Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party is supporting this bill. I note that it's an outcome of the Electricity Price Review which was undertaken in the previous term of Government and many of the recommendations fit with Green Party policy although I would say that the recommendations from that review don't go as far as we think they should. One of the positive things about this particular bill I think will be this establishment of an agency to advocate for consumers. I think that's definitely needed and will be worthwhile.However there are some things that I think are being put off until there is the establishment of the agency that could be done sooner. So for example Powerswitch is extremely difficult for most people who are the most vulnerable on low incomes to navigate and part of the problem with Powerswitch is that it's really difficult for the people running Powerswitch to know what particular product a consumer has from a particular electricity company. So that makes it really hard to evaluate whether they are on the best product and whether they can save money by switching to a different one.There are some really simple changes that can be made really quickly like requiring every individual product to have a code or a number which Powerswitch would have the information about from all of the providers and that that number or code be published on any electricity bill. That will make it really really easy to give good information to consumers. I don't think we need to wait for an agency to be established to require this but unfortunately the Electricity Authority has been extremely hands-off and really hasn't taken I think up the responsibilities that it has to make sure that the market is fair and working in favour of consumers. So I think it's great that these changes are proposed. I think it's unfortunate that it will take some time to be implemented. It clarifies the electricity industry code to ensure changes can be made to protect the interests of households and small businesses. It makes some of the changes to enable flexibility around new technologies like regulation of lines companies who also provide home solar panel services. And I think this could be quite useful to encourage the uptake of solar. Clearly the status quo is not fit for purpose in this respect. We haven't really facilitated the uptake of solar in any big way in New Zealand and I think most people think that's a missed opportunity. I mean you look at countries like Germany which have lower sunshine hours fewer sunshine hours than New Zealand and yet they are generating huge amounts of their electricity from solar because of really proactive Government policies that have supported that and of course that is part of our transition to more renewable generation—to enable more distributed renewal generation like solar.So I think the steps within this bill will be positive and they will have a positive impact for smaller retailers as well. They're a really important part of how we ensure that there is good competition and that the gen-tailers aren't just sort of making massive super profits at the expense of consumers. We see that with some of the smaller changes the bill proposes like enabling or giving the power to the Minister to directly amend the code if the Minister is not satisfied with industry behaviour. Currently only the Electricity Authority can amend the code. I think this is quite an interesting development and it means that some of the changes that the smaller retailers and consumer advocacy groups have been calling for to ensure that the gen-tailers are required to operate fairly can happen. So requiring transparency for example so that gen-tailers have to release information about internal transfers and potentially forcing them to sell a proportion of the electricity they generate on the open market rather than trading it internally. I think those are really important powers. I think the ideology of the 1990s in the electricity reforms was that simply by trying to create a competitive market we would get the best outcome for consumers and lower prices but clearly that has not been borne out. I think part of the problem is that maybe this would have worked in a larger market but New Zealand is a small country and we seem to have this problem in a whole range of areas. Whether it's supermarkets electricity generation banks or building and construction we tend to quite quickly be dominated by a few big players—somewhere between two and four—and they're able to use their market power to extract excessive profit and this is at the expense of consumers and businesses. The other way that we've been let down by that approach is a lack of a strategic approach to transition to renewable electricity. I note that previous members in this debate have argued—and it is a tragedy—that our emissions have gone up from electricity generation because we have been burning more coal over the last few years but this is a direct result of a lack of ability in our electricity system to have a strategic plan to deliver what's best for New Zealand and best for New Zealand's climate. The Green Party—Jeanette Fitzsimons—was talking about this in 2005 and probably before that to be honest. She was working really hard on it in 2005 to 2008 as the energy efficiency and conservation spokesperson for the Government. The Green Party has said for a long time that we need a plan to transition to renewable generation and to transition Huntly to have an alternative for baseload electricity generation that doesn't rely on fossil fuels and yet successive Governments ignored that but most particularly the last National Government because their largest change is a direct result on why we haven't had increased renewable generation provided in recent years. The major energy users group put out a report just a few weeks ago showing that over the last 20 years Meridian has been making excessive profits but particularly in the last five years since the partial privatisation of Meridian. So it's no surprise that if you partially privatise these sorts of companies and you've got private shareholders directing the behaviour of the company they're going to maximise short-term profits over long-term benefit to New Zealand and that's a direct result of National Party policy in the last National Government. You never heard them talking about a plan to reduce our reliance on coal. We never saw any investments made to have an alternative to baseload and it's not a problem that can be solved in one year or three years or four years even. This is a long-term problem that now the Government is grappling with but it's not a result of this Government's policy that we're burning more coal. It's a result of a decade of inaction in terms of investing in renewables and setting up the type of regulation like that which is in this bill which would have enabled the incentives so that we would have more renewable generation and we wouldn't be so reliant on fossil fuels at the peak time. If we'd had improvements to building standards 10 years ago when we needed them we wouldn't have had so much demand in the peak of winter for electricity. So we need a long-term vision and a long-term commitment to sustainability to climate action and to the collective public good here in New Zealand and that can really only be delivered by a philosophy that understands that trying to maximise profits for private individuals who happen to be investors in the electricity companies is not the way to get the best outcome for New Zealand as a whole or the climate. So the Green Party is supporting this bill. We would support further and faster action on many of these areas to protect consumers but also to incentivise renewable generation be that distributed or in a more centralised way.