Kuriger Barbara; Rurawhe AdrianBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to stand here and speak on this climate change bill tonight. As you've already heard from the previous speakers National is opposing this bill. If I go and begin with Minister James Shaw's speech today talking about giving businesses and foresters the certainty they've been asking for businesses have been asking for certainty for the last few weeks and bringing this bill into the House and chopping down a few more trees is not giving businesses the certainty that they're asking for. It's been really interesting through this whole lockdown process because for the last 2½ years farmers have really felt like the butt of everything and then all of a sudden we get COVID-19 unfortunately—a terrible global pandemic that's hit the world. We've been very lucky in New Zealand to get away with the small amount of COVID deaths that we've had and I feel sad for the families of those people that have passed away but really we have had a good health result in this country. But what was really interesting during that time was that we didn't hear much about how bad the farmers were. We heard so much about how the farmers were going to be integral in getting our economy up and running and boy does our economy need to be getting up and running again right now. It was really interesting about some of the dynamics that were going on with the cars off the road and with the planes out of the air and all of those sorts of things. There was still the same amount of cows and guess what! The world didn't come to an end. So you know the cows are one part of it but the cows are not all the parts of it. The thing that really gutted me the most was that every day I was walking down the walkway in Taranaki and it was just amazing how clear everything was. The day we went into having takeaways and everything else opened up again—and we do need to open up businesses again—what distressed me the most was that the rubbish tins were overflowing. So we are all in this together. This is not just about the farmers and the businesses; this is actually about our whole community taking responsibility because one of the biggest gases that we have in this world is from food waste. I see an awful lot of food waste every day. Farmers go out of their way to produce this food in an efficient way and it's time that food waste was taken into account. So on this side of the House National believes that you cannot tax a country into prosperity and that's whether it's economic prosperity or whether it's environmental prosperity. So it's the same way that you cannot tax a country out of climate change. We are trying to meet global targets here and that's what the Paris Agreement was about. It was about doing our bit. It's not about doing more than our bit and our farmers would be the only farmers in the world who would be in an emissions trading scheme under the regime of this Government. What we don't need is tax; what we need is tools. So while this Government is obsessed—and we see it time and time again—with saying that they're the best in the world at everything our farmers are some of the most efficient farmers in the world. We have a huge amount of intellectual property that we can offer the world in helping to lower these global emissions if we're not taxed into a space where the money's going into some administrative scheme rather than actually going towards the science that we need. We need science-based mitigation not money going into a hole where it's administrated and someone will take their chunk out of it. How much will ever go back into research? So we support the farmers farming their way into better environmental outcomes and the income will follow. Tax as I said just goes into an administrative pool and I wonder why we are doing this during COVID-19. We need our resourceful industries like we never did before and this is a whole backward step at this point in time. Why couldn't we wait 12 months? Why couldn't we actually get a better bill rather than the legislation that's now being fixed and put it into some sort of context where we could actually live with it? So this is actually a very messy process. As many people who sat on the Environment Committee have said—and I didn't sit on the committee—it was done during lockdown. I speak very highly of Zoom. I'm sure Zoom has actually helped the climate over the period of the lockdown because we've been able to be efficient and do a lot of things. But to some extent it has also not given our submitters the best chance to be able to engage with this while they've all been away worried about their families getting sick worrying about the economy worrying about keeping their businesses afloat—Hon Scott Simpson: An insult to democracy. BARBARA KURIGER: You're right. My colleague Scott Simpson just simply said it was an insult to democracy and it is. It's like sneaking something under the radar and bringing it back into the House. If you divided the amount of pages in here by the amount of MPs that are currently sitting in the House at question time which is half it's a great insult to democracy to bring this up right now. So I just say look let's give farmers the opportunity and I commend the farming leaders' groups. The farming leaders' groups have got their heads together and said Let's find the answers to this.' But the answers are not in taxing the farmers. All they want to know is where are we today and they've got a pretty good handle on that. They need to know where they've got to go and they're looking for the tools that actually drive the change to get to the end outcome. So I have much pleasure tonight in standing here and opposing this bill because I think it's the wrong bill for the wrong time. Yes we do need to get global emissions down but this—and the multiple trees that were cut down to do it—is certainly not the way for it to happen. So thank you Mr Speaker. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I call Michael Wood. Hon Nathan Guy: This'll be the detail man."