Court Simon; Dean JacquiSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. The ACT Party supports this bill. There will be environmental benefits but unlike some of the more confused members of the House who believe this bill will actually reduce carbon emissions and help the climate it's not a bill about carbon emissions; it's about reducing pollution. That's sulphur dioxides.There are real benefits to reducing sulphur dioxides. We've heard about air pollution human health—but there's a cost. There is a significant cost that New Zealand coastal shippers will bear and that our ports will bear as they have to build infrastructure to cope with the additional bunkering fuel requirements the storage requirements but also to cope with the discharges that this bill requires them to take care of when visiting ships visit ports and they're required to receive whatever's in the bilges from the ships. It's been described as sediment. I'm sure it is a very toxic and harmful substance so it's good that these substances will be cared for but there is a cost and there is also an issue with the supply chain.These fuels are not manufactured in New Zealand. While it's gratifying to hear that the private sector in conjunction with a well-managed port at the Port of Auckland has come to an agreement to provide some fuel storage there are many other major ports around New Zealand where coastal ships call and where they often need to refuel. So this infrastructure will need to be replicated at other ports around New Zealand potentially Timaru and Lyttelton Wellington Napier for example. Each one of these ports will require its own fuel storage facilities. They all come with a cost. Those costs will of course be passed on to the consumer and that is at a time of rising inflation when inflation is outstripping wages. We've seen the statistics today. We know that New Zealanders' wages are not keeping up with the cost of living. This will add another cost.There's also an issue of the coastal ships themselves. New Zealand only has a few dozen of these ships and most of them are specialist vessels that carry products like cement from port to port. That takes thousands and thousands of the equivalent truckloads off the road. But it does mean that we are heavily reliant on these ships as part of our supply chain. Some of the companies that provide these shipping services have bought new ships recently in the past few years. These ships have a 30- to 40-year asset life.Now not all of them are compliant although most are and what these regulations mean is they will have to either retrofit some type of filter system or they will need to purchase a lower sulphur fuel. But they will actually have to modify the engines and increase the level of maintenance and the cost associated with that because they'll no longer have the benefit of sulphur in the fuel. Sulphur is in fact a lubricant in the fuel. It has a positive benefit for engines which is why sulphur has been in diesel as well as bunker fuel because it actually reduces the amount of maintenance and wear and tear on these engines. So there will be an additional cost and there will be additional maintenance required to ships as they have to convert.All of these costs flows through to the consumer. They flow through to the person buying goods at the supermarket. They flow through to the construction sector which depends on cement and other materials that are carted by coastal shipping around New Zealand. The cost to shippers has not been quantified but it can be absolutely certain that it will flow through.Then there is the cost to the ports themselves of providing the extra tankage and complying with rules that are included in this piece of legislation where officials might direct a port to provide tank storage or other receiving facilities for liquid waste and sludges that are removed from ships now. Currently ports around New Zealand are severely constrained for space. Their infrastructure in many cases is marginal. In many cases they are owned by local government publicly and they don't have the capital that they need to actually invest in modernising their ports. This is not a situation where you can go back to your shareholders and say We need to build another wharf. It's $100 million. Pony up with the money but guess what! Your rate of return's going to be 6 or 8 percent over the next few decades." They have to go back to the shareholder being a council in many cases—a regional council or a city council—and beg elected members to give them the capital that could otherwise be spent on water infrastructure or roads or libraries or pools and so on.So there is a cost coming to ports which are already capital constrained. As with so many other pieces of legislation which express good intentions this piece of legislation actually will have an environmental benefit. They come at a cost. While we must accept that there are trade-offs between environmental benefits and costs and that sometimes Government regulation is required so that business actually internalises the environmental effects as a cost rather than externalises those costs to the environment. So there is a place for Government regulation where there are no other incentives that will work effectively. But at the same time that these costs are being imposed businesses are expected to face a raft of other costs whether they be extra public holidays that the business sector did not ask for but are expect to pay for whether they are extra taxes and duties and levies such as fuel excise duty.So the shipping companies that operate these vessels that bring goods to our ports that allow us to build homes and infrastructure that bring goods to supermarkets to the DIY store—all of these costs flow through. At a time when the cost of living is going through the roof where wages are not keeping up with inflation the Government needs to seriously consider how they reduce the cost on ordinary working people. As they impose new regulations on one part of the economy how do they offset that with reduced costs in other parts of the economy? But that has not been a consideration for this Government. In my short time in Parliament—nearly a year—thinking about how to make New Zealand people's lives better every day that ACT MPs come to the House I haven't seen a single piece of legislation introduced by this Government that reduces costs to working families and reduces costs to business. It's all cost on cost on cost.Hon David Parker: National Policy Statement on Urban Development.SIMON COURT: And that member the Hon David Parker he also knows this as the Minister of Revenue responsible for taxing New Zealanders. He's well aware. How much extra tax has this Government collected? Billions and billions and billions of dollars in the last year. So that member knows full well that what I'm saying is true—it is cost on cost on cost. So if we're going to accept environmental regulations that have some benefit but come at a cost then the Government must consider what opportunities there are to actually reduce the cost to business. So we haven't seen that in the short time I've been in Parliament. In fact I think like most New Zealanders the ACT Party has absolutely no trust and confidence that this Government knows how to wind-back the cost dial only how to increase it because they believe that people have an unlimited ability to pay—deep deep pockets. That's not true. All of these additional costs flow through to the consumer when you go to Bunnings Warehouse when you go to Mitre 10 when your builder says "The cost of the concrete slab for your new house is going up because the shipping costs are going up at a time of international supply chain pressures." We know where to pin these extra costs—that's on this Government.Now ACT will support this bill because reducing pollution is the right thing to do. But when it comes at a cost and the Government has an opportunity to reduce costs in other parts of the economy that's what they should do. Madam Speaker thank you very much.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members the House is suspended and I'll resume the chair at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning for the extended sitting. Good evening.Debate interrupted.Sitting suspended from 10.03 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Wednesday)"