Roberts AngelaANGELA ROBERTS (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on the Fuel Industry (Improving Fuel Resilience) Amendment Bill. It's really unfortunate to hear others on the other side of the House who don't like words like resilience" given the huge challenges we have to support our entire economy and our people in it to make a just transition. I'm really proud to be part of a Government that is not scared to take on these challenges. People sound surprised on the other side of the House that we're going to have this grappling and this "How do we move from the carbon-based economy we've got now to one that means it is sustainable and future-proofed and means we can get to zero carbon?" It is really disappointing to hear people are surprised or if they're not surprised they really can't be bothered. They want to keep their heads in the sand because it's all just too hard. This bill is a really good example of how we are helping this economy to grapple with that just transition. We have heard a lot about the challenges to our resilience that are growing—you know there are the examples of contaminated fuel and the supply challenges that were exacerbated through COVID and through the wars that are happening. As we heard from the other side of the House they aren't necessarily new and unique but we have had the new and unique that are becoming the normal which are challenging our resilience and one of those is obviously climate change. We heard about it through the cyclone and the floods. We had isolated communities that did not have energy resilience. As someone who lives in a rural community we know how to deal with power cuts. We don't just have candles and torches; we have little—[Member makes a gesture with her hands]Shanan Halbert: What's that?ANGELA ROBERTS: What a torch or a candle—no? All good. We know how to make sure that our woodpiles are stacked up we know that we always have our phones charged and we always have a full tank of fuel in the car. It is really really important to those in our rural communities that we do as much as we can to provide that support. The interesting thing is that because we have to and we are dealing with challenge of transitioning away from a carbon-based economy we are reducing the incentives for our fuel companies to make that critical infrastructure that tides us over until some time in the future when we no longer rely on a carbon-based economy and so we aren't. As we see New Zealand and the planet reducing its fossil fuel reliance and consumption we are seeing carbon-based fuel companies making decisions about cost and profit and they aren't necessarily in very good alignment with what we need as an economy. We need infrastructure and we need structures that will make sure that our economy will thrive.For those over the other side of the House who obviously didn't pass level 3 economics my students and I would have conversations and probably the hardest topic to teach was those marginal cost curves average costs average variable costs total cost—all of those things—and at which bit of the curve a firm would decide to change its behaviour. They were always really difficult to look at—curves on a piece of paper—but what we did do was we could pick up real-life examples and this is one of them. This is a really good example of market failure that is effectively being imposed on the market to a certain extent because we do need to transition away from carbon fuels.So what happens when we have market failure? We need Government intervention. Market failure isn't really a problem if we're talking about buying mangoes down at the local fruit shop. Apologies to mango-growers but what I'm suggesting is that that is not necessarily critical for the functioning of our economy. But there are some places where we cannot have market failure and where we have to make sure that supply and demand have attention paid to them and this is one such thing. Energy is obviously critical and it is even more critical that we support our entire economy to transition away from carbon to the alternatives. I heard from my colleague Glen Bennett from Taranaki. Those of us who've been in this just transition space for a very long time are very very clear that we have to move the conversation—and we are—from oil and gas to energy. We have to move and make sure that those investments help us to have a lighter footprint on the planet and we've heard about our offshore wind investments and solar and onshore wind and all of those other things that will help us become not just 100 percent renewable but exporters of renewable energy—won't that be fantastic when it comes about? But it is about supporting the market to do that. If we leave it up to the market they will quite understandably—because that's how a firm works. It looks at those cost curves and it says "New Zealand infrastructure—I don't think so." and they'll walk away and then we'll really be in trouble. So I'm really pleased this is going to the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee. I commend this bill to the House."