There are some interesting parallels with New Zealand, where we too have the cultural belief that we can mend anything with 'number 8 wire' (most interesting, I was not aware of that parallel.) This improvisational quality tends to act as a substitute for more serious and disciplined forms of long-term investment.

A tendency to improvisation is in turn born out of a belief that like Australia (population density 3 per square km) and Canada (4.4/km2) we have abundant natural resources on which to prosper and are therefore a 'Lucky Country', to employ the Australian journalist Donald Horne's actually rather ironic expression (Horne argued that Australia's politicians and business leaders were second-rate, but, luckily, Australia had a very low density of population, plenty of golden soil and wealth for toil as their national anthem goes).

Unfortunately, however, New Zealand's population density is not in the low single figures like Australia and Canada but in fact slightly greater than that of Argentina, at nearly 20 per square km, and we also have far less arable land on an area or per capita basis than Australia or Argentina, at only 2.3 per cent of our total land cover, though there is lots of pasture (most of it poor).

The final parallel is that our present govt is also talking up the prospects of a dash for oil and gas except that there probably isn't any more to be found (lots of dry wells and talk about how we will soon have to import LNG, yet the govt is promoting a dash for gas. This is actually less tethered to reality than Milei, which is really saying something.)

Ironically there is one good hand in our otherwise poor deck and that is a huge abundance of potential solar power, much of it in desert-like areas of the south, geographically analogous to Patagonia, which are also close to existing hydro lakes (capable of providing battery storage and with existing transmission infrastructure to plug into), and a huge potential wind resource up and down the whole country as well.

We could therefore become a renewable energy 'superpower', to borrow the title of a book by the present-day Australian economist Ross Garnaut, if enough of our politicians were intelligent enough to grasp this opportunity.

I imagine that the same must also be true of Argentina, in regard to which New Zealand is in so many ways a geographical and demographic mini-me. So, why isn't Milei building solar farms in the Vaca Muerte? (Not a very hope-inspiring name but that is a separate matter.)