Posts on government and governence at national and local level, political parties,politicians, and political participation
For her own petty political purposes, Paula Bennett has put Natasha Fuller through hell. Now (finally) the Privacy Commissioner has asked Bennett to apologise to Fuller for the damage she caused and pay her $15,000. Predictably, this awful person has refused. Paula Bennett, you are a disgrace to your office and a disgrace to New Zealand.
National is under extraordinary pressure on its ETS, and it seems to be starting to panic. While I can commend them for sticking to their guns (better a gutted ETS than none at all), I don’t have any sympathy over the backlash they are facing. They bought it on themselves.
TV3 has reported tonight that John Key admitted on video to owning an Otago vineyard, and providing free wine to “people that help me”. This, despite Key telling the public all his assets were in a blind trust. Key, painted with his Tranz Rail eyes, has responded by still insisting he doesn’t know about his assets – but that’s a hard excuse to swallow in wake of solid contradictory evidence. [UPDATE: video added]
While it rains, thousands of homes are rotting, a legacy of the stupid deregulation of the building industry by National in the 1990s. The current government is proposing that huge costs be passed on to ratepayers, and tonight Wellington City Council votes on the plan. There are no good solutions to this mess.
So Blinglish’s new and improved less-bitter poison is part-privatisation. In much the same way as marketing a filling as more fun than a full root-canal, he thinks that if he sells each of his mates one piece of the family silver (and keeps the spoons) instead of flogging off the whole set to one of his mates, we’ll be much happier.
Trevor Mallard reports being asked by a press gallery member if he knows which nat is about to resign. Trev doesn’t know, but there’s a few choice candidates
One thing National does very well is spend a lot of time softening the public up for unpopular moves so that the public attention has moved on by the time anything actually happens. Look at GST. The ‘rabbit from a hat’ trick of borrowing for larger income tax cuts served to divert attention from the well-signaled GST hike. They’re running the same strategy on privatisation.
Last month Colin King revealed that his National Party colleague Chris Finlayson had said he would block an investigation into the behaviour of his old mate Supreme Court Judge Bill Wilson. Finlayson should have recognised his conflict of interest and stood aside months ago but only did so once the media got the story. It says something about National’s standards.
Pointing out that a “rich get richer” budget is going to increase inequality in NZ seems to be making the Nats uncomfortable. Bill English tries to simply deny the facts. DPF tries to divert attention to “social mobility”. Lame efforts in both cases. The truth is that inequality isn’t on the Nats radar. They simply don’t care.
We don’t expect the state highway network to turn a profit but we know it contributes enormous value to our economy.Airports, seaports, and telecommunications network add more to the economy than just the profits of the companies. Same with rail. But what will come as a surprise, given the Right’s constant attacks, is that Kiwirail will also be making a $4 billion profit in the next decade.
In a move that can only be described as the fox guarding the hen house, the fishing industry has released plans for self-regulation entitled ‘Managing Our Own Ship’. National would be making a huge mistake to hand over more power to the fishing industry and in the end it would be the people who would have to deal with the consequences.
I love that John Key is so desperate to show some progress on his memorial cycleway that he’s even going along to the opening of cycleways that aren’t funded with its money. On Sunday he showed up at the opening of a cycleway in Oamaru. The cycleway was funded by the council and NZTA. The recession has been over for a year – not a single job has been created, no cycleway built.
“The Bechdel test†requires a movie to pass three questions:
1) Does it have two or more women in it (who have names)?
2) Do they talk to one another?
3) Do they talk to one another about something other than a man?
This two minute video explains…
The frustration was palpable today as Guyon Espiner struggled in vain to get a single straight answer from Bill English, who was only prepared to twist, evade, and repeat lines: “GUYON Do you accept that for very high income earners, people on the sort of salary like your own of $276,000 a year,you gave those people money they simply did not need?
It’s interesting to see how Irish’s ‘rabbit from a hat’ metaphor has taken off for describing this Budget. Some, like Tracey Watkins, are even using it positively. She needs to have a bit more of a think about what the rabbit from a hat is. The rabbit itself is nothing special. In fact, in this case it’s a borrowed bunny, despite the media’s tendency to portray tax cut as costless.
In 2008, Bill English was sprung secretly telling National members that he and Key would sell Kiwibank “‘eventually but not now”. After being caught out, English and Key categorically ruled out asset sales in the first term of a National government and said they would seek a mandate to make any sales in a second term.
John Key’s “Don’t Be Jealous” Budget has done little to stop the European contagion from ravaging our sharemarket – at time of writing down […]
I think the saddest part of this budget is that the government will spend $70 million building more prisons while cutting $120 million from early childhood education. It kind of sums up this Key Government’s priorities don’t you think? They’re cutting taxes for the rich while they cut health and education spending. It’s our future they are cutting, so the rich can be richer in the short-term.
Hone Harawira does not want to vote for the ‘don’t be jealous’ budget and he doesn’t think the Maori Party will be standing true to its principles or supporters if it does. Harawira sought permission to vote against the Budget. Tariana Turia, who is awfully comfortable in the back of her Crown limo, refused. Let’s hope Harawira has the courage cross the floor anyway.
We already know that National’s big economic plan this budget is a tax swap from working Kiwis to the rich that will not affect growth but will increase inequality. There’s some money for science and Kiwirail, which is good but only partially reverses the cuts that National imposed last year. The two big items in the budget that the Nats have control over (assuming no cuts to benefits or super) are education and health. The increases in these two sectors are the things to watch.
Inequality is terribly damaging to society. National want to increase inequality by transferring wealth from the poor to the rich. They argue that this provides “incentives” for the vast majority of the rest of us to “get ahead”. But this aspirational argument is both incoherent and absurd.
The US Republican Party faces destruction at the hands of the Teabaggers, a reactionary movement based on ignorance and fear that the Republican leadership purposely created. National faces a similar risk. It cynically fed its members anti-climate change conspiracy theorist nonsense. Now the Nats have to govern but their knuckle-draggers are fighting back.
Yesterday I posted on John Key being named “Dim bulb of the week” by the San Francisco Examiner. Continuing with a dim bulb theme – let’s talk about Edison Hour, as it is explained to us by a budding genius from ACT…
Apparently, President Obama has delivered a speech ‘ranting’ against technology. The opinion in The Economist is worth a read just for the joy […]
The Greens have released their alternative budget, “Mind the Gap”. It focuses on the inequality between rich and poor in NZ (rightly called “the scourge of modern societiesâ€). It’s great to see the Greens tackling this issue head on.
It is always amusing listening to Matthew Hooten being a spinster on politics. But it was rather ironic for him to be in a conversation about John Key’s “loose lips” on NatRad this morning. He talked about this site posting conspiracy theories, but he was talking about a post at Tumeke and attributing to us.
“Loose lips” appear to be rife amongst the right-wing politicians and political commentators these days.
Our PM is now an international laughing stock, having been nominated by the San Francisco Examiner as “Dim bulb of the week” for his cannibal joke. Nor are Key’s most recent comments on the Tuhoe deal likely to help matters…
A passage from Matt McCarten’s article in the Sunday Herald summed up for me not only the approach of Rodney Hide in setting up his Super City but also the neo-liberal project that has been in vogue for the past quarter century. Democracy under the neo-liberal model is, as far as possible, to be a financial transaction.
Hmm, so another bad, bad week for the directionless Key Government. Lucky a major newspaper steps in with a chance to make the PM look cute and adorable. It’s pretty telling that National Party pollster David Farrar chose to highlight a joke question from Valerie Vili and a joke answer; the answers to real questions are amazingly weak.
The headline for the Herald’s editorial today says a lot about where the media are at with National at the moment. The Government and its […]
Sam Cash writes it’s good news for Auckland with Len Brown opening up a strong lead over John Banks. Len Brown’s campaign seems to have been quietly gathering momentum since he launched his insurgency last year.
Family First have a history of trying to make political capital out of stacked questions. They’re are at it again, distorting the results of a survey question to push for bringing back corporal punishment in schools. They are aided and abetted by some spectacularly bad journalism.
David Farrar has finally made a comment on my “Hey Chubby…” post. It raises more questions than it answers. So I ask some of the obvious questions, and conclude that he has forsaken the principles of “free speech” that he so enthusiastically espoused only a few years ago.
The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity. They have stated ‘It is a celebration of life on earth and of the value of biodiversity for our lives.’ National has taken up the cause wholeheartedly in a variety of weird ways. They seem hell bent on enacting policies that will do nothing but destroy biodiversity in the name of the economic growth.
Make no mistake, John Key’s comment about Tuhoe cannibalism was no accident, it was no joke, and it certainly was not ‘self-deprecating’. Key didn’t just happen to accidentally make a comment that appeals to a deep-seated prejudice that is still current among redneck Pakeha and wedges our society in two. It was a message to Tuhoe
No Right Turn on the ignorance of the main campaigner wanting a change to our electoral system. You’d think that if you’re campaigning for something that you’d at least know what you are campaigning for. But apparently not.
