Key goes from 50 shades of confidence on asset sale sweeteners to 5000 shades of grey over the costs

John Key's speech at the National Party Conference should have been called 50 shades of blue. Poorly written, slightly obscene and getting far too little critical attention.

Forget a week being a long time in politics, 24 hours is a different world. Yesterday Tracy Watkins was confidently predicting that the 'heat had been taken out of asset sales' and John Armstrong was happily chirping along with beige opinions asserting Pakeha own everything so Maori can go suck it (a position embarrassingly echoed by Patrick Smellie).

24 hours later all of Key's 50 shades of confidence have warped into 5000 shades of grey as he struggles to tell NZers how much his sweetener is actually going to cost taxpayers.

I predict the Maori rights issue on water will see the same u-turn as these loyalty sweeteners when the white baby boomer commentators suddenly realize what Helen Clark did, that while NZers garden variety racism and justifications for owning all of NZ may be their limitations, the judiciary view it far more in favor of the original owner - Maori.

The mainstream media's utter lack of critical analysis of what was said at the conference (Bill English telling NZers they shouldn't cry over so many Kiwi's fleeing to Australia when National made that fleeing such a major policy plank and holding up a Herald Digi-Poll as 'evidence' that NZers wanted more mining) was compounded by fuzzy logic that the low protest turn out means John Key has gotten away with privatizing our assets.

The corporate media who are eyeing up that $120 million advertising asset sales splurge may be quiet, but the history books will be far more damning. Key gave the richest NZers almost $3billion in borrowed tax cuts so that they are the only 'mums and dads' with a spare $1000 to buy shares in assets we collectively own AND they have given the 5% of NZers likely to buy these shares another taxpayer funded subsidy for loyalty shares worth tens of millions (we aren't sure of the exact cost because Key doesn't have those actual figures yet).

Todays mainstream media worship will be replaced by a damning historical revision once the true inequalities of National's policies are born out.

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