Time for fuel companies to grab their ankles
If the ripely entertaining play The Madness of George III is to be believed, medical examination of the monarch back in the day was permitted only by closely scrutinising the state of his bodily evacuations.
For a mere examiner to go so far as to poke or prod, let alone peer into, the body of a gentleman of such elevated status was an impertinence not to be permitted.
For decades, a rather similar approach seems to have been taken when it comes to scrutiny of fuel companies in New Zealand.
Though there’s plentiful evidence that something’s awry, a reproachful society has been dealing only with informational excreta.
Enough of that. The Government needs to probe deeper. It needs to get proctological with these outfits.
And this, albeit in less indelicate terms, is now being proposed.
A study overseen by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has produced findings that, in themselves, haven’t come close to soothing the seethings of a public positioned somewhere on the spectrum between exasperation and rage.
This inquiry found pump prices ‘‘may not be reasonable’’ and that aspects of the industry ‘‘may not be consistent with a workably competitive market’’.
To this, people the length and breadth of the country reply with a three-word response – the third word being Sherlock.
Concerns like that were an appropriate starting point for an investigation, but hardly an appropriate conclusion.
However, the hesitancy of the findings isn’t so much the fault of the Mbie-appointed investigators – they didn’t have the legal authority to demand access to the information they needed to be more emphatic.
Mercifully – and how long has this taken? – legislation is being lined up to give the Commerce Commission the power to compel companies to provide comparable data. This is potentially splendid news, though it has been met by a great deal of public scepticism.
It’s not easy for Governments past or present to look wounded by the suggestion that this is an election-year initiative timed to look purposeful right now, but destined to evaporate into inconsequential vapours after the voting’s done.
After all, for decades, petrol companies have been able to frustrate attempts to gain information specific enough to allow plain insight into how they operate.
Well see what a sufficientlyempowered Commerce Commission is able to find.
Quite possibly a particularly ugly little oligopoly. A hard sentence to say out loud, but it describes a state that really shouldn’t be so hard to identify and confront.