Unite

As at 31st May 2013 the Unite Union have failed to file their 2011 and 2012 Financial Accounts.

Observation by the Owl

This is a breach of the laws regarding being a Union and being registered with the Incorporated Societies Office.

Any employer could if they wish not negotiate with the Unite union until their status was confirmed.

Interesting question for the Registrar and lawyers to debate.

ᔥ The Tipline

Unite Union finally filed their 2010 accounts – however 2011 accounts are still be files. The accounts show the Union is insolvent and has negative equity of $236k. An operating loss of $65k for the year.

However the interesting point in the 2010 accounts is that the 2009 accounts were signed off by auditors but the 2010 do not seem to be.

Nothing wrong was that at all except in the 2009 the Auditors brought to the attention about Unite being able to trade as a going concern in their notes.

Until Unite files their 2011 Accounts which is now quite a few months overdue (which means that they can be struck off) members can not get a clear picture of how their Union is operating.

Full copy of the accounts can be seen in the MED Societies and Trust website – just type Unite in the search bar.

The OWL

Sunny Kaushal has really taken to Facebook as he campaigns to come second in Pakuranga this election.

I wonder if Sunny has heard of tax cheats Matt McCarten and the Unite union.

I can do more than repeat what No Right Turn says:

If you’re a left-wing union organiser, who opposes corporate tax cuts and favours higher taxes on the rich, you’d be consistent and pay your fair share, right? Wrong:

Inland Revenue is chasing unionist Matt McCarten’s Unite Support Services Ltd. for $150,750 in unpaid taxes after the department forced the company into liquidation last month.McCarten’s vehicle, which supplied administrative support services to the youth-orientated union Unite Inc., was put into liquidation by a High Court order last month after the tax department pursued it for “failure to provide for taxation,” according to the first liquidator’s report.

“Failure to provide for taxation” is a polite way of saying “couldn’t be arsed paying”. Which makes McCarten a hypocrite on a grand scale. As Commissioner of Inland Revenue Robert Russell so eloquently said this morning,

[p]eople who are non-compliant are basically stealing from their neighbours.

McCarten should stop doing that, and start paying his fair share. Otherwise, he’s no different to the rich pricks he rails against.

Clearly Matt McCarten thinks taxes are for “Other People” to pay.

Keeping Stock has some very good questions that Matt McCarten needs to answer.

According to NBR we may be seeing the beginning of the end of Matt McCarten’s Unite union.

Matt Nippert writes:

Part of left-wing political Machiavelli Matt McCarten’s Unite union empire has gone under owing money to the taxman.

The Auckland High Court confirmed Unite Social Services was placed into liquidation this morning at the request of the Commissioner of Inland Revenue at 10.56am.

The Official Assignee was appointed as liquidator.

Unite Social Services is separate from the union Unite Incorporated, but financial accounts filed with the Companies Office show the two entities are linked.

The accounts to March 2009 notes Unite Social Services is “a supplier of administrative support services to Unite Inc. The charges for these services is at the discretion of the company. For this financial year the company did not make any charge for these services.”

The same 2009 accounts show Unite Inc owed the IRD $134,095, and had entered a $8,000 monthly repayment plan with the taxman.

Unite Social Services’ sole shareholder and director is former Alliance MP Mr McCarten.

He is presently serving as a political adviser to Hone Harawira’s Mana Party.

Mr McCarten had not returned repeated calls by the National Business Review as this story was posted.

Part of me feels sorry for Matt McCarten but on the other hand a union that rails against employers that don’t meet their obligations should really be honouring their own obligations to the taxpayer, especially if the arrears is PAYE.

The other fallout of course will be the Mana Party which was going to rely heavily on Unite resources and organisers, the pity for them is that it appears that Unite was spending their tax obligations on campaigning.

I went to the UNITE union bunker/bomb shelter today and spoke with Matt McCarten. I even got a tour of the bunker including meeting Mike Treen. Unfortunately John Minto was out when I was there.

Here is the full interview with Matt McCarten

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Direct url: http://whaleoil.gotcha.co.nz/audio/WOBH-McCarten[dot]mp3

Quotes and excerpts below:

On the new left wing party

The most important thing is you’ve gotta have a constituency and a call for it. It can’t just be a bunch of individuals who write out a cheque and think that’s going to do it.

Resources are important otherwise it is just a good idea

The most important thing is is that is there a view that such a party, like a new left party is needed?

There is a need for principled staunch left party, I also think there is a place for a staunch right wing principled party.

On the Maori Party

The latest successful party has been the Maori party. that was very much one of those triggers, the F&S building up over a period of time, they had no money, but what they had was MPs and state resources through Tariana.

On Labour and the Greens

Labour has no future without the Greens

On Labour

Labour still has a brand but it will take time to recover.

On politics

When we don’t have the two poles we have a dumbing down of politics, and it becomes how to capture the centre and it is full of opportunism and softness and no one actually stands for anything.

The worst thing for democracy and any form of democratic or civil society are these people who take pride in being ignorant.

On the Greens

I think the Green party is the default left party, but i think it is too nice to be left wingers.

Up and coming principled left wingers

I think there is a generational problem, there has been a big gap between our generation and the staunches coming through.

The left lost or ran away from the neo-liberal debate.

We’ve lost a generation of leaders

The intellectual heft isn’t there.

On the right wing

I think a lot of right wingers are intellectually lazy

On money buying elections/ideas

It can’t.

People, particularly on the left, get frightened about people being able to spend money and then thinking that is going to overwhelm the political debate, my view is that people don’t pay much attention to political advertising.

On MMP

It wasn’t pro MMP [the vote], it was just that it wasn’t that system.

It is one of the downsides of MMP [List MPs], it takes the hunger out of candidates

My view is that if you are a sitting MP and have a seat, you shouldn’t be allowed on the list.

It’s hacksville where they kiss up to a committee

On John Banks

John Banks could have spent a $100 million and wouldn’t have mattered

I think Banks was advised badly, he was put into a position into he shouldn’t have been put into.

On Helen Clark

It was very much the top down, I am the great leader, we know what is best, ok

On John Key

He’s the Aw Shucks guy

He’s a pragmatist, I think he is a Holyoake type, I think his end game is to be a popular prime minister, he is apolitical, no he is not ideological and he treats it like the same way he runs his previous life, what works.

On current record he is a shoe in

I don’t think Key is going to drop the ball

On Winston Peters

The FU vote which can be significant, see kind of Winston appeals to that.

Yes he’s a crook, You hear all sorts of stories, half of them are true.

He should be in jail.

I think it is because Labour have been so useless that people are looking at him again

On where the passion on Politics has gone

Capitalism won

The traditional left has run away from the fight.

You do a service and those of your ilk, but they do a service, and that is a service of a contest of ideas.

Politics has been taken over by technocrats who stand for nothing.

On Muldoon

You could argue he was the last socialist Prime Minister.

On Marginal Auckland Seats

Maungakiekie – I think Sam winning last time, we are talking about a pacific islander who did the graft, and all power and credit to him.

There is enough crossover for soft Labour/liberal support who say well they’re a good MP so I give them my vote and give my party vote to Labour…and Labour’s response is…no we want both your votes.

Carol having lost the seat, or not won the seat, and not having won it and then running again so its nothing new, well, I beat you last time and so you are coming back for another hiding.

This government is not un-popular and so therefore Sam will get the National vote anyway and because of who he is, in terms of ethnicity, his moderate position and his mana, then Carol’s going to job cut out.

On Public Transport

If I had my way I’d just have free buses and forget all the other bits

On Len Brown catching the train

It’s called theatre

On Labour

I think Labour has got such a struggle on all fronts, I’m not what its strong in

The Labour party needs stronger candidates, re-hashing list MPs into seats and then thinking they can win them, well there’s no hunger there.

On Act

They have five more than they should

Last night Pedro Gower slammed Litea Ah Hoi for her racist comments about a National party supporter. She called the supporter a “dumb-ass coconut”.

He has put up the extended interview with her and there is plenty more there that Kris Fa’afoi and Labour should be worried about.

Phil Goff waded in the Paul Henry affair and his comments were far less offensive that Litea Ah Hoi’s. I want to know what Phil Goff thinks about this, and I want to know what he is doing about it.

To the rest of our MSM who climbed into Paul Henry over his comments, they should be shamed into their ignoring of this issue. You maybe sure that if a National supporter had said the same thing then Vernon Small would have been all high dudgeon, and over it like white on rice.

I’d go further to say that if Litea Ah Hoi used that type of language in South Auckland then she’d probably get the bash. Her attitude and her non-apology are disgusting.

And where is Matt McCarten’s UNITE union. They should be picketing Fa’afoi’s campaign headquarters like they did for TVNZ. I didn’t think I would ever call Matt a hypocrite but I might have to.

Since Litea Ah hoi sees nothing wrong with the term coconut I thought she might enjoy this little tune. (NSFW) Just remember “it’s pacific humour”. If they offended by the video, then “put it in a bubble an blow it away”.

It’s no secret that I like Matt McCarten, that is because he doesn’t lie, he tells it like it is and fights the fight he believes in.

Not so Matt Jones, a little union creep, that instead of pitching in and helping re-build Christchurch he is running around trying to push struggling businesses under with his little campaign of lies and spin.

On a weekend when we should be celebrating the life of a true Kiwi hero we have our main news networks airing the views of this union scum. It disgusts me that our news media think that a chinless union bully-boy is more news-worthy than the passing of a true Kiwi hero. It seems that our Kiwi War Hero is only a hero in Australia, while here the media focuses on lying politicians and lying union scum.

Matt Jones is the kind of unionist that gives good unionists a bad name.

You know he is a creep because he has that little flavour saver where his chin should be.

I have been watching with mounting concern the blatent and naked aggression of Russia towards it’s neighbour and sovreign nation Georgia.

Make no mistake Russia is gong for a regime change, a land grab and trying to nobble NATO at the same time.

Sen. John McCain has written an article for the Wall Street Journal and he echoes all of my thoughts.

For anyone who thought that stark international aggression was a thing of the past, the last week must have come as a startling wake-up call. After clashes in the Georgian region of South Ossetia, Russia invaded its neighbor, launching attacks that threaten its very existence. Some Americans may wonder why events in this part of the world are any concern of ours. After all, Georgia is a small, remote and obscure place. But history is often made in remote, obscure places.

Exactly. He then explains why he is suspicious of the Russian motives.

Two years ago, I traveled to South Ossetia. As soon as we arrived at its self-proclaimed capital — now occupied by Russian troops — I saw an enormous billboard that read, “Vladimir Putin, Our President.” This was on sovereign Georgian territory.

Russian claims of humanitarian motives were further belied by a bombing campaign that encompassed the whole of Georgia, destroying military bases, apartment buildings and other infrastructure, and leaving innocent civilians wounded and killed. As the Russian Black Sea Fleet began concentrating off of the Georgian coast and Russian troops advanced on one city after another, there could be no doubt about the nature of their aggression.

Despite a French-brokered cease-fire — which worryingly does not refer to Georgia’s territorial integrity — Russian attacks have continued. There are credible reports of civilian killings and even ethnic cleansing as Russian troops move deeper into Georgian territory.

Essentially Russia is annexing Georgia. Saddam Hussein did this in Kuwait and we went to war. This situation is almost identical. People in this part of the world live hard and Russian aggression makes that living even harder.

Image via Wikipedia

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow.

Through his writings, he the horrors of Stalinist Gulag‘s to world attention, for those efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994.

His most famous work was the The Gulag Archipelago, a three-volume work on the Soviet prison camp system. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as well as the testimony of 227 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn’s own research into the history of the penal system. The appearance of the book in the West put the word gulag into the Western political vocabulary and guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities. Solzhenitsyn had already been declared a non-person in Soviet Russia before he wrote the Gulag Archipeligo and after writing it he was exiled until the fall of communism.

Interestingly all of Solzhenitsyn’s sons became U.S. citizens.