Pugh Maureen; Hernandez FranciscoCHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): I call Lawrence Xu-Nan.Francisco Hernandez: I'm Francisco.CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): Oh Francisco. Sorry—Francisco my apologies. Francisco Hernandez.FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ (Green): No beard.CHAIRPERSON (Maureen Pugh): No—I got it.FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ: Thank you Madam Chair. The crux of the question of this legislation to me is whether it will actually reduce waste volumes going to landfill. And for us to determine that I'd like to ask three questions of the Minister for the Environment. Has there been any analysis done on the reduction of waste volume to landfill as a result of these proposed changes? And if so what did the analysis say?And the second question is what assumptions were made on price elasticity on the MFE waste model that is being referred to—the waste disposal levy model? Because when I worked at the Climate Change Commission we used that model and if my recollection serves its waste is actually quite price inelastic. And that's supported by the NZIER report which came out with the waste disposal levy papers. So I'm just going to quote from it because it's really important that we have a picture of how price inelastic waste is. So it reads …there is some effect but not a large effect on waste volumes. The percentage change in the volume of waste disposed … is much less than the percentage change in price of [waste] disposal—waste disposal … is price inelastic. … The international evidence … suggests that price changes are more effective if they are accompanied by other measures to reduce barriers to recycling and other alternatives."And this feeds on to my third question to the Minister. Is there a breakdown on how the waste levy is intended to be spent? Because we've heard from my colleague the Hon Rachel Brooking about how the dehypothecation of the funds kind of makes it so that it can be spent on a whole wide range of other activities. Which means there's actually a world where the investment in resource recovery actually goes down as a result of the dehypothecation which I'm sure everyone in this House would agree would be a very bad thing.And the other crucial thing is that the waste sector is essential for New Zealand to meet its climate targets particularly around domestic methane. Unfortunately this Government isn't committed to supporting farmers in reducing their methane emissions as much as the previous Government was which means it's up to the waste sector to do the heavy lifting of reducing waste emissions.So there is a world where if as a result of the dehypothecation in funding there's actually less money going to resource recovery which would be bad. And I want to quote from the 2021 waste labour report. There were 224 expressions of interest received in that and only 34 were successfully funded. So we can already see that the existing funding for waste minimisation and waste recovery is already insufficient to meet with the demands of the resource recovery sector. And I'll give an example for that. There's a really good waste reduction initiative in Dunedin—the electorate which I'm based in as a list MP—called the Stitch Kitchen.Hon Rachel Brooking: A great MP.FRANCISCO HERNANDEZ: That's right—go Dunedin; great city. That's right. The Stitch Kitchen what they do is they train people to reduce textile waste by giving people skills to sew stitch and recycle textiles that would have otherwise gone to waste. They've not been funded through the waste levy and there's thousands and thousands of other people around the country lots of people doing great work in the resource recovery sphere that are not currently being funded because the current funds that already exist even before the dehypothecation is already insufficient. So I really want to make sure and really get a breakdown of how the waste levy will actually be spent and get some sort of guarantee that the intention is to actually increase the resource recovery funding because we're all saying that it's really great to reduce the waste. That's fantastic.So I'm just going to sum up the three questions that I asked because I acknowledge that I've kind of circled around a wide variety of topics which are all still to do with waste. The first question to the Minister was: has there been any analysis done on the impact of the levy changes on waste volumes? The second question was: what assumptions were made on price elasticity and how responsive the garbage volumes are to the waste levy changes? And the third: is there a specific breakdown of how the waste levy will be spent? Thank you."