Yesterday, National was patting itself on the back for getting, wait for it, 25 people into work and off benefits as part of rebuilding Christchurch. This in a $770,000 programme called Work InZone that was meant to get 100 people into work. This programme didn’t create jobs, it just helped get the select beneficiaries to the front of the queue for them. Just means someone else missed out.
How does it cost $75m to dig a 220m long tunnel? The Government is planning to tear up the 5-year old bypass road and put it underground to give space for the National War Memorial for $75m. You’re never going to win opposing a war memorial – even though the Nats cancelled it in 2009, which is why the cost is so high doing it at the last minute before the centenary of Gallipoli – but $350,000 a metre for a tunnel?
David Farrar notes that 4 of the 10 worst congestion points in New Zealand are in Wellington. He concludes “Transmission Gully will help with some of that, but not all”. Quite the opposite, old boy. Transmission Gully will not create any new capacity at any of these congestion points. In fact, NZTA says it will create more traffic heading into 3 of them.
The design of the red-zone buy-out puts CERA first, the insurers seconds, and the earthquake victims last. Homeowners could take the 2007 valuation […]
A stockmarket float can’t happen at just any time. It needs to be close to the annual report or late enough in the new year to allow new numbers to be made after the Christmas break. So 2 windows a year. 5 to the election. Treasury says the stockmarket can only handle 1 asset sale a window, preferably 1 a year. The Nats know they will lose the next election. So they can’t afford to lose this sales window if they’re to do all the sales by the election.
“At all times, Ministers are expected to act lawfully and to behave in a way that upholds, and is seen to uphold, the highest ethical standards. Ultimately, Ministers are accountable to the Prime Minister for their behaviour.” – The Cabinet Manual. John Banks lied to reporters, and the public, while a minister. That’s not upholding the highest ethical standards. When will John Key hold him to account?
What is it with this government and convention centres? The international convention market is dying. The Nats are already doing a bargain with the cancer in the heart of Auckland called SkyCity to build one there that won’t be worth its cost to build. Now, they want to build another convention centre in Christchurch to compete for that dying market. It’s just one thing that’s wrong with Gerrymania.
In April, Christchurch Council revealed its plan for the CBD rebuild following an extensive period of public consultation. The chance to rebuild the CBD of our second-largest city was a once-in-generations opportunity to fit the city for our future challenges. The Council plan had its faults but one of the good aspects was it addressed smart transport. King Gerry ripped it up immediately.
The Greens have collected 100,000 signatures for the Keep Our Assets Coalition petition to force a referendum on asset sales – in fact, my Asset Keeper email says they were up another thousand at the end of Friday. The Coalition’s total is rapidly approaching 200,000. That’s after just 3 months. Another 150,000 or so to go – with margin for invalid signatures. Play your part.
John Key’s grasp of his own asset sales policy is being revealed to be shakier by the day. He doesn’t know how it would hurt the government books. He flips his position on water rights each day. He doesn’t know how much a looters’ bonus of free shares would cost. And, yesterday, he didn’t even realise that $56m is budgeted to cover sharebrokers’ fees for the looters.
In the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes, they play a game called Calvinball. “The only consistent rule states that Calvinball may never be played with the same rules twice”. It’s a bit like that trying to call this government to account. One day they have legal authority to give away shares, next they don’t. One day they don’t know the cost, then they do, then they don’t again. Like Calvin, I’m getting the impression that Key is just making it up as he goes along.
John Key doesn’t want to go ahead with plain packaging of cigarettes. The cancer sellers would sue. It could cost a few million to beat them in the international courts (me, I would just create a law of corporate homicide and nationalise their NZ assets). Key baulks at the cost, the risk. But something in the hundreds of millions for free shares to looters? Key reckons that’s a great investment.
‘National’s made a complete cock-up of this and everyone’s pissed, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting them in the polls, where they’re still strong’. You can find that stereotype sentence in the media all the time, particularly in the coverage of the weekend’s National Party conference. But it might be time to do some fact-checking, because they are being hurt in the polls.
On Breakfast just now, Petra Bagust asked John Key what’s so great for the economy about listing our assets on the stockmarket. A good question. In his answer, Key tried to make out that floating these companies on the stockmarket would give them more cash to grow. But not a cent of the revenue will go to the companies and Key knows it.
We know that more sprawl is actually twice as expensive to the rate- and tax-payer than increasing density within existing urban limits because […]
Whether you accept the evidence that the consumption of oil is currently peaking or not, it is undeniable that a) the world’s fossil fuel resources are finite and we’ve already consumed a large fraction of it and b) we won’t keep consuming evermore per day until it’s all gone. So, inevitably, the shape of human fossil fuel use is going to look like this.
Key says the odds of a delay in the sale of Mighty River are like the “chance a meteorite will hit the Earth this afternoon”. It turns out, that’s a near certainty. So, Key was accidentally, telling the truth – the odds of a delay in the asset sales are growing daily.
RNZ is reporting that National has spent $216m just on the investigation and design stage of its Roads of National Significance so far (and that’s only 5 of the 7 projects). Most of it on outside contractors Look, I get this kind of shit can be surprisingly expensive. But nearly quarter of a billion dollars just for investigation and design? With these projects involving a 260km of highways that’s nearly a million dollars per kilometre, a thousand dollars per metre, just on planning!
The latest Roy Morgan poll has Labour+Greens neck and neck with National again on 45.5%. The trend is quite clear just looking at the Roy Morgan graphs. And when you look at the key levels that the two sides have to achieve, the change since the election is dramatic.
The Government has binned part of the Northern Wellington Corridor ‘Road of National Significance’ – the four-lane expressway between Otaki and Levin that would have cost $400m. The government’s not getting enough road tax revenue and they had already cut all other transport funding to the bone – so something had to give. But it’s just the start.
Climate change is causing the world’s temperatures and seas levels to rise but this isn’t a steady process. Instead we see more frequent and more extreme weather events. The record-busting heatwave in the US and floods in Russia are examples. The big problem is the effects of these weather events on our production of food and other vital goods.
Are you keen to buy shares in Mighty River Power with a dividend return of 4% pre-tax? You can beat that in the bank, and paying off debt is a far better use of money. But say you’re still keen. What about the threat of Mighty River losing water rights or having to pay for them – will you buy in with that unresolved? Only nutters would take Key’s offer with that up in the air.
Tim Groser: “Our farmers have been reducing their emissions by 1.3% per year for two decades” (that’s emissions per unit of output, btw, not absolute – although total agriculture emissions are down in recent years). Groser on why farming should be out of the ETS: “we’ll introduce biological emissions into the ETS when we think there credible abatement technologies out there.”
You know how the Government is so skint, and absolutely much get back into surplus by 2014/15, that it has cut education at every level, cut conservation, cut home insulation, cut Kiwisaver, cut Working for Families .. etc etc. They even created a new super-ministry to cut costs. And what’s the first action of Mobie Dick? $2.2 million sunk into Aussie V8s.
Yesterday National pollster David Farrar excitedly quoted from a George Monbiot article saying peak oil isn’t happening. Two problems: 1) Farrar omitted to quote the bits of the article saying that the flipside of no peak oil would be runaway climate change. 2) the report Monbiot’s article is based on is written by an oil executive who claims we’ll stumble on endless cheap oil and all live happily ever after.
Bob Jones may be a facetious old bugger but he knows a rort when he sees one. And asset sales are a rort: “Since the advent of the industrial revolution every business has sought the bliss of a monopoly. The competitive market economy denies that, except in unique situations, such as for example with our hydro electricity generating dams. So why sell them?”
House prices and rents are rising quickly in Auckland. The reason is pretty simple: from 2008 to 2011, it added 70,000 people and only 10,000 houses. The shortfall will have been worsened by the exodus from Christchurch since then. While the population’s growing, more houses are needed. But is the Right’s answer – more sprawl – the way to provide them?
Shanghai Pengxin’s bid to buy the Crafar Farms was accepted the 2nd time on promises it would invest in building the farms’ productivity in a way a New Zealand buyer couldn’t. Instead, they immediately turned around and tried to sell 3 of the farms at an outrageous profit. Pengxin has shown it has no intent of being bound to the commitments it has made.
We’re getting used to the Nats running bash the beneficiary /poor /Maori /unemployed /criminal /etc distractions but it’s getting pretty bad when Bill English gets in on the act. Weirdly his idea of drug-testing beneficiaries seems to have been picked up from a Daily Show piece on how it failed in Florida – costing money, not saving it, and proving beneficiaries use drugs less than the rest of the population.
Back Benches was a brilliant show. A lovely amateur air that never became awkward thanks to the unflappable humour of Wallace Chapman and Damian Christie. I never got along in person but it was a great watch. And it was clear that it was the audience that made it. They brought a vibrancy and a direct interaction for the politicians that no other show has.
National’s latest plan to save the country – make another list of targets! What no-one has pointed out yet is that we won’t know whether these target have been achieved or not until 2018 – National would need to be a 4 term government to ever be held accountable to these targets. The list is a curious mix of the utterly unambitious, the impossible, and the deceptive.
The Right would have us believe that the election was a referendum on asset sales and nothing else. Well, let’s take a closer look at the results of that ‘referendum’. Yeah, there’s no mandate there.
There is a sociopathic policy of the leadership at ACC, which sees staff financially incentivised to push long-term claimants off ACC leading to many of them going on the benefit rather than getting rehabilitation. Now, we have proof that this policy came right from the top. National ministers set arbitrary targets for the number of long-term claimants to be booted.
When the government is hooting and hollering over 1.7% annual growth, it’s time to admit we’ve entered a new paradigm. In the past, you would have expected 4-5% growth coming out of a recession. Now, anything above the rate of population growth is treated as a miracle. Growth as we used to know it isn’t coming back. What does that mean for economic policy?
So, National expects 200,000 people to buy shares when it hocks off our assets. Call me simple but there’s 4.4 million of us, 3.3 million adults. Seems like nearly all of us won’t buy shares. But here’s the real rub: they’re talking about a bonus for the elite who can afford to buy shares and hold on to them. A gift from us to them. And National’s got no legal right to do it.
The Nats’ latest defence of asset sales is ‘if Labour doesn’t say they’ll buy them back,then they secretly agree with the sales’. Well, we would all like Labour to be able to make that commitment but, in the real world, that would be irresponsible . The incoming government is going to have to know how the bad a states the Nats leave the books in first.
