At this stage, it doesn’t even matter if Hillary wins, Trump has won. The hate he has injected into the body politic is unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times and the long term carcinogenic impacts of that type of political cancer are difficult to predict.
This isn’t a ‘blunder’ – it’s the truth about a civil service that has become uncivil. About public services that are supposed to be the bastions of egalitarianism essential to a progressive liberal democracy mutating into the cruelest of torture devices used by the State to keep the poor too terrified to fight back.
The truth is, while beneficiaries have been demonised and punished through a cruel regime of blame and penalties, the country’s most voracious beneficiaries are employers and landlords – who also receive tax breaks for their rental properties.
Every Mayor wants to do something they will be remembered for. Could Auckland’s new one become famous for ending chronic homelessness?
Last night Kevin Hague in his final speech to Parliament talked about all the worthy issues avoided by National and the frustrations experienced from their partisan political approach. I agree with the sentiment and I think it’s clear after 8 years we can say they’ve been a government that makes only a token response to the tough questions. We have a bare minimum government more focused on the spin than substance.
I’m John Minto and I’m standing as the Keep Our Assets Canterbury candidate for the Christchurch mayoralty.
A prediction. On the basis of the sluggish Auckland rental market, the end of the Auckland property bubble could be sooner rather than later. (I’m picking October 2017, a month or two after the 2017 general election.) The ‘correction’ will come when enough people who have bought in Auckland for capital gain realise that they will have to sell soon, or risk the consequences.
Unions can expose the hypocrisy of employers demanding the right to import labour while paying a pittance to their staff. But ultimately, the only effective way to turn the situation around is to reunionise the sectors of the workforce that have lost union protection and force the bosses to pay.
It’s always funny how it’s supposed to be Maori who just roll over and have their private property taken off them for the benefit of the public
The fundamental problem of engagement in local democracy comes down to the grim reality that most of the democracy at a local level is a facade.