Street Maryan: Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 04 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13303. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): It gives me great pleasure to rise to speak to the Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill sponsored by my colleague Moana Mackey. Much in all as I admire the member who has just resumed his seat Ian McKelvie I have not heard such an antiquated speech in a long time. We should be preparing for the future. [Interruption] We should be preparing for the future. We should be looking ahead.The Government currently has two targets. The first is that 90 percent of electricity generation will be from renewable sources by 2025. That was a Labour Government target. It was set when Labour was in Government and it is very pleased that the National Government has seen fit to retain that target. The second thing the Government has got as a target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. But it has no plan to achieve either of these targets. What we have are two targets out there in the future with no stepped plan to achieve them. We agree with 90 percent generation from renewable sources. Goodness knows we have got wind marine geothermal hydro and hopefully more solar power coming on stream in the future.The opposition to this bill is based on antiquated views of how this country might sustain its energy supply in the future. I would like to draw what the bill does to the attention particularly of the member Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi who seemed to have ignored the fact that the bill quite explicitly says that this does not include “an existing plant” or “an electricity generation plant that is operating in accordance with a contract for reserve energy entered into by or on behalf of the Commission”. So let us not hear any more of this nonsense about the lights going out. Let us not hear any more of this nonsense. It does not affect existing plants.What the bill does do in fact is put back in place the Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Act which the Labour Government enacted over 5 years ago. That established a restriction on new baseload fossil-fuelled thermal electricity generation. Can I be any clearer than that? It established a restriction for 10 years on the building of new baseload fossil-fuelled thermal electricity generation plants. It was a start to try to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel dependence and begin to apply the kind of pressure that we need if we are ever going to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and if we are ever going to transition to a society that is not dependent on fossil fuels.I am just astonished that members opposite cannot bring themselves to support this bill. They will have to at some stage be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century or into the next decade anyway of the 21st century. The future is not in electricity generation using fossil fuels. The future is in renewable energy. Fortunately New Zealand has an abundance of all those things that other countries cry out for in order to complement or overtake their use of fossil fuels for electricity generation and allow them to move their countries and their economies on beyond using fossil fuels for electricity generation.This is a ban for 10 years. It is something that expires at the end of that 10 years because at that point we will be able to assess the extent to which we have been able to move towards sustainable renewable electricity generation. Thank you.