Woods MeganDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call on this. Labour is supporting this Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. We supported it at its first reading and we think that there was a good select committee process. I would like to congratulate the Commerce Committee which I had the pleasure of sitting in on for some time on this bill the chair of that select committee as well as all the other members. The Minister has outlined very ably the three main things that this bill—that is packaged up as energy innovation—does. While there are some necessary and good changes in here let us not over-egg this as being the innovative answer to everything.Let us go through what each of these three changes mean. The new road-user charge exemption applying to heavy vehicles as well as light vehicles which the Minister has outlined is going to be increasingly important as we think about not only how it is that we uptake electric vehicles (EVs) but how it is that we uptake EVs so as to minimise our greenhouse gas emissions. Fundamentally this bill is part of a patchwork of options that need to be put in place in order for New Zealand to address its greenhouse gas emissions. It is part of a patchwork. I stress that because personally I would like to see an analysis of how this bill and its measures fit within a carbon budget so that we can have an idea about how all the component pieces fit together. How does a change in transport impact on what the overall reductions in our greenhouse gases are going to be?Changing to electric vehicles makes sense in New Zealand more than most other countries in the world. What we see in New Zealand is that every time someone makes the decision to use an electric vehicle there is a direct switch from fossil to renewable energy. Unlike some other countries where people are opting to move from a petrol-powered or a diesel-powered vehicle to a vehicle that is powered by electricity but that electricity is indeed generated by the burning of fossil fuels in New Zealand it is a straight—usually a pretty much one-for-one—swap between fossil and renewable energy. So we have huge potential to address our greenhouse gases through our transport emissions. Transport emissions currently make up about 20 percent of our entire greenhouse gas emissions in this country so the potential is immense. Of our transport emissions 60 percent come from light passenger vehicles so there certainly are savings that are going to be made here.But it is not just in terms of the good of the planet and the need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions—it also makes huge economic sense. If you think about some of the things that New Zealand does well it is the production of renewable energy at relatively low cost if you compare this with other parts of the world. Renewable energy is roughly the equivalent of 30c a litre in New Zealand so just do the math on that of what you are currently paying at the petrol pump. You are over $2 a litre for fossil fuels when you fill up your car and you can see that there are immense savings for people to make.If we are saying that 60 percent of all our transport energy consumption comes from our light passenger fleet—the cars that drive around and that people use to go from point A to point B in the course of their day—we also need to turn our attention to thinking about the other 40 percent and that is our heavy-vehicle fleets. That is why the provision that we have here in this bill and the first measure that this does which is about enabling the road-user charge exemption to heavy as well as light passenger vehicles is a very important measure.The other thing that this bill does is it allows the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) to use its levy in a broader way not just in terms of electricity. This is a good thing allowing EECA to have a broader remit. We need to think about energy not just in terms of electricity but across a range of things. But this cannot be at the expense of the other very important work that EECA does in New Zealand. My fear is that we are seeing the reduction of funding to some other very important programmes within EECA such as the ability of homeowners to access home insulation funding which I think is important.The other measure that this omnibus bill does is to allow electric vehicles to travel in bus lanes. As you can imagine this was a part of the bill that attracted some attention from submitters. I think the important point to acknowledge here—the point that understandably people brought and were worried about at the select committee phase—was that just letting cars into the bus lanes is going to subvert the purpose that those pro - public transport lanes are there for which is to allow non-congested routes through our cities where people can elect to take public transport and not be bogged down in the congestion that cars are in. This certainly was a concern that I had around this measure.But there are some measures in this that do give me a degree of certainty around that. We heard from Auckland Transport Greater Wellington Regional Council and Waikato Regional Council so this was a widely held view. But there are a couple of measures in here that do give me some peace of mind around this. The first is that it is an opt-in provision for individual road-controlling authorities. It is not mandatory now that under this legislation every bus lane in the country will be opened up for EVs or electric vehicles to be able to travel in them. This is something the individual territorial and road-controlling authorities will be able to make decisions around. There well could be routes in different parts of cities or throughout the country that just make no sense to allow electric vehicles to go in. It is going to subvert the whole point of having them there which is actually to free up our roads and to allow people to travel in a less congested manner. So that is certainly something to consider.At the moment allowing electric vehicles into bus lanes is not going to cause a huge amount of congestion for the very simple reason that we do not have that many of them. There are I think just over 1000 electric vehicles in New Zealand at the moment so we are not going to wake up the morning after this legislation is passed and find our bus lanes across the nation clogged with electric vehicles. The other important provision that this legislation contains is the ability to phase that by-law out. So it will make sense at the beginning as we are encouraging people to buy electric vehicles but this is not set in stone for ever. It can be a temporary provision while it makes sense.Obviously this is legislation that is put in place to try to sit alongside the Government's aim of having 64000 electric vehicles on our roads over a period of time which incidentally is pretty much what the Ministry of Transport's modelling shows us would happen if we did nothing—if we just allowed nature to take its course and there was not any Government intervention. So in terms of being a radical disruption this bill certainly is not. This is what I like to call a standing still measure". This is what is going to happen anyway. So what we do have though is the ability for road-controlling authorities to opt out of that over time. I think that these are important concerns and ones that the committee certainly listened to.Another issue that did tax the committee for quite some time was the issue that the Minister touched on and that was around the ability to enforce who should and should not be allowed in a bus lane which cars should be in there how we are going to demarcate which cars were indeed electric vehicles what measures we could put in place that could not be ripped off—so that those who should not be in the bus lane were not putting in place a wrong sticker on their car or a similar measure and sneaking into the bus lane and getting a quicker ride to work.We spent quite a long period of time considering measures around that in the committee. We looked at different models around the world and different things that could happen. It seems to be that the ability to use the photography and the images taken there could be something that can act as a deterrent. But that is something we need to keep a watching brief on because as we get more and more EVs on our roads as technology changes as electric vehicles and normal combustion engine vehicles cease to look different from each other this could become a problem. I think this is something that as legislators we need to keep a watching brief on and check that that is in check.This is a bill that brings into place some measures that are important. The third provision very much reflects the need to keep the regulatory framework up with the technology and the different ways in which electricity is now being generated. These are necessary. They are a small part and a small start and Labour will support the bill for that reason."