Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Russell Brown,
I still think selling Telecom was the correct thing to do. Telecommunications needed a market.
The problem was National being played for complete and utter rubes by the people who did it. They allowed themselves to be convinced that a promise to be really nice and not abuse Telecom’s overwhelming dominance precluded the need for regulation.
This is something we do again and again in New Zealand. We repeat mistakes made elsewhere. There is nothing new about telecommunications companies needing regulation. The US experience alone should have been enough to inform anyone with a brain that left unregulated the company would act to maximise profit to the harm of NZ.
Can we please stop making the same mistakes that have been made elsewhere?
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Steve Barnes,
It’s not that they want to sell, it’s what they want to sell.
That's it for me as well. There are assets a government develops (because nobody else will) that in the end can and should be managed privately. There are examples of such things all over the world. At some point there is no longer any advantage to the country to have the government manage those assets.
But there are other assets where private management simply fails to work for the benefit of the country. To coin the phrase we get asked all the time about our research - "the benefit to New Zealand" is poor. You can look around the world for examples where assets in private ownership and management perform to the detriment of the country.
The specific example of electricity generation and distribution is one where private ownership in the US very nearly resulted in complete collapse of the network across the entire US, yes it really did get that bad. Competing generation companies made inefficient choices, competing distribution companies failed to maintain distribution systems. Stupid profiteering resulted in energy produced in one state being sold to another state at the same time as brownouts were occurring in the state producing the energy. Stupid management resulted in overloading of some distribution networks while others were unused. Only government intervention at the state and federal level sorted the mess out - to howls of protests of course.
From what I've seen around the world private ownership and management of electricity generation and distribution is simply not for "the benefit of New Zealand".
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Rich Lock,
That really should win a bottle of Zunwohl
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Russell Brown,
At least this thing is sorting out the journalists from the celebrities.
Yeah it is. The celebrities get paid more.
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Euan Mason,
in the west
????
Western Europe is a high tax high service structure as is Scandinavia.
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I'm not going to change anyone else's mind and vice versa
That seems to be the message of this election entirely. For all the sound and fury, for all the photo opportunities, the polls* seem to show that people made up their minds 6 months ago or more.
It doesn't stop us having discussions.
* But the polls may not be correct, sample sizes are small and sampling is not random so that leaves me very curious about the results of the only poll that actually matters.
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Two women somehow managed to talk to each other constantly, rapidly, loudly – and at the same time.
No judge would convict you ...
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Thank you!
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We can of course do both. There are times when it is possible to establish the industry in NZ and times when that simply doesn't make sense but you make money from a discovery that someone else can use.
In the plant science field, some of our discoveries are best applied to crops that we just don't grow. In that situation it make perfect sense to license the discovery to someone who can use it. Other projects can create or improve NZ farmers/growers directly.
Both models can work and both models can generate earnings for NZ. It's worth noting that improving rice production or yield by a fraction of a percentage could make NZ more money than producing a new apple that is only grown in NZ.
"Selling out" is simply not a helpful term nor is "benefit to NZ" or "industry alignment".
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Hard News: On Science, in reply to Geoff Willmott,
I don’t think physical scientists in NZ could ever be accused of having preferred status.
I do agree. Look it's great they are getting money. Basically there isn't a science sector in NZ that isn't starved of money.
I just hope they give the money to the good science groups in IRL rather than targeting the money to perceived growth sectors.