Chauvel Charles: General Debate 
Chauvel Charles: General Debate 
[Volume:657;Page:6803] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 All I can say after that speech from Craig Foss is that it is a shame the Labour Party did not have its free condoms policy in place when he was conceived. 
I want to talk today about the emissions trading scheme because that policy is a major concern to Opposition members. Billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money is at stake. Minister Smith once famously said that this was a decision as big as the decision to introduce GST yet we still cannot see the financial modelling that lies behind the changes to the emissions trading scheme that the Maori Party and National have agreed and that is a shame. Phil Goff had to ask seven questions in Parliament yesterday and I asked four. We tried again today; David Parker asked five questions and I asked four. All we got was the selective tabling of documents by the Minister. 
One document purporting to relate to Rio Tinto’s costs was apparently cooked up between the Minister’s office and the smelter itself. It is reasonable to ask on behalf of ordinary Kiwis how much and for how long we are going to subsidise multinational companies like Rio Tinto and Methanex because both those companies are likely to be able to increase their emissions under the changes agreed to the emissions trading scheme while still attracting a massive subsidy from taxpayers under the deal that has been done. 
Yesterday when I asked Nick Smith about these matters he said after some pressing from you Mr Speaker that he did not have a figure to hand for either of those major emitters. This lack of detail with a potential cost of billions of extra dollars over many years to hard-working Kiwi families for no environmental benefit has to be of major concern. The Government is creating a financial black hole for Kiwi families and those families deserve to know the details. Either the Minister does not know the answer—which would be a worry if this measure is a reform as big as GST—or he is too embarrassed to tell the public about the extent to which they will be forced to subsidise two massive polluters for a very long time to come. 
Let us have a look at what Nick Smith did table in the House yesterday. It was a document that had no detail on that black hole in the out-years. It uses a much lower carbon price assumption $25 or $50 a tonne than the analysis that was used by the Government just last month to justify its weak 2020 pollution reduction target. In that document the assumption was $200 a tonne. 
This is just a case of a Minister and a Government using figures to suit themselves scrawled on the back of an envelope in respect of national decisions that will have a massive massive effect on New Zealand families going forward. In addition that document which was a snapshot of the first 4 years of the scheme only fails to reveal that the National - Maori Party subsidy for polluters lasts a lot longer and is therefore much more expensive for taxpayers than would be the case under the existing scheme. 
I have to commend David Carter because at least he came clean on that in the  
Taranaki Daily News 
 the other day. He said that Labour’s scheme would credit 90 percent of emissions and then phase that out by 8 percent a year down to zero over 12 years while the other scheme was proposing to move it at 1.3 percent over 90 years. That is 90 further years of massive subsidies to big polluters at the expense of ordinary Kiwi families. We have no idea how much that will cost taxpayers. 
National has been misleading because it will not reveal the true cost. Instead it chooses to dribble out custom-made documents often misdescribed to discredit or try to discredit Labour and Green policies. But that is not the issue. The issue is what the cost of this deal will be to the nation. Basically we do not know and we should know. We will be debating the bill tomorrow yet we do not even know the costs and we have not seen the text of the bill. How can this be good government? 
Dr Smith in his answers to the House today said that the changes to the emissions trading scheme will cost the taxpayer around $400 million. But that is the cost up to 2013 only which covers the cost of the transitional measures for 4 years only. That money covers the cost of introducing a 50 percent obligation for the transport energy and industrial sectors. This means that the taxpayer picks up the tab for half the emissions in those sectors. It also provides the polluters with the option of paying the Government $25 per tonne for their emissions—$12.50 once it is halved—instead of having to purchase units to cover their emissions. Once more there is a massive subsidy on the bill for pollution. The Government did not have to have this scheme; it could have had a deal with the Labour Party.