Woods MeganDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is a pleasure to take a call on this annual review for the Ministry for the Environment. When the ministry came to the Local Government and Environment Committee according to the report—I was not present at the select committee—the chief executive told the committee that climate change is perhaps the global issue of our time. When you then look through the report of what the Government is doing you would hardly recognise that that is indeed the fact. The initiatives that the previous speaker outlined simply are not enough. They are not going to get us to reach our low emissions target that we placed on the table in Paris and they are not putting us on a pathway of doing our bit in the global initiatives around climate change. Nor are they about putting our economic security at the fore in terms of us doing our bit to reduce our domestic greenhouse gas emissions. One of the things that the report makes absolutely clear is that agriculture will continue to be excluded from the emissions trading scheme. That is something that this Government will not act on and until it does act on that we have absolutely no chance of reaching our greenhouse gas emission target so I would like Government members to reflect on that when they talk about the wonderful work that their Government is doing in climate change. There is still much to be done. One of the big issues in the report that is covered off is one that colleagues have already addressed and that is around fresh water. It is something that a great proportion of the report covers off and it is no wonder because when the ministry came to give its annual review to the select committee it talked about the 6000 people who had submitted during the ministry's Next steps for fresh water process. Fresh water is something that New Zealanders care about. I think most of us have childhood memories of picnicking and holidaying near a river somewhere in this country. It is the stuff of the Kiwi Dream. I know for myself that Coes Ford just out of Christchurch was an incredibly important place for my family and me recreationally. That place no longer exists. That river does not exist anymore. It is a dried up area of land where no one would picnic no one would holiday and certainly where families would not go to recreate and that is what is driving New Zealanders in droves to take this kind of interest in fresh water. We hear Government members talking about the wonderful initiatives around that but the fact of the matter is that according to Nick Smith rivers can exceed the already high limit for E.coli 20 percent of the time and still be graded as good quality for swimming. That is not good enough. That is not what we think about when we think about doing what we need to in this country to protect our heritage to protect our rivers and to ensure that we have swimmable rivers for future generations. You just need to look at the Government's broader approach to fresh water and you can see that there is no action. It has been put in the too-hard basket. The can has been kicked down the road and left for another Government to pick up—and it will be a Labour-led Government after 23 September that will pick up these issues. The issue of water bottling is absolutely critical here. We have had the Minister for the Environment spinning on the head of a pin about how it does not matter but to ordinary New Zealanders the fact that there are companies coming in bottling our water that we can never get back and selling it for a profit that New Zealand does not see any return from is not something that New Zealanders see as desirable or good for their environment. We should not be letting multinationals come in and take our water for free and letting them sell it for millions but this is something that Bill English and the National Government are content to do. It is not something that a Labour Government would be content to do. We charge royalties on all kinds of resources when companies come in and extract them. For goodness' sake! We charge a royalty on gravel when a company comes in and extracts gravel—but we do not on this most precious of resources our fresh water.This Government's attitude to the environment is just indicative of its attitude to the future of New Zealand as a whole. It is kicking the can down the road. It is not making the hard decisions that need to be made and standing up for the kind of future that we want for New Zealand. These things are hugely important to New Zealanders both now and in the future.