Sharing a page with Mr George is a piece by Richard Prebble. Remember Mad Dog Prebble? Haven't heard from him for years and had assumed he was pruning roses somewhere. Now I was only in this country in the latter years of his career but he seems to have led a most interesting and different life. His article this morning is giving the Headmistress a serve (so why wouldn't you read it?) and he has chosen her role as head of a Government in charge of the SOEs as his ammunition. He had a wide range of ordnance to choose from, of course, starting with her being a constant affront to my sanity.
Prebble's writing style is very odd. He seems incapable of constructing a sentence with more than ten words in it. He also seems to be unable to resist blowing his own trumpet about once evey fifty words. We hear twice that he used to be Minister of SOEs (indeed the very first of that ilk) and once that he was very good at it - and there is an advert for his new book thrown in for good measure. The main thrust of his argument is though, I think, a reasonable one. The SOE companies are not answerable to their shareholders (for the simple reason that they don't have any) and therefore make corporate decisions that wold be totally unacceptable if they had an AGM to front up to. Especially if that bearded fruitcake who wears tin helemets to such gatherings was present. Prebble points out that when SOEs were first introduced to NZ (i.e. when he was in charge) they were performing better than their private counterparts. He put this down to the fact the boards were made up with people who were selected because they were good at running companies. They had track records of turning in a profit and that sort of jolly useful stuff.
Nowadays SOEs perform spectacularly worse than their private counterparts. Current SOEs have boards made up of people chosen for their race, gender or some other politically acceptable parameter. Apparently one prominent SOE has a retired Archbishop on the board - not even one who is still out Archbishoping. Why is this patently stupid thing done? I strongly suspect (and I think R. Prebble wants me to think this) it is because the Government can then brow beat the board into doing its (the Government's) bidding. This entails hooverinig as much into the consolidated fund in as short a period of time as possible and sod the social consequences. Prebble (Mad Dog Prebble) wryly ends his piece by trotting out the old adage that there are no bad dogs just bad owners.
Life is a bit dull on the news front at the moment. It is just same old, same old. Government incompetance (that ain't going to stop anytime soon - ask Damien O'Connor), native trees, Auckland's water and Bruce Hucker (I really can't be bothered with this - Hucker gets a lot more Press than his worthless life deserves as it is), the myth of man made global warming, and so it goes on. We need an invasion of little green men to liven things up a bit.
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