During the Labour conference, Armstrong patronisingly wrote “delegates were so blinded and so intoxicated by the prospect of securing a say in the election of future leaders that they did not think through the consequences”. Old Tories hate democracy. But it’s disappointing that Garner made the same mistakes. Democracy doesn’t weaken, it strengthens – ask the Greens.
A closer look at the Household Labourforce Survey reveals startling facts: in the four years since the ‘brighter future’ began, in which time […]
Talk of a Labour leadership vote to be held this Tuesday blossomed and then faded on Sunday. Here’s what went down. The Mallard-led old guard thought they had found a procedural trick to embarrass Cunliffe. They could have an immediate caucus-only vote under the old rules, which would require 60% opposition to Shearer to succeed. But such a cynical attempt to disenfranchise the membership would have backfired
For the first time in the history of New Zealand, being a member of a major party really means something. If you a member of Labour, you will have a choice in who your leader is. Can any but a handful of National apparatchiks say the same? It’s time for National’s members to ask whether they’re really members of just money pots. And it’s time for the Labour Ulterior to re-join.
It now appears that the Government’s controversial plan to allow wealthy frequent flyers on state-owned China Southern Airlines to skip visa requirements was done to help SkyCity get more high-rolling Chinese gamblers visiting. It’s the warped priorities that gets me: the Nats are bending over backwards for SkyCity while insisting that they won’t ‘pick winners’ to save manufacturing jobs.
The amount we have to borrow from the rest of the world is due to hit $17b a year by 2016. Our current account deficit is already the 2nd largest in the developed world and will soon be hitting disastrous levels. But English says ‘don’t worry, if that happens, our economy will just collapse, Greece-style’. I’m not reassured.
Politics 101 for Labour leaders: when a right-wing columnist tells you to piss off your party and your base to ‘win the centre’ she probably doesn’t have your best interests at heart. The truth of it is, Labour didn’t lose the last two elections by losing the centre and it won’t win by trying to win back votes from National. It’s the Labour non-vote that matters.
It was a bizarre Question Time yesterday with Key, English, and Joyce all answering questions on the dire jobs numbers and giving contradictory excuses. It was statistical noise, the wrong statistic to look at, the rest of the world’s fault, pretty good comparatively… But the truth of it is that, any way you cut it, National has failed on jobs.
Remember when Key’s excuse for rising unemployment was that it was a “lagging indicator” and the numbers would soon fall? Well, that was 3 years ago and its been lagging a hell of a long time because, since then 25,000 more Kiwis have become unemployed. So, what was the excuse yesterday with the shocking unemployment numbers?
The deficit so far this year is half a billion dollars worse than expected in the first 3 months of this fiscal year. But English says don’t worry – he’s going to make the 2014/15 surplus, and he doesn’t care what he cuts. Meanwhile, the new Reserve Bank Governor says that borrowing is out of control and the dollar is too high – but he won’t do anything about it. Neoliberal dinosaurs both.
Yesterday, 60 highly paid jobs at Rakon where lost and we learned 5,700 manufacturing jobs had been lost in the past year. The reason, the high dollar made manufacturing here untenable. Steve Joyce shrugged his shoulders like it was nothing to do with him. But it’s his government’s failures that are forcing Kiwi manufacturers overseas.
I just wonder in what world John Key thinks that it’s OK for the PM to go around slagging off and insulting people in public. Planet Key, perhaps. Why does he think it’s OK for him to call a visitor to our country ‘”thick as batshit”? Why does he think that it’s not homophobic to use “gay” as an insult? And does he think it’s not hurtful when he says “gay” is a synonym for “weird”?
On the back of Duncan Garner’s scathing piece on David Shearer, David Farrar endorses Grant Robertson for leader. Yeah, because his last recommendation’s worked out so well. Call me cynical, but I just don’t think National’s pollster has the Left’s interests at heart. No, I don’t think people will be looking to the Right for advice on who should lead Labour again.
Campbell Live had a piece on Monday based on a leaked report into the benefit cost ratio of National’s Kapiti Expressway project. Now, in its evidence to the EPA hearings on the project, NZTA has claimed the BCR was 0.93 – ie you only get 93 cents worth of gain for each dollar spent. It turns out that was a massive exaggeration. In reality, we get 20 cents of value for every dollar spent.
Housing New Zealand is going to build some affordable houses in Christchurch and then sell them. It’s not a bad idea. In fact, if it were done right and en masse, it should have been a centrepiece of National’s empty ‘affordable housing’ announcment. But I fear it won’t be done right. It’s not enough just to build affordable homes: you need to make sure landlords don’t snap them up.
It was almost funny listening to Bill English on Checkpoint. He had identified all, or at least most of, the problems with housing in Auckland: in short, nobody’s building affordable houses, the prevelance of bespoke houses pushes up prices, and speculative capital raises them even more. But his solutions were all, well, not solutions: try to make consenting even quicker, more sprawl.
The US Presidential election is close. Really close. The political futures markets favour Obama about 2 to 1 but polls of the nationwide popular vote and the polls in key states, such as Ohio and Virginia, are essentially tied. Enter the October surprise – Sandy, the latest ever recorded Atlantic storm, now coming ashore and pounding key battleground states.
Listening to the Nats on housing affordability, it’s pretty clear that their only plan is to allow more sprawl. So, let’s say this clearly: sprawl is expensive, not cheap, and it is not lack of housing but over-investment in house price speculation that leads to high prices. National’s ‘solution’ is for the country to needlessly spend tens of billions.
The latest Roy Morgan poll has Labour down 4.5% to 29%. There’s no way to varnish it, this is a very bad poll […]
Detective Inspector Grant Wormald and his Organised and Financial Crime Agency appear to be a rogue police unit that thinks it’s above the law. They acted illegally in the Dotcom raid, they had GSCB illegally spy on Dotcom, Wormald appears to have perjured himself, and, now, there’s the illegal fake prosecution that has led to 21 accused criminals going free.
A TV3 poll shows that 49% to 46% of people believe National is failing to build its promised “brighter future”. The two big weaknesses: jobs and education. By nearly 2 to 1 margins, people believe that National is failing to provide full employment (it says something that this isn’t actually a National Party goal) and failing to provide the best education system possible.
Housing is too expensive. It has been driven up by ‘investors’ in pursuit of a safe, hands-off, tax-free return. 8% of the people own about 40% of the houses. That’s the problem – over-allocation of savings from the upper-middle class into housing pushing prices up, out of reach of the middle and working class, who become their tenants. The Nats’ solution: more sprawl.
I’ve been thinking about what you might call a ‘good problem’ for the Left.. but it leads me to a ‘problem problem’. OK, so let’s say we win the next election – as the Left must do and should do given how unpopular the Nats’ policies are and, for the last year, how inept their political management has been. How do you share the economic portfolios out?
A great piece by Byran Gould yesterday on National’s refusal to acknowledge the jobs crisis in manufacturing, even as the ANZ says unemployment is on its way up to 7%. National is really on the wrong side of public perception and the wrong side of history here. They look like ostriches trying to deny the problem, while the Left is presenting the solutions.
I see David Farrar’s retailing the rumour that’s been doing the rounds over the last week that Shane Jones is in talks with Winston to make the jump from Labour to become Deputy Leader of NZ First. This makes a lot of sense for Jones – he’s to the right of Labour, has a reputation for being a bit un-PC and has the gift of the gab that a leading NZ First politician needs.
Treasury is trying to tell us that private power companies don’t charge more than SOEs to justify privatisation. Of course, a moment’s thought tells you that private owners, with higher costs of capital, need larger profits than public ones. And private owners always complain the SOEs don’t charge enough. Moreover, Treasury’s spin is a complete fail.
I watched Paula Bennett and her MSD CEO make excuses and say sorry yesterday as they revealed that they had let the personal data of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders sit in the open at WINZ kiosks – and it’s all still open to anyone working at MSD. I didn’t hear either of them offer their resignations. What do they think we pay them for?
If I were in Labour, I would be looking at the polls and thinking that a small target strategy is best: preserve your credibility at all costs, keep your head down, pick up the votes as National self-destructs – it worked for Key in 2008. Instead, Shearer seems to be trying to shoot the moon with a knock out blow to Key (interesting parallel to Norman’s export policy there).
Bill English on quantitative easing: “There are big risks with it and it is just barmy to suggest that in an economy growing at all that you would do it”. So, are the countries that are using QE to push up our currency growing? EU: -0.3% (14 of the 27 member states are growing), US: 2.1%, Switzerland: 0.6%, Japan: 3.3%. So, yes, countries use QE while growing – and it lets their businesses undercut ours.
The Key effect is over. That’s the conclusion you draw from the latest Roy Morgan poll. It shows National down to 41.5% and Lab+Green surging to 47%. The last time National polled consistently in this range was before Key became leader. Now Key’s no longer an asset, it’s only a matter of time before he’s a liability. The Collins and Joyce Factions will be sharpening the knives.
So, we know what Key’s utopia is: golf, holidays, no jobs, and, um, no toilets. But where are the Nats’ economic policies heading? Fast forward 20 years: low-skill, low-pay, ununionised, foreign-owned, volume-based extractive industries, rather than value-added manufacturing, massive current account deficit … it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Fortunately,there’s an alternative.
If I was at the manufacturing crisis summit this Friday, and if John Key was showing up rather than spending his time on Planet Key and claiming that manufacturing is doing “extremely well”, I would ask him this: How come when Hollywood calls, you drop everything and go; how come you arrest Dotcom for them and give them $50m a year; but when Kiwi jobs are bieng lost, all you have to offer is denials and the cold shoulder?
40,000 manufacturing jobs gone in four years. Manufactured exports in free-fall. Tourism revenue collapsing. If that’s not a crisis, what is? Why is […]
40 jobs in a hi-tech business repairing jet engines are set to be lost. The business’s profits are being slaughtered by the high dollar. The Bluff smelter could close – 900 jobs directly on the line, plus thousands more in the local economy – as Rio Tinto can’t make a profit with the dollar so high and aluminum prices down. How much longer will we do nothing?
If it weren’t for the fact that the Prime Minister is a) covering up for a corrupt, lying minister because he heads a support party and is, therefore, above accountability on Planet Key and b) being exposed as an inept and asleep at the wheel in his oversight of the nation’s spies, then Hekia Parata would be clinging on to her political career by her fingernails right now. Still, plenty of time for that.
The latest Roy Morgan poll has National at its lowest level of support since before the 2008 election
