It’s almost Big Gay Out time again which also means it’s time for some new images of John Key dancing with drag queens and cuddling up to lines of shirtless hunks. I know I’m supposed to admire the fact that a National party PM would take time out of his busy schedule to be seen with us homos but it’s all PR. Key’s record is true blue anti-gay.
John Key has been less cunning than some thought he would be. Going for a November election, he thinks, will let him leverage off the World Cup mini-boom, and enhance running Michael Jones and Inga Tuigamala as candidates. But it means 5 months for the Budget cuts to hurt and gives us 5 more months to work. So, what are we going to do?
Why the left needs feminism part II: why the centre vote is a lie and what Labour needs to do to reclaim its soul.
In the first part of a two part guest post, Queen of Thorns takes a look at feminism, the left, the labour party and funny old Chris Trotter.
Continual growth in the use of resources is not possible. Society and the economy has to be structured to allow a steady state economy where resource use is within sustainable limits.
Auckland Grammar School (that most private of public schools) has decided that NCEA isn’t good enough for them and that it doesn’t meet the needs of its community. When 300+ Primary Schools said the same about National Standards Minister Tolley threatened Boards of Trustees with the sack, threatened with extra visits by ERO and a cut in funding.
The Tertiary Education Union’s new National President, Sandra Grey, joins us for a guest post on the challenges facing tertiary education as the government cuts funding and institutions are ‘rationalised’ to focus on economic values alone. Tertiary education can be so much more than that.
Will New Zealand First get back into Parliament after the election? If they do, it changes everything. A range of new governing coalitions become possible – both National and Labour-led. Can the Left trust Winston Peters to side with Labour over National? Could a Left+NZF government work? Jenny looks at the issues.
This post from the Oil Drum looks at how peak oil and the economy interact. From 2004 to 2008 oil prices rose and rose with demand. But high prices bought nearly no new oil to the market because it isn’t there. The prices broke the global economy, destroying demand. Now, prices are rising again and the weakened economies will topple much easier.
Under the supposed rules of capitalism, investors take a “haircut” if an investment goes bad – no reward without risk. It’s also Economics 101 that giving relief to the ‘little people’ will have a more stimulating effect on the economy than if you bail out the wealthiest interests in society. But the powers that be are breaking the rules to aid the rich.
As has been amply demonstrated by comments on The Standard in recent days, there are many who believe that the answer to an ineffective deterrent is more deterrent; that leaving in place the likelihood that fleeing from a police car will result in your death is somehow discouraging an unknown number of drivers from fleeing. Increasingly, though, people who respond with their critical faculties as opposed to their knees are realising that the present model of law enforcement and incarceration is a failure.
Our guest poster writes about a letter he had published in the Herald recently. A clever wee missive, it started ‘helpful’ in tone but had a sting in the tail on the inaction of Key’s do nothing government in the face of recession, unemployment, and peak oil. The Herald cut off the sting leaving a ‘pro-Key’ letter. What are they up to?
It’s not just about fees, or cuts, but about the essential corruption of the current system; so it replays the confrontation between the great British radical movements of the past and the landed-gentry “Old Corruption” that they fought to tame. Compared to 1968, the student movement is now much larger and more broadly based, with deeper roots into the working class and society in general, and so the revolt is, if anything, more profound.
Our guest poster looks at the “Warm Arctic / Cool Continents” idea about why Europe and North America have been cold and the Arctic has been so warm over recent years. Quoting Conrad, our guest then skewers ‘skeptics’ with the statement “Or to put it another way: you might not be interested in global warming, but global warming is interested in you.”
All those who think Keynes is dead (and those who merely wondered what happened to him) should check out the website of George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). A remarkable range of economic luminaries are presented on video and powerpoint, most or all of them arguing for a radical Keynesian solution to the financial crisis.
Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee has waited, until after the year-end press gallery drinks, to announce that the state owned Whirinaki power plant will be sold by tender process. The Government talks about having our interests at heart, but the truth is that it is selling off the family silver again. And slippery John Key is doing it while we’re focussed on Christmas.
Annette Sykes recently delivered the annual Bruce Jesson Lecture concerning ‘The Politics of the Brown Table’. Much of her address is a harsh critique of the so called ‘iwi elite’ and their neo liberal agenda. In my opinion her assessments are true and justified. Without doubt neo liberalism undermines Maori efforts for self determination
John Key deserves the award for Politician of the Year. But it’s not quite the honour Armstrong thinks it is. The Left wants a government to deliver results for the people’s health, wealth, family, safety, education, employment prospects etc. That’s why the Left is so critical of Key. He plays the ‘politician’ game well but does nothing meaningful.
A reader responds, pretty curtly, to John Key’s wholly inadequate explanation for why the select committee hearings on extending the SIS’s already broad powers will be secret. “It won’t be in the public interest to have it open, for a whole bunch of reasons I don’t want to go into,” Just doesn’t cut it.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe how the leaders of this world fail to comprehend what appears so obvious to me. In the Information Age, how do they think secrecy is viable? What is happening with Wikileaks, or more appropriately, what is about to happen, appears to be playing out along the same lines as the rise and fall of Napster.
Anne Tolley prefers instead to concentrate on the diversion that is National’s Standards. It must be easier implementing a political slogan than actually doing her job.
It takes many people working together to achieve anything really worthwhile. This also applies to our biggest project yet. Saving a planet. So why can’t we get started? Because human society based around the market can not do it. The answers will only com from the Left. The Left parties, Labour in particular, need to get serious and move Leftward.
CERRA, Ecan Abolition, the Supercity Acts, the Hobbit Enabling Act, Water Privatisation, Fire at Will, the Murray McCully Empowering Act… the list of laws, all passed under Urgency, that take rights off New Zealanders and give more powers to the government is endless. Now, the Police are being empowered to take DNA from anyone they arrest.
Last year, over 13,000 New Zealanders got some measure of satisfaction from ANZ’s part-owned ING in New Zealand. For over a year, half a billion dollars in investors’ funds had been locked up, during a nasty dispute between ING/ANZ and their investors. How has ANZ made things right for everyone who was hurt? They’ve renamed ING as ‘One Path’
Bill English and brother Conner, CEO of Federated Farmers, share a vision for the world. It’s one where the environment and workers are exploited to the hilt in the name of ‘growth’ and the fruits of that ‘growth’ flow to a privileged elite (like the Englishes). Yesterday rich-boy Conner chided the rest of us with a speech titled “There is no free lunch”
Anne Tolley has ignored the advice of the Law Commission and the desire of parents that private schools be required to provide a “safe and supportive” environment for children. She says there’s no problem to fix. Unfortunately that’s not true. Rather than make them accountable, Tolley is opening the public purse strings for private schools.
So people get sick and become less productive. I would have thought that that was pretty much stating the obvious.
Spending tax payers money trying to quantify how much imaginary wealth these sick people could have created for their employers if they had been perfectly well, seems to me to be bordering on lunacy.
The dark side of the current much-heralded free trade talks is that New Zealand could end up letting foreign firms dictate how the country is run, from quarantine rules to local content laws, unless it learns the lessons of previous trade deals. A new book edited by Auckland academic Jane Kelsey, No Ordinary Deal, points out that free trade deals are now about far more than just tariffs.
It’s disconcerting to see National and its blogging lackies running smear campaigns against anyone who has what they deem to be “political connections”. […]
I’m a nurse at a public hospital. Our social fund is looking a bit thin this year so we thought would invite school groups to come along to the hospital, charge $25 a head, and let them play around with the equipment like X-ray machines and bandages to get a sense of how we work as a team. I’m sure Mr Key will say it’s a “good idea“.
In a highly-charged debate like the Hobbit fiasco, it’s easy to lose sight of the real issue amongst the claims and counter-claims over petty details. In a second post that strips things back to what matters, Blue asks the big question: ‘how exactly did NZ taxpayers end up handing over tens of millions of dollars to Warner Brothers?’
Anne Tolley’s Education Amendment Bill 2, due out of Select Committee next week, ignores the Law Commission’s call for “light-handed” legislation to deal with 100 year old gaps that leave children at private schools in a legal vacuum regarding their welfare. Instead the Nats will hand unspecified sums of public money to private schools.
Q+A held a debate between the Mana by-election candidates yesterday. Felix has done a very nice summary of how the candidates came across. Fa’afoi is a good guy but we aren’t seeing his values coming through very strongly. Parata is a nasty piece of work. She continually interrupts others when they speak then gets angry at the slightest questioning.
The Right argues that an already settled labour dispute involving a small union somehow scared a multi-billion film company enough to make them consider abandoning the $100 million already invested in NZ. Blue has gone beyond the slogans and done some excellent research to answers our questions on what really happened.
There is no need to tolerate the existence of poverty. It is an economic and social drag on our country that wastes human potential. The minimum wage, super, and benefits help, yet 15% of Kiwis, and 20% of kids, live in households with incomes below 60% of the average income. A universal income is the best way to eliminate the blight of poverty.
The release of 400,000 classified documents on the Iraq war today highlights a much broader issue for New Zealand. As the world moves into uncertainty, some commentators call it a ‘new new world order’, New Zealand must establish itself definitively, cementing the values we wish to hold true for the coming century.
