Shaw James: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: General Debate[Sitting date: 16 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9803. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): I hope that I am able—after having heard the last three speakers—to turn to matters of more substance than of volume as we have heard from the last few speakers.The Prime Minister said yesterday that he had no idea about the number of farms the number of rural retailers and the number of small businesses that are at risk of going under during the current dairy downturn. He also said that he had no idea about the scale of the risk faced by either Fonterra or the financial sector in terms of their exposure. This is against a background in which farm economist Peter Fraser has said that up to 25 percent of farms are at risk. The Reserve Bank has said that up to 44 percent of loans could become non-performing. Accounting software company Mind Your Own Business has said that 100000 small businesses are looking at facing some real hardship as a result of this.And so the question is: is the Government in denial here? Is it in dairy denial? What is its strategy in the face of this given the scale of what everybody except the Government benches seems to be saying represents a real threat to the New Zealand economy—and not just the dairy economy but the entire New Zealand economy? It does seem that the strategy is more of the same—to keep on doing more of the same in the hope that it produces some kind of different result. Everything that the Government is doing appears to be continuing to contribute to increasing supply at a time of record low prices. And to me that is absolutely bonkers.The Government is in denial and the denial is becoming dangerous to New Zealand. It is actually dangerous for farmers. It is also dangerous to our rivers and it is dangerous to the New Zealand economy. You have to ask how low the dairy commodity price can fall before the Government decides that maybe a change of tack a change of strategy is somehow desirable.At the heart of this are the irrigation projects that I referred to in oral questions today. The Government has made a number of assertions about these which I would like to contest. It has said that these irrigation projects with $400 million worth of Government funding available—there is actually more than that if you take into account the Irrigation Acceleration Fund. There is another $25 million there and possibly even the use of some of the $100 million Fresh Start for Fresh Water Clean-up Fund also for irrigation projects to the tune of essentially nearly half a billion dollars of public money devoted to or directed at increasing large-scale irrigation projects.So the Government has said a number of things about these irrigation projects: first that they are public infrastructure—that they are somehow like roads. Well roads are things that pretty much everybody can use and irrigation schemes are not. Irrigation schemes are able to be used pretty much only by the user so the idea that they should be publicly subsidised rather than having a user-pays principle is somewhat ropey.I do want to just reinforce the point that there are actually three different available funds here for irrigation. One is the $25 million Irrigation Acceleration Fund. There is the $400 million that has been tasked for Crown Irrigation Investments and there is the Fresh Start for Fresh Water Clean-up Fund—$100 million there as well. The Government has also said that in an effort to clean up our filthy rivers it is going to allow irrigation schemes to bid for some of that clean-up fund. Like I said before I just think it is absolutely bonkers that you have got that level of public subsidy available for these incredibly risky schemes. If these projects are that good—if they are that economically powerful—then they should be able to stand on their own two feet.The other thing the Government has said is that somehow these large-scale irrigation schemes are good for the environment—that they are good for our rivers. The only cases where that is true are for rivers that have been so damaged by the clear-felling of trees and by massive irrigation in the past that there are huge amounts of sediment and nutrients in those rivers. The rest of the time all these schemes do is massive terraforming that converts land that is otherwise completely unsuitable to yet more dairy intensification. Of course we know that that increases runoff into our rivers and contributes to the growing problem that we have there.The assertion that the Government makes that these schemes are somehow economically viable that they are somehow environmentally good is actually completely preposterous. They are bad for the environment they are bad for the economy and they are also as it turns out bad for farmers because you have got farmers there some of whom are on multigenerational lands who are leveraged up to the hilt to pay these things back. So the Government’s argument is completely fallacious. Thank you.