Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill

I seek leave to present a legislative statement on the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Leave has been sought for that course of action. Is there any objection? There is none. That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.

I move, That the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

I want to thank all the members of this House who’ve contributed to the debate on this very important but very technical piece of legislation. I want to thank the members of the select committee that heard this legislation.

This bill is very technical in nature, as I said. It amends the Gas Act of 1992, which is the principal legislation for the governance of New Zealand’s gas industry. It amends that legislation so that we have an information and disclosure regime that provides the transparency and information that we require for a properly functioning market. It expands the scope of regulation-making powers under the Act to ensure that the regulated arrangements can be made and to ensure the disclosure and information about matters that may have a significant downstream impact or may contribute to the risk of a critical gas shortage.

These risks are not theoretical. We have seen a situation in New Zealand in the very recent past where there simply was not enough information that was flowing through, and that is what has driven the need for this legislation. It is important for ensuring that the appropriate regulatory requirements can be put in place for supporting security of supply and to improve outcomes for energy consumers, because it is those energy consumers that need to be the focus for us. The co-regulator, the Gas Industry Company, will first be required to make a recommendation to the Government before regulations can be made. This is consistent with the co-regulatory approach.

The bill’s transitional provisions also ensure that the work that the Gas Industry Company has done to investigate information disclosure will be considered valid for making a recommendation under this piece of legislation.

The bill also makes important changes to ensure the Act’s penalty regime is robust. It increases the maximum penalty for industry participants from $20,000 to $200,000 and addresses concerns about the low level of civil pecuniary penalty able to be currently issued by the Gas Rulings Panel. It also creates a new civil penalty instead of a criminal penalty for consumers who are not industry participants. This will align the penalty regimes for industry participants and non-industry participants, and it will be used to deter breaches of regulations by those consumers, which include some of the larger consumers of natural gas. That penalty, aligning with the other penalties, will be a maximum of $200,000 and will not apply to residential consumers.

The Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee made some valuable recommendations to this legislation, which we have discussed in other stages of this bill, to add a specific criminal penalty for breaches of a Gas Rulings Panel order by industry participants. The penalty is currently contained in regulations, but it will be repealed due to the repeal of the regulatory-making provisions for it, and this addition will add the penalty into the Act itself. So I want to thank the select committee for the work they did in that. That will help to ensure that appropriate incentives are in place for compliance with these rulings panel’s orders, and that is vitally important.

This bill does represent a major step forward in improving how information that may indicate critical gas shortages or significant price impacts is released to the market, which should help to improve our overall security of energy supply. It is an important move in New Zealand, starting to think of an energy system rather than separate electricity and gas systems, and how we bring these together and think more in an energy systems approach. It also helps to address the industry’s concerns about how their information is disclosed and helps to ensure that the appropriate incentives are in place for consumers and for industry to follow the rules. I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill.

Now, the Minister just said as she started the reading of this bill that this bill is very technical in nature. It’s just a shame that Labour shut down the committee stage of this bill so that we were unable to ask all the questions that we wanted to. But I’m wondering how this bill gets to be so technical in nature when the industry had already set up a voluntary regime and had it working quite effectively to the point where there were no breaches. The Minister never got around to answering that question in the committee stage either, due to it being shut down. So I just wonder what the penalty is for not being open and transparent for the Government, as they are expecting from the energy industry—because the Minister also said in the committee stage that this is what she had to do because the voluntary regime didn’t work in 2018. What she omitted to say was that the voluntary regime came into force in 2020 and that there had been no breaches of the voluntary code. So, look, I would have liked to have seen the committee stage going a bit longer because I certainly had more questions to ask, as I know others did. I’m disappointed that that didn’t happen.

So National supports transparent disclosure around current, pending, or possible gas outages. But we need to remember why we’re here. We’re here because New Zealand is fast entering a gas supply crisis. The power outage wasn’t an issue of a lack of information; it was an issue of a lack of gas. There were some technical issues within that well which the company are currently working through and they are going to do some more drilling to work through the process where some water actually got into places which impeded getting gas out of the ground. So it wasn’t about lack of information.

The Minister did make a comment in one of the readings of the bill that they had to fly drones over to have a look. Well, if it’s actually under the ground and the water is actually the problem, it’s going to be pretty hard to see that with any sort of disclosure regime and, in particular, with the drone.

So what this bill will do—and we are supporting it because largely the industry was doing it anyway. They’re quite happy to volunteer what they have as long as there’s no commercial information disclosed. That was something Mr Court tried to get through with his Supplementary Order Papers in the committee stage, which the Minister wasn’t too fond of picking up either. But this bill will allow New Zealand to understand just how bad a situation Labour has put us in with gas. That’s why we support it—because, actually, when it’s disclosed, the decisions of 2018 will become very apparent. It’s important to see where we are, and it’s really important to see where we are, because this gas crisis is in part a direct result of Labour’s 2018 oil and gas ban. Whether they like to admit it or not, when they banned oil and gas Minister Woods said, “Don’t worry, we have 100,000 square kilometres of exploration already permitted,” she said. “We have permits that go out 30 years,” she said. “The sky isn’t falling in,” she said.

What she didn’t say or doesn’t understand is that gas doesn’t come out of the ground by magic. Businesses need to invest something called money and things that they call plant and equipment to get gas to our houses, factories, and electricity generation. Labour doesn’t understand how this works: businesses need to invest big sums of money. And so this has dried up and we’ve seen gas production fall 40 percent in three years. This has resulted in job losses at Methanex and timber mills, and New Zealand Steel have reduced production.

Huntly is burning four times as much coal and greenhouse gas emissions are up. Wholesale electricity prices are four times higher than they were in 2018, and this is from a Government that has declared a climate crisis. So not only is the electricity price up and energy security in jeopardy but the climate change results are at risk as well.

So measuring the gas could be a good thing, because it will show the damage that this Government has caused, because if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Now, remember, the industry was already measuring it and already managing it. The Government can’t manage it, so now they need to measure it. They don’t have a plan. They don’t have a transition as they claim to have. The Gas Industry Company says that existing wells will only get us to 2026 or 2027, and that’s not very long left to measure, given that we’re now in 2021. Once this bill is passed—and it will pass in the House, either tonight or next time it comes through the House—it needs to go back to the Gas Industry Company, and then it needs to go back to the Minister for final approval. That operation is going to have to be relatively swift, otherwise by the time it goes through all of that process, there won’t be anything left to measure.

We face an energy crisis in 2027 where we may not have enough gas to process milk, which is our largest export. The Gas Industry Company is investigating importing LNG—liquefied gas—so we can keep our factories going, and that’s a disgrace. That’s a disgrace in a country with multiple high likelihoods of basins off our coast, and we’ll be paying billions to Australia to import their gas. Somebody might want to tell me from the other side: what is the rationale around that?

So this is all evidence of a poorly managed transition. Gas is the key to our transition to our zero-emissions future, and the Government cancelled gas before they ever developed an alternative. They say a pumped hydro scheme is the answer, and without getting into all the problems of that scheme, that’s going to be at least 10 years away, the officials say. Yet our gas isn’t going to last that long.

I noticed recently in a press release Minister Parker said that Onslow pumped hydro was the answer to our renewable energy future. When I asked Minister Parker in a written question how long the Onslow dam would take to refill in year two of a dry-year risk, did he know? His answer was yes. Not forthcoming with any information, just saying yes, he did know. So then in passing, I said to Minister Parker, “You may like to finish the answer to your question.”, and Minister Parker said, “Well, come up and see me and we’ll have a discussion about it.”

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! The member will not bring the Speaker into the debate.

Sorry. Minister Parker said, “Come up and see me and we’ll have a discussion about that.” Now, I’m still making an effort to get up to Minister Parker’s office so we can have that discussion, because it seems pointless to do away with the gas, to put in regimes that do away with the gas, to then put in a pumped hydro dry-year risk, when no one can tell me, if we have two dry years in a row, whether we’re going to solve our dry-year risk. So Minister Parker, I’m still after the answer to that question, and any time you would like to stand up and take a call, I would be very happy to have the answer.

So National is supporting this piece of legislation. I sat on the select committee for the submissions for this bill, and as I said, the industry is already doing it. They are happy to disclose. They already have a voluntary regime. They know it’s in their best interest, but they are very, very, very nervous about the commercial sensitivity of some of the information. So this bill needs to be done very carefully, and I ask more so the Gas Industry Company, actually, rather than the Government to ensure that this is commercially sensitive, watertight legislation so that we don’t have any oopsies in that department, because we know how easy it is for things to leak and things to get out when it comes to some of these regimes. We’ve already seen in the last couple of days all of the cyber-attacks that go on, and as an interest in the security of this country, we need to make sure that this regime is tight and that it works, and I leave that responsibility with the Gas Industry Company and the Government. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend the bill to the House—Madam Speaker, sorry.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Tonight we’re amending legislation that was drafted and passed in 1992—

💬 Glen Bennett: Were you born then?

Two years before I was born—that’s exactly where I was going to go, I say to my good colleague Glen Bennett, here, who’s an awesome member for New Plymouth.

Tonight—and we’ve heard, and throughout the whole entire three readings of this bill—we’ve heard, calls being taken by the Opposition that had no vision for the future. Tonight you would have heard in the House that the Hon Dr Megan Woods talked about our future where there would be energy systems. Now, that is a vision for the future. That is a vision for our generation into the future, where it can be clean, green energy that will be able to look after the environment but would also realise ambitions of economic development for our generation.

I’m proud to support this bill, the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill, as the deputy chairperson of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee, because this is a bill that industry has told us they support. This is a bill that will make sure that the infrastructure of our country keeps running.

Throughout the legislative process of this bill, unfortunately, we’ve heard many calls that don’t actually demonstrate a lot of knowledge about the industry. I am constantly reminded by my colleagues that since the year 2000—2000—we have never discovered offshore gas again. So this is not only about Government regulation but it’s about the industry. It’s about economies of scale. It’s about what is efficient for our economy and the companies that are actually involved in it. They have made a choice, the market has spoken, and so this bill listens to the market, it listens to the industry participants. Therefore, I’m really proud to support and commend this bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, I wish we had the TV cameras rewind and listen again. I’m sure I heard the last member, Naisi Chen, say, “A clean, green energy future for New Zealand”. If she’d stopped to take a breath, she could have then carried on to say, “And we’re importing 2 million tonnes of coal from Indonesia this year”. They’re helping the Indonesian economy, they’re not helping climate change in New Zealand, because actually if there was more gas in New Zealand they wouldn’t have to import 2 million tonnes of coal. We may be looking at a clean, green energy future, but certainly not under this Government.

The reason that this piece of legislation is important, the Government says, is because of a shortage at the Pohokura gas site earlier in this term. In fact, they said it’s because they weren’t measuring properly; that’s not the case. It’s because of gas shortages that, actually, the gas was not available. So this isn’t a solution to not having gas. All it’s going to do is ask people to measure something that’s not there as much. I say it again; this is a Government that stands here and talks about their vision but where the rubber hits the road it is not happening. In the first three months of this year, they imported and burnt more coal than the last two years combined. Nothing to do with gas at all, and this piece of legislation won’t fix that. They will import 2 million tonnes of coal from Indonesia this year, on ships that run oil to get it here. They’ll take it off in the port in Hamilton, and they’ll then put it into trucks and they’ll drive it to Huntly, where there are three coal-powered boilers generating electricity, and we heard last week that in Huntly they turned on a diesel one as well. How can this be about a clean, green energy future for New Zealand? The Government can say it again and again and again, but their rhetoric runs short. All you have to do is go and stand by the port in Auckland and see the coal coming off as fast as it can to be burnt for energy.

The last speaker in this debate had a lot of energy. It’s almost as if she was involved in the Huntly Power Station she’d been gobbling the coal, because that’s the only way we’re getting energy at the moment—electricity—when it comes to what the Government says they want to do. Look, everybody in New Zealand wants a cleaner, greener future. They don’t want their costs to go through the roof unreasonably or unnecessarily because the Government decided a few years ago to ban oil and gas exploration and in so doing means that there is a shortage of gas and it cannot be used as a transition. Because here is the reality: if there was more gas available, then in Huntly they could be using that gas at the moment to be generating electricity, rather than coal from Indonesia. So when members opposite say they want a clean, green energy future, and when they say opposite that, actually, they are changing the way we produce energy in New Zealand and that they want to tax people that have utes but they want to give subsidies to use electric cars, what it actually means is more coal will have to be built to charge the batteries on those cars, which is worse in the short and medium term than it would be if there had been more gas exploration. This is something the Government don’t want to talk about. It’s something that they like to deny. But the statistics are there—2 million tonnes of coal this year imported from Indonesia. And you know what? The last piece of legislation we adopted, and this piece of legislation here that we’re about to adopt, does nothing for climate change, and as far as Indonesia is concerned—where the blimmin coal is coming from to go to Huntly—it might make them feel good here in New Zealand on that side of the House but it isn’t actually helping at all.

We are supporting this because it’s important we have measurement of gas, but the public should not listen and believe the Government’s rhetoric. It’s not actually going to do anything about climate change, it’s not going to actually do anything about gas supply, and it’s not going to do anything about energy security in New Zealand. It’s another piece of bureaucracy. What we should have done at the committee stage is add something to it that says Megan Woods goes and stands by the Port of Auckland and counts all the trucks that roll off as they head down the motorway to Huntly with coal on them to generate electricity for New Zealand. That would be a much more useful use of Megan Woods’ time, at least in as far as talking about climate change is concerned, because under her watch more coal is being burnt to create energy—electricity—which means we are worse off, not better off.

Kia ora koutou, Madam Speaker. Thank you for allowing me to take another call this evening; now on the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill. Now, I just want to focus on the bill and the positive stuff around this bill, as much as I want to say things about the other side of the House, because, as I’ve said in the past, it’s that “c” word they love to talk about—that blinkin’ “c” word they keep going on and on about. But we know the reason they love playing the coal card is because Governments haven’t been ambitious enough. We’ve just had our heads in the sand and have continued to do what we’ve always done. We’ve got what we’ve always got, and now we are working hard on this side of the House to ensure a just transition, but we should have started this 20, 30, 40 years ago, and we did not. So we’re here doing it right now.

But here I’m talking about the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill, which obviously amends the Gas Act of 1992. The objectives of this bill are to strengthen the regulation-making powers in the Act to provide for enhanced information disclosure requirements for the gas market, and to ensure that settings around enforcement and penalties are suitably robust.

So I’m here to say thank you to those members of the select committee who were part of making this happen, to thank all of our advisers, and to thank all our submitters through the select committee process. There were 11 submitters; four were oral submissions from people who came and shared their views around this. And I’m glad that the National Party is supporting this piece of legislation, and it will go through and pass through the House, hopefully, tonight so that we can ensure that disclosures are undertaken. For me, I am committed, as the MP for New Plymouth, to ensuring our just transition to ensure that we move to a low-carbon economy, to ensure that my great-great-grandchildren enjoy a lifestyle even better than I have enjoyed in terms of ensuring that we have an environment to live in—

💬 Simon Court: Tell that to the people of Waitara.

—and we have a place to live in. And the people of Waitara, who I support—I am very much in favour of this, and we’ll continue to work hard as we transition away from fossil fuels and we retain jobs. I commend this bill to the House.

I rise in support of the bill. I think, as I said earlier in this House, most New Zealanders want to do the right thing when it comes to climate change. They want to look after the environment, and they want a Government that is going to show leadership and help create a pathway to renewable electricity, to a more sustainable transport fleet and transport options, and to warmer, dryer homes that use less energy to heat. All of that is entirely possible with good public policy, but, unfortunately, for many decades, we didn’t have good public policy in New Zealand.

So, for the benefit of some of the members to my right in this House, I thought I’d just explain that the current situation with a shortfall of gas has nothing to do with the ban on new offshore exploration that was announced in 2018. It is amazing that the National Party—I guess they think that the people at home are really dumb, that they think that they can sell this line that stopping exploration for new gas, after nine years of an open door of exploration for gas, would somehow affect the supply in 2021. I know it is very hard for some of these people who haven’t worked in the industry, and probably only talked to lobbyists, to understand what is involved, but the chances that you would have found a new significant field offshore and somehow had it up and running and in production in 2021 is laughable, especially given that for nine years, under the last National Government, they were practically paying companies to come here and look for oil and gas. There were the tax breaks, they were rolling out the red carpet; not a word around responsible management of decommissioning, which they are supporting now that they have proof that it can cost the New Zealand public if you don’t have that sort of framework in place.

I’m glad that they’ve come on board this late in the piece, but it would have been better if they’d thought about that 10 years ago, when they were attracting all of the oil and gas people here to New Zealand, and put in place some of those protections before it cost the New Zealand public hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up an oil well. So just a little lesson in how political rhetoric is being used to try and scare people, from the National Party who have no ideas about how to respond to climate change, which they demonstrated in their nine years when their biggest energy priority was privatising our publicly owned energy companies rather than making a plan to deal with climate change. We wouldn’t be in this situation of having to deal with a dry year, not enough hydro production, not enough renewable electricity, and having to use coal if, 10 years ago—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order!

—people had done something about it.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order!

Excuse me, Madam Speaker, I am responding to the points of debate.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Can I ask the member to come back to the third reading of this bill, which, by nature, is a summary of the contents of the bill. Thank you.

Madam Speaker, I would happily speak to the bill, but I think it is perfectly within the realm of the debate to respond to the points that other members have raised in this very debate.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): OK. The member will resume her seat. The member’s speech is expired.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s disappointing to be here tonight for this third reading of this bill, the Gas (Information Disclosure and Penalties) Amendment Bill, and to have witnessed what was an unedifying and extremely poor contribution to New Zealanders’ understanding of this important legislation. Now, there are some aspects of this legislation which ACT would regard as being important: clarifying what information is needed and why about the gas industry and about what gas we have available, yet it’s not enough. The measures proposed in this bill actually—while some positive—are outweighed, ACT believes, by the flawed and poorly thought-out instruments that are included in this bill. That is why ACT opposes this bill.

At the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee, submitters raised some very real risks around the regulatory regime test being, essentially, invalid and they said that the collection of commercial information by the Government was simply not justified. Submitters rightfully pointed to the Gas Industry Company’s own website and their own many hundreds of disclosures about maintenance and operations activities that affect gas supply, and about the fact that the Ahuroa gas storage reservoir is monitored on a daily basis for the volume of gas that is pumped into it and what’s taken out. They also pointed to the fact that no one can have confidence in a Government that regularly loses people’s data and has such a poor record on information technology and information security.

That is why ACT opposes this bill, and despite proposing amendments in the committee of the whole House to address these risks, they were voted down by the Government. In fact, before they could be properly discussed and explored, the committee stage was collapsed, and the Government members and New Zealanders watching at home and reading about the passage of regulations through this House were not allowed an opportunity to better understand the benefits of the amendments that ACT had proposed.

That is why we oppose this bill, because we will not support legislation that, essentially, fails a regulatory impact assessment and doesn’t meet the ACT Party’s test for what is good public policy, and we stand by that. However, it is disappointing that the Government, with all of its numbers and with all of its professors and with all of its doctors and with all of its people from Taranaki that we’ve heard from tonight couldn’t find it in the bottom of their hearts to actually vote for amendments that made the bill better. They preferred to continue along the path that they had chosen.

So let’s just think about disclosure. The regulatory test the bill sets up is invalid. It is an arbitrary test for the cost versus benefits of a regulatory regime. It does not compare a regulatory regime to the very successful voluntary regime we have now, a voluntary regime where there’s been more than 300 disclosures published on the Gas Industry Company’s website, and where at any time of the day or night you can go on to their website and you can see how much gas has been dispatched from gasfields around New Zealand and which of the major users are using it at different times of the day. It tells you everything you need to know about whether New Zealand has enough gas or not enough gas on any particular day.

Then we come to the commercial issues. How safe is your data with this Government? This is a legitimate concern. A few weeks ago we learnt that patients and staff at the Waikato DHB had sensitive medical records, personal information, financial information, details about their homes, and other activities leaked onto the dark web while this Government sat and fiddled with an IT strategy they’d failed to implement four years down the track.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! I invite the member to come back to the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thinking about data security: the police lost firearm licence details, the gun buy-back data was available on a website, and only last year Budget 2020 was able to be searched—

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! I’d like the member to come back to the third reading of this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for that opportunity. So this bill purports to improve the knowledge that the Government will have about the amount of gas available now and in the future. It sets up a regulatory test the ACT Party believes is invalid, and it also proposes to take commercially sensitive information from gas suppliers and major gas users and have that sitting on a Government database somewhere. We are not confident—the ACT Party is not confident—that the Government has the capacity to protect that information. We’ve heard that having this information is important to help the Government plan its transition to a low-carbon future, a just transition we’ve heard about. Well, currently the just transition seems to involve importing very large amounts of solid energy from offshore to power Huntly rather than using the gas that is available here in New Zealand.

Now, the state of Victoria in Australia explored this concept of a just transition. They put a moratorium on gas exploration and with the information they collected over the three years of the moratorium, they decided to lift the moratorium and go back to gas exploration just last week. So, in fact, you know, while I don’t believe in unicorns, I have seen rainbows, and there is a possibility that with this information—not this Government, but a future Government with ACT sitting on the Government benches would, in fact, use this information to demonstrate the benefits of offering exploration permits again to get the gas that we have in New Zealand.

Now, there is a lack of a regulatory risk assessment, a lack of regulatory validity about what the Government has proposed here. It is another example of slogans over substance. There is nothing in this bill that will deliver more gas—having more information about the fact that the gas is running out, and that Government policy directs it to run out much faster, we’ve heard, than even the Climate Change Commission would accept is reasonable. The Climate Change Commission has told the Government that they’ll need gas out to 2040 or 2050. The industry, and even the Government’s own advisers, have said that there’s a risk that major users, including electricity generators, will not have access to sufficient gas from 2026 or 2027. That is a very significant risk that having more information about the lack of gas won’t help this Government solve. In fact, it’s more likely that businesses that rely on gas, rely on affordable energy, actually choose to leave New Zealand and take their high-paid jobs with them.

The average salary in Taranaki is almost double what it is elsewhere in New Zealand, and that is because of the energy industry that underpins those high-paid jobs and those communities, where even if the workers haven’t finished high school or gone to university or obtained a doctorate in some esoteric subject like the Government members have, they can still earn an extremely high-paid job. We know that many of the doctors on the other side of the House do practise medicine well, although some of them have appeared to have adopted a Cuban approach to medicine.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Can I ask the member to come back to the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We think they’ve also adopted a Cuban approach to energy policy. The ACT Party prides itself on doing our research, on identifying better public policy options to deal with real problems. We pride ourselves on finding a nuanced and informed understanding of how to solve problems and actually make New Zealanders’ lives better. This bill does not do that. That is why ACT would repeal the ban on gas exploration, set achievable and affordable climate targets, match our climate targets to those of our top five trading partners, and protect New Zealand jobs from carbon leakage.

There is nothing about this bill that would help New Zealanders in their day-to-day lives. It is simply a regulatory grab and an extension of the Government’s powers into the board rooms and into the financial databases of commercial companies. ACT opposes this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Looks like I have the last word; maybe not. But can I just congratulate you for your firm hand and discipline over this House tonight, because there’s been a lot of hot air.

But tonight I’ll be talking about gas and only gas. [Interruption] No—just gas. And so I want to just acknowledge the select committee for their work, and, in particular, those who made the 11 submissions. What this bill does do is amend the Gas Act 1992, which is the principal piece of legislation for the governance of the gas industry in New Zealand.

And I note just three things—sticking to the topic at all times. What does the bill do? It expands the scope of the regulation-making powers to ensure and to enable gas governance arrangements to be made that provide for the disclosure of information about matters that may have a significant downstream impact. Secondly, the transitional provisions ensure that the work the Gas Industry Company is currently undertaking around information disclosure will be considered as part of the process for forming a recommendation for a new gas governance arrangement. Thirdly, it also makes changes to the Gas Act’s penalty regime. It does that by increasing the maximum civil pecuniary penalty able to be imposed by the gas rulings panel for breaches, and it gives that amount as going from $20,000 to $200,000. This new penalty limit will apply across all gas governance regulations.

I just want to thank all of those who have contributed to putting this together. It appears that there’s a high level of conflict here, but I can assure you on this side of the House, as I said, there’s no hot air, just peace. And I commend this bill to the House.

This debate is interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow. Good evening.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 9.56 p.m.