ETS select committee to sit again next Tuesday

Friday 16th October 2009

The finance and expenditure select committee will resume hearings on the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Bill next Tuesday and appears likely to sit long hours on Wednesday as well.

The committee rose last night after 9pm, having heard more the 25 of the approximately 160 submitters who have sought an oral hearing, after a shambolic day caused by the committee's sudden decision to commence hearings yesterday with less than a day's notice for submitters to attend.

Opposition MPs used the opportunity to ask almost every submitter how much notice they had had of their appearance, with all citing times ranging from the evening before to just a few hours yesterday.

Some submitters, including Todd Energy and the New Zealand Business Roundtable, highlighted what they described as poor process, and tied that observation back to the deeply critical Regulatory Impact Statement in the bill.

The RIS adequacy statement said the analysis underpinning the bill was "not commensurate with the significance of the proposals", and the first time the Treasury had ever issued such a statement, NZBRT executive director, Roger Kerr, said.

For a government committed to reducing and improving the quality of regulation, the bill was a contradiction. Labour MP's gleefully agreed with Kerr, after earlier attempting to embarrass submitters from the New Zealand Aluminium Smelter's owner, Rio Tinto.

Labour's finance spokesman David Cunliffe asked Rio's government relations director Ray Deacon whether the company would agree to a regime where companies that made party political donations should be barred from receiving free allocations of emissions units.

Rio made no political party donations in New Zealand, Deacon said. Few submissions dealt with the new areas of the Bill relating to free allocation methodologies and phase-out times, with most rehearsing well-known objections or support for the principles of an ETS.

In one exchange, a delegation from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment confirmed that the PCE did not believe that the mechanisms in the bill could achieve its stated aims.

However, the executive director for the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development, Peter Neilson, said it was common for one Parliament to pass law with ambitious long term targets, achievement of which would be the task of a future Parliament.

Committee chair Craig Foss told BusinessWire that while the process for oral submissions was clearly very constrained, the committee was treating the written submissions as the focus for their job of getting the bill back to Parliament by November 15 for passage by early December.

The bill needs to be law by January 1 2010 to allow ETS mechanisms to take effect, and the government is keen to have it passed ahead of the global climate change summit, starting in Copenhagen on December 7.

Businesswire.co.nz

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