Politics Daily: Pre-Christmas news dump

Pre-Christmas is a traditional time to dump bad news. Perversely recent good economic news may actually prove to be embarrassing for the government. The Greens and Labour both point to yesterdays Treasury report on record dividends for state assets to attack the economic rationale behind asset sales - Assets returning record dividends – Greens http://bit.ly/t3XFR7

Russel Norman points out that the recent return on the assets far outweighs the cost of any borrowings the government might save - RNZ’s Opposition parties say report reason not to privatise http://bit.ly/vl0Wwh.

One bit of news that the government did wait until Christmas to release, was their encouragement of Canterbury Health to look at public private partnerships for the rebuild of Christchurch Hospital - see: Govt looks to private sector for Christchurch hospitals rebuild http://bit.ly/sswTBF. Unsurprisingly Labour has seized on this as evidence of a wider privatisation agenda than revealed during the election campaign – listen to RNZ’s Labour warns hospitals' rebuild a move toward privatization http://bit.ly/tZ4pQr.

It appears to undermine the Government’s case for state asset sales, the proceeds of which are earmarked for infrastructure development (including, one would have thought, rebuilding Canterbury’s core health infrastructure). This further expansion of private ownership into the public sector is in danger of making the policies look more ideologically than economically motivated. The problem is that privatisation has a very poor record and public image in New Zealand and PPPs have an equally poor record and public image overseas.

The announcement that the SAS will be returning home is no great surprise as public and political support has clearly been waning for some time. Politicians always like to declare victory when bringing troops home and John Key is no different saying that the SAS had done the job they were sent to do – see: SAS must never go back, says Goff http://bit.ly/twqi2Z. Journalist Jon Stephenson has a different view: Afghanistan specialist says politics behind SAS withdrawal (listen here http://bit.ly/sQgQTt).

Stephenson has done great work on the SAS in Afghanistan, revealing the true combat nature of the deployment as well as the treatment of prisoners captured in SAS operations. He says there is no doubt the Afghan Crisis Response Unit, which the SAS has been training, has improved during the deployment but that it, like the rest of the Afghan government, still operates far below the level required for long-term success. His overall assessment is very bleak – the war is ‘lost’.

In other news it seems the education sector is in for a few more torrid years as the government releases a very critical report on the quality of advice from the Ministry of Education. John Hartevelt reports Education advice 'poor or borderline' http://bit.ly/tWKAKY that the ministry has been privately criticised by some in the Beehive who are eager for more reform, including using national standards to target poorly performing schools, ‘more effective teacher appraisals’ and Charter Schools. David Kennedy in Government Attacks New Zealand's Highest Performing Sector http://bit.ly/sYg5Tp wonders why the sector is a target when it is one of the few areas where New Zealand consistently performs highly in OECD rankings.

Finally, the season for political round-ups continues with offerings today from David Farrar 2011 winners in politics http://bit.ly/uHcpZs , Cactus Kate The Pricks for 2011 http://bit.ly/tC920z and Patrick Gower's bloody exciting end of year blog http://bit.ly/uqkXNn.