Collins JudithHon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak in support of this bill. I think it's quite interesting—we've had a few comments from the member who's just resumed his seat Michael Wood about what was done last year in relation to fuel prices. Certainly last year for about ten months I was privileged to be the Minister of Energy and Resources and I really enjoyed getting stuck into an area particularly around fuel supply—Chris Bishop: Very good Minister.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: —and security of supply but also around—thank you very much Chris Bishop. I almost said the Hon Chris Bishop but that's because I'm thinking ahead.I think one of the issues really that struck me was that the industry itself is quite challenged in some ways. And a lot of what's around fuel prices is around the fact that we have three major suppliers that control and own the Marsden Point refinery and that competition is primarily served or given to New Zealand from Gull which imports its fuel already refined from Australia and that even some of the smaller players like Waitomo Group and Allied Petroleum some of the very small players who are often significantly cheaper than the big suppliers of fuel domestically actually buy their domestic fuel from the big suppliers—and I always find it stunning that they can do that and still be able to sell it cheaper. So it was an area that I took very seriously.I discussed the matter with my parliamentary colleague now the Hon Stuart Nash and he told me what his concerns were. He was a spokesman for the Labour Party at the time. We looked at the issue I took it to the caucus and to Cabinet and we agreed that we would have a survey done by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) around the price margins and what was happening in the fuel supply but also the cost to consumers. As soon as that survey was announced the price of fuel came down. It was quite stunning. I don't know whether or not it was as a consequence but it was certainly noticeable. On the other hand this year when the Hon Megan Woods called the fuel companies in to give them a dressing down the price went up but I think that could be something to do with what happened in that room—who knows. Anyway the main thing I think is that we took this issue very seriously.We were also concerned around the ability of MBIE to get all of the advice and information that it needed from the fuel companies. So to put it on the record: Mobil would not provide us with all of the information required by the people who were undertaking the work. Even though I went to see Mobil in Houston actually at their head office for various reasons and discussed this with them they would not provide that. Gull would not provide it either and that was they said because they were in a sale from a private family to Caltex Australia. The companies that did provide full information as requested were Z Energy and BP. I think it's good to put on record who provided the information.We got a result back from MBIE and it said that basically it looked like there was cause for concern around those prices. I took this issue along with my colleague the Hon Jacqui Dean who was at that stage the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs the role that the Hon Kris Faafoi has now—and why that man has not been put in Cabinet I do not know other than that he's not a woman. What we did was we took that to Cabinet and Cabinet agreed that we would give the Commerce Commission extra powers to undertake the market research and surveys that the Commerce Commission had been asking for but we would limit it to areas where there was a ministerial or Cabinet direction to the Commerce Commission to undertake those sort of market study powers. The reason for that is that the market study power provision is extraordinarily costly to an industry and extraordinarily pervasive. If you bear in mind that the Commerce Commission also agreed to the sale of Caltex to Z at one stage and therefore people would say that it was involved in actually making the market less competitive you'd have to wonder sometimes at some of those decisions.Anyway the main thing is that this power is something that we think should be reserved for Cabinet to ask the Commerce Commission or the Minister to ask the Commerce Commission to look at these areas because we should not underestimate how debilitating the cost and the time involved in complying with requests from the Commerce Commission can be. We've certainly seen that in Australia and we took note of some of the issues that Australians had found with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission the ACCC as they call it there which can be extraordinarily difficult for anybody to comply with but also can go on for a very long period of time. What sometimes I think regulators and those in politics who've never been in business tend to forget is that every time there's a cost imposed on an industry the consumer ultimately ends up paying. It's all very well to think Well business can pay for it." Well business actually is there to make a profit too and they will pass that on in some way in some form at some time to the consumer. So you've got to be very careful with this that it's not overdone.We are ultimately only a country of—what—4.8 million people the best little country in the world obviously. We are bigger than the whole of the United Kingdom in surface area. We are the sixth-largest economic zone in the world but our population is smaller than Melbourne's. I think that when we think about that we should be very careful about the costs that we impose on businesses and therefore on consumers.We know that this work was done by and approved by Cabinet last year—I think from memory it was about July last year and then we had this issue called an election come in and it stopped all that work done. That work has already been done and the Minister has been praised roundly by her colleague Michael Wood—who would be much better at the role frankly in my opinion than she is—for getting on with this. Actually she sat on it for a whole year more than a year. She's really done nothing with it and all she's done is she's come back and given in to the demands of those who want to regulate everything without understanding the cost of it.So we have decided in the National Party that we need to support this bill because we do need to get these issues dealt with. We have seen rising petrol costs and diesel costs this year. We know that a large part of that is from the extra taxes that the Labour - New Zealand First - Greens Government have agreed to particularly in the Auckland region with the 10c a litre plus GST—so 11.5c a litre regional fuel tax added on to everything else that Aucklanders are expected to pay. For those who are not in Auckland: don't worry this tax is coming to you too.So we are very aware that the Government has only now decided to slam around the big fuel companies because it's easier to do so rather than to address the fact that so much of our transport taxes paid for solely by petrol buyers and diesel buyers through the road user charges are currently paying for public transport paying for roads paying for apparently a trolley bus or a tram going up Dominion Road paying for cycleways paying for walkways—paying for everything. The people in my electorate of Papakura and many other electorates are not asking about the Commerce Commission's powers to do surveys and to look at things. What they are saying to me is "Why does the Government think we're going to be fobbed off with this when they could actually stop the regional fuel tax and axe the tax?" People are wanting to axe the tax and I think that even though there are some good things that could come out of this legislation ultimately it is not going to deal with the major issue that it's being used to try and be a salve for or even a band-aid for which is the extra petrol taxes and diesel taxes put on by this Government."