Fuel Industry Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Energy and Resources: I present a legislative statement on the Fuel Industry Amendment Bill.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Talofa lava, Mr Speaker. I move, That the Fuel Industry Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Ensuring we get our regulatory settings right for our engine fuel markets is a key focus for the Minister’s work programme. As a country, we are currently experiencing higher than usual engine fuel prices driven by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Although these are beyond our control, we can do more to promote competition. In 2019, the Commerce Commission released its retail fuel market study. The commission’s report indicated that fuel companies had been making persistently higher profits over the previous decade than would be expected in a competitive market; that there is limited competition in the wholesale markets; and that that flows through to the retail market. One of the commission’s key recommendations in that report was to create greater transparency by requiring fuel companies to publish wholesale spot prices at fuel terminals.

The Government implemented that recommendation, and the passing of the Fuel Industry Act 2020 saw the introduction of terminal gate pricing for wholesale suppliers to make easier entry at a wholesale level. However, the commission also recommended that a regulatory backstop be introduced to deal with the risk that fuel companies use the terminal gate pricing regime to coordinate prices. The backstop could also address situations where a fuel company could exert market power at a terminal—for example, where the terminal is isolated. The development of the backstop was put on a slower track to avoid holding up the other fuel industry reforms, as there are some complexities in developing an effective backstop. After experiencing high price volatility in 2022, now is the right time to introduce this regulatory backstop to give consumers confidence that increases in fuel prices are not being driven by unreasonably high margins.

The Fuel Industry Act has already contributed to more competition in New Zealand. The terminal gate pricing regime has supported expansion into new areas by low-price retailers such as Gull, NPD, and Waitomo. Gull has publicly stated that, without the Act, it would not be able to competitively source fuel to operate its South Island outlets and to provide competitive tension. The bill supports these trends by providing strong incentives for fuel companies to ensure that terminal gate prices are competitive and by providing insurance against commercial behaviour which chills competition and contributes to higher fuel prices. So, on behalf of the Minister, I want to thank the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee for their work and consideration of this bill, and I also want to thank those who took time to submit and provide their feedback.

This bill provides an incentive for wholesale engine fuel suppliers to offer competitive terminal gate prices. It does this by providing a process by which these prices could be regulated by the Commerce Commission after an inquiry and recommendation to the Minister. The Minister could then recommend to the Governor-General that an Order in Council be made declaring a particular terminal gate price subject to price regulation. The Commerce Commission would then be responsible for setting and enforcing a form of the price regulation. This would deter misuse of market power and ensure better competition in the wholesale market, which is expected to flow through to consumers at the pump in the medium to long term. This is a well calibrated process. It is not a return to the price regulation that was seen in days past. This is a new power for the Commerce Commission, and if the market works as it should and in line with what we expect, fuel companies should have every incentive to compete hard and avoid being regulated.

The bill was referred to the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee on 22 November 2022. The committee received six written submissions and heard two oral submissions, and I want to thank the select committee for their work on this bill and thank those who submitted. Six amendments to the bill have been recommended by the committee to address matters raised by submitters and advisers and also the excellent Regulations Review Committee. The first was to amend the test for price regulation. The bill currently states that the commission may make a recommendation that price regulation should be imposed on terminal gate prices only if it is satisfied that the relevant wholesale supplier has posted terminal gate prices that were not consistent with what would be expected in a competitive market. To make this test clearer, it has been recommended that the text be amended from “not consistent” to “above”.

The second is to reduce the maximum period of regulation from 10 to five years—this is a recommendation that’s been made—so that it will balance wholesale suppliers’ concern regarding future market conditions while ensuring the regime is effective in terms of improved competition.

💬 Third: to make clearer that the Commerce Commission must consider investment incentives. This change has also been recommended, and it would make it clearer that, when the Commerce Commission sets the price regulation, in considering whether the Act’s purpose is promoted, in making that determination, consideration should be given to determining that the wholesale suppliers’ incentives to invest and meet end-user demands are taken into account.

💬 Fourth: better information-gathering powers for the Commerce Commission. It’s been recommended that one of the Commerce Commission’s information-gathering powers from the Commerce Act should be more broadly incorporated into the Fuel Industry Act. This will allow the Commerce Commission to require comparative information from wholesale suppliers that are not subject to the inquiry and price-setting process.

Also, some better process requirements: two recommendations have been made in that regard—the first, to add a requirement for the Minister to specify a time frame by which the Commerce Commission must make a recommendation after an inquiry is triggered; the second, to clarify a requirement for the Commerce Commission to consult on draft price regulation.

So that was a great select committee process, as always—another great step to a competitive market for fuel in New Zealand. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Well, what a load of blah, blah, blah we have just listened to this afternoon. I mean, really. I mean, what are we doing having a conversation in this House about additional powers for the Commerce Commission to regulate petrol prices? We have already had a Commerce Commission review that occurred in 2018 and 2019. There are recommendations. The key recommendation that came from that was this requirement to ensure that petrol companies had to advertise the daily price at which they sell petrol to competing retailers, because that was the piece that was missing in terms of forced transparency. So that got passed. We all supported it in the House. And guess what? Since that passed in 2020, there has been improvement in competition. There has been greater price disclosure. In fact, there has been significant growth of NPD and Waitomo around the country. There is not a problem here in terms of no competition; there is more competition, and there is more price disclosure and discretion.

You would think that the Government might actually say, “Well, actually, we’ve done that job; we’ll now turn our attention to”—I don’t know—“building a road, perhaps, or building a house.” It might actually fix law and order or do something that the rest of the country is actually screaming out for. Oh, no. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have another process in which we’re going to tie up Parliament time and tie up select committee time to see if there is an opportunity for the Commerce Commission to have powers under law to set petrol prices. What absolute nonsense. We had six submitters—six submitters—[Interruption] And here they are screaming at the back, going, “Oh, but the petrol prices are too high.”

Yes. Let’s talk about why petrol prices are high. Half of it is product cost. Forty percent of it is your—not your taxes, Mr Speaker, although I’m sure you, like me, find it very, very irksome when you have to pay such a high petrol price. Half of it is product cost; the rest is excise tax and the carbon emissions trading scheme price. But this is their logic of it, right? You cannot argue on one hand, saying, “Oh, the reason we’re doing this is because the petrol prices are high.” Well, the reason for that is because the product cost is high and we have a very high tax regime, including 11c a litre more for those who have the privilege of crawling around in Auckland. But instead of actually acknowledging that that’s the reason for the petrol price hikes, this Government, of course, decides that what’s actually required is even more process, even more bureaucracy, and actually creating the power for setting prices, because regulating prices has always worked in this country!

We have this long history of Governments and products that have worked so well when some Minister and bureaucrat somewhere says, “Oh, I know the better market price than what the market’s showing; let me have a bit of that.”! I mean, sometimes I wonder: where did these guys go to school, Mr Bennett? Where do these guys actually get some understanding around how the market works and how it’s actually structured in New Zealand?

💬 Anna Lorck: I’ve had a lecture.

Look, we’ve already had a lecture—it was Deborah Russell before, and I thought that tax response was fantastic! We’re all far more elucidated because of that response earlier!

But, in all seriousness, we have spent a huge amount of time on this in the House. It goes to select committee—we can’t even agree; it’s three all. We come back and the Minister gives—you know, if you were listening, you would try to follow—a sort of a broad assessment of why we’re doing it. We do not need to do it. The competition is clear. NPD and Waitomo have been significantly spreading throughout the country. The Fuel Industry Act 2020 sorted the issue and got the disclosure that was necessary. This is just a Government who doesn’t actually know how to get real things done but instead just obsesses and focuses on process and bureaucracy, because it makes them feel good when they’re in the middle of a bureaucratic process because it gives them a sense of progress. Well, the rest of the country knows that, on the things that matter, they are a failure, and in 140 days’ time, finally, we can chuck this lot out and get some decent Government. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. New Zealand is a country of 5 million people. To put that into context, it is the size of New South Wales, across the Ditch, our neighbour state. It is 1.5 percent of the population of the United States of America. It is 0.3 percent of the population of China and 0.4 percent of the population of India. Our population of 5 million means that we have a very small market and that often competition doesn’t happen, because of the sheer size of our market. And that is exactly what this study in 2019 by the Commerce Commission has found. Because we’re such a small market, industries such as the fuel industry, such as the building supply industry, such as the grocery sector industry don’t have a lot of competition in New Zealand. So that is why, when we implemented our first bill, the Fuel Industry Bill, we needed to make sure that there was fuel gate pricing.

What this bill has done here today is make the recommendations by the commission—those who actually go out there and do the market studies; they can actually recommend to the Minister whether or not our market is working, whether or not there is competition, and whether or not New Zealanders ultimately get a fair deal at the pump. This comes after this Government has reduced our fuel tax, reduced our road user charges, reduced public transport charges, and we need to be making sure that all Kiwis get a fair deal at the pump. That is why the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee has been working very hard and making sure that this bill has all the details we need to make sure there is competition in our fuel industry. That’s why I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. That last speaker, Naisi Chen, said that she wanted to bring competition to the market, and at the same time she’s saying that we’re too small a market and the Government has to dictate what the price is. So how does that work? How do you bring competition to the market if you, as the Government, dictate the price?

💬 Hon Member: That’s not what it says.

Well, that’s not how it works. That’s what they’re saying. Those were her exact words. Her last sentence was, “We need competition in the market.” Yet, at the same time, they’re passing a bill in which they dictate the price. So how does that work? How does it work?

Now, the Commerce Commission is one of the evils that we see in this country. The Commerce Commission has got everything wrong it’s ever done in the last 20 years. There has been no decision that that Commerce Commission has made that has been right. They will go and get huge budgets from the Government; they go off and do these silly tricks where they go down and look at things. They never actually come up with anything sensible, and the only times they do something is when they try and block business getting ahead in New Zealand. That is the history of the Commerce Commission in New Zealand. We should not be trusting them with this.

The Commerce Commission need a good shake up. They need it and they haven’t had it for 20 or 30 years, and they definitely need it. I don’t believe we should be empowering them any more than they are empowered now. They are a body that has not been shown to have any economic sense in the last 20 or 30 years. They have stopped many mergers and acquisitions that actually would have been good for New Zealand. They have actually stopped a lot of things that have been in the best interest of this country.

When we need them to actually act on something, they don’t do it. They walk away; they write a report and say, “This is too hard.” That’s the Commerce Commission in New Zealand. And bless their socks. You know, I don’t even know who’s in there now, but they need a bullet and they need to be sorted out and they need to be put into their place because the Commerce Commission has had a really bad history in New Zealand. I believe that this legislation is another attempt to do what is happening in this area.

💬 Hon Kieran McAnulty: Your face says it all, Penk.

Well, you can talk about that Minister over there that’s just signed off the racing legislation, hasn’t he? Yeah. It was metaphorical, too, and I apologise if anyone takes it the wrong way. But that member has signed off the racing legislation in the last week. We haven’t had an explanation, we haven’t seen that come to the—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, let’s have an explanation of the bill then, shall we, Mr Bennett?

This is a bill where the Government will have total control, effectively, in setting the price. If it wants to have competition, it doesn’t have total control on setting the price. It should enable competition to actually happen, and that’s one of the things that isn’t in this bill.

So, if the Minister promoting it, and the members of Parliament on the other side, want to push it forward, then they should actually do something about enabling competition in this bill. I’m sorry if I went too far in my comments earlier, but the reality is the Commerce Commission is not the body to do this. But, at the same time, Government regulation like this is not the right approach, either. So the National Party does not support this bill.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. I’m rising to support this second reading of the Fuel Industry Amendment Bill this afternoon. As someone who sat on the select committee and so was able to listen and learn and know a bit more about the legislation than the other Mr Bennett in the room, I’d just like to highlight, I guess, that for Gull, in terms of for them and the conversation that was had, they’re saying that without this Act it would be completely impossible for them to source and to operate their services in the South Island and to provide that competitive tension down there.

So, if a company like Gull is saying, “We need this”, I’m willing to sit up and listen. They have been disrupters in the market as we’ve seen Gull move its way around Aotearoa New Zealand over the last two decades. When they have moved into places and spaces—for example, New Plymouth several years ago—we see that it did challenge the fuel price within the New Plymouth market.

Being a member of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee—it was a pleasure to be on it—I mean, it was so controversial that we had six written submissions and two oral submissions! Good legislation. No need to talk more on it. It’s clear. I commend this bill to the House.

💬 Simon Court: [Walking into Chamber] Mr Speaker?

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: We’ll indulge you, Mr Court, because it’s Thursday afternoon.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I do appreciate your indulgence. One of the things about being an ACT MP is that there’s only 10 of us, and so that means we have to work much, much harder than any of the other people representing Kiwis. So, if I was late to the House here this afternoon to speak on behalf of ACT on this Fuel Industry Amendment Bill, you must forgive me. But I promise you I do come well prepared.

One of the problems that we have in New Zealand is that we’re a very small country of 5 million consumers at the end of a very, very long supply chain—very, very long supply chain. What that means is that, when we need petrol, diesel, or other liquid fuels like jet fuel, we’re dependent. At one point, it was the Marsden Point Oil Refinery, but now we’re dependent on imports. So we have to look at what is important to New Zealand—affordability of fuels; security of supply, of course—but also, what is the opportunity for businesses that supply into New Zealand to come to their own arrangements with customers so that they get the best value?

Now, when I drive around Auckland, I use an app called PriceSpy. What that tells me—

💬 Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Gaspy.

Gaspy. PriceSpy is another tool that you can use to compare the price of consumer goods on the internet. And what Gaspy, or “Gasp-eye”—I’m not quite sure—

💬 Hon Judith Collins: Gaspy, it’s called.

—Gaspy, I’m told—tells you is that across Auckland, there is a difference of around 40c a litre between retailers supplying petrol into the Auckland market. What that tells you is there is competition and that consumers who shop around can find a good deal.

Now, what this bill proposes to do is, essentially, establish a regulatory mechanism that would require those who wholesale fuel to New Zealand—so that is, the fuel comes in ships, it’s offloaded, either into fuel storage tanks or maybe taken by truck and trailer to fuel storage depots in other parts of the country—like Hamilton, for example; you know, a bit further away from the ports—and from there, it is distributed to retailers. What this bill proposes to do is to put up a sign outside the fuel depot where all the storage tanks are saying how much the petrol will cost that day.

If I was running a big construction business and I thought, “Crikey, there’s a depot down the road with some storage tanks where I can go and buy diesel at a certain price”, where else could I go and compare that? Well, in Auckland we have the Wiri oil storage terminal; that’s where fuel is stored in Auckland. There’s a few tanks scattered around in other places, like up the Tāmaki River. There’s no more fuel storage tanks down at the Port of Auckland anymore—they’ve all gone from Winyard wharf. So where is the competition in the wholesale market? Where is this practically able to be achieved if there’s only one place in town I can go and pick up diesel if I have a tanker? It doesn’t make any sense to introduce a wholesale regulatory system—or, potentially, force these businesses to publish wholesale prices—when there is no practical way of going and accessing a competitor’s product at a certain price. There is only one Wiri oil storage terminal in Auckland.

Then we think: well, how do businesses and consumers get the best price? Well, if you’re using a very large volume of fuel, if you’re running a commercial trucking business, if you’re running a construction business and you’re putting 200 or 400 litres of diesel into a whole fleet of diggers and bulldozers every day, then you can go to your fuel supplier, whether it be an ExxonMobil or an Ampol, Z, Chevron, Texaco, Waitomo fuels—whoever operates in New Zealand—and you can organise for bulk supply of fuel to your yards, to your depots, and use that in your machines. And I guarantee, if you’re buying $1 million a week, you’re going to get a much better price than if you’re buying 100 litres a month.

What ACT would say is: look, if there is a problem in terms of how much petrol and diesel costs when it’s imported into New Zealand, and if the Government thinks there is an excessive amount of profit being made by these fuel suppliers—when you look at, well, crikey, it can come into New Zealand at about a dollar something a litre but it’s being sold at $2.80—ACT would say the Government needs to look at itself, needs to look long and hard in the mirror, because almost half the cost of petrol at the pump is fuel excise duties, GST, and, of course, charges under the emissions trading scheme (ETS). Everybody who fuels up in New Zealand pays for their emissions—on diesel, petrol, whatever else they choose to use. Jet fuel—I don’t know if they use that in cars; maybe in places like Hamilton and West Auckland, where I’m from! They pay for their emissions—right?—under the emissions trading scheme. It’s somewhere around 18c, 19c, 20c a litre. It might be a bit less now because New Zealanders have found a way to reduce their emissions at a lower price and the ETS price has come down. But almost half the cost at the pump is actually cost imposed through regulation: fuel excise duty—that money taken from motorists at the pump—that’s supposed to be spent on roads, although only about a third of it is spent on capital projects, actually building new bridges and new capacity, new motorways. About a third is spent on operational expenditure, or maintenance of roads, and about a third is shandied off to spend on KiwiRail and bike bridges and all kinds of other things that our Green and Labour politicians like to boast about.

So, look, what ACT would say—it’s quite simple—if the Government was concerned about reducing the price of fuel and making it more affordable, it could do a couple of things. It could stop making stupid regulations that force companies to hold more fuel storage onshore and impose all of those additional costs on them—that are coming through another bill that’s been introduced to the House today: the Fuel Industry (Improving Fuel Resilience) Amendment Bill—which could require these companies to build tank storage all around New Zealand, even though I’m not sure if Labour realises we’re only a few days’ sail away from Queensland and other big refineries in Australia. It could stop punishing Kiwis by spending a whole lot of money on stuff like bike bridges over the Auckland Harbour—$100 million spent on designing and planning a bridge that will never be built.

💬 Hon Julie Anne Genter: It’s not $100 million.

It’s not $100 million my colleague and transport planner Julie Anne Genter says, and she does agree with me, it is a total waste of money. We can differ on the nickels and dimes, but it’s a lot of money—it’s a lot of money. If they were to reduce their wasteful spending on transport projects that no one asked for and that aren’t needed, then maybe they could liberate us from the crushing burden of fuel excise duty—and maybe, if we take it one step further and we think about what it would look like to transform the road funding and financing system. In fact, it’s interesting: Julie Anne Genter and I have been getting on so well at public debates that I think it’s probably a good time to start an ACT-Green cross-party alliance on transportation planning! I’m pretty sure that we could do a deal. I’ll give Aucklanders two or four more lanes, and we’ll create an extra lane for Julie Anne to ride her bike when she comes to Auckland. I reckon that’s a pretty good deal! Even Chris Penk, who lives out west, where I’m from, agrees.

But here’s the opportunity: instead of beating up the fuel companies and telling them that they’re overcharging, and threatening to set prices, what the Government could do is say, “Look, we’re going to actually transition from collecting fuel excise duties at the pump to a road pricing system that’s fair, where users of the road network pay per kilometre and per tonnage and how much they’re actually doing damage to the roads if they’re running heavy trucks. We get rid of fuel excise duty altogether, except for the bare minimum. We transition to a system like that over five or six years.” That would give Kiwis time to adapt. That would also reveal the fact that a lot of the money being taken by the Government on fuel excise duty isn’t being spent on roads. ACT would show how you can actually reallocate funds from kilometres travelled back to the roads that need it. We think that’s a much better way. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party is supporting this bill. I, unfortunately, was not on the select committee that heard the submissions, and we don’t have a member on that select committee, but we did read through the report and the submissions. It was quite interesting to hear that fuel companies, like Gull, are supportive and think these are really important changes.

Just in reference to the debate that’s happening here in the Chamber this afternoon, I do think it’s worth covering some of the territory that the National and ACT parties covered in their speeches, because, I guess, they’re showing their true colours, which is that they’re quite happy to protect corporates profiteering and they want to blame the Government for price rises, even though the Government, basically, invests in things that benefit all of us. So, really, it’s a case of wanting to maximise private profit, in their case, and not social good and public good. They use this mask of pretending to understand economics, and claiming that economics is in favour of the approach that they’re talking about, when, of course, it’s not, because anyone who’s studied economics knows that one of the challenges for a market economy is monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies. That’s exactly the reason why we need regulation and things like the Commerce Commission.

In fact, if you go way back in time to Standard Oil, it was broken up into multiple oil companies. They’re still able to profiteer and they’re still actually having excess profits at a time when their actions are directly responsible for the catastrophic climate events that are hitting many nations across the world, and that’s something that we need to change. And that’s something that, if you get outside of New Zealand—and I know those members have probably never been outside of New Zealand—it’s, basically, mainstream that people think that it’s not right that big corporates should be making massive profits for trashing the planet. That’s not good for the economy. We need a planet, to have an economy; we need a civilisation. All of that’s under threat from climate change. I guess that their world view is just so limited, but they’re, basically, on the side of big corporate profits and against ordinary people.

So why shouldn’t we cut petrol tax? Petrol tax is what we use to build our public infrastructure and to maintain it. So of course we think it’s OK—if the price of carbon is reflected truly in the price of oil, then the price of oil at the pump will rise, but if it’s going towards a public good, which means that people know that the Government is investing in alternatives that are going to make it possible to get around their community without having to rely on a car and oil, then that’s a good thing.

That’s precisely why it makes sense to use the National Land Transport Fund to invest in things like the lower North Island rail improvements, where there was a business case that the benefit-to-cost ratio was well above one; it was almost two. So you get a benefit from that. The majority of the benefits were to people using the roads. So I know it’s hard to understand a system where you don’t need to use the train to benefit from it. In fact, there were greater benefits happening for the people who use the roads, because other people were, then, not using the roads; they were using the train. The single-biggest imposition on people trying to drive a car is other people driving cars. So, if you can reduce the other cars on the road, that’s how you’re going to make the biggest difference to people who need to use a truck or a car to get somewhere.

So, yeah, to bring it back to this bill, this is an important role for the Government and for the public to take, to make sure that people aren’t being price gouged. We should be proud and happy to invest in our public infrastructure and taxes, so that’s why I was surprised to hear the National Party member being against the idea of—he’s for the fuel companies making excess profits, which, of course, we know they were, but he’s not for investing in our roads, in our road maintenance, and in our road safety; or better yet our rail network, which provides benefits to the road network and to the climate and to the people who use it.

So I think that’s fundamentally the difference. We need to call out the fact that the language of economics that’s being used to defend an approach that’s really about letting a small number of people make excess wealth and excess profit and get more than their fair share, rather than all of us working together for things that benefit us all. That is the fundamental difference. I hope that those watching this debate at home can see through the very shallow lines from National and ACT. Like, if they get into Government—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, let’s just let the people at home know what’s in the bill, shall we?

Yeah. Well, what is in the bill, Mr Speaker, as we’ve been talking about, is some really important implementation of recommendations from the Commerce Commission that’s going to result in, hopefully, fairer fuel prices. But it’s important to acknowledge that, yes, some of the fuel price is fuel excise duty and tax, and that’s a good thing because that’s what enables us to fix the safety of the roads, to maintain the roads, and to build new transport infrastructure.

So it’s good when you’re paying the fuel price and you know it’s going towards something you will use or that may well benefit your community; that’s good. But do you want to pay it to offshore shareholders? No. You don’t want to have to pay more than you have to to offshore shareholders.

The whole point of the Commerce Commission is to try and make sure that we do have fair pricing. But the National Party, of course, are the defenders of the monopolists and the corporate raiders and they’re all for excess profit going into private hands. Privatise the benefit, socialise the losses—that is the approach of the right, and they will use an excuse of economics to defend it, when they do not understand economics in the least. They don’t share the values of public benefit, public good, all of us pitching in together, all of us working together to solve the climate challenge.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is my pleasure to rise and take a call on the Fuel Industry Amendment Bill.

I’m a bit confused. Does the National Party support transparency and want transparency, or do they not want transparency? Because surely if they were genuine about wanting transparency, they would support this bill—but they’re not. So I want to put it on record to the small-business owners and business owners, to the individual families struggling in Whanganui right now, that National are voting against a bill which would introduce greater transparency to the fuel market; which would mean that we would finally have an answer as to why we are having to pay 30c to 40c a litre more at the pump than towns 20 minutes down the road.

Because, to date, nobody can answer that. It’s not due to fuel excise and it’s not due to transport cost. It does not cost 30c to 40c a litre more to transport fuel to Whanganui than it does to Marton, to Turakina, or to Sanson. This bill will introduce transparency, which will finally require the companies to explain the differences and the variations in price between regions. Can you tell me: why does fuel cost more in Whangārei than it costs in Northland, yet the tankers go straight through Whangārei to get to Northland?

The answers that we are being given do not add up. That is why we need this bill to ensure that we have a competitive and transparent fuel market—where competition is failing in the market. Then we will finally have a mechanism to intervene. On behalf of my constituents in the Whanganui electorate, who are frustrated and fed up with paying high fuel prices with no reasons for it, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s been very hard to understand and follow—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sorry—a five-minute split call.

Thank you. I can assure you that it won’t be all of that. It’s been hard to understand all the arguments being made across the House by the left-wing parliamentary colleagues of ours today. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m too dumb or too smart to understand them. But, in any case, it seems there’s a real lack of clarity between such basic concepts as profiteering or simply making a profit, which, funnily enough, is similar to the distinction between those who are merely politicking and those who are engaging in the relatively respectable profession of politics. Those who are interested, from a policy point of view, want to understand what the unintended consequences are of policy that might be well-intentioned—and I don’t doubt that it is—but which nevertheless will have negative effects for those, whether it’s in Whangārei or Whanganui, or Whangateau for that matter—completing my little alliterative triplet, and finishing in my own electorate, which is always a good place to be, and to which I look forward to returning very, very soon.

The concept of a command and control economy whereby people in this House—again, with the best of intentions—wish to make life easier by dictating things from Wellington but nevertheless end up undermining even their own arguments in respect of the value of competition—and, of course, freedom to compete between private market entities is important. Government does have an important role to play in some aspects of our national life, but setting the price where there is a competitive market that should, in the absence of pitfalls and barriers—and I mix my metaphors, I know—but with Government not interfering—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Ms Genter, without commenting on the previous speaker, about the coming together of ACT and Greens, could I suggest that, if you want to carry on this conversation, you do get a little bit closer together, so that it’s not quite as distracting to the rest of the House. Sorry, Mr Penk. Carry on.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. No need to apologise whatsoever. I thought we were going to have some sort of telegraph system. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I could see it was putting you off, Mr Penk.

It was putting me off—that explains it!

💬 Simon Court: They’re pretty off-putting!

Ha, ha! That’s right.

💬 Anna Lorck: Green and ACT—we’ve heard it today!

Pardon me?

💬 Anna Lorck: Green and ACT—

Green and ACT? Well, I wouldn’t like to comment on any “coalitions of chaos” with which we are not involved, but that’s for them.

Anyway, suffice to say, that at this very moment, the geniuses that brought us the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act and the unintended and adverse consequences associated with that are now telling us to trust them. It’s all good, they know what they’re doing, they’re from the Government, and they’re here to help! And, in the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, those are some of the scariest words in the English language. The bill, therefore, is to be resisted—opposed—and therefore I cannot commend it to the House.

This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 6 June. Thank you for your work this week.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 4.56 p.m.