In the damaged suburbs of Christchurch, people’s lives, their emotions, in many cases their finances, are all stuck in limbo. Residents need to know which areas are going to be written off. What they don’t need is Gerry Brownlee telling them they are “simplistic”…
The Nats’ blogging poodles are still trying to spread disinformation about credit card details (we have the proof). Are they just stupid, or do they know they’re spreading lies? Either way it amounts to the same thing, they are deliberately trying to upset innocent members of the public. The usual scummy tactics.
National’s first dirty tricks operation of the 2011 election campaign has ended in an embarrassing own goal. But they’ll be back with more of the same. Because the last thing National wants is an election campaign focused on the issues.
National’s raid on Labour donor data was a grubby, amoral little operation, with no point except to intimidate innocent individuals.
Unfortunately for the Nats it has blown up in their faces.
The nastiest quakes since February. A 5.5 closely followed by a 6.0. Damage, injuries, utility outages reported. How much more can Christchurch take?
At 9am today Slater is probably going to publish a list of some of the donors to the Labour Party. A big thank you to every person on that list! To anyone who is angry at being named, please don’t blame some hapless web admin working for Labour. Please blame the people who took this information and illegally made it public.
The Nats, a party which runs as a franchise of an Australian company (Crosby Textor), reckon that the presence of a mate from Australia at a regional Labour Party meeting shows that Labour is “subject to foreign influence”.
Amongst the many vacuous claims made in relation to the last budget, the claim that cuts to KiwiSaver would encourage savings always struck me as the dumbest. Now the facts are in, and guess what…
John Armstrong reckons Key has the “Midas touch”. Ahh, no. Or at least, not in the sense that John meant…
A little over a year ago the biggest single protest march in this country since 1938 put the final nail in the coffin of the Nats’ amateur hour plans to mine our most precious conservation land. Or so we thought…
There are far more similarities than differences in the Hughes / Goff and Worth / Key affairs, but that doesn’t stop the Right trying to rewrite history and blame Goff!
The Nats haven’t got a clue how to run a successful country, and most of the things they do try just make matters worse. We’re drifting…
Is it just me, or is Sue Bradford working harder, and getting more media coverage than all of the Greens put together? She’s not just campaigning for beneficiaries. Yesterday Bradford came out with a strongly worded attack on the Greens’ positioning for the November election.
John Key “thinks” that parents on the DPB are “breeding for a business”. Now his government is testing the waters for a eugenics program, to single out these undesirables and forcibly control their fertility.
All of a sudden National and ACT are sounding vaguely sensible on crime and prisons. There seems to be a golden opportunity to reach a cross party consensus, and get some evidence driven policy and practice in this area. Who is going to make the first move?
Following the news that “Celebrities who make false statements while endorsing finance companies could now face jail or fines up to $1 million”, we at The Standard have received the following important document, leaked by an internal National Party source…
Visionary climate change scientist James Hansen recently toured New Zealand, giving several public lectures. Here’s a quick summary, and a link to the podcast of the talk he gave at the University of Otago. As expected, it’s an excellent talk, with some fascinating suggestions about what we the people need to do. Interesting also to get Hansen’s take on Nick Smith…
How close should corporate interests be allowed to cuddle up to the government? When is a gift not a gift? If it isn’t influence what is it?
The Greens have raised important questions surrounding Westpac and the Nats.
Like the ACC, Pharmac is a Kiwi institution that delivers benefits to everyone at a lower cost than other countries. National has got ACC on the butcher’s block. We must make sure that Pharmac doesn’t follow.
Renaming, merging and splitting agencies is what a government does when it wants to look busy but has no ideas.
Hard to believe it has only taken two and a half years for National to get to this point.
Good old fashioned benefit bashing. Another electoral battle line has been drawn – arm yourself with the facts!
If there is one silver lining to the cloud of a National government, it is that the MMP referendum has come up on their watch. It rather cripples their attack lines.
Plenty of polls lately. Do we really need so many? Two released yesterday show some closing of the gap between National and Labour – but not nearly enough yet…
José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo are heroes. Like Chico Mendes before them, they have paid for their activism with their lives.
This story didn’t get any big headlines. This story slipped by almost completely under the radar. But it’s a very important story. Much more important for New Zealand’s development than the smoke and mirrors of the do-nothing budget.
Last week we had National’s budget and Labour’s conference. A chance for both parties to set out their ideas for the future. National’s do-nothing budget went down like a lead balloon, while Labour started setting out promising new policy. Looks like the 2011 election campaign will be a contest between ideas and schoolboy mockery.
The response to two recent posts here at The Standard have shown what a contentious topic the minimum wage is. So it’s timely that yesterday saw the release of the CTU’s summary of research on Minimum Wage and Jobs.
Prominent scientist Sir Paul Callaghan thinks Kiwis are choosing to be poor. I reckon he’s right too, but we probably disagree about the reasons.
The latest Roy Morgan poll is not good reading for the political left. But it’s not quite time to despair yet!
John Key reckons the unemployed need “a kick in the pants”. Paula Bennett reckons the Nats’ harsh reforms mean that “the dream is over” for beneficiaries. Meanwhile, back in the real world…
It’s just a pleasure to watch Jon Stewart at work. Here he is deflating another pompous right wing twit.
John Armstrong is highly critical of the sub-zero budget: “The Budget has displayed a degree of cynicism one would expect from a Government in its third term, not its first”…
Despite some progress under the last Labour government, too many children have been allowed to slip through the gaps in this country. And now of course, under a National government, it’s getting worse. In her conference speech this evening Annette King renewed her promise that the next Labour government will put children at the centre of policy.
As I think you can tell from the budget speech, that Bill English is quite a funny guy…
