Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I rise in support of this bill. I want to respond to some of the comments that were made by the ACT member Simon Court. He said he would prefer an emissions trading scheme (ETS) that had no floor price, no ceiling price, linked to international markets. We used to have one, and the ACT Party voted against it. That's how the ETS was originally designed, at a time when Kyoto was still alive. We had a market that was attached to international markets. Now, why that went wrong and why we're not ready yet to re-enter international markets was there was a huge oversupply of units in the world market caused by the fact that the US did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and their allowances for their emissions were still in the international system. That was followed by the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol itself and the failure of the successive protocol to set international limits to world emissions. What that meant was that the remaining Kyoto-compliant units that were surplus in the system—sometimes called Russian or Ukrainian hot air—had nowhere to go except the New Zealand ETS, because every other functional ETS in the world banned them from their system.