Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Energy and Resources): What I will do in this call is go through clause 15 of the bill. That seems to be where the predominant source of questions are coming from. I'll go through and I'll explain what the clause does why it does it and where it came from. I think one of the most important places to start is what the legislative etymology of this clause is and of course that was a clause that Gerry Brownlee put into the 2010 legislation when he gave himself a regulatory backstop around the changes he was making to the electricity system.So the constitutional outrage claims from the Opposition are somewhat hollow when actually this is language that has just been lifted from the 2010 legislation put in place by a National Government—exactly the different specified reasons but the framework the idea that you do have the ability for the Minister to act as if they are the authority for specified reasons is straight from Gerry Brownlee's legislation. So I think that's something the National Party might want to reflect on when they're calling this a constitutional outrage and the end of the world as we know it.I think it's worth going through and looking at exactly what this clause says. What it says is that there are some things that is our expectation and we've made our expectation very clear to the Electricity Authority as to what will be done as a result of the Electricity Price Review—that there is a chance for the authority to do this through code amendments and they're specified through section 44B(2) which has a very comprehensive list of what those specified activities are. And if anyone want to go through and correlate those to the recommendations of the Electricity Price Review they'll see that they match.So the recommendations that were made include requirements for distributors to offer retailers standard terms for access to their networks requirements for certain categories of industry participants to make available information directed at improving the performance of the wholesale market requirements for certain industry participants to act as market makers in relation to the training of some wholesale electricity contracts requirements for retailers to process consumer requests for information about their electricity consumption in a timely way limitations on retailer saves and win-backs and requirements for retailers to provide information to the authority to enable the authority to better direct its efforts under section 16(1)(i) which relates to promoting to consumers the benefits of comparing and switching retailers.What you will see from that selection that I have read out there is that they are very narrow specified terms and it is saying that if these are not done in a timely manner then the Government will come back and regulate. It is just that. It is a regulatory backstop. First of all the Act sets out that this can be done through code amendments and in some cases with the willing and voluntary participation of the industry. But what we are doing here is putting in place the legislative framework so that if we do need to regulate in the future because that has not been fulfilled then we have the ability to bring in place the legislation. And as I said that is a clause that is based on a similar clause in the 2010 legislation that followed Gerry Brownlee's reforms to the electricity market in there as well.One of the things that one of the members of the ACT Party I think it was Simon Court brought up was around—and I think what he was referring to was the interim measure that the Electricity Authority was talking about in terms of the wholesale market and this came from the review that they did do into the wholesale market. And that would prohibit generators from giving effect to a contract of over 150 megawatts or more unless certain conditions are met. This is something that has been put in place to protect our wholesale market. What we know is 150 megawatts is a very very large contract. There are very few of them in the country. To put this in context for most members in this House a standard windfarm is 100 megawatts—it's 1½ windfarms—we're talking about major use. This is to make sure that our wholesale market is operating fairly.