The left’s pointless inquiry into bank rates has now been released and can be accessed here. It says it is the Report of the Parliamentary Inquiry into Banking but it is not, of course, an official parliamentary inquiry, it is a Labour/Jim’s Vanity Party/Green inquiry and has no official government sanction as far as I [...]

Paula Bennett has turned her attention to invalid beneficiaries. In a carefully worded statement, she says:
“This Government will support those that cannot work.
“I just want to be clear that this is not a blanket 85,000 people having to walk through the doors of Work and Income in the first month or something,” Ms Bennett told [...]

New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, the people that lefties love to hate, have pointed out the real “elephant in the room” in the debate on climate change. They report that reducing greenhouse gasses is a low priority for New Zealand and there are much more important environmental issues we should be paying attention to [...]

The MacDoctor often hears Global Warm-mongers talking about the health effects of global warming. I note that these articles fall mainly into two categories. Those that confuse pollution with global warming, either naively or deliberately, and those that confuse facts with speculation, again, naively or deliberately.
A prime example of the first group is the article [...]

I see that question time was filled with references to the UNDP Human Development Report on Human Mobility and Development and a book called The Spirit Level. No Right Turn and FrogBlog are also terribly excited about the report, as if inequality is the only thing that matters. They probably get this idea from the [...]

Anyone would think that Tony Ryall was the star in Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 12 – the hospital version.
Health jobs slashed
Screams the Stuff headline
(a slightly more sedate Up to 500 jobs to go as new health authority set up is the headline of the actual article).
The Herald’s contributions:
National Health Board to see 500 jobs cut [...]

Gordon Campbell waxes lyrical on the plan to cut ACC benefits to seasonal workers, dwelling on the evils of ideology (National’s, of course. Socialist ideology is not evil in Campbell’s book). My little amphibious friend at FrogBlog uses Campbell’s diatribe as the basis of one of his “Gutting ACC” posts. The only problem is that [...]

The Frog continues his series on ACC changes, complaining this time about the changes to the management of sexual abuse counseling. Interestingly, Frog is moaning about counsellors having to provide a DSM IV mental health diagnosis, which is odd, because they have always been expected to provide a diagnosis from DSM IV. These diagnoses are [...]

A small, green amphibian over on Frogblog is doing a series on National’s “gutting” of ACC (If only!). Yesterday, he was griping about the plan to cease compensation for people with hearing losses under 6%. Apparently this is not “fair”.
How it can be fair to compensate people for a barely noticeable hearing loss is beyond [...]

I am fascinated by the hysterical reactions to Gerry Brownlee’s wish to take inventory of the wealth hidden under our national parks. It is not as if the man is planning on strip-mining the parks. There are a number of things that can be mined with minimal eventual impact on the environment and there are [...]