When Justice Bill Wilson was accused of serious misconduct, Attorney-General Chris Finlayson didn’t want to investigate telling fellow National MP Colin King “Justice Wilson is a mate of mine and there’s no way I am pursuing this any further”. Now, Wilson’s got a $885,000 golden handshake from the government to make the issue go away.
Things are quickly turning to custard for National. The economy is going south fast and Key’s Teflon-coating is so damaged the mainstream media is openly saying we deserve better than a ‘smile and wave’ PM. The Nats’ strategy – try to convince us nothing is wrong – is really bad. It makes them look either duplicitous or out of touch.
The trend is quite clear now. The Right’s support peaked and the Left’s support reached is nadir last year. The gap has been gradually closing ever since. From a 24.5% gap between National and ACT a year ago, the gap in the latest Roy Morgan has fallen to 5.5%. About quarter of a million Kiwis have switched their support to the Left in a single year.
I’m generally a fan of Gareth Morgan, but boy his facts are wrong in yesterday’s Herald, leading him to really bad conclusions. Basically, Morgan argues that we have to let foreigners buy our assets because we use that money to buy more imports than we export, which we won’t be able to do if we block asset sales. Why is that a bad thing?
In contrast to National’s policy vacuum on the economy, Labour has been focusing its policy work on a major change in direction. It’s obvious that the hands-off approach introduced in the 1980s has failed, leading to mal-investment in housing with an economy stripped of its manufacturing capability and geared for import-dependent consumerism.
This post isn’t about National cutting education at every level, which will damage our country for decades to come. Nor is it about how they’re cutting cost-efficient preventative medicine to fund ‘sexy’ elective surgery. It’s not even about how they’re pouring billions into holiday highways in the era of peak oil. This is about the Cullen Fund.
John Key says that if we don’t let overseas buyers snap up our farmland then land prices will decrease and some over-leveraged farmers will go underwater. And that’s supposedly a bad thing. Key wants us to believe that foreigners putting our farmland out of the reach of Kiwis and making us borrow more from the Aussie banks is a good thing.
The Nats are trying to take credit for the fact that annual inflation in the year to September was the lowest since 2004. What exactly did they do? Dig into the numbers and the cause of the lower inflation is a weak global economy, not National. Already, inflation is climbing, 1.1% this quarter, and will break 5% next year thanks to the GST hike.
While the economy burns, Key is fiddling with spiders. He is the good times PM. He’s all about getting himself in front of a camera and having a grin, as if he’s on a 3 year project in collecting pictures for his photo album, rather than Prime Minister. Key’s inability to handle Paul Henry like a real leader put a deep scratch in his Teflon. The brand is fading.
Yesterday, former National media trainer Paul Holmes and former National Party President Michelle Boag attempted an extraordinary hatchet job on Phil Goff on Q+A. No analysis of the real policy divide that Goff and Labour with National carved out at the national conference, just attack – why? The economy, policy, Key’s fading brand, and the polls.
It’s great to hear Phil Goff announce that a Labour government won’t let overseas interests to own more than 25% of monopolistic companies, like ports and airports, and farmland. In the new world economy we’re moving into, a global scramble for vital natural resources like farmland, we need to keep the foundations of our economy in Kiwi hands.
In his last column Garth George laments how foods he regularly enjoyed in his childhood (1870s?) are now priced beyond the reach of most New Zealanders. It’s easy to dismiss the complaints of an old man about prices these days but there’s a deeper story: with population growth and resource depletion, there increasingly isn’t enough to go around.
John Armstrong is at his insightful best today. He’s hit on the emerging change in the political discourse – the economy is going to crap and that’s what really matters, not the meltdowns of minor MPs and racist TV monkeys. And this do nothing government doesn’t care and has no solutions. This is Labour’s chance to offer a real alternative:
Last year, Icelandic comedian Jon Gnarr set up the Best Party to parody the parties that brought Iceland to ruin. The party contested the Reykjavik local elections with Gnarr promising a drug-free Parliament by 2020, a polar bear for Reykjavik zoo, a Disneyland, an end to debt, and to break all his promises. They won and Gnarr is now mayor.
Russel Norman asked Bill English about the economic impacts of coming oil shocks and how transport infrastructure planning takes them into account. I’m not sure which was more surprising: English’s matter-of-fact acknowledgment that peak oil is coming, or his attitude that the government doesn’t need to act because the market will sort things out.
Parliament has published a research paper called The Next Oil Shock. It’s a pretty sober look at the difficulties the world is facing in producing enough oil to meet demand. The conclusions are inescapable: we can’t produce enough oil and a cycle of oil-driven recessions is coming. Are our leaders finally waking up to the impeding crisis of peak oil?
Congratulations to Celia Wade-Brown, Wellington’s new Green mayor. Apart from the understandable exception of Christchurch, we’ve seen a Leftwing landslide across the main centres and in many of the provincial councils too. The people have voted for community, democracy, and sustainability, and against corporate cronyism. See ya Kerry.
It was a year ago that Paula Bennett first declared victory over rising unemployment. Since then, John Key has been working his economic strategy hard: high-fiving every schoolgirl he can find, playing with spiders, announcing and re-annoucing literally tens of kilometres of cycleway, smiling and waving till it hurts. But dole numbers are rising.
The CTU has just released its Alternative Economic Strategy. Well, they call it ‘alternative’ but it’s not like the Nats have one beyond Key smiling and waving. Anyway, the CTU’s Economic Strategy is an extremely impressive document. It goes through the current problems and suggests 100 reforms for a more successful, fair economy and country.
The Labour Party council has decided to expel Chris Carter from the party. While party members should be free to criticise the leadership, Carter went too far. He has repeatedly embarrassed and damaged the party. In doing so, he disrespected every member of the Labour Party – that’s the real crime.
Michael Lhaws has been a insecure little attention-seeker his whole life and, a lot like Paul Henry, he gets the attention he craves by voicing his prejudices. So, the revelation of his insults against the Governor-General are hardly surprising. They’re more of the brand of gratuitous racism we’ve come to expect from the pathetic little creep.
National Party pollster David Farrar must have seen bad numbers on the Mana by-election, he’s already making excuses. Apparently, Hekia Parata is a top candidate but it’s the voters’ fault – they’ll be confused by having two elections close together. It’s Farrar’s comment about Key, though, that is most revealing.
The just released Income Survey is more evidence of the Key Government’s failure to deliver for working Kiwis. After inflation, this is the third successive year in which the median income of New Zealanders has fallen. It’s now nearly 5% lower than when National came to power. This year alone, the median income fell 3.5%.
Bernard Hickey continues his politico-economic rebirth. Yesterday, he wrote on how New Zealand can protect itself from dangerous international capital flows that undermine our economy and our ability to choose our own path. We shouldn’t leave the guidance of our economy to the invisible hand of blind, fallible, and valueless markets.
We’ve had a lot of coverage of the issue of TVNZ’s bigoted host but I want to chip in with a few points: Paul Henry’s ‘apology’ is in fact a calculated dog whistle to bigots, the blame for Henry goes to a deeper rot in TVNZ, and we have seen prove positive of John Key’s complete inability to lead and stand up for what’s right.
The NZIER survey of business opinion shows that the economy shrank in the September Quarter. The December Quarter was already forecast to be negative and the Christchurch quake will make it worse. So, we’re almost certainly back into recession. That’s going to blow out the government’s debt. The underlying cause is peak oil.
Paul Henry has a racist rant to the Prime Minister and what does John Key do? He laughs along and tries to make a joke. A PM that is afraid to be a leader. A Leader of the Opposition who is afraid of ticking off racists. A Green Party that is afraid of making a claim for the Left vote when Labour fails. Come back, Helen, all is forgiven.
When National announced it would create an ‘Environmental Protection Agency’ and a short-cut resource consent process for projects of ‘national significance’, the implications were clear. The new agency and process would be used to override local opposition. Sure enough, that’s what’s happening with Waterview.
So, Chris Carter is threatening a ‘tell-all’ book on the Fifth Labour Government published at the next election. But he says he won’t publish it if he gets to stay in Labour. It’s blackmail, a further act of treachery for which he deserves to be evicted from the party. Carter’s rot is the corruption of all MPs who forget who they were elected to serve.
Early childhood education is great stuff. Those first few years shape a child’s future more than any other. Getting into learning and into socialising early on leads to huge rewards later in life. Parents can go back to work if they want or need too. For every dollar spent on ECE, society gets 13 back in benefits.
The crime stats are not good news. Homicides are up, violent offences are up, sex offences are up, harassment and related offences are up, drug offences are up, public order offences are up. Oddly, though, the total number of offences is down (by 0.1%). The decrease is all down to a 25.6% decrease in recorded fraud offences. What’s up with that?
For a long, time National and the Right have tried to convince us that all we need is tax cuts. You can understand why: their other policies are deeply unpopular, cutting taxes is a roundabout way of cutting public services, which they hate, and tax cuts deliver the most to their wealthy base. So will we see any actual benefits from the great tax swindle?
Despite Bill English’s firm statement that “unemployment has peaked”, jobs are still being lost in large numbers. 1500 council workers in Auckland. 150 mushroom workers in Morrinsville. 500 workers whose quake hit employers are closing down in Christchurch. From John Key’s Hawaiian beach chair these worries must seem very far away.
Bernard Hickey, one of the country’s leading economic commentators, was a hardline neo-liberal – ie. the market is god. Now, he’s changed his mind. He’s come to the realisation that there’s no invisible god’s hand directing capitalist markets. Instead they are directed by short-termist elites. We need to take back control.
While the cat’s away the mice will play. And while the clown’s sunning himself in Hawaii the ideologues in his Cabinet will launch vitriolic attacks on public service workers. As teachers are forced to endure another day of the country’s most powerful figures attack them, lets consider the consequences of undermining vital public services.
