Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. Of all the remarkable achievements of the member for Ōhāriu dragging that speech out for 10 minutes surely ranks amongst the top two or three of his political career. What a font of knowledge he is on scrubbers. I was sitting there just hanging off every word! Mr O'Connor is I have to say known for some hyperbole but even if that were the case I think the metaphor that he used about the size of some of those ships and the emissions that they create relative to Wellington's light vehicle fleet was quite a sobering statistic. I'm not sure where the member got it from but it certainly I think brings home the importance of reducing emissions in our shipping fleet and that's exactly what this bill is intended to do so we will support it.But I think he also raised a number of other issues as has my colleague and friend Christopher Luxon that for me underscore the fact that despite the fact that there has been a reasonable amount of consultation prior to this bill being introduced a shortened select committee process is once again being used by the Government in circumstances that I think are inappropriate and unnecessary and we will be opposing that part of the motion. I think it's a debatable motion so I'm sure Mr Luxon will speak in more detail about that.If this is an issue of such import that it needs to be passed by September or October why then are we not having a first reading before today? The Government's been working on this for some time. It consulted quite extensively and it actually received some very intelligent feedback from stakeholders who are going to be affected by this. The overwhelming majority support it in principle but the devil's in the detail and the application of this in so far as it relates to the retrofitting of technologies the availability of low sulphur fuels. Where that's going to come from how much it's going to cost whether scrubbers are actually economic to fit on to some of these vessels are all questions that I think the select committee are going to have to grapple with. To shorten that period of time on what I believe is a reasonably spurious basis of having done some consulting before this came to the House is not a good reason to shorten that process.I also want to actually raise a couple of other matters that are the subject of the bill. The first is in respect of the inspections and audits as set out in clause 13 of the bill. Now these are quite widespread powers for the director to require inspections to be carried out by authorised people but on potentially foreign flagged ships and I think it does raise some interesting questions about reasonable cause to access the ships. I hope that other legislation including international maritime legislation has been taken into account in the drafting of clause 13 but I think that's something that we need to hear from stakeholders about.The other aspect that concerns me is in respect of the requirements for courts to effectively have the means to discharge the harmful substances or to reduce them. They're described as reception facilities and there's some quite onerous requirements on reception facilities—effectively ports—to make some changes that perhaps in the short period of time after this bill is passed between then and when it is introduced may create some difficulties. Mr O'Connor also pointed out section 395 is being amended in clause 11. That is the granting of exemptions from marine protection rules as long as they don't breach the emissions rules. Well that actually could undermine the sorts of research that could take place into lower emissions vehicles engines technologies for carbon removal or sulphur removal and may actually act as a disincentive to the sorts of research and development that might enable us to have lower emissions vessel fleets. So there's a lot to actually talk about here. It may be straightforward in so far as well it's a MARPOL agreement. Annex VI is one that we haven't signed up to and a plethora of other countries have and only a handful haven't. That does not diminish this House's responsibility to ensure that we do embark on a rigorous examination of the legislation and the treaty that underpins it to make sure that this is a good bill in all respects. But I'm sure it can be improved and I hope that the committee does have an appropriate period of time within which to do that.