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.
The decision to deploy an additional 4,000 troops to Russia’s eastern borders has been undertaken in an attempt to both intimidate and deter Putin from contemplating a lightning-fast repossession of the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
From Paul Henry in the morning to Mike Hosking at night with a merged right wing newspaper monopoly in the middle. An unbroken chorus of neoliberal mythology masquerading as successful fact.
We have become a one media state.
There’s nothing wrong with operating to the economic left of Labour. But it seems fairly patently obvious that that’s not what National are doing. If there’s any dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warriors out there in the audience, they may perhaps choose to disagree – but running a fairly broadly social-democrat economic policy is not supposed to substantially increase inequality by benefiting economic elites at the expense of just about everyone else.
I remember meeting Helen Clark for the first time when I was an undergraduate student at Otago. She was just six years older than me, but I could tell, even back then, in the early 1980s, that this junior political studies lecturer from Auckland was going to play a major role in New Zealand’s political history. I defy anyone to watch Swarbrick’s performance on last Sunday’s Q+A and not reach exactly the same conclusion.