April 2010

Tonight the government has used extraordinary urgency, not to ditch the ETS, but to raise taxes yet again. Again on tobacco under the pretext that they are trying to stop people from smoking and as a sop to the Maori Party. The highest tax increases were also on loose tobacco, socking the poorest even more.

Tobacco tax goes up 10 per cent from midnight, raising the price of a pack of 20 cigarettes by about a dollar to around $11, and two more hikes are in the pipeline.

The Government brought the legislation to Parliament under extraordinary urgency today and it will go through all its stages, putting in place three excise duty increases of 10 per cent – one at midnight, the next on January 1 next year and the third on January 1 2012.

Loose tobacco used by pipe smokers and to make roll your own cigarettes is being socked with a 14 per cent increase immediately to bring it into line with cigarettes.

Associate Health Minister Tariana Turia, a strong anti-smoking campaigner, introduced the bill and said the debate on it was going to be about life and death.

This is of course not at all about life and death, it is simply about taxing people who are addicted to a legal product and freely chose to suck into their lungs. If it was truly about life and death then the Government would have made cigarettes illegal and unable to be sold in New Zealand and classified tobacco as a Class A drug. As they didn’t do that it is only about revenue.

The National party used to be about personal responsibility and freedom of choice, now it is nothing more than a nanny-statist over-lord deciding what is and isn’t good for you.

Only the congenitally stupid amongst us would willingly take up smoking given all the available information about the deleterious health effects. The fact that in the past 5 years the numbers of smokers has remained constant at about 700,000 people shows that previous tax increases are meaningless, especially to the truly stupid of this country.

Since the government are going to raise taxes I thought I might share with just where those taxes will probably be going. The increased taxes will go to more Maori troughers, like Shane Bradbrook,  intent on spending as much of the poor addicted tobacco users cash as humanly possible on themselves, carting their useless arses around the sights of world so they can un-furl protest flags and promote the palestinian cause by wearing a keffiyah at the same time.These pictures are from his state-funded tours around the world saving Maori smokers, in India at the Taj Mahal, in the Washington DC and in Tokyo.

It is kind of ironic that Shane Bradbrook identifies closely with Palestinians because there are huge similarities between palestinians and Maori especially when it comes to troughing and grievances. Maori are still wailing over injustices perpetrated more than 100 years ago, palestinians are still creating greivances and living in refugee camps. Maori suck massively off the public tit and palestinians suck massively off the UN. The longest running welfare system in the world is the UNDP mission to Gaza, sucking literally billions of dollars off the world and giving it to palestinians as “aid”. The fact that the money has not made one single zak of difference to them escapes almost everyone, and Maori have had millions spent on them trying to stop them being fatties aand smokers and that too hasn’t made a zak of difference. Palestinians and Maori are perhaps the biggest beneficiaries and aggrieved peoples in the world and yet they will not make personal choices that will stop them from getting the same deal. Palestinians won;t stop chucking bombs, rocks, missiles and bullets at Israel and Maori won’t stop chugging on booze, quaffing vast quantities of poor quality food and puffing up large on as many ciggies as they can get their hands on.

The pity is that this measure won’t do a thing except increase the power of the gangs in New Zealand’s poorest neighbourhoods and make tobacco a much more profitable drug to sell illegally than even methamphetamine. This measure is only making larger profits for gangs and smaller profits for legal tobacco companies. Chinese tobacco merchants will be making a killing.

Politicians lie when they say this is to pay for the cost of smoking. The Smokefree Coalition and the Cancer Society provide figures that show that revenue from excise taxes on tobacco raise more than $900 million per annum and the government spends about $250 million on smoking related health costs. Smokers, unlike the rest of New Zealand society actually pay their own way. We should be giving these folk medals for killing themselves before they take a pension. New Zealand benefits economically from having smokers in every-way.

National disgusts me. They have betrayed their founders, their constitution and their own beliefs. It seems that this country no longer believes in personal freedoms or personal choice and no longer believes in personal responsibility for ones own actions. It is all about the state and what it believes is best for you.

Through the wonders of Google Alerts this story about Len Brown has come to the attention of The Whale. I have also had some tips on the tipline but initially discounted them as being fanciful. Surely no mayoral hopeful would malign a city in the way Len Brown has.

Len Brown has compared shopping in Auckland City with that of Apia. At the very least he thought the differences were marginal

Auckland Super City Mayoral candidate, Len Brown, has upset the Newmarket Business Association with his claim that Auckland’s shopping experience is akin to Apia, the capital of Samoa.

The self appointed Mayor of Newmarket and Media Whore extraordinaire, Cameron Brewer, is understandingly very upset.

“Auckland retailers have had a tough couple of years. They’re feeling bruised and battered enough. The last thing they want to hear is someone who wants to be mayor putting down the region’s retail sector. It’s a cheap shot and completely unnecessary,” Brewer said.

What on earth possessed Len Brown to make such a silly statement, did he not think that people wouldn’t let the Whale know?

Brown’s comments were made at The University of Auckland Business School. He is believed to have said that when comparing Auckland as a retail Mecca to Apia, the difference is “marginal”.

This is a derisory comment, and as I mentioned before I have now heard the story from three different sources. Len Brown is now furiously back-pedaling and running interference through his Labour Party apparatchik David Lewis who is Brown’s communications strategist.

David Lewis has been ringing Sydney based Inside Retailing bullying trying to get the initial story dropped from their site. He has now issued a response saying that Len Brown never said his derogatory statement about the difference between shopping in Apia and Auckland as being marginal.

A spokesperson for Brown contacted Inside Retailing saying the claim was “completely untrue”.

Cameron Brewer, CEO of the Newmarket Business Association, maintains that Brown had made the claim and said the accusation was a low blow for the tens of thousands of people directly involved in retail.

For those who can’t remember, lawyer David Lewis is a former staffer of Helen Clark and was involved in the cover-0up of Paintergate by initially purchasing and then burning the evidence. He also was the one who stood in the dock for Helen Clark over Speedgate. This appears on the surface to be a classic case of he said/she said but with David Lewis’ form I’ll be erring on the side of Cameron Brewer on this one.

The problem for David Lewis, Len Brown’s Labour Party appointed communications expert is that this non-story is now very much a story because of his attempts at hushing it up. Well done that man, keep him on the team Len.

John Key and Kevin Rudd chatting about Carbon Trading (image: John Ansell)

New Zealand stands alone in the world. It can’t be called leading because it is going to constitute bleeding more than leading. Australia has canned their plans for an ETS, at least for three years and now the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys and the Sausage Eaters have done the same.

If China, the US, India Australia, Germany and France don’t want a bar of emissions trading then why is that our government is still pressing ahead to keep New Zealand on the bleeding edge of emissions control when our economy produces less than 0.8% of the world’s emissions. It simply is economic suicide and folly.

Rudd in Australia bizarrely blames his flip-flop on the Opposition, a funny position to take considering he has an absolute majority in the House and the Senate with which to pass legislation.

Mr Rudd has put off his doomed emissions trading scheme until 2013 at the earliest, blaming a recalcitrant Opposition and slow global progress over climate change for the delay.

Back here in New Zealand, Fran O’Sullivan points out the precarious position that New Zealand now sits in and David Farrar, finally, if somewhat hesitantly pastes agrees that politically as well as economically our ETS is doomed. Ever the faithful mouthpiece of Bill English’s lies lines he suggests though that it simply isn’t possible to repeal or amend our ETS in time for July 1.

I’ll have to read the ETS legislation to check, but am unsure whether or not the Government can defer the entry of those sectors, without amending or repealing the ETS law. If a law change is needed, it couldn’t realistically be done by 1 July.

This of course is complete tosh. If a government in cahoots with an opposition can pass MP Superannuation schemes in the dead of the night in just 7 minutes then it can easily repeal, defer or postpone the implementation dates for each sector to at least match progress toward similar legislation by at least Australia a but should also include ALL of our major trading partners. This is easily a case for urgency of parliament, it is what urgency was designed for.

It is time now for John Key to put Nickpocrisy Smith and his daft ETS plans on hold, temporarily for now and permanently in the long run.

If Angela Merkel can see the writing on the wall and the short-arsed Frog is delaying then Nickpocrisy Smith and John Key should be able to come to grips with backing us out nicely from this folly. They should know they can get away with it, the polls tell them that,. If mining in national parks didn’t upset anyone, and the super city hasn’t either then I think they will find that ditching the silly ETS shouldn’t be too hard.

In any case it isn’t like Nickpocrisy Smith‘s officials have even got a working framework for the ETS to implement on July 1. They aren’t even close to having the scheme operational by then. There is no use having a market with the field being marked out and all the players aware of the game rules before commencing trading.\

Time for a little helping of humble pie John, ditch the stupid ETS and make it quick. i mean it isn’t like the fourth most abundant chemical element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen is even a pollutant. particularly when combined with two molecules of the third most abundant chemical element.

This is unbelievable, the fact that a petty thief has managed to get herself name suppression when at the moment she is charged with nicking $28.00.

A woman accused of conning local cafes and restaurants out of several hundred dollars by making false complaints about the quality of meals she claims she bought is now facing 34 separate charges.

The 36-year-old woman, whose name is suppressed, has not yet appeared in court since her arrest earlier this month when she voluntarily went to police following publicity about complaints from cafe, restaurant and bar owners.

She was granted an adjournment and interim name suppression by a Dunedin District Court registrar on one charge of obtaining $28 cash by deception between March 20 and 27.

Yesterday, her legal counsel obtained another adjournment on 33 new charges – 27 of obtaining cash by deception and six of attempting to obtain a financial gain.

The alleged offending spans from the middle of last November to April 6, and involves hundred of dollars.

Name suppression was continued, with the case adjourned to May 14.

Why does this woman have name suppression? Is she a cops missus or a judge’s mistress? I bet if I nicked $28.00 and was charged I wouldn’t get name suppression. What has this country come to that petty thieves can get name suppression.

I am sick to the back teeth of Parliamentary Services money being used for party or campaign purposes. They call this all sorts of names, like the leader’s budget etc and all parties are doing it to pay for things like Labour’s silly bus tour and polling on issues and the like.

We all remember the pledge card rort, where Helen Clark & Labour were forced to pay back $800000 for using parliamentary services money to campaign in 2005. This payback hurt Labour but we still ended up with Labour rooting our economy for another three years. This was one of the more extreme examples that got pinged of blatant robbing of the taxpayer to run party political broadcasts.

This was just one of many rorts, where political parties used tax payer funded staff to run their campaigns and their party, using electorate offices and staff to run campaigns.

The Whale’s view is that this carry-on by all parties is a total disgrace. Parties that can’t raise money through donors or build a volunteer base don’t deserve to be in parliament, and if they break the rules they need to be outed and shamed, especially if they are as sanctimonious as the Greens. Yes Metiria & Russel, having watched Pinko Farrar catch you with your pants down over your housing rort I am keeping an especially close eye you.

The case against the troughers who make us pay to run their parties and pay for their campaigns is being made now. The biggest problem we have at the moment is that the people who spend the money also make the rules and they have decided in a nice little bit of togetherness, just like when they passed their gold plated super scheme in the middle of the night in just 7 minutes, to make any information about their spending un-obtainable via the OIA. I’m calling time on the lot of them. Any tips, stories or dark corners for The Whale to look into should be emailed to the tip line.

The seemingly endless streak of rogue polls that show Natioal leading leading continues with the latest Roy Morgan poll.

The latest Roy Morgan NZ Poll shows support for John Key’s National-led Government is unchanged at 55%, comprising National Party 49.5% (up 0.5%), Maori Party 4% (up 1%), ACT NZ 1% (down 1%) and United Future 0.5% (down 0.5%).

Support for Opposition Parties is unchanged at 45%; Labour Party 34% (up 1%), Greens 7.5% (unchanged), New Zealand First 2.5% (down 0.5%), the Progressive Party 0.5% (unchanged) and Others 0.5% (down 0.5%).

If a National Election were held today the National Party would win easily.

Looks like the Super City, Mining, GST and all the other “outrages” of National simply aren’t turning off the voting public.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address the harm that is associated with excessive drinking,” Lianne Dalziel said. “We may not have a personal drinking problem, but we are all affected by problem drinking.”

Patsy Dalziel, unbelievably, opined the above when asked about the Law Commission Liquor law Report.

She ain’t nicknamed “Patsy” for nothing.

Never trust politicians that say things like “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity”, what they mean is they were too lazy in their generation to do it and now they want to meddle in other generations.

I’ve had a thought about Phil Goff’s strange speech yesterday where he decided to set aside constitutional paradigms and offer up a seat at the cabinet table for the new Mayor of Auckland.

I thought to myself, he thinks Len Brown is going to win. He certainly wouldn’t be offering up such a key position for the Mayor of Auckland if he thought Banksie was going to win.

Then I thought, Labour shrieks long and hard about democracy and now we have Phil Goff promising better democracy, direct access to cabinet, for Aucklanders than the citizens on any other municipality. If i was Kerry Prendergast or Bob Parker or Tim Shadbolt or even the mayor of Wally-poo-phuck, then I would be real pissed off with Phil Goff right now. How dare he offer to circumvent our constitution and to make Aucklanders a special class of citizens with direct access to cabinet. How dare he put their interests against my region where ever that may be.

From an Aucklanders perspective, we like that Wellington is more than 600km away and hidden by the Bombay Hills. We like that we don’t have mincing civil servants crawling up politicians arses, felching their way around the cafes and restaurants in a bid to secure tenure writing long boring reports that no-one needs or wants.

What we really want is not a seat around a cabinet table especially for Auckland, what we want is for Wellington stop sucking more of our taxes than it spends per head of population in the region. We want Welling to take a hike. Auckland may suck to the rest of the country but Wellington just blows.

I want Auckland to be a great place to live; a city that offers not just a brilliant lifestyle, but also the opportunity that comes with being New Zealand’s gateway to the world.

I grew up in this city. I have always considered it a great place to live.

The most amazing thing about Phil Goff is that he just doesn’t trust his own colleagues from Auckland to advocate about their own city. He wasnts Auckland to be a great place to live, yet he doesn’t even live in the city itself.But then we can’t expect too much from a leader who professes to be the MP for Mt Roskill but lived 40kms way in the quiet of Clevedon. David Cunliffe isn’t any better, preferring the leafy suburbs of Herne Bay to Mt Albert, Ross Robertson likes living in Clevedon too, rather than Manukau East. Labour are a classic case of do as I say not as I do and this Auckland offer is no different.

I want my city to be a safe place to live, where any child can get the best possible start in life, and any person can live free from fear and risk in their own home; where everyone will find social services they need, and be able to participate in their community.

Again he may want this but I just bet he doesn’t get down to Weymouth or Clendon park too often, he really doesn’t care, you see he lives in Clevedon, a long way statistically from the crime stats of Mt Roskill.

Labour set up the Royal Commission because it was plain that change is needed to the way Auckland is run.

Phil Goff has seen a problem. The problem isn’t that Auckland won’t be well represented, rather is that it will largely be out of Wellington’s control, with enough autonomy to really piss off the socialists. Worse, he has realised that Labour hasn’t a donkey’s show of governing Greater Auckland for the foreseeable future. But the real travesty that Phil Goff has realised is that the great diversion that the Auckland Super City Royal Commission was set up to be has for all intents and purposes been hijacked from the direction Labour, particularly Helen Clark wanted it to go. They were dreaming of a major bastion of socialism, a bastion far greater than the island of pinko-ism that is Christchurch. The problem was they lost the election and so they also lost the ability to write the rules.

It sets up powerful council-owned companies to run most of the Council’s business.

The government has overridden the right of Aucklanders to determine how council businesses should be run.

The Government is right now recruiting the boards and executives of these CCOs even before the select committee has reported back to Parliament on the rights and wrongs of the structure the bill sets up.

Under the Bill the majority of local government operations will be behind a veil of commercial secrecy: no public meetings, no agendas or minutes published.

The transport agency with a board of hand picked appointees will be able to make by-laws, but the local boards elected by the people will not be able to.

The odds are stacked against the super mayor and councillors being able to hold these mega-companies to account.

Strangely that is Phil Goff arguing against the SOE model, a model he helped inplement when he sat in the Labour cabinet before the 90′s. is he saying that the ACC minister, for example, has no control over the Board of ACC? Is he saying that the government has no control over the board of Kiwirail, a SOE that he approved the purchase of just months before the general election of 2008? It seems to me that he is. His preference would seem to be to have council owned services operated at less than optimum for the benefit of all the citizens in order to achieve some political or social whim of the council at any particular time. The SOE model and the CCO model are specifically designed to stop or at the very least hinder meddling politicians from derailing the provision of the services they were set up to provide.

Phil Goff is is writing Labour party policy on the hoof here, and we can now safely assume that Labour will roll back the CCO structure and move also to roll back the SOE model with it.

They tried to tell you the changes would bring down your rates – but you are going to pick up the tab for the changes.

And precisely how would Phil Goff’s suggest changes, of rolling back CCO’s, implementing maori seats in Auckland and making the Auckland Mayor a puppet of Wellington be cost neutral, it won’t. It will just add more cost. He obfuscates that any changes Labour had made wouldn’t have cost anything.

Phil Goff talks a lot about democracy but his view of democracy is more than equal rights for Maori, more than equal rights for Aucklanders. I just don’t think that Phil Goff even knows what democracy is. Of all the parties, Labour has the least democratic candidate selection system, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Phil Goff is confused about democracy.

Phil Goff see a lot wrong with Auckland, and he isn’t wrong himself, but he hasn’t even let the city take shape before he is saying it is still wrong. Labour had nine years to address this issue, but they would rather have made more New Zealanders dependent on the state. So now we see Phil Goff trying to un-pick their master strategy to control Auckland by suggesting even more turmoil ahead for the citizens of Auckland. He had his chance, he blew it. He should just hush up and see how it goes. Most of the people in the street don’t care for him, nor do they care for Labour, he can make empty, hollow promises safe in the knowledge that he will never have to enact them or follow through. He will be long retired from parliament by the time Labour governs in Auckland or in New Zealand.

M.I.A. has released a new song and video called “Born Free”

The music is fine for work, but the video is not.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

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At the risk of spoiling the video for first-timers (and its more serious theme of racism and militarism), I will say only three words: global ginger jihad.

Phil Goff says that he will get the new Mayor of the Super City to attend Cabinet Meetings.

Does this mean that he has no faith in his own elected MP’s from the area to represent the people adequately?

Or is Labour planning on ceding all Auckland seats to National come the next election?

Or is this really just Labour wanting to make sure that Wellington can continue to stick its nose into Auckland business under the guise of consultation?