Nash StuartSTUART NASH (Labour—Napier): Thank you very much Ruth. I will do my best. Look I do disagree with the last speaker Mr Bakshi on one thing. He said that this is a very important bill. Well if it was a very important bill then I would be standing up here and saying that this is finally a Government that embraces innovation and that is going to drive meaningful change in this country.Hon Ruth Dyson: Then he would've spoken for longer than 3 minutes.STUART NASH: And you are right the member would have spoken for longer than 10 minutes—or 5 minutes or 3 minutes.Hon Ruth Dyson: 3.STUART NASH: 3 minutes? Goodness me! You cannot say that this is a really important bill and speak for 3 minutes. If this was a really important bill then like the Minister Dr Coleman you would stand up here and wax lyrical about how it is going to change the world. It will not.The interesting thing about this—let me tell you a very interesting story. Simon Bridges who was the Minister of Energy and Resources—there was a PR shot of him. I think he was there registering the thousandth electric vehicle in the country. What he did was he drove up in this huge big diesel BMW. He got out took the photo shoot about the electric vehicle then jumped into this huge big BMW diesel vehicle and drove back. I would have thought that if the Government was into meaningful change around electric vehicles then what it would have done—the first thing it would have done—was replace its Government Crown fleet with electric vehicles.In fact I was talking to a gentleman friend of mine who knows Elon Musk very well and I was telling him about this and this gentleman said: I bet you if the New Zealand Government went to Elon Musk and said 'We want to replace our Crown fleet with Teslas.' Elon Musk would say: 'How many do you need and when do you need them there?'." He said it would be a beautiful partnership between a guy who knows his marketing—I mean it does not come any better than Elon Musk from a global perspective—and the New Zealand Government.I think this party sometimes forgets that our global brand is "clean green" "100% Pure". We have a brand that lends itself to innovation. In fact in 2005 the then Ministry of Economic Development tried to value this brand. It is very difficult to value a brand we know that but 17 years ago they came up and said our global brand—which started as a marketing brand to be fair but was so successful it morphed into our national brand—was valued at $20 billion a year. That is what people overseas will pay for products from New Zealand or for the New Zealand experience and yet here we are. Our Ministers who are responsible who are guardians of our national brand drive huge big diesel BMWs. Drive Teslas—that is still pretty cool. Imagine picking up international dignitaries in a Tesla. That would send a very clear message to the world that not only do we value our brand but we are actually walking the walk.What this bill does is it purports to sort of champion electric vehicles but it does not go nearly far enough in what we view is an innovative way to send the global community a very clear message—that not only do we value our brand but we live it and not only do we live it but we as a Government put policies in place to really champion this. But this bill is not about energy innovation. It is a small wee step. We are supporting it I must admit. It is the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. We are supporting it because it would probably be a little bit churlish not to because we do believe in energy innovation. We do believe in electric vehicles. The other matters—well they are just part and parcel of an amendment bill. But if the Government really wanted to be innovative—if this was a Labour Government putting this forward—you would see a bill that was incredibly innovative and drove change in a way that played into our global brand.In terms of driving this innovation the Government fleet is by far the largest fleet on the roads. The Parliamentary Library gave me some statistics and said it was about 20000 vehicles I think. It is huge so the way to really drive innovation I would say to Simon Bridges—and the members over there know. You can see their heads are bowed because they are a little bit ashamed of this little bit of nothing bill—a bit like the ones we have been debating in the last couple of weeks. The way to really drive innovation would have been to actually take the bull by the horns and say: "Not only are we going to transition our Crown fleet we are going to transition the Government fleet to electric vehicles." When that happens when the Government makes a decision to do that it will have a whole lot of downstream effects. What it does is it gives business and gives the private sector the confidence that they need to be to invest in the infrastructure that is required to really drive the electric vehicle fleet right across the country.There are a couple of interesting things in this bill. The first one is it allows regional authorities or territorial authorities to permit electric cars to go down bus lanes. That sounds on the surface like it is not a bad idea. It means that if you have got an electric vehicle if you have invested in an electric vehicle then you can probably get to work a little earlier. The thing about that though is they think there are going to be about 64000 electric vehicles in the next 10 years. That is good uptake but what is the point in having a bus lane what is the point in parking at some place that is remote and jumping on a bus if in Auckland you are competing with 50000 of those 64000 electric vehicles? It actually makes no sense.I do not think that people will invest in an electric vehicle because they can drive in a bus lane. They might initially but that sort of competitive advantage will disappear extremely quickly. People invest in electric vehicles for a number of reasons. First of all obviously the cost of petrol drops considerably because you have not got petrol if it is fully electric; if it is a hybrid then you pay very little is my understanding if you to keep it charged and drive it around town. The second reason is that it is actually the right thing to do. We hear about climate change and we understand the impact it has—and we were global leaders in this space. Again it plays into our global brand. We used to be leaders; now we are laggards. But it is a consumer's way of doing the right thing. The Minister of Transport himself has said he has bought two electric vehicles for his own household. That is quite ironic is it not? He will buy an electric vehicle for his own household but he will not encourage his colleagues to transition the Crown fleet to electric vehicles.Peeni Henare: Goose and gander.STUART NASH: You are dead right. What is good for the goose should be good for the gander is that right—it is something like that.Peeni Henare: They're all gooses.STUART NASH: Ha ha! What I mean is you have got to start walking the walk. Do not buy an electric vehicle so you can drive in the bus lane. That is a bit of an anomaly.The other thing that is in this bill that we need to be aware of because it is one of these things that has sort of been slipped in there is something called a gas levy and it is quite substantial. It is a couple of million dollars a year and it goes back into promoting safety around gas and that sort of stuff. Well it used to be collected at the wholesale selling point. The Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment itself admits that there was significant under-recovery of this gas levy—I mean up to 50 percent. In essence it was not being recovered and we came to the impression it was not not being recovered due to any sort of incompetence or any sort of of illegal activity; it was just incredibly hard to collect because it is such a small percentage on a per unit basis but when you add it up it actually adds up to quite a bit.So it is now going to be collected at the retail point which makes a lot of sense—we all agreed on that—but one thing that we are going to be keeping an eye on is that retailers do not use this as an excuse to drive up the price of gas. The last thing we want to see after this bill receives Royal assent is everyone who has got a gas bill—and there are a lot of people who have got them—seeing: "Oh we are now going to charge you a couple of cents extra per unit used because Parliament has passed a gas levy which means that we have to collect it." That would be dishonest because what we were told at the Commerce Committee was that the portion of this levy per unit used is infinitesimal so it should not make any difference whatsoever to anyone's gas bill at all. It just changes the point in the whole supply chain around where this levy is collected. I would say to anyone who is watching this that if you are on gas—and I am myself—and you see a new item on your gas bill that says "gas levy" then query it or get hold of me or better still get hold of the Minister of Energy and Resources and say "This is wrong because this should not be here." because we do not want to see this levy as an excuse to increase charges to consumers.Just summing up we are for innovation. I personally believe that we need to drive innovation in a way that we are not doing at the moment and I firmly believe that when it comes to the energy sector and certainly electric vehicles the Government has a very important role to play. I am not talking about subsidies; I am talking about Government behaviour. Imagine if the Prime Minister turned up in an electric vehicle—imagine the message that would send. Imagine the message it would send if not only were the Minister of Transport's personal vehicles electric but his Crown car was an electric vehicle. It is incredibly easy to do. The message it sends would be incredibly powerful so instead of this sort of nothing piece of legislation—it is a start but it is not the start we need. I think the Government needs to be a lot more innovative. The thing that you will find with a Labour Government is we will bring a fresh approach to this sort of innovation to this sort of sector with fresh ideas around how to drive this forward. Thank you very much."