Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move that the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill now be read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 27 April 2023.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): My humble apologies, Minister. If you could just begin the “I move,” and just read out the text, please? There were a couple of words that were out of order.

Sorry, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill be now read a first time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): “I nominate”.

I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 27 April 2023.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Excellent.

If we are to avoid the worst of the climate crisis, we know that transport emissions in Aotearoa New Zealand must be reduced, and they must be reduced quickly. Since 1990, transport emissions have increased by more than 60 percent. They represent about half of long-lived carbon dioxide emissions, and roughly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions in Aotearoa New Zealand.

As a Government, we are committed to targets of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and one half of total energy consumption coming from renewable energy sources by 2035. We also have commitments to meeting our nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent below 2005 gross levels by 2030.

Action is needed across the whole of the economy to ensure that we meet these targets and get to where we need to be. Fossil fuels will continue to play a part in our transport sector for a long time to come, but a managed phase-out of fossil fuels remains our goal and must be our goal. While we recognise that change cannot happen overnight, we cannot afford to delay action to reduce our transport emissions. The light vehicle fleet represents almost two-thirds of domestic transport emissions, so change here—including increasing the uptake of zero emissions vehicles like electric vehicles—will be critical to what we do as a country.

However, it will take time to develop this infrastructure and to reach the high proportion of zero emission vehicles in the fleet. Unlike biofuels, other low-emissions transport fuels, such as hydrogen, are not yet compatible with existing vehicles and fuel infrastructures. Biofuels have been used safely and effectively in many countries around the world for many, many years, and it is a technology that is available to us today.

Sustainable biofuels are a viable mitigation opportunity for New Zealand’s existing internal combustion engine vehicle fleet. Each vehicle that enters the fleet remains active for an average of 20 years in New Zealand. Biofuels offer us the opportunity to reduce emissions in the vehicles that we drive today, without changing those vehicles. Biofuels also provide emissions reduction pathways for hard-to-abate transport—like heavy trucking, like shipping—where other ways of reducing emissions are not yet commercially viable and available in New Zealand.

The sustainable biofuels obligation introduces an obligation on any company or person who imports fuel into New Zealand or refines fuel in New Zealand. This will introduce an obligation for five companies which operate here in New Zealand. An obligation is important, because without it we will not realise the biofuels opportunity because of the significant barriers we face, including the lack of scale in production.

The obligation is designed to reduce the overall emissions intensity of transport fuel. This means that the average greenhouse gas emissions of each litre of fuel used in New Zealand will need to reduce over time. The targets for reducing emissions intensity have been set so that they provide an ambitious but achievable pathway; the target for 2035 is 9 percent emissions intensity reduction. This is a substantial contribution towards reaching a net zero economy. The obligation will prevent about a million tonnes of emissions from cars, trucks, trains, and ships over the first two years of its operation, and up to 9 million tonnes by 2035.

The design of the obligation means that biofuels, which are better at reducing emissions, will count for more. It incentivises fuel wholesalers to source and supply biofuels with the lowest emission, and it guards against the risks that only the cheapest biofuels—which are little better than fossil fuels—will enter the New Zealand market. This will be a significant change for fuel producers, fuel retailers, and motorists. The Government previously intended to introduce the obligation from 1 April 2023. However, in preparing this bill, I became aware about the lack of infrastructure for the first generation of biofuels—ethanol and bio-diesel—and this meant that there would only have been limited and more expensive options available to meet the 2023 target.

To avoid imposing these unnecessary costs on motorists, the obligations will come into effect from 1 April 2024. This will give the industry more time to get ready for the change and to build the infrastructure it needs.

I’ve heard some people say that this is us putting cost of living against climate change. This is not the case, and let me take the House through the numbers. The foregone conclusions, if everybody were to introduce biofuels—the 2023 date is up to 230,000 tonnes of carbon emissions reductions. It is the obligation on us, under the emissions reduction plans, to then tell how we’re going to make up those forgone emissions. What we have done is we have kept the 2035 reductions targets—we’ll need to have a bit of a steeper curve through there. But in reality, the 230,000 tonnes of carbon removed is roughly the equivalent of two relatively small programmes that we’ve funded through the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund programme, in terms of industrial decarbonisation. This is the budgeting that Governments now must do. If you are not going to reduce emissions in one area, you must tell us where you are going to reduce this. We need to avoid the climate change equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle of budgeting that we’ve seen across this House.

So my challenge to any party in this House that is not intending to support this bill is to lay out, in fine detail, where 9 million tonnes of emissions reductions are coming from. This is what parties in this House signed up to when they supported the Climate Change Response Act. This is what parties in this House signed up to when they supported the targets set by the independent Climate Change Commission. This is where the rubber hits the road. If parties are not going to support this bill, I want to hear where 9 million tonnes of emissions reductions are coming from in other parts of the economy, and I look forward to that.

Now, some people question whether biofuels are truly sustainable. It is not true that all biofuels are created equal, and overseas there have been instances where some biofuels, such as those produced from palm oil, have harmed the environment and their local communities. Biofuels can cause deforestation, which will have unacceptably high levels of emissions and may be even worse than fossil fuels.

This is not acceptable, and we will not accept these biofuels in New Zealand. To address this, the bill that we are debating here contains a power to create regulations which limit or exclude unsustainable biofuels from the obligation. The regulation-making power can be used to limit biofuels derived from crops which are food sources. This is important; it means our demand for fuel will not compete with the world’s need for food. Earlier this year, we consulted on proposals for these regulations. The obligation on fuel wholesalers is clear—failure to meet it will attract liability for a civil pecuniary penalty. In setting the level of this penalty, I knew that we needed to get it high enough so it gave an adequate incentive for fuel wholesalers to comply and ensure they are reducing emissions.

The Environmental Protection Authority will monitor how fuel wholesalers are discharging their responsibility. This bill is another—and important—step in the Government’s comprehensive plan to reduce emissions in the economy and reach net zero by 2050. It’s also another step that makes parties in this House accountable for telling us how we are going to reach our targets we have all signed up for.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a wonderful opportunity to speak on the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill, which the National Party will not support.

I thought it really took the cake when the Minister of Energy and Resources talked about the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund and holding that up as an example, which is an example of corporate welfare, not of actually reducing emissions. A prop.

The Minister said that this side of the House had supported the legislation and we have to explain how we’re going to reduce emissions. Well, actually the Labour Party supported an ETS—an emissions trading scheme—to reduce emissions. They seem to not understand how it works; they have no idea how it works. They think that emissions will be reduced by the wise hand of the Minister intervening in little places here and little places over there to lower emissions. It’s an absolute load of nonsense, quite frankly.

I think it’s absolutely brave of the Minister—heroic, I would say—to stand up here and advocate for a biofuels mandate that will add at least 10c a litre to the cost of fuel, when the moment that actual petrol prices started to go up, what did they do? They panicked—they panicked and reduced the excise tax by 25c a litre. We now have the New Zealand Unit price at $88.50 today, driving up the cost of fuel. So do we really think that on 1 January, they are going to reintroduce the 25c of excise tax? I don’t think so. There’s no chance that they’re going to increase the price of fuel by 10c—at least—later on by introducing this bill. They won’t have a show.

This will add further costs. Upstream providers, those that import the fuel, will have to invest significant sums of money. Some are up to $50 million—I don’t know how much others are going to have—that’s their estimate at this stage. However, they haven’t actually gone to the extent of planning exactly what they’re going to spend, because they don’t know. Because the legislation has only just been tabled last week, they have to actually go to their head offices to get the money to invest it. They’ll get the money but they need to know exactly what it’s going to mean.

In this bill, we don’t even know what the definition of the “feedstock” is, because that’s up to the wise hand of the Minister to decide on an ad hoc basis! This is absolute uncertainty—these companies are running around in circles, wondering what the heck they’re going to do. But they’re going to have to recoup that cost, those millions. That will go directly on top of the cost of fuel. So it won’t be 10c a litre; it will be a greater cost.

There are other problems. The RAP—the Refinery to Auckland Pipeline—will not be able to take biofuels, or biopetrol, anyway, down that pipeline. They’re not able to do that. There are significant issues with mixing those fuels. So there will have to be two fuel stores at the ports where the fuel will be mixed into the tankers as it goes off to the fuel stations, adding costs and complications. The downstream retailers will also—that is, the petrol stations themselves—have to invest in updating their outlets. So more cost that will go on to the per-litre price of petrol.

So biofuels are extremely expensive. They’re going to add a lot of fuel. But the question is—the Minister touched on it—are they actually going to be sustainable? What the Minister mentioned was that they wouldn’t take food crops. But, actually, news for the Minister: there are a lot of other crops that are not food crops that can be grown on land that could be growing food. They’ll be displacing food crops—so impacting food production, price accrued, and yet adding more cost.

However, biodiesel, which I haven’t really touched on till now, is used extensively in heavy transport, of course, in agriculture and in fishing. Now, the cost of biodiesel is going to be, likewise, at least 10c a litre. All of those costs go and impact not only those producers but it goes directly on top of the cost of food, because everything that we consume in New Zealand goes on a truck. It might come in by ship, it goes into road transport and will be delivered to a distribution centre, and then it will go from the distribution centre to the supermarkets and all those sorts of things. Those costs just keep going on to all of those goods.

Who’s going to be impacted by this? Who do we think it is? Do we think it’s the oil companies? No. It won’t be the oil companies; it will be low-income families that will suffer the most. It seems ironic that the Labour Party seems to be bringing in more and more bits of legislation that will impact the most on poorer families—low-income families. They don’t seem to care about them.

The issue, then, with feedstocks is that, as I said earlier, these are not prescribed in the legislation. The Minister has the power to say what is acceptable and what isn’t—that wise hand of the Minister, yet again! Unfortunately, central control doesn’t work well in these situations. More likely than not, palm oil will end up as part of these fuels, cooking oil—Neste, who will be a major provider, have said that they will avoid that, that they will use cooking oils. Where do cooking oils come from? Palm oil. So palm oil will find its way into this. So we’re now going to be responsible, in part, for Amazonian rain forest destruction in order to save the planet from climate change. I think the Minister has got this completely round the wrong way.

It would have been far better to have focused on sustainable aviation fuels, if that was where they wanted to go in terms of biofuels. There is no other alternative. There are alternatives with electric vehicles and hybrids. That is already reducing our emissions profile, and that’s been driven by the emissions trading scheme, sending a strong market signal that people are reacting to. But yet, once again, they don’t seem to understand the emissions trading scheme. It’s unbelievable that they can stand up in front of this House and not understand how the emissions trading scheme actually operates. I think that’s actually quite shameful. Tallow was going to be a major part of it. Actually, Z Energy had a biofuels plant in New Zealand and they could not make it work.

The National Party believes in biofuels. That’s great. If people want the opportunity to use them, they should be able to do that. But there are problems. Older vehicles cannot handle biofuels; it ruins their carburettor and fuel systems. So how’s that going to be dealt with? There will be no alternative if this was to go. Of course, the National Party will repeal it if it comes in.

So what we know, though, is that these companies are so uncertain, they won’t be able to meet the 1 April 2024 date, anyway, because of all of the time constraints involved in obtaining the funding, putting in the infrastructure, but they’ll just pay the $800 a tonne—carbon dioxide, which is the fine that’s being mandated in this legislation—and they’ll just pass it on to the motorist, yet again, in the cost of living crisis.

If they think they’re going to bring this in and add 10c—I’ll tell you what: inflation will still be around by 2024—I think they’re dreaming. That’s the political reality. Well, of course, a lot of them won’t be here to find out, anyway.

Tallow, as I said, is part of the—Z Energy had to give up making biofuels, because they couldn’t manage the costs. The cost of tallow went up by 400 percent. You can’t sustain those sorts of levels of costs.

💬 Todd Muller: Tell them they’re dreaming!

Yeah, well, they are dreaming.

💬 Hon Member: It went up because of its export price.

Well, yeah it went up because it’s an export. It’s a highly competitive market. It’s economies of scale. We don’t have it.

So we will be exporting feedstocks overseas to be processed into biofuels to be shipped back to New Zealand with high emissions.

There’s a lot of platitudes in this, and, as one commentator said, in the war between platitudes and physics, physics remains undefeated. So it’s time they got some good sense on the other side and didn’t come up with silly legislation, and let the emissions trading scheme do its work.

I’m very proud to stand and speak in support of the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill at its first reading here, and I’m delighted that it’s going to come to the very busy Environment Committee, to be reported back by 27 April.

We all know that transport emissions make up a huge proportion of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions—about 47 percent of the carbon emissions and about 17 percent of our gross emissions—so we need to reduce these emissions; we’ve all agreed on that. How do we do it? Well, for transport, we know that electrification is important, but of course that takes time. As the Minister the Hon Megan Woods mentioned in her speech, vehicles can last for around 20 years. So what we’re doing here is changing the fuel.

At the moment, fossil fuel can be mixed with other liquid fuels, and this bill is about requiring a percentage of that biofuel. What is biofuel? It’s something that is produced from biomass, and of course, it’s not a fossil fuel, so it’s not emitting the carbon into the atmosphere. It’s a great, great thing to be using when we use it properly—which I’ll come to in a minute and acknowledge the concern of the previous speaker, Stuart Smith, about sustainability. Very pleased to hear about that! This bill doesn’t apply to aviation. It does apply to an obliged person who’s covered by the Climate Change Response Act and, therefore, covered in the emissions trading scheme (ETS).

The biofuel must be sustainable, and what is sustainable can be determined by regulations. When making regulations, clause 13 provides matters to consider, and I’m sure the previous speaker will be interested in these. At clause 13, we don’t want to have a significant adverse effect on biodiversity, on deforestation, on food and feed security, on water quality, or a high risk of indirect land-use change. The Minister must have regard to soil carbon and the waste hierarchy, and those classes of waste don’t have to meet the criteria I’ve just read out.

The Environmental Protection Agency is the regulator of this bill. It’s a good bill and, while I accept the concerns about sustainability, which is why there is this regulatory process to address that, that will be a good thing to discuss in the Environment Committee. So I commend this bill. It’s squarely aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and it’s one of the many, many measures needed—not just relying on the ETS and market mechanisms, which do not cover everything—which is what every expert ever has ever told the Environment Committee. I commend this bill to the House.

I speak to oppose this dreadful piece of legislation. I say that because it is, without doubt, the most vanity-fuelled piece of legislation this House has seen for quite a long time.

Let’s be very clear: the last time the Labour Government was in power, they did bring in a biofuels obligation, and it was exactly the same circumstances, where there was no capacity to supply the biofuel to meet the targets that were imposed by the legislation.

We made it very clear at the time that the expectation that somehow bringing in a biofuels mandate was going to solve some of the transport emissions for the New Zealand vehicle fleet was complete and utter nonsense. Sadly, there were a whole lot of gullible people who thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, invested in it heavily, and, ultimately, lost their money because the National Government wasn’t prepared to make the greater population of New Zealand pay for such a dopey idea.

So let’s just go straight to the regulatory impact statement that comes with the bill. This is not my work; this is the work of the Government agencies who are advising the Minister. This is the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment—their energy section—and, of course, Treasury. Now, you’ll never get me quoting anything from Treasury on authoritative basis, because they never produce anything that’s authoritative enough to be quoted, but they have come up here and said, “As a biofuels mandate is demonstrable Government action to address climate change, the New Zealand Government will also enhance its credibility to influence international climate change negotiations.” That is code for “this gives Government Ministers the chance to prance about the world and talk about how wonderfully we’re doing in this country to reduce emissions while making very little difference at all—if any.” The difference between 2008, when they last tried this stunt, and now is that vehicle emissions or fuel consumption per vehicle is considerably lower.

The worst of it is this document was produced in September of 2021. The initial document was produced in December of 2020. It predicates diesel price at being around about $1.40 to $1.50. Well, that would be great for all those users out there, wouldn’t it? Even then, they were worried about the cost of increasing price through a biofuels mandate.

If we’re going to have the sort of bill that would allow us to seriously knock back vehicle emissions in this country, this is not it. When we look at it, we can see that even in here—even in here—they’re saying that there are large parts, or large percentages, of the New Zealand vehicle fleet that will not successfully run on biofuels, even with a low percentage. It has an effect on carburettors, it has an effect on the internal combustion systems, and it will be cause for so many people having to abandon their cars in a much earlier stage in their life.

They don’t seem worried about those people who are struggling families at the moment, who really need those vehicles to get to work, who really need to get their kids to all sorts of opportunities that they like to provide for their children. But no, they’ll be able to say, “Well, look, you don’t have a family car anymore because you can’t afford a five-year-old vehicle that can run on this garbage. So just take some consolation that you’re doing your bit—your sacrifice—for the wee tiny bit of carbon emission that we’ll knock out in this process!”

I think the worst of it is—why I keep saying it’s a vanity project for the Government, an opportunity for Ministers to go waving documents throughout the world saying, “Look at us, look what we’re doing, aren’t we fantastic?” We hear it all the time, “the nuclear moment of our generation”, all that sort of thing. The reason I say that is, there’s provision in the bill which allows those who are fuel suppliers of more than 50,000 litres a year to defray their entry into the system by up to two years at a cost of 0.01c per litre—an absolutely tiny fee to go about ignoring the dopiness of this Government, while they wait for a good Government that knows what they’re doing. That’s what will happen. So why would a Government write that into a piece of legislation that has been so passionately supported today by members on the other side of the House? I don’t understand that for one little minute.

So then there is, of course, the other aspect of this bill, which talks about that landed price of petroleum in New Zealand, out to about 2025, being between 55c and 58c per litre. Now, we know that there’s all sorts of price impost on top of that; the fuel importers want a margin, the fuel retailers want a margin, and the Government wants an enormous margin inside that—more than the cost of the fuel and the margins of everybody else involved. That’s why we pay these high prices at the moment.

But look what’s happened to the price of fuel. It’s as if the crisis caused by all sorts of pressures on fuel production around the world—not the least of which is climate change—has not happened in the last 12 months. The signs you see at the petrol pump at the moment don’t exist. So now we’ve got a Government that’s happily going to tell New Zealanders that by April next year they’ll have passed this legislation to add another 10c per litre on to their fuel plus the 25c they’re going to put back in January plus, I suspect, the annual increment of about 10c—so nearly 50c per litre being put back on to the price of petrol with what is included in this bill.

People on the other side of the House have been yelling out, “Well what’s your plan? What’s your plan? What are you going to do?” What we’re not going to do is put people in—[Interruption]—I’ll come to it. What we’ll not do is make New Zealanders pay for something as dopey as this—we’ll not make them pay for something as dopey as this.

Where is one Government piece of information given to households to talk about how they can individually reduce their carbon footprint—just one? The Government spends tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars a year on communications, supposedly, with New Zealanders. We all know it’s just Labour Party propaganda dressed up as Government information. We know that it’s airy-fairy sort of stuff that you get in this type of impact report to try and convince New Zealanders they’ve got to stick with this Labour Government. Why isn’t there just a small amount of information provided to New Zealanders to tell them what they can do in their households, now, to reduce their carbon footprint? I think the willingness of New Zealanders to do so is very high, and that’s something that we’ll pick up. It’s something that we’ll run with. But this is not a way in which to move us forward at all.

One of the things that’s most concerning about this is that on page 18 of the regulatory impact statement, there is a graph which shows what happens if this were to be fully implemented, and, by and large, nothing until 2035. So New Zealanders are being asked to pay considerable extra amounts on their weekly fuel bills for an effect that doesn’t even begin to drop until 2035—page 18 of the regulatory impact statement; not my work, the work of the Government.

Then, of course, there is this extraordinary situation, as I mentioned before, that suggests that anybody who doesn’t want to get into this can just go for a deferral. Well, I suspect the Minister will be inundated with requests for deferrals.

But if we have a look at things like feedstock, where is it going to come from? At the moment, the log price out of New Zealand is well ahead of what’s predicated in this impact report. Are we going to reduce an export market, just like we’re reducing farming production, apparently, under this Government, in order to satisfy, as I said before, the vanity option of New Zealand Ministers running around the world saying, “Look at us; how good we are!” We have a lot of work to do; a lot of serious work to do to combat climate change, but this is a back-to-the-future, completely dumb, hopeless piece of legislation that just puts unreasonable costs on New Zealanders who are already struggling week by week.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very happy to take a call on this bill. If there’s something to be garnered from the last two contributions from the Opposition, it’s that they’ve got no plan. It’s that when it comes to climate change, they sit there and they talk about how much we need to change things. But they don’t follow it through with action. And there goes the stark difference between this side of the House and that side of the House. We’re ambitious; we follow up what we say with actual action to try and change the outcome of the future of New Zealand when it comes to climate change.

The previous contribution talked about the small change that it’s going to make to how we do things, talked about how the pricing might be a little bit different, but, actually, if you take a big step back and you think about the financial impact of climate change, that’s why we’re all here. That’s why we’ve actually been working with the sector, working with the community, to figure out how we can do things differently. The other side of the House will take the really conservative approach, which is actually just to kick back, boo the Government, and talk about exactly what it is that we’re trying to do to make changes in this area. But they haven’t got a plan. So the hashtag to go on that contribution from the previous member is #NationalNoPlan, #NationalNotFitToGovern, #Don’tWantToDoAnythingAboutClimateChange.

But on this side of the House, we’re absolutely committed to following through on what we’ve said that we’re going to. And actually, there’s been a cross-party consensus that climate change is real, that climate change is affecting our various communities across Aotearoa. The difference is that this Government are trying to do something about it; that Opposition don’t have a plan.

The plan for today is to talk about this bill. The sustainable biofuels obligation plan will help to deliver on the Government’s emissions reduction plan.

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: Stop reading the notes—say it from the heart.

TĀMATI COFFEY: It’s going to prevent one million tonnes of emissions from cars, from trucks. And that member should read his own notes, because he’s refusing to understand exactly why we’re doing this. Over the next decade, just over a decade, we’re looking to take out 9 million tonnes from the emissions that we make as a country in terms of transport.

Now, that’s really important because, yes, we can debate whether or not we’re doing the right thing. But actually, we’re talking about taking out nine million tonnes of emissions in an effort to be able to meet our targets, as we’ve agreed as a House that this is a really important thing to do.

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: Where did the number come from?

TĀMATI COFFEY: So what we’ve gone and done is we’ve put this bill up—and yes, it’s a rehash from the last time that that member was here in Parliament. Again, in 2008, we had our Minister at the time, the energy Minister, the Hon David Parker, who brought this to the House all the way back then. We could have got started on this a decade ago. We absolutely could have got started on this over a decade ago. But actually it’s taken us this long to be able to get it back into Parliament. We introduced it then. The Opposition did what they’re saying that they’re going to do now, which is they chucked it out. They just chucked it out. And are we any better off? No. Our emissions are no better off. We’ve not moved.

They said at the time that, actually, if they wanted this to be done in a voluntary way, surely the companies would come around. Guess what!

💬 Hon Members: They didn’t!

TĀMATI COFFEY: They didn’t! They didn’t do it. And so here we are again, playing the same old tune. Here’s the Labour Government. We understand the problem at hand. We don’t want to kick the can down the road like the Opposition. So we’re actually stumping up with a bill. Why are we doing it? Because we want to see our emissions come down. Why are we doing it? Because we understand that with every single year there is the impact that these one-in-100-year floods are having in our community. And actually, that’s really important to remember, because it affects us all. We’re trying to do something really proactive to be able to bring the community in on our goals, to be able to reduce our emissions.

This is a good bill. We’re going to do it. I look forward to actually making sure that this goes through the House this time and that New Zealand has a plan when it comes to meeting our targets for climate change—unlike the other side of the House, #NationalNoPlan. I commend it to the House.

A point of order. I seek leave of the House to table the regulatory impact statement for this bill.

On the basis that the document is publicly available, no. I call the Hon Julie Anne—

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: Point of order. I’ll just point out, Madam Speaker, that there is, in this Government-produced document—and you say it’s very available—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Yep. The member will resume his seat. Thank you.

It’s wonderful to have legislation in front of the House that means that parties are all acknowledging the extreme urgency and need to respond to climate change; something the Green Party has been talking about for 30 or 40 years now—as long as we’ve existed.

So it’s really good that everyone’s come on board, and I actually heard the Hon Gerry Brownlee saying that we need a lot of serious work to respond to climate change. That is true, and I would love to see the National Party or the ACT Party proposing any viable options to respond to climate change. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any.

So the debate from Labour, I have to agree with: that National doesn’t have a plan and that we can’t do everything through the emissions trading scheme (ETS). Any academic or scientist or serious analysis of this situation has concluded that we can’t just rely on the ETS to get the outcomes we want; we need serious, coordinated Government leadership and coordinated action between Government and the private sector in order to respond to the climate crisis and to develop the solutions that will help us radically reduce emissions in a short space of time.

With the Clean Car Discount and the Clean Car Standard, there has been quite a significant reduction in the average emissions of new vehicles being imported into New Zealand, and that’s a huge benefit. But we still have 4 million vehicles on the road that were brought over before the Clean Car Standard and the Clean Car Discount existed, and people are still using those. So we need some way to reduce the emissions that are caused by those vehicles—and also by heavy vehicles, because heavy vehicles are even further away from having the electrification solution.

So on that basis—because, in the Green Party policy, we had reservations about biofuels back when this policy was first mooted in around 2006, 2007—we did support the bill to select committee, and founding co-leader of the Green Party Jeanette Fitzsimons had a member’s bill at the time to bring in very strict sustainability criteria. In theory, there is scope for second-generation wood-waste biofuel sustainably produced in New Zealand, but there’s no question that the quantity we could produce would probably be less than the quantity of fossil fuels we’re currently using to move heavy vehicles, in particular.

It would also probably cost more than fossil fuels, but the cost of fossil fuels is—continuing to use them—completely unaffordable because it’s leading to climate breakdown, which is going to affect food supply, it’s going to affect the ability for humans to live sustainably, and to have stability in their lives that enable us to thrive and to trade and to do other things that we all have spent the last centuries doing.

So the Green Party has serious concerns about whether there truly can be the quantity of truly sustainable biofuel that would be needed to meet the mandate, as it has been proposed in this legislation and the regulations. We have serious concerns that while there might be a very small role that biofuel can play in reducing emissions from heavy transport in the short term, I don’t believe that this bill, as drafted, can guarantee that we wouldn’t have biofuels brought in to meet the mandate that do result in deforestation in other parts of the world or higher carbon emissions than even fossil fuels.

So the Green Party has decided to support this bill to select committee only, but we’ll be looking very, very closely at the submissions and the evidence presented throughout that process. What I understand at this point is that it simply will not be possible, that it becomes a way of greenwashing transport, that there is an industry that has been able to produce biofuels and some of the categorisation of the ingredients in those biofuels is fuzzy—it’s not necessarily from waste products.

So the idea that you could just take products that are purely waste products that otherwise would not be used and turn them into a sustainable biofuel is very attractive. But there is a problem with mandating that we meet a certain supply of that, because there’s a risk that we’re not able to meet the supply.

I do understand that we need coordinated Government action—some of that will be regulatory, some of that will be policy, some of that will be funding—in order to create potential solutions. But I think in this case, unfortunately, the transport emissions reduction plan is leaning too heavily on biofuel without crunching the numbers on the quantity of sustainable biofuel that we would actually be able to source in this decade.

So the Minister did put the challenge to those parties that weren’t going to support this bill to say how they would reduce emissions from transport, and I do think that’s really important. I think it’s a very clear message from the Green Party about how we can reduce emissions from transport in a way that is hugely beneficial to our towns and cities that actually costs less money than what we’re currently spending on transport.

Our current transport system is so heavily reliant on private cars, not because all the people using them have chosen it, but because they have no real alternative. And that is a consequence of Government decisions over decades. So local government and central government, working together, could create communities where it’s very convenient and enticing to use clean, reliable, frequent public transport buses and trains, to have the planning for bikes and other small vehicles that are fully electric like e-scooters—even mobility scooters can use those sort of separated lanes.

If we designed our communities in this smarter way, which many parts of the world do, people get these huge benefits. They have to spend less time commuting, households have to own fewer cars, and that is a direct productivity gain to New Zealand. Because right now, the drag on the total economic cost of high car ownership to New Zealand is an absurd proportion of GDP. We’re talking many tens of billions of dollars annually for households and businesses to own multiple vehicles, to park them in places, and to—

💬 Simon Court: What’s the value of mobility, though? Surely there’s a benefit of personal mobility.

Now I’m being interrupted by Simon Court. Because he’s very close to me, it’s very difficult for me to not get sidetracked by his interjections. So I will say, Simon Court says, “What’s the value of mobility?” And I would say, “Exactly that; exactly that, Simon.”

We can provide low-carbon, affordable mobility to people. We can do that as Government and local government can—working together can provide far greater benefits to people than forcing them into high car ownership. And the difference between—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Can I just ask the member to come back to biofuels? I’m allowing a breadth of discussion across the House, but I would appreciate if the member could—notwithstanding the member has been sidetracked by another member—come back to biofuels.

💬 Hon Eugenie Sage: Point of order.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Point of order, Hon Eugenie Sage.

💬 Hon Eugenie Sage: Thank you, Madam Speaker. My colleague was explaining the concept and responding to the Minister’s comment about parties that have concerns about the bill setting out their alternative. And that was exactly what she was doing. So it was centred on the debate.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): All right, thank you for that. Thank you. I will accept and apologise to the member. I will say that when I’m in my office and not in the chair, I’m not necessarily following the debate, but thank you for your intervention. With apologies to the member. The Hon Julie Anne Genter—although it would be great if she said “biofuels”, just every now and again.

Yes, yes. Thank you, Madam Speaker. So the reason we need sustainable biofuels at this point in time is because our transport system is very heavily reliant on cars, but cars are an inherently energy-inefficient way to move short distances around a city and they take up lots of land. So there really is an opportunity—and I’ve always thought this—right across the House for us all to agree that a more economically and financially efficient transport system that enables people to get around both with a car and without a car should be something that New Zealand could aspire to and most other countries have, in fact, delivered.

So that would be one way of reducing the reliance on sustainable biofuels to reduce our emissions in this decade: to go really, really hard on maximising the opportunities for active and public transport in our towns and cities. And more medium and long term, we must invest in high-quality passenger rail and other services. There will be a role for electric buses, of course, for passenger services in some parts of the country.

But all these opportunities to reduce the energy inefficiency of our current transport system is a direct economic and productivity gain to New Zealand—and actually a gain of quality of life, because while there is a proportion of people who quite love driving and want to own cars, it’s not the proportion that currently are forced to do so because there are no viable alternatives. Ultimately, that is a consequence of Government policy and planning rules—something I thought the ACT Party would agree with, that planning rules have forced car-oriented development. So that was unnecessary Government regulation that has resulted in inefficient outcomes.

Anyway, the Green Party has an alternative. We will support this to select committee, but it will take, I think, a lot of really compelling information and some changes to the bill for us to support it past select committee.

Thank you. So there is a problem to solve when it comes to reducing New Zealand’s emissions from liquid fuels, and that is: how do we reduce emissions from the transport sector? Well, if you’ve filled up your car, your ute, or your truck at the fuel bowser at any time this year, you’ll know that it’s costing you tens or, potentially, hundreds of dollars more for a big truck or a big rig, and a part of that cost is actually the emissions trading scheme. You pay for your emissions, which is about 20c a litre for a litre of diesel or petrol, under the emissions trading scheme. If you have to pay an extra 20c a litre, it makes you really seriously think about being fuel-efficient, driving less, being really, really careful with that right foot on the accelerator, and making sure that you get the most out of every tank.

Now, when we think about solving the problem of reducing emissions from the transport fleet, biofuels and a biofuel mandate would be very, very far down the list. [Notices incorrect speech time remaining on Chamber clock]

Point of order, Madam Speaker. As much as I like the idea that I have an infinite amount of time to speak on this bill—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Ah, thank you.

—I’ve just noted—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. So don’t say that the ACT Party isn’t a ruled-based party. The ACT Party believes that the rules of the House should be followed, and even we should be subject to those rules.

Look, there’s a problem to solve when it comes to reducing emissions from the transport fleet. But the ACT Party does not believe that the biofuels mandate is the way to do it.

There are a number of issues with this bill. Firstly, the industry that is supposed to supply the biofuels—the petrochemical industry—actually has already been delayed by a year. If the Government had stuck to its own time frames and passed some legislation, that could have potentially given them a two-year run-up to install new pipelines and new storage tanks and to deal with distribution, logistics, and supply issues in order to bring biofuels from refineries in Asia and Australia into New Zealand. But the Government has taken so long to bring this piece of legislation to the House that even with a year’s extension, that’s not going to be enough time for the liquid fuel industry to gear up and start delivering biofuels at the quantities that they need to to avoid penalties.

There are other practical issues. It’s not just the lead time and it’s not just the fact that the emissions trading scheme already puts a price on emissions that actually creates an incentive to use less fuel and become more efficient in your transport business or your personal life, but we’ve got issues with the feedstock. Now, a number of members, including the Greens and National, have raised the issue of where the feedstock comes from to make biofuels. Well, if they’re intended to be made in New Zealand, we’ve heard from the climate change Minister and others that you could go around all the pine forests collecting up the pine cones and the slash after a timber harvest, after a pine tree harvest, and take it back to some central processing facility and turn that wood waste into a biofuel.

💬 Barbara Kuriger: Create gold at the same time.

Yeah. Now, it’s true that you can turn wood waste into a fuel. That is a useful supplementary fuel if you’re, say, drying timber at a big timber mill, but it’s absolutely ridiculous to suggest that we can possibly coordinate the collection of pine cones and sticks off the forest floor to replace liquid mineral fuels in any way.

Then we’ve got the issue with the feedstock from South-east Asia. Now, if you go on Google Maps and you look at the island of Borneo, you’ll see that about 90 percent of it has been cleared of its native vegetation, where species like the sun bear and where the orang-utan of Borneo live. It’s been cleared and it’s been replaced with palm oil plantations. Those palm oil plantations provide not just a feedstock for food products but they also provide a feedstock for agriculture and other consumables. Now, if biofuel supply out of South-east Asian and other refineries contain palm oil from plantations that are grown where once mighty forests stood, where many, many threatened species once lived, species on the verge of extinction—if the New Zealand Government, if the Labour Party, thinks that wiping out old-growth tropical forests that once homed precious animals like the orang-utan and sun bear is the way to save us from climate change, then there is no hope for the environment. We’ve lost all hope.

Then we think about timing. Here’s a problem: the biofuels mandate comes in and applies from some time in 2024, but by 2025 the Japanese and Korean and European car-manufacturing companies who came to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee last year to tell us why the Clean Car Standard was such a bad idea—what they told us was that their factories in South-east Asia, in Japan, and in Korea will be producing more battery and hydrogen electric vehicles between 2025 and 2028 than we could possibly use and that by 2030 they’ll pretty much be producing nothing else, and yet this Government wants the fuel industry to invest tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure that might have a five-year or a six-year lifespan. It’s completely unrealistic to ask investors in plant and equipment—major supply chain logistics—to make that investment and try to recover it in, essentially, an unknown but very, very short space of time. I would say to those businesses to hold on because there will be a change of Government, and this bill will go in the bin—so hold on.

Then we think about what the alternatives are, because we’ve had a number of Government members challenge ACT on what are the alternatives. Well, here’s what ACT would do. Firstly, we’d let the emissions trading scheme do its job. The emissions trading scheme puts a price on petrol and diesel at the pump of around 20c a litre. If you think that 20c a litre isn’t enough of an incentive to change the way you drive to reduce the amount of fuel you use, then this Government doesn’t understand the cost of living crisis—20c a litre means a lot to people who have to fill up their cars to get to work on any given day.

Then you think, “What else would ACT do?” Well, we’ve actually got a member’s bill—a member’s bill in my name—in the biscuit tin called the Climate Change Response (Offshore Mitigation) Amendment Bill. It’s the offshore mitigation bill, and what that would allow is three things. It would allow New Zealand businesses that have an obligation to reduce their emissions to reduce them using accredited, approved overseas mitigation schemes, just like the one in Fiji that I heard about the other day, which was restoring mangrove forests in Fiji. They provide climate resilience, they absorb carbon, and it’s a form of international climate diplomacy. ACT’s Climate Change Response (Offshore Mitigation) Amendment Bill would allow threatened species, threatened environments, and rare and precious ecosystems to be restored in other countries that we do business with and that we trade with at lower cost than having to pay all of these charges and taxes under this current Government scheme.

It would establish long-term, enduring partnerships between businesses in New Zealand and communities in vulnerable places—places where their environment has been severely damaged by unsustainable land development practices. That includes places like Fiji, where mangroves have been cleared for tourist developments, and places like Borneo, where old-growth tropical forests have been cleared and the habitat of orang-utan and other threatened species has been destroyed.

That’s what ACT would do. It’s practical because climate change is a global problem. Reducing emissions is something that can have a global effect. It doesn’t matter where you reduce emissions, because if this Government and New Zealanders are serious about climate change, they’ll be just as happy to support an emissions reduction restoring the old-growth forests of Borneo, giving a home to the orang-utan and the sun bear, and restoring the mangroves of Fiji as they will paying a tax and paying over four times extra for a litre of biofuel to satisfy this Government’s “zero carbon at any cost to the Kiwi” approach to solving climate change.

ACT will not support this bill. We’ve got a better bill.

Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. It’s great to take this brief call on the first reading of the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill. I’d like to acknowledge the Minister of Energy and Resources, the Hon Dr Megan Woods, for her leadership in this area, where she belongs to a team of climate Ministers in the Government side of things.

I am proud to be part of a Government that is committed to target net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and to half of total energy consumption coming from renewable resources by 2035. This bill contributes to that target.

So what the bill does, because we’ve not heard a lot from the other side about the bill, is it introduces an obligation for the entity that imports and refines more than 50,000 litres of liquid fossil fuels for transport in New Zealand to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions for their fuel supply and also supplying sustainable biofuels.

Our biofuel obligation is defined in Part 2 of the bill—and if I can just remind the Opposition to go to clause 10 for the definition. As the Minister had said, an obligation is important. Without it, we will not realise the biofuels opportunity because of the significant barriers they face, including a lack of production. You know, unlike the other side, all of whom I have heard are just full of hot air, the obligation is designed to reduce the overall emissions intensity of the transport fuel. The target for 2035 is 9 percent emissions intensity, which would prevent about a million tonnes of emissions from cars, trucks, trains, and ships over two years of its operation, and up to 9 million tonnes by 2025.

I’ve heard hashtags to describe the National Party. I want to add a hashtag to that: #ThePartyOfRepeal”. Repeal, repeal, repeal—that’s all that’s coming from them.

I echo the Minister: the introduction of this bill is another step in the Government’s comprehensive plans to reduce emissions across the economy and reach net zero by 2050. I commend his bill to the House. Mālō.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. #ThankYou for the opportunity to take a call on the #SustainableBiofuelObligationBill, which #NationalWillRepeal if we win the next election—because this is a #BadBill. It’s a bill which will not fix the issues this Government says it will. This is simply the virtue-signalling bill. I was listening to the Minister talking earlier in her speech about how the Government announced their “aspiration” to put in place a sustainable biofuel mandate. But then she listened to people in the sector and realised that it would not be able to be put in place by #2023 because of the costs of the infrastructure involved. That says: this Government #Doesn’tKnowWhatThey’reDoing. #Aspiration, but #Don’tKnowWhatThey’reDoing because, actually, what happened here is they went out there and it’s like everything this Government does when it comes to climate change policy; they want to tell the world that they’re going to fix the issues, but actually they don’t have a plan. They don’t have a plan on actually how to do it.

They still don’t even understand the full cost that this is going to have on the companies which will be forced to mix biofuels with the fuels, the cost of the infrastructure, the advice which has been given here to the House doesn’t understand the cost of the infrastructure, it doesn’t fully understand the cost it’s going to have to the consumer. And guess what? It is not going to have an impact on overall emissions at all because we have a market; the emissions trading scheme has a market for emissions in New Zealand and so if you reduce emissions in one part of that market, it simply makes those emissions available to be burned somewhere else. And this Government’s very good at burning coal. They’re exceptional at burning coal. They went out there and told the world, “We’re going to be world leading, we’re going to ban oil and gas exploration.” Well, guess what? We are importing record amounts of coal into this country, which is twice as carbon intensive as oil and gas, and it’s causing more pollution globally, and that is the legacy of this Government: renewables are going backwards and the emissions are actually going up because of the short-sighted decisions by this incompetent Government which actually doesn’t know what it is going to do.

So the National Party does oppose this piece of legislation, because of the costs, the lack of the Government’s understanding of the cost it’s going to have on the industry, the fact that it will not actually reduce overall emissions, and, also, because of the cost that it is going to put on to New Zealanders at the pump during a cost of living crisis for, actually, no benefit whatsoever. We know this is going to put at least an increase of 10c a litre on the price of a litre of fuel. I think that’s the actual real reason why this Government delayed it. They would have known there had been some costs for infrastructure for the fuel companies. They would have known that this would have been incredibly expensive and difficult for them to put in place in that time frame. But, you know, they wanted to push their aspiration anyway. But the real reason is because this thing came along, which they helped create, called the cost of living crisis—the cost of living crisis, which has meant that New Zealanders are paying more at the pump, New Zealanders are paying more for their food and their groceries, interest rates are now going up, meaning that people have less money in their back pockets, and then they thought, “Wouldn’t it be a bit ridiculous if we go out there and increase the fuel excise in election year and then put another 10c a litre on with a biofuel mandate a few months later?”

I think that’s the real reason why they’ve decided to kick the can down the road—because of the politics and the cost of living crisis. That just shows the cynicism this crowd have: they say one thing about aspiration and wanting to change the world, but when the rubber hits the road these guys are just absolutely cynical politicians who will do anything to try and win a vote. That’s actually what is behind this delay. They don’t actually believe in this stuff. They just want to get good headlines in the Guardian and the New York Times and all these other international newspapers. But when it comes to the reality back at home, they actually will be very prepared to do what this bill does, which is kick the can—the biofuel mandate—down the road by another 12 months. So National opposes this (1) because of increased costs, (2) because it will not reduce overall emissions, and we will repeal it when we come to office if we’re elected next year.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The contribution by the previous speaker, Simeon Brown, really just shows how out of touch the National Party really is with the people outside of this place. We know that this generation, especially my generation, is asking our Government and this House collectively to do something about climate change. We are today to start another part of our work in this space.

The Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill means that we are now asking for greenhouse gas to be considered in terms of our fuel production to make sure that we have biofuels in the mix of the fuels that we have to consume. But that is not all. Look, if this was the only thing that our Government had done in this space, I too would agree that this is not enough. But you have to look at it in the whole range of actions we’ve done in this space, including our supplements to our electric vehicles, making sure that there are now more and more electric cars on our roads; the supplements and the support we’ve given to the hydrogen industry, as well—the fact that we’re now setting up infrastructure, solar panels through the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund in our schools, our green funds, our schools, our industries, all of our State-owned enterprises, who are making sure that we actually set up the infrastructure.

Look, I think I’ve repeated in this House one Chinese saying over and over again: that the best time to plant a tree is 100 years ago but the second-best time is to do it today. And, because infrastructure actually takes time—anything in the energy sector actually takes time—we’re starting that today. So that’s why I commend this bill to the House.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break, and the House will resume at 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity and the privilege to rise and take a short call on this bill, the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill, at the first reading.

I want to acknowledge the Minister of Energy and Resources Dr Megan Woods, for the work it has taken her and officials to bring it to the House. I would also want to acknowledge the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Ministry of Transport officials on their work and consultation to the public, and, in particular, the 24 submitters who provided views on this bill.

Through this bill, the Government is strengthening New Zealand’s fuel sector through a suite of initiatives. The bill is a proposal to increase the use of sustainable liquid biofuels in those suite of initiatives within New Zealand, as the Government looks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport. As we know, the transport sector across the motu is contributing and is a major contributor to greenhouse gases. The Government debated this in the House earlier this year when I wasn’t here, but it was supported by Labour, Greens, and the National Party then.

The improvements pave the way for a more stable, low-emissions supply, a greater choice for consumers, and a more competitive fuel market. Biofuels are made from renewable biomass such as plants, and liquid biofuels are a renewable, low-emissions fuel that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport. They’re not dependent—they’re not as dependent on new fuel infrastructure or new vehicles as other ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, such as electric vehicles.

The bill was introduced for any entity that imports or refines the fossil fuels for transport to New Zealand, which must be reduced. The scale of this work needs to be increased. The targets provide an achievable pathway for the Labour Government’s commitment to reduce emissions to achieve its climate change commitments. It is better for motorists, fuel producers—significant change—and retailers. The Environmental Protection Authority will monitor how well wholesalers are carrying out their responsibility. The Emissions Reductions Plan has targets for 2035, but in reality we need to avoid the increasing of emissions. It is where the rubber hits the road. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, I was in here for a brief period before the dinner break, and we heard lots of hashtags being passed around. I think, on this bill that is called the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill, we should call it another #BadLabourBill. Or we could call it a #WriteItOnPaperAndItWillMiraculouslyWorkBill, because that actually seems to be what Minister Megan Woods wishes for, every time she puts a piece of legislation or tries to do something. It doesn’t have the climate change effect that she thinks it’s going to have. We all know that there are only four weeks of this Parliament to sit before Christmas. We all know that Christmas trees often have fairies on the top, and we all know that the Christmas fairy will probably not gain the wish of the promises that we’ve had on biofuel targeted to reduce emissions from the other side of the House tonight, because it cannot be possible to wave a magic wand and magic this stuff up.

There have been lots of quotes on the other side of the House about how many tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions this bill, with these black and white words, is going to reduce. I have to actually say it takes a bit more than words on a piece of paper to do that. I’ll give you a classic example, because back in 2018, when the oil and gas ban was done, and I know—I heard somebody in the House before dinner break saying, “But the problem is we have coal because we don’t have enough gas.” Well, 80 percent of the gas we had available for exploration before that bill the investors have walked away from, and that’s actually reality. Jonathan Young told the members on that side of the House, time and time and time again, that if this bill passed, the investment was going to walk away. So there’s one failure. I don’t know how that coal that’s being imported from Indonesia is going to make any difference to climate change. That was one promise, which makes me believe that the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill is not going to make any difference.

The second thing that we have been hearing about, and I particularly talked a lot about this to the industry when I was the energy spokesperson, is Lake Onslow. Everyone’s accusing the electricity industry of everything at the moment, in pricing and all the rest of it, but, actually, when you put a big white elephant out there on the horizon, it means people are going to be nervous about investing and they’re not going to be—there’s a lot of resource consents that are already approved that haven’t got the investment going in it because people are nervous, because you put this big white elephant out on the horizon. It’ll take a long time to build, if it ever gets built—and I hope it doesn’t. But that is another thing that’s actually constraining us from reducing our climate change.

So biofuels is only the next one. No idea from this Government or the speakers that we’ve had so far on biofuels about what the consequences—

💬 Hon Poto Williams: What’s your climate change policy then, know-it-all?

—are of this piece of legislation. It’s only a shame, it’s only a shame—and if we’re going to do some name calling in this House; I haven’t done any name calling in this House tonight, Minister, but that’s fine if you want to call me a know-it-all.

What I was going to say is, actually, all these predictions of people saying this is how much carbon dioxide emissions we’re going to save, they actually won’t be here next year to come back and tell us, or the year after, because, you know, there is going to be a change of Government. We’ve heard a lot tonight about #NationalDoesntHaveAPlan. Well, National does actually have a plan, and guess what National’s #Plan is? The #Plan is to actually understand that politicians know far less than what the industries know about achieving these goals. Gosh, listen to them. It’s quite interesting over there tonight. They’re not actually interested in alternative views; they’re only interested in their own. It’s actually really interesting. So when you trust an industry who have the skills, normally they have the people—most of them are a bit struggling for people at the moment because this Government’s actually made people pretty scarce. By keeping the immigration standards pretty low, they’ve made people scarce. But all of the industries who are likely to produce these biofuels are industries that actually have an understanding of technically how to do it, technically how to invest in it, technically how to make it happen. Where National has a plan is that, actually, the industries are the best-placed people to be able to come and explain to Governments how things need to be done.

Unfortunately, this is a top-down Government. They put it in a piece of legislation, they put it on a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work. I challenge anyone—there’s still one more speaker to go on this bill. There’s still one more speaker to go on this bill before the end of the night, and I challenge anyone to stand up and take speech 12 and tell me where the feedstocks for these biofuels are going to come from, because often they vary. They can end up even being damaging to the environment, and they can be damaging to food security. You know, it’d be terrible, wouldn’t it, if it ended up like the coal and we didn’t have enough feedstock in this country to do it ourselves and we had to start importing it.

I guess the most we can hope for is that there will be a few trees that will actually come down the countryside, because there are so many, perhaps, trees being planted in the wrong place that actually aren’t going to end up in any forestry and aren’t going to do grandchildren any favours that, actually, some of that might end up being a stock for a biofuel at some point in the future. But most of those trees have only been planted for two or three years, so it’s going to be a very long time. I heard Simon Court say before about pine cones and some of the pie-in-the-sky stuff that we might be able to use pine cones. Well, again, it’s nearly Christmas—maybe we should spray them with gold paint and hang them on the tree and just wait a while for the tree to grow, because, actually, this is a ridiculous notion, this piece of legislation. It’s set to increase the price of fuel by about 10c a litre, and we all know right now that people can’t afford their vegetables, let alone the fuel to fill up their car. It’s going to disadvantage low-income families who cannot afford to buy a hybrid or an electric vehicle, and they can’t afford to get that tax rebate on a Tesla that everyone keeps getting, because the Government has actually set the levels of the tax completely wrong.

So I challenge somebody on that side of the House to stand up and tell me exactly how much we’re going to save, how we’re going to get the stock for the biofuel, how we’re going to process it, and how we’re going to magically—it’s all very well to declare climate emergencies. It’s all very well to, you know, think that this works in theory, but it doesn’t always.

We over this side of the House, we know that climate change is real, and we always said we would support the targets, but where we’ve got really different views is the path to get there—it’s the place where we always do the most arguments. The problem is this Government always knows best and it tries to think it can tell industry what to do and miraculously these things are going to happen. So where these industries are going to get biofuel from—we want an explanation.

Also, the other thing is there’s a lot of vehicles that don’t actually work with biofuel, or the levels of biofuel for some vehicles are far too high. Many New Zealanders around the country own or belong to clubs which drive classic cars or motorbikes that can only run on certain types of petrol. What’s going—

💬 Maureen Pugh: Hot rods.

Hot rods, exactly, Maureen—hot rods. What’s going to happen when they put this petrol in their car with the amount of biofuels that won’t make it run? Has anyone got an answer on that? There’s a lot of things that we’d like to hear on this side of the House that we’re not currently hearing.

It’s interesting, because the Minister’s actually recently slowed down the time frame. Now, we believe that that’s probably got something to do with the fact that it’s not such a palatable option as it might have been in terms of the targets because it’s election year coming up next year. Early Wednesday morning, the Government announced $20 million in climate compensation, and then three hours later Megan Woods announced she’d be postponing the transport biofuels mandate by a year. So, everyone ask yourself what that means. We look forward to some answers. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. There’s been some comments made tonight about what we could call this bill, and if I was going to rename this bill, I would rename it the “National Have Their Head in the Sand Bill”, because climate change—as the previous speaker, Barbara Kuriger, has said—is real. In my community of Nelson, we’ve had some of the worst floods on record as a result of climate change. It’s an issue that affects our vulnerable communities, and we have obligations as a country to put legislation in place, as a Government, to reduce the effects of climate change on our people and on our planet.

The previous speaker made some comments—and I think it’s fair to ask questions. It’s fair to make comments and raise concerns around the sustainability of biofuels. We don’t want biofuels to end up causing more problems than the problem that they’re seeking to address. So the previous member asked—it is in the bill. If you read the bill, it actually states that “the Minister must be satisfied that any activities that are associated with the cultivation, production, and processing of feedstocks … are not likely to have a significant adverse effect on biodiversity”. It goes on to say “are not likely to have a significant adverse effect on food and feed security”. And there’s more in the bill that specifically states that biofuels can’t also do harm. We will not be approving biofuels that cause other forms of harm.

And, we, as I’ve said, as a Government, have obligations to our vulnerable communities in the Pacific and our low-lying areas in parts of the world that will be affected by climate change. It will be the poorest people that will pay the price, and we have obligations. This is an excellent bill, and I commend it to the House.

The question is, That the Sustainable Biofuel Obligation Bill be considered by the Environment Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Environment Committee.

Instruction to Environment Committee