Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Energy and Resources): Thank you Madam Chair. It's a pleasure for me to take a call in this annual review debate. It is a pleasure because it is a privilege to be able to be able to outline an ambitious and progressive plan that we have for the economy in this country on this side of the House. We just had an extraordinary speech from the previous speaker Alastair Scott that seemed to be a rehash of his 2017 stump speech along with a whole lot of innuendo and flinging around of accusations. But there are some serious questions within this theme in the annual review debate that we need to consider. I'd like to take some time to consider particularly two of these areas.It is a privilege to speak to this because this is where we get to talk about what a plan looks like—a plan to fix up what has been left after nine years of neglect by the previous Government. The previous Government prioritised meagre surpluses and tax cuts over vital infrastructure and investing in our economic future and that is not something that we on this side of the House are planning to do.I want to look at first of all the energy and resources sector. This is an incredibly important sector to our economic future. We on this side of the House are ambitious. We have a target to get to net zero emissions by 2050 we have a target to get to 100 percent renewable energy in a normal hydrological year by 2035—and to do that you need a plan and that is what this Government is committed to. We will not let communities and workers and industry wait to fall off the cliff because we have failed to plan. And that is what we are beginning now. We need to make sure that we're investing in our regions that we're investing in those parts of the country so that there is a long-term future plan right around our wonderful country.This is where my portfolios connect in such a wonderful way. When I look at regional New Zealand one of the first things I think about is our network of wonderful Crown research institutes (CRIs) that are scattered around those regions and the science that is being undertaken within those CRIs that can be the key to our economic future. But you need to have ambition around that. You need to have a plan to lift our investment in R & D.New Zealand currently invests 1.3 percent of our GDP into research and development. This is well below the OECD average of 2.4 percent. We have ambition on this side of the House to raise that investment. But we're not just going to set a target and wait for it to magically happen as we saw the previous Government do where we didn't see the uplift. We have a plan around this to make sure that businesses are given the incentives that they need to make those valuable decisions to invest in all of our futures when they undertake research and development.If we have a look at business investment in R & D in New Zealand it is just 50 percent of our total investment. We compare that to the OECD where the average of all investment in R & D carried out by businesses is 68 percent. What is most alarming to me is when I look at the concentration of research in this country—when I see that in 2016 45 percent of all business R & D was conducted by 30 firms; when I see that 26 percent of all business R & D was conducted by just six firms. It worries me that we don't have the settings right in our economy to set ourselves up for the kind of future with the kinds of jobs and the kinds of security that we aspire to on this side of the House.The previous speaker said that we are taxing and something else—that that was our plan. No we are building we are innovating and we are investing and transforming to make ourselves ready for the 21st century—an opportunity that was squandered by the previous Government which had no plan beyond the three-year and did not have the courage to lift their sight beyond a three-year electoral cycle. Well that is not an allegation that will ever be levelled at us. We are committed to make sure that we are investing in the kind of future that New Zealand needs.