Simpson Scott; Shaw JamesHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Chair. I want to raise with the Minister some questions in Part 1 of the bill relating to the methodology that he will use to set the confidential reserve price. But before I get into that I just want to pick up on a comment that he made in answer to my colleague Erica Stanford about When did he know?" and "What did he know?" and the time frame. Did I hear him correctly say that the officials drew the drafting error—or the instructions that hadn't been taken up by the Parliamentary Counsel Office—in August of last year? Was that correct?Hon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): Thank you Madam Chair. Yes. I actually want to correct something that I said. I was actually incorrect when I said that the drafting instructions didn't pass that on. So actually the drafting instructions did; there was a Cabinet decision to say that there would be a confidential reserve price. At the time we referred to it as a "technical reserve price". That piece of language has changed subsequently. So that was a Cabinet decision that was in the instructions. The bill was drafted and obviously went through Parliament and it was at the stage when regulations were being drafted to match that they discovered there was an inconsistency that didn't allow for the confidential reserve price to be built in at that point. The advice that I received was that that was discovered in late August and then I was advised on 3 September.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you. Look I don't want to be overly pedantic about it but I think that the timing is actually quite important because that's partly why we are in urgency discussing this bill today literally a few days before the first auction. There were a series of Cabinet papers that were presented. So one that went back—and this is according to a report in the much-quoted Carbon News and well-respected Carbon News. It says in an article that they published that Cabinet accepted Shaw's recommendation and on 21 September so after August 2020 invited the Minister for Climate Change to report back to Cabinet regarding—and then there was a piece redacted—the technical reserve price before the third reserve auction in 2021.Now that commentary gives rise to a suggestion that actually the Cabinet didn't have a sense of urgency—that in fact there wasn't any particular urgent need to address this issue and that something changed something clearly changed. If the Minister had drawn to his attention by officials a fault in the regulations that had become clear in August why was it then still back a month later in September—towards the end of September on 21 September—that Cabinet was "inviting the Minister for Climate Change to report back to Cabinet regarding"—something redacted—"the technical reserve price before the third reserve option in 2021" which is you know some time away? So I'm keen to just clarify the timing please.Hon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): No that is consistent. So the advice I received on 3 September was advice from the Ministry for the Environment (MFE) saying that they had discovered there was this irregularity that meant that we weren't able to produce that and the advice at that time was that it presented a low risk. I then took that to Cabinet—which is where you get that reference to the Cabinet decision later in September—because the advice was to say let's fix it up over a longer period of time because we at that time thought that we had another emissions trading scheme amendment bill that would be coming in and we could put them in together at that time.However subsequent to late September when that decision was made as I mentioned before there was some commentary including as previously noted from the Opposition spokesperson on climate change at the time calling attention to this. And that itself changed the risk profile—that MFE felt that that could then induce a different type of behaviour by participants in the auction process—and so therefore I then received in let me get this right mid-November new advice that said it was felt that actually we should go ahead with an amendment prior to the first auction which is what we're now dealing with."