Well, at least its out there now – http://tinyurl.com/2c3b273 - Bill English has signalled that assets will be sold if the Nats win another term. First on the block – Kiwibank.
At Labour’s banking inquiry earlier this year, an analyst said that the introduction of Kiwibank had saved New Zealanders about a $1,000,000,000 in interest payments due to competitive pressure it had bought to the market.
Selling Kiwibank (and other assets) would be a disaster for the country – and is certainly something Labour would never ever contemplate.
The true Nat agenda (as if we didn’t know) is at least not so secret anymore…
Bleep me!
Man NZers were taken for suckers at the last election. 
It seems to me to be a better use of government money to step back from front line trading and just let the rest of us get on with things. I could understand the gummint owning a bank under Muldoon or Rowling or Kirk but for heaven’s sake, why the hell did Anderton bother? Why did Labour indulge his fantasy? Politicians playing at being wiley capitalists with our money is surely an idea whose time will end with the floating of Kiwi Bank on the share market. Then, if it’s truly a public good it will thrive. If it’s not it will wither and good bloody riddance.
John – in what ways is it failing now?
@Tracey – every dollar the govt ties up in pointless ownership (Kiwi Rail, TVNZ, Air NZ, Kiwi Bank) is a dollar less it has to spend on education, health, infrastructure.
Kiwi Bank fails every day of its existence because it diverts good government spending to bad. Ditto TVNZ, Air NZ etc.
That’s an opinion John, I asked you specifically how is Kiwibank failing?
Kiwibank is the “wallet” of all New Zealanders.
It should be owned by New Zealanders.
We went through this before with The Bank of New Zealand and it cost us a packet(another National goverment sell off)
Why would anyone sell their wallet? Not logical!
This is selling a wallet that does not belong to the National goverment.
Its immoral. Lots of greedy(well heeled)hands will get to dip their hands in the dosh.
It is no different from fraud! For instance; renting properties out (selling fabricated rights)and securing cash advances for something owned by someone else, while the victims (public) lose hard earned cash!
Allan can you rewrite without the language. Ta Clare
Yeah, and they’re not too keen on the ol’ education funding either!
I think that another reason for “selling” Kiwibank is that it is an irritation to the bigger foreign owned banks. Although Kiwibank is small in banking terms it is our Bank and offers an excellent service and good rates. This is very very annoying to the big (bully) operators.
John Spavin is very insulting to the Kiwibank customers. Who are the stupid ones?
@John Spavin: And like TranzRail and Telecom worked out *so* well.
Seriously, AirNZ has been laughing all the way to the bank since coming back under majority state ownership.
And there’s little reason why NZ can’t have a Temasek-style sovereign fund. Norway put its oil revenues into a similar scheme and it’s never looked back. We briefly had one of sorts – until Muldoon had a bad case of tunnel vision.
My husband & I are Kiwibank foundation members – we are not happy with the idea of it being sold – partial or otherwise.
It’s a great wee bank except perhaps that the loan side of things is actually controlled/underwritten by what we have personally found to be a very evil finance company that is in clear breach of the Credit Contracts & Consumer Finance Act….but that is another story….
Hey Rebecca, you stayed.
Kiwibank is an asset and I don’t know why anyone would want it gone. 
But it’s not like the voters weren’t warned 
From What I understand, (and please correct me if I am worng) National is condsidering only a partial flaot of the Bank – offering some of the shares to the Public (NZers) to have a stake in the bank. This could be a very positive thing as many of the customers could own and havea say in how their bank is run. What is better is that National are going to seek a mandate for this. What could be more democratic and fair?
Certainly the investment on Contact Energy has proved very popular and I think it still has one of the widest portfilio holdings of any NZ company.
The problem with Kiwi Bank is that there will need to be a full analysis of the costs structure – are they being charged the full commercial rate for all their property leases (in NZ Post sites) throughout the country?
That’s right, Monty, just like slowly privatising ACC they want to do it the sneaky way with KiwiBank!
Why can’t they learn from previous mistakes? We have ONE kiwi owned bank why would we want that to end up under Aussie ownership as well (which would likely happen).
@ John Kiwi Bank does not require any Govt funding in fact last year it made $52.5 million for the 12 months ended 30 June 2009 profit. I’d say thats a pretty decent return for the Govt. Why the hell would we want to sell such a valuable asset? Especially when that asset would prob be gobbled up by one of the big 5 Aussie banks so that more NZ profits can disappear off shore.
If we want to make NZ’s economy stronger we need more of our companies to stay here
James
Correct me if I am wrong but is not TSB 100% NZ owned?
@John Spavin
@Monty
650,000 Kiwi Bank customers and a saving of $1000,000,000 in interest due to competition.
Give up on market solutions or everything Joseph Stieglitz Nobel Laurette has proven all markets have failures and therefore need intervention. Go read some non neo-classical economics text and you begin to understand how Bill & John are leading us down the proverbial. There so much wrong with their approach it is startling.
The world is moving towards corporation control. This is because congress relies on corporations. Take Bush for example, he was one of the most blackmailable Presidents the world has seen. This is moving to New Zealand, and Key’s loving it because him and his mates are getting the money on the other side.
English is trying to say, “We are not selling it off, we’re just selling off a few shares”. Well, I bet that they will NOT keep 51% of shares in public ownership, but sell off enough so that Key’s mates can get the decisions put over to shareholder vote, and they would then vote it for full private sell off.
In fact, I was just having a conversation with a guy after training this morning; a highly intelligent guy, keeps himself to himself and is not in any big fancy role, I think hes an employee for a small development firm, so it was quite surprising to hear him speak out in such passion about this. He was literally quite furious, and said that he specifically moved to Kiwibank as it was a kiwi firm, and he doesn’t want to see the money go overseas, in addition, he also said that this will cause as big a protest as it would if we were to try and invade Iran.
Although I think that this may be a bit of an exaggeration, I think it should be legislated for to keep KiwiBank in New Zealand, only think is the Nats won’t do it.
I’m sure some of u may disagree with this, but this is just my view on the whole affair.
@James(the one that doesnt have a hyperlink)!. Sorry to be so demanding but would you please put another letter or number or something after your name when you put your name and email address in to make a comment to differentiate between u and myself. As I have set up login, I cannot do so.Thanks,James
How does partially selling Kiwibank give New Zealanders more control over it when we ALL have a stake in the government and its assets?
It’s just yet another transfer of public assets into fewer and richer private hands dressed up in a cloak of ‘fairness’.
But hey, we all knew this before 2008 – Bill English told us so. Well, to a person with a tape recorder, but if he didn’t get it recorded then we’d have never known. Transparent politics my hairy arse.
Fair comment Monty @ National making it an election issue.
“The world is moving towards corporation control.” – Controlled by people who were not elected!
@John Spavin, a well run SOE (making a profit) actually reduces our taxes, as with the government as sole shareholder – dividends go to them…
As long as the government legislates that it must retain 51% ownership and only NZ companies, citizens and PRs can own shares I don’t have a massive problem with a partial float, we need to remember that in the 80s (when Aussie pulled ahead of us) they did a partial float which, when combined with a compulsary super, helped divest the Aussie economy away from housing and into investment…
The best idea of course would be to operate Kiwibank like the Bank of North Dakota AND then add the ability for it to issue public credit…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_North_Dakota
The true NACT agenda is to sell NZ to the highest bidder making us all slaves.
Because it saved us a billion dollars?
Actually, it’s the politicians trying to be businessmen and doing what the capitalists wanted that have screwed us over. Every single sale of a state asset has made us worse off. Selling Kiwibank will do the same.
We already own and have a say in the running of the bank.
Bingo.
———————-
Foreign ownership of anything in NZ is bad for NZ and needs to be made illegal now. The banks actually need to be brought under NZ ownership through Kiwibank or be reduced to being finance companies. Either way, they shouldn’t be creating our money – that needs to be reserved to the RBNZ.
@ Jeremy Harris
Like the Bank of North Dakota…lets nationalize our banking sector and cut the puppeteer strings for good
Its like a merry go around.
National sells assets, (well labour / douglas sold some too), the comnpany/ asset is stripped, Labour gets back in, the public demand the asset back so we spend money, bye it back, national gets back in as sells it off and so on and so on.
why do we bother.
Stuart, instead of using propaganda, please explain why “selling Kiwibank would be a disaster for the country”.
While you’re doing this, you might like to think how much it is costing taxpayers to keep kiwibank as it is.
@Alan – Glad you mentioned the BNZ. Along with a blatent (can I say lie, because it is>) obfuscations.
That was quite a little landmine that Labour left for National in 1990. You were right, it cost us a bomb, as taxpayer, $380 million. The BNZ was directly responsible for the creation of the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
The BNZ also wasn’t sold off by a National Government, unless my history serves me correctly in 1987 there was Labour government in place lead by David Lange, who partially floated, then sold down the governments holdings.
Labour then hid what it knew about the financial stability of the BNZ during the 1990 campaign leaving Jim Bolger with the nasty visitation of Treasury Officials to tell him that he had a $380 million problem to deal with really rather urgently.
That single act of economic sabotage plus David Caygill’s extremely poor mathematics that predicted a surplus spawned the Fiscal Responsibility Act, an Act that Michael Cullen treated with contempt when he finished up leaving us owning a broken down rail system that had a book value of under $300M and has cost us so the billion he spent on the plus the promises of nearly another billion to prop it up.
It is an outright falsehood to say National sold the BNZ. It was Labour.
Stuart also thinks that raising GST on fresh fruit and vegetables, costing people a massive additional $0.25 per week would also be a disaster for the country.
Frankly if selling Kiwibank and $0.25 per week are disaster for this country then we are in a right pickle that no-one can get us out of.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/2255590/NZ-Post-reports-52m-profit
Seems that’s it’s “costing” us a reasonably decent profit…
Oh, wait, That’s not a cost.
“Foreign ownership of anything in NZ is bad for NZ and needs to be made illegal now. The banks actually need to be brought under NZ ownership through Kiwibank or be reduced to being finance companies. Either way, they shouldn’t be creating our money”
mmmm, why don’t we just renationalise everything, including say, Telecom? Then we can have massive state owned monopolies (remember, everyone hates a monopoly until they own one) who can charge what they want when they want (increased bank fees for example, no more competition remember), so what’s different? We could then follow up with scrapping MMP, in fact lets just completely get rid of representative democracy altogether and have a stalinesque politburo ruling by decree. One party, no votes. Lovely. Mother knows best.
Draco one of the main arguments that is being thrown around as a reason to sell is that while making a profit, Kiwibank is getting to the point where, like any business, if it doesn’t have investment of new capital, it will start to struggle.
This is of course the downside of any company that becomes quite popular quite quickly – e.g. they get loads of sales (life insurance, loans etc) but is going to potentially struggle to have the capital to meet those sales….
Logic does state that if ytou have something that you have grown and was relatively easy to do so, and its worth alot more than you put in, that you sell it for a tidy profit and then re-invest in a new start up with the goal of doing the same thing.
I would sell Kiwibank. It is such a bad bank and it is not making any money. They are using creative accounting to leverage off NZ Post. Kiwibank is paying NZ Post minimal amounts of money for its transactions to be carried out in the Postshops. Also, Kiwibank seems to be taking the profits from the NZ Post “Billpay” !! What a joke – sell it off !!!!!!!!!!!!! GOOD ON THE NATS !!!
@ Rebecca
Well then, the logic would be that the owners, us, put more capital into it so that it can do what we obviously want it to do. The advantage of it being state owned and that it is what we want is that we can put more of our taxes into it without having to borrow any money at interest to raise such capital.
@ waterboy
Actually, that’s completely irrational as the added competition will increase costs while lowering the value of both items.
Why then does the NZ Govt continue to bank with Westpac and not move it’s business to Kiwibank? Jim himself knows the true value of NZ owned banks, having invested personally in a rather large Australian bank
It shouldn’t matter who owns the banks, goodness knows the taxpayers have paid enough into Kiwibank through taxation. The profits are not being used to benefit taxpayers one little bit. Sell Kiwibank and keep ALL politicans away from running businesses and use our tax dollars for the main infrastructure like schools, hospitals etc.
@ John Spavin – Kiwibank has helped lower interest rates and has allowed communities to prosper where other banks had left. Kiwi Rail will be vital to our economic future as oil becomes more expensive. It helps employ people too. TVNZ and Air NZ? I think they need to be relooked at myself. I support having at least one stable competitive airline in this country, which Air NZ tends to provide. Media is inescapable from our lives. TVNZ can provide a national media voice that is multicultural, provides news, education and current affairs. Both provide employment. I know you want more money put into education, infrastructure and health. I do too, but sustaining communities, democratic voices, the enviornment and the economy is good government spending.
I have also sent this by email to almost every member of parliament, you quessed it, so far not one reply:
As the dust settles on another election in which, despite Fiscal Resposibility Act 1994, the new party blames the old for leaving the nation in debt crisis and Chris Trotter has finally decided to use his mainstream media opportunities to start prodding the economical truth, writing 21 May 2010:
“Translated into plain English, it reads: “We’ve got your economic system under our control. Hand over hundreds of millions of dollars – or your helpless little economy will be made to suffer, and you’ll never see Prosperity again.”
And last night, Bill English paid up – just as every other Finance Minister has been forced to pay up since the 1980s.
It was a bad move then and it’s still a bad move. Negotiating with economic terrorists is as craven and foolish as negotiating with any other kind. Because once they realise you’re willing to pay for their co-operation, they will hold your economy to ransom again, and again, and again.”
–
I say its clear we are already in some form of receivership conditions at the hands of foreign financiers. We are stalemated in the classic predatory lending trap, rating agencies threaten to downgrade our currency as a bad thing because it would increase what we owe in foreign denominated debt, putting us in deeper debt repayment crisis, yet at the same time we are told in order to be able to pay that same debt, even at current levels, we need a lower dollar to the price of our goods more attractive to increase export income from which means of repayment is supposedly to come, stalemate?
I say deeper in debt repayment crisis because we already have to put hard assets into a holding bank before the private incorported investment banks will continue to monetise our money supply as debt with their computer generated created credit which we pledge to repay out of future taxes of the nation of which the debt contract is recorded in what is known as a Bond. NZ and Australia in similar current account debt repayment problems are talking of issuing inflationed indexed bonds.This process was started under fifth Labour Governments watch, so as the issuance of more BONDS, BONDS, BONDS is sold as our means of borrowing our way out of already mathematically unrepayable gross debt.
The National Party’s antics saying they won’t sell assets in the second term, should they get one, unless they get a so-called mandate from the people to continue privitisation of public infrastructure into the hands of transnational corporations, corporations who’s majority stakeholder owners are the very same investment banks that issued the excess created credit to begin with, asset sales will once again become far more mandatory than mandated. Thus if current Labour don’t do something very different they will again find themselves selling the same mandatory further privitisation message, just who is not telling what?
Its time for this:
” “Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nations laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.”
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who nationalized the Bank of Canada in 1938
–
It is no coincidence that Kiwibank is the first thing the fully foreign banker servant National Party Executive are lining up to be taken over, because it quite simply is our only hope of keeping the foreign financial quackery in check by way of competition, if supported by political will, and is the greatest threat to their economic dominance if we do finally wake up to the fact we dont need to go to foreign intermediaries to borrow their created credit at interest to unlock our natural resources then put the built asset up as colateral, but that we can be our owned intermediaries of created credit spent into circulation interest free backed by the productive asset it is used to build, the greatest threat to them is the fact that we currently have in Kiwibank our own means of distribution of our own money supply should we choose to do it.
——–
If you take the time to read in order the articles in the website link below and then choose not to attempt a diplomatic revival of common decency by reforming the Monetary, Banking and Credit Systems of New Zealand and the Globe, you quite simply don’t deserve to be representatives of the people:
http://publiccreditorbust.blog.com/essential-reading-in-easiest-to-understand-order/
Regards
Iain Parker
Productive Public Credit Advocate
I wonder if Jim Anderton would sell his shares in the Commonwealth Bank of Australia if he could buy a shareholding in Kiwibank.
Inventory2- how interesting. Yes, I wonder how many MPs have shares in companies via the trusts so many of them have, in foreign owned companies & whether they would be keen to sell those shares & invest in Kiwibank…..it’s a slippery slope.
That said, selling Kiwibank is hardly on the scale of when the Nats sold BNZ, rail etc etc
We might be foundation members, but we do the bulk of our banking including mortgage with a big bank – Kiwibank haven’t been able to match the deals we have got including the little things like no account fees etc.
P.S. Stuart Nash here’s a question for you: if Labour got re-elected, would you move the government’s funds from Westpac to Kiwibank? This I would imagine, would create the much needed capital that Kiwibank apparently needs
That was something that I always struggled to understand – how under Labour we get a genuinely owned NZ bank yet the government – while expecting us to have faith & bank with it, failed to lead by example by having faith in this bank & move their (our) funds from an Australian one to our very own NZ one……
However, I could be wrong, perhaps you already did this before the 2008 election…
@m att – so the Kiwibank isn’t greedy.
Rebecca, perhaps the answer to your question lies with the Progressives? Kiwibank was the prid quo pro for their coalition vote, Labour didn’t really want the bank, but they promised so we got it? They didn’t move funds cos Labour didnt actually really want or back Kiwibank?
If it’s ok to borrow an extra 400m this year to give tax cuts, would it be worth borrowing $400 and pouring it into Kiwibank to get it closer to its bigger competitiors?
Say what you like about Anderton, but Kiwibank forced the big banks out of their clear, but not provable cartel behaviour, just as he did with his pressure on petrol companies.
Do the privatisers here have a justification for the resulting price increases for consumers through Max Bradford’s efforts with electricity industry (despite assurance the increased competition would see flat or falls in prices)??
@Rebecca.
I always wondered the same. Why not with Kiwibank?
English’s blather about restricting the selling-off of shares to “mum-and-dad” Kiwi investors is surely another Nat piece of fraudulent flummery. Either a partial (as distinct from total) float, or a restriction of share sales to a specified class of investor, is already in breach of international trade regulations or agreements that NZ is a party to, or it probably soon will be, leaving all the shares open to be hoovered up by Goldman Sachs or some other overseas bunch of Key’s international monied mates…
Kiwibank is the one shot this country has of stemming the flow of the huge tide of NZ$ which heads offshore to Australian bank shareholders every quarter.
Tha NACTs don’t appear to take any pride in NZ industry, or in the NZ financial sector. The less of it we own for ourselves, the better, it appears.
@Peter – agreed
Ma and Pa richo. 
Seems I took the name of Goldman Sachs in vain in my earlier post. It was Merrill Lynch that money-whizzkid Key worked for, not Goldman Sachs. (ML was rescued from bankruptcy only by being acquired by Bank of America, but it would perhaps be stretching things to attribute that débâcle to Key, who left ML in 2001. But before its demise as an independent entity it had distinguished itself by some pretty shonky dealings, including one case concerning events that happened while Key was there.
Wikipedia relates that: “The case revolved around a 1999 transaction involving Merrill, Enron and the sale of some electricity-producing barges off the coast of Nigeria. The charges surrounded the 1999 sale of an interest in Nigerian energy barges by an Enron entity to Merrill Lynch was a sham that allowed Enron to illegally book about $12 million in pretax profit, when in fact there was no real sale and no real profit. Four former Merrill top executives and two former midlevel Enron officials faced conspiracy and fraud charges. Merrill cut its own deal, firing bankers and agreeing to the outside oversight of its structured-finance transactions. It also settled civil fraud charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, without admitting or denying fault.”
That’s not to suggest, of course, that Key had anything directly to do with these capers. But it does show the kind of outfit he was involved with.
How much time would it take for them to sell the bank? Could it be done as easily as they raised gst? Is a sale already set up? How many Nat voters use the bank. Isn’t foreign bank ownership one of the biggest holes in our economic bucket? Would it be hard to get 40,000 to march on this with 700,000 Kiwi Banker’s ?, before it is mixed up and lost in a whole mess of pre-election issues, just to sort of cement it as a ‘no no’ urban myth?
Kiwibank annoys the hell out of NACT because it disproves again the doctrine that Govt cannot run a successful, innovative, efficient business entity.