Fitzsimons Jeanette: Climate Change (Government Vehicle Procurement) Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Climate Change (Government Vehicle Procurement) Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 18 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:7817. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 It gives me great pleasure to rise to support the Climate Change (Government Vehicle Procurement) Bill and to congratulate my colleague and co-leader Russel Norman on bringing it to the House. I thank the Labour Party and the Maori Party for their support of the bill. We would gain no inkling from the debate tonight that people in this House understand that New Zealand has the fourth-highest climate change emissions per capita in the whole developed world; nor would we have any inkling that people understand that peak oil is very close and oil will become enormously more expensive in the near future as well as becoming scarce. 
With those two crises vehicles are our Achilles heel. Our vehicle fleet is hugely inefficient. But it also means in a positive sense that this is our lowest-hanging fruit. If we want to reduce our dependence on oil and our climate change emissions then vehicles are the place to start because it is with them that we can make a lot of progress. That is why the National Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy proposed to set a standard of 170 grams per kilometre. I looked up the Automobile Association’s magazine and found that 129 models are on the market in New Zealand now that meet that standard which is the same one we proposed for Government vehicles in this bill. Certainly there is plenty of choice there. 
That strategy is still the law. It is still in force despite what Charles Chauvel said because under the law it is in force until it is replaced. The Minister cannot repeal it; he can only replace it. God knows what he will replace it with! Last year Labour was on the way to setting fuel efficiency standards for the whole country but it did not quite get there in time. The officials were opposing it. Holden and Ford were lobbying very hard so no legislation was brought to the House. I thank them for their support tonight but they could have actually made this happen last year. Now Steven Joyce has announced publicly that there will be no fuel efficiency standards for vehicles. 
I want to look at some of the arguments put forward tonight—some very pathetic arguments. Nicky Wagner used a number of individual cases to show that people will do the right thing—we do not need to legislate. But they are patently not doing the right thing. The EU vehicles coming into the EU are at 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre. Ours are at 210 grams. The fleet fuel use appears to be trending down for the new vehicles until one realises that the Government has removed diesels out of the tables so that it looks better than the old tables used to look. The vehicles coming into New Zealand are more wasteful each year than they have been in the past. So if regulation is such a bad thing if all we need is a bit of education and guidance and we do not want to tie down the country with red tape why do we not replace the law on murder and fraud with education and guidelines? That makes perfect sense as well; people will simply do the right thing if we tell them to! That is what the Government’s argument leads us to. 
Shane Ardern made an excellent point that energy efficiency is not necessarily related to the size of the vehicle and that is why we do not talk about vehicle size in the bill. That is why we talk about fuel efficiency measured in grams of carbon dioxide. He did not tell us anything about the fuel efficiency of his tractor which we had occasion to see at Parliament some years ago but we sympathise with him getting conned over the Mazda. It is not about engine size it is about fuel efficiency. 
Clearly some of the speakers tonight have simply not read the bill. It is a constant frustration that people come down here and speak on members’ bills without having read them. If they had read them they would discover that the bill makes specific provision for vehicles to be fit for purpose. If one is on a Landcorp farm then different rules apply compared with someone in a health board running the district nurse around a city. 
This is a very sensible bill. It would not just benefit the Government and its fuel use. It would not just show leadership. It would bring into the country a better set of vehicles that would save the future drivers—who would be ordinary New Zealanders after the Government spins them off—a lot of money on their fuel bills in the future. I commend this bill to the House.