Hodgson Pete: Energy (Fuels Levies and References) Biofuel Obligation Repeal Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Hodgson Pete: Energy (Fuels Levies and References) Biofuel Obligation Repeal Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:845] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 It seems to me that over the last 2 weeks the economic direction in this country has been set and it has changed from where it was in previous years. Generally speaking it seems to me that our approach to economic development and to progress as a nation is starting to regress. We are going backwards not forwards. We are becoming dumber not smarter. We are becoming unsustainable not sustainable. We are becoming antagonistic to new technology instead of embracing new technology. We are in denial of the global mega-trends instead of mindful of them. 
It is almost as though climate change is some sort of grand intellectual global plot that this Government feels it needs to pay some homage to because it is a vote maximiser. Actually to do as little as possible is the mindset that the Government is in. That appears to me to be what has happened in recent weeks. It started last week with the repeal of tax credits for all research and development in New Zealand. That in itself has set the scene for an economic direction that will be based on volume not value and based on making sure we are technology followers not technology leaders. That is hard enough and difficult enough to swallow. 
Then what happened was that the climate change policy of the new Government altered between election day and the formation of the Government and it altered very substantially. It altered in the sense that the Government’s position when it was trying to win an election was that it would amend the existing emissions trading scheme. Now we have this so-called high-level select committee that is taking us back to the drawing board to see whether we think climate change is of much consequence. This committee will look at what everyone else thinks about it what the big global take on it is what we think about the science and whether we are to have a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme. As a result there has been a whole lot of lost investment in this country and the economic consequences of that are measurable and have come to book. 
As a result of the delay in emissions trading—if we ever get emissions trading back under this Government—we have also seen a delay in the retrofitting of all of our pre-1977 houses. This country is full of very very cold dogboxes. It is a country in which the graphs for admissions to hospitals in the winter months for various bronchitic diseases are much much more severe than they are in say Britain or Sweden where there is not a seasonal rash of admissions or a seasonal death pattern. There is a seasonal death pattern that exists in New Zealand that does not exist in those parts of the northern hemisphere. Even though the climate in those areas is colder than ours those countries none the less have much better building stock and pay much better attention to housing standards. We had an opportunity to fix that and it has gone out the window. That is a very very significant change indeed. 
We have had some other changes and one that we are debating right now is how we are going to put an end to biofuels. Right through the debate on the Energy (Fuels Levies and References) Biofuel Obligation Repeal Bill the Minister of Energy and Resources Gerry Brownlee has clung tight to the sophistry that he is not doing biofuels in the eye and that they will be able to proceed even though the requirement for a sales mandate is being abolished as a result of this legislation. Evidence has been adduced by the Opposition to show that the Minister is wrong. The evidence is really clear and it comes from the industry itself. It comes in the form of letters and one of those letters in particular has been read out in full during the Committee stage of this debate. It stated without any hesitation that the industry could not go ahead without this sales mandate. 
The Government’s reason for not proceeding with biofuels legislation that uses a sales mandate is that it is ideologically opposed to it. The Government is ideologically opposed to a sales mandate because it thinks it is coercive. Of course it is coercive. If we want to start something that has resistance from some of the largest multinationals in the world then we have to put our foot down just as we have to coerce oil companies to take sulphur out of petrol too much benzene out of petrol or lead out of petrol. We have to show them we mean it; if we do not they will continue to colonise us. That is what will now happen: those companies will sell mineral oil in this country pure and simple for the foreseeable future. There will be no beginning of the switch to an alternative even though we know that oil is a finite resource that sooner or later it will run out that before it runs out its price will go up and that it will then go up in price again. These things are now being ignored and newly so. I do not think I can recall a Western nation that has taken a step against biofuels. A number have failed to take any steps towards biofuels but I cannot think of a Western nation that has got up and said: “We are going to axe progress on biofuels.” I do not know of one and that it is a shameful position for us to be in. 
The real problem is that the Government’s arguments against biofuels are so weak. They have no balance to them they have no substance to them they have no logic to them and they hold together badly—so much so that the Government was forced in order to fill its speaking time to come up with a bunch of stuff that were red herrings. The debate that we have had in the last day has shown them to be red herrings. I guess the one that comes to mind and it will do as an example is the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s assertion that the Biofuel Bill as introduced was a bad bill. Well at the end of the day no one in the House disagreed with the commissioner. Certainly no one on the Local Government and Environment Committee disagreed with the commissioner. As that bill went through the House there was awareness that the price of food and the price of oil ran the risk of becoming linked and that that would be a bad thing because a person’s Sunday drive would be responsible for someone else not eating. So the members of the select committee and a few others who were advising from the outside moved to address that and to put sustainability descriptions into our primary legislation that are the most advanced in the world. Underneath that primary legislation further regulation was to be developed. 
The next bit of sophistry that came from the Minister was the claim that the regulations were too hard. Is it not interesting that official advice has apparently flip-flopped in the space of one general election campaign? We were in Government not so long ago and when we were in Government the advice was: “We will be ready by July.” Now it seems it will take far too long so the country most advanced in putting in legislative policy involving biofuels for such a future is the one country that is about to back off and say: “Square one is good for us. Going back to the point of zero is where we want to be.” So we now have a Government that has already started to show a pattern. The Government is only a few weeks old but the pattern is to go back to the future. The pattern is to say: “Let us find the reverse gear and depress the accelerator as far as we dare.” 
This is dreadful legislation. It is dreadful because it does damage to this that or the other company; it is dreadful because of job losses; it is dreadful because it takes us backwards; and it is dreadful because it leaves us ill-prepared for the future. 
If we think of the first charge on any Government we know that it is to defend the realm. In this country we do not have big threats of marauding hordes coming from Indonesia. Our threats are the external shocks of climate change and oil depletion and we have decided in this House today to see whether we can ignore those as possible threats. That is shameful—it is shameful. The biofuels legislation that is about to be ditched was modest enough but it was a start. It was a good start. There was an industrial development response to that start and there was a capital investment response to that start but now it is going up in smoke. It is going up in the smoke generated by mineral oil and that is not the future; it is the past.