Billions owed in leave – Why are we waiting?
Three years ago Unite wrote to all our big employers telling them that they had been miscalculating annual leave payments to their employees for years and they needed to fix it.
Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
Three years ago Unite wrote to all our big employers telling them that they had been miscalculating annual leave payments to their employees for years and they needed to fix it.
Zionism is a self-absorbed, racist anachronism. The ideology’s proponents have never been honest and the attempt to engender a ‘negotiated’ settlement has resulted in nothing but inevitable failure and decades of extreme suffering for Zionism’s victims.
POPULISM VERSUS RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT. The Regions versus Metropolitan New Zealand. NZ First versus Labour. Shane Jones versus Grant Robertson. “Oh yes, Ladies and gentlemen, there’s Trouble: Trouble with a capital ‘T’; and it’s brewing right here in Political City!”
Obama won decisively on the basis of a fervent campaign driven by his supporters believing he would bring real change. Obama’s two terms did nothing of the sort. He bailed out the banks, increased weapon production and delivered 10 times more drone strikes than his predecessor George Bush.
Why else would they push out a simple, dependable system and replace it with a complex one fraught with issues of privacy, a creepy whiff of the state knowing more about you than it should, and having to increase state expenditure on funding systems, by tracking every child every year on a wide range of indicators? (Sorry about the long sentence).
FEW WOULD ARGUE that journalism is not in crisis. Beset by the manifold challenges of a global on-line culture, journalists struggle to keep pace with the demands of readers, listeners and viewers whose tastes they once led but now must follow. The mainstream news media’s dwindling share of the advertising dollar drives it inexorably towards the sensational, scandalous, salacious and bizarre “clickbait” upon which its profitability increasingly depends.
Unquestionably the biggest news in politics of the past week – despite several somewhat sensationalized stories that’ve been in circulation recently – was the Green Party announcing a bold move to give the National Party their Primary Questions in Parliament on occasions when the former are not using them.
If the Greens really were determined to subject the Labour-NZ First Coalition to the scrutiny of the most informed, articulate and progressive members of the House of Representatives, then they would hardly have given away the chance to do exactly that to Parliament’s most ill-informed, inarticulate and reactionary elements. Progressive Kiwis have only to ask themselves: “Who would we rather held this Government to account: Chloe Swarbrick or Mark Mitchell? Golriz Ghahraman or Judith Collins?” – to realise that the justification advanced to them by Green Party co-leader, James Shaw, is pure, unadulterated, bullshit.
There are several reasons why it is wrong of the Green caucus to hand over some of their Parliamentary Questions to National.
There are occasional lovely moments when a politician’s carefully arranged façade of decency and respectability is stripped away to reveal their inner person with all its ugly racism and stupidity on display.