Woods MeganDr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call. Labour is supporting this piece of legislation as we have in its various stages throughout its passage through this House and into law. Broadly the aim and the policy objective of this bill is to encourage energy innovation and to allow the emerging energy technologies to increase variation in energy-related business models. It also implements the Government's electric vehicle (EV) programme as the Minister has outlined. But is this a piece of legislation that is allowing the kind of transformational change we need in order to meet our climate change obligations and to do the transition to a low-carbon or net zero carbon economy which New Zealand needs to be on a pathway to doing? No it is not. It is a very low-ambition piece of legislation. It makes some changes that we support—because why would you not—but does it go far enough and does it set out the kind of transformational change agenda that we need in this country as we are getting through the 21st century?The Minister has identified that process heat and transport are two very critical areas in which we must address our greenhouse gas emissions and where we simply must cut our carbon dioxide emissions. While this bill does address one of those areas in terms of the EVs and it makes some changes around that there has been modelling done that shows that what will actually happen as a result of this legislation is pretty much what would have happened without it. This is standing-still legislation. It is not putting in place the kind of transformational change that will see the uptake of EVs happen faster because the Government is getting in behind it because it knows it simply has to in order to meet its climate change objectives and because this is actually what the 21st century is going to look like.One of the other important things that this legislation does is amend the Electricity Act 2010 and the Energy (Fuels Levies and References) Act of 1989 to allow the Government through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) to focus levy funding on the areas where the greatest impacts can be made. The Minister said that it is in this area of transportation and industrial process heat that the Government sees that the greatest gains can be made but this is an or" for this Government because in order to do this some areas where we could make some really good gains in terms of our energy efficiency as a country and where we could address the amount of energy we use and the efficiency with which we use it along with the great co-benefit of addressing energy poverty is being cut to make way for this scheme. So whereas EECA was once the champion and the agency through which we did some very fine work in terms of insulating our houses that scheme is being cut and the focus is moving.We have over 600000 homes in this country that are still not adequately insulated. That is over half a million houses and well over half a million families and people who are living in houses that simply are not warm and dry enough and we know what the impact of that can be. So while I think that it is good that we can see that EECA is turning its attention to industrial heat and to the issues of electric vehicles we simply cannot lose sight of some of the other core objectives that it should be performing. That is why Labour has said that in Government not only we will not stop the subsidies but we will not deny homeowners access to the subsidy as this current Government has done because we recognise that there are a lot of hard-working New Zealanders who struggle to buy their first house and it is not particularly well insulated but they are simply not eligible. This Government does not think that they are worthy of having any assistance from the Government and we think we can both help families and also address the issue of how it is in a transition to a low-carbon economy we are going to have to make the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy.Not only do we need to increase the proportion of renewables that we use within our economy but we also need to dramatically increase the capacity of our renewable generation as we make that transition because as we transition cars away from petrol and on to electricity we are simply going to need to consume more electricity. If the industrial processes of electricity are one of the solutions to transferring that industrial heat from a fossil fuel to a renewable future then we simply will need to increase the generation quite markedly. That is something that the Vivid Economics report did some really good scenario planning around—about what that future can look like.So I am a bit disappointed because I actually think this is really exciting change. This transition is such an opportunity for New Zealand. If we do this properly and if we put this in place it will actually be an economic transformation on the scale of the Industrial Revolution that the world will be looking at as we make these changes. But instead what we have is a low-ambition Government that just does not get it. It does not get what the opportunity is there it does not get what the future can hold and it certainly has not come out with the kind of fresh thinking and the fresh ideas that we need to take us further into the 21st century when we as a country have to grapple with these things.The most vexing thing in this legislation was how it was we were going to identify electric vehicles in the bus lanes. That was the most vexing issue we could find in this legislation. Where are the big ideas where is the vision and where is that thinking? The Commerce Committee did spend a reasonable amount of time trying to work out whether a coloured number plate or a sticker on the car was the best way to have the observation of whether or not a car belonged in the bus lane. That is an important issue and we need to be able to police that issue but it certainly is not the biggest issue. When we think about modernising our energy sector to face the future that should not be the biggest issue that we spend our time on. What we have seen is that we are saying that local authorities have the power to allow electric vehicles to travel in high-occupancy lanes. This is not a long-term solution because as we see the uptake of EVs at the rate that I hope we see simply allowing those vehicles to go into the lanes that are meant to reduce congestion will only add to it. So again we have a Government that is just looking at band-aid solutions and not thinking about what the big-picture answers need to be to some of these problems.The other thing that this legislation does and it is an important change that this legislation makes is it amends the Electricity Industry Act of 2010 to clarify how the electricity industry legislation applies to a secondary network. This is a really big growing business model in this sector. One of the things that it sets out to do is understand what it means when owners of secondary networks undertake activities equivalent to those of an established electricity distributor. They should be subject to the same regulatory requirements. This is an area where technology is changing all the time. The way in which we distribute electricity and the way in which that is done is constantly on the move and it is an area where we have to have legislation that can keep up with that technological change. The days of just transmitting power down the power lines and it arriving at a house or a business and being utilised—that is changing at such speed so it is really important that we ensure (a) that we have got the right regulations and (b) that we have a legislative framework that can meet those requirements as the change occurs.Labour is supporting this bill. We do not think that it is ambitious enough. It does not have the fresh kind of thinking that we need in this very important area for our economy as we enter further into the 21st century. There is so much opportunity for New Zealand. We have a real strategic advantage in this new world in the amount of renewable energy we have access to at a low cost and this is a Government that cannot imagine a future where that opportunity is maximised."