Gordon McLauchlan: Kiwibank carping an Act of ill-will

The Kiwibank seemed a desirable institution to fill the black hole in the savings market left by the trading banks.

Also, successive governments here have been reluctant to support credit unions the way Australian, North American and European governments have over the past six decades.

The valiant little TSB is a tad too inaccessible for regular business. A fully operational Kiwibank would keep its profits in New Zealand.

And when Kiwibank was mooted I was experiencing the corporate banks' contempt for any business that would affect their balance sheets more than a couple of years ahead.

I am still a customer of a trading bank I joined when I started my first job, and I wanted to start similar associations for four infant grandchildren by opening savings accounts for them. Small sums of money would be deposited on their behalf several times a year in the hope the kids would each have some capital by the time they reached adulthood.

Well, three banks (including my own) showed not even token enthusiasm. They all said they had no suitable accounts. One bank did not - to its credit, I suppose - equivocate for a moment and advised me to go elsewhere. Where, it didn't say. It was clear the bank's customer service planning was fixed on commercial customers, and the bigger the better.

My generation, I reminded it, had savings banks touting for business while we were still at primary school. The schools gave access because they thought it would teach thrift, then regarded as a virtue, and the banks saw it as a chance to get loyal customers to do business with during their high-earning years.

Today's bank staff regarded this as fascinating historical information, similar to the fact that people once lived in caves and wore animal skins.

So I was a supporter of Jim Anderton's Kiwibank idea and decided I would move an account or two of my own to give the institution a start. It was going to be difficult because of people like Rodney Hide braying obeisance to his intellectually enclosing ideology, even though he would know that the one asset a bank must have above all others is confidence.

There seems to be no Dr Jekyll to Rodney's Mr Hide. He is an enthusiastic expert at demolition but shows no interest in creating anything.

It's worth reminding him that banking is one business in which a failure can do more harm to customers - that is, the depositors - than to owners, which is the main reason good governments have always regulated trading banks.

If Kiwibank fails because of Act's persistent attempts to undermine confidence in it without good cause, then it won't be their political opponents who will suffer most.

However, in March some things began to go wrong for me. I had a postbox at a suburban post shop for 30 years and then, a year or so ago, opened another in the city. Around Christmas I began to suspect mail addressed to the city box was missing. I reported it and the response was fairly casual, to the effect that it happened a bit at that time of the year.

In March I found a parcel card in the city box and was handed items of mail rubber-banded together. They were part of my missing pre-Christmas mail.

Frontline staff apologised. They said it had been put in the wrong rack. I asked if they had a system whereby once a week the racks were checked and was told they didn't have the staff for that.

Oh dear! If they couldn't mind my mail should I give them money to look after?

Then I closed my long-standing suburban postbox and arranged a transfer of mail to my city one. It went well enough for a while and we sent out redirection cards, but then I began to get redirected mail that was not mine and - I could see from under the blacking-out pencil - had not been addressed either to me or my suburban post box in the first place.

I went to see the mailroom manager in the city and asked him sternly what was happening. "All I can do is ask" the people at the suburban box to be more careful, he said.

"Ask or tell?" I said, "or are you running a national and international mail service on the hope that everyone will be nice?" He simply walked away.

Then there is the messy business of the lavish, seemingly inefficient spending at senior management level of New Zealand Post. And the company chairman, Ross Armstrong, and the board seem somewhat dysfunctional.

And there's the fact that it's Jim's bank, and Jim Anderton, that 1980s man of integrity, sponsors a law and then spends his waking hours cunningly trying to subvert it.

So do I give Kiwibank some of my money to care for? I'll think about it for a week or two and see what develops. Pity though.

* The arrogance of power, always a whiff in the Wellington air, rose to a stench this week as first Prime Minister Helen Clark and then National Party president Michelle Boag tried to subvert the normal course of judicial inquiries by insisting on "rights" not accorded to other citizens.

Anyone was entitled to make a complaint (even against her), said Clark, "but there is also a right to know who is complaining". Boag and other party members also seemed to think this was fundamental as they flailed away at everyone they could think of, trying desperately to compromise a judicial officer who was responding to a complaint.

Can we expect a new law soon promoted by both parties to end action by any organisation acting on anonymous information?

nzherald.co.nz/kiwibank