Chlöe Swarbrick: Christopher Luxon is gaslighting the country

THREE KEY FACTS
Chlöe Swarbrick is co-leader of the Green Party and the MP for Auckland Central.
OPINION
We have an energy crisis. It is driven by relentless corporate profiteering, in the vehicle of climate-burning fossil fuels.
Successive governments have chosen not to address these fundamental economic settings which cost people and planet dearly, while the current Government weaponises the current crisis to justify perpetuating the problem, gaslighting the country.
In 2013, the National-led Government partially privatised our power companies despite 67% of New Zealanders voting against these asset sales at a referendum.
In the following 10 years, those energy gentailers have paid out $11 billion in shareholder dividends, 2.5 times the amount they’ve spent on energy generation, infrastructure, maintenance and upgrades.
The particularly dirty not-so-secret is that these profits are also helping to bolster the Government’s books given that we, the people, still own 51% of a stake in them.
This should be a call to action to take real ownership and responsibility, but be wary with this Government’s track record – they’re likely to argue for greater privatisation and therefore greater costs for you.
An energy system that runs on fossil fuels is wonderful for company profits and shareholder dividends. It costs households across the country today in higher power bills and poor infrastructure, but even more so in the future, with more climate-changing emissions thickening our atmosphere, creating more extreme weather, less predictable food production and ultimately less stable and more expensive lives for all of us. Think kicking the can down the road, but the can is a time-bomb.
Christopher Luxon is gaslighting the country by telling us all that the solution to these problems is to pour more oil, coal and gas on the climate-crisis fire.
He’s got his talking points down pat, ready to try to appear reasonable by saying the Government is still committed to renewable energy – despite how his Government, in its self-professed obsession with KPIs, has dropped the previous Government’s target of getting to 100% renewable energy.
They’ll tell you the oil and gas ban, which came into effect six years ago, is to blame.
That wilfully ignores how, of the five oil and gas fields that already exist, it has taken an average of 16 years to go from exploration to production. It carefully curates out the fact that gas production has been falling since 2014 – four years before the ban came into place.
But putting fossil fuels on life-support doesn’t only artificially inflate the size of your power bill and help fry the planet. It also actively undermines investment in renewables and their resilience and affordability.
There are currently 33 wind and solar projects already consented, waiting to be built. They aren’t being built because the sky-high shareholder profits aren’t in resilient renewables and lower energy bills for regular people.
Plans to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) will also come at an incredible cost with very little gain for anyone but the fossil fuel lobby. Mark Ogge, a climate and energy expert at the Australia Institute, said if he had five minutes with Energy and Resources Minister Simeon Brown, he would recommend investing more in renewables instead.
“I would tell him to only import liquified natural gas if you like your energy very, very expensive, and if you want it to be very emissions-intensive. Otherwise, go for renewable energy, with storage, which is cheaper and virtually zero emissions.”
The solutions are clear. Last year, the Greens campaigned on a Clean Power Payment that would empower 60,000 homes to upgrade and run on clean energy, reducing demand and distributing generation capacity. This would reduce the power gentailers’ have over households, build resilience and distributed generation into our network, and reduce the cost of living.
The National Party created today’s crisis. In 1996, they privatised Contact Energy. In 1998, they split the Electricity Corporation into two competing state-owned enterprises, driven by profit. In 2013, they partially privatised Genesis, Mercury and Meridian. And in 2024, they’re getting “back on track” to keep piling up household bills while telling you the opposite.
If our Prime Minister were to tell you the truth about our energy crisis, he’d tell you our energy system has been designed to prioritise short-term profits at the expense of people and planet. He’d tell you that system was created by political decisions like those his Government is currently intent on making.
We don’t live in a game of Monopoly. We can and should change the rules when they don’t work for regular people – let alone when they threaten the life-supporting scientific fundamentals of the planet we live on.
Should a majority of politicians find the will, our Parliament has the power to solve these problems by grabbing them at the foundational, root causes. Funnily enough, that’s the dictionary definition of “radical”.