Hide on Greens/Labour nationalisation
Rodney Hide gives 10 reasons there policy is full of holes:
- Electricity prices are working. As they should
- Electricity prices are fair and reasonable
- Quick! Turn up the swimming pool
- The lights will go out
- We all lose as taxpayers
- Businesses shut, jobs gone
- What about the planet?
- We have choice and competition
- Shearer-Norman power
- It’s cheaper to hand out money
No 9 I wish to focus on:
The power market is one of the easiest to enter. Labour and the Greens claim companies are making “super-profits”. If that were the case, they could set up their own power company and fund their election campaign – and lower power prices for everyone. They won’t, of course, because they can’t. There’s no easy money to be made supplying power. The super-profits line is political rhetoric: it’s not true.
This is a very good point. There are no huge barriers to becoming an electricity generator. We have 14 companies that are generators. If they think the profits are so excessive, why don’t they do what they did with Kiwibank and just set up one new competitor – rather than take over the entire industry?