October 2011

Jonathan Milne should know better, he is supposed to be a reputable journalist, yet he publishes a diatribe in support of MMP that is demonstrably misleading and in one egregious example an outright lie.

Now, the big business and old money who supported the status quo in 1993 have again put their money behind dumping MMP at next month’s referendum.

Really! There is only one organisation registered to oppose MMP in the referendum. To my knowledge and it is pretty well informed there isn;t big money involved in the campaign. If there is big money then where ois the evidence of it? In advertising? No. In letterbox drops? No. In armies of workers? No.

There is no evidence.

On the other side though, the side that Jonathan Milne supports there is vast arrays of cash, organisations and workers, and yet it is Vote for Change that Jonathan Milne maligns.

I’ll tell my loyal readers something for nothing.

If the Labour party, the Greens, the CTU, the NZEI, the PPTA, the Service and Food Workers Union, then PSA, the NZ Diary Workers Union, the NZ Nurses Organisation, the Rail and Maritime Transport Union, the Maritime Union of NZ, and the EPMU think MMP is the best system for New Zealand then we must Vote for Change in the referendum and Vote for Supplementary Member, otherwise we hand control of our parliament to the vested interests of the union movement.

The Herald has a poll result about the government’s response to the grounding of MV Rena:

The Government has again defended its reaction to the Rena disaster after a third of respondents to a Herald-DigiPoll survey thought the response was not good enough.

But more than half of those surveyed said the response was adequate or better.

Just over 36 per cent of respondents thought the response was unsatisfactory – a view backed by opposition parties who say the container ship’s grounding on October 5 and subsequent oil spill had been politically damaging for the Government.

At the other end of the scale, 11 per cent thought the response was “very good” and 50.3 per cent thought it adequate.

What a bizarre way to report this.

The Herald focuses on 36 percent, ironically about the same number of Labour/Greens voters for the story instead of the 61.3 percent who thought that the response was adequate or excellent.

What hasn’t been focussed on yet was the doomsday scenarios painted byt teh Greens, Gareth Hughes in particular, and Phil Goff about the coming disaster for summer in the Bay of Plenty. It was rubbish then and it is rubbish now. They have ben proved wrong. The salvors have done a fantastic job and are showing up the screaming doomsayers every day.

Looks like Winston Raymond Peters, 65, pensioner of St Mary’s Bay is a little touchy:

PRESS RELEASE

Rt. Hon Winston Peters Leader NZ First

October 30th 2011

‘Vote for Sanity’

Jordan Williams needs media recognition. Without it this pimple on the face of the body politic returns to oblivion. A brief minute of glory.

How many such people have we seen? Here today, gone tomorrow. He and his twenty innocent supporters for elitism have got to be a secret plant by supporters of MMP. Surely this cannot be the best that foreign money, poking its greedy nose in to domestic politics, can do.

ENDS

That seriously annoys me. I’ve called Winston corrupt, because he is. I’ve called him a liar, because he is. I’ve called him a drunk, because he is. But not once has he issued a press release about me. He’s threatened to sue me three times, I’ve be spoken to sternly by Brian Henry twice but never a press  release.

One thing Winston has right though, in the referendum we need to vote for sanity, we need to Vote for Change and rid ourselves of MMP and the reason that keeps Winston Peters alive politically.

via Boing Boing

Some people just don’t think through the consequences of their actions.

At Gawker, Brooklyn-based journalist Caitlin Curran explains how you could quickly go from being part of the downtrodden 99% to being part of the “no, really, unemployed and utterly fucked” contingent: your boss could see a photo of you holding up a sign at a protest and fire you the next day. Ms. Curran is the woman in the photo above, feature in two previous Boing Boing posts.

3News have released their latest poll:

National: down 5.1% to 52.3%
Labour:  up 3.% to 30.2%
Greens: down 0.4% to 9.4%
NZ First: up 0.5% to 2.4%
Act: down 0.1% to 1.5%
Maori: up 0.6% to 1.4%
Mana: up 0.2% to o.9%

Probably a bit of a correction fromt he last poll which saw National unusally high. Still, National is in the box seat, on these numbers they can govern alone.

This poll serves as a warning against complacency from National supporters.

Winston Peters launched his campaign today. Winston causes the main political parties problems. He is the unflushable grogan of New Zealand politics, no matter how many times you flush he just says in the bowl.

There could be a month long all out attack on Winston, but this would probably just play into his hands. His Australian contemporary, Pauline Hanson, stank up Australian politics for a while, until the professionals told the politicians every time they talked about her her polls went up, and if they ignored her her poll ratings fell away. One of the senior ministers was delegated to say this very publicly, and bipartisanship and collusion with the media did the rest, with Hanson getting no air time and no votes.

Being Australian and bred with a degree of low bastardry that doesn’t occur naturally in New Zealand, they also decided to put Hanson in jail for good measure. She was innocent, but that wasn’t the point. She was an embarrassment and a three year stretch was seen as a good way of taking her out of play.

It is a pity politicians here won’t man up and put Winston in jail as that would solve a lot of problems.

Phil Goff’s is a lonely man. His party don’t want his picture on their billboards and Labour couldn’t afford a campaign launch.

No matter. Phil Goff is far more resourceful than his caucus would believe. If they wouldn’t give him a campaign launch it wasn’t going to stop Phil goff, he went out found another one to go to….The National party’s launch…here he is with all his friends outside Sky City, talking to Tv3, as  hordes of National supporters traipse by on their way to see John Key.

Phil Goff made a huge song and dance earlier in the year about crown limousines.

Labour Party leader Phil Goff says he is saving the taxpayer more than $150,000 a year by no longer using his Crown car.

Mr Goff is entitled to the chauffeur-driven car as the leader of the Opposition and says it is his personal choice not to use the car.

He says when so many low- and middle-income earners are under financial pressure he believes it is better to travel by taxi, which is cheaper.

Nek minnit  - here he is driving off in the crown limousine after dropping by the National party campaign launch and doing a stand up for the news tonight on TV3.

Know one thing, when Phil Goff says one thing he actually does the exact opposite.