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Gordon Campbell - Latest News [Page 36]
On Last Night’s Leaders Debate
Wednesday, 23 September 2020, 10:05 am | Gordon Campbell
Do political debates change voter intentions, and cause voters to switch sides? According to a 2019 Harvard Business School study conducted across 61 elections in nine countries involving 172,000 respondents, the answer would seem to be a resounding ... More >>
On That $4 Billion Hit To National’s Economic Cred
Monday, 21 September 2020, 11:04 am | Gordon Campbell
National released its economic and tax policy last Friday. Weirdly, the plan was announced right at the end of the news week, when whatever impact it managed to generate would be likely to dissipate over the weekend. Well…. that now seems all for the ... More >>
On Tourism’s Endless Sense Of Grievance
Thursday, 17 September 2020, 11:37 am | Gordon Campbell
Sad that a once in a century pandemic should have come along before the government had a clearly thought out plan for rescuing all the firms and saving all the jobs in the tourism sector. Sad that the government now looks like it was making up the ... More >>
On The TransTasman Tinkering With Covid-related Poverty
Tuesday, 15 September 2020, 11:04 am | Gordon Campbell
On September 25, the government’s Covid-19 rent freeze will expire. A fortnight ago, the Commerce Commission (in response to a complaint) sent out a letter warning landlords not to continue trying to reach a a consensus on social media as to what ... More >>
On Campaign Politicking
Friday, 11 September 2020, 12:28 pm | Gordon Campbell
The microdoses of policy that get released on the campaign trail are not meant to be ego-shattering psychedelic events that transform our concepts of political reality. They’re meant to merely tickle the pleasure and pain lobes. Thus it was with the ... More >>
On Saving Small Firms, And Disowning Peter Thiel
Wednesday, 9 September 2020, 10:59 am | Gordon Campbell
According to Business NZ, over 97% of New Zealand firms employ only 20 or fewer staff. One of the political myths about such firms is that they’re forever groaning under the yoke of excessive regulation, with the dead weight of compliance all but ... More >>
On Trump’s Current Chances Of Re-election
Monday, 7 September 2020, 12:33 pm | Gordon Campbell
By now it seems clear that National have no fresh ideas to offer for how New Zealand could avoid the Covid-19 economic crisis. As in the past, National has set an arbitrary 30% ratio of government debt to GDP that it aims to achieve “in a decade or so,” ... More >>
On James Shaw’s Spectacular Own Goal
Wednesday, 2 September 2020, 9:29 am | Gordon Campbell
The apology by Greens co-leader James Shaw was certainly comprehensive . He’s so very sorry that he’s let down not only you, but you and you as well. If you missed out, chances are he’ll be stationed somewhere down Lambton Quay later in ... More >>
On The Challenges We Face In Securing Covid-19 Vaccines
Monday, 31 August 2020, 3:47 pm | Gordon Campbell
The early wave of Covid-19 vaccines appear unlikely to deliver a complete shield against getting the infection, as (say) a measles inoculation comes close to providing. They seem more likely to resemble a flu vaccine. Meaning: they will reduce (but not More >>
On The Royal Commission’s Needlessly Secretive Inquiry Into The Mosque Attacks
Tuesday, 25 August 2020, 11:42 am | Gordon Campbell
Can’t recall the author – Oscar Wilde?- but during the Victorian era there was a popular short story about a Moghul emperor who spent years building and re-building a shrine to his dead beloved, only to find that her coffin became an irritating design ... More >>
On Kneejerk Negativism, Cardi B, And Linda Manz
Thursday, 20 August 2020, 2:21 pm | Gordon Campbell
Yesterday, Victoria recorded 216 new Covid-19 cases and twelve deaths. An inquiry released a couple of days ago found that 90% of Victoria’s second wave of case s have been traced back to a family of four quarantined at a Rydges hotel in downtown ... More >>
On The Sorry Plight Of The International Education Sector
Tuesday, 18 August 2020, 12:00 pm | Gordon Campbell
Tourism and international education have been two of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic. They’re both key export industries. Yet the government response to them has been strikingly different. Tourism got a $400 million boost in this year’s ... More >>
On The Election Delay
Monday, 17 August 2020, 12:37 pm | Gordon Campbell
Hi, team. While the majority of the team of five million has gritted its teeth and obeyed the rules throughout the Covid-10 crisis, a sizeable minority has blamed the ref for their every discomfort. Why can’t the government make the virus go away? ... More >>
On Judith Collins’ Apparent Inability To Read The Public Mood
Thursday, 13 August 2020, 11:51 am | Gordon Campbell
The basic skill that a successful politician needs is the ability to “read the room” and gauge the public mood. If National Party leader Judith Collins ever possessed that ability, it seems to have deserted her of late. Surely, very, very few of the ... More >>
On The New Lockdowns, Leadership And Lebanon
Wednesday, 12 August 2020, 11:52 am | Gordon Campbell
As Melbourne has shown, the webs of urban life overlap so extensively that community transmission can be very hard to trace, let alone control. Each of the family members in the South Auckland family at the centre of the current outbreak will have had ... More >>
On Why The Supreme Court Is A Bigger Threat Than Trump To US Democracy
Monday, 10 August 2020, 12:08 pm | Gordon Campbell
If you need a chilling reminder of how weirdly different the United States is to New Zealand…then abortion rights is the place to start. Last Friday, in a case called Hopkins vs Jegley , the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of the ... More >>
On Political Twins, And On Labour Extending Its Wage Subsidy Scheme
Friday, 7 August 2020, 11:45 am | Gordon Campbell
A quick quiz for the weekend. Which political party currently represented in Parliament issued a press release yesterday that contained these stirring passages: “[We have] long supported a free trade and free movement area between Canada, Australia, New ... More >>
On The Problems The Pandemic Is Causing For Big Oil
Wednesday, 5 August 2020, 9:44 am | Gordon Campbell
Chances are, climate change won’t kill you overnight, and that’s got to be significant. Yet while we were all in lockdown listening to the birdsong, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that if governments can up-end the economy for an unexpected reason ... More >>
On The Virtues (and Fluffed Opportunities) Of The Operation Burnham Report
Monday, 3 August 2020, 1:27 pm | Gordon Campbell
One unspoken rule of thumb in any official public inquiry is : whatever you do, don’t conclude you were made to listen to “a litany of lies” even if the evidence of a deliberate cover-up is right there under your nose. In that respect, the report ... More >>
On Showing The Aussies How To Reach A Consensus On Quarantine Fees
Thursday, 30 July 2020, 11:19 am | Gordon Campbell
Back at the dawn of time, MMP was created (a) to impose a discipline on government and (b) to prevent any one party from riding roughshod over everyone else, the public included. In essence, this is exactly what has happened in the dispute over quarantine ... More >>
