Written By: - Date published: 10:09 am, January 28th, 2012 - 701 comments
Fran O’Sullivan is an enemy of the people. Her article in this morning’s Herald will forever brand her as a traitor to this country. She will be shunned and reviled by people who understand what a disgusting sell-out she has become. There is no coming back from this. The Crafar decision is a victory for …
Written By: - Date published: 12:11 pm, November 11th, 2011 - 21 comments
When people say ‘there’s no difference between the two big parties’ or ‘where are the policies’, it’s shorthand for ‘I haven’t been paying attention’. We had a great example of the contrast yesterday. National would subsidise expansion of dairy by selling our assets; Labour would get modern equipment to poor schoolkids by cutting sports subsidies to rich schools.
Written By: - Date published: 6:16 pm, September 15th, 2011 - 198 comments
It turns out that the high price of milk is your fault. No – really.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, September 9th, 2011 - 17 comments
Written By: - Date published: 10:42 am, August 22nd, 2011 - 75 comments
The Greens want to charge 10 cents per tonne of water used by farmers. Use the revenue to restore our rivers and lakes. Even Actoid types can support this: internalise externalities, use price mechanisms to encourage efficient use of resources. Naturally, the farmers don’t want to pay. Funny how ‘wealth creators’ never want to pay their fair share.
Written By: - Date published: 9:31 am, August 8th, 2011 - 60 comments
We commonly hear the vested interests (Fed Farmers, National, Fonterra) saying that agriculture should continue to get a 100% subsidy on its greenhouse emissions because there’s no way for farmers to reduce their pollution aside from producing less. That’s rubbish. In fact, as BR shows, agriculture is already producing more value for less pollution.
Written By: - Date published: 10:35 am, July 22nd, 2011 - 13 comments
Another big fall in dairy prices overnight. Yet the dollar keeps breaking record highs.
Written By: - Date published: 11:50 am, July 6th, 2011 - 18 comments
There’s an odd contradiction in right-wing ‘thought’. On the one hand, they’re Randian heroes, the wealth creators, modern day Atlases who support the world while ‘parasites’ try to take their wealth and bring them down. On the other hand, they’re victims who need subsidies and special treatment. Fed Farmers CEO Conor English embodies the contradiction.
Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, May 25th, 2011 - 45 comments
No Right Turn on the cost of the ETS to farmers. Forecast to be paid over $8 per kilo for milk solids, what cost do you guess that the ETS subtracts from that sum?
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, May 18th, 2011 - 129 comments
The dairy industry produced 16 billion litres of milk in 08/09. The 17,000 dairy farmers got an average half million payout. So how come they only paid $26 million in tax in total? Are we meant to believe that the average dairy farm makes a million litres of milk for $5,000 profit? Rubbish. They’re creaming it.
Written By: - Date published: 9:33 am, May 13th, 2011 - 86 comments
When confronted with the scientific evidence on the hollowness of our “100% Pure” slogan John Key, as usual, tried to attack the credibility of the source. Key said “He’s one academic and, like lawyers, I could provide you others who would give a counter view”. Now the source (Dr Mike Joy) has called the PM on his clueless claim.
Written By: - Date published: 11:54 am, May 11th, 2011 - 25 comments
John Key didn’t much like being confronted with the facts on our dirty water. He tried to pretend that everything is just fine, when it isn’t. No surprise to find this attitude mimicked in National’s policy on water. They are trying to pretend that they’re doing something when they aren’t.
Written By: - Date published: 12:57 pm, January 24th, 2011 - 42 comments
Higher commodity and food prices, we are told are a Good Thing. Our exporters (ie. Fonterra and foreign oil companies) get more money. But we consumers have to pay more to by the same products, so are we better off? And what about the poor saps overseas who are paying more for less, or the really poor saps who are priced out of the market?
Written By: - Date published: 9:28 am, January 24th, 2011 - 27 comments
You’ll remember the disgraceful Schmuck scandal when Minister John Carter had clauses inserted into legislation specifically to legalise Doug Schmuck’s annexation of a public reserve. John Key took no action. Now, Kate Wilkinson and David Carter got in on the act – forcing DoC to sign over more public land for private use.
Written By: - Date published: 7:10 am, January 7th, 2011 - 66 comments
With oil heading back to $100+ a barrel, food prices are also rising. That makes sense, fuel and fertiliser from oil are major food production costs. The global food price index is now higher than it was in 2008. In New Zealand, we’re supposed to celebrate high food prices but the reality is it means starvation and social unrest around the world.
Written By: - Date published: 11:47 pm, December 16th, 2010 - 32 comments
It’s a tough Christmas for far too many Kiwis. Poverty is up, wages are down. 350,000 Kiwis are jobless or underemployed. The job losses are still coming. The rich got tax cuts, 70% got nothing. Drought is spreading. Thousands of Cantabrians face an uncertain future. Meanwhile, the Nats cynically exploit disaster to advance their agenda.
Written By: - Date published: 11:36 pm, December 1st, 2010 - 120 comments
When they’re not polluting our rivers or fighting animal welfare laws, our farmers, the ‘guardians of the land’, are opposing having to pay for their greenhouse emissions. Now, with the Earth having just clocked up its warmest 12 months since records began, farmers are scratching their heads at the early start to the summer drought.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, November 18th, 2010 - 15 comments
Bill English and brother Conner, CEO of Federated Farmers, share a vision for the world. It’s one where the environment and workers are exploited to the hilt in the name of ‘growth’ and the fruits of that ‘growth’ flow to a privileged elite (like the Englishes). Yesterday rich-boy Conner chided the rest of us with a speech titled “There is no free lunch”
Written By: - Date published: 6:42 am, November 13th, 2010 - 24 comments
So our kiwifruit industry is in peril. PSA may be here to stay, vines may start being burnt today, and a $1.36 billion industry is in trouble. Last year National sacked 54 front-line biosecurity staff, and slashed the budgets by millions. The PSA (Public Service Association) warned at the time that inevitably disease and pests …
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, October 19th, 2010 - 35 comments
John Key says that if we don’t let overseas buyers snap up our farmland then land prices will decrease and some over-leveraged farmers will go underwater. And that’s supposedly a bad thing. Key wants us to believe that foreigners putting our farmland out of the reach of Kiwis and making us borrow more from the Aussie banks is a good thing.
Written By: - Date published: 2:12 pm, October 17th, 2010 - 62 comments
In his last column Garth George laments how foods he regularly enjoyed in his childhood (1870s?) are now priced beyond the reach of most New Zealanders. It’s easy to dismiss the complaints of an old man about prices these days but there’s a deeper story: with population growth and resource depletion, there increasingly isn’t enough to go around.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, October 12th, 2010 - 24 comments
When the 2009 ‘streamlining and simplifying’ amendment to the RMA was rushed through parliament last year, many concerns were raised about new abilities for the Minister for the Environment to use National Environmental Standards (NES) to override local government regulations. Now an NES on forestry is being pushed through. It’s scary stuff.
Written By: - Date published: 3:48 pm, October 6th, 2010 - 44 comments
There has been an interesting ad from Greenpeace running around the site today. It is obviously intended to go viral before the lawyers from Fonterra get it into court… I think I might help out a bit… So should you – dump it onto the social media.
Written By: - Date published: 9:56 am, September 24th, 2010 - 9 comments
Lockwood and Nick did good work yesterday. So praise where praise is due: Keep it up boys.
Written By: - Date published: 10:23 am, September 13th, 2010 - 56 comments
To have power and independence, any country needs a solid economic base. That’s even more true of superpowers/empires. To secure their economic sovereignty they need the raw materials and markets of less powerful countries. They reinforce their economic sovereignty by taking others’. China does it by buying up whole supply chains.
Written By: - Date published: 8:11 am, September 3rd, 2010 - 32 comments
According to Maurice Williamson, we’re all racist. Our concern with foreign investment has nothing to do with the economy, we just hate the Chinese.
Written By: - Date published: 4:28 pm, July 13th, 2010 - 35 comments
Just spotted in the NZ Herald that receivers for the Crafar dairy farm empire have announced that state-owned farmer Landcorp has been unsuccessful in its attempt to buy the properties…
Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, July 7th, 2010 - 71 comments
Supermarkets are squeezing producers while marking up the prices of fruit and vegetables by up to 500%. The worst side of capitalism in action. Support your local farmers’ market, and the Green’s call for a supermarket code of conduct.
Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, June 11th, 2010 - 25 comments
On Wednesday night John key was in Christchurch. He was met by protesters, angry at the abolition of democracy in Canterbury, and the plans of the newly installed dictatorship to allow over-farming to poison the water and kill the rivers. How did TV news handle the coverage? I think it’s fair to say that it was up to their usual standards…
Written By: - Date published: 6:41 am, April 30th, 2010 - 23 comments
Live in Canterbury? Value democracy? What are you doing today after work? Come to the ECan protest, 5:30 pm @ ECan office 58 Kilmore St. Because Canterbury is only the beginning…
Written By: - Date published: 9:09 am, April 26th, 2010 - 98 comments
Our glorious capitalist system should mean farms that can’t handle a bad time fail. Just like any other business. Land gets used for something better. It’s the market. But capitalists don’t really believe in the market. Come the bad times, the farmers want another hand out. So government’s giving them the dole. Yup, the dole.
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