A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
For an electrical engineer, Simin Williams makes some strange connections, and shows a false understanding of the parliamentary power system.
Among 11 crossed wires (and admittedly, two good power-points), the most shocking is her fantasy that the Green Party has been in power for six years. Her loose wiring, poorinsulation and faulty earthing, out of phase with current thinking, liberates her to unleash a battery of false charges, allowing exciting sparks to fly. Her high voltage is revolting, although the editor appears to enjoy it: many would simply have pulled the plug.
The Green Party was in government from 2017 to 2020, but constantly cut off by the most famous alternating current in political history, Winston Peters.
Since 2020 it has been outside government, and not an auxiliary power source, which Labour simply did not need. Labour itself is AC, switching indeterminately between good intentions and business pressures, and the Green Party has applied a principled direct current in the difficult, hearing-impaired environment of Parliament. Given power, it will be a transformer.
To blame the Greens for pathetic progress on child poverty, inflation, sold-off farmland and ongoing coal use, when it opposes all those; to identify loss of 111 service in disaster with lack of resilience, of which it is just a part; to call inflation a tax by stealth, when it is more complex than that and, cushioned by appropriate incomes, actually reduces the burden of debt; to confuse stimulating NZ Steel’s decarbonisation with blanket support of multinationals; to accuse the Greens’ poverty-elimination policy of the same purpose: these are all fuse-blowing short circuits of logic.
Two ticks for Simin. One, the sourcing and whole life-cycle of solar panels is a worry, and use of alternative energy systems will be possible only by vastly slashing consumption. Two, we need a decent buy-back system for home-generated electricity.
The Green Party has not yet been in a position to remedy this, but last week in Gisborne James Shaw said they are working on it right now. Something to vote for.
