John Minto

After a two-year battle KOA was successful in not only stopping the sale of the council works company City Care but also in pressuring the council to restore the company to the strategic assets list.

It is deeply disappointing to see the Christchurch City Council lining up to help the government sell 2,500 state houses in Christchurch.

New Zealand’s Labour Party is a neo-liberal, free market party with policies to match. If NZ Labour wins in September then income inequality and wealth inequality will continue to increase while the rest of us struggle to add that extra lining to the pockets of the idle rich.

What has that man done to deserve a knighthood? Was it the pulling of ponytails? Was it the flag referendum? Was it the lies about mass surveillance? Was it the hundreds of thousands of our kids he left in poverty? Was it the failure of the housing market? Was it the exponential rise in electricity prices? Was it for running down the public health system? Was it for underfunding education? Was it for screwing the poor?

The simple truth is that the bulk of high wage and salary earners, low-wage employers and parasitic landlords are National Party supporters. This is their budget.

In one of his first acts as Foreign Minister he has written to Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to get our diplomatic relations “back on track” after Israel withdrew its ambassador to New Zealand last December following our co-sponsoring of a security council resolution which condemned Israel for continuing to build Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land.

Across the media Myers is being praised as a business leader and philanthropist yet he made money not through his own efforts but through using his massive inherited wealth to exploit the free-market economic policies he championed, as a leading light in the Business Roundtable, alongside the Labour Party of the 1980s. That wealth he gained was at the expense of middle and low-income New Zealanders who continue to struggle today to provide that triple lining to the pockets of the super wealthy.

The new Ministry should be called the Ministry for Roger Douglas’s Children because it was the brutal policies of Douglas and his Labour Party cohorts unleashed on New Zealand from 1984 which, several decades later, are continuing to devastate communities, families and children.