Author Archive

Will the last one to leave ACC please turn out the lights?

Written By: - Date published: 10:07 am, June 21st, 2012 - 20 comments

To paraphrase Mr Wilde, losing 1 board member looks unfortunate, but losing 4 & a CEO looks like a minister losing control of her portfolio. As much as the botox allows, Collins didn’t look happy when board member number 4 quit. But mama said never trust a tory. Expect the Nats to try to turn events to their advantage. Privatisation isn’t off the table.

Remember when….

Written By: - Date published: 7:13 am, June 20th, 2012 - 67 comments

National put out a couple of bizarre press releases saying “remember when…” and recounting the asset sales under the 4th Labour Government. Apparently, the fact that they fucked up is reason for National to fuck up now. Well, remember when asset sales earned Labour a landslide defeat and nearly destroyed it in 1990, resulting in nine years in the wilderness?

How the Greek Right screwed the scrum

Written By: - Date published: 8:21 am, June 18th, 2012 - 89 comments

You know how the Greek’s have this weird ‘winner’s bonus’ – 250 seats are proportionally allocated but the largest, and even by one vote gets another 50 seats. The rightwing got the bonus by a couple of percent over SYRIZA by screwing the scrum. How? By merging New Democracy and a small rightwing party – the Democratic Alliance. Only this allowed ND/DISY to beat SYRIZA. That trick, and PASOK going over to the right will allow a 40% coalition to govern with a majority.

The tax-cheating elite

Written By: - Date published: 1:39 pm, June 16th, 2012 - 137 comments

For 10 years, the IRD has been investigating the tax dealings of the country’s 250 richest people and their 7,500 companies and trusts. It turns out they had underpaid $500m of tax with hundreds of millions more in dispute. If you and I went into a government office and stole $10,000 of stuff, we would go to jail. But ripping us off for $500m was all just a mistake, apparently.

Housing bubble round 2

Written By: - Date published: 10:37 am, June 13th, 2012 - 27 comments

Another housing bubble. Just what we need. House prices up 5.4% in a year, 7.8% in Auckland. Inflation is 1.6%. Billions are being funneled into housing by banks who can make a buck off importing cheap credit from offshore and lend it to homebuyers here. The government could act. But this is National, does anyone expect solutions from them anymore?

Unable to retire

Written By: - Date published: 10:37 am, June 11th, 2012 - 11 comments

Sharples and Turia remind me of an old couple running the family store with no kids to pass it on to. They want to retire. If they do, that’ll be curtains for everything they’ve built. Without them, the Maori Party goes to a deserving death. Plus Key will be pressuring them to stay. They’re his only ghost of a chance. How much longer can they keep going? They’ll be 72 and 70 in 2014.

Don’t feed the troll

Written By: - Date published: 10:46 am, June 7th, 2012 - 33 comments

Bennett is running misdirection for the Parata. Not letting bad parents have more kids is nothing new. It’s just the existing powers courts have to order CYFS to take newborns into custody and to ban people from contact with kids. With the meaningless addition of making these orders before a woman is pregnant. Good talkback bait though. Bennett’s just trolling again. Which is all she seems good for.

Out of order

Written By: - Date published: 10:19 am, June 4th, 2012 - 79 comments

I’m not a big fan of the whole honours system, with or without knighthoods. But if you’re going to have it, make it mean something. Giving the top gong, which only 20 living people can have, to a guy whose claim to fame is marrying his second cousin and then acting like the stereotype of […]

Parata to change careers?

Written By: - Date published: 10:07 am, June 2nd, 2012 - 15 comments

Hekia Parata this week became the fourth minister in three months to see her career reduced to tatters. Looks like she’s planning a change.

Selective memory

Written By: - Date published: 8:59 am, June 1st, 2012 - 37 comments

Things Key can’t remember: Position on Springbok tour: subject of mass protests under his idol, Muldoon. Position on the anti-nuclear issue: cornerstone policy of 4th Labour government, also triggered the schnapps election that brought down his hero. Things Key can remember: Never claiming the child tax rebate for his paper-run. Which is true because the rebate wasn’t introduced until Key was 17.

Banks’ vote protects him from Jones-like accountability

Written By: - Date published: 10:24 am, May 31st, 2012 - 26 comments

Labour’s got its Auditor-General inquiry into Jones’ approval of Yan’s citizenship. We’ve seen this movie before. In a year, the report will recommend better procedures but nothing more. Jone will be reinstated. The politics is more important. Shearer’s shown he has the power to control his senior MPs and set a high standard of accountability. When will Key match that standard and stand down Banks?

Nats pay for booze for the elite, cut home insulation for families

Written By: - Date published: 11:15 am, May 30th, 2012 - 33 comments

National blew the VIP entertainment budget for the Rugby World Cup by $5 million, despite none of the promised big names actually turning up. They got the extra dosh out of Mfat’s budget. In unrelated news, the government is cutting the Greens’ Warm Up New Zealand programme, which has returned four times its costs in benefits. There’s no money, you see.

Larger classes only for the peasants

Written By: - Date published: 7:01 am, May 30th, 2012 - 34 comments

So, half the Cabinet sends their kids to private schools. Those schools – which National has upped the taxpayers subsidies for – boast of small class sizes. Kings, where Key sends his kid, says: “Class sizes are limited and our policy of a low pupil-to-teacher ratio ensures students are given greater individual attention in the classroom”. Guess larger classes are only good for the peasants’ kids.

Budget app a waste of money

Written By: - Date published: 10:37 am, May 29th, 2012 - 17 comments

National is crowing that 8,600 people downloaded the Budget App. Pity it doesn’t work.  And, of course, you can view the budget via your phone or tablet’s browser already without an expensive app. The Nats reckon the $59,000 cost is ‘free’ because it came from printing fewer paper editions – a bit like how if you save $100 at a sale it doesn’t matter if you set $60 on fire.

Picking winners

Written By: - Date published: 10:11 am, May 28th, 2012 - 10 comments

National’s got this love affair with ‘outcomes, not outputs’. Means funding teachers and community groups on the achievements of their students or clients, not the number they have. You don’t have to have seen The Wire to know the results. Schools and community groups will pick winners, only those who can achieve easily, to protect their funding.

Stockholm syndrome

Written By: - Date published: 9:52 am, May 25th, 2012 - 22 comments

With enough conditioning, our psyches will adapt to believe almost anything. Like that pain is good.

Half way there

Written By: - Date published: 8:20 am, May 23rd, 2012 - 22 comments

It’s great that foreign fishing vessels in New Zealand waters will now be required to be flagged here and, in theory, will be subject to New Zealand law. But I reckon that abuses of those crews is only half the problem. The other problem is that we have Kiwi quota owners, in particular iwi, employing foreign fishers while quarter of a million of our people are jobless.

Back to school for Parata

Written By: - Date published: 8:01 am, May 22nd, 2012 - 26 comments

Parata on The Nation: “what we’ve had is a five-fold increase in the number of teachers while we’ve only had a 2% increase in students”. There are 52,500 teachers. Is Parata really saying there were only 10,500 a decade ago? The minister needs remedial maths, methinks. This is the tragedy: our kids’ education being toyed with by nincompoops and dullards with a dumbarse ideological agenda.

The thinner blue line

Written By: - Date published: 11:16 am, May 21st, 2012 - 19 comments

National is going to cut 125 police staff. They’re not sworn officers but who’s going to pick up the work they were doing? Sworn cops, of course. Course, tying up cops with paperwork will help the crime stats drop. And with the navy so underfunded half its inshore patrol vessels are being mothballed I bet illegal fishing instances drop too. Funny that.

Dunne angry

Written By: - Date published: 1:39 pm, May 18th, 2012 - 106 comments

Underneath the ‘common-sense’ exterior, and all that hair, Peter Dunne is an angry man. He lashed out that those who pointed out he’s voting for asset sales he never told his electorate he would support. He screamed at losing TVNZ7 – Backbenches is his one chance to get on the telly. And he’s going feral on the Conservatives because they could usurp him.

Performance pay for ministers to be introduced

Written By: - Date published: 11:46 am, May 17th, 2012 - 10 comments

In a surprising pre-Budget u-turn, Prime Minister John Key has announced the Government will drop its policy of incrementally introducing performance pay for teachers and, instead, introduce it for ministers. “Listening to Hekia Parata fluff her way through her spin lines on the teacher cuts, I had a kind of epiphany” said Key. “Any fool […]

Much ado about nothing

Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, May 15th, 2012 - 39 comments

So, Cunliffe was invited on The Nation. He said, yup but not if leadership nonsense is raised. Garner agreed. Then the leader office said it should be Parker as Finance spokesperson this close to the Budget. Cunliffe agreed. And this is meant to be some huge ado? Get real.

Why are you leaving for Aussie?

Written By: - Date published: 11:43 am, May 14th, 2012 - 75 comments

1 in 80 New Zealanders left for Australia last 12 months. Emigration so far this year is 15% higher than the same months in 2011. 6,000 people attended the 3rd Aussie jobs expo in Auckland in 18 months this weekend. The question is becoming not ‘would you go to Aussie’ but ‘what was the final straw for you to decide to leave Aussie’. Here’s a few reasons.

Another broken promise from our con-man PM

Written By: - Date published: 9:04 pm, May 11th, 2012 - 68 comments

Key looked the Pike River families in the eye and promised to get their mens bodies out. It was a promise he never should have made. But he did to make people like him. He wouldn’t even talk about it today. Coward. And what of his promise to make things right for Christchurch? Or his promise of an aggressive recovery? Or his promise to help the underclass? Or that brighter future?

Stop press!

Written By: - Date published: 8:15 am, May 11th, 2012 - 3 comments

Bet there’s some last minute changes to the Budget happening. A few mil to reverse the bio-security cuts now the fruit fly’s in. A few mil for monitoring MSD contracts – Bennett’s ‘high trust’ (ie too lazy/cheap) model clearly isn’t working. They could find savings by not giving money to fronts for gangs and other corrupt groups, predictably, sucking on the Whanau Ora teat.

Sinking homicide rate justifies murder spree – PM

Written By: - Date published: 12:21 pm, May 9th, 2012 - 15 comments

The Government’s ‘sinking lid’ on homicides means that John Key can personally garotte 3-5 enemies and the overall number of killings will still decrease, a smiling Prime Minister told journalists today. “On current trends, the number of murders is dropping by half a dozen a year. Which means no-one should mind if I bump off a few annoying arseholes” said Mr Key

All in the game

Written By: - Date published: 10:10 am, May 9th, 2012 - 77 comments

Everyone’s leaped on the Nats’ contraceptives for benies bid to distract from banks.com. Guess I’ll jump in too. Capitalist morality goes: the world/God rewards the good, which is why capitalists are rich – so, the poor, like beneficiaries, must be morally bad – the world would be better without bad people. Eugenics has been and remains a logical endpoint of capitalist morality.

Cutting holes in the safety net

Written By: - Date published: 9:35 am, May 8th, 2012 - 11 comments

The Nats’ welfare cuts will cost $500m over 4 years. Supposedly save a billion. Net saving: $125m a year. 1% of benefit costs. 1/8th of the cost of extra beneficiaries under National. Won’t really save even that little. No jobs. Unemployment rising. National’s problem is it tries to save costs of the welfare safety net by cutting holes in the net. The real solution is to stop people falling in. Best welfare policy is a jobs policy.

He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy

Written By: - Date published: 6:21 am, May 8th, 2012 - 136 comments

Don’t get me wrong. Apart from a couple of policies (asset sales, overseas investment, no borrowing for tax cuts), Colin Craig’s politics are bad. But I like his Boscawen-like mad honesty. It’s fun. Mainly because it makes him so uncomfortable for his new National suitors. But his up-frontness ends when asked about his compulsory Christianity employment contracts.

Still no law suit from Collins

Written By: - Date published: 2:06 pm, May 7th, 2012 - 16 comments

For all her bluster, Judith Collins still hasn’t sued Trevor Mallard and Andrew Little for supposedly defaming her by saying she was behind the leak of the Boag email identifying Bronwyn Pullar as the leaker of 6,500 ACC clients’ details. I’m not sure how you can argue its defamatory for a minister to be accused of leaking private information when Paula Bennett did it.

Talley’s cracking

Written By: - Date published: 6:51 am, May 4th, 2012 - 36 comments

It is a fundamental injustice of our society that one family, which already has more than it can ever need, can hold 1,300 families, who have very little, to ransom just to make a little more cash. But the union makes us working people strong. By standing together, the workers are beating Talley’s in the AFFCO lockout. Talley’s cracked. Wants half them back. The workers have said ‘all of us or none of us’.

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