Graham Kennedy: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Graham Kennedy: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 08 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6458. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 The New Zealand Parliament is about to enact an iniquity. With a bare minimum of numbers it will amend the emissions trading scheme and guarantee dangerous climate change for our children. There can be no issue of greater moment before this House than legislation designed to avert dangerous climate change. Climate change is not just another problem. It is about the future of the planet the future of life on earth the future of the human race the future of our children and our grandchildren. 
Anybody in this House—anyone anywhere—who belittles the matter of climate change whether they are a sceptic of the science or not is committing the greatest moral iniquity of all time for they are playing with fire assigning the future of the planet to the vagaries of chance. They are gambling with the lives of our children. They are taunting the gods playing roulette with the biosphere of the planet and they know not what they are doing. They who conceive and give birth to their children they who labour so long and lovingly succour their infants protect and clothe and feed them ensure their good health provide for their education enjoy fulfilment as their children grow to adulthood and produce grandchildren with the cycle of life beginning all over again—who among us can provide such human devotion to the present and such inhuman disregard for the future? For that is what we are doing. That is what we are doing. In our manic devotion to the illusory security in the present we erode the security—the real security—of the future. 
Where is the concept of guardianship in the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill—guardianship to our children to the earth that nourishes them? It is a test of our intelligence—our collective intelligence as a species as a global community as a nation with pride. In each case we are failing the test. 
I level the charge of ecocide at the leadership of this Government. I charge John Key and Tim Groser with moral ecocide: the conscious despoliation of the planet’s environment its carrying capacity that sustains life on earth. Ecocide is a legal crime in some countries. It is not yet in New Zealand or in international law but it is a political crime of the highest moral order. Those who commit ecocide in our contemporary global age are guilty of the act of omission to the point of criminal negligence breaching an obligation erga omnes violating the sacred trust in upholding the values and action that sustain civilisation. I charge Mr Key and Mr Groser both honourable men with gross negligence in failing to take due care of the New Zealand people in combating climate change. I charge them with breaching their fiduciary duty to humankind. 
This amendment bill is described as a balancing act. It balances our international reputation doing our fair share with New Zealand’s national interests in economic recovery and indeed future growth. It balances they say predictability for the sake of business investment at home with flexibility in international negotiations abroad. In calibrating such an exquisite balancing act the Government loses the plot. The aim is not to position ourselves on the deck of the  
Titanic 
; it is to turn the ship round. The goal is not to prevaricate in the present; it is to secure the future. The task is not to soften the pain for the current generation; it is to ensure the survival of the next. The leaders of this Government have lost sight of the goal. They are committing us to purgatory and thence to hell. Purgatory is the next decade hell is the decade after. I charge them with the moral crime of ecocide. 
As we watch the polar ice melt up in the Arctic we defer entry of agriculture in the New Zealand emissions trading scheme. As we hear warnings about the thawing of the permafrost in the northern tundra with the potential release of methane we continue with our one-for-two surrender obligations. As we anticipate ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica with a potential long-term sea level rise of 10 metres or more we retain regulatory settings that appear wilfully detrimental to foresters. 
Do we realise the effect that climate change is already having on our monsoon cycles in the tropics on the warming and acidifying oceans on the boreal forests with their searing summer fires? Do we know down here in Aotearoa about the global water and food shortage that is coinciding with the energy shortage? Are we aware of the epidemic diseases creeping in? Do we care about the decline of the frog population and the collapse of the bee colonies around the world? Are we mad? Are we so blindingly stupid that we do not see what we are doing here? Are we so craven that we cave in to the nearest latest commercial demand put upon us? Are we so intellectually weak that we can postpone action we know to be essential now because the consequence is not physically before us until it is too late? 
What have we done to deserve such leadership? What are we to say to our children when we go home tonight? We weakened the New Zealand emissions trading scheme today because we wished to retain flexibility in uncertain times because we were not prepared to place our trade-exposed firms at risk because we have signed an agreement with a coalition partner not to strengthen the scheme because we do not give a damn about the future because I choose not to look you in the eye. I charge Mr Key and Mr Groser with the moral crime of ecocide. 
I recalled in the first reading of this bill the global emissions gap that the UN has calculated. We have been unable over 20 years to achieve a binding global agreement to reduce global emissions so we content ourselves with voluntary pledges except everybody knows—they knew then and they know now—that voluntary pledges will never work. None of this surfaced in the deliberations of the Finance and Expenditure Committee. The report ignores the global climate change that is occurring around us as we debate. It focuses on the mechanics of an already dilapidated vehicle called the New Zealand emissions trading scheme. Well it is well named because what this scheme does is it trades in emissions. It does not reduce them; it trades in them. It may witness their reduction or it may not. Either way it is ancillary to the intent of the scheme which is to trade except we put it on credit for the kids to pay off with their lives because the global economy will be in such disarray from a thing called climate change turning into climate chaos. 
We are proving to be a very stupid species and we in New Zealand are doing our fair share. I charge the leaders of this Government with the moral crime of ecocide. I trust that in due course they stand accountable before the children of this world the children of John Key the grandchildren of Tim Groser and mine. The Green Party in Government will be 100 percent honest 100 percent accurate and 100 percent defiant in the face of increasing odds in this dramatic battle to avert dangerous climate change. We shall oppose this bill with all our strength.