A Nation Powered by Hot Air

Shane Jones and the Great Kiwi Pizza Crisis

There are moments in life that quietly lay bare the absurd machinery of power. Mine arrived this weekend, in the form of a gas bottle.

The scene - a wholesome New Zealand evening. Our daughter and her boyfriend had come home from uni, a close friend of hers was joining for the night, and one of our oldest mates was staying over. The pizza oven, our prized backyard contraption was wheeled out, its gas-fed fire ready to transform raw ingredients into bubbling, blistered perfection.

Except it wasn’t. Because the gas bottle was empty. And like any responsible citizen preparing to feed family and friends, I did the logical thing - I schlepped the bottle down to our local servo, ready to swap it for a full one.

But alas. Empty shelves. No full bottles. Not for over a month, said the weary attendant, his eyes hollowed out from breaking the news to dozens of other weekend warriors hoping for a hot BBQ or crispy base.

I drove to the next station. “Out of date,” they said. Out of date?! It was a gas bottle, not yoghurt. Apparently, we’d crossed the mysterious threshold of the Ministry for Arbitrary Cutoffs. The bottle could not be refilled. Rules are rules. But I could, of course, purchase a brand-new one, for a modest sum equivalent to an adult ticket to the All Blacks.

As I drove home, the smell of failure still stronger than garlic and anchovies, I started to reflect. The current Government is busy huffing and puffing about the importance of gas exploration. Shane “Drill, Baby, Drill” Jones, that stentorian avatar of extractive nostalgia, has been frothing at the mouth about the "tyranny of ideology" that dared to ban new offshore oil and gas permits.

According to Shane, the only thing standing between New Zealand and prosperity is the minor inconvenience of geological reality. You see, we haven’t actually found any significant new gas fields in years. The cupboards are bare. But that hasn’t stopped him. He bellows on about energy security while ignoring the inconvenient truth that his gas-fuelled dreams are built on geological ghosts.

And then it hit me.

Shane Jones is the gas field.

Not metaphorically. Not politically. Literally. The man generates so much hot air, he could be converted into a mobile refilling station. Just a modest regulator (which, let’s be honest, wouldn’t work on him anyway), a hose and a little nozzle, and boom - pizza night is saved.

Picture it - Shane, lumbering across Aotearoa, dispensing fuel wherever his carbonated rhetoric bubbles over. BBQs roared back to life in Invercargill. School camps rescued in Blenheim. Midwinter spa nights re-ignited in Taupō. He could single-handedly reverse the energy crisis using nothing but his voicebox and a diet of talking points soaked in crude oil.

Of course, this assumes we can safely capture the emissions. No small feat. Any containment vessel would need to be engineered to withstand monumental levels of political hypocrisy, unfiltered chauvinism and the faint whiff of nostalgia for a colonial industrial utopia that never quite delivered.

Let’s be clear - this is not just about pizza. This is about leadership, or the grand theatre of pretending to lead while doing sod all that helps everyday people. We can’t get a bottle of gas on the weekend, but by God, we’re spending millions on oil and gas permits that will likely yield nothing but PR spin and some sandflies.

Meanwhile, real investment in solar, battery storage, wind and actual transition infrastructure is either on pause or stuck in a public consultation loop designed to exhaust optimism.

But hey, Shane’s available. On tap. Just roll him out to your nearest disaster, and he’ll unleash a monologue so volcanically gaseous, it’ll put Taranaki to shame.

One can only hope the emissions trading scheme finds a way to monetise ministerial flatulence. It’s the only renewable resource this Government seems genuinely committed to.

Until then, we continue to live in a country where you can’t cook dinner for your family without a regulatory scavenger hunt and a sermon about fossil futures from a man who thinks the solution to modern problems lies at the bottom of an empty seabed.

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