Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I would like to start by congratulating you on your reappointment as an Assistant Speaker for the coming term. I've thoroughly enjoyed the work—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Deputy Speaker.Hon JAMES SHAW: The Deputy Speaker. I beg your pardon. See? We're off to a good start already! The firm and guiding hand that you gave us in the last term—I'm looking forward to more of that. I'd also like to congratulate the other Assistant Speakers and of course the Speaker himself. I would also like to take a moment to congratulate those new members of Parliament who have joined us here in the Chamber for the coming term. No matter which party you're from it is a great honour to serve in this House. I would like to say I am delighted that three of those new members of course are members of the Green Party. The first time that we have managed to expand the size of our caucus in the last 10 years since 2011; the first time actually that we've won an electorate seat since 1999 so 21 years; and the first support party in the history of MMP who started at the beginning of a term of Government above the 5 percent threshold and also finished the end of that term above the 5 percent threshold—in fact in this case actually increased our support. So for us it was a hugely successful election.Obviously our success was slightly overshadowed by our friends and colleagues in the Labour Party who did astonishingly well and I would like to congratulate the Labour Party for again an historical win under MMP at this election and the vast numbers of new MPs who have joined us in the Labour Party. I would like to say Of those to whom much is given much is expected." Chlöe Swarbrick: Let's do this.Hon JAMES SHAW: So given that—let's do this even more even faster even further. Let's do more of this to coin a phrase. So congratulations to you on joining. Now I'd like to get into the debate the Address in Reply and the Speech from the Throne by picking up on some of the points that were made by the Hon Michael Woodhouse in his earlier contribution where he pulled out a bunch of Thatcherite slogans and threw them around completely devoid of meaning. I mean one of the reasons that we were very proud of our kind of low deficits and our low debt-to-GDP ratio over the course of the last couple of decades in this country was because we actually failed to invest in our infrastructure. So whilst we might have been carrying a low debt-to-GDP ratio we were carrying an astonishingly high deficit in virtually every category of public infrastructure that you can imagine—whether that is transport where in every category of transport whether it's roads whether it's rail whether it's light rail whether it's cycleways whether it's walking and cycling we have a chronic under-investment—and the results of that are being felt in our sclerotic cities at the moment. Of course the previous National Government as was well advertised at the time essentially strip mined the transport budget to put in a few short but astonishingly expensive four-lane highways leaving a huge deficit for this Government to cover.In housing clearly that deficit is making itself felt again and again and again and the chronic shortage in housing—whether it's public housing or housing in the private market whether that's for people who want to own their own home or to rent—that is absolutely chronic and that is a result of failures over many decades. The fact that our schools and our hospitals many of them are crumbling are mouldering away—again that's public infrastructure that should have been invested in over the course of the last three decades. We have another multibillion-dollar problem in terms of the pipes under our feet that are making ourselves sick. If you remember just prior to the previous election in 2017 of course—a couple of deaths and several thousand illnesses in Havelock North due to the poor nature of the water infrastructure there. Wellington my home town—where we literally have sewage pouring into the harbour as a result of crumbling infrastructure there over the course of the last 30 years. We have tens of billions of dollars' worth of backlog in every category of infrastructure. That is a result of the fiscal settings over the course of the last three decades. The National Party who are complaining about the lack of action of the Labour-led Government are as much responsible for their denuding of the public estate as anybody at all. And that is why—that is why—I completely reject the Hon Michael Woodhouse's pithy empty sloganeering in his contribution in this debate earlier because all of those chickens have come home to roost at precisely the moment when COVID-19 hit. So we have this combination this confluence of events which is the fact that our ageing infrastructure is absolutely at the end of its life or past the end of its life and an absolute need to inject vast amounts of liquidity into the economy at this time in order to stimulate the economy to keep people in their jobs to keep things rolling. So it makes absolutely perfect sense right now to address that 30-year infrastructure deficit using the capital that we have to spend anyway in order to keep the economy going through this astonishing pandemic-led downturn. Now there was something I was looking for in the Speech from the Throne that I didn't hear a whole lot about and so I'm very keen to hear from the Labour Party what their intentions are in the domain of oceans. So there were some clues in the appointment of the Hon David Parker in the role of oceans and fisheries Minister as opposed to just fisheries Minister—that's quite a good hint about the sense of direction. Another hint is in the appointment as the Associate Minister of Rino Tirikatene in terms of obviously the very important interests that Māori have in the fisheries industry. But as yet it's unclear what the programme of action is in this domain and I would have liked to have heard more about that in the Speech from the Throne because we know that the system that we have had for the last 30-odd years in the form of the quota management system (QMS) and the regulatory approach that we've had towards the fishing industry has actually failed to do the job that it is intended to do which is to make sure that we are able to sustainably operate a fishing industry that actually preserves the biodiversity and marine life in our oceans. It has actually failed to do that. Now it would probably have been worse in the absence of that system when you look at what's going on in most of the rest of the world but the rate of decline is measurable and it is only going in one direction. So you know during the course of the election campaign the Green Party did call for what a lot of other countries around the world are doing and that is putting a third of our exclusive economic zone into marine-protected areas. We'd like to see that on this agenda. We do think that the QMS does need to be reviewed not just because scientifically when you look at the ecosystem health it hasn't delivered what it's intended to do but also there is some evidence emerging that it actually hasn't delivered value for Māori as quota holders equivalent to other quota holders as well. So we do think that that needs to be looked at. We do think that we need to move away from simply slicing and dicing fisheries into looking at a whole-of-ecosystem approach to how we manage our marine environment and marine spatial planning. I mean this is kind of not leading-edge stuff. This is what some of the leading countries around the world are doing and so we hope that the next Government tackles that. If they don't have a plan they're welcome to use ours. Finally I do want to turn my attention to what was one of the things that was in the Speech from the Throne that I am very delighted about and has been made obvious over the course of the last week or two: that climate change is still very much at the forefront and at the heart of this new Government's agenda. There have been some huge developments in recent months. China have come out and said that they intend to be net zero carbon dioxide by the year 2060. That is huge in terms of its impact not just at the year 2060 but between now and then. With Japan and Korea and others all committing to net zero emissions across all gas categories by the year 2050 every member of the G7 now has a target in place to be net zero in all emissions—I'll say that including biogenic methane—across all of their emissions by the year 2050 which is further than this House was prepared to go last year when we unanimously passed the zero carbon Act. So the landscape is shifting hugely and there is a risk that where we were leading a couple of years ago we may now be falling behind. There'll be more on this tomorrow. Now it is important that these targets aren't just empty language and that they've got to be backed up with solid action and that is true of us here in Aotearoa as well. So whilst in the last term of Parliament we are very proud of the work that we did collectively as a House across the aisle to ensure that we have a long-term strategy that we have goals and targets and an institutional framework we have to make sure that this is the term when we bend the curve on our emissions downwards. First task: transport. We've got to get our transport emissions under control our agricultural emissions our industrial heat emissions and the technologies and the approaches are there for us to do it. And that is what I say when I say "Let's do this." DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is a split call. I call the Hon Dr David Clark—five minutes."