Garth George: If there's a shortage of power, then it's not my problem

Surely this is the last straw. We put up with a worsening health service, we put up with an understaffed and politically polluted education system, we put up with benefit bludgers by the tens of thousands, we put up with crumbling infrastructure - and now we're being asked to put up with power cuts.

Well, not me. I refuse absolutely to do anything to save electricity. It's not my problem. Like bacon and petrol, it is something of which I will have all I want. I will not turn off my heated towel rail, nor will I turn off the television and various other pieces of electrical equipment at the wall.

I am used to activating the TV, the stereo, the microwave and various other appliances at the press of a button. And in any case the sockets serving those appliances are mostly in inconvenient places - under desks and behind dressers and bookcases.

Nor will I turn down the temperature of the water heater. I do not waste time in the shower, rarely have a bath and the dishwasher heats its own water.

My one small concession to the so-called power crisis - which I'll bet never eventuates anyway - is to cut two hours a day off the time the motor runs to filter the swimming pool.

And if worse comes to worst and the powers that be do decide to ration electricity, I will simply fire up the woodburner, which has a water-heating wetback, and use the gas-fired barbecue for cooking.

This is 2003 in a nation which is purportedly part of the developed world. For it to be short of electricity is intolerable. On top of all the other Third World-type shortages we are suffering, it should be enough to bring about revolution.

But it won't, of course. We've become far too wimpish for that. Political correctness has so watered down our Kiwi spirit that it now resembles that of our most populous animal. We have become like sheep, given the runaround day after day by the yapping dogs of politics.

What makes it worse is that if the parsimonious professor who holds the nation's purse strings can talk about a "surplus" of nearly $4 billion - every penny of it stolen from you and me - the Government could well have afforded to provide what was needed to obviate any possibility of an electricity shortage.

In his backgrounder on the electricity business in the Weekend Herald, young Chris Daniels said you don't have to be old to remember the last time we were asked to save power.

Quite right. But if you are old - or at least getting that way - you might, like me, remember that the same situation arose in the 1940s, and under a Labour Government then, too.

I well recall my father, running a National Party election campaign in the Deep South, carting a projector around to candidates' meetings to show a film in which I can still see a family sitting round the dinner table listening to the radio when the lights went out.

The Government, of course, was to blame then - just as it is today, although this Labour lot can quite justifiably shuck some of it off on to the previous National crowd who fiddled with the "market" instead of providing more capacity.

Daniels says too much electricity is wasted in homes and in business. I take issue with that. As I have said, I will use as much power as I please - and happily pay for it - so for me, as for tens of thousands of others, there is no such thing as wasting electricity.

He says economic growth (to which I would add immigration) has brought a big increase in demand for power. Of course it has. And even a halfwit could have figured out that increased generation capacity would be needed urgently, let alone those whom we pay - or who pay themselves - to look after such things.

But as usual with central and local government the provision of necessities of infrastructure and services lags at least a decade behind the need. I wonder if the wallies who inhabit the Beehive and the bureaucracy will ever catch up. That'll be the day, eh?

The other thing about this business that leaves me almost speechless is the coal question.

This country has economic coal reserves amounting to at least 10 billion tonnes - enough to fuel a dozen Huntly-sized power stations for thousands of years.

Yet Genesis Energy, which owns the Huntly station, is about to start taking delivery of 500,000 tonnes of coal imported from Australia. Is anybody going to be held to account for this astonishing situation? Probably not; no one, it seems, is responsible any more.

Of course the burning of coal doesn't appeal to this pink Government embroidered with green because it might create a bit more greenhouse gas, contrary to its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol on so-called global warming.

Which just goes to show that we should never have signed the silly thing in the first place. Wise countries didn't.

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