English Bill: Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill — Second Reading 
English Bill: Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:649;Page:18089] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 As National’s climate change spokesman I state that as outlined we will not be supporting this legislation. I want to run through some of the reasons why that is and how an emissions trading system should be organised because our leader has made a public undertaking that if National is elected as the Government we will ensure there is an emissions trading system in place within 9 months of that election. 
We have had a number of problems on the road to getting here particularly in the Finance and Expenditure Committee. This is probably the most complex and innovative public policy that Parliament has dealt with in a long long time and it deserved due consideration which it did not actually get. There were a large number of submissions and the Government spent too much time characterising submissioners into deniers and whingers—for and against—instead of listening very carefully to the issues they raised. But when all the submissions had been heard officials then turned up at the select committee with a raft of changes—some of which were consequential technical changes which one trusts the officials on—but the committee had almost no opportunity to check and to go through what was a substantial rewrite of important parts of the legislation. That is a shame because the lesson for anyone in this Parliament is that if complex legislation is not dealt with thoroughly it ends up back in Parliament—every time. 
It is difficult enough with such a new concept as an emissions trading system to get it right the first time—I suppose we will not get it right the first time but we should have taken the opportunity to do so. The reason the opportunity was taken from the Finance and Expenditure Committee was that the Government was on a timetable dictated purely by the political needs of the Labour Party and the Prime Minister not by the need of this country with its unusual mix of climate change gases and not by the need of the country to get it as right as we possibly can as we start up the emissions trading system. 
The other uncertainty that became clear at the select committee was that many of the practical issues raised by submissioners will in fact be dealt with by regulation not by legislation. Some of the reasons for that are that we need flexibility; a lot of these issues are sufficiently technical not to be in legislation because they will need to be changed. But the select committee hearing did raise the issue of trust. It was pretty clear to me that many of the submissioners were aware of the political compulsion behind the Government’s timetable and that they did not trust a dying Government to make sensible regulation particularly when its members characterised any critics of their policy positions as climate change deniers. That was the wrong environment to create trust in the Government to deal with all the regulation making that needs to go on because that regulation making is largely beyond the scrutiny of Parliament and certainly beyond the scrutiny of the people who made submissions. 
Now this unsatisfactory legislation has arrived back in the House and of course the House in recent days has come to an even lower level of trust and confidence in the current Government than it might have had as recently as a month or so ago when this legislation came out of select committee. The way it is being dealt with here has the same kinds of shortcomings in two respects. First we are being told that there is a substantial Supplementary Order Paper coming. Of course one does not have a Supplementary Order Paper before the Committee stage but as Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition we have no idea what is in it. What we do know is that it will be substantial that it will bear out the criticisms I have just made that there are a number of problems arising out of the way the select committee had to sign off all the changes without going through them and without settling outstanding issues that were in front of the committee for weeks on end. 
Now we are meant to take the legislation on trust—on the trust of a party led by a Prime Minister who has misled the public for the last 6 months over a critical political issue and who will pay for that. We are meant to trust these people to turn up with a Supplementary Order Paper that they think we should support! We do not trust them; it is as simple as that. We do not trust them and that is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because this is such vital legislation for New Zealand and by far the majority of Parliament—all except I think a couple of members of Parliament—supports having an emissions trading system but we have been deprived by Labour’s now desperate political needs from doing a proper job of it. That is only the Supplementary Order Paper— 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Where’s your SOP? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Where is it? What are the matters that are going to be set out on the Supplementary Order Paper? We know what will happen. Under Dr Cullen’s manipulative leadership of this House we have a one-part bill so there is only one debate in Committee. We will be presented with a large and complex Supplementary Order Paper the desperate dying Labour Government will try to move closures as quickly as it can on any debate within that part and it will use the procedure to shorten this up because its members are desperate to get out of Parliament so their Prime Minister will not have to face weeks of scrutiny over her astonishing revelation today. That is what is driving this process and this nation deserves better. The emissions trading system will be with us for decades to come but because Helen Clark is in trouble we will not get the chance to deal with it properly. 
That is just about the Supplementary Order Paper. There are also the other matters: the deals made with the Greens and New Zealand First to get the numbers for this bill. We need to know—to have a sensible debate here—what those deals are. The deal with the Greens has been accompanied by much conscientious thought and concern about whether the Greens should vote for an emissions trading system it does not support—because the Greens do not believe that the emissions trading system will do what the Government claims it will do. That is a position of principle and they have maintained that position right through this legislation. However a deal has been done with Greens and apparently it is a billion-dollar deal. That is not our number; that is the Government’s number. The Government has done a billion-dollar deal with the Greens to secure their votes. Interestingly from what we know of the deal—which is only a few lines in a press release—it is not to do with reducing carbon emissions; it is to do with a large-scale programme to insulate houses. It does not actually do anything to the emissions trading system itself. Well we would like the opportunity to debate that. 
Then there is the other deal—the grubby deal with New Zealand First. Winston Peters and Helen Clark have both misled the public for the last 6 months over large donations from a foreign donor and in the dying weeks of this Parliament they have put together a deal they will not tell us about which for all we know could be committing hundreds of millions of dollars to buying votes. So when are they going to tell us? How can we debate this bill when that rotten leadership is hiding the deal—hiding what will surely be a rotten political deal—of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy votes in the next 8 weeks? That is no way to debate the passage of the most important environmental and economic legislation that this country will deal with in the next 10 years. The legislation deserves proper scrutiny and it deserves more consensus than this Government could bother trying to pull together. So instead of the bill taking its time it has been crunched up by the election timetable and now by a developing and enveloping political scandal. That is the wrong way to do this legislation. The Government should have paid more attention to the six principles National laid out in its minority report. [ 
Interruption 
] Well no there are six and they are very sound principles. The Government has made no effort whatsoever to deal with those principles then has expected National to support its emissions trading scheme. Well we could not support it if the Government paid no attention to these principles. They are pretty straightforward: the scheme should be fiscally neutral.