Chauvel Charles: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 08 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6452. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 I was reading an article from the  
Independent 
 that was published on Monday— 
David Bennett 
: On an aeroplane—don’t try and make it look like you’ve thought about it. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: I know Mr Bennett does not like to read but it is actually quite a useful thing to do from time to time if we want to know what is happening in the world. If he wants to follow the lead of the previous speaker Tim Groser and lay some sort of claim on behalf of his party to be doing something about this issue in a credible way he might like to do some reading as well at some point. 
The  
Independent 
 tells us that the world is destined for “dangerous climate change this century—with global temperatures possibly rising by as much as 6C—because of the failure of governments to find alternatives to fossil fuels”—and this is all contained in a recent report not from some group that this Government might like to try to malign as interested or fringe but from a mainstream consultancy the accountancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers. What PricewaterhouseCoopers concluded was this: “it will now be almost impossible to keep the increase in global average temperatures up to 2100 within the 2C target that scientists believe might avert dangerous and unpredictable climate change … An analysis of how fast the major world economies are reducing their emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels suggests that it may already be too late to stay within the 2C target that was set by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”. This was a key finding of the PricewaterhouseCoopers study. In order to try to get within that target the global economy would have to reach what it described as a “decarbonisation” rate of at least 5 percent a year for the next 40 years and obviously we have not seen anything like that happen since records began to be kept at the end of the Second World War. 
Even if we doubled the current rate with which we are dealing with this concept of decarbonisation there would still be “emissions consistent with 6C of warming by the end of the century. To give ourselves a more than 50 per cent chance of avoiding 2C will require a sixfold improvement in our rate of decarbonisation”. So we might as well just start planning for a warmer world. That is the conclusion from PricewaterhouseCoopers—it is too late. It says this: “This isn’t shock tactics it’s simple maths. We’re heading into uncharted territory for the scale of transformation and technological innovations required. Whatever the scenario or response business as usual is not an option.” 
What is the response from the New Zealand Government to this phenomenon? Well we just heard it: “We do not want to be leaders in this area.” If only that were just the simple truth. The Government does not want to do anything of practical effect in this area. Not only does it not want to do anything of practical effect but also it wants to hide and obscure the effect of what is being done. 
 I was astounded when I began to read the select committee papers relating to this bill the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill to see the extent to which Ministers and officials under the instruction of those Ministers have been seeking to obscure the truth of what is going on now. What I am sad we did not hear from the current Minister but I am hoping we might hear some enlightenment from Dr Nick Smith or other speakers is this: why is the Government seeking for example to exclude emissions trading scheme units from being valued in the Crown’s financial statements? The translation of that is that Ministers are asking whether local carbon credits given away by the Government as corporate welfare and compensation should even be shown as a cost to the taxpayer and whether the taxpayer who is paying for these things should even be allowed to know first that they are doing it and second what it is costing them. This Government has systematically suppressed detail on the cost of the emissions trading scheme. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Not true. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: It absolutely has Dr Smith. It has done so so that this very complex scheme is harder still to monitor. It is absolutely breathtaking in my view that a Minister would ask officials to consider not valuing something that when given away means the recipient has to pay no tax. Such gifts must be recorded as costs to the taxpayer. This is in line with simple generally agreed accounting practice. It is in line with the sort of openness and accountability that we expect from Governments and that actually the law requires because we have a Public Finance Act in this country and we do require transparency from Government. If we do allow this sort of obscurity to take hold then it will be as was predicted longer than the 2-year time frame that the Minister seems to know about. This debate has been going on for a lot longer than that. 
As was predicted at the time that the Government originally introduced its so-called moderation of the scheme this is a recipe for corruption because if the public cannot know the value of the subsidies it is paying through the now perverted and ineffective emissions trading scheme that we will see emerging out of the other side of this legislation then we will have a major problem with transparency in this country. 
The chairperson of the Finance and Expenditure Committee will no doubt speak later in the debate. I hope he takes a close interest in this issue because we will all be looking to him to ensure that this does not happen. Yet we have a Minister responsible for this issue who wants to obscure the facts and who wants to make it far more difficult for us to know what the cost of this subsidy scheme is. 
On the question of transparency I think the most disappointing thing for me out of the debate over the last week or so in the House was the voting down of one of the Supplementary Order Papers put up by my colleague Moana Mackey. I said in an earlier contribution that one of the things I was heartened by in earlier parts of this debate years ago was Dr Smith’s professed commitment to transparency. But this commitment seems to have absolutely vanished because National voted against this Supplementary Order Paper 146. All it would have done was require the Environmental Protection Authority to publish annually the amount that industries charge their customers for carbon—that is all. It would have allowed the public to see through some of the opacity that this Government has now introduced around what is—thanks to the changes it has made—a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to polluters. But the public is not going to get that chance because National and its allies Mr Banks and Mr Dunne voted this amendment down. 
There is no evidence that the benefits of either the low carbon price which the Minister mentioned or the Government’s so-called moderation of the scheme are being passed on to consumers. They are being kept as profits by these polluters. I was astounded in question time in the last session of Parliament when Simon Bridges as the Acting Minister for Climate Change Issues was questioned in the House on what evidence he had that prices were being brought down by Government policy in this area. The only answer he could come up with was that his constituents told him so. 
Evidence to the select committee which all the members who sat on that committee know about showed that through fuel and electricity prices consumers are still being charged a carbon price of between $15 and $25. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: No evidence at all. 
CHARLES CHAUVEL 
: Absolutely. That is absolutely the evidence. And we all know that the actual carbon price is about $1 so where are those profits going? And if I am wrong Dr Smith why is the Government so scared to be transparent to introduce a requirement that the Environmental Protection Authority have transparency around whether or not there is any pass-on of a reduction or whether these profits are being retained by the corporates? 
To give you an example Contact Energy has yet to review its levies introduced in 2010 which add to consumers’ power bills 0.77c per kilowatt hour for electricity and 0.27c for gas. It even wrote in its 2012 annual report that additional savings from carbon unit costs helped cause its improved profits in the last year. This is what the emissions trading scheme has become under this Government—an unjustifiable mess that cannot be penetrated as far as those who wish to see what is really going on here. It is simply corporate welfare and an opportunity for corruption and we must be very very worried about it. We must be very worried indeed. The tragedy of this bill which we are now reading a third time is that it will do so much to make a bad situation even worse.