Written By: - Date published: 1:44 pm, March 5th, 2011 - 75 comments
Resources for the poor, eastern Christchurch suburbs have been lacking but everyone accepts things are stretched. Key did himself no favours trying to PR paper over real cracks. Helicoptering in to Bexley, talking to some hand-picked locals, and making excuses the whole time didn’t look good. For instance, portaloos have only recently arrived in suburbs […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:12 pm, March 5th, 2011 - 28 comments
3065 people have already claimed the special benefit for people left unemployed due to the Christchurch earthquake. Once that payment expires in a few weeks they’ll be on the dole, if they’re eligible. The quake killed and did physical damage in seconds but, without action, it will keep strangling the economy and taking jobs for […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:23 am, March 3rd, 2011 - 7 comments
The first Drinking Liberally for 2011 is to be held in Dunedin. Pete Hodgson Thursday March 3rd 7:30pm Circadian Rhythm (72 St Andrew Street) The speaker is Pete Hodgson MP for Dunedin North, giving a wrap on his time in the house and perhaps some insight into what election year has in store…
Written By: - Date published: 1:56 pm, March 2nd, 2011 - 61 comments
The man tipped to be National’s next leader, Simon Power, has announced he will not be standing at the next election. The reasons are obvious. As a decent man and an old fashioned caring Tory, Power has no heart for the direction National want to take New Zealand. His resignation is a sign that within the party, the dry right have finally taken total control the idealogical reigns and there is no longer a place for liberal wets like Power.
Written By: - Date published: 11:33 am, February 28th, 2011 - 4 comments
They are doing pretty well on restoring the power. With the exception of some small outlying areas, along the strike line and the CBD most of the city has power again as you can see from this chart. At a guess it will probably take some time on the major remaining areas simply because these are the areas that had the most vertical acceleration during the quake.
Written By: - Date published: 6:24 pm, February 23rd, 2011 - 120 comments
The Civil Defence centre, the police, the ambulance services, the firemen, the hospitals, the army, the search and rescue specialists, the social services – they’re all part of the bureaucracy, as are all those who provide their back office support.
They don’t get a great press and are often described collectively as a block to progress. They’re not called public servants for nothing. Thank God they’re there when we need them.
Written By: - Date published: 11:21 am, February 21st, 2011 - 74 comments
Key has blamed a soldier being killed in Afghanistan for the limo affair. This is just an attempt by Key to protect himself from criticism by hiding behind a soldier’s death. This is just sickening. The very worst kind of politics from a man who can’t take responsibility for his actions and is happy to take advantage of others’ tragedy.
Written By: - Date published: 7:25 am, February 21st, 2011 - 80 comments
It can be depressing to see a week of the government on the ropes and then polls showing National with an apparently commanding lead. But lets go beyond the shallow analysis offered by the talking heads and look at the trends. The Left has more than halved the Right’s lead since its peak. The question is: can the Left close the remaining gap in time?
Written By: - Date published: 3:46 pm, February 18th, 2011 - 21 comments
Our PM in the company of his peers?
Written By: - Date published: 2:29 pm, February 18th, 2011 - 15 comments
Another 1,000 Kiwi jobs at risk – this future… it’s too bright
New right Reform NZ Party forms – will big names join?
Old man Douglas thinks Parliament rises at 9pm – It’s 10pm. Hope he stays retired this time.
Nats preparing to legislate away more workers’ rights
$2 petrol now – wait until the Northern summer
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, February 15th, 2011 - 45 comments
To avoid another three years of backhanders to the rich, falling wages, rising unemployment, and asset sales, we have nine months to chip away at National’s support. As in 2008, The Standard will be running a campaign offering flyers etc for your to print off and deliver around your neighbourhood. Privatisation is an obvious first target.
Written By: - Date published: 3:36 pm, February 11th, 2011 - 35 comments
Archiving websites is a bloody good idea because the public debate and emerging history of NZ society is shifting more and more into these electronic media. So I asked NatLib about one of those political blogs that disappeared from the blogosphere – KiwiBlogBlog. It still exists…
Written By: - Date published: 12:56 pm, February 5th, 2011 - 65 comments
OK, that title is pure spin. National has dropped from 55% to 49% in the latest Roy Morgan, and Labour’s up from 29% to 34.5%. But that just shows the last poll was a rogue. Now, normal transmission, and National’s decline, has resumed. When you look at the Nat/ACT and Lab/Green/New Zealand First potential coalitions – the race is tight and closing fast.
Written By: - Date published: 12:19 pm, February 3rd, 2011 - 68 comments
John Key has been less cunning than some thought he would be. Going for a November election, he thinks, will let him leverage off the World Cup mini-boom, and enhance running Michael Jones and Inga Tuigamala as candidates. But it means 5 months for the Budget cuts to hurt and gives us 5 more months to work. So, what are we going to do?
Written By: - Date published: 2:27 am, February 3rd, 2011 - 13 comments
Periodically I run a scan to identify network parasites that are sucking up our bandwidth and processing resources in excess. Of course I leave the benign parasites that provide search facilities alone. But I stomp on the nasties.
Tonight the biggest parasite appears to have been a New Zealand government department – the Department of Internal Affairs.
Written By: - Date published: 8:00 pm, February 2nd, 2011 - 45 comments
So John Key has flip flopped and decided to rule out working with Winston Peters again. He’s trying to portray that as a principled decision, about running an “aspirational” government. So why did he need to spend so many months working out what his principles are? No, it’s a political decision. Key thinks he can squeeze a little more milage out of flogging the dead horse that is Winston Peters.
Written By: - Date published: 12:09 pm, February 2nd, 2011 - 182 comments
The PM has called a surprise press conference for 12:45 today, and is tipped to announce a November 26th election date. A further “major announcement” is also expected.
Update: Election date November 26 confirmed.
Written By: - Date published: 11:36 am, January 29th, 2011 - 137 comments
We face a stark choice this year: a Labour-led government, which will create fairer tax and invest in jobs and innovation, or National-led government, which will govern for the kleptocracy, giving them tax cuts, then selling our assets and slashing our public services to pay for them. So why is the Goffice doing such a bad job making the case?
Written By: - Date published: 10:55 am, January 27th, 2011 - 6 comments
Ironically, the best response to Key’s ‘slash and sell’ agenda came from Obama, whose spotlight Key is always trying to share: “Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact.”
Written By: - Date published: 6:00 pm, January 26th, 2011 - 83 comments
While we’re all eagerly awaiting Tracy Waktins et al’s reviews of John Key’s controversial decision to wear a mauve tie in his state of the nation speech, I thought I would look at some of the reasons why asset sales are such a stupid idea.
Written By: - Date published: 7:23 am, January 21st, 2011 - 151 comments
It’s always so wonderful to load up Granny Herald and see some wealthy late middle-aged grump (I’m picking this one is John Roughan) taking a swipe at the poor in the editorial. Today, Granny says we can’t afford to give mums more paid leave or more Working for Families for young kids. Hmm. But we can still afford those tax cuts for the rich?
Written By: - Date published: 10:34 am, January 18th, 2011 - 26 comments
Will New Zealand First get back into Parliament after the election? If they do, it changes everything. A range of new governing coalitions become possible – both National and Labour-led. Can the Left trust Winston Peters to side with Labour over National? Could a Left+NZF government work? Jenny looks at the issues.
Written By: - Date published: 8:30 am, January 18th, 2011 - 61 comments
Wow. The first edition of Hone Harawira’s new opinion column in the Sunday Star Times is a jaw-dropping read. He frankly states the party has sold out it values for cabinet seats – put coalition before kaupapa. It’s a brazen attack on Tariana Turia, and confirmation he intends to stay with the Maori Party and, some day, lead it back to its roots.
Written By: - Date published: 2:30 pm, January 17th, 2011 - 15 comments
The Herald today has an article that serves as a stalking-horse for privatisation of public assets. Privatisation is a core part of National’s agenda- it will have to push for it in some form at the election. Articles like this one are all about softening us up for that campaign.
Written By: - Date published: 7:45 pm, January 16th, 2011 - 23 comments
Recently, I did a post on how Labour should be focused on creating an over-arching narrative that embodies its broad set of policies. This should make Labour’s vision loud and clear in election year. While Labour continues to rebuild policy, I have a number of ideas on how Labour could best deliver a new narrative […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:35 am, January 16th, 2011 - 34 comments
A strange little article in the Sunday-Star Times praises National’s ‘rejuvenation’ project. Well, excuse me but 3 MPs out of 53 announcing their retirement and 2 quitting under clouds of corruption during a term hardly equals rejuvenation. In fact, National faces the same problem that Labour did – too little turnover.
Written By: - Date published: 10:57 am, January 10th, 2011 - 35 comments
Our guest poster writes about a letter he had published in the Herald recently. A clever wee missive, it started ‘helpful’ in tone but had a sting in the tail on the inaction of Key’s do nothing government in the face of recession, unemployment, and peak oil. The Herald cut off the sting leaving a ‘pro-Key’ letter. What are they up to?
Written By: - Date published: 6:48 am, January 10th, 2011 - 68 comments
Campbell has a good post on the problem of voters’ emotional reactions to Key and Goff as exemplified by the Sunday-Star Times Horizon poll (the striking thing is how little emotional response they elicit). I’ll look at the party numbers. Horizon tries to include which way the undecideds will fall – the results have National worried.
Written By: - Date published: 12:04 pm, January 9th, 2011 - 59 comments
The Sunday Star-Times has produced an interesting article on the role of emotion in people’s voter choices leading into this year’s General Election. While the results are not great news for Labour supporters, it’s the first poll of its kind to be made public in NZ. There’s a lot of controversy over whether we ought […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:12 pm, January 8th, 2011 - 59 comments
Farrar and Slater are trying to knee-cap a poll in the SST tomorrow. They know the numbers because Key’s office told them. Obviously jittered. Slater says it has NZF at 8.9%. Movement of ipredict stocks suggest its bad news for Nats and Labour. If Nats are in mid-40s then they’re in danger territory. Very hard for them to find a majority.
Written By: - Date published: 10:26 am, January 6th, 2011 - 54 comments
What’s to stop a government minister taking taxpayer money and giving it to, say, a family friend or a political slush fund? In theory, lots. There’s a formal budget-formation process through the ministeries and Cabinet, the Budget then has to be approved by Parliament, and the PM would sack any minister who tried such blatant corruption. Wouldn’t he?
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