Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Thank you Mr Speaker. Prior to the introduction of the clean vehicle standard the Productivity Commission noted that New Zealand was one of three developed countries in the world without such a standard. One was Russia one was Australia and one was New Zealand. This was the group of countries that we were putting ourselves with.What we can see then is New Zealand as a market—and the Hon David Parker talked about this in his contribution—was accepting cars with higher emissions than other parts of the world because the market could see that this was a place that you could dump high-emitting vehicles that simply weren't allowed into other jurisdictions. For example the top-selling new light vehicle models the most efficient variants available in New Zealand have on average 21 percent higher emissions than comparable variants in the United Kingdom. The very real reason is that they have a robust regulatory regime around the standards of emissions of vehicles.What we have is a Government bringing legislation to this House to introduce under urgency and pass under urgency that wants to water down the standards that we as New Zealanders should expect in our vehicle fleet. There is no real cause that's spelt out in any of the documentation. In fact I'm going to go through some of that and I note that the Minister in his speech on this reading didn't address what I think are some really real issues that he needs to address from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment that were released earlier this week in an open letter to the Minister given that there is no select committee process and no process for expertise such as the commissioner to input into that.There will be as we go through this bill clause by clause in the committee stage a number of questions that the Minister will need to address in regards to what the Parliamentary Commissioner is setting out. One of those that I think that this House deserves an explanation on is that we have a Minister that is bringing forward the ability of the Minister by regulation to change the standards outside of the statute by three years. This is significant in terms of our emissions targets. What the Parliamentary Commissioner is saying is that the legislation should contain some criteria and methodology that will inform the Minister's decisions around vehicle emissions standards whenever they exercise that regulation-making power.Now it is not too much to ask that a piece of legislation that allows the Minister to make decisions by regulation and brings that forward that we should be able to see laid bare in the legislation how he is going to do this. What is the kind of criteria and what is going to guide that decision making? We haven't seen any of that in this legislation. Something the Minister will need to address is why not? Because one of the problems the Minister is going to have when he gets into the chair is contained in the documentation that has been on the Table with the bill the departmental disclosure statement which I think is a very interesting read on this piece of legislation. Did the regulatory impact analysis team in the Treasury provide an independent opinion of the quality of any of the regulatory impact statements? No they didn't because they've been reviewed by a panel of representatives through the Ministry of Transport. It's been given a partially meets" rating against the quality assurance criteria for the purpose of informing Cabinet decisions. So Cabinet did not have all the information it needed when it made the decision and yet the Minister thinks that he knows so much he can bring it to the House without any scrutiny at select committee. It hasn't even had that.This from a Government that has set up a Ministry of Regulation and it is saying that they're going to lift the standards around decision making like that. So the Minister's going to have to explain to us why it is he is the world expert in this field that doesn't need his Cabinet colleagues to have that analysis when they're making decisions at the Cabinet table and certainly we don't need it as parliamentarians when we're expected to pass laws in this House.Then something else I found very interesting in the departmental disclosure statement: are the aspects of the policy to be given effect by this bill that were not addressed by or that now vary materially from the policy options analysed in these regulatory impact statements? Yes. So not only did he not get the kind of information he should have been taking to his Cabinet colleagues in the policy advice but then he changed it after that as well.So obviously this Minister is a genius when it comes to these matters and we look forward to him answering these questions in the chair because unlike anything we've seen from this Minister before I'm looking forward to a session when he actually answers some questions and has some information at his fingertips and things that he hasn't just made up in his office before he's come down to the House and had to come back and correct days later.One of the things that we see is the cost recovery impact statement developed for this bill did not address the aspects of the bill relating to the modification of the Clean Car Standard's emissions targets. So you know why would you want a piece of legislation that is actually about how we are reducing our emissions? It's baked into the emissions reduction targets that his colleagues and he as a Cabinet Minister are going to have to report on in only a few short months—didn't even consider it. Didn't consider how changing the regulations around the standards in our vehicle fleet are going to impact on our targets. This is woeful lawmaking. This is lawmaking that makes absolutely no sense. It is lawmaking that is being made on the fly. It is lawmaking that is being made without advice. It is lawmaking that is being made that does not meet the standard of what New Zealanders should expect. Because the Ministry of Transport the Minister's officials had to give an exemption from the requirement to analyse that aspect of the bill the aspect of the bill that was about the emissions targets. So members opposite you're quite happy to pass legislation that is just giving an exemption to thinking about reducing our climate emissions—doesn't matter. It is time this Government actually just owned what it is. It is a Government that cut $3 billion worth of funding out of climate action in this year's Budget. It is a Government that has no plan when it comes to reducing our emissions. It is taking us backwards on every initiative that it was achieving against our emissions reductions plan.The members of this Government are going to cost New Zealanders. We have two choices: we cut our emissions here at home and we keep jobs in New Zealand we support New Zealand industries and we back New Zealanders to have efficient cars to drive or we go the way of say the Swiss who are currently in the process of paying to put electric buses on the roads in Vietnam because they cannot meet their own emissions targets domestically.So as I said in my first reading speech I make no apologies that my colleagues and I every day of the week will stand up and say that we will do everything to maximise our emissions reductions at home to keep jobs in New Zealand to keep highly skilled work in New Zealand and to back New Zealanders rather than thinking you can just trade your way out of this by going and buying expensive credits on the international market. What we're seeing in this departmental disclosure statement is this Government isn't even thinking about that. They're not even considering it. It's not part of their decision-making framework. They do not care about the cost impost that they are putting on New Zealanders which is in the order by Treasury's estimates of probably around $600 million a year. Think about that. We have a Budget next year with a $2.4 billion operating allowance and Treasury's own analysis would suggest if we were to block that as a contingent liability then it would be in the order of around $600 million. This is what this Government is going to cost us and every day they bring nonsense legislation like this to the House that further erodes our own domestic reduction they are costing New Zealanders more. Every dollar we have to spend overseas buying credits will not be spent on schools will not be spent on hospitals and it will not be spent on New Zealanders' futures. That is what this Government is putting at risk."