I’m still struggling to see your point, or am I falling for a red herring?

“If we justify it using an argument like “Well the job justifies the salary’ then is that not the thin end of the wedge for justifying any corporate salary or dividend or whatever.”

Not at all. The PM is not David Beckham, whose job is to generate income for his employer. Her job is to lead the government. You are comparing apples with oranges.

What astounds me about this issue is not that it’s a non-story – Key is undoubtedly on the side of business, and the transcript doesn’t show anything I’d be surprised to hear him say. (It is a little, well, *honest* though, and I don’t think he is, really, being more of a populist bent – but that could reflect his audience at the time). The surprise is the reaction from the blog-right, which largely seems to be composed of “oh noes, he couldn’t have said that, must have been misquoted, etc”. Which shows how much the strategy must be to emulate Labour in order to get the win (and consequentially how much will later be reneged upon or be seen to be “misunderstood”).

This next election is absolutely a game of picking the lesser of two evils. In my mind the greater evil is lying so as to appear less evil!

>Anyway, we’ll have to agree to disagree, because I believe there should be a more equal share of the profits between owners of capital and owners of labour.

That is a fair enough ideal.

My point still stands however.. from the point of view of wealth re-distribution why should the prime minister of this country get.. well it must be something like $400,000 a year?

If we justify it using an argument like “Well the job justifies the salary” then is that not the thin end of the wedge for justifying any corporate salary or dividend or whatever.

Forgive my jocular riposte to your question. I don’t know who you are or what you do. You could be Johyn Minto for all I care and the answer will be the same.

Anyway, we’ll have to agree to disagree, because I believe there should be a more equal share of the profits between owners of capital and owners of labour.

At the moment, with a labour shortage, the owners of capital have to pay more in wages to get quality staff, therefore they have to put up with lower salaries thmselves. It is basic supply and demand. In times of worker over-supply – apparently a goal of Key’s in order to bring down wages – workers have to work harder to justify a higher wage. It’s called capitalism.

We could argue about redistributing the wealth, but we won’t agree, so why bother?

John Key has no idea how a free market works …….. please as your esteemed Deputy Leader (Gollum) stated quite rightly he is a rich prick therefore quite clearly has a better understanding than the members of the current government a large number of whom have never had paid employment outside the public sector

It’s actually wilfully dishonest of you. I suspect you know that Key doesn’t mean to cut wages, but this won’t be what you represent to the members of the Labour movement.

This is exactly the same level of ‘mistake’ as the Owen Glenn saga. In that case in phase 1, we had a casual conversation written up as a labour/government policy. In phase 2, we had a lack of knowledge of technical donation (interest) written up as lying to the media.

However one of them the MSM has chosen to blow into a ‘scandal’ and the other has been ignored. I wonder what that says about the MSM…

Now to me, Key’s ‘mistake’ sounds far more likely to be a party policy as it was exactly the type of policy implemented in the 90′s. In the absence of the Nat’s actually putting out a policy on wages, I’ll believe what Key says is policy.

>”Does she [Helen Clark] provide more value to the country that deserves a salary that far outstrips mine’

>That’s an easy one – yes (and I don’t even know you )

Well my hypothetical answer to you (presuming that you believe that companies should share more of their profits with the workers) is:

“We are sorry but the management of Capitalists-R-Us provide a far greater value to the company than the general workers and are thus deserving of their eye watering salaries”

It’s common practice for journalists to treat a transcript as as good as a tape.