KEY POINTS:
I am agnostic about asset sales. Isn't agnostic a great word? It's a way of sounding intellectually robust while remaining usefully wishy-washy. And comme ci comme ca is just how I feel.
Ten years ago, we were all ridiculously zealous about selling assets - particularly TVNZ - "what is the state doing being involved in broadcasting, thump thump?" But now the whole issue is a bit of a bore; it's fallen out of fashion like other 1990s hot trends - boot-leg pants and ironed-straight hair.
It's hard to get worked up about whether we sell or don't sell Solid Energy , Landcorp or even TVNZ. Events have rendered the question redundant in some cases: TVNZ certainly wouldn't be worth $1 billion anymore.
And who cares? Selling a few itsy bitsy SOEs is hardly going to make us the productivity pin-up of the OECD.
Letting loose with a chainsaw is not the way to make your garden grow. Or is it? I may be wrong since I am more atheist than agnostic when it comes to gardening. Still, my brown fingers aside, I don't think I'm the only one who feels asset sales are tutu-ing around the margins.
Setting free Telecom, Bank of New Zealand and so on from state control had to be done, but selling off the remaining assets - the energy SOEs and the rest - is less, to use the jargon, transformative. There is a law of diminishing returns once the blockbuster privatisations have been done.
Even the muscular freemarketeers who sold Telecom are not true believers anymore - 20 years down the track, privatisation didn't really create the fiesta of glorious competition they had envisaged.
Instead, the jibber jabber these days is all about productivity and actually flogging stuff overseas rather than at home. Although I suppose selling off a state trinket might be shorthand to give the international financial markets a saucy wink: New Zealand is back in the mood for reform, baby. Just like nixing the Canadians' bid for Auckland International Airport sent a less than subtle signal of its own.
Although, if you're looking to keep strategic assets out of foreign hands, I'd have thought there were more emotive assets. This newspaper for one. Bit late for that now though - stable door, horse, bolted and all that.
And while New Zealanders might be iffy about foreign ownership, we do love an accent. Scotsman Paul Reynolds has so far had a much easier ride as Telecom chief executive than homegrown Theresa Gattung ever got - and look how we fell over ourselves with former Westpac boss Ann Sherry. We get a touch of the Carla Brunis about any exotic imports like Kapka Kassabova, Noelle McCarthy or that chappy from Coronation Street who shifted to Shortland Street.
The other weird thing about the foreign ownership debate is that no one ever seems to consider the wacky possibility that instead of whingeing about foreign investment, New Zealanders could become rich enough to be foreign owners of something ourselves. Hey, I'm a believer.
deborah@coneandco.com
