Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, commenting on petrol prices, said, “Our instinct was certainly that New Zealanders were being fleeced at the pump, now the Commerce Commission has confirmed that is true.”
Jacinda and her colleagues had no such instinct. Instinct is unlearned behaviour universal to every member of a species. Humans have only one instinct and that is when babies, to suckle.
What Jacinda should have said and indeed plainly meant, was her “intuition”.
8 Comments
An industry riven with weekly price wars is colluding over prices!? If I had a dollar for every conspiracy theory I came across about the petrol industry
And to my ears the commerce commission has confirmed nothing of the sort. These are the reasons they gave for believing the market was not operating effectively
1-Many fuel companies are highly profitable
Err, this is the static cake model of economics, If I am doing well someone else must be doing badly. Is the commission suggesting that loss making companies would be the preferred model, as this would clearly demonstrate strong competition.
2.- Regional differences in retail fuel prices reflect variations in competition levels
Isn’t that what you would expect in a market? Variation. I am confident that rental prices in Bluff are different from Wellington, does that mean Bluff is not a market?
3- Discounting does not provide a substitute for competition on board prices
So…. how does this say anything about the competition between fuel companies. It is merely a statement of economic fact (maybe) or preference.
4- Premium petrol margins have grown faster than regular petrol.
Perhaps because volumes are down so the margin needs to be higher to maintain the same infrastructure.
What’s also comical is that it’s her Coalition of Leeches Government that is doing the fleecing via fuel tax. It’s like Jack the Ripper having an inkling that some stabbings have occurred.
It will be of no comfort to long-suffering taxpayers that the money raised will be used by Winston and Shane to “make it rain” for every ne’er-do-well in Northland.
She does use a lot of words, often incorrectly, and almost always to hide whatever it was she was trying not to say.
Jacinda operates on feelings; the rights and wrongs of an issue don’t come into it.
Start a commission to find the facts to fit the feelings, make a captains call, job done.
Her use of words reflects her poor education and her laziness because she obviously has made no real effort to improve even after having lived on the taxpayers salary for years.
Um, didn’t Freud, among others, reckon we have more instincts than just suckling?
But yes, trust Saccharine Cindy with her degree in (mis-) Communications from Waikato Uni to mangle her word salad. Both she and Grant Robertson, either by ignorance or design have been known to confuse “refute” and “rebut”, as in, “I refute that statement”. Er, no, only if you provide incontrovertible facts to the contrary. If not, then you are trying to rebut what was said…and it’s up to us punters listening in on the political tennis match to decide if that rebuttal was a refutation.
An interesting primer on under-appreciated human instincts:
https://listverse.com/2012/01/28/top-10-human-reflexes-and-natural-instincts/
But maybe Bob meant that without the primary instinct to suckle once out of the womb, we wouldn’t make it to the developmental stage where, due to nature or nurture or a combination of both, fearing snakes or yawning are manifest.