Keep Our Assets Canterbury hosted a public meeting on Sunday night in the Cardboard Cathedral.
The message from the 13 speakers (who were given five minutes
each) was quite unambiguous – if the Christchurch City Council proceeds with
its plan to sell $750 million worth of public assets over the next three years,
it will have a fight on its hands.
Two of The People’s Choice’s six Councillors spoke and made plain
that this will be a major issue at the 2016 local body election.
This was reinforced by the three MPS who spoke – one each from
Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First.
The representatives of two unions who spoke made the stark point
that privatisation costs workers’ lives.
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John Kerr RMTU speaking in Sunday evening
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Other speakers made these points:
none of the eight Councillors who
voted for asset sales actually campaigned on that platform at the 2013 local
body election, so they have no mandate to do so;
those assets were built up by
previous generations for the common good of present and future generations of
Christchurch people, not to be flogged off because of an ideologically-induced
debt hysteria, and certainly not to pay for the white elephant anchor projects
with which the Government is hellbent on imposing upon us.
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| Paul Watson First Union |
The point was well made that it is not an asset sale programme but
more of an asset transfer one – namely, selling productive and useful assets in
order to pay for unproductive ones whose starting dates keep receding into the
nevernever and for which no business plan has ever been produced.
In the process Big Business, most likely transnational
corporations, will become the new owners of our public assets. The speaker from
the campaign against the TPPA pointed how that Agreement, if signed, will
adversely impact on Christchurch and its public assets.
This is a battle that is far from over.
