Chief Reporter

Don’t Flog Off Auckland Airport
Learn From The TranzRail Fiasco

What a timely coincidence that the Fay/Richwhite “no liability” $20 million payment to settle charges of insider trading in TranzRail shares should have been announced in the same week as reports that a Canadian pension fund is making moves to buy out Auckland councils’shares in Auckland Airport.

Let’s learn from the past to avoid repeating the same cockups being repeated ad nauseum in the future. In 1993 the sale of TranzRail to American owners and their Fay/Richwhite partners by the National government was presented to the public as the best thing since sliced bread. For the best part of the next decade, TranzRail presented the textbook example of why vital transport infrastructure should not be flogged off to foreign owners. What happened is well known and resulted in the ironic spectacle of some of the country’s biggest corporates (including other foreign-owned ones) begging the Labour government to renationalise TranzRail (which Labour partly did, for the track network but the railway system itself is still foreign-owned, by Toll).

In the first six years of the annual Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand, TranzRail won it three times. In the end the Award organisers, in order to give somebody else a go, disqualified this most glaring corporate recidivist from being nominated again. (The detailed reasons why TranzRail kept winning the Roger Award can be found at www.cafca.org.nz, follow the Roger Award Links from the Views, Analyses and Research page).

Let’s not keep on repeating these mistakes. The country’s biggest airport is a monopoly cash cow (which is why the Canadians want to milk it). It is also an absolutely critical part of the nation’s transport infrastructure. The same Labour government that has had to partly renationalise the railways has also had to wholly renationalise Air New Zealand, which it proclaimed to be a vital part of our transport infrastructure and in the national interest. It would be madness to let Auckland Airport go offshore.

TranzRail was a train wreck (quite literally, in some cases) and an object lesson on why vital transport infrastructure needs to be kept in New Zealand public ownership. Hands off Auckland Airport (and not just until “the price is right”).

ENDS

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