Not to be one to recycle editorials like some blogs do, but last Friday’s National Business Review editorial (just sent to me, for some reason I’m not on the free list and its not online) looks somewhat familiar, which is why it’s probably so good.
The time is arriving for the business community to assert itself against a government proving itself on a rang of issues to be as bad as its predecessor and, in some cases, worse.
John Key’s affable persona may be sufficient to keep his government high in the polls for now. This however is not a substitute for a policy programme to deliver the economic growth required for New Zealand to remain a first-world society, let alone catch up with Australia.
After nine months in power, no such programme is apparent. Instead, the government seems at least as determined as Labour to impose unnecessary and extravagant new costs on the business community.
Good stuff, isn’t it (the writing I mean, not the impositions and the extravagance) even if the author has used the word “community” twice in two paragraphs.
The worst offender is [guess who] Climate Change Minister Nick Smith. Rightly regarded as being in the wrong party, he is colluding with the Labour Party to ensure New Zealand becomes the first and only country to impose an all-sectors, all-gases Emissions Trading Scheme on its manufacturers, electricity and fuel users, and farmers.
Even worse, Smith and Labour are working to ensure the new system will deliver the highest possible carbon price. . .
Disgusting isn’t it. I’ll let you guess for yourself which party the insufferably naive Nick the Weasel should really be in – and the editorial spells out how that naivety is going to cost us all big time, especially “the crème de la crème of the country’s productive base [whose] ability to create wealth and jobs is being sabotaged in misguided desire to be the toast of the environmental cocktail circuit.”
Ouch! That’s that hard-hitting stuff from the country’s biggest-selling business weekly about this so-called business-friendly government.
On the same page is the quip, “If John Key was a Viking he’d probably be called John the Vacillator.”
I don’t think Blind Willy Johnson sang that one. Mind you, a revelator’s not a vacillator, is he.
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