ACT have been very stable

Bwahahahaha!

Something to Hide (other than Rodney)?

John Key and John Banks chose to stage a public event in a venue open to the public, for their intended mutual political benefit.

A scrum of journalists attended, as they had hoped. They wanted publicity.

Now they are bleating (or at least Steven Joyce is bleating on their behalf) that recording the bits of a meeting in a venue open to the public, but that journalists were muscled out of, was unethical or illegal.

Suck on a big turd, National and ACT! You wanted publicity from this meeting. It cuts both ways.

Fetch doctor quick, PM may be delusional

“ACT have been very stable, so ACT returning to Parliament is something I’d like to see as opposed to something I wouldn’t like to see.” – Prime Minister, John Key

This one’s for Dr Brash

And the train wreck that is the ACT Party. Campaigning for an election by sending your Leader overseas has just gotta be a winner.

Whaling for a big Gerry Mander

Ever heard of a gerrymander? Yep, that’s what happened for many years in Queensland, when Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party held power there with as little as 20% of the popular vote.

Anyway, here’s Cameron Slater – and again, and again, and again – advocating that New Zealand’s National Party should be advocating a vote against MMP:

News flash National, all your political enemies are conspiring to retain MMP and pouring lots of time, effort and money into it and some in National are even helping them. Silence is no longer an option, silence in 1993 on the issue is what got you 9 long years in opposition and silence is what will see your coalition partners disappear, and with it your chances of governing again for a very long time.

Slater’s argument is about as unprincipled as it gets. He is advocating gerrymandering the electoral system to make it less fair and less proportional because that would advantage the political right by giving the National Party a share of seats in Parliament well in excess of their share of the popular vote.

I somehow suspect he wouldn’t be running that argument if ACT were polling 12%, rather than being terminally ill at 1.2%.

Brash fails to nail the rats down

Don Brash promised an ACT vote of 15% when he took over their leadership. But his leadership is a sinking ship, on which he can’t even manage to nail the rats down to prevent them from fleeing.

Every current ACT MP, including the current Parliamentary Leader, has either been pushed or jumped overboard.

Make what you will of that.

Brash gold: We shall fight them on the beaches

What a difference a day makes in politics. Here’s Don Brash yesterday, endorsing John Ansell’s ACT advertisement. Note in particular the bit near the end, where Brash says “Appeasement never works”, apparently endorsing Ansell’s race-war approach.

Today, Ansell’s goneburger!

John Boscawen should be worried

John Boscawen should be worried. Cactus Kate has set up a twitter account Cathy Odgers MP.  Presumably that means Brash has promised her No 2 on the list, because on current polling ACT will only get 3 MPs if Banks wins Epsom.

Our Nactional Anthem – “Don Brash not quite ready to reveal my campaign” suspended animation version

For those with slow internet, here are the lyrics:

I wanna be a boss
I wanna be a big boss
I wanna boss the world around
I wanna be the biggest boss
that ever bossed the world around

I wanna do it right
I wanna do it right away
I wanna do it right now
I wanna do it right away
I wanna do it now

Don’t wanna be a dancer in the Bolshoi Ballet
Don’t want to work for Daddy
In Daddy’s shop, 0.K.

I get confused, so confused
I get a pain, I get a pain up here
In the Shirley Temples

What you gonna do
How you gonna do it
What you gonna do
How you gonna do it

Little by little, ooh ooh
Little by little, bit by bit

Sssh! Not too loud, don’t tell everybody
Don’t give away the game
Oooh, oooh,
I aint quite ready to reveal my campaign

This is not the time
My hero’s are alive and well in a cave
I’m keeping them on ice in suspended animation
Till the very right occasion comes along

To our rally come along
Come along to our rally
Come along to our rally come along

To our rally come along
Come along to our rally
Come along to our rally come along

A Brave new world will rise from the ashes
And there upon a rock titanic, I’ll cast a giant
Shadow on the face of the deep
And never again will they dare to call me
A freckled, spotty, specky, four eyed
Weedy little creep!

No more tremblin’ and quakin’ in the gym
No more come on fellas, let’s get him

What you gonna do
How you gonna do it
What you gonna do
How you gonna do it

Little by little, ooh, ooh
Little by little, bit by bit
Little by little, ooh, ooh
Little by little, bit by bit
bit by bit
bit by bit

Everyone’s going to be free
But they’ll have to agree to be free
They’ll have to agree to be less free than me
‘Cos I rule the world you see

So wait for the army of kiddy-winkies
And terrible tiny tots
In armoured school buses
Firing poison pea-shooters
And sinking their milk teeth into your thighs
Delapsus resurgam! when I fall I shall rise!

Wanna be a boss
I wanna be a big boss
I wanna boss the world around
I wanna be the biggest boss
that ever bossed the world around

Pssst: Trying to learn from Bernard Hickey how to do interesting blog posts but destroy them with long boring titles.

National, ACT barking on youth rates

I’m almost lost for words – this is so unbelievably stupid.  National and ACT want to reintroduce a discriminatory lower minimum wage rate for young people.  And they are not just talking about people under 18 who were subject to youth rates before a Green Party bill abolished them in 2008.  They are talking about extending them to people aged up to 24.

Labour Minister Kate Wilkinson says:

If you’ve got somebody who is 16 who is wanting a job and someone who is 30 at the same price, then who is the employer going to employ?

Fail, on all accounts.  Wilkinson seems to think employers create jobs because they have some spare money floating around.  They don’t.  They create jobs because they expect doing so will expand their business and/or improve its profitability.  Thanks to the Government’s failure to respond to the recession with policies that encourage employers to create jobs, there are simply not enough jobs to go around at the moment.

But Wilkinson would rather see the 30 year old, often with a mortgage and a dependent partner and children, out of work rather than the 16 year old who has the lifestyle flexibility to choose to further train or study to improve his or her chances in the labour market. Unbelievably stupid!

There is absolutely no evidence of a causal relationship between the minimum wage for young people and youth employment rates.  In  fact, a study undertaken by Treasury and the Department of Labour back in 2004 showed that when the youth rate was substantially increased (and in the case of 18 and 19 year old workers set at the adult rate) youth employment rates actually increased.

This isn’t about getting young people into work at all.  It is about an evidence-averse Government prepared to suck up to employer lobbyists’ demands for lower wages.

If there is an up-side to the Government’s barking mad discriminatory policy, I suppose it will encourage more young people to vote, and young people’s votes tend to favour the Greens.

Update: According to Danyl at the Dim Post, Kate Wilkinson’s office has denied that consideration is being given to setting the age for youth rates at 24.