What a catalogue of chaos in New Zealand infrastructure and governance this week and it’s only Tuesday. And it’s not just the politicians dragging the chain.  It’s the public servants and the private sector. 

Transmission Gully is still only touch and go to hit its opening date in 7 weeks.  This Public Private Partnership has been plagued with bad management from the start.  The $1.25 billion road has been the subject of budget blowouts, bailouts, and delays.  What a nightmare and you and I get to pick up the bill.

The Tauranga border worker vaccination programme is a mess.  Private companies and their workers were told to get vaxxed in March.  All they had to do was phone the 0800 number and they were in. They’ve now been given an extension until September.  5 months to vaccinate 100 people?  4 months to vaccinate just 10. 

But taking the cake is the great rolling power cut of 2021. 

It appears that a perfect storm of incompetence, poor management, poor communication and climatic conditions struck the country at dinner time. 

So many questions need to be answered.  

• Transpower needs to explain why the Cook Strait cable was running at 50% capacity in the middle of winter.  
• Why wasn’t Huntly already running at its higher capacity?
• Are the rumours that we’re running out of imported coal true?  
• Are our hydro lakes really full of clogging algae preventing generation - and why isn’t there a maintenance schedule to combat it?
• Did the public servants give the private generators enough warning?  
• Is there enough oversight of the private generators capacity?
• Do the private companies cooperate or does competition means less than full communication?  
• Was it sensible to abandon mining our own fossil fuels when they are our only back stop in a crisis?

To cap it all off the outages happened on a still clear night so solar and wind weren’t on the table. 

But you know my biggest gripe is with Transpower who forgot to include you and I in this crisis. All day long we should have been warned that this was possible and to avoid going gangbusters with every heater in the house. But we were completely out of the loop and given almost no warning of the outages which was frankly just rude. 

Governments past and present will be getting the blast for designing the system.  The whole system, public and private, failed.  It seems to be hanging on by a thread with few options for expanding capacity.   

And then on top of this rickety crumbling infrastructure designed and built 50 years ago we want to put in brave new ideas like 100,000 heat pumps for Healthy Homes and a fleet of electric vehicles. 

We must be dreaming.