Four spokesmen, one script, no answer on the bill
Bridges, Hartwich, Abernethy and now Genesis’s own chief executive have all run the same defence this winter. Watch what happens whenever someone asks them a number.
On Sunday morning, Genesis Energy chief executive Malcolm Johns sat down with Q+A’s Jack Tame and did what every gentailer defender has now done this winter. Asked a hard question, he answered a soft one.
Four men and women have now run the same defence of the electricity market inside a few months, each with something to lose if the public stops believing it.
It started with Simon Bridges, who argues vertical integration — the same four companies both generating and retailing power — is holding back investment. Then Oliver Hartwich of the New Zealand Initiative said splitting the gentailers wouldn’t fix your bill, without leading with the fact his think tank is funded by the companies he was defending. Then Bridget Abernethy of the industry’s own lobby group made the identical case in the NZ Herald. Now it’s Johns’ turn, and he isn’t even pretending to be independent.
Tame asked him plainly what would break if Genesis’s generation and retail arms were forcibly separated. Johns said prices would become more volatile. Tame asked the obvious follow-up: but would they be lower? Johns reached for “10 independent reviews over 20 years” that found no evidence separation lowers prices — the same line, almost the same words, Abernethy used citing the Frontier report a fortnight earlier. Four defenders, one script.
Then Tame asked the question that actually matters to a household: once the Government’s billion-dollar LNG import terminal is built and Genesis is buying gas through it, how much does the bill go up? “It’s not an answer I can give you right now,” Johns said, before conceding the cost would ultimately be recovered from customers, because it “has to be funded through revenues that companies earn.”
He would put a number on the balanced wholesale price. He would put a number on the household savings from electrification. He would not put a number on the one bill this interview was actually about.
That’s the pattern. Johns can tell you the market balances at $125 a megawatt hour. He can tell you 60 percent electrification would save the average household $3,000 a year and strip $10 billion off the national energy bill. He can tell you sunlight travels 150 million kilometres and never once passes through the Strait of Hormuz. What he cannot tell you, on the one question Tame kept returning to, is what the LNG terminal will cost you.
Pressed on whether rooftop solar could shrink the dry-year risk enough to make the terminal unnecessary, Johns pivoted again — to Australia’s solar duck-curve, to batteries, to the 5 percent of Genesis’s January output bought back from customers’ own roofs. Genuinely interesting. Not the question Tame asked.
The timing isn’t subtle. Power bills rose 6.8 percent for households and small businesses this year, winter is ending, an election is coming, and NZ First and the Greens both want the gentailers broken up. Four voices on the industry payroll have converged on the same message inside one season: don’t look at the structure, look at the sunshine.
I made the separation point myself in April, arguing it “would not, by itself, fix New Zealand’s electricity bills.” I said it for a different reason than any of these four. Separation isn’t the disease. Scarcity is — and I was writing about it in Stuff in 2013, calling the whole thing a “failed experiment” and calling for it to be rethought entirely under public ownership.
Thirteen years later, the numbers back that up, not down. Consumer NZ estimates retail prices are around 60 percent higher in real terms than at the time of the 1998 reforms, in a country generating more than 80 percent of its power from renewables that cost next to nothing to run once built. The four gentailers posted combined earnings of $2.7 billion in the 2024 financial year. Ten independent reviews, and not one of them was asked to explain that figure.
None of Bridges, Hartwich, Abernethy or Johns is lying. They are each doing exactly what their salary requires: defending a structure that pays their employer more when supply stays tight than it would if the lights were simply kept on cheaply. The tell isn’t what they say. It’s what they won’t put a number on.
The fix was never separation, and it was never Bridges’ taxpayer-underwritten generation scheme either. The fix is ownership. Fold the four gentailers into a single utility, price at average cost, and let the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and ACC hold what the public effectively built in the first place.
I said it in 2013. Four well-paid people have now spent a winter proving me right without meaning to.
