\n The inquiry itself
\n is a good idea. There should be an independent stocktake of whether former bank governor Adrian Orr was as hot at dealing with Covid\u2019s economic fallout as he claims he was.\n <\/p>\n
Arguably he wasn\u2019t. He blew more than $10 billion on buying government bonds, which is nearly half the amount the Christchurch earthquakes cost the Government. He overhyped the economy, then had to crash it to control inflation and we\u2019re still suffering the fallout years later. <\/p>\n
So, an inquiry that puts an independent verdict on the official record is welcome.<\/p>\n
The problem is the timing. Covid mostly wrapped up nearly four years ago. Finance Minister Nicola Willis could\u2019ve ordered this inquiry at any point in the past two years and three months this coalition Government has been in power. <\/p>\n
But she got too clever. She waited until this week to announce the inquiry and then set a deadline for the findings weeks before the general election. <\/p>\n
It was too obvious what she was trying to do, which is to turn a valid inquiry into a political weapon just before voting.<\/p>\n
Personally, I think voters should remember very clearly the economic vandalism that Labour leader Chris Hipkins was party to when he was last in Government, but denting the credibility of a necessary inquiry in order to do that is a pity.<\/p>\n
And of course, the chess move by Willis was so transparent that we spent all of about 30 seconds talking about the actual inquiry before we moved on to the cynical timing, and that\u2019s the groove we\u2019ve got stuck in.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s been largely overlooked is why Willis saved the announcement until this week, six months after Cabinet signed off on it.<\/p>\n
Most likely it was to distract us from the clanger we had been talking about, which was the liquified natural gas (LNG) levy.<\/p>\n
Which is the second case of politicians trying to be too clever.<\/p>\n
Sure, on paper, it\u2019s a levy, given that it will technically be the major power retailers forced to pay to fund the construction of the planned LNG terminal.<\/p>\n
But anyone who understands the very basics of commercial reality knows the power retailers won\u2019t be the ones wearing the cost. They\u2019ll simply split it up a few hundred thousand ways and pop it on our power bills and hope we don\u2019t notice.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s really a levy on households. Which you can call a levy, or you can call a tax.<\/p>\n
And arguing whether a levy is a tax is stupid when there is really no convincing argument that says households don\u2019t end up paying it.<\/p>\n
Frankly, it\u2019s wild that the Luxon Administration tried on the levy\/ tax argument, given that they were ringside when the last Labour Government tried on a levy\/tax argument and got laughed at. <\/p>\n
Again, by being too clever, the coalition Government has ensured that we\u2019re debating their sophistry instead of debating the merits of the LNG terminal.<\/p>\n
What we should be debating is whether the terminal will bring down our power prices. The answer is probably not. Name the last time any government intervention brought down power prices.<\/p>\n
We should also be debating whether \u2013 if we\u2019re hell bent on doing this \u2013 there are better ways of funding this terminal than forcing already-stretched households to pay for it. The answer is yes, by selling off shares in our partially listed power companies and using the windfall to pay for it. <\/p>\n
Instead, the National-led coalition Government has underestimated the intelligence of voters and \u2013 by trying to be cleverer than them \u2013 drowned their own ideas in silly debates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The inquiry itself is a good idea. There should be an independent stocktake of whether former bank governor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[95,5195,96081,6630,3278,42,10900,16427,43,1118,158628,10901,223,61,6173,40,38,41,39,28355,792],"class_list":["post-284588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-and","tag-be","tag-clever","tag-du","tag-facts","tag-headlines","tag-heather","tag-luxon","tag-news","tag-of","tag-perils","tag-plessisallan","tag-the","tag-to","tag-too","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-trying","tag-willis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}