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Isn't it funny how this country is run?
Last Tuesday, we had an interview with the Prime Minister. It ended in an odd way, in the sense that some of the subjects I raised with her, it became apparent she didn’t have a clue about.
This set off the usual Twitterati, accusing me of being rude. A lot of people also wondered why so much was going on she didn’t know about.
It happened again yesterday, a government Ministry paying $3000 a house for social housing needs instead of the $550 they were actually worth. Last week there were the two letters to councils in trouble asking for information for the Minister. The Minister has the power to appoint people to run councils if a council has become dysfunctional.
And we also had the letter suggesting the government buy the Ports of Auckland, or 50 percent of it.
Ardern knew nothing of this, which was remarkable given it had been on this programme and a number of other outlets. You'd think the potential sale of such an asset might have caught her eye, or been drawn to her attention .
But as it turned out the bloke who wrote the letter had sprung the idea on his Auckland Council mates. Poor old Phil Goff, who appeared as out of the loop as the Prime Minister, expressed his displeasure and said it was no answer to the councils hundreds of millions of dollars worth of black hole left by Covid.
Anyway, the proposal less than a week later is on the desk of Grant Robertson. So something very few people seemed to be even remotely aware of, is now in front of the man with the money.
The question is, do we want the government owning more stuff than they already do? And it's question we should be asking given, it's an election issue, or it should be.
Government owning things is rarely a good idea. We already have Air New Zealand and their arrangement. We have a loan scheme that Air New Zealand has tapped into or about to tap into that is available to other major players that could involve the government grabbing a stake in the companies.
That includes Tiwai, NZ Refining and the Glenbrook mill.
There is also another loan scheme for smaller businesses where the government might end up owning a stake as well.
Just how much of this country do we want owned by the state? And when the state owns most of the country's businesses, what's the called? Join some dots.
For something so potentially significant, it's astonishing how little it's being talked about.