I would like to say, Chris was the first here this morning, so thank you very much, taking into account any traffic issues. So kia ora koutou katoa, I'm going to put my mic on, am I on? On, good. Kia ora koutou katoa, ko Hayley Horan taku ingoa.
Good morning everybody and good morning to our fabulous members online, we're live streaming today. My name's Hayley Horan, I'm the CEO of Business Central, the home of Wellington Chamber of Commerce, and this is a pretty special event for us because it's the second in our leadership series and ultimately what we want to be doing is facilitating those conversations that help businesses understand the direction of all parties, especially in this incredible year that will be an election year. So before I do introductions, I would like to ensure that we are safe and so I will run through our housekeeping.
In the event of a fire, please use the nearest exit and gather either on Lampton Quay or at the car park entrances on Warring Taylor or Johnson Street. If there's an earthquake, stay away from the windows. The women's toilets are by the kitchen and the men's are through the lift corridor to the left.
Today, as I said, marks the second instalment of our Beehive to Breakfast series and I would like to acknowledge, before we kick off, we do have a large number of the Diplomat Corps here today, so thank you very much for joining us. We also have Labour Finance Spokesperson, Hon Barbara Edmonds, thank you so much for joining us. I feel like there might be a few questions for you today.
We have Mark Aldershaw here, who is the CEO of Wellington New Zealand, and Mary Lossie, the CEO of Pacific Business Trust. So thank you for joining us today. I'd like to thank Allen + Clarke, our partners, for bringing this series to life.
We cannot pull together these types of events without our sponsors and our partners and our members, so thank you so much. And please welcome me in joining us, Matt Allen from Allen + Clarke, who will introduce the Opposition Leader, Right Honourable Chris Hipkins, thank you. Thank you very much and good morning everyone and welcome.
I hope you've all enjoyed your coffee, your croissant and your chats just now. Thank you to the Chamber of Commerce, Hayley, for the opportunity actually given to us to co-host this event. It's a great series and one of the things I value most about the series actually is that it doesn't take sides.
We've had various Ministers from the Government over the last few months at this podium, and this morning we welcome a person who'd very much like to change that arrangement, the Leader of the Opposition, Right Honourable Chris Hipkins. An election year hearing from both sides of the aisle isn't just good manners, it's good business. The decisions made after November will shape the economic and regulatory environment we all operate in, and understanding the thinking of those who may be making those decisions seems to me like a reasonable investment of the morning.
Mr Hipkins has been refreshingly direct and direct about what a future Government would look like, and notably what it would not look like. He has acknowledged publicly and with some frankness that the last Labour Government tried to do too many things at once. The commitment at this time, as I understand it, is to fewer priorities pursued, with more focus on jobs, health and the cost of living at the centre.
For Wellington businesses, there's been a clear signal of intent to work in partnership with the private sector. That's a message this room will no doubt be very pleased to hear. There's also been a shift in thinking on redirecting investment away from speculative property and towards a productive economy, the kind of shift that whatever your politics, most business people would agree is overdue.
The exact mix of mechanisms to achieve this is of course exactly what this sort of conversation is designed to achieve. So to our speaker, Chris Hipkins has been a Member of Parliament for Rimutaka since 2008, making him very much a Wellington figure. Over a long parliamentary career, he's held some of the most demanding portfolios in government, including police, education, health, COVID-19 response and public service.
He served as Prime Minister from January to November 23, a tenure that began with flooding and ended with an election, which is by any measure a challenging way to spend 10 months. He's led the Labour Party since January 2023 and the Opposition since November of that year. And he is, by his own account, in it this to win it.
November will tell us whether the country agrees. Chris, thank you for joining us this morning, and we look forward to your address. Please join me in welcoming the Leader of the Opposition, the Right Honourable Chris Hipkins.
APPLAUSE Tēnā koutou katoa. Good morning, everybody. There's nothing quite like Wellington after a nice, sunny, long weekend.
So welcome back to work, everybody. Good to see you all again this morning. There's a few more of you here than last time, so it must be election year.
Great to see you all. Can I acknowledge the leadership of the Wellington Business Chamber? Thank you for hosting us, and thank you to the sponsors for making this event possible. I want to acknowledge I'm probably slightly biased, but I still think Wellington's the best place in the country to live.
It is a fantastic place to raise a family, and it is a city that has an awful lot going for it. I don't think Wellington's lost its mojo at all. I think Wellington's facing a few challenges, but we have an awful lot to be proud of here in Wellington.
From our creativity and innovation, our hospitality, our technology, finance, learning, growth sectors, there's a lot going on in Wellington. We've got great bars and restaurants. Our film and gaming industries, that entire creative sector, is one that we can be incredibly proud of.
We've got international superstars like Zero, groundbreaking innovators like Open Star, who I visited on Friday, a lot of reasons for us to be excited about the capital's future. But we also need to acknowledge that it's challenging at the moment, and the going's been pretty tough for a lot of our businesses. That's true across the country, but in Wellington, even more so.
In Wellington alone, there are around 10,000 fewer jobs today than there were on Election Day in 2023. Unemployment is now about 5.8% in Wellington. That's significantly higher, but it's also higher than the national average.
There are more people losing their jobs in Wellington than elsewhere around the country. Wellington's GDP shrunk in the last year. Since 2023, we've seen a net loss of 1,578 businesses from Wellington.
That's a big number. Wellington's not only weathered a cost-of-living crisis and an economic downturn, but it's also been at the mercy of successive government policy choices that have made the going even tougher for Wellington. The current government said that their number one priority was to grow the economy, and since they made that announcement, the economy has shrunk.
And it is their policy choices that have been contributing to that. The cost of doing business is continuing to rise. Some of that's due to government, some of that's due to international factors.
Revenues aren't keeping pace. That's a reality facing a lot of businesses. But the cancellation of major government projects has made that so much more challenging for New Zealand than it needed to be.
Years of planning went into many of the projects that have been cancelled or pulled back suddenly. Technology is transforming entire industries, and yet our investment as a country in innovation, research, science and technology remains stubbornly low, and the government have been making that worse, not better. The result of all of that is that businesses have folded, people have lost their jobs, and sadly, a lot of the talent that we so desperately need doesn't stick around to see what's going to happen in the future.
Around 2,000 New Zealanders have been departing every week. Many of those professionals, engineers, designers, IT workers, managers, the kind of people that we're going to be relying on if we want to turn around our economic fortunes as a country. It's not sustainable for us as a region, and it's not sustainable for us as a country.
So, as we get into election year, what kind of country does Labour want to build? We want a future where New Zealand backs its potential, where we add value to what we already produce, and we create good jobs in all of our regions. Not a government that stands back and hopes for the best while industries move offshore and young people follow them. Or a government whose entire plan seems to be to wait for foreign investors to come in and save the country.
We actually have pools of capital in New Zealand that we could be making much better use of, and the government can be a catalyst for some of that happening. This election year, fundamentally, is going to be about who can make New Zealand a more affordable and prosperous place to live, and that includes tackling the cost-of-living crisis that we've now seen going on for about four or five years. We're not going to lower costs with quick fixes, and we have to be really upfront about that.
We've got to get some of the foundations right if we're going to turn that around. We're going to need to back more businesses to create more wealth and keep that wealth here in New Zealand. We're going to need to ensure that our cities are affordable places for people to be able to live.
And there are so many Wellingtonians that I've spoken to who are really struggling to live here because of that very affordability challenge. Young professionals, nurses, teachers, tradies who should be building homes here, students who can't afford the cost of living and studying in Wellington and can't find the jobs to support them. They say things like, I love Wellington, Wellington is my home, I want to live here, I want to study here, I want to raise my family here, but I can't afford to live here and I can't find the opportunities that I need to justify being able to stay here.
I can't afford a house here, I can't find the job that I've been trained to do. That breaks my heart every time I hear one of those stories, and at the moment, I'm hearing far too many of them. So Wellington has a lot to look forward to, but we've got to be realistic about the challenge that's in front of us right at the moment.
We have everything that we need as a city. We've got a skilled workforce if we can keep them here. We've got great ideas and we've got a very proud history as a city of innovation.
When I was here last year, I said that, with many of you, I said that thousands of big and small businesses across the country are playing a vital role in our economy and we want to back that with a plan for a better future. Since then, you've seen some of the details of that plan being announced by Labour. Our plan is about backing our people and our businesses.
An economy with good jobs, rising wages and real opportunity. An economy that creates wealth and keeps it here at home. And our plan, given the conversations that we've been having over the last two years, actually starts with some of the things that we won't do.
Because for Wellington, I know how important these next messages are for all of you. We won't change things that are already working. We won't get distracted with more costly and time-costly structural reforms.
We won't be picking culture war fights when the fight that we have right now is an economic one. We'll be aiming to provide as much certainty and stability as we possibly can. And that means ending the stop-start cycle so that we can build momentum that lasts beyond a single government.
The recent reports of the Infrastructure Commission have been sobering reading for anybody working in politics. There's a reason that everything in New Zealand takes longer and costs more than it should, and that political instability and stop-start cycle, frankly, has to come to an end. We need to fix what needs fixing, and we need to do that in partnership with business, with much longer-term horizons in mind.
Wellington's innovative business sector is primed for growth, and we want to support businesses, entrepreneurs and risk-takers who are creating jobs. And I'll give you a good example of that, represented here in the room today. When we were last in government, we were concerned that we were about to lose our video game development sector to Australia, who were offering generous tax breaks in order to lure them across the Tasman.
So we introduced the game development sector rebate, and that means that companies like PikPok, Lance is here today, have stayed in New Zealand and created jobs and opportunities here in New Zealand. I've made a commitment to expand that after the election, should we form the government, because it's working. It's an example of doubling down on something that's working so that we can get even better results.
We need, as a country, to incentivise the right investment, and, yes, tax plays a role in those decisions. Bringing in a simple, targeted capital gains tax is long overdue in New Zealand. It will discourage investment in the speculative domestic property market and move that investment to where it can make a difference for the country, productive business.
As a government, we want to invest in infrastructure, skills and clean energy, which aren't just going to create jobs, they're going to lower the cost of business and make New Zealand a more affordable place to live. Tackling skill shortages, encouraging our young people to stay in New Zealand with good jobs, making our cities like Wellington attractive and affordable places to live, these are the things we need to do if we're going to turn around the country's economic fortunes. We need a strong partnership between central and local government to ensure that we're all working together to achieve that.
So Labour does see massive opportunity for New Zealand in being a leader in clean energy. It's going to help us to bring down power costs for families and for businesses, and that is a far better option for New Zealand than locking us into volatile, expensive international fossil fuel markets. We can choose a country where young people can build their futures here, not just where they stay until they can afford to get out.
So later on this year, New Zealanders are going to have a very big choice. It's a choice about the sort of future that we want to build as a country. We've got to move past short-term quick fixes and start dealing with some of the long-term challenges that face our country.
We've got to build an economy that works for everyone, a future with cheaper health care, lower power bills, more affordable housing, and an infrastructure that actually meets our needs as a country. A future with better jobs and higher wages. A future that backs New Zealand businesses to compete and to succeed, but also to stay and grow in New Zealand.
Our priorities are clear. Jobs, health, homes, and a more affordable New Zealand. A future made in New Zealand, by New Zealanders, for New Zealanders.
Thanks very much. APPLAUSE And now the fun part. I'm not sure if we have a microphone here.
Thank you. Now we're going to open the floor for some questions. We do have questions online as well, so I'll come to Christy in a moment.
But first, if there are any questions that anyone would like to ask, preferably save your blankets in case you've got an abundant one. Christy, putting you on the spot. Online.
There's quite a few questions from online. What would a Labour-led government do to improve New Zealand export competitiveness? We do need to continue to grow our export opportunities, and you will have seen. It's been the big issue of the week last week that Labour is supporting the government to conclude and sign, which I think they did yesterday, the New Zealand-India Free Trade Agreement.
While it's not necessarily an agreement that we would have negotiated, there are some risks in it that have not been present in other trade agreements, expanding and diversifying our international trading opportunities is really, really important, and the ability to open up a market as large as India is an exciting opportunity for New Zealand. But I think the next big challenge for New Zealand is how do we grow the industries and the economic opportunities that are adjacent to the things we already do well? So this isn't about picking winners, but it's about picking areas where we can win. So there are a lot of opportunities for growth in New Zealand and industries that are adjacent to our primary industries that leverage off them.
If we look at the tech sector, for example, we've got some areas where we've got a proven track record of doing really well. Similarly, in the creative sector, video gaming, I use that example quite a lot because it leverages off stuff that we were already good at. We had people working in film and television who were doing amazing creative things.
Many of those people like to work across a range of creative industries, including video game development. And so it is about government and business working together to identify those areas where we can win. And those areas are more likely than not going to be adjacent to the things that we're already doing really well.
We've got a question down there. I just want to ask about the impact of the fuel crisis on the policies that you'll take to the election. There are some echoes, I guess, of 2020 in the sense that this government will have prepared a budget that is probably rapidly being revised, and you'll be in a very different fiscal environment than maybe the one that you were expecting.
So what impact do you expect that to have on the policies that you take to the election? It will be quite significant, and much as a lot of the media commentary at the moment is criticising us for not being more specific in some of the policy areas we're announcing, that is actually right now the most responsible thing for an opposition political party to be doing. The government have still got a budget to deliver. That'll be about a month from now.
All of the Treasury's economic forecasts are going to change very significantly as a result of the recent fuel crisis. And throwing out a whole lot of potential big spending, big revenue-changing measures right now wouldn't be a responsible thing for us to do until we actually see how this is going to shake down. We'll get a much greater sense of how the Treasury think that's going to shake down in about a month.
The Reserve Bank will give us their update soon as well on how they think things are shaking down, and that will very much inform what we go into the election with. So we have been holding back anything that involves significant spending or significant changes to government revenue, other than the ones that we announced at the end of last year, because until we actually see how the forecasts are going to change, we can't really do that responsibly. Thank you.
Back to you, Christine, online. Didn't give you much warning, did I? What support for small businesses will you introduce? We're working through at the moment some ideas, and as I just said to Connor, we haven't locked down exactly what we're going to do in a range of areas at the moment, but we are talking to small businesses, so now is the time to send in your ideas about what would actually make a difference to you. Because often there are little things that will make a big difference to smaller businesses, and we're keen to hear those.
So I know people were wanting something more specific, but as I've just said, we're not in a position to do that at the moment, but now is a good time to be talking to us. Barb's been... I should have acknowledged you earlier. Barb is here this morning.
She's been around doing a lot of roundtables with businesses, big and small, and talking about the things that will make a difference to them, and you'll see that reflected when we do start to announce the policy. Thank you. A couple of questions out the back.
Thank you for your address. Chris, as businesses, we're heavily hit by high rates in Wellington. Where are you sitting in changing the funding basis and the mechanisms that local government can draw down on to help the infrastructure issue that faces us as businesses, as well as ratepayers, every day? Yeah.
We do need a really much more mature conversation about how we're going to actually fund local government in the future. Some of our most pressing infrastructure needs are in areas where the council's rating base simply doesn't allow them to fix the infrastructure that they need to fix. And they're not going to be able to do it alone.
So how we finance and fund infrastructure in New Zealand is a huge debate at the moment. I hope we can reach a more bipartisan view on that, because, again, it's one of those things where we've got to look at it over a 10-, 20-, 30-year horizon, not over a three-year electoral cycle. It does mean that we're going to have to take on some challenges which could be easily used as election campaign fodder.
You know, even if you look at... Wayne Brown's asked for a bed-night levy for the tourism sector in Auckland. If I can't go out and announce that and that the Labour Party will support that, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The National Party would saturate the media with ads about another tax from Labour.
The reality is we need to be realistic about how we're going to fund local government in the longer term. If we can't even get something very small like that right and an agreement on that, the bigger picture's going to take a bit longer. But I think we've got to be aware that ratings, you know, rating, council rates, are not going to get us there.
I am worried about how the water reforms are going to play out in Wellington City. Wellington City has a different ratings base to most other places around the country. You have a progressive rating system in Wellington.
So the more expensive your house, the more rates you pay. When you take water out of that and you have a standard fixed charge for water infrastructure, some of the wealthiest households are going to have their rates significantly reduced and some of the lower-income households in the city are going to have their rates significantly increased. So sort of reverse Robin Hood is coming to Wellington as a result of water reform.
If you think that's going to be a smooth journey, watch this space. That's going to be particularly bumpy, I think. And Wellington is unique in that regard because most other councils already have a more standardised water charge as part of their rates bill.
In Wellington, it isn't. And so that's going to be a particularly bumpy journey, I think, for Wellington City. And I know the Wellington City Council are already very, very well aware of that and thinking very carefully about how they're going to manage that.
So, yeah, a more mature, longer-term conversation about how we fund local government is very, very important. Yes, there's another question at the back there, Mike, and then there's someone in the middle here. Kia ora.
Will from RCP. Thanks, Chris, for the lovely talk. You spoke to a key pillar of Labour's policies being health and homes.
I'd like you just to expand a bit more on that. So I understand for homes, you've got capital gains tax, and for health, I'd be interested to know where your key pillars are for health. Sure.
Number one, the number one theme that you'll see in forming all of our health policy is a prevention-first approach. The number of people who we've got showing up in a hospital with avoidable illness and therefore requiring much more expensive care than if we had treated them for whatever the condition was in the first place is simply unacceptable. We can't afford it.
If we're going to try and fix the crisis in our hospitals, and I'm willing to say that for some of our hospitals, it is a bit of a crisis. They just can't keep up with the volume of need that's walking through the door. If we really want to fix that, we've got to look really seriously at why we've got so many people ending up in hospital with avoidable illness in the first place.
A really good example, Aisha Veral, who's our health spokesperson, standing here in Wellington North, is our candidate here, talks about her first shift in Wellington's emergency department when she was doing her residency there, and the first ever patient she treated was a Pacifica man with gout in his big toe who ended up in hospital for several days at over $1,000 a day when the gout medication that would have prevented that costs Pharmac about a dollar. But he didn't get the gout medication because he didn't go to the doctor. So making it easier for people to go to the doctor, making it easier for people to get access to preventative health care is going to save us money, and it is going to make our health system much more productive and much more effective because we'll actually be able to focus on the people who need to be in hospital rather than the people who are there with avoidable illness.
So there's quite a lot. We've been unpacking what does that look like, what are the preventative measures that we can put in place, making it cheaper to go to the doctor is one of them, but also more screening tools, more preventative health care, making that more freely available so you can expect to see more from us in that area. So that's very much the focus on health, and then of course making sure that our hospitals have the resources that they need to do their jobs effectively comes a close second to that.
And housing, we need more houses. We're broadly supportive of much of what the current government have been doing in that area. The MDRS was something that Labour put in place that was supported by National, they're not supported by National, they're supported by them again.
Again, I think we've got to try and end the flip-flopping in that area and just give people some stability so they can get on and build houses. I can tell you in Upper Hutt, I drive through Upper Hutt every day, the MDRS has made a massive difference to the volume of house development in Upper Hutt. If you drive down Ferguson Drive in Upper Hutt now, you'll see just about every block has an intensification project happening.
And that is good news. Buses drive past those houses, literally past the front door of those houses, every day. We need more of that if we're going to meet the housing need that we have.
And then finally, we have to build state houses. I'd love to live in a country where we don't need them. We actually have a relatively low ratio of public housing compared to the rest of the world.
And if we don't want people living in cars, under bridges, in homeless shelters, we need more state houses. I think there was a question here. I think it would be helpful for you to give us a bit of a view on the coalition and your views on forming a coalition.
We've found that we put our party vote on maybe your party based on what we hear from you, but then the coalition agreement, subsequently we maybe get things that we didn't quite vote for. And you mentioned Wayne Brown, he's suggesting the Grand Coalition. Do you think that's an option as well? Thank you for that nice big open target.
Look, I think New Zealanders, when they voted for MMP, voted for MMP in order to try and slow government down. You know, the idea that the populace was being subjected to a whole lot of policies that they didn't feel they had voted for was one of the reasons they voted to change the electoral system, to try and avoid that from happening. And yet now, as MMP has evolved, we've reached a point in the electoral cycle, the broader electoral cycle, where it seems like the smaller parties are using that leverage that they have in order to enforce or inflict on the country policies that the vast majority of people have not voted for. I think that puts a greater burden and a greater onus of responsibility back on the larger parties in government.
It means that when you're negotiating a coalition agreement or a support party agreement after the election, you have to, as one of the bigger parties, be willing to say there is no public mandate for that policy and we're not going to do it. At the end of the day, an absence of agreement in an MMP environment means the status quo prevails. That doesn't mean you support something that you previously said you weren't going to support in order to try and find compromise.
If you can't find compromise, then ultimately the status quo prevails. And so that is, I guess, one of my sort of bottom lines for post-election negotiations. I've got lots of things that we want to do, but if we can't find agreement on those consistent with the mandate that we've been given by the people, then the status quo prevails.
And that's not the sort of modus operandi of this government. And I think it's one of the reasons why you're seeing policies being inflicted on the country that only a small number of people actually voted for. So how does the dynamic of all of this play out? New Zealand, since MMP has been introduced, has pioneered a number of different governing arrangements.
A full coalition is only one of those. You can have confidence in supply agreements that have ministers outside a cabinet with a narrow scope of responsibility. You can have confidence in supply agreements where the parties who sign up to them actually don't form part of the executive, and we've had those.
It's worth remembering, while we've got a majority coalition now, for most of MMP's history, we've had minority governments. Helen Clark and John Key made running minority governments look relatively easy. It wasn't easy on the inside.
They made it look easy on the outside. But I can tell you, having worked in one of those governments for quite a period of time, there's a hell of a lot of work that needs to happen on the inside to make that happen. And so having been through a number of different iterations now, I think I'm quite well prepared for what may or may not happen after the election.
One of the things that surprised me about this government is the recent revelation, and I only heard this fairly recently, that a lot of the pre-Cabinet consultation processes between the three parties in government don't seem to apply anymore. When we were in government under Helen Clark, under Jacinda and then myself, nothing arrived on the Cabinet table unless you'd consulted all the other parties in government to make sure you had a majority to get it through. My understanding of the current government is there's a heck of a lot showing up on the Cabinet agenda where they just fight it out in the room.
That's not a way to run an MMP government. Yet things do take a bit longer. You do have to work through a collaborative process to get there.
But the advantage of that is once you actually get into the Cabinet room, you can move things forward. So just restoring some basic principles of good government, I think at this point would be really important. I think we've got time for one minute.
There was a hand out the back somewhere. What was it on that guy? And then I'll come to Christine. Sorry.
Yeah, I'll begin with a more general comment then move specifically to AI. One of the challenges I see in the way our public service operates is since the State Sector Act was passed in 1988, we've had quite good vertical accountability within different silos across the public sector. But the horizontal layer has been pretty patchy.
And as a result, we don't always get the best value for money or the most consistency in what the public sector does, because you've got all the agencies out there doing their own thing. And I do think there is a need, particularly in some of the administrative side of things, for there to be a stronger horizontal layer across the public service. I'll give you a non-AI related example, property, something huge for Wellington.
Each government agency going out there and negotiating its own leases when the collective purchasing power of government agencies could be quite significant and quite good for business seems to me an opportunity that's going missing at the moment. And so creating a stronger coordination amongst, between government departments is a real opportunity for us. That's absolutely true in some of the big gnarly challenges that we're going to face like AI and how we regulate it, how we, I guess, support its deployment within the public service, because there is no question AI could be a massive productivity enabler for the public sector.
One of the things that I became frustrated, alarmed, despondent almost about in the time that I was Minister for the Public Service is the legacy IT systems that we're dealing with are in need of significant investment. But the cost of that was significant. AI actually provides us with all sorts of opportunities to do some of that cheaper.
And so I think we have to embrace it, but we've got to make sure that we've got a consistent approach across the public sector. And that includes looking at the risks involved as well. So I think that whether it sits with the public service, whether it sits with DIA, who currently have the kind of the digital lead for the public service, there does need to be more of a mandate to lead across the public service in areas like that.
Christine, I'll come to you. What action will Labor take to drive down electricity prices? We need more renewable energy. At the moment, the thing that's forcing up the price of particularly domestic electricity prices in New Zealand is the price of fossil fuels, not the price of renewable energy.
The more renewable energy we have in the system, then the more we can contain the significant increases in electricity prices we've seen. New Zealand has an abundance of renewable energy. We actually have an abundance of energy storage as well.
The market incentives for how we use that aren't always the right ones. So we do need some market reform to make sure that our energy system is operating as intended and that we are driving towards a much more renewable energy future. That is the only responsible way forward at the moment.
The idea that we'd import LNG, which hasn't weathered well even in the last few months, is just madness when we have far better renewable energy options in New Zealand. The other thing we've got to look at, if you look at the things forcing up the price, the other thing that is forcing up the price of electricity at the moment is distribution. So transmission and distribution.
More localised electricity generation helps with that, more solar panels and so on. But more solar panels throws the challenge up the other way, that the more solar panels you have, the more energy is going to be flowing the other way as well. So we've got to be realistic that distribution charges in particular are an increase that are going to happen, and there's not a lot that any government can do about that.
But you can certainly support people through that, because while your lines charges might go up, if you've got solar panels on your roof, the amount of electricity that you're buying is going to go down. Just being through that exercise, did the solar panels myself last year. I want to get to a point where people don't have to be in a financially fortunate position as I am to be able to do that.
I was fortunate my bank was willing to give me one of those low interest or zero interest loans so I could put my solar panels on my roof. A heck of a lot of people don't have access to those. So a real challenge is how do we make those opportunities available to people who don't have that? Thank you.
Thank you so much. Thank you. I really appreciate that.
And the engagement in this room, I know we haven't got to all the questions, but please come and see us later. We can certainly gather up any memes and push through. But a round of applause please for Roy.
Thank you. Once again, I think it's really important for us to thank our sponsors, Allen + Clarke, for the Beehive to Business series. And thank you all for coming along.
Those of you online, thank you so much. If you're not a member of the chamber, why not come and see us afterwards and we'd love to have a chat. So thank you all so very, very much.
Take care and have a wonderful Wellington day.
