Sir Bill Birch oversaw carless days in the late 1970s - what's his advice in this latest fuel crisis?

Former minister Sir Bill Birch is the first to say he copped criticism over the carless days of the late 1970s and early 80s.

They're the days that drivers, with coloured stickers on their windscreens, chose to keep off the roads during another global oil crisis sparked by events in Iran.

Sir Bill, who was Energy Minister, said the scheme "wasn't perfect" and "wasn't very pleasant".

"But it sort of allowed people to have some use of their vehicles but to do it on a basis of choice in which days they used their cars and which they couldn't use their cars."

And it was better than the other option on the Cabinet table, he said.

"Nobody in the Cabinet was very keen on rationing, some of them could go back to the war years when rationing was a bit of a nightmare," he told RNZ.

"So we adopted the system of carless days."

Sir Bill believed a lot of people still criticising the scheme today were doing so political reasons.

He does not regret it, he said.

"I mean, we pulled the rug as soon as we had confidence that supply had increased but I think, and I still believe, that it was a better mechanism than rationing."

'Ineffective and expensive'

Basil Sharp, an energy economist emeritus professor at Auckland University, remembers the system well but said it did not work.

"And so it just became a huge nuisance for people and it was very, I'd have to say, it was ineffective and it was costly because you've got to enforce these things."

Sharp likens the response to what was seen during Covid.

"Did we get 100 percent compliance with Covid? Of course not. Some people don't follow the rules and they're going to try to find ways around the rules," he said.

"So in the end... it just became ineffective and expensive and so I think rightly so, the government ditched it."

Sharp said it was a different economy at the time.

"That was an economy based on regulations - interest rates, prices, the cost of electricity, you name it," he said.

"And so the mindset at the time was 'well, let's regulate driving'."

The regulation did little to lower fuel consumption, which is said to have dropped only about 3 percent.

There were other measures too like cutting the open road speed limit to 80 km/h, and restricting when service stations could sell fuel.

Alan Webb, from the Tauranga Mini Owners' Club, said people quickly found ways to get around the coloured stickers.

"People started doing what was referred to as portable stickers, what they would do is put the carless day sticker on a thin piece of perspex and then they could transfer it from one car to another which meant then they could use any car any day of the week," he told RNZ.

"It was never really closely inspected, so it wasn't that successful.

"People were quite angry, quite annoyed about it and some of them just blatantly ignored it, that's what they did, they blatantly ignored it."

Drivers were also able to get exemptions from the scheme, and a black market for exemption stickers cropped up.

There were also forgeries, which all made enforcement a problem.

Households with two cars could simply choose different days to be carless.

Sir Bill Birch said 1979 was a very similar crisis to what was happening now, but current conditions were "a wee bit different".

"Any government has got to go through the options that are available today, and it sort of hangs on supply and demand," he said.

"It's the government's responsibility to manage that, there's nobody else that can have the authority to work their way through a crisis of that nature."

He said the current crisis would be front and centre of Cabinet.

"And they'll have to work out how much storage they've got, what the shortage in supply is going to mean to price, how much increases in prices we're going to see, how damaging that's going to be to the inflation and cost of living," he said.

"And all of those things are very complex that he government's got to work their way through and consider the impact on the inflation index and cost of living."

Sir Bill said the current crisis had made him think a lot of the past.

He said the government needed a longterm energy strategy to deal with times when supplies are pinched.

"And my advice to them is to do exactly what we did and that is to engage with people outside of the government who are going to be affected."

Sir Bill said shortages affected industry, production and jobs.

"And so there's a whole lot of people in the community that you need to really touch base with and talk to about how it's going to affect them and what their views are on how it's managed by the government, so it's not just a simple decision by the government," he said.

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