KEY POINTS:
Message to John Key and his new Government: No pressure.
Well, just a global financial market collapse, a deepening recession, a growing deficit, a crisis meeting with many of the world's top leaders, shrinking commodity prices and a body blow to our other big export earner - the tourist industry - from the British departure tax.
Throw in a major terror attack overseas to further destabilise the planet and the crash of the Air New Zealand airbus in Europe and you get the toughest start any Government here has had.
Just to wind up the pace even further, Key's 100-day programme has his ministers already sprinting on the Beehive treadmill.
Leading the pack, Bill English and his advisers are going hell for leather putting together the $7 billion December financial stimulus package he is planning to inject into the ailing economy.
As the heat goes on it is little wonder English was testy with Treasury this week, complaining that its briefing to him lacks the urgency that has gripped the Government and it somewhat complacently reflects our rosier economic past than the darker future.
English is considering contingency plans to bail out any big New Zealand businesses that might hit the wall if a serious collapse occurs. The problem with that idea is where you draw the line. What businesses do you save and which ones do you let fail?
I happen to run a small business writing this column and, frankly, as I eye the bills littering the corner of my desk I wouldn't mind a government bail-out before Christmas.
Can I point out to the Minister of Finance that it would cost a hell of a lot less to pump some cash into Ralston Inc than Fonterra, should that leviathan crash and burn?
I always thought the essence of capitalism was survival of the fittest and profits were earned in relation to the risk taken. Why should the taxpayer subsidise the losses of a commercial business in bad times when we don't share the profits in the good years?
The plan is all the more curious when Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Coleman is eyeing what is essentially a long-standing government bailout of TVNZ.
The state broadcaster receives $15 million a year or more of direct government funding for public broadcasting plus another $79 million for running its digital channels.
I spoke to Coleman shortly after he was made minister and he agreed that there appeared to be a closed circuit of money operating whereby the Government handed TVNZ funds which went through the internal digestive processes of the broadcaster to be returned to the Government as its dividend.
It should not take long for Coleman to wonder why a company that rakes in more than $300 million a year in revenue makes no profit other than the subsidy it gets from him.
His next thought will probably be to question how much of the $79 million funding for the freeview digital channels TVNZ 6 and TVNZ 7 is being used to cross-subsidise the mainstream operations of TV ONE and TV3.
The TVNZ mothership provides people and services to the digital channels and it must be charging TVNZ 6 and 7 in the process, the digital channels thereby pumping a large chunk of the government digital funding back into TVNZ.
Coleman is adamant he wants to make the $15 million charter funding fully contestable, which means TV3, C4 or Prime could bid for it to make public broadcasting-type programmes, much as they do now with New Zealand On Air funding.
His position was inadvertently reinforced when TVNZ decided to axe the serious Sunday morning political show, Agenda. It was a programme that TVNZ contracted to Richard Harman's private production company to make.
I presume the rationale is that by doing its own Sunday morning show "in house" TVNZ can greedily keep that part of the Government's charter funding that was Harman's profit.
A cunning plan but one that has left TVNZ with powder burns on its foot because the minister is asking himself why the Government gives TVNZ money to make public broadcasting when it axes a public broadcasting show like Agenda?
Parallel to the Government's 100-day plan focusing on priorities like the economy and law and order is a second-tier programme that includes a "reform" of TVNZ and the wider broadcasting industry. I suspect Coleman is determined to screw more dividends out of TVNZ, remove government subsidies from it and make it completely commercial.
Coleman may also wish to make an example of a state-owned company that has been playing silly buggers with taxpayer money.
Heads will roll in one of those periodic TVNZ purges.
