Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This is a bill that has a very narrow scope of focus, but it is a bill that is incredibly important to ensuring that we have fuel security in New Zealand. It is about ensuring that we have the ability to use our levy for domestic onshore stockholding of diesel, to ensure that we do have that resilient supply of fuel, should we require it. It is part of a suite of policies that this Government has been putting in place to ensure that New Zealand does have fuel resilience. This is one small part of it; there is more to come. This is work that began a long period ago and has been working through the system with good consultation. A number of people have given some very, very good input, and I am confident that we are getting to a place where New Zealand’s fuel security can be assured. New Zealand needs to ensure that as the world changes around us, with mega-refineries coming to the fore, we are ensuring that we always have the ability to have the fuel that we need. This is a critical part of that. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, I think the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill has been well traversed in the readings to date. We do support this bill. We do have concerns post the closure of Marsden Point, which we think should have been more carefully approached than it was—bit of a cavalier approach from the Government. Fuel security is paramount for us, as is energy security. We are transitioning to a lower-emissions economy but we cannot put fuel security aside cavalierly. We need to actually be very careful about security, both for the energy system as a whole but particularly for fuel security now that we are not able to refine fuels here in New Zealand.

I have identified a rich vein for written parliamentary questions during this process, and I know the Minister loves answering my written questions. It occupies a bit of her time but I know the passion she puts into the answers is much appreciated and so I look forward to getting those answers back on, particularly, the work that has been done or not done to ensure that we are not breaching the sanctions that we have on Russia. We found out today, fortunately, that the Government is not importing any oil or fuels refined in North Korea, which is a great relief to us all. So, with that, I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s always good to recognise that it’s a cross-partisan effort in trying to secure the security of our fuel supply. It is really important that this bill, the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill, really helps our country keep moving. There are big events happening around the world right now. There’s lot of incidents and lots of disruption in the day and age we live in, and we’re making sure that the Government plans for those unexpected events and disruptions that we know will start to occur more and more frequently, especially on the weather side. This makes sure that New Zealand has the confidence to see this country through those rainy days, and it makes sure that we have the responsibility and the planning ahead. This is what this Government does, and that’s why I’m proud to commend this bill to the House.

It’s unfortunate that the Minister has departed so early without listening to one of my brief tomes.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member cannot refer to other members who are not in the Chamber. Go ahead, Tama Potaka.

I withdraw and apologise. OK, kia ora. Thanks to the National and ACT speakers for raising relevant observations today. Now, New Zealand is at the end of the global supply chain, and our country exists with the tyranny of distance but enjoys also the strength of solitude.

It actually reminds me of a sentence from a book called 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, the famous Colombian writer who spoke about the Buendia whānau in Macondo. “The secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude.” Folks, the secret of a good country is simply an honourable pact with reality.

The reality of this bill is that it’s run faster than my escaped ginger cat chasing skinks while the next atmospheric river abates. It’s been a real eye-opener for a fresh parliamentarian to see the pace of legislative change, and gives me some pause to evince my concern about the meanderings of the Government.

Ultimately, the National Party supports this bill. What we don’t want to do is to make poor decisions, only to spend an inordinate amount of energy to fix up problems caused by those poor decisions—this case in point being Marsden Point.

The bill is less about continuity and it’s more about control of the narrative, and we’ve dealt with this matter for now. But the long-term question remains: do we want to live in a country that relies on an honourable pact with one another in reality, or one that does not? We support this bill. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The ACT Party will be supporting this bill. We’re absolutely committed, through our own policy development in the initiatives that we would introduce should ACT be part of a future Government, to ensuring that the supply chain is resilient and that New Zealand has a brighter future, because New Zealand is extremely vulnerable, with 5 million people living on an island the size of Japan, riven with earthquake faults, spotted with volcanoes, and subject to tsunami, cyclone, and all kinds of extreme weather events. New Zealand is a vulnerable country in the South Pacific.

And that means at the end of a global supply chain, with 5 million consumers—probably only 3 million of which are actually earning enough to be net taxpayers—we don’t have a lot to offer the rest of the world except a friendly environment to invest, affordable homes for people to live in, and higher wages. Except under this Labour Government, New Zealand is not seen as a friendly destination to invest in. Housing affordability has got worse under this Government. Not that long ago in Auckland, where I live, the difference between the median wage or salary and the cost of a home—the cost of the home was six times the median wage or salary. Now it’s 10 times. And when you think about our wages, the average Australian is earning $23,000 more than the average Kiwi doing the same work. So if only New Zealand was an easier place to invest and this Government didn’t treat foreign direct investment as if people trying to send money here were criminals, if only our homes were affordable, and if only our wages were higher.

And this Government’s response to trying to solve problems around security of supply for fuel and supply chain resilience—in fact, every single problem this Government tries to solve, it tries to solve through regulation and more red tape. Now, I asked the Minister at committee stage, “Would there be any additional cost?” The Minister said no. Well, I want to raise this issue, because it’s going to come up. Currently, New Zealand relies on tickets, which guarantee that New Zealand meets its 90-day fuel storage obligation, which is an international commitment which we’ve signed up to in terms of the International Energy Agency, that we will retain 90 days of fuel stockpile. But most of that stockpile is floating around somewhere between the Gulf of Arabia and North Korea, as the Minister accidentally pointed out, and New Zealand. It’s on the high seas somewhere, or potentially it’s just an IOU in someone’s bottom drawer.

That’s what security of supply and resilience means right now. Well, a bit of paper, a scrap of paper, doesn’t cost much. I mean, these were probably arranged at a time when fax machines or even telex machines were still in common use. An IOU sent to another country doesn’t cost much. But what the Minister is proposing is that the Government will procure storage or procure fuel management, testing regimes, and a higher specification—a winter specification—for diesel, to store 70 million litres onshore in addition to what’s currently stored. There will be an extra cost to build tankage, pipe networks, construction, consents, and that’s when we get to the rub of it. If this was a simple thing to organise, the Minister could have simply written to the fuel companies and said, “Would you please give us your plan to store more fuel on site in New Zealand? We’d really appreciate your advice, and if you think there’s any additional cost to that would you please tell us how you think that should be apportioned?” Because there is a cost for paying for security, whether it’s security in your shop—if you’re a retailer these days, you might have to invest in cages, you might have to invest in CCTV. Security costs money, whether it’s building tankage for more onshore fuel storage or whether it’s security for your home and business. Security costs money.

But how easy is it and how affordable is this extra security? I just want to bring the House’s attention, and the attention of people who might be watching this debate on a Friday morning or in the future on demand, because everything that’s said in this House is available for New Zealanders to inspect at their leisure on Parliament TV On Demand. I want to pose this question: let’s imagine that the Government procures additional fuel storage, 70 million litres of tankage, and then in the request for proposal the tenderer offering to build more storage for a price says, “By the way, we’re tagging out resource consenting, because if we have to go and get consents under the Resource Management Act (RMA) or whatever Minister David Parker thinks the future of environmental law might be, we can’t guarantee we’re going to get a consent, because under the current RMA, it says any decision maker has to take account of the effects of climate change on the planet.”

So can you imagine a Government agency procuring fuel storage having to explain to an Environment Court judge why they should be allowed to build diesel tanks, even though there’s a law on the books—which Labour passed, an amendment to the RMA—that said every decision maker needs to take account of climate change? Well, this Government declared a climate emergency and has been fearing up the kids and fearing up the public about climate change for five or six years. And yet, now, reality bites, and they need to pay for onshore diesel storage. These two things cannot exist in the same universe. Either you want to focus on a resilient economy and resilient communities, and give Kiwis options about how they achieve that resilience, or you wrap them up in red tape and you let more and more people object to doing things that are just sensible.

Now, I will give an example: we’ve got a proposal in Taranaki to stand up a wind turbine that would generate hydrogen that would reduce the amount of natural gas being used to make fertiliser at Ballance Agri-Nutrients Kapuni, and Greenpeace has objected to it. If we want to actually become more resilient as a nation, more resilient in our far-flung communities subject to natural disasters, the Resource Management Act has to be reformed, but not in the way this Government proposes. We need to make it easier to build things like fuel storage tanks, and we need to make it easier to move goods and services around the country. Not everything can be done digitally. Even though this Government told people during COVID to put a teddy in the window and stay home, a lot of businesses can’t operate by putting a teddy in the window and staying home. They actually need to get out on the road—we need to put trucks on the road, we need to put things in those trucks, and we need to deliver things to customers.

So it’s not just about building some tank storage somewhere. The Minister wasn’t able to explain where that is, although I’ve offered a few suggestions: it might be the West Coast of the South Island, for example. But we also need ports that are resilient. What we saw during the Blenheim / Kaikōura earthquake sequence, actually, Wellington CentrePort fell down, fell into the harbour, wasn’t able to be operated. We’ve got different port ownership around New Zealand: local government ownership—local government’s cash strapped; they can’t afford to invest in resilient port infrastructure. So buying additional onshore tankage or storage is just one part of New Zealand’s resilience problem.

Then we come to the road network. What did we see during Cyclone Gabrielle? Roads all over the country, particularly in the top half of the North Island, were blown out by floods and storms. Now, a lot of those roads were built to 1980 standards, with culverts and bridges designed between the 1950s and the 1980s when we didn’t understand what we do now about the likely intensity of storm events. And so building tank storage in different places around the country won’t help unless we can transport the fuel to those storage facilities by ship or by road or by rail.

And so this Government has failed to solve the problems of how to make New Zealand’s infrastructure and communities more resilient. It’s failed. That’s why the ACT Party says we’ll support this bill—put to the House under urgency today—but we will be demanding that New Zealand’s Government of the future invests more in infrastructure so that we can become more resilient, and we will be seeking foreign direct investment to help pay for that infrastructure, because the New Zealand taxpayer and consumers are tapped out, tapped out by this Labour Government. ACT will support this bill, but watch out.

Debate interrupted.