Gas (Market Transparency) Amendment Bill

Third Reading Hon SIMON WATTS (Minister of Climate Change) (11:25): on behalf of the Minister for Energy: I move, That the Gas (Market Transparency) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. I wish to thank members for their contribution during the committee phase under urgency. Existing disclosure mechanisms under the Gas Act are too slow, they are too uncertain, and limited in effect to address the current information challenges that face the gas market here in New Zealand. This bill make sure adequate regulation-making powers are in place to improve the transparency of the gas market and to support better decision making by market participants and Government. The significance of declining gas reserves reaches well beyond the energy sector itself. Gas generates the electricity that keeps the lights on when renewables cannot, and a large number of Kiwis’ jobs depend on businesses that rely on gas. It is important that we make sure that market participants and Government have the information needed to plan effectively for the future as gas supplies decline and the market rapidly changes. Passing this bill will enable work on information disclosure regulations to proceed without delay, ensuring timely access to the information needed. Improving gas market transparency is an important step that will support secure, affordable energy for Kiwi households and businesses as this Government continues to fix the basics and build the future. Kiwis deserve power that they can afford, an economy backed by reliable energy, and jobs protected from avoidable shocks. I commend this bill to the House. Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour) (11:27): I want to go through a little bit of the history of what was being done in respect of the gas market, and it was work that did actually begin under the Labour Government. In 2017-2023, the Labour Government kicked off a whole formal work stream on wholesale gas market transparency and we asked the Gas Industry Company to design stronger information disclosure arrangements for outyears production prices. It’s good to see the progression of this work and we agree that it is something that needed to be done. In terms of why we actually got the whole work under way, we knew that gas was a resource that we had to move away from, and we had to move away from it because it is a fossil fuel and fossil fuels are driving climate change, so we did start working on that and making a plan. In 2020, we commissioned the Gas Industry Company to investigate whether the market then, the commercial and regulatory settings, were fit for purpose, and no they weren’t. The Gas Industry Company concluded that in the absence of a transition plan for fossil fuels, for fossil gas, there was a risk of what’s called a disorderly exit of New Zealand’s gas sector—in other words, considerable disruption, huge difficulties for businesses, huge difficulties for consumers. In 2021, we were developing a plan for a transition. The terms of reference for that were agreed in April 2022, and then a new Government came to power, and crickets. Nothing—nothing happening. This was absurd, especially in the knowledge that gas resources in this country were declining; especially in the knowledge that there have been no commercial finds of gas in this country for the last quarter century; especially in the knowledge that we simply must move away from fossil fuels. From that Government: crickets. It’s a real shame because, in terms of moving away from fossil fuels, we have a huge opportunity under renewables—a huge opportunity to go high tech, a huge opportunity to provide jobs in the regions, a huge opportunity to affirm our energy security and to become energy independent. Now, let’s remember that gas is not equal to energy. Gas certainly provides energy, but energy comes to us from a whole lot of sources, and it’s quite appropriate that we move fast to get that renewable energy online and working for us. We’ve been clear on this side of the House that while we don’t support this particular Government’s version of fast-track legislation, and we don’t support it because of its callous disregard for the environment, we did have a fast-track process in place ourselves, and that fast-track process was working with respect to renewable energy. The fact that that Government then got rid of it for a couple of years while it faffed around is on them. Transition planning was under way, working; we had stuff happening. This Government came in, and crickets. Now we are getting the knowledge that our gas reserves are substantially less than we thought they were going to be. We now have the risk of a disorderly exit from the gas industry. That’s why this information that is provided for in this bill is very, very important. We agree that this information is needed. We agree that Government needs to play a role in the transition away from fossil fuels. We agree that Government needs to be working alongside business to ensure that businesses can transition away from fossil fuels. We were doing that. That was happening. Crickets. This is catch-up legislation from this Government, and the fact that it’s catch-up legislation is shown by the fact that it is now being introduced and passed under Budget urgency. Ryan Hamilton: You had no plan—you had no plan. Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: It was there, Ryan. It was there; it was happening. It was actually happening. It is here now, this ability to collect information and to use it That’s a good move, and we support that move. There is, however, something that we are worried about in this bill. It’s something that we asked the Minister about several times when he was in the chair, and the Minister did not answer. That is this last-minute Amendment Paper 634, an Amendment Paper that was tabled after this very short and very simple bill was put on the Table. What happened? We asked the Minister, “Why?”, and he said, “Oh, minor technical changes.” These are not minor and technical changes. In fact, the Minister can restrict the information that is provided—can limit or restrict the publication of the information that is provided. Why? And why did this have to be included in an Amendment Paper that was put on the Table just yesterday, as real time goes, but it wasn’t available when this very short and simple bill was put on the Table on Budget day. We asked the Minister whether there were representations from gas industry representatives, from fossil-fuel representatives. And from the Minister? Crickets. That’s worrying, and we will be following up on that. I want to speak to some of the issues that members did raise in speeches during the various stages of this bill. I think I said, in both my first reading speech and my second reading speech, that for once I agreed with Simon Court. It was an interesting position to be in! He talked about how we are now managing scarcity, but let’s remember that the scarcity we are managing is not scarcity of energy. There is plenty of energy that hits this country every day, coming from the sun. There is plenty of energy that hits this country every day, coming from wind. There is plenty of energy that hits this country every day, coming up from the ground beneath us. I note that Rūaumoko had a little bit to say during the course of this debate. There is plentiful energy available to us. All we need to do is make the transition, and we need to start making that transition away from fossil fuels. People on that side of the House like to deny, effectively, that the climate is changing around us, but that is a critical need for us to address. In our country and in the world, we need to address the issue of climate change, and part of the issue of addressing climate change is forming a credible plan to transition us away from fossil fuels, to use much more varied sources of energy. That is a Government that did not sign up to the pathway to transition away from fossil fuels that was agreed by about 80 nations around the world at COP30. That’s a Government that has its head in the sand when it comes to taking action on climate change. I agree that we need to manage our remaining gas reserves carefully as we help businesses to transition away from fossil fuels. That is what this bill will do. It will help in this process. That is why it is a good bill. But there is a whole lot more we need to hear from that Government. What is their plan with respect to fossil fuels? What is their plan with moving this country to electricity as its major source? What is their plan for helping us to deal with climate change? What do we hear from that Government? Hon Members: Crickets! Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Crickets. It’s great to see this legislation coming through, it’s great to see some work in this space, but actually it’s going to take a lot more than just this to help New Zealand in the 21st century. STEVE ABEL (Green) (11:37): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Well, we do expect to hear from the other side of the House, particularly from the ACT Party, the typical sort of obsequious, simpering, forelock-tugging, petroleum-soaked, gushing-like-a-deep-sea-oil-spill love of the petroleum industry— Ryan Hamilton: So you don’t support gas? STEVE ABEL: And no doubt, at some point, the member who is barking at me right now might want to make a point of order, because he doesn’t like freedom of speech when it relates to criticism of the petroleum industry. He likes freedom of speech when he wants to slander Māori or trans people or migrants but not when it’s criticism of billion-dollar polluting industries. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Back to the bill, Mr Abel. STEVE ABEL: To the bill—to the bill—we are supporting this bill because we do support greater transparency. It was deeply concerning that the Minister was so reluctant to ask my specific questions as to whether he had received any advice on the New Zealand industry overstating, overbooking, overproving, or overestimating its reserve volumes, because, as I elucidated in my opening speech, this is a problem globally: fraudulent reserve reporting, companies overestimating their reserves, and, in fact, being taken for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States because of that overstating of their reserves. It is very obvious, when you think about it for a minute, why the oil and gas industry would do that. They would do it because that is the value of their industry, and if those who use gas want the confidence of having a future energy supply when they are going to be investing in new plant or new machinery, one thing they want to be sure of is that there is plenty of gas into the future. These are one of the points made in the regulatory impact statement (RIS), that one of the consequence for industrial gas users is significant sunk costs in gas-dependent plant and equipment that rely on gas for their manufacturing processes. Their equipment lasts a considerable time. So why would the oil and gas industry want to be optimistic about how much gas they had? Because they know that a company that wants to buy a piece of equipment that relies on gas wants to know that they’ve got gas for the next 25, 30, 40 years. That’s exactly why this bill is so important: because right now, there are companies all across this country who have seen the price of energy go through the roof because there has been an overestimate of the amount of gas that we have in this country. In fact, that gas has been in steady decline for 26 years. Again, the regulatory impact statement very usefully published the graph which showed, from 2000, a steady decline in gas. Yet the industry kept saying, “We’ve got heaps of gas past 2030”. They don’t have heaps of gas past 2030. The crunch is coming right now. The members on the opposite side have been so busy denying climate change that they forgot that gas itself is a finite resource; as is oil; as is coal. We can’t afford to burn the existing reserves if we want to have a liveable planet. But these things run out. And the beauty of us—the beauty of us moving to a renewable energy system isn’t only that we address the existential challenge of climate change, we also address the finite nature of fossil fuels. Right here, we have a bill that will assist us to manage that transition by using what little gas we have left wisely. We have not been using that gas wisely. Because, for example, we’ve been burning it to generate electricity. That is about the worst way that you could use gas, because there are so many other better, cleaner, more effective ways to generate electricity than by burning non-renewable fossil gas. The industry themselves, Todd Energy, for example, were great touters of building gas peakers so that they could burn the gas that they claimed they had well beyond 2030, when, in fact, it’s turning out those claims were not correct. One question I have is that when industry is impacted by the overstating of reserves, it may well be the misleading of people into that state, because of the lack of good-quality information—I don’t know why the RIS hasn’t got page numbers, but some way through it, it says “who is affected” by the “scope, scale and impacts of the problem”: the Government is affected through a lack of visibility; the electricity generators are affected because they face uncertainty; the industry gas users who lack sufficient information on future availability to plan their gas use; and some retailers, Contact Energy, Mercury, Pulse Energy, will also pay higher gas prices due to asymmetric information. What are the consequences for the gas industry if it is proven that they have misled us, which I think is obvious. What are the consequences for them? Everyone in industry has invested on the basis of assumptions that we have a lot more gas than we actually have. What is more, it is very concerning that the industry, and, unfortunately, political parties, have kept making promises that there is more gas and more oil to find when, in fact, the evidence clearly shows there is not. The likes of Anadarko, who were taken for fraud on claiming how much gas they had; the likes of Shell Oil, who paid $350 million for their fraudulent claims on their reserves; the likes of Exxon Mobil, who subsidised the Bush Government millions of dollars to take positions against climate change; the likes of Chevron, the likes of Statoil and Equinor; the likes of Petrobras, the big Brazilian company. All of those companies came to this country. They explored, they searched, they even did wildcat well drills and they found nothing. The last National Government, under John Key, threw everything at trying to find more gas and more oil, and they came up zip—they came up zip. When is this Government going to be honest with the people of New Zealand and the industries of New Zealand who are suffering right now because of a fundamental failure of subsequent Governments to plan our energy future. They still refuse to plan that energy future, even in the midst of this crisis, when we should all be in this House standing united in finding a means for us to secure certainty of energy supply for the future—for the present day. That would be in the best interests of New Zealanders and of industry, of householders, of all those that rely on energy. This bill is a small step in the right direction. It is transparency. That is why we will be supporting it. But we make an absolutely sturdy bid to this Government that they must work across the House for us to have an energy plan. When I visit Profruit, down in Hawke’s Bay; when I visit the pea growers impacted by the closure of the McCain’s factory; when we speak to businesses across this country; the horticulture industry who are turning off their glasshouses this winter because they can’t afford to pay for the energy—all they want is consistent certainty of policy direction across Governments. They don’t want the flip-flop when there’s a change of Government, which is inevitable in the next six months; they want certainty. This Government, if it was serious to the challenge, would step up and invite us all to sit down at the table and make a plan for New Zealand’s energy future. That is the bid I put to the Minister: step up to the plate, Minister. Thank you very much. SIMON COURT (ACT) (11:47): The ACT Party commends the Gas (Market Transparency) Amendment Bill. I just want to point out—I just want to point out—we have heard the most ridiculous hyperbole from the Opposition. You’d think it was 2021—peak climate weirdness is over, you lot. We are focused on energy abundance, security of supply, and affordability above all else. That is what this legislation is for. ACT supports it, and I commend it to the House. ANDY FOSTER (NZ First) (11:48): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First. There’s a lot I would like to say, but I have undertaken not to take that time to do so. But what I would say is: their position is based on: “There is nothing there to find”. I’d just say, from a seismic geologist there, New Zealand remains a frontier rich in opportunity, proven hydrocarbon system, and uniquely positioned to become a future exploration hotspot. I commend this bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Scott Willis. [Interruption] SCOTT WILLIS (Green) (11:48): Language, language—please. I have heard a lot of nonsense from the last two presentations—Simon Court bleating about his climate denial. We hear this from Government members regularly—time and time again. They are not willing to action on climate. I don’t know why, because I have children, and I want to have grandchildren, and I cannot understand how anyone who has families cannot take the existential threat that we face seriously. Dr David Wilson: Your guy said we’re already dead. SCOTT WILLIS: We do have puerile comments like that coming at us time and time again. But we are here to debate legislation. We will support this bill because it improves transparency. We will support this bill. We will support this bill, but we want greater transparency than just in the gas market. We want some transparency about the gas security fund, the $200 million fossil fuel subsidy this Government is giving away. We want some transparency about the liquefied natural gas (LNG) proposal—the proposal to import LNG in a very volatile global market, with no certainty of price—where the cost is going to be worn by all electricity users. We want some transparency around those elements as well. We’d like some transparency around the potential for replacement of fossil gas with bioenergy. We’d like not just some transparency but some investment in the bioenergy sector, but what we get from this Government is the insistence that they are going to find fossil gas—hopeum—somewhere in the future, somewhere deep down. This Government has stymied all the innovation. We’ve just seen, through the Budget, Ara Ake, New Zealand’s energy innovation centre cut—cut. It’s cut down because this Government will not fund energy innovation. This Government wants to return to the age of fossils. This is the problem with the Government. It is doing the little bits, but it’s not doing what is needed. As my colleague Steve Abel said, we need an energy strategy, and we need an electrification plan, and we need to work as closely with the Government as possible, but they just don’t seem willing to discuss these things, because they are in constant denial. Now, this matters. This matters because we have electricity distribution businesses (EDBs) who are running gas networks—gas networks that they know are in decline. They know that they can’t supply, and they know people are switching off, and this has consequences for whānau, for families, who are dependent on gas at the moment. What happens when those gas networks go cashflow negative? What happens is that they just get turned off. For anyone who’s still connected, well, bad luck—bad luck. That’s a $50,000 cost to put in a hot water heat pump, an induction stove, and something else to get rid of the gas machines in their homes that are no longer being able to be supplied. Yes, it might only be 4 percent of consumers. They are real people. They are real people with real lives who matter. They are people who will suffer the cost, and they are some of our most vulnerable. They may only be 4 percent, but every percent matters. Every percent matters of our population. Every degree, every percentage of a degree, matters with climate change emissions, and this is what the Government just does not seem to understand. I had an amendment that I put forward to talk about capturing the emissions, as well as showing transparency, to show the transparency of the emissions profile in our gas market, and that was rejected. This is a sad day, where we see climate denial in full display by a Government that simply wants to condemn us to a damning climate future. We will support this bill, but we will not support this Government. We will replace them on 7 November. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The member’s time has expired. RYAN HAMILTON (National—Hamilton East) (11:53): Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is actually quite a happy day, and it’s a day about providing transparency to the New Zealand gas economy, and all parties are supporting the bill. I commend it to the House. Hon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin) (11:53): Thank you. Thank you to Ryan Hamilton for talking about happiness on this Saturday morning whilst we’re pretending it’s the Thursday the 28th. I want to start by going up some levels and noting that, on this side of the House, we care about climate change. We acknowledge that we appear to be passing over that 1.5 degrees. What that means for New Zealand is more storms in the short term, and those storm events cause New Zealanders real problems. Whether it’s a house being flooded or whether it’s a farm crop being taken out, these are all very real issues for New Zealand. I know members opposite might say, “Well, New Zealand’s climate pollution is not as big as some other bigger countries.”, and that is true, but we, on this side of the House—and it used to be that side of the House too—argued, “Well, that is why we need to work with other countries. That is why we need some international agreements so that everybody reduces their climate pollution.” What can we do in New Zealand? We can reduce, very easily, our reliance on fossil fuels. What is one of those fossil fuels? Gas is a fossil fuel. Yes, it’s a biogas. Gas is a fossil fuel, so we, on this side in the House, want to reduce climate pollution. One of the ways to do that is to reduce reliance on gas as a fossil fuel. We also understand that there are many industries and businesses that, at the moment, are reliant on gas as a fossil fuel to make the thing that they make, whether it’s in a glasshouse or whether it’s the bread that was spoken about before, and whether it is the coffee beans—I’m very keen to have a coffee after this. We acknowledge that that is an issue, and we acknowledge that you have to do a transition. But what worries me, after listening to the other side of the House, is that there’s no interest in a transition. The only reason this Government is promulgating this amendment bill for the regulations is to look at what the market’s doing. It’s not to use these regulations to make policies and to plan for a decrease in that reliance on those fossil fuels that are climate pollution. That is what worries me. We’ve heard from Simon Court that “Peak climate weirdness is over.” I’m not going pretend to understand that statement, but I think what he means is that we can just talk about using fossil fuels with there being no consequence, and that is craziness, because climate change has not gone anywhere. In fact, it has got worse, and it will continue to get worse. If we want to be economically responsible, we have to do everything we can to reduce our reliance on climate pollution—that is, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. That is not what I’m hearing from the other side at all, and that is very disappointing. Now we’ve got some other issues in this bill—things that were not answered in the committee stage—and, of course, we’re in urgency, so there has been no select committee process. We do not know why we have drafting here that relies on the internet site that is governed by an international society. That is an unusual way to make laws in New Zealand—to have a reference for a definition and for an operative clause that relates back to somebody else’s internet site. It could have been specified in the bill. That’s a disappointment, and we got no answer about that. We’ve also found out, from our questions to the Minister and some of the Minister’s responses, that whilst the Government members are mainly talking about gas reserves in their contributions, these regulations will relate to both the reserves and what might be in them or not in them in New Zealand as well as their market in New Zealand—meaning all of the gas that is being imported into New Zealand and that has already been extracted in New Zealand and that is in circulation. We heard from the Minister that that also includes biogas—and that is good that that’s being considered—as part of these transparency regulations. We also heard from the Minister that these regulations can be set to require information about specific agreements. So that could be a contract from a major user. So, presumably, Simon Court’s bread bakers, they might have a particular contract for their gas—I’m sure they do—and there could be regulations that are set that require detail about that specific arrangement. The Minister gave us some comfort about how that information would be protected. But he did not give comfort about the reasons for this regulation setting. The reasons that I would like to see is the Government being active and saying, “We do need to decrease our reliance on fossil fuels. We do need to decrease our climate pollution. So what we are going to do is find out exactly where all that gas is, and then we are going to look at those industries that specifically require the use of that gas now, that have no options, or they might have some time limitations. And we’re going to think about that picture and incentivise those industries that can in the short term get off gas. We are going to incentivise, we’re going to use this information, and look to who can transition first. And those where it’s trickier, we’ll have some planning for how we get the trickier ones off the gas as well.” The Minister himself said that a third don’t have a transition. He specified coffee roasters. We’ve heard—everybody, as I noticed, starting googling: “Can you have an electronic coffee roaster?” It appears that you can. So even in that one third that the Minister says don’t have a transition route, it appears that he is not being ambitious enough. There are transition routes. They might be slower. They might cost more. These are all things that good planning should interrogate and have a pathway for. So my hope is that this Government will not do what the Minister said, and just say, “Oh, we’re going to leave everything to the private sector. Whilst we might gather some more information, it is all up to the private sector—it is all up to the market.” Because we know that that makes things slower. When we had a Climate Emergency Response Fund and we had the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry Fund, we could speed up this transition. By speeding up the transition, that means that we are not using a fossil fuel, that we’re instead using renewable energy so we’re moving from the molecules to the electrons. When we do that, when Government can help with incentives to do that, then we lower our reliance on these fossil fuels—fossil fuels that are causing climate change. Climate change is real. Climate change impacts New Zealand. Climate change impacts individuals, it impacts our rural sector, and it impacts all the businesses in New Zealand. Simon Court: Carbon dioxide makes plants grow. Joseph Mooney: The emperor has no clothes, Rachel. Hon RACHEL BROOKING: I’m hearing some noise from the other side that it’s not real, and that is amazing. It is real, it is happening, and we need to do everything we can to reduce our reliance on those fossil fuels. DAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote) (12:04): This bill is all part of our plan to fix the basics and— Hon Members: Build the future! DAN BIDOIS: —build the future. I commend this bill to the House. DEPUTY SPEAKER: OK. This is not a political sideshow. That was the member’s speech, and I would prefer that if just the member used the lines, if that’s what the tactic is. Reuben Davidson—this is a split call. REUBEN DAVIDSON (Labour—Christchurch East) (12:04): Madam Speaker, thank you so much. It feels like déjà vu that I stand up after the member from the other side of the House, who delivers a speech and a contribution that is so short into what is a very important debate being rushed through in urgency. Francisco Hernandez: 10 seconds! REUBEN DAVIDSON: I’m told by a very reliable member from this side of the House that it was, in fact, a 10-second contribution. If you remove the time that was taken by his colleagues chorusing in, then that would make it even less than 10 seconds. But I’m not going to waste any more of my time talking about how long that contribution was or wasn’t. I’m, in fact, going to get on to my contribution instead, despite also having the same sort of chorus that that member enjoyed through the end of his from the very same members on that side of the House. Now, what I want to do is I want to talk about the problem—and we’ve been hearing quite a bit of the problem at the beginning of my contribution here this morning. The problem that this bill is setting out to solve is that the current state of information has gaps. That’s not ideal if you’re trying to make decisions or trying to make policy or positive progressive steps in a forward direction for the energy future of New Zealand. That would be, I would expect, the hope that New Zealanders should, could, and do rightly have of any Government. But they would be disappointed, I should suggest, with the progress that has been made by this Government so far. We’ve moved this bill through and are now in the final third stage. It hasn’t gotten to a select committee, which is always less than ideal. But what we know with the problem that’s trying to be solved by this bill is that there are gaps in the gas market information—the information that is available on the gas market. It’s either incomplete, it’s out of date, or it’s both. So this is what’s been identified in the regulatory impact statement for this bill. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment does publish comprehensive quarterly gas statistics, but there’s a lag on this, so you’re not dealing with good, real-time data or information. You’re dealing with a lag on that information. That’s really not ideal if you’re wanting to come up with a plan for the future—that you are not looking into a crystal ball for the future, but you are in fact looking back into the past for how you might come up with a better plan for a future. So that’s also not ideal. But what this bill does do is it picks up on work that Labour started when we were last in Government. That was a comprehensive piece of work around an investigation into gas market settings, around a transition plan, around the role that gas can play as a transitional fuel, and that that needs to be really carefully managed. But this Government has stopped work on that plan, and now is restarting it some two-and-a-half years into this three-year term of Government that they are currently enjoying and that will potentially be coming to an end very soon. The thing that I want to reflect on at the close of my contribution to this final third stage of the debate today is that I did go outside this morning. I left the precinct this morning and went outside and saw the sun shining in the sky. It’s a beautiful, beautiful day out there—absolutely stunning day out there. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, it’s a blue sky, there were hardly any clouds. I heard some amazing waiata being performed. I thought, “Well, this looks to me like the future—this looks to me like the future.” As I walked back into the building, when I arrived back in time to deliver this contribution to the House this morning, I walked back into the building and I thought, “There’s that smell.” And I thought, “What is that smell? What is that smell?” I thought, “Oh, it’s the past.” So that’s what I thought: “I can smell the past.” I walked into this House to deliver this speech. I looked up at the wooden plate on the wall, and I thought, “We literally are going back in time for the energy plan that this Government doesn’t even really have ready.” It doesn’t smell good. In fact, it stinks. We’ll support this bill, but the Government should be doing so much more. DEPUTY SPEAKER: I thought the member was going to refer to the renewable energy coffee roasting but, anyway—Nancy Lu. NANCY LU (National) (12:09): I rise to support the third reading of this bill. I have to say, it is about the quality of the contribution in this House, not the quantity of the time. We just wasted five minutes in the House. I commend the bill to the House. INGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri) (12:09): I’d like to share what I heard this morning through the committee stage, because the question that I have is: what is really going on here, and why? If I look at the elements that are involved, we’ve got a Government that says gas supply is tightening and has committed to a $1.2 billion transition loan scheme, and, in that loan scheme, also mentioned the legislation that was brought to the House this morning. But then we also have it expanding the gas market disclosure rules as part of that loan scheme. At the last minute, it then adds production data disclosure, and also at the same time makes those disclosures subject to regulations which have not been made yet and which will involve the gas industry. So what we, effectively, have is something that has been sold as transparency by this Government about wanting to solve the problem of transition but is really retaining power to keep a lot of that information secret. If I put that against the backdrop of the other attitudes shown by this Government: it has reopened offshore oil and gas, it has emphasised energy security repeatedly, and it has been promoting gas consistently through this term of Government as being critically important to the economy. So the question I have is: what is the connection between the Government’s proposed loan scheme and this bill? On the face of it, it looks like this is about trying to get more information to support a just transition and to support business through the loan scheme. We would’ve accepted it, and this could’ve been a very short time in the House had that been the case, but what made the difference was this Amendment Paper 634 dropped at the eleventh hour, and also through the use of urgency for the principal Act, which really didn’t need to go through urgency. There was no rush for it. The transition period and the declining of our gas reserves has been happening for decades. Suddenly, we’re in urgency and then we get this really interesting Amendment Paper. The critical part of that Amendment Paper is clause 4, replacing new section 56AA(1)(a)(iii), which says, “information about how much gas has been produced or is being produced”. This changes the whole scope of the disclosures from gas sale supply to gas production. That is significantly important. It means that the Government will get details about gas operations. They will potentially be able to gain leverage over producers if they were not interested in more drilling themselves or allowing more drilling, and they can also use it to justify further intervention. If I look at the type of information that that would enable to come out to the public, it could be which fields are producing gas, which producers are underperforming, whether producers are holding back production—which could be a really interesting scenario—whether reserves and the estimates of the reserves match the output. All of that information, you will accept, can be used for a number of reasons. It could be used to help get the full picture to be able to do what my colleague the Hon Rachel Brooking has identified as being the best use—the one that we have been sold—which is to get an understanding of the landscape so the Government can make the right investment decisions and use the loan scheme appropriately and responsibly to support a just transition. But it could also be used to reinsure investors—it really could—and when I see that there is a definition on a website from an overseas outfit, I worry about where that has suddenly come up from. It could also be used to build a case for further exploration, and let’s put that in the context. That’s not paranoia. We have members who sit on the Government benches who regularly yell across this House, “Drill, baby, drill.” Now, wouldn’t it be handy for them to know which fields are producing; which producers are underperforming and might do better if they had some additional funding; which producers are holding back their production, because maybe they could produce more with a bit of Government intervention; which reserves are matching the market output? All of that would be very, very interesting. The second point is that when you look at that, that raises a lot of questions that I do hope journalists will be looking at. But then we also want to understand: where did that suddenly come from? When the Minister for Energy was asked in the committee stage, he was pressed a number of times, and finally, in response to the Hon Dr Deborah Russell, he said, “It has been identified by officials that we need it.” He did not rule out having any information or any correspondence or any advocacy between his office or his officials with big producers who might benefit from this very last-minute amendment to the amendment bill. Now, if there was nothing to hide here—that Minister is a competent Minister; he knows what to say; he would rule it out. He would just say there has not been that. He did not say that. He said the change had been identified as needed by the officials. So there are a lot of questions to be asked, and I’m sure we will be asking them—and I can imagine journalists will be asking them—about what kinds of communications have happened over the last 24 hours that might add a bit more context to why we got this dropped on us. Then we go to the really interesting thing in the law about the open-ended proviso in new section 56AAB, inserted by clause 4, which says that information must be subject, but—and there’s a gaping “but” here—subject to any limits or restrictions prescribed under that new regulation-making power. Those regulations have not been made, and those regulations are very likely, as we have seen with other regulations that have happened in other industries, to be made with involvement from the sector—[Interruption]—and possibly to be subject to regulatory— DEPUTY SPEAKER: Too loud. INGRID LEARY: —capture. For those who don’t know what regulatory capture is, it’s when there is a set of regulations made with industry input that are very, very difficult to change. So the questions are: who is going to supply that information? When those regulations are made, will they specify what information will be supplied, what information will be withheld, what information will be aggregated, and how will it be aggregated? We didn’t hear a satisfactory response to that from the question from the Hon Dr Megan Woods. It will make governing rules over confidentiality protections, and it will also govern publication times and who gets access to the information. That is an awful lot of power to go into regulations that have not been made yet that are going to limit the information that may be published under new section 56AAB. That is why I say that we have been sold a lemon here, because we were sold a bill that was going to be about transparency and yet the real effect of it is that it will keep a lot of the information out of the public sector while giving the Government and Ministers lots of privileged commercial information. That commercial privileged information could be used very appropriately: to apply a just transition, to help taxpayers get the benefit of the $1.2 billion loan scheme that was announced in the Budget, to reduce our dependency on gas. If so, fantastic—we’re all on the same page—but as I have laid out, it could also be used for other reasons. It could be used for investors, it could be used for business cases, it could be used to help the Government make decisions about who might be able to justify more drilling, or even, if producers are underperforming, to intervene and make them perform better so that more gas is produced and that our fields run out more quickly. There are so many things that could happen as a result of the open-ended information disclosures that give the Government so much information and yet we don’t get to see it; members of the public don’t get to see it. They only get to see what whoever is writing those regulations wants them to see, and I can tell you now that those who stand to benefit, the big corporations, will have a big hand in that. So the real question from here on in that we need answered to give us some surety is: what happened over the last 24 hours that led to this amendment being put on the Table? Who did the Minister or his officials have conversations with? And what is the real agenda behind the $1.2 billion loans in this bill before us today? TOM RUTHERFORD (National—Bay of Plenty) (12:19): Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. It’s great to see universal support across the House for fixing the basics and building the future. DEPUTY SPEAKER: Dana Kirkpatrick stood up the quickest, so I’ll call Dana Kirkpatrick to take Te Pāti Māori’s call. DANA KIRKPATRICK (National—East Coast) (12:20): Thank you, Madam Speaker. In the interests of expediency and urgency, I commend the bill to the House. Motion agreed to. Bill read a third time.