Sowry Roger: Electricity and Gas Industries Bill — In Committee 
Sowry Roger: Electricity and Gas Industries Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:16019] 
Hon ROGER SOWRY (National) 
: 
 I want to continue on the points being made last week when this bill was being debated. Despite the senior Government whip’s pat reading of the Labour Party’s research lines about the Minister being good and all that sort of nonsense the real issue is that when this bill was introduced and sent to the Commerce Committee last year the Government said it had to be passed in a hurry. The Government made the energy companies and the interested sector people put in their submissions over Christmas—whilst the Minister was wandering around on a beach—and the select committee commenced hearings on the bill. We have now reached 12 October and the Minister is still trying to get the bill passed. He has backdated some of the clauses in this bill to 20 May 2003 which is when he deems that parts of this bill will have come into force. 
National thinks that retrospective legislation is bad. In a commercial environment it is even worse. The Minister is not unpicking any of the commercial reforms of the electricity market. He is not doing anything for the market. The member for Whanganui clearly had not read the bill before she read the Labour research unit’s notes because she alluded to the fact that this bill fixes up and changes a whole lot of the market. No it does not. What it does is set up a bureaucracy to watch over the market and sets up some rather convoluted workings between the Commerce Commission and the Electricity Commission which in fact endanger the independence of the Commerce Commission. 
As well as that the bill overrides some of the contractual arguments or arrangements that might be occurring in the sector and I want to particularly focus on those. Transpower charges lines companies for example for work that is being done or that has been carried out such as upgrades and the like by means of its transitional pricing methodology—so it is the lines companies who end up paying in the end. One part of the bill provides that Transpower’s pricing methodology is deemed to have come into force on 26 January 2004. The bill was before a select committee the Government clearly did not have an open mind on whether things would be changed and it has now said with regard to a whole lot of commercial arrangements that it is too bad about any arrangements or disputes because the State will use its power to ensure that Transpower gets paid what it requires. Of course what happens is that individual consumers end up having to foot the bill because they cannot contest it and the arrangements have run over the top of existing commercial arrangements. 
I think that is bad. This matter was so urgent that it had to be passed quickly. United Future members voted procedurally with the Government as they always do; they lay down on their backs and decided that this bill should go to a select committee and be dealt with really really quickly and urgently. Then of course United Future did not put anybody on the committee anyway. They did not bother with it so I guess it is to the fore for them. But what has happened is that the bill has come back before the House taking not just 1 or 2 weeks or even 1 or 2 months to get to that stage but months and months and months. We believe the dates in the bill should be changed and we have put forward an amendment providing for that. We believe that it is commercially unfair to backdate it as far as it has been backdated.