05 August 2008

Why not sell Kiwibank?

National opposed it being set up.

It wasn't even Labour policy it was Alliance policy (when Jim Ol' Son led the Alliance).

So what's changed? It has 550,000 customers? Great, it is worth selling. It isn't core business to postal services.

Why should the government own a bank? There are other NZ privately owned banks and building societies, so hardly any xenophobic excuse (of the sort the Greens pander to).

So why are the Nats obfuscating? Why not simply say, yes we will consider selling Kiwibank if we get a very good offer - we'd be stupid if we turned one down.

No, they look like what so many voters think they are - lying, deceptive, covering up, pretending black is white, and now having to backtrack, gutless and without any principle. Terrified that if there was a policy to actually take things back to where they were in 1999, that the public would say nooooooo. Terrified they couldn't say for certain what would happen to a privatised Kiwibank, when Jim Anderton embarks on a xenophobic scaremongering campaign that big foreign banks will rip off timid little kiwi battlers. Because of course, nothing is certain in an open market, other than poor performance creates opportunities.

So National has the worst of both worlds, a policy that is gutless and wrong, the taint of lies and deception, and the patent inability to argue for the right policy, even though it was what National had as policy in 1999.

So what party makes politics seem unprincipled?

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