0 A game-changing policy? Maybe not...

David Cunliffe was especially chipper as he announced Labour's 2000 new teachers policy on Sunday. But by yesterday morning he had admitted to Newstalk ZB that they wouldn't actually all be "new" teachers in the first instance, as immigrants and teachers brought out of retirement would be used to plug the gaps until the "new" teachers emerged from training ready to start teaching in 2018.

Add to the mix Steven Joyce having challenged Labour's numeracy yesterday, and the public will again be suspicious of a new Labour policy. It's not the first time, and it won't be the last, and one has to wonder why Labour let its secondee from Treasury go.

Stuff has run a poll over the new teachers/smaller class sizes policy. And it's unlikely to have David Cunliffe grinning Cheshire cat-like as he was on Sunday; check this out:

This will be very disappointing for Labour. The class sizes policy was the centrepiece of its congress at the weekend. Less than a third of respondents believe that the Labour policy will have anything more than a minimal impact on student achievement. Given the policy has also been welcomed by the Greens, far fewer people think the policy will have a major or moderate impact than an average of polls has supporting the Left bloc. 

And on the other hand, the 67.4% who believe the policy will have a minimal impact or no impact at all is far larger than National and its allies are polling at present. That suggests that even Left-leaning voters have doubts about Mr Cunliffe's game-changing policy.

When he can't even take his core support with him, how can David Cunliffe expect to win the support of floating voters?

0 Joyce fisks Labour's sums

David Cunliffe's desire for a positive run-up to the General Election hasn't begun very well. Associate Finance Minister Steven Joyce has been checking the numbers on Labour's education policies from the weekend, and he's positive; positive that Labour has got its sums wrong. He's put out this presser on the Beehive website:

Steven Joyce

7 July, 2014

Many questions unanswered about cost of Labour’s promises


Two and a half months out from this year’s election and already Labour cannot answer basic questions about the details and fiscal costs of its expensive early promises, Associate Finance Minister Steven Joyce says.
“David Cunliffe, David Parker and Chris Hipkins had a ‘hey Clint’ moment on TV last night, when all three of them failed to answer a simple question about the total cost of their grab-bag of education announcements,” Mr Joyce says.
“Labour has rejected having a Treasury analyst in its office, and it really is showing.”
Talking to media yesterday after announcing it would spend $403 million over four years to employ more teachers, neither David Cunliffe, nor David Parker nor Chris Hipkins could do the simple maths on how much their other promises would cost.
“That’s because their numbers don’t add up and their claims are misleading,” Mr Joyce says.
“For a start, the Government currently funds secondary schools for an average 20 students per classroom, well below Labour’s ‘new’ target of 23 students per classroom.
“When it comes to their costings, Labour’s figures include only the cost of the extra teachers’ salaries. They need to come clean on what the total costs would be including ACC, training, support  superannuation, and all the other overheads involved in supporting more teachers.”

Oh dear; Labour releases a flagship policy at its flagship election year congress, but fails on numeracy. Is it any wonder they want to do away with National Standards?

Steven Joyce continues:

Mr Joyce says this is not the first time in recent days that Labour has undercooked its costings and exaggerated its promises to New Zealanders.
“Last week their press release clearly said they were going to end voluntary school donations – yet they put up only half the money needed to cover existing donations and none of the school activity fees parents pay.
“And on Saturday they claimed they would provide every student between years five and 13 with a digital device worth $600 by providing a $100 subsidy and having parents pay $3.50 a week for 18 months. This will be news to Labour, but this adds up to only $373 per device.
“And just to top it all off, David Cunliffe yesterday confirmed he would look at buying back shares in mixed ownership model companies – even though he’s committed to spend all the money raised by the share offer programme and then some.
“After nearly six years in opposition, Labour has learned nothing about responsible economic and fiscal management. They really do need to start showing New Zealanders the money,” Mr Joyce says. “Labour 2014 is already starting to look a lot like the 2011 version, only trickier.”

It's pretty obvious now why Labour let its secondee from Treasury go. There's no way that dodgy numbers like these would have seen the light of day had they been subjected to proper, independent scrutiny. 

There are 2539 schools in New Zealand as at July 2013, according to the Education Counts website. So 2000 new teachers equates to an average of just 0.78 teachers per school across the country. Mr Cunliffe has already conceded they won't all be "new" teachers. He told Newstalk ZB this morning that immigrants and retired teachers would be used to fill the gaps until the flood of new graduates hit the market by 2018.

Labour's numbers in 2011 were exposed as highly dodgy, and they were punished at the polls. It doesn't look as though the party has learned anything in its second three year term in the wilderness of opposition.

Rather than apologising for being a man, David Cunliffe should be apologising to the New Zealand public for once again trying to dupe them with dodgy numbers. He may want to fight an election campaign on policy, and free from personal attacks, but he has a responsibility to front up with credible numbers, not Helen Clark's infamous back of a table napkin calculations.

0 Quote of the Day - 28 June 2014

OK; it's a fair cop. This is yesterday's post. But we were so wrapped up in the Hurricanes' gutsy win over the Crusaders last night that we clean forgot to post it.

But Steven Joyce takes the coveted Quote of the Day for this effort:

Campaign chairman Steven Joyce warned delegates that the campaign was "still a little puppy" and that anything at all could happen in the next 84 days before the election - the wackiest thing imaginable, he said.
"A retired Maori activist who has become an MP working with a hard left unionist and let's just throw in a wealthy German millionaire right-winger, they could form a political party," said.

"That's the sort of wacky thing that could happen between now and September 20.
"If Laila Harre, Hone Harawira, Pam Corkery, Kim Dotcom, Russel Norman, Metiria Turei, David Cunliffe, Matt McCarten, and John Minto are the answer, can we please have another look at the question?"

It's an oldie, but in 2014, it's a goodie, and a very relevant goodie at that. 

0 Team New Zealand gets private funding

Well what do you know? Team New Zealand, reduced to going cap-in-hand to the Government last week has suddenly found some money; the Herald reports:

Relief for sailing fans, as it's confirmed Team New Zealand will have the money to survive to the end of the year.
A week ago, syndicate head Grant Dalton claimed the team was running low on cash, and would need government funding to survive past this month.
But director Sir Stephen Tindall has confirmed they will make it to at least January.
"We've got enough money to get through to the end of the year, we're getting more and more comfortable that we are going to be able to get through and we haven't made any decision on when any announcements would be made."
There's speculation the team will make an official announcement sometime next week.

That's great news, and Steven Joyce will now not have to tell Grant Dalton that the public appetite for further taxpayer rescues is zero. We would even go as far as to say that, in finding enough money to keep Team New Zealand afloat for the rest of 2014, Mr Dalton has earned his weekly $38,461 salary this week!

0 How much? HOW much?

Steven Joyce's decision on giving taxpayer money to Team New Zealand just got a whole lot easier; the Herald reports:

Team New Zealand boss Grant Dalton was on about $2 million a year during the last America's Cup campaign.
Dalton was by far the top earner. The next highest received about $750,000, the Herald has learned.
The figures came from one source and were confirmed by another. It is uncertain whether the $750,000 salary was for skipper Dean Barker.
The salaries have emerged a week after Dalton told a press conference that without an immediate multi-million-dollar cash injection from taxpayers, the syndicate would be "gone by the end of the month".
The Government contributed $36 million to Team NZ's last campaign, which ended in an 8-9 loss to Oracle in the closest America's Cup in history.
It put in a further $5 million after the contest last year and has asked the team to raise more from sponsors before it contributes any more.
The team has said it has raised from sponsors $6 million of the $11 million it needs to take it through to February, when the venue for the 35th Cup will be announced and sponsors will be better able to make investment decisions.

The revelation that Grant Dalton was on a salary of $2 million will dent any remaining sympathy for Team New Zealand. At $38,461 per week ($2,000,000 divided by 52) Dalton was earning more in a week than many New Zealanders earn in a year. And let's say he was averaging 90-hour weeks whilst up in San Francisco; that would still be $427 per hour; ever so slightly more than the Living Wage!

Now we don't deny that Dalton's role was a crucial one in the challenge, and it deserved to be well remunerated, given the responsibilities he carried. But it makes his demands now for taxpayer charity seem very hollow.

The Herald story continues:

Economic Development minister Stephen Joyce told the Herald that most of the money the Government provided after racing ended in San Francisco was for salaries, to enable Team NZ to secure key team members, including crucial designers.
Mr Joyce said he did not know what individuals earned on the previous campaign or now but said design staff was a priority at the moment.
Campbell Live reported last week that it understood Barker was currently the highest-paid sailor, earning similar to a mid-tier All Black — which is about $250,000.
Team NZ chairman Keith Turner said he would not discuss salaries because they were highly commercially sensitive. He acknowledged that public money was involved, but said it was difficult to strike a balance because America's Cup competitions were the most competitive in the world and involved the best teams.
Even releasing salary bands would be giving too much away. "If they had information on salaries, boats, maintenance ... it would hand a huge advantage to rivals, especially to teams starting up," Dr Turner said.

We wonder if Keith Turner's reluctance to discuss salaries was more about the inevitable backlash that would follow the kind of revelation that has been made this morning. The average taxpayer will not take kindly to hearing that he/she has been funding telephone number salaries.

We have no problem whatsoever with seven-figure remuneration provided it is earned, and funded externally. If Grant Dalton does not have the commercial sway and nous to find a way to bridge Team New Zealand's present funding gap from the commercial sector, one would have to question whether he is the right man for the job, or whether he is in the right job.

There should be no more taxpayer funds for Team New Zealand. The only exception would accept is a short-term loan, with commercial rates of interest applying, and penalties for late repayment; just the same as a bank would charge, if an organisation sought bridging finance.

But if Team New Zealand cannot stand on its own feet going forward, Steven Joyce should not feel pressured to keep the team afloat, and there should be no more corporate welfare.

0 Dalton's audition for a Tui ad

This morning's Herald has a follow-up story on Team New Zealand. And we laughed out loud when we read this:

With the minister effectively calling Team NZ's bluff, Dalton late last night moved to offer further reassurance that he was still chasing funds from private and commercial sources.
Dalton declined to reveal how much Team NZ needed to tide them over until February.
"We have raised a significant amount of money to help us out in the interim. If the minister is telling us we need to find more money then my answer is that is what I'm doing every second of every day."
Dalton told the Weekend Herald his intention in calling yesterday's press briefing was never to try and back Joyce into a corner. He wanted to clear up some of the "hysteria" and "rhetoric" around last week's protocol announcement, which he believed was negatively influencing the public's appetite for another challenge. Throwing public funds into the America's Cup has always been a hard sell for the Kiwi public, but with Cup defenders Oracle Team USA widely criticised for tabling rules for the next event that appeared stacked in their favour, Dalton's task of trying to convince New Zealanders that challenging again is a worthwhile endeavour became all the tougher. The general reaction from Team NZ fans was "tell Oracle to go and get stuffed". That approach won't hurt Oracle, it will only hurt Team NZ, said Dalton.

Sorry Grant; we don't buy that. Backing the Government into a corner was exactly what yesterday's hastily-convened media conference was about.If ever there was a statement worthy of a Tui billboard, it's "I'm not holding the Government to ransom"!

There was talk last year of Kim Dotcom coming on board as a sponsor. We use the term "on board" in a general sense; Dotcom physically getting on board an AC boat would have a severe effect on the power to weight ratio!

But the Large German Gentleman has been splashing the loot around lately, despite his assets supposedly being frozen. If he's got $4 million to buy an election, and $5 million for anyone who concocts uncovers evidence of some vast global conspiracy to send him to the Big Hose, surely he'd have the chump change that Grant Dalton wants.

Instead of holding a presser yesterday, Mr Dalton should have visited Coatesville. One could almost say that the now-farcical America's Cup and Kim Dotcom are a marriage made in heaven!

0 The Bill & Steve Caption Contest

Bill English delivers his sixth Budget in around 90 minutes. So what is he saying to Steven Joyce, his right-hand man, in this picture?

And then there's David Cunliffe, but he's in black and white. What might he be thinking?

You know the rules; keep 'em short, pity, amusing and to the point, and don't get unnecessarily personal. Other than that, you're limited, as ever, by your own imagination.

The floor is yours...

0 Budget week begins

Bill English will deliver his sixth Budget on Thursday afternoon. Having inherited an economy predicted to be in deficit for at least ten years after the 2008 General Election, he is tipped to deliver a small surplus in 2014-15, with larger surpluses to follow in following years. New Zealand's economic outlook has not been brighter for many years.

It's a different story on the other side of the Tasman. Australian Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey is facing a nightmare with the Aussie economy tanking while others like ours recover. That's a legacy of the free-spending Rudd/Gillard/Rudd government that Australians kicked to touch a year ago. The Budget Mr Hockey has to deliver on Tuesday night is going to cut deep.

National held its Mainland Regional Conference at the weekend in Queenstown. And here's what Steven Joyce reminded the assembled delegates:

Steven Joyce is dead right. When New Zealand voters make their choice in September they will face the choice of an economy in recovery under Bill English, at least four years ahead of schedule, or an economic recovery that will run into a brick wall if the Government changes to a big-spending, big-taxing LabourGreenNZFirstMegaMana monster.

We know what our choice is going to be.

0 No wonder David Parker needs a "new tool"!

David Parker has been smacked down by Associate Finance Minister Steven Joyce. In a presser headed Parker wrong nine times in one interview Joyce notes:

The Labour Party's attempts to talk down New Zealand's economic performance have hit a new low this weekend with David Parker making at least nine factually incorrect statements in one short interview, Associate Finance Minister Steven Joyce says.
In the interview, with TV3's The Nation programme, Parker made assertions about low export prices, a poor balance of trade, job losses in the export sector, New Zealand’s current account deficit,  high interest rates, a lack of business investment, 40 per cent house price increases, no tax on housing speculators, and low levels of house building.
Mr Joyce says all of Mr Parker’s assertions in relation to these nine things are incorrect.
“This is an appalling number of errors for someone who would seek to run New Zealand's economy. This number of errors surely can't have been made by accident,” Mr Joyce says.
“Mr Parker's attempts to describe the New Zealand economy sound much more like the situation this government inherited from Labour in 2008 than anything we are seeing in 2014. 
“He must have been thinking of 2008 when he talked of ridiculously high interest rates, a poor balance of trade, and the poor performance of the export sector. All were pretty sick back then and all are in much better shape today as a result of this government's careful stewardship of the economy.”
Mr Joyce says there are two possible conclusions. “Either Labour is deliberately fudging the facts to fabricate the need for their radical economic policy prescription, or they have truly woken up in 2014 for the election without observing anything that has happened in the last five years. The latter would at least fit their regular denials of the impacts of the GFC and the Canterbury earthquakes.
“New Zealanders know that this country today is doing better than most other developed countries, and in 2008 we were doing worse than most, in fact entering our own recession before the Global Financial Crisis,” Mr Joyce says.
“It might be an idea for Labour to look at the steady improvements that are occurring in the New Zealand economy before they start trying to write up their policy ideas.”

We're not quite sure which is worse; that the man who wants to be New Zealand's next Finance Minister is so ill-informed, or that Labour is prepared to tell such extravagant falsehoods in order to get some media coverage.

And equally galling is the fact that no one from the media seems to have picked up on Parker's mis-speaking, and that his comments have been generally reported as fact. That does not reflect well on a supposed informed, non-partisan news media.

You can read Steven Joyce's detailed error-by-error critique of the David Parker interview at the link above. We can only speculate that the reason David Parker wants "one big new tool" to tinker with the Reserve Bank Act is because Labour hasn't got a clue how to use the tools already at its disposal. 

The ineptitude of Mr Parker and his party does little to give anyone confidence that they could successfully manage a piss-up in a brewery, let alone an entire economy.

0 Bubble? What bubble?

Apparently, the New Zealand economy is a bubble about to burst. Well, that's what a lone "expert" thinks, but his views have been swiftly dismissed; Stuff reports:

The Government is playing down predictions published by powerful US business magazine Forbes that New Zealand is on the path to economic disaster.
Economic analyst Jesse Colombo yesterday labelled New Zealand's economy a bubble which will pop devastatingly.
The current housing bubble was creating a mortgage bubble, he said, with almost half of outstanding mortgages currently having floating interest rates.
Rising interest rates would eventually pop this bubble, banks would experience losses on their mortgage portfolios, "the country's credit boom will turn into a bust" and over-leveraged consumers will default on their debts, Colombo said.
"Not only is New Zealand's banking system dangerously exposed to the country's property and credit bubble, but so is the entire economy."
Acting Finance Minister Steven Joyce last night dismissed 28-year-old Colombo's theories as "alarmist" and described him as a "bubble-ologist".
"His view on life is that the whole world is pretty much in a bubble and there's no place he doesn't pick on," Joyce said. "I wouldn't be paying too much for that level of analysis. He's a little bit like [earthquake forecaster] Ken Ring. He's out there predicting catastrophe at every turn." 

Whilst of course Labour and the Greens would secretly love to see Colombo's prediction come true (for political purposes only), it's not likely to happen. Colombo has appeared to cherry-pick his data, to produce his prophesy of doom and gloom, as is duly noted:

Infometrics managing director Gareth Kiernan said Colombo had picked out all the high-risk metrics he could find to build an "end of the world scenario".
If his predictions ever came to pass then the economy would be in trouble, but no one was really forecasting that to happen, he said.
"You would need a bit of a catalyst to kill off the housing market so sharply and I don't think, given the outlook for economic growth over the next few years, a lift of a couple of percentage points in interest rates is going to do that."

Even Bernard Hickey, no friend of the current Government thinks that Colomo has over-inflated his bubble; read on:

Interest.co.nz contributing editor Bernard Hickey said many of the risks identified by Colombo were real but they were old news to those who ran the economy.  
"For him to come out and say we've got a bubble, therefore it's going to burst, which will lead to a crisis is a little bit simplistic," he said.
Kiwis had already seen the Reserve Bank step in to curb the risk of rising house prices by introducing a new loan-to-value ratio, he said.
"Should we all be running for the hills with our hands in the air screaming the end is nigh? Probably not."
Hickey added that it appeared Colombo's article had not been published in Forbes magazine proper, which was important when judging its credibility. Instead it was published on the Forbes website with a disclaimer saying Colombo's opinions were his own. 

Those doom and gloom merchants who have an interest in talking down New Zealand's economic recovery will be salivating at the prospect of a bubble bursting. But it is not going to happen any time soon, and we think Steven Joyce's Ken Ring (the Moon Man) analogy is pretty accurate. 

Mr Colombo have have alarmed a few people unnecessarily with his doomsday scenario, but we're not buying it, just as we didn't buy Ring's theory that he could predict earthquakes from the phases of the moon.  

0 Sledge of the Day - 16 April 2014

Steven Joyce is not the most subtle Minister in the John Key-led Government. And there was nothing subtle whatsoever in his sledgeing of Labour Party leader David Cunliffe yesterday; check this out:

And John Key joined Mr Joyce; the Herald reports:

Mr Key said the decision not to attend question time was "odd" given it was just before a two week recess and one of the few opportunities to tackle him head on.
"This is the place we debate big issues. This is the his chance to take me on. As leader of the opposition one of the best places to hold the Government to account is in Parliament."
He was also surprised Campbell Live was having trouble getting Mr Cunliffe for the dinner with the leaders, saying such pieces were good for the profile of any political leader.

John Key is dead right. Parliament recesses after Thursday's sitting. The House will resume in early May, and there will only be limited opportunities for David Cunliffe to take the fight to the Prime Minister. Not only did he miss an opportunity today, but his Deputy David Parker fared at least as well (or should that be no more ineptly?) than Mr Cunliffe has in recent months.

Labour will not win the General Election by keeping David Cunliffe hidden. For better or for worse, he is the leader of the Labour Party, but his leadership was missing yesterday. He needs to stop focusing on daft policies like the #VanBan, and show New Zealand that he is a Prime Minister in waiting. Going missing in action will not cut it.