Today, Fran O’Sullivan calls Key out on his complete failure on jobs: “If I have one New Year’s wish it is that John Key returns from his Hawaiian summer holiday brimming with enough determination to challenge the nation’s employers – and himself – to tackle youth unemployment.” In fact, she is the latest of the rightwing’s pundits to conclude neoliberalism has failed.
Most of the years in review I’ve seen in the couple of weeks have concentrated on gossip and rating individual MPs. Most of what matters not a jot outside the beltway. What matters is how the parties are doing in terms of progressing or thwarting the government’s policy agenda – how’s the government doing at governing? – and how polling is shaping up for 2014.
Japan just elected a Liberal Democrat government promising more jobs through a huge quantitative easing programme. The US has stated it’ll continue QE until unemployment drops below 6.5%. The effect has been to send our dollar to new highs, killing exporters and import-exposed local businesses. Contrary to media belief, Japan and the US aren’t in worse positions than us.
We’re on track to reach half a million comments before the week is out. Who will be number 500,000? As always, its nice to mark these milestones because it’s a reminder of what a big and vibrant community this is. Those half a million comments have sure made writing here a lot more fun than it would have been if no-one wrote back. Cheers.
Market failure is one of the marks of our time. From unaffordable, low-quality housing to child poverty to the over-valued dollar killing jobs to over-priced broadband and failed government IT procurements, the market keeps getting it wrong. The Greens and Labour know the answer is for the Government to step in; National just turns a blind eye. Russel Norman did it again yesterday.
You have to respect how the Ports of Auckland workers stood staunch in the face of the bosses’ attempt to contract out their jobs, without support from the ‘leftwing’ mayor and against an expensive PR effort. They’re still getting their own back. PoAL has just been fined for employing a strikebreaker. And, in Lyttelton, wharfies have started a smart new campaign.
A typical Auditor-General report takes 3 months. “Larger and more complex” ones take 6. Metiria Turei’s complaint about the way SkyCity was chosen for an international convention centre in a ‘pokies-for-convention-centre’ deal has been going 8 months. Clearly, what they’ve found has non-trivial implications for the government and they’re making sure all their ‘t’s are crossed and ‘i’s dotted.
The hearing into the private prosecution of John Banks over his ‘anonymous’ mayoral donations begins today. That the private prosecution has got this far shows the judge believes there is a prima facie case – which puts the Police to shame for failing to take Banks to court. Banks is trying to avoid taking the stand, but I don’t see how he ultimately can.
Back five years ago*, when The Standard was founded by people like Ralph, Irish, Lynn, Tillerman, and Tane, it stood for a few basic Leftwing principles. Pro-worker, pro-environment, pro-equity, and anti-elitist. And it saw a Labour-led Left government as the best vehicle to achieve those goals. Much of the crew has changed but the values and the goals haven’t.
It’s pretty clear: the Greens have managed to hold on to the massive gain they made during the last election campaign, largely at Labour’s expense as it imploded. Labour’s back to its pre-campaign level, at National’s expense. Lab+Green=Nat or thereabouts but the Left needs a good 5% more from the Right to feel confident. So, this is not the time to be listening to John Armstrong’s advice.
“It can only get worse from here.” – that’s the Automobile Association’s numbers man on petrol prices. It’s quite a revelation because, until now, the AA has been firmly part of the dinosaur establishment that has been insisting petrol prices will ‘soon’ fall to ‘normal’. Mark Stockdale also gets the logical response to peak oil – stop building sprawl, reduce consumption.
John Key on whether Brendan Horan has the moral right to stay in Parliament: “I don’t think he would do if Winston Peters can really put up the arguments that he is that whatever he (Horan) has done is so bad that he deserves to be expelled from the party and has really bought (sic) Parliament into disrepute, but the issue is: can and will he prove that?”. Can anyone say: Richard Worth?
Remember when Bill English signed a Ministerial Warrant on behalf of John Key in a last-ditch attempt to stop the GCSB’s illegal spying on Kim Dotcom from becoming public? Did you wonder ‘what’s a Ministerial Warrant?’ I did. I’d never heard of one. Well, the Greens investigated. Now, it turns out there’s only been one issued in at least a decade.
Russel Norman’s taken advantage of the gap in Labour’s economic skills and vague positioning to cement the Greens as the main alternative voice on economics. Labour lacks any strong economic voice now Cunliffe’s on the outer, and they don’t know where they stand – they attack National but essentially adopt their neoliberal approach.
Government has a central role in job creation. Just ask National. They’ll tell you it’s not true, and then proudly proclaim that they got The Hobbit made here, creating 3,000 temporary jobs. According to the New York Times, the total cost of our government’s subsidies for The Hobbit is NZD$150m – $50,000 per short-term job.
Like everyone else, I find you can get better political analysis from chicken entrails than from Claire Robinson. But it seems she can count and use a ruler and what she discovered is interesting. In last year’s election campaign, the four biggest newspapers featured 138 pictures of Key to 80 of Goff, and Key’s were twice as large on average.
So, who won and who lost?
Looking at the MSM reaction this morning, one thing is clear.
They’ve missed that the significance of the vote yesterday was not about whether there will be leadership contest.
It’s about the accountability of the caucus to the party.
Labour has established its new leadership voting rules. The attempt to effectively neuter the membership’s new power by setting a high bar for a leadership vote to be triggered failed. It will take 50% of caucus to trigger a vote in ordinary times, but a 60% caucus endorsement of the leader to avoid a leadership vote in the compulsory mid-term motion.
John Key knows his economic failures are coming out in to the open, so he came to The Nation this morning expecting a fight. And he knew his lines well and it all sounded good. If you didn’t think about it. Basically, he said the solution to the fact unemployment has risen by 80% under his failed economic policies was… wait for it … his failed economic policies.
Didn’t it make you sick to your stomach when smug Tories getting fat on quarter of a million dollar taxpayer-funded salaries get up in the House and make jokes to deflect from the dire jobs situation?* Well, I know 410,000 Kiwis who are looking for work and aren’t laughing when Key and co make jokes about it.
Judith Collins pledged to take Trevor Mallard and Andrew Little to court for defamation after they suggested she was involved in leaking Bronwyn Pullar’s name via Slater-Lusk. Today she dropped the suit after a letter from Mallard and Little in which a) don’t concede defaming her and b) deny intent to do so. A huge back down from Crushless.
For the Left to win in 2014, David Shearer has to resign as Labour Leader. This is a big call to make and one that I have agonised over, but the reality has become increasingly clear: under Shearer, Labour is all too likely to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 2014.
Fran O’Sullivan must be shaking her head in confusion – her endorsement of Mitt Romney failed to get him over the line. Maybe she’ll find succor in these referenda results: 5 out of 5 states voted in favour of legalising marijuana. 4 out of 4 voted in favour of marriage equality. California has watered down its 3 strikes law. And Florida voted against banning public funds for abortion.
Yesterday, Key denied calling David Beckham “thick as batshit”. Specifically, he denied using the word ‘batshit’. While it’s enlightening to see Key remembers quips to schoolgirls better than he does briefings from his spies, couldn’t he just have manned up and told us exactly what insult he did use, and then do the adult thing and apologise?
National’s strategy around the Pike River report is to try to get the media story over in a day. But this won’t go away. For one, there’s Key’s claim that our safety standards were up to Aussie’s and our safety record was good. Then, there’s the larger question of the Government’s whole neoliberal approach that leads to such disasters.
John Key won’t be on the West Coast today when the Pike River report will be released. He’ll have a tightly managed press conference at the Beehive, instead. Key promised that he would stand by the Pike River families. He promised that all efforts would be put in to get the bodies out, no matter the cost. It was all hollow talk from a hollow man.
On Breakfast just now, Tourism Minister Key tried out his line on the international debacle arising from his insulting a prominent visitor to our country who was forbearing enough to spend time talking to Key’s kid. His plan is to try to stymie the story by saying ‘I’m not going to engage with what some reporter think they heard’. No denial. No owning his behaviour. Just pathetic.
It looks like Gordon Campbell has picked up on Irish’s piece on what Labour needs to do and added a few thoughts of his own. I think Campbell has a point here and it troubles me deeply. The last thing we need is for Labour’s vote to collapse in election year the same way Bill English’s did in 2002, or for the campaign to be derailed by faux pas like Brash in 2005.
National are economic failures. Unemployment is up two thirds under their watch and still rising. Household incomes are falling behind inflation. Manufacturing firms are closing up and making workers redundant. People are fleeing to Aussie in record numbers looking for jobs and decent wages So, what’s Key’s solution? Drive down wages by attacking workers’ right to organise.
It’s fine not to agree with someone’s politics. It’s fine to weigh up the attributes of one prospective leader against another and decide that one is the better choice. But the Anyone But Cunliffe clique didn’t do that. They literally wanted anyone who wasn’t Cunliffe. When Parker wasn’t going to win, they went to Shearer. It was a childish way to play with Labour’s future.
The latest Roy Morgan also includes a poll of what people think is the single most important issue facing New Zealand.It makes informative reading. Jobs is the largest: 1 in 5 consider it the most important issue. Combined, the economic categories are 57% of people’s top issue, up from 49% a year ago, and 43% the year before that.
Yet National’s position is that there isn’t a problem, let alone that they can do anything about it.
Here’s Business NZ’s shill on extending paid parental leave: “Employers who have been forced to bear considerable replacement costs, or to find those amongst their other employees willing to provide cover, may well think hard before again employing a woman of child-bearing age”. 1) that makes no sense 2) it’s illegal under the Human Rights Act.
All Police are tainted by the illegal, unethical actions of the few, which the Police Association under Greg O’Connor endorses, defends, and tries to cover-up. O’Connor’s latest outrages are dismissing a report into systemic sexism and sexual abuse by Police as a “ritual humiliation” and justifying Police laying false prosecutions.
