Brownlee GerryHon GERRY BROWNLEE (National): This bill is nothing more than window dressing to give credence to a failed review by the Minister. It's unbelievable. The Minister went out some years ago and said We'll have a review of electricity pricing." There was a big noise made about how prices were too high etc.; they may well have been but there will always be some reason in a market system as to why a price goes up and why a price should come down. But there is nothing in this bill that would make any of that any more compelling than exists at the moment.I think it's important to recognise the history. This bill has been in place for 12 years. Over the 10 years prior to that New Zealand had five electricity crises years; years where everyone was asked to conserve electricity because our supply was starting to run out. The extraordinary thing was watching it then from Opposition was that actually the faceplate capacity for generating electricity never changed; what changed was: each year that the available supply of energy for conversion into electricity energy was artificially manipulated and so there had to be some change to the system. That 2010 Act did make that change; prior to that Act we had a thing called the Electricity Commission that was put in place by the Helen Clark Labour Government. It was an attempt to try and get a few more rules around distribution etc. but it did not go far enough and it did not deal with the single problem that you've got: that electricity is an immediate medium. It can be put into a battery certainly and stored to some extent as usable energy but by and large once it goes down the line it needs to be used. The question always is: how is someone who is distributing or generating able to be paid for the work that they've done to get that energy conversion so that that electrical energy is available to the economy? Now that does mean that you will have an enormous number of rules an enormous number of algorithms an enormous number of nodes and distribution points take-off points—you could go through all of the acronyms you like that this industry is so full of but they are all important because they simply are about getting the electricity supply to where it needs to be.I have to say that since these changes were made in 2010 New Zealand has not had an electricity crisis. We have not had a dry-year shortage of electricity. We haven't had the sort of runaway pricing that we were experiencing for 12 years prior to this bill coming in. That is quite indisputable. What we've got here is a Minister who decided that she could take on the electricity industry and sort out things for the consumer make it a lot better and all we've got is these few recommendations to come out of that very expensive review many of which simply confirm the powers that the Electricity Authority currently has.The bits that are alarming in here are that we're apparently going to establish yet another consumer advocacy body—there are heaps of them out there; we're setting up another one—and it's going to be paid for by consumers. Now the other side of the House will say "No no; it's going to be paid for by the electricity producers and distributors." Well who do they on-charge to? Consumers. So here we have an effort from the Minister to drop the power price by increasing it. Now that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.Then there is this issue of the so-called codes or the rules under which all of the distributors and generators work being subject to change by the Minister. Well let me tell the House that prior to this Act that is what happened. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) would take some rule recommendations—and they were daily almost—from the Electricity Commission they would have a look at them themselves and then they'd bring them to the Minister and say "Minister you need to sign these into some kind of action." One of the interesting things I found was that in asking for an explanation in what those rules did very few people at MBIE could ever tell you. So there was a need to have a body that was specialist in this regard. That's why the authority was set up. I think that taking this back from the authority is a retrograde step—very retrograde.Then of course there's the issue as just stated by Jamie Strange the chairman of the committee that considered the bill saying that this is going to enable greater competition. Well how? How? Anybody can become an electricity distributor in this country if they want to. Anyone can become a retailer of electricity. They can buy that product on the market they can buy it on the forward market they can buy it on the futures market and they can market it or sell it to whoever is prepared to buy it off them. The price will always be set by what is effectively the price of the day; often averaged over a period of time. There will be ability to take out long-term hedges. All that exists now; it's not going to change because of these very minor proposals in this bill. I still can't work out exactly what it is that would give anyone confidence that this is going to increase competition.So beyond this second reading there will be a committee stage and the Minister is going to have to explain to the House and therefore to the country how some of these very cosmetic changes alongside the very significant change of taking power or authority off the Electricity Authority back into the Minister's office is in any way going to benefit consumers. The reality is that electricity demand is going to increase in this country. We do need to have a greater effort on conservation—that doesn't mean not using it; it means using it better—and also of course new generation as well. We know that new generation is just a nightmare for anybody wanting to bring it on stream at the moment through the Resource Management Act. Let's be very clear: the Southern Lakes scheme would never get built in today's age—never get built. Yet it is the thing that so many people on the other side of the House go about crowing about because we're at 80 percent renewable. We're actually at less renewable now than we were in 2017.Then of course there is the big question that's not answered in this bill: why is New Zealand importing coal to burn for electricity production? Why are we doing that? Why does the great climate-change-is-the-issue-of-our-generation Government allow that to happen? They're all over there mumbling into their masks saying "It's not happening—it's not happening." Well go and have a look at the massive stockpile that exists at Huntly.Stuart Smith: 800000.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Go and find out—my colleague here says that it's 800000 tonnes; call that a million. It's a huge amount. Ask yourself: why is it that we've practically destroyed a transition fuel—gas—in this country so that we can import coal from Indonesia? It's great for the Indonesians; not good for us. Unbelievable—unbelievable.So there's no need to take the full time allocation on this! We'll certainly be taking a lot of time in the committee stage because this is as I said before what you might describe as a vanity bill. It's the sort of bill that a Minister comes up with when the actual results from an expensive review don't show up anything of any great significance. So it's a bit like Minister Faafoi today saying that when he gets grumpy things happen; well in this case obviously the energy Minister got a bit grumpy saying "Well you know I said we're having a review I said we're going to drop the price. We've got to do something." So the officials have scurried back and they've come up with this bill. It's taken up a lot of the House's time it's got a huge amount of promise if you listen to speeches that have been made today but it won't make one bit of difference to the price that consumers pay for electricity beyond the additional cost they'll face in paying for their own advocacy group. That's what the Minister's supposed to do; not have some greater-good group over there paid an enormous fortune to give that advice.So this is not a bill that we'll support. It is a bill we'll try and make a little bit better through the committee process. I look forward to that."