The Politically Incorrect Show - 04/10/2001

Music - Die Fledermaus

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show for Thursday, October 4, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit & excellence against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down!]

"As far as I'm aware, no other country in the eighties & nineties deregulated & privatised as far or as fast as New Zealand attempted. In banking, electricity, telecommunications & transport, to name a few, the public sector is making a come-back. ... The New Zealand experiment saw the public sector attempt to withdraw from investment in infrastructure. The experiment largely failed."

Deputy Prime Minister & Alliance leader Jim (If-It-Moves-Tax-It) Anderton was going to say this at a commonwealth business meeting in Melbourne yesterday. It didn't happen because of the terrorist crisis, but Mr Anderton released the speech from which I'm quoting anyway. It is breathtaking in its brazen dishonesty.

Mr Anderton begins by blaming the 1998 power blackouts in Auckland on "attempts to create a market in the electricity industry," yet he well knows - & later acknowledges - that those blackouts were caused by gross cable maintenance failure by the publicly-owned, democratically-elected board that controlled the industry for decades & had been replaced by an entity that was STILL publicly owned. "In California," he goes on to say, "where similar reforms have been abandoned, the policy has had to be revisited." The facts of the matter make it plain that neither in Auckland nor in California was there anything even approximating to a true "market in the electricity industry." For details, I refer readers to the articles "Californian Power Trips" & "New Zealand Power Trips" in Issues 48 & 49 respectively of my magazine The Free Radical.

Mr Anderton finally admits, "Democratically elected power boards in Auckland may well have made the errors that resulted in power blackouts there. But there is little doubt that the voting public would have responded rationally at the next election & 'rationalised' the companies concerned." Odd - voters on the lookout for something for nothing (the mentality that Mr Anderton has encouraged for so long) can be trusted to be "rational" but private shareholders who put their own money on the line cannot.

Mr Anderton is right about one thing, though - "the public sector is making a comeback." Under his government, that unfortunate fact is inescapable. Just today, his colleague Jim Sutton put out a press release boasting that "The government is taking steps to help stop electric fences interfering with internet service in rural areas." Another colleague, John Tamihere, asked a "patsy" question of the Minister for Sport in Parliament: "What action is the Government taking to enhance resourcing [i.e. give more stolen money] for developing coaches?" New Zealand has long been plagued by the cannibalistic view that if an electric fence is interfering with your internet access or you can't find the right sports coach for your kids it's the "guvvamint's" job to "do something" - at everyone else's involuntary expense. Thanks to Mr Anderton's government, that cannibalism is enjoying a resurgence.

Where are electric fences when you really need them?

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