Gordon Campbell on the latest asset sales handout. August 21st, 2013 New Zealand has already spent $30 million as a gift to Rio Tinto over the Tiwau Point aluminium smelter – essentially, to buy the government the breathing space it needed to offload the partial privatization of Meridian Energy, for the benefit of a tiny minority of New Zealanders. No matter that Rio Tinto actually hadn’t been able to find a buyer for the four smelters that it had packaged up for sale, including Tiwai Point. The Key government chose to shovel money at them, anyway. It gets better. There’s now another subsidy/giveaway coming down the pike. The tiny minority willing and able to buy into Meridian (on the evidence of the Mighty River selldown this will be merely 2-3% of the population at most) will be able to buy the Meridian shares on tick, in installments. Just like at Harvey Norman. In other words, the rest of us will be paying relatively wealthy investors a subsidy – in the shape of an interest free loan for oh, up to 18 months – to buy what we already own, and which we are being forced to sell them by this government. Plus, we’ll also get to pick up the tab if the shares happen to tank, and some investors decide to bail on paying their final installments. Nice to have the security of this speculative investment being guaranteed in this fashion by Bill English…just in case…. Rio Tinto should pull the plug on Tiwai Point a bit further down the track. If such dollops of taxpayer money – on RNZ this morning, Russel Norman of the Greens estimated the smelter handout and the Meridian interest free loan handout together add up to about $70 million – was being offered by a centre left government, it would be called socialism, and a market distortion, and would be being denounced from the rooftops. But that’s how things seem to go these days. As Gore Vidal once put it: “The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor, and socialism for the rich.”
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 03:51:26 +0000
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