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Gordon Campbell - Latest News [Page 107]
Gordon Campbell: The Sian Elias speech about crime
Monday, 20 July 2009, 11:08 am | Gordon Campbell
The recent speech by Chief Justice Sian Elias may have been greeted with some - sensational headlines - “Top Judge Suggests Prison Amnesty” - and some equally ropey press releases that the nation’s most powerful judge wanted to give crims a 'Get Out ... More >>
Gordon Campbell on the Winston Peters Comeback
Thursday, 16 July 2009, 9:27 am | Gordon Campbell
Only Winston Peters could say the hardest word in the political lexicon - “ Sorry”- by implying that his mistakes were really due to his performing to a higher standard than others. That is the only meaning that can be taken from the ‘apology’ contained ... More >>
Gordon Campbell on the bogus benefits of PPPs
Tuesday, 14 July 2009, 10:15 am | Gordon Campbell
Occasionally, someone in business lets the cat out of the bag in a way that is impossible to satirise. Thus in the NZ Herald this morning, we find Deloittes corporate finance partner Paul Callow telling us that foreign investors are now looking at New Zealand ... More >>
Gordon Campbell: The Greens’ new peace initiative
Friday, 10 July 2009, 9:57 am | Gordon Campbell
Non aggression pacts tend to get a bad press, both in real life and in fiction. Hitler and Stalin, two of the most violent tyrants of the 20th century, signed up to a non-aggression pact in 1939 that lasted only until Hitler opened up the Eastern Front in mid 1941. More >>
Campbell: The Erosion of Justice
Monday, 6 July 2009, 9:35 am | Gordon Campbell
As the civil rights we enjoy get whittled away, the pattern is becoming very familiar. Initially, fresh powers of search, detention, use of secret evidence etc are sought by the authorities for what is claimed to be a very narrow and specialised reason ... More >>
Gordon Campbell on Paula Bennett’s welfare abuse
Wednesday, 1 July 2009, 11:30 am | Gordon Campbell
To date, the government’s response to the recession has been faulted on the demand side – for not giving sufficient stimulus to the economy, as reflected in its wilful misdirection of most of the April tax cut money to the top tier of incomes, when ... More >>
Gordon Campbell: A soul classic
Monday, 29 June 2009, 4:22 pm | Gordon Campbell
CD reviews tend to be consumer guides, a few paragraphs that boil the music down to a buy/don’t buy advisory note. At The Complicatist, we’re pointed in the opposite direction. Each month, this column will be featuring a song or album that’s as ... More >>
Abel’s Island by William Steig (1975)
Monday, 29 June 2009, 3:53 pm | Gordon Campbell
There’s so much crap in children’s bookshops and children’s tolerance of what is put in front of them is so immense, it should not be abused. That’s why it seems worth singling out some of the enduringly good books that, thanks to librarians and ... More >>
Gordon Campbell: Interview With Dr Alan Bollard
Monday, 29 June 2009, 3:50 pm | Gordon Campbell
A fter the economy has hit the iceberg, how much effort should you devote to manning the pumps, and how much in trying to dodge the icebergs that keep on coming ? And when do you abandon ship, and spend your retirement working on ways how the economy ... More >>
Why the referendum is a futile way to spend $10Mil
Monday, 29 June 2009, 3:37 pm | Gordon Campbell
B y now, the so called ’smacking’ debate is one of those issues that has been aired so thoroughly that its arrival back on the political agenda is like having an argumentative uncle turn up for Christmas dinner. He’s here again, there’s ... More >>
Campbell: National Testing, Michael Jackson
Monday, 29 June 2009, 10:04 am | Gordon Campbell
The current struggle between school principals and Education Minister Anne Tolley over national standards has the hallmarks of a rushed and insuffiently funded process. No one can object to the nominal aim of national standards - which should enable ... More >>
Campbell: Govt’s failure to cope with unemployment
Friday, 26 June 2009, 3:46 pm | Gordon Campbell
There was a quite telling difference of emphasis on Radio Waatea this morning. While Greens MP Sue Bradford was calling on the government to make a substantive response to the unemployment rate among Maori – nearly 45% of those on the unemployment ... More >>
Gordon Campbell On Iraq, And Its Foreign Oil Deals
Wednesday, 24 June 2009, 10:45 am | Gordon Campbell
Remember how, when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, critics said it was all about oil? Next week, political events in Iraq – and the long simmering conflict between the central government in Baghdad and the local government in the region of Kurdistan ... More >>
David Garrett’s lewdness, and Christine Rankin
Monday, 22 June 2009, 11:31 am | Gordon Campbell
Rodney Hide’s excuses for the lewd comment by his Act party colleague David Garrett – that he is new to Parliament, that he may be slow to realize that he is not still working on an oil rig etc etc. – are bizarre, and a bit desperate. More >>
Campbell: Peter Jackson’s Film Commission review
Friday, 19 June 2009, 11:42 am | Gordon Campbell
The selection of Peter Jackson to lead the ministerial review of the New Zealand Film Commission guarantees the review a prominence that no-one else in New Zealand could provide. Yet this appointment is not simply a public relations coup. As Arts ... More >>
Key’s Zen press conference, Iran’s stolen election
Tuesday, 16 June 2009, 10:13 am | Gordon Campbell
Faced with the dying embers of the Richard Worth scandal at his press conference yesterday , John Key reached for gasoline, not water. The press gallery had begun a simple enough line of enquiry – what HAD caused Key to lose trust in Worth? There ... More >>
Gordon Campbell on censorship – bring back Worth!
Friday, 12 June 2009, 10:56 am | Gordon Campbell
One downside of Richard Worth’s exit from his ministerial post at Internal Affairs will be to further postpone any fix of the blatant contradictions in the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993. The case for change in this legislation ... More >>
Campbell: Hide’s plan for gutting local democracy
Tuesday, 9 June 2009, 9:42 am | Gordon Campbell
Rodney Hide’s agenda for local government involves – as Scoop reported six months ago – the importation of an American model that has resulted in drastic cutbacks in the public services provided by local government, and the privatization of some ... More >>
Gordon Campbell: Tiananmen Massacre, Richard Worth
Thursday, 4 June 2009, 10:11 am | Gordon Campbell
Today is the 20th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. In the early morning hours of June 4th 1989, thousands of unarmed students and workers were shot down or crushed by Red Army troops and tanks sent in by the Communist Party to destroy ... More >>
Gordon Campbell On The Greens Leadership Change
Sunday, 31 May 2009, 9:40 pm | Gordon Campbell
Talk about the bleedingly obvious. In the aftermath of the last election, the Green Party moved a few floors upwards into more spacious digs in Bowen House. One area was reserved for three MPs whose offices were adjacent and whose names appeared together ... More >>
