Here’s a question for you: if you really like Winston Peters’ idea of buying back the BNZ - why? What problem do you think will be solved by buying it back?

Do you think the banks are ripping you off because they’re owned by Australians, and that if only one of them were owned by us again, they wouldn’t?

Take a look at the home loan rates Kiwibank is offering right now. They’re basically the same as - if not higher than -those offered by the Australian-owned banks.

Do you think this might improve competition? In that case, how does taking BNZ and Kiwibank and combining them into a single bank - leaving one fewer bank in the market - help competition?

Do you think it will stop $1.5 billion in profit heading to Australia, making us richer? Sure, the logic stacks up at first glance. But first, we’d have to borrow huge amounts of money to buy the bank and pay significant interest on that debt.

It could take 10 to 20 years before we start seeing those profits flow into New Zealand rather than going toward interest payments.

And all of this comes at a time when two credit ratings agencies have warned that we can’t keep increasing our debt without risking a downgrade next year - which would make all our borrowing more expensive.

That’s not even considering the fact that we can’t be sure BNZ would generate the same level of profit under Government ownership as it does under private ownership. In fact, I would argue the opposite is more likely.

Publicly owned assets often become less efficient - they can grow bloated, unproductive and undisciplined.

That might explain why BNZ collapsed back in 1990 when it was publicly owned and hasn’t repeated that since returning to private ownership.

To me, this policy looks like a classic nostalgia play by Winston Peters - appealing to voters who believe life would be better if we could just go back to 1992.

I suspect this will be the first policy dropped in any coalition negotiations. It’s likely the first thing Winston Peters will let go of because it’s simply too expensive, and he knows it.

So don’t get too attached to this policy. I just can’t see it happening. 

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