Mr Rogers: Your listing of state owned assets sold during the second Lange government, is regrettably, beyond dispute. However it adds nothing to the present debate except to confirm that a small number of current Labour MPs did, at the very least, acquiesce in the deeds.
You failed to mention that David Lange was unhappy with the process and called for a 'tea break”. The resulting division within the party led to the formation of ACT whose founding members were the Labour Cabinet members who had engineered the sale of the assets you listed.
But precedent had been set so that there could be no genuine opposition to the later sale of Telecom and New Zealand Rail. The former went to mainly overseas interests and the latter to Faye Richwhite, Merchant Bankers, who stripped it of its saleable assets and left it to languish under foreign ownership. Many of your readers will remember the carve-up of the local power boards, and Max Bradford's promise that subsequent competition would lead to lower power prices. Tell that to the marines!
The last Labour government did try and retrieve some of the situation with the creation of Kiwibank and the repurchase of the Railway which saved it from Toll Transport's plans to decimate it.
You also failed to point out that the driving forces behind the CIR on Assets Sales are Grey Power, the Green Party, the CTU, Greenpeace, the University Students' Association along with another generation of Labour Party MP's.
Your reference to Chris Carter is both puerile and gratuitous.

David Parish, Waihi.