Muller ToddTODD MULLER (National—Bay of Plenty): Thank you Madam Chair. The time caught me a little bit there. I rise to give my first contribution in the committee stage. I would like to draw my comments around obviously Part 1 and an area that Jonathan Young has already begun our conversation on this afternoon and that is section 23A in clause 5 which is focusing on limiting exploration to Taranaki—in particular onshore Taranaki. So the question that I guess sits at the core of our policy discussion this afternoon is: what are we seeking to achieve by this restriction? Now the Minister of Energy and Resources is on record saying that this is part of New Zealand's so-called leadership position in impacting global emissions from a New Zealand perspective but she is particularly silent on global demand with respect to oil and gas. So my question to the Minister is surely when we are reflecting on whether we should constrain New Zealand's economic potential with respect to extracting oil and gas the first key question that we should ask ourselves is: what is the global demand for gas looking out into the medium term?One would assume that if you hold a policy view that is to restrict New Zealand's economic potential with respect to this extraction it needs to be hung off some commercial advice with respect to the place of gas in that global demand. Now the Minister may have different figures than what I am aware of but I'd be interested to hear it. What I read is that looking out to 2040 there is a 40 percent increase in expected demand globally for natural gas—40 percent. In fact by 2040 natural gas is going to be the single largest fuel source globally. Now I'd like the Minister to challenge those figures and potentially table the advice that she has received that challenges that—that that is indeed the global demand with respect to natural gas. Our advice on this side is very clear: it's a critical part of the global energy mix.The reason this is so important is that if the global demand is demonstrably significant for natural gas why is it that New Zealand would be constraining its ability looking out over the next 20 to 30 years to extract that natural gas and obviously make significant export receipts from that? It's half a billion dollars currently. We have reflected previously in the debate around this issue that if this proceeds we are talking about $7.9 billion of lost export receipts potentially as high as $23 billion.So we need to be clear around what the policy objectives are here. If the view is that the natural gas which we believe is a critical part is not going to be a critical part then we would like to have an understanding of that and to hear specifically from the Minister what data and assessment and modelling she is relying on that suggests that New Zealand despite what we can see is happening around the rest of the world with other gas-producing countries—they see the opportunity in supporting natural gas as a positive. They see it as a commercial imperative for their people and their countries and they see it as very much part of their climate change narrative. That in particular is an issue that I would like to return to as we reflect on I guess a series of core questions that Part 1 brings into sharp relief which is: what actually is the policy objective here in simply constraining oil extraction and gas extraction to onshore Taranaki? They are my first series of questions. I have many more others to come.