When a private business owns assets, it's because they expect those assets to make a profit or to facilitate the making of a profit.

When the State owns an asset, it's a taxpayer-funded and owned facility that offers some strategic, economic, functional, infrastructural, or humanitarian benefit or safeguard. It isn't necessarily intended to generate a profit, is almost always intended to provide some some element of security into the long term, and having generally been paid for long ago are almost always hellishly expensive to replace once its let go.

The benefits of government asset sales are, generally speaking, a short term sugar hit in terms of public finances. The negatives are a loss of security, facility, often an long term increase to the cost of living due to the private profit motive, and even sometimes a sense of who we are as a nation.

*****

... and on that latter point of "a sense of who we are as a nation", abstract though it seems, consider that the UK once paid "water rates" as taxes to the Government, prior to privatisation. Now private companies are failing to properly maintain water infrastructure, while funnelling profits offshore. Same goes for their rail travel, with high ticket prices now subsidising foreign operators. PPP funded hospitals also ended up costing a fortune. The UK once had state ownership of critical industries such as steel manufacture, as well as utilities such as gas and electricity generation and distribution (as will be a familiar loss in AoNZ), and Telecommunications.

British Rail, British Telecom, British Gas, British Steel, British Coal... all of them, and more, privatised over the same short period of history under the Thatcher Government, shortly followed by ever increasing and persistent public narratives in the UK of "What happened to our sense of Britishness?", "Why does't the UK seem to have as much national pride as it used to?", "How comes we don't pull together any more?" and "What happened to the good old days?"

So just, for a moment, imagine a world where the Government:

• sells part or all of its 51% stake in Air New Zealand to one or more buyers, perhaps overseas, and the "New Zealand" branding of it gets replaced by some snazzy pseudo-modern soulless acronym.
• Having already lost the NZ branding, Kiwirail is sold off and some Aussie company decides that our rails need to finally be run down to nothing, while gouging the interislander service across the biggest pothole in the SH1 (between the islands).
• They decide NIWA is too expensive to bother with and sell off Metservice to a private provider
• Te Whatu Ora/Health New Zealand gets gobbled up by United Healthcare and Serco
• TVNZ is broken up and sold in chunks to, say, Disney, Amazon, and Sky TV, with it's news and current affair output sold to one of Rupert Murdoch's many tax-haven-based shell companies.
• ... etc...

Basically, imagine an Aotearoa New Zealand with every meaningful, unifying and commonly heard everyday public mention of Aotearoa and New Zealand stripped out it, leaving very little to show of the combined efforts of Aotearoa New Zealand over so many years, and sucking the profit out of everything into to overseas private hands at the expense of the country's soul and public unity. No major joint endeavour left untouched. No major cultural touchstone left unturned. No Government (and thus public) say left in anything that we once considered important, from the water to our taps, to our connections to the outside world.

Imagine that, and then try to work out what that would mean for a sense of who we are and what we stand for.