Australian election
Our cousins on the West Island are winding up their election day soon, culminating a dramatic couple of months for Australian politics. It may be that Kevin Rudd gets the last laugh…
International
Quick bites
There are a bunch of interesting little stories floating around this week that we didn’t get round to writing full posts on or that we wrote drafts for but never finished. So here’s a new, possibly weekly feature – Quick Bites:
NZ Institute: ‘Nats have no plan’
Suicide funding cut
Nats’ interesting donors
Workers’ rights under attack
One foot out of Iraq
Vultures
Party on Garth
Pakistan: Donate Now
The UN says the number of people suffering from the massive floods in Pakistan — an estimated 20 million — could exceed the […]
SAS collecting Afghanis for torture
Wayne Mapp has confirmed that the SAS has been involved in handing prisoners over to the NDS – a Afghan government body that tortures prisoners. Mapp indicated he didn’t give a damn what happens to the prisoners, calling them an “Afghan responsibility”. Sorry, Mapp, but you’ve got to take responsibility. Handing someone over to people you can reasonably expect will torture them is illegal.
Britain’s Sickness Benefit Injustice
Britain’s turfing 75% of people off their long-term sickness benefit on an arbitrary test. Let’s hope the Welfare Working Group doesn’t get ideas.
Rorts in the age of internet advertising.
The Australian Liberal party has been posting sponsored links on Google websites pushing voters seeking information on independent candidates and candidates from other […]
Iraq war profiteers
I regard the invasion of Iraq as one of the most shameful events in America’s history. The made up cover story about “weapons of mass destruction” was quickly shown to be a lie. It was always about the oil. And for too many of those on the ground it was always about lining their pockets with billions of dollars worth of slush money.
Do we feel lucky?
“Global climate talks appear to have slipped backward after five days of negotiations in Bonn, the chief U.S. delegate said Friday, adding that some countries were reneging on promises they made last year to cut greenhouse gas emissions”.
Another sad day in Afghanistan
New Zealand has suffered its first combat death in Afghanistan. This is an increasingly deadly war as the foreign forces slowly lose ground. They have suffered nearly two thousand dead now – more in the past two months than in the first 3 years. No-one knows how many Afghans have died.
Rough Justice
The Economist has a great article looking at the American propensity to deprive their citizens of their liberty for trivial offenses. We have the same stupid political ratcheting here that causes it. A large part of that is fueled by groups like the Sensible Sentencing Trust. There needs to be a broad agreement across the political spectrum about such hysterical groups before they cause more damage.
Pray you don’t get endorsed by Sarah Palin
A recent poll in New Hampshire showed that being endorsed by Sarah Palin was an immediate turnoff to moderate voters. Similarly the RWNJ’s of the ‘tea party’ have managed to succeed in getting ideologically ‘pure’ but politically lower quality candidates selected where the GOP has undemocratic systems in place. Is this the beginning of the end for the RWNJ’s in the US as voters reject their candidates? Now if only WhaleOil would endorse candidates here…
Truth out on wars
Deputy PM and leader of the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg, caused a bit of a sensation last week when he pronounced Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war illegal. And yesterday Wikileaks published a massive cache of American military files exposing the truth about the war in Afghanistan. Not a good week for warmongers.
MFAT leak too convenient
Why would someone in MFAT feel the need to interfere in the Australian election by leaking to the Australian media? I’ve been accused of conspiracy theories in the past but this leak seems all too convenient when National’s old mates Crosby Textor are up against it in Aussie.
Haiti: six months on
The 24 hour news cycle. The 20 second slot. The soundbite. The pithy headline. We have short attention spans. Today’s tragedy is yesterday’s dim memory. I am usually as guilty as most, and this article in The Guardian was a sharp reminder. Haiti: six months on.
Financial regulation in USA
The recent global recession represented a spectacular failure of unfettered capitalism. We never felt the full force and completeness of that failure because the worst was averted – or rather just delayed – by vast injections of Government bailout money. America has learned its lesson, yesterday passing the strictest restrictions on banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression.
Vince’s Latest Cable
Over in the UK, Vince Cable, the former LibDem Deputy leader who predicted the Great Recession and the need to break up and regulate the banks, is now responsible for business and tertiary education. In the tertiary sector he has a radical new idea for funding.
Crowdsourcing the deficit
Why let politicians have all the fun? Now the British public can get in on the service slashing action too – via Facebook. […]
Good news: Solar powered flight
An experimental solar-powered plane completed its first 24-hour test flight successfully Thursday, proof of concept that an aircraft can collect enough energy from the sun during the day to fly all night. The eventual goal is to fly it round the world…
Back to the Future – Education in the UK
God knows what the National Standards are designed to do – it can’t be to lift achievement. Even the Minister says that is […]
NZ hero gets suspended sentence
Pete Bethune has had his sentence for bogus charges laid by Japanese whaling interests suspended. My warm congratulations to Pete and his family. […]
Bypassing the media
Not long after The White House Correspondents’ Association met with Obama’s Press Secretary to complain about limitations on their access, The White House […]
Xenophobia
John Key is claiming that we need to defend our shores against a coming wave of boat people by buying into a detention center in Timor.
I don’t know whether he’s trying to flank Winnie or whether he’s just shooting off at the mouth after being influenced by the Aussies but whatever the reason the idea is plainly racist.
Aspiration and absurdity
John Key’s government has had many “aspirational goals”. One of them was a secret plan to end whaling. With the recent collapse of the international whaling negotiations in Morocco that plan, if it ever really existed, has failed. In response, Foreign Minister Murray McCully takes the politics of aspiration to a whole new, some would say absurd, level.
Private Prison Profile
When National get their ideological wish to get a prison privately run here, the most likely candidate will be Australian/UK prison company G4S. In the ‘care’ of these crime profiteers, an Aboriginal man died in a Western Australian prison van, during a four hour ride without ventilation in 50 degree plus temperatures that gave him 3rd degree burns. And that’s far from the only abuse.
Beware the politics of gender
An article in the Guardian puts gender politics into perspective, with 1,000 “honour killings” a year in India, according to one recent study. For those who think that the world has moved on – it hasn’t.
Beware the young advisers – they reflect their masters
An interesting parallel between Kevin Rudd and the Key government’s leadership style surfaced in our papers this weekend. On Saturday, Tracy Watkins had […]
Congratulations Julia Gillard
It’s been a big day for Julia Gillard. Up late last night with Kevin Rudd and John Faulkner, the ALP’s elder spokesman, doing […]
New Australian PM
Kevin Rudd is gone, and Australia has its first female PM.
It’s been a dramatic fall for Rudd, who was so incredibly popular for his first two years in office.
British austerity budget
The first budget from the new Tory-LibDem government is a shocker, with massive austerity cuts and a rise in VAT to 20%. This is the bill for the £850 billion bail out of big banks coming home to roost.
Rudd for the chop, Gillard to take the reins
Kevin Rudd has lost the support of the powerful Australian Workers’ Union and an array of the ALP’s factions to Julia Gillard. It’s been a dramatic fall for Rudd, who was so incredibly popular for his first two year’s as PM (if it can happen there…). Gillard will make a stark contrast to the strange conservative leader of the Liberals, Tony Abbott, but has a lot of work to do.
Free speech zones
The most disturbing aspect of the handling of the Chinese security guard’s assault on Russel Norman is the way that the Nats are going to use it as an excuse to further restrict free speech. Don’t let them set us on the path to America’s notorious “free speech zones”.
I’m not sorry
I’m not sorry about Russel Norman standing up to Chinese imperialism, I’m proud that he did. While I don’t personally have a lot of […]
Chinese democracy
According to Chinese State media. The Key government has secretly apologised to the Chinese dictatorship for allowing Russel Norman to protest new vice-dictator Xi Jinping. Since when was a peaceful protest something we apologise for? No apology from the Chinese appears to have been sought or recieved. Shameful, corwardly behaviour from our kowtowing government. [Update. The Herald reports our PM personally called the Chinese to apologise. Jaw-dropping]
Do we now kowtow?
The police won’t lay charges against the security guard who assaulted Russel Norman. Fair enough I guess. They’re out of here today. Probably too minor to justify a prosecution. That doesn’t make what happened OK. A thug for a foreign power violated the rights of one of our MPs on the grounds of our Parliament. A display of contempt for our sovereignty. And our democracy.
Chinese security attack MP
A security guard for Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping attacked Green MP Russel Norman today while Norman was protesting at the Chinese delegation’s arrival, and holding a Tibetan flag. Our Government needs to make a formal protest to China over this incident.
The golden curse
You know, if we don’t give those mining companies some more free seismic data, rent-free access to our most precious natural environments, and only demand low royalties when they dig up our minerals, we’ll lose them to the lucky country. That’s right, Afghanistan. It’s sitting, quite literally, on a gold mine and it makes ours look like small change.