Shaw James: Climate Change Response (Removal of Transitional Measure) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShaw James: Climate Change Response (Removal of Transitional Measure) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 26 May 2016. Volume:714;Page:11409. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAMES SHAW (Co-Leader—Green): It is my pleasure to rise in this third and final reading of the Climate Change Response (Removal of Transitional Measure) Amendment Bill. The Green Party is of course supporting this bill because it does move us one tiny timid step closer towards reducing our emissions. When I say “tiny” and “timid” I am of course referring to the Government’s own analysis that this will reduce our emissions by 0.7 percent in the year 2020 3 years from now. That is against a rise over the course of the next 15 years of 96 percent in our emissions over 1990 levels. So it is going to shave a tiny amount off the enormous growth that is projected in our emissions over the course of the coming decade and a half. It really does not slow down the supertanker of New Zealand’s emissions as we head towards frankly global catastrophe.To give you some context our emissions are projected to increase 96 percent above 1990 levels by the year 2030. They have already risen 24 percent above 1990 levels and since this Government came to office they have risen 19 percent above 1990 levels. They are now at the highest level that they have been since 1990 which is when we actually started counting. It is also the period of time that the emissions trading scheme has been in place for.I just want to reiterate the point that the purpose of an emissions trading scheme is to reduce emissions. What has happened has been the precise opposite. Our emissions have increased by 19 percent in the time that we have had the emissions trading scheme and that is because when this Government came into office it gutted the emissions trading scheme it changed the settings and it crashed the price.One of the things that Government members have said several times tonight is that the reason why they are phasing in this tiny measure over the course of 3 years is the cost to business. Well they thought nothing of the cost to business when the Government changed the settings on the emissions trading scheme and crashed the price of units. Hundreds of millions of dollars were wiped off the value in the forestry sector overnight by this Government. There were stranded assets up and down the country—hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost to the Māori economy alone was half a billion dollars. You had iwi businesses up and down the country that lost half a billion dollars because this Government changed the settings on the emissions trading scheme and crashed the price.So when Government members get up and say “Oh well it is going to take us 3 years to phase in the removal of the two-for-one subsidy because of the cost to business.” they have got no idea of the catastrophic damage that they caused to the forestry sector and to iwi businesses around New Zealand when they introduced that policy. They say that they are friendly to business but the cost to business of this bill will go nowhere near the cost to business that they created when they crashed the price in the first place 8 years ago.During the course of the debate tonight there have been a number of speeches from the Government benches that have not just talked about the cost of implementing this bill but have shown that Government members have no comprehension of the cost of not implementing the bill no comprehension of the cost of doing nothing as we have done nothing over the course of the past two and a half decades to arrest climate change.When you look at the costs to our businesses that are mounting up already they are staggering. It is millions upon millions of dollars in costs that are already occurring. We have always thought I think about climate change as this thing that happens in the future to somebody else—to polar bears in the Arctic in the future. In fact the costs are being felt now by us here in this country and in our closest Pacific neighbours where people are already having to relocate to higher ground because rising seas are swallowing up their homes. We will see the same kind of thing in New Zealand—in South Dunedin and in Napier and in Tauranga and on the Kāpiti Coast and in many many other low-lying areas around the country.The idea that trying to do something to reduce our emissions carries with it some kind of unacceptable cost is not stacked up on a business case basis against what is already starting to happen and the costs that are being imposed as our infrastructure gets flooded as roads go underwater and as we have extended longer deeper and more frequent droughts. The cost to our agricultural sector of that—