Hughes Gareth: Electricity Transparency Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Electricity Transparency Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8523. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora ngā mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. I would like to start with a statistic that I think members may find interesting. I was having coffee with the chief executive officer of one of our large generator-retailers last week and he told me that that single company has 14000 separate accounts which are 14000 separate pricing plans. You know it has got various options. You have got 29 different regional lines monopolies all with their own different way of charging. If you apply that across the numerous retail companies across the country we could have a hundred thousand different pricing plans in a little country of—what—4 million people. You think that is complex? What is really complex is when you open up your power bill because it is hard to understand what on earth is going on. You may have tried to use less power in the week but you would not know from the power bill because of all the fixed charges the lines charges the Electricity Authority levy and everything else on top of it. This is a real issue and a tangible issue and I acknowledge and salute the member David Shearer for putting the Electricity Transparency Bill in front of Parliament because we know our customers are struggling in New Zealand when it comes to paying the power bills.When customers open the power bill—you know first you have got to gingerly tear it open because it is terrifying. You never know what it is going to be but you know it is probably going to be higher than what it was last year. What we do know is that power bills have gone up some 25 percent in the last 5 years. New Zealand has seen the fifth-highest power price increases in the entire developed world since the Max Bradford energy reforms. The four countries ahead of us are all ex-communist countries coming out of Soviet domination. We have the fifth-highest power prices in the developed world and what is the Government’s response to massively increasing power bills and a rise in energy poverty that now see a quarter of New Zealand families spending more than 10 percent of their weekly disposable income just to keep the lights on? Sadly families are actually making that tough choice between whether they heat this week and whether they eat. And what has the response been? It has been: “Well shop around. Use your consumer power.” I remember Simon Bridges in this House saying: “Those reforms still need a little bit more time to bed in.” How much longer are we going to have to wait for those reforms to bed in when we have seen the fifth-highest power prices over that period? What we have seen from the industry in response to those rocketing power bills and that real energy poverty is a blame game or a blame-around where the retailers blame the lines companies the lines companies blame the retailers and no one can make head or tail of it because everyone is blaming everyone else.It reminds me of what the former chief executive officer of Telecom once said off the cuff which was that part of its marketing was to cause confusion as a marketing tool. When you cannot understand your bill it is hard to change behaviour it is hard to shop around and it is hard to exercise your consumer power. At the same time we also see the National Government cut funding—or it has not extended funding—for the Powerswitch website where consumers can switch between power companies. What I have heard in this debate—and look it has not been much of an intellectual or a true debate around the issues—from National members is that they want to keep consumers in the dark. I thought that party stood for consumer rights for greater transparency. They said that the companies would do it—you know competition will urge them to provide more information to their companies. If that was the case it would have happened already but it has not. Then they said it was too costly. For those big old power companies with maybe 14000 separate accounts and creaky backroom IT systems to deal with it it may cost a little bit of money. But the fact is you have got innovative new retailers like Ecotricity and Flick that are coming into the market.What consumers want in New Zealand is more consumer power. They are sick and tired; for decades they have been passively paying the power bill and seeing it going up. They want to produce some of the power themselves. They want a little bit more control. When I was in California recently doing an energy study tour what I heard there is that the utilities are trying to think about themselves as providing energy services not just pushing electrons one way down those wires. It is for the reason that consumers are kept in the dark and are not being given real choice that they are going solar in record numbers. I am supporting this bill and the Green Party is because it is part of giving consumers more control. It is part of our mission for energy and my mission as energy spokesperson to get cleaner cheaper smarter energy for New Zealanders. Now we can do it. The question facing Parliament tonight is where members stand. Is it with those old power companies and their old creaky IT systems that cannot get there that spread confusion and doubt when it comes to their power bills or are they going to stand on the side of consumers and the new energy economy to make sure that consumers can have a choice transparency and make decisions based on them.