Air New Zealand -- Free
Market Lunacy Comes Full Circle
“The Government’s
decision to effectively buy an 83% stake in Air New Zealand
is another example of the free market lunacy that Labour
started coming full circle and costing the taxpayer a
fortune not once, but twice” says New Zealand first Leader,
Rt Hon Winston Peters.
“Having sold the airline at a
bargain price in 1989 the Government has in the last month,
because of its naïve comments, ratcheted up the price it
will buy back a majority shareholding. No one can determine
now what the loss to the taxpayer is, or will be. But what
is certain is that it will cost the taxpayer hundreds of
millions, and unnecessarily so.
“The Prime Minister’s
recent comments drove the share price up when she
recommended to share holders that they ‘hang on to their
shares”. She had privileged information, which she made
known to parties able to dramatically improve their
investment by having this information available to them.
There has never been in New Zealand such a high profile case
of insider-trading as this. The Prime Minister is not above
the law just because she is the Prime Minister. All the
technical requirements of insider trading were met by her
statements.
“In the last 15 years, this country has been
damaged enormously by a combination of silly businessmen and
even sillier politicians imposing their special brand of
economic lunacy on this country.
“In short, under these
geniuses $885m, and more to come, buys an 83% stake of what
was sold in 1989 for $660m, when the Prime Minister and the
Minister of Finance were sitting on the front bench along
with the ACT guru Richard Prebble.
“When will this country
ever learn?,” concluded Mr Peters.
If you're using Scoop for work, your organisation needs to pay a small license fee with Scoop Pro. We think that's fair, because your organisation is benefiting from using our news resources. In return, we'll also give your team access to pro news tools and keep Scoop free for personal use, because public access to news is important!
After recording a River of Freedom review the Scoop Political Podcast went into hibernation. Now with a new Government formed it’s time to dust off this forgotten silver and look at the impact this documentary, about the Wellington parliamentary protest of 2022, had on Election 23. Watched by potentially tens of thousands of voters in the weeks prior to the election River of Freedom was not likely to have won votes for the then Labour government. More
Now that he’s back as Foreign Minister, maybe Winston Peters should start reading the MFAT website which is currently celebrating the 25th anniversary of how Kiwis alerted the rest of the world to the genocide in Rwanda. How times have changed ...
In 2023, the government is clutching its pearls because senior Labour MP Damien O’Connor has dared suggest that Gaza’s civilian population - already living under apartheid and subjected to sixteen years of an illegal embargo, and now being herded together and slaughtered indiscriminately amid the destruction of their homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals - are also victims of what amounts to genocide. More
“The Human Rights Commission’s appointment of a second Chief Executive is just the latest example of a taxpayer-funded bureaucracy serving itself at the expense of delivery for New Zealanders,” says ACT MP Todd Stephenson. More
New CTU analysis of the National & ACT coalition agreement has shown the cost of returning interest deductibility to landlords is an extra $900M on top of National’s original proposal. This is because it is going to be implemented earlier and faster, including retrospective rebates from April 2023. More