I HAVE never seen any sense in government selling essential public assets.
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If it can't run the business properly it shouldn't pretend to run a country or State.
The Hawke/Keating government sold the Commonwealth Bank for $8 billion between 1991 and 1996 and I have read estimates of more than $100b in dividends to shareholders since.
Apart from a government bank keeping other major banks honest, this is woeful economics.
The Howard government sold Telstra - a company owned by the people, back to the people. It made no sense.
Now it is Medicare Private.
If it is worth buying, it must be worth keeping.
We will see a huge rise in senior salaries, staff cuts and a decline in service.
Sydney Airport was another Howard government "sale" - the 99 year lease to Macquarie Bank with a first refusal option for the construction of any second airport for Sydney.
An astronomical rise in charges and a decline in service followed .
Max Moore Wilton was secretary of Howard's Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet from 1996 to 2002. In 2002 the government sold the lease to Macquarie Bank.
Moore Wilton resigned and became the bank's new Sydney Airport Corporation chief executive.
He is a very capable man and he was taking a step up rather than a step down.
Senator Arthur Sinodinus was chief of staff to John Howard from 1997 to 2006.
He joined Goldman Sachs bank and later became chairman of Australian Water Holdings; an inexplicable bedfellow to Sydney Water.
He is a capable man who was moving upward. He would have learned banks control governments.
As the first great European Banker, Mayer Rothschild said: "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws".
The West continues a huge transfer of wealth to the super rich.
The US Federal Reserve, unlike Australia's Reserve Bank , is a board of private bankers designed by JP Morgan in 1910 to have government bail out his banking mates in a depression.
It did so in the global financial crisis (GFC) with credit creation.
It is still printing $65b every month and most is swallowed by the banks and their stock exchange shares - little is passed on to the masses whose descendants will be liable to pay back the trillions.
We often talk in a superior way of corruption in developing countries.
However, NSW parliamentarians bring to mind US president Ted Roosevelt's comment on his senate, "When they call the roll, the members don't know whether to answer 'present' or 'not guilty.'"
We do have a free press with Kate McLymont and Michael West of the Herald doing brave, clinical exposes.
We have an Independent Commission Against Corruption whose fearless application makes the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the federal agencies look like gummy old ewes taking up space on pasture.
Iceland is alone in jailing any banker or major finance fraudster in the 2008 GFC.
Banks have accepted government bail outs while increasing their executive bonuses.
Our Treasurer's wife is an international banker. I hope she isn't his global strategist.