The media-invoked feud between Liberal Treasurer Joe Hockey and Sydney Airport Holdings chairman Max Moore-Wilton over Badgerys Creek is pure polly pantomime.
Max Moore-Wilton is a card-carrying Liberal.
Hockey wants a second airport to stimulate his economic growth at all social costs and as a lure to repay his corporate donors.
Moore-Wilson wants a second airport because his employer, Macquarie (investment) Bank will end up owning and controlling any proposed Badgerys Creek airport. Macquarie Bank has first right of refusal on any competition airport, thanks to the unliberal Liberals.
Sydney Airport Holdings is owned by Macquarie Bank under one of its equity subsidiaries, initially set up as Macquarie Airports (MAp) fund, and Sydney Airport Holdings owns an 84% hold in Sydney Airport.
PRIVATISATION IS PUBLIC THEFT
So if Badgery’s Creek airport goes ahead, Macquarie Bank will have absolute market price control over Sydney airports, as Bankstown, Richmond and Camden will be forced to close due to irreconcilable airspace conflicts.
Max will have two airports to fleece airline users, and the Liberals set it up from the start.
The Liberals under PM John Howard, flogged off Sydney Airport, a critical national infrastructure asset back in 2003. But Howard Liberals had no mandate to sell any public asset because public assets are not any government’s assets sell.
Public assets have been entirely funded by taxpayers and so as such all such public assets wholly belong to the people. Public assets are simply held in trust by the government of the day in good faith. Public assets represent our nation’s wealth.
So for politicians to sell such assets off to non-public ownership by privatisation cash grab is public theft, and it warrants triggering the charge of treason or sedition against the State, aka ordinary Australians.
Most politicians, upon ascendancy to power perversely inflate their head space and draw upon their haughty peers adopting a sense of imagined entitlement, likened sickenly to then thousands of since decapitated aristocrats of yore. Elected office, well perhaps in three years time. The bastards are representatives of the people and custodians of our nation’s public wealth, which importantly includes our national public assets.
John Howard deserves this charge, not just for Sydney Airport but for flogging off other Australian airports and infrastructure assets.
Macquarie Bank paid $6.5 billion to Howard’s Liberals for Sydney Airport in 2002, with expected earnings of fourteen times the price paid.
Wasn’t Howard’s asset, just his cash windfall thieved from Australians? Macquarie then over seven years reaped tens of millions of dollars in management and transaction fees as manager of what it treated as one of its satellite funds until 2009.
Macquarie then flogged off the Airport to the stock market for domestic and foreign investors to control, making a gain on the sale of $265 million. Macquarie hadn’t even paid its timely fair share of tax of $69 million without tax office threats. And despite the public flotation of sorts, Macquarie still profits from and controls Sydney Airport Holdings Ltd, which owns Sydney Airport. It was all financial hybrid smoke and mirrors and old fashioned gambling.
What was once Australia’s own Charles Kingsford Smith Airport, and the leading international airline hub for Australia has been treated as a hybrid capital commodity.
Macquarie Bank also agreed to pay overdue primary tax of $69m to settle federal tax office concerns. But its restructure has reduced the appeal of the stock to foreign investors, who now receive distributions after tax and cannot claim franking credits available to domestic investors.
Labor’s Paul Keating had previously racked up massive Commonwealth Government debt, and the Liberals paid it off by selling public assets.
It is the LibLab spiralling writedown of Australia public wealth to corporate wealth.
Investment bank egos, yet are they so up themselves with national public theft as their rogue hero, Kweku Adoboli?