It’s worth having a look at Bill English’s performance on Q+A the other day. What’s telling, to my mind, is that English can’t present a real vision or even any spin-free information. Why not? Because his tax swindle is about taking from us and giving to the elite, and he can’t just come and say that.
The latest GDP figures are awful. the Reserve Bank had predicted 0.9% growth in the June Quarter. It came in at 0.2% – far worse than anyone expected and slower than population growth. The Key Government’s reaction? Deny there’s a problem and spin, spin, spin.
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Jan Wright has released her Mining the Conservation Estate report. Among other important points,it asks what we asked during the Schedule 4 fight: Why do miners get to mine on conservation estate without paying a lease? No private land owner would give away their land like that.
Parliament unanimously made Gerry Brownlee dictator. Apparently, this was necessary to save Christchurch. But are Dictator Gerry and Bob ‘the Rebuilder’ (wonder how long it took Kevin Taylor to come up with that one) actually delivering for the people who need it the most? Not if the anger in poor Christchurch suburbs is anything to go by.
A recent article in Canada’ MacLean’s magazine on the decline of public services in the US bears sobering links to what is happening in New Zealand. For three decades the neo-liberals have worked to starve public services to death with tax cuts for the rich. Now, the US is facing the consequences. New Zealand is on the same path just a little behind.
Twice in a fortnight, we have had the unedifying spectacle of media running a false story based on a video on Whaleoil. It is obviously beyond Slater to get the material for these vids. Now, my comrades in the media, here’s a real story for you: how National uses proxies to run false, muckraking media stories while appearing to keep its hands clean.
A UMR poll just out asked 750 Kiwis if workers should have the right to appeal if they think they are unfairly dismissed within the first 90 days of employment. 80% said yes. That’s a damning rejection of National’s Fire at Will law, which the government wants to extend to every new worker. Will Key and Co listen? Fat chance.
John Key says he supports the teachers and junior doctors’ claims for a pay rise ‘but we simply don’t have the money’. Yet Key who is borrowing half a billion dollars this year for tax cuts for the wealthiest 9%. It isn’t a question of what the government can afford. It’s who matters to National – the rich do, teachers and doctors don’t.
The ‘shock doctrine’ is how (capitalist) elites use moments of crisis to make power grabs while the normal checks are offline and/or the political opposition and media are swept up in a ‘unity’ mantra that prevents them acting to protect democracy. Last week, National used it to make us a dictatorship.
The Labour and Green parties’ activists are in uproar over their parliamentary wings’ decision to vote for the Gerry Brownlee Enabling Act. A lot of people are saying they won’t campaign for these parties and talking of voting for a minor party or independents. Is it time to damn them and leave them? No. We’re going to win our parties back.
The Gerry Brownlee Enabling Act is a Dictator’s Charter, and all we can do is hope Brownlee doesn’t abuse it. Even the Herald is against the unwarranted and excessive powers that have been conferred on one man with no meaningful checks or balances. This isn’t about Left or Right but too many on the Right seem happy with unfettered State power.
The Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act gives the Government the power to pass Orders in Council overriding nearly every law. That makes ministers, not Parliament, the sovereign power in this country. Scary stuff, which I haven’t seen justified by the facts of the quake recovery.
Stuff is reporting that Hone Harawira will not vote for the Nats’ foreshore and seabed legislation. And John Key is clearly upset. Sounds like someone needs the whambulance. Key’s just lost the ability to claim that he has genuinely circled the square, giving Pakeha and Maori both what they want. All he has really done is bought off the Maori Party leadership.
Treasury has released its preliminary report on the economic impact of the Christchurch earthquake. GDP will be down up to 0.8% this quarter but after rebuilding net GDP for the next two years ends up 0.8% higher than it would have. Great! Let’s knock down Hamilton too and get a GDP boost! Actually, we’re just seeing the limits of GDP as a measure of wealth.
To have power and independence, any country needs a solid economic base. That’s even more true of superpowers/empires. To secure their economic sovereignty they need the raw materials and markets of less powerful countries. They reinforce their economic sovereignty by taking others’. China does it by buying up whole supply chains.
In today’s, Sunday-Star Times, Rob Stock picks up on a topic I’ve been writing about: “THE EARTHQUAKE has exposed a policy that must be changed immediately – the way the Earthquake Commission is funded.Significant numbers of people will get nothing from the commission because it is funded by a levy on house insurance.”
The Government has announced it intends to push through emergency legislation to expedite the rebuilding of Christchurch. The urge to put things back the way they were is only natural in the wake of a huge physical and psychic shock but shouldn’t we have a think about how we want Christchurch rebuilt before we let anyone go ahead willy-nilly?
The Napier Earthquake led to the earthquake-resistant building standards that have proven so valuable in Christchurch. The EQC was founded after the Wairarapa Earthquake. World War 2 and the threat of air raids led to the creation of Civil Defence. What lessons can we learn from the Christchurch Earthquake? Better standards building on around liquefaction-prone ground seems like a priority.
It’s been interesting to watch the Nats’ smear machine switch focus from Len Brown to Andrew Williams in recent days. I guess that’s what you get for letting Cameron Slater become your de facto chief strategist. Maybe the Nats have worked out that they’re not going to beat Brown. This article in the Herald certainly won’t help Banks one iota.
86 workers have been fired from Kaiapoi New World, which will be closed for a year due to quake damage. This is exactly why the government should implement the kind of scheme I outlined where the government steps in to supply the full wages of workers who can’t work due to the quake, funded by delaying the tax cuts for the rich.
Fran O’Sullivan joins us in asking why the Government was so quick to completely bailout the South Canterbury Finance investors yet is so miserly with quake victims. The Right cries ‘moral hazard’ when it comes to helping out quake victims; we didn’t hear that over SCF. Fortunately, we can help those in need and avoid creating moral hazards.
The unions, business, and Phil Goff have all gritted their teeth and called the Nats’ $15 million wage subsidy scheme for small quaked-affected businesses ‘a start’. The problem is, it’s likely to be the end. This scheme will leave workers and employers severely out of pocket, killing businesses and jobs.
There’s been some frankly bizarre talk about the earthquake being an economic boon for the country. I guess the Right is just desperate for anything to improve the economy under National. So, I thought it would be worthwhile going through the economic ramifications of the earthquake from the immediate effects to long term.
Christchurch needs a more ambitious rescue package than has been announced. Relying on EQC and insurance payouts is not enough. I would cancel the top bracket tax cuts due to come into force in a month saving half a billion dollars for a real economic revival plan The first step would be to grant emergency bridging funding to businesses closed by the quake so that they can continue to pay their workers
It’s been nearly two years now of Paula Bennett declaring that the unemployment crisis is over. Yesterday, she put out a press release titled ‘More than 6,000 beneficiaries find jobs in August‘. Wow, 6,000 in a month, pretty good. But Bennett must have been hoping we wouldn’t read beyond the title. The fact is that 900 more people went on the dole than came off it. The total number of beneficiaries just keeps climbing.
Unnoticed amongst all the earthquake coverage was a small article in the Weekend Dompost on the foreshore and seabed deal. Apparently, ‘public domain’ will no longer appear in the new legislation. Instead, we’ll have a new name, possibly ‘takutaimoana’, Te Reo for ‘seabed’. That sound you can hear Winston Peters is rubbing his hands with glee.
It’s the stomach-churning way that some on the Right have decided to try to use the earthquake for political advantage by deifying Bob Parker. Even Parker himself looked sick when Paul Henry compared him to Rudi Giuliani. Update: Farrar, Whaleoil, Henry, and Matthew Hooton are trying to spread a lie that Anderton said only an earthquake could stop him winning the election. Danyl has the truth.
After every emergency come the media articles that accuse the civil defence system of failing. This time the well-known emergency relief experts at the Herald were criticising within a day. Well, the Herald can go f*ck itself. I take my hat off to all the public servants who did their jobs with skill and dedication. The public services responded swiftly to get the situation under control and get people the help and information they needed.
John Key says Maurice Williamson was just joking when he called us racists for not wanting to sell more of our country into foreign ownership.
Does he really expect us to believe that? Why compound an insult with a lie?
And since when would it be OK for Williamson to jokingly call us racists?
Where are the Greens and Labour on the South Canterbury Finance issue? Just looking at the sheer politics of the situation, this is something they should be all over. There is enormous public anger at the way National was willing to magic up $1.7 billion of taxpayer cash for its rich mates while services are being cut. This should be the tipping point, when the Left seizes the public mood for its economic vision but where’s the leadership?
20,000 more Kiwis’ jobs are at risk as commercial building construction grinds to a halt. The Greens have a plan to divert money from low-quality spending on motorways to high benefit to cost spending on housing that will save those jobs and give Kiwi families a better standard of living. That’s the kind of visionary economic leadership we need. We’re not going to get it from National.
A few people have made a hell of a lot of money off the South Canterbury Finance collapse and bail-out. Are these the same people behind the mystery company that was created just three weeks ago and wants to buy SCF for $1.57 billion? Whether it’s been an organised plan or just lone sharks attracted by blood in the water, the result is the same: the rich win, we lose.
Key says that teachers are “disconnected from the real world” for wanting a pay rise that will barely beat inflation. This from the same guy who promised higher wages. The same guy chucked half a billion dollars this year alone on the taxpayer credit card for tax cuts for the rich. The only people disconnected from the real world are those who think skimping on education and health will take this country forward.
Serious questions are being asked why South Canterbury Finance was allowed to join the extended retail deposit guarantee scheme in April given that its financial problems were well-known and its credit rating was downgraded just weeks later. Bill English says it was a ‘line call’, one that’s just cost us at least $600 million. It’s not the first ‘line call’ English has stuffed up.
The government is canning it’s already too-small and ill-directed Community Max programme. $40 million was a pathetic amount that created, at best, just 3,000 temporary jobs when quarter of a million Kiwis are jobless. And, due to lazy policy-making all the Key government probably ended up doing was subsidising jobs that would have been created anyway.
South Canterbury Finance is on the brink of collapse. The plan appears to be for the government to purchase the bad loans from the company at twice their book value, giving SCF the cash it needs to get back on its feet. That’s a dumb idea. The owners of SCF have taken huge profits in the good times, they can’t be allowed to pass their losses on to the rest of us now and continue as if nothing happened.
