In September 2008 I wrote this:
Unfortunately, what this [the repeal of section 59] does to parents is place them in a position of having no clear idea what is an acceptable smack. Worse still, it allows children to threaten their parents, thereby seriously reducing their authority, even if the child has no intention of notifying [...]

The Media and the Left-wing blogs are getting all excited about John Key contracticting himself on GST. In 2008, he announced National would not be raising GST. He added:
“If we do a half decent job as a Government growing our economy, I’m confident that’s not going to be happening and that’s not on our agenda.”
In [...]

Apparently, John Key gave a speech today in parliament.
Must have slept through it.
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There is a fair amount of news about drug addiction at the moment, with John Key announcing a (somewhat laughable) $7 million boost for P treatment. Garth George, in one of his best columns for some time, points out that the real killer in terms of drug addictions is, of course, alcohol. He laments the [...]

Apparently that nice Mr. Key is less than enthusiastic about the economic recommendations for his former rival Don Brash.
Gasp! Shock. Horror.
Not.
Without even looking at Brash’s recommendations I could have told you that they will be rejected out of hand by Key. The entire taskforce was never designed to produce any viable suggestion. Regardless of the [...]

Sometimes I wonder if we are all missing Helen Clark. Rodney Hide has now joined the legions of people who seem to think that John Key is doing nothing. This list seems to include everyone from the left and the right, except for the right-wing centrists. Which should tell us something – namely that, whatever [...]

Tracey Watkins bewails the apparent head-in-the-sand attitude of Key and English towards pensions. She and a number of other commentators recently have pointed out, correctly, that the present state of affairs cannot continue, in which people are able to draw a pension from age 65, but may live another 15-20 years. The logical thing to [...]

No, not methamphetamine. That’s already banned. John Key is proposing to reclassify pseudoephedrine to a class B2 drug. This puts it into the same class as Ritalin. In order for me to prescribe pseudoephedrine, I would have to now fill out the same laborious forms as one does for morphine and Ritalin. Considering that pseudoephedrine [...]

So John Key is going to make pseudoephedrine only available on doctor’s prescription. And he’s not stopping there, either:
Mr Key has asked for Medsafe to consider a total ban on pseudoephedrine, which is used to make the illegal drug “P”, pure methamphetamine.
Unfortunately Mr. Key is being poorly advised on this matter by his science advisor, [...]

Presumably, journalists are starting to run out of new angles on the Tsunami story. Today in the Dom Post there is a breathless story about how John Key’s Motorcade sped past unprotected children playing by the roadside at 3 times the speed limit in Samoa apparently because John Key needed a shower before his flight. [...]