Brown Peter: Urgent Debates — Power Outage—Upper North Island 
Brown Peter: Urgent Debates — Power Outage—Upper North Island 
[Volume:631;Page:3478] 
PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 Let me start by alerting this House to the fact that if members want to play politics with this issue then we are doing ourselves no good whatsoever. A number of questions were asked this afternoon that were to some degree flippant. We had allegations made against the Rt Hon Winston Peters that were totally untrue and I would like to dispel them right now. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Prove it! 
PETER BROWN 
: I say to Mr Henare that this is the copy of the speech that Nick Smith wanted initially to table— 
Hon Tau Henare 
: How do you know? 
PETER BROWN 
: How do I know? I know because he came across and gave it to me. That is how I know. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I ask you to ask this member to stick to the debate in front of us. The debate is an urgent debate so that Parliament might express its views on the crisis that occurred in Auckland yesterday as a result of a Transpower failure at one of its plants. For Mr Brown to get up and start reading a 1998 speech from Winston Peters I think stretches it in a way that makes us look silly. He has just asked us to put politics aside and to start debating the issues. I think you should invite him to do exactly that. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: I thank the member for drawing it to my attention and suggest that under Speakers’ ruling 44/3 people are given some leeway when they first start. The member can bring that speech into the debate providing he makes it relevant. 
PETER BROWN 
: Mr Speaker I can assure you it is relevant. 
I want to read a couple of extracts from Winston Peters’ speech. He said: “The Government is doing all that it can in this crisis. The Minister of Energy has done all that he can in this crisis. Every alternative source of energy has been looked at and we are still looking at alternative ways of helping the Auckland situation.” He goes on to say: “I will tell the member what our policy is.”—I remind members he is talking about a New Zealand First - National coalition Government—“We are going to have an inquiry. That is No. 1. We are going to have an inquiry because the people of Auckland want one.” 
The reason I raise those statements is that they are relevant today. Nothing really has improved for Auckland people in particular since 1998 and nobody should be sitting here chastising one side or the other of the House. Collectively we have missed the boat. As I listen to National members I can hear that they still do not have a clue on how to address the electricity problems we are facing in this country. If they listen for a little while I will tell them exactly what needs to be done. First and foremost we need a good deal more electricity. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: That’s right. 
PETER BROWN 
: The member is nodding his head. 
Secondly we need greater investment in the industry. Thirdly we need to be able to guarantee security of supply. Finally we want a competitive environment so that prices are fair reasonable and competitive. 
Auckland itself needs power from more than one route and from more than one wire. It is not good enough to have in the 21st century a majority of the power coming in from one route. We need greater investment. I listened to the Minister for State Owned Enterprises with interest and it saddened me that he got on to so many sidetracks that I thought he did himself a disservice. 
Transpower pays the Government a dividend which was $10 million last year and $40 million the year before. New Zealand First will be encouraging the Government to forgo that dividend and reinvest it in particular in Auckland. 
 Electricity is a very important commodity for the average New Zealander and for New Zealand businesses. If we take a closer look at what happened yesterday we see that people were jammed in lifts and calling out the fire brigade conditions were as black as pitch so that people could not see anything and did not know where they were people were having to walk down 28 flights of stairs it was freezing cold and businesses were closing up and sending people home. We are told by Business New Zealand that businesses lost $50 million - plus in takings. That is how serious the problem is. That is the issue is that we have to deal with—and we have to deal with it in some urgency. 
It is small satisfaction to say this was a blackout of some hours only whilst in 1998 the blackout lasted 35 days. That is a non-issue—the blackout should not have occurred. I do not know how it occurred or exactly why it occurred. A wire snapped and entangled itself around other wires and blew the whole of Auckland into a blackout. Frankly that is the issue we should address with a degree of urgency because it is not acceptable for New Zealand’s foremost city in terms of size and population to have a blackout just because a strong gale is blowing and a wire breaks. 
We will have to bring in power from a number of sources and a number of areas and we will have to give consideration to having more generation produced locally in Auckland. I know the Government is very keen on wind power and New Zealand First will support an encouragement of wind power. But we are also sitting on billions of tonnes of coal in this country so we believe we should be examining coal as an option for producing electricity at a reasonable price for New Zealanders. There is potential up north with the Marsden B power station and there is potential elsewhere in the country. 
We can all go on television or talk on the radio and we can ratchet the issue up but at the end of the day New Zealanders want us to address it with absolute urgency. We can ask people to write reports—we can have reports ad infinitum—but unless we actually get down to investing in our energy industries then this problem will occur time and time again. It might not happen next year but it could well do so—or it could even happen next week given the way the weather is going in this country. But ultimately unless we get more power—particularly coming into Auckland—from a variety of sources and routes we will face more and more problems in the future. 
We should be looking at all the options of generating electricity. Hydro generation produces 60 percent - plus of our electricity and gas something like 22 percent. Coal produces a measly 8 percent and as I said earlier we should be making greater use of the billions of tonnes of coal this country has at its fingertips. The wind produces a modest 2 percent of our power yet the Government is hell-bent on developing wind energy. New Zealand First applauds that but wind is not the only source of energy. 
This is a crisis that should not have occurred; this event should have been identified as a possibility years ago. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: It was—Keith Turner pointed it out. 
PETER BROWN 
: Well Keith Turner might have pointed it out but Winston Peters pointed it out in 1998. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: No he didn’t. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Winston never mentioned Transpower in ’98. 
PETER BROWN 
: He pointed out in 1998 that we had to do something. It is no good those National members screaming their heads off because this is an issue we have sat on in Parliament. We cannot rely just on Keith Turner’s words; we have known of the problem for some time. We knew when the Labour Government produced that electricity legislation last term that it was not going to fully address the issue. New Zealand First is on record as voting against those bills because of that very situation. We did not believe that the legislation in this country was coming to terms with the problem. 
We have to take this problem seriously and there must be moves afoot to address the issue within a relatively short time frame. I can assure the House that New Zealand First will cooperate with any willing party that wants to solve this problem to the benefit and advantage of New Zealanders but to sit here and play politics with the issue is not the way to get things done.