BIOFUEL BILL - Third Reading

This legislation provides certainty for business investors who are poised to invest significant money in infrastructure in this country. It is the sort of certainty that the National Party often demands for investors, but it is not voting for it. It will allow investors to set up a plant to use low-value by-products—like tallow, whey, and, eventually, waste wood and algae—to reduce our dependence on imported oil. The legislation is a small step towards reducing our oil dependence and carbon emissions, but the investment creates the infrastructure that will allow us to build on those quantities and to make a more substantial contribution in the future, when new resources and technologies become available with second-generation biofuels.

But the National Party is not voting for the legislation. The arguments we have heard against it this afternoon and tonight are based on a mixture of such overwhelming, mind-boggling ignorance by some and an absolute determination by others to ignore all the facts, no matter how many times they are put in front of them, that it is actually very hard to know where to start to reply to the nonsense that has been thrown around the House tonight. My colleague Russel Norman said this afternoon, when I just happened to catch the end of his speech, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I think that has been demonstrated by a number of the speakers here tonight. We had John Carter saying that this is an experiment and asking where was the evidence that it would work. Well, it has been working in Brazil for 40 years. Is that long enough for Mr Carter? For 40 years the Brazilians have been blending biofuel with their petrol, and in the process they have become less dependent on imported oil and they have had more security of fuel supply.

Rodney Hide That’s why Brazil flies along—it’s so prosperous.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS Brazil is growing faster than New Zealand is, if that is Mr Hide’s measure. Many other countries have also proven that biofuel blends is not rocket science, it is not hard, and it is certainly not an experiment. Nick Smith said that ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil is displacing the Amazon rainforest. Well, I am sorry, but sugar cane does not grow on the sort of land that grows the Amazon rainforest. It is in an entirely different part of the country. It is soy beans and cattle that are displacing the Amazon rainforest.

If, in fact, at some future time Brazilian ethanol was shown to be displacing some kind of forest and biodiversity, then this is the legislation that creates the regulatory mechanism to keep it out of New Zealand, because at the moment we cannot. John Carter said that biofuels are being grown in Africa and are causing starvation because they are grown on land that should be growing food for humans. He is right. It is one of the great, outrageous tragedies of the world at the moment that the rich are filling the tanks of their sport utility vehicles with grains that ought to be filling the stomachs of the poor. But John Carter knows that this legislation will not allow any fuels of that kind into New Zealand. He knows that, because we have said it repeatedly in the House in front of him. He knows it, because the Greens have required the introduction of section 34GA, which is to be inserted in the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Act by this legislation, and which sets out very clearly the sustainability standards that fuels must meet before they are allowed into New Zealand.

Actually, if the Greens had been designing this legislation from scratch, we would have made it much simpler. We would have set up a framework for biofuels to be grown in New Zealand, and we would not have had any imports, because the ones that will meet our standards are pretty much all New Zealand - grown anyway. But because of the deference to the world trade system, the Government was not prepared to say that we would not have imported biofuels because they are mostly junk, they are mostly unsustainable, and that they are a bad idea and we should do our own thing better and do it here. So instead we had to come up with the sustainability standard.

Nicky Wagner is so worried about the sustainability standard that she says we cannot do life cycle analysis for carbon reductions from biofuels. Well, I am sorry, but the tables exist. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment presented them to the Local Government and Environment Committee. A whole lot of international biofuels have been analysed for their life cycle carbon reduction and for their effects on food growing and on biodiversity. So, once again, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Nick Smith says that it is 9 whole months before we will have any regulations, and during that time the country could be flooded with unsustainable biofuels and the regulations will not be in place.

Well, first of all, he did not believe in his own remedy enough to discuss his amendment with us in advance, and we might well have said that there was a point there and asked to look at it, but instead he just tabled it in the Committee because what he was trying to do was to make a political point that nobody would vote for his amendment. So he had to make sure that he did not tell us first, in case we did. Nick Smith also knows that there is a reporting obligation on anyone who brings biofuels across the border during that 9 months to state and to publish where they come from. He does not trust the New Zealand public enough, after all the articles there have been in the popular press about the damage being done to food supplies in poor countries and the damage being done to biodiversity, especially in South-east Asia, to say that they will not buy the brand of fuel that has been created by knocking over South-east Asian rainforests. And this is quite apart from the fact that during that 9 months the quantities of biofuel coming into New Zealand will be so tiny that it will hardly be the cause of world starvation.

This Saturday the National Party is holding a conference on Waiheke Island called the Bluegreens conference. This is where the National Party claims to have the answers for the environment. National members are trying to paint themselves as the environmental party. What they have demonstrated tonight is that they are mostly too ignorant to even do a good job of misleading the public about the biofuels legislation. The people on Waiheke on Saturday will not buy the rubbish that we have heard tonight; they are far too well informed for that. They know that right now there is nothing stopping the import of the biofuels that cause starvation in Africa, and that that is the situation that Nick Smith says he wants to perpetuate by not passing this legislation.

They know that at the moment there is nothing stopping the import of biofuels made from palm oil in South-east Asia after the rainforests have been knocked over, and that that is the situation that Nick Smith wants to perpetuate by not passing this legislation. They know that this legislation will stop those unsustainable biofuels coming into New Zealand, that it will create a new profitable industry in New Zealand—which is surely something that we want—and that the Greens achieved that through section 34GA, which sets the sustainability standards. We should all be passing this legislation and getting on with it.