During Question Time yesterday, Metiria Turei exposed National’s plan to subsidise mineral exploration by foreign companies in the most important parts of our national parks.
John Key refused to confirm Turei’s information but couldn’t deny it. Clearly, the Nats had been planning to slip it through in the Budget unnoticed.
Bill English can’t defend his economic record, 2.2% fall in GDP, still rising unemployment, falling wages, GDP per capita still falling and not expected to return to pre-recession levels until 2012, so he’s telling more lies about Labour’s record instead. Meanwhile, the Do Nothing Prime Minister is still daydreaming about his cycleway, which he now says will create “a lot more” than 4,000 jobs.
Felix can hardly contain himself at the prospect of National’s tax changes: Woohoo!! Told you my mate Mr Key would be able to deliver a “north of $50 a week†tax cut. And you all said he wouldn’t. So who’s looking stupid now eh? I mean sure, you need to bring in $180,000 a year to get it but just get off your arse and be a bit more ambitious whydontcha?
My mouth dropped yesterday when I read in the Dompost an editorial lamenting the “scientifically ignorant public, suspicious of the work many scientists do”. What shocked me was the chutzpah of the lament coming from a newspaper that fuels scientific illiteracy. Today, the Dompost has yet another anti-science, illiterate climate change denier column. Meanwhile, for all its talk, Key’s Government is cutting science jobs.
I didn’t actually realise that the fact that Andrew Little is considering standing for Labour in New Plymouth in 2011 was news to anyone. I would think that New Plymouth is a natural seat for him.
Farrar’s analysis makes the old mistake of looking at the party votes instead of the candidate votes.
The Herald has a little shock piece on child offending: “5-year-old sex offender on crime list“. Of course, what the offence was isn’t […]
The numbers of National’s tax money go round leaked to the SST. I have worked out who wins and who loses. Key claimed that no-one will be worse off and the bulk will be much better off but 10% are worse off and 80% get next to nothing (without even counting the rent hikes). The elite get $100 in net tax cuts for every $1 the typical Kiwi gets.
There’s a nickname for John Key that’s picking up currency from both Left and Right around the blogosphere: ‘smile and wave’. The one thing Key can be depended on is to turn up grinning in some cheesy photo op. All his promises fall by the wayside. Meanwhile, 276,000 Kiwis are jobless, the wage gap with Australia keeps widening, and so does Key’s credibility gap.
Who would have thought that a Facebook group advocating to keep Radio NZ funded and commercial-free would overtake Prime Minister John Key’s fan […]
Cuts to prisoner rehabilitation, night classes, and the Super Gold Card aren’t about saving money. The government is only too happy to sign blank cheques for stupid projects like Transmission Gully and the Holiday Highway on the vaguest cost estimates. No, these successful policies are having the financial life bled out of them because they contradict National’s ideology.
When a guy who was imprisoned and tortured by Idi Amin calls the conditions in which prisoners are kept in New Zealand “a source of shame and disgrace” you know we have problems. Unfortunately, it has become acceptable in this modern political environment to view prisoners as less than human
Sometimes you get a really pleasant surprise and I got one today from Garth George. Despite being a pretty old school conservative he gives a stunning rebuke of the knee-jerk authoritarianism/fascism/randianism that so often characterises the thinking of the Right these days and was recently highlighted by David Garrett’s call for sterilisation of the poor.
While other countries have used their strong public sectors to steady the private sector and keep unemployment down during the economic downturn, our government is compounding unemployment by cutting the public sector, throwing people out of jobs and feeding worker insecurity.
The more I think about the ‘Wellywood’ sign the angrier I get. Who does Wellington Airport think they are imposing this monstrosity on the people of Wellington without any consultation? It’s just another example of the corporate mentality in this country – a subtle blend of arrogance and idiocy.
“Tolley finds ally in school mum” screams the headline of Audrey Young’s piece today.
When National runs a bus tour the Herald is desperate in its attempts to drum up support, when it’s Labour all they want to talk about is how much the bus is costing the taxpayer.
So Steven Joyce’s big bright idea for tertiary education (which he recently inherited from the hopeless Anne Tolley) is to punish institutions with low pass rates by cutting their funding. It’s basically the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.It reflects the typical short-term thinking of the capitalist class and its political party.
Michael is dead right. The most important thing about the Hollow Men is not how Nicky Hager got the information but what the information is. It reveals National’s modern politics in all its unprincipled ugliness. Nonetheless, which Nats gave Hager the information is a subject of legitimate interest. I have some theories.
Remember how a couple of months back National set up NationalMPs? It was meant to be their answer to Red Alert, Labour’s frequently raucous, unstagemanaged blog where Labour’s MPs write what they want. But the Nats’ attempt is deadly dull. Either the leadership is gagging them or the Nat MPs are dreadful bores.
There are 276,000 jobless Kiwis. The seasonally-adjusted trend on dole numbers is still on the rise. Many other people fall through the gaps and are unable to get public assistance in their time of need.
What better time for the Minister for Social Development to bugger off for five weeks?
In NZ, the average FTE wage rose 2.86% after inflation – $891 to $934 – over the past year. In Aussie, it was 3.6% above inflation – $1159 to $1226. When will John Key admit that he sold us a lie? When will the media call on him to resign if no progress is made on the one substantial promise of a ‘brighter future’ at he made?
This month there are a series of showings of The End of the Line around New Zealand. This acclaimed documentary looks at how overfishing is destroying fish populations and ultimately endangering the industries and cultures that depend on them. This is a problem we can solve relatively simply.
Can someone at MSD please explain to Paula Bennett a season is? Our lazy minister is once again claiming victory over rising unemployment because of the seasonal drop in unemployment numbers. Worryingly, the decline between January and February was less than the average in recent years.
During the neoliberal revolution, the 4th Labour Government and the Nats decided to break up the big ministries into lots of little ministries […]
The poor don’t need tax cuts for the top 12% to to inspire them to want to get out of poverty. Poverty is inspiration enough. But thepoor cannot all become rich. To function capitalism needs poverty. There’s got to be lots of people doing the shitty, dangerous, hard jobs for cheap. And the wealth will always flow to the elite few who own capital or defend their interests.
Fran O’Sullivan is a pro-business liberal or libertarian, David Garrett is a knuckle brain conservative. But actually, they’re not so far apart. It seems both believe in freedom for the rich and control over the poor. Incredibly O’Sullivan goes into bat for Garrett over his sterilisation comments.
The campaign to save Radio New Zealand from funding cuts and commercialisation is going well. Well attended rallies have been held in Wellington, […]
It’s pretty rare that I agree with John Key but he got it right when he voiced concern that journalists are attacking MPs for legitimately using their budgets to do their jobs. Do we really want to force parties to rely on private funding for communicating their positions? That makes politics a rich man’s game. There are plenty of actual rip-offs and rorts for the media to root out.
An ugly side of the Right, one that a lot of people thought was long defeated, has reemerged in recent weeks. Yesterday we had David Garrett’s ‘sterilise the poor because they might become criminals or breed criminals’ and last week we had arguably more disturbing comments from Judith Collins about how she wanted to restore “fear” of the Police.
How’s this for insanity: the finals in the World Cup will be broadcast live on four free to air channels as well as Sky. That’s pretty much the definition of overkill and it has got to have cost a bomb, thanks to the Government’s disastrous handling of the issue.
The recession has forced tens of thousands of people out of work. There are now 276,000 jobless Kiwis. The lucky ones (only a […]
The Nats put the SAS in Afghanistan out of a Boy’s Own worldview that glamorises war and violence by authority. But war isn’t a game and we shouldn’t be fighting unless it’s for a good cause. Our solders shouldn’t die or kill to prop up Hamid Karzai’s corrupt regime.
Some contractors and small business owners record private costs as business expenses and claim back the GST. The cheats who claim enough GST back get payments from IRD. Hiking GST puts more of our money in the pockets of these tax cheats.
Labour’s ‘Axe the Tax’ campaign has hit the road. Phil Goff is travelling around New Zealand explaining why Labour opposes National’s plan to hike GST on everyone to pay for tax cuts that will primarily go to the well-off. National are worried. They’re not promoting their package anymore, they’re lashing out at Goff.
276,000 jobless, of which 168,000 officially unemployed. 115,000 more underemployed.
Big numbers, but remember that the unemployed aren’t a static group being added to every day as the Key Government sits on its hands. In fact there’s a continual churn of people into unemployment and into work much larger than the net increase.
