Hipkins Chris: Electricity Industry Bill — In Committee 
Hipkins Chris: Electricity Industry Bill — In Committee 
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CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak on clause 3 of the Electricity Industry Bill. I will make some introductory comments. Labour will be opposing this bill. We opposed it at the first reading we opposed it through the select committee process and we will continue to oppose it now. This bill simply dusts off Max Bradford’s old policies of more market more privatisation and more competition in the electricity sector. I can see that Roger Douglas is getting very excited about the bill already but it will do nothing to address the three fundamental priorities in the electricity sector: security of supply affordability and sustainability. It does nothing to address those things and that is the reason why Labour will be opposing it. 
New Zealanders are struggling to make ends meet at the moment. The National Government’s GST increase which will of course apply to electricity bills will do nothing to help them with that particular predicament. Therefore this bill is simply another blow because it does not deal with the fundamental issues that New Zealanders are currently facing. Those fundamental issues concern the cost of living going up which the Electricity Industry Bill does nothing to deal with at all. 
Labour members took a very active interest in hearing submissions during the select committee process. We were concerned about a number of the issues raised and we were concerned that the analysis does not appear to have been done that would justify many of the provisions in the bill. I will be talking about more of those issues. We were particularly concerned about the asset swap involving the Waitaki water catchment system which is something I will talk more about when we get to that part of the bill. The case has not been made for that swap. Treasury raised concerns about it and so did the Institute of Professional Engineers New Zealand and so forth. So we will be raising a number of concerns regarding that when we get to that point in the bill. 
This bill as I mentioned in my introductory comments does nothing to deal with National’s major election promise when it came to electricity prices. Gerry Brownlee John Key and Bill English went up and down the country saying that power prices were too high and saying that Labour had let power prices continue to go up and had not done anything about that. But what do we know? Well here is a bill. What does it do? It does not address the issue of power prices which is what New Zealanders were all expecting the Government to deal with when it came into office and when it introduced this bill into the House. This bill is silent on power prices. In fact it will do nothing to control the exorbitant rise in electricity prices that people have seen. It will do nothing to address the concerns raised by the Commerce Commission in its recent report on the electricity market. In fact it raises a whole lot of new concerns. It simply goes back to the failed experiment that Max Bradford started in 1998. 
One of the criticisms that Gerry Brownlee keeps coming back to the Labour Opposition on is that he says we had 9 years to deal with that so why did we not do something? Well it is very difficult to unscramble an egg. The Government sold Contact Energy and privatised a lot of the retailers and lines companies to the point— 
Aaron Gilmore 
: The Government didn’t privatise them. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Well the local authorities did—under direction from the Government. 
Aaron Gilmore 
: They chose. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
 They chose to? Under direction from the Government they privatised the retailers and the lines companies and it is very difficult to unscramble that particular egg and get back to the point where there can be any kind of coherent system. So instead the previous Labour Government established the Electricity Commission which was designed to address some of the failures in the market. But Gerry Brownlee with this bill is now stripping out many of the functions of the Electricity Commission by establishing a new Electricity Authority. That authority will look at only a small part of the equation though and one of the biggest opportunities for us if we are talking about more efficient use of energy is to get people to use less energy if they do not need to. But that function is being taken away from the Electricity Commission; it will not be with the Electricity Authority and that is just crazy. If we want the Electricity Authority to be the overarching body that looks at all of these things and that manages the electricity sector then saying to it that it can manage the electricity sector but that we do not want it doing anything about electricity efficiency and the more efficient use of electricity—actually reducing demand on the system—is just crazy. For example one way we avoid significant capital investment in the transmission system and in the management of that system is to get more distributed use of electricity more localised generation and more efficient use of electricity which is something this bill does not address. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker) 
: Just before I take the next call I remind members that we are in the Committee stage or the “nuts and bolts” stage. This is the simplest clause that one could hope to see in legislation: “This Act binds the Crown.” Members should address their comments to the purpose of the clause and not have a wide-ranging debate.