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Tuesday, May 2, 2023

Mike Hosking: Flawed ideology leaves us poorer


There have been two great cons of the Green Party.

Years ago Rod Donald, the former Green Party leader as he was, was spruiking MMP and reassured us all that the tail would never wag the dog, despite most of us not believing a word he said.

Enough people got sucked in, MMP arrived - and so did Winston Peters.

The second great Green Party con was Julie Anne Genter telling us that the feebate scheme for cars would be fiscally neutral, despite the fact she could make no such claim.

How could she possibly predict that the right number of people would purchase petrol cars to offset the right number of people who would purchase EV's or hybrids? She couldn't of course.

But that didn’t stop her pedalling the myth.

The madness should have stopped when she lost her job.

But, sadly, Michael ”watch me build light rail in record time” Wood was in the wings ready to grab the reins and screw us over just a little bit more.

And so, with all the middle class cashed-ups shelling out $80,000 for a Tesla, the rest of us now get to pick up an even bigger tab.

Are they saving the planet in their new EV's? Well, sort of. There is another scandal in that.

The actual emissions savings are not that great.

That was another con exposed when the new Prime Ministers dropped the "cash for clunkers" program as part of the policy bonfire.

When they launched it, the savings in emissions were enormous. By the time they dumped it, the policy was cumbersome and the savings were tiny. Ah, the anatomy of a con.

And so here we are this morning, with the news that we will be paying even more for a petrol engine, to subsidise those that don't need to be subsidised, to buy something more eco-friendly.

As I have said all along, if you love EV's and if you want to save the world then rip into it.

But don’t expect the rest of us to foot the bill for your passion. And this is what the Government does.

It's policy driven by ideology, not fact. An ever-shifting landscape, a series of promises never kept and the expectation that the bills will simply keep going up and up and up.

Whether it's Donald, Genter or Wood it's always slippery logic and it's always us writing the cheques.

Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A bit like co governance.
Trying to tell us all that its ok, nothing to worry about here. Meanwhile anyone with half a brain can see it’s got civil disorder written all over it.
And to make it worse, underpants Morgan states on public radio, Māori are after all the water rights.
Hipkins has lost control of his caucus, it’s becoming obvious it’s now a free for all.

Anonymous said...

and what happened to all the clunkers they replaced ?
were they crushed ? nop
theyre still driving around so they've saved nothing

Anonymous said...

And all the EVs in Auckland get plugged into the grid powered by dirty Indonesian coal at Huntly power station.
Saving the planet my arse and at our expense.
We are angry about a lot of things and this government will be toasted and roasted come October.
MC