Bennett David: Electricity Transparency Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBennett David: Electricity Transparency Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8521. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East): It gives me great pleasure to speak on the Electricity Transparency Bill. It is great to hear about the last speaker Stuart Nash’s power bill and the ins and outs of his power usage. But the reality is if that member has a bill that discloses all that information why do we need this Parliament to prescribe to other providers that they should do the same? And that really comes down to what it is about. This is about the Labour Party thinking it knows best and telling people what they should have in their bills. This is typical Labour Party rhetoric and—Stuart Nash: It’s about transparency.DAVID BENNETT: It is not about transparency; it is about prescription and it is about creating more cost when the market already provides it. The market can provide that information as that member has said. Why does that member not believe that other companies would transfer their technology—Stuart Nash: Why won’t they?DAVID BENNETT: Why do they not do that? Because there is not a desire amongst the public to do so Mr Nash and if there was a desire amongst the public they would do so. This Parliament should represent the people’s desires. It should represent what the people want not what Mr Nash or what Mr Shearer want in their power bills. Rather we should be looking at what is in the best interests of New Zealand consumers—Fletcher Tabuteau: Oh well don’t—DAVID BENNETT: —and New Zealand consumers have that choice. It is all right for the New Zealand First Party to sit there and groan and moan. It has never supported anything that has been good for New Zealand consumers. It never has and it never will because its party is a party of negativity and it is against any competition in any market and that is shown by its prescriptive nature as well. It is a wonder that those members’ boss is not here to prescribe to them their speeches—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! [Interruption] Order!DAVID BENNETT: That is the normal approach in the New Zealand First Party. But we do not need to put this into our electricity market and into our electricity companies and their billing arrangements. They are quite able to do it themselves. If they feel that it is a desire of the public to do so they will do so and without creating a lot of requirements on companies that may not be able to do so or may not have the desire to do so and on consumers that may not have the desire to pay for that extra increase of collection then it is something that I think this Parliament should not invest its time in—making companies do something that they are able to do if they want to and consumers are able to request by moving to the company that delivers that information. Far be it for this Parliament to believe that it has the role to be prescriptive to all New Zealanders in how they live their lives. And I think that is partly what it comes down to with Mr Shearer and Mr Nash—looking to have every little bit of control and every little bit of prescription over consumers rather than giving the market the choice.Members may say “Well that could be a very limiting approach.” but it actually is not. It actually is about giving consumers and companies more important the ability to have some flexibility. Why not let them be flexible suppliers to the market? Why not let companies be flexible in the way that they deliver their bills to their customers? That flexibility is important for the delivery of products. If we are not flexible with their products then they will not be flexible in their billing arrangements. So it goes to a prescriptive approach to the electricity market and we all know what the Labour Party wants to do in the electricity market. The Labour Party wants to nationalise that market and that is why the New Zealand First Party is supporting this bill because it wants to go back to those days of the nationalisation of the electricity market. It was Labour’s policy at the last election. At the last election its policy was to nationalise the electricity market and that was its policy. This is another symptom of this.Stuart Nash: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. It was never our policy to nationalise—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! No no no. You are wasting the House’s time.DAVID BENNETT: For those listening that is a common ploy by those who are in trouble—to try to do points of order when they know that they are in trouble. It was Labour’s policy; everyone knows that. Labour may not be able to enunciate that before the next election in its no-policy approach to the next election but it certainly does believe that and this is just another part of that process that it would go through. The New Zealand First Party is always a party that supports those kinds of things because it believes in nationalising everything in this country and then it would sell it as its leader has—