Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Climate Change): Thank you Mr Speaker. I want to start by acknowledging that now we're in the third year of the pandemic people are feeling the pressure. The fact that we're having an outbreak with higher levels of mortality now than we've had recently the fact that people are struggling with rising rents they've still got their concerns about their health. That is having the impact on people of increased stress an increasing sense of people needing to deal with those very immediate issues to do with themselves their family their households and so on. And amidst those concerns I know that people are having to deal with a number of other issues as well that are also mounting on top of those. My colleague Kiritapu Allan came back from Gisborne in Tai Rāwhiti just the other day where of course they've seen two one-in-100-year rain events just in the last six months. As somebody said it's been a short hundred years between those two. The people of Westport and Buller of course have seen some extraordinary storms both in July last year and February this year—again events that were only supposed to happen one in every 100 or one in every 200 years are occurring in the same six-month period. Until yesterday there was an unseasonal drought in Southland which was causing a lot of consternation obviously for the farmers down there who are trying to grow food. In a period of the year when normally you would have plenty of rain water they had none—and obviously celebrating the breaking of that drought yesterday. All of these events of course are increasing in their frequency and their severity and all of that is happening whilst people are having to deal with the pandemic and the consequences of the pandemic in terms of their lives and livelihoods. Yesterday—the same day that that drought was finally broken in Southland—we also had the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) telling us the news that we have kicked the can down the road long enough and that we are now out of time. One of the extraordinary things that they laid out in that report yesterday was that globally our emissions need to peak in the year 2025 which of course in Governmental terms is right around the corner; literally just three years away before they need to peak and then continue to fall every year. We know that the lived experience of the people of Tai Rāwhiti the people of Westport and Buller the people of Southland and other parts of the country who are experiencing these increasingly severe storms and droughts and floods is backed up. Because we've always had dramatic weather in this country the extent of which people's lives are changing is hard to tell. But we know that actually what is happening here in Aotearoa is that the kinds of rainfall that we've seen recently in Gisborne and Tai Rāwhiti is 15 percent more intense now than it was 100 years ago and it's 20 percent more like to happen than it was 100 years ago. So when people are starting to report back to us it does feel like these things are happening more frequently and it does feel like when it rains there's more rain than there used to be then actually that experience is backed up with the data as well.As the IPCC says we're out of time. And I think historically over the course of the last 30 years we've been in this situation where these reports have talked about what's going on globally but we here in Aotearoa we don't necessarily connect that to our personal experience. But that is now shifting. We know that what we need to do here in Aotearoa needs to not just mirror what needs to happen in the rest of the world but actually as a developed country as a wealthier country we actually need to do better than the global average in order for us all collectively to meet that global average. Over the course of the last four years we have had an enormous programme of work to try and bring down our emissions. We've passed unanimously in this House the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act major reforms to the emissions trading scheme we've banned new off shore oil and gas exploration we set up the Green Investment Fund and the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund and so on. We have changed the future trajectory of our emissions but not yet enough in order to bring them right down. I just wanted to say that the reason why we're focusing on this right now is because next month in May we're going to be publishing the emissions reduction plan and giving New Zealanders that sense that things are changing and changing for the better.