Nash StuartSTUART NASH (Labour—Napier): I would like to respond to a couple of comments that the honourable member Melissa Lee has just made. First of all she said that this bill is responding to the Government's commitments and it is just not so. As my colleague Megan Woods said it is a good bill. We support the bill but it just does not go far enough. There is nothing aspirational or visionary about it. I know that the member Chris Bishop said that Labour seems to be captured by vision or that we talk about aspiration too much. This is one area that I have a real passion for because I think this can play into our global brand on such a big scale and in a way that adds value not just to our country or our brand but to our whole sector and the way people view us. Let me give you an example of that. Simon Bridges who has talked about the electric vehicle policy I must admit for quite a long time now—I remember when he went to cut the ribbon. I think it was for the 1000th electric vehicle to be registered on New Zealand roads. He turns up in this huge big diesel BMW. He gets out cuts the ribbon for the electric vehicle smiles for the camera has a couple of words and then he jumps back into this huge big diesel BMW and drives back to Parliament. To me there is a—Meka Whaitiri: Irony?STUART NASH: It is just wrong. There is an irony. I was going to say hypocrisy" but there is an irony in that. The thing is that when we want to make these sorts of changes it is often that the Government has to lead the way. A lot of press releases and a lot of commentary to do with this bill talk about the fact that the Government has to work with the private sector to make this happen and I could not agree more. But often what has to happen is the Government has to take the first step to give the private sector the confidence to actually invest. Let me give you an example. My understanding is that there are around about 17000 vehicles in the wider Government fleet and let us make an assumption that they are all on 3 by 1-year leases—that assumption will not be correct but it is just easy for mathematics. Let us say that 15000 of those can be converted to electric vehicles (EVs). After 8 years you have got about 40000 vehicles on the road simply because the Government made a decision to convert to electric vehicles. There are a whole lot of assumptions amongst that but I suppose the point I am making is that if the Government led the way in this—if the Government was really serious about driving a change towards electric vehicles—then the first thing it would do is convert the Crown fleet.Imagine if we picked up dignitaries in a Tesla. Imagine turning up at the airport—CR1 is a big Tesla and it is an electric vehicle. That would send a very very clear message. I have got a friend who knows Elon Musk quite well actually. I mentioned this to him and he said that knowing Elon and the fact that he is a fantastic self-promoter if the New Zealand Government went to Tesla and said it wanted to convert the whole Crown fleet to Teslas Elon Musk would probably go: "Absolutely. Tell me where you want them and when you want them and let's put them in." It would not only look good for us it would look good for Tesla.The thing that I suppose disappoints me about this is that we go to the world with a brand—we go to the world with a brand that says "clean green" "100% Pure". The interesting thing is that this brand started out as a tourism brand and it was so successful that it sort of morphed into our national brand. In 2005 the then Ministry of Economic Development tried to place a value on this brand. It is very difficult to value a brand but they came up with a figure—this was 12 years ago. They came up with the figure that the "clean green" "100% Pure" brand was worth about $20 billion a year to our country. At the same time a group—I think it was Deloitte—came out with another survey that said 80 percent of companies when they are exporting products overseas leverage off that clean green pure brand. When Melissa says that we are an environmentally friendly country well our brand says that—that is how we go to the world—but it is actually not the reality. You know 60 percent of our rivers are unswimmable at some point in time.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Back to the bill.STUART NASH: No Mr Assistant Speaker this is about energy efficiency—[Interruption] The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): This is about—back to the bill.Hon Member: Do as you're told.STUART NASH: Who said that? The arrogance—9 years of arrogance and you end up with that. But anyway what I am talking about is—we are talking about energy innovation. Energy and innovation—it is what drives this country. It is about where we see ourselves. It is about how we sell ourselves to the world and we are just not doing it well.I am a huge fan of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) and this allows EECA to actually derive its fees to drive energy efficiency from not just the electricity sector which it can at the moment but from the gas and petroleum sector as well. That is a good thing. But when I hear Government members stand up and say "Isn't it wonderful. We've insulated all these houses and we now live in a much better world."—well we do to a certain extent but 50000 New Zealand kids are admitted to hospital every single year with respiratory disease. That is a disease of poverty so let us not pat ourselves on the back until that 50000 figure gets down to zero. That is aspirational. I know Chris Bishop does not like aspiration but that is aspirational.There is one thing I would like to talk about in this bill and this has sort of been overlooked. That is the fact that we have changed the way that the gas levy is going to be collected. In the past the collection of the gas levy sat at the wholesale selling point and what we heard from the officials was that this was woefully inefficient and quite complex to the point that the levy just was not being collected. There was never any suggestion of any form of illegal activity fraud or anything like that; it was just so complex that it just was not being collected. What we decided—or what the officials decided and we teased this through and we agreed—is that in fact we would change it so that the gas levy would be collected by the retailers as opposed to the wholesalers.This makes sense. I understand this but the one concern I do have—and I have brought this up a couple of times when speaking about this bill—is that we are all aware that if Parliament decides there is going to be a levy placed in a certain point in the supply chain often retailers or wholesalers or whatever businesses are involved use that as an excuse to put up the bill or to charge more. What we do not want to see and what we have specifically put in the report for this bill—we will monitor the way in which this levy is implemented to ensure that consumers are not unduly or unfairly charged. What we actually heard from the officials is that the amount that this levy represents to each consumer is just an infinitesimal amount—barely a cent. The last thing we want to see—and I suppose the committee is putting the retail sector on notice—on any consumer's gas bill especially in the middle of winter is an increased charge because Parliament has decided that this is the point in the supply chain at which the levy will be collected. We just want to put it out there—we do not want to see any increase in the gas bill because of what Parliament has done here.Let me get back to electric cars and energy efficiency. What Mr Bridges has said is that we want to double the number of EVs to 64000 by 2021. If the way we are going to do that is simply by allowing electric vehicles to drive in bus lanes well I do not think that is good enough. I would love to see 64000 electric vehicles in New Zealand by 2021. It is an aspirational target—I hope he did not check with Mr Bishop because he would not have liked that. We have just got to be—when I say "we" I mean a Government so I suppose it is going to come down to us in a couple of months—has got to be more proactive in the way it does this. I must admit in this area I am actually not for subsidies. I do not think we should subsidise electric vehicles because I think all that does is—it has the potential impact to distort the market much to the market's overall detriment certainly in the long term.But as mentioned what we can do is—Governments can influence behaviour or influence outcomes by their own behaviour. What I think we have said—and I do not think I am releasing any policy now because I think it has been out there—is we would actually convert the Government fleet to electric vehicles or the majority of them because that is about walking the walk. I think that what happens is the general public tends to respond and take us as politicians seriously when we say "This is what we would like to see in the country." and then we go and do it. Too often what happens—and this bill is a classic case—is we say: "This is what we would like to see—64000 electric vehicles; fantastic." Then quite rightly so people ask what we are doing about this. Well nothing—we are just driving these big German diesel BMWs. It is the wrong signal. We are supporting this bill. Labour does support anything that drives energy efficiency. We are supporting anything that drives energy innovation. We just think that this bill could have gone a whole lot further. It actually could have been innovative it could have led the way and it could have once again put us at the forefront of global leadership in this space but it fails yet again. We need fresh ideas in this space."