Open Letter to KiwiBank

Dear Sir

I recently had the misfortune of watching your “take the leap” advert on television, apparently aimed at those who have left the security of their jobs to set up a business. In the advert, you claim to know how this feels and that your bank also “took the leap.”

I find this not only an insult to the intelligence, but a bare-faced lie.

At no time since your bank’s inception did anyone in your organisation invest their own capital in your bank. Your bank was started off the backs of the taxpayer, and had continued that way. You risked nothing but the taxpayer’s anger. Thus your future was and still is assured – by the taxpayer. Regardless of how badly managed KiwiBank is, the taxpayer will always be forced to foot the bill.

In short your bank is another example of the State overstepping its mandate, and involving itself in areas of life in which it has no business.

I would therefore ask that you remove this advert from view as a gross misrepresentation of the truth, and an insult to those of us who have risked our own money to start a business -- and who would have  rather kept our earnings in our own pockets and our own businesses, instead of having it go to your own dubious enterprise.

Yours Sincerely

Peter Osborne

When did “Kiwi” become the pejorative for big government?

David Cunliffe was pleased to announce at his party’s conference two big policies he wants to take into election year. One was giving preference in Labour’s candidate selection to folk with particular genitals. The other was a policy pinched from Winston Peters.

This was a policy calling for the state, which has enough problems running itself, to run an insurance company. It will, he says, be “a local insurance company called KiwiAssure, which will work for all New Zealanders.”

Or so he says.

He says we wants folk to have the option of patronising a New Zealand insurance company. Which, when you think about it, is extremely patronising to New Zealand insurance company Tower Insurance.

He says we wants folk to see what a state insurer can do, he says.

Oh, David, but we have!

Someone should tell David, and those journalists questioning him about this so unquestioningly, that we have seen in the last few years what a state insurer can do. In Christchurch we’ve seen it in abundance, and many of the stories about what a state insurer can do to people are compiled at EQC Truths—a website “outlining the presence of corruption, systemic fraud, and failure of EQC to abide by its reinsurance treaties”—a website the state is still trying to close for fear folk might read about what a state insurer can do.

So if he wants to folk to see what a state insurer could do, he could just point them there. Or he could point to the sorry record built up by the state’s Accident Compensation Corporation, whose expertise—from many of the stories we hear--is not so much in working for all New Zealanders as in working against New Zealanders who are injured. You can read many of those stories here at the ACCforum, or the most recent high-profile case over at Madeleine Flannagan’s place.)

If he wants folk to see what a state insurer can do, he should also remember what a previous Labour government can do with a state insurer—a Labour government containing Annette King and Phil Goff—who sold off the state insure because it wasn’t providing anywhere like the service to New Zealanders that it should. Apart, that is, from those few New Zealanders employed by that former bureaucracy.

So why Mr Cunliffe thinks being a state insurer will somehow “raise the bar” is fatuous, not to say ludicrous. As if setting up a government department and slapping a “Kiwi” in front of it is enough to make it “work for all New Zealanders.”

He says however that this government department “will build upon” the success of the “wildly popular” (his words) Kiwibank, a bank which he himself admits can attract only 5% of all NZers who have bank accounts—predominantly those who use it to churn their welfare cheque into cash.  A bank which is itself little more a welfare case—set up with taxpayers’ money to do things profit-seeing banks wouldn’t and unable to survive in the market without frequent injections of ever-increasing tranches of OPM to prop up its credit rating—at the extraction of which from successive Ministers of Finance it has proved outstanding. A bank that has delivered its involuntary shareholders, us, the worst return on capital of any bank in the country.

Rest unassured that any of these facts will make a blind bit of difference to a politician desperate for a fix of bigger government.

UPDATE:  Apparently blind to his own party’s proclivities for top-down management (cough, Christchurch, cough) Steven Joyce is surprisingly coherent in opposing the CunliffeCorporation:

According to Labour, the Government should take political control of electricity, house building and now insurance. They want to remove the independence of the Reserve Bank, and they want to go back to a rigid national pay system, where everyone gets the same no matter who they work for or how hard they work; and they want to increase taxes on productive businesses that grow jobs… New Zealanders are entitled to ask which planet are these people on?

[…]

Labour’s leadership are keeping their heads in the sand and suggesting what the country needs is a radical step back to the past with less opportunity, fewer jobs for New Zealanders, and more state control.
    They haven’t learnt. It was a Labour Government that drove New Zealand into a recession before the GFC … And yet Labour’s leaders want to drag New Zealand not just back to 2008 but all the way to the 1970s.

KiwiBank and Gareth Morgan up a tree … [updated]

So KiwiBank is to buy out Gareth Morgan Investments, including the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme—a case of the politically appointed “People’s Bank” buying out the self-anointed “People’s Financier.”

KiwiBank’s CEO Paul Brock reckons “The ‘aligned values’ of the two businesses reinforced the decision to buy rather than build.”

Rarely has a truer word been spoke. Their “values”are aligned—and in more ways than one:

• KiwiBank was set up by a political tool with truckloads of taxpayer money to help resurrect the tool’s political career. Meanwhile, the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme was set up by a political fool eager to use his notoriety to attract money from gullible fools, and to suck down loads of taxpayers’ money.
• As a bank KiwiBank is simply a welfare case; a bank set up with taxpayers’ money to do things profit-seeing banks wouldn’t and unable to survive in the market without frequent injections of ever-increasing tranches of OPM to prop up its credit rating—at the extraction of which from successive Ministers of Finance it has proved outstanding. Meanwhile, the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme has taken advantage of what is little more than a welfare programme for suits, at the exploitation of which it has proved exceptional.
• And finally, KiwiBank has delivered the worst return on capital of any bank in the country. While year on year the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme has proved to be the worst performing KiwiSaver scheme in New Zealand.

These are two entities clearly made for each other.

So now the directors of Gareth Morgan Investments are eager to get a payday for their consistent underperformance.  And with this buyout of industry-leading underperformers, KiwiBank has once again confirmed their own.

UPDATE: Taking time today out of his busy schedule writing another book about how good he is, Gareth Morgan  responded today to criticism of his funds’ less than stellar performance (his balanced fund has returned a negative - 0.1% per annum since inception; its “growth fund” a negative -3.4% p.a.; its conservative fund  faring better at a positive 2.4% p.a, which still however sees his investors losing against inflation) blaming, in order, the ignorance (of others), the financial illiteracy (of others), and the league tables produced by ratings agencies Morningstar and Fund Source—who shamefully use actual figures instead of the ones provided by the voices in Gareth Morgan’s head—before pausing to point out his funds had done brilliantly against the “benchmarks” in his head.

He also said a “key focus” for GMI with respect to its KiwiSaver funds was “wealth preservation,” at which performance he maintained anyone criticising his growth portfolio’s return of negative 13.1% just doesn’t understand risk like he does.

He then touted for KiwiBank’s Kiwisaver work, before heading off to the travel agent to book his next holiday.

So much for honest government

Was the government changed at all at the last election?

You wouldn’t think so.

• Nanny is still with us.
• Her anti-smacking law is still with us.
• Aside from making it easier for the govt to bulldoze houses and factories, the Resource Management Act is fundamentally unchanged.
• Council rate rises continue to rise, even as their borrowings to fund their spending increases accelerate.
• The global warming/emissions trading scam continues.
• Our substance is still eaten out by KiwiRail and KiwiBank, KiwiSaver and Welfare for Working Families, by bureaucrats and central bankers, by the IRD and ACC -- and by politicians whose snouts are in the trough with an arrogance and sense of “entitlement” that normally takes three terms to develop, not just one.
• And in the face of the biggest economic crisis in seventy years we have a Finance Minister who can talk only about “sharp edges” and “green shoots” “rebalancing,” and between times acts in a manner that makes a deer in the headlights look purposeful.

So it’s all not good. Not good at all. 

And then yesterday it was reconfirmed, as it was was in September last year, and then again back in April this year, that the Electoral Finance Abomination is on its way back again, with just a few tweaks from Simon Power-Lust to pretend that all the campaigning and protesting and marching in the streets to oust Helen’s Electoral Finance Act really  meant something.

But it didn’t.

We marched to tear down Helen’s anti-democratic attack on free speech, only for you lot to vote in this lot to do the same themselves. To replace her Electoral Finance Abomination with their Electoral Finance Abomination-Lite. It includes:

• a $300,000 spending limit on non-political parties running protest campaigns in the three “official” months of the election.
• These “third party” protestors must register with the grey ones if they want to spend anything more than buying a classified ad in the Herald;
• and include their names (and addreses?) on their ads and billboards.
• "Anti-collusion" measures to really crack down on these jumped-up ne’er-do-wells with the temerity to criticise their betters.
• More taxpayers’ money gifted to the big two parties to advertise themselves on television and radio to the effective exclusion of the smaller parties.

And of course Labour will support it all because it, too, wants to limit the political competition—any competition at all—from anyone outside the Tweedledum and Tweedledumber of The Big Two parties.

What a crock.

So much for all the pontificating blowhard National Socialist MPS who blew hard and long at rallies around the country about the iniquity of Helen’s Electoral Finance Abomination, only to introduce their own.

Just as they marched and blew hard and long at rallies around the country about the iniquity of Helen’s  ant-smacking law, only to support it themselves.

They are scum, scum, scum, from their back teeth to their bum.

Bernard Darnton said two-and-a-half years ago that he looked forward to seeing the back of Helen Clark, but did not look forward to seeing the front of John Key.

Two-and-a-half years on from exchanging one from another, the only visible difference is a smile and a wave and the endless repetition of the word “relaxed” while things fall to pieces around him.

But of any fundamental change, there is none. None at all.

Here’s a poster produced by Whale Oil based on those produced for the last free speech campaign. All it needs is some funding and a corner site somewhere.

Welfare for bankers. There’s a lot of it about. [Updated]

‘Tis the season to give welfare to bankers. Unfortunately, New Zealand is not immune.

What is Kiwisaver, after all, but a giant welfare scheme for local paper shufflers; the nett result of which is that NZ’s overall level of saving hasn’t changed a whit—just the places where saving is done, and the levels of the taxpayer subsidy for it.

And what is the call for compulsory saving but even more welfare for those same suits with nothing in them—suits who’ve already failed to grow the money they’ve been give voluntarily, so that giving them your money by force just looks like rewarding failure.

Which is pretty much the case with Kiwibank.  A bank set up simply to assuage those New Zealanders who are frightened of foreigners—one that gives no returns at all to its shareholders (i.e., you, whether you like it or not), that makes virtually no return on the enormous capital you and I have sunk into it, and on the back of its lower profits has been rapidly expanding its loan book ((by $2.2 billion last year) by propping up the rapidly deflating housing bubble.

And its reward for its dismal return on your involuntary investment of more than $300 million?  That’s right: another hit of the same.  A promise from Bill English to pour $150 million more of your money down its black hole, just so it doesn’t lose its credit rating.

There is no rational argument for Kiwibank to exist as a state-owned bank, nor for it to keep sucking in more taxpayers’  money just because (with its unprofitable business model) it can’t generate enough itself.  There are four other big banks and fifteen smaller ones doing the job banks actually need to be doing without having otherwise productive capital tied up in a bank whose advertising and very existence is based on little more than NZers’ xenophobia.

New Zealand has a small labour force, and it enjoys among the developed world’s worst figures for labour productivity. A primary reason for that is because entrepreneurs have so little capital with which to put labour to work.  Yet this government and the last one seem insistent on making the little capital we do have is put to the least productive uses they can find for them.

It makes no sense.  But then, xenophobia never does.

UPDATE: Eric Crampton spotted superb commentary on this at NBR’s Plays of the Week:

National’s decision to use taxpayer funds to prop up Kiwibank’s credit rating ensures not only will this dog remain on the government’s books but also the liability will continue to grow.
    Only a few months after considering at least a partial sell-down of Xenophobiabank, the government has decided to give it a credit facility, allowing it to borrow about half a billion dollars more to try to keep the housing bubble inflated.
Massey University banking studies lecturer David Tripe told media the facility was basically a government guarantee that gave Kiwibank an unfair competitive advantage over the other main banks.
    But there should be no surprise the spineless National Party has continued to pander to unthinking nationalism and economic illiteracy.
    Just as with Kiwirail, that other capital-destroying “investment” made by the previous Labour government, National opposed Kiwibank when it was created.
    However, when handed the levers of power it decided to send more funds down this giant black hole for taxpayer money, just as it did with Kiwirail.
    Throwing good money after bad is a strategy only governments can get away with for any length of time, because they can continue to thieve from taxpayers to fund the stupidity.
    If a private company destroyed this much wealth it would go bust faster than you can say “malinvestment.”

Magnificent! I’d be proud to have said it myself.  :-)

National, one year on

What can you say about the National-led government and its leader Guy Smiley after their one year in office.

Well, what is there to say?  Their list of concrete achievements is … let’s be polite … slight.  Not to say, almost non-existent.  When it comes to boasting, there’s practically nothing to be boasting about.

Helen Clark once had the temerity to say that her ambition for her Premiership was that New Zealanders wouldn’t have to wake up every morning to discover that her government had done something drastic overnight. I say temerity, because the irony can’t have escaped her.  By contrast, under John Boy’s Premiership New Zealanders have woken up after a year to find that his government actually has done nothing – not even to roll back the few things they promised to, or New Zealanders hoped they would.  In fact, after a year New Zealanders might wake up and look around with a clear eye and realise there’s been no real change at all:

• Nanny is still with us.
• Her anti-smacking law is still with us.
• The Electoral Finance Act is on the way back again.
• The Resource Management Act is fundamentally unchanged.
• Rates continue to rise at double the rate of the CPI.
• The global warming/emissions trading scams proceed apace.
• Our substance is still eaten out by KiwiRail and KiwiBank, KiwiSaver and Welfare for Working Families, by bureaucrats and central bankers, by the IRD and ACC -- and by politicians whose snouts are already in the trough with an arrogance that normally takes three terms to develop, not just one-third of the first one.
• And in the face of the biggest economic crisis in seventy years, we have a Finance Minister who can talk only about “sharp edges” and “green shoots,” and between times makes a deer in the headlights look purposeful, and Michael Cullen look principled.

Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel famously declared that “You shouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste.” The Bill & John Show haven’t just wasted the opportunity of their lifetime to make-over New Zealand’s government into a lean mean non-frightening machine.  They’ve also wasted the opportunity handed to them on a plate of an opposition with all the appeal to the electorate of a fart in an astronaut suit.

They’ve taken these twin opportunities and done . . .  nothing.  In fact, worse than nothing.

They haven’t taken out-of-control government spending by the throat – instead they’ve watched in grow.

They’ve done nothing to reduce the decades of ballooning deficits – instead they’ve acquiesced as deficits have ballooned, and the fiscal child abuse has exploded.

They haven’t done anything to take the shackles off New Zealand businesses – all they’ve done is “reform” the RMA to take the shackles off New Zealand’s government projects, and “reform” Auckland by constructing a new super-bureaucracy.

They haven’t done anything to meet their election-winning promise of “substantial” tax cuts of “around $50 a week for most New Zealanders” – instead they’ve delivered ACC levy increases, and indications of whole new taxes on the horizon.

They’ve added new asset confiscation rules and new and heinous search and surveillance powers which belong to a police state, not a civilised State.

Bernard Darnton said one-and-a-half years ago that he looked forward to seeing the back of Helen Clark, but did not look forward to seeing the front of John Key. 

One year on from exchanging one from another, the only visible difference is a smile and the endless repetition of the word “relaxed.”  But of fundamental change there is none.

There’s another anniversary this week too that’s worth thinking about in the context of “change”: the twenty-year anniversary of of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Writing at the Mises Economics Blog, Richard Ebeling reflects on The Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Continuing Threats to Liberty that we all still have to confront [hat tip Mark Hubbard]:

    “We need to emphasize the threat that Big Government represents to all our freedom — including the right of freedom of movement — and which should be remembered on this 20-year celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, the Collectivist mentality did not end with either the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union. It remains alive and well in America [and New Zealand] and around the world, with its insistence that the individual lives for and is to be sacrificed to “interests” of the state. We still have our work cut out for us, to demolish the numerous political ‘walls’ with which the government continues to enslave us through its police power in the growing interventionist-welfare state and the threatening economic fascist order.”

There’s a lesson there that John Boy and his grinning confreres in cabinet might care to grasp -- and those over whom they preside might care to remind them.

Banking ‘inquiry’ collapses [update 2]

Kiwibank CEO Sam Knowles, who owes the existence of the bank he manages to Jin Neanderton’s jingoism and  taxpayers’ largesse , was not returning Old Jim or the Labour Party who extracted that largesse any favours at yesterday’s banking pseudo-inquiry.

The pseudo-inquiry is an attempt to position the Labour lightweights as the poor man’s economic heavyweights when it comes to bashing banks.  It was ostensibly intended to “investigate claims that banks are not giving customers the full benefit of Reserve Bank rates cuts.”

It was over however from almost the first question.

Knowles was the only banker to show up at the pseud’s inquiry.  Asked by opposition Punch ‘n Gro spokesman Clayton Cosgrove whether other banks’ higher rates were evidence that Kiwibank's larger rivals were "rorting Kiwis," Knowles short answer was “No.” 

His longer answer , which was  probably too long for either Punch ‘n Gro or Neanderton to digest, involved pointing out that if you already have customers (like the bigger banks do) then in order to take those customers yourself (which is what Kiwibank has been trying to do) then you have to offer a better deal.  Hence Kiwibank’s lower rates.

And at that point the whole raison d'être of the psuedo-inquiry collapsed in a heap. Only thing was, the pseuds themselves didn’t appear to notice.

UPDATE 1: Banks maximising profits? People say that like it’s a bad thing. But as David Rawcliffe points out at the Adam Smith Institute’s blog,

    The argument for profits is so simple as to be trivial: firms, provided they are subject to laws preventing theft and violence [and fractional reserve banking], can only gain revenue by selling things that people want; they can only make a profit if they sell these things for more than they cost to produce; and in the process of production they employ people who prefer that job to any other they could find. That is, profit-making firms create wealth (in the broadest sense of the word) for their customers, owners, and employees. They take wealth from no-one.
    FSA chief Lord Turner talks vaguely of the banks failing to be ‘socially useful’. The truth is this: any industry that makes money is ‘socially useful’, in the very concrete sense that it makes all those involved better off.

As you can see, I only needed to add one phrase to make it strictly accurate.

UPDATE 2: Give the state of BERL’s own economic literacy, isn’t it a bit rich for BERL’s senior alleged economist Ganesh Nana to be pointing fingers at the economic literacy of other New Zealanders?

And if it’s true that New Zealanders are more interested in property prices and mortgage rates than another other economic phenomenon, could it be that New Zealanders are simply responding rationally to distorted incentives – i.e., to investment incentives severely distorted by the Reserve Bank’s dictatorship of the money supply and their overseeing of the profligate issue of counterfeit capital – credit expansion (measured in M2) at the rate of over ten percent a year. 

Since the dollar in your pocket is diluted every time a new tranche of money is issued, it’s no wonder that NZers prefer a “flight into goods” rather than be left with holding too much of the Reserve Bank’s risky paper.

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Envy, greed and broken contracts

In which Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath takes his regularly irreverent look at some of the past week’s headlines.

1. Telecom board defends CEO’s ‘shameless’ salary package – Union boss and Labour Party hopeful Andrew Little calls the Telecom chief executive’s remuneration package “insulting to striking lines engineers”, and “shameless greed”. Well, if you think you can do a better job for less pay, Andrew, I’m sure the board of Telecom would like to hear from you. And isn’t it a little ironic that unions regularly strike to increase the pay of those they represent? Aren’t those employees being “greedy” too?
       It always seems those who protest the loudest about the “obscene” pay deals of high-ranking executives are those least qualified and able to fill the job themselves. Could there be just a smidgeon of envy colouring the views of these whingers? What they tend to forget is this: Telecom is a private company owned by shareholders, with governance by a board who appoint a CEO. The details of what executives are paid is the business of the board, and to a lesser degree, the shareholders. The latter can overturn the board if they feel the CEO is being overpaid; however none of us really know what was in Paul Reynolds’ employment contract. He may well have fulfilled his agreement with the board to the letter, and thus may be fully entitled to his salary and bonuses.
       Those people so upset about how much Mr Reynolds’ is paid also forget that the IRD probably steal half of his earnings back anyway, so that other people can be paid for not working and for breeding the next generation of Labour-voting non-workers.
2. Tobacco firm fined $20.4m – A brief report on yet another example of an irrational and grossly disproportionate payout to the family of a person who, knowing the risks from smoking tobacco, elected to carry on regardless and then to everyone’s surprise developed a fatal lung cancer.
       This whole story is absurd. The dangers of smoking are well-known to everyone; as a child in the 1960s, I knew that smoking was linked to lung cancer. Anyone who has opted to continue smoking since the Surgeon-General’s report of 1964 has done so knowing the potential consequences of their actions. To award damages against tobacco companies is to relieve smokers of responsibility for their actions.
       The means by which juries arrive at the amount of damages often awarded to smokers or their families can only be described as non-objective. Philip Morris - the tobacco company being punished for selling a product that adults want to purchase - allege that prosecution evidence violated state and federal law, and described the punitive damages award as “unconstitutionally excessive.” Still, in 2002 another jury recommended damages of 28 billion dollars to this same smoker and her family before the decision was overturned by a district court of appeal. Clearly, juries are making punitive damages awards based on emotion not reason, and there is a clear anti-business bias and a persistent portrayal of smokers as helpless victims which does not reflect reality.
       Those who sue tobacco companies should have to prove fraud or some other initiation of force by the company in question, and a more objective quantification of harm caused should be a requirement before damages are awarded. Whether or not one has any sympathy for tobacco companies, multi-million dollar damages awards to smokers (who knew the risks they were taking) are manifestly excessive.           
3. Kiwibank joins bank fee slashing – Hey! Surely Jim Bolger’s taxpayer-funded state bank hasn’t been ripping off its customers for the last few years? No? Then how come they have only just decided to remove overdraft fees, months after those greedy Australian banks did the same? Why should Kiwibank customers have to put up with this corporate greed? This is the same Jim Bolger who, along with his wife, gets a 90% taxpayer subsidy on his air travel. The same Jim Bolger who, it is alleged, quickly put his mum’s assets into a family trust before a law change, so that the taxpayer would be landed with her rest-home fees. I think the latter might just be a nasty rumour, so please Jim, correct me if I’m wrong there.
4. Households refuse to pay power bills – That’s OK; don’t pay your power and gas bill, and learn the hard way what life was like before someone invented electricity and greedy utility companies brought it to individual homes. As the Electricity Complaints Commissar said, her staff were powerless (pun intended?) to help: “If [your power bill] is high because you’ve used a lot of electricity, there’s not much we can do.” The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so that there is a cost to generating electricity; by the second law there is a cost in relaying electricity around the country. There is no such thing as a free lunch, or a free kilowatt-hour. Power companies have to run at a profit or they will disappear; and there is no right to have electricity supplied cheaply just because you want it. There is also such a thing as individual responsibility and the moral onus to honour contracts – so if a power company has supplied you with their product, kindly pay for it!

See y’all next week!
Doc McGrath

LIBERTARIAN SUS: Don’t bank on it

You can’t bank on the Wales, says Susan Ryder, no matter how long you wait.

It’s like a cancer. It starts slowly, undetected, before spreading insidiously, gathering momentum in its wake and eventually taking over.

I speak of environmentally-friendly advertisements. Especially those on television.

Not that I dislike clean products for the sake of it. I don’t. It makes good sense to utilise clever, cost-effective, waste-reducing technology. One of my favourite television programmes is the UK’s Grand Designs, which often features fabulous new concepts in engineering and home design. My problem is that I detest bandwagons and those who jump on them, not wanting to be left out. It smacks of group-think and collectivism and Nick Smith. Enough said.

But it’s really too much when trading banks get into the act. Stephen Fleming selling me an efficient heating system is one thing – he’s making a bit of money by doing so and that’s fine and dandy – but being preached to by the bloody banks is, cough, a bit rich.

I speak of the latest Westpac ad. It screams sustainable-this and sustainable-that, although what that has to do with banking is puzzling. If there was ever an industry that was unsustainable, it would be one that indulged in fractional reserve banking. And if there was ever a bank that was unsustainable, it would be one that confused ten thousand with ten million too often.

“Sustainable” is the Greenspeakers’ favourite word. As long as something is sustainable, you can’t go wrong. Even Helen Clark proved that in the end. She peppered her speeches with “sustainable” so often last year that she lost New Zealand but gained the world. It was a bit like losing your purse, then winning Lotto. Or asking for ten grand and getting ten million.

So Westpac is officially on board Mother Earth. Well, kumbayah kids and light a candle. It’s a beautiful thing.

If only. I don’t bank with Westpac, but I have reason to visit a branch every so often. Like all banks, they make a really good impression of treating their customers with disinterest at best. Never mind how long the queue gets, don’t, whatever you do, put more tellers on. Which reminds me of a wee story ...

Earlier last year I was at Sylvia Park, a large shopping centre in South Auckland that features all the banks. I had to make a deposit at Westpac but saw there was a queue of five or six customers waiting for two operational tellers. I chose to run another errand in the interim and arrived back nearly ten minutes later.

Nobody had moved. I joined the line and glanced at my watch. From a few feet away, it seemed that both customers at the counter had problems that took some resolving. Another five minutes passed with no movement and I was starting to get cheesed off.

In the interim I counted five staff wandering behind the tellers at the back of the bank. Nobody was in a hurry; they were ambling. They would invariably glance at the immobile queue and carry on walking. The possibility that waiting customers might quite like to be served before closing time didn’t seem to occur to them.

Out in front, standing in front of an information counter bereft of customers, wearing the most incredibly high heels was Russian Bride. I called her that because she looked like one. She had more makeup than Max Factor, with that arched expression of boredom and disinterest that Eastern European women have perfected. In spite of having nothing to do, and to doubtless ensure its continuance, she successfully managed to avoid meeting the gaze of a single customer in the rapidly growing queue.

New Zealanders are generally very polite people and so am I. But I don’t appreciate being ignored. And sometimes, people just need a bit of encouragement ...

“Look, I have things to do – and I’d like to be served sometime today,” I called out to Russian Bride. “This queue hasn’t moved in ages – and I’m sure these other customers have things to do, too! Is it possible to get some service please?!”

The floodgates opened. “Yes!” said the Indian man in front of me. “This lady’s right! We’ve been waiting here for more than ten minutes! It’s not on!”

“And I came past about a quarter of an hour ago,” said a woman behind me, “and the same lady is still waiting at the front of the line! I’ve got two kids to collect from school and I’m going to be late!” - together with cries of agreement from the others.

The mutiny stunned Russian Bride, but not enough to get her to move. She resumed her position of ignorance.

“Excuse me!” I said. “We’d like some service and we’d like it now, please. Perhaps you could go and find those staff I’ve seen wandering out the back there. Two would be good, but three would be ideal!”

Instead of getting on with it, she shot a look of pure venom at me. Big mistake. She left me with no choice but to remove my virtual gloves.

“Hey, this isn’t bloody Candid Camera! Take your high heels off and get out the back and get some tellers, please! NOW!”

By this time, I was thoroughly enjoying myself, the other customers taken up the call and, more importantly, had caused staff to come running. They managed to staff two more tellers, the others went back to their ambling and that was that.

I wouldn’t mind waiting if they just acknowledged the queue with a “sorry about the wait, we’ll be with you as soon as we can,” but none of them do that. This isn’t a whinge about Westpac specifically, because they’re all guilty of not giving a toss.

The BNZ has flying pigs and the National Bank has Black Beauty turning up at weddings. The ANZ has a bloke scoffing “lingueeeni” and the ASB has Goldstein. And having dispensed with the smug arse on the megaphone, Kiwibank now has the world’s most irritating woman berating foreigners. They spend a collective fortune telling us day after day how important we are – and now how important the bloody planet is – when we just want to be served.

It’s nothing new. Twenty odd years ago, 60’s pop singer Peter Noone was in Auckland starring in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. After waiting ages in a Queen Street bank queue that stubbornly refused to move, he shouted in frustration: “Where the hell are we? Poland?!”

* * Read Susan Ryder’s column every Tuesday here at NOT PC * *

NOT PJ: Wogs, Wops, and Chinks Need Not Apply [updated]

This week Bernard Darnton investigates whether or not human rights apply to darkies.

Wogs, wops, and chinks need not apply. And neither need bearers of other racial epithets. And if they have already applied, got the job, and worked hard, then they can jolly well go back to their own countries and stop stealing jobs from not-so-hard-working New Zealanders.

The Department of Labour is investigating “concerns” that a number of migrant workers were retained by a Christchurch company that has just made some New Zealanders redundant. Perhaps the Department’s time would be better spent investigating whether badgering companies to retain more expensive or less skilled staff is likely to make the recession better or worse.

Union secretary Phil Yarrall went whining to the Department of Labour asking for the migrant workers’ work permits to be revoked. He might like to explain how solidarity with the brotherhood of man is furthered by firing workers because of their ethnicity. Perhaps he should swap his job at the Manufacturing and Construction Workers Union for a nice spot on the board of the Ku Klux Klan.

There’s a disturbing degree of nationalism creeping into advertising too. Kiwibank has been at it since its inception, hence the name. Its advertising is based around the fact that they aren’t all nasty and foreign like those – horrors – Australian banks. Market research shows that this campaign has been wildly popular. Which just goes to show that there are a lot of fuckwits out there.

Air New Zealand is advertising that they’re “truly Kiwi” because they fly to Gisborne and Timaru unlike those Aussie-owned airlines, who are not from round here and are therefore crap.

What is it with government-owned companies and economic nationalism? State sponsored slagging-off of foreigners has been tried before and it ended up no fun for anyone. Thank God that New Zealand First was killed off at the last election. Now isn’t the time for a foreigner-hating Foreign Minister. Actually it’s never the time for a foreigner-hating Foreign Minister, and fortunately only 4.5% of the population disagrees with me.

Speaking of idiots who get het up about airport sales, last year a Canadian pension fund was prevented from investing in Auckland Airport because it’s a “strategic asset.” As if they were going to sneak over one night, stick the runway in a suitcase, and take it back to Toronto.

You get the same sort of economic nonsense from the Green Party – witness the now thankfully defunct Buy New Zealand Made campaign. American mega-corps with their refined-this and their detransfatulated-that are out to poison us. Chinese manufacturers of milk, sweets, canned strawberries, lead-painted Thomas the Tank Engine characters – pretty much anything in fact – are also out to poison us – and our children, the heartless bastards. Only good old New Zealand businesses (except those run by businessmen) are safe.

Not that economic nonsense from the Greens is a surprise; it’s just that you’d think a crowd of hippies would be a bit nicer and not get so down on our comrades of exotic extraction. But it turns out that foreign trees don’t deserve a hug.

If I were an employer (which I thankfully am not – I would rather be waterboarded with filthy foreign melamine-tainted milk) the absolute last person I would employ would be some whiny ignoramus who thought that his best qualification for a job was an accident of birth rather than, say, talent.

* * Bernard Darnton writes every Thursday at NOT PC * *

UPDATE:  Matt Nolan follows up.  So does Eric Crampton.

Privatising the forests

Privatisation is about as popular in the present political environment as Clint Rickards doing stand-up in a home for battered women.  No airport shares must be sold to Canadians.  No Air New Zealand shares must be sold to New Zealanders.   And the likes of TVNZ, NZ Post, Kiwibank, Solid Energy, Landcorp, Ontrack, Broadcast Communications Ltd, MetService Airways Corporation and the state-owned power generators ... well, don't even think about it.   Keeping state assets in state hands is supposed to be a "public good," no matter how badly mismanaged the asset.

There are people who will die in a ditch to fight any privatisation of state assets.  That is, any privatisation except one. On this one they have a blind spot.  It's when state assets are given to people with brown faces as payment for things we haven't done.

Note that $400 million of state forestry assets are being given to Maori, not to Maoris -- that is, they are being given as one lump to seven central north island tribal leaders, not as shares to individual iwi members (not to mention the $40 million that lawyers involved have pulled down for doing the deal).  Just as with previous "treaty settlements" that handed over forests and fisheries to a Browntable of  tribal leaders whose snouts are raw and bellies full from years of feeding from the trough, control and privilege is being handed over to a those at the top tribal table, leaving individual iwi members unlikely to see any benefit. 

This is the Maori version of trickle down. 

Frankly, whatever the injustice of taxpayers paying tribalists for things they didn't do, I'm all in favour of taking land out of the commons, and taking state assets out of state hands -- removing assets from the state's cold dead hands by any means necessary -- but there's no point in simply transferring assets from one munted bureaucracy to another. 

A property right has been created where it didn't previously exist, and that's a good thing.   But yet another opportunity has been lost here to take tribalism out of the mix altogether.  Instead of being detribalised, Maori are being retribalised -- and this is to no-one's benefit but the tribal leaders themselves. The answer would have been to transfer title NOT to tribal leaders in one lump, or to iwi as a whole, but to individuals in the form of transferable shares that would give them control over the asset they've been granted.  Those who've been awarded the shares will be able to do anything they wish with their own share -- which will give an accurate indication of how much they really value this land -- and as Ronald Coase points out (for those who object to privatisations effected in this manner), it's in the nature of things that land titles so created will eventually tend to end up in the hands of those who most value them.  All that's needed is to start the process.  [More on the process proposed here.]

Everybody would win if things had been effected in such a fashion -- except of course for the Knights of the Brown Table for whom fame and fortune now await.