Written By: - Date published: 10:19 am, July 4th, 2011 - 48 comments
Lockwood Smith has ruled the word ‘privatisation’ is “political” and not “objective”. National doesn’t want to engage in an honest debate on asset sales because it can’t win on the facts. But trying to stop the Opposition using the word privatisation and insisting they use the govt’s spin term ‘Mixed Ownership Model’ is a step too far.
Written By: - Date published: 10:59 am, July 1st, 2011 - 71 comments
Treasury has confirmed that National’s plan to sell public assets would need foreigners to buy a lot of the shares because domestic demand would be too small for the government to make as much money as it is counting on. Forget ‘mum and dad investors’, the big buyers would be foreign sovereign wealth funds.
Written By: - Date published: 6:29 am, June 22nd, 2011 - 134 comments
David Cunliffe has done the maths. National wants to sell $6.8 billion worth of assets and it says they would be bought up by ‘mums and dads’. How much would each household have to invest to keep hold of the assets we already own? Over $4,000. Have you got that kind of money lying around to buy what you already own? Me neither.
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, June 20th, 2011 - 19 comments
NZX Chairman Andrew Harmos laments opposition to asset sales saying “if only opponents of this could have the intellectual honesty to recognise that it is a policy that has no losers”. Rijab respectfully disagrees and wonders if it isn’t the Chairman of the organisation with the most to gain from privatisation that is being intellectually dishonest.
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, June 20th, 2011 - 92 comments
Phil Goff has just announced that Labour is putting up a private members’ bill to entrench SOEs. This would mean they could only be sold either with 75% support of Parliament, or with majority support in a referendum. Great Stuff. These are our assets. They should not be sold without our permission.
Written By: - Date published: 11:55 am, June 20th, 2011 - 57 comments
Labour proposes a new law to stop asset sales. More like this please!
Written By: - Date published: 12:49 pm, June 15th, 2011 - 271 comments
Natural monopolies should be controlled by councils or government. The so called free market has only one plan for them: extract as much money as they can, then keep milking them for all they are worth till the government steps in and regulates or is forced to buy the asset back with the private owners making a huge profit.
Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, June 14th, 2011 - 43 comments
An attempt to promote asset sales in yesterday’s Dom ended up falling on its face. The author takes the government line, that Contact provides the template for ‘mum and dad’ investors buying SOEs. But the article admits the truth: only a tiny fraction of Kiwis ever invested in Contact, less own it now, and even they may soon be forced out.
Written By: - Date published: 4:19 pm, June 9th, 2011 - 15 comments
Question Time: David Cunliffe wipes the floor with Bill English in the House today, as he shows up his missing costs of asset sales.
Written By: - Date published: 6:37 am, June 9th, 2011 - 54 comments
So, that’s National’s great big plan: get rid of our electricity assets and use the cash to build more prisons. Not much of a brighter future there. National still hasn’t come up with a convincing reason why we would sell highly profitable monopolistic companies. Instead, we’ve seen a series of weak excuses. Now, English has revealed the truth.
Written By: - Date published: 2:13 pm, June 8th, 2011 - 21 comments
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, June 2nd, 2011 - 41 comments
National has announced plans to privatise ACC’s work account. Currently, they don’t have the numbers to get it through the House. ACT won’t vote for it because its not completely rabid and the Maori Party won’t vote for privatisation. So, this becomes another election issue: another bloody good reason to vote National out.
Written By: - Date published: 6:30 am, May 30th, 2011 - 85 comments
Labour’s Chris Hipkins has the inside word: On Wednesday this week, Nick Smith is going to announce what amounts to the effective privatisation of a large part of ACC. You won’t hear the word privatisation uttered from his lips, he’ll use all sorts of other words like ‘competition’ and ‘market discipline’, but privatisation it will be.
Written By: - Date published: 2:41 pm, May 28th, 2011 - 23 comments
No Right Turn on National’s spin about “Mum and Dad investors”.
Written By: - Date published: 11:21 am, May 27th, 2011 - 58 comments
Based on the Herald’s latest poll, that is a message the Left will be well advised to push hard. The poll shows 62% opposition vs 29% support for asset sales, while NACT polls at 56%. So, at least 18% are prospective NACT voters AND oppose Key’s main policy. The Left can win over many of these people on this vital issue.
Written By: - Date published: 12:09 pm, May 26th, 2011 - 53 comments
Labour’s new online game is hilarious. Choose whether or not to take the options presented and see the results. Politics is all about choices
Written By: - Date published: 10:56 am, May 26th, 2011 - 15 comments
Remember when John Key was promising that he would seek a mandate from the people at the election before starting to sell public assets and cutting Kiwisaver. It was only a week ago. And he’s breaking his promises already: the Kiwisaver cuts actually kick in on July 1, and the privatisation process is underway.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, May 25th, 2011 - 22 comments
*Key says that we will get to vote on his Kiwisaver cuts in the election. Truth is, they passed the law last week and the tax credits are cut from July 1. *What’s up with the dodgy Kiwibank numbers? Plans for sale? *The govt is importing World Cup workers while 270K are jobless. *Key’s jokes falling flat with pissed off voters.
Written By: - Date published: 11:59 am, May 20th, 2011 - 6 comments
It matters not who owns a thing, what really matters is “who controls it” . We have been watching our house being burgled for to long haven’t we? We seem to forget we are still in control of this country, and we the people need to get back that control, the control of our parliament, that belongs to us!
Written By: - Date published: 6:54 am, May 20th, 2011 - 108 comments
Not in John Key and Bill English’s third budget. The ‘good times’ they are promising would have looked pitiful under Labour. 4% wage growth will be below inflation once the Kiwisaver clawbacks get you. National have pinned their hopes on Christchurch rebuilding itself, and claiming the credit for themselves. Oh, and their projections assume asset sales.
Written By: - Date published: 8:11 pm, May 9th, 2011 - 17 comments
Colin James tips National’s plan for our water: ” a Crown company like that for ultra-fast broadband fibre-laying, capitalised from the proceeds of selldowns of state-owned enterprises and operating in public-private partnerships to get projects under way and then sell them on to farmers. Now where does China fit in that?”
Sounds like one disaster after the other. Decisions after the election of course.
Written By: - Date published: 8:29 pm, April 21st, 2011 - 54 comments
I’ve long held to the principle of owning your mistakes and as such I’ve gotta say I was wrong about one aspect of the “stop asset sales” campaign – the signs are authorised.
Written By: - Date published: 9:00 am, April 18th, 2011 - 58 comments
The TV3 poll has the NACT vs Lab/Green/NZF gap at 22% vs 9% in the latest Roy Morgan. I’ll tend to pay attention to the company that polls every fortnight to the one that polls once in a blue moon. Nevertheless, the story of both polls is the same: Labour struggling to make headway + Nats potentially with a majority = opportunity for Winston Peters
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, April 11th, 2011 - 105 comments
National came to power promising to close the wage gap with Australia. Not only have they failed to fulfill that promise but Bill English now portrays it as a good thing. His appearance on Q+A yesterday only confirms how out of touch National is: determined to sell our assets for no good reason, against our will, and happy with our low wages.
Written By: - Date published: 10:21 am, April 7th, 2011 - 25 comments
The PSA is the frontline in our fight against National’s plans to savagely cut our public services. Much in the same vein as the sticker campaign that Eddie posted on yesterday, the PSA has used humour to get across an incisive message: what the rich elitists in National consider ‘nice to have’ is very different from what we value.
Written By: - Date published: 9:03 am, April 7th, 2011 - 48 comments
This post is largely by the head of the IMF. “[T]he pendulum will swing … from the market to the state,” Mr Strauss-Kahn says, “The benefits of growth must be broadly shared, not just captured by a privileged few … the invisible hand must not become the invisible fist.”
Written By: - Date published: 8:25 am, April 3rd, 2011 - 84 comments
The economy, shall we say politely, is facing some difficulties. With a National government there was no plan as to how to weather the economic storm, we just got tax cuts for the rich and an economy that just can’t get growing.
Written By: - Date published: 11:31 pm, March 1st, 2011 - 147 comments
I’m really pissed off that politics has come into the Christchurch earthquake so quickly. But make no mistake, the Nats are pursuing a strongly ideological agenda. They’re using the quake as cover for radically cutting important policies and making other extreme decisions, while preserving the tax cuts for the rich. It’s called the Shock Doctrine.
Written By: - Date published: 7:53 am, February 18th, 2011 - 52 comments
Kiwis are strongly against selling our public assets. National’s policy is opposed by 60% and supported by just 30%. That’s more opposition than the mining proposal. There’ll be no back-down from the Nats – pillaging the State is a core reason for them wanting power. On these numbers, it may lose them the election.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, February 16th, 2011 - 27 comments
As you know, National has been trying to justify selling off our assets and cutting our public services to pay for tax cuts for the rich by saying that debt is at dangerous levels and we risk a credit downgrade. Numerous commentators have shown that’s false. Now, the final nail in the coffin has come from credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s.
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