Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): Thank you Mr Chair. I was part of the Environment Committee that started doing some of the background work and started considering this bill and then through the usual permutations in Parliament I moved on to a different committee. It was exciting to work on this legislation and in particular it was exciting to work fairly intensively but cooperatively with the Opposition members of that committee in trying to get it right and trying to understand what was going on. I would like to pay a particular tribute to the Minister for Climate Change Mr James Shaw on the way that he worked in that bipartisan manner as well through that process.It's in that spirit of bipartisanship that I do wish to address the Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs) that have been raised by the Opposition today and to try to address some of the points they've made. I'm going to start with Mr David Seymour's SOP 406 in which he really advocates that we should be able to use overseas mitigation efforts as well as what we do here in New Zealand in order to meet our targets. He says it's one world and so why shouldn't we use carbon credits that are generated overseas. There's a plausible simplicity to that but it is too simple—it is too simple. It misses the point.It misses the point because it misses where our emissions come from in New Zealand. They come primarily from two major sources. They come from transport and they come from agriculture. Transport is irremediably linked here in New Zealand. It's us getting from Bluff up to Kaitāia. Transport is located here. The emissions are generated here. There is no leakage with those transport emissions unless it's in the cost of building vehicles but there is no significant leakage around that.The agricultural emissions are generated here. They do not leak overseas. They are generated here by us. It is us who needs to take responsibility for them. So I agree that in a sense we should have some access to overseas credits that we do need to have that at the margins but primarily we need to take responsibility for our emissions here in this country. That is why it is so important that it is New Zealand carbon credits that are available to be used in the context of accounting for carbon and accounting for greenhouse gases in this country.To me it's an interesting SOP from the ACT Party because all along they've been quite keen on free-riding on the efforts of the rest of the world saying that New Zealand's emissions are so insignificant we really shouldn't worry about what we do here; we should just sort of let the rest of the world deal with the problem. But the very spirit of this bill is that we deal with our own problems here that we do stand up and take responsibility for ourselves and that is why it is so important not just in terms of where our emissions come from but in terms of the ethos behind this bill that we are doing our share towards ensuring that this world does not end up in a terrible mess from greenhouse gases.Moving on from that I just want to address some of the thoughts that are lying behind some of the SOPs from the National Party. I accept that they are intended in a spirit of compromise but I think they're on the wrong track. So looking at SOP 401 Mr Muller raised a couple of issues in respect of that and in particular he said that what they want to do is for us to engage in efforts that do not threaten food production. Mr Muller said that we feed I think 43 million people worldwide. It is a significant number of people that we feed. I'm not sure that we have a responsibility to feed as many people as possible. We certainly want to ensure that we produce food—it's one of the things that we export—but it's not clear to me that we need to continue producing food at that level. We do want to take our part in the world we do want to contribute to the world but not at any cost. So I'm just going to suggest that in terms of threatening food production I think that is a misplaced concern. We do not need to feed only ourselves but we can have a long and serious think about the extent to which we need to create as much as possible here for export if it comes at that cost of greater carbon. We are facing an existential crisis here and we need to weigh those concerns up very very carefully.It's a curious thing to me because in terms of that threatening food production" on the one hand this SOP is saying that we have a responsibility to the world but on the other hand in this very SOP we have a call to have that temperature limit set at something well below 2 degrees. So in the legislation as introduced the temperature that we are going to try to limit our increase to is 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Now that's based on the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data. But the Opposition would have us set that target something well below 2 degrees. So on the one hand when they say we shouldn't threaten food production they are saying we should be right involved in the world; on the other hand in that very same SOP they are saying we should retreat from the world. It's a mixed-up messed-up SOP because it sends two messages there and they are contradictory messages.What I want to suggest is that the appropriate message we should be sending to ourselves and this links back to Mr Seymour's SOP is that we will do our part but it is our part not everyone else's part as well. That is the point of ensuring that we use our carbon credits that we use domestic carbon credits. It's really important that we do that. That's why we will do our part to get to that 1.5 degrees because that is what we need. I just wanted to reflect on those two things.I want to move on to another of the SOPs the review of forestry assets. This is SOP 404 Mr Todd Muller's SOP. What it's calling for is a review of the use of forestry assets. Again it sounds plausible that we must always think about these forestry assets. Now my reading of the bill as it's come out of the select committee—and it is a shame that I wasn't there to be part of it because I was enjoying that process—was that in actual fact these sorts of provisions are already in the bill. There is no need for this explicit clause on it. So in clause 8 new sections 5Q(1)(c) 5Q(1)(d) and 5Z(2)(b)(ixa)—goodness we get a long way on that—are going to meet in large part this review that's suggested in this SOP. In particular new section 5Z(2)(b)(ixa)—goodness the people on that committee did work a long way down those numbers didn't they—was a recognition of the importance of land-use decisions for rural communities that those concerns have been taken into account in this bill.There is an important point around forestry and we do need to think very very hard not just about soaking up emissions by increased planting of trees—we can do that at the margins—but in actual fact we do actually need to reduce our emissions. We need to reduce the emissions from transport. We need to reduce the emissions from agriculture. Yes with the use of forestry we can soak up some of the rest some of the leftovers by using forestry but may I suggest that if we are to be serious about doing our part in the world for climate change putting our shoulder to the wheel doing our work standing on our own two feet then our target must be reduction not just forestry and if we take that seriously on board—I don't think the forestry problems will melt away but they will become much less significant.This is an excellent bill and I commend it to the committee."