Shearer David: Electricity Transparency Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Electricity Transparency Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8528. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): We have had some pretty lacklustre average sorts of responses from the other side as to why those members are not supporting transparency and full information by which consumers can make a choice. It is kind of surprising really when it is coming from the side that purports to be the party of pro-market. For example Jonathan Young and Todd Barclay were just talking about the fact that somehow a press release which is an optional mechanism that can be adopted by power companies is going to be as good as getting a fully annotated and broken-down power bill. Let us face it guys: that is rubbish.The Electricity Authority came out with a report that has got to be the lowest possible intervention it could possibly scrape out to try to keep up some sort of semblance for the tens of thousands of dollars it spent on that study. Then David Seymour from the ACT Party stood up and made actually quite a good contribution but it consisted mainly of questions: “What about …” “Perhaps” “Maybe”. The way to actually get around that is to send it to the select committee so we can actually get the industry—David Seymour: The answers were implied.DAVID SHEARER: —to give the answers that perhaps Mr Seymour lacked when he stood up to make his contribution.The real issue here is about consumers getting a fair deal and being able to look at their power bill and understand it. The power price has gone up 25 percent in the last 5 years and every time it does there is finger pointing between line companies Transpower power companies retailers—whoever—that they are not to blame and somebody else is. You can talk about all these power prices coming down. Ask the people out there Mr Young about power prices going down. I can tell you you would be hard-pressed on the street to find anybody who could tell you that their power price has gone down.This is about real information. Let me give you another example: meters—power meters—smart meters. We have had smart meters installed across our country. They are the dumbest smart meters in the world. They give the power companies the ability to know what you are consuming in terms of your electricity every 15 minutes and what everybody else in the world gets is real-time information on a minute-by-minute basis of what is happening inside the home so they can turn on their dryer late at night or they can make use of cheaper power. We have dumb power meters that will not give us that. They will give the electricity companies lots of information but they will not give it to the consumers.Why is that? It is because they do not want you to have good information. As Theresa Gattung once said about the telecommunications industry it makes good business sense to keep people in the dark to keep it opaque to keep them confused. That is what we have got now: confusion that suits the industry down to the ground and that party over there is backing that. It does not want to have consumers being able to know what their power bill is and to be able to break it down and make informed choices.If I were sitting here watching this debate today I would be disappointed with the National Party not standing up for consumers and with the ACT Party—with consumers in the name of its party—not standing up for consumers. I would be saying: “I give up on these parties because they do not stand up for what they believe in.” I would recommend that instead they go to a company like Flick Electric Co. and try to get a better deal. Unfortunately the number of Flicks we can sustain throughout the country—and it has only less than 1 percent of the power market right at the moment—is not going to be great enough to make a huge difference.That is the real tragedy of what we are talking about today: that what we could have easily done is what the Minister of Energy and Resources has purported to want to do which is to break down our bills into their component parts. That is what Doug Heffernan of Mighty River Power has wanted to do: to break down our power bills into component parts. In fact just about everybody agrees with that. You talk to Simon Mackenzie chief executive officer of Vector. Look at its submission. Of course it wants to see these broken down. This is a bill that is unfortunately a wasted opportunity. Thank you.