Shaw James; Mallard TrevorHon JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): Well as Gwendolen remarked in The Importance of Being Earnest there are times when it ceases to be a moral duty to speak one's mind; it becomes a pleasure. I'd like to just start by responding to some of the myths being peddled by the Hon Judith Collins who started her contribution by talking about how New Zealand was such a small contributor—0.02 percent of global emissions. It is true that when it comes to global emissions we are one of the small emitters but if you add up the 96 countries in the world which each individually emit 1 percent or less of global emissions together we add up to 24 percent of the total. That is 1 percent behind China and it's 10 percent ahead of the United States.Being small does not absolve us of responsibility and in fact as an OECD country with a highly developed economy as the emitter of the fifth-highest emissions per capita in the world we actually have a greater responsibility because per capita we emit more than most. Not only that it shows that when we act in concert with the other small countries in the world together we can change the world and today New Zealand showed that we are willing to be one of the leaders in the world in the global fight against catastrophic climate change. We are willing to stand up alongside France in saying that we seek to end offshore oil and gas exploration in our waters here in Aotearoa.I've been fascinated listening to the National Party contributions and reading their press releases today. You have to remember it was the National Government with climate change Minister Paula Bennett who signed the Paris Agreement on behalf of New Zealand. That agreement commits every country to hit net zero emissions in the second half of this century. That is a radical proposition particularly when you are a country like New Zealand that has such high per-person emissions—it's a radical proposition—and yet today what we find out is that while they might have signed New Zealand up to that agreement they have no intention of doing anything that would actually change things that would actually bring down our emissions that would actually reduce pollution.Today we got to see the National Party defending their mates in the big oil industry saying Actually let's just keep this going a few decades longer or maybe a few centuries longer. Let's not start the transition. Let's just keep it going. Let's drill baby drill." because that is their instinct. It is remarkable on one hand to say that you are serious about climate change to the point that you are willing to sign an international agreement saying so and then the same people are saying merely a year later "Actually no. Let's not do that. Let's keep going with fossil fuel emissions. Let's allow that industry to continue as long as it wants to." That's a remarkable thing to say.The other thing that I heard today is how little faith the National Party have in New Zealand innovation in New Zealand workers in New Zealand industry. What they are suggesting is that over the next 30 years as we transition away from fossil fuel exploration in this country that somehow will not be replaced by anything. They're suggesting that somehow all economic activity is going to stop as a result of this decision. It's remarkable. They're saying "No actually industry isn't going to innovate. It's not going to reinvest. It's just going to close up shop." and in fact what they're suggesting is it's going to start closing up shop tomorrow or maybe this afternoon because there's only 30 more years left of guaranteed activity.I find that utterly remarkable and I've got some numbers—some statistics—I wouldn't mind sharing with them. Around the world US$11 trillion is going to be invested in renewable electricity investment in the next 20 years—that comes from Bloomberg. In the single year of 2016-17 there were 8 million clean energy jobs created worldwide according to the International Energy Agency. In the United States solar jobs are being created seven times faster than the entire rest of the economy. It is the single fastest-growing sector by a factor of seven. Here in New Zealand PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that New Zealand's share of the global clean-energy market could be $7.5 billion to $22 billion a year if we had policies to encourage it—policies like the one we announced today.Countries who have signed up to the Paris Agreement have actually committed—and New Zealand is one of these countries—to mobilise at least US$1 trillion worth of green investment in the next 12 years. Last year in the renewable energy sector alone global investment was up to $280 billion. So there is a colossal movement of capital into renewable energy and yet Judith Collins is suggesting that because over the next 30 years we are intending to phase out fossil fuels somehow none of that capital—literally not a cent—will be redeployed into other more renewable forms of energy and industry in New Zealand. That is a remarkable statement to make. It shows an utter lack of faith in capital in industry in innovation in research in science in technology and in New Zealand. It is an utterly faithless statement to make.Judith Collins also suggested that New Zealand can only ever bridge the gap between what we currently generate from renewable electricity and 100 percent with coal or gas. She suggested that is literally the only form of energy available and yet at the same time there are 3281 megawatts of consented renewable electricity generation ready to be built in New Zealand. Already it is consented and ready to be built. So if we wanted to we are able to make the switch to renewable electricity and close the gap that our current fossil fuel reliance—that could have been built a long time ago. That number hasn't shifted in a decade. There have been over 3000 megawatts of energy consented and ready to go in this country that we have held off investing in and held off building because of our dependence on fossil fuel electricity generation.Westpac bank last week estimated that acting early and managing a smooth transition could add $30 billion more to the New Zealand economy by the year 2050 than the alternative. And what National is suggesting—and suggesting by saying they're going to turn back the fossil fuels; they're going to actually increase fossil fuel exploration—is that actually we're going to have the kind of sudden transition as the world winds down its own fossil fuel use and yet we're continuing to drill and continuing to try and find markets for what is a declining market place around the world. The National Party is suggesting that actually we should just keep it going and then allow the kind of crash that happened in the 1980s—right. Actually what we need to do is send a long-term signal into the market place to allow industry to invest in the future and that's what we have done today.I'd like to just finish with some words. About 50 to 60 years ago President John F Kennedy from the United States announced that it was going to become the mission of that country to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back home within 10 years. At the time that he made that commitment they actually didn't have the technology to get there. They didn't have the metallurgy. They didn't have the rocket fuel. They didn't have the guidance systems or the computing systems. None of that existed. They knew that they needed it but they were prepared to invest and invest they did. What he said at Rice University in Texas when he announced that—he said "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept one that we are unwilling to postpone and one which we intend to win". And we can—SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The member's time has expired."