Flavell Te Ururoa: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Flavell Te Ururoa: Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:657;Page:6866] 
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Maori Party—Waiariki) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker kia ora ano tatau katoa i tenei ra. A i te ahiahi nei i poroporoakihia a Ta Hauata Morihana engari no na tatanei kua rongo ake kua hinga a Tikirau Stevens raua ko James Ritchie. No reira koia nei te poroporoaki ki tera kahui a te tokotoru kua hinga i te rangi tonu nei. Waiho ratau kia moe anei tatau e hui nei i tenei ahiahi. Kia ora tatau.  
[An interpretation in English was given to the House.] 
[ 
Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker and greetings again to us all today. Earlier this afternoon we paid a tribute to Sir Howard Morrison but word has just arrived that Tikirau Stevens and James Ritchie have died. This tribute then to that cluster of three who died today. Leave them there to rest while we meet here this afternoon. Greetings to us 
.] 
I rise to take a call on the first reading of the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill. While we debate the bill in the House today we know that a high-level summit on climate change is meeting in New York bringing together over 100 heads of State and Government in the biggest ever gathering of political leadership. In addressing the summit the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon prepared the ground for the United Nations climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen in December in just 74 days’ time. His words are worth repeating for the record. He said: “Failure to reach broad agreement in Copenhagen would be morally inexcusable economically short-sighted and politically unwise.” Those words tell us that we need to get our act together and fast.  
Climate change affects us all and we all have a part to play in encouraging environmentally responsible choices. The Maori Party has consistently raised our call for an emissions trading scheme to be effective fair and transparent. It must be effective in the way in which it reduces emissions to enable Kyoto targets to be met. It must be fair in that all sectors should be included units should be allocated fairly between and within sectors and no sectors should receive more free units than necessary or face disproportionate costs. It must be transparent in that all allocations including free unit allocations to industry and other sectors should be incorporated in the legislation.  
Our explicit support for the first reading of the bill is predicated on the basis of the preservation of our environment and the need to invest in ensuring that the finite resources of Papatuanuku are safeguarded. We do not support subsidisation of the nation’s largest polluters at the cost of householders and small to medium sized businesses. The over-representation of Maori in lower socio-economic areas when coupled with the concentration of iwi interests in the primary sector—forestry agriculture and fisheries—has always meant that the emissions trading scheme is very high on our agenda.  
The bill states that the key purpose of an emissions trading scheme is to enable New Zealand to comply with obligations at the least cost to the economy while providing certainty for economic growth. To be meaningful in its application we suggest that its purpose must also be to transform the economy in a way that takes account of our social and environmental well-being. How should that transformation take place? As a starting point the bill must include some form of statutory provision for the Treaty relationship. We have spoken passionately about the need to protect the property rights of iwi and the citizen interests of Maori. We have taken as our lead the recommendation to the Government from the Climate Change Iwi Leadership Group. That recommendation was that “the obligations of the Crown to Maori including those under the Treaty of Waitangi not be compromised by the New Zealand emissions trading scheme.” 
We acknowledge the support of the Government for an amendment to the bill to include a specific reference to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and we will be working with officials and Crown Law to draft an appropriate amendment. In recognition of the Treaty relationship we will ensure that Maori do not bear a disproportionate share of the burden. We are committed to ensuring that a full array of assistance measures be considered and targeted at rural communities lower-income households and other members of our community who are likely to be more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Those individuals are likely to be less able to meet the costs involved.  
The Maori Party has been concerned throughout the process that households and small businesses will face disproportionate costs under an emissions trading scheme. On reading the bill we note that the Household Fund will be disestablished. What is not in the bill but is a key priority for the Maori Party is specific detail around the mitigation of the impacts of the emissions trading scheme at a household level. The Maori Party seeks an extension of the Government’s energy efficiency assistance scheme specifically targeted at low-income households. That is not currently provided for in the bill but we are working with the Government to ensure that there will be particular measures to support households that will simply not be able to sustain increased costs.  
The bill enables the planned increase in the cost of petrol and electricity as a result of the scheme to be halved from 7c per litre to 3.5c per litre for petrol and from a 10 percent increase to a 5 percent increase for electricity over the first 2 and a half year period of the emissions trading scheme. It is estimated that increases in household electricity and petrol costs will be $165 per year rather than $330 per year in the transition phase. We are pleased that specific provision is being made but we emphasise that the two-for-one deal along with the household insulation fund is not a sufficient mitigation of the impacts of the emissions trading scheme for lower-income families.  
Another set of issues that we promoted in the revision of the scheme was around afforestation and engagement in offsetting. We have come to the Government with some very specific proposals which have been outlined publicly. For the record we expected there to be some compensation for iwi who have forests that were returned in Treaty settlements prior to the emissions trading scheme and a commitment from the Government to work with those iwi and the Maori Party to find solutions. We expect that the Climate Change Iwi Leadership Group will play an ongoing role in international negotiations to allow for offsetting. We expect that the possibility of a Crown and iwi partnership will be scoped including exploration of the viability of accessing the Department of Conservation estate. Our commitment to iwi has been that we will do all that we can to create a robust afforestation policy which would include a commitment to iwi-Crown joint afforestation programmes. We have also identified the need for a biodiversity standard to prevent planting over regenerating indigenous forest. Another element of the ongoing work will be to review the rules of the Permanent Forest Sink Initiative to remove any unfair bias against landowners who under the current covenants have to take all of the risk.  
We are arguing for the inclusion of post-1989 indigenous forests and the publishing of accurate tables of the carbon sequestered in them. Although we are pleased that more unit allocation plans are included in the bill than are in the existing legislation the rules for unit allocation for the forestry and fisheries sectors are not in the bill because they are to be set by regulation. There are other matters outlined in the bill that warrant much fuller discussion including the proposed intensity-based allocation of units and the proposed price cap.  
Finally the urgency of the climate change crisis demands the development and implementation of an effective scheme that is not reliant on if or when the price of carbon increases to a sufficient level to incentivise change. The nation urgently needs to grapple with the notion of sustainability and the increasing challenge made by a changing climate system and impending peak oil to think and live differently. It was along those lines that we argued that the Maori Party should be actively engaged in ongoing dialogue on a broader environmental policy programme. We will also continue to urge that iwi be directly engaged in policy design and implementation as the emissions trading scheme develops.  
The Maori Party has open discussions with National; it is no secret. We intend to work hard to balance economic imperatives with environmental issues. This is the first reading debate on the bill; there is a lot to talk about and to nail down as we advance. We want to move positively forward and we intend to make our requirements very clear as we go to ensure that we can indeed live with the final product. In the expectation of our agreements being honoured the Maori Party supports the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill at its first reading.