Author Archive

Best stick to the polling, Farrar

Written By: - Date published: 7:07 am, March 19th, 2012 - 103 comments

David Farrar has had a go at David Clark for supposedly blaming (or crediting, Farrar can’t make up his mind) National for the revenue loss resulting from Labour’s 2008 tax cuts after Clark said that National’s tax cuts have sucked 2.5% of GDP out of the Crown’s revenue, widening the deficit by $5b a year. Either Farrar can’t read or he’s desperately spinning.

Nats running a $5b a year strategic deficit

Written By: - Date published: 8:38 am, March 18th, 2012 - 112 comments

Labour’s Revenue spokesman, David Clark, has picked up on a statement in IRD’s Briefing to the Incoming Minister that “2.5 percentage points of this decline [in tax take as a percentage of GDP] is attributable to policy changes”. 2.5% of GDP is $5 billion a year. So, a huge chunk of the record deficits that National is running is attributable to their tax cuts for the rich.

Chinese threats over Crafars deal

Written By: - Date published: 1:59 pm, March 17th, 2012 - 141 comments

China’s political counsel (note, not a trade official) has threatened New Zealand over the Crafar Farms deal saying that New Zealand trade to China and investment from China is at risk. It seems an extraordinary action over a supposedly private business arrangement. As was Chinese Officials’ meeting with the OIO while the first Crafar farm decision was being made.

Nats back down from ACC privatisation why not asset sales?

Written By: - Date published: 10:56 am, March 16th, 2012 - 16 comments

National has backed down from privatising ACC’s work account. To make it work, they were going to have to pump up ACC levies and make it pay a dividend to the Crown to make prices high enough for the private sector to compete. A sign of how weak the government is that they couldn’t push this through. Problem is, the same logic applies to asset sales.

Juking the stats

Written By: - Date published: 7:44 am, March 16th, 2012 - 12 comments

There’s some odd omissions from Key’s new ’10 targets’. There’s nothing hard. Nothing about closing the gap with Australia, formerly goal number 1. Nothing about creating jobs, despite 170,000 being promised. Nothing about the cycleway that was going to end the recession. It invites a closer look at the 10 targets. And then you discover, they’ll all happen anyway.

Incompetent management forces Shearer & Brown off fence

Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, March 12th, 2012 - 47 comments

After months on the side-line, David Shearer and Len Brown have been forced to choose a side in the Ports of Auckland dispute by the irrational and unreasonable behaviour of the Ports management. Shearer has come out against casualisation and marched with the workers in Saturday. Brown has offered mediation between the parties.

Ryall confirms asset stripping on the cards

Written By: - Date published: 9:50 am, March 2nd, 2012 - 136 comments

So, National wants to re-assure us that, when they sell our assets against our will, they’ll keep 51% and control. But, um, minority shareholders have rights and private boards have to maximise profits ahead of the national interest. If they decide to sell off the dams later they can, and the Nats won’t stop them.

National’s transport priorities revealed

Written By: - Date published: 7:50 am, March 2nd, 2012 - 19 comments

Louise Upston had a patsy for Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee about a bridge replacement in her electorate (the Nats have big achievements to crow about, eh?). Upston asked about the project’s benefits. Brownlee responded “First, I would expect re-election of the local member”. Now we know what National sees at those end of those highways to nowhere – swing votes.

Does working pay?

Written By: - Date published: 11:02 am, February 29th, 2012 - 72 comments

Maybe it’s the influence of Bill ‘Guess’ English but National has this strange habit of only doing half the sum. Paula Bennett counts people going off the benefit, but not people going on. John Key looks at normal job creation but ignores normal job destruction. Now, he’s claiming that a mother with a 1-year old is better off working, but he’s not counting the costs of working.

Nats try to confuse between churn & real job growth

Written By: - Date published: 10:23 am, February 29th, 2012 - 17 comments

There are quarter of a million jobless people. In a typical quarter, about 250,000 people start new jobs. Does that mean we can eliminate joblessness in a quarter? Of course fucken not, but that’s what National is telling you when they rabbit on about ‘10,000 jobs on Trademe’. To get joblessness and benefit numbers down you need a net increase in jobs,not just churn.

Where’s Murray?

Written By: - Date published: 11:08 pm, February 27th, 2012 - 16 comments

As controversy swirls over Murray McCully’s leaked emails and the government’s secret position on “restraining China” and McCully is nowhere to be found to answer questions, John Key says “I have absolutely no clue where he is“. Funny, cause he was the one who approved McCully’s travel. Seems a lot of ministers are taking to hiding when the heat comes on.

Private sector can’t compete with ACC

Written By: - Date published: 12:04 pm, February 27th, 2012 - 35 comments

Government documents from last year reveal a plan to make ACC boost its levies and pay the government a dividend so that private insurers can compete. But that wasn’t enough. Now, the plan seems to be to exclude ACC from workplace injury insurance altogether. Private insurers just can’t offer cover as cheap as ACC can. So that Nats’ solution is to deny us access to ACC workplace cover.

Crowd-sourcin’: asset sales question

Written By: - Date published: 11:37 am, February 21st, 2012 - 47 comments

Economic sovereignty is suddenly the hot issue with the vast majority of Kiwis opposed to more foreign ownership and asset sales. The Nats are in a spin: Key is desperately trying to upgrade English’s ‘guess’ on the fiscal impact of asset sales to a “best estimate”. Time for that asset sales referendum petition. Maybe you can help draft the question.

Nats’ debt pile hits $50b

Written By: - Date published: 6:23 am, February 21st, 2012 - 210 comments

For the first time in history, net government debt has passed $50 billion. New Zealand’s net international liabilities, the amount New Zealand owes the rest of the world, is also skyrocketing: $140 billion now, $197 billion in 2016. John Key used to say we had a growth problem, not a debt problem. With GDP per capita down 2% under National, we now have both.

How low will they go?

Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, February 20th, 2012 - 11 comments

The Nats are looking to Queensland for lessons in privatisation. They want to see how incentives for locals to hold on to their shares work. But you don’t pay for incentives with magic beans. Any incentives for the few locals who can afford to buy shares just means a diminished return to the government, making the economic and fiscal rationale for selling even weaker.

Seething O’Sullivan misunderstands markets

Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, February 18th, 2012 - 303 comments

Fran ‘Sell it all’ O’Sullivan is fuming over the Court decision putting aside the approval of Pengxin’s application to buy Crafar Farms. She knows that Pengxin can’t satisfy the actual legal test because its bid has never been about bringing benefit to New Zealand. Its been about securing strategic assets for China. But some of her whining really needs to be pulled up.

Nats want more expensive ACC so private insurers can profit

Written By: - Date published: 10:48 am, February 18th, 2012 - 127 comments

Private sector competition brings market disciplines and efficiencies to bloated publicly-owned monopolies. That’s the mantra, eh? That’s the indisputable truth… right? So, how come the Nats are planning to make ACC raise its levies and pay a dividend – for the first time ever – so that private insurers can compete? And how does that benefit NZ?

Even English’s made-up asset sales numbers don’t add up

Written By: - Date published: 10:59 am, February 17th, 2012 - 20 comments

Bill English admitted yesterday that his new estimate that asset sales will net $6b in revenue, $800m above book value, is just a guess – the midpoint of the previous guess of $5-7b. And that’s not all that’s made up. The forecast foregone profits are way under-estimated. Even with these fiscal frauds, English still can’t get asset sales to make economic sense.

Key’s ‘sell, sell, sell’ mantra out of touch with NZ

Written By: - Date published: 7:47 am, February 16th, 2012 - 77 comments

The Crafar Farms decision is sensible and a correct interpretation of the law. Foreign buyers must add something that a local buyer can’t, other than a higher purchase price. Otherwise, our farmers will continue to be out-bid for our land by foreign government-backed companies that can afford a lower rate of return, and NZ will gain nothing. So, why is National rushing to change the law?

Billions down the drain on roads to nowhere

Written By: - Date published: 12:13 pm, February 15th, 2012 - 42 comments

Gerry Brownlee has weakly attempted to fob off the decline in benefit:cost ratio of highway projects under National. ‘Sure’ he says ‘we’ve been funding projects that barely break even while high BCR spending like early childhood education gets cut, but things will turn around’. Um, no. Look at the projects National has on the horizon, […]

Foreign banks bleeding us dry

Written By: - Date published: 6:47 am, February 14th, 2012 - 340 comments

The Bankers’ Crisis is hurting people all over the world. From the deepest, darkest austerity in Greece, to the continuing foreclosure tsunami in the US, to cutbacks and job losses here, it’s the ordinary people suffering the hangover for the bankers’ wild decades of unbridled excess and profit. But at least the banks are suffering too, eh? Yeah, nah.

The circling vultures

Written By: - Date published: 10:59 am, February 11th, 2012 - 105 comments

People are waking up to National’s plan to remove the democratically-elected Christchurch City Council and replace it with its own hand-picked commissioners, who will then give a green light to Brownlee’s developer mates and the sale of council assets. You can already see the vultures circling – waiting for the chance to seize more public wealth for themselves.

Dictatorshipwatch: Christchurch City Council

Written By: - Date published: 10:15 am, February 10th, 2012 - 23 comments

When National decided to seize control of Canterbury Regional Council to remove roadblocks for unsustainable irrigation by their mates in the dairy industry, they didn’t do it overnight. They spent months creating a crisis. The same thing’s happening in Christchurch. Brownlee’s building a ‘crisis in the council’ to justify replacing the councilors with commissioners. The only question is when.

Not a bad idea

Written By: - Date published: 8:45 pm, February 6th, 2012 - 20 comments

David Shearer wants to move the New Year’s and Queen’s Birthday honours to Waitangi Day. I reckon that’s a goer. If honourees were advised ahead of time, they could attend a public ceremony at Waitangi, to add to all the other events. With thousands there, it would be a much more public celebration of their contributions to our society and bring a positive focus to the day.

Hickey on playing by the rules

Written By: - Date published: 8:49 am, February 5th, 2012 - 130 comments

While the rest of the world is moving away from the ‘hands off’ monetary policy that became fashionable in the 80s, our government insists on playing by the outmoded neoliberal ‘rules’ of a clean float. Well, what happens when everyone else ‘cheats’ by printing free money to drive their currencies lower and we sit on our hands? We lose our assets and our exporters.

MoT reveals massive budget shortfall from peak oil

Written By: - Date published: 7:33 am, February 4th, 2012 - 36 comments

Almost missed among all the blacked out paragraphs of the Transport Briefing to the Incoming Minister are 2 interesting graphs. While not explicitly mentioning peak oil, the graph of the National Land Transport Fund shows a massive shortfall in revenue in a ‘high oil price, low growth’ scenario. The other shows how low-quality National’s highway spending is.

Marryatt must go

Written By: - Date published: 6:41 am, January 31st, 2012 - 84 comments

Most Kiwis have had no payrise, if they’re lucky enough to have kept their jobs, in the past few years. Yet Christchurch City Council CEO Tony Marryatt has kept on getting pay rises on his obscene salary, even as his job performance has declined. Now the arrogant bastard is saying he’ll keep $34,000 he doesn’t deserve unless the elected council ‘behaves’. There is no justification for this madness. Sack him.

Ports of Auckland vs 400,000 wharfies

Written By: - Date published: 7:30 am, January 21st, 2012 - 116 comments

Tony Gibson with his $750,000 salary and his senior managers on half a million each may have thought they had it easy beating up on some $27 an hour workers so that they could increase profits by cutting wages but they failed to calculate that those 330 workers are backed by 400,000 brothers and sisters around the world.

Adapting to peak oil

Written By: - Date published: 8:45 am, January 20th, 2012 - 160 comments

As peak oil slowly grinds down our economy – meeting any hint of growth with sky-high petrol prices and making $2 a litre the ‘new normal’, we are actually, gradually,starting to react. Not at a governmental level, where action is most urgently needed, but in the decisions made by ordinary Kiwis every day.

Texas of the South Seas?

Written By: - Date published: 10:57 am, January 17th, 2012 - 132 comments

Every few years, since the 70s, they’ve promised the great New Zealand oil boom is coming. It ain’t going to happen. If there is lots of oil, it’s deepsea and expensive. And they haven’t found it in 40 years of looking. We have a worse production-consumption ratio now then the 80s. Even if we somehow become a massive oil exporter, it’s not the economic panacea you might think.

Stick a fork in Port management, they’re done

Written By: - Date published: 7:03 am, January 13th, 2012 - 264 comments

A leaked Ports of Auckland strategy document shows their goal is to reduce the stevedores’ wages by 20%. They were planning to manufacture a crisis even before the stevedores’ collective expired. They’ve been rumbled breaking the law by not bargaining in good faith. Their political support will now evaporate. They should cut their losses, and a deal with the workers, now.

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