Interesting to see the truth coming out about the NZ media’s hero Peter Whittall. Pike River was very much Whittall’s baby. 29 of his employees died in the mine he designed and ran. I’d be interested to hear from a journo the story of why the NZ media chose to portray this as an unavoidable accident, and exonerated the company from the start.
If a corporation can have the legal rights of a person, why can’t the environment can’t have the legal protections of a person too?
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Chris Carter’s egocentric valedictory earlier this week didn’t exactly cover him in glory. Whether it should ever have gotten to this point is another matter. It’s interesting to review the evolving views of Standard authors on the issue. Did Carter do this to himself or did mismanagement from the leadership escalate the situation?This guest post takes the second view.
Nicky Hager’s Other People’s Wars and the Urewera ‘terror raids’ fiasco raise, once again, serious questions. Are the security agencies that are meant to protect our society from threats, themselves operating outside the law and democratic control? Not according to Key. And he knows because he got advice. From whom? Why the security agencies of course.
Margaret Mutu argues she isn’t being racist in her call to stop Europeans immigrating here because their cultures are inherently racist. She says she can’t be racist because racism is a power issue – discrimination against and degradation of people by others on the basis of ethnicity – and Maori are not in a position of power. But, wait a minute, is Mutu really powerless?
IHC workers won a lengthy court battle to have the work they do overnight (so-called ‘sleepover’ shifts) recognised as work worthy of the minimum wage. The $300m in backpay they were due would have bankrupted IHC. The government, so keen to bailout corporate mates, refused to help. Now, the workers have given us, taxpayers, a $200m break on their debt.
RNZ had the news this morning that the schools most strongly opposing the nonsense of “national standards” – the Boards Taking Action Coalition – have decided to change their tactics.
Four years ago we were told tales about military style training camps, terrorism, Molotov Cocktails, firearms etc. Police laid charges and put people’s lives through hell. Now, four years later, they can’t prove any of it. If you or I were put through what they were put through we’d expect, and deserve, an apology. Why should it be any different for them?
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Respected Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf argues that the last thing we need in a world of excess saving is for creditworthy governments to cut their borrowing. He presents evidence that shows that fiscal deficits are helpful not because they return the economy to swiftly to health but because they promote the (required) painfully slow healing. If the debt diagnosis is wrong then so is the asset sales cure.
Sometimes the similarities between life and art are uncanny.
A reader sent us in a Steven Joyce lookalike pic (over the jump).
“Just keep to your promises. I was at some of the family meetings where you promised off camera to parents who were in tears that you would do your utmost to try to get the men out. Money was not a problem. Those same parents have gone home and cradled their kids that are crying. Do what you say and just pull your finger out and do it.”
If electricity assets were part privatised, future governments couldn’t make the kind of reforms that National made earlier this year because of the need to consider private investors’ rights. Pretty simple, eh? Tell that to Hekia Parata. Bill English has his head in the sand on the effect of falling markets and can’t guarantee Kiwi ownership.
This post by I/S at NoRightTurn will upset some but I think it makes an important point. It’s natural to soothe the pain of a death by labeling the cause heroic. The danger is that this understandable emotional reaction becomes hijacked to justify continuing an SAS deployment that is all about currying favour with the US and was never worth a soldier’s life in the first place.
National is the party of middle aged white guys, but according to their chief spinster we shouldn’t care…
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Robert Reich writes about the impact of growing inequality in the United States. He has a graphic that shows the effects over the past hundred years. As the US and Europe come closer to their Niagara fall, the logic is compelling. Edmund Burke’s saying that those who don’t know their history are destined to repeat it comes to mind.
Treasury has now adopted their masters’ political line on income statistics. The latest Treasury MEI uses average after-tax wages to argue that an average worker is better off by 2% since October 2010. In real terms the average worker’s gross wage less inflation means they are 1% worse off. The average of $50,000 a year is a long way above the median wage as indicated by the 2009 IRD distribution figures. In reality a few are hugely better off, some are ok, and most are still worse off.
The “Urewera 18” are now down to four. The police persecution has now been dropped for eleven of those charged in the Operation […]
Once again recent headlines prompt me to ask if in 2008 we really chose a brighter future after all.
The New York Times has a graphic comparing the outcomes of economic policy in the US, specifically comparing the broadly social democratic policies prevalent between 1847 and 1979, and the NeoLiberal policies since 1980. The differences are astounding.
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The stories coming out of the Pike inquiry paint a picture of a company with a basic disregard for workers’s safety.
But we shouldn’t expect anything else after thirty years of putting the interests of business ahead of everyone else.
Labour’s Charles Chauvel is campaigning hard in Ohariu, and would certainly bring a fresh approach and much more energy to representing the electorate. The polls are close, so close that John Key has had to come out to Ohariu’s small party launch to support Dunne. This may backfire – word is that many people in the electorate don’t like being told how to vote.
Listening to John Key explain the lack of women on his list is like entering a place where words are devoid of both meaning and melody, and eloquence is heresy. When Key concluded “of course we’d like to have more women in the top 10 and that involves us putting more women in the top 10 if we possibly can”, I heard the sound of one hand clapping.
There’s plenty of good posts around already on National’s election list, how its dominated by white men and there’s very little room for new blood. But just how bad is their list? I thought I would do a comparison of the ethnic and gender balance of the National, Labour, Green, and ACT lists. Judge for yourself.
Denis Tegg on National’s head in the sand Energy Strategy. All the official international warnings have been dismissed and the government has forced official to remove any reference to peak oil. The minister flatly refused to answer questions about the impact of peak oil on her fossil-fuel centred plan at the strategy launch.
“Happy” anniversary Christchurch. And with it comes a broken promise, and an interesting legal decision.
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The right sure won’t be able to criticise Labour about a lack of renewal in their list after National’s release of their party list. If you want an actual example of what a non-renewing list really looks like, I think we now have the definitive one. It looks a lot like their energy policy this week – lots of pious talk about renewables but really just mining the same old things that have been doing for generations.
Reading the political spin from David Farrar (channeling Bill English) over the weekend, I have to keep reminding myself that he really has very little idea about the practicalities of business. Where he is concerned about political costs, I find from a perspective of an exporter that I’m far more concerned about reliability of services.
