Media Release

Monday 13 July 2015

Rail infrastructure funding is available

If Labour’s Transport spokesman Phil Twyford’s admission that KiwiRail’s freight and lines operations should be treated differently is to be taken seriously, the next step is for his Party to re-visit successful social credit policies to support that statement, said Democrats for Social Credit Party leader Stephnie de Ruyter.

Labour’s Savage administration successfully implemented social credit mechanisms to fund infrastructure using Reserve Bank generated fiat money, thereby ensuring that essential infrastructure was built and maintained. That was a good call then, creating jobs and building the economic infrastructure of a nation. It would be a good call now too.

Labour is well positioned to win the support of all Opposition Parties as well as the Maori Party for a similar programme of capital works, enabling track repairs to be advanced and railway workshops to remain open.

This is a common sense alternative to issuing bonds for sale to private investors or borrowing from overseas financiers. As many central banks are doing worldwide, our Government could pay for repairs with money issued from the publicly-owned Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), interest free.

The urgent need to undertake rail infrastructure repairs without increasing an already heavy nationwide debt burden offers the best possible reason for direct government funding of infrastructure using the existing facilities available from the RBNZ. It’s an opportunity to use credit as a public utility.

The Opposition must lobby the Government to exercise its prerogative to spend or lend low cost money directly into circulation to meet the cost of building, repairing, and maintaining public infrastructure, in the public interest.

Rail infrastructure funding is readily available - for those with the political will to deliver it.

ENDS

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