Kedgley Sue: Local Government (Protection of Auckland Assets) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Local Government (Protection of Auckland Assets) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:656;Page:5718] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I start by congratulating Phil Twyford on an extraordinarily clever bill the Local Government (Protection of Auckland Assets) Amendment Bill. It has unmasked the true intentions of the Government and of Rodney Hide for the super-city. If their hidden agenda is not really to sell off the assets of Auckland City why do they not support the bill? Why are they making such a fuss about it? 
Rodney Hide said that it is a pretend debate. He said the debate over this bill is just diversionary. But it is actually a real debate and it gets to the heart of what I am sorry to say are deep concerns out in the Auckland electorate about the real agenda behind the super-city. That is Rodney Hide’s agenda to amalgamate all of the assets of the Auckland region built up over generations into one big super-city. It is $28 billion worth of assets; I can almost feel him rubbing his hands with excitement. Then they will try to get their people elected to the super-city council and—mark my words—they will sell those assets off one by one piece by piece. 
Paul Quinn 
: Conspiracists! 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: It is no conspiracy; I will tell members what has happened in Wellington. One thing we must congratulate Rodney Hide on is being completely open about his intentions unlike the members of the National Party. He has made no secret of his privatisation agenda. The other day he said: “I love privatisation.” Those were his words. Last night on  
Campbell Live 
 he said: “I would love to privatise Ports of Auckland.” 
Let us be under no illusions. Let us ignore the spin and the discomfort of the National Party. That is what this bill is all about. Thank goodness Phil Twyford came up with this bill! If it is defeated tonight we will seek to put amendments into the Local Government (Auckland Council) Bill. 
Previous speakers have recounted horror stories of Auckland assets that have been flogged off with disastrous consequences. I will contribute a story about a Wellington asset that was sold off about 15 years ago. It is like a parable of what happens when one sells a good well-functioning community asset. In 1994 I was a Wellington city councillor. The smarties on the council Kerry Prendergast her predecessor Mark Blumsky and Fran Wilde decided it would be a brilliant idea to sell off our well-functioning local electricity network. First of all they set it up as a saleable entity called Capital Power then they launched a campaign. They said that Capital Power was a high-risk investment and we would be fools to hold on to it. They said that if we sold it to private enterprise it would run it much more efficiently and they promised that electricity prices would fall once we privatised it. There was no referendum. Wellingtonians were not allowed to have their say. A majority of the councillors—not me I assure members—sold off this precious asset that had been built up over generations to a Canadian company TransAlta for a couple of hundred million dollars. Then the Canadian company sold it to a Kansas banking group for about $1.5 billion then on to Vector and now it has gone to the richest man in Asia who runs it in partnership with the Chinese Government. So after a decade $1 billion or more of profits have disappeared out of New Zealand. Electricity prices instead of going down have gone up by 600 percent over the last decade. And our electricity network is owned by the richest man in Asia. 
Here is the hypocrisy revealed by the Local Government (Protection of Auckland Assets) Amendment Bill: Rodney Hide wants to say that if a council wants to build a new asset it must have a referendum but now he is opposing a bill that says a referendum should be held when a council wants to sell a major asset. So we should hold a referendum when we want to build an asset but there is no problem when we want to sell an asset—we can just flick it off. That is the agenda of Rodney Hide and the National Government and nobody should be under any illusions about it.