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:18295. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) 
: 
 I just know Mr Chairperson that you are dying to hear the rest of the bit at which I got cut off on when I was debating a previous part and it does fit neatly into the title of the debate—trust me. The title is I guess the principal part of the debate we are having and as I said in an earlier debate this is largely a placebo bill. Certainly one of the reasons I oppose it is that it does not encompass those things that are really going to make a difference. I would have much preferred this bill to have in its title and to include “alternatives to fossil fuels” because in my humble view if there is to be some resolution to the consumption of fossil fuels then we have to look at the big picture at the hydrogen options and at some of those other things—dare I say electric; I am not sure whether that is a fuel or not—including solar power. That is why this bill is so narrow and will make such a minuscule difference to what actually happens. That is my first point. The bill is too narrow to actually resolve the issues confronting humanity. I put that out there to be considered.  
The other thing I was about to raise in the previous debate in terms of sustainability is that we have a dearth of knowledge—a lack of knowledge—about the impact on existing plant and machinery in New Zealand. When we start mandatorily making regulations about what fuel mixes are to be I am not sure what the implications of that are going to be. In my modest operations at Te Tipua I have a tractor. It is an old tractor but it is about 140 horsepower. The replacement value of a tractor today is about $1000 per horsepower so members can do the sums. If this tractor which probably has an engine life of somewhere in the 12000 to 18000 hours—it has done about 4500—does not like what it is mandatorily being asked to consume under this bill which is a 5 percent mixture of a biofuel into the additive and it dies the implications are going to be quite serious on the kind of revenue flows that are in my modest operation I can tell you.  
So when we talk about sustainability there is a certain sustainability of the plant and machinery that we do actually have currently in New Zealand and nobody has actually raised that issue. If we are seriously talking about the title then it might include the words “and killing off obsolete machinery”. So that is an issue I want to put before the Committee as well.  
There is another issue about sustainability. Whilst I acknowledge what the Minister said about the corn-to-ethanol argument there is a sustainability issue too surrounding the use of our farmland. We talked earlier in the debate about the pressures on feeding the world and food chain compaction in terms of the food now being consumed. One or two members in this series of debates have talked about rape or granola or some of those other oil-bearing fruit alternatives that we can actually grow. The economics are that the current price of wheat is about $500 a tonne and most good operators are getting yields in excess of 8 tonnes. Some of them are getting over 10 tonnes per hectare. Members can do the sums on that—$5000-odd a hectare gross. With the current price of canola at about $800 a tonne and somewhere about 2.5 to 3.5 tonnes per hectare one is sort of saying that the pressures then come on to sustainably farming one’s arable land.  
Whilst the bill talks up the benefits of rape in a crop rotation most people involved in arable farming in New Zealand have been around long enough to have worked out what grain crops suit them and where they have pulse crops brassicas and all that. To actually impose a crop that is not as viable as current arable use puts certain other implications on arable farmers.  
The absolute contrast in this is that the current price of wheat at $500 a tonne makes the growing of the oil-seed crops less viable and less preferable. But the more of a move there is to the oil-based crops the less there will be of the grain crops and that price goes up further and that margin just gets wider and wider.