Quote of the Day - 5 September 2013

Today's quote comes from an editorial in The Press this morning on the subject of the asset sales referendum:

When the act allowing for citizens initiated referendums to be held was passed in 1993, it provided that they could only be started after a petition to Parliament signed by 10 per cent of registered electors within 12 months.
The provision was designed to be, and has been, an effective deterrent to single-issue cranks getting their pet obsession on to a ballot paper. It means that anything that does make it to a referendum has some public support already.
It has not, however, prevented the four referendums held so far from being a waste of time and money. All four have produced the answer their proponents wanted and all four have, quite properly, been ignored by the governments of the time, both Labour and National-led.
The latest, promoted by the Green Party in opposition to the Government's policy of partial privatisation of state assets, will be no exception. It has taken the Green Party two goes, and the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars of its parliamentary grant, to get the required 10 per cent of valid signatories, but it will be no more successful than earlier petitions to preserve the number of fulltime professional firefighters, to oppose legislation on smacking children or to reduce the number of members of Parliament.
The referendum is even more pointless than usual. Not only will it have no influence on the Government's stance on the issue, it is also on a matter on which the Government undoubtedly gained a mandate at the last election - the fate of state assets was one of the foremost issues of the election campaign. The partial sale of state assets is, furthermore, an issue for which the Government will be answerable at the general election just over a year from now. 

We could not agree more strongly. National's stance on asset sales has been completely transparent, unlike the Labour Government of the 1980's. John Key clearly stated that there would be no asset sales in National's first term of government, and he kept his word. 

In 2011, the Mixed Ownership Model was signalled in January, and again in the 2011 Budget in May. It was the single most talked-about issue by Labour, the Greens, NZ First and Mana. But from the moment that John Key was able to form a government, he had a mandate to implement the policies that National had campaigned on, including the sale of a minority shareholding in selected and named SOE's.

LabourGreenNZFirstMana wants to re-write history, and pretend that the 2011 General Election never happened. John Key will sensibly ignore them, and their Political Party Initiated Referendum. If the voting public does not like the Mixed Ownership Model programme, it will vote National out at the 2014 General Election. 

The referendum is nothing more than a cynical positioning exercise for the parties on the Left in the run-up to next year's election. They claim to support democracy, but in effect they are claiming that National does not have the rights enjoyed by a democratically elected government to implement its policies. The hypocrisy, especially that of the Greens is breathtaking, but it is not unexpected. Perhaps that explains why the Greens have still never been in government.