Brownlee Gerry: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Brownlee Gerry: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10521] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 Members can see why this Government’s climate change and energy conservation policy is in such trouble. The Minister in the chair Harry Duynhoven packages up a whole pile of fairy tale fictional rubbish and presents it as if it were fact. He says that we are to be a sustainable nation because the Prime Minister says so. In the meantime we will burn more coal than anyone has ever seen before. We will burn it here we will burn it in Newcastle we will burn it in China and we will burn it anywhere. In the meantime we will go around tilting at every windmill we can see in the hope that it might make some difference to our children’s lives in the future because we want this country to be a nice clean green country etc. 
The Minister’s view is totally divorced from the reality of what his Government is doing. Here it is in black and white. The Government’s own agency is reporting not last year not last month not last week but today that coal production and the use of coal for energy in this country has seen a 10 percent rise in the last 12 months. 
Why will Helen Clark not accept the invitation to go up and open the E3P plant in Huntly? It is because of—in a word—embarrassment. The word “sustainability” was mentioned 39 times in her speech at the beginning of the year but my goodness at the very time when she was saying that we had a record use of coal for energy production in New Zealand last year and the only reason the lights are staying on this year is that a gas-fired plant a three-stage turbine is fired up at Huntly. 
The Minister in the chair Harry Duynhoven is telling an absolute porky when he says there is not enough gas to fire up Huntly. Rubbish! There is plenty of gas and the Minister knows that. He knows that the predictions for the Maui gasfield have been extended and extended and extended. He knows that there is lots of gas in Pohokura. He knows that suddenly the Maui field which for years was considered to be a pretty low-level low-flow field is now in full-on production and is entirely backing E3P. What he does not tell us is that it is convenient to burn coal it is cheap to burn coal and it works to burn coal. If that coal was not being burnt and that 1000 megawatts was taken out then the lights in the country would go out. 
So here we have a Government saying that it will do something for the environment; that we are to have a sustainable New Zealand. It is not a target. At least the National Party has said that we will try to reduce emissions by 50 percent by 2050. But from this Government there has been absolute silence on any target. 
Everywhere anyone looks the picture is bleak. The Minister said: “We have a range of wind farms.” and I think he said they are about to come on to production. Every one of those projects is held up in the Environment Court. Every one of those projects will end up with a greatly compromised consent. Everyone knows that that is how it works because the deck is stacked against renewable projects. But it is interesting that E3P and Whirinaki never went near that process because those sorts of projects are easy to get consents for. 
National members ask a simple question. If the Prime Minister is out there saying that we want a sustainable environment and a sustainable economy then why does her Government not make the changes that are necessary? 
The Minister also said that Project Aqua was scrapped because water would have spilled all over the place. That is rubbish. Keith Turner the chief executive has told anybody who wants to listen that the prospect of going for more than 360 individual consents on that project made it economically unviable. There was far too much time and far too much capital tied up for far too long. 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: Talk to the engineers. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Well the interesting thing is that the irrigation projects that were a consequence of that are actually going ahead. There was no problem with those. It might surprise the Minister if he looked at where the water was coming from at where the water will now go and at what is missing in the middle which is the generating capacity from a renewable source like that. It is what this country so sorely needs. 
The Minister also challenged the National Party as to whether it would pull out of the Kyoto Protocol. In my view that is a somewhat stupid question. Clearly we will not pull out of the Kyoto Protocol and we have said that over and over. But the Kyoto Protocol will not survive beyond 2012. I think the question is what the Government will do when we get to 2012. There is silence. 
David Parker came to the Commerce Committee a couple of weeks ago and for a start he told us that the expected emissions first stated by the Ministry for the Environment which showed us in credit were wrong. But now the Minister also tells us that the figures showing we are in some sort of deficit are equally wrong and that rather than a $1.8 billion deficit he thinks it might be somewhere around $600 million. 
Does that mean that the Government will simply pay it and not do the things it should do to try to lessen the effects of carbon dioxide emissions in our own country? Does that mean that we listen to what Minister Duynhoven had to say today—that burning coal is not such a bad thing after all and because we have such good high-quality coal why should we not burn it here and simply pay our way out somewhere else in the world? A question arose as to where the payment goes to in 2012. Where does the Government write the cheque to? 
I would like the Minister in the chair Harry Duynhoven who is a different Minister to confirm this statement from Minister Parker because different Ministers have different views which is the only consistent thing with this Government in any portfolio. Minister Parker told the committee members that New Zealand emitters could either spend that money reducing emissions in this country or—and this is straight out of a transcript—they may choose to invest in carbon reduction programmes offshore and if they can gain a greater amount of credits then so be it. The question though that sits in behind all of this is whether it is now the Government’s intention simply to give up on the prospect of having a greater level of renewable energy to do away with some of the energy efficiency options we have in this country and to create some sort of domestic trading market that is largely predicated on purchasing our way out of the particular mess we are in. 
One of the things we can be certain of is that beyond 2012 the whole world will get into this—the recent G8 conference makes that extremely clear. Our opportunity is to get ahead of it but it is alarming to hear people like David Parker giving trite explanations such as those he gave to a select committee just a few weeks ago. I wish his officials who appear to be in the Chamber tonight had been at that select committee meeting because then they would know what he had said and this evening they would be giving accurate advice to the Minister in the chair the Hon Harry Duynhoven who as we have already discussed has very little idea of what these particular issues are all about. 
But we are talking about climate change in these estimates and I wonder whether the Minister might be prepared to tell us when we are likely to see some papers indicating the Government’s thinking on a trading market when we would expect that trading market to be up and running and just where the Government thinks it will get some of the credits it needs in order to start that particular market. These questions should not go unanswered; they are questions that the current Minister should get up and explain. 
I think it would also be nice if the Minister was prepared to apologise to the officials who sit behind him for denying the information they have put out today in the New Zealand  
Energy Data File 
 dated 18 July 2007 which makes it absolutely clear that electricity generation from renewable sources accounts for 66 percent inside a growing market. That means that a greater percentage of our electrical energy consumed now comes from thermal sources than was the case just a few short years ago. 
I further want to ask the Minister how many gasfields have come on in the last 8 years that were explored consented and developed entirely in the time of the Labour Government. The answer is very very few and at a very very low level. But let us think about the volume of them. The reality is that Pohokura was started and developed under a National Government and it was finally approved during this Minister’s term and that the extensions on Maui and on the small field Kupe have all come about as a result of work commissioned by the previous National Government.