KEY POINTS:
At last the National Party has done something to differentiate itself from Labour and to put paid once and for all the epithet "Labour Lite" which has been applied to John Key and his team by some of our less perceptive political commentators.
It came when deputy leader Bill English at the weekend disclosed that the party is considering a policy of partially selling some of our state-owned enterprises. That is good news indeed.
Not so much because the proposal is to sell off some more assets but that National has shown itself courageous enough at least to raise the possibility and thus exhibit a measure of open-mindedness.
If there is anything this country needs in its politicians after nearly eight years of Labour-led Government, it is open-mindedness. What a breath of fresh air that would be.
For all its time in government the Labour leadership has exhibited a rigid ideological dogmatism which has grown more and more impenetrable the longer it has been in power.
And along the way this dogmatism had infected much of the populace to the extent that borders on brainwashing, because people in general don't seem to do much thinking for themselves but seem simply to accept what they read in the press or see on TV.
If any proof were needed of the closed-mindedness of the Labour leadership, it was given in the knee-jerk reaction to Mr English's statement, first by Acting Finance Minister Clayton Cosgrove and later by the Dear Leader herself.
Said Mr Cosgrove: "This is just a slow-burning fire sale. You can only partially sell something once, then you lose the dividend stream."
Said Helen Clark: "Why would we want to go from having very successful state-owned companies returning a dividend to every kiwi, to some kiwis getting the chance to get a lot more from them that others?"
Note the similarity in the two statements: The principal concern is that the Government might lose some income if parts of some state-owned enterprises were sold. As for these enterprises "returning a dividend to every Kiwi", have you ever seen a cent from any of them? Have some of the profits of, for instance, the state electricity providers been returned to consumers?
Not on your life. Miss Clark's "dividend to every Kiwi" is, in fact, a dividend to the Government - and that is a different thing altogether. Because this is a Government that really, really believes it can spend our money better than we can so, as well as holding on to all the profits from its enterprises, it also taxes us unmercifully and robs us blind with other duties and charges.
What the Cosgrove-Clark reaction proves is the utter intolerance of the Labour leadership of any concept that might be contrary to its increasingly left-wing socialist dogma. Another that springs to mind is nuclear energy which, in view of so-called global warming and the alleged greenhouse gas problem, would provide an ideal answer - cheap, efficient and clean. But this is another area in which a large section of the public has been brainwashed over the years to believe that anything preceded by the word nuclear is evil, and that somehow our national identity depends on having nothing to do with it.
But back to Mr English's proposal. Nowhere in what he said is there any suggestion that state assets would be flogged off dirt cheap to offshore investors or to unethical and avaricious locals who would strip them of assets then shoot through overseas with container-loads of wineboxes full of their ill-gotten gains.
That was what happened when the real fire sale took place in the mid-1980s under Douglas, Prebble and co - the predecessors of today's Labour leadership. No wonder Clark, Cosgrove and co are so sensitive.
What Mr English has proposed is that selected assets - and I agree with this newspaper's editorial that they must be carefully selected - might be sold to Kiwi investors, be they the NZ Super Fund or mums and dads with a few bucks to spare. He has made it plain that sales of the sort undertaken by Labour 20-odd years ago - nothing short of a disaster for us citizens - are not on the agenda, but that giving Kiwis a personal stake in some of our valuable state assets is worth thinking about.
What a relief that is in a nation that has for too long been under the thumb of left-wing ideologues, who would even, if they could get away with it, pass laws to control spending on election advertising to ensure that their policies come under attack as little a possible, leaving the field clear for their own propaganda.
For, you see, there is nothing that terrifies socialist demagogues more than people who think for themselves.
* garth.george@hotmail.com
