The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades

Well Jianqi has corralled his lambs and just about got his coalition organised. And when you think of it; coalition is a good name for it since it will be putting out a lot of heat and black smoke and it will bring tears to your eyes before very long.

So what is that blinding light on the horizon? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Of course not, you silly buggers; it’s that brighter new future we were promised so many times during the last month.

What’s that? You can’t see it? With all due respect, I think you need to take the blinkers off NOW, because Jianqi’s brighter future is here and just keeps getting brighter each day.

Take the economy for example (I wish someone would...). Is that bright or what? Treasury figures are just out on the country’s operating deficit for the four months to Oct 31, 2011. Treasury gave all us voters the low down on how this would work out six weeks ago and now we find they were absolutely...wrong. It was out by 4.1 percent, which doesn’t sound much, but considering this prediction was only made six weeks ago (and half-way through the period in question) it is not particularly bright.

They tell us it was down due to lower Crown revenue and a smaller tax and GST take. So the taxation policy is working well, then...NOT. They can hardly blame the economy on Labour now they’ve been in total control for the last three years!

Maybe we should check out the brighter health outlooks instead. I see National Disgrace is promising to provide even more elective surgery. Goodness me, that sounds great. Furthermore they have a goal of all patients booked for elective surgery to wait no more than four months. Wow – two months less than now. Or is it? Actually no. The whole waiting times issue is a load of lies and deceptions.

You see the current system ‘guarantees’ patients on the list will be seen in six months, but how can they guarantee this, you might ask? Easy, I answer. If they don’t think they can see you in six months; then you don’t get put on the list. This was exposed on National Radio’s Nine to Noon programme of 10 November 2011 where surgeons told Kathryn Ryan exactly how it works and why we have Charity Hospitals in Auckland, New Plymouth and Christchurch performing much needed varicose vein and hernia operations as well as many other surgeries for painful conditions that the DHBs are ignoring.

Okay then let’s look at the brighter future for jobs. That’s always one to get everyone excited. Jianqi tells us the abolition of the youth rates lost us 9000 jobs in one fell swoop. Let’s suspend judgment on that for a moment while we check out the Nats’ brighter future answer to this.

They are going to introduce what they have dubbed a ‘starting-out wage’ which apply to 16 and 17-year-olds beginning work and 18-19 year-olds who have just come off a designated benefit as well as 16-19 year-olds in training in certain recognised industry training courses. It will be equivalent to 80 percent of the minimum wage (wow $10.40 before tax -such generosity). For new young workers this will apply for the first six months with the same employer. Which means if for some reason their employer decided to toss them out after three months (and what is to stop him/her?) they have to start again with their next employer at $10.40 for another period of six months. You see after six months the employer is obliged to pay them the adult rate, so with an easy out at three months it is easy to see what will happen to many.

So what is really giving us a brighter future Jianqi? Certainly nothing in this lot. But perhaps it is your plan for asset sales ... er sorry ‘the mixed ownership model’? Now in the lead up to the election we were told the change to the ‘mixed ownership model’ would net us $7B. That sounds quite a tidy sum, but how did the Nats arrive at it? Well, unfortunately we don’t know because they muzzled treasury and the Ombudsman before the election. I can think of only one reason why they would do that, and it has nothing to do with ‘commercial sensitivity’. It is ‘political sensitivity’ because when you discover the whole concept has been built upon figures that don’t add up, it suddenly becomes a far more worrying matter than simply losing the income from these assets. After all that pain was supposed to bring gain. But realistically what sort of gain could it ever bring other than a very brief elation rather like when you sell your house and have a whole lot of money ....but nowhere to live, because you didn’t get as much as you thought for it.

I am the first to admit that my understanding of economics is rudimentary at best, although lately I have begun to realise I share this level of expertise with those in treasury who get paid far more than I could hope to earn. So at this point I should defer to those who actually work in the money market.

Auckland financial analyst Brent Sheather, and NZ Herald business columnist Brian Fallow have both laid out a very convincing analysis of the situation You can find details of their analysis at http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2011/11/24/gordon-campbell-financial-analysts-jump-ship-on-asset-sales/ but in a nutshell Sheather says To get these asset sales, the Government will need to price the companies at price-earnings multiples of somewhere around 14 to 16 times, which implies after-tax earnings yields of 6 to 7 per cent. The 7% is the profits of the company after tax. So the company could pay out 4% as tax free profit, and re-invest the other 3% for more growth. Either way, that’s going to be nearly twice the 4% cost [of the borrowing option.]. Again, these sums indicate that ordinary New Zealanders stand to lose by selling down the assets.

 Both commentators seem to be of the opinion their views are pretty widely shared within the financial community, who is pulling Jianqi’s chain? And more to the point; where is this brighter future coming from?

Maybe it’s coming through the communication companies who are rolling out faster broadband ‘all over the country’. Wow! But wouldn’t it be better if all of us had decent cellphone coverage and television reception first? I mean how fast does broadband have to be? You can only type or click so fast.

Or maybe it’s coming from those nice mining companies. You know the ones. . These guys bring lots of work – they are the good guys. We’ve got a mining inspector so it’s okay. The companies are responsible people. It’s just that they don’t need all that health and safety nonsense because they employ real men, not cry-baby scaredy-cats who worry about being entombed in their workplace, or blown to smithereens.

But wouldn’t our future be so much brighter if everyone just stopped complaining about silly things such as child poverty child abuse, drunk drivers, lousy employers, a failed health system, dirty dairying, degraded environment and a failed education system and just got on with helping Jianqi to help us?

Yeah, right! I might as well toss my shades away for the next three years.

Slightly used country going cheap

We ought to just put up the for sale signs now. Or perhaps if we are hell-bent on selling out, we could list our country on TradeMe

Former currency trader and lifelong money geek JiangQi has found new markets to exploit while traitorously selling out his homeland. Currently he is seeking photo opps with Barack Obama; though why he would think a big cheesy front page spread alongside a man whose country is even further down the gurgler than our own is good publicity I’m buggered if I know.

Although I suppose that is just my old fashioned attitude showing through. When I were a lad, going broke or being adjudged bankrupt was not something we aspired to. For some odd reason we saw it as failure if your business enterprise went tits up and bankrupts were not wined and dined by political leaders. These days it would seem to be some sort of badge of honour and I think many vie with each other to see who can leave the largest number of unsecured creditors thrashing about with no lifeboat in sight.

So those who have any plan to cast a vote (and see what you might catch) in November, should pay attention to what this fly boy and current polls leader has been up to. Then ask yourself if this is in the best interests of New Zealand?

The first destabilising thing he and his cronies have been up to is all this bollocks about free trade deals with what seems to be almost every country that uses child labour and has no labour laws or health and safety regulations. China and India are both soon to flood our country with their cheap nasty products made by 9-year-olds in disgusting conditions and therefore able to be sold for less than the cost of five minutes of one of our workers’ labour.

That should do heaps to solve our unemployment problems.

Next they want to sell off a whole load of assets. We’ve been there before and it’s nothing short of a miracle we have anything left to sell. This selling off is a two edged thing too, because not only are publicly owned assets earmarked for sale; they are also selling off as much of our productive land as they possibly can to the likes of Chinese dairy operations. And as if that wasn’t enough they are offering offshore mining opportunities to Brazilians who if things go wrong could make our eyes water a lot more than with one of their famous waxings.

More brilliant plans to put us firmly in control of our waka.

In the middle of what is referred to as our dire economic circumstances when we are told there isn’t enough money to fund health or education or anything else important adequately we find Billy Bunter Browneye has given his mates some ripper cream buns for tea. Despite a limit of $655 per day for the chairman and up to $415 per day for the rest, he has paid his old mates on the panel set up to monitor the Christchurch quake body more than twice that sum. Using what are essentially wartime powers enacted straight after the disaster and ‘in the national interest’ or rather more likely ‘in National’s interest’chairman Sir John William Hansen gets $1400 per day and the rest of them including Jenny Shipley get $1000 each per day.

That should help get Christchurch back on its feet much quicker than if he had just paid the amount specified in law, eh?

You’d think all that stuff was enough, but our lisping leader has even more up his sleeve. It now appears that we have had more activity from Mossad agents and they were present in Christchurch before during and after the earthquake. They were uncovered when their vehicle was hit by rubble and the survivors decamped leaving a dead colleague with a nice collection of false passports in his possession.

The buzz is that the SIS got onto it and has been making enquiries to see if these bastards got up to anything like hacking into our (so-called) intelligence information. If it had just been some dude with a bunch of passports we might have just thought him to be a common criminal (rather than an uncommon one). However the Israelis kind of blew it by sending a couple of ‘search & rescue’ teams over that had no UN accreditation, which was suspicious in itself. However what really blew the lid was when one of the teams was confronted by armed Kiwi patrols INSIDE the red zone and escorted out.

The Prime Prick refuses to discuss much about this saying it is not in the national interest for him to do so. Once again I think it is more likely ‘not in National’s interest’.

In the absence of any real information here we can only speculate (as we will in an information vacuum) that it is not in HIS interest to do so, because it might uncover something else he has been up to with the Israelis that he won’t want us to know about.   

This is not the first time Mossad have been found in NZ with no reasonable excuse and the fact that JiangQi refuses to do anything about it, suggests he has things he wants to cover up here. I don’t know what, but like I said at the beginning; he is a money man and the Israelis are pretty well connected in that regard, so maybe that’s the link.

In any event what this little turd is doing is called treachery. The penalty for traitors used to be much worse than electoral death. But as the scaffold is no longer around, let’s hope the voters can reclaim some of our sovereignty in November and dump this pillock back into Civvy Street. The only problem is; the heirs apparent are getting a little thin on top.