Graham Kennedy: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Graham Kennedy: Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 25 October 2012. Volume:685;Page:6224. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) 
: 
 I commend David Cunliffe for his impassioned speech—something that is conspicuously lacking from the Government. The Finance and Expenditure Committee has held its foreshortened hearings and deliberation. It has returned its report by majority only to this House. The Green Party still opposes the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading and Other Matters) Amendment Bill and explains why in our minority report. Part of the reason has to do with the global reality out there that David Cunliffe has just spoken about: the gathering reality of climate change already better termed climate disruption possibly turning to climate chaos sooner rather than later. But I will address that later in the final reading. Today we focus on the intense unreality that is the New Zealand emissions trading scheme and the sad irony and sad history that have led up to the mess that we are now in. My purpose is not to damn the past for its own sake but to seek what we can learn from the experience before it is too late. 
In understanding this amendment bill and why the Green Party opposes it so strongly it is necessary to recall what has gone before: the litany of bold pronouncements faint-hearted gestures deliberate self-deception and downright chicanery. It is breathtaking in its political cowardice and it brings no credit to New Zealand as a nation. It reveals governmental failure on a monumental scale. We find over the past two decades eight about-faces in the history of New Zealand’s renunciation of its fair share of climate change obligation. In 1990 the Government declares an interim goal of a 20 percent drop in gross emissions below 1990 by 2005. We would explore a goal of 35 percent by 2005—a brave new world long since abandoned. 
Feint No. 1: in 1992 just after signing the Framework Convention on Climate Change the Government drops the 20 percent target promising only to reduce emissions to 1990 levels with no specified period. No. 2: in 1994 the Government moderates its ambition again to a target of equalling 1990 levels by 2000—this time not gross emissions but the new concept of net using forestry sinks to help meet our emission obligations. No. 3: in 1997 New Zealand signs the Kyoto Protocol with the legal obligation to cut our total emissions to 1990 levels not by 2000 but in the period 2008 to 2012 a whole decade later. Fast-forward 5 years to No. 4: in 2002 the Government implements the Kyoto Protocol on the understanding it will meet its obligation on a net basis not gross. This accords us freedom to increase gross emissions without constraint. No. 5 is coming up. The Government having declared in 2002 a goal of peak gross emissions by 2012 revises that 3 years later by predicting continued growth in emissions after 2012. The goal is now simply reducing the rate of growth by that year. Here comes No. 6: in its 2008 legislation the Government takes the goal of reducing the rate of growth by an unspecified amount over an unspecified period. The target year of 2012 drops from sight. 
Enter the Key Government and No. 7: in 2009 the Government accepts the 450 part per million threshold of carbon atmospheric concentration with the associated 2-degree limit but announces a mid-point target for 2020 of 15 percent—half of that required to meet the threshold. No. 8 coincides: the 15 percent will not be a mitigation target in which we actually reduce our gross or even our net emissions but rather a responsibility target that can be met also by the unlimited purchasing of international credits and it is qualified by a number of essentially unattainable conditions. Bravo! It is an exquisite irony that the European Union is committed to an unconditional 20 percent target by 2020 which is virtually what New Zealand declared as a goal for 2005 back in 1990. 
The history of the 22 years has shown New Zealand to have now become a laggard in climate change. We have downgraded our promises to make things easier in the short term forgoing the opportunity of switching to a smart green low-carbon economy that would benefit us all in the medium term and ensuring dangerous perhaps catastrophic climate change in the long term. What we have constructed over 20 years is a madhouse of self-deception of which this amendment bill is the latest shiny model. 
The select committee received 803 submissions and heard from 73 submitters. Many reflected corporate self-interest. That is valid enough as far as it goes even if it is occasionally myopic on its own terms. But it is never the national interest and it surely is not the global interest. Others reflected the broader interests expressing alarm from the most recent scientific findings of polar ice melt. That has in no way derailed the Key-Groser regime in fudging the matters further. The result is an emissions trading scheme that will celebrate the end of the first Kyoto commitment period 20 years after the Framework Convention on Climate Change by encouraging emissions. The amended Act will not respond to the challenge of climate change. It will busy itself with transfers of monetary coupons circulating with near total futility inside New Zealand as the planet’s climate begins to wreak its havoc upon us. What titanic stupidity. 
The Government has come to regard the Kyoto commitment period as a transition period—a 5-year transition period that is a prelude to an 8-year transition period to a global agreement that begins too late. With its weakened emissions trading scheme New Zealand is becoming a safe haven for dirty emissions. Carbon leakage may transform into carbon importation. The emissions trading scheme originally designed to be a stimulant to behavioural change has become a prophylactic against that change. Our gross emissions continue to rise and we are saved in Kyoto accounting terms by the forestry sector which incidentally has been given a bad deal. The Government fails the child’s test of logic that today’s forest sinks are tomorrow’s emissions—not too bright on the IQ scale for intergenerational justice. This Government plays up the free market as its ideological underpin then interferes with the market at its political discretion. The price gap a 50 percent surrender obligation sectoral favouritism free allocations and non-convertibility of most local units—not too bright on the IQ scale for socio-economic harmony. 
The New Zealand scheme has become a magician’s trick: self-deception by numbers. The presiding officer is Minister Groser chief wizard of neo-liberal orthodoxy in trade—an art translated directly into climate change as if the climate is a tradable commodity. His devolved Prime Minister looks on not entirely familiar with the drama or cognisant of the content knowing enough not to want to know more careful not to read the documents or recall what might have been said. Like the blighted captain of the  
Rena 
 Mr Key sails on courting disaster but hopeful that his tenure will run its course before nature exacts its revenge. In the greatest brain fade of a career he said in 2005 he was “suspicious” of global warming. That was 13 years after all the Governments of the world had agreed to a binding legal obligation to avoid it. Eighteen months later he said “I firmly believe in climate change and always have.”—as if science is a matter of belief. 
Our emissions trading scheme has become so degraded relative to the original theory of cap and trade that some think it is beyond rescue as a framework for a real climate change policy. What we need is a policy regime that effectively prices carbon and thereby reduces emissions—something above the UN offset price which fell 30 percent 2 days ago with certified emission reduction units and emission reduction units below €1. That is a carbon price here of NZ$1.30 or NZ65c after the one-for-two deal. Brilliant! It may be time now to visit the whole edifice of New Zealand’s climate change policy. Whatever the future holds it is critically important we strengthen not weaken the New Zealand policy for we are now lagging behind other countries. The Green Party will oppose this bill all the way through and we shall before long advance new ways of restoring New Zealand’s climate change reputation through a strengthened national mitigation policy.