Brownlee Gerry: Third Readings 
Brownlee Gerry: Third Readings 
[Volume:609;Page:6925] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (NZ National—Ilam) 
: This is more legislation from the Labour Government that loads extra and unnecessary costs on to hard-working New Zealanders. It is legislation born out of the electricity crisis that Auckland alone experienced a few years back in the late 1990s when there was a meltdown in the cables that took electricity into the city area. Even if this legislation had been in place at the time it would never have stopped that. It would never have done anything to encourage the sort of investment that was needed to prevent that happening—investment I might say that has now taken place. 
The National Party was concerned that electricity was being classed as a good and particularly perplexed at the concept of electricity being something that could be considered to have a spare part could be improved or delivered as the good itself with some greater level of quality. Everyone knows that it is service delivery around electricity that is most important. One cannot improve the quality of electricity; it is either electricity or it is not. As my colleague Dr Nick Smith pointed out last night what are consumers to do—bottle up some of the electricity that they have been supplied and take it down to the local power company and complain about its quality? That is not possible. There are some very silly aspects in this legislation that should not see it proceed. 
We have also expressed at some length our concerns about water being included in this legislation. My reasons for that are very simple. I come from the city of Christchurch where we have about the best natural drinking water of anywhere in New Zealand. We have deep aquifers that bubble the water up through the shingle; and it comes out of the tap completely untreated with any chemicals at all most of the time. 
However if one were to ask the city council what grade its water is considered to be when it is measured against the so-called New Zealand standard for water quality it is not an A grade it is a B grade. It gets that B grade because it does not have certain chemical additives that the standard requires to reach A grade. We could now have a situation where consumers are unhappy with that ignorant of the fact that they have the very best water in the world. We go to our city council and say to them that it must improve the quality of that water by adding those chemicals. We would end up like many other parts of New Zealand turning on the tap to be greeted with the smell of chlorine or any other purifiers that are added to the water. That is very sad. 
Is it a real prospect? I think that it is. I look at the Christchurch City Council annual plan and the submissions to that plan and I note that when it comes to indicators of satisfaction with water supply in the year 2002 it received only an 82 percent rating. Therefore 12 percent of the population out there were unhappy with things. If they had been able to specify that they were unhappy with the pressure unhappy with the colour of the water because of the quality of the pipes then I would understand that and so would the city council. That is why according to the council’s plan in the next 12 months the council intends to spend some $5.5 million to improve pipe work other facilities pumps and improving security around the source of the water supplies as well. The council did not need this legislation to be encouraged to do that. 
The other issue that really does perplex us is telecommunications being left out of the legislation. This is a Government that has Ministers running up and down the country making speeches and being photographed where there is anything to do with the new technology that is being touted as the great saviour for the New Zealand economy in the future. Would members not think that with such a desire to promote the so-called knowledge wave there might be some understanding that telecommunications broadband capacity and so on is very much part of how that progresses? 
I would have thought it not unreasonable that everyone in New Zealand at some point should expect to have access to broadband communication. I would have thought that it was quite reasonable for rural communities to expect that over time they would have broadband in their communities to such an extent that they would be able to connect very very speedily with the rest of the world. These days farming is very much part of the technological advances that we see. In fact the Government is so confident that it can get technological advance out of farming that we are now to levy cows sheep goats pigs and any other thing that moves on four legs for the so-called flatulence tax. 
John Key 
: What about chickens? 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: There we go: the two-legged anomaly! Apparently that money will go into research to try to reduce those emissions. I am not sure how one goes about that but for a country that grows grass very well it is a little bit concerning that the Government is doing research into how we might give animals other types of feed to prevent that particular exhaust problem. 
So on the one hand the Government says: “Yes we understand the capacity that technology has to advance the nation.” then on the other hand says: “We’re not going to see the engine of that technology the broadband telecommunications network subject to consumer protection subject to consumer guarantee and subject to consumer expectation of access and quality delivery.” 
A number of my colleagues have raised the issue of computer software. I have noted that the legislation very specifically talks about computer software being a good—in other words people go down to the computer adviser buy a disc it has a programme on it and according to this legislation that is the good. It is not. All people get is a licence. I do not think there is any indication in the legislation that those who sell licences to any product have an obligation to the people who purchase that licence. That was never explained by the Minister in the Committee stage. That explicit question was asked of her and we did not get an answer. That leaves us in a position of concluding that this legislation does very little for New Zealand consumers other than to guarantee that their costs for electricity water and potentially computer software will go up very considerably. 
Finally we note the irony of computer software being considered a good but the means by which one uses it one’s telecommunications network broadband facilitates and suchlike are not considered a good. So the National Party finds itself quite unable to support this legislation.