Shearer David: Electricity Transparency Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Electricity Transparency Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8517. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): I move That the Electricity Transparency Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Government Administration Committee to consider the bill. This bill is about protecting consumers. It is a guard against householders being screwed because they are being screwed or if they are not they do not know whether they are or not because their electricity bills are so obscure and so opaque that they do not actually know what is going on. This bill is very simple. It simply gives power to the consumers to see which part of the electricity bill is being charged at what rate. If there is any change they can see that from day to day and from bill to bill. They are able to go over to their next-door neighbours or whoever and compare one bill against another and see what sort of a rate their neighbours are getting. So it is about transparency of pricing and that transparency of pricing will encourage competition.The idea is first of all to unbundle the bills so that there is a clear separation from the various components of the electricity bill and secondly as a part of that to estimate a percentage of what part of that bill is actually generated by renewable resources. It is an effort to be able to show people this and therefore give some sort of impetus towards renewables as opposed to fossil fuel consumption.We have an electricity system that is relatively complex as they are all over the world. We have many generators whether they are hydroelectric whether they are geothermal whether they are wind or whether they are coal-fired. Those generators generate electricity. The electricity goes into the grid which is looked after by Transpower a State-owned monopoly. And from Transpower off that grid come the local lines groups whether they be Orion or Vector or the lines company or whatever. Each part of the country has its own lines company. Finally the electricity is delivered to the householder and billed to the householder by the retailer.A few months ago when I put this bill into the ballot—and it has not changed since that time—power prices were going up. Each of those components whether it be the power companies or the lines companies was pointing the finger at each other and saying that it was the fault of the power company or it was the fault of the lines company that power bills were going up. The remarkable thing about this was that nobody could disaggregate what was actually going on. So even when the Electricity Authority Consumer New Zealand—a whole bunch of different people—sat back and looked at it they could not see what the different parts of the electricity bill were made up of and which parts were going up and which were staying static. An unseemly row broke out. Contact Energy pointed the finger for example at Wellington Electricity and Wellington Electricity told Contact Energy that it was a liar. The whole thing went round in an unseemly circle. But the bottom line and the key issue here was that consumers were not able to see what was happening in their power bill but they should have been able to. We all should know which components of our electricity bill are made up by which parts. Surely that is straightforward.Let me give you another example: Vector the lines company in Auckland was told by the Commerce Commission that it was charging too much. It had to drop its lines charges by 9 percent which it did. Under law it was obliged to. What it expected to see was that drop flow through into people’s power bills. It never happened. Why not? Because the power companies absorbed that windfall if you like themselves and did not pass it on. Actually nobody knew because there was nothing out there that was going to be able to indicate to them that their power bills had changed.So in New Zealand we have—in a sense—these conglomerates that have a pretty comfortable existence whether they be the banks or the power companies or the building supply companies or whoever. I believe that consumers need and deserve a better deal and that is what this bill is about. It is about unbundling our electricity bill so that we can see what is going on and we can make choices on the basis of that and that in turn would encourage competition.The main electricity body in the country the Electricity Authority is charged with trying to ensure that there is sufficient competition in the electricity sector. So the Electricity Authority after this happened announced that it was going to do a survey and do some analysis on unbundling these bills and providing more transparency. So it went out and spent thousands of dollars and talked to everybody but—surprise surprise—the electricity companies came back and said: “We don’t need any more transparency. The consumers have enough transparency.”Contact Energy said that not only has it got enough transparency but it would be too expensive for it to do it and actually it is not sure if it could actually do it anyway. Despite the fact that we have got telecommunications companies all across the country that can tell you almost minute by minute what your phone bill is a power company as large as Contact Energy which has just spent tens of millions of dollars on its billing system cannot give you a breakdown of what your bill is. Then along comes Flick a small retailer that is not only able to give you a breakdown of your power bill by sector—whether it be the generator Transpower the grid or the lines company—but also can tell you hour by hour what the price of electricity is. So for Contact Energy and others to say that this is somehow impossible for them is absolute nonsense.So there is a conspiracy and a cloak of opaqueness and convenience around power bills that benefit the power companies at the expense of the consumer and I want to see the consumer getting a better deal. Unfortunately I believe that the Electricity Authority is more of an apologist for the status quo and what is going on rather than an authority stepping up and being on the side of the consumers which is actually part of its rationale in its statement. In fact it is really only talking to people in the know. If you have a look at its website I can guarantee that 90 percent of New Zealanders would not spend more than about 3 seconds on there because everything is so densely presented there that nobody could actually make sense of what it is saying and what it is doing. It is certainly promoting the status quo above what consumers would want to think of as an Electricity Authority that is standing up for them.This bill is a member’s bill and I am asking for support right across the House because let us face it this is something that the National Party would—I would imagine—be wanting to support. I was on a panel with Simon Bridges the Minister of Energy and Resources when he said that yes he thinks billing will need to be broken down into its component parts. He is on record saying that so in a sense it is part of what he wants to do. It is part of I would have thought the ACT Party’s agenda of giving consumers—after all the “C” in ACT stands for “consumers”—the benefit of actually having good information and transparent information so that they can make good choices. Unfortunately I do not think that right now people are able to make good choices because they are not getting good information.So this is the chance for the people in the House to vote on the bill going through this first reading to a select committee so that we could actually bring in the various components that make up our electricity system in New Zealand and have them talk about what transparency means—to have Flick alongside Genesis and Contact Energy and ask whether this is possible or not. Why can consumers not have good information? Why do they have to rely on the press releases of power companies or lines companies in order to be able to get proper information? Incidentally the Electricity Authority’s recommendations after spending tens of thousands of dollars on this analysis were to have some guidelines which of course nobody is adhering to. I mean guidelines are the lowest bar that you can possibly come up with in terms of recommendations. So I say again that this is a bill that is on the side of consumers that is promoting transparency and that not only gives information about billing on those various parts of an electricity bill so that somebody can see whether they are getting a good deal or not but also provides some information about the sustainability aspect of their bill as well.