SIMON COURT (ACT): It's now two days after an avoidable and costly failure of our critical power infrastructure that caused blackouts across the North Island. We've heard from the Government, we've heard from generators, the grid operator, and experts—what they think caused the blackouts. We've heard about a series of contributing factors, which is what you always hear after an airplane crash or some terrible industrial disaster, and that's very nearly what this was. Contributing factors: planned maintenance on a big hydro dam in the South Island took one of their units out of production, a 400 megawatt gas-fired combined cycle power station in Stratford takes three days to fire up—that's because it's old, it's ageing infrastructure—the Huntly generator taking 10 to 12 hours to fire up. That's not a text message away, not like the McKee peaking plant, those two 50 megawatt jet engines in Taranaki, which are literally a text message and 20 minutes away from being fired up in an emergency. But they were already running at full noise, as was the diesel oil generator in Whirinaki—that diesel oil generator that's a relic of a past Government intervention to provide additional peaking capacity that turned out to be so expensive and inefficient to operate that they sold it to the private sector, because they knew that it was better the private sector take the risk on peaking and managing this dry-year supply.