CHIELDA.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast.
Presented by the New Zealand Herald.
A local election begins today in Auckland. Though you're probably not even aware, three hundred and sixty four thousand Auckland households and businesses can vote this month for the trust board that runs en Trust.
If this name.
Sounds familiar to Auckland's, it's because the majority shareholder of Victor dishes out dividend payments to eligible electricity account holders every year. Yet very few of us actually vote in these elections, with voter turnout hitting single digits in twenty twenty one. Today, on the front page, Herald's senior writer Simon Wilson.
Is with us to us why you should be paying attention.
Simon, First off, can you explain to me what intrust actually is, because all I know is that I get a three hundred and fifty bucks a year.
It's a ridiculously complicated situation, and that's one of the problems that these things should be easy. It's a trust. It's a community trust, which means that the customers who are the people who use the lines that deliver power to Auckland are the owners of the trust. Intrust used to be called the Auckland Energy Consumer Trust. They changed their name to the Snappier In Trust a few years ago, and it owns the company that owns the lines. The lines company is Vector. So if you look at your
power bill, you'll see there's a component in that. If you get it from Mercury, say, there's a component in that that says the lines charged from Vector is whatever it is. Intrust owns most of Vector. There are no other large scale owners of Vector. So interests and effect owns Vector. And because it's a trust, it has to have elections for its trust board, the trustees, and they come along every three years.
Why are electricity users considered investors?
How did that come about?
Well, it goes all the way back to the fact that in this country power energy and electricity used to be state owned. So in the process of the government divesting its ownership of the whole power system in the eighties and nineties, we ended up with some consumer trusts and that was part of the way of saying okay, private investors and come in, they can own this and they can do what they want with these things. But there will still be community ownership. So that's why there
are community trusts. En Trust is the big one in Auckland, but there are other community trusts related to the Lin's companies in other parts of the country.
You mentioned elections.
How often do they happen and why should auckland Is be paying attention?
The elections happen every three years and the way in which they are set up at the moment. Every year, the Interrust Board for men years now has paid a dividend to its beneficiary, so that's us the power will payers. It pays that dividend, and shortly after it pays the dividend on a three year cycle, we get a chance to vote for them to do it again.
I don't suppose many people know about these elections. I suppose what has voter turnout been like in the past.
Six years ago, voter turnout was a low seventeen percent. Three years ago it dropped to nine percent. And one of the issues around the election this time is that you would think that people in charge of the elections and effectively that is the existing trustees who were elected in last time, you would think they'd be worried about that low turnout, and you would think they would do something to grow the numbers better, advertising that kind of thing.
They do nothing, almost nothing. So we have this very low turnout and that suits the people who are there because they got elected last time on a low turnout. By and large, they are voters from the Auckland's eastern suburbs, from Uera, epsom Cohimatmer, et cetera. They are a well held, high voting lot compared to the rest of the city, and the Entrust trustees who've been elected by those people appear to be quite happy for that to continue.
Well should it continue?
Have they? Have?
They been doing a good job simon.
Well, it depends how you look at it. Let's look firstly at the money. Intrust has been paying this dividend to the bill payers for a long time now. In two thousand and six, which is when the current structure was established, the dividend was three hundred and ten dollars
every year. Thereafter, for the next six years it fell in real terms, then it grew for a little bit, but from twenty eighteen it's been falling and falling in real terms, so that three hundred and ten dollars in two thousand and six nearly twenty years ago is now
three hundred and fifty dollars this year. If you look at the effect of inflation, if you use the Reserve Banks calculator and put three hundred and ten dollars in two thousand and six into the calculator and see what it should be worth now, they should be paying US four hundred and eighty three dollars, not three hundred and fifty. So actually the dividend has been declining in real terms, and in my own view that's a bit of a scandal that it's reducing and reducing and reducing.
Once a year intrust beneficiaries receive dividends. Dividend day, you know, is the invalope that makes you say yes, freaksh cheers and trust.
Have they given any explanation for that?
Well. Power is difficult and complex, but at the same time, of course, our power bills are going up. They're going to go up significantly next year, we're told by the industry, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment have advised the government they're going to go up next year and the year after. So we're getting a declining dividend and rising power bills. It's pretty unsatisfactory situation.
So the communities and residents teke At have run the board for as long as it's been a thing. Are they promising to do anything differently? Or do they want to keep things as is?
Well?
They're not that. They promote themselves on the basis of we give you three hundred and fifty bucks this year. Their billboards say three hundred and fifty dollars safe with cn R. CNR is the national party in Auckland, and they're very comfortable with that being the key thing that they do. And you've got to say, actually, that doesn't look like good business practice. These are business people, now,
experienced business people. But if this is an ordinary company, ordinary shareholders would almost certainly not be at all happy with that return.
Who are the other players here? What are they promising?
So there are seven other candidates. Two of them are independents, one of them is a former c and R trustee who fell out with the group and is now standing against them. And then the remaining five belong to a group called More for You, Better for Auckland, Better for Short. They are largely aligned or sympathetic to labor slash green politics. So that you've got straight on the left and on
the right split in this election. Thus, those two independents and the Better Group argue that there should be a better dividend. They argue power prices shouldn't be going up so much, and they have a proposal to address both those issues and at the same time increase security of supply because Aucklanders will know that when the wind blows, the power loans are in trouble, and that happens over
and over in the city. Of course, a security is supply and at the same time also lower our emissions because our power grid at the moment is dependent on colon gas for a proportion of the power that is supplied. So what the Better Group is saying is why don't we roll out solar energy on rooftops.
A little under a month ago, those people who are eligible to vote received their dividend from Intrust. I've read your piece in the Herald this week and see you're not very happy about the timing of this.
Well, I think it's extraordinary. Effectively, what happens is that the sitting members of the Trust board pay people, advertise the fact that they've paid you, and then ask for your vote. It's impossible to imagine that that would be acceptable in a general election or a council election in the main ways in which we exercise democracy in this country. But they're allowed. It's not illegal. They're doing it legally, But in my own view, it's far far from ethical.
Well, could national crow from the rooftops that they gave us a tax cut and then ask for our vote?
Is it not the same thing?
Yeah, I mean, you can call that a bribe in a loose sense, but you've got to put that in the context that there's a full blown political debate that goes on in general elections about how much we should be taxed, where the money should be spent, who's responsible for what, all of those things. So you can put that into that larger debate and say, okay, even if you think it's wrong to promise people tax cuts for their vote, at the same time, there is a big
political debate about it. That's very different from the entrust situation, where almost the only thing that anybody knows about Terrust, if they know anything at all, is oh, that's the group that gave me three hundred and fifty bucks, full stop, whereas the better people are saying, actually, that's just a red hearing that should be bigger, that your powerbles should be lower, and if we had a roll out of solar we would have made a significant difference to security
supply and lowering emissions.
Well, I will say that when I googled Entrust Elections while researching this episode, the top result is, of course the en Trust site, and when you click on the Entrust Elections link, a big, massive pop up ad about the three undred and fifty dollars dividend does appear.
And when I say big pop up for that, doesn't it absolutely feel you have seen it?
Yeah, it's like shameless.
Yeah, why do you think this country is so resistant to installing solar panels?
And how could and trust change this?
It's really interesting, isn't it, Because we've had some poor experiences in the past. Solar was hard to install, some of the equipment wasn't very reliable, batteries were expensive, and the memory of all that kind of thing lingers, and there's a whole bunch of people who think it just
won't work, just how could it work? What we are lucky about in Auckland is that we can look across the Tasman at Australia Australia has around about thirty five percent of its rooftops now have solar panels on them, many with batteries. Now that statistic doesn't just apply in Queensland or wherever the sunshines all the time. It applies in Melbourne. Melbourne has about the same amount of sunshine
hours a year as Auckland, very very similar. Melbourne has thirty five percent of its roofs have sola on them, and that's because they have incentivized people to buy the equipment, or they have made it possible for people to lease it, or that the power companies themselves have retained ownership and given people the use of it. Those models are all available in Auckland, all available to interest, and could really change the game here. It would mean that there's an
organization that has done the numbers on this. It could mean that you might pay as little as a sixth of your current power pill thirty four cents of Killer what hour at the moment, down to six cents killer what hour. If you were paying off the loan to get the equipment, it might be twelve cents an hour. That's phenomenally different from what we currently have. So we could have lower power pills and be doing our bit
for the planet and have more security of supply. Because of course, in a storm, though it's possible your solar panels won't work, might get blown off the roof, that's not really likely. It's far far less likely than a tree bringing down the powerlights. You just wouldn't have that worry anymore.
Unplanned power rateagues are never fun, especially during a storm. It's stressful for everyone involved. Everything Vector does during an outage is to keep our crews and you safe and to get the lights back on as quickly as possible.
Getting rid of power poles helps prevent serious accidents, It makes our grid more resilient to storms and other natural disasters wells, and it keeps our cydewalks free for people.
And so how can Entrust help facilitate this? Can they offer subsidies alone?
Yes, they can. They can set it up so that they can provide the financial incentives and support for this to happen. And it's not just domestic, aren't they. I mean you could do it for your own roof, and if you're flatting your land or could do it, or you could get your land or to do it. But it's also community groups like schools and maria and sports clubs and community halls and so on could all do it.
And then industrial buildings. So you think about when you fly into Auckland, there's hectores and hectares of empty white rus they could all have solar on them. That would make a massive difference. Entrust calculates they could build a bigger connected plant of distributed energy on those commercial roofs, bigger than Huntly, bigger than any of the South Lonlond dams.
Would that mean the end of our dividends though each year?
No, it wouldn't.
It wouldn't.
No, it wouldn't know because now, why aren't they doing it?
Simon?
It is such a good question, And I don't know the answer to that except that there's an enormous resistance to change, and there's enormous resistance to the idea that we should be doing anything except for what is working for those trustees at the moment. And that's a problem for this country and lots of areas, and in this particular area, it's a really massive problem when you think about it in terms of what are we going to
do about growing climate crisis. Dunedan's just experienced at Pauling flooding. That's the latest. We know that. It just happens and happens and happens in this country and in other countries much worse. America's about to get its biggest cyclone. They think the century or is it ever extraordinary? There? We do have to change. We do have to actually do
something about our emissions. We do have to do something about the resilience of our infrastructure so that it's not so subject to being damaged and taken out by storms. We do have to do these things. And if we can do them in a way that will end up being cheaper for us, how fantastic that would be.
Well, what are the downsides of installing solar panel though.
Well, if you like the look of your roof now and you don't think it will look so good with solar panels on it, then I guess that might be a downside.
But in terms of the kind of debate sigmen, I can see the other side of cycle lanes, right. We love our cars, we love our space and our roads. Cycle lanes equals drama. But solar panels, what is the negative?
What is It's not transactional? Is it in any way, and it's the other side of it. Of course, we don't have a large scale solar panel industry in this country at the moment, doesn't mean we can't build one. Australia has an enormous one, the world leader, isn't it.
Well.
I can remember that those subsidies coming through even when I lived in Australia, so ten fifteen years ago.
So we're very well behind, which we sure are.
And we like to think that Australia are nasty coal mining, which is true of course, but actually if you look at what Australia has done there, it is massively significant. And you think about the hundreds and hundreds of jobs that could be created in Auckland and then roll it out nationwide. Then they're good jobs. There's skilled jobs, and they're going.
To go on. Do you think in the wake of, like we said before, the severe weather events of last year, and of course what's happening in the US at the moment, we need to look at undergrounding more of the power network, regardless of who gets in.
Undergrounding is a complicated issue, firstly because it's expensive. Secondly because retrofitting undergrounding, taking out the wires and digging up the streets and putting in.
The underground's disruptive.
It's incredibly disruptive. So the expense in the disruption make it a difficult prospect. New subdivisions, new areas of housing should definitely have undergrounded lines, and that is largely what happens now. But if you're talking about existing suburbs, there's a massive operation which would be extremely expensive, will go straight on your power bill. And also underground lines are harder, of course to service because they're hard to get it.
And you know what would be cheaper and better, Oh.
Yeah, I do. Actually it's called solility.
So simon, how are we going to make people care about this election, regardless of who they want to vote for?
Well, you know, it's not just our job, I guess to make people care. I would like to think that people were listening and reading the newspaper and thinking about these things, and I would like to think there was growing media attention. This week, the voting papers will be arriving in Aucklander's letterboxes and they're only going to get a couple of weeks, a very short period time to voters. Well, so hopefully it'll all ramp up over the next couple of weeks. And I guess I should also say it's
not the whole of Auckland. Older listeners will know the old Auckland City Council and old Monacow Council and Papakura District Board areas. That's who it covers. So that's mainly isthmus Auckland from Avondale all the way out to the Perth of Thames and from Otahou North up to the Harbor Bridge.
Thanks for joining us, Simon. That said, for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at anzat Herald dot co dot z. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Seals with sound engineer Patty Fox.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
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