It's funny how pragmatic big companies can be when they act as consumers rather than producers. The corporate-funded Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand has campaigned for years for the government to bring Telecom to heel. TranzRail customers would love to see the government wade into rail. And, this week, big electricity users appear to be welcoming the government's new power plan.
The plan, it must be said, is an odd-looking beast, designed to cover the electricity market's failings without, if possible, stepping on the market's toes. It would all have been much easier had the industry not been privatised in the way it was. So generators will pay a levy (which will inevitably be passed on to consumers) to cover the cost of fossil-fuel emergency generation that will kick in in "very dry" years like the current one. Spot prices will be allowed to go high (this is the ostensible point of the market) but, um, not too high …
Bill English was on Morning Report today honking away about it, and maintaining that all the government needs to do is get out of the way of generators who want to build new capacity. But the whole point, surely, is that there isn't a business case for private generators to build reserve capacity that might go unused for five or 10 years at a time, which is what the new plan aims to do. If things get tight, they get better prices on the spot market anyway. It's the customers, not the generators, who have a problem.
A John Roughan editorial in the Herald makes a reasoned case for the government continuing to stand back and let the market "mature" - even though in years like this that means potentially ruinous cost increases for many businesses. But the fact is - as if there were some vestigal memory of the days when it was the government's job to build dams and power stations - the punters have been quite clearly looking for the government, not the market, to do something about it all.
Anyway, methinks it can be no accident the government can change, that a whole ministry can change its name - Commerce to Economic Development - but a letter from Bill Birch and Max Bradford trumpeting National's electricity reforms can still be available for viewing: "The Government's overall energy policy objective is to ensure that: Electricity is available when required by consumers; Electricity is produced at the lowest possible cost to the economy as a whole; and Harm to the environment is minimised." Hilarious.
And, as a matter of interest, here are a couple of old Hard Newses, archived from 1998 (the Auckland power crisis) and 1999 (Bradford and the line charges fiasco). Amazingly, the popular drama 'Deregulating Electricity' has been running roughly as long as Shortland Street …
PS: 28,000 tickets for Saturday's Super 12 final sold out in under two hours. After 30 or 40 fruitless attempts to make a transaction on the Red Tickets website, I queued for an hour at the Point Chev Post Shop and managed to get my crew into the North East stand (after it had apparently already sold out), and my butcher and his mates onto the terraces. When I gave him his tickets he very kindly handed me a nice roast of organic lamb, which I cooked last night with apricots and thyme. Life could certainly be worse …