Sage Eugenie: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 10 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1406. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker and welcome to the new year. It is very good to be back here refreshed and invigorated after the summer break. I like many of us enjoyed time at the beach swimming making sandcastles and just mucking around in a boat. Those are some of the great Kiwi pleasures. That is why it was encouraging when the Prime Minister’s statement said that National proposed to develop policy to improve the responsible use management and conservation of New Zealand’s ocean environment. But how can National improve the responsible use of our oceans when at the same time it is promoting risky deep-sea oil drilling? What the Prime Minister says and what National actually does are two different things.New Zealanders love their beaches. They enjoy them over summer in particular and they want them open for swimming for fishing and for boating not closed because of oil spills. That is what National is risking by its subsidies to the oil exploration industry and by opening up so many of our ocean areas to permits for more deep-sea drilling. The deeper you go the riskier it is. So National is prepared to allow drilling even in areas that are supposed to protect Māui’s dolphins. We have got only 55 Māui’s dolphins left yet National is prepared to allow exploration in an area that is supposed to protect them. It is paying only lip-service to protecting our oceans. The Prime Minister also talked about having a policy for a greater range of marine protected areas. At the moment we have got 45 marine reserves. That is less than 0.5 percent of our marine environment that is protected and that is tiny given that this National Government has opened up more than 12 percent of our marine environment to oil and gas exploration.What National seems to be proposing now is not legislation to really protect our biodiversity through no-take marine reserves which are safe from oil exploration which are safe from fishing but simply recreational parks. We may need some recreational fishing areas but we really need some no-take marine reserves where our distinctive biodiversity is genuinely protected. We have not heard anything from the Prime Minister about that. We need those reserves not just around the coast but in our deep oceans beyond the 12 nautical mile limit.But National’s lip-service to ocean protection is most evident in relation to climate change and its failure to take real action to reduce our emissions. There was a significant study on ocean temperatures that was published last week in Nature. It showed that ocean warming steadily increased between 2000 and 2013. It showed that the increase in the temperature of the Earth’s oceans was equivalent to putting 2 trillion 100-watt continuously burning lightbulbs into the ocean. What is most worrying is that not only is this temperature increase happening on the ocean’s surface but it is happening up to 2 kilometres deep. The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research has been involved in those studies through it putting out some of the Argo floats that help to measure the temperature.But what the Prime Minister and what the National Government do not seem to be recognising is that this increase in ocean temperature will affect our weather patterns. It will contribute to more frequent and intense tropical storms. We are a coastal people. More than 65 percent of New Zealanders live within 5 kilometres of the coast. More intense storms combined with sea-level rise will expose more areas to coastal hazards and to coastal erosion. The cost of this to our country will be immense. The human misery will be immense. Just last year we had seven severe weather events. They cost the insurance industry $135 million.We can take action to arrest our emissions. We can take action to be on the right side of history in tackling climate change. The Green Party has a platform and a comprehensive programme of action to arrest our emissions. We will be working this year to promote those policies to convince the Government to take its head out of the sand to take action to reduce our emissions and to tackle climate change so that we can bequeath to our children a stable climate.