Goff Phil: General Debate 
Goff Phil: General Debate 
[Volume:672;Page:18337] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. Today I want to debate the National Government’s decision to flog off to corporate and foreign investors the New Zealand - owned community assets that belong to all of us as Kiwis. I have noted that the National Government is desperate not to debate this issue. National members are desperate not to debate the issue because every one of them when they go back to their electorates knows that New Zealanders and their constituents do not want those assets sold. Those members are so desperate to avoid the issue that they are building an elaborate deceit around what will happen. They say the Government will not sell all of the assets; it will sell only some of them. 
But now along has come Dr Brash. Dr Brash has been manipulated into his position by Steven Joyce for the purpose of creating a smokescreen for National so that after the election—if the country is so unfortunate that National wins the election—National will do what it will not tell New Zealanders before the election it intends to do. Members should mark my words: Don Brash who is pulling the strings says he wants the whole of the assets flogged off and the advice from Mr English’s Treasury officials is to do just that. Bill English has not told that to the public. But I want to know why it would make any sense at all for any country any business or any individual to flog off the assets that are the most valuable ones they own. 
The Prime Minister said a couple of months ago that the proceeds from the State-owned enterprises pay for our doctors and our hospitals and he is right. We can take the three State-owned power companies. Between them they return $700 million to Kiwis and that offsets the taxation that the Government would otherwise need to pay for a whole lot of services. So I ask Mr English why he is so keen to bail out failed private enterprise finance companies as he did in January of this year entailing a liability of $1.7 billion. Why is Mr English so keen to bail out foreign-owned media companies that cannot pay what they should be paying for the use of the airwaves? Why is he picking up the duds from the private sector who want to socialise their losses at the same time as he wants to sell our assets that are the most valuable assets we have? 
The other elaborate disguise is that the Government is saying this ownership will go to mum and dad investors. That is what Mr English told us when he privatised Contact Energy back in 1999. But what happened to Contact Energy? Does Mr English know that every year $100 million of money generated by the Clyde Dam which New Zealanders built and paid for goes out of this country to foreign investors? A billion dollars has been lost from New Zealand since National privatised Contact Energy in 1999. 
What about the Bank of New Zealand? The Bank of New Zealand was also privatised by National. National sold it; what did it get for it? It was $1.5 billion. Do members know how much money the National Australia Bank has made out of the Bank of New Zealand for that price of $1.5 billion? 
Hon Parekura Horomia 
: How much? 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: It is $12.4 billion of New Zealand money that has gone out of this country and across the Tasman yet the National Government wants to do more. The Government wants to flog off the rest of the banks. I say thank God for the last Labour Government. Far from selling any assets it set up Kiwibank and provided some real competition in response to $2.5 billion of profit from the banks going out of the country and to the Aussies. 
Now Mr English is saying “But we’ve got to sell to retire debt.” That man is borrowing $300 million a week. Do members know how long the proceeds from the assets of our State-owned power companies will last at that rate? It is about 8 months. After 8 months we will still be borrowing $300 million a week but we will have lost the assets and we will have lost the dividend stream from them. How can that make sense? When will this National Government learn from history? The sale of the Bank of New Zealand the sale of New Zealand Rail—all of those sales were duds and all of them were failures. Let New Zealanders keep the assets they own now.