Written By: - Date published: 9:11 am, April 12th, 2012 - 43 comments
Vetoing extra paid parental leave doesn’t make social sense and it doesn’t make economic sense either.
Which is why National have said they’ll do it.
Written By: - Date published: 1:02 pm, November 14th, 2011 - 17 comments
Key is avoiding the hard questions, but his photo-op face is everywhere. The rest of the Nats are working hard at being invisible. Let’s bring a little sunlight into that darkness!
Today’s InvisiNat is Bill English.
Written By: - Date published: 5:09 pm, July 8th, 2011 - 60 comments
Even Bill’s readers like the CGT…
Written By: - Date published: 10:37 am, December 27th, 2010 - 33 comments
The idea of this little group-effort series of posts is to look at the major areas of government activity and have an objective look at how National is doing – both against their own promises and things that we hold important. Let’s start with the economy, the direct responsibility of Finance Minister Bill English and Economic Development Minister Gerry Brownlee.
Written By: - Date published: 9:54 am, December 15th, 2010 - 28 comments
3 under the radar stories yesterday. All linked by ideology. Kiwirail to buy 300 wagons from China because its cheaper than building them here. Not allowed to consider wider economic gains. Collins outsources her new prison to a multi-national with a history of prisoner abuse. English wants more ‘value’ from public assets. Value for whom? The likes of Serco?
Written By: - Date published: 8:03 am, November 9th, 2010 - 63 comments
Tax take is down due to reduced spending and the government’s response is to urge “restraint” and keep cutting. These cuts will, of course, help fuel higher unemployment and further reduced spending, which will probably result in calls for further cuts. We’ll also see asset sales if the Nats win a second term, which will …
Written By: - Date published: 8:58 pm, October 23rd, 2010 - 103 comments
After days of trying to read the media and rumour mill tea-leaves on the Hobbit it was time to do some fact checking.
It turns out this has been a hard lesson in how the international film industry works.
Written By: - Date published: 11:51 am, July 14th, 2010 - 28 comments
The NZ Herald editorial criticising National’s pursuit of a private prison in Auckland should make Judith Collins and her cabinet colleagues sit up and rethink.
Written By: - Date published: 7:57 am, July 13th, 2010 - 9 comments
English is talking more cuts at a time where cutting could well push the economy into a downward spiral.
But he knows that better than most – he was a minister in the cabinet that did just that in the ’90s.
Written By: - Date published: 12:30 pm, June 17th, 2010 - 53 comments
More information is emerging about PEDA director Anthony Joseph Pereira (aka. JR Pereira). His connections with National, especially English, are deep and go back to before the last election. The Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs warned of “risks for ministers” in dealing with PEDA. The government’s refusal to give straight answers is just making the situation worse.
Written By: - Date published: 6:53 pm, June 11th, 2010 - 25 comments
Mita Ririnui has gone on the record on RNZ’s Checkpoint tonight insisting Ministerial Services advised him personal spending on ministerial credit card was ok as long as it was reimbursed. Of course that doesn’t let people like Hide, English and Heatley off the hook, because they only paid back their personal misuses of ministerial allowances after they …
Written By: - Date published: 4:13 pm, June 2nd, 2010 - 54 comments
In the May budget Key broke his pre-election promise not to raise GST.
Today, in the House, Jim Anderton foreshadowed what looks like the next unequivocal promise that’s set for the chop.
Anderton pointed out that during the 2008 TV3 Leaders’ Debate Key promised not to sell Kiwibank “ever”.
The video is embedded below.
Written By: - Date published: 3:45 pm, May 26th, 2010 - 89 comments
Tracy Watkins recently observed of Key’s reluctance to front the media post-budget that:
“Mr Key has refused all but three requests to be interviewed by National Radio’s Morning Report so far this year. That must be unheard of among modern-day prime ministers…”
She puts his avoidance of the tough questions down to a desire to protect his brand.
Written By: - Date published: 4:18 pm, May 21st, 2010 - 109 comments
In 2008, Bill English was sprung secretly telling National members that he and Key would sell Kiwibank “‘eventually but not now”. After being caught out, English and Key categorically ruled out asset sales in the first term of a National government and said they would seek a mandate to make any sales in a second term.
Written By: - Date published: 2:24 pm, May 20th, 2010 - 139 comments
Telecom Paul Reynolds’ $290,000 ‘rich guy bonus’ alone is enough to hire six nurses or teachers. It’s enough to pay for 40,000 hours of early childhood education. It’s the added GST bill for some 400 typical Kiwi workers.
As expected this man, earning $7 million a year, has been given a tax break more than 200 times bigger than that of the average Kiwi worker.
Update: Key has spent up large in his irresponsible tax cuts for the rich. We’ll be paying for this for decades to come. What happened to the fiscal conservatives in the National Party?
Written By: - Date published: 8:52 am, May 6th, 2010 - 60 comments
The March quarter unemployment rate is out today. It should be back down below 7% from the appalling 7.3% that National let it rise to. My hope is to see it fall to at most 6.8%, that’ll represent 10,000 Kiwis back into work. But Bill English has hinted it won’t fall. If there is not a serious reduction in unemployment, we will know who to blame.
Written By: - Date published: 8:16 pm, April 22nd, 2010 - 48 comments
John Key is planning to slash and burn $2 billion out of our public services. Key says the slashing is needed to pay for increasing health and education costs. Bullshit. It’s about paying for John Key’s and his rich mates’ tax cuts.
Written By: - Date published: 11:23 am, April 7th, 2010 - 22 comments
I don’t have a problem with MPs being able to get public funding for court cases arising from their professional activities. You wouldn’t expect private sector employees who are taken to court over their actions in their job to be forced to pay their own way. But what a sense of entitlement Gerry Brownlee has.
Written By: - Date published: 11:48 am, March 31st, 2010 - 7 comments
The Key Government is constantly promising us great results and actually do nothing that improves things for New Zealanders. English, Bennett, Brownlee, and Tolley are prime examples of this MO. While they promise great things and fail to deliver unemployment is rising, wages are falling, crime is up, and the government has no plan to move us forward.
Written By: - Date published: 12:09 am, March 22nd, 2010 - 100 comments
I made a mistake in my calculations of the effects of the leaked tax reforms. In the corrected numbers, the poor get less, the rich get more. The wealthiest 13,000 taxpayers get a quarter of a billion in tax cuts between them – nearly $20,000 a year each. The poorest half $1.25 a week and higher rents to pay. This ‘tax reform’ package is really a mask for a wealth grab from the many to the few.
Written By: - Date published: 9:12 am, March 11th, 2010 - 21 comments
While other countries have used their strong public sectors to steady the private sector and keep unemployment down during the economic downturn, our government is compounding unemployment by cutting the public sector, throwing people out of jobs and feeding worker insecurity.
Written By: - Date published: 6:14 pm, February 25th, 2010 - 43 comments
Today in the House David Cunliffe took Bill English on over his lies regarding Labour’s record on economic growth. Rather than admit that he had been using the wrong figures in an effort to make Labour’s record look worse, English compounded his sins by lying to the House.
Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, February 24th, 2010 - 26 comments
Success for Opposition frontbenchers largely consists of embarrassing their opposite number by forcing them to answer questions they would rather not. Labour showed both how to do that and how not to do it in the House yesterday.
Written By: - Date published: 11:22 am, February 19th, 2010 - 11 comments
When you’ve got a Finance Minister who can’t get stats right, a Social Welfare Minister who can’t define her flagship policy, and an Education Minister who can’t explain her flagship policy, it’s easy for an incompetent Women’s Affairs Minister to slip through.
Written By: - Date published: 12:08 am, February 19th, 2010 - 21 comments
An interesting piece from One News. Bill English gave another underwhelming speech on National’s economic plan, which basically boiled down to ‘tax cuts!’. A young businesswoman in the audience told English she wanted a real plan. His response: ‘tax cuts’. But he could give no proof his tax cuts would improve the economy.
Written By: - Date published: 11:23 pm, February 17th, 2010 - 9 comments
It’s hard to decide which is worst: Do Nothing John Key flouncing around the country while thousands of Kiwis lose their jobs, the Joyce cabal pushing their hard-right economic agenda, or the rest of them who don’t have two brain cells to rub together.
Written By: - Date published: 4:42 pm, December 8th, 2009 - 17 comments
Ministers are given self-drive taxpayer-funded cars for official business in their electorates (in Wellington they have crown limos at their disposal for official business). Pretty logically, the cars were always based at the ministers’ primary place of residence because that’s where they would need it. But that presented a problem for Bill ‘Double Dipton’ English. …
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, November 14th, 2009 - 74 comments
Whatever argument there is between the hierarchy of the Maori Party and Hone really doesn’t concern me. While I’m sure Kelvin Davis is watching with considerable interest, Hone was elected by the voters up north for being exactly who he is. This isn’t a political row with the over-powering stench of political hypocrisy like recent …
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, November 12th, 2009 - 18 comments
Brian Fallow has a great post over at Granny Herald this morning. “Emitters on bludger’s end of deal” deals with the way that the NACT government has been loading costs onto future voters and taxpayers. On superannuation: By siphoning off and investing around another 1 per cent of GDP while the babyboomers are still in …
Written By: - Date published: 3:22 pm, November 6th, 2009 - 38 comments
Documents that the government was forced to release under the Official Information Act reveal that Bill English exercised extensive control and sign-off over each stage of his million dollar political propaganda ad, funded by publicly-owned broadcaster TVNZ. The documents (which, unfortunately, the media organisations have not seen fit to release to the public in full) …
Written By: - Date published: 3:23 pm, November 4th, 2009 - 40 comments
Back in February, former currency speculator John Key and former Treasury adviser Bill English started talking about suspending contributions to the Cullen Fund, which was set up to help fund superannuation. ‘It’s losing so much money’, they wailed. Some people pointed out that the markets were already recovering, that investments could now be bought at …
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