Archive for December, 2008

Oh dear

Written By: - Date published: 5:14 pm, December 9th, 2008 - 55 comments

Rodney Hide on National and ACT’s select committee into the ETS: “I am especially pleased to see that the issue of the scientific and trade implications will be considered alongside the impacts on the economy. “There is definitely not a monolithic view on the fact of human induced climate change and I welcome this government’s […]

Spin-busting: Probationary periods

Written By: - Date published: 2:20 pm, December 9th, 2008 - 22 comments

National has been working hard to push the idea that its fire at will policy introduces a ‘probationary period’ of employment. This is not true. The Employment Relations Act already allows for probationary employment periods, it simply requires that workers are given the right to fair process and natural justice. All National’s proposed legislation would […]

Kia kaha

Written By: - Date published: 1:55 pm, December 9th, 2008 - 34 comments

The Greens have joined in opposing National’s “Fire at Will” Bill which they say puts “jobs and democracy at stake”. They’re calling on the Maori Party to stand strong in its previous opposition to the bill. Only two years ago Hone Harawira said when voting against it: [O]ur journey with this bill has not been an […]

Bringing it home

Written By: - Date published: 1:02 pm, December 9th, 2008 - 16 comments

These ads made by the ACTU to oppose John Howard’s removal of unfair dismissal rights sure bring home what National’s fire at will law will mean for working families. No wonder National wants to curtail any real debate by ramming it through under urgency. Part two is here.

Ramming it through

Written By: - Date published: 11:11 am, December 9th, 2008 - 51 comments

I’ve just been informed that the National/ACT Government has put its 90 day fire at will bill on the Order Paper and could ram it through under urgency as early as tomorrow. This is frankly an astonishing abuse of our democracy. A piece of legislation that will remove basic work rights from hundreds of thousands […]

No longer at the back of the class

Written By: - Date published: 10:47 am, December 9th, 2008 - 17 comments

Word is National’s David Bennett will be chairing the Transport & Industrial Relations select committee. After his unhinged performance over the youth minimum wage bill (audio below) where he screamed that the bill was “communism” and that we need to protect our hierarchical society, I’m not surprised John Key doesn’t want to send the 90 […]

Work rights? Gone by Xmas

Written By: - Date published: 9:22 am, December 9th, 2008 - 40 comments

Tracy Watkins reports that the National/Act government will be taking all work rights from anyone in a new job in a firm with 20 staff or less and they’re going to do it under urgency. I’ve heard that the question of whether to proceed with the bill under urgency was still being hotly debated within […]

Dear John

Written By: - Date published: 9:09 am, December 9th, 2008 - 3 comments

In case, like me, you tend to mainly read the news online, here’s what was stuck to the Dominion Post this morning:

Kiwisaver changes

Written By: - Date published: 9:20 pm, December 8th, 2008 - 16 comments

NZPA reports that the Government is looking at reviewing its changes to Kiwisaver so that workers who don’t earn enough to get the full $20 tax credit in a revised 2% scheme are not unfairly discriminated against. The changes are expected to cost $700 million over five years. This is a good measure, and in […]

Urgency

Written By: - Date published: 2:38 pm, December 8th, 2008 - 50 comments

During this morning’s Nine to Noon politics segment Matthew Hooton was saying how he thought the Government’s 100-day action plan would only include policies signalled prior to the election when he let slip: “And I’m sure while there will be some complaints about one measure… er… some measures…” I wonder what that one unpopular measure […]

Occupy, resist, produce

Written By: - Date published: 1:32 pm, December 8th, 2008 - 34 comments

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis describe in the New Statesman how: [a]lmost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. Full article here.

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?

Playing with rankings

Written By: - Date published: 2:32 am, December 8th, 2008 - 10 comments

Since the 16th of November, I’ve been running an experiment with the Alexa ranking system to look at the site sensitivity in rankings from what is hopefully a single new person using it. This is one of the factors used by Tumeke and Halfdone‘s rankings. So I was interested in how much it would affect […]

Taking responsibility, a trait of government

Written By: - Date published: 9:52 pm, December 7th, 2008 - 13 comments

I was looking back at posts from last year to get some idea of traffic patterns over the December period. I found this interesting post from Tane titled Personal responsibility. It made me think of the poor performance of the National-led government over the last couple of weeks as a government. Tane’s post was about […]

Hanging up on Barack

Written By: - Date published: 7:00 pm, December 7th, 2008 - 2 comments

According to the BBC: US Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen thought she was being hoaxed when a man who sounded a lot like Barack Obama called her – so she hung up on him. In fact, the man at the other end of the line was indeed President-elect Obama himself. It took two further phone-calls before Ms […]

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 ethical considerations of Christmas trees

Written By: - Date published: 4:20 pm, December 7th, 2008 - 12 comments

Christmas is coming. We want to feel like we’re part of the sustainable, clean and green in action movement. So what sort of Christmas tree should be twinkling? Leo Hickman of the Guardian asks these questions and more: Aren’t they just a colossal waste of money? Can such a decadent waste of resources be justified in our […]

Farrar back on the PS payroll?

Written By: - Date published: 12:12 pm, December 6th, 2008 - 135 comments

A mate just pointed out that the metadata of David Farrar’s election analysis document suggests it was authored on a Parliamentary Service computer. With the document open in Microsoft Word go to the ‘File’ menu then down to ‘Properties’. You’ll see something like the image below: Of course you’ll notice that the document title looks […]

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 […]

What to do with Treasury

Written By: - Date published: 2:28 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 38 comments

It’s good to see Treasury’s extreme right-wing prescription for New Zealand has not been wholly embraced by the National Party – and it’s easy to see why. While Bill English (a former Treasury wonk himself) no doubt agrees with the policy ideas and direction outlined by Treasury, he has the disadvantage of being accountable to […]

Govt’s ACC spin working

Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 32 comments

We’ve covered the National/ACT government’s latest ACC beat-up extensively already. IB spelled out rather well here the techniques being used by the government to undermine ACC in order to create a sense of crisis and soften up the public for privatisation. And it pains me to say it, but it’s working. And it’s working well. […]

Treasury – Labour left us in good shape

Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 17 comments

Treasury’s briefing to Bill English as the new Minister of Finance must’ve pissed him off big time. Aside from the expected ideological burp (already covered in depth by No Right Turn) it reads like a long list of Labour achievements and calls on National is reign in its irresponsible promises. Here’s a taste of some […]

The moral high ground

Written By: - Date published: 11:05 am, December 5th, 2008 - 15 comments

Murray McCully has just used his recently acquired ministerial discretion to allow Fiji’s under-20 soccer team to enter New Zealand in transit on its way to a tournament in Tahiti. This is broadly at odds with the Labour government’s sanctions following the coup in 2006 (though they did grant the Fiji sevens team permission to […]

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 […]

A journal for the ruling class

Written By: - Date published: 12:36 pm, December 4th, 2008 - 74 comments

The Herald continues its campaigning today with a puff piece about a poll that claims business wants National’s 90 day ‘fire at will‘ policy enacted as soon as possible. The policy would remove the right of any worker in a small business to appeal against unfair dismissal during their first 90 days in a new […]

Spinbusting: the anchor-story

Written By: - Date published: 12:27 pm, December 4th, 2008 - 52 comments

There’s a lot of talk about the ACC budget deficit and National’s use of the issue to create an environment in which their privatisation scheme can roll with the minimum political fall-out. Any doubt I had that this was their plan evaporated this morning when I heard Nick Smith on RNZ moving the story along […]

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 […]

Laying the foundations

Written By: - Date published: 4:33 pm, December 3rd, 2008 - 46 comments

Let’s not fool ourselves that what we’ve seen from National over the last 24 hours on to the shortfall in the ACC non-earners account hasn’t been carefully managed in a way to lay the foundation for their arguments in favour of privatising the scheme. I won’t go into a lot of detail around their motives, […]

Merriam Webster word of the year: Bailout

Written By: - Date published: 3:39 pm, December 3rd, 2008 - 8 comments

It often provides an interesting take on what’s on people’s minds. The top ten was filled out by: Vet Socialism Maverick Bipartisan Trepidation Precipice Rogue Mysogeny Turmoil  Here’s the link.