The government has started the election year with a tough on crime message. More police on the beat and more prisons. The government plans to spend $1 billion on a massive prison-building programme in a country that already imprisons a greater proportion of its people than all but a few OECD countries.
Sewage pollution of the inner Waitemata harbour is a direct consequence of Auckland’s disproportionate growth. The failure to provide for sufficient basic sanitation infrastructure is something the Auckland Council and the government driving these growth policies would rather the public know as little as possible about.
In all of my dealings with Ron over the last few years, and from my ongoing observation of the ‘second phase’ of his Parliamentary career, if I could pick but two phrases to sum him up they would unquestionably be “man of principle”, and “fighting for a just cause, to defend our country”.
The last conspicuous veteran of the plague years of the 1980s has bowed to the irresistible logic of Jacinda Ardern’s by-election victory and announced her retirement. Part of that logic, undoubtedly, was the reaction of Annette King’s caucus colleagues to her spittle-flecked outburst to the NZ Herald’s deputy-political editor, Claire Trevett.
In light of the scope, scale and sheer audacity of corruption inside Auckland Transport that Matt Nippert has exposed, it’s time Phil Goff fronted on this issue and explained to us all why he removed our oversight on Auckland Transport and what the hell he intends to replace it with so that Auckland Transport are accountable to us.
TDB pointed out this would happen on Monday and we explained the internal tensions that were building for it to happen…
National need huge migration numbers to prop up the property bubble and require tens of thousands of exploitable migrant workers to keep labour costs down. Blaming mass immigration and cheap labour exploitation on Kiwis smoking weed is like downgrading your water quality and renaming it ‘swimmable’.
Not content with checking the pee of beneficiaries, the leader of the Big Business Party has now complained about local workers, blaming their refusal to submit to pee tests for the National Party policy of encouraging record immigration, which others say is making housing unaffordable, depressing wages and driving locals out of work.
It’s become a depressing pattern. Every time news of record migration numbers come out in the media, the National Party leap into action with another excuse for why they’re justified.
The most recent “alternative facts” laden argument for adding tens of thousands of people to the New Zealand labour market … is that apparently the workers already here can’t pass drug tests.
So after building the Prison Empire that we now suffer under, ACT have decided the skyrocketing prison population is a damaging social cancer and are suggesting if Prisoners learn reading or writing the will get an early release.
Lovely to see ACT come out of the dark ages.
