David Cunliffe has given another excellent economic development speech. I think what’s interesting is that he’s not really proposing new policy – what he’s saying is largely in line with the platform Labour ran in on 2011, but he’s articulating the vision behind those policies – the why, rather than just the how – which was lacking from Labour in 2011. Great stuff.
John Key refuses to accept any responsibility for what his spies get up to. The only point of democratic responsibility for our spies doesn’t monitor them and won’t take the blame for failing to do so. He won’t fire a corrupt, lying minister, either. The rot is spreading to the public service. There has been not one resignation, not a single one, due to the Dotcom debacle.
A couple of days before it was surely all going to come out – very messily and very publicly – in the Dotcom court case, Key has revealed that his spies illegally spied on Kim Dotcom. But, beyond that, Key won’t tell us anything apart from that he signed no warrant for spying on Dotcom (such a warrant would have been illegal anyway). Key has chosen not to find out more so that he wouldn’t have to answer questions.
The Righties are wetting themselves because the national standards supposedly show higher results in larger classes. But the data is unmoderated – you can’t compare schools to get national data. And the apparent link is down to special schools and deciles. So, what have we learned? Nothing. Certainly nothing about the impact of class sizes, anyway. But maybe a little more about the Rights’ willful blindness.
John Key on the impoverished Chatham Islands, holding a huge crayfish. He says ‘big as a horse, freshly cooked, $80 a kilo.’ He kisses the cray, then looks at the camera and says ‘jealous?’ Christ, what a cock. Those 270,000 kids aren’t jealous, arsehole. They’re hungry. The fact he knows the price of cray off the top of his head but not how many Kiwis are unemployed tells you all you need to know.
The ever forward looking and even-handed Herald devotes its editorial to attacking Labour for supporting Winston Peters’ Bill to make some small changes to the Reserve Banks’ objectives to bring them more in line with Australia’s. Leaving aside the fact that the Herald hasn’t attacked NZF or the 3 other parties who support this, only Labour, isn’t it time Granny got with the programme?
National is celebrating the creation of 1300 jobs (only 300 permanent) with a prison. How many more prisons would they have to build to reverse the increase in unemployment under their watch and create 65,000 permanent jobs? Only 217. It’s ironic that the only job creation the free-market loving Nats can trumpet is a government-paid for prison.
Does anyone have the number for John Key’s supplier? Because when he answered a question in the House yesterday about poverty and low pay by saying that in his paradise, Planet Key, there would be no toilets and no jobs, my first thought was ‘man, that guy is on some good drugs’. My second thought was he’s gone and made that Planet Key tease into a meme that’ll haunt him.
National says that opening up publicly-owned ports to the transparency that all our other publicly-owned organisations are subject to would be “taking New Zealand backwards”. Accountability is “inefficient” (failed port management hiding behind the lack of OIA coverage isn’t). That’s why they voted against Darien Fenton’s Bill making ports subject to the OIA.
In the House yesterday, Metiria Turei threw National’s ‘Planet Labour/Planet Green’ line back at Key, asking if ordinary people get to break the law too or if that privilege is reserved for ministers on Planet Key. Like all little bullies, Key couldn’t take it back. He lashed out and, like Romney’s fatal gaffe the same day, it exposed something of Key’s real world view.
Get ready for a week of farce in the House. The Opposition will be peppering Key and Banks on the numerous holes in their position. Key will play dumb. But the Opposition has to plug away with persistent, forensic questions. One of them will crack in time.
The government recently released a figure of $78 billion as the ‘lifetime cost’ of the benefit system. That number is the estimated answer to the question: ‘how much would we have to have put aside now to pay for the expected future cost of benefit payments to all current beneficiaries’. But the really question is: why would you want to know that?
Over 2,200 children, according to the Government’s estimates, will end up living in households with their already meager benefit incomes cut in half under National’s plan to punish families who can’t afford to or don’t want to send their children to supposedly voluntarily early childhood education. I’ll give Bill English credit – he at least looked sick as he defended a policy of starving kids.
Fresh from having to delay the sale of Mighty River for 6 months because of sheer incompetence and on the back of hundreds of jobs losses in our largest employing sector – manufacturing – Key went overseas to boost our exports. His Russian FTA talks were a dismal failure (wonder why) and, now, he’s re-heating a failed attempt to boost tourism.
The paper mill at Kawerau is halving its production, and its workforce. Another hundred plus jobs gone. Meanwhile, Norske Skog, which owns the mill, is expanding production at its paper mill in Tasmania. What’s the difference? In Australia, the government is investing in local production and local jobs to substitute imports. Here, our government doesn’t give a fuck.
Something struck me as weird about the Spring Creek closure. Why have they stopped mining immediately even though the future of the mine hasn’t been decided and the miners are still being paid? Why did Solid Energy consider it more economic to pay the miners to leave the coal in the ground than dig it up? The answer has big implications for the government’s mining obsession.
I reckon that if Labour and the Greens combined get more votes than National next election, they’ll be able to find enough support parties to govern. Vice versa too. Until March, Lab+Green had been less then National for over four years. Since then, it has been equal or above half the time. In both August polls, Lab+Green was ahead.
I think Mike’s hit it on the head. National’s asset sales policy is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet. Key’s punted for touch, pushed the hard calls out by six months (at a cost of another $10 million to us, thank you very much). But what’s really going to have changed when we get to March 2013? Key’s ruled out giving iwi what they want. So, any sales will be blocked by court injunctions.
The Keep Our Assets Coalition has now collected 250,000 signatures for the petition for a referendum on asset sales in just four months. You need to help with the big final push – the Spring Collection – to get the last 60,000 signatures and the 10% spares within the coming month.
Suspicion is turning to Minister Tim Groser as the person who leaked information on Murray McCully’s botched reforms of Mfat. As I understand it, the suspicion is not that Groser directly told Goff but that Groser was ‘too loose’ in talking to some public servants about his criticisms of McCully’s botched reforms, who then became conduits for the information to Goff.
National has a line on child poverty to allow them to oppose actually doing anything: ‘Jobs! Jobs are the solution to poverty, not more assistance for poor kids. National is about jobs, not handouts! And we’ll get more jobs with mining!’ But their record doesn’t match the rhetoric … There are 65,000 more unemployed under National and hundreds of mining jobs are being lost.
In Parliament yesterday, Metiria Turei challenged Key on his record on poverty, holding up a graph of the GINI index, showing the increase in inequality under National. Key nonsensically blamed the recession – why must it be that in a recession the poor get poorer while the rich still get richer? That’s a result of policy that protects the rich, not an inevitability.
Remember how National’s excuse for cutting the top tax rate from 39% to align with the trust rate at 33% was that half of the rich were dodging the top tax rate – so, they should all get a tax cut. Tax cuts for tax cheats, it was called. And guess what? They’re still cheating. Only half of the ultra-rich are paying even that slashed 33% rate. When they cheat we pay with cut services, higher charges, and more government debt.
Remember the Ports of Auckland lock-out? The bosses tried to starve out 300 worker to push through contracting out, and ‘save’ $6m a year. The workers won. Now, PoAL has reported a $12m loss caused by the $33m cost of the lockout. So, the bosses spent $33m trying to get a $6m a year ‘saving’. Time the councils sacks the managers who wasted that money.
The Nats are admitting the wheels are coming of their asset sales programme. Solid Energy’s revenue is in free-fall. So is AirNZ’s. Nobody can predict the impact the water rights issue will have on the power companies. And Meridian is playing chicken with its main customer, the country’s largest energy consumer.
Z has set a new record for petrol prices with 91 up to $2.23. The others are expected to follow. We are in a new oil shock due to peak oil. The once unimaginable $2 a litre is now the low price. Ironically, the high dollar that is killing our exporters is protecting us from much higher petrol prices. So why is our government investing $12 billion on deepening our oil addiction?
Compare the latest figures on CEO pay to the median income of New Zealanders and to the minimum wage. The average CEO gets 10 times the pay of a full-time minimum wage worker or the income of the typical Kiwi. The gap is growing. The CEO pay increase was 26 times the median income increase, 56 times what a full-time minimum wage earner got. Does anyone think this is a recipe for a happy and successful New Zealand?
There are just short of 630,000 people aged 20-29. A net 33,000 of them have left for Australia under National – 13,000 in the last year. That’s twice the rate of emigration under Labour. There’s also twice as many unemployed in this age group – 46,000. That’s 1 in 8 of our youngest generation of workers either leaving for Aussie or unemployed under National.
Mighty River, when its water use rights are in doubt? Meridian, when its deal with its largest customer is in question? Solid Energy, when it is reviewing all its operations due to the high dollar? Genesis, when Meridian could flood the market with cheap power if its deal with Rio Tinto falls through, and a future government is likely to sharply increase the cost of its emissions from Huntly?
The Greens’ successful call for an Auditor General’s probe into the Government’s pokies-for-convention-centre deal with SkyCity has stalled the negiotations – despite the Nats’ claims it wouldn’t derail their attempt to sell our gambling law. No meetings have been held since the A-G’s investigation began two months ago. With any luck, it’ll push out the legislative timeline past the 2014 election.
Labour’s hands on approach to economic management focused on boosting manufacturing stands in stark contrast to National’s failed record of big promises and no delivery. Manufacturing is our largest employer. It has lost 25,500 jobs under National. National has been pushing mining for four years. It employs 6,000 people, up just 600 under National.
I look forward to Trevor Mallard and Andrew Little calling Paula Bennett as a witness in their defamation suit with Judith Collins. Bennett openly admits doing what Collins has sued Mallard and Little for accusing her of doing: using ministerial powers to leak the private details of a political opponent. Bennett even says she’ll do it again. She obviously doesn’t see doing it as hurting her reputation.
Transport spending has always been paid for out of road taxes. But National’s roads to nowhere cost too much. They’ve added huge top ups from general tax but it’s still not enough to meet the rising costs of the motorways. They’ve cut every other area of transport spending to the bone. Still not enough. Now, National’s going to start borrowing for their motorways.
The Nats spent $420,000 on branding for the Ministry of Science and Innovation, which only existed for 18 months before being swallowed by MoBIE. It included money for branded play putty… Shearer’s right: “The Government’s supposed public service reform is an incoherent ego trip for ministers.”
Research from the Green Party shows that the $12 billion ‘Roads of National Significance’, the bulk of the next decade’s transport budget, would be on routes that carry just 4% of the country’s traffic. So, the other 96% of us are paying nearly $3,000 a head for roads that bugger all people will use. Traffic on many of the routes is actually falling.
Key’s making excuses for his government’s pathetic record on jobs. Unemployment is going the wrong way but Key calls another 2,000 people without jobs to 162,000 – the highest number since 1994 – a “very small, technical rise“. 65,000 more unemployed under National. And we’re doing relatively badly. We’ve gone from 6th lowest unemployment in the OECD to 14th.
