Author Archive

If you believe in it, put something on the line

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 7:21 pm, August 25th, 2009 - 54 comments

It’s a strange day when you’re praising Tau Henare. But at least he’s standing up for Maori seats, unlike the pathetic display from Pita Sharples. Henare’s email brought to public attention Hide’s bullying threat to resign over the seats. Today, he kept up the fight having a go at Hide for his wag the dog tactics […]

Healthcare – need or wealth?

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:32 am, August 25th, 2009 - 44 comments

I don’t know if you’ve been following the healthcare debate in the States. Obama’s trying to bring in a plan that gets their ludicrously backward and complicated system part way towards the universal system every other developed country has. The Right’s going nuts. These next two clips prove that Jon Stewart is the smartest man […]

Ultra-fast broadband? Eventually, but not now

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:46 am, August 25th, 2009 - 17 comments

For what seems like the fiftieth time, we’re being told to expect an announcement from Steven Joyce on the shape of the Government’s ultra-fast broadband investment programme. It’s been nine months now and he hasn’t managed to produce anything solid, let alone get the legislative process underway. Before the election, we were told that $1.5 […]

More than just a job

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:30 am, August 24th, 2009 - 76 comments

Recently, Bill English has been trying to make excuses for not doing anything about the spiralling numbers of unemployed. He says that the practically full employment* of recent years was a mirage and people who are becoming unemployed should know “their jobs were unsustainable“. It’s similar to what he was saying in 1999, when he […]

Playing catch up?

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:39 pm, August 23rd, 2009 - 18 comments

In the 1980s and early 1990s, during the Right’s neoliberal economic revolution, New Zealand’s economic output per person stalled – growing just 0.01% per year between 1984 and 1992 – and fell behind Australia’s economy, which grew 1.84% per person a year over the same period. Between 1999 and 2008, the New Zealand’s GDP per capita actually […]

Tax reform mustn’t be a gift for the rich

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:25 am, August 21st, 2009 - 16 comments

Vernon Small’s pieces on tax in the Independent and Dom this week have been interesting. He provides a good overview of the issues around a land tax, capital gains tax, and raising GST. He points out that most economists argue we should tax things that can’t be taken away or avoided and things we want to discourage […]

Telecom’s profits first, NZ second

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:07 pm, August 20th, 2009 - 37 comments

You’ve heard about the Telecom dispute. But while a lot of the focus has been on what it means for the lines engineers involved, an equally important issue is what it means for the future of our country’s infrastructure. Because basically, this whole dispute is a sympton of Telecom’s attempts to increase its profits at […]

GST up? It depends

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:08 am, August 19th, 2009 - 40 comments

The Government’s Tax Working Group has proposed increasing GST to 15-20% to pay for cuts to income tax. I’m not automatically against GST or even raising it, if it’s part of the right package. Here’s the issues as I see them: Points in favour of increasing GST Taxing spending is better than taxing income: generally, […]

A question of trusts

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 1:17 pm, August 18th, 2009 - 52 comments

Here is Bill English in the cocktail tapes talking about Working for Families: “the reality is if we had been the government, with the surpluses they had, we would have done something similar, like Working for Families… there’s a set of inevitable problems, it’s like physics… If you give people cash [that abates as income […]

Breeding for a business

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 9:00 am, August 18th, 2009 - 29 comments

In 2002, John Key (then a free-speaking backbencher) told the Sunday-Star Times: “We’ve seen enormous growth in the number of people on the DPB, and where people have been, for want of a better term, breeding for a business” Of course, it wasn’t true that DPB numbers were growing – they’re down 16% over the last […]

On their coat-tails

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:48 am, August 17th, 2009 - 40 comments

Jon Stewart talks to Austan Goolsbee, Chief Economist for President Obama’s Economic Recovery Board: “when you’re looking in the face of the next great depression, that’s not the time to tighten the belt” Now, I’m not as optimisitc as Goolsbee about the long-term outlook but thank goodness the governments of the major countries didn’t go […]

On cultural relativism

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 3:17 pm, August 16th, 2009 - 22 comments

It’s a pretty rare thing for a conviction for manslaughter not to lead to some jail time. In the past 28 years, only 69 of 814 convictions haven’t resulted in a custodial sentence*. I would have thought that not getting jail time would be especially rare when the killing was at the more culpable end of the […]

Nip it in the bud

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 2:19 pm, August 16th, 2009 - 19 comments

Reading the Herald on Sunday piece about this senior political figure in the domestic violence dispute, I’m surprised his party hasn’t made him step down yet. I know that he has a right to fair process in the legal issue but from the facts that are public, it’s hard to see how he hasn’t crossed the moral […]

On the scrap heap

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 3:50 pm, August 15th, 2009 - 26 comments

Call me old fashioned if you will, but I like the idea that reforms of government activity should be concieved and implemented by experts in the particular field in question. Which makes me wonder, why the hell has Tony Ryall appointed a financial guy, Murray Horn, to lead a ministerial review into the health system? […]

The great leader

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 3:06 pm, August 15th, 2009 - 2 comments

Something about the title of this press release from Peter Dunne yesterday just made me laugh: Call for leadership, vision from pharmacy workshop And, inevitably, it led to this:

It’s Labour’s fault it didn’t rain!

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:00 pm, August 14th, 2009 - 33 comments

One of Bill English’s favourite lines is that New Zealand entered recession ahead of the rest of the world ‘due to Labour’s mismanagement of the economy’ and that’s why his government is unable to get off its arse now. Pity that Agriculture Minister David Carter had to go and spoil the lie for him: “Agriculture […]

Malthusian merriment

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:37 am, August 14th, 2009 - 74 comments

In the wake of a rather nasty piece of ‘satire’ on another blog earlier this week, I’ve been thinking about over-population. It’s a pretty sensitive topic, and one that is easily derailed by the kind of ‘forced abortion’ scaremongering that Farrar practices so well. I’m intending to write a more substantive piece later today on […]

New Zealand’s global shame

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 4:01 pm, August 13th, 2009 - 67 comments

Well, there goes our clean, green image. After Key announced the pathetic 10-20% emissions reduction target, we were declared ‘fossil of the day’ by environmental groups attending the Copenhagen climate change conference. Here’s Eco, talking about the failure of New Zealand and other developed countries:”The New Zealand target completes a rather dismal Annex I picture. The […]

Double bubble trouble

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:56 pm, August 13th, 2009 - 19 comments

It’s a rare day that I agree with Bill English but he’s right about the danger of another housing boom. The last bubble has not deflated yet we are already seeing prices start to grow again. There are now projections of 24% growth housing prices over the next three years, in a period when GDP […]

Recreating the reserve army of labour

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:48 am, August 13th, 2009 - 56 comments

Unemployment has shot up to 133,500, nearly doubling in 18 months. But that’s not the whole story. The official ‘unemployed’ are only the people without work who looking for work and able to start now. Add to that the ‘jobless’, people who want work but are not actively looking (because they’re discouraged or there’s none […]

Wellington fundraisers

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:59 am, August 12th, 2009 - 5 comments

Two cool fundraisers coming up for the Greens and Labour. The Greens are holding a screening of Kiwi ‘s The Age of Stupid, a movie set in 2055 looking back at today and asking the painful, obvious question – ‘if we could see all these problems of resource exhaustion, pollution, cliamte change, and over-population coming, […]

Big issues in Telecom lines strike

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 4:45 pm, August 11th, 2009 - 32 comments

It’s great to see all the lines engineers standing up to Telecom’s attempt to strip away their employment rights and turn them into dependent contractors. I was lucky enough to catch the protest above yesterday (not my photo though), and there was a lot of passion from the guys. There’s a good reason for that […]

Padding pockets, not houses

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:45 pm, August 11th, 2009 - 45 comments

Just a month into the Government’s housing insulation programme and John Key has had to launch an inquiry into rorting by contractors who are taking the subsidy but also increasing their prices, and so pocketing a good part of the subsidy themselves rather than passing it on to the consumer as intended. That’s a bad […]

Double dipping

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 8:59 am, August 11th, 2009 - 20 comments

No, not another post about Bludger Bill, this one’s about that thing that he and Key are meant to be taking care of. What’s it called again? No, not the cycle-way. No, not solving disputes over wills. Um, bear with me, it’ll come back to me. Oh, right, it’s the economy. That thing? But everything’s […]

Unambitious for New Zealand

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 6:52 pm, August 10th, 2009 - 45 comments

If ever there were a sentence that summed up our collective folly it’s “Scientific opinion is that a reduction of 40 per cent is needed to prevent serious global warming but few countries are expected set that as a target.” That’s from the NZPA article on the Key Government’s newly announced climate change target. 10-20% below […]

Save the climate, raise our albedo

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:06 am, August 10th, 2009 - 18 comments

Dark material gets warmer in sunlight than light-coloured or white material. Heat energy enters our atmosphere after light strikes the surface of the Earth, is partially converted into heat, which then radiates into the air. White stuff reflects the sun’s energy straight back into space without converting as much of it into heat. Because of this, […]

Time for tory charity?

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:41 am, August 10th, 2009 - 22 comments

Following the success of TV3’s ‘Big Night In’ Telethon which raised over $2 million for KidsCan, I was thinking there are others that could benefit from some charity. You know, the recession is biting and even people who have been used to living well are now having to couple with dramatic cuts to their incomes. […]

Unemployment back to English’s ‘realistic’ level

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:11 am, August 7th, 2009 - 33 comments

Who said this? “if we continue with National’s policies over the next three years we will be able to create another 115,000 jobs and bring unemployment under 6%. These are realistic targets…Labour’s claim that it can bring the unemployment rate down to 3% is also a hoax” It was Bill English in 1999. Of course, […]

Greens show the way forward

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 10:00 am, August 6th, 2009 - 42 comments

The Greens have presented a sensible and feasible plan to reduce our greenhouse emissions to 40% less than 1990 levels by 2020. Contrary to Nick Smith’s scaremongering, it won’t break the bank. In fact, at current carbon credit prices, they will save us money. phase out fossil fuel plants and set higher energy efficency standards. […]

Less work, less pay for Kiwis

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 5:00 am, August 6th, 2009 - 5 comments

Today the Household Labour Force Survey, which includes the official measure of unemployment, will be out. The headline number is expected to be around 5.6%, up from record lows below 4% just nine months ago. The HLFS has a few limitations though. It only measures the percentage of people who are ‘in the work-force’ (ie in work […]

Why don’t they just stop ripping us off?

Written By: Marty G - Date published: 11:20 am, August 5th, 2009 - 26 comments

Key admits his ministers are rorting the system – exploiting the allowance not for need but just because it gives them a chance for a bit of free cash: “In some instances you’ve got ministers moving out of homes where they might otherwise stay there but the rules don’t really encourage that” So, they’re moving […]