Sell the South Island

After the appalling display of corporate welfarism displayed by the Government yesterday in bailing out South Canterbury Finance you would expect to see the MSM picking apart the details of the Retail Deposit Guarantee scheme. Instead we just see article after article of churnalism.

Not a single one has done what any prudent churnalist or average repeater would do and go to the source documents. Only one person has done that and that is Cactus Kate.

Her post about South Canterbury Finance is the single best post yet written by anyone about the wholesale subsidy of greedy rich South Islanders and the show of power by the wet, yet still powerful rural rump of the National party.

By going to the source documents, appropriately called Deeds of Guarantee or even better DoGs she has found the necessary dynamite with which to get more than a few idiots sacked and a few prosecuted. the sackings should start with the finance minister with an alacrity not ever seen before has authorised the passing of billions of dollars of corporate welfare to stupid South Island investors and move right on down to the treasury advisors who have seemed to have adopted a ostrich like quality for advice tot he minister based on documents that even a blogger could find.

Labour will of course make much of this corporate welfarism but they shouldn’t squawk at all because this situation is largely their handiwork and that of Michael Cullen’s in particular.

Or was it a deal struck for politicians?

Can we ask now how many of them have money (or their companies and trusts) directly or indirectly tied up in South Canterbury Finance and have benefited in this guarantee rort?

That’s the only logical explanation I can think of to get a politician to do something that reading the legal documents, they probably did not have to do.

Update - In this interview with Meier, John Campbell seems to have nailed Maier on television to the cross with his interview. Maier stating quite clearly the DOG was breached:

Asked whether it had been cynically exploiting the government guarantee, Mr Maier replied: “It might have been cynical, it might have been merely incompetent… it probably violated a lot of prudent lending criteria.”

Go back to 6.3 of the DOG’s and tell me that SCF in the guarantee period was run in a “proper, business like, efficient and prudent manner“. It’s own CEO, in the final foreign accented “fuck you” to New Zealand taxpayer has now publicly admitted it was not.

There is preference for South Islanders. Bill English is incorrect (well let us face facts – teling porkies) in this interview. The taxpayer did not have to pay SCF anymore than they would have had to for Hanover or Blue Chip. SCF took deposits for and moved $700m (or 41% of total) of their lending to more risky criteria even into the the hyper-risk of mezzanine lending. They breached the guarantee and their own CEO said so.

There is a prima facie case for that guarantee money to have never been handed over in the first place. It appears to be nothing more than corporate welfarism, and welfarism that would have had the farmers of South Canterbury wailing into their poo-ponds if the bailout occurred with flash harry finance companies based in Auckland.

Which then leads me to repeat my policy of selling the South Island. It is a dead weight full of useless politicians and 75% of the population live north of Cook Strait.

Sell the South Island. All of it.

It isn’t such a bad idea you know. Firstly it would get through a vote, 76 per­cent live in the North Island. Fuck all peo­ple actu­ally want to go to the South Island. Some have never been and the rest only want to go to Queen­stown once a year for a week for ski­ing. So sell it. The place sucks anyway.

If we sold it for $43,706,750,000,000 (around $44 Tril­lion, 44 x This pic­ture) and vested the amount in indi­vid­ual accounts for every man, woman and child, they would each receive $10,000,000.

Peo­ple who live in the South Island could con­tinue to live there, but under new rulers, or they could move, there is noth­ing stop­ping them, they have $10,000,000. The real­ity is that their new land­lords would be the Chi­nese and since most of them are pinkos any­way they would wel­come the Chi­nese with open hands.

In the North we already import power so noth­ing changes there. The ski-fields won’t go any­where. The coal that is dug up already goes to China so no change there and the best part of all is we get $10,000,000 in the pocket. A fam­ily of 5 would get $50,000,000. Basi­cally a pal­let of cash would be deliv­ered to every third house to divvy up with their neighbours.

Of course the ensu­ing may­hem as the fools and dolts were parted from their $10,000,000 is just a bonus as far as I am con­cerned. By and large the coun­try would be a whole heap bet­ter off.

Let’s face it, no one wants to live in the South Island, if they did the pop­u­la­tion stats would say different.

If we sell the South Island then we won’t need to throw money dis-proportionately at them. the bonus of course is that we would no longer need ll those MPs and their assorted hangers on from down there.