slippery
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You call that policy? This is policy
Written By: - Date published: 2:45 pm, June 23rd, 2008 - 90 comments
National has released a brochure, laying out all its policies. They take up two A4 pages of double-spaced bullet points. That’s incredibly lightweight. Contrast that with the policy files of another party outside government, the Greens. National has 14 vague policies. The Greens have 51 policy area pages, each containing dozens of actionable policies. There […]
National breaking promises already
Written By: - Date published: 10:07 am, June 23rd, 2008 - 24 comments
As you know, National promised to cap core public servant numbers at 36,000. That was going to deliver each of us a whopping 50 cents a week tax cut. Well, that one single solid policy promise from National is already in serious jeopardy. Corrections staff make up 6600 plus of the supposed ‘bureaucrats’ of the core […]
More bluster, still no policies
Written By: - Date published: 4:01 pm, June 20th, 2008 - 49 comments
Every month, Stats releases migration figures. Each month, they show little change in the pattern from last month. And each month, National comes out all in a fury over the figures as if they herald Armageddon while offering no substance, just a lot of bluster. Nothing has changed from April. In the month of April, […]
ToryAid: Wastewatch (2)
Written By: - Date published: 2:40 pm, June 19th, 2008 - 40 comments
Here’s the waste National has identified so far: 1) Embassy in Sweden – approx $3 million capital, $3 million operating 2) Badges about Te Teo for school kids – $56,000 Why it’s waste: badges for Maori language! Next they’ll be wanting their land back. Why it’s not a waste: Meh, maybe it is waste but […]
Key promises productivity magic
Written By: - Date published: 6:50 am, June 19th, 2008 - 47 comments
Key reckons he could bring down inflation by targeting ‘low quality’ government spending. How? To counter inflation, you need to increase productivity. Inflation is projected to run at 4.7% this year. The Government makes up a third of the economy. If Key was to bring that down to 2% by increasing Government productivity how much […]
Slippery John’s “after-tax incomes” line
Written By: - Date published: 10:29 am, June 18th, 2008 - 33 comments
You’ll have noticed that Key only ever talks about increasing ‘after-tax incomes’. Even when he’s asked about wages for government employees, like doctors, he responds that National would increase their after-tax incomes with tax cuts, not by increasing their wages. But anybody can see that cutting taxes is only a short-term way to slightly increase […]
Matt McCarten from the Herald on Sunday
Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, June 16th, 2008 - 15 comments
Worth a read: Remember when George Bush’s administration promised the world that the invasion of Iraq would be over in a few weeks? We were assured that the Iraqis would throw flowers at their liberators, the war would make a tidy profit and petrol prices would plummet. Next time you fill up your car think […]
Key’s slippery promises on waste
Written By: - Date published: 3:27 pm, June 14th, 2008 - 50 comments
National has staked it all on delivering bigger tax cuts than Labour. To remain credible, they need to deliver $20 a week on average more than Labour. That’s $3 billion a year. The operating surplus is gone, so where will the money come from? John Key has been repeatedly referencing the fact that the government […]
Treating the voters like children
Written By: - Date published: 9:45 am, June 13th, 2008 - 30 comments
Keith Holyoake used to say “tell the people, trust the people”; be honest about the benefits, trade-offs, and costs of policies and trust the people to judge you in an adult manner. Central to Brand Key, however, is playing to voters’ baser desires, especially greed, and fomenting juvenile beliefs, including that it is possible to have ones cake and eat it. For […]
The wage gap and the Nats’ crediblity gap
Written By: - Date published: 5:01 pm, June 12th, 2008 - 32 comments
Remember when National was all about the wage gap, whinging about it every day? Heard them talk about it lately? The last mention we can find is three weeks ago. Has the issue suddenly gone away? No, there is still a wage gap and solutions to it require serious debate. But National wasn’t talking about […]
Why Key really wants super-fast broadband
Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, June 11th, 2008 - 29 comments
Remember National’s broadband ‘plan’ that reads like it was drawn up on the back of a napkin? Notice how the only gains they can point to from this plan to borrow $1.5 billion are better video conferencing (when was the last time the average worker used video conferencing?) and being able to download pirated movies […]
What’s Behind Key’s Cheesy Grin?
Written By: - Date published: 2:06 pm, June 8th, 2008 - 38 comments
Ever since Labour’s budget was released, John Key has been talking cheese. I’ve been wondering why all his talk of blocks of cheese has been making him smile with such a big big grin. Well, a check of MPs’ financial interests sheds some light. Slippery John is making a bundle from Kiwis buying cheese. He is the third largest shareholder […]
Bubbles and empty spaces
Written By: - Date published: 12:31 pm, June 7th, 2008 - 63 comments
John Key’s policy vacuum is such a joke that even the ad-men are using it for comic material. Have a listen. powered by ODEO lprent: There seems to be a problem At ODEO. Stored local in link below. John Key – Bubbles
Into the void: examining National’s ‘policies’
Written By: - Date published: 2:45 pm, June 5th, 2008 - 107 comments
National’s so-called policies are laughable. National says it has released ’14 policies’ (14! wow! anyone would think they were planning to run a scout troop not a country) but six are just to adopt the existing policy. And the others, well – * Setting national standards in reading, writing and numeracy – shown to have no positive effect […]
How much did Key pay for his seat?
Written By: - Date published: 8:33 am, June 4th, 2008 - 85 comments
It’s funny the stories you hear when you’re out in the provinces. I was up in Auckland over the long weekend and came across someone who told me the story of how Key became involved in National. See, Key was never political growing up and certainly not strongly National. He can’t remember where he stood […]
What’s National’s real assets policy?
Written By: - Date published: 10:23 am, June 3rd, 2008 - 18 comments
Isn’t this the one issue where we truly know what National will do? Didn’t John Key say ‘there will be no asset sales in the first term of a National Government (we’ll save that or the second term)’? Yes, he did. But that goes against the deepest of National principles and caused real disquiet about […]
“pretty similar”
Written By: - Date published: 7:56 am, May 29th, 2008 - 60 comments
I noticed an interesting comment from Ferdinand in our Kiwisaver thread yesterday: I signed up to Kiwisaver based on the 4% employer contribution being rolled out. If National cap that at 1% then I’m out of pocket by about $75,000 in contributions alone. That got me thinking about that meaningless phrase John Key used to […]
Kremlinology: National and Kiwisaver
Written By: - Date published: 11:59 am, May 28th, 2008 - 15 comments
National’s refusal to say what it stands for is becoming so ridiculous we have resorted to the Cold War art of Kremlinology. Today, we look at Kiwisaver. National has had a tortured relationship with Kiwisaver. When it was first introduced in 2005 John Key described it as a “terribly designed system” and spent the next […]
The status of KiwiSaver
Written By: - Date published: 3:03 pm, May 27th, 2008 - 34 comments
Tracy Watkins reports: “National has been forced into an embarrassing u-turn on KiwiSaver after its industrial relations spokeswoman Kate Wilkinson appeared to put the kibosh on a major component of the scheme. Ms Wilkinson was forced to retract comments made earlier today suggesting National would do away with the compulsory employer contribution.” On his blog Vernon […]
Even Granny’s patience can wear thin
Written By: - Date published: 9:47 am, May 26th, 2008 - 42 comments
With a loving smack that would have brought a smile to Bob McCoskrie’s face, the Herald‘s editorial today rebukes John Key in the strongest terms it can. Now that the Budget is behind us, the National Party has less excuse for indecision on most of the important economic issues facing the country at the coming […]
Asking the second question
Written By: - Date published: 11:24 am, May 24th, 2008 - 62 comments
Key’s best trick is to answer questions with impressive or technical sounding assertions that stop the line of questioning but don’t actually tell us anything. When he does that, interviewers need to push him to explain himself. Here’s a few paraphrased examples from the last couple of week: Q. ‘What don’t you like about the […]
Where’s the beef John?
Written By: - Date published: 10:57 am, May 23rd, 2008 - 5 comments
Key kicks off this Close Up interview by trying to dampen down rising expectations of National’s tax package and make himself some wiggle room by emphasising that his comments from earlier in the week about tax cuts “north of $50” relate to voter expectations rather than what National may eventually be able to deliver. Presumably […]
Key lacks leadership on climate change
Written By: - Date published: 5:02 pm, May 19th, 2008 - 26 comments
National has pulled its support for the emissions trading scheme which is intended to set limits on the emission of greenhouse gases and penalise polluters. This is the latest in a long line of Key’s shifting positions on climate change. First climate change was a “complete and utter hoax”. Then as the environmental mood gained momentum […]
Key’s green mask slips
Written By: - Date published: 9:46 am, May 19th, 2008 - 33 comments
Last year John Key announced National’s ‘Blue-Green’ Strategy. It contained the first shadow of acknowledgment from National that climate change is a serious issue: a target to reduce greenhouse gas emission to 50% of 1990 levels by 2050. Of course, setting a target for a time when most of your MPs will be dead is […]
Mythbusting: ‘Book value’ & ‘over the odds’
Written By: - Date published: 10:14 am, May 12th, 2008 - 32 comments
In an attempt to find a non-ideological ground to justify opposing the Government’s buyback of the rail system, John Key and others have been claiming that the $665 million price-tag is ‘over the odds’ and $200 million in excess of Toll’s ‘book value’ for the assets bought. What do these two terms mean and what […]
Put it on the kids’ tab
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, April 29th, 2008 - 6 comments
Some may have noted an odd series of questions in Parliament and press releases from Bill English around government borrowing over the last month. The questions purposely conflated the idea of maintaining current debt levels with increasing debt. We noted this at the time and Tane correctly picked the strategy: First, sow confusion about debt […]
I’ve got a solution, what’s the problem?
Written By: - Date published: 9:44 am, April 23rd, 2008 - 38 comments
The junior doctors’ strike is a difficult issue. On the one hand, these are highly valuable workers whom we can’t afford to lose overseas and they do work long hours in difficult conditions. On the other hand, the pay rise they want would cost $50 million and is well above what other medical professionals have […]
Note to John: get a new lawyer
Written By: - Date published: 10:59 am, April 21st, 2008 - 18 comments
John Key: ‘ my lawyer actually does those things clearly [he] had the wrong information.’ That’s how Slippery John explained why legal documents showed him living at different addresses at the same time. For election purposes he had claimed to be living at his $1.1 million home in Waimauku in his electorate, but on documents […]
Ralston sez: leave poor Johnny alone
Written By: - Date published: 5:45 pm, April 20th, 2008 - 61 comments
In the Herald today, Bill Ralston sticks up for poor John Key who has been the subject of personal political attacks recently. Like Key, Ralston wonders what is “the cost of the Government using countless bureaucrats to endlessly scour records in an attempt to discover inconsistencies in any utterance [Key has] made”. Ralston needs to […]
Business to Key: ‘You’re ruining everything’
Written By: - Date published: 11:50 am, April 18th, 2008 - 54 comments
Business is starting to get worried. This was meant to, finally, be the year that they got the Left out of government and started making New Zealand work for the business elite again. But there’s a problem: the man they chose for the job. Sure, Key’s got a cheeky grin but on real ‘prime minister […]
Flip-flopping at warp speed
Written By: - Date published: 3:13 pm, April 17th, 2008 - 31 comments
On Monday, I wrote ‘Stay tuned for National’s next assets policy, due out sometime next week.’ It seems I miscalculated. Here’s what Key had to say on asset sales today on newstalkzb: ‘I’m going to go into an election with a group of policies and those policies we will implement or not implement as the […]
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