OPINION: In the last few days, every mainstream media outlet in New Zealand has performed a synchronized routine. They have all tackled the same question: Would our fuel security be better if the Labour government had not allowed our only refinery, Marsden Point, to shutter? Shockingly, they all reached the same conclusion. No. Whether the outlet leans left or right, the consensus is total.
This is a remarkable display of narrative harmony for an industry that a recent poll shows is trusted by only around 30 percent of the public. For anyone with a basic grasp of logistics, the expert consensus feels less like journalism and more like gaslighting.
Every armchair expert has seemingly grasped a logic that eludes our press gallery. If Marsden Point were online, we would not be staring down the barrel of a diesel-driven commercial collapse. The maths is simple. While we would still be paying extortionate prices for crude, we might actually be able to get some, be it from the United States or South America, for instance. Instead, we remain hitched to a logistical rigmarole: extracting crude in the world’s hotbed of hotheads, shipping it to Asia for refining, and then hauling the finished product down to the bottom of the world.
The argument that we can just rely on Asian refineries was always a lie. Those refineries are subject to the same supply regulations we have here. The current government is coming face to face with that reality. Even if Asian refineries wanted to sell us fuel at a massive premium during a crisis, their own governments have the legal right to prevent exports to prioritise their own domestic security. You know, the same regulations our own government set on fire back in ’22. We are at the very end of a very long, very fragile string.
The unspeakably grim reality of the Marsden saga, is that for both sides of the political isle, the closure of the refinery was a victory.
For the then Labour government, the closure was an ideological victory. After banning new oil and gas exploration in favour of green tech that has not been built, Marsden Point was a vestige of an era they despised. They call themselves Labour, yet they presided over the destruction of thousands of high-paying industrial jobs at the likes of Winstone as electricity prices spiralled through the roof.
Remember, these are the architects of the “Ute Tax”—a system where a banker in Remuera gets a taxpayer-subsidized EV funded by the tradesman in Pukekohe who has no choice but to drive a diesel Hilux.
If you expected the National Party to stand up for the taxpayer, you haven’t been paying attention. Our ‘free enterprise’ crowd of bygone-era neocons—the type of politicians who have been booted from power across Europe and the US by the likes of Farage, Meloni, and even the architect of all this, Donald Trump, are like vikings stuck in time.
Nothing greases the gears of a Kiwi neocon like jerking off big business. What interest did they have at the time in arguing for enforcing energy security regulation on private enterprise? Better yet, after shuttering the refinery, it now looks like Channel Infrastructure is set to receive a $21+ million taxpayer bailout just to meet government fuel storage regulations. When was the last time the local hairdresser or builder had the government spring a few million to make them “regulation compliant.” Was it recently? Or never?
In my opinion, the vast write down accounting that flipped Channel into a loss leading up to the approval to shut Marsden was used by both the Labour government to persuade the public, that a bailout was impossible, and show the right-wing corporate class that a streamlined, low-overhead import business was a great upside to putting the entire country’s industrial output into the hands of the Ayatollahs of Iran.
Oh, and just a word on the “green” elephant in the room, paraded by our increasingly caught-out leftists who green-lit this scandal. The so-called bunker fuel used to power the massive tankers that carry our fuel literally 15,000 nautical miles from the Middle East to Asia, and (we hope eventually) on to NZ, is literally the filthiest of all crude derivatives on the planet.
Beyond that, our then Labour coalition traded a refining process powered by our own hydro and geothermal energy (amongst the greenest in the world), for one in Asia that chugs through fossil-fuel electricity, all so the government could strike CO2 off our local books, while making the global total worse by every metric.
By killing Marsden Point, the then coalition engaged in the most suicidal form of greenwashing imaginable: offshore the emissions, increase the shipping distance, and pretend you’ve saved the world while the tankers burn sludge to get here.
The tragedy is that the energy damage to NZ’s economy isn’t just the present Iran shock. It’s semi-permanent. Even though the current government reversed the Oil and Gas permitting, it takes around seven years to get oil and gas projects back online. That is longer than a political term. We are still suffering from the pain inflicted by the previous government, and even if by some (undeserved) miracle, the right is re-elected this November, we would not see a genuine industrial recovery until the end of their second term at the earliest. Just in time for another left-wing crowd to swing in and axe it all again.
Perhaps the smartest move is the one made by Jacinda Ardern: move to Australia and live in comfort off the huge dividends of a country unashamedly addicted to its massive mining and oil and gas businesses.
So, why haven’t we read any of this in the last few days? I’d argue it’s more structural than malicious. Modern media ideology sees reporters more as stenographers for the leaders of the country, be they political or corporate, than common sense thinkers. They don’t draw obvious conclusions because they’re not really allowed to.
Furthermore, for whatever reason, in all the newsrooms I’ve worked in, most find the views of Winston Peters, Shane Jones, NZ First, and Co. morally repugnant—or really, anyone questioning the people journalists interview on a daily basis, as repugnant. So even if they do casually table the fact that Winston, for example, revealed Channel had flooded its crude refining infrastructure with cement so it could never be restarted, it comes in the form of dismissive throwaway lines rather than actual analysis.
The Left got their “green” win, the Right got their corporate cronyism, and you got screwed. Perhaps this article would have been more eloquently titled, “A Tale as Old as Time.”
