Bank Nationalisation

Uh it's interesting, uh, isn't it though, that Kiwi Bank that was brought in after uh the BNZ was sold to the National Bank of Australia, uh, for this very reason that New Zealanders wanted their uh the uh the funds from the bank to remain in this country, and that was old Jim Anderton's idea. It was implemented by Michael Cullen, who was Gregg uh drag kicking and screaming through the front door, he didn't like the idea, but uh Kiwi Bank is growing quite considerably now and obviously looks as though it's going to get more um capitalization. But look, the BNZ, you'll remember it's interesting when Winston says they want to buy it back because uh in that 1990 election, um leading up to it, Jim Bulger said there'll be no ifs, no buts, no maybes, superannuation surtax introduced by the Labour government. It'll go. Well, when they looked at the books of the BNZ, it was 380 million dollars. They had to cough up for that, and after several more interventions, they got up to a billion dollars. So that's what happens when you've got a bank. Maybe it was um controlled by the government. Yes, because it's it's government nothing that the government runs runs as well as when it's privately run. Well, we've seen that, haven't we? Although Kiwi Bank is doing you know better than uh certainly what the BNZ was doing at one point. But but P Kiwi Bank is tiny. Oh, yes, yeah, tiny compared to uh the BNZ. I remember being very disappointed when it was sold.