Kiwirail

The Herald reports:

The Labour Party has asked tough questions about the state of KiwiRail after it won a temporary injunction preventing the publication of sensitive material from a leaked business plan.

The state-owned company yesterday won a temporary High Court order after it was leaked to Radio New Zealand.

But parts of it were read in Parliament yesterday by Labour MP Phil Twyford under the absolute privilege MPs have, without the source document being identified.

Kiwirail should dump the injunction. It won’t work. Inevitably the document will end up on a website somewhere, not hosted in NZ. The injuncion just increases interest in it.

On the substantive issue, it is no surprise that Labour’s “sale of the century” purchase of Kiwirail is proving to be a disaster. They paid almost $700 million for a business that is incapable of coming even close to covering its capital and operating costs.

Despite the massive deficit the Government has, it has committed $3 billion towards rail. Labour, Greens and NZ First cry out this is not enough. They would no doubt throw even more at it, hoping that they can fill up the black hole that is Kiwirail.

The solution is not to keep throwing money at it. The solution is to auction it on Trade Me with a $1 reserve and hope there is someone stupid enough to bid for it.