HELEN. DON’T JUST STOP AT SAVING ST JAMES STATION FROM FOREIGN OWNERSHIP
The Campaign Against Foreign of Aotearoa (CAFCA) congratulates the Government for buying the St James Station for the explicit purpose of keeping it from falling into foreign ownership.
This proves that its 2005 Overseas Investment Act is not working. At the time that was touted as affording protection to “iconic” land. The Government obviously doesn’t trust its own law to do that when it opted to spend $40 million to buy St James. In fact, all that Act does is put up a few more hoops for foreign buyers to jump through but it doesn’t actually stop them buying land, iconic or otherwise.
There is a simpler, and much cheaper, solution than ad hoc multi-million dollar purchases to prevent NZ land being sold overseas – institute a legal regime that much more severely restricts foreign ownership of land, or ban it outright. That is the logical conclusion of what the Government has done in the case of St James Station and we call upon it to admit that and put such a regime in place as soon as possible.
Showing posts with label press release. Show all posts
Showing posts with label press release. Show all posts
US Free Trade Agreement - CAFCA Press Release
US FREE TRADE AGREEMENT A POISONED CHALICE FOR NZ
The proposed expansion of the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, commonly known as the P4 Agreement) to include investment and financial services, and to add the US to its membership, was bad enough.
For a succinct, detailed critique of that original proposal, go to http://nznotforsale.wordpress.com/danger-ahead/ on the New Zealand Not For Sale Website.
But for this to suddenly morph into a fullblown Free Trade Agreement with the US is catastrophic for any remaining economic sovereignty that New Zealand has. We say this not because we are “anti-American”. All such FTAs – such as with China, or the existing P4 partners, for instance - pose the same threat to a greater or lesser degree. And our opposition to them is not because of “xenophobia” but for well founded grounds that they simply enmesh NZ more and more tightly in a cobweb of transnational corporate control.
So it’s a recipe for disaster to enter into an FTA with the biggest economy in the world, headed by a Government that aggressively pushes the interests of American Big Business (there is a seamless flow between the US Government and US Big Business, as is evidenced by the current trillion dollar bailout of the mega-greedy financial sector, a textbook example of socialism for the rich).
A full blown US FTA will:
Remove any remaining “restrictions” on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ’s (purely token) oversight regime as “discriminating” against US transnational corporations
push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;
make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;
attack our GE controls and food labelling,
weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.
Both Labour and National myopically see a US FTA as being the Holy Grail of their adherence to the cargo cult of “free trade”. It’s actually a poisoned chalice and it will be New Zealand which will be poisoned by it.
The proposed expansion of the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, commonly known as the P4 Agreement) to include investment and financial services, and to add the US to its membership, was bad enough.
For a succinct, detailed critique of that original proposal, go to http://nznotforsale.wordpress.com/danger-ahead/ on the New Zealand Not For Sale Website.
But for this to suddenly morph into a fullblown Free Trade Agreement with the US is catastrophic for any remaining economic sovereignty that New Zealand has. We say this not because we are “anti-American”. All such FTAs – such as with China, or the existing P4 partners, for instance - pose the same threat to a greater or lesser degree. And our opposition to them is not because of “xenophobia” but for well founded grounds that they simply enmesh NZ more and more tightly in a cobweb of transnational corporate control.
So it’s a recipe for disaster to enter into an FTA with the biggest economy in the world, headed by a Government that aggressively pushes the interests of American Big Business (there is a seamless flow between the US Government and US Big Business, as is evidenced by the current trillion dollar bailout of the mega-greedy financial sector, a textbook example of socialism for the rich).
A full blown US FTA will:
Remove any remaining “restrictions” on foreign investment, as the US regards NZ’s (purely token) oversight regime as “discriminating” against US transnational corporations
push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac;
make access to digital recordings more expensive, and copying more restricted;
attack our GE controls and food labelling,
weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases.
Both Labour and National myopically see a US FTA as being the Holy Grail of their adherence to the cargo cult of “free trade”. It’s actually a poisoned chalice and it will be New Zealand which will be poisoned by it.
Rio Tinto - CAFCA Press Release
RIO TINTO, STOP CRYING WOLF
Just Close The Bluff Smelter & Bugger Off
Here we go again. Every time that Rio Tinto, the gargantuan mining and processing transnational which owns 80% of the Bluff smelter feels that its charmed existence in New Zealand is going to become less cushy, it threatens to pull the plug, close the smelter and walk away. This time it has threatened to do so because of the Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. Previously it has made an identical threat as a negotiating tactic in power price contract talks with Meridian. And it has done so before when the Government of the day called for power use reductions because of electricity shortages.
Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa calls Rio Tinto’s bluff. Stop crying wolf, stop holding Southland and the country to ransom. Go ahead and close the smelter and bugger off. See if we care, the country will be much better off without you. The smelter is the single biggest user of electricity, consuming one sixth of the total, 24/7 for the past nearly 40 years. It pays a top secret super cheap price that is not available to any other user and all it does is export electricity from NZ in the form of alumina, while being subsidised by all other electricity users. Once again we are being told to brace for power shortages this winter and once again this parasite is being given top priority of guaranteed uninterrupted supply.
The smelter is the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand. It is the biggest bludger in the country. Those who extol the bracing discipline of market forces for everybody else are strangely coy when it comes to this corporate recidivist. When the Government renationalised the railways last week, one pejorative word which was heard a lot was “featherbedding”. If you want to see the most feathered of beds, look no further than the Bluff smelter.
What about the people who work for the smelter, directly or indirectly? The P industry provides an income for thousands of people too, but we don’t hear any demand for that insidious trade to be kept going to keep them in a job. This smelter constitutes a bigger crime against the people of New Zealand and has done for the nearly 40 years that it has been operating. In the national interest, it must be closed and the sooner the better.
Just Close The Bluff Smelter & Bugger Off
Here we go again. Every time that Rio Tinto, the gargantuan mining and processing transnational which owns 80% of the Bluff smelter feels that its charmed existence in New Zealand is going to become less cushy, it threatens to pull the plug, close the smelter and walk away. This time it has threatened to do so because of the Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. Previously it has made an identical threat as a negotiating tactic in power price contract talks with Meridian. And it has done so before when the Government of the day called for power use reductions because of electricity shortages.
Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa calls Rio Tinto’s bluff. Stop crying wolf, stop holding Southland and the country to ransom. Go ahead and close the smelter and bugger off. See if we care, the country will be much better off without you. The smelter is the single biggest user of electricity, consuming one sixth of the total, 24/7 for the past nearly 40 years. It pays a top secret super cheap price that is not available to any other user and all it does is export electricity from NZ in the form of alumina, while being subsidised by all other electricity users. Once again we are being told to brace for power shortages this winter and once again this parasite is being given top priority of guaranteed uninterrupted supply.
The smelter is the textbook example of corporate welfare in New Zealand. It is the biggest bludger in the country. Those who extol the bracing discipline of market forces for everybody else are strangely coy when it comes to this corporate recidivist. When the Government renationalised the railways last week, one pejorative word which was heard a lot was “featherbedding”. If you want to see the most feathered of beds, look no further than the Bluff smelter.
What about the people who work for the smelter, directly or indirectly? The P industry provides an income for thousands of people too, but we don’t hear any demand for that insidious trade to be kept going to keep them in a job. This smelter constitutes a bigger crime against the people of New Zealand and has done for the nearly 40 years that it has been operating. In the national interest, it must be closed and the sooner the better.
No Corporate Welfare for Telecom
While it’s commendable that John Key wants everybody to have access to broadband, his proposed method of going about it leaves a lot to be desired. If spending $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money on it is his definition of a public private partnership, we’d love to see his definition of a subsidy for Telecom.
What John Key is proposing is nothing more than corporate welfare on a massive scale, which is ironic indeed from a party that for years has mined a rich electoral vein of beneficiary bashing. Well, here’s one very big bludger that richly deserves bashing.
Why should the long suffering New Zealand public pay for the manifest shortcomings of this recidivist transnational corporation? The corporatisation and sale overseas of Telecom is still the biggest and worst example of privatisation of a State asset. Under its foreign owners, Telecom has creamed umpteen billions in profits, considerably more than the $1.5 billion that it reckons it can’t afford to complete the broadband rollout. And the vast majority of those profits have been paid out as dividends to its shareholders (up to 98 cents in the dollar at one stage), not reinvested into its infrastructure.
Telecom won the 2007 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand (it’s the only transnational to have been a finalist in every annual Roger Award since the start, in 1997) and one of the major reasons the judges gave it this most coveted of prizes was because of its flagrant lack of reinvestment. The full Judges’ Report can be read online at
http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/Roger2007.pdf The Report includes a very detailed and fascinating Financial Analysis of Telecom’s accounts by Sue Newberry, Associate Professor of Accountancy at the University of Sydney. That conclusively demonstrates how figures can be massaged and re-titled to present a more flattering picture of reinvestment than is actually the case.
If the taxpayer is going to spend $1.5 billion on providing a service that Telecom can’t or won’t, but from which Telecom will continue to profit handsomely, then the logical conclusion is obviously that the State should take back its former asset so that the New Zealand people can once again fully benefit from what is rightfully ours, and this most strategic of assets (the Government has now prioritised strategic assets) can be operated in the national interest, not that of foreign owners and shareholders.
What John Key is proposing is nothing more than corporate welfare on a massive scale, which is ironic indeed from a party that for years has mined a rich electoral vein of beneficiary bashing. Well, here’s one very big bludger that richly deserves bashing.
Why should the long suffering New Zealand public pay for the manifest shortcomings of this recidivist transnational corporation? The corporatisation and sale overseas of Telecom is still the biggest and worst example of privatisation of a State asset. Under its foreign owners, Telecom has creamed umpteen billions in profits, considerably more than the $1.5 billion that it reckons it can’t afford to complete the broadband rollout. And the vast majority of those profits have been paid out as dividends to its shareholders (up to 98 cents in the dollar at one stage), not reinvested into its infrastructure.
Telecom won the 2007 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand (it’s the only transnational to have been a finalist in every annual Roger Award since the start, in 1997) and one of the major reasons the judges gave it this most coveted of prizes was because of its flagrant lack of reinvestment. The full Judges’ Report can be read online at
http://canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Roger/Roger2007.pdf The Report includes a very detailed and fascinating Financial Analysis of Telecom’s accounts by Sue Newberry, Associate Professor of Accountancy at the University of Sydney. That conclusively demonstrates how figures can be massaged and re-titled to present a more flattering picture of reinvestment than is actually the case.
If the taxpayer is going to spend $1.5 billion on providing a service that Telecom can’t or won’t, but from which Telecom will continue to profit handsomely, then the logical conclusion is obviously that the State should take back its former asset so that the New Zealand people can once again fully benefit from what is rightfully ours, and this most strategic of assets (the Government has now prioritised strategic assets) can be operated in the national interest, not that of foreign owners and shareholders.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
