3 economic/social policies limped to life this week, each highlighting the utter disarray caused by National’s need to implement ideological rhetoric rather than well thought out ideas.
Benefits cut for 13,000 parents in new regime
National’s need to create a whipping boy in the form of beneficiaries for rump voters to feel a sense of righteousness over has malformed policy here so badly that over 13 000 children have been caught up in the process of punishing their parents for that sense of smug National Party voter satisfaction that solo mums are getting a kick in the arse.
This isn’t social policy, it’s cruelty. Those children, the most vulnerable in our society, don’t need the additional stress of Mum or Dad breaking down because the benefit’s been cut and there’s no food that week. All stick and no carrot makes little Wiramu a prison statistic.
Meridian shares priced at $1.50
The total farce of carving up our public assets to sell to those rich enough to have the tax cuts to buy shares is an abomination of every egalitarian principle this county has ver set for itself. This Government have handed their rich mates billions in tax cuts, and those rich mates went out and bought up Mighty River Power shares, transferring an asset that was once owned by 100% of us down to a mere 2%. The true madness is that even that theft is uneconomical and won’t add much in terms of gain for those who hold the shares. After that miscarriage of economic policy, you’d think the Government would pause in its rush to do the same damage to Meridian, especially with a referendum on the topic about to be launched, incredibly no, National won’t pause and so have rushed a second power generating company to the auction block and the result has been a horrible joke.
Instead of the quarter of a million ‘Mums and Dad’ investors the Government claimed would buy shares, a tiny 62 000 have while the valuation back to NZ is billions less than what it should be.
This is economic vandalism but it’s surpassed by the Government’s out-right self-mutilation…
Prefab imports may axe timber jobs
Nothing shows the utter incompetence of this Government’s lack of industry interaction for favor of invisible free market dynamics than this sorry story. We have two problems rushing together, the first is that due to a lack of vision by the Government to invest into the necessary skills to build up our export market beyond sending raw product off shore, we have no added value being generated. The second problem is the Government’s own penny pinching mean spirited tendering process will see us buy back the raw product from China in the form of prefab state houses rather than create NZ jobs building NZ houses.
This Government focuses on policy for the rich, by the rich in the interests of the rich, and they mix that with some social reactionary beneficiary bashing to keep the cheering rednecks from realizing that they aren’t gaining from these economic reforms either.
Rollon 2014 election.
[…] See more at: https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/10/24/benefit-cuts-to-13000-parents-massive-asset-sale-float-flop-and… via Facebook […]
The NACTs politics are to serve the narrow interests of international monopoly capital of which they are merely the colonial agents.
They have no interest in generating wealth for distribution inside NZ. They own shares in international monopolies whose only interest is that NZ provides cheap raw materials, energy, R&D etc, and to pay the labour that produces this as little as possible.
Neoliberalism is not a disease, its capitalist business as usual.
That is why NZ has reverted to being a farm, quarry and a mine with an impoverished people. Its called re-colonisation.
That is why the NACTs are not interested in adding value inside NZ if that costs more than value added outside it. Its called free trade, competitive advantage and TPPA.
That is why they sell state assets for half price and rip, shit and bust the economy while the rest of us become impoverished cleaners.
The nationalist hype about kiwiland being destroyed by a greedy underclass breeding on welfare is just fascist insurance against the risk of kiwis waking up and taking power.
When we do we will put them and their toys in the Te Papa Manukau under the label Colons.
We are now seeing the demise of this government. The fact they are continuing with their deluded policies merely confirms they are driven by ideology over the needs of the electorate. When the penny finally drops and they realise they cannot raise the cash they need they will have to eat humble pie and turn to the bond markets BUT the stupid sods will have to pay considerably more interest than now. And Key claims to be a banker. (NB He was never a banker, he was Forex derivatives trader who eventually managed a team of traders as none of the others wanted the job.)
Seeing all this taking place makes me think that movies like Soylent Green are not so far-fetched and the new entertainments for the rich may well be Rollerball and the Hunger Games.
It’s because they believe in the free-market as the road to freedom. And the “unseen hand” – it’s now true that most national supporters believe in pixie dust and the gnome at the end of the garden. This is what happens when mythical ideas rule the day.
This is not a government of rational free thinkers, this is a government of dreamers, drunks and petty crooks. They will do any old shit now, as long as they get a few bucks.
It’s the new New Zealand the land of the used car sales man, the 2 dollar shop merchant and pixie dust. What a wonderful thing the unseen hand is – I wonder what other bullshit they will feed us tomorrow.
Q:”I wonder what other bullshit they will feed us tomorrow.”
A:That the TPPA is the best thing since sliced bread and we will all be eating cake once they sign it unseen.
I’m a hard numbers person, so just as I did for Mighty River Power, I crunched the numbers for Meridian. And just as I concluded for Mighty River Power (but for different reasons), the numbers simply don’t stack up for Meridian – not even for a $1.50 per share valuation.
Here’s why (since we now know that the price IS $1.50, all the numbers I present here are for that price… which imo is still far too high).
The Price/Earnings ratio is an eye-watering 20.5x (i.e. it would take 20.5 years of earnings of this company to buy back its own capital value).
The dividend is is supposed to be 8.9% (gross) – that is on the face of it an exceptional good dividend, given current interest rates. BUT, Meridian doesn’t seem to make anywhere that sort of money (as is implied by the PE ratio above). Indeed, digging deeper, we see that the underlying net profits after tax (NPAT) for 2014 (and roughly that in 2013) are $161.5M. The market cap of Meridian at $1.50/share is $3,844,500,000 (2,563,000,000 shares x $1.50), this includes shares held by the Government. So, the NPAT is $161.5M for the entire company, which equals 4.2c/share ($161,500,000 / 2,563,000,000). So how exactly does the company manage to pay 13.3c/share (i.e. the 8.9% dividend yield) with 4.2c/share of actual net operating profits? Now maybe someone will shed some light on where I went wrong here, but this thing on first glance seems wildly overpriced. Or is Meridian, as I strongly suspect, paying out it’s dividends with borrowed money?
The offer document can be had here BTW: https://zen.nzherald.co.nz/media/webcontent/document/pdf/201338/meridian.pdf – the relevant data is all on Page 11.
Hey Martin, your picture is wrong. The guy on the left should be a conservative middle class New Zealander, or even a businessman. Because that’s the mad thing about National’s policies and economic management – it’s bad for just about everyone who lives in this country including most of their voters.
Comments are closed.