News that Donald Trump has tested positive for Covid will have a significant effect on the US election as well as our local election. It raises the issue who will you trust to lead the country against this most agile yet deadly virus?
Post for discussion of the latest leaders’ debate scheduled for this evening. Be kind to each other.
Jacinda Ardern is a contender for winning a Nobel Peace Prize. If she were to get it for anything, it will be for her leadership response to the national health crisis response to COVID19.
Some random musings on the news yesterday that persons associated with NZ First had been charged by the Serious Fraud Office.
The SFO has put out a press release a few days before overseas voting starts. They have not laid charges against NZ First or anyone in it. They have laid charges against two other people. What I find appalling is that they waited so close to the election before making it clear that whatever NZF did was lawful. To me that smacks of political malfeasance. And the complainants probably should be brought up on charges themselves for wasting police and SFO time.
Judith Collins has said about Dirty Politics author Nicky Hager that he “still needs to meet his maker.” What did she mean by this? And why does she harbour such dark thoughts about Hager?
The NZ Herald Mood of the Boardroom finance election debate should be for National what it is like attending a Living Wage campaign meeting for Labour. They should be at home and the participants should be solidly behind them. But not this year.
There’s been plenty of criticism about Labour’s policies not being effective enough to alleviate poverty. Time for a bit of perspective.
President Trump once again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the US election.
If ever you needed a symbol of National’s current plight it is the handling of the release of its alternative budget. It has been a complete and utter shambles. A clusterf&*k of epic proportions. Because if there is one part of National’s reputation that needs to be defended at all costs it is the perception that they are competent financial managers and making multiple billion dollar mistakes in your alternative budget at election time is the one thing over all else that will hurt that part of your reputation.
Ten months ago National supported the Zero Carbon Bill and called for a consensus between the major political parties on the overall framework through which climate change issues are addressed. This week National trashed all of that to try and shore up its sagging support.
This is a backpocket election – and that’s where most of Labour’s effort is going as it rightly should.
On Tuesday National announced the fifth variation of its Covid border policy this year.
The leaders of our both main parties committed to neoliberalism is another kind of brutality that we seem reluctant to address.
With news of a second mistake in National’s draft budget its campaign is in trouble and support for other right wing parties appears to be surging. Update: Stuff is reporting a further $3.9 billion dollar mistake …
Paul Goldsmith has blighted National’s campaign launch by making a $4 billion dollar mistake in National’s budget costings.
RBG’s death was an important event for women here because it happened on the anniversary of Women’s Suffrage Day 126 years ago. On this day in New Zealand we celebrate women being able to vote, the women who won further victories of political liberation, and many got together to recount our female heroes enabled by that right and all those rights that followed.
Despite claiming that the PREFU figures were catastrophic and despite stating a month ago that it would not do this National has come out with a policy of temporary tax cuts favouring the rich. They must be desperate.
Yesterday Shane Reti ignited leadership rumours after he was asked if he wanted to be National leader and did not pledge support for existing leader Judith Collins.
Much has rightly been made of the leadership quality of Prime Minister Ardern this year. But the PREFU results announced today shows that Minister of FInance Grant Robertson is by a long way the most effective Minister of Finance we have had since Dr Michael Cullen.
The Prefu is out! And it is not as scary as National would have wanted.
Just two months before election day, Donald Trump appears to have won a diplomatic coup in the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have normalised relations with the state of Israel.
This has been quite a year for National. It is onto its third leader, has lost a slew of experienced MPs, and has had other MPs resign in curious circumstances. And now it appears that it has a crisis involving its Upper Harbour candidate, Jake Bezzant.
While a few in the media leapt at the opportunity to vilify a small evangelical community at the latest COVID 19 spread, the really big COVID 19-conspiracy story landed by the thousand this weekend. It’s overdue we woke up to QAnon here.
Labour has announced that if elected they will significantly increase abatement levels for beneficiaries and reinstitute the Training Incentive Allowance Scheme, the policy that Paula Bennett famously had the benefit of but then cancelled once she was Minister.
The Greens just boldly stepped up their election campaign.
There has been disturbing local news that some members of a local evangelical church, influenced by American equivalents, refused to accept the threat posed by the virus. And in America a new book from Bob Woodward suggests strongly that Donald Trump knew how big a threat Covid would be but chose for political reasons to downplay the risk.
I’m going to give this government just 5 out of 10 on the conservation front.
The Court of Appeal has ruled that Southern Response has engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct and has potentially short changed thousands of Cantabrians hundreds of millions of dollars.
One of the most interesting questions about the current election campaign is will New Zealand First make it back into Parliament after the election, with polling and a slew of not dissimilar parties on the right suggesting that Winston’s time may be up.
Simon Thornley is claiming that New Zealand’s covid response is a failure and we should be more like Sweden. But it appears that in more recent times Sweden has toughened its stringency tests so that they are similar to New Zealand’s.
As the covid crisis deepens Labour appear to be committed to entrenching the underclass and giving a helping hand to the middle class.
Neoliberalism has run its course and displayed its profound inability to address inequality issues. It makes the poor get ever poorer while the affluent top 10% ticks of society get bloated and increasingly insufferable on untaxed capital gains. In 2017 Jacinda Ardern set a goal of bringing all children out of poverty within six years. So how is that going? And what are the next steps?
Post Trump how is the world order looking?
* but you should see what Judith Collins’ husband has been posting.
New Zealand’s local and regional councils have been given until August 31 2020 to sign up to a ginormous fund that would help them improve their water, wastewater, and stormwater systems. The implications for them doing this are significant and could see the end of Council control of the supply of water.
