The Press reports: “The Central Christchurch recovery is under threat as quake-weary property owners start using their insurance money to buy new buildings in Auckland and overseas.” Hmm. If only they had been repeatedly warned about this for the past seven months. Hopefully, we’ll see a real plan from Labour today.
Keen to shift the blame for the RWC opening fracas Murray McCully has used reserve powers under his very own CERA-like powers to seize control of the whole Auckland waterfront. John Key wants it run like Party Central, which he says “worked absolutely perfectly”. Yeah, tell that to the waka paddlers who were assaulted by a drunken mob there.
According to his interview in the SST, John Key seems to think the job of Prime Minister is essentially taking emotional decisions in relation to high-level questions and leaving the rest to the underlings. But what happens when ministers are getting it wrong and Key isn’t monitoring them? The evidence is mounting that the government got it badly wrong on RWC transport.
Which minister(s) will John Key fire this week? Bill ‘Double Dipton’ English, is embroiled in yet another personal corruption scandal involving a job for his brother. Gerry ‘The VIIIth’ Brownlee’s Christchurch fiefdom is seeing a peasants’ revolt among redzoners. Murray ‘drowned rat’ McCully delivered Key a huge embarrassment on Friday at the RWC opening.
I’ve just read Vernon Small’s piece today and I actually learned things from it, other than opinions plucked out of thin air by the author. Small explains the fiscal and economic challenges now existing that the next government will have to cope with and, with a nod and wink, tells us National is going to push out its date for getting back to surplus.
John Armstrong wants Labour to come out radically different after the Cup. Having refused to cover Labour’s skills package or its mining policy, he’s suddenly interested in policy. He wants Labour to suddenly adopt league tables and forget the 39% tax rate. Armstrong genuinely doesn’t seem to get it. Parties of the Left don’t pick and swap policies on a whim.
Nicky Hager’s Other People’s Wars and the Urewera ‘terror raids’ fiasco raise, once again, serious questions. Are the security agencies that are meant to protect our society from threats, themselves operating outside the law and democratic control? Not according to Key. And he knows because he got advice. From whom? Why the security agencies of course.
If electricity assets were part privatised, future governments couldn’t make the kind of reforms that National made earlier this year because of the need to consider private investors’ rights. Pretty simple, eh? Tell that to Hekia Parata. Bill English has his head in the sand on the effect of falling markets and can’t guarantee Kiwi ownership.
Listening to John Key explain the lack of women on his list is like entering a place where words are devoid of both meaning and melody, and eloquence is heresy. When Key concluded “of course we’d like to have more women in the top 10 and that involves us putting more women in the top 10 if we possibly can”, I heard the sound of one hand clapping.
The Tertiary Education Union has revealed that 350 jobs are for the chop at Canterbury University – 18% of the workforce. The Uni, hardly reassuringly, says its 100 to 500. The Nats blame the quake. That’s rubbish. These kind of cuts will permanently gut the Uni, leaving it in no position to be part of the recovery. National: the anti-education government.
Tracy Watkins admits today’s Fairfax poll is pretty out of whack but there’s no denying the trend has turned against Labour in the past few months. People back the policy. That’s not the problem. Labour will still be hoping to close up 5% or so in the campaign. On the positive side: what a result for the Greens!
Remember Greg Clydesdale? He caused quite a fuss in 2008 when the Dom uncritically ran a frontpage story based on his “research” that concluded Pacific Islanders are a drain on a society who are, amongst other sins, crowding ‘our’ beaches. Well, he’s back, spouting more anti-immigrant trash, and Farrar’s blowing the dog-whistle for him.
John Hartevelt ran a piece yesterday about National’s paint by numbers press releases. The problem here is not with National MPs and candidates using the same words to describe their policies or government spin. It’s when they claim, in identical words, to have had information from the public when that isn’t true, it’s just a cookie-cutter line and a lie.
During his disastrous campaign trip to Kapiti yesterday, John Key said the Kapiti Expressway would be paid for by asset sales. Labour will do neither. National won’t release the Expressway’s benefit-cost ratio but it will cost $500m ($30K per metre). To get it, we would have to sell half of Solid Energy, which has paid us $310m of dividends in the past 5 years.
Gareth Morgan and Susan Guthrie’s piece in the Herald brilliantly elucidates the crisis of capitalism and the inadequacy of an economic system that only recognises value in work that produces market goods and services. Their book, The Big Kahuna, on their alternative tax system has just been published and I found these videos of Morgan explaining.
Jackie Blue, MP for [insert region here], accidentally unmasked National’s media practices when she published a blog post called “Generic Column – Lifting Education Standards” and forgot to add the ‘personal touch’. Now, the Dimpost has shown that the Nats are still using these [insert region here] columns to spread the party line.
90% of Labour’s MPs are hardworking, principled, and bloody good at what they do. Cunliffe, Fenton, Parker, Nash, Moroney, Ardern, King, O’Connor, Shearer, Twyford, Davis, Mahuta. The list goes on. It’s the quality of these people and what they believe in that makes me support Labour. A pity, then, that loudmouths like Clare Curran taint their public image.
At the start of the year, John Key said that he wanted to have a mature debate on asset sales. Now, his Finance Minister and SOE Minister are refusing to front up to debate David Cunliffe on the issue. Instead, that was left to old man Brash on Q+A yesterday. Cunliffe made mincemeat of him. The Right still has no justification for flogging off profitable assets.
A New Zealand SAS soldier has been killed in a suicide attack on the British Council Offices in Kabul. The reports confirm what has become apparent in recent months: the SAS aren’t training Afghanis, they’re leading the combat response to Taliban attacks in Kabul. Our sympathies with the soldier’s family. It’s past time they came home.
John Boscawen thought he was on to a winner yesterday. In an unprecedented move, he asked Parliament’s permission to ask a question of Phil Goff on the youth minimum wage. He got it, and the result was Goff at his very finest. He looked and sounded like a Prime Minister – like a real one, that is, not like Key. Let’s have more questions, Boscawen!
Who said: a payment card for people on a benefit that forbade alcohol and tobacco purchases would require moral judgments by the Crown, would be highly intrusive, would rob individuals of freedom of choice, and would impose an enormous administrative burden on Work and Income, and there was no need to change the way in which welfare is paid or assessed?
Having decided to beat up on a few thousand of the most hard done by young people in the country, National is now refusing to acknowledge the problem of disconnected youth that has ballooned under their watch. There are enough young people who aren’t in education, training, or work to fill Eden Park, and Key is literally running from the issue.
The private operators of the new Mt Eden remand prison are using desserts as a reward for good behaviour. It seems to work. But the Right doesn’t know quite how to react: on one hand, it’s mollycoddling prisoners, on the other hand it’s a private operator being innovative. Imagine how they would have reacted if the public prisons started doing this.
A few weeks back, I wrote that Labour’s policies are popular but it hasn’t secured the trust it needs to sway swing voters, partly people don’t feel they really know Phil Goff. Today’s Herald piece, reminiscent of one on Key in 2008 (except we get a lot more of the substance of Goff, not just carefully targeted anecdotes), should go a long way to fixing that.
Fran O’Sullivan reveals her softer side today. No, she’s not against National’s benefit cuts for the unemployed, the sick, and invalids. Nor against cutting the wages of the 103,000 working 15-19 year olds on the half-baked premise that will create more jobs. But leave single mums alone, she says, because she had one. It reminds me of something I saw on the Daily Show.
An Auckland University study, “Not in our waters, surely?” was released last night. It details a gruesome list of human rights abuses, crimes, and breaches of labour law being carried out abroad the slave ships contracted by our quota-holders to harvest our fish. Now, the government is moving to deport the prime witnesses before they can testify.
I’ve just been playing Ben Clark’s asset sale game on his campaign website. (Ben is a fellow author here and Labour’s candidate for North Shore). In the game, you have to try to suck up the shares that John Key throws out before the big foreign buyers suck them up – it’s great fun and a little frustrating when they get the shares before you!
Stuart Nash put Bill English’s feet to the fire yesterday on his economic record. English has been claiming that the economy is in better shape to withstand another economic crisis than it was in 2008. Does anyone seriously believe that? We’re poorer, we’re more indebted, we’re less employed, and costs are higher.
Before the government launched its asset sales policy, the Treasury told it that “significant participation by foreign investors” would be “essential” to provide “pricing tension”. In other words, if they can’t sell to foreigners at a high price, they wouldn’t get the revenue they want. So, the second global financial crisis should scupper the plan, eh?
National says that you’re a racist for not wanting to sell our assets to foreigners, particularly Chinese state-owned companies. It’s not racism. It’s about our sovereignty. We are never going to be able to choose our way in the world if we sell everything abroad and we do not want to become a vassal of the world’s newest empire.
Next week, a report will reveal the abuse of 2,500 foreign workers used as virtual slaves on ships employed by kiwi fishing quota holders in our waters. By rights, we should have a world renowned fishing fleet. Instead, we let our potential go to waste and employ foreign slaveowners and human traffickers to do the work instead.
Fisheries workers bearing a 12,000 signature told a select committee yesterday the horror stories of abuse of foreign workers on fishing vessels, whose low wages displace Kiwi workers, how the focus on low-cost, low-quality that is wasting our fish stocks, and how this is caused by Kiwi corporates putting a quick buck ahead of their people and their environment.
National pollster David Farrar wants scientists to debate a fake Lord climate change denier saying “Why should anyone listen to people unwilling to debate?”. Well, David, next time you’re giving your polling report to the Kitchen Cabinet, tell them that. Because National is refusing to participate in coming debate on their asset sales policy.
It looks like the race for Epsom is about to get a whole lot more exciting. Former ACT funder Colin Craig seems set to throw his hat into the ring against ACT’s John Banks, National’s Paul Goldsmith, and Labour’s David Parker. It only needs Winnie to join in to make a real party of it. Can Parker slip through the middle and win?
The neoliberal myth is that government economic policy doesn’t really matter, it can’t affect the economy – apart from being an anchor on growth. The truth is, government is the biggest actor in our economy. What it does matters. Bernard Hickey has listed 10 ways that the government could act to get the exchange rate down.
