I have a child. She's four. Cool kid. Four is a fun age. She's got her own little personality and views of the world. She tries to make jokes. They're terrible. We laugh along together anyway.
One of the big tropes of this age is "why?". She keeps asking why things are, and I don't have go...
National eh. They bloody love to privatise. Their latest brain fart is to privatise a form of social welfare.
Nicola Willis, National's Deputy Leader and finance spokesperson, 2022-10-22 01:09:47 +0000 UTC
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Imagine 200 years ago some folks just showed up and told your ancestors they were taking part in a running race. They weren't super keen but these folks would not take no for an answer. So your ancestor thought fuck it, ok then. How bad could it be.
Everyone lined up at the starting l...
2022-10-17 02:14:08 +0000 UTC View PostI'm a fairly staunch advocate of the environment. I was the Green Party's head of communications and policy (for like five minutes, but still...). I have written several times about the plight of the climate and how successive governments from all around the world have willingly chose immediate-e...
2022-10-16 20:21:50 +0000 UTC View PostIt's October 2011. Kim and I are house hunting. We had an upper ceiling of $450,000 to buy a house. We had a combined income of about $130k. Fortunately we had a friend who said that lifting our ceiling by $50K would get us a much nicer house and not materially increase our mortgage repayments at...
2022-09-25 22:58:07 +0000 UTC View Post
With about twelve months to go until an election, polls stop being hypothetical and we can start making proper assessments.
At the moment it's pretty damn close. In the most recent Talbot Mills corporate poll* the "right" block of National and ACT was at 48%, and the "left" block of Labour...
I've been waiting a while to write this. I wanted to get a sense of where it all landed. But it's been a schmozzle.
Ahead of the Green Party AGM there were murmurings that people were going to roll James Shaw as co-leader. But those murmurings happen every year. So nobody paid them much min...
2022-08-02 20:54:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Donations. Political donations. Gross. Not a fan. I think we should ban them to be honest. Or make them compulsory. Give every New Zealander $500 or some amount and they have to spend it on a donation to an MP. This would completely level the playing field so that parties who...
Gangs. Gangs. Gangs. Gangs. Poors. Gangs. Crims. Extremists. It's all gangs.
National announced it would be getting tough on gangs. Because National is tough on crime you see. TOUGH. ON. CRIME. And when you're tough on crime, well then you're a good government. Because crime is bad, so we s...
2022-06-12 22:18:15 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been a charmed run. The media has been gagging for National to be actually competitive. Since Covid they've not been. Then when Collins tried to knife Bridges in the dark of night and found herself cast adrift, National went to the chosen one, Christopher (not Chris) Luxon.
His opening...
2022-04-25 04:41:53 +0000 UTC View PostI have a recurring bit. I'll do a gag on twitter and then self-grade it. I've had a few misses, probably more misses than hits if I'm honest. But occasionally I'll smash it out of the park and give myself a 10/10.
As far as I can tell it's only happened six times in the past few years, so a...
2022-04-05 02:00:40 +0000 UTC View PostAbout 18 months ago the Guardian interviewed me. It was running a story on how New Zealand seemed to have avoided the worst excesses of politic...
2022-04-04 01:44:25 +0000 UTC View Post
ACT had been the wunderkind party. Its polling had gone from like 0.5% to around 16%. The party thought it had a chance of becoming the main opposition. But then oh no, National got its shit together, became viable, and most of ACT's gains went right on back.
This has been the source of muc...
2022-03-30 22:52:50 +0000 UTC View PostThe moment had arrived. Christopher Luxon was giving his first major speech (apart from that major speech where he appeared to side with protesters). We've imported that horrendous Americanism "State of the Nation" to describe these speeches. But they're not.
Luxon had apparently wanted to ...
2022-03-06 22:26:57 +0000 UTC View Post
I do media training. One of the first things I do when I'm doing media training is to ask the person "do you fuck dogs?".
100% of the time the answer has been "no".
"Cool" I'll say. "That means the headline in the paper tomorrow will be
So and so denies fu... 2022-02-23 04:11:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Sounds nice. Needs work. That's my takeaway from the social insurance policy announced by Labour.
It's a policy that's been worked on for a while now, and it essentially amounts to middle class welfare.
The fear of losing your job and having your income go to zero is very real, and ...
It's Wellington Anniversary day today. This means I'm not at work. Instead I have woken up to Omicron vs NZ round 1.
It's been nearly two years now. Covid has owned our lives. Whether we openly acknowledge it or try to live our lives like it's not there, it remains. Tucked away in the corn...
I'm sick of it. As I've continued the inexorable march of aging I expected to become more conservative. That's what we're told. It's that axiom "If you are not a liberal when you are 20 you have no heart, if you are not a conservative when you are 40 you have no brain."
I'm nearing 40 now....
Summer Holidays! Bliss. Fucking round. Not needing to find out. Just roasting in our climate changed scorchers all round the country. Haven't even had to think about politics.
And yet, had I not, I would have missed this 2022-01-05 23:18:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Whew. What a year eh.
There are plenty of political columns citing people's politicians of the year.
Hot tip: it ain't David Seymour. He disqualifies himself for a whole host of reasons, not least because he actively tried to hamper targeted Māori vaccination when he twee...
2021-12-31 02:04:14 +0000 UTC View Post
He's been leader for two weeks. Suddenly National has a spring in his step. But is he really the messiah? Or is he just a naughty little boy?
The first disgruntled call came in just before the caucus voted Luxon in as leader. A National MP was displeased at how things had shaken out. Subseq...
2021-12-12 20:45:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Update: just received this.
Luxon with Willis, Bridges will be ranked #3 and take finance, Bishop at 4.
National is a shitshow. Even after the insansity of last week's vote of no confidence in Collins, the shitshow continued. Yesterday a...
I'm considering mixing up my political columns with more attempts at humour. Is this something you'd welcome?
2021-11-16 04:59:40 +0000 UTC View PostLast night's poll on TV1 was both boring and fascinating. It was boring because fuck all had really changed since the last poll, but that was what made it so fascinating.
Everyone admits it's been a messy few weeks for the Government. Confusion over covid status, Auckland's malaise of this...
He's a real piece of shit. I have spent a long time ignoring David Seymour because he'd been an irrelevancy and I didn't want to give his toxic views an airing, but now he's less irrelevant thanks to the ongoing shit storm that is the National Party.
Over the weekend he tweeted:
2021-11-14 19:59:35 +0000 UTC
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This trope has to die. Every now and again someone writes a piece bemoaning the Green Party for not just focusing on environmental issues.
The most recent addition to the genre said that the Greens had gone too far left and were viewed as being anti-capitalism. A) while James Shaw is leade...
Shit that was good. What a vibe eh? People were excited and engaged and we smashed the target. It felt like the whole country was swinging in behind it; there was a feeling of hope in the air. It was helped by the [relatively] low number of positive Covid cases that day. I had been spitballing wi...
2021-10-17 20:30:28 +0000 UTC View PostI really need to turn off news alerts.
The nature of my work means I need to know what's going on in media land, but the Covid alerts are ruinous!
They seem to love coming through right about when I'm thinking about going to bed which makes sleep so much harder.
I'm ...
Patreon stresses me out. Every week I sit down to write something and every week I freeze and can't come up with something good enough.
So I'm trying a new approach, I'm going to jot down ideas as they come to me. This will be like extended tweets. I'll still write longer posts, but I'm ho...
There's a battle of framing. It's usually split between left and right wing divides and it's frustrating.
Because framing is just the way you talk about something in order to make your argument more persuasive. It doesn't actually improve the merits of your argument.
The way in which ...
2021-09-26 19:53:10 +0000 UTC View Post