Young JonathanJONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to speak in reply to the Prime Minister's statement in February. The Prime Minister has taken great pride in signalling to the world that New Zealand is leading the world in closing down oil and gas exploration. In fact she devoted four full seconds in her 20-minute speech to say [The Government has] ended [new] offshore oil and gas exploration". Four full seconds—quite a momentous sentence in relation to her "nuclear-free moment" policy regarding banning permits for oil and gas exploration. So why four full seconds? Why only that? Well simply put like many of her policies such as KiwiBuild and child poverty reduction it's backfiring. It's not producing what she promised. It's not even improving outcomes. In fact it's doing the opposite: it is making matters worse.It's quite interesting that recently the Minister of Energy and Resources the Hon Megan Woods released a Cabinet paper about progressing the Electricity Price Review recommendations and there is the now famous paragraph 107 which has had multiple articles up and down this country written about it where in that Cabinet paper it says "Also of interest as a low-impact option is whether policy levers for the Minister of Energy and Resources are warranted on the grounds of market failure."—whatever that may be—"A possible option is the provision of emergency powers to reallocate electricity or gas in situations of acute electricity or gas shortage."I think what has taken the energy sector by surprise is that for the first time the Minister is proposing to introduce powers to reallocate electricity or gas reserves or resources if there was an acute shortage. And here we are; we're looking at a Government who has decided to end exploration for oil and gas and natural gas as we know is actually a quite critical component of our finely balanced energy system for a country that's isolated at the bottom of the world. We're not like a European country where we can just buy renewable electricity from Norway and they pipe it to us. We are a country miles away from anywhere. The only energy we can actually import is crude oil and that is what we do.So what we have is a Government that basically is taking a very heavy-handed approach to matters in terms of closures of exploration and then to compensate because they are concerned that there could be shortages coming up in that particular area creating a power to reallocate. Well I call it a "power to confiscate" to cut across commercial contracts between producers and consumers—mostly they will be industrial consumers—to take what they have contracted to buy and then reallocate it. If you don't see that as a form of nationalism then what is—where the Crown the State can actually confiscate? And I think it's taken everybody by surprise because it's seen in the context of this exploration ban. No wonder the Prime Minister in a 20-minute speech gave only four seconds of cognisance to that particular part of policy because I actually think that it's quite a significant embarrassment to the Government that they're now putting in mechanisms and regulations—certainly proposing them—to make up for what they perceive to be a lack coming forward. We have said all the time—we have said all the time—that there is a potential gap coming in our energy system and now the Government is putting this insurance policy and this mechanism in place.What we found in 2019 in this past year is that the world continued to support the use of natural gas. In fact the International Energy Agency reported that last year 2019 even though the world economy grew by 2.9 percent emissions flat-lined. They put that down to the increase of renewables—all credit to that—but they also put it down to the fact that electricity generation was moving away from coal to using natural gas which has a far lower carbon content in its emissions.Stuart Smith: Not in New Zealand.JONATHAN YOUNG: And—yes but as my colleague Stuart Smith said "Not in New Zealand." No in fact the opposite happened here because in 2019 we used 19 percent less natural gas for electricity generation. But to compensate to keep the lights on to keep industry going and to keep the TVs happening and businesses continuing to have access to electricity what we had to do because we had less gas was we had to burn more coal. In fact we burnt 115 percent more coal last year. If you go to Genesis reports on Huntly and you look at the gigawatt hours that were generated from coal use from Huntly power station you will see the increase was 115 percent. If you go to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment's website in terms of generation when it comes from natural gas you'll see that it declined by 90 percent.So we are the first country in the world that instead of moving from coal to natural gas we've gone from natural gas to coal and all because we have shortages. What I say is that this Government has been reckless by its rash ideological intervention; instead of consulting with the energy market they've interrupted it—they think that's a good thing. What's happened is that it's just gone backwards; it's backfired. No wonder it's only four seconds in a 20-minute speech; it's an embarrassment.What I think is completely surprising is that when the International Energy Agency do an introduction on New Zealand's energy situation this entity based in Paris—fully au fait with the Paris Accord fully au fait with energy requirements demand and supply around the world—makes some great comments about its integrated well-balanced energy system but they finish off their comments by saying this: "It's recommended that New Zealand develop access to global liquefied natural gas markets because the country is phasing out oil and gas production offshore." So what they're saying is that because they see this policy position that has been made and put in place by this Government that doesn't have access to indigenous natural gas we should be accessing international markets for LNG; so we should buy our gas from offshore.Well in my last couple of minutes I just want to revert back now to December 2008 to my first parliamentary speech which was about importing LNG—liquefied natural gas. You know in order to liquefy natural gas you bring it down to 162 degrees below zero: minus 162. You ship it from an LNG production plant from different places around the world with specially designed tankers you offload it and re-gasify it through a reheating process. This creates—believe it or not—a carbon footprint significantly higher than domestic or indigenous natural gas. Indigenous natural gas produces 52 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per gigajoule of energy—that's what it creates. But the full fuel cycle analysis done on gas through LNG produces when you look at it 73 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per gigajoule of any—a 40 percent increase. So this is what the International Energy Agency is saying that we now ought to do because this Government across here made a stupid decision based on ideological thinking that we needed to ban oil and gas exploration.We now need to import—because let me tell you there are industries that electricity will not cut the mustard for; they need natural gas. We either lose them or in the end we have to import with a 40 percent increase in carbon emissions. Just another self-goal. No wonder four seconds in a 20-minute speech; it's an embarrassment.I think what this Government ought to do instead of you know trashing an industry instead of throwing my electorate and my region under the bus what they should really do is they really should admit that they've made some mistakes. They should overturn what they have done because it's only been counter-productive to the environment counter-productive to our economy counter-productive to my electorate to my region and it has not worked one little iota. It's about time we had a sensible serious Government."