By: Larry Williams | Friday, April 13, 2012

Paid Parental Leave 1

The paid parental leave bill has been scuttled from the outset.

The Government will use its power veto because the cost would have more than a minor impact on the countries fiscal position.

Labour is appalled. They are now calling the Finance Minister the 'Minister of Arrogance'.

The Greens blurted that Bill English was anti-women and anti-family.

Last time I looked Mr English was married to a woman and had six kids.

Clearly the response has been rather pathetic.

Labour's leader suggested that the extra paid parental leave could be paid for by cancelling the State Highway One upgrade north of Auckland. This is the so called 'holiday highway'. Labour has already promised to spend the money elsewhere.

The country is screwed because we have politicians who want to forget about the economics and focus on the politics.

I find it all very scary.

Paid Parental Leave 2

Winston Peters on the issue says:

"The Government keeps crying poor and cutting social services, yet it can pour billions into failed finance companies for its mates, so perhaps a compromise can be reached."

Couple of things stick out here:

1) Those that lost their shirts in finance companies were ordinary New Zealanders many of them NZ First voters.

2) Mr Peters was part of the Labour Government that enacted the guarantee scheme back in 2008.

Greens

"Too costly," is how National saw the prospect of extending its agreement with the Greens.

The Memorandum of Understanding signed between the parties in 2008 will stay as it is, despite attempts by the Greens to come up with new initiatives.

A National spokesman says taking into account the quite different priorities and philosophies of the parties, and this year's zero Budget, it was realised there isn't enough money for expanding the deal.

I can't quite work out why National wanted to work with the Greens in the first place. They are at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The Greens are never ever going to be a coalition partner of the future. The alliance just seemed dumb from the outset.

Fracking

The Christchurch City Council has voted unanimously to declare Christchurch a fracking-free zone.

I would have thought the council had more important things on their plate right now than to waste time implementing something that is meaningless and pointless.

The mere suggestion that fracking could ever occur within the Christchurch city boundaries is just nuts.

Ports

The Ports and the Maritime Union failed to reach agreement yesterday to a revised package.

This is the tenth offer the unions have rejected on the back of their anti-contract paranoia.

Any rational person looking at the previous nine offers would think the deals on offer were pretty fair and reasonable.

As for the security cameras and guards at the Ports - seems more than reasonable considering the threats and intimidation that has gone on.

Fonterra

Fonterra is expanding in China.

They plan to develop two more large scale dairy farms in the Hebai province in northern China.

They have already committed investment to five farms in the Hebei province.

Fonterra has other farms under construction.

There intention is to produce 1 billion litres of high quality milk every year by 2020.

That’s just China. There's India, other Asian nations, and South America.

This puts the sale of the Crafar farms into context.

Breakers

Simply fantastic.

What a game against Perth. Extra time. A win. It doesn't get much better than that.

There's a part of me that says it would be great to have a decider back in Auckland. But the problem with that is they may not win. And that wouldn't be the fairy tale ending we want.