Last Straw

I see the National Party are kicking their little ideologically driven project of plundering NZ into a higher gear.
This time it’s the privatisation of ACC and prisons.
Thanks again to those who voted National (out of a “mood for change“).

While the rest of the world attempt to stimulate their economies with government spending, the ideologically hamstrung National/ACT government of New Zealand is arbitrarily slashing departmental budgets by 10%.1
No Right Turn:
And it looks like the slash and burn has already begun, with confirmation that the government is planning to slash 500 to 1000 people from the Ministry [...]

Somehow copyright holders have managed to royally trump all other interests in getting an unbelievably crap copyright law through Parliament; giving New Zealand the most draconian copyright law in the world, which allows people and organisations to be disconnected from the internet simply on the basis of accusations of “copyright infringement.” No courts involved. “Guilt [...]

Free-market ideology is dead, and none too soon:
The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale.
I just hope the same can be said for New Zealand.

Just a quick word of thanks to all those National and ACT voters out there in NZ, especially those who were in a “mood for change,” because now you’ve got it. A government of radical right-wingers, many proven untrustworthy in the 80s and 90s, ready to turn New Zealand upside down and shake.
Almost everything I [...]

This is the first in a new series tracking people who find the whole democracy thing inconvenient1 and would rather those pesky citizens just shut the $%!@ up so they can get on with transferring the world’s wealth from the hands of the many into the hands of those who are actually entitled to it, [...]

Oh New Zealand, what have you done? Roger Douglas on election night fantasising about the mandate he thinks he has:
We have to make some changes and there’s going to be a lot of hurt for a lot of people.
What a cheek, coming from the scoundrel who lied his way into government in the eighties, unleashing an [...]

In a representative democracy it’s not democracy’s purpose to produce good government but to produce representative government. While I don’t expect much in the way of democracy from representative democracy1 enough New Zealanders voted against their interests on Saturday to elect into government a multimillionaire merchant banker Prime Minister and his self-interested fat cat accomplices, including some of those [...]

I thought I couldn’t vote because I haven’t lived in New Zealand for over three years but I was having a poke around elections.org.nz and, as a citizen, I don’t have to have lived in New Zealand in the past three years but just have passed through.
Can’t believe I nearly missed the chance to vote: you can download [...]

There are a myriad of reasons I hope you don’t vote National this Saturday, such as their record on selling off the country or their keenness to send Kiwi kids off to get killed in illegal wars to curry favour, but if there’s just one reason it’s this: our democracy.
National wants to take away one [...]