Dean Jacqui; Lee MelissaGAS (INFORMATION DISCLOSURE AND PENALTIES) AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingDebate resumed from 3 June.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): The National Party have the first call. I call Melissa Lee.MELISSA LEE (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise to support this bill in the second reading. Having actually sat through the select committee process sometimes members have to reflect back on how far ago we have actually discussed this bill and how many people participated in the select committee process in terms of our submissions. This Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill was referred to the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee of the 52nd Parliament on 27 May 2020. The committee called for the submissions and there were in fact 11 submissions from interested groups and individuals. We heard oral evidence from four submitters at a hearing by video conference and we received advice from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment and I thank them for the process that has taken place. I think when this bill continued on in the 53rd Parliament the committee tried to re-open the submission process because we felt that given the distance in time from the time of the last Parliament to this one we thought perhaps that there might be more people interested in the subject matter and perhaps submit more. But we didn't have too many people interested so we just basically continued on.The purpose of this bill is to amend the Gas Act of 1992 to provide and enhance information disclosure requirements for the gas market and to ensure that settings around the enforcement and penalties are suitably robust. The bill does not actually make substantive changes in itself but amends the framework to expand the scope of regulation-making powers. A number of changes require gas industry participants to report forecasts of supply and demand of gas reserves and I know that there were some concerns in terms of commercial sensitivities from some of the submitters who were not very happy if disclosure actually meant that competitors could potentially have information that they would actually like to keep not public because it would mean that they might end up not being competitive. This is also reflected in the response to the 2018 Pohokura outage.One of the issues with the Pohokura outage—it wasn't an issue of lack of information but an issue of lack of gas actually. But this bill will allow New Zealand to understand just how bad the situation is in terms of this Labour Government decision to ban gas exploration in Taranaki. But I digress the gas crisis is in fact the direct result of the policy implementation by this Government and it is effectively decimating a whole district actually—a whole area of Taranaki which actually relies on the gas exploration business a lot of supply and support businesses that support the people who are in that industry—and I think that we will actually see the impact of their decision going forward into the future because we are short on gas. We are going to be running out of gas because we stopped exploration. The other thing is that we are importing more coal from overseas and our carbon footprint is going to be bigger as a result of the decision of this Government.Maureen Pugh: It is bigger.MELISSA LEE: Yes Maureen Pugh. You are right. It is absolutely bigger.Business actually needs certainty. They need good regulation good policy to make sure that they can plan for the future and sometimes they don't actually have that—particularly in the gas industry sector—and I feel devastated for those people who are involved in that industry. It is estimated we need $100 million of investment per year just to keep the production levels that we currently have. This has dried up and we have seen gas production fall 40 percent in three years. This has resulted in job losses at Methanex and timber mills. New Zealand Steel have reduced production and as I said we're using more coal and Huntly gas station is burning four times as much coal—and that is definitely a humungous increase in the greenhouse gas emissions.However the framework in which this bill actually works in terms of the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill—the responsibility of the businesses involved in their duties is something that we actually support and I commend this bill to the House.