Smoking and Budget 2016
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.
politics
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The British Labour debate is really about policy
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.
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Killing off Lifeline
While Key can build tax havens and blow $26million on a flag referendum, apparently we don’t have any money to ensure Lifeline stays afloat.
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NATIONAL’S DOUBLE SPEAK: To make unemployment stats drop, Government claims anyone looking for jobs on internet isn’t unemployed
National’s double speak are obvious lies but when you are a desperate speculator mortgaged up to the hilt you don’t care and if you are one of the missing million voters, you stopped listening.
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Government Continues Fudging Statistics To Hide Failure
In many countries around the world, statistics about things like the rates of unemployment or crime are used by the government of the day to demonstrate changes in those areas. In New Zealand, by contrast, changes in statistics (as in, changes in what the statistics actually represent) are used instead to obscure a lack of improvement in same.
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Brexit result shows democratic rejection of neoliberalism
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.
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“Kathryn’s Story” highlights the need for major welfare overhaul
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.
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From Top To Bottom: Some Thought’s On Britain’s Brexit Nightmare
THE MAGNITUDE OF THE CRISIS now overtaking Britain is difficult to exaggerate. A society obsessed with class has somehow to deal with the impossible fact that those on the bottom have over-ruled those at the top.
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GUEST BLOG: Comrade Dave Brownz – Last Exit before the Revolution
My position on Brexit was that workers should have abstained in a dispute between their bosses over how to make workers pay for their crisis.
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GUEST BLOG: Maire Leadbeater – West Papua: Human rights abuses cannot be hidden
The Indonesian Government has developed strategies for avoiding international criticism over its appalling human rights record in West Papua. One strategy is to keep the outside world out and ensure that approved visitors such as journalists and diplomats are carefully guided and get to meet with the ‘right’ people.