Saturday, May 30, 2009

Wealthmakers Lifesavers

The kind of people who create wealth and jobs.
Whose ideas and products make life better for their fellow human beings.

Prosperity makers

Friday, May 29, 2009

Its academic

I had for a time believed the wasting of the last nine years was the result of a socialist clique (sorry wash my mouth, democratic socialist, whoops wrong again, social democratic cabal wasting the country’s best financial boom in years.

I am not so sure.
I am slowly coming to the conclusion it was rather a government of academics who started life with fine theories and ideas and who led the country into an imaginary place where social justice was the order of the day.

So that the country of Norman Kirk, of working people, became prisoners in ghettos of despair, and the elites, who only turned left at 18 because they read books in a different corridor of the library from their Tory neighbours, were both ignorant and indifferent to the damage they had done.

As George Orwell said some ideas are so silly and so preposterous that only an academic could believe them.

Meaning I suppose the reality of the world disabuses the more sensible members of the community of such misguided notions.

The are a powerful group, academics, in a party of the working people.

They spend all day in their day jobs lecturing people who by certification know much less than they do.

They have been selected and praised all their lives not for common sense and wisdom but for a mental agility and skill of thought.

So when you put them into a branch meeting in New Lynn there is not much oxygen for ordinary people.

After a while they stay silent while their learned betters take the conversation away from the bread and butter issues that concern them to the arcane abstractions of achieving social justice, gender equity and diversity.

It becomes difficult to socialise as the party socials gravitate from beer, the drink of the workers, to wines and pinkie food that needs a lifetime of study to consume with good manners.

When the beer and sausage rolls are gone and the workers are relegated to doing things like distributing pamphlets and getting out the vote the party ship can sail on to the balmy waters of abstruse arguments and theoretical debates.

Of course you would say the workers should bugger off and found their own party of honest toilers.

The problem with that is its soon evident that out there is a bunch of wilder academics who have read different more emphatic books split into realms of Trotskyites, Marxists, who found other corridors in the university library with the real gospel of social equity, class struggle.

Meanwhile the workers are diminishing anyway, (the academics like them in state houses and on the dole, tidier).

The trade unions whom you could once rely on to have a hard headed appreciation of wages and conditions and the bread butter and jam issues have changed as well and the academics have arrived en masse in those sacred Trades Councils as well.


Instead of the hard bitten officials, who spent years on the job getting in the front of every stoush with good bosses, bad bosses and real bastards before becoming an official and getting a job with the union, there is soft handed Harold, who has a degree in social equity, union studies and who has written a thesis on the effects of the abolition of the Arbitration Act 1898.

For much as I thought Pat Kelly, god rest his atheistic soul, wasn’t a labour man but a true and dyed communist for most of his life and who ran the poker school at Mere Mere, a grave sin, he had worked a day or two in his life and lived the life of the people whom he represented.

But Harold is the new face of the union and he is all up for the workers, a mob he has recently met for the first time.

And Harold or Haroldess is only there until a research job is freed up in parliament and then only until a job is free in a minister’s office and then until a safe seat comes along. But he will give it his best shot.

And Haroldess can go along to the Labour Electorate Committee as a fighter and toiler for the unions and the masses, where it helps that Harold is well connected and knows his wine.

So if there is blame for the wasted nine years and if there’s culprits to be found I am all for blaming it on the academics, give democratic socialism a break and lay it at the door of the well meaning ideologues who left the hallowed halls of academia to teach the common people how to live their lives.

And don’t we owe them so much.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Second world infrastructure

The Desert Road is closed today, and its only the middle of May.

It must be the only number 1 highway in the world that is regularly closed for snow.

The country's main highway has corners in shaded gullies with a 25 km reccomended speed.

It would take about 4 viaducts and maybe a couple of hundred million to have a weather proof number one state highway.

Yet when the good times came in the last 9 years the new 15,000 state servants was thought a good place to spend money.

Astonishing.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Greens win Freemantle

The Green party won a by-election for Jim McGinty’s seat in the Western Australian State Parliament.

The seat has been with Labor since 1924.

This is quite an event.

They have five crossbench senators in Federal Parliament, which is elected by proportional representation.

This might be a sign of the parting of the ways by the insufferable latte socialists from the battlers in the Labor Party.

Labor may lose a few central city seats in the next Federal election.

The trendy wendys in these seats won’t forgive Kevin Rudd for watering down the Global Warming Carbon Reduction Trading scheme before the Senate.

Meanwhile the battlers in the outer suburbs that Labor won back from Howard in 2007 and the miners and workers in the rest of the country will not acrifice one job for those 385 molecules in a million that have Green's leader Bob Brown so worried that he would let a wrecking ball loose on the Australian economy.

Queen City - Auckland

Yet another campaign to tart up Auckland.

More Auckland foolishness, an expensive rebranding to the Big little city - Sounds like someplace in Texas.

They will run an expensive campaign , pay a lot of cash to the hucksters but won't actually change the reality.

Ancient Dan campaigned 20 years ago to have the area from the Gladstone Road Bridge to the Viaduct declared a development area, to put Quay Street underground, remove the red fences from Kings wharf toPrinces wharf and open the city up to the sea, with the casino at the old railway station.

What Auckland got was a casino where the Bus depot should have been, and a bunch of restaurants around the sump at the viaduct.

So the public got the use of the worst section of the waterfront, a tiny corner on the left hand side.

Wellington did just run a campaign.It changed the waterfront into an interesting place.

It spread poetry along the wharves.

Stuck little eateries and pubs there, built museums and entertainment centres.

It is a pleasure to go there.

(And when they put the roof on Wellington it will be just peachey).


Auckland blessed with better weather and a wonderful harbour has for forty years kept the public away from their waterfront with those victorian red iron railings.

Like a finger up the city's nose the port company parks used import cars right smack dab in the prime waterfront area.

Vancouver, San Francisco, hell every port city in the world used the opportuniy of the change to container shipping to reclaim the waterfront for recreation and leisure. Not Auckland

An advertising campaign won’t do it.

You actually have to change the physical reality.

The problem has been that Auckland's local body politics are steeped in childishness.

Getting the City, the region, the port company to agree open the waterfront up is near impossible.

What they will do is try and turn that industrial tank farm miles away into a real estate rake off.

The one city structural changes will not do it.

Until the Auckland political culture changes or a leader like Robbie arrives progress is unlikely.

Another tartup campaign putting make-up on the old whore will not work.

Line up and take your medicine children.

Kiwis will put up with anything from the Government.
The latest is dosing bread with folic acid.

Over four million people will have their bread adulterated to cure 4 to 10 birth deformations.

So pregnant women are unable to buy this stuff themsleves?

Worse it could increase cancers of the prostate and the liver.

Food Safety Minister Kate Wilkinson should can this one as soon as possible.

Just because the last government wanted to line the people of the country up in yards and drench them like sheep is no reason why sanity should not prevail under this one.

Whats next - aspirin in the milk to thin the blood.

This is madness.

We protest - We go to the pub - Sod the planet

The numbers are falling every year.

No not the Anzac parades, the numbers of Alarmist Global Warmers who turn out to complain that the planet is warming up and its your fault.

Sydney 2007 - tens of thousands
Sydney 2008 - thousands
Sydney 2009 - 200 turned up.

Then again the skiing season started a month early and in the last few years it has got colder.
Margos Maid