Some nations are congratulated for embracing the ideas needed to overcome adversity, others are damned for succumbing to ideologies that only make things worse

By Chris Trotter*

There is a dreamlike quality to life in New Zealand at present – and it’s not a nice dream. It’s one of those dreams where, in the dream, we know exactly where we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to be doing, but somehow, we can’t get there, we can’t do it. Something is blocking our way. Some force is slowing us down, pushing us off course, and (as the dream shades into nightmare) overwhelming us with paralysing feelings of dread.

Psychologists would characterise this sort of dream as a symbolic expression of deep-seated, contradictory, and unresolved personal issues. That paralysing sense of dread indicating the sheer scale of the stress and conflict required to achieve any sort of resolution. The most likely driver of the dream/nightmare? Some sort of unacknowledged or mischaracterised trauma.

It is a considerable stretch to scale-up an individual dream/nightmare into something gripping an entire nation. That said, we do it all the time. Historians readily describe whole peoples descending into madness – the most frequently cited example being the German people under Adolf Hitler.

Vast historical events: world wars, global pandemics, international economic crises, technological revolutions; all of these have been presented as the triggering traumas for all manner of social and cultural pathologies. Some nations are congratulated for embracing the ideas needed to rise above such events; others are damned for succumbing to ideologies that only make things worse.

The Coalition Government’s recent policy announcements concerning the generation, distribution and pricing of energy have much in common with the dream/nightmare described.

The common theme emerging from the many critical responses to what was generally agreed by energy experts to be a rather timid collection of policy announcements was that they would neither take the nation to where it should be going, nor encourage it to do what should be done.

There was also a large measure of agreement concerning the nature of the forces slowing down urgently needed energy reforms and pushing them off course. The individuals and organisations indicted were those that drove the market-driven policies of the 1980s and 90s and continue to defend them against all comers.

The Sunday Star-Times’ Andrea Vance wrote: “The electricity market is a rort. It is a system created in the 1990s sold as efficiency and competition but which has delivered neither to Kiwis.”

Max Rashbrooke, of Victoria University’s School of Government, seconded the motion, describing the designer of New Zealand’s malfunctioning electricity market, Max Bradford as: “a 1990s politician perfectly happy to see inequality rise as long as it served his [National] Cabinet’s attempts to remake government in the image of the market […..] Bradford was, in particular, responsible for the market-based reforms that gave us the current electricity system.”

The key question which rises inexorably from this analysis is: “Why, if this system is failing so spectacularly to deliver either efficiency or competition to Kiwis, has it not been replaced by a system that does?”

That the logical alternative to Bradford’s electricity system might well be the system it replaced: one in which the generation and distribution of electrical energy had been a publicly-owned monopoly dedicated to the twin goals of keeping the supply of energy generation in step with demand, and selling it to the people and businesses of New Zealand at a price they could afford; was a thought that had occurred to more than one of those seeking a way out of the looming energy crisis.

The Deputy-Leader of NZ First, Shane Jones, has made no secret of his inclination to re-nationalise the electricity system. Very sensibly, Jones made a point of absenting himself from the formal public announcement of the Coalition’s anaemic energy plan. Rather than stand alongside his Cabinet colleague, Energy Minister Simon Watts, the Deputy-Energy Minister opted to stand before a meeting of the Māori Women’s Welfare League in Northland!

Rashbrooke’s summary of Watts' announcement was nothing if not succinct: “Apart from a vague plan for extremely expensive imported gas, and even-vaguer noises about toughening regulation, Watts’ major promise was to give the state-owned gentailers even more capital if they want to boost generation.” (That’s right, and for all the good it has done them, the citizenry, with 51 percent of the shares, remains the electricity companies’ largest shareholder).

In a more robust political world, Jones might instead have arranged to have himself seated in the front row as the NZ Council of Trade Unions economist, Craig Renney, spelt out the CTU’s plan to “buy back the farm” – electricity-wise – by using those hefty gentailer dividends.

A more nimble and less hidebound trade union movement would have applied maximum pressure on its more natural policy ally, the Labour Party, by offering enthusiastic support for NZ First’s serious examination of the nationalisation option. Certainly, CTU endorsement would have served as a sharp reminder to Chris Hipkins that practical social-democratic solutions are supposed to be Labour’s stock-in-trade.

It should be Hipkins, not Renney, saying: “NZ should be using electricity generation and distribution as a tool of economic development & industrial policy. We have abundant resources to generate renewable energy. We need to make sure this is capitalised on and that we use it to secure well-paid, sustainable jobs.”

What’s more, policies such as these are being received favourably by voters all around the world. As Rashbrooke noted in his recent article to The Post: “In Australia, Victoria’s Labor Party has just revived the State Electricity Commission, privatised in the 1990s but now rejuvenated with $A1b in funding. Again, it’s pursuing renewable energy; again, it’s an electorally successful proposition.”

But, even when the destination and the mission are clear (even the Government-commissioned report from Frontier Economics is reputed to have canvassed the option of re-nationalising the electricity sector) and the public is willing to go there, the way is blocked.

Bryce Edwards’ Integrity Institute would no doubt attribute this resistance to the small army of lobbyists and fixers that infests the capital. But is that the real reason why the public’s dream of lower electricity bills and economic progress descends into a nightmare of nameless dread at the very prospect of challenging the supremacy of market forces?

Might it not be more truthful to acknowledge that the pro-market reforms of the 1980s and 90s were by no means universally loathed; and that a very large number of New Zealanders benefitted hugely from the sharp spike in social inequality that accompanied Rogernomics and Ruthanasia?

Yes, the “reforms” imposed traumatic changes upon thousands of Kiwi families, but by many more families that trauma was adjudged to be a price worth paying. It is the fact that the reforms didn’t work: that 40 years later the country is still, according to Treasury, hurtling towards the fiscal cliff; that renders the nation’s earlier judgement obscene.

Surely, it is the sense of having benefited from a profound and ultimately fruitless injustice that accounts for the paralysing onset of dread that afflicts the nation’s soul whenever the possibility of confronting the sins of the past is canvassed.

We know where we should be. We know what we should do. It’s the thought of what might happen next, and to whom, that gets in the way and prevents us from moving forward. There’s a part of New Zealand that’s willing to pay whatever it costs to keep the lights on, for fear of what it might encounter if they went out.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.