Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Madam Chair and thank you to the member who has just resumed her seat Dr Liz Craig. I thought it was an excellent summary of what the amendments on Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 406 would do. She's right: they would require that people are allowed to meet their obligations to reduce emissions using either domestic or international credits or removals and that the Minister should be neutral in deciding whether people would use domestic or neutral so long as they were of a specified quality.It was interesting that the member quoted the Victoria University of Wellington Students' Association as an authority on the question because they submitted to the Environment Committee saying they didn't want to use international credits. Well they don't have to. But I would point out that if students at the university of Victoria are anything like students at every other university I know they don't apply the principle of using only domestic products in their own lives. If you go to a university and you said to them You must get clothing transport and electronics using only domestic sources." they would say "That's nuts. We want to be able to get competitive inputs to our lives and we don't care generally if they're sourced from New Zealand or offshore." I'd say to the member—she's respected among other things for being a doctor for being a medical professional—that nobody in the New Zealand medical profession would ever say that it's somehow wrong to take techniques and training and drugs and equipment for the medical profession from offshore. Of course when we try to provide for our needs we use inputs from a whole range of different jurisdictions. What's wrong with that? Why if we're prepared to trade with the rest of the world to provide for our needs and everything else would we not be prepared to provide for our needs in terms of carbon credits and emission removals by doing deals with people in other countries?There is nothing inherently wrong with doing that and I didn't hear the member explain exactly what is so wrong inherently with New Zealanders being able to meet their needs as efficiently as possible by sourcing reductions in carbon emissions from anywhere in the world so long as those reductions meet a standard that my amendments would provide for the Minister to set. There is no argument against this that I'm hearing tonight. Actually what's being proposed is to restrict New Zealanders to a narrower range of options for reducing their emissions than others. That puts New Zealanders at a disadvantage and that may also lead to greater carbon leakage—one of the things that the bill seeks to reduce.I think it possibly gives an insight into the bill as well and some of the motivations behind it because it appears to be more about transformation of the New Zealand economy and the way we live than effectively reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide equivalents in the atmosphere which of course is global. I think that's a real problem.Then the Minister in charge the Hon James Shaw said that my other amendment—which is not actually amendment 407. There is no 407. It's a tabled amendment with the time stamp 5.07. He said that it was ridiculous. Well actually what that amendment does is remove the power to set strategies by regulation. This House can still regulate a strategy any time it likes. Actually the Minister knows something about the desirability of that because if we go back to new section 5ZA(1) set out in clause 8 he's put in place a provision that actually the Minister must consult with but not actually debate what's in his strategy.So the question for the Minister is: if he acknowledges the importance of democracy and he acknowledges the importance of consulting Parliament about what sort of strategies or plans are put in place by the Minister well why not do it properly and actually come to the House and have the debate properly about what the strategy should be? He's halfway there and if he was to support my tabled amendments at 7 past 5 then he'd actually be going all the way and giving truth to his proposition or at least his apparent aspiration for these plans to be set democratically. I leave it to the two members to explain what possible remaining reasons they have for refusing to support as the Minister himself has said my very well-thought-out amendments on Supplementary Order Paper 406 and the amendment tabled at 5.07."