One take out from today’s budget says it all.
The government thinks that the net fiscal impact on the economy will be contractionary.
Here’s what Bill English says in his Fiscal Strategy Report for the budget:
“Having been stimulatory during the recession, fiscal policy is expected to exert a mildly contractionary effect on the economy throughout the forecast period.”
The National Government isn't going to bother even thinking about the Electoral Commission's recommendations to reform MMP. I wish that they'd told us this was the plan before we spent our time and effort engaging with the issue.
So it looks like the Electoral Commission's review of MMP, complete with recommended changes to fix those parts that haven't been working that well,
The Crown won't be able to change Sky City's gambling concessions without paying for it. But it isn't the Crown that would do so.
I have but three words to say to those who think that the announced agreement between Sky City Casino and the National Government, complete with regulatory concessions that will permit the casino to make a lot more money from punters over the next 35 years, really is "legally binding" on the Crown.
John Key now has no choice but to act on Aaron Gilmore, but at the same time has to protect is narrow majority in parliament. Someone has to hatch a deal
I haven't bothered to write about the Aaron Gilmore scandal because, well, it didn't seem like much of a scandal and this week I didn't feel much like kicking a man while he was down. But now it's interesting to consider what the National Party and its leaders may do, because their options have diminished dramatically.
In the different stories being told about the sell-off of Mighty River Power, not even numerals mean the same thing to everyone.
If you were to go searching for a place where absolute, unarguable truth could be found, you might think you would find it in the realm of mathematical certainty. After all, we like to say that numbers - unlike certain lowly ranked National Party MPs - never lie.
