Written By: weka - Date published: 6:05 am, May 8th, 2021 - 18 comments
Mindboggling.
Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:22 am, November 8th, 2017 - 113 comments
Winston Peters has launched a legal fishing expedition to identify who exactly breached privacy on his superannuation over payments. A problem that he shares with about 50 thousand other pensioners. Unlike them, his problem wasn’t trying to find money to repay it. It was that the breach was deliberately timed to be a classic dirty politics ploy, almost certainly by National, in the leadup to the recent election. I wish him good fishing.
Written By: Anthony R0bins - Date published: 7:01 am, October 13th, 2017 - 64 comments
It’s starting to feel a lot like 1996 all over again. Another term of the Nats would be bad news for the institutions of democracy. We’ve had recent warnings on the state of the justice system, press freedom, and the public service.
Written By: Stephanie Rodgers - Date published: 12:30 pm, October 14th, 2016 - 125 comments
In Year Eight of this National government, the idea of a budget surplus is a joke. They’ve promised it for nearly a decade. They’ve fiddled the books. The truth is, there is no surplus.
Written By: Natwatch - Date published: 12:22 pm, November 26th, 2015 - 45 comments
Campaigning with public money. Politicising the public service. Cabinet club is cash for access. This is a corrupt government.
Written By: notices and features - Date published: 3:00 pm, August 25th, 2014 - 12 comments
Something to go to in Wellington this Wednesday
Written By: Anthony R0bins - Date published: 9:46 am, September 12th, 2012 - 12 comments
National would like us to believe that it is the party of sound business management. How sound is it to spend $114 million on redundancies, while simultaneously running up a $910 million bill on external consultants?
Written By: Anthony R0bins - Date published: 9:32 am, April 10th, 2012 - 8 comments
Cronyism. The politicisation of the public service. Internal power struggles. It’s all just grubby Nat politics as usual. Why do we put up with it?
Written By: Anthony R0bins - Date published: 9:45 am, February 17th, 2012 - 172 comments
The Nats want to replace public service jobs with computerised systems. They claim that this will improve service and save money. Quite apart from the folly of destroying jobs in the current economy, they are likely wrong on both those claims.
Written By: Jenny Michie - Date published: 3:00 pm, August 30th, 2011 - 41 comments
Good human interest story in the DomPost today about the human costs of public service jobs cuts. A Wellington woman has written a letter to Prime Minister John after her 63-year-old mother learned last week that her position at the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry is to be axed. Staffing cuts after a merger with the Fisheries […]
Written By: r0b - Date published: 8:26 am, March 19th, 2011 - 38 comments
Who will plan, oversee and administer the rebuilding of Christchurch? Public servants. The kind of “back room bureaucrats” that the Nats love to hate. But governments can’t get anything done without them.
Written By: r0b - Date published: 7:07 am, February 10th, 2011 - 66 comments
By every significant measure our economy is a mess. Bill English is finance minister for what is looking increasingly like the most useless do-nothing NZ government in living memory. So is he working on a plan to put things right? Is he rolling out the big ideas that will get New Zealand moving again? No – he’s lashing out at public servants. Pathetic.
Written By: Marty G - Date published: 12:55 am, May 13th, 2010 - 25 comments
I’ve been having a look at the new advice on the civil service code of conduct. It is a clear attempt by the Nats to make sure the civil service is ‘politically correct’ for their purposes. Perhaps they’re tired of getting official advice that says ‘don’t cut that, it’s good value for money’, ‘don’t fund that, it’s stupid’, and ‘don’t pass that law, it might cause more murders’.
Written By: Guest post - Date published: 9:07 am, December 24th, 2009 - 43 comments
So John Key thinks I’m a Muppet. “[when I’m in Hawaii on holiday] they’ll send me stuff … those Muppets in the background who send it all to me”* Well f#ck you, John. While you’re off in Hawaii with your DPS pouring you drinks, I’ll be working. The days I do get on ‘holiday’ I […]
Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:41 pm, April 25th, 2009 - 42 comments
There was a great turnout at the Mount Albert War Memorial building this morning, both inside the hall and people outside waiting for the flag and the silence. What has been intriguing me over the years is the changing number and demographics of the people who are now turning up. When I first started attending […]
Written By: all_your_base - Date published: 12:18 pm, April 23rd, 2009 - 18 comments
On the impending job losses at the IRD, TVNZ reporter Catherine Loft ended her report with: “Anyone who once thought that they were safe working for our government really needs to think again”. I wonder how on earth they could have got that idea?
Written By: Tane - Date published: 11:58 am, June 24th, 2008 - 21 comments
It’s good to see the PSA broadening the public debate on tax cuts with a UMR poll showing the majority of Kiwis don’t want bigger tax cuts if they come at the expense of public services. To summarise: 71% of New Zealanders would prefer to keep taxes at current levels than have higher user charges […]
Written By: Steve Pierson - 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 […]
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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