We could look at bailed-out TranzRail and Air NZ, with privatisation leading to risk-free pay-outs for the temporary owners of infrastructure that couldn’t be allowed to fail. Or Telecom that doesn’t look out for NZers interests, and needs us to pay for it to build us a fibre network. But let’s look at the “success” story of Contact, the closest privatisation to National’s new plans.
John Key, very optimistically, reckons he can raise $10 billion by selling our assets. Key’s Government gave massive tax cuts, averaging $16,000 each, to the richest 1% of taxpayers that they’ll get year after year. The present value of those tax cuts for the richest 1% is over $10 billion. He’s selling our assets to pay for tax cuts for the richest 1%.
In 2008, John Key’s line was ‘New Zealand doesn’t have a debt problem, it has a growth problem’. In Budget 2010, he said the Crown would be back into surplus in record time. In December, he said debt wouldn’t force a downgrade. Now, he says debt is such a problem we need to slash and sell. When did he mean what he said? Never. It has never been about debt.
Ironically, the best response to Key’s ‘slash and sell’ agenda came from Obama, whose spotlight Key is always trying to share: “Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact.”
Just what is this political “courage” the Herald speaks of?
Halfway through last year I suggested we’d see a July election as National raced to lock in a second term before their numbers fell.
I reckon that’s exactly the strategy we’re seeing today. The tories know that their numbers are only going to go down this year as their policies bite so they’ve decided to put the pedal down.
While we’re all eagerly awaiting Tracy Waktins et al’s reviews of John Key’s controversial decision to wear a mauve tie in his state of the nation speech, I thought I would look at some of the reasons why asset sales are such a stupid idea.
So John Key’s great bit of policy for the election is to sell off the family jewels. Generations of New Zealanders have built up these assets, and now, like in the 90s, National intend to flick them off to foreign investors, and drain the country’s wealth.
You’ll remember the disgraceful Schmuck scandal when Minister John Carter had clauses inserted into legislation specifically to legalise Doug Schmuck’s annexation of a public reserve. John Key took no action. Now, Kate Wilkinson and David Carter got in on the act – forcing DoC to sign over more public land for private use.
The Herald today has an article that serves as a stalking-horse for privatisation of public assets. Privatisation is a core part of National’s agenda- it will have to push for it in some form at the election. Articles like this one are all about softening us up for that campaign.
Since it came to office, National has cut the Conservation budget in real terms by 2% and the cuts are going to get deeper. Now, we learn that DoC is looking at contracting out camping areas on the conservation estate to be run for a profit. Coincidence? I think not. It’s privatisation by stealth.
Say you run a large company. Say the manager of a division in your company chose do a deal that improves the division’s own profitability instead of one that would have made the division less profitable but the company as a whole more profitable. You would be angry. So why are the people who run our SOEs required to act like that?
‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the House,
Nats announced policies, they’re usually scared to espouse.
Journos on holiday, Key out of reach on his Hawaiian vacation,
It was the time to let slip, their plan for ACC privatisation.
Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee has waited, until after the year-end press gallery drinks, to announce that the state owned Whirinaki power plant will be sold by tender process. The Government talks about having our interests at heart, but the truth is that it is selling off the family silver again. And slippery John Key is doing it while we’re focussed on Christmas.
What to do if you’re a government with an ideological fixation on selling assets, which is hugely unpopular? The public will catch on if you put SOEs as full entities up for auction. So, you don’t sell off the companies. Instead, you sell off the things they own or, through bond issues, their profit streams. We’ve been warning this would happen. Now, it is.
Three government investment decisions in the last couple of weeks have shown the deficiencies in the neoliberal way of doing things. SOE Solid Energy’s lignite-to-liquids obsession, Kiwirail buying trains in China rather than making them itself and Steven Joyce decision to re-create Telecom’s monopoly by giving it 70-84% of the broadband contracts.
3 under the radar stories yesterday. All linked by ideology. Kiwirail to buy 300 wagons from China because its cheaper than building them here. Not allowed to consider wider economic gains. Collins outsources her new prison to a multi-national with a history of prisoner abuse. English wants more ‘value’ from public assets. Value for whom? The likes of Serco?
So Pansy’s gone. That should mean we can breeze over the fact that thanks to National’s economic policies (or lack thereof) the economy’s […]
It was pretty cool that the next Finance Minister wrote a post about my post yesterday. Even if was to say I was dickishly misinterpreting him 😀 I’ve got a couple of points in reply but the biggest is why is Labour talking about (restrictive) privatisation and PPPs policies when there are much more important economic issues at hand?
By backing a (soft) privatisation policy, David Cunliffe is throwing away a vital point of difference with National and allowing National to move rightwards. Worse, Labour appears to be determined to give up political advantage for dumb policy: public-private partnerships and tolling have a terrible track record.
By backing private public partnerships David Cunliffe has potentially given the government a free pass on privatisation – one of the biggest issues of the next election.
That’s bad policy and bad politics. I expected better from him.
The Government is planning to reduce ACC cover and portray it as a cost saving for levy-payers. You would get less income coverage when injured and have to endure a longer wait time of three weeks until your coverage would begin. Levies would be personalised on the private model. This is privatising ACC on bite at a time with no actual cost savings.
In contrast to National’s policy vacuum on the economy, Labour has been focusing its policy work on a major change in direction. It’s obvious that the hands-off approach introduced in the 1980s has failed, leading to mal-investment in housing with an economy stripped of its manufacturing capability and geared for import-dependent consumerism.
It’s great to hear Phil Goff announce that a Labour government won’t let overseas interests to own more than 25% of monopolistic companies, like ports and airports, and farmland. In the new world economy we’re moving into, a global scramble for vital natural resources like farmland, we need to keep the foundations of our economy in Kiwi hands.
National is developing an agenda for privatisation. It’s crazy. State owned assets are generating some rare bright spots in an otherwise dismal sea of poor economic news. So why would any rational government sell ACC (or other state owned assets)? Why would any rational government be cutting back on the Cullen Fund? Why are the Nats determined to kill the golden geese?
20 years too late, Spud has announced that the neoliberal privatisation agenda has been a failure. He says we sold the wrong things, sold them the wrong way, got too little money, and created private monopolies. Of course, what we should have done is hold on to our assets, rather than turning them into cash cows for foreign owners.
In the Treasury asset sale papers we released earlier this week, a key word is blanked out again and again. It is the name given for a group of SOEs in a series of slides on reforming the SOE sector. One can only presume that this list is the group of SOEs that the Government will be seeking to sell, if it can find a way to dupe the public first.
John Key and Bill English said they have neither requested nor seen official advice on privatisation. That is a lie. Even just the papers we’ve seen, let alone the eight Treasury says are still under consideration, show that privatisation is very much on the government’s agenda. They’re just trying to work out how to sneak it past us without a public backlash.
For the last few months, the Standard has been politely asking Treasury for their papers on the sale of Crown assets. To say they weren’t keen to share would be an understatement. We’ve managed to get a few papers of the papers, more are being withheld. These papers show what we’ve long suspected: the Government plans to force SOEs to issue bonds as a method of privatisation by stealth.
We’ve already seen criticism of the move by National to introduce private prisons (eg. NZ Herald editorial). Now the soon-to-depart prison boss, Barry Matthews has indicated that he too has his doubts.
Judith Collins is lauding the $1.2 billion of economic activity that will suppoedly result from the private prison at Wiri. But wait, the government is planning to spend $101 million on construction and $40m per year for 30 years on wages. That’s $1.3b spent for only in $1.2b of economic activity. How’s that? Oh, yeah, the private foreign owner who will be taking hundreds of millions offshore.
Kiwi Dad Michael Fay and his wife Sarah announced today that they would be keen to invest in any SOEs the government privatises. “My old mate David Richwhite and myself made $500 million off the last round privatisation.” said Fay, “It was a great success. We used other people’s money to buy public assets. Asset-stripped, flogged them off and walked away”
When National get their ideological wish to get a prison privately run here, the most likely candidate will be Australian/UK prison company G4S. In the ‘care’ of these crime profiteers, an Aboriginal man died in a Western Australian prison van, during a four hour ride without ventilation in 50 degree plus temperatures that gave him 3rd degree burns. And that’s far from the only abuse.
Papers obtained by Radio New Zealand under the OIA show Treasury told the Government that investing $100 million in extra capital in Kiwibank would bring the Crown a healthy return. Not long after, Bill English and John Key started talking about selling Kiwibank. It raises the question: if people are so keen to buy are our assets, why would we be keen to sell?
The Government’s privatisation by stealth agenda continues – from ACC to Whanau Ora to mining to PEDA to water.
And the fight back is gathering strength.
The post-Budget bump for National in the Roy Morgan polls was there but was small and it’s already evaporating. Fundamentally, National’s policies just aren’t popular,as the poll showing 80% opposition to asset sales proves. National is still pursuing privatisation by stealth (whanua ora, PEDA, water etc), giving the Left an opportunity make public assets the big issue of 2011.
