Over the last three years, our current incompetent government has been running New Zealand into an artificial recession. But they keep blaming the previous government, especially on the oil and gas exploration ban. So over three years how have they done to realise active exploration? Not much. So we now have a typical Shane Jones face saving announcement, typically squandering taxpayers money again.
I don’t agree with people from New Zealand Initiative often. Mostly I just growl. But Oliver Hartwich who is the Initiative’s Executive Director wrote a article in The Australian “Christopher Luxon’s challenge for NZ economy: fiscal discipline or tax cuts”. Hard to find anyone aware of the current recession who could disagree outside of a small political minority in the National caucus.
There are the odd occasions when you find a political opinion that is a joy to read and quite revealing. An analysis piece by the Bagehot columnist that refers to the Conservatives as the dysmorphic Tory party completes its transition from the natural party of government into a British version of the Taliban…
National’s leak problem is developing into a full blown crisis as it struggles to deal with the repercussions of Jami-Lee Ross standing down.
Politik reports that some mayors from Northalnd are upset that they aren’t going to get a four lane boondoggle to feed more heavy trucks into traffic chaos that is the Auckland isthmus. They can stick their trucks up their body cavity of choice and learn to love rail. We don’t need more traffic in Auckland until we fix the disaster that National have left us.
Truckers don’t own the roadways. We do. If Ken Shirley wants a stricter adherence to user pays, then he should start with his trucking members. In the meantime the best thing we can do for improving the roading network is to get large trucks off of the road – they damage it way too much.
Richard Harman at Politik: A “Families’ Income Package” is likely to be at the core of this week’s Budget. Sources close to the Government have “leaked” details of the Budget to POLITIK.
I read this morning in Politik that Vernon Tava has left the Greens and appears to be leaning towards National. It doesn’t seem to me to much of a problem to lose a conservationist to National. It just means that the Greens can concentrate more effectively on the work of getting everyone trying to build a cleaner sustainable future.
I was rather amused reading Politik’s “Despite the pact Shaw takes on Robertson“ and was struck by the strange way that some political commentators (and probably some politicians) view the world at the political coalface. They really need to start to think about political parties as being like any other organisation. Tactical compromises without a strategic focus will always kill any organisation – eventually.
