KEY POINTS:
Helen Clark was all giggles and smiles this week as she gambolled across a privately owned mountain side with high-profile Canadian foreign investor Shania Twain.
As the pair traversed a small section of Twain's vast high country estate for a staged photo opportunity - to celebrate the opening of a public access walking track - you could be forgiven for forgetting there was ever a public outcry about the Government's rubber stamping of the land sale back in 2004.
In fact there was plenty of public discontent at the time - mostly from the same people now egging the Government on to veto the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board's purchase of a 40 per cent stake in Auckland Airport.
The Prime Minister (to her credit really) couldn't name any of Twain's songs when put on the spot by a cheeky reporter, but if she had been properly briefed she might have noted that one of Twain's biggest hits is called Come on Over.
That's a sentiment that it seems this Government is happy to share with some Canadians but not others.
It might well be argued that it scored a victory four years ago when the popular country star was forced to build a public access walkway before being allowed to buy the land.
But surely on that basis it is time now for the Government to trumpet its victory in moderating the terms of the Canadians' airport purchase.
And time to pull back from a blatant act of interference in the property rights of thousands of New Zealanders who have decided to sell their shares.
As compromises go, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board's decision to reduce its voting stake to 24.9 per cent is considerably more onerous than the inconvenience of letting a few scruffy German tourists walk through what is probably the country's biggest back yard.
At 24.9 per cent the Canadians no longer have outright control of the airport's destiny. While they'll certainly be the most powerful shareholder, they can be trumped in any strategic vote by a coalition of patriotic local shareholders - Auckland City, Manukau City, Infratil and the Cullen fund will have a combined stake of more than 26 per cent.
The Government can also claim to have successfully protected the country's tax base by banning the use of stapled securities to reorganise the airport's capital structure - further watering down the value of the deal for the Canadians.
They could yet get out of this awkward political situation looking like they've done something positive.
So why take that dangerous next step and veto a sale for populist and xenophobic reasons?
Ironically, the Government's opposition to the CPPIB bid seems to have rallied support for the deal and probably pushed it over the line.
One of the key reasons for opposing the deal - and it was a valid one - was that once it was done there was no prospect of getting a better offer some time in the distant future.
The "no" camp was concerned we were selling our control premium too cheaply. You can only sell control once, after all.
But the Government removed the relevance of that objection when it made the rule change to the criteria for foreign ownership. That implied the airport was a strategic asset which will never get Overseas Investment Office sale approval.
If, under the new rules, nobody else would ever buy the airport either then investors suddenly saw no harm in throwing their lot in with the offer that was on the table.
For some, like Shareholders Association chairman Bruce Sheppard, voting to sell became something of an anti-Government protest. In a sense the Government made martyrs of the Canadians - who weren't previously all that popular with a large chunk of the investment community.
So you can only sell things once - and this country has already sold the airport. It has been a private company since 1998 when - rightly or wrongly - it was sold off by the Government of the day.
A veto now will take Labour's trampling of shareholder rights far further than the regulatory whacks they have thus far delivered to the likes of Telecom and Vector.
The state already has regulatory control of airport pricing. Airlines have been begging it to exercise that control and bring prices down for years now. It hasn't. But the Canadians will still be at the mercy of the Government as to the amount of profit can extract from the asset.
This is now a transaction between a willing buyer and willing sellers. Those that don't want to sell - like the two city councils - will keep their shares. And as sales of publicly listed companies go it has been one of the most democratically sound the market has ever seen.
For once the votes of the small shareholders actually counted for something. If this deal is vetoed, the Government will succeed in making Green Party and New Zealand First voters happy.
They'll keep the hardcore left wing of their own party happy.
But a large chunk of centrist New Zealand voters - who aren't so stupid that they see asset sales as a black and white issue - are likely to be left singing one of Shania's other big hits: That Don't Impress Me Much.
* Liam Dann is business editor of the Herald.
