National's Quick and Dirty ETS a Travesty
This week National, relying on the support of the Maori Party, rammed through Parliament under urgency its new Emissions Trading Scheme legislation.
Its key effect will be to load the burden of pollution on the taxpayer, costing us and our children $110 billion, according to Treasury.
By putting the cost on the taxpayer, not the polluter, it removes the incentive from the polluters to cut their emissions.
The legislation is environmentally unsustainable, economically catastrophic, and socially unfair.
National's management of the process was a shambles and its disregard for proper Parliamentary scrutiny a farce. When it tried to have all 300+ submissions heard in one day, even the Act Party voted against it!
The Maori Party reversed its earlier stance of total opposition to the legislation, when it got a deal worth $1.75 billion of taxpayers' dollars for five iwi corporations.
It was supposedly to compensate the corporations for bad faith for not warning them in Treaty negotiations in 1997 that they could be adversely affected.
But Crown Law Office opinion was that there wasn't bad faith, and no grounds for paying the money.
It was simply a shabby deal, deliberately not subject to Select Committee scrutiny, to buy off the Maori Party to enable bad legislation to be passed.
Reports are that this has deeply divided the membership of the Maori Party.
I'm against the privileges the ETS legislation creates, whether for Rio Tinto or Ngai Tahu or the agricultural sector, which now has 90 years according to the Minister of Agriculture before it has to meet the full cost of its pollution.
In Government, Labour will have to reverse the legislation so we have a system focused on cutting emissions, not simply loading the cost of them on taxpayers at an average of $92,000 per family.
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New Zealand Monetary Policy Not Working
At last week's Federated Farmers Conference, I announced that Labour would be promoting changes to New Zealand's monetary policy.
The Reserve Bank's policy targets and tools have been earlier accepted by us in relation to maintaining price stability.
But in critical areas they have not worked.
By relying simply on pushing up interest rates to control inflation, the result has been to attract hot money from Japan and Europe into New Zealand to exploit our higher interest rates.
That has forced up our exchange rates, and the combination of high interest and exchange rates has made otherwise competitive and efficient export industries uncompetitive in international markets.
Ironically, the influx of money has also often helped push up speculative activity and inflation in New Zealand.
We need an export-led recovery and we need to promote the productive economy, rather than again fund speculation in housing prices.
New Zealand cannot continue, as it has for decades, spending more than it earns overseas.
While price stability will always be a critical objective, we need also to promote growth, employment and prosperity through better meeting the needs of the productive economy.
Shabby Deals with Maori Party, Harawira Comments Divisive
The electorate I represent, Mt Roskill, is the most multicultural in New Zealand – 40% Asian, 18% Pasifika and over 110 different ethnicities.
I received strong comments from constituents in response to Hone Harawira's comments, including from Maori, with a common theme that they were not simply self-serving and insulting to others, but also damaged our race relations.
I made my views on that very clear.
I deplore those comments as much as I did Don Brash's in an earlier era.
The deal on the ETS is similarly damaging.
The Treaty settlement process, in my view, is absolutely critical in addressing and putting behind us grievances based on past injustices.
But it is damaged by being misused to create unfair outcomes as it was to buy the Maori Party's vote on the ETS.
Shane Jones made strong comments on this during the debate:
I also believe that there is potential for changes to the Foreshore and Seabed Act to be divisive, as indeed the original legislation was because of the charged Iwi vs Kiwi political campaign by National at the time.
I earlier indicated that Labour was ready to be constructive around achieving any positive changes which would help build a consensus.
After our experience with the ETS, where a consensus-based approach was rejected by National, we are now concerned about what changes are being planned, and why.
How are they going to reconcile the opposing views of the legislation held by the National Party and the Maori Party? Given the success of the Ngati Porou negotiation under the legislation in having its needs met around customary rights while keeping the statutory guarantees around access to our beaches, what is it about the legislation that is not working?
You can see the full speech on the Labour website.
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