John Minto

The “pocket money” offer to state house tenants wrongly evicted from their homes based on bogus meth testing is deeply cynical and insulting.

Members of the Christchurch Progressive Network will attend todays Christchurch City Council Meeting from 8.30am to protest the proposal to spend an extra $220 million on a rugby stadium ahead of rebuilding council rental housing destroyed in the earthquakes.

When Helen Clark’s Labour government came to power in 1999 there were 14,000 “non-casino” pokie machines in New Zealand. Four years later there were 25,000.

Labour was asleep at the wheel.

The National Business Review published its annual celebration of unearned wealth last week with the breathlessly-reported news that this bunch of specialised parasites increased their wealth from a net of $79.9 billion in 2017 to $100.8 billion this year.

With all the self-flagellation about free speech these last few weeks most people seem to have missed ASB’s record net profit – $1.18 billion. (Net profit means profit AFTER the ASB has done all its dodgy dealings to limit its tax liabilities here – the real profit is much higher).

With its appalling record in handling the cases reported in the media so far, Housing NZ  has a huge bill ahead of it and will want to put this matter to rest asap. On their record of disrespect and callous attitudes to vulnerable tenants we expect HNZ will want to do lots of quick, grubby little deals with affected tenants and offer them “pocket money” compensation.

When someone hands out leaflets which say “Allah is a gay god” and “Allah is transgender” then this is not an issue of free speech. This is part of a calculated campaign to incite religious hatred.

In this environment progressive New Zealanders must fight for free speech in every arena possible but this does not include defending “rights” of anyone to promote racist or religious hatred which smooths the path to fascism.

The semi-hysterical response from employers to the Labour government’s mild (Oh so mild!) plans to reform Labour relations show the government is on the right track.

New Zealand is a low-wage economy after the crushing of unions in 1991 through the Employment Contracts Act and that’s the way the bosses love it.

And they are fighting to keep it that way.

The early signs are good for the government review of Tomorrow’s Schools.