NZ First has been extremely critical of the idea. <\/a><\/p>\nNational has ruled out asset sales this term but has strongly suggested it will campaign on a mandate to sell assets if it wins a second term. <\/p>\n
Treasury secretary Iain Rennie said the overall exercise was called the \u201cCrown ownership purpose exercise\u201d and it meant going through \u201centity-by-entity\u201d.<\/p>\n
Snowden said once all the reviews were completed, State-owned Enterprises Minister Simeon Brown would take a collective paper through Cabinet. <\/p>\n
Green co-leader Chl\u00f6e Swarbrick asked whether there was contemplation of selling the assets. <\/p>\n
Rennie said that Treasury would not be making recommendations to sell or keep an asset, but it would give advice on whether the Crown had a firm rationale for continuing to own an asset. <\/p>\n
\u201cDecisions about retaining assets, selling assets, carving up part of assets… that sits with ministers,\u201d Rennie said. <\/p>\n
Snowden added that Treasury could conclude that the Crown doesn\u2019t have an explicit purpose for owning an asset, but ministers would decide whether it should actually be sold. <\/p>\n
He said the exercise was designed to ask whether the Crown had an interest in a particular area, if so, is that interest best served by owning an asset or regulating that sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne option from that is you may conclude the Crown doesn\u2019t have an ownership purpose and it\u2019s up to ministers to decide what they want to do with that asset.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added the exercise wasn\u2019t driven by deciding whether to hold or sell the asset.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe initiated it so that we could be clear from a monitoring perspective, what does the Government want out of the entity that we\u2019re owning, so we\u2019re using it far more to be able to target our monitoring efforts. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you might keep or drop is almost an offshoot from that,\u201d Snowden said. <\/p>\n
He said Treasury had not done any work on actually selling the assets if that is what ministers wanted to do.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a follow-up piece of work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
National is likely to take a policy on selling asset sales to the election. Edmonds pressed Rennie on the line between helping the Government formulate government policy and assisting National in writing party policy to take to an election.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe test I have is, \u2018is there a reasonable expectation of any work that we do that it is going through a Government process that ultimately ends up in the Cabinet?\u2019,\u201d Rennie said. <\/p>\n
He said there was a \u201cgrey area\u201d where Treasury helped on work commissioned in good faith \u201cbut for whatever set of reasons it will shift on to a party track and that is for good and sensible reasons\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said Finance Minister Nicola Willis was \u201cvery good about defending the integrity of the Treasury\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It later advised the Government that it should complete purpose statements on all the commercial assets that it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":166119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[74,16391,19092,13485,52364,1738,3088,29136,13242,13486,108497,108496,185,702,6093,3556,111,43,139,69,6662,1523,660,5204,3109,762,312,7812,13311,544,210,61,6859,25187,100545],"class_list":["post-166118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-after","tag-asset","tag-assets","tag-barbara","tag-beginning","tag-campaign","tag-commercial","tag-committee","tag-confirms","tag-edmonds","tag-governmentowned","tag-halfway","tag-is","tag-it","tag-little","tag-national","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-off","tag-over","tag-planning","tag-process","tag-public","tag-review","tag-says","tag-seen","tag-sell","tag-some","tag-through","tag-to","tag-told","tag-treasury","tag-widely"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}