Curran Clare: Electricity Industry Bill — In Committee 
Curran Clare: Electricity Industry Bill — In Committee 
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CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 I am addressing Part 3 of the Electricity Industry Bill which allows lines companies to retail in their local areas. I will just reference what my colleague Damien O’Connor said about the small consumer and fair deals and electricity prices. I will also reference what my colleague David Parker said about insufficient competition in the market monopolistic behaviours and the effect on consumers. 
Essentially the way this industry will operate under this bill means that the residential cost of electricity will remain too high. Ultimately this issue is one of affordability and that is affordability in a whole range of different things. I will tell members what it is like for the people in my constituency at the moment with regard to affordability or the lack of affordability. When we think about what the potential is for where this industry could be going and for the other things that it could be doing which is also about affordability we see that there is a lot of potential. 
Today I will share with the Committee that I heard from a major social service agency in Dunedin which talked to me about what it is really like for families in Dunedin right now with regard to the affordability or the lack of affordability of electricity prices. The social service agency administers the community electricity fund that is run through the Dunedin City Council on behalf of all the local organisations. It told me that this winter it has been inundated with inquiries and queries and its staff have been working all day most days on requests from the public relating to power. It says that it is only one agency and although it sees a lot of applications other agencies are having their own appointments with citizens throughout the winter. Frequently they say that it is not uncommon for people to be coming in with power bills of more than $1000 for a month. That may sound extraordinary to the Committee but it is not; the median power price for families in Dunedin and in other places in this country that are cold in winter is about $400 to $500 a month. My colleagues have talked about the lack of ability of people to pay these bills and the indifference of the Government towards measures to address the problem. 
It is interesting that during the election campaign we had National members saying that we must lower the price of electricity but now that a bill has come into the House it will not actually address that issue at all. Many of these people are families. A number of other people are living on their own and their bills are not as high as those for families but their bills are up around the $300-a-month mark and they are on fixed incomes. The organisation that I spoke to today gives grants of up to $200 through the community electricity fund but it certainly cannot address many of these people’s needs. 
I will quickly talk about the future of this industry and address the issue in Part 3 which relates to allowing lines companies to retail in their local areas. Although Labour supports having increased retail competition we believe that allowing lines companies back into the retail sector will ignore the problems that arise out of their geographic monopoly status and it may actually reduce competition rather than increase it. One of the options that I know my colleagues have talked about is whether electricity lines companies could be the bearers of other services to households such as broadband which is probably a more efficient use of their networks. It could be about investigating and eliminating barriers to entry into the retail sector which would be a better way of introducing competition. 
When we think about the future of this industry which is a network industry we know that our networks in New Zealand are critical. The newest network that we are looking at introducing is broadband. There is support pretty much across Parliament around the importance of our new broadband network if it ever actually appears and there is a lot of talk about how that will be delivered. Several ways have been discussed by the industry about how to do that. One of them is through our national telecommunications company Telecom which is a competitive monopoly and the other way involves asking whether the electricity lines company should have a role. I will briefly address that matter because there are some signs that the electricity lines companies have a significant role to play in this and this could be about where their future lies in terms of how to deliver the newest network to the country. It would seem to be that instead of having fierce and to some extent contrived competition which is raising the price of electricity for the ordinary citizen we should look at how lines companies could have a better role in delivering broadband to the country. 
Recently there has been an announcement by the Government that could potentially be positive relating to how the lines companies can deliver broadband to New Zealand. Three organisations that are lines companies are in discussion with the Government. One is in Northland one is in the central North Island and one is in Timaru. The major issue that the country and certainly the telecommunications industry is grappling with at the moment is whether we will be looking at electricity lines companies delivering broadband or whether that will be done by a monopoly such as Telecom. 
If we are really looking at the future of how New Zealand can move forward in this area and not looking at having higher electricity prices for the ordinary citizens of New Zealand and increasing the pressure that is being put on families and our older citizens then this is the area where the Government should be. It would be good to have some response from the Minister today on that issue and on whether the Government believes that this is a viable place for it to be moving towards.