Thank you, everybody. It's a pleasure to appear in front of you again.
I'm calling in from Rotorua in New Zealand. I'm here with Chris Karamea Insley, who is one of the advisers to Canative Energy.
I requested to appear again before the standing committee just because this is a topic that I feel very, very strongly about. This is my life's work, and it has been my career to date so far. I'm an indigenous finance professional. I have worked internationally in the energy sector since I began my career. I spent three years in Ecuador working in social development with Ecuadorian indigenous communities that had been impacted by the energy sector.
As for what I'd like to share with you, I'll just touch base on the three points I raised previously and then bring up another two that I think are very important. It's echoed in what I'm seeing here in New Zealand as well.
The first point I brought up was diversification. It's really important that these communities are not completely dependent on income streams generated from the energy industry.
It's also really important that they have a long-term plan in place. At some point, I saw some Ecuadorian communities that were looking into the future, but some are very nearsighted, and it's very difficult to engage with a major capital project if you are looking only at what is right in front of you.
The third point is building capabilities. Last time, I spoke about the education aspect, the literacy, etc.
I think this next point echoes Robert Beamish's point about energy literacy. What is energy literacy? Basically, it's providing the education and the awareness of what the industry is. What do these capital projects look like? What is the terminology being used? What is the machinery that they're going to see coming through their community? This is really important. It's really difficult to engage with something if you don't know what's going to happen, especially in these communities. They're very tightly knit, so they get a lot of their information from their neighbours and their families. Sometimes the messages change. Sometimes they're coloured a bit by people's ontologies, so it's really important that the government promote energy literacy within these communities so they're able to engage effectively.
The last point is the prioritization of youth voices. What I've seen is the polar opposite of what happens in the energy industry. In the energy industry, it's usually the oldest, loudest voice at the table that's prioritized in the boardroom, whereas in the communities that I've seen operating effectively in their space, they're actually bringing children and youth into the room and asking them for their opinion because they are the leaders of the next generation. They're engaging with these individuals with the expectation of empowering them and engaging them in the conversation to be able to move this forward.
With that, I'll hand it over to Chris. He'll tell you a bit more about what's going on in New Zealand.