Written By:
Anthony R0bins - Date published:
7:07 am, November 23rd, 2011 - 53 comments
Categories: assets, economy, election 2011, national, privatisation -
Tags: asset sales, lies, stop asset sales, treasury
You can’t trust anything the Nats say. John Key has a long history of lying. Other Nats add their own lies to the mix. Three lies in particular have been both recent, and significant for the election.
The first was Key making up (on the most dubious of “sources”) the nonsense that rating agency S&P had said that a credit downgrade was more likely under Labour. S&P flatly denied it. Ouch.
The second lie was Key’s often cited excuse for not raising the minimum wage – it will “cost 6000 jobs”. It turns out that in fact Treasury gave him the opposite advice: “The balance of probabilities is that a higher minimum wage does not cost jobs”.
Last night TV1 revealed the third lie, on the explosive topic of asset sales:
Ombudsman called in over asset sales
Two major aspects of National’s asset sales plan are in question.
ONE News has discovered that the party has very limited official advice to back up its claims about restricting foreign investors and big businesses buying up the assets. ONE News has been fighting since August to have this made public under the Official Information Act.
Finally this morning, ONE News found out that despite claims that up to 90% of these assets will remain in New Zealand hands, the Treasury has not provided the Government with any detailed analysis on that aspect of the asset sales policy. …
In August, National said it expected New Zealanders would end up owning 85% to 90% of those companies, and just 10% to 15% would end up in foreign hands.
“These companies will remain firmly and overwhelmingly in New Zealand control,” Tony Ryall, State Owned Enterprises Minister, said in August.
Information blocked
ONE News used the Official Information Act to seek the expert advice given to back up those claims.
The Government refused to release the information about the asset sales so ONE News called in the Ombudsmen to investigate.
The response to the ONE News complaint reveals the Government has received very little official advice to back up some of its major claims about the asset sales programme.
In fact Treasury admits it has not provided the Minister of Finance with any advice about a possible 10% cap on shares held by any single company or individual. … The Ombudsmen’s ruling also says that the basis for the 85% to 90% domestic take-up rate and the 10% cap for any one shareholder was oral advice provided by Ministerial advisers and informal discussions with market contacts. …
In other words the Nats have been advising themselves about whatever fairy story they want the public to believe. And they’ve been caught out just days before the election. Read on for plenty more disturbing revelations in this report:
A significant amount of information is being held back from the public about this asset sales programme. In fact five official reports on asset sales policy are being kept secret.
The Ombudsman has made an official ruling that the Government was right to refuse the release of these papers. The ruling says it is too early in the sales process, and if the information got out now it could affect the amount of money gained from these assets. The ruling also says the negative economic impact of that could be significant given the total asset sales price is expected to be between $5 billion and $7 billion.
ONE News has argued that people need this information to judge whether the asset sales policy stacks up, given they are about to go to the polls in a few days’ time. The Ombudsman will hear ONE News’ final case tomorrow and make a final ruling probably by Thursday. That would leave one day for this to be debated before people go to the polls to vote on Saturday.
We’re being asked to vote to sell our best performing assets on the basis of lies and incomplete information. In the best case, if the Ombudsman decides that the public has a right to know what’s going on, we get one day to assimilate it before the election. It’s nonsense, it’s a travesty, it should never have come to this.
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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And these lies the only be the very tip of a massive iceberg of deception that the Right Wing is pulling on every NZer. I’ll be out again today making it clear to voters that a vote for National is a vote to sell our great country out to foreign ownership.
Both Phil Goff and Andrew Little supported selling Air New Zealand to Quantas isnt it being a bit hypocritical to be saying what they are saying now?
[ you need to actually look at what happened when Labour bought AirNZ, rather than just repeat Kiwiblog’s latest lie. Also, learn to spell Qantas. Eddie]
You mind altering your ‘log in’ name a bit to avoid potential confusion? Cheers.
Key was on Breakfast comparing the partial sale of Trade me to his plans for selling our Kids future to his mates
TRADEME is owned by Fairfax u dick WE own these assets not you or ur tory mates..
I have been going hard out on Facebook and have managed to persuade a few younglings to vote
Not many had heard of the youth rates plan
seems the story isnt and hasnt been getting across or maybe they dont care i dunno
None of National’s so called reasoning behind asset sales stacks up. Most business commentators and economists think it’s a dumb idea and an overwhelming majority of New Zealander’s oppose it. Seeing as National focus group the life out of every other policy why are they so comitted to this one when it’s so widely opposed?
Two reasons – pig-headed ideology and a nice big hand out to their wealthy mates who can then price gouge and asset strip.
John Key is tired and the brand is damaged – his star has passed the pinnacle of it’s trajectory. If, and it’s a big if, National do form the next government, once the asset sales programme kicks in Key’s brand would take bigger and bigger hits. Key knows this and I reckon if National gain another term he will resign within 12 months “to spend more time with his family” before any asset sales begin. That’s when Kiwibank, ACC and numerous other assets will go up for sale – the firesale will be unstoppable and we will become defenceless clients in our own country.
Remember Key has only ever offered an assurance that Kiwibank etc. will not be up fo sale “while I’m Prime Minister”. He will want to have a legacy as ” NZ’s most popular Prime Minister” – not as the guy who sold us out.
Remember Key has only ever offered an assurance that Kiwibank etc. will not be up fo sale “while I’m Prime Minister”.
And what would you have him do? He can no more limit what his eventual successsors may do than Phil Goff can control what his successor will do. Why it was just the other day that Labour Party stalwart mickysavage said on this very site:
So, if mickysavage one day becomes (or re-becomes!) leader of Labour, AirNZ would presumably be on the block. And other assets that meet his criteria for sale.
They are solely in power to pass our assets off to themselves and their rich mates making all the rest of us serfs – if we’re lucky.
Pigheaded ideology is what pigs think when their noses are in the trough.
So let me get this straight…….
– NZdrs have paid for and own a series of assets.
– The governments wants some more money.
– They say we have money.
– They want our money.
– So they are going to sell us shares in what we already own.
– So we hand over our savings, assume a risk that we will lose our money, in hope that we will get a return bigger than the rate of inflation.
– The government will then take our money and use it to plug gaps in their budget created by giving tax cuts to the rich.
To convince us that it is a good idea and hide from us the downside….
– They announce, (3+ years after they first announced the sale and just before the election), a new idea that the money will go into a fund with laudable aims – except all of those aims should be a part of their normal budget.
– They hide the fact that they have no Treasury advice on who will be able buy the shares.
– They ignore the fact that because of increased inequality, increased unemployment, a low wage economy, an internationally recognised low rate of savings – only the rich and institutions will be able to buy the shares.
– To hide this and to make us feel good they use terms like “mum and dad investors”
– They ignore that fact that they cannot prevent the shares being on sold to foreign interests.
– In the week before an election based in asset sales it is revealed that they have a number of reports from government departments that they refuse to release using the excuse that they “commercial sensitive”.
+1
Now if you could only sum it all up in four words or less, a nice slogan, so it would hold all the power of the truth but none of the pesky thought, reflection and realisation required to comprehend it, you’d get through to NZ voters.
It’s utterly frustrating knowing that people will not accept any information that isn’t in the form of a soundbite. And if information does get through, the next hurdle is whether the person feels they like the idea or not – not if it’s true or right.
Keep Assets
HawaiKey Retiree
The Govt buys and sells assets all the time and no-one seems to care. It buys property and sells it off when it has no more use for it. It’s been doing that pretty much since our founding. Look at how many schools have been closed and the land sold off in the last 20-30 years, or old railway lines or road alignments. Why have these passed under the radar? Surely there is no philosophical difference.
They haven’t passed under the radar. What do you want – to jump in a time machine and revisit the arguments that happened in the past?
If I come round to your house and steal your stuff and I’m not caught, though you later find out some stuff is gone, it’s ok with you for me to do it again? And if you don’t report the theft immediately, the police can disregard you complaint – since you aren’t really all that bothered.
That must be it.
Your words imply that silence and the inaction of the disempowered and ignored is approval; that memory is reality (once momentarily forgotten, the original deed did not happen); that no one may learn from experience; and that levels of importance do not exist.
What other amazing ingenuine gymnastics will you try next?
That a person, held in custody or oppressed for any reason, has no human value, no rights, or choice of their own.
That all the people in the history of the world that you personally didn’t meet or can remember, didn’t exist. And everything you don’t know right now, but that others do and don’t say, also doesn’t exist.
Once someone commits to a behaviour, or consents to an action, they may not ever change their consent, or consider changing their minds. That changing one’s mind in the face of considered evidence is hypocrisy.
Or that since people stub their toe and don’t see a doctor, those with internal bleeding should not see a doctor either.
And of course, anyone who doesn’t agree or reflect your values is stupid and unworthy of being heard.
Are you a troll, or do you just not understand the English language?
yeah its not selling your best preforming assets at bargain basement prices as for rail assets the vultures made in excess of $ billion dollars out of the land they got for nothing!
Insider trading they call it they were punished by the courts but the ill gotten gain is in a swiss bank account. Third world banana republic style
Supposedly the NATs really care and selling the Assets for much needed cash to pay for Schools, Health etc…. yeah right….. Its another TAX, just delayed…..
Unfortunately if you begin to dig into similar experiments in raising cash you see the picture is not so pritty, see below
Taken from: Public Services International Research Unit
http://www.psiru.org/node/16067
UK citizens pay £24billion extra for PPPs, profits go to tax havens
“Since PFI was first devised in 1992, more than £70bn ($114bn) of capital has been raised to provide new hospitals, schools and prisons, new roads and defence projects. These services are being provided now. But payment for them – including their running and maintenance – will cost taxpayers, including children yet unborn, £240bn to 2050. This is equivalent to about one-seventh of current national income.”
A recent report by the European Services Strategy Unit also showed that PFI projects had been sold on repeatedly, generating profits of over £10 billion. At least 90 of the 700 existing PFI projects are now owned by companies based in tax havens, so that UK citizens did not even receive tax revenues on these profits made out of government spending. http://www.european-services-strategy.org.uk/news/the-ps10bn-sale-of-shares-in-ppp-companies-new
No mention in Stuff about the Asset Sales Scam.
Need to Know – A PBS video on Privatizing infrastructure:
This sums up the game of Privatisation – basically it highlights how risk is transfered to the public while profit goes to the Companies….
http://video.pbs.org/video/2132368113/
Thanks Karl for both links on privatisation. Very well explained. I just can’t understand why the polls continue to show NZr’s are supporing Key despite his proposed asset sales!
Unbelievably inept that Espiner and the producer at One News didn’t seem to get that the “ministerial advisors” providing the advice are actually paid Tory political flunkies working for Tory ministers.
Rather bemused by the interview with 2 key economists on Asset Sales this morning on National Radio. I thought the economists and Radio NZs analysis was a little lite. Admittedly they only have a few sounds bites to get across their points, but I think the issues are little deeper. Questions such as the following were not asked: who assumes the risk (public); who gets the profit (private); and are public service employees competent enough to mix it up with big business? Interesting that the video: Need to Know – A PBS video on Privatizing infrastructure described by previous blogger seems to cover off these points….
KJ
Step outside the slave camp and you start to see a lot of hidden truths. Stay inside the slave camp and you will see and hear what the slave masters want you to see and hear.
NR is an important channel for promotion of misinformation and DAU (disaster as usual).
Not inept but willfully omitted, Gluon knows exactly what’s going on…they all do.
It’s called ‘controlling the mesaage’
What is national suppose to do when the logic, facts and public support is so totally opposed to this policy? Bend the truth to justify the policy outcomes. But unlike keeping the age of entitlement for retorted at65 key has not said he will resign should this policy be changed. He maybe just kicking the tires, pity he cannot see how distasteful this is to many
Key confirmed on RNZ this morning that he is not negotiable on assets sales. They will go ahead regardless of public opinion, regardless of coalition arrangements.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2503239/john-key.asx
That’s because it’s in his job description when recruited from business to front these clowns getting back into power…..looky here a state housing raised, solo mother success story, style and image first and foremost.
blag another term so we can say ‘mandate to sell’ then off you go job done, by the way how many shares do you and your mates want ?
tc
Spot on, though I prefer to use the term ‘criminals’ when obvious malfeasance is involved and ‘clowns’ when acts of utter stupidity are involved.
No one really expected the Nats to have any real advice, did they? They haven’t sought any over any of their other idiotic policies, so why would they start now?
They govern by ideology alone.
Well that’s not quite true
http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2011/11/treasury-on-minimum-wages.html
Am I missing something?
I can’t find references to where the Government claimed they were relying on detailed Treasury advice on asset sales.
All Guyon Espiner has found is that Treasury has not provided the Government with any detailed analysis of expected ownership after sales.
Given the issues with Treasury advice in the past, I can only conclude that this is not necessarily a bad thing…
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1111/S00456/secret-state-owned-assets-documents-must-be-released.htm
I agree with the Green Party 100% on this matter.
‘Secret State-Owned Asset’ documents MUST be released before the election.
How can the public ‘cast an informed vote’ without the FACTS?
Penny Bright
Independent Candidate for Epsom
Campaigning against ‘white collar’ CRIME, CORRUPTION and ‘CORPORATE WELFARE’
I suspect the global elites now recognise there is very little time left to loot the public purse before it all goes down. Their attempts to defy the laws of physics, chemistry, geology etc. are increasingly seen to be failing, and now they are struggling to even hold their phoney money system together.
The US ‘super-committee’ has effectively admitted there is nothing they can do to prevent collpase (almost certainly before 2014). Maybe that is why faith in US political institutions is now measured as a single digitit percentage. And the Eurozone is already falling apart. NZ, Australia, Canada and a few other places provide the last reasonably stable places in which the looters can make a few fast bucks prior to the collapse.
Key obviously knows we are in the early stages of systemic failure and is finding it increasingly difficult to keep up the pretence that he will provide the average NZer with anything other than destitution if re-elected. Lying continuously when things provide the facade of going well is obviously a lot easier for him than lying continuously when things are going badly.
Just what game Goff is playing is hard to decide. He too must know the entire global Ponzi scheme is facing systemic collapse. Perhaps Goff’s lowish poll ratings make it easier for him to keep pretending the system has a future. It must be quite comforting knowing you are not going to have to deal with the triple tsunami* that is thindering up the beach.
* post peak oil collapse, unravelling of fiat currencies and evironmental collpase.
Sorry, I didn’t get to the editor quickly enough. Old age brings the ‘joys’ of failing eyesight and less nimble fingers.
the triple tsunami* that is thundering up the beach.
* post peak oil collapse, unravelling of fiat currencies and evironmental collapse.
With all the talk about asset sales I just thought I’d do a bit of digging. Here is what I came up with. Again, one for your John Key voting mates: http://aotearoaawiderperspective.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/is-john-key-heading-for-a-position-with-goldman-sachs/
And now MonKey is all over RNZ lying that he has actually “narrowed” the gap with the Aussies and we are doing better than them? Looks like his ‘ministerial advisors’ have been texting him again? Same guys who gave him the ‘S&P’ info, and the ‘asset sales’ info. When will the brain dead idiots in the MSM wake up that he is lying and scamming them? Ignorant fools.
TG.
‘When will the brain dead idiots in the MSM wake up that he is lying and scamming them?’
MSM is part of the misinformation system and cannot expose the truth.
‘In almost all other cases, the big well-funded media are owned by corporations or rich individuals.
Now to own a national newspaper or television or radio station, you need to be rich; very rich indeed. I once saw the costings for the takeover of a tabloid newspaper: it required a minimum capitalisation of £400 million: almost four billion rand. You need, in other words, to be a multi-millionaire.
Now what multi-millionaires want is what everybody wants: a better world for people like themselves. A better world for multi-millionaires is, by definition, a worse world for everybody else, for the simple reason that it relies upon vast levels of inequality. They don’t want everyone to become a multi-millionaire: in such circumstances there would be no point in being one. They want to remain richer and more powerful than everyone else.’
http://www.monbiot.com/2004/10/06/no-longer-obeying-orders/
What happens to the current management of the SOE if it becomes partially privatised ?
Do they have to reapply for their jobs and will the first thing the company does be to up the salary package and ensure only the ‘best quality’ applicants need apply ?
jobs for the boys you reckon ?
HAve you ever seen the board of an SOE? If you want jobs for the boys, go look at the red and blue tides that regularly sweep over them.
SOEs already have to compete for managers in the market, so their salaries should not be affected.
The ones I know are already salivating at the share options and higher pay they expect to get.
Frequently our expectations on salaries and benefits are not matched by the reality of the market… or maybe that’s just for me.
The heads of Meridian and Mighty River are already on >1m. They’ll probably get more if they reach targets because a listed company is more complex (assuming they keep their jobs that is) and they’ll likely incentivise share value growth. But the others need to look at their counterparts at Contact and Trustpower, or Powerco, or Wellington Lines etc. If those guys are getting them, then yes they might improve, but if they are on par, change shouldn’t be dramatic unless performance change is dramatic.
trav.
Thanks for that. Presumably Key is already on the GS payroll and collecting a retainer. And presumably the bonus comes upon satisfactory completion of the looting.
‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.’
Goldman Sachs: The Wall Street Bubble Mafia
July 1st, 2009
This was published last week in Rolling Stone issue 1082-83. As of now, Rolling Stone has not posted this article online.
—
THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression – and they’re about to do it again
By MATT TAIBBI
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup – which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the rear end in a top hat chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman – not to mention …
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain – an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere – high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth – pure profit for rich individuals.
I can see it clearly, John Key once finished raping our country, getting on a plane for some high-powered job overseas saying, “Thanks New Ziland, ackshully I’ve been great.”
He really looks tired, that mask must be heavy. I’m thinking he’s wishing he was back on Wall St gleefully squeezing money out of the middle class without pretence. Or as he put it “just executing orders.”
The partial asset sales are only a short term adjustment and pallative to get $6 billion captial to help us get thru the next three years without great structural adjustment. An argument can be made they are a useful capital raiser for these business’s. In reality these business’s cant be fully privatised and sold without disaster anyway. The power companies are vital and absolutely economically and constitutionally strategic. The Government will have to maintain at least a 51% control. There is ample evidence from the last 20 years in NZ and enron’s exploitatiion of power supply in California that complete private control in likely to lead to blackouts, disruption and anarchy. In the case of Air NZ a fully privatised Air NZ will either go bankrupt or pass completly into foreigh control.
So these asset sales are only a short term pallative and the Nats or Labour will have to adopt more radical policies in the medium term. Real money thru privatisation and restructuring has to mean radical change in health and education and this has largely already happened in the US, UK and Aus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Auckland_Blackout
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Auckland_power_crisis
Plenty of evidence here as well.
Of course there would be blackouts they would squeeze every cent and put in their pocket rather than invest in the company and leave the government of the day to buy it back when it has been shrivelled to almost nothing.
Unfortunately for you draco both those issues were due to local or central govt monopolies that had underinvested or designed and maintained their systems poorly.
In 2008 the private company Contact helped avert a crisis by bringing back into service its outdated New Plymouth power station after Genesis and Meridian played fast and loose with the system.
Insider trading BS again Their was a drought you idiot
Go and read the review of winter 2008 and it will tell you that the failure of Meridian and Genesis to act responsibly and agree hedges instead of muscling up to each other was a key driver of supply fears. AS a result there was a significant percentage of energy generation opportunity wasted that could have been utilised. Two SOEs acting badly pushed the power system to its limits. ANd you guys worry about privitisation.
It was actually due to being changed from service driven to profit driven. Also, the lines in Auckland were sold a long time ago into private hands.
No Draco, read the incident report. It was pure and simple bureaucratic incompetance that had been going on for years. The cables had never been adequately maintained. Change in ownership structure was irrelevant – the managment stayed the same.
Note: Vector is 75% owned by the local councils through the consumer trust holding company. It’s basically a reconstitued MED with a few private shareholders. Next to nothing private about it. You really should read the pages you link to.
So lets make our votes count and vote labour the only party big enough to stop this shananigan from happening. Why not release the papers for goodness sake we are in a democracy but we seem to enjoy being dictated to by this shonkey John.
Here is the reason that John Key has blocked any release of the paper work,he claims it would affect the price of the assets or some weak excuse, the reasons are more sinister than that.
He didn’t want the public knowing the real truth because.
On 1st November 2011 he appointed these following advisors to the crown with regard to
the sale of tax payer paid assets.
The Deutsche Bank, this bank bought the Bankers Trust,the bank where Key learned his first
steps in the Derivatives trade now causing the Global financial collapse.
Craigs Investment partners, Criss Tims who is an ex Golman Sachs Investment Advisor.
Australian Lazard who have already been in NZ preparing our assets for sale.
Key met with Timothy Geithner,who is a sub serviant to Rober Rubin who is a Golman Sachs man.
So our tax payer paid Assets are in great danger and the rhetoric of selling them to ‘mums and dads’ is an absolute lie,this needs to be exposed,shame it didnt come out earlier,its never too late though.
Also those bankers that traded in the derivatives that are causing the global financial crisis are finding their way into those countries governments and ruling parties.
Why is it that a man who also partly responsible for the 1987 near crash on our nz dollar be in such a position that allows him to have the power to sell tax payers assets,just because he can,
he has deliberatly run up debt in order for there to be an excuse for a sale.In 1987 The then gov of the nz reserve bank phoned new york and told bankers trust to stop the raid on our dollar.
To think this man is in control of our enconomy is downright scary.