No shooting from the hip, please

Astory in the Taranaki Daily News on June 25 outlined a ‘‘squeeze’’ was forecast for our region by an ASB economic scoreboard survey, which also ranked us the worst of 16 regions.

I just wonder how many of our readers agree and will leave for Auckland or beyond. I would suggest zero, other than those leaving for other reasons.

New Plymouth Mayor Neil Holdom, MP Jonathan Young and Taranaki Chamber of Commerce chief Arun Chaudhari said they were certainly not influenced by the ASB survey and neither am I.

Surveys are just that, made by a person putting pen to paper. So I thought I would have a look at my Oxford Dictionary to just check the meaning of the word survey and there were several interpretations but here are a couple: cursory inspection or take a general view of, the other being to scan. With interpretations like that how much weight do you put on such a survey? Again, very little.

During my presidency of Taranaki Federated Farmers through the 1980s our national president was Peter Elworthy, who was from a notable South Island family and was later knighted for his services to farming and the country in general. He was an incredibly smart man who proved such a great leader as our nation fought through some rough Rogernomics times.

I heard Peter quote at many shed and public meetings around our province his views about economists so let me quote him: ‘‘If you got all the economist in the world to hold hands, they would never reach a conclusion.’’ How true.

For Taranaki the two big industries are agriculture and oil and gas, with both recently being given a body blow. Farming was hit hard by the early drought closely followed by cyclone Gita. However, I am confident that our farming community is strong and will remain strong as we are a very resilient group.

For the oil and gas industry, we had this stupid decision by the new Government to halt all offshore seismic surveying, which is what indicates the presence of oil and gas to the industry. I believe this is an unbelievable decision at this time, which was also confirmed by responses in a recent survey conducted by Venture Taranaki.

In the minds of some people is a world without fossil fuels but one does not have to be that smart to realise that is a long way off yet.

The North Island has become dependent on the continuing supply of natural gas, so if we don’t continue to complete seismic surveys what will we replace the existing gas supplies with? Yes, we have large deposits of coal but, from what we are told, that is a far worse pollutant than gas. Remember only a few years ago the main gas line ruptured and it cost industry millions of dollars in lost revenue and downtime.

As for the new gas-fired power station being built just south of New Plymouth, I hope they have procured long term gas supplies otherwise under this Government’s plans it may become a white elephant.

Then we have the massive Motunui methanol plant producing valuable exports for our port and of course our national economy. There’s also the massive gas-fired Stratford Power Station, which keeps our country lit up in our hours of need. But as well as the above there is an endless list of other industries that rely on oil and in particular gas to keep the country ticking over. So it makes no sense to shut down such a vital local industry

Let us as a nation put our efforts into finding alternative solutions like electric or hydrogenpowered vehicles. We should also acknowledge that the petrol motor industry has come a long way from leaded petrol to the unleaded fuel of today.

What we all need to strive for is the balance that is created by logic, common sense, science and new technology, along with sensible leadership by our politicians to arrive at solutions that we can live with and prove environmentally friendly. This is a much better option than shooting from the hip.