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Speaker 1: David Seymour back home looking for red tape to cut

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Speaker 1: to get more mileage out of our fuel stocks. His

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Speaker 1: regulation ministry wants businesses and the public to dobb in

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Speaker 1: any regulations that might get in the way of our

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Speaker 1: fuel response. He's with me this morning. Good morning, minister,

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Speaker 1: Good morning. Good to have you on the show. It

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Speaker 1: sounds like we've been primed. Just reading the papers this

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Speaker 1: morning and listening to sounds like we've been primed for

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Speaker 1: a bit of a U turn on the LNG situation.

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Speaker 1: What do you reckon.

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Speaker 2: That I'm aware of. It's a policy that was designed

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Speaker 2: to address a very simple problem that is that we

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Speaker 2: always hear the electricity companies make massive profits but don't

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Speaker 2: invest in enough generation options. This policy effectively forces them

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Speaker 2: to invest in one. And given the price we pay

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Speaker 2: as always the lowest available source of energy at any

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Speaker 2: given time, having an additional option in the form of

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Speaker 2: LNG actually means that when it's dry and the dams

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Speaker 2: aren't full, and it's nighttime and the soul is not shining,

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Speaker 2: and maybe the wind's not blowing the turbines, we have

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Speaker 2: another option to keep the price down. So I would

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Speaker 2: have thought, if you can get the energy companies forced

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Speaker 2: into investing. If you can get prices down, that's got

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Speaker 2: to be a win win, because if the current circumstance

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Speaker 2: tells us anything, we need optionality, as many options as possible.

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Speaker 2: I would have preferred we didn't ban oil and gas exploration,

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Speaker 2: but unfortunately that was labor and first green government, but deliver.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but if the price of LNG is going to

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Speaker 1: be high for longer, then does building a terminal make

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Speaker 1: sense right now?

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Speaker 2: You know? Well, if if you look at the price

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Speaker 2: over the long term, there are times when housing LNG

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Speaker 2: will be better. If it's those dry winters and cold

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Speaker 2: still nights where it makes difference. Now, it would be

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Speaker 2: easy to take the lesson that because energy prices are

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Speaker 2: high right now, we should make all our decisions around that.

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Speaker 2: I think the lesson that it's better to take is

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Speaker 2: that the world is uncertain and the more options you have,

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Speaker 2: the lower your prices likely to be.

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Speaker 1: All right, what are you asking people to provide you with?

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Speaker 1: This is the red tape regulation for fuel in New Zealand.

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Speaker 1: What exactly are you asking people for here?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, so the red tape tipline s been running for

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Speaker 2: about a year. It's had a couple of thousand people

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Speaker 2: come in with really specific ideas. It's led to making

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Speaker 2: it easier to get probate out of a will, making

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Speaker 2: it easier to build a garden shed or bake cakes

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Speaker 2: to sell in your home. There's lots of things that

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Speaker 2: have come through the red tape tip line that we've

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Speaker 2: actually changed, and now we're just making the point there

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Speaker 2: may be examples of red tape and stupid rules that

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Speaker 2: stop you from being able to be energy efficient. So someone,

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Speaker 2: for example, we've already had a few dozen in the

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Speaker 2: first few hours, but when we launched for yesterday, but

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Speaker 2: someone just said, look in New Zealand, you're allowed up

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Speaker 2: to ten percent ethanol in petrol. In the US it's

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Speaker 2: fifteen percent. Maybe if we relaxed our restriction on ethanol content,

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Speaker 2: we could get a bit more value out of our petrol. Now,

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Speaker 2: you know, I'm not saying we should shouldn't do that.

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Speaker 1: You're looking over thing that they'll look into.

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Speaker 2: Yep, well, brilliant. You know we didn't think of it,

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Speaker 2: but we can now do something about it. Brilliant.

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Speaker 1: David, appreciate your time. David Seymore, Minister for Regulation for.

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