Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm very grateful to the comments from the previous speaker Shanan Halbert in relation to this. I actually have both a professional and a personal link to this because I happened to be advancing this whilst I was covering for Julie Anne Genter after the birth of her first child in 2018. The reason I say that is because the Hon Michael Woodhouse gave a sense that maybe this was all moving a bit quickly. I take the opposite view; I think that this has moved extraordinarily slowly and I'm extremely glad that something that I was trying to move forward in 2018 now in 2021 is actually finally about to happen.The previous Prime Minister Sir John Key said that when it came to climate change he thought that New Zealand should not be a leader but a fast follower". Well this treaty MARPOL Annex VI was agreed to in 1997 24 years ago. It took effect in 2005 which was 16 years ago. Our Government kicked off the process of acceding to it in early 2018 three years ago—over three years ago. I think we have been anything but a fast follower.As has been previously noted in the House for many of the—well in fact the whole time I've had any association with it MARPOL VI has only had two countries in the OECD that have not been members us and Mexico. Frankly it is embarrassing that it has taken us 25 years to accede to a treaty on frankly just the quality of the fuel that we stick into our ships.Also as previously noted by Greg O'Connor and Michael Woodhouse asked for the reference to this—it came from Dr Gerda Kuschel who quoted in a Stuff article in 2019 said that a rough calculation is that "emissions from a single cruise ship visiting here is the equivalent of 200000 cars a day." That is the entire Wellington light-vehicle fleet per day in terms of the output of those ships. And of course there's not a lot of those cruise ships arriving at the moment but for over half of the year there are—or there have been you know when we had travel those ships there and they were constantly running their engines whilst in port not just in between ports but actually using them to power themselves whilst in port as well. And you can just see the air pollution in our harbours here in Wellington in Auckland and in Tauranga.Maersk the shipping company do about a thousand visits to New Zealand a year. And yes the profile of a freight ship versus a cruise ship is marginally different but if you can multiply 200000 cars a day times a thousand visits a year from one shipping company you get a sense of the scale of the pollution. When Maersk were trialling these cleaner fuels that are compliant with MARPOL VI what they found was that they cut the pollution coming out of their exhaust gases by over 80 percent. So this is just basic hygiene and we are extremely late to the party as a country when it comes to just observing this very basic treaty.Now it's also kind of one of those things where we have considered it and we have consulted and we've held workshops and we've talked to everybody who is involved at a time when 98 percent of the world's shipping is already complaint with it right? To coin a phrase: the ship has sailed on this one. We're just catching up to the rest of the world on it.So my view is we absolutely need to support this. Obviously it will make a huge difference to air quality because shipping emissions particularly when they're docked in the harbour increase nitrous oxides. There's particulates in the air; air quality monitors in downtown Auckland have shown significant increases in air pollutants over recent years which come from the ships docked in Auckland harbour and so on. We're talking about fuels here that have been described as Marmite-like; thick black viscous basically the lowest grade fuels available to humankind. So all this really does is to get rid of those and say that we're actually going to observe—Simon Court: Apart from coal.Hon JAMES SHAW: —other than coal—a higher quality of fuel in our ships. Now there is something that I should mention here because this obviously has an intersection with climate change and the commitments that we've made. Now international aviation and international shipping neither of those are covered by the Paris Agreement right? So the only place to handle emissions from international shipping and international aviation is through these separate agreements. When it comes to international aviation of course it's the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) agreement. When it comes to shipping it's MARPOL. Now some countries are moving to integrate their international aviation and shipping emissions into their national greenhouse gas inventories. The draft advice of the Climate Change Commission that came out in February of this year—when you look at the modelling that they've produced they've actually left some buffer zone on there. I guess the probability that they're calculating was that we will probably follow that trend and start to incorporate them particularly given where we are located in the world and the fact that we are a trading nation that we're highly dependent on tourism and that both aviation and shipping are absolutely central functions of our economy.It kind of doesn't make sense to ignore aviation and shipping emissions when it comes to our commitments but the problem with leaving shipping and aviation outside Paris is that you then kind of forget about them as a country. Everybody focuses on all of the things that we have to do which are inside the Paris Agreement and that's well and good but actually we do have these very significant emissions that occur outside and that are dealt with through their separate treaties. And so again I think that acceding to this treaty and bringing in a higher standard of fuels at least in our shipping fleets means that we can start to actually drive down the emissions relating to this component. As I said we're extremely late to the party when it comes to that and it's about time that we cracked on with it.So I am delighted that this is finally in the House. I'm delighted that New Zealand is finally acceding to it. For me it should have happened decades ago frankly but it is better late than never at all. And so this is one treaty I say "Let's get on with it.""