Author Archive

Will Sandy decide the election?

Written By: - Date published: 7:47 am, October 30th, 2012 - 53 comments

The US Presidential election is close. Really close. The political futures markets favour Obama about 2 to 1 but polls of the nationwide popular vote and the polls in key states, such as Ohio and Virginia, are essentially tied. Enter the October surprise – Sandy, the latest ever recorded Atlantic storm, now coming ashore and pounding key battleground states.

Sprawl does not equal affordability

Written By: - Date published: 9:39 am, October 29th, 2012 - 85 comments

Listening to the Nats on housing affordability, it’s pretty clear that their only plan is to allow more sprawl. So, let’s say this clearly: sprawl is expensive, not cheap, and it is not lack of housing but over-investment in house price speculation that leads to high prices. National’s ‘solution’ is for the country to needlessly spend tens of billions.

29%

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, October 27th, 2012 - 172 comments

The latest Roy Morgan poll has Labour down 4.5% to 29%. There’s no way to varnish it, this is a very bad poll for Labour, particularly for David Shearer. Yeah, it’s just one poll, and it does come off the back of the GCSB tape debacle. But it’s part of a broader trend of Labour […]

Protecting criminal cops

Written By: - Date published: 8:56 am, October 26th, 2012 - 14 comments

Detective Inspector Grant Wormald and his Organised and Financial Crime Agency appear to be a rogue police unit that thinks it’s above the law. They acted illegally in the Dotcom raid, they had GSCB illegally spy on Dotcom, Wormald appears to have perjured himself, and, now, there’s the illegal fake prosecution that has led to 21 accused criminals going free.

Government failing on jobs, education

Written By: - Date published: 7:29 am, October 25th, 2012 - 46 comments

A TV3 poll shows that 49% to 46% of people believe National is failing to build its promised “brighter future”. The two big weaknesses: jobs and education. By nearly 2 to 1 margins, people believe that National is failing to provide full employment (it says something that this isn’t actually a National Party goal) and failing to provide the best education system possible.

The false economy of sprawl

Written By: - Date published: 9:28 am, October 24th, 2012 - 95 comments

Housing is too expensive. It has been driven up by ‘investors’ in pursuit of a safe, hands-off, tax-free return. 8% of the people own about 40% of the houses. That’s the problem – over-allocation of savings from the upper-middle class into housing pushing prices up, out of reach of the middle and working class, who become their tenants. The Nats’ solution: more sprawl.

Supernumerary

Written By: - Date published: 3:50 pm, October 22nd, 2012 - 100 comments

I’ve been thinking about what you might call a ‘good problem’ for the Left.. but it leads me to a ‘problem problem’. OK, so let’s say we win the next election – as the Left must do and should do given how unpopular the Nats’ policies are and, for the last year, how inept their political management has been. How do you share the economic portfolios out?

Crisis, what crisis?

Written By: - Date published: 9:50 am, October 19th, 2012 - 92 comments

A great piece by Byran Gould yesterday on National’s refusal to acknowledge the jobs crisis in manufacturing, even as the ANZ says unemployment is on its way up to 7%. National is really on the wrong side of public perception and the wrong side of history here. They look like ostriches trying to deny the problem, while the Left is presenting the solutions.

Jones to jump to NZ First?

Written By: - Date published: 8:26 am, October 19th, 2012 - 45 comments

I see David Farrar’s retailing the rumour that’s been doing the rounds over the last week that Shane Jones is in talks with Winston to make the jump from Labour to become Deputy Leader of NZ First. This makes a lot of sense for Jones – he’s to the right of Labour, has a reputation for being a bit un-PC and has the gift of the gab that a leading NZ First politician needs.

Treasury’s spin fail on electricity numbers

Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, October 16th, 2012 - 2 comments

Treasury is trying to tell us that private power companies don’t charge more than SOEs to justify privatisation. Of course, a moment’s thought tells you that private owners, with higher costs of capital, need larger profits than public ones. And private owners always complain the SOEs don’t charge enough. Moreover, Treasury’s spin is a complete fail.

No accountability in National Government

Written By: - Date published: 7:28 am, October 16th, 2012 - 252 comments

I watched Paula Bennett and her MSD CEO make excuses and say sorry yesterday as they revealed that they had let the personal data of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders sit in the open at WINZ kiosks – and it’s all still open to anyone working at MSD. I didn’t hear either of them offer their resignations. What do they think we pay them for?

Shooting the moon

Written By: - Date published: 6:47 am, October 12th, 2012 - 74 comments

If I were in Labour, I would be looking at the polls and thinking that a small target strategy is best: preserve your credibility at all costs, keep your head down, pick up the votes as National self-destructs – it worked for Key in 2008. Instead, Shearer seems to be trying to shoot the moon with a knock out blow to Key (interesting parallel to Norman’s export policy there).

Research-based opinions

Written By: - Date published: 11:12 am, October 11th, 2012 - 63 comments

Bill English on quantitative easing: “There are big risks with it and it is just barmy to suggest that in an economy growing at all that you would do it”. So, are the countries that are using QE to push up our currency growing? EU: -0.3% (14 of the 27 member states are growing), US: 2.1%, Switzerland: 0.6%, Japan: 3.3%. So, yes, countries use QE while growing – and it lets their businesses undercut ours.

Lab+Greens move well clear of National in latest poll

Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, October 11th, 2012 - 98 comments

The Key effect is over. That’s the conclusion you draw from the latest Roy Morgan poll. It shows National down to 41.5% and Lab+Green surging to 47%. The last time National polled consistently in this range was before Key became leader. Now Key’s no longer an asset, it’s only a matter of time before he’s a liability. The Collins and Joyce Factions will be sharpening the knives.

Two paths diverged

Written By: - Date published: 6:44 am, October 10th, 2012 - 16 comments

So, we know what Key’s utopia is: golf, holidays, no jobs, and, um, no toilets. But where are the Nats’ economic policies heading? Fast forward 20 years: low-skill, low-pay, ununionised, foreign-owned, volume-based extractive industries, rather than value-added manufacturing, massive current account deficit … it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Fortunately,there’s an alternative.

Manufacturing crisis

Written By: - Date published: 9:53 am, October 9th, 2012 - 19 comments

If I was at the manufacturing crisis summit this Friday, and if John Key was showing up rather than spending his time on Planet Key and claiming that manufacturing is doing “extremely well”, I would ask him this: How come when Hollywood calls, you drop everything and go; how come you arrest Dotcom for them and give them $50m a year; but when Kiwi jobs are bieng lost, all you have to offer is denials and the cold shoulder?

Greens call for new tools, QE to save jobs

Written By: - Date published: 9:51 am, October 7th, 2012 - 328 comments

40,000 manufacturing jobs gone in four years. Manufactured exports in free-fall. Tourism revenue collapsing. If that’s not a crisis, what is? Why is the government going to do? Nothing. Nothing. On Q+A, Russel Norman put forward a solid proposal: lower the OCR, new tools to stop housing booms, and quantitative easing to pay for Christchurch […]

More jobs on the line as Nats fails to act on the dollar

Written By: - Date published: 7:19 am, October 7th, 2012 - 59 comments

40 jobs in a hi-tech business repairing jet engines are set to be lost. The business’s profits are being slaughtered by the high dollar. The Bluff smelter could close – 900 jobs directly on the line, plus thousands more in the local economy – as Rio Tinto can’t make a profit with the dollar so high and aluminum prices down. How much longer will we do nothing?

Parata must be giving thanks for Dotcom

Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, October 4th, 2012 - 30 comments

If it weren’t for the fact that the Prime Minister is a) covering up for a corrupt, lying minister because he heads a support party and is, therefore, above accountability on Planet Key and b) being exposed as an inept and asleep at the wheel in his oversight of the nation’s spies, then Hekia Parata would be clinging on to her political career by her fingernails right now. Still, plenty of time for that.

Polls get worse for National

Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, October 1st, 2012 - 40 comments

The latest Roy Morgan poll has National at its lowest level of support since before the 2008 election

A vision for manufacturing

Written By: - Date published: 7:33 am, October 1st, 2012 - 117 comments

David Cunliffe has given another excellent economic development speech. I think what’s interesting is that he’s not really proposing new policy – what he’s saying is largely in line with the platform Labour ran in on 2011, but he’s articulating the vision behind those policies – the why, rather than just the how – which was lacking from Labour in 2011. Great stuff.

Where are the resignations?

Written By: - Date published: 10:12 am, September 30th, 2012 - 87 comments

John Key refuses to accept any responsibility for what his spies get up to. The only point of democratic responsibility for our spies doesn’t monitor them and won’t take the blame for failing to do so. He won’t fire a corrupt, lying minister, either. The rot is spreading to the public service. There has been not one resignation, not a single one, due to the Dotcom debacle.

Key plays the “don’t read, don’t care” card again

Written By: - Date published: 11:40 am, September 25th, 2012 - 19 comments

A couple of days before it was surely all going to come out – very messily and very publicly – in the Dotcom court case, Key has revealed that his spies illegally spied on Kim Dotcom. But, beyond that, Key won’t tell us anything apart from that he signed no warrant for spying on Dotcom (such a warrant would have been illegal anyway). Key has chosen not to find out more so that he wouldn’t have to answer questions.

The Right tilts at class-size windmills

Written By: - Date published: 8:48 am, September 24th, 2012 - 10 comments

The Righties are wetting themselves because the national standards supposedly show higher results in larger classes. But the data is unmoderated – you can’t compare schools to get national data. And the apparent link is down to special schools and deciles. So, what have we learned? Nothing. Certainly nothing about the impact of class sizes, anyway. But maybe a little more about the Rights’ willful blindness.

It came from Planet Key

Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, September 22nd, 2012 - 39 comments

John Key on the impoverished Chatham Islands, holding a huge crayfish. He says ‘big as a horse, freshly cooked, $80 a kilo.’ He kisses the cray, then looks at the camera and says ‘jealous?’ Christ, what a cock. Those 270,000 kids aren’t jealous, arsehole. They’re hungry. The fact he knows the price of cray off the top of his head but not how many Kiwis are unemployed tells you all you need to know.

Granny says – you can’t do that

Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, September 21st, 2012 - 16 comments

The ever forward looking and even-handed Herald devotes its editorial to attacking Labour for supporting Winston Peters’ Bill to make some small changes to the Reserve Banks’ objectives to bring them more in line with Australia’s. Leaving aside the fact that the Herald hasn’t attacked NZF or the 3 other parties who support this, only Labour, isn’t it time Granny got with the programme?

They’re trying to build a prison/for you & me to live in

Written By: - Date published: 8:47 am, September 21st, 2012 - 16 comments

National is celebrating the creation of 1300 jobs (only 300 permanent) with a prison. How many more prisons would they have to build to reverse the increase in unemployment under their watch and create 65,000 permanent jobs? Only 217. It’s ironic that the only job creation the free-market loving Nats can trumpet is a government-paid for prison.

Return to Planet Key

Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, September 20th, 2012 - 17 comments

Does anyone have the number for John Key’s supplier? Because when he answered a question in the House yesterday about poverty and low pay by saying that in his paradise, Planet Key, there would be no toilets and no jobs, my first thought was ‘man, that guy is on some good drugs’. My second thought was he’s gone and made that Planet Key tease into a meme that’ll haunt him.

Accountability is bad, mmmmk?

Written By: - Date published: 7:58 am, September 20th, 2012 - 11 comments

National says that opening up publicly-owned ports to the transparency that all our other publicly-owned organisations are subject to would be “taking New Zealand backwards”. Accountability is “inefficient” (failed port management hiding behind the lack of OIA coverage isn’t). That’s why they voted against Darien Fenton’s Bill making ports subject to the OIA.

Journey to Planet Key

Written By: - Date published: 6:40 am, September 19th, 2012 - 58 comments

In the House yesterday, Metiria Turei threw National’s ‘Planet Labour/Planet Green’ line back at Key, asking if ordinary people get to break the law too or if that privilege is reserved for ministers on Planet Key. Like all little bullies, Key couldn’t take it back. He lashed out and, like Romney’s fatal gaffe the same day, it exposed something of Key’s real world view.

Banks/Key – water on a stone

Written By: - Date published: 9:42 am, September 18th, 2012 - 61 comments

Get ready for a week of farce in the House. The Opposition will be peppering Key and Banks on the numerous holes in their position. Key will play dumb. But the Opposition has to plug away with persistent, forensic questions. One of them will crack in time.

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