I met Russel Norman once. Don't know where his feet are but I know where he keeps his head stuck.
Printable View
I met Russel Norman once. Don't know where his feet are but I know where he keeps his head stuck.
I haven't met him, but he almost always sounds sensible on TV, and in written articles. He does his research.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=10851514
Craic: should I go back over how many Heinz Watties jobs have disappeared overall in NZ?
It is a step in the right direction though, and they are still big employers.Quote:
Heinz Wattie's has reported a 5 per cent fall in net profit to $61.5 million, reflecting the costs of relocating sauce and beetroot production back to New Zealand.
Is Russel Norman a communist now? I don't think so.
A friend who is high up in the canning industry here tells me that his company, not HZ/Watties, would move almost everything here if they could rom Australia but the unions block it. For the record, I did a season at Watties -3 months - over Christmas 1963 when they paid six shillings an fivepence an hour. Seven to eight shillings an hour was the going rate elsewhere but the attraction to the Canneries was the overtime and weekend work at time-and-a-half or double-time.
They promote measures to lower our dollar even further - we're already too low compared to the Aussie $, our major trading partner. That's just one example. The off the planet housing scheme is another - Norman's total nonsense about carbon emissions which he is going to fix .......pardon my laughter.
The current govt. to its immense credit has kept hands off and that's absolutely the best thing. Time will correct the world situation - not govt. tinkering. NZ is doing comparatively well and will continue to do so without one man, or a govt. committee of non-acheivers telling us they know best. Go for a wander around Europe or the states and get things in perspective. Or better still go for a wander around some of the commie parts of the world, and ask yourself if that's really what you want for NZ.
OK FP, you're saying the market will correct itself. John Key is saying that's at least three or more years away, and he should be better informed than most. I'll have to take your word for it that NZ is doing relatively well, maybe that's one tradeoff a small-scale employer makes - not much time for flitting off around the world on junkets until the business has achieved critical mass. All your fears about the next government must surely be encapsulated in Matthew Hooton's article:
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/wr-open...-now-lf-133603
- in which the libertarian view of "tinkering" as always failing, is brought forward as though it is a truth. The market itself does the same thing, only in smaller bites. They buy out competitors, try changing things, go belly up or wait years for their investments to recycle. Their method is also a giant experiment. The difference is that the market does most of its work with a profit motive, and usually the govt will do things with the whole of the country in mind. The govt also has the big benefit of holding most of the cards.
For example, the Kiwibuild idea is gaining momentum, and it would at the very least employ many who are at the moment unemployed. It will provide work training, and will start up a lot of businesses, and require goods from many others. It will also bring the lower end of the housing market back a bit, and the first worry for libertarians and conservatives, supporters of the free market, is who will take up those homes. My guess is there will be some landlords with empty properties, some of the time.
Newsflash - maybe the path to sustainable extra income for small-scale property investors is a bit harder than buying a cheap rental, spending as little as possible on it, and charging market rentals to wait for the more substantial and normal tax-free capital gains. It used to be a no-brainer, now it's not.
This report was nearly binned from my desk: what a treasure trove from some parliamentary reporters, their rankings of our MPs. This will be partly based on how personable the MPs are, and I detect a favouritism for the National Party, but I'm biased myself.
http://static.stuff.co.nz/files/Roll_Call_2012
The National grades are significantly higher than the average Labour ones, but John Key (graded an 8) is advised to start looking like he enjoys the job. Chris Finlayson gets the vote for the Politician of the year. John Banks and Brendon Horan got poor grades (and that was before the furore, so they're not bad judges).
FP take note, Russel Norman got a grade of 8 and they thought he "looks and sounds like the leader of a much larger, more mainstream party", while David Parker achieved the highest Labour grade with Phil Goff, (6.5). David Shearer: lacking instincts for politics, said to run a chaotic office. That's a pity, his grade was a 4. Tough to shake those perceptions.
Colin picks David Clark as the rising new MP of the year, and Steven Joyce as the politician of the year.Quote:
Colin James's column for the Otago Daily Times for 18 December 2012
Forgetting, fumbling and forging ahead
This was the year our most forgettable resident, Kim Dotcom, a small, insignificant, undemonstrative, law-abiding, eighth-acre suburbanite, skipped out of the Prime Minister's and ACT leader's consciousness.
Their brain fades about spooks' briefings and trifling $50,000 cheques locked Key and Banks into a tight embrace that made last year's tea party look chaste.
Banks will take ACT out of Parliament in 2014. Till then (the Maori party having gone into opposition in all but formality) he is Key's majority. So Key became curiously incurious about an inconvenient police report on Banks. Legal technicality sufficed. Ethics can be niggly.
With that incuriosity added to Key's devolved governance, last term's political management slip-ups this year grew to stuff-ups.
Key's personal rating on TV3's poll dropped from a 49-55 per cent range in the last half of 2011 to 37-43 per cent over the past six months. Handling his job well: from 68-76 per cent down to 52-59 percent. Honesty: from 49-64 per cent to 42-49 per cent. National: from 50-55 per cent to 46-51 per cent.
The levels are still pretty good but the direction is not.
That masks Key's recent sharpening: much better briefed at media conferences; exactly the right tone and substance in response to the galling Pyke River report (until needled by Labour); active involvement, even down to annotating papers, in some policy areas. An executive Prime Minister lurks under the jokey, blokey ex-trader.
And he has leeway. Labour's opinion poll party support is just back to its 2011 electorate vote of 35 per cent, its real support then.
The Greens are also where they were a year ago: stable polls and ambitions to be a not-so-junior partner with Labour. That emboldened Russel Norman -- a standout media performer of 2012 -- to stake out economic policy territory too far outside the mainstream for Labour which is hunting middle-ground traction.
Worse for Labour, Ministers talked up Norman as the real opposition leader in an "anti-growth" "Greens-Labour" combine. They could do that because David Shearer was media-inept and David Cunliffe couldn't resist a self-harming media splash at Labour's conference en route to a coup attempt in February. Ministers made fun of all that.
The downside of that fun was its manner: teenage barracking, led by Key, debased Parliament's question time. Paula Bennett took first prize by provoking Speaker Lockwood Smith to snap on August 16 that she was "showing less discipline than a 3-year-old child". Bennett's courtesy and gravitas did not flag: on November 29 she told Jacinda Ardern to "zip it, sweetie".
Smith is off to the diplomatic corps. He has been one of the best Speakers. But even he could not tidy up after the teens.
Labour's problem was the plausibility in the ministers' fun.
Shearer still lacks enough knowledge of policy, politics and the country and has yet to convey much of his inner substance.
Labour has latched on to a slogan with potential: "active government". It has promising MPs -- David Clark is my new MP of the year -- but no stars yet. It has done some policy rethinking, notably on aspects of monetary, economic development, social support and health policy. But it has a long way to go.
So for 2012's standout politician, turn to National. (No one in the tiddler parties qualifies.)
Amy Adams settled fast into the cabinet. Nikki Kaye showed initiative in education on the back bench. Paul Hutchison's gutsy, dispassionate speech on Louisa Wall's gay marriage bill was small-c conservatism at its best.
Chris Finlayson fully earned very high praise for innovations and energy on Treaty of Waitangi claims, most notably getting the Tuhoe deal at last through the cabinet and making the Whanganui river a legal person.
But his guardianship of the constitution from Key's and others' insouciance was wanting. And, while he is a man of fine culture and elegant charm, he is too often snooty and snarky.
Bill English is still the cabinet's anchor. Without him, it would be strategically adrift. But this year he was not quite the superminister of the first term.
The cabinet's engine was its other superminister, the minister for GDP growth which he has made National's dominant theme, trumping other interests.
He is often too linear for the tortuous trade he is now in. He is short on political history: "voodoo economics", his putdown for Labour's monetary policy, was a 1980 phrase describing what became the very orthodoxy, current since 1989, he was extolling -- an orthodoxy last week chipped at by two high priests of money, Ben Bernanke and Bank of England boss-to-be Mark Carney.
But he gets the cabinet's business done. His hardball management has made him seem at times to be the government, swatting aside nuisances in public and behind closed doors and dousing whiffs of green with GDP air freshener.
Only four years an MP, Steven Joyce is the cabinet's operator, across swathes of politics and policy. He is my pick this year.
-- Colin James, Synapsis Ltd, P O Box 9494, Wellington 6141
Ph (64)-4-384 7030, Mobile (64)-21-438 434, Fax (64)-4-384 9175
Webpage http://www.ColinJames.co.nz
He really can't give a balanced opinion on anything can Colin? He should use a red font.