Mini-Hoon: 'Why don't we buy back the shares?'

On the eve of the Government’s big electricity market reform announcement this morning, I chatted in a ‘pop-up’ ‘Mini-Hoon’ with CTU Economist Craig Renney about a CTU proposal for the Government to use the gentailers’ dividends to buy back the privately-held shares in the 51% state-owned Meridian, Mercury and Genesis, if they chose not to build much more power generation capacity to stop rampant inflation.Craig argues the gentailers chose to generate cash for dividends rather than invest in new renewable capacity for over a decade, which contributed to a sharp spike in prices and is causing energy poverty for households and de-industrialising what is left of Aotearoa’s industrial sector. We spoke about the arguments for and against such a partial nationalisation, along with why electricity prices had risen and whether the RMA and the oil and gas drilling ban were factors.I am opening up this video podcast to both free and paid subscribers immediately and in full. I view this as part of my public interest journalism mandate whereby paying subscribers support me to do the work and then make it much of it public, including on other media. Paying subscribers get early and deeper access to some of my work here and can comment. Subscribe as a paying subscriber to support this work.Here’s the charts I referred to in the video above showing:When dividends were paid instead of investingElectricity output per capita since 2015Electricity consumption by sectorElectricity prices indexed to 2015Electricity generation vs GDP since 2015Ka kite anoBernard This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thekaka.substack.com/subscribe