Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Madam Speaker. Following on from the earlier speeches by my colleagues Nicola Willis and Scott Simpson National does absolutely support the emissions targets including the net zero Paris Agreement. As with all Government policies and spending we need effective and efficient climate change policies to deliver on these ambitious emissions targets. While we support the emissions budgets and the targets we will carefully evaluate each part of the Government's Emissions Reduction Plan when it's released next week because where we disagree—and we will have places where we will disagree—it is because we are committed to lower emissions. We need to make sure that every step that we take in this process around the policies that are put in place will lower emissions and I want to just take a rural lens on this for a period of time and talk about New Zealand farmers. New Zealand farmers are up for the challenge. We already lead the world in the production of low-carbon food and fibre products. There was a KPMG report out recently on an evaluation of 32 countries where New Zealand was ninth out of those 32 countries for zero carbon readiness and our agriculture sector was at No. 1. Now that doesn't mean we can sit on our laurels and say that we're the best. We have things that we need to do and we definitely as a rural community are up for the challenge. We need to be striving all the time to reduce our footprint if we're to maintain our position at the front of the pack but what we need to see in this process is transitions that are made sensibly and this means ensuring that all farmers have the tools in the tool box that they need to successfully make the shift rather than simply becoming unviable because that would be a terrible outcome not only for Kiwi farmers but for all New Zealanders. Where Governments have an important role in all of this is in supporting research and development but also ensuring that the right regulatory settings are in place and it's quite concerning for farmers at the moment that there are tools for methane reduction that are becoming available to other countries. There are certain methane inhibitors at the moment where regulations in Europe have been approved and here we are with close to I think 18 months in this country of having had that particular methane inhibitor sitting on the desk of the Environmental Protection Authority. So National doesn't want any leakage in any of these processes and doesn't want to have our food production transferred overseas by making our rules here rather harsh without thinking about how we'd progress the transition but equally if other countries like in parts of Europe are able to use technologies that we have sitting on a desk here in New Zealand that our farmers cannot use that puts us at a disadvantage. So that's where you're going to see National step in and look for transitions that absolutely do work. We do need to make sure as in the current discussions that we've got the debate going on between short-lived and long-lived gases because there clearly is a difference. Yes agriculture is responsible for a proportion—a large proportion—of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions but agriculture is not responsible for half of what is contributing to warming and at the end of the day stopping warming is what this is all about. So what we want to see in policies under the Emissions Reduction Plan is for them to be transparent about the true costs in the emissions reductions that will be achieved. We must be able to fairly assess the costs and the benefits of the Government interventions so that we can make informed decisions as we work our way through this process. National wants to lower emissions. We need sensible policies sensible transitions and sensible ways to do it. Thank you Madam Speaker.