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Business awakens to National’s undemocratic ways
Written By: - Date published: 10:41 pm, February 20th, 2011 - 6 comments
On a day when I’ve heard of 3 smaller businesses shutting down due to National’s economy, Big Business too is waking up to the flaws in National’s ways. The push through, don’t consult, override the wishes of the people mentality even chafes the corporates when it’s not in their favour.
Whitcoulls
Written By: - Date published: 8:19 am, February 20th, 2011 - 32 comments
Whitcoulls has been here since forever — “one of New Zealand’s most famous and enduring retail chains”. But the chain is in big trouble, and it’s sad to watch the ongoing wreck. Let’s hope that Whitcoulls can be saved before hundreds more workers and families in NZ lose their livelihood to the moribund economy.
Bloody Klowns
Written By: - Date published: 9:13 am, February 5th, 2011 - 80 comments
Ever been in a job where you thought you were underpayed and overworked? Ever voiced those feelings to your workmates? Either on the job, or during ‘smoko’, over the telephone or through some other electronic medium?
A Burger King employee in Dunedin has. And now, astonishingly, faces the possibility of being fired for serious misconduct.
Brethren taking subsidies for illegal discrimination
Written By: - Date published: 10:16 pm, January 13th, 2011 - 65 comments
Another great piece of work from I/S at No Right Turn: “the Exclusive Brethren have set up their own KiwiSaver scheme… The scheme will only be offered to members of the cult. This is, of course, illegal.” They’re trying to take taxpayer money for a business that illegally discriminates on the grounds of religion. It must be stopped.
Why didn’t the warning sound at Pike River?
Written By: - Date published: 9:22 pm, January 6th, 2011 - 44 comments
I never, ever thought I would say this but there’s a very good article in Investigate this week. It’s about the Pike River disaster. With methane sensors in place, alarms should have gone off well before the gas reached combustible level. Investigate reveals the sensors may have been disabled by workers who would lose pay if they had to stop work.
Farrar joins call for SOE reform
Written By: - Date published: 7:00 am, December 24th, 2010 - 95 comments
Say you run a large company. Say the manager of a division in your company chose do a deal that improves the division’s own profitability instead of one that would have made the division less profitable but the company as a whole more profitable. You would be angry. So why are the people who run our SOEs required to act like that?
Nats & Jackson played us for fools
Written By: - Date published: 8:09 am, December 21st, 2010 - 130 comments
The Herald has used the OIA to get hold of emails Peter Jackson sent Gerry Brownlee during the Hobbit shakedown. They show that the Actors’ Equity blacklisting was not a threat to the film staying here – yet Jackson and Brownlee told us it was to justify handing Warners $34 million and rushing through an anti-worker law.
The real target of DB Export campaign
Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, December 20th, 2010 - 61 comments
There’s an ad campaign at the moment about how DB Export was supposedly created in reaction to the Black Budget. It’s full of lies and a lot of people see it as a slur on Arnold Nordmeyer and Labour in general. In fact, this odd campaign under the slogan ‘how to lose an election’ isn’t about Labour. It’s a warning to National.
The new economy: Govt as an economic actor
Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, December 17th, 2010 - 42 comments
Three government investment decisions in the last couple of weeks have shown the deficiencies in the neoliberal way of doing things. SOE Solid Energy’s lignite-to-liquids obsession, Kiwirail buying trains in China rather than making them itself and Steven Joyce decision to re-create Telecom’s monopoly by giving it 70-84% of the broadband contracts.
Nats’ ideology: outsourcing NZ
Written By: - Date published: 9:54 am, December 15th, 2010 - 29 comments
3 under the radar stories yesterday. All linked by ideology. Kiwirail to buy 300 wagons from China because its cheaper than building them here. Not allowed to consider wider economic gains. Collins outsources her new prison to a multi-national with a history of prisoner abuse. English wants more ‘value’ from public assets. Value for whom? The likes of Serco?
Treasury warned on risk of Hobbit hustle
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, December 2nd, 2010 - 15 comments
Remember how Peter Jackson and Warner Bros pulled the old Hollywood shakedown on us? By making a hollow threat to film elsewhere they got an extra $30 million and a law passed just for them. This was supposedly necessary to save a vital economy gain for the country but the Government knew that was bollocks all along.
Gaynor on something important
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, November 29th, 2010 - 5 comments
“New Zealand investors are facing an accounting crisis. This is because domestic companies have rejected many of the new international financial reporting standards (IFRS) and are declaring “adjusted”, “underlying”, “operating”, “excluding non-trading” and “from continuing operations” profits that vary significantly from audited IFRS-compliant profits.”
OMG! ING! WTF?
Written By: - Date published: 1:33 pm, November 18th, 2010 - 60 comments
Last year, over 13,000 New Zealanders got some measure of satisfaction from ANZ’s part-owned ING in New Zealand. For over a year, half a billion dollars in investors’ funds had been locked up, during a nasty dispute between ING/ANZ and their investors. How has ANZ made things right for everyone who was hurt? They’ve renamed ING as ‘One Path’
As Nero Fiddles…
Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, November 13th, 2010 - 74 comments
Climate change and a shoals of dirty little red herrings would seem to go together like salt and pepper or cheese and pickle.
High pay makes elitists view us as serfs
Written By: - Date published: 12:31 pm, November 9th, 2010 - 41 comments
I’ve never really understood the logic of paying CEOs multi-million dollar salaries. Can Telecom’s $7m man, Paul Reynolds, for example, really be worth 100 skilled technicians? Is there no-one who is basically as good who would work for a million or two less? Now, research shows high pay gaps for CEOs actually makes them worse bosses.
Q&A on The Hobbit – Part 2
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, November 3rd, 2010 - 52 comments
In a highly-charged debate like the Hobbit fiasco, it’s easy to lose sight of the real issue amongst the claims and counter-claims over petty details. In a second post that strips things back to what matters, Blue asks the big question: ‘how exactly did NZ taxpayers end up handing over tens of millions of dollars to Warner Brothers?’
The dust settles on the Hobbit fiasco
Written By: - Date published: 9:54 am, October 31st, 2010 - 37 comments
Eventually the dust was going to settle on the Hobbit fiasco and the truth was going to come out.
Fortunately the media has done a bloody good job of making sure that happened.
So what have they been saying?
Death threats and dud deals
Written By: - Date published: 9:10 am, October 29th, 2010 - 78 comments
Today we learn just how extreme some of the anti-union nutters in our country are, with news of death threats to unionists and actors involved in The Hobbit fiasco. I hope we hear soon of a sustained police effort to track down the perpetrators. Or are we as a country going to effectively condone these actions by ignoring them?
Campbell on Key’s sell out
Written By: - Date published: 3:39 pm, October 28th, 2010 - 21 comments
Scoop’s Gordon Campbell has written a long piece on the Hobbit settlement and its implications. Key said that we couldn’t match the tax deals offered by other countries, but according to Campbell’s calculations that’s exactly what we have done. Campbell also has harsh words to say about Key’s “skill” as a negotiator, and advice about strengthening the film industry in NZ.
Q&A on The Hobbit
Written By: - Date published: 11:30 am, October 28th, 2010 - 84 comments
The Right argues that an already settled labour dispute involving a small union somehow scared a multi-billion film company enough to make them consider abandoning the $100 million already invested in NZ. Blue has gone beyond the slogans and done some excellent research to answers our questions on what really happened.
The price of our hysteria
Written By: - Date published: 8:30 pm, October 27th, 2010 - 180 comments
The Government will give the Hobbit producers an extra $33 million to stay in New Zealand and it’s going to use this ‘crisis’ as an excuse to slam through more anti-worker laws. New Zealand has been played like naive hicks. The Hobbit was never leaving. We let Jackson and his Hollywood mates whip us into a frenzy of fear – now we’re paying the cost.
Key’s announcement
Written By: - Date published: 7:15 pm, October 27th, 2010 - 179 comments
An invitation to Warner Brothers to be up front
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, October 27th, 2010 - 10 comments
Wallace Chapman has a thoughtful Open Letter to the visiting Warner Brothers executives on his blog, inviting them to front up to the New Zealand public: We have a small segment called “Soapbox” and we’d just love you to come over and join us and speak your mind to camera for 60 seconds. We know […]
Win win for Key
Written By: - Date published: 7:18 am, October 26th, 2010 - 156 comments
Lucky John Key – he’s going to have a great week! It’s hard to see how he can lose. He’ll either be the man who single-handedly saved The Hobbit, or he’ll be handed a big stick to beat the evil unions with forever. In reality, however, the decision to keep the movies here is probably already made. Key’s ego will be just another tool used against him in negotiations as the studios go for the best deal they can get…
Key the real target of Hobbit producers’ game
Written By: - Date published: 2:01 pm, October 24th, 2010 - 75 comments
The Hobbit ‘crisis’ is all about money. It’s about the producers of this long-troubled production, who are in financial difficulty, wanting to minimise their up-front costs. The mark in the con is the only one with cash to offer on the scale they need – the Prime Minister. He’s the one with the most to lose and the most ability to pay.
Some clarity on the Hobbit dispute
Written By: - Date published: 8:58 pm, October 23rd, 2010 - 105 comments
After days of trying to read the media and rumour mill tea-leaves on the Hobbit it was time to do some fact checking.
It turns out this has been a hard lesson in how the international film industry works.
Government manoeuvres on the Hobbit
Written By: - Date published: 12:37 pm, October 23rd, 2010 - 84 comments
Fran O’Sullivan reckons the Government will offer tax-breaks to keep the Hobbit in NZ.
But it also looks like they’ll try to keep claim it’s about the (settled) dispute.
If that’s the case there’s some truly gymnastic spin to look forward to this week.
Why Russell Brown is wrong
Written By: - Date published: 10:58 pm, October 21st, 2010 - 69 comments
Russell Brown’s anti-union take on the Hobbit dispute has been cited by righties all over the internet as “evidence” the union is wrong.
So let’s take a look at what he’s saying and how it matches up with employment law, industrial relations and all the rest of that good stuff.
Exporting Dunedin
Written By: - Date published: 9:45 am, October 11th, 2010 - 50 comments
David Clark is the Labour Party’s new candidate for Dunedin North. He’s been talking to innovative local technology start-ups, and hearing about some of the barriers to success.
Christchurch earthquake rebuilding: speed, not haste
Written By: - Date published: 9:18 am, September 12th, 2010 - 72 comments
The Government has announced it intends to push through emergency legislation to expedite the rebuilding of Christchurch. The urge to put things back the way they were is only natural in the wake of a huge physical and psychic shock but shouldn’t we have a think about how we want Christchurch rebuilt before we let anyone go ahead willy-nilly?
Just what they needed
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, September 10th, 2010 - 17 comments
It was heartbreaking this morning to read of the worsening conditions in Christchurch’s poor suburbs, where damage assessments are only just now being done and aftershocks are accumulating more and more problems on already vulnerable communities. So, this picture sent in by a reader caused a bit of a bemused smile (click title for big version).
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