Archive for March, 2009

Friday quiz – late edition

Written By: - Date published: 1:34 pm, March 21st, 2009 - 27 comments

Imagine two incidents when a person is at home and they hear someone outside their house. In the first incident, they grab a knife and head outside. In the second incident, they grab an air rifle and go outside. In the first incident, they see two taggers running away and chase them. In the second […]

Redistributing the wealth

Written By: - Date published: 3:27 pm, March 20th, 2009 - 104 comments

In a speech to the International Fiscal Association Conference today, Revenue Minister Peter Dunne said the Government’s goal over the next 18 months is to start moving towards a top personal tax rate of 30%. This would be a whopping 9% cut from the current top tax rate, almost exclusively going to the rich, and […]

An idiots* guide to what happens when the CO2 affects the WAIS

Written By: - Date published: 2:31 pm, March 20th, 2009 - 61 comments

The preliminary results of a drill by the ANDRILL (Antarctic Geological Drilling) were published in the print edition of Nature this week. It has shown a history of the previous retreat and collapses of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The WAIS melt with its vast stores of solid water, and even more in the […]

Strings attached

Written By: - Date published: 12:18 pm, March 20th, 2009 - 20 comments

I’d always thought Westies were the type to do things their own way, so this seems more appropriate in light of today’s RNZ interview discussed in the following story from Tane…

Out of her depth

Written By: - Date published: 11:03 am, March 20th, 2009 - 41 comments

Paula Bennett’s performance on Morning Report today didn’t just bring home how completely out of her depth she is as a Minister, it also exposed the limits of National’s strategy of government-by-PR. If you haven’t heard the interview yet, download it now. You won’t be disappointed. What’s clearly happened here is Bennett was sent into […]

Four wheels good, two wheels bad

Written By: - Date published: 10:08 am, March 20th, 2009 - 34 comments

The Government is taking nearly half a billion dollars out of public transport, cycling, walking, road maintance, and traffic policing to pay for more state highways. Transport Minister Steven Joyce’s reasoning for this – ‘86% of people go to work by car’. Doesn’t he get that people have to go by car because there aren’t […]

Fox in the henhouse

Written By: - Date published: 5:06 pm, March 19th, 2009 - 19 comments

The National Business Review has an interesting article online that suggests Simon Power’s recommendation of Dr Mark Berry to take over from Paula Rebstock as chair of the Commerce Commission is a sign the government is planning a radical deregulation of the competition landscape. The piece even goes as far as to describe Dr Berry […]

Jobs rally in Nelson this Saturday

Written By: - Date published: 2:30 pm, March 19th, 2009 - 5 comments

The Service and Food Workers Union is organising a rally and march in Nelson on Saturday (21 March) in support of Sealord workers and other workers in the community who are losing their jobs through restructuring. Sealord recently announced it planned to axe 180 jobs and has threatened the other 400 with up to $70 […]

Third party returns

Written By: - Date published: 1:06 pm, March 19th, 2009 - 10 comments

The Electoral Commission has released the third party spending returns for the 2008 election campaign and it looks like for all National and ACT’s fears that the $120,000 third party cap would stop groups from being able to express themselves, only the Council of Trade Unions came close with a spend of around $100k. Other […]

Cycleway updates on Campbell Live

Written By: - Date published: 11:11 am, March 19th, 2009 - 28 comments

Another reason to watch Campbell Live: cycleway updates. John Campbell announced last night he’d be doing regular (nightly?) updates on the number of jobs created by the cycleway and how many kilometers of it have been built. The top to bottom national cycleway is one of Key’s highest profile initiatives for fighting the conomic downturn […]

Tory charity

Written By: - Date published: 7:18 am, March 19th, 2009 - 138 comments

According to the Herald John Key has declared people should spend their tax-cuts on charities and wants an American “culture of giving” to the needy. I’m just stunned. His plan is to take money out of the pockets of low income New Zealanders to create tax cuts for the rich and then encourage those low-income […]

Key on wages

Written By: - Date published: 8:09 pm, March 18th, 2009 - 93 comments

Key’s speech to the CTU today showed an interesting inight into how he thinks you lift wages. NZPA reports: He said it was not good enough for New Zealand to be in the bottom third of the OECD for per-capita incomes, but was cautious about tackling the issue by lifting minimum wage rates. “In reality, […]

They’re doing it, why aren’t we?

Written By: - Date published: 4:17 pm, March 18th, 2009 - 20 comments

This morning I spotted a poignant example of the inequalities inherent in tackling climate change. The Maldives have announced they’ll go carbon neutral by 2020. Newly elected President Mohamed Nasheed says his small archipelago nation will hereby spurn fossil fuels – opting instead for wind and solar power – and buy EU carbon credits to […]

National’s cargo cult mentality

Written By: - Date published: 11:49 am, March 18th, 2009 - 32 comments

Over the weekend I pointed out that National’s plans to review the Overseas Investment Act would lead to even more foreign control of New Zealand and, ultimately, even more of our national wealth sucked offshore to pay the dividends of overseas shareholders. Murray Horton from the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa weighs in today, […]

Ambitious for New Zealand

Written By: - Date published: 10:37 am, March 18th, 2009 - 21 comments

John Key in the NBR*: There is more chance in this decade than the last one of New Zealand moving up the OECD league table because other countries are moving backwards. So, it’s OK if we’re getting poorer because other countries are getting poorer even faster. Not so ambitious for New Zealand after all I […]

DL Wellington – Andrew Little

Written By: - Date published: 10:15 am, March 18th, 2009 - 16 comments

Patrick’s sure got DL Wellington humming along. Next Wednesday at the Southern Cross they’ve got Andrew Little, national sec of the EPMU and the new Labour Party president along to talk about mobilising the labour movement. Should be plenty to discuss and debate. Here’s the email: The next Drinking Liberally Wellington is featuring newly elected […]

Healthy Homes, Healthy Kiwis

Written By: - Date published: 4:37 pm, March 17th, 2009 - 42 comments

Well I’ll be, it seems Labour is finally starting to act like an opposition. They’ve set up a campaign website on home insulation – Healthy Homes, Healthy Kiwis – and have started a petition calling on the Government to commit to a home-insulation retrofitting programme. It’s not a bad looking website, and they’ve even managed […]

Jonathan Coleman on TVNZ

Written By: - Date published: 1:20 pm, March 17th, 2009 - 42 comments

Jonathan Coleman on TVNZ. Parliament, 10 May 2007. Dr Jonathan Coleman When the Minister says that the Government is committed to the core objective of building national identity and will do so through television, does he not realise that New Zealanders do not want to be told by the Government what their identity is, and […]

Tapu Misa on private prisons

Written By: - Date published: 12:14 pm, March 17th, 2009 - 32 comments

From Tapu Misa’s latest column: National thinks that… [t]hrough the magic of “competition” we’ll get a first rate penal system, and private providers will make a profit without our having to spend any more money. Given the lack of strong evidence for this proposition, this seems to be based squarely on faith and ideology. But […]

Starving the beast

Written By: - Date published: 10:34 am, March 17th, 2009 - 60 comments

Before the election National promised that the public service would be capped, not cut. That promise was betrayed a long time ago, but what hasn’t been known up til now is the extent to which they are cutting it. You’ll recall a month back Consumer Affairs Minister Heather Roy let slip that across-the-board cuts of […]

Once upon a time there was an island

Written By: - Date published: 10:36 pm, March 16th, 2009 - 47 comments

Fancy a restful island holiday? If the Cateret Island was your chosen destination you might want to travel sooner rather than later according to CNN: There is one holiday destination that should shake the faith of even the most vehement climate change skeptic: the Carteret Islands, part of Papua New Guinea, located northeast of Bougainville… […]

Espiner on National’s use of the crisis

Written By: - Date published: 7:03 pm, March 16th, 2009 - 29 comments

Sadly, I couldn’t find Colin Espiner’s excellent piece in The Press today online. It’s good. Colin’s thoughtful observations derail the government’s PR spin about That Nice Man Mr Key and his commonsense centrist approach. He wonders whether the National government is taking advantage of the economic crisis to push through hard-right reforms Kiwis didn’t vote […]

90 axed at TVNZ

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 pm, March 16th, 2009 - 56 comments

In what’s turning out to be the gift that just keeps on giving for National, the Recession Bogeyman is now being blamed for a need to axe 90 staff from TVNZ. The Minister for Broadcasting reckons the cuts are necessary to make sure TVNZ keeps returing a fat dividend, even in these extraordinary times, even […]

National’s blitzkrieg

Written By: - Date published: 3:15 pm, March 16th, 2009 - 43 comments

The government’s first hundred days are up and they’ve decided that this signals the start to a multi-pronged political offensive. They are now moving rapidly to make a slew of legislative and policy changes that were either not announced or mentioned only briefly before the election. The Herald has noticed too, writing: “the Key Government […]

S92A: Opportunists jumping on bandwagons

Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, March 16th, 2009 - 78 comments

It is always interesting watching people and organizations jumping on bandwagons of popular movements. In the case of the section 92A of the new Copyright Act, there was a genuine movement by the denizens of the local net and artist communities that we participated in. Over the weekend Disk Smith Electronics did exactly that by […]

Death knell for print media?

Written By: - Date published: 11:32 am, March 16th, 2009 - 13 comments

A conversation that seems to be occuring more and more frequently is asking what’s the future of our newspapers? It’s a global question and is examined in some depth in this interesting article from The American which says: Speculation about the future of the newspaper or its equivalents should start with a review of the […]

More questions on the Sensible Sentencing Trust

Written By: - Date published: 5:48 am, March 16th, 2009 - 52 comments

Last week, Tane pointed out that the private prison industry had been involved in corrupting the political process in the US by funding ‘tough on crime’ groups that call for longer sentences (and bigger profits for private prisons). He wondered if the same could be happening here with the Sensible Sentencing Trust. This provoked a press release […]

A bunch of clowns

Written By: - Date published: 3:29 pm, March 15th, 2009 - 17 comments

Poor old Nick Smith. Not only is he stuck peddling long-disproved lies about ACC but now it seems he can’t even get a simple procedure like sacking Ross Wilson right. According to the Sunday Star Times Smith hadn’t managed to properly sack Wilson by midday Friday and may not even have managed it so far: […]

A fairer 9 day fortnight

Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, March 15th, 2009 - 5 comments

National’s 9-day fortnight will save only 2-3% of the jobs that are expected to be lost in the recession. It’s a trifling investment of only $20 million. It makes no effort to get workers into training. But the deep, dark secret is it is geared to the gain of business, not working people. Here’s the […]

Stewart vs Cramer

Written By: - Date published: 10:29 am, March 15th, 2009 - 10 comments

Earlier this week, I posted on the feud that erupted when the Daily Show criticised CNBC and the business media. Last night, CNBC’s Cramer came on the Daily Show. The results were funny and informative about how the financial crisis was allowed to develop. “We’re both snakeoil salesmen to some extent but we label it […]

ACC killed Kennedy says Smith

Written By: - Date published: 6:39 pm, March 14th, 2009 - 18 comments

Fresh on the heels of allegations ACC has blown-out and is likely to decimate New Zealand’s credit rating, Accident Compensation Minister Nick Smith has revealed he has evidence of the public insurance scheme’s involvement in the assassination of loved American President John F. Kennedy. The revelations were announced by Smith in select committee late this […]