Posts by Matthew Poole
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Question for Mr Edgeler perhaps: has Ede committed a crime by destroying evidence for this inquiry? Prosecution and jail time would be a fitting outcome.
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Hard News: Team Little: pretty good, in reply to giovanni tiso,
In fact the last vaguely qualified Minister of Finance the country has had was Roger Douglas, who studied accountancy.
And look where that got us. The dangers of a man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
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Hard News: Team Little: pretty good, in reply to Russell Brown,
The post-leadership-election stories I saw made it seem like a response to the result, but I’m happy to be corrected.
Yes, it was a response to the result. A response that he signalled before the ballot, when he said (paraphrased) that if he wasn't elected leader he was going to step down as Finance spokesman.
Don't have a source, but it was definitely announced before the election that it was not his intention to cling on. Potentially he was forestalling a clash with Little, who was the winner-presumptive, over Parker's hard-developed tax policies with which Little appears to have little sympathy. Little winning certainly does not give me much hope that we will have a CGT and other sensible taxation changes within the span of the next decade. -
Parker himself had clearly already got the memo
All the reporting I have seen says that Parker took himself out of the Finance portfolio, and had announced as much before the first vote was cast. What evidence do you have that this was anything other than the true situation?
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Legal Beagle: Gerry Brownlee is…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I think that between the CAA and Brownlee's office they've pretty much dreamt up the $2k fine as a token that Something Was Done.
$200 fee.
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Hard News: Garbage in, garbage out, in reply to mpledger,
One of the things I wish RNZ would do would count the number of times a minister didn’t come on air when asked. Something like “since the last election the the Minister for Justice has been unavailable for interview X times”.
Or, "Since first becoming Prime Minister in 2008, John Key has never appeared on this station despite repeated invitations."
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Really interesting listening to an older RNZ podcast of an interview with Mike Joy (Massey uni water scientist) who was saying that Ministry for Environment used a 10-year timeframe and declared that water quality was “stable” in most rivers (since when does ~12% of a sample constitute "most"?) when the scientifically-accepted test for quality stability wasn’t used and a longer timeframe showed, at best, statistically-insignificant levels of change that may or may not have indicated stability.
That shit could have lead to a heap of stories, probably on a number of topics, but if it did they passed me by. Nailing the government and its agencies over loose language and dodgy reporting timeframes doesn’t require any politicians to talk. -
Southerly: This Week in Parliament: 20…, in reply to Grant McDougall,
Ever noticed how eerily similar she looks to Vladimar Putin ? Put a blonde wig on him and you couldn't tell the difference.
Have you ever seen the two of them in the same room at the same time?!
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Where most conspiracists fall down is a response along the lines of "That's just what 'they' want you to think" when faced with some compelling piece of official evidence that contradicts the theory.
That and the supposed ability of necessarily hundreds, if not thousands, of people to actually Keep. A. Secret!
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Katharine Moody,
So, Dirty Politics must be sorted. And it will be.
We hope. What, exactly, can the Privileges Committee do to MPs who misbehaved in a previous term? Particularly when the PC is going to be heavy with caucus colleagues of the MPs who are before it, and the Speaker is likely to also be from that Party.
If National were in Opposition, or at least running a proper minority government, we might get somewhere. But they're not, and they're not, so I have very little hope that we'll actually get anywhere at all. Key is not going to convene a Royal Commission that might end up finding that he knew pretty much everything about pretty much everything and lied through his teeth about it to all and sundry.