Collins JudithHon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): Thank you very much Madam Chair. Well this is an interesting bill having been the energy and resources Minister at a time when renewable energy in New Zealand was 84 percent at one stage. I understand that it's now around 63 percent or perhaps the Minister will eventually at the end of my contribution want to answer that.I've been looking at something and I heard the contribution from the Minister and I thought she was quite sarcastic towards my colleague Stuart Smith—very unkind and sarcastic. She said If only he knew his numbers". So I went on the look for some of those numbers to update myself and I found that there was a paper put out by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—the Minister's own ministry—called Energy in New Zealand 2022. There was some very good information in there which probably helps to tell us why we're in this sorry state when it comes to renewable energy.So this is what it says: "Coal imports exceeded [exports] for the first time since 1990."—so this is for the year of 2021. "This meant that New Zealand was a net importer of coal."—for the first time since 1990 by the way. "Coal imports increased by 69 per cent … the highest level on record. This was due to higher imports of sub-bituminous coal which was driven by the demand for electricity generation as well as constraints on the ability of domestic producers to supply the required amounts at short notice."I also looked to see about the local coal production for electricity and I noted that it had actually gone up 1.7 percent in the year before—so that is coal production in New Zealand in 2021 increased by 1.7 percent—and there is now a 12 percent increase in just one year for the production of electricity 7.5 percent of the New Zealand primary energy contribution. When I was the Minister that was down to about 4 percent and that is the difference. This Government came in and announced "We're going to be 100 percent renewable." and up went the price of coal and up went the production of coal and up went the importation of coal and now we receive coal from Indonesia. It's not the sort of excellent coal that we have here but apparently it's better to ship it over than to sort out the production of renewable energy or to use the natural gas that we have here which is a far cleaner-burning product than coal. Thank goodness we didn't actually close the Huntly thermal power station which was actually something that some people I thought more focused on climate change rather than actually having the electricity to pay for that climate change were suggesting at one stage. Thank goodness we didn't because if we had we would now not have electricity sufficient for the winter months. Wait till the summer comes and the air conditioning and the electric vehicles are all being charged up.I have a question for the Minister on this. Apart from the fact that I'd love to know what the current state is of just how much of our electricity produced is from renewable energy I'd like to know from her how having another piece of bureaucracy stuck in place to supposedly protect small consumers and small businesses is going to make one scrap of difference other than to add more cost to a sector that already is producing very high rates of electricity prices. The only thing that's saving us in the world rankings frankly at the moment on electricity prices is the fact that in Europe in particular prices have gone through the roof because of a scarcity of supply and we all know what that issue is. It is not an issue here because I see that our imports also of oil from the United Arab Emirates have gone right through the roof so clearly Emirates will be able to continue to fly in its current state for a very long time based on those profits. So I'd like to ask the Minister this: how's this going to make one bit of difference other than to put up the prices?"