Chief Reporter

National’s Asset Sale Plans: Reheated 1990s Leftovers

All the polls tell us that National will be back in power in 2008. They don’t deserve to be if all they can offer is reheated 1990s’leftovers such as State asset sales – and they didn’t taste any good first time around either.

Bill English doesn’t seem to have learned the lesson of National’s 2002 election annihilation under his less than inspiring leadership – people are sick of the same old same old, and asset sales are so last millennium. For a start, he can call them what they are –public assets. They belong to all of us.

Who is going to buy them? The same transnational corporations that profited mightily during the last great garage sale, and who made such a monumental cockup of some of the most high profile ones – TranzRail and Air New Zealand are the most obvious examples. Is Bill going to bring back Max Bradford to finish off the electricity sector? He did such a good job with it in the 90s, after all.

What great timing English shows – right at the time of massive public uproar over the proposed sale overseas of Auckland International Airport Company demonstrating unequivocal public support for retaining strategic public assets in public ownership (the same thing was demonstrated with the 2006 fiasco of the proposed sale overseas of Lyttelton Port Company).

And it is deeply ironic that while English is proposing a new garage sale (to finance the election bribe tax cuts, presumably) his grassroots allies are pledging their support to continued public ownership of public assets. In Christchurch, the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) has challenged all candidates for the Mayoralty, Christchurch City Council and Community Boards to sign a Public Ownership Pledge committing them to continued City Council ownership and control of all significant Council assets and services. What has been striking about the strong response is the number of conservative, Right of Centre candidates (from the likes of Independent Citizens and City Vision) who have signed. The full list of those who have signed the Public Ownership Pledge can be viewed at www.cafca.org.nz

If grassroots Tories can so clearly see which way the political wind is blowing on this issue, what does that say about the political nous of Bill English and John Key? They’re not responding to public opinion on this issue, quite the opposite. Which means that “new look, compassionate conservative, Labour lite” National is having its strings pulled by the same old puppeteers from the 90s and 80s, who adhere to the doctrine that if you tell a lie often enough people might finally believe that it’s true. New Zealanders won’t be fooled again, once was painful enough.

Labour has got nothing to feel superior about on this issue –it was the 80s Labour government which started this disastrous garage sale, and its successor has done virtually nothing about making good the damage beyond recognising the obvious fact that any repetition is electorally disastrous.

ENDS

www.cafca.org.nz

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