Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to take a call on this bill and this has been an illuminating session. Hon Member: Well not really.STUART SMITH: Well it has because we found out how little we do know because the Minister doesn't know much either about it. It's quite surprising actually. And I can see future court cases coming up here. We have a Minister that has no idea absolutely no idea what will actually qualify for the exemption or not. What we've heard was it was new discoveries; no then it's new deposits. We don't know what a deposit is because there is no definition. I mean you could take one definition of a new deposit as the gas being new but all those deposits are millions of years old so how would you define that? In a field that we know if it's drilled from the same place but it's a new deposit then it applies. If it's not it doesn't. But if we don't have a definition of what a new deposit is then the whole bill has been a waste of time.So the estimate of $50 million might be five could be less might be nothing. And the potential to use the Minister's words of lost revenue could be you know $50 million or more because the bill is simply ineffective. So we don't know why this bill was brought to the House. It doesn't make any sense at all. We've had several explanations about what the genesis of this bill was. Initially it was that the Minister had had representations from the industry but it doesn't say anything about that in the documentation provided. In fact it says here are there any publicly available inquiry review or evaluation reports that have informed or are relevant to the policy to be given effect to by this bill?" Answer: no. So was there a secret meeting? Maybe. Is there a discovery that is potentially about to be exploited that has a significant revenue stream? Maybe; I would say highly likely. I would say there's been meetings about this sort of stuff in the Minister's office. They've had a run around and they've got a bit of a panic going there. I think it's almost certainly the case and this will come out in the fullness of time—probably by the time it comes out the Minister will no longer be in Parliament—in November or somewhere. But it is really very disappointing that we could come through when we didn't have the benefit of a select committee process where these things could have been explored so we could see what was at stake here. This is really fast and loose with the legislation process. We could have heard from the oil and gas companies; it would be really good to hear from them in the select committee. They would no doubt have submitted; I'm sure they would have. We could have heard from the oil and gas users and we are all—Simon Court: You could have got Glen to ask them some questions.STUART SMITH: Well that's right. It would have been fascinating. Well oil and gas users are really important in this process because actually what I've heard from sources throughout the course of the afternoon since this bill actually landed on the table is the chilling effect that it is already having on the industry. The thing that people forget about with natural gas is that if they stop exploring if they stop drilling new wells actually it almost immediately—the access to that gas starts to decline. It is not like a water well that you drill a hole into an aquifer and the water just keeps replenishing from water coming from rainfall percolating through into the aquifer. This is quite different; the natural gas deposits were laid down millions of years ago. They're sitting there waiting under pressure and we can exploit them to use them and natural gas is a much cleaner alternative. As I said in one of the earlier debates on this bill in the UK they lowered their carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by switching from coal to natural gas. In New Zealand we have gone from natural gas to coal and we've done that because of a very unwise decision to give a former Prime Minister an opportunity to star in the media in front of some schoolchildren in France—in Paris actually—to give an outrageous decision that has to ban oil and gas exploration offshore which has had a chilling effect a significant effect on our sovereign risk profile. And the members on the other side might not think that's important. Perhaps they've never been in a business transaction dealing with international financiers. Perhaps they've never been in a trade negotiation. These things are very very important. They are taken very seriously in international fields. I think it's an absolute disgrace that this bill has had such little scrutiny and it was appalling. If it was so important and so important for New Zealanders in a fiscal sense and was a technicality that could have been dealt with the way to deal with that would have been for the Minister to approach the Opposition and the Opposition parties and inform them of the issue and work with us. We may not have supported it anyway—in fact we wouldn't because of what we know now—but if it was a legitimate case or the case that the Minister has tried to make unsuccessfully—I mean we've got two former energy Ministers very experienced people in this field on this side of the House who should know if this was a good bill; they would know. And they don't. They do not follow the logic behind it. I know that on the other side they are following speaking notes that were given to them. They haven't had the benefit of any more information than we have. In fact I suspect that the only person with information is the Minister and quite clearly she doesn't understand it all. She doesn't understand what a deposit is. She doesn't understand the technicalities of actually how these fields are maintained how the flows are kept going at a rate that is economic. They don't understand that natural gas is far more important than just generating electricity although that's incredibly important. I think people underestimate the importance of methanol. It is almost in everything. I think even though I've got a wool suit I'm pretty sure that the dye in this suit will have a component of methanol in the manufacture of that dye. It's almost in everything or that industry here in New Zealand is dependent on the continual investment and the oil and gas sector to maintain those fields. And yet this bill is sending a chilling effect to those investors and those companies are not just sitting there with a pile of cash wondering what to do with it. They have to go out and approach people on international money markets and say "I've got this proposal; I want to develop this well further extend its life." As we've heard Māui has been extended by a significant amount. It should have closed down many years ago and has continued to develop and produce income for New Zealand actually and royalties for New Zealand. But that has all been put at risk by a shoddy process. This will likely fail I would think. I think that any company that wants to get around this it's going to be pretty easy because there is no definition of what is one—Simon Court: Unless they ask for it. STUART SMITH: Well did they ask for it? We have no evidence that they asked for it whatsoever but we won't go there as to what that implication would be for the Minister. But the reality is we're here tonight. This is a poor bill—it's poorly thought-out not understood by the person who's promoting it and I think it is a really shonky process and we oppose this bill vigorously."