national

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.

Class sizes vox pop

Written By: Anthony R0bins - Date published: 12:08 pm, June 7th, 2012 - 14 comments

Public opinion is massively opposed to cutting teachers. When 50,000 people marched down Queen St the Nats dropped plans to mine conservation land. Time for another show of people power.

Basher Bennett rides to Hekia’s rescue

Written By: Mike Smith - Date published: 3:26 pm, June 6th, 2012 - 41 comments

Same old National – when they’re in trouble, out comes the club for a distracting headline.  Hekia Parata’s under fire and digging herself  into a very deep hole, so Paula Bennett rides to the rescue with the “news” that Cabinet is discussing allowing judges to direct miscreant parents not to have children. Who knows what the judges think about this hospital pass – let’s hope the media sees it for what it is.

One law for some

Written By: Mike Smith - Date published: 7:48 pm, June 4th, 2012 - 18 comments

Financially troubled private school Wanganui Collegiate received a $3million grant in Budget 2012, 3 times the annual operating grant of the larger Wanganui City College. Since then it has been advertising its low class sizes and ability to  reduce fees significantly. Private schools will no doubt be using the current outrage over increased class sizes for recruiting purposes, but they should not be doing it with taxpayers’ money.

Emmerson: Larger classes

Written By: notices and features - Date published: 9:25 am, June 3rd, 2012 - 8 comments

Polly Parata

Written By: Mike Smith - Date published: 12:11 am, June 1st, 2012 - 69 comments

Hekia Parata is demonstrating how political lines endlessly repeated can go horribly wrong if you have nothing else to say. Her Polly Parrot repetitions are wrongly-based, and the longer she and Key go on about how fewer teachers and larger classes  is going to improve the quality of teaching the worse its going to get for National. The hubristic Parata  has galvanised and united the education sector and more backdowns are likely, both in policy and politics.

Class size backdown

Written By: Anthony R0bins - Date published: 9:07 am, May 29th, 2012 - 32 comments

Is the government coming to its senses on the matter of reducing class sizes? That would be a rare pleasure indeed…

Govt banks on winning lottery

Written By: Ben Clark - Date published: 8:32 am, May 26th, 2012 - 47 comments

National don’t have faith in Kiwis, or our skills and education, our Kiwi ingenuity. Nope, they think the only way to wealth is farming – which can’t be expanded, tourism – which provides low value jobs, and resource exploitation – of oil, gas and minerals unfound. They’re banking on us hitting the jackpot, because they can’t think of any real way of providing a future for our country.

Caption competition

Written By: notices and features - Date published: 12:58 pm, May 25th, 2012 - 41 comments

Fail Budget

Written By: notices and features - Date published: 2:09 pm, May 24th, 2012 - 106 comments

Budget reaction here. Seems the Nats’ preferred budget tag line is ‘Investing in the future’. Should have called it ‘Waiting for Godot’. Here’s a quick summary: Zero = Fail.

Update: Nats planning to tax kids’ after school jobs. No, not joking.

David Parker’s Greece-proof paper

Written By: Ben Clark - Date published: 5:05 pm, May 22nd, 2012 - 30 comments

Don’t blame Greece: if you change nothing, nothing changes. National’s problems are their own to solve, but they don’t have the guts to look at the big problems in New Zealand’s economy. 0.6% growth in total over the last 3 years – less than population. But National only tinkers and distracts, as our brightest and best head to Aussie.

Spin v reality

Written By: Ben Clark - Date published: 6:45 pm, May 21st, 2012 - 13 comments

National have become a very adept PR machine. While not adept at running the country, they’ve become great at running statistics. John Key was pushing things a little too far with his lines that unemployment rising to 6.7% showed an improved economy and that Europe electing anti-austerity leaders showed their austerity policies were right, but […]

The only growth industry

Written By: Anthony R0bins - Date published: 7:13 am, May 15th, 2012 - 29 comments

I guess we should give credit to National, in this time of economic stagnation, for the one and only growth industry that they have accomplished.

Nat Civil War: ceasefire breached

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 6:35 am, May 9th, 2012 - 90 comments

Well, that didn’t take long. A couple of weeks of quiet (probably thanks to some good polls more than anything) and, now, the National Party Civil War has re-erupted as the Collins and Joyce factions fight over the post-Key future. The leaking of National Party board minutes shows how serious the fighting is and reveals strong opposition to Slater/Lusk’s tactics.

Another MMP rort?

Written By: Mike Smith - Date published: 11:50 am, May 4th, 2012 - 44 comments

The media are doing a good job investigating John Banks’ donation history.  The Police are presumably also doing theirs, and it seems clear that the matter must end up in Court and the issue of who is telling the truth will be decided by a judge. Some in the media have dismissed the question of any threat to National’s majority. Short-term maybe, long-term I’m not so sure.