>Yes, but if NZ government hadn't sold it off it wouldn't be making $800M
>from 3.4M people now would it?  If you still owned it, it would still be
>corporate sloth, and you would be complaining about how hopeless they
>are.
>
>This would have to be the worst possible time for a government to be
>running a telco.  Better to let the private sector do it.
>
>I can't comment on foreign ownership, no ideas there.  Print money?


I worked (and I DID work) for NZ Telecom (originally NZ Post Office) for 24
years.
I have a fair idea about the bureaucratic excesses that can occur in such an
organisation.

BUT a large part of this was being tied into the overall government control
situation and having money siphoned out unaccountably etc.

Towards the end when we became "Telecom" and were a separate corporation
with accountability and less (but not no) government interference we got
prettyt good. Niot as ruthless by far as what we have now but "a good little
eraner" and still a reasonably sized employer.

In its hey day (hay day ? :-) ) NZPO was a major trainer (possibly THE major
traimer) of electrical technicians in NZ and a repository for knowledge. The
3 men and a dog to repair a telephone concept while expensive of resource
was a means of offering genuinely meaningful employment to many.

Compare inefficiently giving 10 men a moderate salary to inefficiently do
something
with
giving 1 man even less, employing 1 other man as a contractor, sending the
vast profits overseas and paying the other 8 men unemployment benefit, and I
know what I would choose.

Telecom was sold for about 2.5 billiion NZ dollars and is now "worth" about
4 times that. It completely repaid the original buyers their investment
BEFORE they resold it and is now taking about 1/4 of the original sale price
out of the country each year. Summat aglae there methinks.



Russell McMahon


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


>
>Jinx wrote:
>>
>...
>> And these are mostly major assets too, originally paid for by NZ
>> taxpayers. The stinger is that companies like Telecom or NZ Rail
>> are now returning profits to their overseas owners. At the time they
>> were sold they were regarded as comfy jobs-for-life govt depts that
>> were either not developed and brought up to date or couldn't be for
>> lack of funds. Telecom now makes > $800,000,000 profit on just
>> over 3.4m population, and although it's regarded as progressive
>> and technically efficient and innovative, it employs a small fraction
>> of the staff it used to. NZ will never be able to afford to buy any of
>> these back - "selling the family silver" it was called
>>
>> --
>> http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
>> ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
>use mailto:listserv@mitvma.mit.edu?body=SET%20PICList%20DIGEST
>
>
>

--
http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
use mailto:listserv@mitvma.mit.edu?body=SET%20PICList%20DIGEST