The New Zealand labour movement used to have its own newspaper. A group of us thought that now might be a good time for it to be digitally reborn: The Standard v2.0.
Following a perfectly sensible Cabinet reshuffle story tonight, TV One News must have had this weird rush to the head because they sent an English (really silver spoon English too), white, tie wearing suit to interview the good people of South Auckland to find out what they thought of Labour’s Cabinet reshuffle.
Is it me or do other people think too that… um… that was a bad choice of interviewer? And that perhaps, the locals might have opened up just a tad more if they suspected that this was NOT the first time ever that the media guy had EVER EVER EVER been in South Auckland?
This Halloween, the Glindas, gladiators and harem boys of the Castro — along with untold numbers who plan to dress up as Senator Larry E. Craig, this year’s camp celebrity — will be celebrating behind closed doors. The city’s most popular Halloween party, in America’s largest gay neighborhood, is canceled. The once-exuberant street party, a symbol of sexual liberation since 1979 has in recent years become a Nightmare on Castro Street… [read on]
A new townhouse development in Toronto put up a billboard showing what kind of community they expect to attract. Someone who goes by the name Defy added cartoon balloons to each, voicing what the neighbors were thinking already. The street art has already been removed, but the pictures are on the net forever. You can see the whole thing in detail at Dead Robot.
Three new cabinet ministers (Maharey’s retiring, Burton’s returned to the backbench, and Benson-Pope’s old place was still open):
Steve Chadwick becomes Minister of Conservation, Women’s Affairs, and Associate Health
Maryan Street becomes Minister of Housing, Minister for ACC, along with Associate Minister for Economic Development and Associate Tertiary Education
Shane Jones becomes Minister for Building and Construction, Associate Minister of Treaty Negotiations, Associate Immigration and Associate Minister of Trade
Darren Hughes becomes a Minister outside Cabinet with responsibilities as Minister of Statistics, Associate Minister of Social Development and Employment, and Deputy Leader of the House
Portolios were reallocated, from the press release, the most significant were:
Michael Cullen takes on the Treaty Negotiations portfolio in addition to finance
Phil Goff adds the Corrections portfolio to his responsibilities
Annette King takes on the Justice portfolio, and retains Transport and Police
Pete Hodgson becomes Minister for Economic Development, Tertiary Education, and Research Science and Technology
Chris Carter becomes Minister of Education and retains Ethnic Affairs
David Cunliffe becomes Minister of Health, and continues his responsibilities in Communications and Information Technology
Trevor Mallard becomes Minister of Broadcasting, the Environment, and Labour, and retains SOEs and Associate Finance
Ruth Dyson becomes Minister of Social Development and Employment, Minister for the Community and Voluntary Sector and retains Senior Citizens and Disability Issues responsibilities
Lianne Dalziel takes on Food Safety and Associate Justice in addition to Commerce
David Parker adds States Services to his responsibilities
Nanaia Mahuta takes on the full Local Government portfolio and Associate Tourism in addition to her other responsibilities
Clayton Cosgrove takes on the full Immigration portfolio, Sport and Recreation, Small Business, and responsibility for the Rugby World Cup. He retains Associate Justice and Finance responsibilities.
Coming into an election when work rights is going to be a major issue, we’ve heard Ruth Dyson will be relinquishing her labour portfolio tomorrow.
The big question is who’s going to pick it up?
Across the ditch work rights has become the defining issue of the upcoming election and given National’s desperate attempts to innoculate the 1990s and their dire effects on working New Zealanders, we suspect it will be a big issue come 2008.
Witness the CTU’s stance on a $15 an hour minimum wage and the EPMU’s recent Labour Day campaign and you’ll see that the left’s answer to National’s obsession with tax cuts can only be higher wages and better conditions.
Today’s Herald Digipoll is not good news for Labour, coming off the back of last week’s positive Roy Morgan poll which showed a centre-left majority. As the Herald notes, on the basis of this poll National has enough support to govern alone.
But what it also demonstrates is the mistake National has made in devouring its potential coalition partners (ACT and UF score a pitiful 0.2% each). MMP doesn’t look too fondly on parties gaining a majority by themselves, and as the election nears and National’s vote inevitably drops down to the mid-40s the numbers game will start to look very different.
Labour’s vote has actually held up pretty well, and at just 0.8% less than the last Digipoll it’s well within the margin of error. Still, they’d be feeling a lot more comfortable in the early-40s, especially with the Greens a little closer to the 5% mark than they’d like.
In a strange twist that would appear to cast some doubt on the poll’s accuracy, Helen Clark has increased her lead over John Key in the preferred Prime Minister stakes, leading him 50.8% to 37.3%. This is odd because preferred PM generally tracks pretty well with the party’s fortunes.
Also of interest is the projected size of the Parliament, with ACT, United Future and Progressive’s low polling adding to the Maori Party’s usual overhang to stretch the house to 125 seats.
Overall, it’s 65 seats to the centre-right (Nat, ACT, UF) and 60 to the centre-left (Lab, Grn, Prog, Maori). Even on a bad day, there’s still not much in it.
Interesting to see EPMU President Don Pryde has thrown his hat in the ring for the Dunedin South seat and has the full backing of his union. Having met Don at a conference a few years ago I’ve got to say I was taken by his level-headedness and the way he’d think before passing comment on anything - definitely a safe pair of hands. I can only assume that this is a clear sign that NZLP council member Clare Curran’s candidacy was designed solely to open the debate as she’s a personal friend of EPMU National Sec Andrew Little and was the strategic talent behind that union’s ground breaking Fair Share campaign so it’s unlikely Little would endorse a candidate against her if her candidacy was serious.
Whether Pryde will make the cut against Benson-Pope is another question but I’d assume he has the backing of the Dunedin South LEC (he’s a member of it) and endorsement from the EPMU never hurt any political candidate, especially in the crucial floor vote. Interestingly for Labour’s largest affiliate and such a political powerhouse the EPMU only has one ex-official in parliament and Pryde is definitely from the grassroots end of the union’s spectrum - a friend of mine rang him for an interview today only to discover he was taking the call from the top of a powerline he was servicing!
I’d imagine that sort of background will play well in what is a traditionally blue collar left-dominated seat but with nominations still open for a little over a week anything could happen.
Actics.com is an online neworking site for “ethical” businesses.
Businesses that sign up choose to nominate themselves as expressing various corporate values and also describe how they embody them. Users, clients and investors then get to rate the businesseson these criteria.
The site’s meant to help individuals find businesses with values they share as well as provide businesses with a way to promote themselves and get feedback from their networked ’stakeholders’.
Pol science lecturer and commentator Jon Johansson has given a lucid and scholarly account of the inexorable decline of John Key and National’s prospects. In a speech to the NZ First conference at the weekend. Johansson told delegates that after a promising beginning, Key has started to “unevenly walk the new generation walk…”
An excerpt:
“In fact, and despite Key’s and National’s high levels of popular support, his performance has become, in some respects, quite mediocre, with a thoroughly forgettable conference speech, presiding over and contributing to the recent series of policy gaffes, and coming up with what I describe as his ‘blerts,’ not all of which survive scrutiny. As an outside observer it seems to me that National’s old template has snapped back into place. ‘No risks’ and ‘inoculations’ on the right, and unremitting negative attacks on the left. It has also gone unnoticed that National’s overarching ‘change’ narrative that Key had begun to carefully construct through his ‘Burnside’ speech and subsequent regional conference speeches has lost all shape and focus. It also seems to me that National’s current low-risk strategy takes it down one of the few paths where it could conceivably lose what should for it be, from its current position, an unlosable election.
Second, Key is faced with presentational problems which potentially undermine any future-oriented ‘change’ narrative that would, I think, comfortably prevail at the next election. Voters might well be seriously entertaining changing from Labour but Helen Clark will counter by saying to voters… sure, but change to what? Change that sees 1990s retreads like Tony Ryall in health, Nick Smith in the environment, English in finance, and then John Key also has his Williamson’s, Lockwood’s and McCully’s as ideological talisman from the 90s. None of these individuals have public appeal so Labour will be doing its utmost to isolate and then contrast the respective front benches as a point of difference in its favour.
Thirdly, National’s eventual policy mix remains a mystery. This poses a risk for National as accusations of ‘Hidden agendas’ remains viable currency for as long as a policy vacuum exists. Secondly, the threshold for scrutiny of National’s eventual policy mix, post-’Hollow Men,’ will be higher than in ‘05. National seem to feel they successfully inoculated against the claims made in Hager’s book once they replaced Brash with Key. Their tactics certainly gave the appearance of having worked given the lack of scrutiny of the book’s claims that ensued. But, I’d suggest, the lack of integrity that is at the heart of the ‘Hollow Men’ will be an important sub-text to analyses of National’s policy and Key’s campaign performance. Trust is conceivably the issue of the campaign. All in all, National remains fragile enough, and Labour patient, skilled, and ruthless enough, to think that this next election is far from being a fait accompli.”
Cannabis use among young people has fallen significantly since its controversial reclassification in 2004, according to the latest British Crime Survey figures published today. The Home Office figures showed the proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds who had used cannabis in the past year fell from 25% when the change in the law was introduced to 21% in 2006/07.
Unfortunately the same report suggests that cocaine use there appears to be on the rise…
Peter Bradshaw, at the Guardian, reviews Michael Moore’s movie Sicko:
Last week in this paper, Seumas Milne reported on the boa-constrictor-sized parasites of US private health insurance seeking to get their fangs into the British NHS. This magnificent new film from Michael Moore is a timely reminder of the grotesque mess that Americans have made for themselves with healthcare, and how insidiously easy it would be for the same thing to happen to us, little by little.
And on the subject of health, interesting to note that the GP fee cap is still marked for removal by National.
If you thought the public outcry might have been enough to have them reconsider, you’d be dead wrong.
Tony Ryall: “In light of the response [to the removal proposal] we are prepared to consider a monitoring regime to deal with public concern about relying solely on competition and patient pressure to manage fees.”(NZ Doctor, 10 Oct 2007)
There’s a new Roy Morgan out today. It covers the date range 1-14 October 2007.
Gary Morgan said of the result:
As was suggested in the previous New Zealand Morgan Poll, National Leader John Key’s recent policy gaffes have handed Helen Clark and her Labour Government a golden opportunity to make up some ground.
In the first fortnight of October, Labour has closed the gap from 15.5% to 6.5% — the closest it has been since early February.
So now Tariana is calling for a police probe into the Mallard/Henare incident.
Mallard came clean yesteday about his role in the incident but we still haven’t heard much in the way of detail from Tau bar this kind of thing:
“He just said to me ‘come outside’, and I went outside and, in the lobby, we had a bit of a talk and he lost his rag.”
If the Dom is right this morning when it reports that “…Mr Mallard punched Mr Henare, apparently after the National MP grabbed him by the tie” then Tau’s being “economical” with the truth.
Neither MP’s behaviour was appropriate but if one’s to be held to account, both should be.
The Australian Council of Social Services has highlighted an update on the numbers living in poverty.
New figures released by Australia Fair show that the number of Australians in poverty increased from 9.8% to 11.1% of the population between 2003-04 and 2005-06. This is based on the standard measure used extensively in OECD countries, 50% of median income.
The Prime Minister’s announcement of assistance for pensioners with their utilities bills is welcomed, but should extend to around 1 million sole parents, unemployed Australians and people with disabilities on NewStart Allowance.
In addition, we’re looking for a national plan with targets to assist the more than 1 in 10 Australians living in poverty which would include investment in dental care, affordable housing, education and training, and lifting the living conditions for Indigenous people.
Given recent coverage of tax cuts in NZ and the desire of New Zealanders not to lose social services we should pay attention.
John Key said just yesterday that “a programme of personal tax cuts, starting with our first budget, and they’ll be progressively rolled out. Very similar to Australia. Australia started this programme five years ago, they’ve cut them every single year and it’s made a huge difference over in Australia.” (Sunrise, TV3, 24 Oct 2007).
So who’s been benefiting from those tax cuts then?
Meanwhile the social report here shows that gaps between rich and poor New Zealanders have finally started to close. So I’d say we’ve had our priorities about right. And now the question can be asked & what’s next?
Bob Hawke still tells it like it is; watch his devastating rebuttal of the Liberals’ attempts to demonise unions here.
He points out how the union movement was crucial to Australia’s successful economic transformation in the 1980’s.
Labour in Australia in 1983 and New Zealand in 1984 both faced the need to modernise their economies after Howard in Australia and Muldoon in New Zealand had run them into the wall.
The difference in relative living standards between Australia and New Zealand that right-wing commentators harp on about dates from that time, and is due in large part to the vastly different strategies used then.
In New Zealand, Rogernomics and Ruthanasia rammed in crash-through deregulation with effects that we still suffer from. In Australia Hawke and Keating had an Accord with the ACTU that resulted in a much more orderly sequence, and has led to much better outcomes over time for Australian workers.
The Dom yesterday ran a front page story by Tracy Watkins which used National Party figures aimed at showing that “Joanna Average” isn’t much better off than seven years ago despite significant wage rises.
Turns out that neither Bill English nor John Key got the maths right.
From Cullen’s press release:
On Tuesday, Bill English invented a “Joanna Average” - a sole income worker, without children on the average wage. Unfortunately, Mr English used gross income instead of net income when calculating the worker’s income. The error meant that Mr English, and the media reports that relied on his numbers, significantly understated the increase in take-home home pay over the last seven years.
The actual increase is more than three times higher than Mr English reported.
“Not only was the National Party’s example dismissive of the significant impact Working for Families is having for hundreds of thousands of middle income workers, it was just plain wrong,” Michael Cullen said.
“After Bill English used the inaccurate information in the House on Tuesday, John Key made matters worse by tabling the document in the House during Question Time yesterday. This was not a small error, especially for two people who make claim to economic credibility.
So National’s mislead us twice.
First, by messing up the maths: instead of being $500 better off, Joanna is actually closer to $1800 better off.
Second, by telling only half the truth: ignoring working for families, cheaper doctors’ visits, cheaper prescriptions and a range of other cost-saving policies.
National want to be taken seriously on economic policy. This won’t help.
The Guardian has launched a three year aid project with the objective of ‘together, lifting one village out of the middle ages’.
The village is Katine, located in northern Uganda.
The challenge is to see whether a newspaper, its readership, a bank and an NGO can make a significant and lasting difference to the lives of people who are essentially still living in the 14th century.
Natural disasters, conflict, and disease make life in Katine hard and short.
The project organisers started by asking:
Would it be possible to find a way of… connecting the ideas, goodwill, resources and expert knowledge of 15 million readers around the world and focusing them on one problem? Would it be possible to do all this in a way which avoided the classic trap of creating a temporary oasis in a desert? Of doing something both sustainable and replicable? Could there be a model for using web-based technologies - and the power to link and harness people - that could be developed by other western communities, whether businesses, schools or towns? Why twin your village with one in Belgium if you could twin it with one in Uganda?
It’s an ambitious three year project and they’re looking for help. If nothing else, check out their website.
The Guardian has launched a 
