Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you very much Madam Speaker. I stand today to speak to the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill in its first reading. As we heard very articulately from my colleague Jonathan Young the purpose of this bill is really simply to strengthen the regulation-making powers in the Act and to provide for enhanced disclosure requirements for the gas market. What that aims to do is ensure that the settings around that enforcement are suitably robust. The bill follows the gas supply disruptions as has been mentioned by Jonathan Young most notably in the Pohokura outage which when it happened contributed to a really high electricity spot market prices. As a consequence of that outage there were complaints made to the Electricity Authority which amongst other things raised some concerns with the complainant about whether the gas supply outages were being fully disclosed to the market. So as a consequence we are here today to address how those disclosures are noted. But what we'll find as we work our way through this bill is the process that has been followed and how the market has behaved without the need for this legislation. Currently there is a difference between the electricity industry which is subject to mandatory disclosure—and the electricity industry where the gas industry is not subject to that same disclosure has current practices where they use a range of reporting mechanisms. But what is interesting is that the gas industry even though this bill seeks to make it mandatory is actually using their own disclosure on their website when they advertise these planned outages. So the industry itself is almost self-regulating and we'll hear more about that as I work my way through. The electricity users use a range or a suite of reporting mechanisms. I'll refer to three of them that I'm familiar with which are SAIDI SAIFI and CAIDI. So SAIDI is the System Average Interruption Duration Index and that's what the electricity retailers use for power outages. So that's the right reliability indicator and that's usually the reporting for the length of time for an outage whereas SAIFI which is the System Average Interruption Frequency Index is the number of interruptions that the consumer would normally experience. CAIDI the Customer Average Interruption Duration Index is the one that is used eventually to measure the average restoration time of any outage.So what the electricity industry a retailer or a lines companies would do would be to anticipate their SAIDIs SAIFIs and CAIDIs in their annual plan and then they would report against those at the end of the year. But I know that for some electricity utility providers that does become a bit challenging when you have the likes of a Cyclone Ita or weather events that happen that bring about severe interruptions to the electricity supply. But it actually does provide a platform where there is reporting against the interruption and the frequency of those power supplies. So following the Pohokura outage the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) actually went out to investigate and consult on some of the options that could be made available for the disclosure by the participants in the gas industry and also looked at maybe some penalty regime around that as well. But according to MBIE the regulatory framework that exists now actually works really well. So they determined that there were no major gaps or overlaps between the regulators to justify any significant change to their roles. MBIE's own discussion paper even mentioned that the Government did not need to amend the law to strengthen the powers of the regulatory bodies. The regulatory bodies seem to have manoeuvred and adjusted as required and they're the ones that regulate the information disclosures. So the fact that the electricity price review has already suggested that those regulatory bodies are needed to create stronger disclosures—there was no opposition from the gas suppliers to that because they were already moving in that direction. They are self-regulating anyway. So there was no issue. There was no need for legislation to force them to do that. They were going to do it voluntarily anyway. The Gas Industry Co. Limited had already initiated its own stream of work to look at whether the current arrangements were sufficient or whether other arrangements were required but they hadn't actually finished that stream of work so they haven't had input into this bill. You would think it would be appropriate before this paper and this bill came to this House that that work would have been considered from the Gas Industry Co. So without that industry—the one that this bill actually applies to—having had any input into this bill or even the requirement or need for this bill it seems to me to have put the cart before the horse.What the gas industry does have concern with is the kinds of disclosures that are being prescribed in this bill and the main one they do have concern about is the pricing. Some of the forward-looking reporting that this bill may anticipate would have other market information their forecasts their information about potential or actual planned outages and information about risks to security of supply etc. but they do not want to have their private business made available to the general public where that individual company could be identifiable and in which case makes them very vulnerable in the marketplace.The Pohokura outage did highlight other issues in the gas market but as we've heard from my colleague Jonathan Young the Government has not turned its mind to those. The main one of course is that it doesn't matter how much information is gathered or how many disclosures are made about the information or the forward planning it still does not address the basic core problem of supply. The critical issue that this country faces is that we have not in this bill any security of the supply for the gas or the energy sector in this country. It is very sad that with only a little over 10 years' worth of natural gas reserve left the market is likely to tighten even further and the irony about that is what's going to happen is that the market will tighten which will force the prices up and it's then becoming counterintuitive. But the great thing for the West Coast about that is that as the prices for gas go up the value of coal comes into its own. And I tell you there is nothing more efficient and British thermal unit - rich than a tonne of coal. It will be great to see that coal burning in Huntly more than it ever has because this country's energy resources are now so at risk that we are importing coal from Indonesia to keep Huntly burning. Unfortunately the West Coast coal is so valuable and so carbon-rich that it's not burned in this country; it's sent away for more valuable products and they'll return to us. But we do need to address the demand and we are seeing even more risk introduced as we watch Auckland now with its severe water shortages. If we do not address the water storage issue in this country not just for electricity but for a whole lot of other things like drinking water and like farm irrigation and stock water we are still going to be victims of a shortage of energy. I'd like to make a note of one of the small power schemes on the West Coast which is typical of what this Government's philosophy is all about. We want to make sure we've got plenty of people using plenty of energy we want them all to stay warm and dry we want them all to drive EVs but by the way we're not going to guarantee you that we're going to have the energy for you to use to fire those things up. And so when we put a 20-megawatt power scheme up to the Government for approval a run-of-river scheme what did they say? No." I'm aghast. Thank you."