Posts by Russell Brown
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You all in Auckland may be interested in my friend's blog - he's reviewing some of the finest lunches to be had for not much cash here.
Good blog! I haz his RSS ...
Although the statement that "Sichuan is, in topical fashion, the Chinese province that borders Tibet" is precariously political ...
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Cullen is on Checkpoint saying that Toll's position would have involved the government subsidising the purchase of its rolling stock, and that the original 2003 agreement had never been complied with. I understand the counter-argument, but the more I look at it, the more I'm okay with the government choosing not to expatriate a whole lot of taxpayers' money to Australia.
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I agree with most of what you've said there. The counter-point would be - if the subsidy led to a profit (which it presumably is doing for Toll), that profit should be used to reduce the subsidy and make it profit-neutral for the government. Instead of a $10 million subsidy, maybe it could be $7 million.
I think the main issue was access charges: Toll wanted a monopoly on freight service but didn't want to pay for it. The real subsidy is the money the taxpayers would spend on the network to give Toll a monopoly position.
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Owning the railways ourselves doesn't make us any better off unless the government can actually run the service at lower cost or higher quality, or if the subsidies are temporary measures needed while the business develops to a normally profitable level.
But this was the argument put up against the buy-back of Air New Zealand. It was very easy to argue a counterfactual and simply assume that selling the airline to Singapore would have solved everything.
But it's a lot harder to argue that Air NZ's performance since the government became the major shareholder hasn't been out-of-sight better than when it was a widely-held listed company.
We can't know what state the railways would be in now if the people who bought TranzRail from the government (in a deal that sucked for both the government and Fay, Richwhite's shareholders) hadn't basically looted the company. But they did, and it seems clear that Toll's ownership wasn't going anywhere that would fix things.
What we can say is that Labour wanted to announce this at the first possible opportunity: the full sale agreement isn't even completed yet.
The Q&A suggests an SOE. One like Kordia, that operates commercially but can be roped in to public goals.
I'm not at all against privatisation of businesses the government doesn't need to own. But I think there's a case to be made that the government did need to step in here, if it wanted to be able to exercise a strategy to reduce fossil fuel dependence that went beyond carbon taxes and emissions trading.
Of course, if you think there's no need to reduce fossil fuel dependence, there's not much of a case.
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I kind of miss the regional Schechwan, Canton chinese food that use vegetables unknown here.
You might be surprised at what you can get in downtown Auckland. I know Mr Brown was.
And good Italian food, with pasta and bread made on the premises, using the type of tomatoes and herbs and cheese that are specific to the regional dishes.
Delicious makes pasta and bread on the premises. And you might even get the legendary Basil Fawlty floor show from the proprietor ...
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What's with trashing the Lone Star?
At least it has flavour.Well, David's utterly woeful experience might have been a little less out-of-order if the food had been cheap and cheerful.
But for less money I can order a fine steak at Prego from some of the best hospo workers in the country.
That's the issue.
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National: We said we'd sell the railways if Labour bought them, but now they have we won't because no one would pay for them anyway.
It's actually a reasonably savvy line to take, and they managed it before 2pm.
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It's where I first encountered deep-fried camembert.
What were they thinking in those days?
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I'm still vexing over that $30 steak.
$30 will buy you a piece of prime eye fillet at Prego, and I bet I know which one is better.
Mmmm ... Prego ...
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and we have no guarantee, but certainly a well founded suspicion that once rail is vertically integrated again, it will behave like most, nay all, vertically integrated transport network operators. At least we know we're going to be subsidising rail.
Odd isn't it, just when we cleave Telecom into three, we cleave Rail back into one
I wouldn't say it's a given that the state will directly operate services.
But Toll had exclusive use of the network for freight, and seemed to be playing hardball over its next access agreement (which was key to the negotiations with the government). It may have been that the only way to enable new commercial services was to get Toll out of the way.
So I don't think the telecommunications comparison is completely apt here.
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