ImperatorFish: Smoking Studies For Schools?

Written By: - Date published: 2:13 pm, April 19th, 2012 - Comments Off on ImperatorFish: Smoking Studies For Schools?
Categories: john key - Tags:

Scott at Imperator Fish has kindly given us permission to syndicate posts from his blog – the original of this post is here.

So it turns out that John Key was the one who came up with the idea of giving a bunch more pokie machines to Sky City in return for a convention centre.

It’s the kind of innovative forward-thinking we have come to expect from our PM, and it demonstrates yet again that National leads the way when it comes to generating ideas that will grow corporate profits at the expense of the community and, ultimately, the taxpayer.

So if Key can come up with one great idea, he must have had others. You bet!

  • Provide millions of dollars to the owners of a football stadium, in return for requiring the owners to put a reminder in their Outlook calendar: “Must organise insurance.”
  • Spend hundreds of millions of dollars bailing out the investors of failed finance companies that Treasury has failed to properly monitor, in return for a promise by finance company heads not to engage in such greedy recklessness until next time.
  • Change our employment laws to take rights away from workers, in return for a Hollywood movie studio making a film in New Zealand.
  • Build more expensive motorways at the behest of the trucking industry, in return for mumble mumble, quick, change the subject!
  • Exempt most big polluters from the Emissions Trading Scheme, but there doesn’t have to be any benefit to the community, and if you question this then YOU MUST BE HATING ON OUR FARMERS! YOU HATER!

So what now for Key? If I were a gambling man, here’s where I’d put the taxpayer’s money next:

  • Allow daycare centres to serve alcohol to kids, and require the liquor industry to subsidise the booze for 12 months.
  • Allow the tobacco industry to market and sell cigarettes to minors, and change the school curriculum to include Smoking Studies as a subject, but require tobacco companies to fund a brief and ineffectual no-smoking campaign.
Who could possibly object to such measures? We would only be letting the market operate more freely.

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