Land Transport (Clean Vehicle Standard) Amendment Bill (No 2)

New Zealand has an incredible opportunity in electrifying its economy and particularly electrifying its vehicles. Most of our electricity generation is already renewable and we have huge scope for increasing the capacity. But we don’t actually need a huge increase in capacity to handle electric vehicles because electric vehicles can be charged off peak, so it helps pick up the excess supply that is already there.

Since coming into office, this Government have taken just about every possible step they could to discourage the transition to electric vehicles, despite saying they’re in favour of electric vehicles and having electric vehicles being pretty much the only policy they were relying on to help reduce emissions from transport in the medium to long term. The first thing they did was axe the feebate, known as the Clean Car Discount. That policy is objectively incredibly successful at supporting the uptake of zero-emissions vehicles.

Indeed, during the submissions to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee on this bill, we had Isuzu New Zealand come in and hold this graph up as an example of why we didn’t need standards or a feebate, saying, “Look at how we had mainly internal combustion engine vehicles being imported and suddenly there was a big increase in electric vehicles, in hybrid electric vehicles, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.” Well, ironically, what the graph shows is the success of the Clean Car Discount and then the Clean Car Standard which came in after it because it’s precisely at the time that policy was announced that you see the large increase in low- and zero-emissions vehicles coming into the fleet and the point at which it was repealed by this Government, which led to an increase in internal combustion engines being imported as a percentage of the fleet.

There is no good excuse. The Government will point fingers to excuses, but here, in their own regulatory impact statement—which was belatedly provided to the House this morning in what looks like draft form—there is a graph called “Figure 5, International Comparison of Electric Vehicle Sales”. As you can see in this graph—which people at home might not be able to see, but I’ll explain what it says—it shows that New Zealand’s percentage of electric vehicle (EV) sales, as a percentage of car sales, rapidly declined from 2023 to 2024 by 70 percent. During that time, globally, EV sales increased by 15 percent. They are now higher in Australia—last year they were 25 percent—and they’re higher in Canada. They’re higher in the United Kingdom—the United Kingdom and Australia obviously being left-hand drive countries like us—and they’re much, much higher in China.

We’re in a context where the world is rapidly adopting electric vehicles and we stand to benefit from that, and we have a Government that is taking every step to make it harder to get electric vehicles. They increased road-user charges for electric vehicles to a point where they’re being charged roughly double what an internal combustion engine might pay for the amount they drive on the roads. Of course, this was all thanks to the previous transport Minister, Simeon Brown, who seems firmly committed to increasing carbon emissions and is in total denial of climate change or economics.

You don’t even have to care about climate change to think that electrifying our vehicle fleet is a good idea. It makes economic sense, but we do need policies to show leadership. Otherwise, New Zealand gets taken advantage of by the motor vehicle industry, which is, you know, people building cars in other countries. There is no question that fuel-efficient technology is a little bit more expensive and they can’t mark up the vehicles as much. The reason the vehicle industry spends so much money and such effort on driving demand for utes in their advertising—not for work purposes but, you know, as a sort of lifestyle option—is they are high margin for the vehicle industry. What is good for the vehicle industry is not good for New Zealanders. We waste more money on imported fossil fuels just to get around and it’s the vehicle industry that benefits, not to mention we pay the health costs of that and we will pay the climate cost of that.

Yet again—and we’ve seen it with the tobacco industry and this Government, and we’ve seen it with oil and gas exploration and this Government—at every turn they seek to subsidise and make it easier for vested interests and polluters to make more money at the expense of public good, at the expense of our health, and at the expense of our future and our climate. That’s what this Government is all about. They try to pretend it’s sensible, but the reality is they are only listening to vested interests and they are ignoring the objective benefits that New Zealand can get from good public policy.

All around the world we have seen what is effective at driving fuel efficiency. It’s not, as the member Simon Court claimed in the second reading, just the vehicle industry naturally improving efficiency; it’s been Government policies in other countries, like in Germany, Japan, the EU—even the United States at some points has put in place fuel economy standards. In the case of Japan, they’ve actually regulated and mandated that every car manufacturer uses the most efficient technology, and when that happens, we get more efficient vehicles. So, it’s really the vested interests who are looking to maximise their profits, not to increase the public good.

Everyone in the world benefits from fuel efficiency, and electric vehicles are roughly twice as efficient as fossil fuel vehicles. Even if an electric vehicle is getting its electricity from a coal-fired power plant, it is lower emissions than just burning diesel or just burning fossil fuels in an internal combustion engine. Internal combustion engines are only about 12 percent efficient. They do not convert that energy well into forward motion.

We get enormous benefits from electrifying, but what this Government fails to understand is we need leadership. The Government is there to be the responsible party, providing the incentives, and those are price incentives at the point of purchase of a vehicle, which is what the feebate did. It was incredibly effective. It’s also taking other steps like Government procurement. By focusing on procuring electric vehicles, the Government would help hold up the demand for electric vehicles, and then that flows through to the secondhand market. We’ve had it laid out in the regulatory impact statement that officials say we’re not going to get enough secondhand EVs from Japan. Well, that’s why we should be facilitating the importation of more brand-new electric vehicles now, because most New Zealanders are not buying brand-new cars. Most New Zealanders do not buy brand new cars; it is businesses that primarily do that, including Government.

Why are we watering down the standard and providing an incentive for the new-vehicle importers to import more polluting vehicles? That just means we’re going to have more second-hand polluting vehicles in the market in five to 10 years from now.

This isn’t about protecting consumers. It is about protecting vested corporate interests and it is to the detriment of our economy, of our people, of our health, and of our climate, and is a classic playbook. Whether or not the Government is openly corrupt and supporting these interests or whether they’re just totally incompetent, it doesn’t matter, the outcome is the same: New Zealand loses out. New Zealand loses out from political parties that focus on culture wars rather than sound public policy that is going to deliver for New Zealand. If we go out there and talk to the average person on the street, most of them understand the concept of the feebate and they agree with it.

Of course, we heard repeatedly from the Minister in the chair, James Meager, that supposedly the emissions trading scheme (ETS) is going to solve this problem. Well, we have decades now of evidence that the ETS does not result in efficiency gains. It’s right here in this graph. We had an ETS; it did not result in improving fuel efficiency. It did not incentivise EVs. It has to be at the point of purchase of the vehicle. That worked. Even vehicle importers themselves have said this. You know, we had Simon Lucas of Simon Lucas Mitsubishi who said that the removal of the Clean Car Discount caused sales to—and I quote—“collapse by 80 to 90 percent”. If we go out there and talk to renewable electricity providers, to charging providers, they all say they can’t make the numbers work on increasing chargers or increasing supply because demand has been cut off. It is Government that supports demand through policies like an effective Clean Car Standard, which works really well with an effective price incentive.

New Zealanders watching at home, it’s very clear: if they want a Government that is going to show leadership and support them to get the benefits of cleaner vehicles, of lower fuel bills, of cleaner air, of quieter vehicles, then we need a Government that is going to show leadership and not simply cave to the interests of a polluting industry. It is a sunset industry. We will become a dumping ground for polluting vehicles. We already are until we get a change of Government, and the Greens have demonstrated practical policy.

Well, thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s been an interesting—well, I suppose it’s one day, but—couple of days listening to the contributions coming from the other side. The amount of times I’ve heard the “clean vehicle discount” used as a phrase, and I know that’s the official phrase, but in working New Zealand we called it a ute tax for a reason. It was a clean vehicle discount for the wealthy, and it was a ute tax on the workers, the farmers, and the producers.

Well, we have scrapped the ute tax and today we will be scrapping the other side of the supply and demand equation. We will be getting rid of this abhorrent way of influencing the market that has not provided the goods that were promised. All we’ve seen is cars stacked up in importation hubs, unable to be sold because New Zealanders don’t actually want what the demand influencing - other side thinks they do.

ACT is the only party who has consistently stood against this, and we will see it gone if we ever can. It adds costs without the benefits. We have an emissions trading scheme; we don’t need this sort of market manipulation. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mr Speaker. Look, it’s been interesting listening to the Opposition, because the Opposition has asked us for evidence. I think that was you, Mr Shanan Halbert, wasn’t it? The Opposition said that the Government has bowed to industry pressure. Well, that’s nonsense. Actually, what the Government has done is it has listened to evidence. It’s been quite clear both in the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and also to the Minister very clearly that the system as it is set up with the assumptions that are set up behind it was not working and so it needed a change and that is precisely what we are doing at the moment. We’re not doing away with it. We are changing it.

We’ve also been told that the last Government did not even consult with the industry on the scheme—

Hon Julie Anne Genter: That’s not true.

ANDY FOSTER: —and the assumptions so they got the settings wrong. You’ve had your turn—you’ve had your turn—Julie Anne Genter. The Opposition’s position is bizarre. When they are faced with a scheme that quite clearly is not working their approach is to say, “Let’s double down. Let’s keep on doing it. Let’s do even more of it.” It’s that situation of saying, “We’re going to keep the beatings going until morale improves.” It doesn’t work.

If you look at what the regulatory impact statement (RIS) says, the objective of the clean vehicle standard is to increase fuel efficiency, to reduce emissions, and to do so “without placing a net cost on to consumers”. It is failing that element. That is the problem with the current scheme. Without changing, vehicles will be more expensive. That’s what the RIS says. These guys on the opposite side keep on quoting the RIS; that’s what the RIS says. The RIS says that without change, vehicles will be more expensive, some models will not be available, there’ll be more limited opportunities, and some manufacturers might even abandon the New Zealand market.

What it also says is that—and we’ve had the concept of dirty cars being talked about by the Opposition—New Zealanders will tend to hang on to their vehicles longer, so they will become older and dirtier as a result. So that, from the Opposition benches, would be an own goal.

The Opposition has also said that Government is incentivising higher emitting vehicles. That’s completely untrue. What we’re trying to do is take away those distortions to the market. It’s not putting an extra tax on them—sorry, it is simply not putting an extra tax on them. The Opposition, meanwhile, has also been busy trying to spend that extra tax revenue, ignoring the fact that the whole scheme was not supposed to raise any tax at all. It was supposed to be net revenue neutral.

The Opposition’s also criticised the speed of the report back and the legislation and the RIS is very clear about the reason for that as well, because this scheme, the new charges, will come into effect on 1 January next year, so we have to act with some speed. That is exactly what we are doing.

The Opposition said that we risk becoming a dumping ground for dirty cars. The RIS, again, says that the risk really is that New Zealanders will hang on to their older cars longer, so they will be more polluting as a result. The simple reality is that Kiwis are voting with their wallets, with their feet, and they are buying the vehicles that they want to, not the vehicles that the Opposition wants them to buy. I heard Helen White saying that we, the Opposition, can lead the way to what Kiwis want to buy. We can drive this industry the right way.

That’s really scary. The words, “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.” are some of the most scary words—scary words—in the English language we’re often told. But they’re taking it one level further. “I’m from the Government and I’m here to tell you what to do.” That’s what they want to do. They want to take choice away from New Zealanders.

The one thing the Opposition have not contested is that the scheme as it is set up does not work. They’ve railed about it, but they have not contested that. It doesn’t work because Kiwis are not buying as many electric vehicles (EV) as predicted when they designed the scheme without consulting the industry.

Now, the Opposition then says it’s the coalition Government’s fault for cutting the EV Clean Car Discount. What they haven’t acknowledged there is that by agreement—and they were part of this as well—the EVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles entered the road-user charges system, so, obviously, they were less attractive than they were once they got to 2 percent of the market.

They’ve also ignored, as we’ve already heard from my friend Cam Luxton, is that the Clean Car Discount was being paid for by our hard-working farmers; our hard-working tradies, through the infamous ute tax; and also, by hard-working taxpayers everywhere. By the end of 2023 when we got rid of that system, $579 million had been paid out to subsidise Teslas and the like; $290 million of that had come from the hard-working farmers and tradies; and $302 million had come from the hard-working taxpayer. That is not a sustainable scheme.

Tradies and farmers would under their model, if they had what they wanted, pay three times—not just once but three times: at the border, through the clean vehicle discount, on the purchase of the ute, and through the emissions trading scheme charges on fuel.

This bill was about softening the scheme a bit. It was about trying to make it work. The majority on the select committee could see that when the bill was introduced it was only moving deck chairs on the Titanic. This is about clearing, giving the industry and New Zealand car buyers some breathing space. The Minister’s amendments do not cancel the scheme. The industry’s actually said it doesn’t want the scheme cancelled, but it does want time to be able to work it through, make it workable so they don’t end up with a very, very large bill. This makes the Clean Car Standard realistic.

Finally, over time it is a good thing to have a lower emission vehicle fleet. Technology is improving. The Hon Julie Anne Genter talked about Government supporting high fuel use vehicles, but the reality is the biggest funding challenge for the transport system, the land transport system, is the improving efficiency of vehicles across the fleet.

What that means is there is less money available to put into roads, public transport, etc. That is continuing, regardless of what Julie Anne Genter says there. That is good for the environment, because that’s technology improving. It’s good to reduce those fuel import costs. But what we have to do is to manage the transition, to be realistic about what vehicles are available—we can’t magic vehicles in; we don’t make those vehicles—for Kiwis and Kiwi businesses with all our diverse vehicular needs and the vehicles we need to buy now. I want to finish off just by saying thank you to all the people involved. I commend this very sensible bill to the House.

We’re in urgency so the Government can get more dirty gas-guzzlers into the country through the most inaccurately named Land Transport (Clean Vehicle Standard) Amendment Bill. Nothing says “climate denial” more than this—urgency for more climate pollution. We’ve had, from this Government, cuts to the methane targets; we’ve had, from this Government, opening up oil and gas; we’ve had, from this Government, the desire to open up coal mines. Yesterday, at the Boston Consulting meeting, the Associate Minister for Energy talked about the need for oil and for gas and for coal, and half-threatened the gentailers with making them buy more coal to fuel our nation, assuming we were going to have cheaper power.

I had an opportunity to visit West Wind this morning, where there are 62 wind turbines and 143 megawatt installed capacity; Mill Creek, nearby, has another 26 turbines. There was a lot of discussion about the chaos in the political space around sending signals about the electrification of our nation. When we cut demand, such as cutting the Clean Car Standard, we are sending a signal: “Don’t worry about building that generation. There’s not going to be the demand for it.” When we send a signal that we’re not going to invest in new renewable electricity generation and we’re going to invest in more gas, we send a signal to that sector that we don’t really care about electrification—don’t necessarily invest. The sector is really concerned by the inconsistency—by the chaos of this Government’s direction in electrification. This bill is doing exactly that; it is saying, “More dirty gas-guzzlers.”

We’ve seen demand for clean cars that has plunged off a cliff, as my colleague Julie Anne Genter pointed out, when the Clean Car Standard was taken away. That’s a really clear signal of Government action causing more climate pollution—a really clear signal. The Minister seems to have assumed that it’s hard to get a supply of low-emission vehicles. Well, it’s hard to get a supply when you say, “We don’t want them.” It’s really hard to get a supply when you say, “We don’t want them any more.” When Polestar brought all of the vehicles into the country for the Clean Car Standard, then had to sell them at a discount—a heavy discount—and made losses because of this Government’s just tanking the market, well of course there’s not going to be the supply, because people don’t trust us any more. We have lost trust. That’s the problem.

If a country like Ethiopia, with a fleet that’s only one-third of the size of New Zealand’s fleet, has as many electric vehicles (EVs) as we do, why the hell can’t we get the EVs here? It’s because we have a Government that is fossil fuel focused—that’s the only reason that we can’t get the EVs here. Sixty-three percent of new cars sold in China last year were EVs. We’ve heard from Cameron Luxton that only the wealthy buy EVs. Well, my son—my youngest son—his first car bought was a $5,000 Leaf. This is what happens when we bring EVs into the country; they move into the second-hand market, and people move into EVs—and they don’t go back.

The question also is about tradies. Now, my electrician has a number of EVs—he only drives EVs, and his team only drive EVs. Some of the farmers in the deep South have replaced their vehicles with EVs or with e-bikes, because so many people in rural Aotearoa understand the electrification journey—but this Government doesn’t. This Government is full of climate denial. They want a dumping ground—a dumping ground for the most toxic, dirtiest vehicles you could get from around the country. This bill gives us laxer standards than China, the UK, the USA, Canada, and South Korea. It is shameful. It moves us further from our climate ambitions, puts us further in line for $24 billion of cost—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): The member’s time has expired.

This amendment bill addresses industry concerns that the clean vehicle standard is misaligned with the vehicles that New Zealanders actually want to buy, and the industry cannot meet the target until more no-emissions vehicles are produced at scale. The changes in this bill improve workability, provide regulatory certainty, and keep the standard credible while supporting our shift to a lower-emissions fleet. Once again, common sense trumps ideology. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Labour’s continuing to oppose this bill, obviously, for obvious reasons, because it takes New Zealand backwards and we shouldn’t be surprised about that, because almost everything else this Government has done has in some way, shape, or form just taken us backwards. Ten points, at least, for being consistent and for having another congruent day in this House when we just edge ourselves a little bit back to the future.

It’s a shame, though, because this is the very time when we should be speeding up and moving forwards. This was the time where we started to make some of the gains and started to actually reap some of the rewards from the earlier policy settings that would have just afforded us some real gains in that direction. When we think about the infrastructure that would have been due to come on board—because the more electric vehicles in the fleet, the more demand there is for charging infrastructure, the more demand there is for the technology advances, for the talent, for the good jobs, for all the other good positive things that go with that. But no, this Government has said, “Why don’t we just chuck the other side of this demand and supply equation out? We already got rid of the Clean Car Discount and now it’s time to chuck the other side out.”

I commend Cameron Luxton from the ACT Party for at least being honest and being the only person on the Government side of the House to stand up and say that they just didn’t like the whole thing. They just don’t believe that the State has any role in directing future direction. I fundamentally disagree with that, but at least they’ve said the writing on their particular tin, because an active State does play a role. Almost nothing good in history has happened without the impact or without the direction at some point, rather, some point through a process of a good active State, whether that’s through investment, whether it’s through incentives, whether it’s through just really good savvy policy or funding appropriately. To say that the only good policy and the only good direction is for the State to take five steps backwards and have no input into the future direction of New Zealand is just nuts.

New Zealanders, I believe, do want cleaner, cheaper to run vehicles and they want a Government, fundamentally, that treats climate action as if it’s something that’s real, not something that’s optional. For every Government backbench MP that walks around their electorate waxing lyrical about the merits of doing something in the space of climate action and has the audacity to then come into this House when they have an opportunity to not vote for something that does the opposite, that is the definition of hypocrisy. Those MPs need to be exposed for having two faces—on one side in their home electorates, talking to groups and organisations and sympathising with the need to do more in the climate space and then coming here and doing absolutely the opposite and doing nothing to help what should be a collective task.

The bill weakens the clean vehicle standard; it simply does. The bill makes it easier for importers to delay progress and harder for us to meet our emissions goals. Rather than pushing for cleaner cars, which was the direction that we were heading in—it’s been said before and it’s worth repeating—it simply responds to industry pressure for looser rules. It does so for no other reason than a temporary need to do so. There were other opportunities to provide the relief that was required without having to go down this path.

Extending the credit life slows down the transition. Credits were meant to drive year on year improvements—as perfectly acceptable in the design of these policies, of this suite of policies, of these dual policies. Extending them from three to four years simply lets those importers push obligations into the future and that just doesn’t really make any sense. It doesn’t make the obligation go away. It doesn’t actually do what I think the Government thinks it’s going to achieve and provide the relief that they think it’s going to achieve. It just means that we’re going to have to deal with this in some other way in the future. If you give people more time to comply, they’re going to use that extra time and not necessarily turn their minds to adjusting the types of behaviours or the settings that they’re involved in to make that work, and emissions stay higher for longer.

The credit trading rules encourage higher emitting used imports. We’ve heard several contributions about that throughout this bill’s progress through this House—this bill’s unusual progress through this House. Allowing credits to move freely between new and used importers, the so-called two-for-one rate, absolutely risks tilting the market towards older, less efficient vehicles. We know that that will happen. The regulatory impact statement (RIS), the various iterations of the RIS—the one that we eventually got late last night but wasn’t available to us today till it was tabled at the committee of the whole stage, and the one that was prepared in regard to the first iteration of this bill—spells that out. You know, there are some things that are just basic, and we should have taken them into account.

On this side of the House, we certainly believe that good policy shouldn’t create loopholes that reward the highest emitters. This is another example of a bill and a piece of policy that’s doing just that. By removing the weight adjustments without strengthening the targets makes compliance easier, but certainly not cleaner. That is a fact. Taking away the weight adjustments without also targeting the overall targets just makes it easier for heavier and higher polluting vehicles to meet the rules—meet the rules. The Government has removed, essentially, the stabilisers and loosened the rules at the same time—so it’s a bit of a double whammy.

Overall, this bill slows decarbonisation, as many of my colleagues have already said throughout earlier iterations of readings, and leaves families worse off. So even if you’re not incredibly passionate about climate action, even if you could barely muster any enthusiasm at all for the concept of climate action, everybody in this House should be exercised to some extent about making life a little bit easier for household budgets and for looking out for the long-term affordability of a vehicle fleet. Particularly for people that have very few options. Particularly for people who rely on the fact that new electric vehicles may, and do, gravitate down to the used market and therefore become much more readily available for people in that price band.

The outcome of that is that over time, eventually, if you maintain this, you know, if you stay the action, maintain the course, keep the faith in the policy settings that were designed well, then the outcome is benefit and common good for everybody. But no, this bill is all about lowering those expectations, lowering ambition, lowering pressure on importers, and lowering New Zealand’s pace of change.

Actually, there are lots of things this Government could be doing if they wanted to face the concept of lowering. They could be lowering unemployment, they could be lowering the cost of living, they could be doing all sorts of things. They’re not choosing to do any of that; they’re just choosing to lower our expectations and lower ambitions in this particular sphere. We could have, and we can still have delivered cleaner vehicles, lower fuel costs, and a transport system that actually meets our climate goals. All it would have taken was a little bit more ambition and a little less knee jerk reaction, as evidenced most graphically through the way that this bill was handled at the committee stage.

At the committee stage, due to report back in December, the chair of the committee clearly has a conversation with the Minister. All of a sudden, we have to report it back to the House that day. We come to the House; we come prepared for a committee of the whole House stage to find that the Government itself isn’t prepared to be able to conduct those proceedings effectively or well. So therefore, there’s no other graphic example of the fact that this is all completely knee jerk, not well thought out, and here we find ourselves.

This bill weakens the standards; it slows decarbonisation and leaves us further behind. For those reasons, Labour absolutely does not support this bill, and we are, in fact, proud to oppose it.

I’m a big fan of electric vehicles; I’ve got two in our household, and I welcome the pragmatic changes that we’ve made to this bill to ensure a fair, efficient, and balanced sustainable clean vehicle system. I do welcome the review of the scheme. I think there are some really fundamental flaws with the scheme, and I welcome the Minister’s six-month review of it. It’s going to keep costs lower, which Ryan Hamilton knows is really key for his electorate, and all of our electorates around the country, with the cost of living pressures. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you. I got myself in a bit of a hot water in an earlier session on this bill, and it was because I talked about the impact on children. I don’t want to repeat the mistake, so I think I’ll just stick to my children and my grandchildren. I said at that time—and I’m being now quoted in the Herald as talking about my “hopeful” grandchildren because I don’t have any, I just want them. I want them to be in an environment where they don’t get asthma. I have a niece who grew up in an area of Auckland where there’s a dip, down in Freemans Bay, and she has had quite bad childhood asthma, and I don’t want that to be repeated.

What we have here is a bill that—and I want to focus on this one issue, because I think it’s a good thing to contribute in that way. I think it’s important that we actually think about the realities for our communities.

I represent Mt Albert, and it has an area in it called Wesley now—that’s in the new boundary change. It’s right down in the dip by the motorway, and it’s had a lot of State housing, so the houses have sort of stopped for a while, so they’re not necessarily as well insulated as they would be, because the Government has decided not to rebuild that area—there was a big plan to rebuild it. They are in the area most impacted by that motorway.

I went in and had a look at a report from the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago. It was released in July of 2022, and it was talking just about the pollution that is the impact—that is clearly accepted by everybody here—of greater emissions; it’s something that’s going to happen. So there are two types of pollutive material. There’s one called particulate matters, and then there’s the nitrogen dioxide, and that’s the big one from cars. There’s $15.6 billion of damage done by pollution in this country, and a fair part of that is from nitrogen dioxide, from the emission of petrol and diesel cars—3,300 deaths per annum in Auckland alone. Sorry, in Auckland alone it’s just over 900; it’s 3,300 deaths per annum across the country. It’s 13,100 hospital admissions. That’s a lot of people. It’s contributing to childhood illnesses, it’s contributing to premature deaths.

That was one of the reasons why I was incredibly proud of being on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee when we brought into place the law which had this that’s being reversed today, and it had a subsidy to electric vehicles. I, too, shared some of the scepticism about a subsidy on first, brand-new electric vehicles, and I worried—just as Minister Bishop is worrying—about the impact on families who couldn’t afford those vehicles. But I was quickly convinced that what happens is those vehicles run through the market. Wealthier people buy them and they run through the market and you end up with a lot more electric vehicles. And that’s what happened. That’s why Scott, my friend Scott Wilson, who talked about his—

Cameron Brewer: Willis.

HELEN WHITE: Sorry—Scott Willis, who talked about his child being able to buy a $5,000 Leaf. He could do that not because it was a first-hand vehicle but because it was a second.

As I said in my last speech, I do respect that it’s different if you’re a tradie. I do respect that it’s a very different thing, and I do respect the need for choice. But I think it’s a myth to suggest that that overrides everything else. When you weigh death of children in my area with great amounts of choice which is unnecessary—

Cameron Brewer: Not your area, it’s their area.

HELEN WHITE: —when you weigh that—and you do have to weigh it—guess which wins? For the Labour Party, it’s actually making sure that we clean up our environment and that pollutant side too. And, actually, it is my area. I am very proud to represent the area, but I also live in the area of Mt Albert and I have for a long time.

It’s incredibly important to me that this isn’t a political football that gets misrepresented as some sort of attack on working people, because it’s the working people in those houses. It’s the working people who need to have safe housing, they need good jobs, and they need clean air in New Zealand.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This bill is practical and it’s affordable. The importers are currently having to pay more, and that, ultimately, lands on the consumers, who are the tradies and the farmers. This bill takes the pressure off Kiwis still dealing with the fiscal spoon of medicine that the last Government dealt up to them. If the members of the Opposition want more Kiwis using electric vehicles or hybrids, then guess what? They need cheap, abundant power. They should have voted for the fast-track bill, because there’s a shortage of renewable energy, and that’s in large part due to the rash decision to ban oil and gas and a complete failure to plan. I commend this bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s good to rise today to speak on the Land Transport (Clean Vehicle Standard) Amendment Bill (No 2). I’ve been listening to the contributions across the House, and particularly very keenly to Government members and the contributions that they’ve made, because, in fact, it is the Government that has called us in, in urgency, for what they believe is an urgent bill. This land transport amendment bill seems to be urgent to this Government and the legislation that they have to put through. How is this an immediate priority for the average New Zealander that is sitting at home, dealing with the economic mismanagement of this Government and, in fact, the cost of living crisis that they promised—they promised—to clean up? But they just haven’t been getting ahead. It’s a dismal, dismal failure.

In listening to the contributions from the other side of the House, I was intrigued to hear one of the National Party MPs say that he owned two electric vehicles, and when questioned by Opposition members as to whether he received the subsidy, there was no answer—no answer. Opposition members continued to ask, “Did you receive the subsidy?”—no answer. I’d take that as meaning that that particular National Party MP did indeed receive the subsidy for his electric vehicles—

Laura McClure: Does he need it?

SHANAN HALBERT: But he received it, and the importance of that is that the Government is advocating from a cost perspective that suddenly this impacted on the cost of working people.

I remember that in this legislation when it was initially put forward before our Transport and Infrastructure Committee under the last Government, one of the goals there was to really clean up the fleet of cars that New Zealand receives at the very bottom of the world. Everyone acknowledged that we had a problem because of our proximity to where cars and vehicles were made across the globe. It took a while for them to get their way via Australia and then back down to Aotearoa New Zealand, and so it’s not an easy task in that sense.

By influencing the market, the intention was to be able to create a cleaner fleet of vehicles that were available to New Zealanders—those that can afford them, like the National Party MP. He might be able to afford it up front—or two, in fact—with the subsidy, I’ll say. But, in turn, New Zealanders do tend to buy second-hand cars, and that is normal for the average New Zealander. So second-hand and third-hand cars became cleaner over the generations that they were passed down, and that’s an important part. By changing this back, we, in fact, continue to hold and grow the number of dirty cars.

When we think about the emissions contribution that our transport fleet makes in Aotearoa, it was 43 percent at the time that we discussed it—43 percent of emissions came directly from our transport fleet. That’s a significant amount, and so we needed to make tweaks in the ways that we could in order to reduce the emissions in different parts. For those of us who live in Tāmaki-makau-rau Auckland, unless you’re a tradie, it’s unnecessary, really, for us to purchase utes as our primary vehicle. It’s very difficult to get around through congestion in a large vehicle in Auckland. We tend to be one passenger per car still, and that is largely problematic for us and it’s the reason why we experience such significant congestion.

If the argument of the Government members today is that this is about reducing costs, then I’d put it back on them that, actually, things have become more expensive in transport under their watch. What we’ve seen is road-user charges (RUCs) go up. What we’ve seen is the introduction of congestion charging, and—don’t get me wrong—we support that. But it’s still an additional cost to the average worker that is driving from A to B. Warrants of fitness have gone up. Driver licensing is no longer free. As an alternative, the cost of public transport is double what it was two to three years ago, simply—well, I blame that one directly on Simeon Brown, because he cut $1.2 billion out of Auckland to save for road projects outside of Auckland. So poor old Auckland Council has had to actually prop up and ensure that people can use our public transport fleet, and that was something that I raised within the debate on the congestion charging legislation that was before us.

This is quite a backwards move, and I come back to the point that, within urgency, the role of this House is to consider legislation in a timely way. We’ve heard about the issues within the select committee process, but it was also disappointing today that we didn’t have a regulatory impact statement on the Table. We had a Minister answering our questions and waving a regulatory impact statement that none of us had access to, and all he could say was, “Well, it’s available on the website.”—no. We knew we were going into urgency at least 48 hours ago. Why has that information not been made public and available for us—the Opposition—to do our job?

Reuben Davidson: What’s he hiding?

SHANAN HALBERT: Certainly, what are they hiding, and we’ve seen that over consecutive weeks. That is of concern, not only to myself but particularly to our communities out there. They’re wondering what the heck is going on with this Government, because it just doesn’t seem focused on the things that matter. It hasn’t created a response to the cost of living. Instead, here we are, in urgency, sitting until Saturday, debating the Land Transport (Clean Vehicle Standard) Amendment Bill (No 2).

Our view is very clear. We laid that out in the dissenting view. The bill prioritises short-term convenience—that is a symptom of this Government; the “short-termism”—and the convenience for importers over meaningful emissions reduction. Extending the carbon credit lifespans from three years to four years undermines annual accountability and it will slow decarbonisation. There are new trading rules between new and used importers, despite a two-for-one ratio risk, incentivising more used, higher-emitting imports. The bill creates loopholes that allow older, less-efficient vehicles to remain dominant in the market, instead of shifting the fleet. This is a missed opportunity to strengthen the clean vehicle standard, and this particular bill before us today, in urgency, is weakening just that.

I don’t know what the Government is focused on or where the Government is focused, because for the average person, this isn’t going to make a difference, but particularly to our future generations, with global warming and—yes—with climate change happening, actually, the little decisions that we make today will count for a better tomorrow. But, instead, for the National Government, the National MPs, the ACT Party MPs, and the New Zealand First MPs in the House today, this is their priority. This is how they’re responding to the needs of New Zealanders when they’re stuck in a cost of living crisis.

Because of this Government’s economic mismanagement, they haven’t been able to change a thing. They’re putting up an argument today that it’s going to save New Zealanders money—what a load of whatever—when, in fact, their Government has increased costs in transport every single way that we look at it, whether it be RUCs, whether it be the warrants of fitness, or whether it be public transport. This is a terrible bill, and I do not commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The rules imposed by the previous Government were ridiculous. They were too stringent, and they caused unnecessary costs. This bill’s about reducing the cost of living, which the people on this side of the House are relentlessly focused on, and it’s about backing our farmers and tradies and reducing the import fees on their loved workhorses, like $1,000 on a Hilux over $1,400 on a Mitsubishi Triton. I commend this bill to the House.