Friday, March 03, 2006

Reponse to Jim Anderton

Unfortunatly the NZ Herald does not publish its letters to the editor online so I can not link to Jim's letter today - however I post my submitted response below:

Jim - In exactly the same way that the Government had to pump $840 million into the BNZ for capital adequecy requirements in the 90's (to stop bankruptcy), so the giving of money to Kiwibank for capital adequecy is giving it money.

That there is a possibility of future earnings being able to pay it back is irrelevant to the fact it is a current capital injection.

That you continue to deny the existence of the TSB as a wholly NZ owned bank that did everything the Kiwibank does (including post shop banking) without needing millions of tax payers money is phenominal. However perhaps it is because you realise what a waste of our money it has been to setup a new establishment to do exactly what the market had already done - with the exception of providing a party policy vehicle?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might want to mention PSIS as well.

Unknown said...

Thanks Mark,
Unfortunatly PSIS is not a registered bank - so makes the comparison a bit weaker. Otherwise I'd be able to use Southern Cross Building society etc.

Also I think one of the key points about throwing TSB at JA in particular is it fulfilled ALL the criteria he had for Kiwibank before setting it up:
NZ owned,
operating through Post Shops,
Low fees,
etc
And in fact given that it is still operated by a trust it actually has less profit motives than what Kiwibank does...

Anonymous said...

Less profit motive? I guess. But I don't think profit is the point when you're as far left as Jim.
More on this later.

Anonymous said...

You might want to check out Eric Raymond's blog re the EU. Those guys are even further left than I thought. Scary, even.
http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/

Gardener said...

Great effort.

Back when loopy-Jim was trumpeting the success of establishing the 'People Bank' from the roof tops I wrote a letter to the editor (surprisingly they printed it) calling for Jim to stand down from Politics if the govt ever needs to prop up the bank with a capital injection.

Clearly it was only a matter of time that it would happen. Interestingly I didn't even notice it was happening now. Must have had my head in the sand when I skipped through the newspaper that day.

Unknown said...

Mark - good point about Jim not being interested in profit per se, but I have to hope that at least some of the scrutiny around the institution leads to this end at least partially. It would be nice for our subsidisation to not extend any further than the current cross-subsidisation from NZ post.

My implicit allusion in the post was to this point though - Jim's ultimate end in the creation of Kiwibank was to have a STATE OWNED / CONTROLLED bank, the reasons he gave were lies - as shown by TSB's existence/

Unknown said...

Burt - I agree; unfortunatly my letters at the same time didnt make it to print (not that Im conceited enough to think that even if they did it would make a difference). But on the whole "I told you/them so" theme I've got an earlier point to post tomorrow...

Gardener said...

Jim's a loose cannon and I'm surprised he's still where he is.

Like many Chardonnay Socialists he's been caucht several times with his snout in the trough but he seems to fly under the radar.

One thing I cannot understand is why he's got ministerial involvement with issues like teen suicide. Some would say he's the man for the job becasue he has personal experience BUT the question needs to be asked 'Would we put the father of a Pedophile in charge of youth afairs ?'

Unknown said...

"Would we put the father of a Pedophile in charge of youth afairs ?"

Only after 5 years...