Kia orana, referring to the excellent letter to the editor in the Cook Islands News January 17 edition regarding successive governments thinking they can run commercial businesses, when in reality most schemes that government and public servants dream up become abject failures, and never any blame or repercussion on anyone!

This latest pipedream is to try and run a ship! They can hardly run the ship of state, let alone a commercial shipping operation. The letter went on to ask how many schemes over the last 40 years or so have actually been successful? Answer would probably be very few.

Let’s name a few To Tatou Vai (Te Mato Vai) – a major and incredibly costly failure, and still not even close to working properly (and costing $120 million+), and now we have the added and expensive additional cost of an entire agency trying to run the show. Lift at Justice? $600,000 for another failure (it is now operational). Love it that a private lift was installed for about $80,000.

Maybe someone should dig up the old Stair Climber that a previous Minister showed off with so much pride many years ago, and which was taken away because no one was going to ride on it in wet weather…duh! And remember the prawn farm at the back of Matavera? Remember CI International? And many more examples over the years.

The bottom line is OPM, not Office of the PM in this case, but rather Other People’s Money. And when it’s not your money, who cares?

(Name and address supplied)