The Nats have announced their asset sales legislation. Mum and dad aren’t at the front of the queue. No provisions to ensure 85-90% stays in Kiwi hands. Nothing to stop the companies being sliced up and sold after partial privatisation. No real way to stop one company owning more than 10%. There’s 1 vote that can stop this. It’s all down to Dunne now.
Now, last week Tony Ryall seemed to think the government’s majority was assured. But, actually, Dunne campaigned against asset sales. Admittedly, he campaigned against asset sales that weren’t part of National’s policy but he never supported National’s policy either.
In fact, Dunne’s confidence and supply agreement with National doesn’t have him voting for asset sales either, it just talks about not selling certain assets.
A lesser man might accuse Dunne of being a duplicitous prick who didn’t have the guts to just come out and tell the voters of Ohariu that he would support National’s asset sales programme and purposely muddied the waters by saying he would vote against different asset sales that were never on the cards. But I’ll take a more charitable interpretation, which is that he really isn’t committed to asset sales unless they make sense.
Now, Peter is your chance to be the hero who stopped asset sales and ensured he would remain member for Ohariu and Revenue Minister for life. The alternative is to be the focus of a remorseless campaign for the next three years and go down as the villain who made asset sales happen.
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