Public Address have been outdoing themselves this week:
Russell Brown launches his first book, Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about ourselves, which is based on this weblog. You can get it in local bookstores in NZ, or online if you’re not in NZ. I have one on order so I’ll fill you in once I’m done.
David Slack continues with ‘a virgin’s guide to tax cuts’.
As the calculator demonstrates, as soon as you implement a cut of any heft, you need to abolish entire government departments to get the savings you want. That doesn’t just banish the analysts who might or might not be wasting space, it means you have to start throwing overboard the people who do the uncontroversial stuff as well. The ones who pay the pensions, stamp the passports, pay the teachers and the police, and keep an eye on minor issues like foot and mouth disease and mutating avian flu viruses.
But don’t just take my word for it. Ask someone who’s run the Treasury …
Tze Ming Mok gently mocks Don Brash’s absurd comments on “mainstream†New Zealand.
It seems redundant for me to comment on this ‘excluded-from-the-mainstream’ outrage issue when the demographic status of most people in this country renders Brash’s comments absurd. All I want to ask is this: When the hell did people start being so proud of being mainstream?
And something makes me think Alastair Campbell has ditched the Lions and decided to work for National: Frogblog comments on more divisive politics from National; but not only are they divisive, they’re also a bunch of bald-faced lies.
It’s deviously intelligent and intelligently devious. It also pollutes New Zealand’s political discourse. It’s National’s Iwi/Kiwi billboard, which suggests Labour has given beaches to iwi, and National would restore them to Kiwi ownership. Quite apart from the fact that this suggests, as Steve Maharey points out, that members of iwi aren’t Kiwis, the billboard is quite simply false advertising. It’s a bald-faced lie.