Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Energy and Resources): I'll address the very few issues that have been raised that are actually in scope of this bill.So I think it is worth actually outlining what it is that this bill does. The bill's purposes in particular are strengthening the consumer voice—I've addressed one of the questions around that; I'll go over the reasons for that again in this contribution—and protecting the interests of small electricity consumers whether they be residential or whether they be small businesses; promoting competition in evolving markets and I think that's a really critical place and somewhere I would have liked to have actually probably seen some questions in this debate is the innovation there; and also regulating distribution access agreements which is about how we prepare our electricity sector for the future and for a decarbonised future.So one of the things that has been asked is around the purpose of the consumer advocacy group and what it will do and how it fits within the network of groups that we have across the electricity sector. Of course as I've said in an earlier contribution this was identified by the independent Electricity Price Review as a real gap. And one of the things that I think that it's really important to note—I think one of the previous speakers Melissa Lee said Won't this just replicate what the Commerce Commission does?" Well the Commerce Commission is not an advocacy group and I think it's really important to remember that. This is a needed part of the landscape we have. We have our large electricity users who are very well represented in terms of advocacy and their voice being able to be heard in the policy process. This will complement other groups that exist like the Utilities Disputes. And that is an excellent service that exists within our electricity sector and it can only resolve disputes on certain matters. So it needs to sit alongside that and it is one of the things that we know makes a difference.As I said in an earlier contribution if we look to comparable overseas jurisdictions that do have advocacy services that are legislated we do see smaller increases in utility bills. There is a very strong correlation between those two things happening.As for the costs which the member Judith Collins brought up I already laid that out in an earlier contribution. It will result in around a $2 a year cost on levies. So this is minimal and the benefit we see to our economy both at a household level and at the small business level more than offsets that. We've also seen some other questions that have come through—many of which weren't in scope of the bill—but one of which was questioning the amount of coal that we used and how that fits with our renewable targets. I'm going to be generous and see this in the spirit of the kinds of things that we have to do to bring the innovation to our distribution systems that is covered off in this bill. But one of the issues that we have in our energy system—and I would like to remind the former Minister of energy that it is important to differentiate between energy and electricity. We have never had an 80 percent renewable energy system as she claimed that we have around 90-odd percent renewable electricity system at the moment. Our energy system is only around 40 percent renewable. We've got a lot of work to do in that area.But the whole reason that our coal usage spiked last year is because we experienced a dry year and at the moment the only way New Zealand stores energy for a dry year is in the form of fossil fuels. We store energy in the form of coal and we store energy in the form of gas and this simply cannot continue and is something that this Government is investing in to make sure that we have renewable forms of storage; that we have a plan for our future that fits with a decarbonised world and isn't just relying on fossil fuels for the way that we store those things.There's a lot of stuff being—I can see that there's a desire in the House to have a more general debate on energy and electricity but let's remember what the scope of this bill is. This is very specific and I think a really important thing that we need to do for our electricity system and that is making sure it is working for all the users of electricity and that we are seeing that the rights and interests of those smaller interests are also represented—households and small businesses—but also that we are preparing our system and our distribution systems to ensure we are ready for the innovation that we need. And there's some very interesting clauses in the bill."