Shirley Ken: Climate Change Response Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Shirley Ken: Climate Change Response Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:625;Page:20400] 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY (ACT) 
: 
 It is beyond doubt that climate change is a reality. The point is that the planet has always been undergoing climate change—sometimes quietly sometimes very dramatically; periods of change in climate tend to be quite dramatic. We have had huge variations through the ages and evidence is overwhelming for that. So to say that it is climate change is not the point; the issue is what is the anthropogenic impact—that is the human-induced climate change—and that debate is very much alive and unproven. The Minister for the Environment said she is just back from New York where she spoke to a few scientists but there are thousands and thousands of scientists who fiercely debate that the anthropogenic effect is minimal. The overwhelming evidence would suggest that solar variations principally caused by varying orbital patterns with the Milankovitch cycle and others that we could go into in depth are the real drivers of periods of climate change. 
Be that as it may—we can debate that—we then come to the Kyoto Protocol which is the UN kind of response mechanism. The ACT party’s position on the Kyoto Protocol is this: it is fundamentally flawed. It is unfair; it will not achieve its stated objective; and even the proponents of it and the key scientists say that after 100 years of full implementation it would make only a 5 percent difference. So it is an instrument that does not achieve its stated objective and is grossly unfair for the reasons we have just heard with only a very few countries having any obligation whatsoever. And here is New Zealand thanks to this Labour Government putting on the thickest hair shirt and saying: “We’re going to save the planet!”. What absolute and utter nonsense! 
Of course last week we had the new carbon tax that Labour has trotted out and it is another round of retro-socialism. I would like to go through some of the aspects of that because we have heard in this debate that it will put an additional burden of $300 million to $400 million of costs on New Zealand and New Zealand businesses. But the Minister dressed it up as a market instrument. Unfortunately retro-socialists do not really understand the market. She referred to  
The Economist— 
I am pleased that she is at least reading  
The Economist 
—but the article was actually on global environmentalism. It virtually stated that Rachel Carson the  
Silent Spring 
 author of a few decades back—the 1960s I think—has to meet Adam Smith and I could not agree more. Rachel Carson does indeed have to meet up with Adam Smith. 
I support market instruments. In fact I was a member of the Government’s Working Group on Carbon Dioxide Policy back in the 1990s with Bill Falconer Keith Turner and Guy Salmon which wrote the durable response report on how to set up a tradable carbon regime—and I actually believe in it. But the purpose of a market instrument is to put out incentives and disincentives to change behaviour. Let us examine this retro-socialist Labour Government’s market instrument. It thought: “Oh yes carbon credits in forestry! The sequestration of carbon! Fast-growing trees sequester carbon.” If one believed that one would leave the credit there to encourage the behaviour—that is the planting of more pine trees to sequester more carbon. What did the Labour Government members do? As good socialists they nationalised it. They said: “We’ll take that.” So there is no incentive to plant more trees. 
At 6 o’clock I am going to the farewell function for Rob McLagan who is retiring tonight as the Chief Executive of the New Zealand Forest Owners Association. He of course took my former job—the job I had before I came back to Parliament. I will be reporting back to the executives of the forest industry there just how bad it is. They know they have had their property right stolen by this retro-socialist Labour Government. It has nationalised the carbon credits and destroyed the market instrument. 
Let us look at the other side of the ledger. It then imposed a carbon tax. But it will have these negotiated greenhouse gas agreements. Having confiscated the property right the Government will dish out largesse to selected industries. If one lobbies politicises and comes knocking on the door of the Government the Government—at its pleasure—will dish out dispensations shall we say. Again the market instrument is destroyed. Neutrality is destroyed. The energy-inefficient will be subsiding the energy-efficient. How smart is that if one truly wants an economic instrument to work? It is pretty dumb. It is not Rachel Carson meeting Adam Smith. No it is Rachel Carson meeting Stalin or Karl Marx. It does not work. It fails. It will not work at all. 
Let us look at the electricity market. The Government is going to slap a big tax on electricity based on the carbon component. But how does the electricity market work in New Zealand? We have 200 nodal offtakes and every half-hour we run an auction and the highest bidder sets the price for everyone else. Contact Energy runs the Huntly power station which is based on coal. A lot of the time particularly when our lake storage is low it will bid the highest and will set the carbon tax and all the hydro operators—the non-carbon emitters—will pay the same price. So all consumers will be hit with this tax irrespective of how much carbon is emitted. Of course the non-carbon emitters the hydro operators will then get a super-profit by that amount. Let me think who the main hydro producers are in this country. There is Meridian Energy there is Mighty River Power and there is Genesis Power. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Who owns them? 
Hon KEN SHIRLEY 
: Who owns them? The Government of New Zealand. So they get big fat dividend payments back on super-profits that have been gouged out of poor struggling New Zealand businesses and poor struggling New Zealand households. I ask the Minister how smart that is. It sounds pretty stupid does it not? But that is her Government’s policy. It is not a market instrument and how dare this Government come to this House masquerading it as a market instrument. It is a complete failure. All that it is is nationalisation of the economy and an excuse for the Government to get its hands on the levers of control. Industries now have to lobby and politicise to get dispensation. The Government is taking hold of the levers of the economy. We know that energy drives the economy and under this Government’s application of what it calls a market instrument it is taking control of all of the market instruments and all the levers of the economy. It is doomed to failure. 
The position of the ACT party is quite clear: we should scrap the Kyoto Protocol. It does not achieve its stated objective. It is grossly unfair. The National Government should not have signed it in 1997. Simon Upton was just as eager to sign it and wanted to rush to ratify it just as keenly although he might have understood the market instrument a wee bit better. But it was fundamentally flawed from the outset. I attended several of the working-group preparatory committees leading up to Kyoto in 1997 and I was aghast at the politicisation of the process. It is a UN process out of control. It is all about bureaucracy. There are thousands of the so-called scientists that the Minister spoke to in New York last year. All of their funding is dependent on their perpetuating this story. They swan off around the planet flying in jets depleting the ozone and using up great amounts of energy to attend conferences every other month that are just hot air and garbage where they reinforce their views. They ask: “Where is it spring next month? We’ll move there for our conference next month.” 
The Minister tags along like a little patsy lamb and they wind her up and tell her that it is humans who are causing all of these problems. It is utter nonsense. The Minister should go back to the basic science. There is 50000 times more carbon dioxide in the oceans; if we take total carbon there is 50000 times more. We know that temperature changes the solubility of carbon. It is change in temperature that is driving carbon out of solution and into the atmosphere as it has done for millennia. It is change in temperature—because of changes in orbital pattern and changing solar radiation—that is increasing atmospheric carbon; it is not atmospheric carbon increasing temperature. Thousands of scientists around the world have come to that conclusion. This Labour Government has missed that basic point because it is so wound up in its UN committees. In a way it is just an excuse to apply this control to apply this movement towards a command economy.