Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. Well it is a pleasure to speak on the Electricity Industry Amendment Bill. We just did the committee of the whole House stage yesterday so I'm going to cover quite a bit of the ground that we did yesterday because we actually asked a lot of questions of the Minister and we got very little in the way of answers. We got quite a lot of hot air and quite a bit of snarky comments but nothing in the way of substantive answers to our questions so we still don't really understand why this bill has been brought in. Some of the things are OK but actually we can't support this bill. I mean it is quite outside of what the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) advised in some of the provisions it's outside good practice and most importantly it won't address the single issue that is the problem at the moment in the electricity sector and that's high electricity prices. It does nothing to address that problem at all. I did note that the member Priyanca Radhakrishnan who just took her seat talked about the new Consumer Advocacy Council and she said that it would be rebalancing bargaining power for small consumers against large industrials. Well I've got some information that the Minister might be quite interested in: industrial electricity costs have increased from 2017 through to 2021 by 24.7 percent. Yesterday I asked the Minister of Energy and Resources that question and I'm sure my colleagues here will remember that question. The Minister alluded to it being 0.1 of a percent—that's what she said. It was completely wrong. That was really an example of how the questioning went yesterday and how we didn't get any information really despite trying to lead the Minister with enough information so that she could actually answer the questions but she didn't. Of course she blustered on about something else. Penny Simmonds: She doesn't listen to anyone's information.STUART SMITH: Well that's right—absolutely. So why is that—why have industrial prices increased so much more? The rebalancing that the Labour member just mentioned in her speech is totally unnecessary and it seems strange that we'd have another entity set up by the Government to try and do what actually the Commerce Commission does anyway. So we're going to have another entity checking on another entity to see whether they can help people to rebalance when actually it is the large industrials that are paying more than anyone else and their costs have gone up quite simply because they operate on the spot market—for very good reasons. They may have hedging mechanisms and so on which we don't need to go into in this debate but the reality is the sector has a sword of Damocles sort of hanging over the sector and that is actually Lake Onslow—the Onslow pumped hydro scheme that the Minister referred to yesterday. That is actually having a hugely negative impact on the ability for the industry to decide whether to build more generation or not because they don't know what the impact of Onslow will be or this pumped hydro scheme—a mega - Muldoon-like Think Big project which I thought New Zealand had moved on from. Admittedly Rob Muldoon was a National Prime Minister but I don't support those projects. I don't think anyone on this side of the House would support Government intervening in such a way.As I said yesterday at the Wind Energy Conference what gets built where is not a decision that should be made inside a Minister's office. That is something that the industry itself should make. They are the people who are investing their capital. They know—Penny Simmonds: The Minister's stifling innovation.STUART SMITH: Well that's right and it's actually a shame that we've got to this. But the Minister has completely gone right off track and thinks that she is the font of knowledge sitting in her office and knows what should be built where—she knows how to operate the electricity sector. She has in fact given herself some power to actually go over top of the Electricity Authority. In fact in the regulatory impact statement it said that the Minister's power to made code will temporarily duplicate that of the authority and does not conform with the practice of independent Crown entities—the Minister's ability to regulate over the top of the authority is inconsistent with the independent Crown entities. MBIE have said Don't do it." The Minister said "Yes please I want that power."The Electricity Authority is an independent body that knows what it's doing. It's got a huge staff that—well not a huge staff but very well-qualified staff. They're very clever people in there. They know what to do and yet the Minister thinks she's got a better idea of how to manage that. I think that's just outrageous. Penny Simmonds: She thinks she knows best. The Government knows best.STUART SMITH: Yes—well that's what they believe yeah. So having more bureaucrats isn't actually going to help. Having the Minister coming in over the top isn't going to help with electricity prices; in fact it will create more uncertainty and less investment where it should be. As I said yesterday the Onslow project—and I just referred to this earlier—is like the sword of Damocles hanging over the industry. The problem is it's going to take a long time to make a decision on this as well and I've just looked up a couple of projects before I came down to the House. Switzerland has a pumped hydro scheme that they started building in 2008 and I'm sure that you'll be shocked to learn that it's only just opened now. Fourteen years it took to build—14 long years—and the cost overruns were enormous and that is exactly what we're facing here. Penny Simmonds: But Switzerland is generally efficient not like this Government.STUART SMITH: Well that's right. The Swiss are generally pretty efficient. It would take a lot of pocket knives I guess. Snowy 2.0 in Australia—that's a really interesting scheme and a similar sort of pumped hydro scheme to here in New Zealand. Well that was the brainchild of former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull who announced the scheme in March of 2017. Now that scheme was to be finished in 2021 at a cost of $2 billion with no taxpayer subsidy. They've come back looking for another $2 billion of taxpayer subsidy to help finish the scheme. The scheme will end up being $6 billion to build and then it's $4 billion to upgrade the transmission system so we're talking $10 billion from $2 billion—five times the cost. Everyone I've spoken to in the electricity sector—everyone who is an engineer anyway; except for one person—has said that Onslow is not a good idea. It will have an unsettling effect while it's still out there until a final decision has been made. We don't know what it will do to the sector. It's actually in the wrong place. It will take an upgrade of the high-voltage direct current line—the Cook Strait cable—and it will be at least another $1 billion on top of the $4 billion that they are projecting but that's actually not going to make it anyway. They all estimated it would be two to 2½ times more. So we're talking probably $10 billion plus the upgrade of the transmission. How is that going to help small electricity consumers? How is that going to help industrials? Why am I concerned about industrials? Because we've got a cost of living crisis in New Zealand with most of it down to Government policies. Yes there's some imported inflation but mostly from their overreach in their expenditure and industrial electricity prices lead to higher inflation higher costs for families higher costs for small businesses higher electricity costs for everyone and also higher consumer costs. This is a bad bill and we do not support it."