When foreign companies want hand outs, John Key says ‘ how much?’ But there’s no such concern for Kiwi workers.
Young people need work – National gives them a pay cut.
40,0000 manufacturing jobs lost – Key turns a blind eye.
No wonder Key’s losing his credibility. He just keeps on getting it wrong.
National promised us an “unrelenting focus on jobs” and delivered record highs in unemployment and emigration. Now Key is refusing to even attend a Union jobs summit, because on Planet Key everything is just fine. The unwillingness to admit that anything is wrong is just blind arrogance.
In another slippery John Key u-turn, after his mission to Hollywood ‘sweeteners’ are now on the table. Key is bending over to let US-based conglomerates extend their dominance in NZ, in support of their own interests and values.
40,000 manufacturing jobs gone in four years. Manufactured exports in free-fall. Tourism revenue collapsing. If that’s not a crisis, what is? Why is […]
There is increasing concern about New Zealand’s housing situation, with an escalation in homelesssness, people living in totally unacceptable conditions, and the lack of sufficient affordable housing stock.Update: Government close to unveiling plans for “cheap” housing on city fringe and ‘brownfield’ sites.
The narrative that the Government has tried to sell, and which has been largely accepted to date, is that the GCSB’s illegal spying on Dotcom was a cock-up. They claimed that Key wasn’t briefed, when he was. The Nats also claimed only a change in immigration law in 2009 protected Dotcom. Now, we know that’s rubbish. Cover-up it is.
It’s now clear that National are unfit for office anywhere but Planet Key. Which is unfortunate, because here on Planet Earth, things aren’t going so well. We need new ideas, we need action, we need results. We aren’t going to get them from National.
If it weren’t for the fact that the Prime Minister is a) covering up for a corrupt, lying minister because he heads a support party and is, therefore, above accountability on Planet Key and b) being exposed as an inept and asleep at the wheel in his oversight of the nation’s spies, then Hekia Parata would be clinging on to her political career by her fingernails right now. Still, plenty of time for that.
Call me cynical but I just don’t think it’s credible that it took over two weeks after Key supposedly learned of the GCSB’s involvement in the Dotcom raid before they realised he given a presentation featuring Dotcom by GCSB a month after the raid. They’re amateur, they’re not that amateur. No, I think the ‘presentation on a laptop screen’ is a red herring.
As Key heads off to the US to promote the NZ film industry, I look back at the Hobbit union-busting case and the issues it raised. Will Key’s latest mission to Hollywood, boost the economy, increase jobs and provide benefits to the NZ film industry? Or will it actually undermine the NZ’s economy and democracy, further Americanising NZ’s culture along with it?
Watch this video of John Key being interviewed by the media on January 24th. 1: Key is clearly well-briefed on Dotcom. 2: he knows that Dotcom is a resident, so why didn’t he raise that a month later with GCSB? 3: How did Key know that Dotcom was a resident and GCSB didn’t? 4: Banks has told media he had dined at the mansion with Dotcom – months before denying remembering that meeting.
Key is trying to subtly rewrite history on his denials re Dotcom. Unfortunately for Key his categorical denial is on record.
What can one say to the latest. No Right Turn says…..
“So, having told everyone that he wasn’t briefed about the Kim Dotcom spying fiasco until September, it now turns out that John Key was told about it back in February. ” … “That whistling noise is the PM’s credibility shrinking even further. His amnesia is just too convenient here to be believed”
Updated: Added links to his next two posts.
As Shane Jones makes a complete dick of himself in public yet again in a traditional display of Labour party backbench egotism. I’m left shaking my head at the apparent complete inability of the Labour caucus to settle down to the task of being an effective opposition.
Parata is trying to close schools based on data that is (as even the Ministry now admits) massively incorrect. The attack on the social fabric of Christchurch was already inexcusable. This latest fiasco makes it even worse.
It’s been interesting to watch the Collins Faction of National talk down the Conservative Party all year. It’s not hard to see why – they occupy space/take votes that a Collins-led National would want for itself. What the Collins Faction would like is a decent liberal-right party. That would allow National to swing conservative and give up liberal votes to an ally, rather than to the Left.
Key says that we would all be very scared if he had control over the GCSB. That’s wrong. Key is the only democratic control on our spies and he has extraordinary oversight. Every warrant the spooks need has to be approved by Key. Is he exercising that role properly, or is he just signing whatever the GCSB puts under his nose?
Last week, Key tried to tell us that the illegal spying on Kim Dotcom – which he, the minister, we’re supposed to believe wasn’t told about for 8 months – was down to one agent’s ‘brain fade’. Uh huh. So, why has he now appointed a senior public servant to review and reform GCSB? You don’t do that when the problem was one person’s human error.
[Update: Lol at Key. Police are launching a high powered inquiry after he said there was no need for one]
I’ll be in Manchester tomorrow to hear Ed Miliband speak at the UK Labour Party conference. Labour are ahead in the polls, and Miliband’s leadership is more secure than Cameron’s or Clegg’s. Ed Miliband has surprised those who thought Labour chose the wrong brother. Ed is receiving plenty of free advice about what he should say; I suspect he will continue to be himself. Interesting parallels to New Zealand; I’m looking forward to it.
The speed with which Planet Key caught on is a measure of the public recognition that the Nats have lost the plot.
We’re told 36,000 workers are needed for the Christchurch rebuild. But since the earthquakes began 2 years ago, 9,000 people with the skills needed for the rebuild have left New Zealand. We’re making no effort to keep the skilled workers we have but the Government thinks those 36,000 workers will just magically appear when needed.
Split Enz once sang, “History Never Repeats”… Or does it? Destructive prejudices separating ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor have been around a very long time. When the likes of Paula Bennett pander to such ill-informed vindictiveness with punitive social welfare reforms, they will damage large numbers of children – our future citizens.
John Key refuses to accept any responsibility for what his spies get up to. The only point of democratic responsibility for our spies doesn’t monitor them and won’t take the blame for failing to do so. He won’t fire a corrupt, lying minister, either. The rot is spreading to the public service. There has been not one resignation, not a single one, due to the Dotcom debacle.
My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. This week: Obama the Tory, fish, Planet Key and the UK’s hit political single.
Labour has written to Key calling for a much wider-ranging investigation into the Dotcom spying affair than Neazor’s narrow, tell-us-nothing-we-don’t-already-know report. They would have been better to go straight to the Auditor-General. The Greens have gone for the established illegality and called in the cops on the GCSB – cleverly citing the same offence Key claimed in the teapot tapes.
I was reading an article looking at the aftermath of the Rena shipwreck in the Herald. In it I read some ridiculous statements by Gerry Brownlee that seemed (like so much from him) to come from the early part of the last century. It appears that he (and his minons in the M0T) haven’t quite caught up on rapid progress of the digital age in nautical circles. Hasn’t he heard about AIS? Or computers?
Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce has launched a broadside against the environmental opponents of the privately owned Denniston mine project. To do this Stephan Joyce has tried to draw a bow linking those who wish to stop the opening of the Dennistion mine, with the closing of the Spring Creek mine.
Our government’s spies are overseen by two people – the Prime Minister and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. The former asked the latter to investigate he found out the GCSB had been illegally spying on two Kiwis. And, guess what, the report blamed underlings. It didn’t even investigate the question of oversight.
John “power at any cost” Key isn’t ruling out a deal with Peters in 2014. Peters isn’t ruling it out either. Deputy PM Peters anyone?
John Key put on a display of incompetence in the House yesterday over the Dotcom spying affair. He claimed not to know a laundry list of basic facts that, if he didn’t know them before, he bloody well ought to have been briefed on by now. In some instances, his memory failed him over Dotcom. Yet he then showed he could recall exchange rates from 20 years ago. I think he’s lying. The alternative is too scary.
There’s a lot of it about in right-wing parties at the moment. For John Key, John Banks and David Cameron it appears to be becoming the strategy of choice. It’s not working very well for any of them.
“Ignorance gets us nowhere”, it’s National’s new slogan and it certainly applied with Key’s feigned ignorance in answer to questions on Banks’ corruption […]
Bennett’s reforms aim to cut the costs of government spending on welfare. But what this means is that more of the necessary caring and service work in NZ will be unpaid, or underpaid. It doesn’t mean people will necessarily work harder or longer, and that they aren’t making a significant contribution to society and the economy.
Key has failed to uphold high ethical standards for himself, his Ministers, or his government. The GCSB illegal spying fiasco is just the latest example.
National has a plan to deal with their crisis of job losses, GCSB illegality and bad polls. Tomorrow will probably see another welfare crackdown, although with the number of groups left to target rapidly diminishing, could it be the turn of one-legged Dutchmen to feel Paula’s wrath?
But if that plan doesn’t work, National has another up its sleeve: blame Labour. Go on, sing along.
