Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you Madam Chair. It is a pleasure to speak on this bill. We in the National Party strongly believe that consumers and businesses and households should have affordable electricity particularly in this current environment where electricity prices—the cost of electricity itself; the energy—have gone up considerably under this Government. It has been a quite noticeable impost on households and businesses in particular. Businesses have faced higher energy prices at a much faster rate than domestic consumers. In fact it has really put the viability of some businesses right on the line. We note that last year we had businesses having to shut down because the cost of electricity was too high. The Electricity Authority has looked into this and can't find why just over $30 per megawatt hour is an unexplained extra cost in electricity and they don't know where that's come from. Unfortunately they haven't really been looking into that. Hopefully they will do now in the future and find out exactly why we have that extra cost in our electricity.The electricity sector is actually in a bit of a mess. Next month even Transpower the system operator is predicting that we will run short of generation on a few dates. It's unbelievable that we would be in this case in this situation.Maureen Pugh: It's Third World.STUART SMITH: It is almost Third World. That's right Maureen Pugh the soon to be member for West Coast-Tasman. That is a shameful situation in a country that deems itself to be First World. We are unfortunately following in the footsteps of what has happened in Germany in particular and in Europe where the value of an open and competitive electricity market has been called into question because of what's known as the energy trilemma—putting affordability reliability and sustainability as the three legs of that trilemma—calling that out and putting it off balance by putting a focus and subsidising intermittent renewable electricity sources at the expense of reliability and affordability. We are going down that path and this bill does nothing at all to address the energy trilemma.Unfortunately the Minister has not explained why one of the main provisions in this—the electricity consumer agency—is needed when we have a Commerce Commission to cover off the issues that it will look at. I've met with the new group and they're nice people and I'm sure they'll do a good job but they're doing a good job of replicating a job that someone else is doing. This is unnecessary red tape which is something the Government is very good at. I have to give it to them—if this was the Commonwealth Games they'd get a gold medal in red tape. But unfortunately red tape strangles the life out of the economy and we can't have that. The Minister has had no satisfactory explanation for that. So Madam Chair I will come to a question in a moment but I think that it's very important that New Zealanders understand why there's going to be another leg of bureaucracy added into a system that has a very good Commerce Commission. They have their faults and there's no doubt about that but actually they have the ability and the funding to carry out the necessary investigations to deal with this. It's another group that's a feel-good thing and I just don't understand the need for that so I would like the Minister to address that please.