Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well I was rather intrigued by the last speech on this Fuel Industry (Improving Fuel Resilience) Amendment Bill from Angela Roberts talking about market failure. So just not very long ago we had the Hon Gerry Brownlee basically pointing out to the other side of the House that currently the industry has 43 days of consumption storage for petrol—that's premium—40 days for regular 47 days for jet fuel and 21 days for the consumption of diesel. Now this bill is actually mandating these same industries to 28 days of consumption for petrol on average; 24 days of consumption for jet fuel; and 21 days of consumption for diesel. Now I'm not sure how market failure fits into that conversation when the industry is actually doing double the quantity that this Government is putting this legislation in place to mandate them to do. The other weird thing about this piece of legislation is that this is not a Government that's typically worried about energy security especially around our natural resources and we keep hearing all the time about the just transition. Yes there's a plan but you can't heat people's houses on a plan. You can't fill their cars up on a plan. To transition oil and gas to energy as the last speaker said you actually have to have some things on the ground. So we've heard this afternoon about Hiringa doing some great work—doing some really good work in hydrogen—but there's no quantities yet. There are no amounts that we can use to actually put into our energy sources that will take this country anywhere in the short term. We've also heard about offshore wind. Now look it's going to be at least 10 years before any of this offshore wind is likely to be up and running. Yes it's good to have a plan and it's fine to have a plan but it was really silly to cut off the existing energy sources until that plan was well and truly in place. So anyone that talks about a just transition is actually just covering up for the fact that we could end up with energy insecurity somewhere in the middle and particularly over recent times when we've had some terrible things going on over on the other side of the world in terms of the war against Ukraine. So when this Government talks about making sure that we have plenty of petrol jet fuel and diesel on hand and making sure that the Government is mandating these industries to store half of what they're already storing I'm wondering how long it will be before they'll be screaming about not having enough gas reserves and actually mandating the industry to store what they haven't been allowed to extract. So in considering this bill National is supporting this bill. It makes sense to make sure we have enough energy security. It's just this bill in itself is a complete waste of time because that security has already been put in place by the industry. Without a domestic refinery New Zealand now relies solely on the importation of refined fuels from overseas rather than just crude. So it was coming in to be refined before but now it's actually just a terminal. But I think the other piece of resilience—whether we like that word or not—that has been lost is that when we look at the potholes and the bitumen that we used to get out of Marsden Point that is now not being used to maintain our roads we are finding that the standard of road surfaces is far poorer than what it was at recent points in time when we had our own bitumen being produced in this country. So while we're starting to rely more on electric vehicles and to decarbonise away from fossil fuels our heavy transport and airlines still need to keep our economy flowing. We've seen some very poor examples in the aviation industry recently where we needed to make sure that we've got the resilience and the right content in the fuel that's going into our airplanes. None of us actually wants to jump on a plane that's not fuelled correctly so that's extremely important but the industry is actually taking care of it itself.But road transport up and down the country relies on diesel and petrol and we do need security of fuels. Utes use fuel. We hear about the fuel tax all the time. Major industries like agriculture and industrial processing require transport to function and if they were without fuel they would suffer immensely. I think probably something that hasn't come to the attention of most people in the Government is if you actually look at the large geography of New Zealand—and everyone talks about the farmers when it comes to ute taxes because of course it makes very little sense to put a tax on something where there is no answer or no solution to the problem. But actually if we think about the energy industry which works in the large geography of this country and if we think about conservation the conservation estate is huge. If we're going to get to being predator-free and we're going to do all of those things we still need people who have fit for purpose vehicles—i.e. utes—that cover large geography. They don't have the chargers that need to get around the country to help us do what we need to do. So none of us would stand in the House today and argue about having fuel security—of course it's important. But what we want to point out on this side of the House is that the Government is really undershooting on what the industry is prepared to do by itself. It just seems like the Government has run out of legislation where they've got new ideas meaningful ideas. They're throwing up ideas like this which are going to be totally ineffective. We're standing in the House and we're actually having a debate this afternoon—if any of the public are watching—that's actually mandating fuel companies to do what they're already doing.I'd like to mention that the five fuel companies that have access to storage facilities are BP Gull Mobil TasmanFuels and Z Energy and they're already doing this job. So I'm not quite sure what the Hon Megan Woods is trying to achieve by putting this piece of legislation in front of this House. As I said before in March and December last year jet fuel arriving in the country tested off spec meant that fuel companies and airlines had to put in place contingency arrangements to minimise disruptions. So that's a wise move that these organisations are doing to make sure that we do have enough fuel for our aviation industry—that's really important—and the fuel was rejected because it had an increased level of conductivity. Now I'm not a scientist I'm not an engineer and I don't understand exactly what that would do to an airplane but it sounds serious enough for me that I wouldn't want to be flying on that plane if that fuel was put into it. So having more stocks of aviation fuel at strategic locations like Auckland Airport will reduce the risk of such incidents happening again. I guess we can buy into that when it comes to the fuel industry for aviation. But the rest of this piece of legislation appears to us in the National Party to be a complete waste of time and I would like the Government to actually focus on fuel security as much they do on the words just transition" which are extremely overused. It's extremely inefficient. I also come from Taranaki and look I can see things on the horizon but they're not things that are going to keep us as a country running as energy sources in the short term unless something happens much more quickly than the Government is able to get infrastructure built because we're just going to end up in a very cold place. Our homes won't be warmed and our cars won't go. We do not have enough renewable electricity supply to drive the electric cars let alone all of the other electricity transition that this Government is trying to do. I think the whole energy focus of the Government is extremely bad for our resilience and nothing in this bill that we're debating at the moment is going to make any difference to the big problems that we face in energy. Thank you."