🤠 Lawless Land: How New Zealand’s Utilities Wild West Is Strangling Our Economic Future 🏗️
This morning, Andrew Body’s article on Business Desk crystallised much of what is wrong with our housing and infrastructure crisis.
His piece shows that we are living in an economic Wild West where monopolies reign supreme and competition has been shot dead at high noon.
New Zealand operates under what’s euphemistically called a “high trust model” via the CommerceAct. Charges must be transparent and upfront, they tell us.
😹 Codswallop, is what I say! 💸
When Auckland city land was opened for development, it released a mass of ‘mums’ and dads’ backyards into the utilities Wild West.
This has served only to bolster the balance sheets of our monopolies.
Competition? What competition?
Only Vector via Omexon or NorthPower could connect new houses.
In one year, their capital charge was NZ$1,500 per house. The next year, NZ$7,000. Then roughly NZ$3,500, all of this was plus plus (civil works that only they said they could do).
I worked out that of our collective data new homes were commonly carrying a cost of around $15,000 each to connect — in the same years that Vector was making profits well above what had been seen in their very recent past.
📖 One story illustrates this perfectly: Vector quoted NZ$72,000 to move a utility box one metre. So ridiculous was this figure that the owner simply paid contractors with a box of beer to do the job themselves. We have screeds of these stories across the Auckland, I have shared many of them with the Commerce Commission already.🍺
Now, belatedly, ElectricityAuthority seems to be trying to fix things. Where were they when we were screaming in 2021? Where were they when I was actively trying to be ‘nice’ with Vector in 2023, hoping reasonable discourse might prevail?
Where are our politicians in all this? Seemingly content to let the Wild West continue whilst our productivity suffers and housing costs spiral beyond reach of ordinary Kiwis.
We desperately need **CONSEQUENCES IN LAW**.
The high trust model is actively harming our egalitarian society.
Combining low-maintenance, dominant councils, uncompetitive suppliers, and bully behaviour, the net result is clear:
🤠 The HIGH TRUST model is the WILD WEST.
🫗We have a serious deficit in productivity, it is crushing our prosperity.
There is hope. With an improved education system—thanks to the efforts of Hon Erica Stanford MP perhaps more Kiwis will start reading their contracts and asking the hard questions. Only then can we turn our country around and restore the position of prosperity. 🌟
The time for empty promises and regulatory theatre has passed.
New Zealand deserves better than this Wild West. We need real competition, real consequences, and real change before our economic future rides off into the sunset.
https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/opinion/toothless-regulation-and-the-entrustvector-issue
