John Key’s suggestion on Q&A today that the Chinese might come and bid for the Government’s big $1.5 billion ultrafast broadband contract is a bit out of left field.
Leaving aside the fact that there’s a tender process already underway, the government has recently widened the scope of the tender, pushed out the likely dates for a decision to be made and now, it looks as if John Key has decided to enter the fray and get the Chinese interested in bidding.
That would certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons in terms of the role Telecom would be likely to play.
Maybe John Key is looking for a circuit breaker! Or maybe, just as he did a few weeks ago, he’s decided to interfere in his Communications Minister’s portfolio area by unilaterally changing the terms of a big announcement. In mid-June John Key virtually announced a later start (by at least two years) to switching on digital delivery of television which will result in a major set-back for the broadcasting and telco industries and for NZ communities.
I wonder what Steven Joyce thinks today about the propsect of a big Chinese company entering the bidding process (at a very late stage) on UFB.
Here’s what John Key said in his interview with Guyon Espiner in Shanghai last Friday night (played today on TVNZ):
GUYON Are there specific projects that have been looked at, I mean I’ve seen commentators talk about projects like Transmission Gully in Wellington. I mean is that a realistic thing that the Chinese might come and do something like that?
JOHN They might do, and at the end of the day from New Zealand’s perspective I mean we’re looking for value for money. So let’s take ultrafast broadband, they’ve got a lot of expertise in that area, Huawei is a big player, they’re bigger round the world, they’ve got a huge partnership in the United Kingdom for instance. No one’s saying they would be the final selected partner in New Zealand but they’ve certainly got the capacity if they wanted to, to come in and look at doing something like that. So you know from New Zealand’s point of view the bottom line is, can we get investment, can we get ultimately value for money?
Sell our country to China, everything here will soon say “made in China” because we will become just another state of China!
Seriously, is this the quality of ideas that NACT has to build up our economic infrastructure? Are they not supposed to be on the side of business? Then how come they are so **** useless at building anything substantial, from broadband infrastructure to a party tent?
Time to learn Mandarin.
I see he’s also wanting to mix Chinese money and NZ ag skills and go colonise South America.
I know sovereignty and national identity are such outmoded ideas, but can’t we have a government that cares about New Zealanders?
We should be so lucky Rainman !
“No one’s saying they [Huawei] would be the final selected partner in New Zealand but they’ve certainly got the capacity if they wanted to, to come in and look at doing something like that.”
That’s Crosby/Textor speak for a done deal.
Key looks he doing a Shipley for his retirement job. ie a board position on a huge state owned business.
The big Chines construction business has been here to check out construction infrastructure projects. ie they provide the finance, design and build , all using Chinese workers. And only want a 10% profit margin instead of the local firms 20% or so.
Key would call it a win -wing
And getting the Chinese or anyone else to come in from outside and build this will benefit New Zealand’s technical community exactly how?
It’s downright insulting to the abilities of the very capable technical people in this country that our Government should feel the need to invite overseas experts in to show us how to do this. Companies like FX, Citylink, Kordia and Chorus (and plenty of others) know how to do this stuff without needing outside help. They need our tax dollars spent on backing them to do the job.
Or does John Key thinks this is like the building of the trains and anything else that isn’t milking cows or growing plants.
There – that’s better – I’ve got that off my chest!
@Ghost – that’s bleepin disgraceful!
AndyLinton, same pattern of behaviour with Auckland’s trains, much of which could be fabricated or assembled in NZ. Can’t expect any new thinking patterns from the NACTs.
I think he was just making stuff up because he couldn’t think of any other answer to the question…
By the way if you want to feel depressed about our UFB rollout check out the Aussies:
http://www.nbnco.com.au/
The announced a year after us, the government is forming an SOE that will design and build a wholesale network with the 90% of urban areas getting 1 GB capacity with the remaining 10% of rural areas getting 100 MB WiFi, they allocated $43,000,000,000, they will privatise the company after 5 years giving Aussie savers yet something else excellent to invest in (no histerics over privatisation there – implemented by Labor)… Almost enough to move there when you consider I’d only have to front up 40% of baby boomers retirement instead of 88% here and earn 30% more… All NZers should be ashamed…
I’d emigrate to Australia, except it’s full of Australians..
Why can’t we get this sort of infrastructure completed quickly and efficiently ?? What fundamental mistakes are those in charge of this making ??
Trains, broadband… how much are we proposing we pay out to China, versus how much they are increasing their payment to us for goods? In the past our excitement over trading partners has been how much we can sell to them, not the other way round.
Is it xenophobia, or a genuine concern that if China buys into sufficient NZ production, they will be in a position to divert that production to China, at the expense of NZ, OR, as is the case now, they will be merely shifting what would have been exported to other countries, to China?
The same way selling Telecom off did – they’d have even more reason to move offshore.
Which just goes to show how stupid the Australian Labor Party is. They’ll invest $43b and then sell it all off for ~$10b. Win for capitalists and lose for the Australians.
The same Labor party whose reforms in the 80s and 90s over there are the reason they’re 30% ahead of us and growing faster..?
JMH said:
Bit of an assumption that those Australian ‘reforms’ had much to do with anything (what were you thinking of in particular?); we too had plenty of major ass-kicking reforms in the 1980’s and 1990’s did we not?
The 80s are gone, lessons learned, the 90s really belonged to the National Party.
Govt for NZ.
Would NZders understand it.
They are fed daily with a load of half truths and statements from media which appear opposed to such a proposition.
A Govt within NZ is about the best we can see at the moment and nothing much else on the horizon unless some NZ voice can be heard more widely.
China does well on cheap labour and a controlled value of the Yuan.
How our FTA helps NZ in the longer term is difficult to see. Our imports from China create punishing imbalance and no doubt much to the delight of the importers.
What are we walking into. The scars left by fish hooks will be deep. Will we recover.
Learning to speak Mandarin as Key suggests would require learning three words
“Shi” “Dui” or his favourite “Hao”
“They are fed daily with a load of half truths and statements from media which appear opposed to such a proposition.”
Not just the media the political parties feed the half truth and misstatements
The Keating economic reforms, this is the period when Aussie pulled in front of us…
That’s kinda correct – they didn’t privatise everything the way we did but it seems that they’re trying to do so now. Conclusion: Privatisation of state assets is bad for the country.
They started a savings culture and switched to personally investing in their former state owned assets, thus encouraging more saving and investment… It really has little to do with whether state ownership is good or bad, saving and investing is good, what we are doing now is bad and our politicians don’t do anything transformational enough about it and looked shocked when talented Kiwi’s flood overseas…
JMH so the valuable Australian reforms in the 1980’s and 1990’s you were referring to is the creation of a savings culture?
That’s it? My word man why didn’t you say so earlier? We could do that here in NZ, right here right now. I remember being in Primary School and being given the chance to put money in a Post Office savings bank account. So WOW its like in the 1980’s NZ actually did have a savings culture that was encouraged from young and which we then went on to destroy!!! And now you are saying this is why per capita income in Australia is 30% higher than in NZ. In that case, lolz at us
By the way JMH if private citizens invest their monies in floats of SOEs there will be less capital available for investment in real entrepreneurial businesses.
I love your ability to look at history with red tinted glasses and rewrite it as you go Loota… Also your ability to reduce complex arguments to single points that you can fire cheap shots off about… Really clever stuff…