New Zealand National Party Incompetence

It's not just New Zealand Labour and the New Zealand First party that are incompetent. It's the National Party as well, which makes NZ vulnerable to say the least as the country lacks effective governance. The parties just mentioned have no right to exist, that's how incompetent they are. But they do exist and the reasons for that are many and varied, but one reason that stands out is the failure of the media and industry groups to hold them to account.

The list of how these parties have failed their country is a long one. The most recent example was Labour/NZ First's oil and gas exploration ban. Sheer incompetence that one. But National did even worse during their previous stint in office. That's what this blog post is about.

I'm talking about cement. Readers may recall the recent outage at Golden Bay Cement's facility near Whangarei and how that impacted NZ's cement supply (Golden Bay Cement is owned by Fletcher Building, their woes continue). This cement plant is the only cement production plant left in NZ. If it goes down as it did this year, the economy is in jeopardy.

Well, the predicament NZ found itself in is because of the inaction of the previous National government, it had nothing to do with Labour as it turns out. 

What National did is it looked the other way, put its fingers in its ears and went 'nah nah nah can't hear a thing' when Holcim announced they were ceasing manufacturing in NZ. That was despite Holcim having the resource and all the consents in place to continue. 

I wrote to the government about this situation, contacted the Manufacturers Association, you name it. Well, the Manufacturers Association understood, they were already on it. But do you think the National government wanted to know? Not likely and I'll tell you why:

They were too thick to understand the importance of cement to an industrialised economy. They're dumb shits. And that's an understatement.

So what happened? Holcim were allowed to close their plant at Westport, and were not required to open a new one. They're allowed to import from Japan or somewhere. Like that makes sense - NOT. Any basic student of microeconmics would know, shipping cement from the other side of the planet when it can come from just down the road is lamebrain. Note, I use the word 'allowed' in this paragraph a lot. That's because cement is a strategic resource and treated that way by sensible countries like the USA and UK. They don't allow any company to just shut down a third of all cement production. They just don't, in the USA or UK any company proposing it would find their assets seized. I'm not kidding.

Why does this cement shut-down impact NZ? Well, it's because the numbers look like this; NZ consumes only about a million tonnes of cement a year. LafargeHolcim has about 2,300 cement facilities producing 280 million tonnes a year. You may notice the size differential (sarcasm). One of their large plants can produce 1-1.3 million tonnes a year, more than all of NZ consumes from all sources whether manufactured locally, imported as clinker and crushed and just imported ready to use.

And this is where it gets really bad. When things are going gang busters, all of this capacity is taken up. That's right, when things recover, NZ will be left swinging in the breeze. And it takes 10 years or so to get another plant up and running properly. What I'm talking about is a potential shut-down of Aotearoa/New Zealand and it's the National party that left NZ so badly exposed.