US data largely positive; China exports fall, reserves rise; China's dairy industry struggles; Aussie CoL indexes higher than CPI; UST 10yr 3.97%; gold unchanged and oil up; NZ$1 = 60.1 USc; TWI-5 = 68.9

Agree. As much as I love the idea of a mass house building program for FHBs ala 1930s-1950s I must also acknowledge the reality of systemic incompetence and bureaucratic ineptitude which almost certainly makes it a pipe dream.

There’s plenty of coal

you can't take in 200,000 people in a year and expect demand for electricity to stay stagnant. They already had turbines to replace at Kapuni and Huntly which were supposed to be completed sometime around May this year (x1 turbine at each offline from 2023 until fixed), so add in immigration demand, more EV's and conversions to heat pumps from fireplaces (boooo), and we have the perfect storm for higher prices. 

Within the next 12-24 months you will find out your electricity bill will eclips your insurance and rates easy. More specific when you are now a customer of a non generating retailer. And.. yes you are right with your comment "The market seems to be getting it almost exactly right IMO" because that is how the NZ electricity market has been designed: high prices in times of scarcity. But...it feels like daylight robbery when you calculate that the cost of generating 1 MWh of hydro cost only $26.02 ( See: Meridian June 2024 operational report for the last 12 months)

What would our power prices be like if we had the same infrastructure but less people paying for it

"yes if that is the price that makes current demand meet current supply" But that essentially kills off the small business's, and possibly even some private users if it flows over. In other words it favours the wealthy. There are already a lot in the population who cannot afford their winter heating bills.

I suggest that the government actually screwed the structure up when they privatised it. They required it to be profitable which in effect prioritised paying the government it's dividend rather than ensuring the network and capability was sustainable and affordable. This is where SJ is coming from in my view. To that end he is correct and needs to keep doing what he is doing.

Meanwhile Octopus puts down the price it gives me for my solar going out the gate.

17c to 15c.

We have let checking and balancing become way more important than the thing that's being checked and balanced.

The irony being that in the current era, when things do go wrong, it's apparently nobody's fault.

Nailed it

I think this is a well understood issue, nothing cultural. Almost anything publicly run sucks, its why we don't buy our bread / milk / cars / etc from the government. 

SOEs can work OK, but even then its pretty average. Look at Kiwibank, hardly able to turn a profit, in the same market the big 4 are creaming it. 

Are there any countries where this isn't a problem? Seems pretty bad everywhere else in my experience. 

I get to experience a raft of different entities undertake the same function (construction).

The public sector is by far the most organizationally bloated, expensive, inefficient of the entity types. Their extra operational requirements means anyone doing work for them, has to charge more, because doing work for them sucks up so much extra time, vs doing work for anyone else (large corporates being the second most expensive sector to work for, but by some distance).

Didn't always used to be this way, but philosophically they now have a piss poor approach to doing actual things in the real world. If I operated my private business like them, I'd be broke. Unless I charged twice as much - but then I probably wouldn't get as much business.

No, there’ll be no offering of anything. Do nothing, leave it. If individuals want to get across sort it out yourself. Maybe a demand for coastal shipping will develop. You know what happens when there is demand.

due to lack of council oversight in projects.

It is interesting that if someone or something wasn't performing to expectations, you'd stop doing it, or get someone else to do it. Now, the solution is oversight.

Let's bring in a performance management layer to speed things up. That sucks up 10% of the hours in a day, having meetings about making things go faster....

It is good to hear a real world validation that our ratepayer money is not getting value for money due to lack of council oversight in projects.

FFS, we're not getting proper oversight because we don't want to pay for it. First we cut the people doing the work and sold that work to private interests. Then we cut the people doing the oversight of the private interests and outsourced that to private interests. Now we wonder why we're getting screwed.

We're getting screwed because we think we're making savings with constantly keeping public sector salaries low, cutting staff levels and outsourcing to the public sector. I know I've charged the public sector 5 times more for what it would have cost had I been employed by them directly.