The Daily Blog Open Mic – Thursday 13th July 2017

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Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

Moderation rules are more lenient for this section, but try and play nicely.

EDITORS NOTE: – By the way, here’s a list of shit that will get your comment dumped. Sexist language, homophobic language, racist language, anti-muslim hate, transphobic language, Chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, climate deniers, anti-fluoride fanatics, anti-vaxxer lunatics and ANYONE that links to fucking infowar.  

11 COMMENTS

  1. http://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/94652559/IwiRail-Maori-Party-want-mothballed-tracks-reopened-in-regional-NZ

    IwiRail: Maori Party want mothballed tracks reopened in regional NZ
    Henry Cooke 13:58, July 12 2017

    Marama Fox says the Gisborne line would be brought back under Maori party’s IwiRail.

    The Maori Party want to build a new “IwiRail” railway network for both freight and tourism in New Zealand’s regions – starting with Gisborne.
    The party’s co-leaders announced the policy at Parliament on Wednesday morning.

    It would initially consist of a revitalised rail network around Gisborne, which currently has no direct rail connections after the line to Napier was mothballed in 2012.

    SUPPLIED

    Promotional material for the new policy.
    The network would support both tourism and freight.

    *East Cape rail line mooted

    “IwiRail would take over the leases or key regional lines, and work with local communities and Iwi to build new rail infrastructure which is able to compete effectively and efficiently against other transport modes,” co-leader Marama Fox said.

    The trains would be high-speed and sustainable but not necessarily electric – although Fox said she wasn’t keen for more diesel trains.

    The network would be developed as a public-private-partnership, with the Government contributing an initial $350m and iwis and local businesses stumping up more capital.

    The Gisborne network would ease the load on ports and roads in the region, the party said.

    “Anybody who travels up the East Coast will tell you the number one priority is to get those logging trucks off the road,” co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell said.

    “Our roads are appalling up the East Coast. There is a slip in the road up the East Coast which happened 35 years ago which reduces State Highway 35 down to one lane. It’s ridiculous,” Fox said.

    “When we enter into coalition talks it is our view that we will be asking our coalition partner for a fund of $350 million towards the strategy,” party president Tuku Morgan said.

    Fox said connecting Gisborne back to Napier would only cost about $6.5 million.

    The rest of the $350 million could go towards exploring other regions and possibly new lines – like one from Gisborne to Kawerau, which would connect the region with the wider upper North Island.

    Gisborne would be the “proof in the pudding” that the scheme would work.

    “Our regions need a rail transport network that connects more people and more goods to more places,” Flavell said.

    The policy was aimed at stopping a regional Maori brain-drain and re-connecting Maori to the rail network.

    “The rail network in this country was built on the backs of our ancestors. It connected our people. They were the locomotive engineers, they were the track layers, they were the mechanics,” Fox said.

    “One of the key focuses of IwiRail is to bring back the 15,000 rail jobs and apprenticeships which existed before the Labour Government put a hatchet to rail in the mid-1980s.”

    “Our people drove the trains, build the trains, and built the rail lines,” Morgan said.

    The party believed the policy would indirectly produce thousands of jobs and bring a billion dollars into the economy.

    Fox said the Government was “interested” in the proposal, and that the $350m would be a drop in the bucket for the Transport budget.

    Vote Transport received around $5.2b in the last budget, including $861m for Kiwirail.

    Like all other Maori Party policy, it would not be a bottom-line in coalition talks.

    Transport Minister Simon Bridges has been asked for comment.

    Labour transport spokeswoman Sue Moroney said Labour supported rail development in the regions but doubted the Maori Party would be able to convince National to invest.

    “They’ve had nine years in government to get this through and they’ve failed to do it so far,” Moroney said.

    “National are ideologically opposed to it. They get a lot of their funding from the Road Transport Forum and those lobby groups.”

    Nevertheless, increased investment in a nationwide rail network was “absolutely in line with Labour policy.”

    Labour would not rely on private partnerships to achieve this.
    “We think it’s a core government function to ensure that we have an integrated rail system that delivers regional development.”
    Stuff

    • Fox and Morgan collude with NACT to privatise rail using public money.

      Privatisation by Maori partners is privatisation. and we have seen enough of it.

      Nact are deliberately starving Kiwi Rail to make it vulnerable for another collapse as it did under the last privatisation. It is working against rail.

      Would you trust a bludger like Underpants Morgan. His track record is plain enough. Robbing Maori to fill his own pocket. I never said corruption but do I need to.

  2. Property Bubbles

    ‘ “Canada Is In Serious Trouble” Again, And This Time It’s For Real’

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-12/canada-serious-trouble-again-and-time-its-real

    “Some time ago, Deutsche Bank’s chief international economist, Torsten Slok, presented several charts which showed that “Canada is in serious trouble” mostly as a result of its overreliance on its frothy, bubbly housing sector, but also due to the fact that unlike the US, the average household had failed to reduce its debt load in time.

    …Additionally, he demonstrated that it was not just the mortgage-linked dangers from the housing market (and this was before Vancouver and Toronto got slammed with billions in “hot” Chinese capital inflows) as credit card loans and personal lines of credit had both surged, even as multifamily construction was at already record highs and surging, while the labor market had become particularly reliant on the assumption that the housing sector would keep growing indefinitely, suggesting that if and when the housing market took a turn for the worse, or even slowed down as expected, a major source of employment in recent years would shrink….

  3. ALMOST FELL OFF MY CHAIR WHEN THIS CAME ACROSS MY DESK FROM THE PM. HE THINKS HIS HOUSING POLICY IS GREAT!!!!$$%^&*()_+.

    I want you to know how committed we are to delivering affordable housing for Kiwis.
    This morning I was in Hamilton to announce the allocation of the Government’s $1 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund. This is yet another milestone in our plan to increase housing supply for a growing New Zealand.
    The projects we announced will speed up the delivery of 60,000 houses across our fastest growing population centres over the next ten years. The funding will be allocated across nine projects in five different council areas, Auckland, Hamilton, Waikato, Tauranga and Queenstown.
    Add your name to support our strong economic plan.
    This is another major step forward in our plan to permanently lift the capacity of the construction sector to support a more confident, expanding New Zealand.
    Our team is united and optimistic about the country’s future, and we will keep delivering for all Kiwis.
    Click here to show your support.

    • talk about a u-turn!…but the damage has been done and is ongoing

      ….this government has made 100s of thousands of New Zealanders homeless…and shattered the dreams of our New Zealand youth

      …the NACT Party is NOT to be trusted

      • Surley you guys can recognise by now the entire pension system that we kindly supplied taxes to for the last 100 odd years has totally failed to deliver on every front successive governments have endeavoured to control.

        Boomers and Gen X have clicked on. That Indoctrination tricked muddle nui zilind into becoming punctual unics and none of them know how to generate income in retirement. And every day that income gets smaller and smaller.

        So get over your butt hurt ideology because it’s way to hard to show sheeple how to make money properly.

        • A paramount indicator of a stable society is the measure of how its looks after its young and aged.

          A sound pension scheme means smaller families and stability.
          The only agency to run a pension scheme that is guaranteed is the Government.

          Kirk set up a new path to augment the State pension and “invested” a small percentage of every wage into a personal contribution invested with the Govt of NZ. Kirk died.

          National with the CIA ( heaps of proof for this statement) colluded to scare the public that this was communism – dancing cossacks on Nationals election propaganda produced by Hanna Barbera , a CIA funded arm.

          Helen Clark floated Kiwisaver but the funds go into private investor firms run by global banks. Our funds can disappear overnight gobbled up by the international gamblers who will stash their ” losses’ into off shore assets over time.. A nest egg for the capitalist criminals.

          Who was Helen working for.

          The present pension was set up the first Labour Govt. allowing retirement at 60. Later Universal Superannuation came in at 65 and was not income tested.

          • Day trading in terms of oppertunity costs hasn’t been a thing since 2008/9 because folitility dried up. So whats changed since the loony POTUS jumps tarted the NASDAQ? Well global debt to GDP doubled, commissions doubled and the price for life sustaining infrastructure doubled. So no wall for the loony US middle class. As a consequence brokers are being forced to to price there Brokers Over The Counter contracts at zero so there is growing pressure from the entire industry to change the way they execute trades so that retail traders make money instead of lose money.

            Peak 90/90/90 rule spotted. (Hope I didn’t blow your brains out, market fundamentals in one minute skip over a lot of detail)

            • Fine but the back ground picture is bigger than that.

              The market is but a small part of the system and cannot be relied upon in most directions.

              It depends where you start in your analysis and what you accept as significant.

              • Every one has figured out that they can’t generate income in retirement and there are subtle differences between the UK, NZ, USA. In Europ the average pension balance is about the same as the UK so £30,000, in the US about $60,000. Asia is all over the place but Singapour has the highest average pension balance of $330,000 and for good reason. One reason Singapore has the highest pension balance is Because the countries first Elected Prime Minister in 1959 cultivated State Housing Security and food security. In Fact US brass pour all over satellite pictures wondering how many troops it takes to take one square urban block in Singapore, heaps.

                Let’s just say there talking about division size elements so 50,000 GI’s. And this is a challenge Hybrid warfare poses when one side involves state and non state elements to lay ground work so that hard power can come in and have an easier job taking objectives, CIA spooks ect would be the soft power, but essentially US military planners are not sure that they can take a Mega City of 20 million plus with current technology because military planners understand that the Battle of Singapore during WW2 was a death kneel to the “great british empire” so the US wish to avoid that, so they’ll use any excuse for an air campaign.

                So these aren’t market forces at all, backing the entire pensions industry. It’s just force. And this is the history of money because those that make the rulz have the biggest guns.

                • I know it may seem hopeless or beyond our personal efforts to effect change but all the armies are made up of people and the factories that make the arms , ships, and service the daily needs of maintenance and goods supply are also staffed by humans ( at this point in time anyway).

                  So their power systems are very vulnerable and depend on binding human obedience which they do well at though it is a battle to organise and tends to run on inertia. But it is a very fragile system.
                  Scales can tip easily with a number of senarios.

                  We may live in revolutionary times and are looking at the causes of giant unrest with despair that hides a glimmer of hope.
                  The unexpected is not prepared for.

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