Lengthy John Key interview

Get Frank has done a lengthy three part interview with John Key, over Skype. You can read Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

The most amusing part to me was:

Q: It's been argued that Murray McCulley was essentially New Zealand's version of Dick Cheney for Don Brash in terms of being a significant ‘steerer' of policy and strategy; what have you been doing to change that, because the party does seem in quite a different direction now to what it was, and you're obviously reaping the of that in terms of being preferred Prime and Helen Clark being deposed for the first time in 8 years.

A: Firstly Murray McCully hasn't shot his hunting partner, so I guess he's got some differences to Dick Cheney

Also some thoughts on broadband:

Q: Can you tell us about your thoughts on broadband in New Zealand? Are you familiar with how the Japanese and Korean governments have used a mixture of incentives to encourage private companies to service small remote areas where the government matches private contributions. They now have speeds of up to 100Mb per second.

A: Well I think the first thing is, I think broadband is critical and the internet is critical to New Zealand's economic success, so you can see that for the first time in New Zealand's history, the tyranny of distance is not going to be an issue. Not withstanding that we're not getting this to work currently at the moment. This is kind of the future I think of where we go in terms of business and politics and communication in , and this is impossible unless you have broadband. I think secondly you're absolutely right, I don't know what the numbers of households are that are not economic to roll out broadband to currently, but my guess is it's probably not a long way from half the current applications.

Q: And your policy in regards to the local loop unbundling and separation of Telecom.

A: We support local unbundling and the separation of Telecom. My view is that I'm not as negative as they are on operational separation and they're really arguing that structural separation is the only thing that will work. They know the numbers better than I do, and my view's been for a long period of time that they were pretty happy with the system that we've actually proposed, which is a tripartite model: a wholesale company, a retail company and a network company. But what ever, we will need to look at it. If structural separation is the right answer with a net-code type model then yeah; look maybe that's the way forward. But whatever we do know is that, I think unless we can get competition into that market then a big monopolistic incumbent ultimately slows competition and we don't like that.

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