Resource Management (Climate Protection) Amendment Bill — Second Reading

I move, That the Resource Management (Climate Protection) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. This bill was written at the end of 2004, after the Government had amended the Resource Management Act to remove the powers of regional councils to consider climate change matters when they were issuing air discharge consents and in making regional plans that dealt with air discharge consents. The Government removed from the Act the ability of regional councils to consider climate change because it intended to bring in a carbon charge and believed that a national economic instrument was all that was needed to deal with climate change in New Zealand.

Then it became apparent that the carbon charge might never eventuate, and at the end of 2005 it was dumped. I felt a huge hole had been left in the Resource Management Act because we had neither one thing nor the other, so I introduced this very simple little bill to replace the clauses in the Resource Management Act just as they had been before. I was proved to be right, in that now in 2008 we still have no price on carbon. We do not know whether we are going to get one. But it became clear along the way that even if we do, there is no reason not to give regional councils the power to control carbon emissions as well.

There were 1,925 submissions on the bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee. Admittedly a lot of those were form submissions, but they were nevertheless from people who felt strongly enough to put their name to a piece of paper and support the bill. The vast majority of the submissions did support the bill, and I want to thank all the people who went to the trouble of doing that. They were ordinary people who had just read about the bill, decided it was sensible, and put their name to a form submission, and also people who went to a great deal of trouble to bring us detailed, well-thought-out, and academic submissions.

The bill sat in the select committee for more than 2 years. It was not because it took very long to hear submissions—we actually heard only 33—and it was not the case that the committee gave it a huge amount of consideration either. The delay was because the report back was repeatedly extended. The committee went for repeated extensions because the Government could not make up its mind whether it was going to support the bill. I agreed to those extensions for a while. I was being told that we had to have extensions until it was clear whether we were going to have an emissions trading scheme, or that we had to have extensions until was clear what the emissions trading scheme was going to say. Then, when further extensions were asked for, it became blindingly obvious that the Government had no intention of supporting this bill at any stage and neither did the National Party. At that stage I said no, I would not agree to another extension. I said I thought 2 years was long enough for them to make up their minds, so it was time we brought the bill back to Parliament and they put on the record why it is that they are not supporting it. That is what we are doing tonight.

I disagree with the position that all we need in order to deal with climate change is an economic instrument. I have always disagreed with that position. Putting a price on carbon is a useful thing to do, but we actually have to deal with climate change at every level of the economy. We have to deal with it in regional and local councils, we have to deal with it in businesses, we have to deal with it as individuals, and we have to deal with it internationally. This bill would be a very useful supplement to the price on carbon that we may or may not get.

I will quote from a chapter called “Carbon Neutrality and the Law: the role of the Resource Management Act”, which was written by Klaus Bosselmann, the director of the New Zealand Centre for Environmental Law at the University of Auckland, and a very learned professor at that. He wrote: “The recently announced emissions trading scheme and other proposed policies are insufficient to meet our Kyoto target, let alone to achieve carbon neutrality. The Government must pass the Resource Management (Climate Protection) Amendment Bill 2006, a private member’s bill. We need to develop national environmental standards and/or a national policy statement for achieving carbon neutrality.

The purpose of the bill is to once again empower local authorities to consider the effects of greenhouse gases, and in particular CO2, on climate change when writing local plans and granting air discharge consents.” He goes on to say: “The current state of legal affairs is not without irony. While a system of air quality standards has been established, it protects people from certain toxins with an immediate effect on health, but almost completely ignores the biggest threat, climate change.”

Many submitters agreed with that view. Many of the people who disagreed with the bill were those with a vested interest in it not proceeding—those who wanted to get their air discharge consents rather more easily, without having to defend their carbon dioxide emissions, or those who did not want to be involved in the trouble of administering the system. But we had some interesting, very substantial submissions from others. For example, Meridian Energy put it to us that if it wants to build a renewable electricity station, using renewable energy, it has to fight through the Resource Management Act in order to get consent to use its fuel. Whether it wants to use water, air, or geothermal heat, it has to get consent to use that fuel. But if a company wants to build a thermal power station, there is no consent required to use the fuel. Nobody can challenge a company’s right to burn oil, coal, or gas in the way that it is possible to challenge the right to take water or use the wind. Meridian Energy said that that created an un-level playing field, and I agree with that. The removal from the Resource Management Act of the provisions enabling regional councils to consider climate change matters is one of the reasons why there is a problem.

But we are not just talking about power stations here; we are talking about anybody who builds a plant that needs an air discharge consent because the plant will burn fossil fuels. For example, I think of a new Fonterra milk-processing plant that wants to burn coal. One might say that the emissions trading scheme would take care of that. But hang on—Fonterra will be grandparented at the rate of 90 percent, until 2019, for its emissions. It will only have to face the price right at the margin, not for the rest of its emissions, and then that will phase out only by 2030. So for a long, long time companies that build fossil fuel - burning plants will not face the price on more than just the very margin of their emissions. A lot of people have become very concerned about the Genesis-proposed gas-fired power station in Rodney District, which really faces no great obstacle in terms of climate change emissions. The council up there is powerless to look at the fact that the power station will be a very heavy emitter of carbon dioxide.

Some submitters, including the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, who was one of our advisers, suggested that the bill would be strengthened if we added a provision for mandatory national environmental standards to be set for carbon dioxide emissions. As the hearings continued, a kind of consensus developed among many submitters—and even the committee was quite sympathetic to this view—that if we were going to pass the bill, it would be sensible to amend it in order to establish national environmental standards that councils could then use around the country in their land-use planning and in their air discharge consents.

Unfortunately, that is not to be, because the committee has decided to recommend against passing the bill, and I think that is unfortunate. Even the Government admits that the emissions trading scheme will reduce emissions by less than 2 percent—less that 2 percent. Putting a price on carbon is a good start, but it will take us only a little bit of the way towards the destination. We need to have a whole lot of other measures that are complementary to that price, if it is actually to work.

Those who submitted against the bill were opposed to it because they said it would be complex and costly. That argument, of course, is used against anything one does that interferes with anything that anybody else wants to do—it will be complex and costly. Well, if people want something that is complex and costly, they should try the emissions trading scheme. It is hard to get much more complex and costly than that. Sometimes a measure that is complex and costly is OK if the outcome that we achieve through it is worth having, and that is what we still have to decide about the emissions trading scheme.

So I will be voting for this bill to proceed, and it up to the House to decide whether it does so.