Kiwiblog

Privatising Protection is the name of the second article written by David Shearer about the use of mercenaries. I’ve uploaded a copy of it – privatising-protection.

This one was written three years after the 1998 “Outsourcing War” article – in 2001.

What is really interesting is that in 2001 he was an Adviser to the New Zealand Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade. And who was that? Phil Goff of course.

Now I have worked in a Ministerial office. I find it hard to believe you could be an advisor to the Foreign Minister, and submit an article to Chatham House on private military forces without the Minister giving it an okay. The article is summarised by Chatham House as:

When people in the world’s conflict zones need protecting, it is the United Nations which is most frequently charged with ‘doing something’. Often short of soldiers, it should be given another option, to call on professional military companies to provide human security – for a fee.

Pretty clear – advocates the UN hiring private mercenary armies. But as the NZ Herald reports, Phil Goff said just two years later:

Mr Goff conversely referred to mercenary work as “paid murder” in 2003, when introducing legislation banning mercenaries.

So did Goff know of the article before publication? If so, how does he reconcile it with his statement in 2003?

I give full kudos to David Shearer who is not resiling from his views:

He said he was still supportive of using private security forces for peacekeeping as a last resort.

“If you have got a situation where thousands of people are being mutilated and it’s your only option, then your first priority is the protection of women and children.”

I agree with Shearer. But Shearer has also advocated that they may have a useful role in countries with civil wars. He said:

As a result states’ monopoly on dealing with civil violence has persisted unchallenged.

So Labour argue the state has to be a monopoly in corrections and workplace accident insurance, but their likely Mt Albert candidate says there should be no state monopoly in dealing with civil violence or the military.

Now I agree with Shearer, but I can imagine it is going to be very uncomfortable for Labour when he is an MP.  Everytime Goff or King gets up to accuse the Government of having a privatisation agenda, the Nats will laugh and remind them that they have an MP who supports privatising the army. And when you consider Labour’s entire strategy is to basically label everything National does is as privatisation, well Naional can’t wait until Shearer is an MP. Hell, they are probably tempted to endorse him themselves.

I mean look at his free market logic here:

Many factions are increasingly motivated by economic gain through the control of diamonds, gold or minerals. Why not award the concession to a company that will mine and protect the resource, thereby keeping diamonds out of the hands of rebels who will sell them to finance their war?

I love it – profit sharing with the mercenaries. This guy understands free markets and incentives and best of all has no ideological opposition to them. He sure is no Helen Clark.

Of course not being a woman may harm him. The Herald reported:

The Service and Food Workers Union’s northern region secretary, Jill Ovens, said the affiliated unions would not be endorsing any particular Labour candidate.

She said her personal view was that it should be a woman, as Labour no longer had a female electorate MP in Auckland with the departure of Helen Clark.

That is true – they don’t. Cunliffe, Carter, Hawkins, Robertson Goff and Su’a hold the other seats.

I have found it very amusing that Labour have been accusing John Key of following focus group supplied scripting, because they are so good at it themselves. The media have already reported on how they spent one entire month trying to label Key as “slippery”.

Their other tactic is to label every policy or move by National’s as “privatisation”. Their focus groups have shown the public don’t like this word. So whatever National does or say, will be labelled privatisation by Labour.

We saw this yesterday with Helen Clark and Trevor Mallard’s response to what is hardly an earth shattering policy by National (rather tepid in my views).

NZPA reported:

He [Mallard] was suspicious that a National government would look to commercialise or even privatise Radio New Zealand.

Now what was the actual policy:

Continue funding for Radio New Zealand, National Pacific Radio Trust, and Access Radio

So a policy of maintaining funding, is described by Trevor as a policy to privatise. It’s hilarious.

Then we have TVNZ:

Broadcasting Minister Trevor Mallard said without TVNZ having charter obligations there was little point in having it remain as state-owned broadcaster.

“The promise to retain ownership rings hollow. This policy is a Trojan horse privatisation down the track,” Mr Mallard said.

You have to give Trevor kudos for not acually trying to defend the charter as having produced anything worthwhile – he knows it has been a disaster giving TVNZ mixed priorities.

But let us look at his claim there is no point in hvaing TVNZ owned by the state without the charter. Well, apart from the 30 or so years it was happily state owned with no charter.

I am looking forward to future Labour responses to National policies. We will see stuff such as:

• More money for MOTAT = privatising Te Papa
• Greater subsidies for GPs = privatising primary health
• more money for books on homes = privatising education
• tax free charity donations = privatising welfare

Yes no matter what the policy is, Labour will call it privatisation.

Roger Kerr writes in the NZ Herald:

With the National Party’s decision not to move any state-owned enterprises to the private sector in its first term if elected this year, we appear to have a new political consensus between the major parties in New Zealand: privatisation is bad.

I wouldn’t say that “privatisation is bad” is the consensus, more that “privatisation is very unpopular”.

Indeed New Zealand has done even more to stand out from the crowd: it has gone in the opposite direction with the buy-back of Air New Zealand and now the railways and ferries, the establishment of Kiwibank, the renationalisation of ACC, and the Auckland Regional Council’s reversal of the part-privatisation of Ports of Auckland.

Yep, the state grows and grows.

The position across the Tasman is also instructive. All governments at federal and state level are Labor, and none is opposed to privatisation. Currently the New South Wales government is battling with trade unions to privatise its electricity generators. Victoria did so in the mid-1990s, and in the five years to 2007 electricity prices in Melbourne have risen by less than one-third as much as in Sydney.

Labor in Australia is far more moderate than the counterpart in New Zealand. National has been scared off privatisation because they know a rational debate is so difficult to manage from opposition. I certainly hope that if National wins, they will govern in such a way in their first term to gain the trust of the public, so that if they then propose some modest asset sales in a second term, the debate can focus on the merits of the actual asset being in state vs private ownership, rather than an ideological holy war that all privatisation is bad and all nationalisation is good.

The worldwide moves in the past 25 years to shift state enterprises into the private sector have been driven by the evidence of major economic gains in the form of improved efficiency and profitability, lower prices and better services, and more investment and output.

Indeed. While there are some individual examples which didn’t achieve the above, the evidence if you look at the whole OECD is over whelming. And if we really want to close the gap with Australia, it will be hard to do so with the state running such a major segment of our economy.

This does not mean all private businesses are success stories and all state-owned enterprises underperform. Rather, the point is that, on average and over time, the private sector is better than politicians at running commercial businesses, and governments should not bet against the odds with taxpayers’ money.

Also owning an asset can make a Government reluctant to regulate monopoly aspects of it, because they own it. They try to do hidden regulation, where they drop hints to Directors, or appoint the right Directors, instead of having an open and transparent regulatory process.

Out of some 30 privatisations, criticism focuses mainly on just two alleged “failures”, Air New Zealand and Tranz Rail. Even if true, these criticisms would not weaken the general argument that most privatisations have been successful, but arguably the Government did not need to get involved in either case.

The Air NZ bail out only became necessary because the Government refused to allow Singapore Airlines to invest in the company.

The political aversion to privatisation is costing New Zealand potential gains in living standards. A Business Roundtable study (www.nzbr.org.nz) estimated New Zealand could gain about 1 per cent of gross domestic product a year by privatising SOEs (leaving aside local government-owned businesses).

Unless wages and other incomes in New Zealand are to drift further behind those of Australia and other countries, this is an economic reform that will have to come back on the political agenda sooner or later.

1% of GDP might not sound a lot, but over a decade or so it is massive, and long-term is the difference between having living standards of Australia or of Slovakia.

Housing NZ is selling off some state houses. Obviously this indicates that Slippery Maryan is committed to a secret agenda of privatisation.