John Key’s grasp of his own asset sales policy is being revealed to be shakier by the day. He doesn’t know how it would hurt the government books. He flips his position on water rights each day. He doesn’t know how much a looters’ bonus of free shares would cost. And, yesterday, he didn’t even realise that $56m is budgeted to cover sharebrokers’ fees for the looters.
I don’t know if you’ve seen these little Facebook infographics of Parliamentary exchanges going around. This one from Tuesday’s Shearer/Key exchange made by Labour is pretty telling.
And this one (amateur by the looks) is of the Norman/Key exchange yesterday and also shows that Key is clueless:
And, sure enough, there it is in the Budget: $56m for ‘direct sales costs’ of asset sales (p34 of the PDF). Treasury explains it “relates to the direct selling costs of shares in each company, most of which relates to the fees paid to the selling syndicate”.
What’s worse: that asset sales are already costing us a fortune, that Key doesn’t know what that cost is, or that he doesn’t care and is determined to flog off our assets anyway?
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