Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Thank you Mr Speaker. This isn't a good bill. This isn't a good idea. There are some parts of this bill which I look forward to discussing more carefully at the committee stage which are the regulation-making powers. This bill would enable a Minister to set regulations which are not appropriately set in secondary legislation. As my colleague the Hon Damien O'Connor has alluded to there are some problems with that and in moving them forward in this way that the primary legislation does.But this bill is also not a good idea because it takes away those tools that the Government has retained to ensure that New Zealand is meeting its international climate obligations. So when you look at this bill it doesn't really tell the full picture of how useful a tool like the clean vehicle standard can be for Government. We had the Minister of Transport presenting what was meant to be a legislative statement but was really a pretty politically charged speech about taxing everything.This wouldn't have acted like a tax and I want to quickly explain to the House in the three minutes I have remaining why it wouldn't have acted as a tax. I think this was something that Andy Foster alluded to in his speech too. These mechanisms in other jurisdictions are for sending the market a really clear signal on what sorts of vehicles should be imported and what sorts of vehicles shouldn't be. In most jurisdictions that use this kind of tool large importers are able to offset the high emissions vehicles that they import with lower emissions vehicles. It's also done on a weights basis. So if you were Toyota for example and you want to be importing the Hilux which is one of your most popular products you offset that by importing lots of the electric vehicles that are also popular products for you.Hon Peeni Henare: Of a base.ARENA WILLIAMS: So most—exactly. The Hon Peeni Henare is drawing the point here that most of the large vehicle importers in New Zealand that we have in our market are already doing this. They're already offsetting basically those larger products with the smaller ones that are super popular in our market. Used alongside a tool like the Clean Car Discount you then further incentivise importers to act in this way. It doesn't act as a tax at all. This Government is interested in stepping out its use of taxes like that which actually work as a signal for the market and doing things like time of use charging in our urban centres. This is exactly the same kind of tool which sends a really clear signal to the market that if you are going to be an importer you need to be making sure that the fleet that you're importing balances your emissions across the fleet. That's how we change our emissions profile in our vehicle fleet overall over the long term.We know that basically New Zealand's emissions profile—the big levers that we have here are one improving our transport fleet and two on agricultural emissions. We've got a Government that has just hours ago removed its ability to step out the agricultural sector's contribution to our climate goals. It has the right to do that. But then you would think that it would be interested in using some of the other tools in its toolkit to be able to impact on the emissions profile of our transport fleet but instead it's going the other way on that. That's something that we will have to tackle in the committee stage.When we're talking about the reality of this for consumers this is also a bill that pushes costs onto consumers with a regime that was originally designed to put costs on the importers. The funny thing here is that if you've got a properly designed system you're sending a clear market signal to your importers to spread their emissions profile across their import fleet. But now in this legislation there's a sort of policy call which is being made here that the major benefits of the Clean Car Standard accrue to importers of vehicles and consumers—and so those should be borne by consumers. But that doesn't actually achieve any of the policy goals that the Government should be advancing here which is to change the emissions profile of our transport fleet. Again we really need to turn to this and think carefully in the committee stage about why we set these fees in the first place what kind of tool this is meant to be for Government and what kind of outcomes we're trying to see when we set fees and when we push costs onto consumers instead of spreading them more fairly amongst the industry to actually change industry and importer behaviour here.Just returning quickly to my point about the regulatory making powers: yes it's useful for Ministers to have some flexibility to introduce new standards especially if things aren't ready to go or if we're getting good feedback from the industry about changes that need to be made. It would be appropriate to do that as an amendment to primary legislation which this kind of process would allow. So I look forward to the committee stage.