This week the National Government's favourite Bovver Boy, Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee launched a ministerial inquiry into this country's now dysfunctional market-driven electricity sector.

The question is though....will Gerry undo the damage wrought by his National predecessor and former colleague Max Bradford who introduced the electricity reforms we live with today in 1998? Or will the new National regime further extend the ambit of the profit-driven electricity market system which has produced all this mess? In other words, will this Government do an about face by seeking to regulate power prices as was the case prior to the 1990s?

Answer.....no,not likely.

I feel that just like the 'Jobs Summit' which so far hasn't saved one job from being lost since it was held, the announcement of the ministerial inquiry is just public relations driven flim-flam and was probably suggested by the Tories favourite political consultancy Crosby-Textor in an attempt to keep the electorate sweetly singing John Key's praises. National, as the party that traditionally supports free enterprise and private markets, will never back a regulatory regime where the State re-assumes the power to democratically set prices which is really essential if our poorest and most needy are not to experience another Winter of energy poverty whereby, for example, older people and those with younger families don't turn on their heaters for fear it will send their power bills through the roof.

This has become more the case since Mad Max Bradford's power reforms in the late 1990s. Back then, the Mad Max name was tagged to the then energy minister (after Mel Gibson's character in the 1980's Australian film of the same name) when it was suggested that he was mad enough to force through the wholesale deregulation and privatisation of the electricity sector, which many New Zealanders regarded as a key public service.

Mad Max's move was based on the Treasury-driven premise that free market control of our power supply would force down wholesale and retail prices through greater competition. Assumptions were made that if this were the case, then both business users and consumers would benefit in terms of lower prices and improved service.

However, this has not proven to be the case. As is usual in free markets, the drive for profit maximisation has overridden any concern for the public interest with successive, annual price rises that have hit consumers and businesses hard for the last decade or more. Many of these rises have been over and above the rate of inflation and have been announced just prior to the season with the greatest demand for power, Winter.

Public cynicism has therefore pervaded these announcements and many people have been correct in assuming that prices rises have been driven by the need to raise profit levels rather than improve service through investing in transmission capability as the companies have sought to claim. Electricity service failures in Auckland in recent times have put lie to the contention that power companies are investing in generating capacity.

Furthermore, the profit motive has been made easier to achieve through power being generated largely through one source, hydro generation. Although alternative energy sources such as wind, solar and wave have begun to be added to the national grid, these choices are still not yet available to the vast majority of New Zealanders.

What is more, electricity companies probably can't believe their luck that most of our housing stock built prior to 1978 is uninsulated as their was no legal requirement to do so until after that date. While an increasing number of private home owners and landlords have invested in insulating pre-1978 dwellings, there are still huge numbers of uninsulated homes in this country and the new Government's recent scaling back of it's predecessors plans to insulate all older housing stock to increase energy efficiency and heat conservation will make the goal of insulating all New Zealand homes more difficult to achieve.

So, for all the above reasons, the new power barons have made billions of dollars in accumulated profits over the years at the expense of ordinary Kiwis. This is despite the majority of power generators remaining state or local authority owned but, unlike the democratically elected power boards of old, the main difference is that they are run as profit-generating businesses. The only private sector electricity concern in New Zealand is Contact Energy which is foreign owned and that, last year, generated (to use a pun) the most adverse publicity possible for any company when it's directors voted themselves a hefty pay rise at the same time as it announced whopping 10% or more power price increases for consumers. And before that, remember the Muliaga tragedy in South Auckland, a story that made headlines around the world and bad ones at that for Mercury Energy?

Then, what is the real solution? During Labour's time in office, it promised to regulate the sector and introduced legislation that enabled it to do so but it never utilised this tool in its armoury for it was fearful of spooking overall market confidence during boom times. For many years now political parties such as the Alliance and the Greens have been calling for a return to full public control of the electricity market, the re-nationalisation (without compensation) of Contact Energy, greater efforts to ensure that alternative energy sources are tapped into, that state-funded energy efficiency and insulation projects are launched to make homes warmer and healthier places to live and that power prices should be regulated and even subsidised for domestic consumers as part of a co-ordinated energy and electricity generation policy.

For Gerry Brownlee and his ministerial inquiry team, this recipe will not wash as at the end of the day, the Nats are wedded to the free market as I've said above. This will mean that the outcomes of the inquiry will be pre-ordained in that there will be calls for even greater competition via a manufactured split between the generating and retailing arms of electricity companies and enhanced moves to allow newer electricity firms (read foreign-owned power companies) into the marketplace. Once again, as was the case in the 1990s, the Nats will say that this will lower electricity retail prices for consumers and businesses.....and history will then repeat itself again until the next meaningless, PR-driven inquiry ordered by either National (or Labour). What's more, the Government has just instructed SOEs (including state owned power generators like Meridian and Big River) to increase their dividend return to government, so this will mean one thing...price rises. So, the Nat's will be cutting their nose to spite their face.

That's why the time is now ripe with free market solutions seen to have failed across the globe to call for a democratically run electricity system, where the public interest in providing all New Zealanders with healthy and warm homes has greater prominence in policy than that of satisfying foreign and domestic private owners whose only motive is greed.