Written By: - Date published: 3:08 pm, June 6th, 2014 - 45 comments
In Kiwiblog this morning, David Farrar appeared to be running a 9th floor pre-pump for John Banks to resign. But I was rather incredulous when I read this “I don’t think the Judge has actually helped the Government by delaying the decision on entering a conviction. Now that it is the Judge’s role to care about the impact on the Government.”. Huh? DPF badly needs to go back to do some adult education. Perhaps to night school?
Written By: - Date published: 12:01 pm, June 6th, 2014 - 87 comments
I see that Labour announced the restoration and increase of the Adult and Community Education (ACE) funding that National slashed back in 2009 and largely killed the programme throughout much of the country. Damn good idea. This used to be a vital step up for people and their families to improve themselves and the subsequent generations as well. I have a personal history and interest in this. More than 4 decades ago the night schools that ACE now run caused a transformation in the opportunities for my extended family.
Written By: - Date published: 2:30 pm, May 27th, 2014 - 4 comments
Anyone interested in issues such as asset sales, corporate tax avoidance, GCSB surveillance and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement would be well advised to head along to see Murray Horton this Wednesday.
I’d go, but I am just leaving the windy freezing city with a almost excellent public transport system
Written By: - Date published: 1:31 pm, May 27th, 2014 - 23 comments
It appears that David Farrar, paid rubber mouthpiece for the National party, is exercising his right to be a hypocrite again. Surely he remembers his attitudes back in 2012 when he was acting as their mouthpiece to discourage other economic migrants seeking a better life in NZ? And it looks like Key is parroting the message tested at Kiwiblog… How predictable.
Written By: - Date published: 11:31 am, May 27th, 2014 - 171 comments
It is difficult to describe how abhorrent that the concept of the US military murdering the many bystanders and even targets with drone strikes and then trying to justify their illegal actions (under both US and international law) by labelling all of those killed, injured, and maimed as enemy. It reeks of the counting the body bags of civilians mentality that has been losing them wars for many decades. But this practice needs to be constrained before it gets used by other rogue states with even less compunction that the United States.
Written By: - Date published: 10:31 am, May 25th, 2014 - 171 comments
I was listening to Wallace Chapman interviewing Professor David Farrell, from University College, Dublin this morning on Radio New Zealand on compulsory voting which he was strongly in favour of. At one point the discussion veered on to the issue of “none of the above”. I think that this is the key to compulsory voting. Add “none of the above” and “I don’t know”
Written By: - Date published: 11:08 pm, May 24th, 2014 - 14 comments
Just been watching the documentary “Helen” about Helen Clark past and present. Pretty damn good. For me it was a bit of a blast from the past. I started volunteering for her in Mt Albert in 1989. But I suspect that the same will be true for most people who have been aware of politics in NZ over the last 3 decades. Those images of Muldoon and Douglas were kind of creepy.
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, May 23rd, 2014 - 37 comments
I nearly snorted my coffee down the wrong way when the Economist arrived on my pad this morning. “In need of new oomph” opened with the obvious, that world wide growth was stalling. But then it moved past the usual central bank mantras to the need for governments to start doing something more useful than just cutting deficits. Translated to NZ, we need investment in useful economic infrastructure.
Written By: - Date published: 2:10 pm, May 18th, 2014 - 131 comments
The Sir Douglas Robb Lectures for 2014 start tomorrow evening in Auckland. These three free lectures are being given by the authors of “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better”, a book much hated by those amongst us who would prefer that societies either didn’t exist or were more unequal and tilted in their favour. Based on many of the trolls here on this topic, it’d appear that most Act supporters and many National supporters appear fall into this category.
Written By: - Date published: 6:51 pm, May 14th, 2014 - 77 comments
National Party pollster David Farrar must be seeing some numbers he really doesn’t like because he is claiming that David Cunliffe photoshopped himself into a rally that he was really at! Yeah right – a doyen of the local net governing body failed to use google before making a complete dick of himself on the net. I expect we will see a lot more of National’s paid for bloggers acting like fools heading into this election because National only being good at putting us heavily into debt (again!) rather limits the good news they can write.
Written By: - Date published: 4:24 pm, May 12th, 2014 - 45 comments
Update: Rescheduled for Tuesday 5:30.
David Cunliffe will taking some time to write a post and engage on comments about it tomorrow evening. The topic will be about David’s “vision for New Zealand and how we get there”. The post may be up earlier, but the earliest that David will be able to respond will be about 5:30pm and then only for a limited period of time. The post’s comments will be fully moderated, so read the rules in this post about what is acceptable.
Written By: - Date published: 8:51 am, May 8th, 2014 - 51 comments
Yesterday the global dairy trade auction was held. Prices are still going down as they have since Feburary. The rate of decrease was less than previous drops. Only 1.1% rather than the colossal drop on April 1st. Also yesterday Graeme Wheeler, the governor of the Reserve Bank did a speech about dairy which has provided some useful reading this morning.
Written By: - Date published: 12:25 pm, May 7th, 2014 - 9 comments
The announcement from National that they’d bribe unemployed beneficiaries to go to Christchurch was “An empty grab for headlines”. Perhaps they should have used their strategy for party renewal? Pay more from party funds awash from selling the time of Ministers time seems to work well.
Written By: - Date published: 7:44 am, May 7th, 2014 - 8 comments
Yesterday Judith Collins announced that she was quitting Twitter. Some mischief makers may mourn the passing of this well-known troll from Twitter, including an awful lot of journalists and their bottom feeder golem wannabes. But there will be many in NZ who currently tend to avoid Twitter may begin to cautiously test the platform again now that at least one blowhard has retired from it.
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, May 1st, 2014 - 199 comments
It never seems to end does it? A National Party Minister contacted a top ranking police officer after a wealthy businessman with close ties to him was arrested on domestic violence charges. The Prime Minister’s office is understood to be considering Maurice Williamson’s future as a Minister, following Herald inquiries into the phone call that he made and over his involvement with Donghua Liu’s criminal case.
Bunji: And he’s gone – resigned as a Minister
Written By: - Date published: 10:54 am, April 30th, 2014 - 77 comments
Manufacturing exports dropped by 3.3% over the last year. Manufacturing businesses and their jobs disappeared with them. Meanwhile the National MP’s with dairy farms and interests will today be proclaiming a buoyant economy based on them selling barely processed milk-powder to China. It is good for them but as they gut the manufacturing jobs few other kiwis will reap any benefits.
Written By: - Date published: 1:14 pm, April 29th, 2014 - 32 comments
The head of the reanimated corpse of Brash should now be spinning furiously along with those fools from ACT who are into simplicity (because they can’t handle the real world). However having the Reserve Bank looking the balance of payments is pretty good. It includes the exchange rate and the export economy. They’re effectively now concerned with the exterior economy with a enforced savings tool as well as the interest rates. The government becomes largely responsible for the structural rigidities we have built up in the internal economy. That is a pretty good mix. Might have to train the MPs a bit though.
Written By: - Date published: 5:43 pm, April 28th, 2014 - 68 comments
I don’t use too many drugs because they interfere with my dominant programming addiction/work. But after decades of seeing people using pot, I can’t see any real problems with it if people use it in moderation. I have seen people with problems with excessive indulgence. But I’ve helped neighbours who have subsequently died from alcoholism as well. There is simply no way to definitively and fully protect everyone from themselves. We need to tax and regulate it. And if there is a substance that is fully tested on humans, then I’d have say it’d be pot… I can’t say the same about chemical manufacture of synthetic drugs.
Written By: - Date published: 12:46 pm, April 25th, 2014 - 32 comments
We hit 14 thousand posts since the site started this morning. As is usual I’ve been digging through the stats on the site to look for things we need to change. So there are a few graphs looking at what has been going on numerically. It isn’t too bad. We do need some more people posting is about the only thing. They’d needed to replace the usual pre-election year issue of those who looked at the upcoming election year and said that they really don’t have the time….
Written By: - Date published: 4:52 pm, April 18th, 2014 - 8 comments
This site gets rather a lot of comments. Every time a comment is made the page it is on has to be regenerated, which limits the amount of static caching that can be done. So on a dynamic site like this one we require rather a lot of raw processing power to generate dynamically pages that keep changing all of the day. These days we do it in the cloud, buying hours on servers as we require then. It saves us money and allows us to handle the story breaking peaks. Looks like we’re ready for election year.
Written By: - Date published: 11:42 am, March 26th, 2014 - 10 comments
I can’t think when the last time I’d been along to a gig or a concert was. Years probably. But Lyn dragged me (kicking and screaming) to the concert by Billy Bragg last night at the Powerstation in Auckland that was pretty damn good. These days I’m pretty portably connected so I don’t feel like I’ve left half of my brain behind when I head off on holiday or to a social event. So I was watching for trolls while Billy was singing about them…
Written By: - Date published: 9:10 am, March 20th, 2014 - 26 comments
One of the more irritating traits of National politicians is their bone-headed and short-term obsession about being rentiers selling raw and lightly processed raw materials offshore. Sure it is great in the short-term for the seller of the rights to those raw materials, but it does little to nothing for the other 4+ million people […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:41 pm, March 11th, 2014 - 77 comments
The deficit was $637 million dollars bigger than expected. In fact it was more than double the expected size. Why? Well mostly because of much smaller tax revenues than previously estimated. So much for the mythic recovery that National’s spinners have been pushing over xmas. We just finished paying off the mountain of debt that National gave me back in the 1970’s and early 80s. Now the shifty party of crony business morons are trying to do it to another generation.
Written By: - Date published: 2:23 pm, March 11th, 2014 - 27 comments
Just at present I’m particularly interested in adding union sites with RSS feeds to our feeds. But it is somewhat irritating. Many of the sites don’t have a RSS feed. They should have one. Unions are an inherent part of the labour movement that we like to think that we’re helping and a part of. It’d be nice if they did their bit to help us help them.
Written By: - Date published: 10:27 pm, March 6th, 2014 - 30 comments
One of the most effective political videos that I have seen from a country that is coming to specialise in them. I’m unsurprised that it went completely viral. It was a great description of all of the ways that Tony Abbott is beholden to the interests of those made insane by idiotic greed – and welcoming him to Western Australia. All expressed in a polite quiet voice enumerating exactly how much of a arsehole Abbott is. He even makes John Key look sort of rational – in a traditional junior partner kind of way
Written By: - Date published: 5:13 pm, March 6th, 2014 - 31 comments
We passed 700 thousand comments sometime today. Not bad over our last 6 and a half years. I was going to have a whole pile of statistics ready for the occasion. However a dose of flu caught me. But we’re tracking towards our long predicted million comments in 2015. Congratulations to the commenters who make this a raucous and entertaining blog to write for and to moderate
Written By: - Date published: 10:55 pm, March 4th, 2014 - 23 comments
After having the past five and bit years with National’s negative policies about anything to do with new technologies, it is really nice to see some partially formed red-tinged morning ideas about how to encourage local usage of the net appearing on the sky’s horizon. National’s ICT strategy seems to see how uselessly slow they can do everything and how much they can slow down the development of ICT in NZ.
Written By: - Date published: 8:16 am, February 28th, 2014 - 55 comments
In my experience, left politicians are a interesting mix of being either pretty damn technophobic or having an inept over-enthusiasm for it. But I get the impression that they’ve done some study and thinking on most tech areas I raise with them. However it’d be pretty clear to everyone who has followed 3D printing over the last decade that Maurice Williamson, National’s version of a techhead, appears to be clueless.
Written By: - Date published: 8:45 am, February 26th, 2014 - 67 comments
Looking at all of the hype that sometimes goes around about the economy, you have to wonder if anyone ever reads actual economic indicators later on. We have a government now that operates as if claiming a target is all the work that they have to do. For instance look at the tax take. It is “unexpectedly” low and the “expected” government surplus is in jeopardy. That is because this government has been ignoring growing the actual economy for 5 years. Taxes and jobs come from growing businesses.
Written By: - Date published: 5:13 pm, February 25th, 2014 - 12 comments
I did a email interview with Damien Venuto of StopPress (an online advertising industry mag) a few weeks back. It has now been put up online if anyone outside of that industry is interested. I’m in my usual pleasant, widely expansive and egotistical best with my beautific face beaming out at you
Written By: - Date published: 8:04 am, February 17th, 2014 - 113 comments
The NZ Herald starts cuddling up even closer to the National party. I guess they have definitely dropped that shallow facade of being the “Newspaper of Record”. Mind you, it isn’t a good look when Paula Bennett, the minister meant to take care of children, cuddles up with the heartless hypocrite who laughs at dead children. National really must be worried about this election.
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