Income Tax (Clean Transport FBT Exclusion) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Income Tax (Clean Transport FBT Exclusion) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Finance and Expenditure Committee to consider the bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Right now on the other side of the world, the Conference of the Parties (COP)—I’m not sure which number it is—

💬 Hon Members: 29.

—climate conference is happening—29. At the same time, I’ve just read a headline that says that scientists have determined that the 1.5 degrees of warming that was agreed to in Paris at COP 21 is already unattainable. It’s been about nine years and we haven’t seen the action that we needed in order to radically reduce carbon emissions to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees above industrial levels. Of course, the Paris Agreement was one that the National Party signed Aotearoa New Zealand up to and have repeatedly asserted that they were committed to achieving those targets.

Now, one of the things that we need to do—one very small thing, it might seem, and this bill would help contribute to—is increase the demand for electric vehicles, so I put this bill in the ballot. This is the first member’s bill, in 13 years of being in this House of Parliament, that I have the pleasure of speaking to. I was quite lucky six years in to have a member’s bill drawn, but then I was a Minister by the time it got to first reading, so I had to pass it on to a colleague. Then it took another six years for this bill to be drawn, so it’s my first time speaking to a member’s bill. It was one that I put in the ballot because I thought it might get the support of parties in the current Government. The reason I thought it might get support is because it’s literally a policy that National had in their manifesto in 2020, not so long ago.

What this bill does is it creates a temporary exemption for fringe benefit tax on electric vehicles. The rationale for this is that the majority of vehicles purchased in New Zealand are purchased by businesses—that employers who have large fleets who provide their employees with vehicles could be incentivised quite easily to purchase electric vehicles if we created a temporary exemption of fringe benefit tax. Of course, we’ve seen other exemptions of fringe benefit tax. There’s an exemption for employer-provided car parks. Employer-provided car parks generate additional traffic trips, they have a whole host of unintended negative consequences, and yet they’re exempt from fringe benefit tax.

Because of the distortion that’s created by that exemption, we’ve seen more exemptions put in, which is helpful because the commute to work trip is one of the biggest drivers of the morning and afternoon peak in traffic. If we have different incentives, if employers can provide different incentives, you can get shifts in behaviour. We saw an exemption brought in last term that the Green Party had campaigned on, which was an exemption for public transport passes, and then, at the very last minute, an amendment that I proposed to exempt bikes and electric bikes. That is actually creating an incentive and a kind of industry support for services to employers, like managing fleets of electric bikes. It’s enabling people to access clean transportation. That’s why this bill was put in place.

I know it seems really boring and technical—I feel that when I’m giving this speech. It’s hard to be really passionate about fringe benefit tax, isn’t it? But here we are—here we are. What happened was the Government said they’re committed to the Paris targets and they’re committed to reducing emissions. Transport is one of the largest sources of our carbon emissions, and the vast majority of our carbon emissions from transport are from private vehicles. If we’re going to have any hope of decarbonising and there’s no plan from the current Government to shift away from a very high reliance on private vehicles—indeed, if anything, there are policies that are all about encouraging reliance on private vehicles and making it harder for people to use public transport. If we’re going to reduce emissions, which this Government says they want to do, we need more electric vehicles.

I just want to quote some supporters of this bill who I thought members opposite might be interested to hear. The Motor Industry Association (MIA) have provided this quote of support: “The MIA’s support for this bill goes beyond the associated financial incentives. Our immediate concern is consumers’ low uptake and continued hesitation in transitioning towards EVs. The supply of suitable vehicles is no longer a barrier to meeting carbon reduction targets—consumer demand is. Achievement of future decarbonisation goals now hinges upon consumer demand. Continued consumer hesitation will directly impact carbon targets and our ability to achieve them.”

This bill is a targeted, strategic step towards strengthening demand for zero-emissions vehicles, which is essential for positioning New Zealand to meet its environmental commitments. It’s been supported by a wide variety of automotive industry representatives, like the AA. In fact, when Simon Bridges was transport Minister—if anyone remembers that; he’s currently the chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency—he had an electric vehicle advisory group who pushed for this policy. That was what they were campaigning on. That’s why National then campaigned on it in 2020, but, sadly, it was dropped from their manifesto.

However, it is not too late—it is not too late. I ask all members here tonight to consider voting for this bill, simply to send it to select committee where it could be considered further; where we could hear from the public, from experts, and get advice from officials. Of course, we’d have to hear from more than just IRD officials, because IRD officials, we all know, just love a very simple tax system and they’re not a huge fan of exemptions. However, we are policy makers and we’re here to get outcomes for New Zealanders. The OECD has repeatedly told New Zealand we’re not using our tax system to get the environmental outcomes we want enough. This would be a simple way to get the outcomes we want.

Now, this is not going to be very visible on television, unfortunately, but I did print a graph to show what happened with electric vehicle registrations in Aotearoa in 2024 after the Clean Car Discount was cancelled. There is a whole range of industry supporters like people who provide the charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. They’re saying—and a number of them, I know, will have emailed members in the last week or so—that we need policy support from central government to increase the demand for electric vehicles. If we want the charging infrastructure, if we want the renewable generation, the single key driver of that is demand. How do we create the demand? We incentivise electric vehicles.

I accept that members opposite, despite the success of the policy, were not in agreement with carrying on with the Clean Car Discount. The advantage of the Clean Car Discount was that it kept the incentives within the market of new vehicles coming to New Zealand. It meant that everybody who was bringing a new car into New Zealand—whether it was a highly polluting vehicle or an EV—somehow was playing a role in helping us reduce our emissions from those private vehicles. They have chosen to end that policy; however, there’s nothing in its place. If anything, the road-user charges for battery electric vehicles are penalising electric vehicles now, because if someone has a hybrid vehicle, they pay half the cost per kilometre as a battery electric vehicle would, even though it’s comparable damage to the road.

So it is time; we need a solution. That’s why I put this very constructive bill in the ballot, because I thought, potentially, Government members, whatever party they might be in, might see the attractiveness of a bill that takes a tax off businesses and supports private cars.

💬 Andy Foster: What about landlords?

Well, oh, and some people are heckling me right now, as usual. I would love to respond to every heckle. Let me say: why is it that you’re OK with tax breaks that don’t reduce emissions, but you’re not OK with tax breaks that do reduce emissions? That’s my question for members opposite.

The whole point of the tax break is to get an outcome we want. Do we want more people who own property to keep buying up properties? No. Do we want to reduce emissions and incentivise the electric vehicle market and the electric vehicle charging infrastructure and the generation of renewable electricity? Yes. We should all want that. I would hope that all members, whether they’re in the Government or not, will consider voting for this bill so we can take it to select committee and potentially find a solution we can all agree with.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s a great pleasure to speak on the Income Tax (Clean Transport FBT Exclusion) Amendment Bill. I have to say, I’m used to listening to Dr Deborah Russell, who’s very knowledgeable on tax, actually, and very enthusiastic about it, and she’s a great asset to the Finance and Expenditure Committee when it comes to tax. I’ve now found another member of the Opposition who speaks enthusiastically about tax, so I’ve learnt something tonight I didn’t know tonight about the Hon Julie Anne Genter.

I will put the member out of her misery and say that we’re actually not going to support this bill. It is a great thrill to have a bill drawn out of the ballot, and well done. Thirteen years and this is your first opportunity to speak to one, but at least you got your other one through—or did it go through? Oh, that’s a shame. Anyway, it is a great thrill to get a bill out and get it to the floor and to speak to it, but, ultimately, you have to have a bill that’s going to be supported. The reason that we don’t support it is, actually, we don’t think it is necessary to have a fringe benefit tax to incentivise the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs).

We’re in a period where we’re in change and where electric vehicles may well overtake the internal combustion engine in the long run. We’ve been in these sorts of periods before. I take you back, Mr Speaker—not that you will remember it, of course; but the great horse manure crisis of 1894. This was a big thing around the world. Horse manure was making cities uninhabitable because the transport of the day was, of course, the horse. Cars did exist, just after that period in particular, but they were not being taken up at a fast enough rate to overtake the horses.

Of course, Mr Speaker, I know you’ll be interested in this: the issue was all of the manure in the street, how do they clean it up? Well, of course, they had to have horses to clean it up, and that caused more manure, so it didn’t really solve the problem. There was a story in The Times about it in 1894. In fact, there was a bit of an urban legend: it said in The Times—allegedly—“In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under 9 feet of manure.” That actually was a myth; that’s not what it said. In fact, in 1894 they were complaining about dust and mud rather than manure and dead horses in the street.

Where am I going with this? Well, actually, in 1908, Mr Speaker, you’ll be pleased to know, Henry Ford produced the first Model T that rolled off the production line where they had mass production, and he made vehicles affordable for the common person to buy. There were a lot of cars around—in fact, there were electric lead-acid battery cars at that time. Anyway, the internal combustion engine won the day and it’s still the primary means of road transport today. Of course, buses and electric trams also dealt with the horse manure issue, but people took up those vehicles because they made a decision that that technology was better than the existing technology. They weren’t subsidised, they weren’t taxed or didn’t have tax incentives—either a tax break or a tax on horses—people made a technology decision.

Now, I give this speech as a person who owns an EV, and I own an EV that never got a subsidy. I own that EV—well, actually, my wife does—because we like that technology. It’s a technology that we like, and it’s a far better drive than an internal combustion engine. Unfortunately, we live in rural provincial New Zealand and an EV is not that practical for long distances and we do a lot of long distances, so we have a diesel vehicle. We didn’t buy it to save emissions; we bought it because of the technology. Actually, I think we know what’s happening in the world at the moment. I think there’s going to be a lot more Chinese EVs that are very cheap and are hitting Europe about now and we will get them at some point anyway. They will be more than cost-competitive, so we don’t need a fringe benefit tax for EV uptake.

What we do need is what we are doing, and that is building charging stations to ensure that people don’t have range anxiety. I know that unless you have an EV, you don’t know what range anxiety is, because, believe me, Mr Speaker, you don’t want to go below 20 percent left on your battery. That can run down very quickly. I can tell you, driving through the McKenzie country in an EV in a nor’wester and watching the battery just drain away—it’s a long way to the next charging station. It’s not a very nice experience.

That aside, the member spoke a lot about emissions, but the reality is, and there’s research to show this: you have to drive an EV for over 100,000 miles—miles, not kilometres; miles—until you get the benefit, in terms of emissions, of having an EV rather than an internal combustion engine vehicle, because of all the mining that’s required for the materials to go into an EV. There’s a lot of emissions that go into the manufacturing of that vehicle—it’s not a disputable fact.

I note the fringe benefit tax, also part of this bill, is to actually deem all double-cab utes as cars. I’ll tell you why that is: because that will then make them not able to receive the fringe benefit tax. I know a former Prime Minister who has made her name helping Kamala Harris with her election campaign—well, she didn’t go that well, actually. Anyway, she talked about utes and being an “illegitimate” ute, in that people were driving them around. Well, illegitimate utes cannot get fringe benefit tax.

There are conditions on what can get a fringe benefit tax, and that is, one, a vehicle that prominently and permanently displays on its exterior the employer’s identification—so it must have that on it. It is not a car. It is not available for an employee’s private use, “except for private use that is (a) travel to and from home that is necessary in, and a condition of, their employment; (b) or other travel in the course of their employment, during which travel arises incidentally to the business use.” Everyone who owns, if this were to pass, a double-cab ute for their business—like the tradies, the plumbers, the builders, all the electricians—will not be eligible for a fringe benefit tax exemption, and that is hitting the productive sector of New Zealand. It’s outrageous, and that is one of the main reasons why we will not be supporting this bill. I’m—with pleasure, actually—opposing this bill.

I want to make probably about three or four points in relation to the Income Tax (Clean Transport FBT Exclusion) Amendment Bill. The Labour Party will be supporting this bill. Now, ordinarily, we would not take the step of looking at fringe benefit tax (FBT) exemption sew-ons for a very specific period. It’s a sort of wrinkle in the tax Act that we would not ordinarily support, but we did want to support this one, and the reason is quite straightforward: there are currently no incentives around the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) in New Zealand—nothing since the Clean Car Discount was removed.

We think that this measure would encourage businesses to use electric vehicles, and, of course, once a business uses an electric vehicle and perhaps uses it for a few years and then it gets sold out into the second-hand fleet, it increases the supply of second-hand vehicles in the country in general. It would actually be a good measure in terms of trying to work hard on reducing our emissions. At present, there seem to be no measures being taken by the Government to reduce this country’s emissions, and this would go some way towards doing that. It’s a short-term incentive. I think it would be worth trying in the absence of any other measures designed to make it more financially viable for businesses to take up electric vehicles. That would be quite a straightforward thing to do.

Now, the bill achieves this by adding an exclusion to section CX 6 of the Income Tax Act. What that particular section does—section CX 6—is it imposes fringe benefit tax on the private use of a vehicle which is supplied by an employer. But there are some exclusions: when the vehicle is used for an emergency, when it’s used for a work trip that lasts more than 24 hours, and so on—there are various exclusions. It would simply add an exclusion if the vehicle was an EV, and that seems like a pretty straightforward way to do it. That is how a change could be achieved, and I think it is worth a try.

I do want to just take up something which the previous speaker, Stuart Smith, was talking about, and that is the other rule that is proposed in this bill around double-cab utes. Now, at the moment, if you’ve got a vehicle that is designed exclusively or mainly to carry up to nine people, including the driver, that gets defined as a car, and cars get caught by the fringe benefit tax rules when they are supplied by an employer for an employee to use, right? That’s fairly straightforward, but work-related vehicles fall out of the fringe benefit tax rules, and there’s a little bit of an anomaly around double-cab utes. Even when someone is using a double-cab ute pretty much for personal purposes, it does seem that in the ways that the law is applied, many people seem to think that, because it’s a double-cab ute, it is defined as a work-related vehicle and it falls outside of the FBT rules. This would just be a matter of clarifying what actually ought to be the practice.

We know from evidence from Inland Revenue and from Inland Revenue officers up and down the country that there are some areas where double-cab utes are treated as just being a work-related vehicle when in actual fact they are functioning as a car. This would just clarify the rules around that. If a person is using their double-cab ute for work-related purposes and they’re only using it for work-related purposes, there’s no problem. It’s when they use that vehicle as a car for passenger transport—for personal passenger transport—that it becomes a different matter. It would simply clarify the rules. If a business wants to use a double-cab ute, go for it; that’s absolutely fine. It’s just a matter of where the benefit from that falls and whether it does form part of, I guess, an employee’s remuneration. It would simply clarify that, and I think it’s a valuable measure in itself, just clarifying that aspect of the FBT rules.

Having said all that, it’s a shame to hear that this bill won’t at least be supported to select committee, where we could have gone into some of the issues around fringe benefit tax. Our fringe benefit tax does need reviewing. There are some anomalies in the law. It is a complicated piece of legislation which could do with a wee bit of tidying up. It’s a shame that the Government won’t allow that to take place. In the Labour Party, our position is very clearly that, even though as a tax measure itself we might not support it, as a measure to reduce emissions we do. For that reason, we support this bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Congratulations to the Hon Julie Anne Genter on having your bill drawn and having the opportunity to present to the House your case for why electric vehicles should be exempt from fringe benefit tax.

💬 Hon Julie Anne Genter: Temporarily. It’s only a temporary—

And only temporarily, the member says, which doesn’t add to the weight of evidence that she has presented. The evidence for the prosecution of this flawed case: electric vehicles (EVs) are so cheap and so plentiful that the Government needs to subsidise them with tax breaks in order to make them more plentiful and more available. That doesn’t stack up.

Now, the honourable member, I understand, is a transport planner—and I’ve had lots of wonderful conversations where we agree about transport planning and urban planning—but this proposal is missing an economic support, because, when supply exceeds demand, that is evidence of customers expressing preference. It could also be evidence that suppliers have become so efficient at producing the goods at such a low price that, essentially, they’ve flooded the market; they’ve reached maximum capacity of what consumers of any product will absorb.

Two things will happen in that case: consumers might suddenly decide to switch preferences based on price, or it may very well be that the manufacturers of those products made a very poor choice in oversupplying the market, investing in plant and equipment that turned out not to be able to achieve its rate of return. The New Zealand taxpayer should not be helping companies who have mal-invested, or helping consumers who have adequate choice at very low cost.

The previous Government gave hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to subsidise electric vehicles. They taxed tradies who needed to buy utes and vans, and large families who needed to buy larger vehicles, and they transferred that money to another group of consumers to subsidise the cost of their electric vehicles. That artificially stimulated demand which didn’t exist without Government interference. Now, this coalition Government, the ACT Party included, campaigned to get rid of the ute tax and restore fairness into the vehicle market and for tradies, farmers, and people who need big family cars. We did that—we delivered that in the first 100 days. We got rid of the ute tax; the ute tax is no more. Now there’s a surplus of electric vehicles, and it’s almost like we didn’t need the tax. We didn’t need the subsidy; the market has provided. That may be a surprise to the Green Party and members of the Labour Party apparently supporting this—that free markets will supply as much stuff as you want.

I just want to give you an example about what’s changed in the EV market in the last few years. The Hertz rental company in the past week has written off $2 billion of the residual value of its EV rental fleet because it turns out, after three years, they’re worth next to nothing. Whereas a different type of a petrol or diesel vehicle with 100,000 kilometres and three years on the clock still has a significant—maybe 40 or 50—percent of its residual value, EVs have next to nothing. There is nothing that the Greens, Labour, and other socialist parties wouldn’t subsidise in tax and get other people to pay for, but we can’t make consumers choose things that they don’t want. We can’t. You can’t subsidise rubbish, failing media companies by taxing successful ones, like Google, and handing them other people’s money.

A famed Wellington economist, a gentleman called Dr Eric Crampton—some of you might have read his writings, Dr Eric Crampton from the New Zealand Initiative.

💬 Hon Paul Goldsmith: Expert on every topic.

He is an expert on so many topics. He’s an expert on Wises maps. He made the point recently, on that wonderful social media channel X, that, you know, taken to the extreme, if we want to subsidise businesses that are failing, maybe we could tax Google Maps and give the money to Wises maps. It would sit dusty and unwanted in the service station. This bill is about as sensible as that. It won’t work, but I want to offer hope for the member Julie Anne Genter, something that is so cheap that they’ve been given away at cost. The market has already solved the problem for consumers and businesses; ACT will not support it. I’m sorry.

I want to congratulate the member for getting the bill drawn and, obviously, for the work that went into getting it to that stage. I do understand at face value the intention here, which is to try and get towards a cleaner fleet over time, and I understand the issues around saying that, look, over time, hopefully, electric vehicles (EVs) will become cheaper and, therefore, they will become more cost-competitive without some form of incentive. However, this looks like a back-door approach to doing exactly the Clean Car Discount twinned with “Let’s tax the utes.”, which is what we got rid of earlier this term. It looks like having another crack at that.

What are the problems with this bill? Well, first of all, there’ll be a fiscal impact, and, actually, we don’t know how big the fiscal impact will be, but my bet is that it will actually be bigger than the fiscal impact of the Clean Car Discount because, of course, the fringe benefit tax (FBT) applies every year. It’s not just a one-off, but it will apply every year, and I’ll come back to some numbers very shortly.

Secondly, it proposes a tax rebate for people who have provided a vehicle. I do note that we get harangued by the other side of the House when we say that there is a group of people who have a legitimate business expense, and it seems an outrage to the other side of the House that we should, that that business expense should be deductible against the cost of providing a business. Of course, I’m talking about people who are providing housing for other people—i.e., mum and dad landlords and other landlords—and yet we get harangued by the other side of the House, and here they want to provide a tax incentive, effectively, for somebody just to make it cheaper for them. I don’t quite get the logic behind that; maybe there isn’t any.

Third, the bill would take from the less well-off and give to the more well-off, and I would have hoped that that side of the House might be talking about being for the Robin Hood approach. This is more the Sheriff of Nottingham approach, because what we know is that, disproportionately, EVs are in the wealthier parts of the country and they’re in the urban parts of the country—particularly Wellington and Auckland. The rural areas, for the reasons that Stuart Smith has espoused, have much lower numbers of EVs and also, of course, have lower incomes on the whole.

Then, of course, EVs are much more expensive than ICE vehicles—or internal combustion engine vehicles—on the whole, and I did some quick maths. I tried to do the calculations on FBT because, of course, the higher the value of the vehicle, the higher the value of the FBT, or the FBT rebate in this case. By my calculations, for an $80,000 vehicle—which is not stratospheric for an EV—purchased in 2024, the FBT would be $8,888 this year, and then whatever it is in future years. If it’s a $150,000 vehicle, the FBT will be $16,656. The more expensive the vehicle, the greater the rebate which is being proposed to be given in this bill. As I said, the bill would tend to support the wealthy in our wealthier cities.

The other thing is that we’ve heard one or two comments that said that the bill specifically also has a little barb in the tail, and it’s that barb which says that it specifically will make double-cab utes “cars” for FBT purposes. Again, it’s the same things that we had with the ute tax, and, of course, these double-cab utes are much more likely to actually be used for work vehicles.

Look, we’ve heard some comments made there about whether they are or are not work vehicles, but I’m just drawing from the Deloitte report which Stuart Smith referred to. In terms of double-cab utes: “Inland Revenue’s view in relation to double-cab utes is: ‘This vehicle is designed equally for carrying people and for carrying goods. The front half of the ute comprises the cab which has two rows of seats for carrying people. The back half of the vehicle is the tray, which is used for carrying goods. This vehicle is not a car.’ ”—is the comment which is made there—and, of course, this bill makes them a car.

In summary, the fiscal cost of this is unknown. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Minister of Finance—if it went anywhere—said, “Oh, hang on. I’m going to veto that because of the cost of it.” It will take from the poorer rural areas to give to the wealthier urban ones. It will penalise the people who use vehicles for work and give to those who do not, and, essentially, it tries to put back in a policy approach that this Government took out earlier this year. New Zealand First will not be supporting this bill, and I do not commend it to the House.

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. E tū ana hau ki te waha i ngā kōrero mō Te Pāti Māori i te pō nei, e mihi ana au ki te mema nāna tēnei pire, otirā ki Te Pāti Kākariki. E tū ana hau ki te tautoko i tēnei pire.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker, and greetings to the whole House. I stand to speak on behalf of Te Pāti Māori this evening. I would like to acknowledge the member who brought this bill forward, and also to the Green Party. I stand to support this bill.]

I am glad to stand here to take a short call to support this bill and enter the discussion on this particular amendment, the Income Tax (Clean Transport FBT Exclusion) Amendment Bill, which will seek to ultimately improve electrical vehicle uptake through the removal of fringe benefit tax for five years from zero-emissions vehicles that are provided to staff as a part of their salary package. This is important as it is clear financial incentive for employers to purchase new electric vehicles as company cars. By extension, this bill will help support a transition towards cleaner transport options, lessening the impact of fossil fuels on the whenua.

In previous months, my colleagues stood and spoke on the road-user charge amendment bill, and I’ll readdress a point made during those readings because it is important, especially for our whānau and people who may wonder why amendments such as the one we discuss today impact our oranga.

At that point, we as Māori are often segregated from this type of discussion and this kōrero, given that for us as Māori, it can be an everyday struggle to survive, to put food on the table, and to afford the basic necessities—a particularly relevant issue in our current political climate; it is a struggle to keep a roof over our heads. Given these things, discussions on electric vehicles are far from reality at times, and the removal of fringe benefit tax are often so far away from our real-world life issues we are removed from these conversations.

I stand here to affirm our place in this discussion, as my colleagues have done in previous weeks for Māori, to reassure our hapori that we are making our voices heard in every corner of this House, for every issue that may impact us, no matter how relevant it may be. As I stand before the changes that are to be made, this bill will encourage the uptake of electric vehicles and therefore reduce harm caused to our whenua by our heavy reliance on fossil fuels.

For Māori, the health of the whenua reflects the health of the people. Therefore, a reduction in harm to the whenua is ultimately a reduction in the harm to ourselves. Amendments such as the one discussed today will contribute—even though it is minute—to the betterment of the health of our people. I can therefore, with the best interest of our mokopuna yet to come, that this whenua will be taken care of and passed on to them. That is why Te Pāti Māori is in support of this bill. Tēnā rā tātou e te Whare.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak on this silly bill, this silly opportunity for the House to be having to say that this is not something that is worth going to first reading, but it is actually something that most people in this House would support. You would think that the National Party were taking every opportunity, right now, to show that they are listening to people in New Zealand who are looking for some leadership on climate action, some leadership from the National Party that they are still committed to meeting their Paris Agreement targets—

💬 Ryan Hamilton: We are.

—when, over and over and over again, they say, “We are.” The Minister in the chair, the Hon Paul Goldsmith, says, “We are.” Well, prove it then. Find something you can support, because the Government can’t support the restrictions on mining. No, those are all back on. The Government can’t support the policy that the prior Labour Government brought in to increase the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs). The Government can’t support further funding for public transport and all of those good things in our cities that reduce emissions. What is it that speaks to ordinary New Zealanders who want a moderate Government to lead on its long-term vision for New Zealand? What is it that the National MPs will find to show people that they are listening to their concerns?

The Hon Julie Anne Genter is an expert on transport policy. She’s someone I’ve learnt a lot from, and I commend her for this bill in her work on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. She has served in the Labour Government as a transport expert, and this kind of sensible policy that steps us out to say, “Well, it wasn’t what I would do.” It’s not the comprehensive kind of policy that would implement the kind of transformational change that Labour and the Greens could achieve together, but it’s something. It’s something to make people’s lives better. It’s something to show New Zealand on the world stage and that there is a bit of vision left in this place. But, no, National have thrown that in the bin. For what? Some petty politics to show that they can’t work with the Greens? You would think that there was some appetite there, at least at a political level, to show that they’ve got some friends left on this side of the Parliament when they are in bed with one of the most divisive politicians of our generation. But, no, we’re here denying even the ability of a select committee to look into what is a good and sensible and middle-of-the-road idea on climate change.

What does that say to young people in this country who are looking to this Parliament to do something about the planet boiling—literally boiling—in its skin? That is the future that we are looking down the barrel of with a Government who finds that funny. We could be having a really useful discussion at a select committee level about the ways that we could incentivise uptake of EVs. National, at the election time, said that was a great idea. They said that they would be spending public money on it to support private ownership of EVs. You know, that’s certainly not what I would do either. Where’s that? Where’s that on the agenda? Why aren’t we debating that? It’s certainly worth having a discussion about how we might incentivise people to get out of cars as well and into different public transport choices—whether it’s walking, cycling, buses—but we’re not having that debate either.

We are so far, in this Parliament right now, from the cares of ordinary New Zealanders and the things that will actually make their lives better. We are being distracted by this Government buying into a debate that is divisive out there on the forecourt of Parliament the other day, and we’re not supporting these sensible ideas which would have advanced the debate. Even though this isn’t what I would do, I would spend my time very happily working through this in a consensus-building way with people around the House who know more about this than I do.

I would like to think that the New Zealand Parliament is well known around the world for the way that parliamentarians can get together and hash out ideas like this one and decide, based on the evidence, whether it is good. But we’ve heard a jumble of hot reckons around the House tonight about why we won’t be spending our time doing this, and it’s a real shame. It’s also a shame when we know the challenges that are facing this country long term about the kind of infrastructure that we need to prepare ourselves for the kind of change that we will face in my generation and in the generation of my children to adapt to climate change. That is a useful conversation for this Parliament to be having. That is what we should be doing. This bill—open the door for it.

Thank you, Julie Anne Genter, for bringing it to this House. I’m sorry that it won’t be passing, but we support it.

I rise to oppose this bill. Look, I am going to touch on the member who has just spoken, Arena Williams, saying that we aren’t taking climate change action; well, I’ll tell you we are, on this side of the House, taking climate change action, because we are looking to double our renewable energy by 2050 and reduce emissions in New Zealand. I’ll just give an example, actually, from today—a visit that I paid to a wind farm opening in Hawke’s Bay, the second-largest wind farm in New Zealand, where we switched it on: 41 turbines powering up 70,000 households and businesses across Hawke’s Bay. Now, creating more renewable energy, using our water, our sun, and our wind—our wind—is how we are going to action climate change and how we’re going to reduce our emissions.

It’s all very well to have those electric vehicles, but somehow we need to create the electricity to power those electric vehicles. The way we’re going to do that is by building more renewable energy, more infrastructure, and getting it done faster. That is why we have the Fast-track Approvals Bill, because these farms are taking so long to consent. Just today, I was with the landowners and they were saying that it’s taken 20 years to get this wind farm built—20 years; 2004 they started. Well, that is just absolutely senseless. If we want to build wind farms and solar farms, we need to get them consented fast and built. It only took two years to build this wind farm. That’s the reality that we’re facing, that is sensible policy, and that is how we are going to address climate change. I do not commend this bill to the House.

The Hon Julie Anne Genter in reply.

Well, I think this debate has demonstrated very clearly, sadly, the dream of some sort of sensible, evidence-based discussion across parties that would result in some consensus around effective policies to achieve outcomes that are good for New Zealand, whether you believe in climate change or not. Now, I think it’s pretty safe to say, based on the actions of the Government parties, that there are not many people on the Government benches who actually believe climate change is a real problem and one that we need to do anything about.

Even if we didn’t think climate change was a problem—which is a completely ridiculous position to have after Cyclone Gabrielle and all the many events that have happened across the globe over the last few years—switching to electric vehicles makes pure economic sense for New Zealand. They use 40 percent less energy than fossil fuel vehicles and one of our largest imports is oil—petrol and diesel—to run our cars and trucks. Anything we can do to use less energy to move people and goods, and anything we can do to reduce the energy that we use from fossil fuels, actually is a productivity gain to New Zealand. We produce most of our electricity off clean, renewable sources here in New Zealand already, and therefore in New Zealand there’s quite a significant reduction in fossil fuels from electric vehicles.

Even if we didn’t care about the carbon impact—which we should—it would make sense, and when we look at the countries in the world that have had large uptake, and Norway is the leader in this in electric vehicles, it’s very clear how they did it. Norway is actually very comparable to New Zealand in many respects, because they have a lot of rural areas. They have some remote rural areas. They actually have a much more extreme climate than New Zealand, and they have a similar population, but they have, very clearly now, more electric vehicles than fossil fuel vehicles. They’ve achieved it in a very rapid amount of time and it is first and foremost due to a substantial package of incentives developed to promote zero-emissions vehicles into the market. It was done through tax exemptions, because Norway has very large taxes on all the vehicles they import, and now they have much larger taxes on fossil fuel vehicles. The higher-emitting the vehicle, the higher the tax.

They also have farmers and tradies in Norway and yet somehow they have a tax incentive system for vehicles which has resulted in very, very high uptake of electric vehicles. This is very beneficial for many reasons. They also have high renewable electricity generation and so they get the same benefits of clean electricity powering their vehicles—40 percent energy reduction for moving people and goods by those vehicles, because they’re electric, and you get cleaner air. It’s just one of those situations—like, there’s a big reduction in particulate matter. There’s no significant difference in resource depletion. We know there are all these benefits.

This bill was a policy that the National Party had in their manifesto in 2020. We’ve got the Motor Industry Association and the New Zealand Automobile Association who previously promoted this policy. It’s not like just a Green policy; it’s actually one that is widely supported across the industry and particularly people working in electric vehicle charging, because they know we need a rapid increase in demand for electric vehicles.

Now, the case for Government intervention is very, very clear. Climate change is market failure, and I really have to emphasise this point. It is very, very clear for the people who are currently in charge of our Government. There is no awareness, no knowledge of the existential threat of climate change and the huge opportunities to get better outcomes for all New Zealanders through taking practical, evidence-based actions that would lead to a change in the vehicles we use, the way we get around, the way we build our homes. The way we do everything has to change and these dinosaurs on the other side of the House are actively taking us backwards in time in a way that’s just going to cost us more. I say shame—shame on this Government and their climate denialism.