October 25, 2013

Possibly the stupidest thing our deputy prime minister has said

Labour and Greens hurt share float, says English (Audrey Young, Herald, 24/10/2013)

Finance Minister Bill English conceded that the Government would like to have had more New Zealand investors than the 62,000 and a higher share price than $1.50.

But he blamed in no small part Labour and Greens’ energy policy, accusing them of scaring off mum and dad investors from Mighty River Power and Meridian because of their policy to control wholesale power prices.

“They set out to sabotage lower income New Zealanders doing it. Unfortunately they’ve had some effect.”

So Bill English (yes, that’s the deputy prime minister, not your ignorant workmate) thinks poor NZers can afford to buy shares, and the only reason they aren’t buying shares in what we used to own together is that Labour and the Greens “sabotaged” their investment plans by “scaring them off.”

The most obvious explanation is that he’s trying to contort the embarrassing failure of the asset sales into being somehow the opposition’s fault.

A more worrying possibility is that he actually believes what he’s saying. This is, after all, the man who wrote off child poverty as merely “relative.”

70% of National supporters don’t know anyone who’s unemployed, so what are the odds the National deputy leader knows any “low income New Zealanders”?

As Robert McAfee Brown put it: “who we listen to determines what we hear; where we stand determines what we see.”

(Re. the title: I’m happy to be corrected)