Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management and Electricity Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Resource Management and Electricity Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22322] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 National members have criticised the Labour Government for not doing enough to ensure we get more big power stations more big pylons and more big roads. They need not be concerned. This whole legislation and everything that flows from it is about forcing big infrastructure projects on to unwilling communities. In Part 2 those two clauses about works crossing roads—extending it from 110 to 400 kilovolts—are just a detail of the Electricity Act. The real meat of it is in Part 1 which we have discussed before. 
The combination of absolute environmental standards with ministerial direction may say for example that huge transmission lines shall be a permitted use in district plans—that is clearly what is envisaged. National environmental standards will say for example that electromagnetic fields must be allowed to be 100 times stronger than those that have been shown in recent UK studies to be associated with a doubling of leukaemia risk in children because that is about the standard that is being advised by the National Radiation Laboratory at the moment. The weakening of the rights of the public to make submissions and the striking out of submissions from members of the public who offend councils in some way is all part of closing down public opposition to this. This is being done for only one way of providing for our electricity needs. It is not as though there is no other way of keeping the lights on in Auckland. There are lots of alternatives that could do so without imposing those huge transmission lines across Waikato. But this Government has done absolutely nothing to make sure that those alternatives can be properly developed. 
The Government has given the Electricity Commission the job of evaluating the transmission lines against the alternatives but has not done anything to ensure that the alternatives will be properly developed so that they can be evaluated. There are certainly no law changes being proposed to make it easier for example for new gas finds to be used as a direct fuel and to be taken to Auckland through the gas pipelines rather than being wasted and turned into electricity at 50 percent efficiency or less which requires new transmission lines to get it up to Auckland. No legislation is being proposed to make it easier to get a coordinated programme of energy efficiency implemented across Auckland’s commercial buildings where so much electricity is wasted at the moment and could be saved at much less cost than generating it. There is no special legislation or other Government favours being proposed to enable better metering and load management in order to send the right pricing signals in Auckland about the time of day of electricity use. There is a lot of technical stuff that one can do with the lines that will reduce that peak loading on the grid. 
There is no special legislation or other provisions being put forward by this Government to make it easier to use wood waste in Northland as a fuel for forestry product processing which would reduce the amount of power that had to be brought to Auckland. All those alternatives are clearly possible and cost-effective but all the effort is going into making sure that it is easy for the pylons to be built because that is what Transpower New Zealand wants to do. It is extremely unfortunate that when we have planning that is designed to facilitate a particular way out of some problems we have such as power demand in Auckland we are facilitating only one approach to the problem—actually the most destructive and unpopular approach—rather than facilitating the alternatives that could have solved the problem.