In December, Dunedin City Council released its Peak Oil Vulnerability Analysis. We’re going to weather the peak oil age largely reliant on the built environment we already have in place – we can’t tear it all down and start again in time – but, the report shows there’s a lot we can do with the infrastructure we have to make it less oil-dependent.
Following Key’s ‘I’ll have a hissy fit and quit if you don’t re-elect me’ interview yesterday, the Herald has an interview with Phil Goff. The contrast is stark between smile and wave’s self-centred answers and Goff’s focus on delivering real results for NZ.
I’ve been traveling around for Christmas/New Year’s. It hadn’t hit me until I drove about 1000kms around NZ just how much more expensive petrol has become. The extra cost is a shock when you fill up and it hurts the economy. I got wondering what the political impact is. The numbers suggest it matters a lot.
The economy shrank by 0.2% in the September Quarter. None of the forecasters had dared to predict it would be this bad, except yours truly : ) because I looked at the facts, rather than being taken in by Key’s rosy spin. The money trader’s economic record is looking pretty disgraceful now, isn’t it? Hope smile and wave is enjoying the Hawaii sun.
Yesterday, we hit 3 million pageviews for 2010. Today, we’ll have our millionth visit. 45% growth on 2009 even with the few days we were offline and a couple when stats data wasn’t captured. It’s not just a small cadre of hardcore fans (although, do we love you guys and girls) – over 212,000 unique visitors have visited The Standard this year.
It’s First Past the Post thinking to look at the polling gap between National and Labour and conclude National will romp home. MMP is here and set to stay – it means the coalition with the support of a majority of MPs governs, not necessarily the largest party. The final Roy Morgan of the year lets us look at the trends in support for Left and Right.
It’s surreal to see people who cried that not going into Iraq has cost us a trade deal with the US, now saying that the Reconstruction Team Labour sent was to get access for our milk exports. The claim’s based on a US Embassy cable but that doesn’t make it gospel. In reality, the Right wanted us to fight in Iraq to get an FTA with the US.
Liam Dann had a very good piece in the Herald the other day about rising commodity prices. Despite insipid growth, prices of food and oil, the fuels of our civilisation are through the roof. The underlying meaning of those high prices is we’re having to devote more of our resources to feeding and fueling ourselves, leaving less for anything else.
What to do if you’re a government with an ideological fixation on selling assets, which is hugely unpopular? The public will catch on if you put SOEs as full entities up for auction. So, you don’t sell off the companies. Instead, you sell off the things they own or, through bond issues, their profit streams. We’ve been warning this would happen. Now, it is.
Brownlee ignored warnings that his reforms would increase power prices, not lower them as intended. Wholesale power prices have spiked from $50 to $300 per MWH. Exporters have cut production. Residential users are next. With power up and petrol breaking $2 a litre, energy is a handbrake on this supposed economic recovery.
Three government investment decisions in the last couple of weeks have shown the deficiencies in the neoliberal way of doing things. SOE Solid Energy’s lignite-to-liquids obsession, Kiwirail buying trains in China rather than making them itself and Steven Joyce decision to re-create Telecom’s monopoly by giving it 70-84% of the broadband contracts.
It’s a tough Christmas for far too many Kiwis. Poverty is up, wages are down. 350,000 Kiwis are jobless or underemployed. The job losses are still coming. The rich got tax cuts, 70% got nothing. Drought is spreading. Thousands of Cantabrians face an uncertain future. Meanwhile, the Nats cynically exploit disaster to advance their agenda.
A very good close of year speech from Phil Goff in the House yesterday. I think this is the kind of thing we want to see more of next year. Phil’s job is to crystalise the vague sense of dissatisfaction that most people feel with the Key Government with himself as the spokesperson for those Key has betrayed and let down.
Corrupt former National minister Pansy Wong has finally done the right thing and resigned from Parliament. Key didn’t want her to go. This […]
Two years ago we had one of the best government balance sheets in the world. Key said we didn’t have a debt problem. Two years of him as PM, and we sure have one now. When we learn exactly how dire things are later today, remember that National brought this on us by borrowing $3 billion a year for tax cuts that no-one noticed.
I was in Christchurch this weekend for the second time since the quake. It felt like things are gradually getting worse. Compared to the pre-Christmas bustle in other cities, Christchurch CBD was a ghost-town. The public service’s emergency preparedness got us through the initial disaster – has enough been done since? What are your impressions?
Deborah Coddington, trying to justify leaving solo mums and their kids with no state support, says: “I’m nearly 60 and my generation were at it like rabbits when we were teenagers but there weren’t masses of teenage pregnancies because there was no DPB. You couldn’t raise a child on your own, therefore few women got pregnant.” A quick fact check.
The sum Phil Heatley has so far spent trying to get three women and their families evicted from their state houses, an effort to look tough, is the equivalent to the cost of building two new state houses. Over half a million spent on an ultimately pointless exercise – one that’s far from finished.
Yesterday, the OECD released its annual comparison of educational achievement in different countries. This study compares half a million kids’ aptitude in reading, maths, and science. Kiwi kids come out pretty damn well: 7th in reading, 13th in maths, 8th in science. And, guess what, we beat countries with National Standards hands down.
I’m in favour of lifting the retirement age. Life expectancy continues to rise and is now 80.4 years. A man aged 65 can expect to live on average another 18 years, a woman 20. That’s a hell of a long time to be getting the pension and an enormous cost. Rising the age to 67 would free up $1.5 billion a year to go into education and preventative health.
One of the features of the neoliberal revolution has been the outsourcing of public service delivery, usually to not-for-profits, sometimes to profit-making entities like private hospitals. Whanau Ora is an extension of this. Two recent stories have exemplified the risks of this model – corruption and cuts by stealth.
The other week we talked about what a new economic order should look like, following the neoliberal experiment’s resoundingly failure. Sustainability and fairness need to be at the heart of the system. Government acts on the economy through law, taxation and income redistribution, and as market player. Let’s start with tax and redistribution.
In a surprise to no-one, John Key has appointed 3 time election loser Hekia Parata to replace the latest of his corrupt ministers to walk the plank – Pansy Wong. I’m hoping Parata will be less of a disgrace than Wong. It wouldn’t be hard, she would just have to actually try to answer questions in the House and actually do something about the wage gaps.
The modern urge to label leaders who perform adequately during an emergency as ‘heroes’ astounds me. Particularly in the case of Pike River. Peter Whitall is a boss who just had 29 workers die on his work-site. While reserving judgment on his blame for that, I’m not going to call him a hero for doing a decent job for the cameras.
Once again the play is performed. A minister is caught rorting, admits wrong-doing, an investigation is launched, the investigation doesn’t ask crucial questions, it finds no fault just confusion on the part of the poor old minister, the rules are changed. English, Worth, Heatley, Wong… all the same. These farces need a new script.
When Chris Finlayson’s on the backfoot he starts to sound bitchy. Out comes the name-calling and the put-downs – as if his opponents are going to be scared off. If Finlayson is going to throw a tizzy at anyone it should be National for first whipping up the rednecks over the ‘beaches’ and then raising Maori expectations.
Lawmaking is serious business. It is how we as a community, through our elected representatives, set the bounds and frameworks for our behaviour, allowing our community to function. Laws shouldn’t be made, things shouldn’t be banned, for the hell of it. So why is Parliament passing a law that everyone, including the PM, thinks is pointless?
It was pretty cool that the next Finance Minister wrote a post about my post yesterday. Even if was to say I was dickishly misinterpreting him 😀 I’ve got a couple of points in reply but the biggest is why is Labour talking about (restrictive) privatisation and PPPs policies when there are much more important economic issues at hand?
Remember how Peter Jackson and Warner Bros pulled the old Hollywood shakedown on us? By making a hollow threat to film elsewhere they got an extra $30 million and a law passed just for them. This was supposedly necessary to save a vital economy gain for the country but the Government knew that was bollocks all along.
The other week, Lynn and I made fun of John Key’s dream that New Zealand would become the Ireland of the South Seas. Does he still believe we should emulate the Irish? The answer is yes. Key wants to abandon proper process and speed up work on an international financial centre for New Zealand, just like the one that helped get Ireland where it is today.
When they’re not polluting our rivers or fighting animal welfare laws, our farmers, the ‘guardians of the land’, are opposing having to pay for their greenhouse emissions. Now, with the Earth having just clocked up its warmest 12 months since records began, farmers are scratching their heads at the early start to the summer drought.
By backing a (soft) privatisation policy, David Cunliffe is throwing away a vital point of difference with National and allowing National to move rightwards. Worse, Labour appears to be determined to give up political advantage for dumb policy: public-private partnerships and tolling have a terrible track record.
There used to be a webcam in the Beehive Theatrette run by R2 that broadcast the PM’s Post-Cabinet press conference. Anyone who could go to the site and watch – live and uncut. The very model of digital democracy. Now, that service is gone. R2 was being asked to pay too much and Parliament blocked maintenance. So much for transparency.
It’s dismaying to see a few rightwing commentators using the Pike River disaster to attack restrictions on mining in national parks. The claims are baseless and crassly opportunistic. One expects the like of Matthew Hooton, Whaleoil, and Paul Holmes to try to score political points off tragedy but I thought better of Fran O’Sullivan.
Agriculture Minister David Carter has been exposed abusing his ministerial powers to protect the trade interests of his private investments. Earlier this year, Carter banned Jewish religious slaughtering practices because of perceived risks to the meat trade with Muslim nations after being briefed by companies he owns that take part in the trade.
It’s a special breed of people who can deny workers a cost of living pay increase while pocketing a hundred thousand dollar a week pay cheque. It’s a special breed who can take people’s livelihoods or risk their health and safety to add a few cents to the share price. Research names that breed: psychopaths. Capitalism is built by and for them.
