General Debate 17 March 2009

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Inventory2

Oh dear – with 90 jobs to go at TVNZ, now’s not the time for making cock-ups!

http://keepingstock.blogspot.com/2009/03/bugger-tbe-sure-tbe-sure.html
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March 17, 2009 7:59am
barry

interesting article in the ODT by Colin James.

“Cross-dressing: John Key told ACT’s conference on Saturday he was going to have a “red-tape bonfire”; Rodney Hide told the conference he was going to be “surgical and laser-like” in trimming regulations.”

Cant wait.
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March 17, 2009 7:59am
Spam

Performance bonuses, eh?

While I think bonuses in the millions are ridiculous, I did note TV3 going to the ombudsman to get SOEs to tell all in terms of how much they paid in bonuses. Along with a handy little table saying how much various SOEs had paid to staff. Shock! Horror! NZ post topped the list paying $18 Million amongst 10,000 staff. That’s an averge of only $1800 per person.

I have a bonus as part of my remuneration package. And when they do market salary reviews to check that I am being paid my worth (as part of our retention strategy), the bonus is included. Which effectively makes the bonus just part of my salary. In fact, the company prefers to keep my base salary low and give me ‘allowances’ and ‘bonus’ instead.

Total beat-up.
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March 17, 2009 8:03am
expat

spam say ” In fact, the company prefers to keep my base salary low and give me ‘allowances’ and ‘bonus’ instead.”

They sound like a bunch of c*nts.
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March 17, 2009 8:17am
OECD rank 22 kiwi

That’s what we want to see:
Razor gang’s 10pc target

More of this please.
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March 17, 2009 8:18am
OECD rank 22 kiwi

That’s not what we want to see:
Petrol tax to rise 6c a litre

What the hell?

If you can’t afford to build roads out of existing taxes then find cuts from else where in the budget or don’t built the roads. Less than six months into a National administration and they’re already doing the same old tax and spend tricks that the last government did. Labour-lite indeed.

[DPF: Petrol tax is effectively a user charge. I have consistently advocated that road users should pay for the roads. You also may have missed the crucial point that the national 6c/litre regional petrol tax will replace the up to 10c/litre petrol tax that would ave been levied in most regions]
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March 17, 2009 8:26am
expat

Nah, just get AKL to pay to keep those central otago roads in A1 condition.
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March 17, 2009 8:34am
jacob van hartog

DPF is trying to snow the fact that a 10c litre tax for Auckland is now a 6c litre for the WHOLE country. Most regions would have had a 2c at the most, with Auckland going the whole hog.

Along with $400 mill of roads funding taken from local councils to go on State Highway but sold as an increase.

Those high priced spin doctors are earning their money, aided by the partisan blogs from DPF to macdoctor , quelle surprise, who are part of the ‘noise machine’

[DPF: And for the 88th time this month you are wrong. Petrol tax was going to increase nationally by 3c/litre regardless. So every region was facing a 3c to 13c increase. Do try to keep to the facts]
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March 17, 2009 8:46am
Inventory2

jvh said “Those high priced spin doctors are earning their money, aided by the partisan blogs from DPF to macdoctor , quelle surprise, who are part of the ‘noise machine’”

Yeah, yeah; whatever you say Cunners 😉
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March 17, 2009 8:54am
expat

hartog, you practised knob twister, NZ infrastructure has been subsidised by AKL and Waikato for years.

Especially WGN and the Sth Island.
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March 17, 2009 9:10am
big bruv

expat

You are of course correct when you say that the Auck’s have subsidised the rest of NZ when it comes to roads and infrastructure however that is not the issue.

The wrongs of the past cannot be undone, it does amaze me that many who use your argument are the same people who think we should not be handing out millions to Maori for supposed “wrongs” of the past (and indeed we should not).

The fact that Auckland needs more roads is not in dispute, what Key should be doing is apportioning the existing roading fund to the areas where the income is raised, if the Auck’s raise more than their fair share they should be able to keep that extra money and use it on their roads.

And as for the trains, we as I have said many times they are not needed or wanted.
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March 17, 2009 9:20am
MyNameIsJack

Less than 6 months into a national Govt and we are heading faster down the road to a police state.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10562047

Army heads are calling for recruits from the armed forces to man an anti-terror squad responsible for domestic security.

A defence source last night said the recruitment drive was prompted by “a surge in the global war on terrorism”.

The unit would also be responsible for dealing with any security threats at the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

The Army is not a part of the nation’s policing. These are matters that rightly belong to the police, not the Army.

Just another beatup by the khaki kinks so they can get more toys to play with.
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March 17, 2009 9:48am
gd

OECD Love this petrol tax one . I remember old Sir Rob Muldoons political theory he used to say What you do is threaten them with rape burning and pillaging and then when you only do 2 or the 3 to them they are so grateful

Its works ever time the suckers say Oh good its ONLY 6 cents not the 10 cents they told us

Wow we save 4 cents.

Pathetic!!!!!!
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March 17, 2009 9:54am
big bruv

MNIJ

Were you born an idiot or is it something you have had to work at?

Need I remind you of the Munich Massacre (oh hang on, they were Israel’s so I suppose you do not care) or the recent terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team?

Our government would be foolish not to take all measures to ensure the safety of the participants and the fans at the Rugby World cup.

It is no wonder that you lefty low life’s take such a hammering here, it seems that even human life is not sacred to you guys in your naked pursuit of power.
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March 17, 2009 9:55am
big bruv

And now for the good news…….

“Mon, 16 Mar 2009 6:00p.m.

New Zealand women are getting bigger breasts, with D cups and bigger accounting for nearly half of Bendon bras sold in New Zealand last year.

Though the C cup is still the most popular bra cup size, sales of D to J cup sizes have increased by 53 percent over the past three years, compared to a 2 percent increase in the sales figures of AA to C-cupped bras, according to Bendon figures.

The figures were calculated based on sales of Bendon, Fayreform and Elle Macpherson Intimate ranges of bras.

Fayreform “braologist” Carol Rashleigh had seen steady growth in breasts over more than two decades of helping women into fitting bras.

“More than 70 percent of women in New Zealand wear the wrong bra size or style, which can affect posture, cause back pain and lead to sagging breasts,” she said.

NZPA
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March 17, 2009 9:57am
wreck1080

And , consumer mag just awarded tomtom 1 as the best gps, with the following qualifier…

“Occasionally chooses less-than-ideal routes.”

Isn’t choosing the best route the entire point of a gps?
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March 17, 2009 10:10am
Komata

Predicably ‘Communist Keith’ (sorry, ‘Mr. Keith Locke, Green MP’) got air-time last night and just as predicably did the great put-down agains the SIS – why am i not surprised?

Thankfully, cats can be killed (and observed) by other ways – even if they ARE MP’s

After all, in intellignce-gathering, ‘what is said’, is not necessarily ‘what exactly is. . .’
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March 17, 2009 10:21am
LC

“New Zealand women are getting bigger breasts, with D cups and bigger accounting for nearly half of Bendon bras sold in New Zealand last year.”

To go with their bigger bums
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March 17, 2009 10:50am
big bruv

I note that the unions are calling for immigrants to be the first sacked or laid off if a company is considering redundancies which just goes to show how our of touch the unions are.

In my experience the hardest and most productive employees are those who have come to NZ for a new life, most of them (apart from the Brits) are not steeped in union traditions and most are happy to go the extra mile for their customers and the good of the business.

The first people I would lay off are the union agitators and then work back through my least productive employees, I sure as hell would not be keeping on some local lazy bastard in preference to a hard working immigrant.
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March 17, 2009 10:54am
PhilBest

The estimable historian Victor Davis Hanson is already saying “told you so”:

“Not the Obama they knew?”

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson031309.html

“…..I think Warren Buffet, Jim Cramer, Jack Welch and other in-the-news, conflicted capitalists counted on Obama being a sort of Robert Rubin, Clintonite neoliberal like themselves.

So he would come in, rail for a week at most about Bush this/that, greed, Wall Street, extend the financial guarantees of Paulson, and then talk up the economy, calm fears, and pretty much do what every other President has done when faced with bad recessions: loosen money, stimulate a bit, talk up free trade, promise no new tax hikes, extend unemployment benefits, put other agendas on hold, forgo the class warfare talk, bring in captains of industry to assure them of calm, of long-term plans to encourage investment, and of soothing rhetoric of friendship and support.

In other words, they assumed that with an Obama Presidency they thought they would be in control, feel good about themselves for supporting a non-traditional candidate, and get a break from the Bush-bashing of their Euro and Asian friends when they jetted to conferences abroad, dropped in at Davos, or hit the party circuit in DC and NY.

It was not to be. Instead right away, Obama started the prairie-fire them/us rhetoric about the “rich” this and the “rich that. The more he denied he was for protectionism, the more someone in his cabinet evoked it. When one did the math on his proposed $250,000 income and above tax hikes, it was not hard (in high-tax states) to reach a confiscatory rate of 70%. And when Wall Street sighed thinking ‘Hmmm, at least the money will pay down the debt’; they were shocked to discover ‘No!, the new revenue won’t even pay for the existing deficits.’ And now they fathom that Obama will be wildly trumping both the Bush deficits and the Clinton tax hikes all at once.

Moreover, in teen-age fashion, Obama daily blamed Bush for the mess, rather than talked up the U.S. To get an agenda across that would reshape American life, he evoked the Great Depression from November to February to scare the nation into increasing the government share of GDP. Ossified, secular, shrinking, pacifist, static, and statist Europe was clearly the model.

Instead of Bill Clinton’s “focusing like a laser” on the economy and the “It’s the economy, stupid!”, we got talk of nationalizing health care, free education, cap-and-trade, 8,000 earmarks,and trash the oil companies. And abroad, his team’s massage was, “We dislike Bush even more than you (fill in the blanks: Europeans, Arabs, Iranians, etc.) did.”

Again, instead of getting some old Wall Street capitalists or some crusty CEOs sprinkled here and there in the cabinet, Wall Street sees either novices like Geithner (who reminds me of what I remember of toady graduate students trying to conjugate the subjunctive mood in Greek for their professors), or nominees that are cheats, dodgers, and party hacks like Daschle, Richardson, and Solis, or left-wing crusaders like Holder (Americans are “cowards”) and Chu (California’s farms are doomed).

In short, they don’t see anything that is helping, and a lot that will make things worse. And the result?

Suddenly, American capitalists are at Rick’s in Casablanca and shocked! — Obama is acting more like the Chicago organizer, the most partisan Senator in the Congress, the devoted Rev. Wright attendee, the pal of Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi — and not the neoliberal who both lets the financer alone and makes him feel better about himself……”
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March 17, 2009 10:57am
PhilBest

More from Victor Davis Hanson:

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson031509.html

“….I don’t think anyone knows what is quite going on. I recently gave a lecture, and a Wall Street grandee afterwards approached the dais, asking me for advice (me, who could not even turn a profit growing raisins, and was a lousy peddler of family fruit for years at Farmers’ Markets), saying in effect something like the following: “Mr. Hanson — Consider: Real estate bad — not going to put money there when I’m not sure where the bottom is. Stocks worse — had I got out at New Year’s, I’d have thousands more than I do now. Cash pathetic — the interest doesn’t even cover what’s lost to inflation. So what’s left — the dole?”

I had no advice, of course, other than some vague warning that we are in a war against capital, sort of similar to what Sallust and Cicero claim that Catiline and his band of dissolute and broke aristocrats were planning, with his calls for cancellation of debts and redistribution of property.

Here are the possible exegeses

(a) Clueless. Obama, the community organizer from Chicago with a mere two years plus in the Senate, is clueless. He has never run a business, never served as an executive, never done anything in matters of commerce other than speak and write and authorize spending bills as part of his government job. The result is that he listens to the last person he speaks with — and with dozens of advisors with dozens more agendas, we are seeing a herky-jerky, now this, now that, everything but the kitchen sink, sort of governance. This version of the President is a nice guy who wants to please everyone and will please no one.

(b) Not so clueless. Or Obama has a pretty certain, calculated European objective of high taxes, big-spending programs, utopian foreign policy initiatives, and a therapeutic sense of ensuring we are all going to be equal by result. In that sense, the recession was a godsend, since he has a brief window of about six months of fright and uncertainty to ram through programs that will last a lifetime, and whose expense will ensure a vast redistribution of income. His closest advisors are life-long government technocrats who are inured to spending others’ money and can use tax-free public appurtenances (salaries, perks, benefits, travel, etc.) to emulate the grand lifestyles of those they detest in corporations and on Wall Street. So we will get a new technocrati overseer class to replace the now disgraced masters of the universe on Wall Street. This manifestation of Obama is a hustler of the first order, and almost everything he says from FISA and earmarks to raising the ethical bar on appointments and limits on spending is, well, made up as he goes along, with the assurance that the media is still ga-ga.

(c) A Mean streak. Or there is not so much chaos or European utopianism at work as a sort of primeval dislike of capitalists and those who have access to money — an angry President Obama whose furor now and again peeks through (remember the clingers’ speech, the accidental middle finger scratches, and the Robespierre rhetoric). Never mind the hypocrisy involved, or the mega-fortunes at play in the rise of Obama’s candidacy. Instead concentrate on the effects, both direct and insidious, of his initiatives on capital of the near-do-well. This is a quadruple whammy:

1) Aggregate tax rates are going to approach 70% in some states, effectively destroying the idea that anyone from the lower classes can ever achieve wealth in a single lifetime, and pass some of it on to his children (increases in estate taxes will be next).

2) The pulverizing of the Dow (cf. Obama’s flippant talk of gyrations and advice to invest now at rock bottom prices, as if those who were wiped out have disposable cash to buy more stocks) means that the aggregate wealth in 401(k)s and stocks for millions — along with equity in homes — of the upper middle classes has effectively vanished. In some cases, the lawyer or contractor who a year ago had $400K put away in retirement funds and $300K in home equity has effectively lost half, if not more, of his hard-won wealth. And when one computes the additional taxes on future income he will pay, it will be almost impossible in his remaining lifetime to make it back.

3) The promises of free health and free education for everyone most surely will come with salary considerations and mean-testing (we are seeing that already with ideas floating about charitable contributions). In other words, the more you of the upper middle class will pay for new expansive entitlements, the more likely you will not be eligible to use the full extent of them.

4) The power of anti-“rich” rhetoric is already beginning to demonize the wealthy as those who have somehow done something wrong in paying the full ticket for their children’s’ educations, or their own health care, or their full mortgage payments. Of all the things that worry me about Obama, the most troublesome is his conflation of the super wealthy — who are so rich that even Obama cannot touch them and who often are his most fervent supporters — with the entrepreneurs, the scramblers of the small business class who make between, say, $250,000 and $600,000.

These already pay over 50% in various taxes, are eligible for almost no government support, do not have access to insider government breaks and special legislation, pay their own way — and create both jobs and new innovations critical to the performance of the U.S. economy. Yet between Wall Street and DC they have been targeted for extinction…..”
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March 17, 2009 11:01am
big bruv

Another Maori kid killed at the hands of family members.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/2269456/Woman-charged-with-girls-murder

Will we hear anything apart from the usual platitudes from the racist apartheid party?…I doubt it.
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March 17, 2009 11:17am
thedavincimode

big bruv says:

“And now for the good news…….

New Zealand women are getting bigger breasts”

… so are the men.
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March 17, 2009 11:23am
philu

it’s gonna be revenge-time..soon..

http://whoar.co.nz/2009/americans-are-raring-for-a-fight-against-corporate-power/

phil(whoar.co.nz)
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March 17, 2009 11:30am
big bruv

“it’s gonna be revenge-time..soon..”

Damn right Phool, the revenge will be taken by the Kiwi tax payer against low life such as yourself.
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March 17, 2009 11:32am
philu

“..Army heads are calling for recruits from the armed forces to man an anti-terror squad responsible for domestic security.

A defence source last night said the recruitment drive was prompted by “a surge in the global war on terrorism”.

The unit would also be responsible for dealing with any security threats at the 2011 Rugby World Cup..”

this unit will be responsible for suppressing the expected economic-civil unrest..

..as the grim realities of ‘great recession’ unfolds..

..and is being formed ..

..for the same reasons those new troop-carriers..(useless in the jungle..perfect for here..)

..it will be to ‘keep us down’..

phil(whoar.co.nz)

and very clever to couch it in ‘protecting rugby’ terms..eh…?..)
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March 17, 2009 11:37am
philu

such an unexpected response from you there..bb..

phil(whoar.co.nz)
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March 17, 2009 11:39am
sbk

“..it will be to ‘keep us down’….. Philu,do you volunteer to stand in front, aka Tiananmen Square!.
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March 17, 2009 12:03pm
baxter

New Zealand women are getting bigger breasts”…………….Comes from eating too much KFC full of enlargement hormones, why won’t they listen to Sue Kedgely………On the other hand Braologist seems an interesting occupation. Guess I missed my natural career calling.
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March 17, 2009 1:32pm
NeillR

Talking up the property market
I’d have to say i’d struggle to buy a house from Loundes if this is an example of how nutty he is. He’s looking at the NZ property market in isolation. If people can’t get what they want here, they’ll move to the Gold Coast and buy a house for $200k or so (oh, wait a minute that’s what happened in the last three years and led to a collapse of prices and the market here).
A much more likely scenario is that all those boomers who are watching their “nest eggs” disappear will sell out, creating a glut on the market with a steepening of falls in the price. There was no “property boom” before the boomers started buying and becoming a self-perpetuating myth. As they begin to shuffle off this mortal coil there’s much more possibility of prices returning to their historic averages, which are WAY lower than at the present time.
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March 17, 2009 2:49pm
big bruv

So does anybody know who got the arse from TVNZ today?

I hope the list includes Fran Mold and Barry Soper’s Mrs.
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March 17, 2009 4:39pm
Max Call

yes, not just boobs that have gotten bigger.

average dress size has too.

boobs are partly composed of fat – so as a women puts on weight her boobs will get bigger too
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March 17, 2009 4:58pm
baxter

Interesting to read the trial of FRITZL in Austria on charges of murder and enslavement , and compare with the ‘Bain’ trial.
Bains is set down for either 3 or 6 months before 12 good men and true. FRITZL is set down for 5 days before a jury of 8. Maybe they don’t have unlimited free legal aid in Austria.
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March 17, 2009 5:07pm
calendar girl

Fritzl has pleaded guilty to most of his charges.
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March 17, 2009 10:48pm
wikiriwhis business

Fritzl will die in jail, well fed, roof over his head after a long life and the girls are scarred for life
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March 18, 2009 12:24am