True grit: the Brits keep on trucking, defying the weather. Ian Britton at Freefoto.com
True grit: the Brits keep on trucking, defying the weather. Ian Britton at Freefoto.com
When our UK-based Grumpy correspondent Merv quietly reveals that he hasn’t had a fag since December, you know that something’s amiss. This was a man who not only smoked for England. He smoked for Africa (or at least Zimbabwe, until Robert Mugabe torched its tobacco industry and where it now costs about 5 trillion Zimbabwean bucks to pick up a fag-end). And when Merv tells you that there are 13 inches of snow above 2 inches of black ice around his house (these values are expressed in Old Money) and he hasn’t been able to reach the pub for three days, you know that things must be grim in Old Blighty.

Clearly, the recession is hitting hard in Britain, a nation that has had almost 2000 years to deal with snow, but still cannot get a grip on it.

However, up in Auckland, there can be no excuse for this week’s power failures. There is no snow – in fact, no weather at all. In the finest of climes, Auckland’s power has failed yet again. When the power was cut in Auckland’s CBD a couple of decades ago, and didn’t come back for six months, the rest of the world marvelled, mocked and laughed, but felt no pain.

Auckland: Turn the lights out, and you'd hardly notice the difference. Picture from Dreamstime.com
Auckland: Turn the lights out, and you'd hardly notice the difference. Picture from Dreamstime.com
Now, someone has once again failed to replace the three AAA batteries that apparently sustain Auckland, a place that pretends to be a super-city, but is actually the world’s largest and most messy suburb and is apparently dependent on a couple of electricity transformers with no back-up. This would be a joke, until you recall that the skilled power experts who have allowed this farce to occur come from the same highly paid school who would have you believe it’s OK to turn this country into a giant porcupine, peppered with inefficient wind factories that would raise your electricity bills and add value to their share options.

Auckland is like an Aeroflot airliner, accurately described as 100,000 badly maintained rivets flying in loose formation. It is a catastrophic mess, and it’s no accident that Auckland is also a hotbed for Labour politicians whose extended record of failure in ensuring adequate power supplies to the city is nothing short of breathtaking.

Those fossils will no doubt argue that they were unable to sort out the City of Wails’ electricity woes because of the Resource Management Act, which we’re amazed to now learn also applies to trees, shrubs, Dunedin bagpipers and Christchurch office owners wanting to install a shower for the workers. Voters should, however, make a note that these are the same people who created the gross RMA albatross that now hangs around everyone’s necks.

The privatisation of publicly owned and taxpayer-funded strategic assets such as our power and telecommunications systems was a serious mistake. We now have the bizarre prospect of all manner of highly paid electricity experts pointing fingers of blame at each other, in the dark. New Zealand’s economic powerhouse is today revealed as a dead battery, with too many flatulent councils, too many interest groups and in severe need of a good kick up the starter motor (if only because they whinge too much and they cost the rest of us too much).

The sooner Rodney Hide attacks and reduces this country’s bloated council structure, and the sooner Bunter Brownlee tells the powerless Transpower what to do about buying new Ever Ready batteries for Auckland, the better.

Then the rest of us can get on with what we prefer.

Which is: Forget all about Auckland.