Luxton JoJO LUXTON (Labour): Thank you Mr Chair. It's a pleasure to stand and take a call on the Appropriation (2016/17 Confirmation and Validation) Bill with the theme being the environment. I'm not on the Environment Committee but I have read the reports. Like any other New Zealander and like everybody here in this House I'm sure the environment is of huge concern now and going into the future. [Pause in speech]Hon Member: That was a good speech!JO LUXTON: Thank you. Thank you. If we continued on the path that the previous Government had been on our environment would suffer to the point where as the ministry said critical boundaries are being reached for many environmental issues in New Zealand and addressing these issues will require significant shifts in approach. Now what did the previous Government do with regard to climate change? Not much: hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil. Do as little as possible. Oh hang on a minute. There was a little bit of lip-service given here and there. We heard things like wadeable". We heard things like "being a fast follower". How aspirational! What an aspirational previous Government New Zealand had—clearly not.All we saw was a failure—a failure to address climate change or be ambitious in any way about climate change. It is time to focus on addressing environmental issues. I think about the environment now and I think about it when I was a child and it is so different now. I remember being able to go swimming in my local river my local lake—Angie Warren-Clark: Drinking out of your river.JO LUXTON: Yeah drinking out of the river actually. Yeah that was a really good fun thing to do. But looking at it now there's a river not far from where I live and I used to take my children there swimming. We'd have fish and chips on a Friday night and go swimming in the local river. There is no way—no way in heck—that I would consider doing that now. I wouldn't even take my dog for a walk down there for fear of the dog getting sick.Hon Willie Jackson: And that's the National Party's fault.JO LUXTON: That's right. So as Chlöe Swarbrick a previous speaker for the Education and Workforce Committee said we've inherited a right mess—an absolute right mess. We've been left in a real state. The previous Government was of the opinion that you should choose the environment or the economy but not both. Why shouldn't we have both? We sell ourselves on our clean green image. Tourism is one of our main income earners and yet if our environment is an absolute mess totally polluted well there goes our tourism. That's a huge amount of money that is brought into our economy through tourism so I don't see why we cannot have them side by side. There should not be any cause or any reason to make it a choice.We talked about fresh water. The previous Government felt that "wadeable" was aspirational. Let's have wadeable—and then perhaps we could have "swimmable" by 2040. Swimmable: does that mean we could put our head under the water without getting sick or—? I don't know. What does that mean? With the quality of our water in our waterways we are seeing some aquatic life freshwater fish coming close to being extinct and that is really sad and that is shameful. It is shameful that the environment is in a situation that potentially our grandchildren would not be able to swim in those rivers and not be able to swim in those lakes. But it is OK because we have a new Government and this Government has a plan. We have a plan. We have a plan to clean up our waterways. We recognise the importance of our environment and we value our environment. It has to be good for our people it has to be good for our economy and the two can go side by side.Clean water is our birthright. We should be able to go and swim in our local rivers and things without fear of getting sick. So this Government has plans for fresh water in regard to the fact that we will insist that our rivers and lakes are swimmable for New Zealanders and liveable for our native freshwater species. We are pushing ahead with setting proper standards to improve fresh water quality and preliminary work to create a national policy statement for fresh water has begun. So there is hope for the environment."