16 comments

  1. I have always thought the Herald was a rather right wing rag but Ive noticed an increasing number of anti-National govt missives amongst articles, cartoons and reader comments on the Herald website. Interesting change. Would be nice to see more of this sentiment flow into the general public arena.

    1. Interestingly if you look at left wing type publications they tend to see the Herald as right wing but if you look at right wing publications they tend to see the Herald as left wing. Perhaps that means they are more neutral than people think?

  2. That’s a great cartoon, I hope it leads to some actual critical discussion in the public sphere of where this out of control road building is taking us.

    1. It is clear that all parties wish to nurture the economy; the disagreement is about how best to achieve that.

      It is also becoming increasingly clear that the current government’s faith that aggressively building duplicate motorways will grow the economy is not supported by any meaningful evidence, especially now that they are both borrowing and increasing the tax burden in order to to it.

      More like a yoke around future generations necks than any kind of boon. It is also extremely concerning that as the evidence increases that this policy is at best misguided they are unable to reevaluate it but rather are doubling down…. No plan B, whatever the consequences? Strong or Pigheaded?

      1. Okay so much for the tongue and cheek parody 😛

        Pigheaded is the word I would use at the current situation. I did comment else where in the blog that if the exchange rate falters to US75c or even US67c – while our exporters will be going Chin Chin, people will be screaming out for the CRL like nothing on this Earth.

        So yeah, The Party – that is The Government has delivered us a nice present. God help us if the US decides to deliver us a nice Easter present next year…

  3. Towards the end of Labour’s last term the Herald was becoming aggressively pro National, to the point where a number of people questioned how they could possibly hold to account the inevitable National-led government to account because they had been such vocal cheerleaders for John Key – a multi-page glamour spread of him and Bronagh in the Saturday edition a few weeks out from the election, for example, full of soft-ball questions and pretty answers. David Shearer never got anything like the same coverage when he became leader of Labour, despite his being much more of an anonymous figure than Key who, by 2008, had been an MP for a full term.

    A number of their columnists are very strongly of the Chicago School, and the only parties that are still holding to those concepts are National and Act. Because many of those columnists are senior editorial staff who write editorial pieces as well as holding forth in their own columns, it gives the paper a right-wing flavour. An example that regulars to this forum will recognise is John Roughan, who is generally identifiable when there’s an anti-transit editorial even though he’s hiding behind the paper because he’s just as vile when he writes under his own name (which hasn’t happened so much, lately).

    One thing about people who call the Herald left-wing is that they’re frequently very, very far right, and convinced that pretty much the entire media is one vast, left-wing conspiracy against the rational economic policies espoused by the Chicago School. I’ve not seen any particularly moderate right-wing commenters call the Herald a left-wing paper.

  4. Brownlee isn’t even bothering to hide it anymore!

    “We” can’t get ourselves a competent Traffic Minister until the next election, but could we help some other faction inside National knock him off his perch?

    Or get him “promoted” to Minister of Cheese Inspections or something?

  5. The governments pigheaded insistence on completing the RoNS no matter what means that the billion dollar cost of repairing the Raliegh Wave damage to Canterbury roads has to be funded by ratepayers and by taxpayers through the earthquake recovery fund while Christchurch petrol taxes get used to pay for the RoNS, which are of course competing for construction resources and therefore driving construction price inflation. A civilised first world government would have seen the Canterbury earthquakes as the perfect excuse to abandon or ‘delay’ the RoNS, especially the most dubious ones. But then this is government that has been castigating the city council for being unwilling to pay it’s 40% “fair share” of the infrastructure rebuild costs at the smae time that the Austrlian, Japanese and US governments have demanded less than 15% contributions from Brisbane, Sendai, and New York cities. Hopefully the Herald is finally waking up to the fact that NZ is looking more and more like a third world dictatorship every day.

  6. hyperbole only slightly.

    Having studied post-disaster reconstruction in considerable detail as part of my planning degree I can assure you that no first world city has had to replace more than 15% of its ratepayer funded infrastructure after a disaster and no first world country has ever expected a damaged city to pay more than 15% of those repair costs and most importantly no first world country has ever experienced a boost to its GDP following a large disaster. We can afford not to force Christchurch City to privatise its assets and to be more genrous than simply returning the rebuild GST as the government’s rebuild contribution.Those three things are quite common in third world countries. By copying third world practice when confronted with the most damaging disaster (per capita) to hit a first world country since world war two the government has placed NZ firmly into the third world.

    Just coz Joyce and Brownlee etc etc only have an army of spin doctors to back them up and only use character assassination and still have to go through the motions of ‘consulting’ the public their behaviour really is akin to that of dictators, as captured so well in the top cartoon.

  7. After the Brisbane floods in 2011, every tax payer in Australia paid into a Disaster Tax for 12months to help pay for additional cost associated with reconstruction.

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