EMPTY POSTURING OVER STATE ASSETS

The state-owned power companies that Labour are championing are the same power companies that keep putting their prices up.


So a Labour Government wouldn't sell any further state assets.

Big deal. I'm not about to break out the champagne and put on my party hat. I'm not about to declare that this is 'a real point of difference' with National.

Given that this is the very same political party that plundered the state asset larder in the 1980s, Labour's claim to be the defender of 'our assets' is more than a little hypocritical.

I watched Phil Goff on television last night declaring that it was only six days until New Zealand's future was hocked off to the highest bidder. Really Phil? I thought you and your Labour chums did that in the 1980s and, as John Minto has commented, we've been paying the price ever since. Paying through the nose.

This isn't the Catholic Church Phil - you don't get pardoned for your past sins. Some commentators might be able to forgive you for the sake of political expediency but these the same people who never fight back, who are always prepared to 'compromise'.

If Labour really had seen the error of its ways it would be campaigning on a policy of re-nationalisation. And it would nationalise the banks and the finance sector. (Every year New Zealand loses billions of dollars in dividends that the Australian-owned banks take out of the economy,)

But Labour won't do that because it remains committed to neoliberal economic policies that have completely failed.

At the very least Labour should have committed itself to scrapping the State Owned Enterprises model.

It was the fourth Labour Government that brought in the SOE model to ensure that state companies operated on the same basis as those in the private sector.

In short, none of the state assets that Phil is championing today play a social role. The job of the SOE's is to make money and pay whopping dividends to the government.

The power companies that Phil likes to refer to as 'ours' are the very same power companies that have been ramping up their prices for years and making life miserable for the very people that Labour claims to represent.

Indeed electricity prices went up over 70 percent under the Labour Government of Helen Clark. I didn't hear Phil Goff complaining about this.

What's so fantastic about the government owning a power company that is continually putting up its prices and which ruthlessly disconnects families who are struggling with the huge bills they are receiving?

But none of the neoliberal parliamentary parties are prepared to break with the SOE model that has created this situation.

Labour's defence of stste assets is, frankly, little more than political posturing. There is no difference between privatised state assets or corporatised state assets - ordinary folk still get shafted.