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A power of weasel words

What a sad day.

The New Zealand Government has basically said "you people are so stupid that you're bound to fall for this spin" -- but I'm here to highlight this contempt for the intelligence of the public.

I'm talking about power prices in New Zealand.

The NZ government says that it is going to force energy companies to pay $1Bn for a new gas terminal that will allow us to import LNG from overseas to power our generation capabilities.

This, we're told, will reduce our power bills.

WTF?

What the hell are they smoking in parliament?

The claims are that renewable generation from solar, wind and hydro are too unreliable and affected by the weather. What we need are systems that will deliver energy regardless of rainfall, windflow or cloud. That's where liquified natural gas is the winner, they say.

The weasel words being used in spinning this new plan are beyond belief.

We're told, for instance, that this will result in lower power bills for consumers and that it's not a tax, it's a levy.

Excuse me?

If you're going to force energy producers to front up with $1 billion then do you really think they're just going to absorb this huge extra cost?

Of course not -- the first thing they will do is recover that money from consumers - by hiking the price of electricity even further than it has been. This isn't a levy on power generators, it's a tax on consumers!

What's more, the thing that everyone seems to have forgotten is that our government has a 51 percent shareholding in the four major energy generation companies. They are the majority owners.

With this in mind, why doesn't the government simply instruct these companies to spend the $1 billion on this new terminal *instead* of paying the huge dividends that they do each year. I mean, the government gets almost half a billion dollars a year in dividends from its energy SOEs so it would only require them to forego those dividends for two years and it's "job done". If you factor in the tax paid by them and Transpower -- well that's a full billion dollars in a single year.

This would not require prices to be increased to consumers and, if all the promised benefits were realised, prices would actually fall.

This proposal from the government is probably the worst bit of political BS I think I've seen in my entire life.

A government that gave its solemn promise of "no new taxes" is simply trying to pass off this new burden on taxpayers as a levy by saying "it's not a tax because it only applies to energy companies for the purpose of funding this new terminal". This conveniently forgets that taxpayers will be paying the $1 billion through increased power prices as a result of that levy.

If it walks like a duck....

When governments have to resort to this kind of deception and fraud to violate the promises made during elections, you know there's something deeply wrong with their relationship with voters.

Never mind, I'm sure the $35 million we gave to a Kiwi fusion startup company who haven't even been able to achieve fusion yet, will save the day.

Carpe Diem folks!

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