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Open mike 26/09/2014
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Archives · 2014-09-01 to 2014-09-30 · Page 2
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Searching: posts Sorted by: newest Results: 31–60 of 232
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The last five days
A train is travelling through a nasty thunderstorm. It’s an express train; it’s late at night, and it’s travelling fast. The bad weather unnerves the driver. He’s had several close calls already. He squints through the small window in the cab, at the curve ahead…
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Facebook censoring pages critical of John Key?
travellerev in comments. Just a word of warning. A facebook group called “John Key has let down New Zealand” has just been closed for violations of the user agreement. This group had 16.000 members and was one of the most active political facebook pages in…
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Health service funding
Not that you'd know it from most media coverage, but National has been steadily cutting funding to health and education in real terms (not keeping up with inflation and rising demand). Today yet another doctor broke: Orthopaedics chief quits, slams health board Orthopaedic surgeon Associate…
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Open mike 25/09/2014
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Kumbaya
We have a situation where 4 or 5 blokes with longstanding one-day-i'll-be-the-prime-minister fantasies all pathetically fight each other for a go as captain of the titanic. I suggest we lock them up in a room with a keg of Emersons so they can get drunk,…
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NRT: Will Key act on child poverty?
Reposted from No Right Turn While the left lost the election, it looks like we've won another battle in the war of ideas, with John Key being forced to at least pretend he wants to do something about child poverty: Prime Minister John Key has…
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Labour’s Choice
Labour now has a choice. Spend the next 3 months in naval gazing about "why we lost" and "how to appeal to voters", and playing musical chairs with the leaders. Again! Then wait patently for your next "turn" in Dictatorship. Or join the Greens in…
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WANTED: new ideas on child poverty
It’s great to see John Key taking a sudden interest in addressing child poverty in New Zealand. In Parliament in 2012, when Metiria Turei produced a graph showing how fast inequality was growing, his response was: That graph looks like the National Party’s poll ratings…
bill english child welfare john key national paula bennett poverty welfare
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Some brief musings on unity
Unity is much easier to call for when your faction is doing the leading and the calling. It is much harder to provide when your faction is not doing the leading, and feels wronged. Whatever the outcome of Labour's current leadership debate, many of us…
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Open mike 24/09/2014
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No rush to judgment
It would appear that the Labour caucus has decided to take its time to fully consider all implications of what was a massive defeat before proceeding to decide questions of leadership. I think that is wise - we have to get the Labour horse in…
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Time to say thanks
A word of thanks to our departing Members of Parliament - Hon Maryan Street, Moana Mackey, Raymond Huo and Carol Beaumont. Maryan's contibution to Labour has been huge as Party President through some difficult years, and as a Minister in the fifth Labour-led government. Carol…
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For all our futures
There have been some massive international demonstrations for people wanting more concerted action to counter climate change. The demonstrations have focused on New York, where the UN is about to hold a UN summit on the issue. People marched in Auckland on Sunday: Organisers have said…
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The Election That Left One Third of Us Behind
No one should begrudge John Key and the National party the right to celebrate an impressive election victory. It is little consolation to those who opposed them that the win is very much a personal triumph for the Prime Minister rather than for the party…
assets Deep stuff democracy under attack democratic participation election 2014 labour national Politics poverty
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Where’s the Whip?
Our Labour MPs seem to be in disarray. Somehow the party that teaches solidarity keeps on being fractured, while the party that teaches individualism is a strong union. Why are they talking to each other through the media instead of picking up the phone? Why…
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Labour’s leadership
From TVOne: David Cunliffe has announced that he will let the Labour Party decide whether he stays on as leader. Mr Cunliffe made the unscheduled announcement ahead of Labour's caucus meeting today. Addressing the media in a press conference before caucus this morning, Mr Cunliffe…
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Clean it up
Action Station (campaigning for a fairer NZ) has taken took out a full page ad in today's last week's NZ Herald, asking to vote to clean up dirty politics: https://twitter.com/DirtyPoliticsNZ/status/511997930266296320 Let's be clear what is meant by "Dirty Politics" as outlined in Dirty Politics, by Nicky Hager Several…
accountability blogs brand key david cunliffe David Farrar democracy under attack john key Left news spin
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Our children in Wellington
Today our Labour MPs will probably vote for a leadership challenge in Wellington. Fine. We have come to expect no more of them. At every available opportunity they keep playing their bloody stupid dominance games that disrupt the rest of the party. It wastes our…
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Open mike 23/09/2014
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Idiots, Cowards and Bastards.
2 700 events protesting inaction on global warming have just taken place across 161 countries. And Lord Stern has released a new, somewhat upbeat report , claiming there are fifteen years in which to take action on global warming. I’ll come back to that, but…
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NRT: MMP, electorates, and misaligned incentives
Reposted from No Right Turn. Amongst the post-election entrail reading, I've seen a couple of people suggest that one of the reasons labour lost was due to a lack of tactical voting by Greens. If only Green supporters had held their nose and voted tactically…
electoral systems First Past the Post greens labour MMP Politics
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National’s promises to you. #1.
National's promises to you. #1. 1. "Lift student achievement by investing $359 million over four years to keep the best teachers teaching, encourage schools to work together and strengthen school leadership". Pay more to Teachers who toe the National party line, producing unthinking vocational cannon…
national/act government privatisation same old national vision
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The lurch to the right begins
John Key is busily constructing the smokescreen for his third term, and the key phrase is going to be "centre ground". "Obviously there are some things we want to do; RMA (Resource Management Act) reform, employment law reform, but they'd be very much based around…
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Lessons
Greetings from the sanity of Dunedin North. Every pundit and their dog is opining on the lessons of Saturday, so I might as well have a go too: (1) The left made its share of mistakes in this election, largely (as usual) fighting amongst ourselves.…
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Open mike 22/09/2014
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Psephology-o-rama: Hangover nerdery edition
Reposted from Polity. I was really privileged to be able to work with the TV3 election night team last night, providing some quantitative analysis on the results as they came in. One of the things we put together was a tool that could do demographic…
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Looking Ahead
Win or lose, there are never any final battles in politics. A defeat simply means the firing of the starting gun for the next round in a never-ending struggle. And, especially for the left, it is the struggle that matters. Without that struggle and the…
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Media don’t believe their own polls
You have to laugh at this tart comment from Lanthanide What strikes me now is the media commentators saying it was “a surprising result”. Well, if we were to believe all the polls, then this result is not a surprise. This tells us that the…
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Another 3 years of work (first notes)
Damn! More years keeping The Standard running now await. It is going to be a bit more difficult as the job I'm now in will require more travel. I will need another techhead as a more operational backstop. Personally I think that the main issue with Labour…