Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
At the stroke of a pen, unemployment fell from 5.7% to 5.2%. Simply because if a person was job-searching using the internet they were “not actively seeking work“. Which beggars belief as the majority of jobseekers will be using the internet. It is the 21st century – what else would they be using?
HEAR FOR YOURSELF the voice of the invincibly self-interested business class. Proclaiming Australia’s inconclusive election result as “bad for business”, Christopher Niesche, consoles his readers with the observation that “it doesn’t look as if Labor will be able to form a government.”
It appears that Finance Minister, Bill English did not get the memo from Dear Leader Key’s office: “Dont get arrogant!”
For the record, my Bill would have cost just 0.7% of the NEW spending for Budget 2016 and 3.6% of the NEW spending planned by National for 2017. At full implementation it would cost 0.03% of the $3b worth of tax cuts John Key wants. Is that more than minor? I don’t think so.
Workers in this country and around the globe need our own policy on immigration. Ultimately we can never stop workers seeking a better life. That is true for New Zealanders going to Australia or workers coming to New Zealand. We should support every step that equalises the status of workers here, whether they were born here or not. As a first step, that means that no worker on a temporary visa should be tied to one employer.
This government has done what few other Western democracies have achieved; a state of Orwellianism that Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and other dictatorships required unrelenting brute force to achieve.
Budget 2016 saw the Māori Party score another set of annual excise tax hikes, seeing efforts to further decrease the number of smokers continue to 2020, and the cost of smoking to rise by up to $30 in the same period.
Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader represented a big shift to the left in the British Labour Party. But from day one the mostly right-wing Labour MPs have been plotting to get rid of him.
Brexit has shone daylight on a crisis that’s been brewing for several decades. The utopian proclamation by Francis Fukuyama about the ‘end of history’, in the heyday of globalisation, has succumbed to the reality that paradigms come and go.
In August 2015 I sat through a whole day of hearing in the High Court on this sad case. What a convoluted sets of arguments were expounded to justify the punitive approach taken by the Crown. That was the latest court event in a 15 year saga in which an unwell beneficiary is being pursued for the repayment of $20 a week.