David Shearer

David Shearer’s big idea to kick off the year after “hooking up” with the people around bbqs and pubs of rural NZ is…A Waitangi Honours system…kid you not, that’s it.

Labour leader David Shearer has proposed changing the honours system so that Waitangi Honours are handed out instead of Queens’ Birthday or New Year’s honours.

Mr Shearer made the suggestion after the dawn service in Wellington today. He has previously called for a more celebratory Waitangi Day, after protests de-railed Prime Minister John Key’s welcome onto Te Tii Marae.

“I think it should be a national day we actually celebrate. I’d like to see, for example, our honours list come out on Waitangi Day rather than Queen’s Birthday or New Year. I’d like to see us talk about the great things New Zealanders have done. It’s too often focussed on the negative and not the positive.”

Yeah, that’s gonna win lots of votes for Labour.

Profitable NZ assets shouldn’t be sold to foreigners – so says David Shearer.

Presumably Shearer is saying that non-profitable assets can be owned by foreigners.

Putting aside the fact that it’s actually the business that is profitable, rather than the asset (which is a resource to be used by the business), what happens if Chinese, or Jews (according to the SST, Israeli’s are buying our land) live up to their reputed business acumen and turn non-profitable assets into profitable ones?

Should they be made to give them back to NZers, or are profitable NZ assets ok to keep, just not ok to buy?

It is ok for Crafar Farms to be owned by the Chinese since the farms went into receivership (and therefore aren’t profitable)

We think D-d-d-david Stutterer should tell us why it’s ok for foreigners to own losing assets but not winning ones.

Chris Trotter in a DomPost opinion piece has called out David Shearer and Labour for their hypocrisy and racism over the Crafar Farms deals:

It was all the more perplexing, then, to hear Opposition leader David Shearer declaring his and the Labour Party’s opposition to the sale. It’s simply inconceivable that Mr Shearer is unaware of the MFN prohibition against denying China the same right to buy land as the nations that bought upwards of 650,000 hectares of our national patrimony exercised when Helen Clark was Prime Minister, and Mr Shearer’s friend (and former boss) Phil Goff was the Minister of Trade.

To avoid the inevitable charges of rank hypocrisy and populist opportunism, Mr Shearer needed to accompany his statement opposing the sale with an announcement that Labour was committed, immediately on regaining office, to repudiating the New Zealand-China FTA and tightening up the legislation regulating overseas investment.

I’m still waiting for those other shoes to drop. And, frankly, I think I’ll go on waiting. Why? Because I simply don’t believe Labour is about to abandon its long-standing commitment to free trade. Nor am I confident Mr Shearer is any more willing to court the fury and retaliatory trade restrictions of the Chinese government than Mr Key. Both are well aware that this country’s future prosperity is inextricably bound up with China’s.

If foreign ownership of our land was something successive governments wished to restrict, they should have legislated against it before they embraced the doctrine of free trade.

 

via the tipline

A Scoop journalist has been busted doing an Ambrose, but this time against David Shearer.

A reporter from the website Scoop will resign from Parliament’s press gallery after being caught photographing documents in Labour leader David Shearer’s office.

Lyndon Hood was among a number of journalists waiting in the office for an interview with Mr Shearer yesterday afternoon, and was spotted taking photos of documents on the leader’s desk by a Labour Party press secretary.

Scoop general manager Alastair Thompson confirmed today Hood would resign from the gallery but would continue working as a reporter in Wellington.

Scoop had written a letter to Mr Shearer apologising for the incident.

This has interesting parallels with the Bradley Ambrose case. One of David Farrar’s commenters notes:

Surely the photos were taken by accident?

And, having invited the journos in, hadn’t Shearer made it a public event where he couldn’t expect that anything seen or heard to be kept from the public at large?

I say release the documents! Public interest…there must be something in those documents otherwise why would Lyndon Hood have mistakenly photographed them? Just what is Shearer hiding?

Will Russell Brown and Judy Callingham, amongst others, be seeking to spread the images far and wide in this instance?

Will we see Duncan Garner and Winston Peters call for the documents to be released?

The Crafar Farms sale decision has thrown up some very strange politics.

There was Winston Peters supporting Michael Fay, which is utterly strange in itself. But nothing could be stranger than seeing Labour pursuing the prospect of being sued by China - over an FTA signed by Phil Goff…

Labour says its opposition to the sale of the Crafar farms to a Chinese company is not racist.

Labour leader David Shearer claimed yesterday that Prime Minister John Key and Land Information Maurice Williamson have accused the party of being racist.

“I have been called much worse,” Mr Shearer said.

What concerned him was that by implication, National was labelling every New Zealand opposed to the sale as anti-Chinese and possibly racist when what they opposed was “the sale of profitable New Zealand-owned assets to foreign interests.”

Predictably assorted crazies, including Jane Kelsey have waded into the dispute. Despite being a raving lefty who opposes all FTAs and the fact that she tries very hard to stick it to the Government the bottom line is that Phil Goff’s FTA with China pretty much guaranteed that Maurice Williamson and Jonathan Coleman were always going to approve a bid that fully complied with the law, rather than react to knee-jerk xenophobia from politicians desperate for traction.

All those Labour MPs who went round saying their policy prescription in 2011 was the ducks nuts are going to have some serious humble pie to eat. I doubt they will though because butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. David Shearer certainly appears to be rolling back Goff’s “game changer” policies:

“We still think a capital gains tax is something that’s good for New Zealand but I’m not so sure about some of the others,” he said.

And this guy went out all guns blazing today claiming the Government doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Sheesh.

When David Shearer stood at the gate of one of the clapped out Crafar Farms did he consider for even a minute that the farms were already owned by an overseas company and were ever since Alan Crafar defaulted on his loans to Westpac Bank, which correct me if I am mistaken, but I thought they were Australian.

But as long as they aren’t Chinee, Labour is fine with selling rural land:

During its nine years in power, Labour allowed 650,000ha to be sold; in 20 months National has approved the sale of 31,000ha.

Trevor Mallard thinks that Shearer gets a free pass though because he wasn’t an MP and so Labour’s past misdeeds don’t carry through.

Fran O’Sullivan schools Shearer and Mallard hard:

Labour’s Trevor Mallard has joined the fray opposing the Chinese bid. But it’s notable that he has not challenged any of the successful “Anglo Saxon” bidders for NZ farm land such as German investors, US and Australian investors. No dairy farms have yet to be sold to Chinese buyers. Penqxin also has extensive agriculture investments in South America and elsewhere.

Something Mallard omits to say is the Crafar farms are diddley squat in size and value compared to the amount of farm land that was sold offshore during the Clark reign. The Real Estate Institute said yesterday that rural property sales had a strong finish in 2011, reflecting good growing conditions across the country.

The institute pointed to the emergence of offshore buyers, mainly from Europe, acquiring properties in both Canterbury and other regions, although “this comes after extensive due diligence and securing OIO approvals in the six to 12 months prior”.

Steve Braunias has David Shearer’s diary:

TUESDAY

My new chief of staff brought in an unfamiliar document.

I said, “What is it?” He said, “It’s a newspaper.” He suggested I read the latest column by political commentator Chris Trotter.

I said, “I love his show on National Radio on Sunday mornings. It’s very relaxing.”

He said, “No, that’s Chris Laidlaw.”

Trotter’s column wasn’t very relaxing. It demanded that I get off the fence and take a stand alongside locked-out workers at the Port of Auckland.

It’s hard to take Trotter seriously.

He’s Left-wing.

WEDNESDAY

Called a meeting with my new chief of staff.

I asked him, “You look familiar. What’s your name?”

He said, “Stuart Nash. I was an MP last term.”

I said, “Forget the past. Focus on the future. We need to connect with New Zealanders much better than we have.”

He suggested we sit down and discuss policy.

I said, “Didn’t you listen to a word I just said, Steve?”

He said, “It’s Stuart.”

via the tipline

Taken at 11:30am on Anzac Ave in town – Garry Parsloe and David Shearer together on their way to morning tea. Looks like Shearer is going down the do as say not as I do route.

Perhaps Parsloe is having a chat about the lack of progress after their big donation. If they were any closer they could have been holding hands.