NZ Politics

This is exactly the sort of privatisation that Seymour's Atlas network buddies prefer. They want to take something that is a necessary public service, insert themselves in the middle, extract as much money out of it as possible without doing any further necessary investment, and then in time it'll fall over, they'll walk away with billions and then because its a public necessity governments will be forced to come back in to fix it.

A classic example of this is the absolute state of water services in the UK, but you can see similar in NZ as well. I think I read a stat the other day that since the Key governments partial privatisation of the electricity SOEs their investors have extracted $10b from them, while only $2b has been reinvested into the infrastructure. And what has happened this year is that generation hasn't kept up with demand, and so the coal plants have had to run more which has meant all the power companies can charge much higher prices for electricity and they've made even more money.

Seymour could make an argument that publicly owned services could be run better if he wanted, fine, everything could be done better. But it is an absolute myth that private sector is just intrinsically better at delivering services. They're just better at extracting profit, but that's not the point of keeping a society healthy, or educated, or watered etc.

Hopefully the National Party is aware that private roading, health, education companies will never bother with their rural voters, even if they're not all that remote and they'll just abandon them to focus on urban centers instead. Of course, Luxon doesn't appear to be a deep thinker, and Willis, like Seymour, is on the either fully bought, or true believer side of neo-liberal magic so who knows.