14 posts tagged “john key”

Linda-Joy pointed me to this article about John Simm in The Independent:

Who on earth is John Simms? A bit embarrassing to have a typo in the headline.
   I assume he is also known to the fictional New Zealand locksmith–prime minister, ‘John Keys’, whom Dr Pita Sharples of the Māori Party has referred to from time to time.

Anyone listening to National Radio today and the PM’s comments about the waste-of-time referendum we are having?
   Mr Key says he wants the referendum question to be ‘comprehendable’ (sic).
   Bushisms are not the exclusive province of Americans.

[Cross-posted] This week, for those of you who follow me on Twitter, you will have noticed that I blacked out my avatar in protest of the amendments to the Copyright Act 1994 in New Zealand. The new law—to come in as ss. 92A and 92C—essentially (and I am highlighting only the negative bits here) gives copyright owners the opportunity to make an accusation against a netizen, with the ultimate result being that that person’s internet connection is severed. The opponents to this are touting it as a ‘guilt by association’ principle. The other provision is that anyone who provides internet services becomes an ISP under the law. Even Mr Stephen Fry, the world’s most famous Tweeter, has joined the protest by blacking out his avatar.
   You would think that given my background in fighting piracy I would be all for it. But it is unworkable. I don’t believe in the idea of guilt before innocence. If I find our copyrighted work on a server somewhere, there are already very useful provisions for getting it off, whether one is in the US or in New Zealand. I know, and I have used them, and I get results within a week. The proposed law, as far as I can see it, doesn’t work.
   However, the National Government has no intention of listening to the protest and has indicated, by my reading, that it will allow the new laws to come into effect—even though the EU and the UK have rejected similar laws. The Hon Peter Dunne MP, leader of United Future, is one of the few who have actually said anything against the amendments. (Mr Dunne’s position is protecting authors is OK, but that these go too far.) But the plan for National is to see how it all goes.
   This is a major shortcoming and backs up all my accusations about National lacking a vision. Government, as its all-too-green MPs are going to find out with this law alone, is not a forum for policy experiments. Nor are laws ways to test the waters with the public. When the sections are repealed, as they only must, someone will claim to be a hero or heroine, when the reality is that the party will simply look slow off the mark.
   Juha Saarinen at The Techsploder suggests that the government is not going to listen because:

The reason our politicians won’t listen is because they’re concerned about New Zealand having signed various WIPO treaties and that the country might not get a free trade deal with the US unless the entertainment industry that vigorously lobbies the US Trade Representative gets its way. If that’s the case, then we the voters should be told and not have our sovereignty being sold down the river on the sly like this. Incidentally, my understanding is that the local rights holders people are not in favour of the law, but have to toe the line laid out for them by their overseas masters. Too bad, if that’s true.

   It probably is. What we do have is a government that functions at an operational level, as I have been trying to say for years about the John Key-led bunch.
   I have nothing personal against the Prime Minister, and I will even say he is far more personable in real life than he appears on television—the same can be said of his deputy. However, actions do speak louder.
   Remember when Key, then leading the Opposition, tried to paint himself the local equivalent of a Cool Britannia leader by holding an under-40s’ party in Auckland, inviting trendy types to be seen with him?
   When Labour refused to meet with HH the Dalai Lama during his New Zealand visit, Mr Key decided to stay away, too. Because it was safer, never mind the principles of self-determination.
   When I said it was terrible that the politicians all got a 4 per cent pay rise on the first Monday Key and his MPs took office, nothing was done until President Barack Obama suggested his administration should not get raises. Key didn’t seem to realize it was a good idea till Obama suggested it. A principled stand, or one that looked good that he felt he could pinch? (He said it ‘showed leadership,’ when a two-month delay showed anything but.)
   I’m not sure what Key’s policies really are, even though he is in government, but he looks like a political kleptomaniac to me, ready to get on others’ bandwagons rather than come up with initiatives of his own. I do not mind this too much—but where does he stand?
   Right now the agenda seem to be technocratic: the support of Red China (as I bore witness at the Minister of Ethnic Affairs’ splendid New Year function a few weeks back) and, if Juha is right, support of the United States’ trade policies.
   I have long been pro-American, in terms of the traditional principles of the US, and my family has a long history Stateside, but I will not support any legislation that weakens the freedom of New Zealanders. Such a law would be anathema to Americans, so how would abuse of New Zealand freedoms be appealing to a trade partner? Unless, of course, the government sees New Zealanders’ rights as below that of a foreign country’s—Labour allowed Red Chinese “diplomats” to push our own cops around to bar people they didn’t like, and National, it seems, are quite happy to put New Zealanders second to American trade lobbyists.
   Regardless of who is in the White House, New Zealanders do not enjoy their sovereignty being sold out by their elected officials.
   The American trade lobbies, even in the entertainment industry, should know that copyright law in New Zealand is actually superior already to what they enjoy in the United States, and the mechanisms for pursuing pirates are already workable if they simply had the skills to use them.
   A blanket guilt-before-innocence principle—something that any American would regard as unconstitutional, or perhaps the principles of the Bill of Rights no longer matter to lobbyists these days, when it comes to non-Americans—is not the way forward in this country.
   We had Labour passing ex post facto laws and rules against satire, now we have this. There’s not much difference between the two in their understanding of democratic government.
   But visionless governments cannot see beyond the arguments of their own citizenry. Insistent that pursuing failed technocratic policies is the only way out of a recessionary mess—when sparking innovation and creating jobs are clearly more beneficial—democracy and giving New Zealanders a “fair go” may well take a back seat under Mr Key and his ministers.

Getting for yourself and your mob a 4 per cent pay rise while the country is in recession. Dumbass. Great way to get the people on side, Johnny. Even if it was subject to independent review, the smarter thing to do on your first day as Prime Minister would have been to decline it on behalf of the entire party. Imagine what goodwill that would have given you, especially with the tough economic decisions you have to make next. All those old comments I made about this National Party lacking vision are already looking prescient.

At Judge Bob’s blog today (and no, I Don’t Know Why Every Word In The Video Is Capitalized Without Regard):

I post this not to say this is typical of Obama supporters—one could equally post one about McCain supporters and find some pretty weird things—but to say that voters are by and large uninformed. This is not an American phenomenon: go around and ask New Zealanders how National voted in the last Parliament, or who the leader of the Alliance is, or even what portfolio Phil Goff held, you will probably get more clueless than informed answers. There are still people who insist the New Zealand prime minister’s name is John Keys—I heard this only days ago on the radio.
   Many people, sadly, still vote on style and image and not on substance. And we really need to think about how we change this and get the issues out there for the next elections: here it’s the local body ones in 2010, and the Americans have their mid-terms the same year.

What a relief. John Key has announced his government line-up without resorting to kissing the rear end of the Architect of Doom, Sir Roger Douglas.
   ACT’s Rodney Hide and Heather Roy get ministerial portfolios in local government and consumer affairs respectively.
   The Māori Party’s Tariana Turia and Dr Pita Sharples will be ministers for the community and Māori affairs respectively.
   Peter Dunne of United Future keeps his old portfolios that he had with the former Labour government, in revenue.
   I haven’t mentioned the associate ministerial jobs the above people have.
   I think this could be a potentially stable coalition and I congratulate Mr Key for keeping his promises regarding the formation of the Cabinet.
   The media predict that he will have to juggle the relationship but I think it will be far less eventful, unless they wish to create sensationalism from nothing.

Voter turnout on Saturday was 78·69 per cent, according to the Chief Electoral Officer. Unlike Australia, voting is not compulsory, and the figure is roughly what we have had in the past.
   Apparently, there are still 240,000 special votes to be counted this week, but as I noted in an earlier post, this should not make any real difference.
   It appears both Helen Clark and Dr Michael Cullen have stepped down from their leadership positions in Labour, not just Helen Clark as I learned earlier. Both will remain in Parliament.
   John Campbell’s TV interview with John Key tonight was an easy walk in the park, with some specifics, including Mr Key’s assertion (for the time being) that he will not move to the far right despite traditionally teaming up with ACT. That could mean, if I understand correctly, no deals with the Architect of Doom, Sir Roger Douglas.
   But National has a tendency to have hidden agenda as the lead-up to the campaign has shown.
   Polls did show that five per cent more New Zealanders trusted Helen Clark (48·4 per cent) to John Key (43·6), just as more trusted John Major than Tony Blair in the UK in 1997.
   But elections, it seems, are not based on trustworthiness, and that is always a shame.

The polls were mostly right: National is back in power, and considering it voted for most of the same legislation as Labour, this means no substantive change. PM-elect John Key was a former Wall Street type, which is discouraging. ACT gets four seats, so the country’s worst politician and the technocratic architect of national decline, Sir Roger Douglas, gets in. (Just because his old man did all right as an MP doesn’t mean he inherited the genes—if he thought Sir Robert Muldoon had contempt for him he hasn’t met me.) United Future and Māori also have seats but National–ACT might not need their support to govern. At least Franks did not get Wellington Central: he may have fancy learnin’ but I could tell you a few stories there. What a totally boring outcome.
   Helen Clark stood down as Labour leader as well tonight, which means the only person with leadership skills and any sense of decency on that side is out. The creeps from the former Cabinet will find someone totally unelectable and we can make a prediction already for 2011.
   A few of the more positive things I can say is that I have met Deputy PM-elect Bill English and he is a far nicer man than the camera seems to show. Also he is far more intelligent, just that in 2002 he had some terrible advice from his party. There are decent MPs among the Nats such as Nicky Wagner who will serve their electorates well. I would rate the future Cabinet more highly than the likes of Cullen and Goff but for the impotence they have shown in their years of opposition.
   We didn’t get any seats, but it was a privilege to have stood and to have played a greater part in democracy. I thank the Alliance for letting me stand as no. 12 on the list.

[Cross-posted] In January 2006, I predicted petrol would hit NZ$2 per litre but attributed it more to the Labour Government’s mishandling of New Zealand currency rather than oil prices. Now that the price has come to pass—consider that when I made it, $1·40 per litre was unheard of—I am surprised that no one in the mainstream media or even politics has brought up the parallels with the 1970s and New Zealand’s solution to the fuel crises.
   It seems a very obvious thing to bring up, so I have to question what people are afraid of.
   Responding to the volatility of international fuel prices, the Muldoon administration of 1975–84 embarked on energy projects in an effort to make New Zealand less vulunerable. The various Synfuel projects and energy exploration resulted in an era where New Zealanders drove around in natural gas vehicles, and we even produced our own petrol after converting it from gas.
   By the late 1970s, the New Zealand Government was subsidizing gas conversions and certainly by the early 1980s, many (most?) petrol stations offered compressed natural gas or liquefied petroleum gas alongside petrol and diesel. It was just considered normal.
   New Zealand was saving its foreign exchange and people were driving environmentally friendly cars.
   In 1984, the right-wing policies of the Labour Government saw most state assets relating to the venture sold off to corporations and Muldoon’s venture was passed off as a folly by the new administration, the technocrats of the Business Roundtable and, shockingly, by the National Party itself as it changed leaders.
   Even a bid to market LPG as an environmentally friendly fuel in the 1990s could not save it as the National Government taxed it tremendously—something that was clearly not done in the national interest.
   The winners of the destruction of this energy venture were the corporations, predominantly foreign-owned, buying in to outmoded, socially irresponsible technocratic thinking that has brought a widening rich–poor gap.
   That gap can only increase today with the cost of petrol, now refined offshore and imported by those same corporations, spiralling out of control.
   There’s not a peep from National, now in opposition, to say that it had been right in the 1970s as the only party prepared to shield a little country, so easily swayed by global economic forces, from oil company greed.
   The only logical and cynical conclusion is that National are as big a sell-out of New Zealanders as Labour and Roger Douglas were in the 1980s. And that they are suckers for monetarist theory, all the time closing their minds to the mere possibility that Muldoon—whose policies were adored by successful national leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who did all right with them—might have been right.
   It’s election year—and National’s John Key is silent. Again.
   There’s a lot Sir Robert Muldoon got wrong but on the alternative-energy policies, I can’t find too much fault.
   First, New Zealand is a little country that is too drastically affected by global economics. Even Malaysia in 1997 could not protect itself properly against them. Hence, the technocratic, monetarist movement cannot be left unguarded.
   Secondly, energy prices are unstable and New Zealanders need to be protected against them.
   Thirdly, environmental policies demand that we look at alternative fuels.
   Fourthly, this is something that needs a governmental push to ensure alternatives are available nationwide, or at least somehow create incentives for the infrastructure.
   Faced with these basic facts, the development of our own energy sources for the long term seemed to be the only way forward.
   Sure it was cumbersome and expensive to develop, and there were missteps along the way, but where would we be today? Certainly not paying $2 a litre.
   Little did Sir Robert foresee that it would be so gleefully dismantled by his successors—with the same arguments of efficiency so cleverly used by the technocrats of the Slater Walker era in the United Kingdom.
   In spite of all the English expats here, we bought the arguments hook, line and sinker.
   One would have hoped that today, we would remain shielded from these energy crises offshore, with our fleet of natural gas-powered cars. That we would be leading the world in showing how alternative fuels worked, and foreign countries would be coming to us to license our technology.
   We gave up that lead, that advantage, in 1996 to follow the American example of gas guzzlers and SUVs.
   The General Election is mere months away, this is the hottest issue on the book, and no one dares bring up Muldoon. It’s because no one dares offend a few rich bastards making money off working New Zealanders by bringing up a leader who dared stand up to foreign corporate interests.

From Muldoon by Muldoon, the political memoir written by the then-in-office Prime Minister of New Zealand:

The National Party has always been a mass membership Party, and although when we are in Government many of our good people become disgruntled and leave us, either in terms of Party membership or of voting at election time, when we are in Opposition they come back very quickly because they believe that even with all our faults we best epitomise what is most desirable in the New Zealand way of life.

   While the book is still current on many issues, this quote surely is one to which we can say, ‘How times have changed.’
   Squeaky and Head Prefect, I mean, the Leader of the Opposition, John Key and his deputy, Bill English, would kill to have that perception in 2008.
   Right now, it looks very élitist and male.