Brownlee Gerry: Electricity Industry Reform Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Brownlee Gerry: Electricity Industry Reform Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:644;Page:13982] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 The National Party will support the Electricity Industry Reform Amendment Bill being referred to the Commerce Committee. We do so making the observation that this bill and its intention joins a very long list of policies announced by the National Party then flogged by the Labour Government.  
Sue Moroney 
: No one believes that. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Poor old Sue Moroney is the Labour junior whip. I mention her name because her opportunities to have it recorded in  
Hansard 
 during her political career have been relatively few. We had a policy in 2005 going into the election that did exactly this. If the member were to go through the  
Hansard 
 record of the debate on the 2004 amendment legislation she would see reported throughout it our comment that restricting lines companies in the way they were being restricted then would not result in the necessary pick-up.  
The Hon Harry Duynhoven who does not know much about this topic and who unfortunately is just a stand-in Minister of Energy tonight did his best. He read from the officials’ notes and he did a beautiful job of reading them. It was almost seamless; one would not have known he was reading— 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: Other than the strings! He’s just a puppet. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: —that is right—other than the pauses sometimes being in the wrong place. He tried to explain what this is all about. It is pretty simple. Lines companies throughout the country obviously have an interest in electricity distribution. They also have very very stringent limits on what they are able to invest in. They are companies that have particularly strong balance sheets and the ability for those companies to invest in generation—particularly embedded generation or distributed generation—is quite considerable. If they did invest in a wind farm that had 100 megawatts of capacity they would never have that 100 megawatts available for sale because we know that a wind farm works at only 43 percent or 45 percent efficiency if we are lucky. They would be constantly chasing their tails. This provision says that the lines companies can go out and retail their full 10000 gigawatt hours that they can supply that by buying in and out of the market that they can hedge that cost by taking out hedge contracts and that they can fully participate in the market provided that they put the generation in place and that is the key to it.  
This country has a scarcity of electrical energy but we should not. We should have an abundance of electrical energy but unfortunately for the last 8 years the Labour Government has made conditions so tough that no one has invested to any great extent. It is very interesting that in the 9 years of the last National Government nearly 1600 megawatts of new electricity was put in place but in the last 8 years the amount has been much less than 700 megawatts. A lot of that has been renewal which we want but its efficiency rating is so low that it causes a problem.  
Surprisingly this is not a bad attempt by the Government to put into legislation the National Party’s 2005 energy policy. For that reason we are prepared to consider it at the Commerce Committee. We think that some of the arm’s length separations in here are a little bit of a joke. I guess they reflect how the factions work inside the Labour Party— 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: Oh yes there are plenty of those.  
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Yes. Everyone knows they are all one but there are different heads of factions and different handshakes going on around the place at different times and they all try to keep their little bit secret from each other. I do not think that is a good way to conduct business. 
We will look at the provisions as the select committee considers them. All in all I do think that if this law is enacted and the lines companies respond to the opportunities offered by the change in the law it should have quite an effect in at least holding the price of electricity if not seeing it fall.