Henare Peeni: Electricity Industry (Small-Scale Renewable Distributed Generation) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHenare Peeni: Electricity Industry (Small-Scale Renewable Distributed Generation) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 11 November 2015. Volume:710;Page:7913. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Amongst that confusion it seems that not only are Government members tired of saying no but also they just seem too tired to debate this particular bill.Carmel Sepuloni: They’re just tired in general.PEENI HENARE: They are just tired in general. Maybe they need to consider more ways of renewable energy—something to get them a bit more proactive in the debate in this House.Can I echo the sentiments of my colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson towards Mr Hughes for his fantastic work and indeed the entire Green Party for your continual work in this space around making sure that we leave a taonga and we leave an environment for our tamariki and for our mokopuna. So I rise to support this bill in its first reading.The bill amends the objective of the Electricity Authority to include the line “to promote … greater use of renewable energy including from distributed generation sources”. We will break that up into two parts. The first one is “to promote … greater use of renewable energy”. I am well-connected in the Māori circles and I visit many marae across the country. I know of many discussions across marae around the country all around how do they involve themselves in the market of renewable energy. They are looking for better ways to utilise their natural resources from water to wind and of course to capture the great sunshine that we have.So anything that incentivises our people to get involved in more renewable energy sources I think is a very good thing. Although the member opposite mentioned how we are already functioning at around 80 percent of renewable energy sources well what is wrong with aiming towards 100 percent of renewable energy sources? So that is a good thing to be able to promote particularly amongst our Māori communities—the ability for them to get involved in renewable energy sources.What kinds of benefits does this bring? It obviously brings benefits. As the tourism spokesperson I can say that those in the international community look to New Zealand. They look to New Zealand for leadership in this particular space. They also look to New Zealand because of our beautiful environment. Most people who come here want to go to see our beautiful mountains. They want to swim in our beautiful rivers which sadly at the moment is just a little bit harder to do than it was when I was a child. They also want to come here to water-ski on the lakes and to go on bush-walks and track walks and even on cycleways.They want to be able to do all of this and I think if we can move our country into a focus on our environment which I believe is just one part of this bill and what it tries to promote then that can only mean good things for our tourism industry—but with a word of caution there that it must be managed and it must be maintained in a clear plan to make sure that the boost in visitor numbers does not have a negative impact on our environment. But I digress.My colleague the Hon Ruth Dyson talked about the distributed generation sources. The bill talks about the fact that if you establish a renewable energy source and you have excess power and you want to redistribute your power to the national grid then you should be able to do so and you should also be able to do so at the market rate. As it stands currently it seems that the bigger power companies which have a very big strong stranglehold on the industry at the moment get to dictate and determine what that looks like without any real sort of independent authority or oversight. So I think that this is a particularly good bill. I want to just echo Labour’s support for this bill and also to congratulate Mr Hughes. Kia ora tātou.