Groser Tim: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGroser Tim: General Debate[Sitting date: 03 December 2014. Volume:702;Page:1074. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon TIM GROSER (Minister for Climate Change Issues):I am not going to comment on the speech that has just been made by Andrew Little which sounded like a speech you might make 2 years after an election not just a few months after.I want to talk about climate change. I want to talk about climate change because our interdepartmental team of officials and New Zealand stakeholders have arrived in Lima for the annual ministerial conference on climate change. I will be leaving this weekend for the political segment of it.I am not going to talk about the science because basically in my view we do not any longer need to debate the science. There are clearly some very important issues at the level of detail but the broad point to me is 100 percent clear. This is a serious long-term issue. We need a far more effective global response. What I want to talk about is New Zealand’s contributions both domestically and internationally.The core point on the domestic front is I think best summed up still by the report put together with a group of New Zealand climate change scientists led by Sir Peter Gluckman last year which said: “New Zealand’s net greenhouse gas emissions represent but a minute fraction of global emissions … Any action from New Zealand to mitigate emissions would have negligible direct global impact … Therefore New Zealand’s contribution … to reduce greenhouse emissions is more of a geopolitical issue …”.The question is this—this is not a statement about a free pass. This is not a statement saying we do not need to do anything. It is a realistic assessment that without more comprehensive serious international attention what we are doing here is a complete waste of time. The real focus has got to be on the international dimension here. In the meantime in terms of us meeting our obligations we will easily meet our first obligation under the Kyoto Protocol. Although it takes an inordinately long time to come down to final definitive statistics we will easily meet that. We have got a very respectable offer on the table for the next commitment period which started in 2013—a minus 5 percent target. We are prepared to do more under certain conditions. But frankly with 100 countries representing 22 percent of global emissions which did nothing in the Kyoto period and have offered to do nothing in the next period the case still has to be made. In any event as the World Bank global carbon markets report of 2013 pointed out there is a carbon price—whether it is via a carbon tax an emissions trading scheme a cap in trade or any other scheme—on only 7 percent of global emissions. So I am absolutely certain that this Government can say we are absolutely doing our fair share.The more intriguing thing I think comes to the international dimension. Let me make this very clear: do I think we are just doing our fair share internationally? Oh no. I think actually we face for certain Opposition parties a very uncomfortable truth: we are vastly exceeding any rational definition of a fair share in terms of what we are doing internationally. I am going to look at this under three headings: what we are doing under climate change development assistance particularly focused on the Pacific countries and helping them both with mitigation and adaptation with quite important co-benefits on the development side; what we are doing in terms of international research and development; and lastly—and never talked about because it does not fit the political narrative—what we are doing in terms of the international negotiations.On the first issue I can be relatively brief. We are now hardwired into our development assistance programme in the Pacific—climate change adaptation and assistance with these countries in meeting the challenges. We have accumulated nearly $700 million of assistance with the help of the European Union to push that forward.But in the little time I have I want to focus on our international climate change negotiations contribution. We have just seen a landmark agreement between the Chinese and the Americans reached in Beijing. They account by themselves for over 40 percent of emissions. The New Zealand proposal for the long-term agreement was the only proposal the US has commented on and has been described in these terms by the US administration: “We think by far the most interesting proposal on the table is the New Zealand proposal.”Far from being marginalised our proposal is central to this negotiation. New Zealand is doing a great deal on the international stage. If we had time to talk about the global research allowance which you Mr Speaker of course helped to launch with me at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations ministerial we are also doing a huge amount in terms of the international dimension there.