Fitzsimons Jeanette: Budget Debate 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Budget Debate 
[Volume:639;Page:9365] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I start by congratulating the Minister of Finance on his pale yellow tie. I remember that last year he wore a Shot silk tie with red and blue in it. I guess that leaves him with no other choice next year than to wear a green one and we look forward to that. Ever since the Prime Minister—[ 
Interruption 
] 
I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I apologise for not noticing that you had taken the Chair. I have very little voice left and will not be able to shout in this speech. I am not asking to be heard in silence; I am asking just for the noise to be down a bit. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: That is at the discretion of the House. 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS 
: Ever since the Prime Minister declared an aspiration for New Zealand to become carbon neutral and truly sustainable the nation has been waiting for the means to this end to be revealed and funded. Instead we have a Budget designed to make us a teensy-weensy bit less unsustainable in a few years with carbon emissions growing just a little bit more slowly than they are now provided we do not upset anyone and provided we continue to move slower than all our trading partners. 
This is the first Budget since the Stern report a World Bank report on the costs of addressing climate change which showed that addressing climate change would be costly but not nearly as costly as ignoring it. It is the third Budget to have ignored the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report which told us that the resources we depend on now—fresh water climate soils and fisheries—will not be there for our children if we continue to use them as we do now. It is the first Budget since Al Gore’s  
An Inconvenient Truth 
 hit the screens raising public consciousness to the point where the ShapeNZ poll this week found that over 80 percent of voters think that climate change is a problem 36 percent think it is an urgent and immediate problem while only 8 percent think it is not a problem at all—they are mainly ACT supporters. If the Prime Minister’s aspiration is serious we might have expected a price on carbon this year that is linked to the world price and a fairly rapid transition to polluters taking full responsibility for their carbon emissions. We might have expected a substantial fund to invest in cleaner technology better planning and design sustainable infrastructure—like public transport a decent rail system and coastal shipping—planting of steep eroding land and incentives for businesses to be more sustainable. 
Earlier this week in the House I quoted from Lester Brown’s highly respected book  
Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble 
. He says: “Saving civilization means restructuring the economy—and at wartime speed. It means restructuring taxes to get the market to tell the ecological truth. And it means reordering fiscal priorities to get the resources needed to restore the earth eradicate poverty and stabilize population … If we cannot restructure the tax system to enable the market to tell the truth we almost certainly will not make it.” He is talking about the survival of large sections of humanity and of many other species with which we share the earth by protecting and restoring their life support systems. 
I have argued in this House for the last 10 years that we need to change the way we measure economic success in order to focus on human well-being and include environmental sustainability and that the genuine progress indicator would be a good way to start. We have also been arguing that we should reduce taxes on desirable things like goods work and enterprise and instead tax waste pollution and the use of scarce resources. Once again after 10 years we have a Budget that largely ignores that. In fact this Budget takes a step backwards in that last year we still had a plan for a carbon tax to come into effect this year. Now it has gone and there is nothing to replace the lost $360 million of revenue. 
Income tax company tax and GST are bearing even more of a burden proportionally. A huge opportunity has been lost with the business tax cuts handed out indiscriminately to polluters and conservers fossil energy and renewable energy organic farming and highly toxic farming good employers and bad employers and innovators and laggards in technology. Those cuts will produce no change in behaviour and serve no public good except for lining a few pockets. Instead we could have had a system of tax incentives that rewarded sustainable investments especially in technology to save energy and water reduce toxic materials and replace fossil fuels with renewables. A Government that truly cared about sustainability would not have missed this opportunity. 
This Budget was the chance for the Government to show whether the Prime Minister’s statement was a serious policy goal or hollow rhetoric. It was the chance for the Government to put its money where its mouth is. But the money turns out to be only farthings. Specifically in a Budget where a surplus is identified as $1.7 billion we are told that there is $7.5 million a year for “sustainability”. I will be generous and add to that the $18 million for energy efficiency the $16 million a year capital investment in rail—which of course does not come off the operating surplus—and some amount on climate change that must be small or it would have been identified in the speech. We were given no numbers on that. It is not that there is nothing in this Budget that goes in the right direction; it is that sustainability is a minor footnote. What is there is the result of hard lobbying by the Greens from a position right outside Government where we are not even supporting on confidence and supply. 
However let us celebrate the small things starting with the initiatives that flow from the Greens’ cooperation agreement with the Government. On energy efficiency an overall package has been put together as part of the New Zealand Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy to upgrade people’s homes. Declining funding for insulating low-income homes is being replaced so that we can continue at the rate of 12000 a year. A new interest-free loan scheme will enable people to get their homes insulated and to pay back out of their power savings. That will also include clean efficient heating devices because insulation alone is not enough to improve health and well-being if there is no affordable heating source. We also have the new building code coming into effect later this year with upgraded insulation requirements for new homes which in effect will mean double glazing through much of the country. There is new money for the Home Energy Ratings Scheme to go operational at the end of this year giving every home the chance of a quality mark in energy efficiency. This will protect homebuyers by informing them about the energy performance of the home they are considering buying and it will provide a market advantage for those with superior standards. The $15.5 million Green-initiated solar water heating programme is funded in this Budget and is already rolling out with better quality standards consumer information installer training and grants for complying systems. 
Also new as signalled in the Greens’ cooperation agreement but without any acknowledgment today in the speech is $2.2 million a year for the ecological restoration of three of New Zealand’s foremost wetlands—Whangamarino in the Waikato the Ashburton Lakes and Upper Rangitata River in inland Canterbury and the Waituna Lagoon in Awarua wetland complex in Southland. This new baseline funding is more than 10 times the funding these sites have had to date. We can expect it to reverse declining water quality control invasive pests and weeds and protect endangered birds—such as the bittern fernbird crested grebe and the wrybill—some of which are internationally important as they fly across the equator twice a year to breeding grounds in Siberia and Alaska. Eventually these sites will have the potential for the reintroduction of locally extinct brown teal. The Greens have ensured that a large part of these projects will be delivered by partnerships between the Department of Conservation and local communities especially adjoining landowners iwi and local conservation and land-care groups. They will also operate as test beds for new methods of control that are acceptable to local communities. 
The revelation of my co-leader Russel Norman that our savings in the Superannuation Fund and other Government funds are being invested in nuclear weapons production uranium mining tobacco landmines and other socially and environmentally destructive practices has obviously somewhat embarrassed the Government. We are very pleased to see the transparency requirements for managed funds and the advisory committee on socially responsible investment. But we do not note any change signalled in the Budget for the investment of public funds such as the Superannuation Fund and accident compensation. 
After years of pointing out the embarrassment of being near the bottom of the OECD in our generosity to countries struggling to survive we celebrate the increase in overseas aid from 0.27 percent of gross national income (GNI) to 0.3 percent. This is a big victory considering that the Government previously intended raising it to only 0.28 percent in this Budget. The Greens have been pushing the Government hard on this—as stated in our cooperation agreement and for some years before that. Of course much of the credit should go to the determined effort of the whole aid community over several years under the 0.7 percent campaign. The Greens will continue to work closely with this campaign for a timetable to get New Zealand from the 0.35 percent of GNI that this Budget projects New Zealand to be at by 2010 to the 0.7 percent international target by 2015. It is urgent to help developing countries in Pacific Island States at our back door to leapfrog the fossil fuel age and develop clean energy technologies that will give them a more stable future. 
One of the most important investments we can make to reduce carbon emissions is in transport—in particular to reduce the huge imbalance between funding for new roads and for lower carbon transport options. Labour-led Governments have for the last 5 years poured megabucks into roadbuilding. They have so stretched the capacity of the construction industry that it is pushing up prices far faster than inflation. All the international evidence is that countries that rely primarily on road transport with poorly developed or non-existent rail public transport and travel demand management have high carbon emissions. In New Zealand transport is responsible for almost half of our carbon dioxide emissions—one of the highest proportions in the world. Public transport spending has not kept pace. What improvement there has been is largely owing to the influence the Greens had in a special agreement in the 2002-05 Government where we managed to get a substantial part of the petrol excise ring-fenced for public transport travel demand management walking and cycling. 
We are pleased to see some further progress in this Budget as a result of our efforts. First the Wellington rail improvements will take some pressure off the Kapiti Coast road. This Budget funds only about half what is needed but if the rest were funded we might well find that pressure for Transmission Gully would reduce considerably. I have to give some credit to the Option3 lobby group which has consistently done the analysis to show that an improved rail option on the western corridor would be cheaper and more sustainable than more big roading projects. 
We also finally have the prospect of a mechanism for funding the electrification of the Auckland rail system which is an essential first step to increasing its carrying capacity from 5 million passenger trips a year to 38 million and eventually more. We have watched the Government gradually warm to the idea as Auckland has made it abundantly clear that it wants more spending on public transport and proportionately less on roads. There has been a petition e-cards and a very well-attended public meeting in Auckland calling for the Government to fund its share of the capital cost which will allow more frequent more reliable cleaner and quieter trains. 
A regional petrol tax of course still has Auckland paying for it yet it does not have to pay a penny for State highways like the western motorway known as State Highway 20. This is the big imbalance that must be addressed. Big roads cost the regions nothing; for public transport they have to find much of the money themselves. Legislation still has to be developed to provide for regional petrol taxes. We will reserve our position on that issue until we see the bill. Yet another way of funding yet more roads is the last thing we need. It is time to even up the balance a bit. 
It is pretty clear that if the Greens had not been in Parliament it would have been hard to find much in this Budget to support the Prime Minister’s stated goals. But in looking at the new things in the Budget we should remember also the many Green initiatives that are included without headlines because they were found in previous years to be so effective that they have been baselined. As a result of previous Green Budget initiatives which are now permanent we have for example environmental legal aid community internships organic farming support increased energy-efficiency funding and the Conservation with Communities programme to mention just a few. The last Budget allocated $11.5 million to the Buy Kiwi Made programme run by my colleague Sue Bradford. In August this year we will see the beginning of the Buy Kiwi Made media marketing campaign. The Green Party looks forward to that celebrating New Zealand manufacturers during the difficult period they are facing and encouraging New Zealand consumers including the Government I must say to support New Zealand products when they make their purchasing decisions. 
Past Budget initiatives that are not baselined but continue to be funded this year include environmental education and support for schools to offer better food to children. There have been calls today for a Budget that delivers tax cuts so that an economy running on consumption-led growth can consume even more. Consumption-led growth is what one gets with a high dollar giving us cheap imports but poor export returns and massive household debt fuelled by a perception of wealth from rising house values. Banks are not just offering easy credit; they are pushing credit in our face and suggesting we are fools if we do not let our house pay for a new car and an overseas holiday. So we support much greater enforcement of current rules on capital gains but we doubt they are strong enough or that they will work without addressing also the use of loss-attributing qualifying companies. 
We also give qualified support to the tax rebates through KiwiSaver. It is a clever way of ensuring that the assistance does not add to consumption-led inflation and that it goes to those on low incomes equally with those on high. This I have to say is vastly different from the scheme put forward in 1998 and rejected comprehensively by New Zealand voters. However it continues the current discrimination between part-time workers and full-time workers and against beneficiaries such as invalids who will have no savings in their old age. 
To conclude we cannot vote for this Budget because it fails to deliver even the first stage of investing in a sustainable future making a mockery of the Prime Minister’s goals. Our cooperation agreement always anticipated that this would be the case given the current make-up of the Government and its support. That is why our agreement is to abstain. However we see no reason to break our commitment and oppose the Budget given that the Government’s side of our very modest agreement is slowly being delivered. There is some way to go yet to implement the full agreement and there will need to be progress next year but we have no evidence at all that a National-led Government would deliver anything closer to the programme the Greens have outlined for survival; so we will not vote to bring down the Government. 
We hope that over the next year or so the competition to win the votes of the increasing number of New Zealanders who are seriously concerned about environmental sustainability will move from where it is now—a race to be not last—to a race to be first. Then we may have a partner that we can work with enthusiastically in a new Government.