Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you very much Mr Speaker and it's my pleasure to speak on this bill the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill. I have to confess I haven't been on the select committee which has dealt with this bill but like all New Zealanders I'm deeply concerned about the effective running of the gas industry which of course has been thrown into chaos by this Government's hasty oil and gas ban. Apparently New Zealand is so rich—so rich—that we don't need to look for oil and gas and that comes as a surprise to people. There's only two countries in the world that we've been able to find who think they are so rich that they don't need to look for oil and gas. It's us and one other place. I wonder whether people would know where the other country would be that is so—Hon Simon Bridges: France.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: France. France is the one. But of course the French have nuclear energy and a pipeline from Russia. But everybody else think it's a reasonable idea to look for some stuff in order to get around but we are so rich that we don't need to.Having said all that the direct genesis of this bill was in relation to the Pohokura outage in 2018. That as people who are tuning into this debate on their wirelesses back home will remember was an outage of that oil rig in particular which led to a shortage of gas supply and high electricity spot-market prices in 2018. There were complaints made at that time to the Electricity Authority the regulatory body which raised concerns about whether gas supply outages were being fully disclosed to the market. As a result of that a policy decision was made by the Government—and we broadly supported it—to put out a discussion document across the sector to get an opinion about whether further transparency information transparency was required. That's what this bill seeks to do: to strengthen the regulation-making powers in the Act to provide for enhanced information disclosure.Now so far so good. That sounds all very well and good. We should do that. But then I asked—and we broadly support this bill but there is widespread concern however across the sector about what is becoming very much the fashion within this Government. That is to say they come up with a bill which gives it the power to make regulations requiring all sorts of information in a particular industry and when they pass their bills they always give themselves plenty of opportunity to pass plenty of regulations. So they go broad and the result of that is to give themselves every bit of room that they need to make whatever regulations they feel that they need to.The problem with that is that the people who are trying to make a living in the sector look at that and say Oh well we don't know what's coming down the road next and will this Government abuse that power?" They look across to Megan Woods. They look at Megan Woods and they look at Kelvin Davis and they think of Phil Twyford and they look at Jacinda Ardern and they think about the possibility of another UN speech coming up and they worry—and they worry. They think of Judith Collins and—not Judith Collins. They think of Jacinda Ardern and they think of a UN speech coming up and they're worried that she might do something else that will have a massive impact on their livelihood and their ability to make a living and create jobs and provide for their families and for the communities' families.That uncertainty unfortunately has been one of the things that this Government has introduced into our economy in a shocking way over the past few years because who can make the capital or is going to be likely to make the capital investment that we need to grow our economy and to become more productive if we don't know what's coming down the track if Megan Woods decides one day that she's just going to impose a ban on your particular industry or that she's going to require a whole lot more information—commercially sensitive information potentially—to be disclosed? So it's that uncertainty that fills the minds of many with dread.We've seen another example of that. I was in the select committee yesterday on education. I'll diverge very briefly from the topic around early education where again this Government has come in in the dead of night introducing urgent legislation changing that sector dramatically and the consequence of all that is that anybody investing in any sort of business in this country feels unnerved and wonders who's going to be next to feel the cold dark hand of this Government on their shoulder—Hon Simon Bridges: Dark hairy hand.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: —dark hairy cold hand on their shoulder—in the middle of the night imposing new regulations and new requirements or telling them that they don't like their business and they don't like it. Fundamentally what we've just had in the last month is a Budget—a big-spending Budget one of the biggest-spending Budgets in the history of this country. Nothing about—[Interruption] oh and they applaud.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Well why not? I mean it takes enormous skill. It takes enormous skill—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! The member will resume his seat. Thank you. This is the second reading speech. I'll ask the member to come back to the bill.Hon PAUL GOLDSMITH: Indeed and it takes enormous skill to spend money wisely.Anyway so I looked for the regulatory impact statement on this bill and it's an interesting one. When you introduce legislation that imposes new regulations on particular industries one of the disciplines that thankfully this Government has retained from the previous Government is that it's supposed to go through a regulatory impact statement. So one of the basic sort of questions was: was there a regulatory impact statement to inform decisions around this bill? And the good news is there was. The second question is: if so did the regulatory impact assessment team in the Treasury provide an independent opinion on the quality of that regulatory impact statement? The answer to that was no. No they didn't.Then they said that the regulatory impact statement identified above did not meet the threshold for receiving an independent opinion—it wasn't anywhere substantial enough. And has any further analysis been offered for this bill? All we've seen is just another example of the Government coming in putting out a discussion document getting feedback from the stakeholders they say "Yes we agree that there should be some more information being made available." and they develop a voluntary code and it happens. All the information is being made available but the Government decides they need to legislate anyway on top of that and then they come in with very broad legislation which leaves that uncertainty within the broader sector about what's coming next and how will their shoulder be tapped in what way for new information.The only point of reference that I make to the previous decision around the banning of oil and gas explanation is the link between the two is this bald assertion that we're so rich that we don't need to look for oil and gas and somehow we're going to make a living in this country and we're going to maintain the high living standards that we all aspire to in order to provide for our families but every few months we'll just chop off another limb of our economy and everything will be fine. So oil and gas goes because we don't really like that. International education goes because we don't like that. We don't really like the farmers so we'll give them the bum's rush. We don't like mining so we'll do that. And somehow—somehow—we're going to still continue to make the living that we make.So it's the cavalier way in which the Government chops off arms of our economy that worries us but secondly it's the capricious way in which they make their decision making and announce it on the basis of no independent analysis. It's that uncertainty around decision making that has that inhibiting effect on investment because ultimately how do we make the economy more productive? It comes back to private sector investment as one of the great drivers of productivity increases. You only get improved productivity if people are prepared to invest but who would feel confident to invest in a sector like this when at any given moment Megan Woods can hove into view and bring new regulation into place and change the rules and pull the carpet out from underneath you? That concern is what we're worried about and I can very much sympathise with the industry on that score. But I'm conscious that time is racing by and I haven't had a chance to deal with some of the specifics in this electorate but I will when I get a chance. One of the elements that I do want to draw attention to—oh dear I've run out of time."