Hodgson Pete: General Debates 
Hodgson Pete: General Debates 
[Volume:617;Page:12651] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Energy) 
: 
 As the general debate winds up I turn the attention of the House back to the issue of asset sales previous asset sales and upcoming asset sales if ever the members of the National Party were to regain the Treasury benches. If ever they did we know that Kiwibank would be on the block. It has been getting 400 new customers a day for the last several years but that is not enough—they want to hock it off. People are joining Kiwibank at least in part because it is the only widely available New Zealand – owned bank that they can join. But Don Brash would sell it; there is no doubt about that. He would sell New Zealand Post. He has said so. His spokesperson on broadcasting has said that TVNZ will be on the block. 
I want to know what the National Party is going to do about our energy assets. I want to know whether National members would put Genesis Power on the block just as they put Contact Energy on the block when they were last in Government. Many New Zealanders do not know because of the name changes that the company called Genesis Power is owned by the taxpayer as are the companies called Mighty River Power and Meridian Energy. Those are State-owned enterprises. Contact Energy alone is derived from the State and was privatised in the 1990s. All the rest of the electricity generating companies are in State ownership and under this Government will stay in State ownership. Would the National Party privatise Transpower; the people who own the pylons the people who own the transmission system from one end of the country to the other? “Oh no!” one might say “No Government would be stupid enough to do that.” Well people should consult history because the National members sold the railroads. 
The National members did not just sell the rolling stock when their thirst for ideology needed to be slaked back in the 1990s. They did not sell just the rolling stock. It was as though they were selling a truck company and the roads besides. They sold the railroads and the end result of that was that we had an asset rundown in the 1990s. We had competitors priced off the track. Chaos was created in Auckland because nobody could get access to the suburban railroads. The track was not available to other people and we let public transport run into disarray. This Government because of some lucky timing and some good negotiation managed to buy the track back for a dollar. None the less that meant that the rail monopoly was broken. That means we can now have other people who are involved with the track aspect. Because the Government has bought back the tracks it does mean we can now have some double tracking in Auckland. We can now have reinvestment in track. That sale of the railroads was a privatisation from hell. 
The National Party has already said it wants to hock off airports. We should look at National’s history to see whether it did so before. We should ask ourselves what caused the original collapse of the National – New Zealand First coalition of 1997 1998 and 1999. We should ask ourselves what happened in 1998 that caused that Government to fall to bits. Was it the privatisation of Wellington Airport? It most certainly was. If we look at what happened yesterday we see a review of the sale in 1995 of another airport Paraparaumu Airport before the New Zealand First Party formed part of the coalition Government. If we look hard at that sale we find that it is full of errors. So said the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee yesterday. It said that an objective of the sale was to maintain the airport but that it was not a condition of sale to maintain the airport. Can members believe that? The National members were to sell it to people who had an interest in an airport. Well for goodness’ sake! At the price they got less than one-half of the unencumbered valuation one would have expected them to have people who were not only interested in maintaining an airport but who were committed to it and were not shortening the runway and hocking offbits of real estate within months of the sale for half the price they paid for the whole thing—none of that. But no that Government decided it had an ideology to move on sales. It needed to slake the thirst for that ideology so it sold Paraparaumu Airport in the most extraordinary circumstances. The select committee found that despite evidence that the airport was of strategic and national importance it was sold without legal impediment to its sale. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.