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6:00 am, October 1st, 2024 - 8 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
The UK is no longer burning coal for power.
A huge change in recent decades.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/8db8/live/bacb9020-7f0d-11ef-b66d-034eed51208d.png.webp
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o
The social investment approach
First principles
It is a diversion away from state provision.
A multi-contract system.
Healthy Homes is cited as an example of an approach which had multiple benefits.
(why Labour named social investment – by its purpose – Well Being, such as via Food in Schools etc)
Arthur Grimes noted
And thus of course Investment (for profit) partners are to be involved
A reactive dismissal of critics as from those focused on their ideology, rather than the focus of English-Willis on getting results.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/529489/social-investment-what-you-need-to-know
This will be great for businesses operating as consultants to government ministry (maintaining capacity with less of their own staff) – hiring up experienced and specialist workers who want to retain work from home rights.
One might well suspect a Ministry might well refers on workers disappointed by the government policy. Meeting staff cutback targets, if not saving any money overall.
And as the government loves going to non government organisations, everyone wins.
https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/09/30/hybrid-work-crackdown-may-not-work-as-intended-economist-warns/
Why on earth Key's opinion on the US election should be front page news is beyond me, but it is, and I held my nose and took the bait.
“I think he's better for the economy.”
“He's likely to embrace a bit more market. He's likely to have less red tape and he's certainly going to have lower taxes. So that bit is good.”
But Sir John still thinks overall Trump is still the better choice.
“Well he certainly wants lower taxes. He probably wants more market based solutions. He's probably got a freer energy policy. There's a whole lot of different things.”
So- tax cuts. Some things never change.
Sir John says Kamala Harris has economic views that are radically left-wing and that she’s more aligned with Senator Bernie Sanders than President Joe Biden.
"Radically left-wing"???
America- take him, keep him, let him vote there. And hopefully he'll revoke his NZ citizenship at the same time, and our media will stop the fawning.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350434743/why-sir-john-key-thinks-donald-trump-should-win-us-election
Sirkey has first and foremost represented International Capital and Finance Capital all his adult life, even while NZ Prime Minister…anyone remember the offshore Trusts debacle set up by his personal Lawyer? 10, 000 members of the parasite class departed virtually overnight once IRD required more than an A4 sheet on who was who, and other details of their trusts.
The beneficiaries of the orange tax cuts are pretty obvious, hence the Key support.
What stood out for me was Keys endorsement of trumps energy/climate change policies, trump would wind back laws put in place by Biden. Does Key not understand climate change? Under his governent NZ did FA about reducing emissions so he might not particularly care. Here's the point though Mr Key, without a solution to climate change we will have little or no economic growth, and more and more climatic shocks.
On another matter seemingly Casey Costello received "independent advice" on tax cuts for heated tobacco products. I am wondering who provided her that "independent advice", Rothamans or Pall Mall?
This is Chris Luxon's favourite government and his model for governance.
James Butler's piece in the LRB on the Grenfell fire is a searing indictment of modern neoliberal Britain and well worth a close read.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/james-butler/this-much-evidence-still-no-charges
So much of the story leaps out as giving a coherence to the otherwise inchoate coalition currently governing NZ. In particular it highlights the global problem of the paranoia and deep unseriousness representative of the collapse of modern conservatism. Modern conservatism regards any kind of expertise as by definition a sort of special interest capture, so a minister can characterise his department’s officials as "…Guardian-reading pinkos…" (a similar attitude seems to define this government's attitude to the civil service) despite also observing that "…whatever their views were, they acted in line with (the governments) antipathy to ‘regulatory madness’…" and signalling the complete acquiescence and colonisation of the senior civil service by neoliberal conservative acolytes "…thoroughly acclimated to (their) department’s culture…"
The collapse of the MSM is also canvassed: "…The kind of local journalism that might have uncovered and campaigned against the problems at Grenfell… …is long dead…" and "…At the BBC, Kate Lamble produced a detailed weekly podcast throughout the hearings, though its insights rarely seemed to make it across to the corporation’s main news programmes. In an act of managerial malfeasance typical of the BBC, Lamble was made redundant a day or two after the inquiry reported…"
The whole piece is a meta-condemnation of the utterly exhausted late capitalist neoliberal project, a tired and discredited ideology so ingrained in the political and media class that it is difficult to "…‘make the water visible’. The phrase comes from the old story of one fish asking another ‘What’s water?’, a way of talking about conditions so pervasive they can no longer be perceived…"
What Chris Hipkins thought he could learn from talking to Kier Starmer – "a technocrat without a plan" https://unherd.com/2024/09/keir-starmer-a-technocrat-without-a-plan/ who project seems to largely consist of a continuation of the Conservative with austerity somehow done better and who was elected largely by gaming the first past the post electoral system and is surrounded by radical centrist liberals and grifters, is anyone's guess.