Author Archive
Hickey slams Key’s get rich quick scheme
Written By: - Date published: 9:20 am, February 18th, 2010 - 13 comments
Is it just me or does this ‘financial hub’ idea of John Key’s sound a bit too much like a get rich quick scheme? Apparently all we have to do is exempt foreign owners of foreign assets stored in NZ-based trusts from tax and the money will roll in.
Dompost learns not to take English’s word
Written By: - Date published: 1:09 pm, February 17th, 2010 - 13 comments
The Dompost has repeated English’s false claims on GDP growth. They trusted the Minister of Finance to get his maths right. But English’s numbers are completely wrong. He can’t do simple maths, no wonder there’s no government leadership on the economy.
MMP campaign heats up
Written By: - Date published: 12:39 pm, February 17th, 2010 - 30 comments
The business elite wants to drag us back to the days of unfair elections and weak democracy, when business interests held even more sway than now. We don’t want to return to those days. We want to keep the best electoral system in the world – MMP.
Public: GST should pay for cuts to bottom rates
Written By: - Date published: 12:03 am, February 17th, 2010 - 16 comments
Key doesn’t have the money to keep his promise to make everyone better off or at least no worse off from tax reform. He doesn’t have pixies in the garden to make more money. But he can cut the bottom tax rates, and a new poll shows strong support for that move.
Our innumerate finance minister & friends
Written By: - Date published: 6:05 pm, February 16th, 2010 - 20 comments
Bill English claimed in the House today that the economy only grew by 0.9% a year in Labour’s last three years in power. Unfortunately for him the problem was his maths, not Labour’s economic policy. English can’t get simple percentages right, can we trust him with the nation’s finances?
No ideas? Bash some beneficiaries
Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, February 16th, 2010 - 30 comments
John Key says sickness and invalid’s benefit numbers are increasing because “the previous government encouraged a move off the unemployment benefit into those categories, which aren’t work testedâ€. You’ve been caught out on this lie by The Standard authors before, John. Did you think it would slip by us now?
Right turns a blind eye to middle NZ
Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, February 16th, 2010 - 62 comments
In their attempts to justify putting up GST on all New Zealanders to give huge tax cuts to the wealthy few, the Right are going so far as to argue that middle and low income New Zealand doesn’t even exist.
Key’s uranium mining interests
Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, February 16th, 2010 - 57 comments
John Key says Jackson Mining was just a gold mining company when he bought them and that they didn’t get involved in uranium until later. In fact, Jackson mining was already involved in uranium when Key listed his interest in the company last year
What is Whanau Ora? 2
Written By: - Date published: 7:49 pm, February 15th, 2010 - 41 comments
Asked to explain his billion dollar policy Key says: “Whanau Ora is a way of saying we’re going to measure outcomes, instead of just inputs into a family to give greater flexibility to a third party private providerâ€. I take that to be a long way of saying “I don’t know what Whanau Ora isâ€.
Whanau Ora, who gains?
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, February 15th, 2010 - 30 comments
Whanau Ora is a terrible idea. It is the beginning of the privatisation of social services, wrapped in a cloak of Maori-centred solutions for Maori. The Maori Party and the National Party can’t agree over (among many things) whether Whanau Ora will be open to all or just for Maori but the reality is that […]
Key confirms: tax up for middle NZ, down for rich
Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, February 15th, 2010 - 54 comments
Key has explicitly promised that no-one will be left worse off by these changes but he doesn’t have the money, can’t have to money, to do that if he persists in handing over buckets of money to the rich.
Love for Key dying in middle NZ
Written By: - Date published: 11:54 am, February 14th, 2010 - 50 comments
Matt McCarten asks “are we still in love?” with John Key after a year of do-nothing government and a promised ‘step change’ that is really just favours for National’s rich mates. If the views of people on McGehan Close, Key’s famous ‘underclass’ street are anything to go by, the answer is increasingly ‘no’.
Columnists slam Key’s lack of plan
Written By: - Date published: 4:14 pm, February 13th, 2010 - 110 comments
Tracy Watkins awards the first week of Parliamentary politics this year to Phil Goff, and points out that it’s as much due to his and Labour’s much improved performance as it is to Key and National’s shambolic, over-promise, under-deliver governance. (more…)
No help for the invisible
Written By: - Date published: 12:10 pm, February 12th, 2010 - 5 comments
Relating to what I wrote yesterday about the Right and much of the media being largely blind to the existence of those of us on low and middle incomes, here’s an interesting piece from the New York Times: The folks in the upper-income group are not suffering much, if at all, from the profound reversals […]
Nats & Maori Party headed for foreshore & seabed showdown
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, February 12th, 2010 - 25 comments
It turns out that the silly ‘no-one owns it’ option for the foreshore and seabed is John Key’s ‘elegant solution’. Here he is defending the proposal: “It is a concept where you don’t get into the emotional debate of ownership. Now it sounds a bit foreign when you think about it, but no-one owns the air, […]
The lie behind the Right’s attack on wages
Written By: - Date published: 7:39 am, February 12th, 2010 - 35 comments
Paying a person doing the same work as another person less money because of their sex or religion or ethnicity or any other grounds prohibited under the Human Rights Act is illegal and abhorrent. Yet, the Right wants to do just that with a private member’s bill from Roger Douglas reintroducing a lower minimum wage for 16 and […]
Nats need to follow Labour’s lead on GST
Written By: - Date published: 12:43 pm, February 11th, 2010 - 9 comments
“Last GST hike had little impact, say tax experts” – Herald The article is about inflation but it is also true of growth. There is no evidence that increasing GST from 10% to 12.5% and cutting income taxes boosted growth. In fact, the country entered a long period of stagnation and recession. And why would […]
Quick comments
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, February 11th, 2010 - 18 comments
The Government and the secretive Iwi Leadership Group are looking at an option where no-one owns the foreshore and seabed. It’s often forgotten that the Ngati Apa case, which sparked the foreshore and seabed, contraversy was about big business. Ngati Apa wanted to have title over the seabed so it could undertake aquaculture, bypassing a […]
The Right’s blindness towards middle New Zealand
Written By: - Date published: 7:44 am, February 11th, 2010 - 100 comments
I find it frustrating that the debate over tax concerntrates on the top rate rate, which doesn’t apply to 90% of taxpayers. It’s as if the Right, and many in the media, are either blind to the existance of people on normal incomes or severely underestimate their number. John Key, of course, is the worst. […]
Key’s magic money-pot
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, February 10th, 2010 - 25 comments
John Key has indicated that the Government will lift the GST rate to 15% and remove depreciation from investment houses. According to the Tax Working Group, that’ll raise $3.6 billion. That revenue will then be spent on compensation and tax cuts. First, he has promised compensation for the GST increase to beneficiaries, people on working […]
How did Nats know parents’ addresses?
Written By: - Date published: 6:57 am, February 10th, 2010 - 31 comments
You’ll recall that last week National spent $200,000 of taxpayer dollars on a proganda drop defending its national standards. This was a targeted exercise – 350,000 of the pamphlets were produced, enough for the parents of each primary school pupil. So, how did they know what addresses to send them to? You can’t get information on […]
Commentators damning of Key’s visionless speech
Written By: - Date published: 5:46 pm, February 9th, 2010 - 97 comments
Bernard Hickey: He had a chance to follow up all the talk of real reform to create a ‘step change’. He had all the experts under the sun from inside and outside of government telling him he needed to do something. He commissioned reports. He talked a good game. Today he did nothing. He did […]
Goff’s response to Key
Written By: - Date published: 2:53 pm, February 9th, 2010 - 79 comments
Even National Party pollster, David Farrar, could only give Key’s speech a B Goff says that it’s ‘Alan Bollard 1, John Key 0’. There’s talk of a step change but no actual plan that will close the gaps. ‘No bold plan, no plan at all’ ‘Big Tuesday? More like tip-toe Tuesday’ Rubbishs the notion that […]
Key’s statement to Parliament
Written By: - Date published: 2:34 pm, February 9th, 2010 - 59 comments
Very little specific so far. According to Stuff, National will increase GST to ‘up to’ 15% – which I take to mean 15%. He has ruled out a land tax, capital gains tax, or tax on risk-free rate of return. That leaves just closing the loopholes that allow landlords to offset losses on investment properties against […]
Fair share for workers best way to close gap with Aussie
Written By: - Date published: 10:56 am, February 9th, 2010 - 21 comments
30 years ago, according to John Key, wages in Australia and New Zealand were the same. Since then New Zealand wages have stagnated and Australian wages haven grown away from us to the point where they are nearly 40% higher. The conventional wisdom is that this is due to faster economic growth in Australia, driven […]
Ideology trumps science for the Right
Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, February 9th, 2010 - 63 comments
Consider these results from opinion surveys of experts different areas of research, I won’t tell you the areas of research just yet: In one, 97% of actively publishing experts agree with a statement (I’ll give you the statement below) concerning their field. In the other field, 46.5% of experts fully agreed with the statement, 27.9% agreed […]
Key: Look over here! Please, look over here
Written By: - Date published: 6:45 pm, February 8th, 2010 - 44 comments
Well, wages are stagnating, unemployment is just shy of its all-time high, crime is up, and there is no chance of the Government fulfilling its flagship promise – closing the gap with Australia by 2025. Tomorrow, a make or break speech will lay out Key’s programme of action for the year ahead, and expectations are […]
Quick thoughts
Written By: - Date published: 11:06 am, February 8th, 2010 - 36 comments
It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that a government that spends half its time on holiday and the rest on PR stunts is never going to get New Zealand to catch Australia by 2025 but having the Reserve Bank Governor say its impossible, that’s hugely embarrassing. Of course, Key is refusing to acknowledge the […]
Nats lying over firing Aroha’s mum?
Written By: - Date published: 7:07 am, February 8th, 2010 - 30 comments
In yesterday’s Herald Jackie Blue told us she’d sacked the mother of young Aroha because she had to merge offices with Sam Lotu-Iiga. But some investigative work at The Hand Mirror suggests otherwise…
Unemployment: real action, not vague promises needed
Written By: - Date published: 4:41 pm, February 6th, 2010 - 43 comments
The Herald reports: “[Key] also raised the 15 per cent Maori unemployment rate, saying improving education outcomes for Maori children would help address that.” Improved education sounds good but: 1) how is Key going to actually lift Maori educational achievement? Not by cutting millions from the education budget like he did last year. Not by […]
Paula, John, seriously, put away the champagne
Written By: - Date published: 12:53 pm, February 6th, 2010 - 2 comments
Paula Bennett and John Key have been, once again, prematurely popping the bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of rising unemployment. In the face of the shocking 7.3% unemployment rate announced on Thursday, the pair responded by saying ‘ah, but that was December quarter things are better now.’ They pointed to the number […]
Recent Comments