“After publicly throwing commercial power companies under the bus following widespread power outages in August last year, the Electricity Authority has shown the Minister was just trying to shift the blame with her baseless remarks,” says ACT’s Energy spokesperson Simon Court.
“At the time, Megan Woods described the outages as being the result of “commercial decisions” made by the power companies. This report shows her assertions were complete nonsense and instead it was the Government-owned Transpower who was at fault.
“The Minister needs to front up and make sense of this. Did she know the real cause of the outage and intentionally mislead? And if she didn’t know, then why did she say it at all?
“Who would want to run a commercial business providing an important public service, not knowing when the Government is going to throw you a hospital pass for their latest bungle?
“Woods should have established the facts before pointing fingers. ACT even predicted the outages in June last year as major electricity users started to cut back on usage as our supply ran low.
“Media have today reported that the Minister is conveniently unavailable for interviews on the report as well, and her written statement fails to mention her unsubstantiated finger pointing at commercial operators at the time.
“This all comes back to this Government’s inability to be held accountable. They won’t take responsibility for domestic inflation, house prices, gang numbers, MIQ. This Government will do anything to not be held responsible.
“Ministers need to be accountable for their decisions and when they’re caught out they need to front up.”