A strong case can be made that the popular struggle to reclaim Bolivia’s privatised water resources laid the groundwork for the nation’s sharp political turn to the Left. New Zealanders’ experience of the neoliberal privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s – and the partial privatisation of energy generators in the 2010s – has left a sizeable portion of the population implacably hostile to the privatisation process. All the foreign investors need to identify is an appropriate vector through which their two-step process – indigenisation to privatisation – can be realised. Who else but the true instigators of the project: the always silent, always patient, foreign investors. Is Act just another dupe of the foreign investors’ bait-and-switch operation, or is it surreptitiously giving them a helping hand?

Source: New Zealand Herald February 16, 2023 22:52 UTC