The abusive supporters of the government

Amazing: the capacity of the government's cheerleaders to wallow in smear and filth.

What is is about the National party's fans that they are so full of hate, mud-slinging and personal abuse?

The damage done

Paying for the damage caused would seem to be a just outcome for the Waihopai three.

Breathtaking hypocrisy

So here's Cameron Slater calling Andrew Williams 'foul beyond belief' for comparing Rodney Hide to Hitler.

Indeed, one should not call ones opponents fascists, when they are simply wrong.

But how interesting this case is levelled by Slater, considering this video up on YouTube, in which Helen Clark is compared to Hitler. Posted by someone called Whale Oil.

Foul beyond belief. Yes.

Argument from analogy

So let me get this straight:

If I tell you not to pee in the living room, you point out that I pee in the bathroom and say "your credibility is shredded because you pee in the house too."

National is going ballistic on mining, keeping the story rolling on and on. Either they're on a winner, or they're worried they're on a very bad loser and they're trying to…dig their way out.

Mining

Prog Blog is not anti-mining - if you like using stuff made from minerals, then you have dig them up.

But that is not the same as saying we should mine just anywhere. 

The Standard has a pretty good case that the govenrment has been throwing around some wild figures. Thoroughly recommend reading that post. Although the mining industry earned $6.8 billion in royalties in 2008 (including from oil and gas drilled from way out to sea), "it paid just $500 million in wages and subsidies and only $70 million in royalties."

All the revenue from ruining our national parks and heritage land would just go off shore anyway.

Mining is the sort of short-term option a government comes up with when it doesn't have any meaningful long-term vision for how to create jobs and increase New Zealanders' incomes.

The Waihopai jury decision is wrong, wrong wrong.

Having just praised the Standard, Prog Blog disagrees strongly with this defence of the Waihopai attackers.

People who use violence to further their views are not lefties of peaceniks, no matter how they couch their justification. They are reactionaries. 

And anyone who defends the Waihopai attackers is in no position to condemn the idiots who firebomb abortion clinics.

You're either for the rule of law, or you're for people taking the law into their own hands to defend what they genuinely perceive to be immensely important human values.

And anyone who is on the side of the firebombers is dead wrong.

If bloggers at the Standard or other people who think of themselves as progressive think the left in New Zealand is ever going to get elected by advocating firebombing, civil disobedience and attacks on anyone you disagree with, they are helping to destroy the left's chance of returning to power.

At last! Something funny on the The Standard!

This is really good: The Standard takes apart John Armstrong's latest apology for John Key.

Armstrong has been a huge fan of Key - but then, so is much of the public, and that's not only because gallery reporters write lickspittle nice things about him.

Now, both Armstrong and Garth George have noticed the emperor is lightly clad. They are experiencing cognitive dissonance.

National is out of ideas

Whatever happened in this trivial incident, what the enormous outrage on the right shows is that National is so short of ideas, so lacking vision for New Zealand, they have nothing  important to worry about.

Auckland's anti-democratic revolution

The Greens' post on developments in the Super City is interesting.

Both National and Act campaigned against cost increases imposed by local government, even though those local authorities were democratically elected and accountable.

Their response is not to have better ideas, and win by persuading local electors, but to take away the local accountability altogether.

There aren't any governments that have been made better by being less democratic.

Where's all this money coming from?

Right wing bloggers are excited about some figures that might have been kited to the Sunday Star by the government

The claim is that everyone, yes everyone, gets a net tax cut under the government's plans.

Golly, that's wonderful!

It's also a fairy tale.

If the government suddenly has a whole heap of cash to unload, I guess we won't be hearing much more about how we're borrowing $250 million a week.

But the government doesn't have huge surpluses. So where is the money coming from? Pixies at the bottom of the garden?

Even on the figures the Nats are excited about, someone on $150,000 gets five times as much as someone on the average wage. 

Not only is that unfair, it's bad economics. Someone on $48,000 can spend the money more efficiently than someone on $150,000: they are more likely to spend the money on things the economy needs more of, like better health care for their kids, whereas someone on $150,000 is more likely to spend the money on things we don't need so much, like new BMWs.

Prog Blog believes no government would be irresponsible enough to cancel NZ Super and increase tax on our most innovative businesses in order to fund a tax package like this; but even if they were that irresponsible, it would still be poorly designed and hopelessly unfair.

BTW, that argument that the rich get bigger tax cuts because they pay more tax - isn't that just another way of saying an inordinate amount of wealth is locked up by an inordinately small number of people?

Flawed logic

The Labour party introduced the welfare state. Therefore they should want everyone in the country to be on a benefit all the time.

The National Party recently increased sentences and non-parole periods for some crimes. Therefore they should support locking up all criminals for ever.

The Green Party worry about the sustainability of our lifestyle. Therefore they want us all to live in mud huts.

Labour opposes increasing GST to 15 per cent. Therefore Labour should support removing GST from food, and Labour is hypocritical because they brought the tax in in the first place.

TV guy wrong on GST

So here's a blog by Guyon Espiner about Labour's campaign against the increase in GST.

Here's what his argument boils down to: 

- Even though National hasn't confirmed its tax policy - and it's the Government - Labour has to confirm its policy for an election two years away. 

- Labour can't critique anything without defending the status quo.

- Even though Labour is strongly opposed to the policy, and has the majority of public opinion on its side, it should just shut up and go away.

That is clumsily stupid analysis.

Of course Labour should oppose the GST increase. On fairness grounds alone, but also because it betrays National's promise to introduce policies that would grow the economy.