Smith Nick: Climate Change Response Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Smith Nick: Climate Change Response Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:635;Page:6395] 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson) 
: 
 What a pickle we have in New Zealand in respect of climate change policy. It has all been said quite accurately by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. That neutral office holder has said that in New Zealand right now we have a vacuum in respect of climate change policy. Here we are 7 years after the election of this Government and on one of the most critical issues of our time we have a vacuum. All we have from the Minister responsible for Climate Change Issues is that next month we will get some options. We on this side of the House say that after 7 years of this Government a set of options is simply not good enough; it is simply not credible. 
 It is all the more incredible that the Prime Minister at the recent Labour Party conference said that New Zealand is going to be carbon neutral. That was an extraordinary commitment from the Prime Minister. The advice from officials is that New Zealand does not have a bolter’s show of meeting the very modest targets of the Kyoto Protocol as ratified in 2002. Officials are saying that even to stabilise emissions from New Zealand is an extraordinarily demanding thing to do. So for a Prime Minister who has failed so badly to now be talking about a more ambitious goal than that of any other country in the world defies credibility. 
Then we look at the Government’s actual record. How often have I heard Labour members damning the Governments of Australia and the United States in respect of climate change? How often have I stood on the platform and heard Labour Ministers talking about big bad George W Bush being in the pocket of the oil barons and a threat to the climate? Well this week in Nairobi this Government got a very harsh message. You see emissions under Helen Clark’s Government have grown by 6.8 percent. 
Lindsay Tisch 
: How much? 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: By 6.8 percent and in the big bad USA over the same years emissions have grown by 1.3 percent. So there we have Helen Clark’s actual record—not the rhetoric but the actual record—which is five times worse than that of George W Bush. Now let us look at the record of Australia because I have often been at international conferences where our Labour Ministers have pretended that somehow John Howard and Australia are the bad guys. Again I ask them to look at the record because New Zealand’s emissions are growing at a far faster rate than Australia’s. 
Darren Hughes 
: What’s their total per person? 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: But even more serious I tell Mr Darren Hughes is that in the last 6 years when Mr Hughes and Labour have been in Government we have seen each and every year a decline in the amount of forestation. Throughout the 1990s we averaged plantings of 60000 hectares of new forest each year. Every year that Labour has been in office that number has dropped to the point where in 2004 and 2005 we actually had net deforestation. Labour has said that that is just economics and it is not its fault. Well that is interesting. If we go across to Australia which is selling to exactly the same markets and which is investing heavily in the pine and forest industry we see that there is 450000 hectares of new forests. So I say— 
Shane Jones 
: It’s a bigger country. 
Hon Dr NICK SMITH 
: Well Mr Shane Jones says that it is a bigger country. Let us say that it has five times our population. If we were doing even one-fifth as well we would expect to have 90000 hectares of new forest in New Zealand. But I tell Mr Jones that we are actually cutting down more trees than we are planting—we are going backwards. So I say to Labour members that their track record is appalling. 
Let us look at the track record of policy failures. There has been the “fart tax” and the backward flip on that. There has been the carbon tax and the Government’s back-down on that—although we have different answers from the Prime Minister and from the Minister responsible for Climate Change Issues as to why the carbon tax was dropped. There is the billion-dollar bungle in respect of the Kyoto balance. Projects to encourage renewable energy have been stopped. We have had negotiated greenhouse agreements and that policy has been canned. There has even been the nonsense of Labour voting to remove climate change provisions from the Resource Management Act then voting for a bill that would put them back in. Labour has blocked renewable energy projects—it killed Project Aqua and it stopped the Dobson hydro scheme—yet it has built coal-fired power stations and gas-fired power stations and for goodness’ sake it has even spent public money on building an oil-fired power station. It is little wonder that we have seen a constant decline in the proportion of New Zealand’s electricity that is produced from renewable energy. 
Members opposite who have no policy—the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment says they have no policy; their friends in the Green Party say they have no policy—ask what National’s policy is. I want to outline exactly what National thinks should be done. We believe that we need to cap the emissions in the electricity sector. They are growing faster than those in any other area. New Zealand has lots of renewable energy options with wind hydro geothermal and wave and tidal energy to be able to meet this country’s electricity needs without building another coal-fired power station as Mighty River Power one of this Government’s State-owned enterprises is promoting in Whangarei. 
We also say that we need to provide an incentive to plant forests. That is why we are saying we want a tradable emissions permit system which will enable us to encourage players in the forestry industry to get some credits for the forests they are planting. You see this Government with its ridiculous policy of a deforestation cap is saying to foresters that it will charge them if in future they cut down their trees. Not surprisingly those foresters have their chainsaws out early and they are cutting those trees down which is bad for our economy and bad for the environment. That deforestation cap will go. National says that is a sound approach. 
We have identified a whole number of other such ideas including bio-fuels improving the fuel efficiency of vehicles updating the building code to take into account energy efficiency reforming the Resource Management Act so that we can actually build some renewable energy projects and joining the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate an agreement that includes India and China. Let us be honest: we will not make any progress on climate change unless those countries are engaged and involved. We have also talked about the fact that we need to substantially boost investment in research and development. This Government has turned down over $3 million worth of research projects to reduce our agricultural emissions and we simply say that that is wrong. 
 So this bill is not going to take us very far at all. Those who think this bill will solve New Zealand’s climate change problem are kidding themselves. I challenge the next Labour speaker to tell us how Labour is going to make New Zealand carbon neutral. It is all very well for the Prime Minister to prophesy with her incredible targets at the Labour Party conference and to talk about our being carbon neutral but she should come down to this Parliament and tell us how that will be achieved. For us it looks like a pipedream. [ 
Interruption 
] I say to Mr Hughes and Marian Hobbs that the Labour Party cannot have a conference where it talks about being carbon neutral then have Mighty River Power propose to build a new coal-fired power station that will produce 38 million tonnes of carbon over the next 40 years. That is simply not credible. I would like the next Labour speaker to explain why it has proceeded to build a new oil-fired power station. 
We need leadership in this area. National has provided it. I encourage Labour to pick up National’s constructive ideas around a tradable emissions permit system. That is the way of the future. This bill is only a teeny-weeny step towards providing what is required. We need to fill the vacuum that exists in climate change policy and actually provide New Zealand with a constructive way forward.