Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Madam Chairperson. It's a pleasure to speak to this bill and speak to an amendment. I particularly want to speak around the winter energy component.I wanted to focus on this bit of the bill and I want to focus initially on the objective of the winter energy payment (WEP) which is stated in the explanatory note of the bill as follows: The WEP will support those recipients to meet their household heating costs during the winter period." I want to just focus there—I'll come back to it—on heating costs during the winter not cooling during the summer. I will come back to that point.I think the dilemma this amendment seeks to correct and the amendments I wish to make are several—firstly with the definition of winter and its correct application in this bill to 122 days starting initially in July and then later progressing to a May start. Secondly there is the duration of 22 weeks or 154 days.Now it's a winter energy payment so what do we understand by "winter"? Well why don't we ask our premier meteorologist the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). They decide or they define that winter is June July and August—92 days. Internationally the Southern Hemisphere is considered to have had winter this year from 21 June to Sunday 23 September—92 days. Surprisingly Tourism New Zealand calls winter June July and August—92 days. New Zealand.com has it as June July and August—92 days. Across a whole range of domains winter is defined as June July and August and as a much shorter period.Maybe there's some alignment actually with the electricity sector. Why don't we go and ask some of the retailers what they consider winter to be? So I had a look around and Meridian does define a buy-back period for solar energy as winter and again it doesn't match at all what this bill is calling winter. You know it may well be that the public and the retailers have got used to some concept of winter—particularly winter in the electricity domain—and yet we're going to change everything and confuse people.I think introducing another definition of winter would be confusing so there are some questions here. Why is the start date next year in July? That's too late; winter's already started. And then when it's moved through to May that's too early; winter hasn't started. Why is it 22 weeks—154 days—when everyone is saying winter's actually 92 days? Why does the winter period not align with any other definition of winter that I could find?Now if we look at 154 days—let's say that the programme had been in place and we add 154 days to 1 May this year. That would push the winter energy payment through to October. If we look at the NIWA's latest report on October they tell us this: first of all it was 30 degrees in Cromwell in October—way too warm to need an energy payment. Secondly they also state that temperatures were "well above or above average temperatures for most of the country" in October—again hardly winter.The bill specifically says "heating" and not "cooling". If the programme were in place right now—and it started in May and went right through to the hot month of October—many consumers would have their heating devices heat pumps etc. on auto-regulating thermostats. What would happen is as the weather warmed the device would change to cooling at exact counter-purposes to what the objective says the energy payment can be used for. It very clearly aligns to heating—which makes sense—in the cold periods but because of climate change and various other reasons as it gets warmer and as this period projects the 154 days those devices will automatically change to cooling. I would suggest that's at counter-purposes to this bill.So the problems that I'm finding here are that the dates suggested are too long and are outside of anyone's definition of winter. Secondly pushing into the warmer periods makes the heating requirements redundant and auto-cooling is at cross-purposes to this bill. Now a couple of suggestions: the suggestion with this amendment is that if we align the definition of winter with the NIWA definition then it does actually solve a lot of these problems. Secondly if we resolve or we try to resolve the thermostatic auto-adjustments by changing the definition of the purpose to "cooling" as well—I think that's going to make the bill messy and diminish the intent and purpose that you have. So the amendment that I have on the Table is that the NIWA definition of winter be considered by the Minister. Thank you."