Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: A thundering clash of, in reply to Nick Russell,
Yeah, I still don’t get why Metiria has been hung out to dry over this but Bill English gets a free pass.
It’s not like nothing happened. Reporting on the story forced Key to close the loophole, revealed that other ministers were doing the same and moved the office of Auditor-General to investigate.
The AG concluded that English had not been entitled to the payments, but a full investigation wasn’t warranted because English had legal and Parliamentary Services advice that he was entitled, and because the system was being changed as a result.
Simon Wilson wrote a good piece yesterday (addressing the somewhat deficient Herald piece on the same topic) about how much difference being able to afford a lawyer makes.
-
Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to simon g,
Hooton’s RNZ rant was a series of fantasies
That's basically every week. But yeah, he was turning it up today.
-
Metiria answering questions on the move at Wellington airport this morning.
She was impressive – and showed a degree of grace that perhaps some of the party’s activists could take a lesson from.
-
Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to izogi,
then suggesting that it’d be a good idea for Clendon and Graham to be in talks with TOP, and create an incentive for Grant Robertson to step aside in Wellington Central and give his support to Geoff Simmons (TOP).
It's not going to happen, and Hooton knows that.
-
Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to Sacha,
I am just so sad at our msm for making the story about Metiria as opposed to the utterly oppressive benefit regime.
That was always going to happen. Party strategic comms people and leadership should have known that.
Toby Manhire on The Spinoff this morning:
The strategy around Turei confessing to having lied to Winz started promisingly, bringing a poll boost and to a large degree prompting the conversation about welfare she sought. But it became unwieldy, and tipped over into further revelations around an electoral roll breach. What seems as extraordinary as anything is that the strategy could have gone ahead without the full buy-in of caucus. There’s only 14 of them.
-
Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to Neil,
Shaw is in a difficult position.
Duncan Garner is claiming Shaw wanted Turei to step down. If so, backing him into a corner doesn't seem the best way to achieve that.
-
There's a bit more in the Stuff story:
A source close to the party has suggested the two MPs threatened to go, and the party was prepared to let that happen.
Green Party general manager Sarah Helm said the pair had done very little in the way of campaigning, and suggested they had been disgruntled for some time.
"Neither of these candidates have been campaigning for us all year. David's made one phone call, and Kennedy's put in about three or four hours worth of calls.
"My understanding is that both of them were not happy with their list placings either," Helm said.
The party is understood to be furious at how the two MPs have handled it - going outside normal parliamentary channels to tell media of their plans.
.
-
Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Purely speculative on my part but I wonder whether there are more revelations known on the inside that have since come to light and that was a tipping point.
Based on my conversation with a longtime Green activist last week, my guess is that this has been brewing for a while among part of the membership as frustration with Metiria's perceived flakiness – she wants to go and be an anarchist again/she wants to be a Minister of the Crown – and the poor political handling of the confession is a final straw.
Maybe? I dunno. But it's terrible timing.
-
Another report from yesterday. Duncan Greive got to be the one to go out to Papakura for the National Party transport announcement.
I think, as he suggests here, that the big danger for the urbanists is that they become pigeonholed as narrow central Auckland liberals. (Although Ben Ross would have something to say about that. He was excited about the Botany-airport plans.)
Bridges listed off a fairly mundane (by comparison to a giant light rail network) collection of local projects: new platforms and park and ride facilities, totalling out at about a tenth of what Labour had committed to public transport across town. And while he was at pains to point out that National had also funded the CRL (grudgingly sure, but still), the crowd’s response was more polite and dutiful applause than genuine enthusiasm. Tellingly, while they were here to announce rail upgrades, the biggest cheer came for a reference to the nearby Mill Rd highway. In less than 20 minutes it was over, Bridges and English were subsumed into a media scrum and the crowd began to disperse. There was no ‘come have a beer with me‘, that’s for sure.
Afterwards I rejoined the Southern motorway, this time heading north, and was immediately struck in bumper to bumper traffic late on a Sunday afternoon. A sign read ‘more lanes end 2018’, and you got a sense of what living with this gridlock day in, day out must feel like.
While rail to the airport gets the inner city suburbs excited, and reads like the future, out here it’s easy to see why it’s not just the roading lobby which wants new roads. And while public transport use is surging – to the point where the Employers and Manufacturers Association’s Kim Campbell was approvingly quoting the 20% rise in train journeys so far this year on The AM Show this week – for vast numbers of people a single occupant car remains their dominant transport mode.
For those near train routes and engaged with the research around road usage, projections about driverless cars and with proximity to the apartment boom, the argument about funding the likes of a second Southern highway or the East West link feel like an absurd anachronism. But for those sat in traffic day after day, new roads promise more time at home and less hours spent frustrated behind a wheel. Which is likely why National continue to find money to spend on them, and they remain a potent electoral weapon.
-
Hard News: The new establishment, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I hope that this heralds a new shift towards embracing all the good work done by credible groups in civil society. About time government stopped thinking they know best.
Yes, that's how I see it. These groups are earning the right to be heard.