Graham Kennedy: Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Graham Kennedy: Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:664;Page:11784] 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 I rise to support the Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill and I commend Chris Hipkins for his initiative in bringing it forward in this House. The bill has—or at least the issues underlying this bill have—I think had a strange if not a tortured history in this House. Of course the ancestral legislation is to be found in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its derivative the 1997 Kyoto Protocol but the direct parentage of this bill is found in the Climate Change Response Act 2002. The bill that is before us essentially began life only 2 years ago in the previous Labour Government’s Climate Change (Emissions Trading and Renewable Preference) Bill. That legislation of course introduced both the emissions trading scheme and the original ban for 10 years on thermal power plants. That legislation was killed in its infancy after being in force for only 1 year by the Electricity (Renewable Preference) Repeal Bill which was introduced and enacted by the current Government. Now 1 year after the premature death of Labour’s legislation Labour seeks its reincarnation in the form of this Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill. 
So essentially this is a see-saw political game of the kind that we see so often between the two major parties. The bill seeks as much to score political points as to strike at a common underlying consensus which is necessary for us to proceed substantively with addressing the overwhelming magnitude of the climate change problem. We need to ask ourselves about the kind of policy that underlies this kind of vacillation in the House. The answer is ideological differences. Both major parties—in fact all parties in this House except ACT which is becoming increasingly schizoid on the subject—acknowledge that climate change is a reality and acknowledge the need for action to be taken to combat it. But the differences between the parties on this issue immediately appear. 
National claims that the market is sufficient to combat the effects of climate change and that the price signal it sends out is sufficient. Nathan Guy speaks about this bill being a blunt and unnecessary instrument. He is wrong. He is wrong to think that we can rely on the price signal available through the market alone and this Government is certainly wrong if it thinks that the current moderated emissions trading scheme is a good enough signal. But on that basis the Government opposes any kind of interventionist policy such as a ban on thermal generation plants. In addition the Government is worried about security of supply and it wants new thermal plants to be built to underpin supply. It disregards the fact that those plants impede the switch to a low-carbon economy which it claims to want to see occurring. 
For its part Labour believes that the emissions trading scheme and the ban on thermal generation will be sufficient and in that it is closer to the mark. Chris Hipkins says the bill would reaffirm New Zealand’s commitment to climate change and turn New Zealand back into a world leader. With respect to him I think that might be stretching matters a trifle. None the less it certainly would be closer to the mark than anything that the current Government in any way achieves. 
For our part in the Green Party we differ from Labour in the sense that we believe climate change is not just another problem that can be solved through more strenuous efforts at mitigation and adaptation within the prevailing economic model. We say the overdeveloped world of the North including Australasia cannot and should not wish to continue with economic growth. Instead we seek an economy that attains an optimal scale rather than eternal growth. At that optimal scale we will find a dynamic equilibrium within an ecosystem rather than a necrotic production process that ignores the natural resource base at the pre-productive end and the waste disposal challenge at the post-productive end. 
But having said that I reiterate that the Green Party will support this bill despite our reservations over the weakness of some of the clauses in the 2007 bill. We will support the current version simply because it is better than the status quo. Thank you.