is it a buy, page-8

Hi Pixie 40,

you have got the wrong end of the stick.

In my opinion the Federal Government should never have privatised the Single Desk.

There is no question that the single desk is the most powerful medium for marketing this countries wheat crop and the only people who argue against what is a basic of truism of Economics 101 are those with vested interests in accessing the grain more cheaply through the old tactic of divide and conquer or whom have interests in competing commercial concerns.

The grubby truth of it is that if the AWB had still been a government run monopoly then it would have done exactly what it did and it would have left exactly the same paper trail and it would have told all the same people that it told (who all would have forgotten they were told exactly the way that they did).

It was effecting the dirty process of competing in dirty international agricultural markets and it was never the right thing for that vehicle to have been in the form of a publicly listed company.

Q.E.D.

Anyone who hasn't worked that out yet shouldn't be investing in AWB and doesn't understand international agricultural markets or political realities.

Itv was doing work best described as in the interests of the nation (which it should have been doing - thats why it was also trying to dig BHP Billiton out of the shi te) and was hopelessly compromised by being a listed entity.

Free market economics has big holes in it when politicians start flogging off the nations family jewels thinking that they as a taxidriver or policeman or whatever they were before they became a politician are now internationally credentialed economists by dint of having been elected to parliament.