The wool between their ears

We all know that the National party is more concerned with making themselves richer than actually helping New Zealand businesses succeed. Of course these aren’t always mutually exclusive things, but they often stack the deck against Kiwi industry and the public good in favour of their crony capitalist mates… deals that invariably cost our country dearly.

That appears to be the case when Bill English came out against Winston Peters’ government contract plan for woolen carpets. The Prime Minister basically claimed that woolen carpet isn’t worthwhile because competition means synthetic carpets are better because they’re cheaper. Ridiculous eh!

Yesterday, Stuff reported:

Winston Peters wants government departments to have wool carpets

Prime Minister Bill English rubbished the idea.

"There's any number of industries that would want a bit of a boost from some kind of political guarantee that their product would be purchased. New Zealand hasn't operated that way for a long time and we're not going to start now," English said.

"It's an unrealistic conversation because Mr. Peters has no idea whether it's commercially viable on the government's terms."

English was obviously lying when he claimed the National party didn’t operate that way. For instance, the government favouring dairying over sheep farming is pretty obvious to all, and is clearly not a viable long-term solution to get New Zealand back on track.

People only need to look at the continued All-of-Government contract with Fuji Xerox when the government has known for a long time that the companies NZ based subsidiary was involved in $285m worth of accounting irregularities fraud to see that National does in fact operate that way.

Saying that the woolen carpet industry in New Zealand isn’t viable while the National led government props up any number of other industries with tax incentives, large write offs, government contracts and tariffs against fair competition clearly shows their favouratism for particular industries… businesses that National party MPs and their associates often have investments in.

A vote for National is therefore a vote for the continuation of crony-capitalism.