Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): There's a very important question facing this House this afternoon: is it worth sacrificing our fourth-largest export earner thousands of jobs and millions of dollars of royalties and taxes to give the Prime Minister a talking point for her town hall meeting with Justin Trudeau? That's what this is all about. This is all about politics. It's not about good public policy for New Zealand it's not about meeting our Kyoto or Paris obligations it's not about helping the environment and it most certainly is not about helping the economy.Isn't it interesting how the Prime Minister and her bevy of Minister delivered this? Was it in Taranaki the region that will be most affected by the economically ruinous policy? No; it was at the Beehive theatrette and then up at Victoria University with crowds of adoring fans behind her. No guts to go to Taranaki and talk—SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] No I'll deal with it. The member will stand withdraw and apologise.CHRIS BISHOP: I withdraw and apologise. The Prime Minister should have gone to Taranaki and gone to New Plymouth. She says that she's going as soon as she gets back from the United Kingdom. Well how about not going to the United Kingdom and going to New Plymouth and standing and looking the people of Taranaki in the eye and saying This is a decision we're taking."? How about talking to the industry before the decision was made—talking to the Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand and talking to the players involved in the industry? What an appalling outrageous process this Government has decided to follow as they cut the knees off one of our most successful export industries.Shane Jones "Matua Jones" was standing there today with all of his facial contortions and he knows what I'm saying is right. As he was standing there—the first captain or the first leader or whatever—Rt Hon David Carter: First citizen. CHRIS BISHOP: First citizen—whatever grand title the matua wants to give himself today about the regions. He knows that this is a hammer blow for Taranaki and a hammer blow for other regions that want to develop their petroleum resources.As Judith Collins pointed out there are 19 petroleum basins in New Zealand. We use one of them and the one that we use is the most wealthiest part of the country. They pay double the average salary of every other region and there are 7000 jobs there dedicated to oil and gas and all of those downstream jobs. Can you imagine what it would be like if we developed another petroleum basin?Megan Woods in a bit of cognitive dissonance talked in her speech about how there's hundreds of thousands of kilometres of oil and gas to be explored. But which international oil company or petroleum company is going to come down here in the next few years far away from supply lines and far away from the rest of the world and spend their tens of millions of dollars when James Shaw and Chlöe Swarbrick and Golriz Ghahraman and the Greens are going around the world lauding this great policy about how we're cutting off oil and gas? No international investor is going to spend the money and spend the time. It's hard enough to get them down here to start with because we're so far away and we're known as a wildcat destination in the oil and gas game. Well no one's going to come down here now.All of their exhortations about how there'll still be jobs and we're not cutting off the existing permits and don't worry about it—all of that is hollow. The headlines the Prime Minister is generating in the Financial Times and The Guardian and all of the headlines she'll get when she goes to the United Kingdom about how it's the nuclear-free moment and all of these silly phrases—all of these headlines she gets are exactly what she wants but the damage to New Zealand is incalculable. The damage will be in that international investor interest drying up.This is economic vandalism. This is our fourth-largest export earner—thousands of jobs. This is economic vandalism. The worst thing is that it is economic vandalism for no environmental gain. Stopping the export of oil from New Zealand does not mean that the countries we export it to stop using oil; they just don't buy it from New Zealand. They don't stop burning oil they just don't burn ours and they don't pay the money to us that comes back to the Government through royalties and taxes.It doesn't help us meet our Paris obligations. Stopping the export of oil does not help us meet our Paris obligations. We don't burn the oil. We don't accumulate the cost. The companies in countries that buy it do. What this does do is stop New Zealand making our contribution on the world stage of gas as a transition fuel. I hope in other debates in this House I'll get a chance to talk about this. This is economic vandalism of the worst order."