Luxon promotes NZ’s ‘stability’ to investors in bid for foreign cash to build roads, prisons
One of the craziest things about the Investment Summit was the audacity of National selling NZ on its stability when this Government has started open race conflict with their deeply divisive Treaty Principles referendum!
It’s outrageous they provoke such a vile piece of divisive legislation and then have the gall to sell out social stability THAT THEY ARE RISKING as an investment ‘opportunity’.
What’s also outrageous is that the Government spent the first 12months burning everything to the ground on investment and then again have the audacity to talk about bipartisanship!
The deceit National are prepared to use to sell NZ off is as disgraceful as the attacks in the first place!
Now all the self congratulations of how well we hosted the Billionaire Investment Club have passed, let’s ask again, what were we actually selling at this investment summit.
The Private Public Partnership model is deeply flawed…
Campaign groups, economists and unions have come out against the government’s drive for Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), calling them short-sighted, inefficient and expensive.
“Farming out infrastructure development to the private sector lumps substantial costs onto taxpayers, both for funding exorbitant private sector profits, as well as the more expensive cost of private sector borrowing,” said Edward Miller, Researcher at the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research.
“Infrastructure investors are already lining up for handouts like concessionary tax rates and greater scope to artificially reduce taxable profits. The experience in letting the private sector run our electricity generation sector has shown that cash for shareholders consistently trumps investment in new generating infrastructure for Kiwi households and businesses,” said Miller.
“There is no financial case for PPP’s in New Zealand where the Crown can borrow more cheaply”, said CTU Economist Craig Renney. “The Government’s own PPP guidelines state that. We shouldn’t be handing profits to overseas financiers when it comes to building the schools, hospitals, and essential public services Aotearoa needs. We will all pay more in the long-run.”
Grace Newton, from campaigning group ActionStation added; “there is a much cheaper way of building what we need, and that is to finance infrastructure ourselves – rather than pay rent to an asset management company who doesn’t even pay domestic tax. PPPs mean we end up paying more for a slower job, with far less checks and balances, let alone future proofing..”
“If we consider that the economic argument doesn’t stand up for PPPs, and they are in fact reckless, then we need to question why this government is pursuing them – and can assume that it is ideological,” says Newton.
“This would track with similar decisions from the coalition – such the corporatisation of our school lunch programme, moves to privatise our healthcare system, and the stopping of hundreds of state housing developments to make way for the private market. This is despite 72% of New Zealanders thinking that the government should be building state housing at scale – showing that the public appetite is for well-funded services, not privatisation.
“When public services and infrastructure are handed over to private companies, we all lose – it ultimately leads to corporate profits rising while we’re left paying more for lower-quality services”, said Newton.
…PPPs are a joke and we are seeing how they impact our School Lunch programme perfectly…
…so we are giving corporations the opportunity to rip us off, and who exactly does own NZ?
The threat is Australian, it its focused at our productive farm land and monopoly rentals and the solution of using more public debt to fund our own infrastructure is ignored despite private debt being the problem, not public debt…
PPPs aren’t a solution and neither is more exploitative industries.
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Even a country as rich as Australia has PPP .We have some great construction firms here but they lack the knowledge and expertise in the large infrastructure work that is now needed by a growing country. Obviously we need to learn from past mistakes but it is a positive way forward.
Trevor we managed very well with our skills, knowledge and financing of large infrastructure projects such as power stations, schools, hospitals, roads etc up until some nitwits decided to start deferring new builds and maintenance in favour of tax cuts and the stupid belief that Government Services such as energy, rail, coastal shipping, health, etc should either be privatized or return a dividend to the government. Then we added insult to injury by allowing John Key to improve our GDP by the importation of people as opposed to a real improvement in productivity.
He and English did irreparable damage to our economy following on from previous National Governments. The obsession with keeping Government debt to levels most households and business will never achieve and using that obsession to promote the smoke and mirrors of PPPs and immigration to apparently increase GDP is inherently dishonest and will never alter the fact that we have been seduced by manipulation of our own personal greed and stupidity while allowing our infrastructure and social consciousness to be destroyed.
What we really need is a politician to ask us do we want world leading infrastructure and social norms and are we prepared to pay for it now or do we want to continue to kick these issues down the road further while bitching and moaning about how shit our hospital or school or police stations are.
We can’t go on forever putting our own personal circumstances up front when we know that our Politicians are trying to look as if they are helping us when in fact they are hindering all but their donors and benefactors.
We will be paying for the likes of Transmission Gully from future taxes when in fact the Government could have financed that either by way of loans, repaid by tolls or as some have suggested
just print the money. Not hard after all most other countries do it and according to our media are so much better off than us.
Jus
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