"Director remuneration is clearly an issue, and impacts the availability of competent directors.

Like it or not, remuneration also affects the commitment of directors to their roles and responsibilities."

This is a joke right?

Yes Roger, sell everything and turn them into slaves

Poor financial performance as opposed to great financial perfornace from say Citigroup, Bank of America or Lehman Brothers?.....yeah right.

Or what abour GM's profits up until oil hit $147 a barrel.....just maybe the SOE's are being prudent and sound in their busines models. Anybody can rip off a company by loading up debt, paying its sharehloders a wopping dividend and moving on....

Clearly Roger is still tied up in the ACT / free right mantra of sell everything for short term gain no matter the damage to the environment, ppl jobs or long term viability of the company......As shown in Iceland and probably a number of other countries shortly, voters dont want this sort of management style running the country....in a word dinosaur.

regards

I went looking for that empirical evidence of a 1% increase - and all I found was ideological presumption.

Produce a robust analysis - which SOEs, what would be the expected productivity gains and why ... empirical evidence, then maybe we can be as convinced as you are, Roger.

Can I suggest Roger Kerr and his like watch "The Smartest Man in the Room" doco on ENRON and then track the careers of those traders to Morgan Stanley and the $150/barrel oil prices while demand was actually declining.

Can we run SOEs better, for sure but we don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Strategic monopolistic assets like Power Generation, Water, Gas, Ports, Telecommunications, Air New Zealand belong in the hands of the tax payers to avoid what happened to California under Enron's self created power shortages / brown outs. But that's America RIGHT? It would never happen here.

We had the same effect here when Telecom was privatised. Theresa Gattung is personally responsible for the loss of 1% of our GDP or more by not investing in Broadband while paying out huge dividends to off share shareholders. Bill English must agree with this statement as it was Nationals No 1 investment promise going into the election. Oh that's right its dropped now.

How many times do we want to pay for the dams we have. Past generations of tax payers paid once, then twice and now let's keep revaluing it at cost of replacement and then reward the CEOs for capital under management. Sounds like a plan.

Our market is not a market at all. Our country is the size of a half decent city with monopolies or duopolies everywhere ready to take the unsuspecting tax payer for a ride. The top three or four banks make more profit that the entire NZX 50. That sounds okay doesn't it?

I'm sick or pretending that privatizing things automatically makes them better and worse is automatically in the national interest. Have a look at the halve way house, the SEOs model with Electricity. Tell me that if the energy SEOs where privatised that the prices and salaries will come down and give me evidence of that happening in a monopoly situation.

In contrast I think government organizations like NZTE should be privatized. How on earth can you spend that amount of money and not provide incentives to people to deliver desired national outcomes. Tech NZ and the VIF funds I would treat in the same way as they need to be separated from government. The world is a big place, it has real markets, and we require our best and brightest to go and conquer them and that's truly in the national interest. I don't see the private sector lining up to take this part of the STATE to market. But then it's not a monopoly and requires real skill to be run profitably and is in the national interest. If we want to stop wasting money we can and should. SOEs can be much better managed so John Key get on with it, but don't sell the silverware yet again as the outcome will be as predictable as it was the first time around.

Good article, Mr. Kerr. But, as you can see from some of the blogs above, there may be a dissenting voice or two. And I'm sure that they will agree with Michael Cullen, that paying a "premium price" (his words!) for Kiwi Rail was a fine example of the success of NZ governments at picking ( and running ) winners !

Oddly enough, the current Labour members of Parliament have disparaged Mr. Key's government for wanting a roll out of broadband internet access. Yet buying back yesterdays technology, the train set ( which never turned a profit ), is clever thinking ?

Roger, Labour didn't do well at many things and have been voted out as a result. But can we perhaps move on as the country has the odd issue at present and looking backwards may make a few national voters feel happier but frankly it won't fix the issues.

National can make a lot of noise about what the inherited, as both major parties do but this mess is systemic and we have been building to this since think big. Neither Labour nor National own this mess alone as both have failed to fix it during their respective terms. He who introduces flawed policy is only quality if the policy is thrown out by the incoming government. They both make up stories about why they can't change what has happened and have to march on blah blah blah but they could if they wanted too. National won't sell Rail as they know people want a good rail service and frankly why shouldn't a so called first world country not have a good rail service. If we had one what would we save in increased productivity and reduced fuel imports.

Anyway the last Labour government failed New Zealand's Productive Economy by not acting on the 135 submissions on Monetary policy and not introducing capital gains tax on secondary properties. In the same way National voters will soon argue that National has failed them by sticking with Working for Families and not reducing the number of Civil Servants and reneging on more tax cuts . So let's move on and talk about what we can do now, not what hasn't happened in the past. National has the tiller and we must target National policy makers with the best ideas we can muster and debate them as much as possible in the public arena to create a deeper understanding of the issues.