Written By: - Date published: 12:48 pm, May 27th, 2012 - 3 comments
A couple of good BBC articles: what have the Romans done for us? and can we have a society that doesn’t depend on us becoming ill with our fatness? And Kim Hill’s excellent interviewee Steve Keen.
Written By: - Date published: 8:33 am, May 27th, 2012 - 6 comments
Adding to the canon of reasons and commentators on why you don’t sell your assets (particularly to pay for your maintenance) is an excellent article on The Guardian. It is an article exhorting the countries of the Arab Spring to resist Western countries pressure to implement neo-liberal economics in the name of ‘freedom’. It cites …
Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, May 23rd, 2012 - 227 comments
The media (and the braying right-wing blogs of course) have been bleeding plenty of ink over Shane Jones’ actions in the citizenship case. Jones hasn’t really put his side of the story – until last night.
Written By: - Date published: 6:45 pm, May 21st, 2012 - 12 comments
National have become a very adept PR machine. While not adept at running the country, they’ve become great at running statistics. John Key was pushing things a little too far with his lines that unemployment rising to 6.7% showed an improved economy and that Europe electing anti-austerity leaders showed their austerity policies were right, but …
Written By: - Date published: 11:16 am, May 21st, 2012 - 18 comments
National is going to cut 125 police staff. They’re not sworn officers but who’s going to pick up the work they were doing? Sworn cops, of course. Course, tying up cops with paperwork will help the crime stats drop. And with the navy so underfunded half its inshore patrol vessels are being mothballed I bet illegal fishing instances drop too. Funny that.
Written By: - Date published: 10:12 am, May 18th, 2012 - 42 comments
Austerity is reducing the opportunities for social mobility, for reducing income inequality, for a fair society. The increased class sizes, the removal of Adult and Community Education, the removal of Training Allowances, and many more things National are doing in the name of “austerity” are undermining our society.
Written By: - Date published: 10:03 pm, May 15th, 2012 - 19 comments
Rebekah and Charlie Brooks have been charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to the News International phone-hacking affair. Now it’s in the courts, this albatross will hang around Cameron’s neck through to the next election.
Written By: - Date published: 11:43 am, May 14th, 2012 - 75 comments
1 in 80 New Zealanders left for Australia last 12 months. Emigration so far this year is 15% higher than the same months in 2011. 6,000 people attended the 3rd Aussie jobs expo in Auckland in 18 months this weekend. The question is becoming not ‘would you go to Aussie’ but ‘what was the final straw for you to decide to leave Aussie’. Here’s a few reasons.
Written By: - Date published: 10:48 am, May 14th, 2012 - 38 comments
Gay marriage looks set to become a “key election issue” in the Obama vs Romney presidential contest. How utterly depressing.
Written By: - Date published: 2:28 pm, May 1st, 2012 - 24 comments
Scott at Imperator Fish has kindly given us permission to syndicate posts from his blog – the original of this post is here.
John Key comes up with a crisis.
Written By: - Date published: 6:35 pm, April 30th, 2012 - 34 comments
David Cameron’s defence of embattled Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has been called a “firewall” that’s failing to hold.
Cameron needs Hunt to stay or else Cameron is the next to go. It is the same for John Key.
As the stench of corruption around John Banks grows, he desperately needs him to stay or else all he loses legitimacy for asset sales and potentially his majority on the issue as well.
Written By: - Date published: 4:46 pm, April 27th, 2012 - 37 comments
Stayed up last night to watch Robert Jay QC question Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson enquiry. It was riveting – you can see why top lawyers like Jay are called silks. Murdoch denied, deferred, demeaned, derided and defended but couldn’t help himself – ended up with more damage than control. This affair has more legs than a millipede.
Written By: - Date published: 1:19 pm, April 26th, 2012 - 40 comments
Scott at Imperator Fish has kindly given us permission to syndicate posts from his blog – the original of this post is here.
The United Kingdom is in recession again. Thanks austerity!
Written By: - Date published: 9:49 am, April 26th, 2012 - 72 comments
You’d think we’d draw some obvious conclusions from the Arctic melt. Apparently not though. We’re in a hole, but we’re going to keep digging…
Written By: - Date published: 6:33 am, April 26th, 2012 - 17 comments
Tax increases on working people: GST hike, replaced Labour’s cuts with cuts for the rich, put tax on your employer Kiwisaver contributions, cut WfF tax credits. Record emigration to Australia: 53,237 last year, 1000+ per week.
Written By: - Date published: 10:11 pm, April 25th, 2012 - 7 comments
James Murdoch has confirmed to the Leveson enquiry that he did discuss News International’s bid to take over BSkyB with Cameron at a dinner at the home of Rebekah Brooks. Cameron had previously denied this. Also Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, charged with ensuring that the takeover was according to law, was briefing Murdoch on the back channel via his staff. His tenure looks very shaky. Cameron will also be under severe pressure. There are lessons for us as well.
Written By: - Date published: 5:00 am, April 25th, 2012 - 53 comments
Today marks the lives and loss of lives of many New Zealanders in battle fields around the world.
One can only wonder of what they would make of the world they have fought for.
Written By: - Date published: 11:58 am, April 20th, 2012 - 107 comments
As expected, the Nats kept on pushing until they got the answer that they wanted on the Crafar farms. A bit more of NZ has been sold out…
Written By: - Date published: 11:42 am, April 11th, 2012 - 28 comments
With the effective withdrawal of Rick Santorum from the Republican primary process, Mitt Romney is now all but certain to be the Republican nominee to go up against Barack Obama in the Presidential election this year.
Written By: - Date published: 8:24 pm, March 31st, 2012 - 31 comments
OK – so we’re a bit late with this – but it’s Earth Hour, 8:30 – 9:30pm NZ time.
Written By: - Date published: 10:50 am, March 31st, 2012 - 16 comments
Punching above our weight will never be the same again …
Written By: - Date published: 7:50 am, March 29th, 2012 - 20 comments
Mfat is spending $9.2m a year on 30 strong razor gang cut diplomat jobs. It’s a ludicrous waste of money. As Goff notes – McCully’s splurging on ‘back office’ contractors in the razor gang to cut the ‘frontline’. 49 of 53 heads of mission have written to McCully say this process is destructive and dangerous. All McCully can do is blame the ‘star’ private sector head of Mfat he appointed.
Written By: - Date published: 12:24 pm, March 27th, 2012 - 48 comments
The Nats selected Chinese company Huawei to build theparts of the UFB network after Joyce and English visited them in China. Now, the company’s been banned from Australia’s UFB project because of links to Chinese espionage. Key’s shrugged it off. Maybe there’s a risk, maybe not. But our government should give a damn and investigate. Its indifference makes it look compromised.
Written By: - Date published: 9:13 am, March 27th, 2012 - 113 comments
The lead story on Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest newspaper is about the “violent comments” of Gerry Brownlee. How would we react if a foreign politician told those kind of lies about NZ? We’d go off our self-righteous rockers. In some countries, like Finland, a minister would resign without hesitation if they brought their country into disrepute.
Written By: - Date published: 3:54 pm, March 26th, 2012 - 45 comments
The ever-diplomatic Gerry Brownlee has got New Zealand coverage in the European press. In an effort to try and score a point against David Shearer the former woodwork teacher called the country with the best education system in the world “uneducated,” and claimed that an economy with higher GDP per capita and faster growth than …
Written By: - Date published: 8:15 am, March 24th, 2012 - 42 comments
The government has introduced their welfare changes to parliament. In addition to making mums of 1 year-olds seek paid work in addition to raising children, it introduces private companies profiting from unemployment misery with welfare to work schemes. The UK has been trying this for a couple of years – let’s look at how that’s going…
Written By: - Date published: 5:01 pm, March 21st, 2012 - 14 comments
Murray McCully has been described as a “seagull Minister, one who flies in, squawks loudly, poops over everyone and flies away again.” Today in the House he squawked, pooped over his Chief Executive and flew away from any responsibility for the the restructuring of MFAT. John Key better get his knighthood soon. The wheels are starting to come off his government.
Written By: - Date published: 9:40 am, March 13th, 2012 - 19 comments
There’s been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over Pengxin Shanghai’s attempt to buy the Crafar farms. Justified too. I want to take a step back and look at the strategy that China is executing and the imperatives behind it. Like any successful organisation, China is seeking to perpetuate its power. That requires securing access to resources. And China’s sitting on the low-cost cash to do it.
Written By: - Date published: 4:29 pm, March 7th, 2012 - 10 comments
With Super Tuesday closing inconclusively in the US Republican Party Presidential Nominee race, here’s a chance to laugh at the contenders…
Written By: - Date published: 11:04 am, March 5th, 2012 - 39 comments
In my previous post I laid out the reasons why a NATO/US intervention in Syria is unlikely, even though the alternative will almost certainly be defeat of the freedom fighters and even more mass murder by the regime. There’s no strategic gain from the Right’s perspective and many on the Left would rather see a massacre than US military action. Homs has fallen. So, what next for the rebels?
Written By: - Date published: 8:22 am, March 5th, 2012 - 45 comments
Labour has obtained a cabinet paper showing the Nats’ plan to introduce a ‘two-tier’ immigration system – those with money go to the front of the queue. It’s more evidence of how everything is for sale under National – our employment laws, our power plants, our farms, our gambling laws, and, now, our immigration law. I wonder if they’ll call it the Kim Dotcom Bill.
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