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Martin Lally's avatar

John, thanks again for your comments and I read Ian's submission with great interest. Ian's most compelling point seems to be that, with an Emissions Trading Scheme, WCC's actions to reduce its emissions through this project will likely not reduce NZ's emissions and therefore the project is not only pointless in that sense but extraordinarily expensive relative to the current carbon price. We see these kinds of alleged emissions reduction projects in numerous other places within the NZ public sector. It is tempting to attribute them to ignorance amongst their proponents about how the Emissions Trading Scheme works. Perhaps the proponents of these schemes do understand how the Emissions Trading Scheme works but extract utility from being seen to be saving the planet by people who themselves do not understand how the Scheme works? Cycle ways seem to be the classic example.

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Mzee wa kazi's avatar

Re: "Well-written and well-enforced PPP contracts can transfer blowout risk from the public to the private sector". Have we had well-written and well-enforced PPP contracts to date? Is it not the case that the public sector had to pick up a big chunk of the cost overruns for Transmission Gully and the Puhoi-Warkworth extension? And don't private sector companies have incentives to submit unrealistically low bids to secure public sector contracts and then bully the public sector once the point of no return is reached to secure additional financial concessions from the government? And does government have the staff expertise to negotiate and manage PPP contracts adequately?

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