Reynolds became CEO in 2007 and continued the process of outsourcing all the actual stuff Telecom does, leaving just a hollow brand and poor quality service that is dragging us behind the rest of the world. During Reynold’s time at the top, Telecom’s shares have lost half their value – about $4.5 billion. A lot of that is owned by foreigners but many of the ‘Kiwi mum and dad investors’ National always claims to stand for have lost out too.
The minister, Steven Joyce, claims he is powerless to intervene to correct the manifest failures of Reynolds and his organisation that are costing the country millions.
Instead, they are planning to give him over $6,600 a week in tax cuts. About $350,000 a year.
Yup, apparently this screw up on a $7 million salary is the kind of guy New Zealand needs. If we are to avoid him, heaven forbid, leaving our shores and screwing up someone else’s telecommunications system, we have to bribe him with a tax cut 12 times the median income of New Zealanders.
It’s not just Reynolds. New Zealand’s entire capitalist class, the self-proclaimed ‘wealth creators’, the Atlases who think they carry the rest of us, are a bunch of muppets. When John Key got a few hundred of them together for a the Jobs Summit, the best ideas they could come up with were a cycleway and a stripped down version of the unions’ 9-day fortnight. Such is the intellectual rigour of these purported ‘smartest men in the room’ that ex-Telecom head Peter Shirtcliffe is going around claiming, with not a hint of evidence, that abandoning MMP would boost growth, and the premier business newspaper, the NBR, prints his views uncritically.
I have got an idea. How about instead of giving Reynolds and his blathering mates in the capitalist class yet more money they don’t need we keep GST where it is and don’t make it harder for working families to feed their kids. How about that?
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