National admitted today that the sale of Mighty River cost around $100m, and that the paltry 2.5% of New Zealanders who bought an average of $8,000 each are not typical Kiwis. The figures themselves are shocking but the politics is really revealing. English didn’t try to avoid the unpalatable failure of asset sales, he was flippant. He is so out of touch he doesn’t see the problem.
Take a gander at Russel Norman’s question to English:
Now, if they spent $100m to get just 113,000 ‘mums and dads’ who aren’t really typical mums and dads ($1,000 taxpayer per ‘mum or dad’), what’s it going to cost to sell the larger Meridian and Genesis, and AirNZ? And who’s going to buy them? Surely, if you have money for a punt on a power company, you would have gone for Mighty River.
Now, you might be asking what else could have bought with $100m. Metiria Turei asked English how many houses it could have insulated. Have a look at his response:
The answer, btw, according to the Greens is 67,000. That’s 67,000 houses we could have insulated for $100m. And with a return on investment of $500m according to Treasury. Instead, National wasted it on a failed asset sale.
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