Twyford Phil: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Twyford Phil: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:670;Page:16705] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour) 
: 
 There is a saying in the United States: “selling the Brooklyn Bridge”. A person who could sell the Brooklyn Bridge would be a con man a fraud artist and a huckster. Selling the Brooklyn Bridge was the oldest scam in the book. The cons began after the bridge was built in 1883 and went on for years. The con man who was most famous for selling the Brooklyn Bridge was a guy called George Parker who claimed to have successfully sold the bridge twice a week for several years. Some of his victims even put up traffic barriers to try to make a buck out of their new purchase. But those poor suckers did not realise they already owned the bridge. What is the difference between John Key and those scam artists who sold the Brooklyn Bridge? It is a rhetorical question and I am not expecting an answer from you Mr Assistant Speaker. National’s policy to sell off our most valuable high-performing and profitable State-owned enterprises is a scam on the people of New Zealand. It is a fraud; we already own Meridian Energy Solid Energy Genesis and Mighty River Power. 
Let us look at what Mr Key said in his Prime Minister’s speech to this House. Mr Key said he wants us to own our own future. How will he help us to do that? He will sell off our assets. I do not know who is writing Mr Key’s lines these days but that is either so good it is bad or it is so bad it is good. All over New Zealand mums and dads are watching TV and looking at each other in amazement thinking “What is this guy on? He is supposed to be our Prime Minister. Does he think we’re completely stupid?”. You see either Mr Key is out of touch or he is starting to believe his own spin because the mums and dads he is talking about all over New Zealand are struggling to make ends meet. Petrol is up food prices are up—they have been whacked by this Government’s GST increase—and the fees to send the kids to kindy or early childhood education are going up. Families are not only struggling to save but they are struggling to get through to the end of the week and Mr Key thinks they are suddenly going to pick up the phone and call their stockbroker and ask him to hold a few hundred shares in our country’s energy companies. 
Even if ordinary Kiwis could afford to buy up these energy companies how long do we think those shares would remain in New Zealand hands? What do small investors do? They sell at a profit. The share prices of these high-performing companies will inevitably increase and what will those small investors inevitably do? They will sell. Whom will they sell to? It will almost certainly be to foreign investors and we can look to the experience of Contact Energy which was privatised by the National Government in the 1990s. What happened? A controlling share ended up in the hands of Origin Energy an Australian company. That is Mr Key’s idea of helping us to own our own future. The only real winners out of this policy will be foreign investors not the mums and dads of Mr Key’s spin lines. In question time today Simon Power said that the Government was going to make sure that Kiwi investors would be at the front of the queue. Well I have heard some pretty unconvincing explanations for this policy over the last week but that is one of the weakest. 
The main reason that the Prime Minister gave for putting forward this policy to New Zealand was that New Zealand has a debt problem and as a response to this debt problem he will sell off some of our most valuable companies. He said that we have to borrow $300 million a week on average to pay the bills. On a number of occasions he has disingenuously likened New Zealand’s debt profile to that of Portugal Ireland Greece and Spain. I think everybody knows now that the problem in New Zealand is private sector debt; it is not Government debt. This policy of selling off our State-owned enterprises will do nothing to tackle the structural problem in our economy that we have with private sector debt. In fact it will weaken our Government’s balance sheet and weaken our ability to pay off our Government debt. Bernard Hickey has usefully pointed out that the rate of return on these four State-owned enterprises is over 7 percent yet the Government is currently paying just over 5 percent on its recently purchased Government debt. The Government of New Zealand—the taxpayer—will be the net loser under this policy. 
Mr Key put forward the idea that by privatising these companies they will be run more efficiently. I would have thought that international events over the last couple of years with the global financial crisis and the behaviour of some of the biggest companies in the world would have finally put to rest the mythology that the private sector is always more efficient. Mr Key even mentioned the case of Air New Zealand and said that Air New Zealand would not be much more efficient and service-oriented if it were 100 percent owned. Well what an extraordinary rewriting of our country’s history! It was when Air New Zealand was 100 percent owned by the private sector that it made the phenomenally stupid decision to purchase Ansett. Since the fifth Labour Government bailed out Air New Zealand we have seen the company return to profitability and to once more become an innovative company that we can be proud of as our national carrier. 
The Prime Minister also claimed that asset sales would be good for New Zealand’s capital markets. He is ignoring the advice of Treasury which says that domestic saving and tax and regulation settings are much more important policy tools to increase the depth and breadth of our capital markets. Selling State-owned assets is the ultimate quick fix. It begs the question of what this Government will do when the cupboard is bare and when there are no more State-owned assets to flog off. It shows how absolutely bankrupt the Government is for ideas to grow the New Zealand economy and increase the wealth that is generated by New Zealand firms. National has nothing to say about savings it has nothing to say about monetary policy and it has nothing to offer the country on innovation and research and development or on how investing in skills and training will give us the productivity increases that we need to grow more wealth in New Zealand. National’s solution its idea of an economic plan is to sell off four of our energy companies and that shows how utterly bankrupt this Government is when it comes to policies that will grow the New Zealand economy and deliver the wealth and prosperity we need. 
Most New Zealanders today are worse off than they were 2 years ago. It is clear to everybody that this Government does not have a plan. We have heard a lot of rhetoric about ambition. Katrina Shanks was just talking about how National wants New Zealanders to be more than ordinary. We have seen cycleways and we have seen Job Summits but we have seen a woeful lack of serious strategic thinking about how to grow the economy. New Zealanders have seen job losses cuts to services belt tightening and an increase in GST; all this Government has to offer are asset sales cuts to public services and tax cuts heavily weighted to the top 10 percent of earners. 
John Key’s policy to sell State assets is a con. It is as simple as that. But New Zealanders are not stupid. They will not buy John Key’s version of the Brooklyn Bridge. They did not come down in the last shower and they know when a con artist is trying to put one over them. Justice caught up with the con artist George Parker who sold the Brooklyn Bridge and the long arm of the New York Police Department caught up with him and put him behind bars. Politically speaking that is what I think will happen to John Key and this Government. 
We saw it last year in Auckland. Aucklanders did not trust Rodney Hide and his plans to hand over Auckland to his mates and their plans to privatise Auckland’s assets. Aucklanders knew that Hide was setting Auckland up to privatise their assets. And what did they do? They threw Rodney Hide’s candidate John Banks into the Waitemata Harbour. They elected a mayor who promised to protect their assets and in whom they trusted to protect their assets and they will do it again in this year’s general election.