The Te Tai Tokerau by-election has the potential to be a game-changer. If it comes off for Kelvin on Saturday the result may shake up a few other predictions for the general election – another example of the wisdom of Harold Wilson’s famous remark that a week is a long time in politics. Now it’s down to who goes out on the day. After the battle of the hustings will come the battle of the explanations – they will be fascinating.
I haven’t seen the full interview of Brownlee on the Nation. If the clips on the news were anything to go by, it was more of the same. No info for Christchurch residents. No empathy for them either. More haughty bullshit. More vague excuses for delays. More focused on himself than the people who need help. He needs to go.
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”…
My jaw dropped when I heard this listening to Question Time yesterday. Mallard: “Does he understand that real average wages go up when high-income earners get massive tax cuts-$1,000 a week, in his case-and low-income workers lose their jobs?” English: “No, I do not understand that, because it is not true.” Can’t English do simple maths?
Watch Kelvin Davis on Q+A with Hone Harawira. He was superb. He says the message he is giving about being part of the future for Maori is resonating around the Tai Tokerau. I’ll bet it is. The by-election result could be very interesting indeed. I liked his take on leadership too – it’s about being focussed on the objective and doing what is necessary to achieve it. Couldn’t agree more.
Bill (and John and the entire National caucus) have been telling us that we are required to borrow $380 million each and every week. Apparently we aren’t.
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 Budget is unravelling at a startling rate of knots. Bill English is floundering to explain his dodgy asset sales numbers that count the benefits but not the costs. Now, a senior minister has admitted that John Key’s claim that “there are 170,000 new jobs being created as a result of this Budget” is a lie. We actually really do deserve better than this.
Question Time: David Cunliffe wipes the floor with Bill English in the House today, as he shows up his missing costs of asset sales.
So, that’s National’s great big plan: get rid of our electricity assets and use the cash to build more prisons. Not much of a brighter future there. National still hasn’t come up with a convincing reason why we would sell highly profitable monopolistic companies. Instead, we’ve seen a series of weak excuses. Now, English has revealed the truth.
Do you remember back in the day when Bill English didn’t want to put any money into the Cullen Fund? Remember how we were smugly told that borrowing to save was foolish? Well, since then the Cullen Fund has made a fortune and, we know learn, the government has been borrowing to build up savings for the Christchurch rebuild.
Don Brash has attacked Bill English’s budget which he says fails to lay out a plan for New Zealand. The reality, I think, is that both have plan however there is little or no future in either plan. Neither Brash nor English have laid out a plan which deals with the present and quite near problems we will face.
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…
Christchurch business owners, unable to even get to their premises in the red-zone, have asked for some help to stop going under. Gerry Brownlee’s arrogant response: “If they are such clever, gifted, and forward-looking entrepreneurs it’s pretty sad that their first port of call has to be to Government looking for a bailout”. What an arsehole.
After intense criticism for using government-owned helicopters for personal trips, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has reimbursed the state for the cost of the flights. I look forward to John Key following Christie’s lead and repaying us for his flights to watch the V8s in Hamilton.
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.
John Key prefers his gut to real evidence, and it means that the policies he is implementing aren’t the ones that are best for our country.
Also: Steven Joyce & the Rail Loop.
Bob Clarkson is back into public politics. This time generously helping the Act Party. Long may this continue!
We give Phil Goff a lot of hassles, so I thought I should show an example of him getting it right. Goff takes control of the interview away from the Petra’s attack lines and nicely turns it to Labour’s lines. It’s about connecting voters with Labour’s positions. For example, people don’t want asset sales, so Goff saying voting Labour is the way to save them is vital.
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.
Seen the coverage of Goff’s visit to McGehan Close? So negative. Portrays it as cynical politics. Yet when Key visited in 2008, the coverage was fawning over the ‘kompassionate konservative’. What’s wrong with Goff going along to the place, it’s in his own electorate, and showing Key’s broken his promises? Nothing. Governments should be held to account.
John Key just rumbles on from one lame excuse to the next on the ETS. First bringing farmers in was going to raise dairy prices, now he’s making other claims that don’t stack up.
Visionary climate change scientist James Hansen has written an open letter to John Key.
Labour’s Jacinda Ardern replies to Don Brash’s letter to John Key: “In many ways though Mr Brash, I fear that you have written off not just my generation, but New Zealand. There was no hope in your letter, no sense of aspiration or of the idea that we can build a prosperous country”
“The worst display from a Prime Minister since the schnapps election” – that’s what a journo said about Key the other day. No, it wasn’t about him being a multi-millionaire who gave himself tens of thousands of tax cuts opposing a fair wage increase for the lowest paid workers. It was this disgraceful behaviour on Budget Day. Watch.
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…
Phil Goff has announced that Labour will bring agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme earlier and use the extra revenue to fund R&D, much of which will be into clean tech and low-carbon farming. There’s a swath of announcements showing Goff’s Labour has the vision Key’s National lacks. Labour is making positive choices while being fiscally responsible.
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”…
As I think you can tell from the budget speech, that Bill English is quite a funny guy…
John Key thinks National will lose some support because of the budget saying: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we ease back a bit. I mean that’s logical. Some of that sort of froth in there will come away”. Hear that, tens of thousands of swing voters who believed in the ‘brighter future that Key promised you and didn’t deliver? You’re just ‘froth’ to him.
