Posts by Euan Mason
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It seems very likely that JK approved of Ede's little plots with Slater, and understood that he was the good cop to Slater's bad cop. I am therefore astounded that Key released the email that finally undid JC. Maybe the rumblings of her impatient Prime Ministerial ambitions influenced this?
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to Rob Stowell,
It would also put Slater’s nose out. And it’s possible ‘pissing off the whale’ is something those close to him are reluctant to do.
Maybe. I think Slater's days of influence are numbered.
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to Michael Meyers,
t’s admitting that there is truth to the “made-up stuff” in this “smear campaign” from a known “left-wing conspiracy theorist”.
Key could be very specific and confine it to what JC has admitted doing, and that would be perfectly feasible to run in parallel with his fanciful planet Key denunciations of Nicky Hagar.
Key will be doing an electoral calculation along with an assessment of what it would do to his personal power base within the party. He already sees English, a more centrist Nat, publicly shuffling in the wings. So while sacking Collins would get the Nats back on track prior to the election, it would help destabilise his within-party support.
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Yes, well the smart move for Key now would be to sack Collins as a minister, deselect her as a candidate and declare a fatwa on party engagement with fringe wingnuts such as Slater.
I suspect she's already been asked to resign though, and has refused.
You are right of course, but it will be difficult for Key to take this path. He apparently has a delicate within-party struggle on his hands, and he favours the more extreme right, where Collins is Queen diva.
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Hard News: Steven Joyce: Prick or Treat, in reply to Tristan,
The best person for the job post key appears to be Bill English.
There's going to be a hell of a lot of damage to repair. Do you think New Zealanders will be up for it, or will we just continue to drift with laissez faire?
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Whyte needed to study some history and sociology along with philosophy.
However, I agree with Tussock that ACT’s role is to pretend to force the Nats into passing legislation that they really wanted to pass but didn’t dare propose themselves. We’ve see that ACT’s coalition “conditions” last election ensured an embarrassing and ultimately very damaging failure of our climate change policies, and now we see that Fish & Game is to be emasculated at ACT’s bidding; something that the Minister of Conservation would clearly love to do himself but now doesn’t dare.
Imagine the conversations between ACT and the Nats: “What policy would you like us to insist on next, Johnny?” Maybe removing affirmative action for Maori was next on the Nats' hidden agenda.
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Speaker: A true commitment, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Wouldn’t it be nice if such an event triggered an automatic support system, both social and financial. Would be happy to have my taxes do something like that.
Great idea. Support that doesn't leave you in penury. Can’t see National going for it though. Would love to be proved wrong.
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Hard News: It was 30 years ago today, in reply to Sacha,
"It was one of the best National governments we ever had"
It was the first Act government, economically. And they would never have got away with it if National had been their parasitic host.
It's very electorally convenient for National to have ACT as a coalition partner to take the blame for excesses such as stuffing our Emissions Trading Scheme, selling our assets, punitive union and employment legislation, punitive unemployment legislation, exploitive and pollution-friendly environmental legislation, attempting to privatise education, regressive taxation, and ultimately for the Trans-Pacific-Partnership Agreement that will sell us down the river. Roger Douglas loves this stuff, as does ACT. Make no mistake, though, these are National's policies and tendencies. ACT is where JK's head really lies, but in ACT he would lose middle ground voters. Historians will not look kindly upon this government.
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Muldoon has a lot to answer for, but when you see it from his perspective it is understandable, albeit disastrous. New Zealand’s way had always been government intervention. When something big was needed the government created a department and invested in it. This included railways, mail, telecoms, forestry, power, education, health, shipping, roading, research, and even farming was a quango given the support for research and subsidies the department provided. NZ was economically part of Britain, the rich agricultural rump of an industrialised nation, until Britain joined the EEC. We hit a loss of our export market and the oil shocks simultaneously and became a rich country with a third world economy. Muldoon’s answer, whether he voiced it as I have or not, was to have the state industrialise by intervention because that was the New Zealand way.
However, there was a difference between state interventions of the 1970s and previous ones. Intervention to create a domestic wood supply and ultimately a burgeoning export industry, for instance, could be done one small piece at a time, with adjustments as problems became apparent. The risk was low. Think big projects, however, involved massive initial investments with taxpayers bearing all the risks of massive loans. Muldoon failed to appreciate the difference, and we went from being one of the richest peoples per capita in 1968 to the most indebted per capita in 1979 with very little successful industry to show for it. Many third world countries followed this same pattern, but usually with corruption added in.
This is how “state intervention” became dirty words in NZ.
Enter Thatcher, Reagan, Douglas and the new panoply of right wing neoliberals, and NZ was ripe for slaughter. We lost our assets, our jobs and our innocence. You could argue that Muldoon mortgaged them, paving the way for Douglas and Richardson to finally dispose of them.
I welcomed the Labour government of 1984 without realising that, as one of my right wing friends puts it, “It was one of the best National governments we ever had”. Lange realised only belatedly what his Pandora box contained and by then he couldn’t close it.
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Mark Graham,
Unless they can catch Key out with a direct lie. And he's too smart for that.
I doubt even a direct lie would do it. He's the ultimate teflon PM.