Labour should of course have offered the subsidy only to manufacturers who would slash pre-subsidy prices below stipulated price points. And they should have selected only one or two manufacturers to receive the subsidy based on how much they slashed ...
I think Andersen botched the attack on Mitchell. Because there is a legitimate critique of his time in Iraq. The question to ask him is this: does he think the Iraq war was justified? If he says "no", the onus is on him to pass the money he made there back...
A government that exaggerates its debt is up to no good and wants to run a TINA scam on the voters. Neatly said. And also applies to deliberately increasing debt by tax cuts targeted at the already-comfortable.
And of course, the mess can only be solved by doing the things we have always wanted to do anyway, have always done in the past, and always will want to do under every possible set of economic conditions in future, including those completely different ...
Information is not instruction. Use your judgment. Not everyone's health status is the same as yours. You are being given the opportunity to choose what you might and might not do on a hot day (isn't choice the ultimate good in the right wing pantheon of ...
Tame is stuck on the "why not cooperate with National" question. Swarbrick's ambition should be not to enable the National Party and lend it credibility by supporting it, but to destroy it. Or more particularly, to use the second pathway of power she ...
Pretty sure it's a giveaway to employers: more people back at work earlier because they feel superficially better. So potentially less cost to employers from using temps/casuals to plug gaps.
All he needed to do was preface the recycled bit with: "As I said last year, and I still believe this to be true, ..." Then round it off by saying how we must work to make sure it stays true always. Something like that would have given it a little bit of ...
Possibly the former and definitely the latter. Not an either/or.
Yet the obvious fit between the ideology of small government/unregulated markets and the denial of minority indigenous rights (particularly in natural resources) goes unnoticed and unremarked on in most of our media. And it's more than a mere "fit" really ...
I assume she got the prize for an entire body of work, not this short verse. So it has to be considered in that context. If this was meant to stand alone as a poem in itself, then it's quite thin conceptually in its understanding of history and emotionally...
"Reward for lack of effort" - heh, very good.
I like John. He's a decent guy with a lyrical soul and a good interviewer who sometimes gets lost in his own effusiveness. But it's not clear if he realises that all the (so-called) anti-woke rhetoric and English-names-first idiocy is a cynical electoral ...
No, they won't. It's featured in the Herald because it can still be blamed on the previous government - provided the reader is sufficiently gullible and reactionary. Give it a year and the Herald will scarcely mention such incidents - Mark Mitchell's ...
who live in fear of what they believe to be strategies to impoverish and de-power, the "ordinary person" Those strategies exist, but not in the form of cycleways and speed limits. And it's not quite right to call them strategies - they are not drawn up on...
Every state house is a lost profit-making opportunity for a private landlord. Well - not quite "every" - some people will never afford market rents, but clearly National's landlord/real estate backers see KO intruding into 'their' territory and they want ...
If there are 90-day trials for employees because employers want to reduce their risk, then there must be reciprocal 90-day trials for employers, so employees can also reduce their risk. What employee wants a stain on their CV due to 90-day termination that...
A Holy Trinity of denialisms come together: the climate is not being screwed; neoliberal economics is not a scam where collectively-produced wealth gets pumped upwards to the few; Maori are not going to insist that their worldview is accommodated. A ...
Imagine if we had a large right-wing party that said it "cared deeply" about getting GHG emissions down, but clearly intended to do nothing effective about it - and on top of that pretended that the reason it wasn't going to do anything about it was ...
Will be interesting to know if local people are now much cheaper to hire than they would have been without the intervening period (20-30 years maybe) of offshoring. If they are, perhaps the true, long-term goal of offshoring has been achieved - to lower ...
Asian shops won't have to do that because they are private businesses - so Luxon's argument about NZers being able to "navigate their government" doesn't apply. (He means "navigate their way around their own government" if anyone's wondering wtf his ugly ...
Shane Reti has a dream. A dream of solving Maori health inequities through devolved funding, i.e. iwi ambulances at the bottoms of cliffs, not the significant downward redistribution of wealth and power that might actually work.
Mostly a smokescreen - it displaces the argument from something front-page worthy into a series of invisible background niggles about 'relevance' which the media will largely ignore. As others have pointed out, it's a shift from the vulgar boofheadery of ...
Agree with that as a description of the broader picture. With an addition - I don't think it's only about waging a perpetually winnable culture war. It's also to de-fang Maori as that "significant axis of organised and serious non-state power" that you ...
Not sure there is a lot of point in waiting. The coalition's intentions are pretty clear. It's possible that Luxon might dial it back if there is sufficient mainstream non-Maori concern about what's happening. Or he might cave to Seymour and Peters and it ...
I guess we should avoid criticising her for her youth alone - and it's something easily used against the left too. She seems to me to be a textbook example of University Business Schools working as intended - taking in thoughtful young people and spitting ...
Taylor seems to be a spectacularly silly man. In this piece he appears to think that deep-seated social and economic problems can be solved only by a stellar convergence of brilliant and innovative individuals (such as himself). There is nothing ...
Who are the lot Luxon cares about? He claims that FPAs will be inflationary by increasing wage costs for employers who will pass it on to consumers, i.e. the attack line should be that National is fighting the cost of living crisis by keeping your wages ...
Not sure about that Dennis. My impression is that there's an element of historical thought in Maoridom that sees the Crown (the other Treaty signatory) as to some extent their protector against a colonial government that is intent on violating the Treaty ...
Elderly couple may lose their home due to Council charging affected ratepayers $48k for a new sewerage scheme to protect Lake Tarawera. The lake must be protected of course, but this is a consequence of how the work is funded. Fast forward to the cost of ...
It's a useful lie as it plays into the myth that normal public health measures are an example of the repressive nanny state, locking you down, telling what you can and can't buy, etc. Covid created this leverage point and it can quickly move outside the ...
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