Sale of assets

Press, 30 December 1988, Page 16

Sale of assets

Sir, —Now that Air New Zealand has been sold to its competitors one question begs asking. Brierley Investments is charged to selling off 30 per cent shareholding to public and staff at no profit. Do we assume that the Brierley Investments’ shareholding in Air New Zealand has been

bought on credit? If so, perhaps we can have assurances from 8.1. L. (and the Government) that holding costs for the 30 per cent shareholding to be on-sold will not be added to the share price offered to the public and the staff. — Yours, etc., DAVID SMYTH. December 22, 1988.

Sir, —Those who desperately want to sell the national assets built up by the prudence and sense of previous generations are either fools or knaves, for at no stage have they disclosed where the pressure for sale is coming from nor established the need to sell a single one, least of all the Bank of New Zealand which should be the Government’s last line of defence against foreign financial pressures and exploitation. What their rush to sell off our national assets discloses is the inexperienced crass inability of our present masters to manage our affairs, be they Labour or National. Have they never thought about the courage of true leaders like Norman Kirk, who had the gumption to prepare to challenge the foreign moneylenders, and have they never wished that they had the same intestinal fortitude, because that is what true national leadership is about and it is that which electrifies the nation to a united response to international pirates? Many other small nations are in the thrall of the debt trap and are not too proud to be meeting and planning against it as we should. Maybe the Lange Government worries that Norman Kirk’s “Think Tank” was annihilated within 18 months by various eventualities and is scared to put together a group of independent thinkers. That may be so, but it is no justification for the stupidity and gross derogation of trust that is apparent in the selling of the public’s national inheritance. — Yours, etc., GERALD O’BRIEN. Wellington, December 21, 1988.