National will vote against a Sue Kedgley’s member’s bill, which could see factory farms phased out within 5 years. Despite support from the Greens, Labour, United Future and the Maori Party, without National or ACT’s support this bill won’t pass it’s first reading. There’s no good excuse. The government needs to be shamed on this.
Dictatorships are good.
Or at least that’s what Farrar is saying now his team has one.
Two more Supercity polls. Brown ahead 29% v 17% in a Horizon poll. Herald’s Digipoll has it closer – 29.8% v 27.8%. Brown still ahead. Naturally, the Herald calls it too close to call. Looks like the Right’s plan for an Auckland coup is coming unstuck. Guess they’re lucky Labour and the Greens supported their nation-wide coup instead.
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Rodney Hide can either ditch Garrett and likely lose his leadership.
Or he can back him and likely kill off Act.
It’s a classic individual versus collective dilemma.
So ACT’s nutcase extraordinaire, the man whose only talent is to make John Boscawen look stable, has done it yet again. Forever getting attention […]
In the Today in Politics column in the DomPost there’s a snippy little piece about the Fairness at Work submissions. The CTU reckons around […]
Not content with destroying education to get at teachers, now National are after your health to get at doctors and nurses.
The feds want the OCR frozen.
But that’s not a sustainable answer for exporters.
It’s time to look at better ways of controlling inflation.
The Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act gives the Government the power to pass Orders in Council overriding nearly every law. That makes ministers, not Parliament, the sovereign power in this country. Scary stuff, which I haven’t seen justified by the facts of the quake recovery.
The state sector is in turmoil. Secondary teachers and medical technicians are striking for fair pay and against claw-backs in their work conditions. Junior doctors look set to join them. What’s the Nats’ reaction? They’ve appointed the Scottish ‘smiling assassin’, Dr Kevin Woods, who fired 1,500 nurses from the Scottish NHS and will apply the same formula here.
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Cameron Slater, aka Whaleoil, found guilty today in the Auckland District Court on eight breaches of suppression orders and one of identifying a […]
Continental Philosopher Slavoj Zizek talks about ethical buying and charity and the contradictions they entail. I’m not sure I agree with him (I […]
Here are the reasons for tomorrows strike from a member of the PPTA (Post Primary Teachers Association) in a guest post. The Ministry of Education has rejected them all.
You’d have to expect the spinners for the government to carefully ignore these issues in favour of their usual simplistic meaningless dogwhistling messages. That is the level they’d prefer that kids are educated to.
John Banks’ team really jumped the shark yesterday with their bizarre ‘poll tax’ attack on Len Brown. Banks claimed Brown was proposing a Thatcher-style poll tax to fund the Supercity instead of rates. Of course, Brown is proposing no such thing – he is saying we should look at replacing rates with income tax. Desperate, Banksie, desperate.
Stuff is reporting that Hone Harawira will not vote for the Nats’ foreshore and seabed legislation. And John Key is clearly upset. Sounds like someone needs the whambulance. Key’s just lost the ability to claim that he has genuinely circled the square, giving Pakeha and Maori both what they want. All he has really done is bought off the Maori Party leadership.
It seems Sarah Palin is stepping up her campaign to be the Republican’s candidate to run against President Obama in 2012. The world couldn’t ask for a better candidate to oppose Obama: She won’t have a show in hell.
Treasury has released its preliminary report on the economic impact of the Christchurch earthquake. GDP will be down up to 0.8% this quarter but after rebuilding net GDP for the next two years ends up 0.8% higher than it would have. Great! Let’s knock down Hamilton too and get a GDP boost! Actually, we’re just seeing the limits of GDP as a measure of wealth.
Jim Anderton’s mayoral campaign got a lot harder last week. He had been the favourite by a long, long way but Bob Parker has handled the disaster recovery well and he will win votes for that. But it doesn’t change why the people wanted shot of Parker and Anderton in his place. All’s not lost. Jim’s holding a community forum tonight in Woolston.
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It seems Act MP and wannabe tough guy David Garrett has a conviction for assault.
I guess you don’t have to dig too far beneath the skin of these Sensible Sentencing Trust types to find their inner thug.
Obviously tired of politicians saying one thing on the campaign trail and then doing the exact opposite when they’re in office (which reminds […]
Teachers are striking on Wednesday.
But there’s not a lot of information about why.
That’s an information void the government will fill if the PPTA doesn’t.
Reading the New York Times this weekend, I found this wee gem.
Compared to my iPad, I’d have to say (sadly) there is at least one thing that newspapers are better at. However I don’t think that this will prevent me from avoiding bloating landfills.
In the lecture theatre that the Radio NZ SuperCity debate was held this morning Len Brown clearly and easily won – but how did it appear on radio?
Bill Ralston and his coterie did his best to even up the perceptions…
To have power and independence, any country needs a solid economic base. That’s even more true of superpowers/empires. To secure their economic sovereignty they need the raw materials and markets of less powerful countries. They reinforce their economic sovereignty by taking others’. China does it by buying up whole supply chains.
I meant to post on Sean Plunket’s last day with Morning report last week but better late than never I suppose. Plunket is […]
“The Spirit Level” is a book with a simple message: An unequal society is a sick society. It’s a message that has the right wing running scared, and trying to dodge the issue by pretending that they believe in “equality of opportunity”. But across society there’s no such thing…
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In today’s, Sunday-Star Times, Rob Stock picks up on a topic I’ve been writing about: “THE EARTHQUAKE has exposed a policy that must be changed immediately – the way the Earthquake Commission is funded.Significant numbers of people will get nothing from the commission because it is funded by a levy on house insurance.”
The Government has announced it intends to push through emergency legislation to expedite the rebuilding of Christchurch. The urge to put things back the way they were is only natural in the wake of a huge physical and psychic shock but shouldn’t we have a think about how we want Christchurch rebuilt before we let anyone go ahead willy-nilly?
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