The slick sales job the country doesn’t need

Thursday, 12 February 2026

Janet Wilson is a regular opinion contributor and a freelance journalist who has also worked in communications, including with the National Party.

OPINION: Like some slick sideshow hawker, the Government this week tried to convince the nation that we need to spend money to save money - all in the name of energy security.

That by introducing an electricity levy of between $2 to $4 per megawatt hour (MWh), around $15-$30 per household annually, it would pay for the $1 billion cost of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility.

But, hey punters, once built the import facility is expected to reduce electricity prices by at least $10 per megawatt hour saving us $265 million a year.

That’s $50 a year per household!

Read More:

• Government plans levy on power users to pay for $1 billion LNG import terminal

• LNG facility biggest Taranaki energy project in decades

• It’s not a tax, it’s a levy! National and Labour swap lines on LNG terminal spat

• Oil and gas majors not returning to NZ, says industry body as it waits for word on LNG

• Fact check: How much cover could LNG provide for a ‘dry year’?

And while Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Energy Minister Simon Watts exuded Salesman Sam energy, all hair-oil and no socks, at Monday’s post-Cabinet announcement, it also revealed another truth; that for all their thrusting self-confidence, this is a Government happy to ignore officials’ and experts’ advice and take the most convenient and least-sustainable road travelled.

That in an election year, when the cost of living is overwhelmingly plaguing the electorate, the Government wants to tax - sorry, levy - you more.

Sure, using floating storage regasification ships may be a fast and flexible way to solve a repeat of 2024’s regional business closures or soaring price spikes, but it locks the country into old technology for years to come while stifling development of new tech.

It also calls into question the Government’s presumptuous judgement, as it ignores an avalanche of reasoned advice; first, from its own review, led by Frontier Economics, which warned that LNG was only a last resort, that developing an LNG terminal would make no economic sense if it was only used as a backup – which the Taranaki proposal is.

Then there’s the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, former fellow National MP Simon Upton, who wrote to Watts last November questioning the need to use public money to underwrite the development of an LNG import facility “that will potentially be with us for decades to come”.

“New Zealand has a long and less than distinguished history of sponsoring expensive ‘solutions’ without fully understanding the consequences,” he wrote.

A month later more than 20 organisations, from the Public Service Association to Sustainable Energy Association NZ to 350 Aotearoa, wrote to the Government telling it not to waste taxpayers’ money on an LNG import terminal.

It pointed out that it would increase energy costs, while exposing the country to international price shocks and create more emissions.

And while the coalition continues to blame the energy crisis on the previous Labour government’s 2018 oil and gas ban, it has played its own part in this catastrophe. In 2023 it shelved the Gas Transition Plan, designed to manage reserves and declining supply, then went on to cancel the GIDI Fund, which provided co-funding for businesses to switch from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources.

Clearly, this is a Government that largely pays lip service to alternative energy, and while it issues draft statements on geothermal energy and prattles on about biomass and biogas, it still doesn’t have an energy strategy despite promising one.

Sure, New Zealand needs fossil fuel as back up, but doesn’t it already have it in the Huntly stockpile, which the Commerce Commission recently gave its approval as an emergency reserve?

But there’s another reason why the coalition doesn’t want to look at sensible alternatives – it’s rewarded mightily for the system we already have. The four gentailers - Meridian, Genesis, Mercury and Contact – are hard-wired to underinvest so that shareholder dividends remain high.

Last year the Big Four’s dividends were worth $1.4 billion, with the government owning 49% in each being the biggest beneficiary of that. Never mind that the electricity the LNG plant produces will cost more per megawatt hour than wind or solar, as the Electricity Authority estimates; it’s all about maintaining the status quo.

Let the market dictate how it’s going to fulfill the coalition’s promise of “doubling renewables” while providing little incentive to do so.

Maybe the Government has left its run too late, with its timeline of a facility being operational from 2027 or early 2028 standing in contrast to an industry report last year saying it would take three or four years to establish.

Meanwhile domestic gas reservoirs remain at historic lows with estimates that there’s barely enough to last a decade.

In the years ahead, historians will research this coalition’s decision to reach back into the 20th century instead of leaping into the 21st and conclude that the safe option may have granted the country insurance, but it rapidly became a millstone in holding Aotearoa back.

They’ll see a government which relied on the private sector – until that sector didn’t see any commercial sense in building an import facility, and the government was forced to do it instead.

And they’ll see a government which sought a short-term fix but created a long-term problem and failed to solve the energy industry’s structural problems.

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