Author Archive

Two face

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:28 am, July 20th, 2012 - 76 comments

$444m for road consultants, $128m out of poor kids’ mouths

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:33 pm, July 18th, 2012 - 69 comments

Never let the Nats tell you that they’re making responsible cuts in tough times. When the Greens tried to amend the social welfare bill currently before Parliament to ensure no kids would “unduly suffer”, National vetoed it saying that would eliminate $128m of the savings National’s planning to make. Get that? National’s welfare reforms take $128m from poor kids.

Denialists set to make monkeys of themselves

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 8:50 am, July 17th, 2012 - 103 comments

Could we be about to have our very own Scopes trial? In that famous Tennessee Court Case, the State prosecuted a teacher for teaching evolution. He walked free and it was a decisive moment in mainstreaming evolution and making the creationists the crackpots. Now, the climate change deniers are suing NIWA and their loss will be a dagger through the heart of denialism.

Not with a bang but a whimper

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:59 am, July 17th, 2012 - 21 comments

There’s some interesting speculation that the Government could collapse within months. The theory goes that the Government could lose its majority due to 1) the Maori Party walking away over the water rights issue and 2) John Banks being forced to resign over illegally anonymised donations in the 2010 Auckland mayoral election. I don’t see it happening, yet.

Key’s comments a blank cheque for investors

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 9:32 am, July 13th, 2012 - 48 comments

Now, I’m no big city lawyer, but it seems to me that John Key may be walking on some mighty thin ice by telling prospective investors in Mighty River not to worry about the Maori Council’s water claim. If it goes wrong, isn’t he exposing himself (actually, us taxpayers) to some major law suits and very expensive damages payouts?

Key’s fight with Maori no accident

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 9:13 am, July 11th, 2012 - 145 comments

Just 32 hours after Key started running the line that the Government would ignore the Waitangi Tribunal’s decision on the Maori Council water rights claim if it didn’t go his way, the Maori Party reacted. Key is abusing the privilege of his office by trying to pre-empt a judicial body’s decision says Pita Sharples. Tariana Turia says they will talk about their ‘future’ with National.

Asset sales & Brand Key becoming inextricably linked

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:08 am, July 10th, 2012 - 163 comments

It’s getting almost sad, how desperate John Key is to sell our assets. He’s preparing to overturn convention and ignore the Waitangi Tribunal. Meanwhile, something on the order of 3,000 people a day are signing the referendum petition on asset sales. Key is now spending every day fighting fires on a highly unpopular policy. It’ll make for a sad legacy.

Can iwi stop asset sales?

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 1:12 pm, July 9th, 2012 - 38 comments

someone will have explained to Key that Maori have a solid claim to ownership of water that could affect asset sales. But someone else will have been in his other ear pointing out that picking a fight with Maori over the Treaty could be a good way to win some votes back and wedge the opponents of asset sales. Guess who he listened to.

The Nation runs Nat smear

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 11:28 am, July 7th, 2012 - 39 comments

Gerry Brownlee is in court as some property owners challenge his decision to open up some blocks of land for new sections post-earthquake and not others. One of those property owners is Independent Seafoods. They would also have been one of a hundred to have benefited from a 2009 private members’ bill by Clayton Cosgrove. One of Cosgrove’s donors was IS. Brownlee’s shopped a smear based on that, and The Nation ran it.

Resource optimisation

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 9:48 am, July 6th, 2012 - 84 comments

You might have heard of this new TV series called The Block, where they get 4 couples to compete to do up dilapidated houses. It’s the most expensive non-fiction programme ever made in New Zealand. It’s vacuous, contentless garbage. But what gets my goat is they took 4 perfectly OK, not flash but OK houses, and munted them so that they could be done up on TV.

Can you afford to buy shares?

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 9:27 am, July 5th, 2012 - 106 comments

The median household has $1700 in the bank – you couldn’t really term that savings, it’s operating cash. The Nats want us to fork out at least a grand a time to participate in each share float. That just doesn’t add up. Labour and the Greens are right, this isn’t an opportunity for ordinary people to invest, it’s a wealth transfer to the elite.

Reasonable doubt

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 6:10 pm, July 3rd, 2012 - 52 comments

There’s some very wrong with the Police. A second murder trial in a month ending in acquittal (the Qwaze case wasn’t even a homicide). A case based on evidence that was never going to make it past reasonable doubt. This comes on top of the increased politicisation of the police and the grounds for two over-the-top armed raids being destroyed in court.

Minimum pricing

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:16 am, July 3rd, 2012 - 136 comments

All the evidence (eg) shows that increasing the price of harmful substances is the best way to decrease their use and, particularly, their abuse. Minimum pricing is one effective measure to do that for alcohol. But John Key disagrees. Based on … nothing. He hasn’t even taken the time to understand what minimum pricing is.

What did Key really know about Dotcom?

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:48 am, July 2nd, 2012 - 57 comments

We know that the Police overstepped their authority following their Hollywood wannabe raid on Dotcom’s home. They used invalid warrants to take property of Dotcom’s that they weren’t entitled to, and gave that data to the FBI. Now, we learn that Key’s office was involved in advising the Department of Labour on shutting down a leaked email.

Time for Govt to bring the cops to heel

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 10:43 am, June 29th, 2012 - 53 comments

Looks like the Police have cost us a fortune in an inevitable lawsuit from Kim Dotcom. Not only were the warrants they used to raid his house illegal, they took things they weren’t entitled to even under those illegal warrants. They aggravated this by playing FBI wannabes, causing distress and public humiliation. Then they gave their illegally obtained information to the Yanks.

Tariana’s final days?

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 6:49 am, June 29th, 2012 - 40 comments

Tariana Turia’s privatisation by stealth of welfare for Maori, known as Whanau Ora, was an open invitation to fraud. Money was signed over to groups with no track record and no plan. It’s finally caught up with her as New Zealand First, Women’s Refuge, and the Greens team up to reveal Turia’s lies and willful blindness over reported fraud in Palmerston North.

When spin backfires

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:46 am, June 28th, 2012 - 41 comments

John Key has this weird defence when challenged over the number of Kiwis who will buy and retain shares in his asset sales, given that shareholders in Contact have plummeted from 225,000 at point of listing to 78,000 now. He cites a single article by a single journalist that says Contact is widely-held. Yesterday, Key quoted at length from the year-old article. And walked straight into David Shearer’s trap.

When photo-ops backfire

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:42 am, June 27th, 2012 - 41 comments

3 years ago, a National minister dancing on a flattened boyracer car would have been a PR coup. And certainly that’s how National’s spin doctors expected it to play out last week. But times have changed. Now, it’s being criticised as an unseemly act and a waste of money through-out the media. These tipping points creep up on governments. Strengths suddenly become weaknesses.

Nats’ pollster reveals asset sale plan

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 9:34 am, June 23rd, 2012 - 250 comments

National pollster and Herald columnist (I know!) David Farrar has revealed what National has up its sleeve for asset sales. No, I’m not talking about how they would put ‘mums and dads’ at the ‘front of the queue’, or any such nonsense. I’m talking about how they will attempt to de-legitimise the referendum or, alternatively, try to slam the sales through before it happens.

Robertson and Cunliffe on the Environment

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 11:27 pm, June 22nd, 2012 - 87 comments

Grant Robertson and David Cunliffe will be talking environment & economy at Titirangi Saturday at 1pm.

It’ll be interesting to watch how Labour positions itself on this pivotal question vis-a-vis the Greens.

Government wastewatch: PPPs

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 8:58 am, June 20th, 2012 - 4 comments

So, National is using a Public Private Partnership to build a school in Hobsonville. You’ve heard of PPPs. They, like all privatisation, are billed as somehow unleashing the magic of the market to reduce costs. But the reality is they turn the taxpayer into a dairy cow to be milked by private profiteers. And this school is no different: it’s costing us more, and the profiteers are racking it in.

Good on the Greens

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:13 am, June 19th, 2012 - 104 comments

The Greens have hired the equivalent of 8 full-time staff for two months to get their signature collecting as part of the Keep Our Assets Coalition rolling. It comes out of the fixed budget allocated to the party’s leaders’ office – not one additional cent from the taxpayer, just a choice: other parties spend millions of taxpayer money on polling. It’s a good use of our money.

Key on the Nation

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 9:59 am, June 16th, 2012 - 93 comments

Well, the same old lines just aren’t working now. Maybe its a factor of having 3 journos interviewing him, but they are just rejecting Key’s spin outright – they know that the lines are fundamentally misleading, so they just brush them off and ask tougher questions. He’s getting his arse kicked on everything from schools to the economy. I predict this’ll be one of Key’s last long-format interviews.

How much will you pay for a assets ‘loyalty scheme’?

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 8:45 am, June 15th, 2012 - 17 comments

Most Kiwis won’t be able to afford to pay to buy what we already own when National sells our assets. When they sold Contact, only 5% of us got shares. You know who will buy the shares. Not your working families. Not Key’s new army of the unemployed. It’ll be the people who won big from National’s tax cuts. Now, to add insult to injury, Key is looking at making you and me pay a bonus to these people.

The Nats’ succession problem

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:00 am, June 14th, 2012 - 58 comments

John Key’s days are numbered. His personal popularity is falling. His brand is tied to unpopular asset sales and a pokies for convention centre deal that is now subject to an Auditor-General investigation. He’s not winning the next election. So a change of leader is coming: pre-election or post. But who can succeed him? Parata? Collins? Joyce? They’re all shot.

A day of wins for the Left

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 7:27 am, June 13th, 2012 - 67 comments

We should remember to celebrate our victories, and yesterday was a day full of them. First, there was the announcement of a settlement in the Oceania rest-home dispute. Then, the man the Nats selected to push through ACC privatisation was sacrificed to protect Crushless Collins. Finally, the Nats gave up trying to stop caregivers getting paid.

Nats try and fail to inoculate Key from Budget mess

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 11:10 am, June 10th, 2012 - 64 comments

The Prime Minister chairs Cabinet, which signs the Budget off policy by policy. A competent Prime Minister would be intimately familiar with the major policy changes. So, it was very interesting to see Audrey Young’s ‘insider’ piece on the education debacle yesterday. Chock full of tidbits supplied by Murray McCully. All the blame sleeted home to Bill English and Hekia Parata. Crucially, John Key barely mentioned.

Caption contest

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 1:17 pm, June 9th, 2012 - 76 comments

Flip-flop still leaves hole in education budget

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 6:28 am, June 8th, 2012 - 65 comments

With its polling slip-sliding away, National had no choice but to dump its ideological class size increases. But why did they dump the spending on teacher quality too? If that was such a priority that it justified sacking 1,000 teachers, couldn’t something else be cut? And what other education spending will now be cut to fill National’s budget hole?

The problem with Treasury’s broken crystal ball

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 6:56 am, June 7th, 2012 - 35 comments

The Budget was released on May 24th and Treasury’s numbers are already proving to be wrong. It’s not just a laughing matter. When you’ve got a government making its decisions based on a arbitrary, binary bookkeeping target: surplus by 2014/15 – yes/no, then you’re going to get problems when your chief bookkeeping agency doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.

Collins rates her reputation worthless

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 8:27 am, May 31st, 2012 - 25 comments

Judith Collins has tried to go for a lower bar in her defamation suit against Andrew Little and Trevor Mallard to get it over with quicker. But asking for a declaration, rather than damages, doesn’t reduce the legal test. There’s just no way Collins is going to be able to show she was legally defamed, let alone rebuff the defences Little and Mallard have.