Curran Clare: Electricity Industry Bill — In Committee 
Curran Clare: Electricity Industry Bill — In Committee 
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CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 I am pleased to speak in the Committee stage of the Electricity Industry Bill. There is absolutely no evidence that introducing further competition and asset swaps will tackle the huge price variance between domestic and industrial power users. Despite this Government’s pre-election promise to lower power prices National has seriously taken its eye off the ball. New Zealanders want to pay lower power prices and they were led to believe that National would deliver affordability. The Government has said the legislation means there will be more competition and more stability in the electricity industry. Although there may be a bit more competition happening right now stability or affordability is certainly not happening in the electricity industry. Essentially the effect of this legislation is to make things worse for the vast majority of New Zealanders such as the families who are struggling to make ends meet and our senior citizens who are living on fixed incomes and all the while their electricity prices continue to go up. 
As members have heard Labour does not support this bill. It has not supported this bill at any stage. Thousands of New Zealanders are currently feeling the squeeze when paying their electricity bills and they will not receive any help from the Government’s electricity market review or this bill. In fact things will just become worse for them. After promising that the Government would take action the Prime Minister has offered very little to help New Zealanders who are finding it difficult to pay their energy bills when their family budgets are so tight. That is about to get added to by the 2.5 percent GST rise and by allowing companies to use the emissions trading scheme as an excuse to price gouge between 5 and 10 percent with nothing but a meek warning. National promised it would do everything it could do to take the sharp edges off the recession and help struggling Kiwi families. But the Government’s electricity market review and the bill miss the point. Nowhere in the overview of the bill does it even mention constraining or reducing prices. 
Any reforms of the electricity sector need to deliver as members have heard on three priorities: sustainability security of supply and affordability and predictability of prices. These reforms do not go any way towards addressing any of these priorities. Nor do they give us any clue as to how to balance the competing considerations at stake. Transferring assets between power companies and reshuffling the bureaucracy is just smoke and mirrors which does not guarantee any immediate relief for Kiwi power users. 
I will refer back to what the Government said it wanted to achieve with this bill which was more competition and stability and I will talk a little about Dunedin which is one of the coldest places in the country during winter so electricity bills are quite high there. I will refer to an article in the  
Otago Daily Times  
last Friday that reported that Contact Energy lost more than 2000 Dunedin customers in the same quarter that it controversially hiked prices up by more than 9 percent. It had 47 percent of the 50000-plus market or more than 24600 customers in the May quarter. At the same time that Contact Energy increased its prices by up to 9 percent the Prime Minister and the Minister of Energy and Resources warned companies not to use the emissions trading scheme as an excuse for price increases when they learnt of its review in June. Contact Energy said at the time there were actually two increases: a Dunedin-specific 6 percent increase to reflect the cost of generation and supply and a nationwide 3.2 percent increase to meet the costs of the emissions trading scheme. Meanwhile at the same time Mercury Energy increased its prices by 3.3 percent. Just over a week ago Contact Energy announced that it would increase its prices again when GST rises on 1 October.