I don’t care who owns something so long as I get decent service at a decent price – something which we did actually get before Max Bradford got his dirty little fingers into the electricity pie and screwed it up royally.

Also, as everyone else said, a CCO is vastly different to an SOE.

What you are talking about here, however is who controls the decisions that affect everything that happens in the public realm. Everything from how we design our access to our shops, public spaces, cycling and pedestrian access, whther my kids are safe getting to school. Whether I can live at home with minimal traffic noise, whether I have access to employment, government services, parking and pedestrian access to my local shops. Whether the business I work in is able to provide parking for its clients.

A lot of these things will have a big bearing over your quality of life.

The estimate is that the Transport Authority will control 80% of what Local Boards will be looking after.

As good and well qualified our traffic engineers are, I’m not quite ready to put 100% control of these things in their hands.

That is a totally wrong statement, as Jarbury has explained. Auckland Transport is hugely more powerful, and takes away into that secrecy many functions which are currently open and accountable to local councils. Plus, there are all the other CCO’s.

What this is doing is taking pretty much everything away from politicians – what it will achieve is that those politicians will (quite rightly) campaign day and night to battle these CCO’s where they go astray. Fine setup for efficiency.

“And (surely) no one wants to decorporatise the electricity companies and turn them back in to a government department as they used to be.”

A typically corporate-thinking statement. Government-owned electricity corporations did very well electrifying this country and supplying it with power for decades, almost centuries. You may follow the business-community opinion if you say so – but despite decades of such talk, not everyone agrees that a common utility like electricity SHOULD be in a coporate, for-profit model.

To state it in short – yes, I would prefer to have electricity generation be a government responsibility. The vaunted advantages of privatisation in the areas of utilities service have, time and time again, shown themselves to be mirages except for the shareholders of the privatised companies.

Take NZ Post for instance. Their Board isn’t made up of MPs, thank goodness. I don’t have the right to attend Board meetings, let alone meetings of the senior management. But I’d hardly say that NZ Post were operating secretly or unaccountably. Who do I complain to if my letter isn’t delivered? I’d complain to NZ Post obviously. If an MP suggested that disgruntled postal customers would naturally want to complain to MPs and that this was a reason to allow MPs to manage the day to day business of the postal system, then that would be a recipe for disaster.

Clear separation between policy development and operations is a good thing, IMHO. The alternative is meddling and operating to maximise non-transparent political objectives, rather than targets that can be clearly codified and given to an operating agency to pursue and where their performance can be measured.