Neo-Liberalism is a failure; not just in human terms, but by its own measures. Since the concepts of neo-liberalism were taken up by Roger & Ruth 26 years ago neo-liberalism has driven down wages as a share of GDP, massively increased inequality and stripped workers rights.
Roger Douglas has a private members bill to introduce bulk funding. It (hopefully) shouldn’t get through – National are unlikely to support it as they’ve already introduced by the back door.
When National get their ideological wish to get a prison privately run here, the most likely candidate will be Australian/UK prison company G4S. In the ‘care’ of these crime profiteers, an Aboriginal man died in a Western Australian prison van, during a four hour ride without ventilation in 50 degree plus temperatures that gave him 3rd degree burns. And that’s far from the only abuse.
It is good to cast light on ministers putting personal spending on the taxpayer but the media is attacking legitimate spending too. As a result, MPs are being prevented from doing their jobs properly for fear of appearing profligate. Is this the desired effect of the chill wind blowing from the media on our representatives’ expenses, that even John Key warned about?
Many think that Capitalism has been corrupted, socialised. It hasn’t – it’s been purified. We used to have capitalists that produced things; they […]
At the moment the UK is debating a rise in Capital Gains Tax, from 18% to 40 or 50%. The debate is largely going on within the ruling Tory party, as their coalition partners the Liberal Democrats won several tax concessions so that they could create a GBP10,000 income tax free band. The proposed tax rise is to treat earned and unearned income the same.
John Key continues to let his attack dog do his business, and take the heat. So on Saturday there’s some more heat with a big Day Of Action to fight Rodney’s latest nasty bill. The Greens, Labour and the Maori Party are all fighting this odorous piece of legislation that aims to allow privatisation of water, amongst other attacks on local democracy.
National’s budget broke a number of economic promises. One that’s not been emphasised enough is their commitment to be fiscally neutral. Labour got New Zealand to $0 net government debt. Now we are headed back into the red again and National is making it worse, not to create jobs to help ordinary Kiwis through the recession, but to fund tax cuts for their rich mates.
So John Key is going to get to fly over and see the All Whites at the World Cup. Maybe he could do a match report for Radio New Zealand whilst he’s there. The World’s biggest sporting event by far, the Football World Cup, features New Zealand for the first time in 28 years. Can Radio New Zealand afford to send someone to cover this major story for our country? No.
According to a new report: “New Zealand is a great place for children if their parents have a good income, live in a warm dry house and are well educated.” However if you’re not born into a privileged household, then death and disease “is worse than that of all but two [developed] countries, Mexico and Turkey.”
Two Electoral Reform bills are currently accepting submissions, and each contain one particularly large flaw. Firstly, as I commented on the Electoral (Finance […]
After the first shocking news, Israel took control of information about their act of high seas piracy. From jamming the airwaves to stop the media reporting from the boats shortly after they boarded them, to keeping the protesters detained, they ensured that their side was the only one that had the facts.
John Carter was willing to help out a local business man late last year, however dodgy his desire to run his private business on public land against local wishes might have been. But when the people of Rodney are desperately calling out for a local MP to support their bill to be excluded from the SuperShitty, John has gone deaf. As have his fellow Rodney MPs John Key and Lockwood Smith.
Murray McCully is still smarting from the Aid community so strongly (and correctly) objecting to his destruction of our world leading NZAID program, that he continues to kick them. Not content with last year’s 75% cut to the funding of the NGOs umbrella group The Council for Development, he has now suspended $26 million paid to NGOs like World Vision, Oxfam and Save the Children.
So Blinglish’s new and improved less-bitter poison is part-privatisation. In much the same way as marketing a filling as more fun than a full root-canal, he thinks that if he sells each of his mates one piece of the family silver (and keeps the spoons) instead of flogging off the whole set to one of his mates, we’ll be much happier.
Last year ACE, this year ECE. What has this government got against education? Once again it’s the big loser in a National budget. […]
There’s some useful scenarios to look at on the beehive’s tax site. They show how we all pay less tax, even after GST, and somehow the government also gets more tax. I love maths like that. But some of them seem to have something missing, so I thought I’d correct a couple of them…
