Recent Posts...
Page 101 of 323
Archive
This just in ... | Sep 07, 2005 14:34
I don't normally post twice in a day, but I've just had two callers to my 95bFM show - one a workmate, the other an estranged family member - emphatically informing me that members of the Exclusive Brethren have been putting up National Party billboards in Auckland. And not just one or two billboards either.
Given the nature of the organisation, it's inconceivable that they'd be doing so without instruction from the church leadership.
Certainly everyone has the right to join a political campaign - even the leaders of abusive religious cults. And it's perfectly possible that National doesn't know who its little helpers are. But this would seem to rather give lie to this morning's protestations that there is no connection between the Exclusive Brethren and the National Party's election campaign. I thought this was newsworthy.
What a Cult! | Sep 07, 2005 09:19
So the anti-Green and Labour smear pamphlets turn out to be the handiwork of the Exclusive Brethren? Freaky. There's no evidence that National even knew about the Brethren campaign, but it will not exactly welcome the news that its campaign on behalf of the "mainstream" has been joined to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by a rejectionist and abusive religious cult. After all, the dark public sentiment to which National has been appealing with the "mainstream" catchphrase has been turned on just such groups at various times in New Zealand's history.
Leaving aside its abusive practices and lack of transparency, the Exclusive Brethren has every right to say its piece in the debate, but the comparison with, say, newspaper ads placed by the PSA and the nurses' union is inaccurate. Those organisations have their names on their ads, they answer the phone when someone calls and they don't set security guards on the leaders of political parties who come to ask about wanton inaccuracies in their printed material.
If Helen Clark was as consistently unable to correctly state her own party's policies as Don Brash is, the RWDB tendency would be screaming about it. Assuming this isn't deliberate, it's absolutely ludicrous:
Up to several hundred thousand people would lose subsidies for GP visits and prescriptions under National - a week after leader Don Brash gave assurances they wouldn't.
Announcing the details of National's health policy yesterday, Dr Brash admitted that when he told the Herald his party would retain universal health subsidies in regions where they were already in place "that was a mistake".
On Monday, Dr Brash told TVNZ he did not know if National would reintroduce market rents for state housing tenants, despite it being confirmed in a housing policy released that day.
WTF?
More policy oddities from National: Brian Rudman notes that its transport pitch for Auckland abandons the earlier support for the politically dicey Eastern motorway, and represents quite a flip-flop for Maurice Williamson, who this week said:
"It is not a state highway and you can't just decide to do things in a local roading area by foisting it on a local authority."
But a few weeks ago, Rudman observes, Mozzer was sininging quite a different song to Herald reporters:
He said: "I can't find anyone that can explain to me why that is not a state highway. You would never build these things if you had to rely on local authorities through which they run."
Warming to his theme, he said that if we were to listen to those who didn't want a motorway in their backyard, "Auckland will never build any more motorways ... and we are grossly short of them".
Taken in the context of National's pledges to streamline the Resource Management Act, scrapping legal aid for objectors and introducing mechanisms "to prevent vexatious and frivolous objections" - whatever that might mean - it's a nightmare scenario.
Again, WTF?
Rudman also points out that the claim in Don Brash's speech and elsewhere that "the congestion on Auckland's roads is worse than in Sydney or Melbourne" is simply not true.
New Yorker editor David Remnick has a good comment piece on the Katrina debacle:
Just as serious, the President's priorities, his indifference to questions of infrastructure and the environment, magnified an already complicated disaster. In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the Army Corps of Engineers' funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23 million less than the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million, delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees. Former Republican congressman Michael Parker was forced out as the head of the Corps by Bush in 2002 when he dared to protest the lack of proper funding.
Similarly, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which is supposed to improve drainage and pumping systems in the New Orleans area, recently asked for $62.5 million; the White House proposed $10.5 million. Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a pro-Bush Democrat, said, "All of us said, 'Look, build it or you're going to have all of Jefferson Parish under water.' And they didn't, and now all of Jefferson Parish is under water."
I was a talking to a bloke I met on the terraces at the test match on Saturday evening - no, really I was - about Christopher Hitchens, and we agreed that Hitch had fallen so far into denial about Iraq that he was really a bit sad these days. As it happens, Juan Cole has penned a critique of his recent writing that pretty much tears Hitch a new rhetorical you-know-what.
And this build-your-own-National-billboard site is bloody excellent. There's a league table of the most popular efforts, and the current frontrunner is a cracker.
Bad policy, baby | Sep 06, 2005 09:00
Euphemism of the week. So far. "We will ensure there is equity between private rentals and state home rentals." It sounds sort of nice in context in National's Housing policy, but yes, what it means is a return to market rentals for state housing. Here are the money quotes on what that wrought last time.
National's Housing policy comes in the dainty little flier format that suffices for policy documents in this campaign. It's quite a piece of work. It addresses access to the housing market:
"Housing is less affordable than it was 20 years ago partly because of the lack of available land. National believes there must be a more responsive zoning of land to open up more of it for housing. Reforming the RMA will help to achieve this," it says. In fact, the claim that that there is a lack of available land that could be fixed by RMA reform appears twice in the two pages to which the "plan" runs.
Oddly enough, it's a factor that was cited in a speech a year ago by Reserve Bank governor Allan Bollard, entitled What's happening in the property sector?, a grand total of zero times.
Bollard noted that the recent period of strength in the residential property market was "hardly unprecedented" in New Zealand.
The early 1970s, the early and late 1980s, and the mid 1990s were also periods marked by intense activity in the housing market and strong house price inflation.
There were some unique features to each of those cycles, but also some common drivers. Each coincided with a substantial acceleration in population growth to levels well above normal, due mainly to a spurt of high net immigration -- more arrivals and fewer departures. Each cycle was also reinforced by some other stimulus, such as a lift in export prices received from abroad, fuelling household incomes.
He went on to note that "a sharp lift in net immigration and the sharp improvement in export returns from about 2000 through to 2002" were catalysts for the upturn, but thought that both short and long term migrant pressure was easing. As other possible factors, he listed the drift to warmer regions, a drop in the average number of person per dwelling, lifestyle changes and the shift to "more exotic alternatives to the traditional New Zealand family home", capacity in the construction industry, "strong economic activity", the popularity of residential property investment and the inevitable short-term inelasticity of housing supply.
At no point did he refer to regulatory roadblocks to the supply of land for housing developments. But he did say this:
Another source of demand during the latest cycle, at least in its early stages, has been the significant demand for properties by non-residents particularly in coastal and lakeside regions. The relatively low New Zealand dollar up until about 2002 helped to make such properties particularly attractive to foreign buyers. Although we have no reliable way of telling how much of New Zealand's housing stock is now owned by people living abroad, that proportion has almost certainly increased substantially over the past few years. Demand coming from people living abroad is likely to be less sensitive to monetary policy than demand coming from resident population.
So. Coastal and lakeside land. The very sort likely to be freed up by a loosening of the RMA …
National also claims to be "wary of the perils of offering a one-off grant [ie Labour's KiwiSaver-based package] to help people into first homes … ultimately the cost of housing rises to match the size of the grant." (Curiously, if you're a state house tenant wishing to take your property out of the public housing stock, you will be eligible for a $15,000 suspensory loan for your deposit, written off after seven years' occupation.)
And yet National is happy to ditch conventional public housing rents, and load the public obligation into the accommodation supplement, a landlord subsidy (National actually wants to pay it direct to landlords). This policy helped send rents soaring last time around. This will doubtless come as welcome news to people who piled into residential property and have felt the pinch as rents fell: rather than being left to the discipline of the market, they'll be bailed out by National. If you're renting but would like to buy a house: not so good.
Seriously. The last time market rentals were phased in, from 1994 to 1996, the percentage of state house tenants spending half or more of their income on their housing costs increased from 37.5% to 58.8%. At the same time, the percentage of private tenants spending half or more of their income on rent increased from 58.9% to 62.7%. By the end of the 1990s, 71% of applicants for food parcels at the Auckland City Mission cited market rents as the reason for applying.
What planet are these people on?
PS: For a little light relief, National's Communications policy. All 82 words of it (exactly the same length as this paragraph). It proposes a return to generic competition law (which worked so well in the 1990s), implicitly rules out unbundling, promises telco power of appeal against the Telecommunications Commissioner and says National would "regulate an outcome if necessary" if all players fail to strike a deal on number portability. Nothing about broadband or mobile termination rates. Is this some sort of joke?
Ugly As | Sep 05, 2005 09:01
Last night's Colmar Brunton poll was about as ugly as could be for Labour, which can only hope that it's as much of an outlier as Pete Hodgson says it is. It certainly makes the position of New Zealand First interesting: if Peters does, as suggested here today, declare a coalition preference for National, he may lose even more of his support, given that more than half of his voters want him to go with Labour.
The polls are certainly a little weird: two weeks ago the Herald Digipoll poll had Labour miles ahead in Auckland. Then last week's Fairfax poll apparently had a similar huge break for National in Auckland. The story covering the Fairfax poll had this extraordinary news from the Epsom battle, where an electorate vote win is Act's lifeline:
National has been under pressure from ACT to step aside for it in the blue-ribbon Epsom seat, and leader Rodney Hide announced yesterday that he would campaign for National in Tauranga to topple Mr Peters.
But an Epsom deal is unlikely, with relations between ACT and National at an all-time low, exacerbated yesterday by allegations about ACT's tactics in Epsom.
Among those allegations by sitting National MP Richard Worth were that ACT door-knocking teams were pretending to be National Party members, and that phone polls were asking how people would vote if Mr Worth died. Mr Hide rejected Mr Worth's claims that the door-knocking tactics were underhand, saying his supporters included genuine National members who wanted him to win. No one had been asked questions about Mr Worth dying, he said.
I'm not sure if the electorate is all that receptive to arguments about the viability of National's tax and spending promises, but someone who ought to know confirmed to me in Wellington last week that the paint wasn't dry on National's fiscal numbers when the tax cuts were announced. (What will they cut to save, for instance the implied $350 million on education?: "They don't know.") From a personal point of view this gives me the fear, because the resources likely to be for the chop (the so-called "bureaucrats") are the very support staff that our family - we have two special needs children - has been depending on.
It appears that National is counting on Treasury's revenue forecasts to continue to be exceeded when the money actually comes in. They would hope so. Anthony Trenwith pointed out something I hadn't thought about with respect to the cost of National's law and order policy:
While the parole policy will, as you've pointed out, prove pricey in the long term some of those made to serve their full term may well have done so anyway. What could really cost this country is the insane idea to take DNA samples from all convicted criminals. So for example, almost every kid caught breaching the liquor ban at Whangamata will be required to provide a sample. Even the cluster of MPs with convictions (predominantly drink-drives) won't be immune!
Currently, ESR handle about 500 samples per month (according to their website). Under National's policy this will skyrocket to 500 per week! Even then, this could be considered be a conservative estimate - 500 per *day* would not be unrealistic considering the volume of people processed by the courts per day. Consequently, a drastic increase in technician numbers will be required along with more space - both in the labs and in the system to store and process all of these samples. Then there's the question of how all of this is to be paid for (a post-dated cheque perhaps)...
In most cases there is little or no purpose to be served by taking a sample and there can be no better case to illustrate this than that of Donna Awatere-Huata. Sure keeping crime down is a real concern for all New Zealanders, but keeping the ideas to do this realistic must also be a concern.
It would be nice to see someone actually pin them down on this, because it seems extraordinary that they don't appear to have allowed for it.
(Oh, and sci-tech spokesman Paul Hutchison's submissions on behalf of National at the Scanz conference last week were unenlightening: a few criticisms of the government and … yet another promise to "review" things. David Slack has more on how "reviews" seem to comprise a good deal of National's policy platform.)
Some extraordinary video clips from American TV have been posted online in the past few days, but perhaps none more so than this one from Fox News's Hannity and Colmes show. While Sean Hannity tries to work things around to the sponsor's message ("let's get this in perspective") his own field reporters shout him down.
The other one is rapper Kanye West on a fund-raising Telethon: he abandons the autocue and just starts talking: ""I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they are looting if you see a white family it says they are looking for food ... We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war now fighting another way and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us ... George Bush doesn't care about black people." Mike Myers looks stunned.
You may have seen the Interdictor blog from on the ground in New Orleans. The author seems to think that the situation is stabilising. New Zealand writer Paula Morris is a contributor to this blog from the Mississippi area.
So much here is troubling - the inadequate response at local, state and federal level, the alarmingly thin membrane of social order, the desertion of their posts by so many policemen. In the New York Times, David Brooks sees a "bursting point" that will transform political culture as much as America's sense of national failure did in the 1970s.
The response from some of the more prominent pillars of the right-wing blogosphere has been appalling. For them, the victims are not in New Orleans, but Washington, and the most important thing is not saving them, but saving the reputation of the Bush administration. It's ironic to see them coming over all indignant about other people "exploiting" the tragedy to make a political point. It's not so long since the same ugly crowd was busting a gut to depict the Asian tsunami relief effort (which really looks pretty competent now) as an indictment of the United Nations. Scarily, some of them seem to regard the New Orleans victims as something other than real Americans.
Salon has an interesting analysis headed: The Culture War Over Katrina.
Editor & Publisher excerpts desperate pleas for help, texted in from around New Orleans to the blog of the New Orleans Times Picayune. The Superdome is nearly cleared but it appears that many others will die in their homes.
The Washington Post has a long but interesting story focusing on changes to the system for federal emergency response since 2001:
The roots of last week's failures will be examined for weeks and months to come, but early assessments point to a troubled Department of Homeland Security that is still in the midst of a bureaucratic transition, a "work in progress," as Mencer put it. Some current and former officials argued that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism, the department has diminished the government's ability to respond in a nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet it is still charged with leading the government's response to disaster.
"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then."
PS: If you're looking for my paper for the libraries research conference in Wellington, I'll tidy it up and post it tomorrow in Great New Zealand Argument. Although I fear that if the polls are correct it might all be moot. In 1999, the National Library was withering and selling books. Are we going back to that?
Another Email Emerges | Sep 02, 2005 08:42
News reports have made much of the fact that there were no outbound emails among the hundred pages in the "Brash files". Not true. Today, Hard News reveals a previously unknown email - from Dr Brash to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair. The text is as follows:
Dear Tony,
Don Brash here: Prime Minister of New Zealand in waiting. I write to warn you of an issue that could bring down your government and tear apart your country. No, not the war in Iraq - I'd need more information before I could venture an opinion (or even answer a simple question) on that.
No, I mean the Welsh. And for that matter, the Scots.
I am surprised that a man of your charm and intelligence has not realised that allowing these groups to have separate Parliaments and particular cultural practices is taking your nation down the road the racial separatism.
I invite you to take a look at the policy on such matters developed by the National Party at the suggestion of a friend of mine called Roger. In it, we enforce the principle of One Law for All.
I urge you to abolish your race-based assemblies before your country becomes a North Atlantic Zimbabwe. (I am particularly concerned that you allow the courts in Scotland to practice a traditional version of the law that is peculiar to the Scottish race.)
You must also take steps to curb the politically correct practice of encouraging the use of minority languages, and even the operation of an entire Welsh TV channel to force it on people. You really must crack down on this; perhaps by forbidding your student teachers to pronounce Welsh correctly. (I expect this will not be difficult.)
You may also wish to follow our example and organise a purge on the way history is taught in schools to bring it in line with new policy expectations. (I understand you are familiar with the phrase "fix the facts around the policy".)
Actually, the school curriculum thing isn't so much policy as something I blurted out when that hippie guy from Scoop got me a bit rattled a few days ago, but I'm very pleased with it. I find that once you set your sights on One Law for All, it's very easy to come up with things on the spur of the moment. My deputy leader calls it "pulling policy out of my ass", but I find this a little distasteful, as I suspect would you if you saw my deputy leader.
Anyway, I have policy to discover and a campaign to conduct, so I'll leave you with one key word: Resentment. It has never been hard to get the English to dislike the Welsh, and of course the Scots will always harbour grudges. If you play your cards right, you'll have your majority resenting your Celtic minorities before you know it. It has certainly worked for us.
Kind regards,
Don Brash
PS: What do you think about this Iraq thing? Should we have gone in?
Page 101 of 323
Archive