Sage Eugenie: Address in ReplyText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Address in Reply[Sitting date: 29 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:403. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Mr Assistant Speaker I congratulate you on your appointment as Assistant Speaker and look forward to your knowledge your fairness and your light touch in being a referee of proceedings in this House. I congratulate also the other Assistant Speaker Lindsay Tisch; the Deputy Speaker the Hon Chester Borrows; and the Speaker the Rt Hon David Carter. I would also like to congratulate new members in this House on the very powerful and eloquent maiden speeches that we have heard from across the House. I look forward to working with you.I am very pleased to be back here in Parliament and I would like to thank everybody who voted in this election particularly people who party voted Green. I would not be here without your votes. There were more than 10000 extra people this election who party voted Green than did so in 2011. So as a Green MP I recommit to being a voice in this House for a long-term vision for this beautiful country of ours for a smarter fairer and greener economy and a much less rapacious approach to nature.The National Government is an expert in double-speak. We had the Speech from the Throne referring to “balanced and sensible management of our natural resources” and then in the next two paragraphs it talked about encouraging petroleum and mineral exploration and more dams and more irrigation projects. The National Government just does not get it. It is not listening. The United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres has said that three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change and cap the rise in global mean temperatures to 2 degrees. Yet the National Government is doing the exact opposite by encouraging more oil exploration and more exploitation of fossil fuels.In the Speech from the Throne the Governor-General said that the Government would continue to focus on managing New Zealand’s emissions. That is a joke. Under National we have seen net emissions increase by 20 percent and they are predicted to increase by another 50 percent in the next 10 years unless Government policy changes and we have seen absolutely no indication of that happening in this term. So it is the National Government’s complacency on climate change that is a threat to the health and well-being of present and future generations to our environment and to our economy because it is based on maximising the exploitation of nature. That means that New Zealand remains part of the problem in terms of climate change rather than part of the solution. Instead of locking us into this high carbon investment and oil exploration and agricultural intensification the Government needs to focus on reducing our emissions and that is something that is a priority for the Green Party in this Parliament—to get a change of policy. We have an urgent need to shift to a much smarter and fairer economy and that will provide many opportunities in terms of export income regional development and jobs.In this term I am really pleased to pick up the oceans and fisheries portfolios because our marine environment is underprotected and it is seriously threatened by overfishing. The Government is certainly promising new marine protected areas legislation but that needs to be supported by a comprehensive ocean protection strategy and a commitment to an extensive network of marine protected areas that use the best practice in marine reserve design—instead of what we have got at the moment which is a very ad hoc approach with postage stamp - sized reserves scattered around the coast.If the Government is to be serious about marine protection we need to do something about ocean acidification. There is a recent report from the Ministry of Primary Industries that makes chilling reading about its effects on shellfish. Ocean acidification leads to changes in the saturation levels of calcium carbonate. That makes it more difficult for shellfish like oysters to actually form their shells. As larvae they have a very small window of time to form shells otherwise they die. There have been massive mortalities in oyster larvae off the Oregon coast in the United States. We have the potential to experience those effects here unless we do something about climate change and contribute to reducing our emissions. Thank you.