Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of the ACT Party to cautiously support this Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill in its first reading. I say cautiously" because much of the bill seems to rest on a contradiction: that on the one hand new technologies and electric vehicles are very very good—but not good enough that people will use them without being prodded by the Government. The fact of the matter is that if we want a neutral treatment of different technologies so that consumers can choose—based on what is most efficient for their particular purposes weighing up all of the costs and benefits using information about their preferences known only to them—then we already offer a very significant subsidy to people adopting electric vehicles. That is just the very simple fact that electric vehicles do not use petrol and therefore are not subject to the major form of revenue or the major tax that the New Zealand Government puts on people driving.So acknowledging that the bill actually seeks to further extend this subsidy to a class of vehicles that would by happenstance be exempt from that particular subsidy—and that is the heavy electric vehicle class up to the point where they get to 2 percent. I have to concur with my colleague James Shaw's comment in which he said that the use of high-occupancy and public transit lanes by electric vehicles is not a suitable inducement for people to buy electric vehicles. This is not because it will not be as effective—as James Shaw claimed—but simply because to the extent that it is effective it will be ruining the purpose of high-occupancy transit lanes which is to increase the number of people who travel on a given section of road. So all of a sudden you have people purchasing electric vehicles to access a benefit that was actually designed to deliver a completely different policy outcome—which was increasing the capacity of a particular length of road.This is a sort of omnibus bill and the fourth section is much more interesting. I think that the various initiatives to increase the uptake of electric vehicles are frankly dubious at best. I have not mentioned the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority's extension of funding to try to promote people to pick up electric vehicles but it does seem ironic that the Government has various initiatives under way to suppress consumers finding information about nicotine and sugar and alcohol and all sorts of other things that they like to buy and yet when we find something that is truly good the Government has to spend money in order that people find out about that particular product. It is a very cynical view of New Zealand citizens: that we have to stop them finding out about things we do not want them to know about and then when really good things come along they need us to take their money and spend a million dollars a year encouraging them to find out about electric vehicles. As if there were really people—I asked the Minister of Transport about this in the House a few months ago and he said he could not tell whether there were people out there who did not know electric vehicles were more efficient but none the less he is prepared to spend a million dollars on it.The secondary network section applying the same regulation as we apply to electricity distributors to secondary networks—private networks of electricity distribution that might take place in an apartment building or an industrial complex and so on—is something that I think we really have to watch for the submissions that will come forward at the select committee stage. In principle we have to acknowledge that there is enormous innovation going on in the electricity transmission distribution and retail space—absolutely enormous innovation. People are setting up peer-to-peer networks selling and storing electricity with solar panels and batteries and so on. However the devil with these things is always in the detail and it will be interesting to see what the select committee has to say or what it hears about the practical effects of bringing secondary networks into the traditional distribution regulatory scheme.So it is an interesting bill one that has tried to I guess pick winners and pick a particularly trendy technology to promote over others while distorting the regulatory framework. I think that is very regrettable but on the strength of the secondary networks aspect I will be happy to see what people say at the select committee on this bill. Thank you."