Luxon ChristopherCHRISTOPHER LUXON (National—Botany): Thank you Madam Speaker. Look I'm pleased to take a call too on the Maritime Transport (MARPOL Annex VI) Amendment Bill at first reading. National is pleased to support this bill to select committee. It's not the most radical or transformative or sexiest piece of legislation that we're dealing with this evening but it is certainly a very positive step forward in our collective actions around climate change and around a cleaner environment and making sure we've got healthier communities. That's a good thing. We believe small actions over time—actions being the operative word not just words—can actually make a big difference.As we all know the MARPOL agreement is a really good multilateral tool that is available to countries around the world in arresting the effects of climate change particularly in the marine environment and that is a really important thing. Certainly you know we've all been signed up in New Zealand here to MARPOL since 1998 and we've acceded to four of the six annexes already and it's good that Annex VI which is really fixated on limiting air pollution of ships around ports and harbours is a good thing for us to be signing up for.The bill as it's been proposed is really around enabling the Minister to make marine protection rules around Annex VI around air pollutant substances which are things like nitrous oxides in sulphur oxides in particulate matter. That's important because it makes our harbours and our communities around those harbours much safer and obviously has some public health benefits. It enables the director of Maritime New Zealand to make interventions to do audits to check that actually ships are complying with Annex VI and it has a number of obligations on them which is fantastic.So we think you know limiting sulphur content in marine fuels requiring ships to meet certain performance criteria emission standards port receptions having facilities to actually deal with those particulates and those wastes is really important. Ninety-four countries have signed up to it over 97 percent of the world shipping tonnage and I think we're one of only a handful of OECD countries that hasn't yet done so so it is certainly time that we embrace this piece of legislation.It will have public health benefits and that's important for people with compromised immune systems and it does give us some public health benefits estimated to be in the order of about $33 million annually. So I think it is important—and on this side of the House we think in National that it is important—that we are playing our part as part of a multilateral system to work collaboratively with our trading partners to try and improve the marine environment and it's one of the things that helps us protect one of our trade and our economic interests.But there are a few things that we really would dispute and I think the four-month window for us to discuss this bill and some of the implications and particularly the implementation plan around it is something that we can pick up and discuss later on but we have some issues with that and would oppose that. We think it is important that we really do properly understand what low sulphur fuels are going to be needed in this country where they're coming from how they'll be distributed who can access them and which ports—all of that implementation plan needs to be completely understood. We know that for a lot of our New Zealand coastal shipping fleet they've got to be able to use fuels that have a 0.5 percent level of sulphur in it. They can fit their ships with scrubbers but that's actually not very economic for that fleet. We know also here in New Zealand that fundamentally Refining New Zealand isn't going to be refining this kind of fuel and sending it down the main pipeline so we're going to have to import that fuel from overseas. Obviously low sulphur fuels are in huge demand globally. So the real thing we want to use that time for is to understand exactly how that implementation plan will come together and what is New Zealand's ability to make sure that when we make a declaration like this we can actually meet our commitment and support our coastal shippers and our shipping community that actually need to be able to use these fuels.So we look forward to that time being used to hear more from our shipping operators and of course the affected officials who can give us some insights and confidence that there is an implementation plan here. And the reason for that is very simple. We think this is a Government that likes making declarations and announcements; we've seen it on oil and gas we've seen it on lots of different things and we really want to see an execution or an implementation plan. We know this Government suffers with execution so we just need to reassure ourselves that we actually have it all sorted that we actually do know what we're implementing and that we will be able to get the job done. We'd also like to see—I think the Ministry of Transport had a New Zealand Institute of Economic Research report commissioned. We'd like to see some of the benefits of that and just take the time to go through the analysis tick off the boxes make sure that we can do what we say that we're going to do and execute things incredibly well. So apart from that we're pleased to support this bill through to the select committee stage. Thank you.