Roy Eric: Biofuel Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Roy Eric: Biofuel Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18291. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) 
: 
 I have had to break an important occasion to get back here to take part in this debate. [ 
Interruption 
] Yes it is commendable. I was involved in a carbon-neutral activity to get here—I walked. 
Part 2 deals with miscellaneous amendments. National members aired a number of issues that are of concern to us during the debate on Part 1 and similarly this part raises a huge number of questions for us. 
The first issue is that I have never seen a bill before Parliament with so many delegated responsibilities in it. There will be more than one Order in Council; there will be Orders in Council to change set amend and modify issue after issue. That in itself might not be bad except that there is a vagueness around a whole lot of these issues—the setting of levies the setting of taxes and deeming whether something is sustainable. Being a member of the august Regulations Review Committee I have to say that I see troubled times ahead when it has to determine for example whether an ethanol-based biofuel has come from sustainably harvested sugar cane. Those are the sorts of decisions that are delegated responsibilities. As I said in a previous debate on this bill the focus is in the wrong place. The focus should be on finding alternative fuels that are sustainable and will solve the issue of our significant consumption of fossil fuels and this bill simply will not do that. The delegated responsibilities are a significant issue. 
Another issue that National members have a number of concerns about is what the cost will be. We are principally an exporting nation. That is where we earn the wealth that drives this economy. If we are imposing upon ourselves a series of levies taxes and costs that our competitors do not have the impact is that we will not have investment in that part of our industry and significant sections of our industrial base will head off overseas. Already a number of people who have been investing on a continuing basis in the dairy industry are now heading to South America. They are doing that because opportunities exist over there but also because they will not be bound by the various regimes that are incorporated in this bill. 
One need only read clause after clause. There is clause 29 “Assessment of tax”; clause 30 “Assessment presumed to be correct”; clause 31 “Tax recoverable as a debt”; clause 32 “Penalty for late payment of tax”; clause 33 “Separate bank account to be kept by distribution authority”—for storing the money—and on it goes. Those provisions would not be in this bill if there were not significant costs associated with the implementation of it. We want a quantification of those costs. We are not saying we want to abrogate our responsibilities in terms of dealing with climate change; we need to know some of the specifics of the costs but all we have are the words “set by Order in Council” which are embraced within the bill time after time. Having spent some time on the Regulations Review Committee which has the responsibility of reviewing such orders I can see inquiry after inquiry. I can see a dearth of knowledge of how to make the astute decisions that will have to be made about issues of sustainability and where to strike those taxes. That will be the responsibility of the Regulations Review Committee. It will have to make sure that those impositions of cost stand where they fit. 
The other issue I want to raise—and no other member has raised this issue that I know of—is we talk about sustainability in terms of the supply of fuel—