Author Archive

US ‘shoes-for-guns’ program in Iraq backfires

Written By: - Date published: 12:05 pm, December 15th, 2008 - 15 comments

[The shoe-thrower is a journo from a Baghdad newspaper taking his opportunity to make his feelings known during Bush’s surprise farewell visit to Iraq. In Arab culture, the sole of the shoe, being dirty, is insulting.]

Cui bono?

Written By: - Date published: 11:32 am, December 15th, 2008 - 16 comments

I’m no lover of the car industry but it’s interesting to see why the effort to put together a bailout for US carmakers has failed. Seems the Repubicans couldn’t face the horror of a 14 billion dollar payout, which is chump change compared to the welfare Wall St has gorged itself on, with far less […]

Red ink

Written By: - Date published: 11:01 pm, December 12th, 2008 - 26 comments

Hilarious. Jon’s got a serious point though. Newspapers worldwide are in trouble. Many predict they will soon have to be handed out free to commuters in an attempt to keep circulation high enough to run on advertising. Here in New Zealand, the major newspapers’ circulation fell 4% in the last year alone. APN and Fairfax, the duopoly which […]

Dulce et Decorum est

Written By: - Date published: 2:19 pm, December 12th, 2008 - 35 comments

Imagine: you are a new MP. Tens of thousands of your fellow New Zealanders have shown a great faith in you; they have shown that they want you to be one of their select representatives in the most powerful body in the land – our sovereign Parliament. You now have great power, privilege and responsibility, […]

The Standard Week: 5-12 December

Written By: - Date published: 11:24 am, December 12th, 2008 - 5 comments

National/ACT won the election, fair enough. They won the right to govern and attempt to pass their laws. What they did not win is the right to behave like an elected dictatorship – keeping their laws secret until the last minute then passing them in the dead of night without any chance for the public […]

Risk

Written By: - Date published: 9:21 am, December 12th, 2008 - 43 comments

If you’re still wondering what the Fire at Will Bill (about to become law just over a day after it was first made pubic) is all about take a look at No Right Turn’s analysis. It is a poorly-written and poorly thought-out law. It takes away your right, if you are fired when the first 90 days of working at […]

Present

Written By: - Date published: 1:03 pm, December 11th, 2008 - 9 comments

I was sent this by a comrade in the union movement. You can download the A3 poster here to do poster runs. There’s already a bunch up in central Wellington this morning. Or why not grab the image on the left and send an email to your friends and family letting them know (in your […]

Training wheels

Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, December 11th, 2008 - 18 comments

On the first day of Parliament, Gerry Brownlee made a complete hash of his role as Leader of the House. Despite having repeatedly needed Michael Cullen’s assistance to organise the order of business in the Business Committee, Brownlee mucked up procedures in the House, which Labour gleefully exploited. John Key tried to make light of […]

Tax increases into law

Written By: - Date published: 11:15 am, December 11th, 2008 - 46 comments

The tax bill has just been passed into law. The Maori Party voted for it. They also voted against the Cullen amendment that would have created a tax credit to cancel ou the tax increase on low income workers. Te Ururoa didn’t show up to Backbenches. I haven’t heard a single Maori Party MP defend […]

No longer so critical?

Written By: - Date published: 10:12 am, December 11th, 2008 - 1 comment

Our new Attorney-General, National’s Chris Finalyson, on the importance of select committees: Select Committees are the engine room of Parliament. They are also intended to provide a level of public and political scrutiny for the range of legislation some routine and some contentious promoted by the government and by individual MPs. They are an important […]

Happiness? How much can you sell that for?

Written By: - Date published: 9:05 am, December 11th, 2008 - 41 comments

We’re told that every country in the OECD except New Zealand and Denmark has a probation period like National/ACT’s Fire at Will law. Apart from being incorrect – we already have provision for probation periods like other countries do, difference is in those countries and under our current law a dismissal can be challenged as unjustified, the […]

On mandates

Written By: - Date published: 6:54 am, December 11th, 2008 - 16 comments

The National/ACT line in defending pushing through legislation like the Fire at Will Bill under urgency, without any select committee process, without any of the normal procedures for the proposed law to be publicly reviewed, even without tabling the Bill before it is to be voted on, is that the election gave them a mandate […]

The prideful cowards

Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, December 10th, 2008 - 24 comments

So far, the Maori Party has refused to take its opportunities to contribute to the debate on the tax bill before Parliament. They have just sat meekly and voted for National/ACT’s Bill. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see anything ‘mana-enhancing’ (to use a phrase from the National-Maori support agreement) about voting for a […]

Will Hone keep his oath?

Written By: - Date published: 10:25 am, December 10th, 2008 - 22 comments

Yesterday, the MPs were sworn in. After the section ‘pledge true allegiance to Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors, according to law’, some of the Maori Party MPs (reading the oath in Maori) inserted, ‘and the Treaty’. They were asked to repeat the allegiance without the reference to the Treaty. Hone Harawira went […]

The Secret Diary of Prime Minister John Key aged 47 1/3

Written By: - Date published: 10:59 am, December 8th, 2008 - 4 comments

If someone sent me this to put up as a guest post on The Standard, I would probably reject it as too childish. But seeing as the Dompost printed it and it is pretty funny, here is Bob Jones’ The Secret Diary of Prime Minister John Key aged 47 1/3:

Unambitious

Written By: - Date published: 10:15 am, December 8th, 2008 - 89 comments

National/ACT has cancelled the Buy New Zealand Made programme. So, this is that ambitious and positive vision for New Zealand we’ve been hearing so much about?

Off the Agenda

Written By: - Date published: 5:56 pm, December 7th, 2008 - 10 comments

Well, if that was the best they could manage for the final Agenda then we haven’t lost much. There was one decent question in an hour. That was from the business editor of the Press asking Rodney Hide why if people wanted their councils owning local assets and bringing in a profit that wasn’t a […]

The Standard Week 28 Nov – 5 December

Written By: - Date published: 3:59 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 2 comments

At the election, National won a mandate for its platform to review the Work Account of ACC, to see whether privatisation might make it better. Of course, we know that they’re not interested in the findings of any fair review, which would show ACC is a worldleading, cheap, efficient system that would be wrecked by […]

Ad-men

Written By: - Date published: 10:56 am, December 5th, 2008 - 46 comments

What would you guys think about us taking on advertising? A few months ago, I saw Public Address’s advertising rates card and it turns out there’s a fair, but not by any means huge, amount of money in advertising for a blog of our size. Now, we wouldn’t want that money for its own sake […]

Ad rant

Written By: - Date published: 11:28 am, December 4th, 2008 - 25 comments

I despair at the mentality behind this ad. Why should universities, which are all publically-owned, be advertising to try and take students off each other? I mean, it’s one thing to compete on quality but this kind of vacuous ‘marketing’ nonsense just shows we’re losing our universities. Universities were once places to learn how to […]

Slash and pray

Written By: - Date published: 10:05 am, December 4th, 2008 - 14 comments

The Reserve Bank has cut 1.5% off the official cash rate, bringing it down to 5%. The rate has now been cut 2.5% in just six weeks, an unprecendented slashing. Mortgage rates will drop as well, but perhaps not by as much because the banks (excluding Kiwibank) have to borrow most of their money from […]

Nowhere to Hide

Written By: - Date published: 2:05 pm, December 3rd, 2008 - 37 comments

“Far too much irksome regulation is putting unnecessary burdens on households and businesses,” says Rodney Hide. Problem is, for all his rhetoric, Rodney can’t actually name any ‘irksome’ or unnecessary regulations. Now, he is “appealling” to us to stop him looking like a puffed up idiot. He wants us to do his job for him […]

Drinking Liberally – Christchurch

Written By: - Date published: 12:45 pm, December 3rd, 2008 - 4 comments

Matthew Hooton calls Drinking Liberally ‘a trendy leftie clique’. Well, I’m not sure I would agree with mad Matt on the ‘clique’ bit, four chapters around the country with as many as a hundred people coming along to events seems a bit bigger than a clique, but it sure is getting trendy. The latest chapter […]

First days on the job disappoint

Written By: - Date published: 2:30 pm, December 2nd, 2008 - 18 comments

The journos don’t seem to have been very impressed by Key now that he has returned to take up the reins of government. Several journos criticised his performance at his first post-Cabinet press conference. There is growing criticism of Key’s response to the situation in Thailand. Certainly both both his lack of urgency and his […]

Mythbusting: we can’t cut emissions from agriculture

Written By: - Date published: 12:15 pm, December 2nd, 2008 - 27 comments

This classic myth is used by National/ACT as an excuse to not do anything about climate change and, now, to attempt to undermine emissions reduction targets in the international climate change agreement to succeed Kyoto. And it is nothing more than a myth. Between 1990 and 2005, agriculture became 30% more efficient in terms of […]

More to worry about

Written By: - Date published: 5:54 am, December 2nd, 2008 - 41 comments

John Key said yesterday that he expects growth in “the next financial year to be pretty close to zero”. That means he’s anticipating a serious recession. That’s our national wealth shrinking for two years, even as the population continues to grow – a smaller pie for more people to share. Here’s hoping we will see an […]

The housing question

Written By: - Date published: 11:15 am, December 1st, 2008 - 55 comments

Good housing is a foundation of a healthy society, and it is something that New Zealand has long lacked. Despite leading the world with our state housing in the 1930s, we have fallen behind. Housing in most other first world countries is much warmer and drier than here. That has important consequences; a study by […]

Anatomy of a honeymoon piece

Written By: - Date published: 8:50 pm, November 30th, 2008 - 33 comments

Most of our political journalists are more than capable of producing informative, insightful pieces. For instance, Claire Trevett wrote an excellent series of pieces that confirmed John Key had stolen Coldplay’s ‘Clocks’ for his ‘Ambiguous for NZ’ DVD. She researched the legalities of the issue, consulted a musicologist on the tune, brought forward a confession […]

The Mt Victoria Supplement

Written By: - Date published: 11:22 am, November 30th, 2008 - 15 comments

We were emailed the Mount Victoria Supplement a while back but I forgot to post it. It’s, um, it’s extraordinary. A good Sunday read, download it.

Wailin’

Written By: - Date published: 2:25 pm, November 29th, 2008 - 44 comments

Foreign Minister and Whaling Spokesperson Murray McCully has announced that New Zealand will be breaching international law by not undertaking search and rescue operations if whalers or protesters get into trouble in New Zealand’s zone of responsibility. Great. So, in a week and a half our new government has abandoned its part in the global […]

Just wondering

Written By: - Date published: 11:38 am, November 29th, 2008 - 8 comments

“National’s honeymoon has to run its course. The public – not Labour or the media – will decide when that honeymoon is over” writes John Armstrong. I’m just wondering: how does the public gather information on what the Government is up to, to decide if it wants the honeymoon to continue? And, how do we, […]

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