Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill

Good morning, members. When we broke last night, at 10 p.m., the House was considering the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill. I’d now like to call the next speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Happy Pink Shirt Day. It’s my pleasure to take a call on the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill.

This bill is to ensure that the levies we collect go towards making sure that our onshore supply is one that is capable of seeing New Zealand through hard times. This is especially important when there are global disruptions, supply chain disruptions, and weather events. Doesn’t that sound familiar to us? Hasn’t that been exactly what’s been happening in New Zealand for the last four years? This is to make sure that the money that we collect from levies actually goes to ensuring that New Zealand keeps moving. It’s to make sure that our onshore oil supply, petroleum supply—our energy supplies—are actually up to the fact that our economy does not see the disruption that we saw in the last four years, and that we’re prudent to avoid those rainy days. So that’s why I commend this bill to the House.

What the member who’s just resumed her seat, Naisi Chen, forgot to say is that we didn’t use to have this, and it wasn’t because of offshore operations but it’s because Marsden Point has been closed down. The companies that owned Marsden Point, or those who are the shareholders in it, they were quite shocked when the Minister didn’t bat an eyelid and said they were going to close down Marsden Point. What is true is we now have a situation where we don’t have security of supply, of fuel, and, of course, we’ve got a Government which has been anti the oil and gas industry from day one, although when they were last in Government, before that, they understood that it was an important part of our economy and our security. So they’ve let Marsden Point close and now there’s a problem—well, they walked away from that, but what they forgot to do is to actually make sure that there was that supply and the capacity to hold the supply.

So this fuel levy, which is, by the way, the sort of levy that most people would think was paying their fuel taxes so that the roads could be built, is now going to be used to hold storage of diesel. The issue about diesel supply in New Zealand and storage is, actually, critical. So given the fact that the Government allowed Marsden Point to be closed without any attempt being made to find an alternative, this is why New Zealanders are going to see their fuel taxes going to pay for diesel storage. One of the things that we’ve seen in the last six years has been a massive rise in inflation, particularly the last few years, and part of that is around the cost of fuel, and a lot of that cost is actually Government taxes and levies anyway. And on 1 July this year, it’s going to go up yet again, and that is one of the things that’s driving up the cost of fuel in this country.

So rather than worrying so much about, you know, every little dollar here and there around prescriptions, how about just looking at this, because we’re going to have to support this today as the Government has allowed Marsden Point to be closed without an alternative, without requiring the fuel companies to look for other storage, or for the Government to provide that storage, and they’ve allowed this situation to occur?

So I’m sorry to say we’re going to have to support them on it, because we can’t allow the country to not have enough storage of diesel. It’s a problem that the Government has allowed to happen. The energy Minister was consulted, I understand, by the owners of Marsden Point, when the decision was being made to close it, mothball it, and they tell me that they were really shocked that she said, “Yeah, no, that’s fine—it’s your decision.” Maybe she didn’t understand how important storage of diesel is to this country, given that our heavy transport fleet does not run around on electric vehicles (EVs) and it’s very hard to have any truck that’s an EV given the weight of that truck and given the range that it doesn’t have.

So it really is that they’ve basically cut the fuel security out from under New Zealanders without another plan, so therefore we’re going to have to support it today.

If there’s one thing that 2023 has taught all of us, it’s the need to be resilient and to plan for the future, and to realise that shocks that we thought were happening once in 100 years can happen several times in a year. We need to be prepared, and failing to plan is planning to fail. What this piece of legislation does is enable the Government to be more prepared, to be able to ensure that we have the stocks that we need onshore so that we can be resilient if there is some kind of devastating international event or a disruption to our supply chains. It means that we have, in a way, a nationwide business continuity plan, something that just gives us a buffer to be able to continue to trade, continue to get in our cars, get our kids to school, go to work, get to the doctor, as we then work out the bigger plan for dealing with some of these shocks that were almost inconceivable a few years ago.

Climate change is upon us. We’ve also seen other things that were not wholly predicted, such as the invasion of Ukraine and the impact that’s had on oil supplies around the world. This legislation is very much just about planning to be resilient, to have a plan, and to be able to have a buffer so that we can continue business and not have devastating impacts that would otherwise occur. It’s a good bill. I commend it to the House

Thank you, Madam Speaker. ACT will be supporting this bill. We believe that it’s important that New Zealand has a secure energy supply, including high density liquid fuels like petrol, diesel, and jet fuel, because that is what our economy runs on. That is how we’re connected to the rest of the world. The problem the Government is trying to solve is security of supply.

Now, we’ve heard from many concerned citizens over the past couple of years that they are very worried by the closure of the Marsden Point oil refinery, which means that New Zealand no longer has offshore processing capability for crude oil into a range of products, and it’s true that that has major implications for our economy. For example, crude oil, when it arrived in New Zealand, had a relatively high sulphur content, and New Zealand’s refining processes at Marsden Point removed that sulphur to produce a high quality low sulphur diesel. That sulphur that was removed was then itself polished and refined and made available as a commercial chemical product, elemental sulphur, to be used in all kinds of processes, including manufacturing sulphuric acid and adding sulphur to phosphate and other fertilisers to create a product that Kiwi farmers might be familiar with: superphosphate.

Now, it’s also resulted, the closure of Marsden Point, in the loss of a source of carbon dioxide, which is a by-product of refining crude oil into petrol and diesel. That carbon dioxide is used to package food, to preserve food, it’s used in greenhouses and all kinds of other industrial applications where industrial gases like carbon dioxide are very valuable. So the closure of Marsden Point oil refinery has not just raised issues about security of supply for onshore fuel stocks but also the availability of other by-products from the manufacturing of petrol and diesel and jet fuel at Marsden Point.

That actually shows what New Zealand’s big problem is: 5 million people at the bottom of the world, at the end of a global supply chain, who don’t have many options and who need to consider very, very carefully when decisions are made around public policy that might affect the things that businesses want to do. Last night in the House, for example, the Government pushed through a piece of legislation under urgency which would apply a levy on natural gas—natural, clean gas extracted from existing reservoirs in Taranaki—retrospectively, which means that business investment decisions made in the past decade or so about investing in production, investing in people, investing in personnel, and investing in technology are at risk by a Government increasing its take of royalties from 5 to 10 percent up to 20 percent on the natural gas removed from existing reservoirs. It’s decisions like that that cause businesses, particularly those funded by foreign direct investment or with a share of foreign ownership—which we absolutely depend on to underpin our local domestic economy—to be concerned about their risk of operating in New Zealand.

That’s a concept called sovereign risk. When Governments pass bad laws or push bad policies or push through bills under urgency, as this one is, or announce things without having done the policy research or a benefit-cost analysis, that’s what causes Kiwi investors and international investors to think twice about coming to New Zealand, and that may well have played into the thinking behind the closure of Marsden Point, which was a privately owned facility which got to a certain point in its asset life where the owners of that facility had to make a decision. “We’ve got 5 million customers in New Zealand. They don’t earn as much as their neighbours across the ditch in Australia; they can’t pay as much for stuff. If we want to continue processing crude oil into refined petrol, diesel, and jet fuel in New Zealand, our asset’s at the end of its life, or nearing it. We’re going to need to make a huge investment, potentially in the billions of dollars.”

The New Zealand Government has taken a stake in that oil refinery at Marsden Point in the past, under a previous National Government. Over a billion dollars was tipped into that refinery to stand up additional hydrocarbon cracking and processing equipment back in the 1980s. The New Zealand Government, the taxpayer, is not about to tip a billion dollars into an oil refinery in 2023—that was never going to happen—but private sector would still continue to invest in plant and equipment if they thought that there was a long run available for them to recover their cost of capital and that there was no additional risk of a Government like this Labour Government passing laws in the night under urgency with no consultation, like they did last night with the levy on energy resources—natural gas.

So there’s an issue with security of supply, there’s an issue with infrastructure, and then there’s an issue with this Government and its absolute allergy to foreign direct investment. Again, we saw that in yesterday’s Budget. There’s not enough money to rebuild the infrastructure that we need that was damaged by cyclones and storms—only a few hundred million dollars to what the Government has said is a multibillion-dollar damage bill. There was no provision for public-private partnerships, where the Government might chip in some money in expectation of doing a deal with the private sector investors, say, to invest in new roads or rail or other types of infrastructure New Zealand vitally needs. This Government is allergic to private sector capital and investment, and that is one of the reasons, I surmise, that the Marsden Point oil refinery closed and we find ourselves in this situation.

Then, I want to come to the issue of resiliency.

Hon Julie Anne Genter: What are you talking about?

Hon Andrew Little: Corporate welfare—he supports corporate welfare.

SIMON COURT: Last year—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Well, Labour are good at that!

SIMON COURT: Now, I want to be—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Look at the Budget! Unbelievable! The corporate welfare in that—

SIMON COURT: Mr Brownlee makes a good point. This Government is tipping hundreds of millions of dollars into green initiatives that don’t reduce emissions by a single tonne of carbon, because New Zealand’s emissions are already capped under the emissions trading scheme, and is making all kinds of excuses about why it can’t do things when it comes to investing in infrastructure.

Now, ACT’s not advocating for corporate welfare, and here comes the dilemma—here comes the dilemma—because New Zealand, at the end of a global supply chain, does need to have regard for its resilience and security of fuel supply. Now, last year, in October 2022, I asked the Minister what is New Zealand’s total stock of fuel held onshore at any one time in tonnes and days, and the Minister replied: 25 days’ worth of diesel, 47 days’ worth of petrol, and 94 days’, or three months’, worth of jet fuel, which is quite helpful, but remember at that time we still weren’t quite sure whether we could leave the country without some kind of passport, or whether we’d be allowed to come and go. So I’m not surprised there was a big stock of jet fuel back in October.

Now, 25 days’ worth of diesel: the New Zealand economy runs on diesel. That’s milk tankers picking up the milk from farms, that’s trucks taking food from distribution warehouses to supermarkets. The entire economy runs on diesel, but, fortunately, there are some great Kiwi investors and entrepreneurs, technical specialists, who are introducing hydrogen into the diesel supply chain in the form of hydrogen injectors to decarbonise and reduce the amount of emissions from diesel. So it’s not all downside if you’re an environmentalist and you’re concerned about protecting the climate.

But when I asked this question in October 2022, the Minister then replied to say the Government was going to procure 70 million litres of diesel to hold onshore, and this was back in November last year. So now we’re in May, nearly June. The Minister promised that this would be a matter of urgency because of our issues around security of supply and risk, and yet it’s May and the bill’s been dropped under urgency.

So the ACT Party doesn’t believe it’s really been a priority for the Government. They’ve been focused on other things, like finding more money like the $50 million they found last night from taxing natural gas, finding more money down the back of the couch to pay for their pet projects. No doubt there’ll be more bike bridges, cycle lanes, and all kinds of other things that hardly anyone will use and are unlikely to get built announced between now and the election. The ACT Party says this Government needs to focus on its priorities. That’s delivering infrastructure so that Kiwis can have better and healthier lives, and if that includes spending money on things like roads, bridges, and other ways for people to get around efficiently, then that’s what they should be doing. But the ACT Party will support this bill—disappointed it’s under urgency; the problem’s been known about for a long time.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. This bill is perfectly reasonable. The Green Party is supporting the bill. It is something that we’ve been talking about for quite a long time, the importance of both managing a transition away from fossil fuels and ensuring resilience and security of supply during that transition. Of course, we should have started planning for this a long time ago—20 years would have been good. Back in 2008, I remember, as oil prices were shooting through the roof, I was working as a consultant to the New Zealand Transport Agency, which had just been formed, on managing transport challenges as oil prices rise. Everything that we laid out in that report is still absolutely relevant today. We knew that there could be sudden disruptions to the supply of fossil fuels, because our transport system is so heavily reliant on fossil fuels, which is not inevitable—it doesn’t have to be that way; that’s a consequence of decisions that previous Governments and local governments made. We could have a transport system that is much less reliant on fossil fuels.

Indeed, we will have to have one that is much less reliant on fossil fuels and can use clean, renewable electricity but also one that moves people and goods at much lower energy cost. We can do that in our towns and cities and have massive benefits, because it means more people-friendly cities with really excellent public transport, with walkable neighbourhoods, with cleaner air, and with quieter neighbourhoods.

And in terms of moving goods, we obviously need to have a joined-up approach where we’re looking at the opportunities to really utilise coastal shipping, which will also help us with resilience to events that disrupt the road network—whether that be earthquakes or heavy-rain events. We did see coastal shipping was very instrumental in keeping the South Island and North Island connected after the Kaikōura earthquake and in the wake of—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: What a load of—

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Well, I mean it was necessary. There obviously wasn’t a built-up system of coastal shipping services, because the Government didn’t do anything to prepare for that or plan for that. But sea freight will be vitally important as a means of resilience and as a means of transition, and joining up rail and sea freight will be really important.

I am intrigued at the ACT Party’s philosophy, because, on the one hand, they don’t think Government should be responsible for anything or planning anything, but, on the other hand, when the Marsden Point oil refinery closed down, which was entirely privately owned, they are somehow blaming the Government for that. It just doesn’t add up, this philosophy. The truth is there’s a bunch of things that we do better together, and that’s the role of Government, and that’s why we collectively pool our resources to pay for infrastructure and services that we can pay for together. And there is a role for the private sector in working alongside and partnering to supply some things.

But, ultimately, it’s us together through this democratic process who determine what our goals are. And one of the goals that we have is transitioning to a resilient economy that is net zero, which means we’ll be able to protect our climate, look after our environment, and look after our people. It is absolutely untrue that we need to somehow allow those extracting fossil fuels to not pay their fair share from extracting those, which is why the bill last night made sense, closing a loophole to make sure that new gas that’s extracted is all subject to the same royalty rate, and it makes sense for us to work together. So the Green Party supports the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to take just a quick minute to reiterate what the bill does so that those who have tuned in this morning and perhaps weren’t watching when this bill was introduced last night into the House—maybe they were celebrating the changes to prescription charges, the fact that the health system will be relieved of tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of dollars with the burden—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): We’re getting back to the bill.

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: —if they were doing something else last night and missed the start of the bill.

Hon Damien O’Connor: A stitch in time saves nine.

Hon Dr DAVID CLARK: It is a bill that has a similar purpose—as my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor says, a stitch in time saves nine. It’s the same general principle, right?

So making sure that we have the supply chain resilience—similar to the announcement around the prescriptions—having that thing done early so you save costs later on. The same kind of principle, the preparedness principle, in action.

This bill amends section 14 of the Act so that the fuel levy can be used for the purpose of “meeting the reasonable costs and expenses of the Crown on promoting resilience of engine fuel supplies in New Zealand.” It’s part of a wider package the Government’s settled on just to make sure we have those supply chains as resilient as they can be. Because we’ve seen—in the face of the cyclones, the natural disasters—how important it is to have stock on hand.

The change to the levy’s purpose through this change in the Act will give the Government more flexibility to use the levy funding for initiatives that would improve resilience of fuel supplies in New Zealand. At its most basic, it goes to things like getting good information, to planning ahead as to what a good set of reserves would look like, to procurement of those same reserves, and to any mitigating action if there are disruptions. Those are the things that this bill will achieve through the change in purpose of this levy.

For New Zealanders who are facing that disruption of natural events, we know that one of the best things that people can do is remember that they have a car with fuel in it, and they can go and check their radio to get emergency updates—some of the things are really simple that are enabled by having good, resilient supply chains for fuel.

So I want to support this bill. It is a sensible bill looking to the longer term, and I think from what we’ve heard, the whole House is supporting this bill. So I’m imagining most of the speeches will be very short. And on that note, I commend this bill to the House.

Sam Uffindell—five minutes.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I will also rise to support this bill. We are rushing this through under urgency today. I’m not sure if that’s the best way to go about it, but here we are—we’re doing that.

We don’t have a lot of resilience in our supply chain at the moment, and I think that we saw that we had a couple of bad batches that came in last year. They were talking about having to ground planes or limit the amount of time that they could fly. Not ideal—it’s a long way from Tauranga to Wellington—but, thankfully, that was averted.

We note that there are quite low diesel stock holdings, and that’s a challenge as we no longer have the ability to refine onshore. We don’t have that independence or that resilience, so this bill is coming in to help address that, and the fuel companies—I’m not sure whether they were consulted. I’m going to hazard a guess that they probably weren’t, but it was noted that there is quite a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built out and they may not be able to do that. So through the levies, they will get some support from the Government, which is good. It’s not an ideal situation, but here we are, with no Marsden Point.

We will support this bill. Thank you.

Good morning, and happy Pink Shirt Day. It’s a pleasure to rise to speak on this bill, the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill, for its first reading in the House. I will be taking a second call in the House so you can expect to hear from me again.

Hon Members: Whoa!

ARENA WILLIAMS: My colleagues on the other side of the House aren’t very excited about that.

Let me tell you that this is an important bill, and I can speak from experience. Recently, I was travelling in the US with my colleague who has just resumed his seat, Sam Uffindell. We had the opportunity to go to the UN and to speak with our ambassador there about energy policy and climate change and how it is destabilising the States around the world that we care about, particularly our neighbours in the Pacific. This bill is relevant to our policy at home, about how we respond to those challenges which are inherently global, our climate change challenge that we all must respond to. This is part of a package of wider fuel resiliency policy announced by the Government in November 2022.

It also means we’re making changes to introducing minimum onshore fuel stockholding obligations, and a dedication of additional resources to operating the National Fuel Plan. It means that we are setting ourselves up so that we do not have the kind of reliance that we have previously seen on offshore fuel lines. But it also means that it should be read in a broader package of moving our transport fleet into cleaner, greener opportunities. It also should be read in the context of us moving to a future where we have less reliance on offshore.

So this is a good bill. As part of that, it should be read together and I look forward to speaking on it in the second reading.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We know fuel is a lifeline service. In the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle, fuel played an essential role. We had to ensure we could get diesel and LPG gas out to isolated communities. This required a huge response from our helicopter pilots and the air force and military to make sure that we could get out to those communities. We are acting, now, to improve fuel resilience so we are confident that we have got the stocks onshore that we need for when we do run—never ever ever run out.

Storing more fuel such as diesel in New Zealand will help protect us against disruption to critical services. And this includes things such as getting food out to these communities and to give us peace of mind that emergency services have the capability to get out and help those in need every time we need them. And this bill does what has needed to be done. I’m pleased to see that support across the House for business continuity and making sure that we can keep going forward as a country that’s more resilient and looks after each other. Thank you, Madam Speaker, I commend this bill to the House.

Those are two extraordinary speeches we’ve just heard from the other side of the House. The first, from Arena Williams, made that impassioned plea that this is part of our transition to a clean, green economy, but it also managed to say that this is a global challenge, and it seemed to forget that New Zealand was once about 50 percent self-sufficient, in net terms, in hydrocarbon product—that’s now fallen by the wayside—and we had a refinery here, which meant that we could bring in crude oil, clean that crude oil up quite considerably into high-quality motor spirit and other product, and get a whole lot of benefit from the by-product of that exercise. But now, the Government, having seen the closure of Marsden Point—because the company recognised that the cost of buying offset carbon in New Zealand just didn’t make it economic to stay here and it decided to shut the thing down, putting this country into the position where we are now 100 percent dependent on other nations for our motor fuel. Now, who pays the carbon price on that?

This is the sort of fallacy that you get from the Green Party and the Labour Party about this transition with New Zealand becoming a wonderfully clean, low-carbon - emitting country, etc., but we’re simply transferring some of our obligation on to other nations. Then they’re standing up and piously saying, “Oh, it’s a global challenge and we’re all in it together.”—well, this is a Government that’s pulling us right out of that when it comes to our motor spirit requirements.

The other thing that we’ve heard is the member Dr David Clark over the other side there quoting one of his colleagues saying that this was a stitch in time measure—a stitch in time measure. Well, 12 months ago, we went into a position where we were 100 percent dependent on imported fuel, and for 12 months there’s been nothing, until in Budget legislation—Budget legislation—under urgency, we’re apparently taking a stitch in time. This is complete and utter rubbish, and we are in this situation because the Labour-led Government and the Labour Government that followed it have taken their eye off the ball and failed to recognise that if we are going to have a transition in New Zealand from carbon-emitting fuels and other carbon-emitting processes, it takes time. It takes time, and what we’ve got today, effectively, in this bill is an admission from the Labour Government that they’ve got it wrong and that they should have sat down with the owners of Marsden Point and should have negotiated a way through that would not leave this country so dreadfully exposed, as we are at the moment.

It’s here because the certain circumstances that are surrounding the Ukraine war and the potential for escalation there could put us in a difficult position. I do want to say, though, that it’s noticeable that over the last 12 months of absolutely horrific casualty, death, destruction, and dispossession inside Ukraine, international oil prices have fallen, which is quite an interesting sort of thing. It means someone is buying somewhere from countries that perhaps they shouldn’t be buying from, and it would raise the question about where does all of our refined oil come from and what is the base source of that fuel before it gets here—what is the base source of the crude that gets refined and, ultimately, exported to New Zealand?

My point is that New Zealand is at the bottom end of a supply chain. I don’t know what the supply chain looks like now, but it for decades was around about seven to 12 weeks. In other words, if an oil company ordered fuel, they could expect delivery of that inside that time line. So we’re supporting this bill today, not because we are supportive of the Government’s ridiculous position that it’s a stitch in time, but simply because it is desperately needed to ensure that we do have that continuity of supply available to us and that we do have motor spirit, which is the lifeblood still of the New Zealand economy, in good supply in all parts of the country. I think it’s fascinating that we’ve got a Budget predicting 3.5 percent economic growth in the coming year, but at the same time, just quietly, the Government is going into a little bit of panic about whether or not we might be in a position where the motor fuel is not available to fuel that economic growth.

So many things that we see from the current Government are contradictions of former policy, and I think it is time that we actually had an energy policy that was more clearly stated to New Zealanders about where we’re going and what we expect to achieve over a period of time. The sort of vague references out there to transition, to new fuels, and to all sorts of opportunities that sound great on paper but are not backed up by any particularly practical activities is borne out by the fact that we are here today, chasing this piece of legislation through so urgently.

I’m aware of a large trucking company in the south of New Zealand, the Richardson Group, who have decided that they are going to convert their trucks to hydrogen, and they’re doing that at a huge expense of around about $150,000 per unit. I take my hat off to them because they are saying, in a practical sense, “We can see the value of doing this. It’s worth it for us in the long run.” But that hydrogen and those conversions, admirable as they are—and I really do mean that—will still mean that they need motor fuel, because there are so many parts of the country where they won’t be able to fill up with the hydrogen.

I say this as an example of the transition that we’re going through. Yes, there will be uptake of those new fuels, and that’s good. There seems to be not a lot of encouragement for people to do that. I can’t imagine that there’s any particular and actual incentive for that company to make that decision—

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Did you read the Budget?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: I beg your pardon?

Hon Dr Megan Woods: Did you read the Budget?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Now, here’s the Minister who could not understand her own bill in the House last night—a piece of Budget legislation—calling across the House, “Did you read the Budget?” Well, I read the Budget and there’s $75 million worth of transition money in that Budget, but I also heard from Andrew Little that that’s not corporate welfare. So there is just another example—

Hon Dr Megan Woods: No, did you read the hydrogen initiative? Read the hydrogen initiative.

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: —of the massive confusion inside the Labour Government at the present time, and it won’t matter just how much the Minister wants to squabble on over there. It is a fact that very few Ministers in that Government understand what their Budget is really doing.

If anyone wants to know, here’s the deal: they’ve found $4 billion in savings, they overspent by $7 billion—that’s the deficit. It’s a four-year deal, we’re $11 billion in the hole, and they’re telling us that we’re all in great shape.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order!

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Unbelievable—unbelievable!

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Back to the bill—back to the bill.

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: So while I respect the Minister as a member of Parliament and a fellow Christchurch MP, I have to say that her calling across the House of “Did you read the Budget?” is an utter joke, because, quite clearly, most of the Cabinet didn’t read the Budget, and there’s been absolutely no justification why a bill like this is so particularly urgent, other than the fact that, quite clearly, there’s a rough time on the way somewhere and the Government doesn’t want to be caught napping as badly as it has been for so long.

I’ve got to say to Minister O’Connor that if this is a stitch in time, I’d hate to see what’s unravelling in his portfolio—I’d hate to see what’s unravelling in his portfolio. Unbelievable, because here it is: 12 months after the problem potentially emerged, we’re now getting some legislation.

So, I say again, we are supporting it. We’re supporting it—and I make this statement again—not because we think the Government is worthy of that support, but because the people of New Zealand are, and because it recognises that, finally, the Government have woken up and realised that all of their wild talk about transition and about a new economy, the green economy and everything else, does require practical steps to ensure that people can step their way towards that, and this bill is part of that. So, as I come to the concluding seconds of my time, can I simply say that it is utterly ridiculous that a bill like this took 12 months to get to the House and it is now being done with some urgency.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I too will support this bill, the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Amendment Bill, like other members of the House. For that reason, I don’t need to go on very much more. We’ve had lots of contributions today. This bill is going to pass through urgency, and it’s very needed for the reasons that previous speakers have outlined. For that reason, I commend it to the House.