Rule of Law

I noticed something. I’ll put it in really small words so that Armstrong can understand: the government is proposing to intervene in cases before the courts, changing the rules halfway through for the benefit of the prosecution. Both are an affront to the rule of law, the idea that no-one is above the law, no-one can…

Facepalm

No Right Turn entitles this post “Refuted”. One of the right’s favourite talking points is that higher taxes are pointless because they will simply result in more evasion. In New Zealand, this argument focused on Labour’s introduction of a 39% top rate, and the difference between that and the trust and company tax rates. The…

Child Poverty

  Let us fisk… Child poverty is our most pressing social problem. It blights lives. I’ve never understood the term “Child poverty”. It seems to mean “poor people who have children”. It sees kids going to school hungry, or not going to school at all. Given school is free (and compulsory) and breakfast is about the cheapest…

I hate the government because I believe they’ll be evil, because I…

The Government has cancelled the cencus. Queue stupidity from the left: While I’m sure its a reasonable response in the situation, it is also clearly unlawful. Section 23 (1) of the Statistics Act 1976 is very clear: The census of population and dwellings of New Zealand shall be taken by the Department in the year 1976…

Austerity

I feel like a fisk, it’s been a while. Capital Coast District Health board has a problem: it is underfunded by central government, to the tune of $47 million last year. The situation is so bad that last year it was forced to shut down Wellington hospital for a weekin a desperate attempt to balance the…

South Auckland Street Prostitution & the ability of the left to exaggerate an issue out of all proportion

Idiot/Savant has outdone himself with this one. As I’ll show, he’s claiming that stopping attempted child sex abuse is  is going back to the dark ages. It’s almost as though he wrote his usual “I’ll spin this out of all proportion” thing, then took what he wrote and spun it another level up. While the…

Police Chases Kill

It’s probably a bad sign when a fisk of Idiot/Savant seems calm and logical by comparison to other politics of the day! Last year, our police killed sixteen people in chases, victims of a policy which allowed them to chase on suspicion without regard to the danger such chases posed to the public. Yes, the police killed…

The Aussies are Coming, um, like they did a few years back. But this time it’ll be really, really scary I promise!!!

Sometimes fisking is just too easy. More controversial policy dumped just before xmas so it can be buried in the holiday “silly season”: Apparently “controversial” in this context means something like “a policy unchanged this century”. I’d have thought releasing such a policy when there’s no other political news around is an amplifying effect* (and…

Taze that white man, we need to get our stats straight

Well, the latest taser report is out, and Idiot doesn’t like it. I was particularly interested to read the latter half of his post. But that wasn’t the only disturbing thing the study found. Maori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) and Pacific (people with Pacific Island ethnicities) were over-represented among subjects where ethnicity was…

Standing up for NZ values

Idiot has really outdone himself here. New Zealanders love whales. New Zealanders hate whaling. So you’d expect the New Zealand government to be joining the Australian government’s case to prevent Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary before the International Court of Justice, right? Wrong. Instead, we’re just standing on the sidelines: … Wouldn’t…