Rortbuster Pete Hodgson unveiled yet more information about Pansy and Sammy Wong’s business activities in China on the taxpayer dime in Parliament yesterday. It’s damning material. The Auditor-General had decided not to investigate but there’s every chance she will now or that the Police will.
3 under the radar stories yesterday. All linked by ideology. Kiwirail to buy 300 wagons from China because its cheaper than building them here. Not allowed to consider wider economic gains. Collins outsources her new prison to a multi-national with a history of prisoner abuse. English wants more ‘value’ from public assets. Value for whom? The likes of Serco?
As a government and as a country we honoured the Pike River dead, as was right and proper. But now the hard part starts. What are we going to do for the Pike River survivors? The families who lost loved ones. The fellow workers who have now lost their livelihood.
Child poverty is on the rise again. My question to the National government is simple. What are you going to do to reverse this trend and lift children out of poverty? It’s your watch. What are you going to do?
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Let’s face it. A government doesn’t accidentally spend $15 billion more than its revenue while cutting billions in taxes. The unsustainably high deficit is intentional policy, not happenstance. In good times and bad, National’s answer is always to cut taxes. The objective is to make huge deficits that then need to be ‘fixed’ with spending cuts.
So Pansy’s gone. That should mean we can breeze over the fact that thanks to National’s economic policies (or lack thereof) the economy’s […]
Corrupt former National minister Pansy Wong has finally done the right thing and resigned from Parliament. Key didn’t want her to go. This […]
Key has been very busy defending sacked Minister Pansy Wong. He has been desperately ignoring the calls for an Auditor General’s investigation as the cracks in the whitewash report on her illegal spending continue to grow. But Key is very quick to call for the Auditor General to investigate a single solitary billboard.
Do you feel better off after the great tax swindle? Two recent surveys have shown that the significant majority of us do not. John Key has expressed his surprise at our ingratitude. But the numbers tell the story. Most of us don’t feel better off because we aren’t better off. The only surprise is that John Key is so completely out of touch as to fail to understand this.
National are consistently attacking the vulnerable in society – those who cannot fight back and complain. This is where a lot of their cuts are aimed at – those who need it most. Be it in health, education or welfare.
And in several recent health and education National cuts have hurt the most vulnerable – our children. Not just the massive ECE cuts of Tolley, but cuts hurting those at the bottom even more.
Two years ago we had one of the best government balance sheets in the world. Key said we didn’t have a debt problem. Two years of him as PM, and we sure have one now. When we learn exactly how dire things are later today, remember that National brought this on us by borrowing $3 billion a year for tax cuts that no-one noticed.
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How journalists make a hypothetical question based on a nutty claim and manufacture a sensational headline out of it. The really sensational headline is that western journos appear to have picked up the story from that world renowned nutter Anthony Watts raving about a fictional war between Russia and Poland. It looks like you can only rely on hard checked science news from some of the rational blogs, and a Chinese news agency…
Interesting piece by Sue Bradford over at Pundit. If the quote attributed to John Key is for real, it’s a shocker: “If we cancelled welfare to 330,000 people currently on welfare, how many would starve to death? Bugger all.”
So John Key predicts an unhappy New Year for Phil Goff who is at risk of being rolled… Because the ShonKey DonKey knows so much about the Labour Party and the extra-secret hidden leadership battles that are certain to be going on, according to his own imagination.
Get on with running the country John, and get us out of a double-dip recession before you start speculating on things you know nothing about.
I was in Christchurch this weekend for the second time since the quake. It felt like things are gradually getting worse. Compared to the pre-Christmas bustle in other cities, Christchurch CBD was a ghost-town. The public service’s emergency preparedness got us through the initial disaster – has enough been done since? What are your impressions?
The UN climate change talks at Cancun, Mexico, are finished. There were some positives, but not on the big issues. Reduction targets are still voluntary and still too low. We’re still on a catastrophic collision course with the laws of physics.
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One of the central tenets of Brand Key is that he can do what ‘normal’ politicians can’t. With his boundless optimism and those mysterious trader skills, he can solve problems no-one else can. For a while, some believed he can satisfied both Maori and the Rednecks on the foreshore. Of course, really, he had just done a cheap rebrand of the existing law.
A documentary that aired in Sweden last night. Fascinating. The origional can be viewed here. The following is from YouTube as it is […]
John Key deserves the award for Politician of the Year. But it’s not quite the honour Armstrong thinks it is. The Left wants a government to deliver results for the people’s health, wealth, family, safety, education, employment prospects etc. That’s why the Left is so critical of Key. He plays the ‘politician’ game well but does nothing meaningful.
Today Labour choose their candidate for Manurewa to replace George Hawkins. It’ll be a show of the party in good health, with 500 expected to turn up and vote on 7 candidates.
Next week there are 8 going for Te Atatu.
So in a week’s time we’ll know which 2 quality candidates will replace 2 over-inflated egos in 2011. It looks good for the future health and direction of the party.
Deborah Coddington, trying to justify leaving solo mums and their kids with no state support, says: “I’m nearly 60 and my generation were at it like rabbits when we were teenagers but there weren’t masses of teenage pregnancies because there was no DPB. You couldn’t raise a child on your own, therefore few women got pregnant.” A quick fact check.
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National, under the direction of Gerry Brownlee, continue to abuse parliamentary procedure and make bad law. They tried to ram 12 bills through on Thursday, resulting in them sitting under urgency until Saturday night. There is no proper oversight, no thinking through the possible problems with bills, and far too little chance for the public to have their say. We have procedure for a reason…
After parading his prejudices about for a bit, John Armstrong lauds Key as “politician of the year”. Key is popular yes, but is he actually effective? Is he a good leader? It won’t surprise you to learn that my answer is a resounding no. Care to convince me that I’m wrong? Go ahead — make your case…
Labour has opened the door on cross party negotiations to achieve a true consensus on the foreshore. But Tariana Turia is too locked in to ancient personal hatreds to do anything but reject the offer. In doing so she has become a huge obstacle to progress on the very goals that she claims to support. It’s time for Turia to step down.
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To arms! To arms! The Food Police are coming! Remember how I led you in the battle to get junk food back into schools? It was a near-run thing. If we hadn’t acted, the days of the 12 year-old who can’t climb a flight of stairs without wheezing and going red in the face might have been numbered. Now, National has hypocritically betrayed us.
OIA papers show how the Nats prostrated themselves for Warners. $6K was spent treating the movie execs like foreign dignitaries – ministerial cars, customs ‘facilitation’. Nats wanted to “present an image of an effective government that is worth working with“. All they showed was they had fallen for Warners’ hollow threats. Cost us $33 million.
The usual suspects are accusing Labour of “flip flopping” on its position on the foreshore and seabed. You have to admire their bare-faced gall eh?
The Auditor-General seems certain to launch an investigation into the Wongs’ taxpayer-funded travel as even more evidence shows the Parliamentary report isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. A majority of Kiwis want her to resign. Why John Key hasn’t already called on the A-G to investigate, as he did with Phil Heatley, is beyond me.
The sum Phil Heatley has so far spent trying to get three women and their families evicted from their state houses, an effort to look tough, is the equivalent to the cost of building two new state houses. Over half a million spent on an ultimately pointless exercise – one that’s far from finished.
John Armstrong pulls no punches on the constitutional review, the second time in recent history that he has called the government a disgrace. Add it to the ever growing list of outrageous behaviour from the Nats. Is this the worst government for democracy in the history of NZ?
