Archive for May, 2016
Tuesday, May 31st, 2016
Has Act leader David Seymour got the easiest job in the world, or what? Roll out of bed, turn on the radio and hmm…there do seem to be a lot of problems out there in the world. Must think of something. And so it came to pass that ...
Posted in Articles | 11 Comments »
Friday, May 27th, 2016
Budgies, so their Wikipedia page says, are popular pets around the world due to their small size, low cost, and ability to mimic human speech. Which is a reasonably good description of Finance Minister Bill English eighth Budget. Especially when it comes to the mimicry bit about providing an adequate ...
Posted in Articles | 12 Comments »
Thursday, May 26th, 2016
According to former PM and UNDP leader current Helen Clark, the allegations leveled at her this week in a Foreign Policy magazine article by the prize-winning UN journalist Colum Lynch have been ‘totally fabricated’.
Hmmm. That would be very, very surprising. Foreign Policy is a heavyweight journal. More to the point, ...
Posted in Articles | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, May 24th, 2016
In his victory speech at the Cannes film festival this week, the British film director Ken Loach warned that the rise of far right parties in Europe was being fuelled by the economic policies of austerity, and manifested in a welfare bureaucracy that systematically denies assistance to those in most ...
Posted in Articles | 18 Comments »
Monday, May 23rd, 2016
Libor. It stands for the London Interbank Offered rate. Back in 2012, Libor became synonymous with a scandal involving the dodgy manipulation of how interest rates were fixed - during the years before and after the Global Financial Crisis - thus affecting the cost of money for bank customers and ...
Posted in Articles | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, May 18th, 2016
This week, New Zealand’s crisis of poverty and homelessness has been making headlines around the world.
At exactly the same time, Electricity Authority has unveiled the final version of its pricing plan for electricity transmission. This will change the way transmission prices (which comprise about 10% of the average power bill) ...
Posted in Articles | 8 Comments »
Monday, May 16th, 2016
Thanks to Sacha Baron Cohen, Kazakhstan will always seem like a bit of a jokey, ramshackle kind of place. To that end, the Stuff story last week about the New Zealand courts’ recent compliance with the wishes of the Kazakh dictatorship was illustrated with a picture of Borat.
The Kazakh ...
Posted in Articles | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 13th, 2016
Monopolies are bad for people, and bad for capitalism, too. Look at what happened in the late 1980s when a Labour government handed a state monopoly over to Telecom – which proceeded to screw its customers over prices, spent the bare minimum on new technology and blocked innovation for the ...
Posted in Articles | 16 Comments »
Thursday, May 12th, 2016
For years, observers have noted the contrast between Prime Minister John Key’s ordinary Kiwi bloke persona, and the patrician prat more commonly seen in Parliament. This week though, the prat has been in plain sight. Nominally, Key got expelled from Parliament yesterday for disrespecting the Speaker, David Carter, by continuing ...
Posted in Articles | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, May 11th, 2016
Not many heroes so far in the Panama Papers saga, but any number of villains. Those villains happen to include: criminals laundering their ill gotten gains, terrorists funding their nefarious activities, and shadowy figures guilty of varying levels of larceny stashing their wealth in bolt-holes, offshore. Much of the talk ...
Posted in Articles | 7 Comments »
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