Electricity Companies screwing us again

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
17
706

Power bills to increase approx $10 per month from April

Kiwis’ power bills will go up next year by approximately $10 a month, with further increases to come as the electricity sector upgrades ageing infrastructure and deals with rising costs.

The Electricity Companies screwing us again!

The entire market is rigged so that there is the pretence of competition when it isn’t.

Outraged at your electricity bill?

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John Key sold 49% of our Hydro Assets to create a $400million irrigation slush fund that was used to intensify dairy farming while polluting our water and generating climate changing gasses!

It also had the perverse impact of stopping investment into renewables as Russell Norman points out…

…the manner in which we are being scammed by the big power players and being failed by our Political leaders has manifested in our broken electricity market!

The social carnage our brutal monopolies can wage against the poor thanks to our under regulated capitalism is far larger than we have previously suspected…

Opponents of wealth taxes and housing and energy market reforms often complain those reforms would be too expensive for taxpayers, but not reducing our worst-in-the-world housing and energy costs is already costing taxpayers over $6.6 billion a year.

Solving the failures in our housing and electricity markets would reduce the taxpayer burden by that much, let alone unleashing massive improvements in public health, productivity and real wages.

A new official report quietly buried by the Labour Government in its final months in power identifies over 300,000 people are now living in housing and energy poverty so severe that they are unable to afford the power needed to stay warm in winter, have warm showers or cook their own food. Figures on the number of families who turn off their own power because they can’t afford to pre-pay aren’t even collected.

The report documented people who lived in homes without power because of bad credit records or their pre-pay plans had run out of money, forcing them and their children to sleep in cold, mouldy homes and cook food on fires outside.

This housing and energy poverty leads to thousands of unnecessary hospitalisations and hundreds of deaths from chest and skin infections, costing $1.14 billion each year in extra public health costs. That’s on top of income-related rent subsidies, accommodation supplements, First Home Buyers grants, progressive home ownership grants, emergency housing costs and winter energy payments totalling $5.5 billion per year.

The report recommends any new Government reform the electricity market to focus on improving affordability, rather than gentailer profits and dividends, along with monitoring disconnections from pre-pay power and forcing retailers to abide by a consumer care code, which is currently voluntary, along with increasing funding for insulating and retrofitting homes and appliances.

…the sheer scale of misery our system generates for the poorest amongst us should be a nationwide shame, but then again, so should the 600000 who need food banks each month, the 25 000 on the social housing wait list,  the hundreds of thousands living in poverty, our suicide rate or the hundreds of thousands of domestic violence incidents.

Each should be a national shame, yet the idea of over 300000 unable to use electricity and being forced to cook on open fires is shocking in a supposed first world country.

This rapacious attack on the poor with systems designed to cost them money should be a major story of economic justice, but it’s not!

We know the lowest income homes are punished without mercy by this user pays system…

Low-income households hit hardest by rising power costs

  • Low-income households are spending more of their income on electricity.
  • Consumer NZ estimates 140,000 households have taken out a loan to pay their electricity bill.
  • They also say 38,000 homes were disconnected due to not paying their bill.

…there is a naked class war erupting in NZ and we don’t have the political vocabulary to express that dimension, meanwhile the assault on the poorest and the most vulnerable begins at pace.

 

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17 COMMENTS

  1. It should be shameful, but the right doesn’t feel shame at the predicaments of the poor. That’s how they get to the top. By not caring. It’s all about their ego, not their abilities.

    Big new thermal power station at Taupo being touted as likely meaning reduced power costs for hardworking kiwis. The PM actually had the gall to stand there and spout that nonsense. The breathless reporter repeated it. The news reader repeated it.
    We’ve heard all these lies before.
    How stupid do they think we are! Maybe as stupid as them. That’s TV news for you.

    In the central North Is. the main costs are the supply costs. It’s ‘very difficult terrain’ you know, and it’s damned cold working up a power pole. As if that doesn’t happen in a lot of places??!!!???
    That won’t change just because they have this new power station, all renewable and clever.
    So won’t be holding my breath and expect it will be more like the article predicts, a $10 increase each month instead.

  2. Interesting use of the phrases – ‘housing and energy crisis’. It’s not really a crisis if you own property or have shares in the power companies. Why do the power companies insist on using the most expensive forms of energy? Because they are more labor intensive and more profitable. Solar and wind energy are extremely cheap and essentially free once the infrastructure is installed. The profit margins are tiny.
    In Spain recently there was ‘energy crisis’ because too many homes have solar panels and the consumption of grid based energy dropped dramatically causing the price to fall below what is profitable.
    For capitalism deflation is the worst thing that can happen. In the 1930’s, in the US, the prices of farming produce became deflationary as unemployment rose to 20% and the economy collapsed. Roosevelt’s solution was to pay farmers not to produce as much food in order to reduce supply and increase prices – while millions of US citizens were starving.
    Profitability in Capitalism depends on scarcity – if scarcity is not there it has to be artificially created by regulation (NZ’s power generators) or direct government intervention.

  3. Kiwis keep voting for this even as the so called middle is getting smaller each year and they are joining the bottom feeders they despise .Some may move up a rung but 99.99% will be sliding faster and faster as they are consumed by the hate being generated by the failing capatalist system which just funnels more money to the top 1%.

  4. The system was broken by the nats under Max Bradford’s electricity reforms of the late 1990s and has remained broken ever since. Neither National nor Labour have done anything to address the problem and we are reaping it now with job losses and factory closures because of the cost of electricity making some businesses unprofitable.

    • Steve King Yes Max Bradford was the rich liar who said that separating the lines system would reduce consumer costs. Unfortunately, there’s no legal redress available to make lying politicians accountable, and it was as devious as Shipley with her absurd bilge re lowering the drinking age morphing drunken Kiwis into sophisticated continentals. What a dreadful thing to do to our youngsters. What a sleazy pair.

      Thanks for the ram raids, Shipley. Thanks for the old man with chilblains, Bradford, and the children with galloping consumption just like in granny’s day.

      However, whatever his purpose in doing so, balding hair pervert immigrant Key selling my country’s hydro assets, was, IMO, evil. He had to know, IMO, this would impact most upon those who could least afford it, and cared no more IMO than he did when he belched and bellowed in Parliament to send other people’s kids off to fight in other people’s wars.

      Pontius Pilate’s hand-washing serving the Roman Empire had nothing on shyster Key’s grovelling to America and keeping Kiwi kids living cold. And still, vacuous media hacks drag out Key as some sort of political pundit as if he were a good man, when IMO, he is not.

  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_New_Zealand
    How about the govt build numerous hybrid geothermal+coal powerplants across both islands to increase the base load generating capacity, and keep them fully govt owned. There are 129 potentially suitable locations. And legislate to force power companies to buy back solar power at the same rate that they sell power, to encourage more home solar, including solar on all new state houses?
    Before more large businesses like pulp mills close down during winter peak power prices. And what is wrong with targetted temporary tariffs to help indistries like pulp mills compete with cheap imports from countries with lower energy costs, due to insufficent thoughtful planning from shortsighted previous govts, bent on privitisation for ideological reasons? Muldoon would be murmuring – I told you so, you neoliberal twats.

    • Keep us in touch with what comes to mind Dick H – it is good to get closer to the problems and possible solutions.

  7. Power affordability is shocking.

    So to is rates, insurance, housing and all the other essentials

    Add to that a wide range of new fees in the pipeline, households and businesses have a lot more pain to come.

    And don’t look to Labour, they’re backing National’s PPP plans.

    • Is it because when partys buy their way into govt with a tax cut and chid care subisidy that turn out to be a lot less than promised, that the hit to govt revenue has to be made up by other means? Widespread higher fees and fines, more speed cameras, tolling the Manawatu gorge route, baulking on the needed Dunedin hospital, and Waikato med school, and decent ferries, and state housing, and public health cutbacks, and tightening up welfare to drive the jobless across the Tasman to get them off the books?
      No joke, just look at the pitiful number of vacancies advertised on the MSD website, compared to private job agencies, doesn’t add up since it’s free to employ people through MSD, so why can’t they get more employers to use them? Maybe it should be MSD getting the sanction instead of giving them.

  8. Ah ha! One of my favourites.
    “Electricity Companies screwing us again”
    The price of OUR electricity is a chilling example of how powerful a force the Professor Stanley Milgram effect is and of how it’s having such a profound effect on us. We moan. We acquiesce. We whine and try and make do but ultimately, we pay. We live in freezing cold houses and mope about like sad minions. And that’s because we are. We’re minions to forces we can see and hear but are mystified by. We’re hypnotised by the might of advertising and are rendered immobile by self appointed authority figures. Many of you will live in dread of the meter person and will timidly allow them to come into your home, take down the figures from your meter board then scrape and save to pay when the bill comes in from The Mafia. The fact remains, we’re convinced that we’re powerless to act and then not acting becomes the new normal.
    Once The Jimbo bolger deregulated unions the privateers that roger douglas opened our doors to our electricity generation and supply became the property of the mafia. Yep. Look it up. Here it is.
    wikipedia:
    New Zealand deregulated its labor markets in 1991 with the Employment Contracts Act (ECA):
    The 43rd New Zealand Parliament continued. Government was The National Party, led by Jim Bolger. National controlled nearly seventy percent of the seats in Parliament.
    AI Overview
    Learn more
    The New Zealand electricity market has been liberalised since the 1980s, and some of the industry has been privatised:
    1987
    The New Zealand government corporatised the New Zealand Electricity Department, forming the state-owned New Zealand Electricity Corporation (ECNZ).
    1996
    The government split off about a quarter of the ECNZ’s generating capacity into Contact Energy, a separate state-owned corporation.
    1998
    The Electricity Industry Reform Act was passed, requiring the separation of ownership between lines and energy businesses. The government also announced the privatisation of Contact Energy.
    1999
    The government sold its remaining share of Contact Energy to investors.
    The Electricity Amendment Act 2001 focused on improving governance and controlling monopoly functions.
    The New Zealand electricity market is regulated by legislation such as the Companies Act, Electricity Act, Resource Management Act, Commerce Act, and Fair Trading Act.
    In other words, i.e. in plain English, our corrupt national party’s minions, the one that’s been in ultimate and over riding power since 1936, hatched a plan to genetically create an AI cash cow to feed their mates our money and the machinery used was, and still is, YOUR electricity.
    I was told one by an old bugger once who worked for MED South Otago. ” Electricity should only cost as much as the water out of the fuckin’ tap.”
    Said in a whisper…. ( people…. you’re getting fucked without the kissing….)

  9. I’d be very interested in seeing a comparison of the percentage of income families spend on their power bills, 1984 vs. 2024.

  10. I would mention Kainga Ora under the recent Labor Govt – they put time and skilled people and investment into a delivery pipeline to create homes for a range of society.

    The homes (many already delivered) were designed as lower carbon and cost effective to build using intelligent kaizen processes, they were highly energy efficient (systemically designed not problem solved to leave other problems) and the sites prepared/ design wth good urban principles – not perfectly but moving toward regenerating community well being and health. This pipeline would have delivered thousands more affordable to live in homes.

    The new Coalition Govts’ destruction of Kainga Ora was pure vandalism – to be replaced in a few years with ‘market’ led solutions, but in the mean time has contributed to the near collapse of the design and construction industry. You know where the skilled young people have migrated to, and we have a deep recession with no immediate end in sight.

    Check out what an intelligent developer has created in Tamaki https://26aroha.nz/ with total monthly costs for renters utilities, of less than 50% of typical household. Do not expect the private market to follow this incredible example because the Council, The Planners and the banks are indifferent or block them.

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