Archive for November, 2012
Thursday, November 29th, 2012
The best way of appreciating Fran O’Sullivan’s attack on Auckland University law professor Jane Kelsey in the NZ Herald yesterday is to read it aloud as if you’re actually Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey. In which case the general content of O’Sullivan’s column - does this creature never sleep? How ...
Posted in Articles | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
By now, we’ve come to recognize Prime Minister John Key’s typical response to bad news, which is to (a) claim the real figures aren’t in yet, so any verdict would be premature. A job loss spiral in manufacturing? Let’s wait and see what the Household Labour Force Survey says. And ...
Posted in Articles | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, November 20th, 2012
According to one of RNZ’s Morning Report hosts this morning, David Shearer “needs to stamp his authority” on the Labour caucus over the David Cunliffe affair. Well, when people feel the need to stamp their authority on something, it usually means they don’t bring natural authority to the table, and ...
Posted in Articles | Comments Off on Gordon Campbell on Labour’s leadership vote
Monday, November 19th, 2012
One of the credibility problems for the Labour Party is that the party membership is considerably to the left of both David Cunliffe and David Shearer. In that sense,Cunliffe’s articulate speeches earlier this year and Shearer’s heartfelt pitch to the party conference on the weekend were both projections into a ...
Posted in Articles | 6 Comments »
Friday, November 16th, 2012
The conference speech that David Shearer will deliver this weekend is shaping up as one of those Masterchef/New Zealand’s Got Talent events where the nation is sitting with his score cards on its lap, primed to give him a roasting. It is hard to imagine what Shearer could possibly do ...
Posted in Articles | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, November 13th, 2012
A week is a long time but, thankfully for governments, the flow of news tends to get broken down into discrete items which can then be prioritized, contested or diverted via the usual process of political management. Given that these bite size chunks of political content are also then interspersed ...
Posted in Articles | Comments Off on Gordon Campbell on the government’s bad week, and General Petraeus
Thursday, November 8th, 2012
Was it only four years ago that Barack Obama was first elected? The visibly tired, visibly older man on stage in Chicago yesterday seemed to have aged a decade or more, and his rhetoric reflected it. In place of the fleet hearted, ‘anything is possible’ air of his original victory ...
Posted in Articles | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012
Gordon Campbell and Alastair Thompson
November 7, 2012
Hi there and welcome to Scoop’s election day coverage, in which Al Thompson and I will be blogging the election results as they start to come in…which should begin around 12.45-1pm, judging by election day 2008. >> NOTE: HIT REFRESH TO GET THE ...
Posted in Articles | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 6th, 2012
While Kate Wilkinson has resigned as Labour Minister, it is clear from the Royal Commission Pike River report that the contributing factors were (a) rooted in legislative changes made 20 years ago, and perpetuated under governments led by National and Labour and (b) that New Zealand’s health and safety problems ...
Posted in Articles | 3 Comments »
Friday, November 2nd, 2012
While the moral epi-centre of Middle Eastern politics continues to be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, much of the struggle on the ground is still between the old Sunni regimes (supported by the West) and the revolutionary threat seen to be posed by the Shi’ite regime in Iran – which supports its ...
Posted in Articles | 2 Comments »