Open mike 08/07/2012
Open mike is your post. For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose. The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the link to […]
Positive Money & the Wizard of Oz
In our current system, we give men like Bob Diamond the immense power to create money. Need it be so? The Positive Money movement wishes to change that, and give that power back to Government. The first Labour Government used the power to create a better NZ – we could do that again.
Stay classy
Rumour has it that one of the Sunday papers is going to run a homophobic piece on a gay political figure. There’s no suggestion of impropriety, just: ‘hey this openly homosexual person’s gay, in case you didn’t know’. One paper a week. Limited space for politics. And they fill it with this. No wonder the print media is dying.
The Nation runs Nat smear
Gerry Brownlee is in court as some property owners challenge his decision to open up some blocks of land for new sections post-earthquake and not others. One of those property owners is Independent Seafoods. They would also have been one of a hundred to have benefited from a 2009 private members’ bill by Clayton Cosgrove. One of Cosgrove’s donors was IS. Brownlee’s shopped a smear based on that, and The Nation ran it.
17 year old Kiwi addresses the UN Earth Summit
Well said. What a tragedy that they heard, but did not listen.
Australia’s sweatshop
The Nats have given up on catching up with Australia, and are content for us to become their low wage sweatshop instead. Their cheerleaders think it’s a great idea.
I beg to differ.
Open mike 07/07/2012
Open mike is your post. For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose. The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the link to […]
Weekend social 06/07/2012
Weekend social is for non political chat. What’s on for the weekend, gigs, film or book reviews, sports, or whatever. No politics, no […]
Frogblog: Greens call for inquiry into inquiries
A very funny response from the Greens to Key’s complaint that they’re always asking for inquiries: “The Greens have been criticised by Prime Minister John Key, who said, ‘The Greens call for an inquiry on virtually anything.’ The remark prompted immediate calls from the Green Party for an inquiry, which would focus on why the Greens call for so many inquiries.”
Resource optimisation
You might have heard of this new TV series called The Block, where they get 4 couples to compete to do up dilapidated houses. It’s the most expensive non-fiction programme ever made in New Zealand. It’s vacuous, contentless garbage. But what gets my goat is they took 4 perfectly OK, not flash but OK houses, and munted them so that they could be done up on TV.
A good time for that plan to end whaling
Remember back in February 2010 when John Key announced that he had a super-secret plan to end whaling? I’m sure there’s some real clever strategy behind why nothing has come of it so far and Key never mentions it. But I think, now that he’s called South Korea’s plan to restart ‘scientific whaling’ “abhorrent“, it might be time to unveil the plan. It is real, eh?
NoRightTurn: Private prisons still failing
NRT reports: When the government introduced private prisons, they promised us that it would lead to better performance. But six months on, Serco’s Mt Eden Corrections Facility is still failing to meet basic performance targets. And remember, these are intentionally soft targets, set below Corrections’ performance so National could declare privatisation a success.
Choices, choices: waste at Pukekohe
You know how the Government is so skint, and absolutely much get back into surplus by 2014/15, that it has cut education at every level, cut conservation, cut home insulation, cut Kiwisaver, cut Working for Families .. etc etc. They even created a new super-ministry to cut costs. And what’s the first action of Mobie Dick? $2.2 million sunk into Aussie V8s.
Open mike 06/07/2012
Open mike is your post. For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose. The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the link to […]
Banks case to Police lawyers
The Police have concluded their investigation into John Banks’ donations to his 2010 mayoral campaign. The Police legal section will now decide whether or not to prosecute. There are two tests; the evidential test and the public interest test. There is no question that if the evidence is sufficient, prosecution is in the public interest. It comes down to credibility – best decided in court.
ImperatorFish: The Higgs Boson: How The Politicians Reacted
What do our leaders in parliament have to say about the latest developments at the Large Hadron Collider?
Kiwiblog: media getting savvy?
The media have generally just regurgitated David Farrar’s angled statistics, stories and lines. Now we finally see a story that looks behind: this is a blog from one of the National Party elite, so why is he running a story on Police pay? Are National looking to move on this?
What is “progress”?
If “two-income families are increasingly worse off than single-income families were a generation ago”, then something is seriously wrong with our definition of “progress”.
TwistedHive: Thar she blows
There’s a new member in the ‘sphere, a cheeky little blog called Twisted Hive that appears to be a member of what you might call the Labour Ulterior, that great mass of Labour people who are unhappy with and feel excluded by the way things have been managed lately. This post, though, is about Steven Joyce’s white whale.
Can you afford to buy shares?
The median household has $1700 in the bank – you couldn’t really term that savings, it’s operating cash. The Nats want us to fork out at least a grand a time to participate in each share float. That just doesn’t add up. Labour and the Greens are right, this isn’t an opportunity for ordinary people to invest, it’s a wealth transfer to the elite.
A quick question
The Nats are going to terminate the benefits of those who fail or refuse drug tests. I have a question…
Visions of the brighter future
A rock and a hot place
Yesterday National pollster David Farrar excitedly quoted from a George Monbiot article saying peak oil isn’t happening. Two problems: 1) Farrar omitted to quote the bits of the article saying that the flipside of no peak oil would be runaway climate change. 2) the report Monbiot’s article is based on is written by an oil executive who claims we’ll stumble on endless cheap oil and all live happily ever after.
Open mike 05/07/2012
Open mike is your post. For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose. The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the link to […]
1 job 312 applicants
High levels of unemployment in NZ are both a condemnation of the Nats’ bungling of the economy, and a reality check on their perpetual grandstanding beneficiary bashing.
Paul Reynolds takes the money and runs
$20 million. That’s how much Paul Reynolds pocketed during his disastrous 5 years as CEO of Telecom. You could have employed dozens of teachers and nurses over that period for that money. Instead, it all went to one man as the company he headed went down the toilet. What a broken system capitalism is. The kicker: the $1.75m goodbye gift, on which he got a $100,000 tax cut. Nice.
Spin the wheel
Legitimate calls for inquiries
Key has dismissed calls for an inquiry into the Police’s actions in the Dotcom affair. He says that the Greens call for inquiries every week. In fact, they’ve called for 19 in the past year and a half. Is that too many? Well, the Auditor-General didn’t think so: she responded positively to the Greens’ call for a investigation into Key’s dodgy SkyCity deal.
Open mike 04/07/2012
Open mike is your post. For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose. The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the link to […]
Reasonable doubt
There’s some very wrong with the Police. A second murder trial in a month ending in acquittal (the Qwaze case wasn’t even a homicide). A case based on evidence that was never going to make it past reasonable doubt. This comes on top of the increased politicisation of the police and the grounds for two over-the-top armed raids being destroyed in court.
ImperatorFish: Environmentalists Are Not The Problem, Mr Groser
Tim Groser in the NBR: “Our enemies who are internal, will find one cow in one stream and feed it back to environmental activists in the developed world to be used to try to exclude New Zealand’s products and services in the ludicrous belief this will somehow help New Zealand.” Paranoid, much? And don’t you think the polluters are the problem, not the people who fail to hush it up?
Even Bob Jones against asset sales
Bob Jones may be a facetious old bugger but he knows a rort when he sees one. And asset sales are a rort: “Since the advent of the industrial revolution every business has sought the bliss of a monopoly. The competitive market economy denies that, except in unique situations, such as for example with our hydro electricity generating dams. So why sell them?”
Minimum pricing
All the evidence (eg) shows that increasing the price of harmful substances is the best way to decrease their use and, particularly, their abuse. Minimum pricing is one effective measure to do that for alcohol. But John Key disagrees. Based on … nothing. He hasn’t even taken the time to understand what minimum pricing is.
Iwi and the riverbeds
The only remaining possible legal threat to the Nats’ plans to sell off our power companies is a Treaty based claim to water rights or riverbeds.
National has no intention of ever enforcing ETS
As many of us expected, National has no intention of ever enforcing the ETS in the area where it makes the most difference to NZ emissions – agriculture.
Open mike 03/07/2012
Open mike is your post. For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose. The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the link to […]