Business NZ's Phil O'Rielly has made a useful contribution to the debate over policy response to climate change and sustainability in yesterday's Herald on Sunday.
Businesses play an integral role in our communities, with their profits and wages providing the resources essential for infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and roads essential to community prosperity.
The money we earn from exports when our businesses succeed offshore provides crucial opportunities for our firms to expand, innovate and employ more people - central to helping Kiwis afford the standards of living we all aspire to.
So it is alarming that when several well-respected business organisations last year raised concerns with how the Government was moving to establish an emissions trading scheme, they were sidelined for their views and - in the worst cases - labelled vitriolic and unbalanced.
Brian Leyland gives his perspective on the Government's Energy Strategy in today's NZ Herald.
He is not positive.
New Zealand would be better off without a strategy than it would be with the one outlined in "Powering Our Future".
Support for it comes from those who believe that economic development is incompatible with the environment, those who see it as a way of making profits from carbon trading, those (like Al Gore and his Generation Investment Management company) who are pushing heavily subsidised renewable energy projects and those academics that see it as a bottomless source of research money and an excellent way of getting recognition, promotion and income.
The Government sees it as a way of making even higher windfall profits from Meridian and Mighty River Power and gaining votes and exerting more control over the economy and our lives. And no one shows any concern for domestic and industrial consumers who will pay more and more for an increasingly unreliable power supply.
