The government is promising no sudden surprises as it gets ready to spell out the criteria for escalating New Zealand’s fuel response, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.
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What to expect today
Finance minister Nicola Willis and associate energy minister Shane Jones will front a press conference at midday, in which they set out the trigger points for moving New Zealand up through the four levels of the National Fuel Plan. No step up the levels is expected today – as RNZ’s Jo Moir reports, Willis told parliament on Thursday that the country would not be changing its alert level and she did not expect the government to be “skipping through the response phases”. However, for the first time, the public will learn the specific criteria that would prompt such a move.
An alert level refresher
New Zealand is currently at level one: fuel is flowing normally, but a committee consisting of representatives from government agencies and fuel companies has been convened to monitor the situation. As Stuff’s Emma Ricketts explained, level two would bring prioritisation measures, with designated lanes for critical customers at petrol stations. level three would introduce mandatory demand constraints such as restricted opening hours, maximum purchase limits and bans on filling jerry cans.
Level four is when national supplies are “severely impacted” and only critical customers would be served at designated distribution points. Willis has been clear the goal is to avoid levels three and four: “Our goal is to be doing enough to source the supply of fuel internationally that that does not become necessary.”
Watching diesel closely
Thursday saw an unscheduled update from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Concerns had been mounting about in-country diesel stocks, which as 1News’s Justin Hu reported, had fallen on Wednesday to 18.1 days’ cover, their lowest point so far, with only two ships listed as arriving in the next fortnight – just one carrying diesel. The clarifying update added important context: six vessels were already discharging or moving between New Zealand ports, carrying 11.6 days’ worth of diesel not previously counted as “in-country”. The ministry said fuel supply remained within normal levels and there was “currently no need for New Zealanders to change how they buy fuel”.
The information problem
MBIE’s twice-weekly data releases have drawn criticism for being too infrequent. As The Post’s Nick James reports (paywalled), the last full update drew on data from Sunday midnight, with the next scheduled for Monday. The Taxpayers’ Union took matters into its own hands on Thursday, releasing a “Fuel Clock” that draws on publicly available MBIE and shipping data. Spokesperson Tory Relf argued that “if we can do it in a few days, with essentially a very clever intern, MBIE should be able to do it themselves”. The ministry said it had no plans to release data more frequently, citing the time needed to compile and quality-check figures provided voluntarily by fuel importers.
The Fuel Clock joins NZOilWatch, a site run by a BNZ financial markets project manager that has quickly built a cult following among those tracking the story closely. Both show considerably lower figures than official totals, and both readily explain why: they can only track vessels identifiable through public sources, and deduct for consumption elapsed since the data snapshot was taken. MBIE, by contrast, surveys fuel companies directly and has full visibility across every vessel in the supply chain.
Reading the fine print
Which brings us to Politik’s Richard Harman, whose headline “What aren’t we being told about fuel supplies?” (paywalled) set a certain expectant tone. Harman described NZOilWatch as using ships’ Automatic Identification System (AIS) “to verify that the tankers are actually headed for New Zealand” – framing that implies the site independently confirms what MBIE might not be disclosing.
Except that is not quite what NZOilWatch says about itself. The site is explicit: it tracks only “the handful of vessels we can identify through public sources”. That is rather different from independently verifying the entire inbound fleet. The gap between NZOilWatch’s figures and MBIE’s is, as the site itself acknowledges, simply a limitation of working with partial public data. Harman’s question was attention-grabbing; the answer, it turns out, is fairly straightforward.
Related:
- Gone By Lunchtime: Is New Zealand getting its fuel crisis response right? (The Spinoff)
