Jami-Lee Ross is to resign from Parliament amid further claims about unlawful activity from Tory leader Simon Bridges. Ross says he will stand in the Botany by-election. Ross also says he will lay a complaint against Bridges with the Police.
National has acted in breach of State Services Commission guidelines for the pre election period by having a flash opening of the Christchurch Justice Precinct even though it was not finished.
During the weekend one of National’s rising stars Amy Adams debates housing with Labour’s Phil Twyford. Adams was supremely confident but the data she relied on appears to have problems …
Yesterday Phil Twyford debated Amy Adams on the housing crisis. Adams was hopeless, the Nats still have no answers.
* in a list of developed nations for homelessness.
No further information from either Netsafe or the complainant. I can’t proceed any further apart from writing explicit site HDCA instructions. The Daily Blog has had the samehappen, with an attempt to gag any public debate on their actions by Netsafe. Amy Adams has hurriedly issued a press release saying how wonderful the HDCA is… I guess she doesn’t like debate.
It’s great that the government is planning some action on this shameful situation. It’s a pity that they are treating the consequences, not the underlying social problems that contribute so much to the causes, and it’s a pity that it’s taken so long.
In the spirit of bi partisanship the Standard wishes to offer the candidates for leadership of the National caucus guest post slots and the ability to answer readers’ questions.
Following the shock resignation of John Key as Prime Minister the question will be asked. Who will the next leader of the National Party be?
The Government has agreed to pay $925,000 compensation to David Bain, not for wrongful conviction but as an ex gratia payment for the flaws in the compensation process.
A review of some commentary about the leak of information from the Bain compensation claim report includes a comment from David Seymour which is surprisingly good.
Leaks to the Herald about details from the report investigating the compensation claim by David Bain suggests that the Government is moving to refuse the claim.
A public private organisation with the acronym CERT was announced this week along with the new cyber security strategy. CERT’s role is to provide information to government so it can protect against cyber threats. Which is one of the roles of the GCSB.
This week we have had the release of the Priestley Report into the escape of Phillip Smith which details a litany of problems within Corrections and overnight there have been reports of rape and assault on a person moved from segregation in Serco managed South Auckland Correctional Facility. But no sign of Corrections Minister Sam Lotu Iiga. Where is he?
Goff has attempted to throw a fire-cracker into the notion of the National Party leadership and caucus being one big happy family. Is this the Labour Party’s way of sowing seeds of discontent without tainting the image of their leader? It is NOT Dirty Politics by any normal understanding of that term as captured in the book of the same name. Is this Goff’s role now? To box from the shadows?
Amy Adams has congratulated Chris Finlayson’s commitment to equality in Judicial appointments for the first all female Court of Appeal sitting. However each of the Judges had been appointed to the Judiciary by the last Labour Government. And Finlayson’s history of judicial appointments still favours male appointments.
Whether it’s about election donations or portfolios, some people do seem to think MPs should always get the benefit of the doubt.
Amy Adams announced yesterday that $600,000 worth of legal reports about the Bain claim for compensation were going to be junked. Judith Collins has some explaining to do.
Nick Smith today announced proposed changes to the Resource Management Act. It is likely he will resuscitate the reforms that were stalled after Peter Dunne refused to support them last year. ACT’s David Seymour has said he will support the changes even though he did not know what they are. Treasury are to release a paper with proposals for change. Updated lprent – yep National stupidity reprised.
Megan Woods has discovered that three OIA requests processed within the same day by Judith Collins’ office for Cameron Slater were not entered in a log of successful OIA requests recently released by Amy Adams.
Labour has announced its water policy and proposed that a fair price for irrigation takes be imposed and that the country’s waterways be improved over this generation. But Amy Adams thinks that providing clean rivers is somehow an attack on rural New Zealand. It is strange that she thinks that clean rivers should be such a terrible thing.
No Right Turn on the Environmental Reporting Bill that has the watchdogs up in arms. Listening to Amy Adams last night going on about how transparent and open to public scrutiny regulations are made me wonder what bloody universe she lived in – bizarro world perhaps?. Submissions on the Environmental Reporting Bill are due on Thursday.
Who will it be? Judith? Simon? Hekia? Amy? Or a surprise?
There is danger of reading too much into polls months out from an election. Commentators were claiming that National was too strong to lose the next election based on a rogue poll. Few looked at multiple polls, accounted for the margin of error nor the trends over past months. The last fortnight has seen a National with the latest Roy Morgan Poll plummeting from the Colmar Brunton result of 51% to 45.5%. And it is based on a lack of ministerial performance…
This week Hekia Parata has achieved what I thought was impossible. She has shown even worse judgment than Judith Collins and is threatening to replace Collins as National’s minister who is most in trouble. Hekia’s days as a Minister must be numbered …
Further questions have arisen about Amy Adams’ involvement with decisions relating to Canterbury water and in particular the decision to extend the term of the existing commissioners.
Just a wee list to try and keep track of the current scandals our dear friends in the National party are dealing with.
Amy Adams is now facing questions of conflict of interest after details have been published that land and company shares she owns may increase in value because of the proposed Canterbury Irrigation Scheme.
After having the past five and bit years with National’s negative policies about anything to do with new technologies, it is really nice to see some partially formed red-tinged morning ideas about how to encourage local usage of the net appearing on the sky’s horizon. National’s ICT strategy seems to see how uselessly slow they can do everything and how much they can slow down the development of ICT in NZ.
When I first heard a Labour staffer had accidentally sent Amy Adams’ office a document on ICT my first thought was “here we go again.”
But then I heard Adams’ weird and defensive interview on Checkpoint. So I took a look at the actual paper and realised just why she was so awkward and nervous on what should have been an easy political hit.
Dave Hansford contrasts the way that France handles its usage of waterways by farmers with the unsustainable degradation of NZ farmers. For that matter with the way that farming in the France is targeted at high value rather than commodity factory farming. Let’s have the really tough conversation: is a low-value, mass-market business model really the best we can do? Are cheap, anonymous, industrial commodities our finest work? And are they worth the hidden cost to farmers, taxpayers and the environment?
The Government appears to be softening us up for a financial contribution to Chorus in the realm of $250 million so that it can do what it has a contractual obligation to do anyway. And TUANZ thinks that some insider trading is going on with Chorus’s shares.
In news this week a Putaruru woman walked 25 kilometers to attend a compulsory WINZ meeting despite there being no jobs available and the Government signalled that it was going to help Chorus with costs overruns despite Chorus having a contractual obligation to roll out the fibre optic network. On Planet Key beneficiaries are obviously expected to comply with their requirements no matter what but rich corporations will be given a helping hand when times get tough.
I welcomed Amy Adams independent review of Chorus’s financial claims in response to Chorus’s sad song. Not something I should say in a […]
Matthew Hooton said this week that Cameron Slater should put up or shut up. Slater then promised explosive new revelations in the SST and the Herald today. As detailed by Karol in her post The Blame Game the revelations were, but I suspect not in the way that Slater had hoped for. Because he has succeeded beyond what I thought would be possible in converting a story about a a philandering mayor into a story of how forces on the right tried to usurp the democratic choice of Aucklanders.
