There are quarter of a million jobless people. In a typical quarter, about 250,000 people start new jobs. Does that mean we can eliminate joblessness in a quarter? Of course fucken not, but that’s what National is telling you when they rabbit on about ‘10,000 jobs on Trademe’. To get joblessness and benefit numbers down you need a net increase in jobs,not just churn.
As controversy swirls over Murray McCully’s leaked emails and the government’s secret position on “restraining China” and McCully is nowhere to be found to answer questions, John Key says “I have absolutely no clue where he is“. Funny, cause he was the one who approved McCully’s travel. Seems a lot of ministers are taking to hiding when the heat comes on.
Government documents from last year reveal a plan to make ACC boost its levies and pay the government a dividend so that private insurers can compete. But that wasn’t enough. Now, the plan seems to be to exclude ACC from workplace injury insurance altogether. Private insurers just can’t offer cover as cheap as ACC can. So that Nats’ solution is to deny us access to ACC workplace cover.
Economic sovereignty is suddenly the hot issue with the vast majority of Kiwis opposed to more foreign ownership and asset sales. The Nats are in a spin: Key is desperately trying to upgrade English’s ‘guess’ on the fiscal impact of asset sales to a “best estimate”. Time for that asset sales referendum petition. Maybe you can help draft the question.
For the first time in history, net government debt has passed $50 billion. New Zealand’s net international liabilities, the amount New Zealand owes the rest of the world, is also skyrocketing: $140 billion now, $197 billion in 2016. John Key used to say we had a growth problem, not a debt problem. With GDP per capita down 2% under National, we now have both.
The Nats are looking to Queensland for lessons in privatisation. They want to see how incentives for locals to hold on to their shares work. But you don’t pay for incentives with magic beans. Any incentives for the few locals who can afford to buy shares just means a diminished return to the government, making the economic and fiscal rationale for selling even weaker.
Fran ‘Sell it all’ O’Sullivan is fuming over the Court decision putting aside the approval of Pengxin’s application to buy Crafar Farms. She knows that Pengxin can’t satisfy the actual legal test because its bid has never been about bringing benefit to New Zealand. Its been about securing strategic assets for China. But some of her whining really needs to be pulled up.
Private sector competition brings market disciplines and efficiencies to bloated publicly-owned monopolies. That’s the mantra, eh? That’s the indisputable truth… right? So, how come the Nats are planning to make ACC raise its levies and pay a dividend – for the first time ever – so that private insurers can compete? And how does that benefit NZ?
Bill English admitted yesterday that his new estimate that asset sales will net $6b in revenue, $800m above book value, is just a guess – the midpoint of the previous guess of $5-7b. And that’s not all that’s made up. The forecast foregone profits are way under-estimated. Even with these fiscal frauds, English still can’t get asset sales to make economic sense.
The Crafar Farms decision is sensible and a correct interpretation of the law. Foreign buyers must add something that a local buyer can’t, other than a higher purchase price. Otherwise, our farmers will continue to be out-bid for our land by foreign government-backed companies that can afford a lower rate of return, and NZ will gain nothing. So, why is National rushing to change the law?
Gerry Brownlee has weakly attempted to fob off the decline in benefit:cost ratio of highway projects under National. ‘Sure’ he says ‘we’ve been […]
The Bankers’ Crisis is hurting people all over the world. From the deepest, darkest austerity in Greece, to the continuing foreclosure tsunami in the US, to cutbacks and job losses here, it’s the ordinary people suffering the hangover for the bankers’ wild decades of unbridled excess and profit. But at least the banks are suffering too, eh? Yeah, nah.
People are waking up to National’s plan to remove the democratically-elected Christchurch City Council and replace it with its own hand-picked commissioners, who will then give a green light to Brownlee’s developer mates and the sale of council assets. You can already see the vultures circling – waiting for the chance to seize more public wealth for themselves.
When National decided to seize control of Canterbury Regional Council to remove roadblocks for unsustainable irrigation by their mates in the dairy industry, they didn’t do it overnight. They spent months creating a crisis. The same thing’s happening in Christchurch. Brownlee’s building a ‘crisis in the council’ to justify replacing the councilors with commissioners. The only question is when.
David Shearer wants to move the New Year’s and Queen’s Birthday honours to Waitangi Day. I reckon that’s a goer. If honourees were advised ahead of time, they could attend a public ceremony at Waitangi, to add to all the other events. With thousands there, it would be a much more public celebration of their contributions to our society and bring a positive focus to the day.
While the rest of the world is moving away from the ‘hands off’ monetary policy that became fashionable in the 80s, our government insists on playing by the outmoded neoliberal ‘rules’ of a clean float. Well, what happens when everyone else ‘cheats’ by printing free money to drive their currencies lower and we sit on our hands? We lose our assets and our exporters.
Almost missed among all the blacked out paragraphs of the Transport Briefing to the Incoming Minister are 2 interesting graphs. While not explicitly mentioning peak oil, the graph of the National Land Transport Fund shows a massive shortfall in revenue in a ‘high oil price, low growth’ scenario. The other shows how low-quality National’s highway spending is.
Most Kiwis have had no payrise, if they’re lucky enough to have kept their jobs, in the past few years. Yet Christchurch City Council CEO Tony Marryatt has kept on getting pay rises on his obscene salary, even as his job performance has declined. Now the arrogant bastard is saying he’ll keep $34,000 he doesn’t deserve unless the elected council ‘behaves’. There is no justification for this madness. Sack him.
Tony Gibson with his $750,000 salary and his senior managers on half a million each may have thought they had it easy beating up on some $27 an hour workers so that they could increase profits by cutting wages but they failed to calculate that those 330 workers are backed by 400,000 brothers and sisters around the world.
As peak oil slowly grinds down our economy – meeting any hint of growth with sky-high petrol prices and making $2 a litre the ‘new normal’, we are actually, gradually,starting to react. Not at a governmental level, where action is most urgently needed, but in the decisions made by ordinary Kiwis every day.
Every few years, since the 70s, they’ve promised the great New Zealand oil boom is coming. It ain’t going to happen. If there is lots of oil, it’s deepsea and expensive. And they haven’t found it in 40 years of looking. We have a worse production-consumption ratio now then the 80s. Even if we somehow become a massive oil exporter, it’s not the economic panacea you might think.
A leaked Ports of Auckland strategy document shows their goal is to reduce the stevedores’ wages by 20%. They were planning to manufacture a crisis even before the stevedores’ collective expired. They’ve been rumbled breaking the law by not bargaining in good faith. Their political support will now evaporate. They should cut their losses, and a deal with the workers, now.
National high flyer Jami-Lee Ross, Ports of Auckland’s chief shill, and Fran O’Sullivan all joined the fray over the port dispute yesterday. How does their line that the workers are overpaid marry with the Port’s claim that they’re offering pay rises? Does the Port project its wage bill would rise or fall if its offer were to be accepted? And what to make of this ‘national interest’ line?
They say that the nice thing about Cameron Slater is he’ll believe whatever he’s paid to believe. Yesterday, I asked whether Slater is being paid to run dirt stories for Ports of Auckland. He didn’t deny it. So what is the Port’s propagandist up to? Yesterday, he was calling for the workers’ pay to be slashed while defending the directors’ massive fees.
Update: Ports of Auckland denies paying Slater anything.
Since my post yesterday, Ports of Auckland has upped the ante threatening to sack all its workers and contract out (to quick and loud cheers from the National-aligned blogs they are working with – Cameron Slater’s rate is $10,000 for an operation like this). What they’re proposing is a breach of the law and wouldn’t work, but its just setting the scene for the next stage.
The Right is up to its old tricks over the Ports of Auckland. It’s the usual pattern: make up some bullshit about how the workers are spoiled and unreasonable, cry that the sky will fall if the company doesn’t get its way, and (this is the long-game) suggest privatisation as the solution. What you haven’t heard is the cause of the ‘crisis’: the Port’s attempt to cut the workers’ conditions and pay.
I read Colin James’s piece on the need for a resilient economy/society in yesterday’s ODT. A competent explanation of a risks facing New Zealand and an acknowledgement that New Zealand needs to design itself to withstand and exploit them. Nothing new to readers of The Standard. But are we building that resilience? James offers no opinion. The answer is ‘no’.
I’m really disappointed the New Zealand Institute is merging with the Business Roundtable. It smells like the NZI was out of cash. It’s a pity because, since getting rid of David Skilling, the NZI has been producing some good, broad-minded,practical work on the economy’s fundamental challenges. Merger just leave a shill for the neoliberal elite.
Trillions have been plowed into bailing out banks, investors, and whole countries during the economic crisis. The cost easily exceeds total investment in tackling climate change. Is it, as George Monbiot argues, that elites just look out for themselves, or are humans just incapable of perceiving the danger of large, slowly-building problems?
140 more jobs have been lost in Christchurch. Employment in the region had already fallen by 26,800 in the year to September. DoL […]
I enjoyed Jenny’s piece the other day on David Shearer’s leadership abilities. His skill at taking the ball and running with it, and doing what he thinks is right. I want to similarly praise David Cunliffe for his leadership in economic thinking. God knows we need someone who gets the problems and the solutions. Cunliffe brings that understanding in droves.
In the Budget, we were told to expect 4.2% growth in 2012, which would make getting back into surplus and creating jobs possible. The Pre-election Update reduced it to 3%. Now, the OECD says ‘2.5%, providing Europe doesn’t go to crap .. oh, and Europe’s going to crap’. We’ve got to accept that economic growth won’t fall on us like manna from heaven anymore and work out how to build an actual brighter future.
Labour’s David Cunliffe put out a press release judging National’s proposed asset sales programme by the 5 tests that Key laid down in an effort to reassure us that sales would only go ahead if they made sense and were good for the country. Cunliffe’s analysis shows asset sales clearly fail the Nats’ own tests. The only reason to go ahead is blind ideology.
When people say ‘there’s no difference between the two big parties’ or ‘where are the policies’, it’s shorthand for ‘I haven’t been paying attention’. We had a great example of the contrast yesterday. National would subsidise expansion of dairy by selling our assets; Labour would get modern equipment to poor schoolkids by cutting sports subsidies to rich schools.
National would get the books back into the black with a $1.5b surplus 2014/15. It’s on their ads, it’s in the PREFU. So, it’s gotta be true, eh? Well, we already know they’ve cooked the books by claiming both that they would have the revenue from asset sales and the dividends from those sold assets. Now, their ETS changes have opened a second great big hole in their budget.
The number of people attending adult community education has fallen by 80% since National’s cuts in 2009. National’s cuts have saved only $24m (vs the $1.1b cost of the ‘fiscally neutral’ tax cuts) but have denied over a quarter of a million people the opportunity to broaden their horizons and acquire new skills. National is leaving a poorer society behind it.
