National pissed off: Labour is nicking John Key’s dodginess!
When it comes to dodgy deals done behind closed doors – or at “informal” events – nobody does it better that National.
Setting the Agenda
Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
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Teaching Their Parents Well
Forty years of right-wing counter-revolution has left its mark on the Baby-Boomers. For too many of them it proved a lot easier (and much more profitable) to give up the fight for a kinder, gentler America. For those “of tender years”, the trick will be to convince their parents and grandparents that the March For Our Lives is a march for their lives too.
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Dave Macpherson: What can happen to self-entitled health sector bureaucrats, or what goes round comes round….
Three years ago the stars of four men who had responsibility for the care of our son – and a lot of other people – were in the ascendency: ‘Dr’ Nigel Murray the well-fed DHB CEO; Bob Simcock the laid-back DHB Board Chair; Chai Chuah the bean-counting Health Ministry boss; and ‘Dr’ Jonathan Coleman the ‘all care, no responsibility’ Health Minister.
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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.
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Zionism condemned
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.
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Are Labour and NZ First Partners in Populism – Or Not?
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!”
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Barack Obama – champion of the rich
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.
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Dr Liz Gordon – The definitive guide to NOT scrapping school deciles
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).
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The Political Economy of Mainstream Political Journalism
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.
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On The Greens’ Transition From Voice In The Wilderness To Ventriloquism Through Handing Their Questions To National
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.