Privatisation - Wrong time to sell the family silver

The parable about a hungry man and a fish is often used to support the idea of development aid and self help.

The gist of it is that if you give a man a fish you feed him for just one day but if you teach him to fish you feed him and his family forever. The kernel being that investment pays off on a long-term basis but sticking-plaster solutions just defer the inevitable.

Our Government, in a kind of perverted inversion of that logic, considered selling harvesting rights to State forests but our debts are so huge that a forestry fire sale wouldn’t make any meaningful contribution to resolving our woes. This may be the reason the idea of a sale has been shelved. That very welcome decision positively answers many other arguments as well, especially on jobs, public access and financial consequences. It also suggests that the widespread opposition to the plan had some impact, though that may just be coincidental.