Perhaps the next generation’s fraudulent “full and final settlements” will include Labour, Green and the Maori Party MPs in the villain line-up. Because they have been part of the cunning plan to persuade punters that they are getting a steal instead of taking commercial risk off the a Crown that is handicapped in handling it by stupid politicians.

Who will believe after they’ve lost money on the risky generation assets (and only just missed out on losing the lot in coal mining) that the whole left/drongo/media beat up about flogging the national silver was not part of a calculated plot to deceive.

Future generations will simply not think it credible that our politics and media could be so dominated by economic and financial ignorance. They’ll prefer a conspiracy theory – essentially that the Opposition was in it with Bill English. It will all hang together. He just looks as if he is being forced to go around the country offering preferential access to shares, if they roll part of their current claim proceeds into shares.

And if there is still a Waitangi Tribunal then, given its current form in making up “wrongs” and entitlements, they will have no trouble holding that unsophisticated iwi should have been protected from their own gullibility in taking SOE shares instead of money to lose some other way.

How refreshing it would be if even one of the “leaders” who’ve spent the last two years whining that the government was about to steal kiwis’ birthright by flogging the SOE silver could acknowledge that the taxpayer would have been far better off if it had happened a year ago, before it became so obvious that we may have an electricity surplus, and before coal returned to what could be its long run status as a sunset industry.

State owned businesses in competitive markets are no more ‘silver’ than any other family businesses. By the third generation they have mostly crumbled unless they’ve changed hands.