Hide Rodney: Electricity and Gas Industries Bill — In Committee 
Hide Rodney: Electricity and Gas Industries Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:15854] 
RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I am afraid that the Minister’s explanation goes no way to satisfying the ACT party. I ask him to consider these questions: how is gas found how is gas lifted out of the ground how is gas lifted from the ground to where it can be processed and how is gas processed? 
I can enlighten the Minister. This is the answer: it is by investment and by heavy heavy investment. When investors invest their money—I know that this is not something the Labour Government is aware of—they are looking for a return. This is an industry that is fraught with risk but this Government with this bill is introducing a phenomenal risk. 
Let members read in section 43C inserted by clause 45 what can happen. Investors can invest in a pipeline or a processing plant and the Government can come along and take it off them. There is no other way of putting it. The Government can come along through an Order in Council and set reasonable terms and conditions for access to processing facilities and to the transmission and distribution of gas. 
I have a simple question for the Minister: whose pipeline or processing facility is it? It belongs to the people who own it. The Minister stood up in this Committee waved his arms and said: “Oh no we would only pinch it if the rest of the industry thought it was a good idea.” It is as if the Minister is in his house—I will put it into something that maybe a Labour Government Minister can understand—and the Government decides he has a spare bedroom and sets the rules by which someone can come and occupy it. Then the Government says that it is excess capacity so there is a spare bedroom and to make it available. But the Government says “Oh no no. We won’t do that—it will require everyone in the street to agree.” 
Somehow this Minister of Energy thinks that that is OK. Well we have had plenty of experience down through the ages across a whole lot of countries of what happens when people do that. It crashes investment. I just wish that the Minister in the chair Pete Hodgson understood the significance of the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989 and of communism collapsing under its own weight of poor incentive and failure to understand the significance of property rights. 
If the Minister wants to have good investment in gas exploration and in the gas processing and distribution industry the very best thing that he could do is to protect property rights—not pinch them as he proposes to do in Part 4A. I implore the Minister not to be blinded by ideology or the politics of this or by the idea that a bunch of civil servants sitting around can somehow come along and reshape an industry into a better outcome. 
I look to United Future. I do not believe that those members are stupid enough to think that Part 4A will increase investment in gas exploration and distribution. I know about the Greens. They will vote for this because they do not want gas processed found dug up and distributed; they want it just left in the ground. I can understand that. I look across to New Zealand First and I say to its members: “Ask yourself. If you were an investor in anything and this rule applied—whether to your car house place of work or business—would you invest under these rules?”. They might if there were a big enough return but they would be less likely to—and that is the trouble with this bill and this Government.