Unsustainable?
Is that the one where we purchased the Chinese train locos instead?
The ones with asbestos that didn't work properly?
I wonder what the overall 'real' saving was in the end?
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Hillside were still making really good train bodies, and the govt accountants didn't look at the full story of the cost of laying off a lot of govt employees and the increased WINZ costs versus the tax gain of having people paying PAYE instead. Instead, they just looked at the likely NZ rolling stock costs versus Chinese made ones. Now KiwiRail are dropping out of electricification, so more hardware is being made redundant, probably because Hillside staff aren't there to help keep it running. What's the long-term cost of that? We're going to be stuck with fossil-fuel locos when we have heaps of zero-carbon electricity. The rules for govt depts or SOES are surely different from private enterprise. The govt has obvious benefits from being an employer, that the private sector doesn't have.
Suppose Winston with his views on immigration would not have given Peter Thiel NZ citizenship by being a person of "special benefit to NZ."
Apparently you don't even need to live in NZ to get citizenship anyway
Is this what you're referring to, W69?
http://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-gains...ite-1791550567
Almost makes NZ look like a safe haven as its main attribute. I was hoping that our politicians would raise their sights a bit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/t...tizenship.html
It was one of the "Think Big" projects, and like the Huntly Power Station, it's still around, so it wasn't too crazy an idea. Both would have employed many people for the construction works, they gained skills and paid taxes.
http://www.kiwirail.co.nz/about-us/h...ification.html
Of course a Labour Govt must have helped see this through, the project didn't open until 1988.