Posted on 3-10-2002
Government
Buys Banks Out Of Trouble
by Alan Marston
The New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark will announce today
that the
Government plans to buy Auckland City's stock of 1600 pensioner
houses,
which are valued at $75 million. The deal provides relief to
the self-made
Mayor of Auckland, John Banks, whose first year in the job has
seen his
`privatisation, build more roads policies divide the city into
angry
opposing sides.
It will be the second time the Labour-led Government has come
to the
financial aid of Auckland. Last December it paid Tranz Rail
$81 million for
the city's rail corridors. This time the Government is acting
as if it can
be cornered by Mr Banks and his allies' ideological moves to
sell off
housing and the shares in Auckland Airport - sell to whom one
could well ask.
Helen Clark, who lunched with Mr Banks in Auckland last Friday,
will
announce details of the deal on a visit to a council pensioner
village in
Otahuhu at 11am. The village is in the electorate of Housing
Minister Mark
Gosche, who will attend. Also present will be Mr Banks and councillor
Bruce
Hucker, the City Vision leader who has negotiated with the Government
since
the council decided that housing was not a core function.
The sale of pensioner housing was a key plank of the cost-cutting
report
prepared by former Finance Minister Sir William Birch shortly
after Mr
Banks and the Auckland Citizens & Ratepayers Now ticket
won power last
October. Mr Banks and his allies pledged that existing tenants
would have a
home for life, then raised their rents in net terms between
5 per cent and
12.7 per cent. The Banks regime is playing it anything but straight,
and
the PM seems to want to smooth out the swerves rather than confront
them.
|