Smith Nick: Environmental Reporting Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSmith Nick: Environmental Reporting Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 23 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4685. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister for the Environment):I just want to make a quick intervention to put the record straight. The member who has just spoken Eugenie Sage said that the appointment of an independent committee in Australia was in the Australian legislation. That is not true. I have the legislation before me. It makes very plain that the report is produced by the Minister in Australia. The Minister prescribes the regulations. It is true that as a matter of practice in Australia the Minister for the Environment has appointed a committee to be responsible for it. I can just hear the cries of “Foul!” from the Green Party and the Labour Party if this report was to be produced by a committee appointed by me. This report is going to be produced by the Government Statistician and the Secretary for the Environment. The member is simply factually incorrect in what she says of the Australian legislation and I refer her to section 516 of their Act.The second point the Green member made was this: the Greens want to include in this legislation the climate change data. Well actually this Parliament has passed specific climate change legislation that requires reporting to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are a Government that is not about repeating bureaucracy. We are not about repeating costs and where there is solid reporting data that is required in one Act to repeat it in another Act is exactly what our Government is opposed to.But let us just test Eugenie Sage’s proposition that we need to publish the exact names of those people who are the biggest greenhouse gas emitters. Well let us start by asking what the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in New Zealand are. Actually they are dairy farmers. Farmers make up with the combination of methane and greenhouse gases about 43 percent of New Zealand’s emissions. But because it is spread over 30000 farmers you are not going to list “Ma and Pa Bloggs: farmers in my electorate” as the big emitters—it is a nonsense. What is the second-biggest sector of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions? The transport sector. Does that mean I am going to have to list the big car that I understand our colleague from New Zealand First drives around? Is he going to be caught on the transport emissions? From what I have read in the newspaper he has got a real big grunty car. I think it does 16 litres to 100 kilometres or something of that sort. But let us just test—Denis O’Rourke: That’s not true.Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I apologise to the member.But regardless it is a nonsense when the transport sector and the agricultural sector are made up of thousands—tens of thousands—of individuals to somehow pretend actually because you have got one factory or one emitter that they are a substantive part of the problem when they are not. That is just simply typical of an anti-business view from the Greens rather than actually recognising that all of the science around climate change shows that it is areas like transport which affects all New Zealanders; it is sectors like the energy sector; and it is areas like agriculture that make up the bulk of the emissions and for that reason specifically listing the hundred top emitters does not make sense.When you have the Climate Change Response Act which has a very high level of integrity about the reporting that is required to be audited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change we are not as a Government of a mind to repeat the cost to the New Zealand taxpayer of simply regurgitating the same information with amendments to this bill.