Sharma GauravDr GAURAV SHARMA (Labour—Hamilton West): It's a pleasure today to take a call on the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill. I just want to thank the member before me Angela Roberts who spoke about her invitation to New Plymouth—I will happily take that. It's a beautiful part of the country and it's doing a lot of good work in just transition which we should all be proud of.The bill we're talking about at the moment will amend the Gas Act of 1992. The Act is the principal piece of legislation that governs the gas industry in New Zealand. The gas industry is co-regulated by the Government and the approved industry body the Gas Industry Company (GIC). The original Act empowers the making of a wide range of regulations relating to matters that govern the gas industry; however recent natural gas supply outages have raised concerns about the lack of transparency of information in the gas market. The outages include those at the Pohokura production station in 2018 as well as planned outages at other stations. Outages at gas production stations can affect gas availability and prices as we have seen in the past. They also affect the electricity market which uses gas for thermal electricity generation which acts as a backup electricity supply during periods of high demand when limited electricity storage is available—for example the outage as I mentioned in 2018 led to increased prices for many consumers during the spring of 2018. Some power companies even reported receiving only minimal information about how long the disruption was expected to last. The outage also reportedly cost its main customer around $2 million a day in lost revenue—$2 million a day.The bill as proposed now which has gone through the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee would expand the scope of the regulation-recommendation powers available to the GIC by inserting provisions enabling enhanced information disclosure about the gas market. Information able to be disclosed would be matters that may have a significant downstream impact or may contribute to the risk of critical gas shortages. These provisions would enable regulation that could apply to all industry participants and non-industry participants. They will not apply to domestic consumers and the types of information that might be required to be provided or disclosed are broad and non-exhaustive.The bill would also amend the penalties regime under the Act for regulation or rules breached by industry and non-industry participants. It would increase the $20000 civil pecuniary penalty limit for Gas Rulings Panel orders to $200000 so that's a tenfold increase. It would also replace the current criminal penalty for non-industry participants with a civil pecuniary penalty. This aims to make the penalties for industry participants and non-industry participants more aligned so it brings everybody on to the same playing field.Now yesterday when I was hearing members on both sides of the House talking about it there were members of the select committee who talked about receiving a significant number of submissions which has led to I guess a few different changes being made through the select committee process. One of them was that the recommended change will ensure that a failure of an industry participant to follow a gas rulings panel will continue to carry a criminal penalty. The second one was that this will help ensure that the appropriate incentives are in place for the industry to comply with the orders from the Gas Rulings Panel as I have mentioned before. And thirdly the bill represents a step forward in improving how information that may highlight risks of critical gas shortages or potential for significant price impacts is released to the market which should improve the management of situations where critical gas shortages may occur. So overall this bill significantly enhances the original Act of 1992 and I do want to commend the Minister Megan Woods for putting this Government bill forward as well as the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee which has spent quite a lot of time consulting with people across various communities and I understand communities like New Plymouth and Taranaki where a lot of members and their constituents have fed into this consultation process. So I think it is a strong bill and it will only help with the just transition and other measures the Government is taking in the energy field across the board in New Zealand and I would highly recommend this bill to go ahead and just want to thank everybody who's been involved in the consultation process—thank you.