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.
Drinking Liberally’s Facebook group has just sent out the invitation to their second event.
I don’t know how they’ve swung it, but they’ve got Michael Cullen speaking. It’s not every day the Deputy Prime Minister agrees to talk to your drinking club/politics forum.
It will be on Wednesday again to fit Cullen’s schedule. So, details:
WHAT Drinking Liberally WHEN From 5.30pm, Wednesday June 4th. WHERE Southern Cross, Abel Smith Street SPEAKER Michael Cullen, Deputy Prime Minister CONTACTwellington@drinkingliberally.org
Cullen will be there from 6:00 to 6:40 but last time most people stayed around after Nandor had finished to get to know people who were there and chat about political ideas. Listening to the guest speaker is just a part of the night.
I had a great time last Wednesday and it was awesome to see so many people. The Facebook group has 63 members now and I’m told the mailing list is about 150, so there ought to be a good crowd next week too. If you’re interested in left-wing politics, I encourage you to come along even if you find yourself well to the left of Cullen. In fact, especially if that’s the case. Drinking Liberally is all about hearing diverse voices and community-building across the Left.
The Government has announced that the percentage of kiwi adults who smoke has fallen to 19.9%. The number of daily smokers is down from 25.2% of the adult population in 1996 to 18.7%. 150,000 people have given up in the last four years alone.
The really good news is that the number of teenagers who are taking up smoking is quickly falling away. 12.8% smoke now, down from 28.6% in 1999. That means the rate of smoking is likely to continuing falling quickly in the future.
Smoking is a burden on our society not just in terms of health dollars, but also in quality of life and productivity. Initiatives like the ban on smoking in bars have gone a long way towards reducing that burden.
Maori Smokefree Coalition director Shane Bradbrook sums it up: “The only group hurting over this positive result will be the tobacco industry.”
National’s Tony Ryall has made a disgrace of himself, yet again. This time, by labelling a Government initiative to hasten improvements in the detection of colon cancer (which kills 1200 people a year) ‘a political stunt’. Here is Health Minister David Cunliffe and Ryall on National Radio:
CUNLIFFE: I’m not doing this because of votes, I’m doing this because I’ve seen evidence which indicates we can do good, we can save lives. I am not happy that the previously proposed timetable [for routine colonoscopys] is aggressive enough and I think Mr Ryall would join with me and say that if we can do this more quickly with a view to that can it be achieved that we should do that. Look, I know there’s an election later in the year but I’m, frankly, far too busy with the portfolio to think about election stunts and I just hope that Mr Ryall could see this glass is half full rather than half empty again.
RYALL: I think that the Government is desperate and is going to come up with anything that makes it look as though they’re dealing with the issues.
Here’s a Minister dealing with a serious issue, even reaching out to National because surely this should be a common cause. Yet all Ryall can do is play politics in the most pathetic, hollow manner.
Ryall would rather the issue was not addressed and people die of colon cancer than for voters to hear a good news story about the Government.
You’ll note that not once in the interview does he suggest what National would have done differently. Why? Because National isn’t going to spend more on health, it’s going to spend less.
National doesn’t have a solution to colon cancer or any other issue. All it has is rabid attack dogs like Ryall and hollow calls for tax cuts.
We’re used to hearing that a poll has a margin of error but what does it mean? A margin of error of 3% doesn’t mean the poll’s numbers are definitely within 3% of the ‘real’ numbers, it means there is a 95% chance they are within 3% of those numbers; that is, one in 20 polls will be out from reality by something greater than 3%. One in twenty polls is a rogue poll and there is nothing that a polling company can do to prevent that. See those Xs on the graph of the last 22 polls below? That’s the Fairfax poll showing a 27% gap. Look how far it falls outside the polls before and since; an obvious rogue.
But polls can also be out if the sample isn’t random. Random doesn’t just mean the first 1000 people who you get to answer. It means that your sample is not different from the general population. Let’s take a bad poll to see how this can go wrong - David Farrar’s recent poll for Family First on smacking.
If you’re in Wellington, head along to the City Gallery tonight at 6pm to check out the free screening of a documentary on homelessness by Kate Amore and Charlie Bleakley. It was featured on Close Up last night:
Another Herald Digipoll is out today, with a sample taken both before and directly after the Budget.
The poll pretty much confirms what Roy Morgan showed us last week - the gap between the two main parties remains about fifteen percent and the controversial and highly publicised Fairfax poll was probably a rogue.
Of course, the Herald’s primary purpose is to sell newspapers, not provide you with a considered analysis, so they have to make this poll sound interesting. The angle this time is that there’s been no bounce for Labour from the Budget.
That’s to be expected - this far out from an election changes in party support tend to build up over time, not as a result of one single event. The key here is to look at the trend in multiple polls over time. Trying to read too much into any single poll makes sense for the people who commission them, but for the rest of us it’s pointless.
Following a series of National Party questions to the house the Herald has discovered the Labour government has spent nearly $27K on sausage rolls since taking power in 1999. Sources inside the public service reveal that in many cases morning teas would be provided with nearly two sausage rolls per person in attendance and some sausage rolls may have contained pork.
National Party grocery spokesman John Key says the situation is disgraceful:
At a time when hardworking Kiwis are struggling to buy cheese this kind of extravagance is shameful. Rather than wasting taxpayers’ money by governing the country and badgering us for trivial information about how we would govern it, this tired third-term government should be stepping up and coming clean over just how much they know about this over the odds sausage roll spend.
Sausage-roll-gate comes hard on the heels of a series of small goods scandals for the government including last month’s discovery that the Ministry of Economic Development has infinitely increased its spending on teabags since 1998 when it did not exist.
Tracy Watkins reported yesterday that National’s weakening of the employer contribution to Kiwisaver may take a different path to the one we envisaged. Rather than limiting employer contributions to a lower level Watkins reports businesses want to be able to dock or cut wages to compensate for the Kiwisaver contributions they make. This is currently illegal.
Now, an employer is already compensated by a tax credit on the first $20 a week they contribute to a worker’s Kiwisaver and tax deductibility on contributions in excess of that. So, hopefully, National wouldn’t allow wages to be lowered by the whole amount of contributions, only the part not covered by the Government.
So, time for some Notional Party Policy:
- Employers will be allowed to dock wages by the amount they pay into their employee’s Kiwisaver, less Government compensation.
What’s the effect of this? The worker loses out because their wages are lower.
Someone on the average wage would lose $48,000 over a working life, and the benefit would go entirely to businesses, who will no longer have to contribute anything – all their ‘contributions’ being covered by the Government or the worker.
Stories like this stress how important it is for National to come clean on its plans for Kiwisaver. There are hundreds of thousands of Kiwis trying to save for their retirements here, and they deserve some security.
Mark Gosche has announced he will retire from politics at the election. Gosche has represented the people of Maungakiekie for 12 years and, in 1999, became the first minister of Pacific Island descent. You will be aware of the family tragedies that led him first to step down from Cabinet and now to retire.
Here’s a sample of what will be one of his last speeches in Parliament, on the Minimum Wage and Remuneration Bill (which protects people from being employed as ‘contractors’ as a means of circumventing the minimum wage, a la Reachmedia):
“It is a pleasure to take part in this debate as a Labour member of Parliament. This is the sort of thing we stand for on this side of the House—fairness, not ripping people off, and not misusing the elderly and the young to go out there to make massive profits for people who can get on national television and say they find it acceptable to pay somebody as little as 25c an hour.”
Good on ya, Mark. Best of luck in the future.
Incidentally, another retiring MP put his oar in while Russell Fairbrother was speaking in the same debate-
Fairbrother: …The unspoken [National] script there is that the employer can screw over the worker to maximise the profit, and can describe it as productivity.
Bob Clarkson: There’s nothing wrong with that.
I’d thought at the time that it seemed a little odd for David Farrar to pass up a free hit regarding the Family First commissioned study on smacking. The headline in Granny Herald was: “Poll shows we’re still smacking our children”. What an opportunity!
Turns out though, that it was Farrar’s company, Curia, that did the polling.
The ODT, which is now online takes a closer look at the study, noting:
Prominent pro-smacking lobby group employs prominent pro-smacking “activist” to provide market research designed to emphasise a statistically validated message? In today’s spin-spun world, that’s probably par for the course.
The most surprising thing to come of the National’s Kiwisaver fiasco is not that they want to undermine the scheme and get employers out of paying their part (this is the party of big business, after all). No, the real shock is to learn that Kate Wilkinson, National’s Industrial Relations spokesperson, is not involved in developing National’s policy on the biggest new work rights issue of the past year and “ignorant”, in Key’s words, of the policy.
This is just incredible: National spokespeople not developing policy in the major issues under their portfolio and not even informed by the leadership of what that policy is. It fits though, with what a couple of drunk National backbenchers told a reader one night “John doesn’t really know what he wants to do if (when, hah!) he becomes Prime Minister and he certainly hasn’t told us!”
Policy development is in the hands of a few senior Nats (assuming that someone is developing National policy). The fact that National is not sharing the load as normal can only have one explanation – the leadership does not trust the caucus because the caucus is opposed to Key’s policy direction. That certainly meshes with the stories of internal ructions we keep hearing. Like the Rogernome faction that controlled Labour in the 1980s, a small band within National is controlling policy, keeping the rest of the party and the country in the dark.
The results of such cabal politics were disastrous for Labour in the 1980s, and it looks like it’s starting to damage National too.
[incidentally, what a world where a party is scared to announce its own policy and its opposition is keen for it to see the public light. Both National and its opponents believe that if people know what National wants to do in government it will cost the party support]
Yesterday, the leaders of the parliamentary parties apologised to the veterans of the Vietnam War for the treatment they received both while fighting and on their return home. It was not these soldiers’ fault that their government deployed them in a disastrous and unjust war.
Except, now John Key is saying the war and New Zealand’s involvement weren’t wrong either. Incredibly, Key has said that the Vietnam War was justified and New Zealand’s involvement in it was “the right thing to do“.
This was a war in which over two million of the poorest people on Earth died as a superpower attempted to defend a succession of corrupt military governments.
This war remains America’s greatest military shame. A war that should never have been fought. And they have the wall in DC to remind them, name by name, of the cost.
This was a war that all the Western allies, except Australia and New Zealand, rightly refused to follow the US into. It was a war that New Zealand only, reluctantly, joined after years of US pressure in return for better trade and security assistance.
Vietnam was a mistake. We should never have sent soldiers there and they deserve the apology they received for what they went through because of it. Key has displayed a breath-taking, scary ignorance in defending this indefensible war.
Key wanted us in Iraq (he complained we were ‘missing in action’), he is happy he were in Vietnam. Now, there is the possibility (advocated by Senator McCain ) of the US attacking Iran. Would Key lead us into that war too, given the chance?
I noticed an interesting comment from Ferdinand in our Kiwisaver thread yesterday:
I signed up to Kiwisaver based on the 4% employer contribution being rolled out. If National cap that at 1% then I’m out of pocket by about $75,000 in contributions alone.
That got me thinking about that meaningless phrase John Key used to describe National’s position on Kiwisaver: “pretty similar”. WTF?
So I had a think about it. Key could mean “pretty similar” to the current situation of a 1% empoyer contribution or perhaps “pretty similar” to the plan to put it up to 2% next year.
Now if you are a worker on an average wage of $45,000 with 40 years of working life ahead of you then the first scenario means you lose about $140,000 in contributions and interest. If it’s the second you lose about $90,000.
That’s a lot of money so I’m not surprised Ferdinand is concerned about what Key means and I’m sure the other 629,999 Kiwis signed up for this scheme will be too.
With so much at risk you would hope National would be sending a clear message about where they stand but I guess that’s just not something they do.
Think about it: 630,000 people with up to $140,000 to lose each. That’s a lot of cheese.
Hear that sound? It’s Judith Collins banging the sickness beneficiaries drum again. Fresh from a sensationalist report on the front page of the Dom today, Collins is demanding the Government and the Department of Work & Income:
“admit they are failing beneficiaries and failing doctors because Labour is more focused on pushing people on to sickness benefits to make unemployment benefit numbers look better.”
This has been a Tory standard for some time: the reason unemployment rates are down so much is because Labour is putting everyone on sickness benefits. Unfortunately the stats don’t support this claim. Here’s a graph showing trends in benefit numbers between 1990-1999 under National, and 1999-2007 under Labour.
You’ll note that even with our growing and aging population putting pressure on sickness beneficiary numbers there is no marked increase since 1999, and certainly nothing to account for the drastic fall in unemployment. In fact, if you adjust the figures to population, sickness beneficiary numbers increased 51% under National compared to just 33% under Labour.
Collins has a research unit to tell her this kind of stuff. She just knows you don’t.
The Dompost reports that the Greens will not vote for the Emissions Trading Scheme if the introduction of transport fuels into the scheme and the end of free allocation of credits are delayed. Without the Greens, the Bill will probably not pass.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Greens’ position. The ETS is not all it could be as a scheme to tackle climate change. BUT it is the only game in town. If the ETS does not pass there will be no carbon pricing scheme. Don’t think for a second that National would introduce one. They want the ETS to fail and always have. When push comes to shove, National will always be on the side of the pollutors.
The Greens must be able to find some arrangement with labour to support the scheme in return for some policy concession - a subsidy on the construction of renewable power generation, for example, to encourage renewables and keep electricity prices down, or a major low-carbon technology research and development prpgramme.
It’s no use the Greens cutting off their nose to spite their face. Better to have the ETS in place as a foundation for climate change policy going forward than a policy vacuum.
Here’s Barry Soper on ZB on the ’Kate-gate‘ Kiwisaver debacle:
What I found interesting was the way it was handled. I was the only person this time yesterday at this particular breakfast and it was a question from the floor. Kate Wilkinson quite clearly said that employer contributions to KiwiSaver was not going to be compulsory.
Now, I had a call from the chief spin doctor from the National Party [Kevin Taylor] saying ‘I understand you are going to run the story, you are wrong’. And I thought, hang on, I was there, I heard it, and so did everybody else in the audience. And he repeated, ‘you are wrong, you will not run this, you are wrong’. Well we ran it and by two o’clock yesterday afternoon John Key was saying ‘it was Kate Wilkinson that was wrong’.
But it was the handling of it that I found not just offensive but bullying, and saying don’t run this.
This is not the first time that National has come down hard on a journalist that hasn’t followed their line. You will remember that Bay Report journalist Greg Robertson was bullied and threatened with dismissal after he quoted John Key saying “we would love to see wages drop”. Soper also felt National’s wrath when Bill English tried to stop him running an interview in which English said National would borrow for tax cuts.
National sees the media as a tool to hammer the Government, not an independent observer and critic. They can’t handle it when the media starts asking them the hard questions and their reaction is to threaten and bully. Hardly promising stuff from a possible government.
National’s refusal to say what it stands for is becoming so ridiculous we have resorted to the Cold War art of Kremlinology. Today, we look at Kiwisaver.
National has had a tortured relationship with Kiwisaver. When it was first introduced in 2005 John Key described it as a “terribly designed system” and spent the next year deriding the scheme as a “glorified Christmas Club” that “won’t work” because it is “fundamentally flawed.”
By the time Michael Cullen released Kiwisaver Mark II in last year’s Budget Key had changed his tune, attacking the new turbo-charged version but describing the old version with fondness: “we think, um, the first mark I version of it worked very, you know, was probably gonna be successful and not too bad.”
Then came the unedifying spectacle of Bill English at the Kiwisaver conference in March refusing to give National’s policy on the scheme. In a media scrum afterwards, he let slip that National would keep the Government matching contributions but refused to comment on the employer contributions.
National does not like Kiwisaver and the employer contributions in particular. So, it was plausible when National’s employment spokesperson, Kate Wilkinson, said National was against compulsory employer contributions. But that was quickly retracted by Key (and we learned National spokespeople are not involved in policy development in their portfolios) to be replaced by a slightly less empty void: National would keep compulsory employer contributions in a “pretty similar” form.
The conclusion must be that National is planning to weaken the employer contribution, probably by stopping contributions at 2% from April next year, rather than growing them to 4% by 2011. This will not save the Government anything, it will still be covering $20 a week of employer of contributions but it will mean that for employees earning less than $52,000 a year employers will pay nothing. Kiwisavers’ nest eggs will be smaller but businesses will get away with contributing nothing.
Greg Clydesdale’s report that labelled Pacific Islanders a ‘drain on the economy’ has been rubbished as a lazy, intellectually dishonest piece of work by fellow academics.
The report concludes that Pacific Islanders make no net contribution to the economy but the substance of the report does not justify that conclusion in the slightest. Moreover, it ignores the other effects of immigration and, as we pointed out last week, appears totally ignorant of class and history.
Race Relations Conciliator Joris de Bres (a man who impresses with his intellect, sense of practicality, and dry wit - traits which I would say were typically Dutch if that weren’t racial stereotyping) has chosen to undertake a report on Clydesdale’s paper and the media coverage around it. This has upset some who seem to think the Race Relations Conciliator has no business commenting on race relations issues that arise in the public discourse. It is his job to do just that.
Let’s just be clear, no-one is disputing Clydesdale’s right to be a lazy bigot or to say lazy, bigoted things, nor the right of anyone to cover that report in a sensationalist manner. However, when producing an academic work that work can be critiqued according to academic standards. And when that work is jumped on in the media and bandied about as some higher truth that Pacific Islanders are worse than other New Zealanders it is hardly surprising if it gets criticised in the media (mainstream or blogosphere) too.
Just as Clydesdale has a right to call Pacific Islanders lazy without justification, we have the right to call Clydesdale a lazy bigot, with every justification.
Drinking Liberally’s Facebook group has just sent out the invitation to their second event.
