Brownlee GerryHon GERRY BROWNLEE (National): I think that that previous speaker—Glen Bennett—should resume his feet and apologise to the House and to the nation for implying that the wonderful Holden HQ was not a great car. It was truly one of the great marks of the world and I wish that he had spent a little bit of time telling us about what happened to that car rather than blithering on with the rest of the incomprehensible speech that he offered to the House. The question is why do so many Government members when they speak about the new technologies that are coming on and the new fuel sources that are coming on and they label them green and get excited about them as if it's completely new and they've somehow discovered this themselves—they seem to think that as a Government they are the ones who are seriously pushing it. They are not. These things will happen. Just as the candle was replaced by the kerosene lamp the kerosene lamp was replaced by the filament lightbulb and the filament lightbulb has been replaced by the LED lightbulb so it will go on and when it comes to motor fuels the same thing will happen over time. I'm struggling to see what it is that the Government think is so important about this bill other than the fact that they went to the Commerce Commission and said Please conduct a market study." The Commerce Commission duly did that and came along with various recommendations central to which was price control. Last November the Minister was out there very much in this sort of boisterous mode saying "What a marvellous job we have done with this market study. It's going to make all the difference in the world. We're going to lower the fuel price."—but then of course abandoning it. We haven't seen a single bill here this year that would enable a Minister to exercise price control on motor fuels—and nor should we—because the experience this year has been that if a Government takes its own hands out of the pockets of consumers and takes less tax off them you will get the sort of price stability that we've seen even in the volatile world situation that we've got at the moment. I think it's fascinating that when one considers the current holdings—so firstly I'll go back and say that the bill is going to compulsorily require oil companies to have specific tonnage of their product available to the market at all times. But when there's an actual consideration of what the market does provide at the moment for their businesses and what do they need to have in their tanks to ensure that they have that continuum of activity well it's 43 days of petrol 40 days of regular petrol 47 days of jet fuel and 21 days of diesel. So why is the Government coming along with a bill that says "Oh well actually we'd be a lot better off and be far more resilient"—a word I hate by the way and I think it's much overused—"if we dropped all that down to just 28 days of petrol 24 days of jet fuel and 21 days of diesel"? Why would we halve—compulsorily halve—what an industry itself has already decided should be twice as much to maintain that industry? We're a country that's seven to eight weeks on the end of a supply chain. We cannot bring in crude oil now and have it refined in New Zealand so we must have refined product and the Government seems to think that while the industry itself has determined 43 days 40 days 47 days and 21 days for different fuels it would be better to compulsorily require 28 24 and 21 days. This is just a vanity bill brought in by a Government that's run out of steam and it's fascinating that the only bills that we had out of the Budget that needed to go through with any degree of urgency were energy bills. That tells us that the great strategist for the Labour Party—the Hon Megan Woods—is the only one who's out there pencilling up these bills at a great rate of knots to fill up time between now and when the House lifts late in August. We're happy to send it off to a select committee because we want to hear from those fuel companies who will I'm sure tell us that this is a complete nullity and a total waste of time."