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Q+A: Panel - Upton Fitzsimons Holmes And Arseneau Sunday, 26 July 2009, 9:30 pm Press Release: TVNZ

Sunday26th July 2009: Q+A’s Panel Discussions with Paul Holmes, Therese Arseneau and former MPs Simon Upton and Jeanette Fitzsimons.

Points of interest:
- Simon Upton (the Minister that put us in the Kyoto Agreement) expects the government to commit to a “modest” emissions target
- Upton: “anything we do will be costly”
- Fitzsimons: new government report “simply not true”

The video interview of the panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

PANEL DISCUSSIONS led by PAUL HOLMES

Response to NICK SMITH interview

PAUL Well it's a most interesting picture the Climate Change Minister paints so what do our panel have to say. Let's go straight away to a clip of what the Minister said about the possible target for cutting emissions by 2020 will be.

Nick Smith: 'For a target, one I don’t think it's achievable, I don’t think you'd get there, I think you'd do more damage to New Zealand's reputation and certainly you're not going to get.'

And that’s the clip in which he is ruling out what Greenpeace wants which is a 40% reduction. So what do you know of the report, what do you think the new report is going to suggest we try and aim for Jeanette?

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS – Green MP
Well I've seen reports from NZIER before, and they start from the premise that everybody in the economy at the moment is optimally efficient in terms of energy and transport fuels and farming and that there are no savings that can be made without huge costs. That’s simply not true. We know for example that if everybody used the same amount of petrol as my car did coming to Auckland and back today, we would halve the emissions from our transport fleet, that’s 50% from our cars, and that’s entirely feasible, it's not even an expensive car. We know for example that this government abandoned the moratorium on new coal and gas fired electricity stations so that more could be built. We actually need to start from the ground and plot the measures that we're going to take, we won't do it just with an Emissions Trading Scheme, we've gotta have a lot of complementary measures in terms of energy efficiency, vehicle fuel efficiency, better public transport.

PAUL So we can aim for a more ambitious target than he appears to be thinking?

JEANETTE I believe we can aim for a more ambitious target, but I think that someone should be doing the analysis and I'm amazed that the government just asks for a macro economic view and doesn’t start adding up from the bottom where could the savings be made, how could they be made and what would it add to.

PAUL What do you think the target's looking like Simon Upton.

SIMON UPTON – Former National Cabinet Minister
Paul, governments won't make decisions on the basis of economic modelling, I mean they commission it every time and it's not bad but it's not brilliant either. At the end of the day there's a political judgement going to be made and it will be made internationally as well as domestically. Now look 40% is more than anyone else is committing to. I cannot see a government going for 40% when Europe - if the rest of the world does everything – would go to 30, and we have a more expensive path than those economies. So just pragmatically I would predict the government would go for the less ambitious end of the spectrum.

PAUL Because he said of course you aim too high and the politics start to look ugly Therese?

THERESE ARSENEAU Yes and I agree with Simon, I think the government's basically ruled out that they're not going to go for the 40, but what Greenpeace's campaign does tend to do, and we've seen so many examples in politics, where you have a more ambitious target being put out very strongly, what it does tend to do is perhaps move the centre to a slightly more ambitious target than they would have had it. So you know those people on either side and either extreme do tend to move the target, I don’t think anyone's expecting that they’ll get all the way to 40, but it might move where the government ends up.

PAUL It's a very difficult political balance isn't it, because you know you want to be a good international citizen but you’ve got to take the people with you. How difficult as policy do you think this is to develop?

SIMON I think it's incredibly difficult, let me answer that first because I was there in Kyoto in 1997, and I have to say we did much less analysis then and the whole world did much less analysis, and I think what we did in Kyoto was agree to things that none of knew how we could meet, and that’s the reality, I've had that from the mouths of American negotiators. This time round much more work's been done, and even if the outcome is modest in terms of Greenpeace, I think it will be real and frankly a real outcome that starts a process is going to be better than something built on clouds.

JEANETTE But there's something nobody is saying here, and that is that the target doesn’t all have to be met domestically in New Zealand, we meet what we can here and we pay for reductions in other countries around the world to meet the rest of our target and that’s where the technology and capital transfer comes from to the developing world, so that they can get their emissions down.

THERESE Paul can I say it's the most complex policy issue I have ever seen in my life, and it is about finding the right balance, and I think the Minister hit on that very well.

PAUL He seemed to be very reasonable.

THERESE Well it's balancing into the environment, you know it is the issue of our generation, and we have to balance it up against truly our economic conditions as well, it's an international problem, it does depend what our trading partners do, and I also thought that Helen Clark gave us a timely reminder, it's one of the many issues at the international level that we have to be taking into account.

PAUL And it will be a very big issue domestically particularly if power prices which are already astronomical shoot even further into the galaxy. The Minister commented on power price rises.

Nick Smith: 'The advice I've had, the existing law, the existing ETS would have petrol price go up by about six cents a litre, power price up by about 10%.'

So that’s going to cause trouble isn't it?

JEANETTE And that’s why last year in negotiating with Labour we agreed that some of the money that comes from that will go into insulating people's homes. We've managed to restore that scheme with the National government, and that home insulation scheme will bring power bills down for many people even when power prices go up.

SIMON Those are real costs people have to meet, but on this I think the government has to be quite honest with people, anything we do will be costly, there is a price to tackling the issue. What these numbers like 10%, 6%, don’t and can't show us is the real ability to react and actually minimise use. Every single New Zealander wastes energy, every single person in this country wastes energy, it is cheaper here than in many countries in the world, and I have to say that at the sort of modest end of the spectrum that the Minister I think probably has in mind, I think most New Zealanders can actually make the adjustments, and we'll never make them if the price doesn’t go up.

PAUL You’ve just come back from Singapore where you were chairing I think the OECD meeting on sustainable development or sustainability. Is there a world appetite for this, are all governments struggling to take the people with them on this?

SIMON I'm sure governments are struggling but there is an appetite to do something. The world changed when the Obama administration came to town. The fact is that quite a lot if developed have done things and countries that aren’t even required to like China, are taking it very seriously. I've just recently been in China and I really have little doubt that this is actually a major issue, because they can see with their population their economic growth...

PAUL Are China and India going to come with us?

SIMON They won't come with us in terms of required reductions this time round, but what they're lo9oking for is some real evidence of action by the rest of the developed world and that really means by America, once that’s happened then I think the pressure will come on and you'll get some action, but to date frankly China can say listen come to us when you’ve done something.

THERESE I thought it was interesting Guyon criticised the Minister I think for he is probably not going to make the nine month election promise to have the Emissions Trading Scheme reviewed. I would say we're far better off taking our time and getting it right, and I think the second issue is, this is a very important policy issue, it's complex, and it is really worth trying to get as broad a consensus in parliament as possible.

PAUL And to get it right of course.

*****

Response to CHERYL SAVILL & BOB McCoskrie interview

PAUL Yes it's a difficult issue this whole smacking thing that is back before us. Who's going to win Therese?

THERESE Hard to tell, the poll that appeared in the Herald, from what I can tell it only polled 200 people which is a very small sample and it's only of parents with four year old children, so you'd have to be very cautious before you extrapolate out from that that it's 85% of the whole population, but the other thing to remember though is they did manage to get over three hundred thousand signatures on this, and that should not be scoffed at because you know if you look at the smaller parties in parliament at the moment all together in the last election combined they got three hundred and forty thousand votes, I mean let's put this in perspective, that’s actually a high barrier to get that many signatures.

PAUL The very strange thing here is that while most people according to that poll seem to be going to agree with the question. At the same time there's a great reduction in the number of people who are hitting, they seem just to want the right to do a smack on the hand.

JEANETTE I think the really exciting news is that the culture of parenting is changing and that since the bill was passed two years ago a lot fewer parents are smacking than used to smack and that is the first step towards a less violent society.

PAUL Well is it?

JEANETTE Yes I believe it is because a lot of the serious violence against children in the past, the sort of thing that was always prosecuted started as 'well I was just giving him a hiding for being naughty' it was just a good smacking and then it escalates and escalates.

PAUL And often is done in anger.

JEANETTE Absolutely.

SIMON I tend to agree with Jeanette there, there was a lot more violence in the name of smacking than could ever have been justified, and if you had to change the culture then this law change seems to have assisted, but as with the old law being too loose in one direction, the question is, is it now too tight in the other direction. Now John Key I think has it right, if it's not working we should do something, if the public say through a referendum it's not working then of course it will be handed back to the politicians. So it's not going to solve anything having the referendum, I think the Prime Minister was always going to look at it anyhow, it'll come down to the facts.

THERESE And governments are notorious for ignoring these citizens' initiated referenda.

JEANETTE It's the question.

PAUL Well talk about the question. Is it a dodgy question.

THERESE Well the simple rules for a good referendum question is that it should be clear, it should be neutral, and it should be easily answered with a yes or no, and I do think there are problems with this question, I think the question was locked in back in February 2007, so before the final version of the law was actually matted out...

PAUL The question is comprehensible when you read it, but when you go away from the print you can't remember which way to vote.

JEANETTE That’s right, and I've come across a number of people who say oh no I'm going to vote no, I think the law's working well and we don’t need to change it so I'm going to vote no, well that’s the wrong way to vote if you think the law's working well. What is a smack? That’s the first question about the wording. The law doesn’t talk about smacking, it talks about assault. The second question is, it expects you to accept as a given that a smack is part of good parenting, and then it says should good parents be criminalised. I mean it is a terribly confusing and misleading question.

PAUL Is there real dispute about whether a smack is a good parental tool?

JEANETTE Yes I think there is. I think there is dispute. I think a lot of people are saying here, it's not a good tool because it doesn’t work, it's not a good tool because it teaches children that the way to respond to irritation and annoyance with other people is to hit them.

PAUL Cheryl Savill seemed very rational about here smacks.

THERESE I think what the debate comes down to is that one smack that’s she's talking about, that she agrees that if it's multiply smacks it is assault, and I guess what you hear from their side is that they don’t take great comfort in the fact that the Police – you know the compromise that came from National that the Police will have discretion when it comes down to that one smack, it's highly unlikely that any parent is going to be criminalised for one smack, but the problem is that parents don’t like that that one smack is considered criminal.

PAUL Exactly so. Alright looking ahead the House is sitting next week so there could be – well a riot like South Korea but probably not, what do you think the big political stories of the week are going to be.

JEANETTE Well the Greens have got two bills before the House on Members' Day on Wednesday so that’s our big political week, we've got one setting sustainability criteria for biofuels which is a very important worldwide problem.

PAUL That’s the one that caused the riot?

JEANETTE That’s the one the government is supporting so far, and I'm pleased about that, and the second one is about protection of marine mammals, and we don’t know where the government sits on that in the fishing industry.

SIMON I'd like to think they'd be leading off your news but I don’t think they will be. There's two conferences this week, one at the beginning of the week, one at the end. At the beginning of the week Local Government Association, John Key is addressing one day, Rodney Hide the next, the contrast between the two will be interesting and watched by people like Therese I'm sure. At the end of the week it's the National Party Conference where there is a big contest for the presidency that may be of interest to some people. Offshore the big issue going on for me, and there is a world out there beyond New Zealand, what's happening to Obama in the lead up to his health reforms, this is critical for America in all sorts of ways and his presidency.

PAUL Just quickly the National Party presidency who are you picking?

SIMON Oh Paul I haven't been to a National Party – I'm going to this one because they’ve asked me to speak about the environment. I haven't been to a conference for years, I haven't a clue.

THERESE I agree with Simon, I'm going to be watching that Local Government Conference, we had Rodney Hide and the Prime Minister on the show last week, they seem to disagree about what the definition of a core service is for local government and considering that Rodney Hide is the Minister for Local Government, he speaks for the government, to hear that the Prime Minister disagrees with his own minister on local government, I'm hoping they're gonna resolve that at the conference.

ENDS

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