Ministerial Statements — Climate Change—Report of the Climate Change Commission

I wish to make a ministerial statement relating to the release of the Climate Change Commission’s report, Ināia tonu nei: a low emissions future for Aotearoa.

💬 SPEAKER: Just keep going.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Earlier today, I tabled the advice in Parliament that the Government has received from the politically independent, science-led Climate Change Commission on the total amount of global warming pollution Aotearoa New Zealand must cut over the next 15 years. The commission’s advice also provides an achievable, affordable, and technologically feasible blueprint for achieving this. As members read through the advice in the coming days and weeks, there are four main points to keep in mind. They are that addressing the climate crisis is achievable, it is affordable, it offers huge opportunities for improved wellbeing and innovation, and that it must be planned in a fair and equitable way and honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Starting with the targets themselves, I’d like to take each of these in turn. The Climate Change Commission says that our climate change targets are achievable and can be met with existing technology, but only if we act now. Over the last 3½ years, this Government has laid the foundations from which the commission is now asking us to build. This will help to ensure a sustained decline in the pollution that we put into the atmosphere, and it will mean future Governments can ensure that this decline continues and, in fact, picks up pace every year until we hit net zero.

The commission is also clear that taking the action required of us is affordable. According to the world’s leading scientists, we must cut global emissions in half by 2030 to have any chance of staying within the 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming threshold. That is now less than nine years away. If we delay action for another year, that drops to eight, but the size of the effort doesn’t get any smaller. We still have to cut the same amount of pollution, whether we do it in seven years or eight or nine, if we start today. Every year of delay makes the effort harder and more expensive than if we just get on with it right now. Those calling for delay, as they always do, are in fact calling for higher costs and greater economic disruption than is necessary, and the commission makes that clear. It predicts that delaying action would cost us 2.3 percent of GDP—almost double the cost to our economy of acting now.

The third point is to draw members’ attention to the opportunities within our grasp. A zero-carbon economy will create cleaner, more vibrant, and healthier communities in every part of our economy. It will connect our towns and cities with frequent and fast trains and buses, and roads freer of congestion. It will create green jobs that pay people enough to provide for their families and put a roof over their heads. It will support innovation, new business opportunities, and new investment in clean-tech, high-value industries. It will benefit people’s health because of warmer, drier homes, more walking and cycling, and less air pollution. When the commission released its draft advice in January, I said that I had never felt more confident that a climate-friendly, healthy, and prosperous future for New Zealand was within reach, and I still feel the same today.

Finally, though the commission’s advice makes clear the overall benefit to New Zealand of the transition to a lower-emissions future, it does say that the impacts will not necessarily be evenly felt. There will be people up and down the country wondering what the transition means for their families and for their livelihoods. On this, the commission presses upon the Government the need to plan our transition in a fair, equitable, and inclusive way. This includes working in partnership with iwi Māori and local communities, and signalling policies well in advance to give everyone time to plan.

The first chance the Government will have to show that we are equal to the challenge that the Climate Change Commission has set us will come with the setting of the first three emissions budgets and the emissions reduction plan. This plan will need to include policies and strategies that cut across every sector of the economy, including agriculture and forestry, transport, building and construction, waste and heat industry, and power. It will also look at the changes needed across the finance system, infrastructure, and planning and emissions pricing.

We will consult on the plan and there will be opportunities for members to consider the emissions budgets. In doing so, I hope that they will take heed of the commission’s point that some issues are too big for politics and, in turn, the calls for cross-party consensus from business and local communities.

To close, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank the commission for their hard work, their analytical honesty, and their rigour. What they have achieved with their advice will have a lasting impact on the type of planet that our children inherit from us. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

Mr Speaker.

💬 SPEAKER: Oh, I’ve lost your name.

💬 Hon Members: Stuart Smith.

💬 SPEAKER: I call the member.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m glad that the Climate Change Commission has listened to the National Party through our submission on their original draft and dropped the recommended policy positions that they had in their draft report. The National Party has a history of mitigating the effects of climate change. Under the National Government, renewables increased from 65 percent to 85 percent, and we signed the Paris Agreement and we supported the zero carbon Act. We also supported the establishment of the climate commission. We still, however, have some concerns regarding the policy interventions addressed in the report, but we support a split-gas approach and we also support the use of carbon budgets to reach our goals.

Farmers are being asked to do more in the final report than they were under the zero carbon Act, and that really does raise some concerns, because the zero carbon Act targets were significantly challenging in and of themselves. Also of concern is the first emissions budget, which has New Zealand reducing emissions by 8 percent in just four years. Given that under this Government, emissions have increased by 2 percent and we’re on track to burn over 2 million tonnes of coal this year generating electricity, we first have to slow down our emissions to bring them back to zero before we start reducing them, so it’s quite a challenge. However, as the Government reflects on and works through this report, we will continue to advocate for New Zealanders to ensure that we are not having command-and-control policies foisted upon us.

I’d now like to ask the Minister a couple of questions, if I may. Is the Minister confident that the two months allowed for the commission to consider the over 15,000 submissions was enough to then reflect those submissions in the final report?

Yes, I am confident in it. If the Climate Change Commission had advised me that they didn’t feel that they could do it, then I would have considered a request from them, but they didn’t say at any point that they felt that they couldn’t do it. In fact, we did give them an extension during the initial consultation phase, and when they asked for that, I did ask them whether that left them with sufficient time to consider the responses and they said that it did.

Is the Minister satisfied with the commission’s handling of the media, given the 40 minutes that they were given to read the report before going into a press conference to ask the Prime Minister questions on the report, and—going back to the draft report—that some hand-picked journalists were given an advance copy of the draft report?

Well, any concerns about today’s lock-ups should be directed at me rather than at the commission, because it was my office that organised that, not the commission.

💬 Stuart Smith: I did ask if you were satisfied.

Well, you asked if I was satisfied with the commission, and the response to that is yes. They didn’t handle today’s media; I did.

Is the Minister satisfied that the commissioners had enough time to read the report before they signed it off?

I think, given the calibre of people on the commission, they wouldn’t have signed off something that they felt uncomfortable that they didn’t have time to consider. I also would say that I have been advised that every single recommendation in there was by the unanimous consent of the commissioners.

We’ve received reports that commissioners had less than 24 hours to consider the report before signing it off. Is the Minister aware of that, and, if so—or even if he isn’t—does he think that’s satisfactory, given the report is over 400 pages?

I haven’t received those reports, no.

Does the Minister think that the public would have any confidence in the final report if it turned out that the commissioners had less than 24 hours to consider the report before signing it off?

Oh, I think that that question really should be directed at the commission themselves. You know, it is an extraordinary body of people. They have put in a huge amount of work over the course of the preceding 18 months, and I don’t know where he’s getting his rumours from.

Is the Minister aware that Dr Rod Carr is not a member of Parliament and I can’t ask him that question in the House?

Yes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and it’s my pleasure to welcome—

💬 SPEAKER: Sorry. I do want to just, before the member speaks, sincerely apologise to Mr Stuart Smith. I just had a complete blank on his name, and I do apologise.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s my pleasure to welcome the Climate Change Commission’s final advice outlining a blueprint for tackling climate change by achieving the reduction targets agreed to under the zero carbon Act through to 2035.

Nearly six years ago, I had the privilege, along with the Hon James Shaw, as Opposition members of Parliament, of being part of New Zealand’s delegation to the Paris climate talks. Over the course of those two weeks, representatives from Governments and civil society came together to wrestle with how, as a globe made up of individual nations, we could confront climate change. During that time, there were numerous conversations about how New Zealand could meet the targets that we were signing up for, and today marks the momentous milestone of putting in place the plan to do just that—to meet our obligations and to prepare for ambition.

The Prime Minister has described this report as one of the most significant she will receive as Prime Minister. Decisions we make as a result of this report will shape our future as a nation. Significantly, it lays out that not taking action will cost us. It will cost us to the tune of 2.3 percent of GDP by 2050—in other words, delaying action will make the decarbonising job harder and more expensive in the long run. So this is not only a blueprint for change; it is an opportunity for us not to squander.

It also tells us that meeting targets is achievable. We already have the tools we need available to us. We don’t need any magic wands. What’s more, the Government is already taking action in the right areas, but we must move faster, and there is much more work to do. We have begun. We have banned new offshore oil and gas exploration, we have passed the zero carbon Act, we have established the Climate Change Commission, we have doubled our climate change aid to the Pacific, we have overhauled the emissions trading scheme, we have overseen the more than doubling of the carbon price; we have ploughed billions into infrastructure for buses and trains, cycling, and walking, we’ve helped businesses switch to clean energy with the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund, and we’ve invested in electric vehicle charging infrastructure and brought back the mandate to include biofuels and petrol. But the commission says that we must build on this progress, and this work needs to start now.

We do not need any miracle technologies, but we do need to get them into place. Further steps need to be taken to address the unevenly distributed impacts of climate change on New Zealanders, including our most vulnerable. Government needs to signal policies early to give business and communities time to adjust, and we need a clear and strong partnership with local government and with iwi Māori.

As energy Minister, I also welcome the recommendation that we develop a national energy strategy. This, as with the other 33 recommendations, will be carefully considered and consulted on over the coming months.

So, to conclude, now that we have the commission’s advice, we have an amazing opportunity and chance to transform our economy as well as the lives of our children and our grandchildren. But we must work with renewed urgency and determination. The job is not yet done.

Well, thank you, Mr Speaker. The ACT Party stands strongly opposed to the zero carbon Act policy, to this commission, and to its report. Why? There are, basically, three reasons and three big problems with this initiative. The first is that the way it tries to micro-manage and plan the economy well into the future is completely indefensible. I just heard the Minister of Energy and Resources and the Minister of Climate Change get up and say that these actions will save the economy 2.3 percent in 2050. Really? Can any of them name any economists in the past century who have been able to forecast GDP 29 years out to the nearest 0.1 percent—

💬 Hon David Parker: Rodney Hide.

—and, actually, all of the assumptions have been—and David Parker says “Sir Roger Douglas”. He’s probably the only one, and he doesn’t agree—he doesn’t agree. Sir Roger Douglas wouldn’t agree with them, either.

But the fact is that like all of the assumptions that are put into this plan, they do not hold water. The micro-management, the banning of technology is the wrong way to reduce emissions, because this Government now has two contradictory climate change polices. One is the emissions trading scheme, which sets a cap on total emissions. If the objective is to reduce total emissions in New Zealand, the right thing to do is to set that cap, auction off the units, let people respond to the price signals, and make choices about how they live and do their work and build their businesses within that constraint.

The second policy which works against it is the zero carbon Act, which requires a plethora of new bureaucracies and micro-management that will try and control each sector and say there should be 13 percent fewer cows, the type of car that you can import should change in this year, and you should cook your burgers at a restaurant with this type of energy source. All of that micro-management not only will turn out to be wrong, because the predictions of the future, technologically, so often are, but also they are pointless, because to the extent that any of them do reduce emissions, they merely free up carbon units that somebody else can use under the same cap. So there are two contradictory and pointless policies that this Government has. Added together, they don’t work.

The second problem is the total disconnect from the rest of the world. This report issued today says that we should not in New Zealand be able to use foreign carbon credits. Really? So what it is saying is that the Government would like New Zealanders to pay people in Hawke’s Bay to sell up their sheep and beef farms and plant a monoculture of more pine trees that turn into wilding pines and a future ecological disaster. Instead of being able to pay Brazilians to reseed the Amazon, or at least pay them to stop burning it down, was that really the right answer for someone who wants to think global and act local? It is completely wrong that our competitors around the world will be able to do that and buy cheaper carbon credits, exposing New Zealand business.

That’s the third problem—that the goals are set by New Zealand as if we are totally isolated from the global economy and climate. It says that New Zealand agriculture and New Zealand business and New Zealand transport and energy must reach certain goals set in legislation, regardless of what the rest of the world does. So they are happy to say that if the rest of the world decides not to meet these targets, New Zealand should destroy its economy and the way of life of its people to reach these targets that nobody else is seeking, and, therefore, New Zealand has no impact. That is why we oppose it, and those are the three things that are wrong with it.

But I’d just like to quickly ask the Minister a question. Does he think—not the commissioner—the way that select journalists were given access to the material beforehand and the 40 minutes that other journalists were given to read the material before questioning the Prime Minister was adequate?

The lock-up was provided in much the same conditions as the Budget lock-up.

So we have to take that somewhat non-committal response that he does think it’s OK—one of the most significant economic and environmental policy changes in a generation, and he thinks the conditions were fine. I’m glad the press gallery got an answer from James Shaw on that. Does he believe that the 24 hours that the commissioners were given to look at the draft were adequate, or is he denying that that happened?

No, I just don’t know the source of those rumours.

💬 Debbie Ngarewa-Packer: Tēnā koe, te Pīka. Tēnā tātou—

Well, I think what I’m going to do is to seek leave for Debbie Ngarewa-Packer to make a statement on behalf of the Māori Party here, because there is not an entitlement. Can I also suggest that we put it down as a matter of business for the Business Committee to see if we can agree to an order for the rest of the year, or a sessional order, so we don’t run into this problem again. Is there any objection to that? There appears to be none.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. I might be able to short-circuit that process and seek leave for the Māori Party to be considered a specified party for the purposes of the Standing Orders for the remainder of this term of Parliament.

Is there any objection to that? There is objection. OK, we’ll undo the short circuit and we’ll take the long route and say: is there any objection to Debbie Ngarewa-Packer making a statement now?

💬 Hon Member: We’ve already agreed to that.

I thought I was interrupted by the Leader of the House, but if we’ve already done it, we’ll keep going.

Kia ora. Ka tū ahau anō. Tēnā koe, te Pīka. Tēnā tātou e te Whare. I rise on behalf of Te Paati Māori, recognising the tautoko to do that today, and acknowledge the release of the Climate Change Commission’s final advice and the Minister’s statement in the House today.

Despite decades of warnings, protests, and discussions, the planet is continuing to warm. Since 2016, Aotearoa has had three of its hottest years on record since recordings began in 1909. As a result, extreme climate conditions are continuing to accelerate. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a landmark report that made it clear there were only 12 years left to limit climate catastrophe. There is no time for inaction or delay.

Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of fighting to protect our climate for our mokopuna yet to come. As tangata whenua, we have the most to lose from a failure to act on climate change, despite a relatively tiny contribution to global emissions. Many of our Pasifika whanaunga face the prospect of losing their islands altogether due to sea-level rise. Here in Aotearoa, from Raukūmara to Te Hiku, Kaikōura to Pātea, we have seen that Māori are on the forefront of resisting extractive industries that pollute our environment. We cannot achieve environmental protection and restoration without acknowledging and implementing Māori rights and recognising the role of tangata whenua as kaitiaki, and, yes, that includes actually returning our land and our resources. We cannot beat the climate crisis without restoring lands to their rightful indigenous owners, who know how to manage that land in harmony with the climate.

I acknowledge last term’s decision to ban new offshore oil and gas permits, but we must go further. We need to end new onshore oil and gas permits and withdraw both existing onshore and offshore permits, with the target of decommissioning all sites by 2030. This House has another opportunity to take action on protecting and restoring the biodiversity of our oceans and taking action on climate by supporting my member’s bill, the Prohibition on Seabed Mining Legislation Amendment Bill.

The commission’s report highlights what we need to do to meet our international targets. We must fundamentally transform our transport system. We must transition fast to renewable energy and energy efficiency, and this House must stop ignoring the elephant in the room, which of course is the effective exclusion of industrial agriculture from our response to the climate crisis. It is clear beyond all doubt that significant and lasting reductions in methane emissions is absolutely critical.

The truth is simple and staring us all in the face. Even the Government and the Minister fail to acknowledge it: we need less cows. We need less cows in this country. We must reduce our herd sizes. There is a huge economic opportunity in going for value-add products and making our “clean, green” brand more than just a brand but a reality. Organic and regenerative agriculture is the future—[Interruption]—and I’m really glad that the people on this side of the House are animated. Our Te Paati Māori manifesto in the last election committed us to taking real action on methane. We would immediately bring methane into the emissions trading scheme and phase out synthetic fertilisers by 2025. These chemicals are driving the surge in climate and water pollution coming out of New Zealand farms in recent decades. This will be a disincentive to continued growth in industrial dairying. We’d also establish a $300 million fund to support Māori farmers to transition towards regenerative and value-added agricultural models.

We have an obligation to our rangatahi to unite and to do everything as kaitiaki to protect our taiao and our whānau from the climate crisis in the short time that we have left. I appreciate the clear advice from the Climate Commission that sets out how we can do that in our context here in Aotearoa. Now, as MPs, it’s our job to step up and take the action that is so urgently needed. Nō reira, tēnā tātou katoa.