My extended thinking goes like this:
- ramp up a dispute
- take some short term losses
- promote privatisation
- rationalise POAL and Tauranga under private ownership
IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW: The Ruminations of Robert Winter
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Fonterra moves POAL Contract: anyone surprised?
My suspicions about the orchestration of this dispute are growing by the day. Fonterra's decison to move weekly trade of $27 million from POAL to Tauranga is, shall we say, timely for the management position in POAL. There are layers within layers in this dispute, and we on the outside see only some of them.
My extended thinking goes like this:
My extended thinking goes like this:
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FFS, Robert please take your tin-foil hat off and think for a moment that it may be the fact that the industrial dispute is costing Fonterra (ipso facto NZ) an arm and a leg each day rather than some huge machiavelian plan to stop unionism in NZ at the cost of a couple of GDP points!
ReplyDeleteAS XChequer said - logic says it is purely a commercial decision by Fonterra.
ReplyDeleteThose Auckland wharfies and their Union mates might have to get proper jobs shortly.
We'll see.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't the Unions have to be pretty thick to walk into such a trap, Robert?
ReplyDelete@anon: it has happened before, unfortunately, and will happen again. It's not about being 'thick', but of strategic vision and being ahead of the management game.
ReplyDeleteThe whole POA drama has been coming for a year or more.
ReplyDeletehttp://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-19012011/#comment-289822
I've said it before - Tony Gibson was hired to facilitate the sale of POA. The two things that stand out for me are (1) the determination of MUNZ to win a battle but lose the war, and (2) why weren't Fonterra using Tauranga already? It's closer to the Waikato, where many of their shareholder/producers live?
In the long term (50+ years) I think Auckland needs to be converted to a small local port and the big ports should be Whangarei/Marsden, Tauranga, Lyttleton and Port Chalmers. And something in the Wellington/Marlborough Sounds area.
@Armchair Ctic: and longer still - back to the 1990s and 'Project Mercury'. I think Fonterra is using Tauranga also, but will have to check that. And the COO-Board-CEO nexus (in the context of whatever quiet discussions have been going on in various quarters) is worth thinking about, as I've noted before. Moving the port from the bottom of QS has been around for ages - hence the Pollen Island idea once upon a time. The interesting question is: what would a private serctor solution for NI ports need in terms of e.g. new rail infrastructure. There is a lot in play here.
ReplyDeleteWell done. A beautifully executed one-two by two Masters of the Game. There are people, Wets, in the blogosphere who state: '... I have a general belief that consensus is built on well reasoned argument and earnest discussion. Trying to hammer someones beliefs to mirror your own doesn't work....
ReplyDeleteWell, Mr Winter, you'll undoubtedly be reeling. You've signally failed to be succesful like Us by i) failing to think and ii) failing to use opinion-asserted-as-logic and/or fact and iii) using a tin-foil hat to ward off the blows of another's earnest desire to bludgeon your views into a working mirror for their own consensual and derisory delight.
As to collusion? Well, Right-thinking people would never use such a word, would they? A farmer's collective being involved in a dispute with watersiders? Absolutely, unheard of in New Zealand. We all get along so well, which, is very much in contrast to the rude proles who don't have proper jobs and frankly, Don't Know Their Place.
It really is time Our Government fully broke the back of the Improper Job market; the State, who takes care of Our interests so well, should just finish the job - Properly. The aim of the policy should, as it has alway been, to address a very real problem in Our Country: that of being able to retain the untermensch in meaningfully menial graft.
Yes, Mr Winter, the old one-two was a moment of triumphant Onanism by Two of the Best. I just hope you can find cover from this sort of thing in the future.
Sorry.......Was in the pool. Did I miss something?
ReplyDeleteDon't recall a 'Project Mercury' and always thought Pollen Island was a dumb place for a port.
ReplyDeleteThe answer to your interesting question is irrelevant as the private sector has no interest in investing in port infrastructure from scratch. Why would they, when it is much easier to buy existing assets?
I do recall the Project Mercury that NASA undertook, but I am insufficiently clever to see the link between NASA's Project Mercury and POA, if indeed there is one.
ReplyDelete@Armchair Critic: I'll leave Project Mercury as a detective story for you to investigate. And Pollen island was a dumb idea, hence its subsequent disposal. Here's an infrastructure argument - suppose POAL and Tauranga are rationalised under private ownership in Tauranga's favour, but the road and rail infrastructure to and from Tauranga requires substantial up-grading to cater for increased traffic (but not the port facilities themselves, which would be a private sector concern)? Who might be tapped for additional funding for that transport infrastructure?
ReplyDeleteI'm an engineer, rather than a detective; I'll leave Project Mercury to find me.
ReplyDeleteBeing an engineer, I like infrastructure and who is funding it is a bit of a secondary concern compared to interesting technical solutions. However, I know that the NZ taxpayer will be "tapped" for the additional infrastructure for the hypothetical situation you describe, and that is not particularly well aligned with the arguments usually used by supporters of privatisation. In this case the misalignment is with the "user pays" argument.