Public Bank Performance

Heather Duplicy Allen. Okay, here's a question for you. If you really like Winston Peters' idea of buying back the BNZ, here's a question. Why? What is the problem that you think will be solved by buying back the BNZ? Do you think that the banks are ripping you off because they're owned by the Aussies, and if only one of them was owned by us again, then they wouldn't rip us off? Go and have a look at the home loan rates that Kiwi Bank offers right now. They're basically the same as, if not higher, than what the Aussie owned banks are offering. Do you think that this might help competition? In which case I'm going to ask you the question: how does taking BNZ and Kiwi Bank and then combining them into one bank so that you have one fewer bank out there help competition? Do you think it's going to stop 1.5 billion dollars in profit heading over to Australia and that will make us richer? Yep, your logic is good on that one. But first, we're going to have to borrow huge amounts to buy the bank and pay huge amounts in interest. So that'll take about 10 to 20 years before we start seeing those profits flow into New Zealand rather than into the interest payments on the debt. And that is at a time when two credit ratings agencies have warned us that we cannot keep taking on more debt or they're going to downgrade us next year, making all of our debt more expensive.