page_title: 2013 New Zealand asset sales referendum
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: 2013 New Zealand asset sales referendum / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Protest in Dunedin against asset sales (upcoming referendum).
context_page_description: The 2013 New Zealand asset sales referendum is a citizens-initiated referendum that took place by postal ballot from 22 November 2013 to 13 December 2013. It was on the Fifth National government's policy to partially privatise four energy-related state-owned enterprises and reducing the government's share in Air New Zealand.
  In March 2013, the groups collecting signatures to force the referendum announced that they had achieved enough signatures to comfortably clear the 10% registered voters threshold. However, in May 2013, the clerk of the house announced that the petition was 16,500 signatures short of the number required, as about 100,000 signatures on the petition were faulty or invalid. The organisers had a further two months to obtain the extra signatures. In September 2013, it was officially confirmed that the added signatures had successfully been collected, with the tally now standing some 18,500 more signatures than required.
  The referendum was backed by several prominent New Zealanders, including Dame Anne Salmond, who called it the "only just way" to determine whether asset sales are acceptable.
context_section_description: The National government was re-elected at the 2011 election on a platform of "Mixed Ownership Model" for the five state-owned companies Meridian Energy, Mighty River Power, Genesis Energy, Solid Energy and Air New Zealand, where a minority stake in the companies would be sold off. This policy was opposed by the opposition. A coalition of groups including the Green Party, Grey Power, Council of Trade Unions (CTU), Labour Party, New Zealand Union of Students' Associations (NZUSA), Greenpeace and others started a petition against it in April 2012. The New Zealand Herald argued in an editorial that the Green Party used parliamentary funding to pay people to collect signatures, which while legal broke a long-standing convention about citizen initiated referenda.
  By July 2012, it was reported that nearly 200,000 signatures had been collected, of which 100,000 were collected by the Green Party. As a combined initiative, Labour and the Greens issued a protest T-shirt against asset sales in support of the referendum. By early January 2013, the group had collected 340,000 signatures, more than enough to force a referendum; 10% of registered voters or approximately 310,000 signatures are required to force a referendum, although more are generally required to be collected to account for invalid and duplicate signatures. By late February 2013, 391,000 signatures had been collected.
  On 12 March 2013, the entire 393,000-signature petition was presented to the House. It will take up to two months to verify whether there are sufficient valid signatures to force a referendum, and if there are, the Government has one month to set a date to hold the referendum, which must occur within one year of the verified petition being presented to Parliament. As referendums must take place on a Saturday, this would put the last date to hold the referendum as 10 May 2014.
  Several political commentators thought that the most likely date the referendum would be held on was Saturday 12 October 2013, in conjunction with the 2013 local elections, as most of the resources required to conduct the referendum would already be in place. Holding a referendum separate from an election process is estimated to cost $9 million. Defending this cost, Russel Norman, Greens co-leader, noted that this cost paled in comparison to the (to September 2013) $100 million cost of the asset sales program itself.
caption: Protest in opposition to the privatisation of state-owned enterprises in Dunedin, June 2012
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