Pacific Blue's domestic launch sees others raise the bar

Good on them, more competition on domestic air routes. It reminds me again of the debates in the 1980s when old Labour (yes before 1984) fought AGAINST deregulating the domestic airline market - and then in power opened it up to 100% foreign owned competition.

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Something Jim Anderton and Winston Peters opposed vehemently, because they loved old fashioned state owned Air NZ. Of course Air NZ is new fashioned mostly state owned now (albeit a publicly listed one).

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The domestic airline market has gone through a full cycle. Before 1987 and Ansett NZ, there was next to no service and fares were expensive. Ansett saw more discount fares, but also saw airline lounges, airbridges, business/first class and hot meals appear on domestic flights. I recall a column by Chris Trotter who saw domestic business class being some sort of class divider between the "haves" and "have nots". I never figured why people who flew were ever "have nots". On top of that, who the hell ever flew domestic business class unless they were:

a. Connecting to a long haul business class flight, so it was part of the ticket;

b. Using a free upgrade voucher which you got as a Gold/Gold Elite airpoints member; or

c. A politician (Rodney Hide used to say he had to fly Business Class to meet his constituents, but Laila Harre also regularly flew business class between Auckland and Wellington).

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Then Ansett became Qantas NZ, then Qantas before Air NZ dropped business class and hot meals a few years ago, to go no frills. Qantas followed suit. Now Pacific Blue is coming in with no frills, Air NZ is responding by introducing a few rows in the front with around 4-5 inches more legroom for "premium customers " (likely Gold Elite/Gold status frequent flyers, full fare passengers and passengers connecting to business class international flights). Qantas has also announced it is upgrading NZ domestic lounges and installing upgraded interiors, more food service and a free evening bar service on flights.

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S0 you might get a good deal on Pacific Blue, but frankly I'm looking forward to sitting at the front end of Air NZ with international long haul economy class legroom, or getting fed for free again on domestic flights. No doubt Chris Trotter will bemoan this as representing a new bastion of the class struggle!

"Big Money" envy

The left uses language carefully when it talks about issues. The term "Big Money" in most countries wouldn't refer to a peculiar small religious group spending a 5 figure sum campaigning against a particular electoral outcome. It usually means businesses funding politics. However, for Labour it is the new "bogey man", and Labour is used to creating language based bogeymen.

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The word "nuclear" is one. The 1984-1990 Labour Government and the Party before the 1984 election eagerly took the word to be a byword for war and pollution. The first big scaremongering messages associated with "nuclear" were that anything "nuclear" would make NZ a target for Soviet nuclear weapons - something that was ok for Australia, the UK and the US in the event that the then communist bloc wanted to destroy free Western liberal democracy, but not NZ - which wanted to distance itself from that. That of course spoke volumes about who was behind being "anti-nuclear", as it was about being neutral between liberty and Marxist-Leninist dictatorship - as if you could be. The second scare is that "nuclear" meant Three Mile Island, Chernobyl - there were visions of fallout, Hiroshima and the like from nuclear propelled ships - despite the evidence to the contrary. The numbers who voted Labour because of this fear are difficult to determine.

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Another is "privatisation", which is associated with people being ripped off, or services being cut, or "flogging off the family silver" -instead of flogging off the fools gold and the mythology around how good state owned monopolies really were. It's a bogey word - which too many of those who are economically illiterate in the media find easy to throw out there, when close scrutiny reveals most of the claims made make little sense.

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So now we have "big money". Visions of Montgomery Burns from the Simpsons scheming with John Key to find ways to send children down salt mines (Winston Peters can get advice on this from North Korea of course), to find ways to poison the population, cut wages and ensure old people shiver in the streets. Visions that those who are successful and well off are only that way because they have taken from the less well off, or cheated them, or been greedy. The idea that wealth is a pie magically baked by "society" and those with "big money" have been so mean as to cut a big slice for themselves. This all forgetting that everyone bakes their own pies - their own pies - you know it's called property, and almost all of those who bake big pies did so from their own initiative and use of reason. The government at best exists to stop people stealing from each others' pies - although it does a good job of confiscating different amounts from most people's pies. OK enough of the pies.

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Helen Clark is now painting a world where you, the voter, is actually quite gullible. You don't know what is good for you, let alone the country - and you can be bought by political parties which get large donations, or by "big money" campaigning for who THEY want. Those parties can dazzle you with flash ads, slogans and advertising and you wont vote for who you want. Her solution is simple, she will ban anyone from campaigning outside a political party. She also wants you to be made to pay for political parties too, even if you despise them all, she likes forcing you to pay for people who well, force you to pay. Nice that. She is hiding all this under the auspices of a threat from "big money".

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So what is "big money"? It is organisations, made up of individuals, who want to spend their own money - remember that phrase "their own money" on political campaigns. They don't want to force you to pay for it, but they want you to vote a particular way. Labour believes, with good reason, that in sum, it will get less money from voluntary donations than National. It thinks this is unfair, so it wants to ban the spending of such money, and force you to pay for political parties to be equal.

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Well not all political parties. The big ones would be nearly equal, the small ones would get bits and bobs - because, after all, Labour finds it hard enough competing with National, to have to worry about those annoying small parties "stealing" votes from their left and right flanks.

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So let's not forget what Helen Clark means when she says "the National Party benefits enormously from big money in New Zealand politics." She means "I wish we did too, and if we can't attract it, they are not allowed it." It's naked party political self interest, and it is, as the Herald has said, all about keeping Labour in power. The last major electoral reform carried out was MMP - by National - and nobody can ever accuse that move of being about keeping the National Party in power!

In the "no shit Sherlock" files

Stuff reports "A family's fatal attempt to drive out a Maori curse may have been performed by charlatans, an expert in Maori culture says."

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Perhaps those who are not claimed to be charlatans will participate in double blind experiments on this

Trust NZPA to give you the "facts"

According to NZPA, which has given us "facts about North Korea" on the end of an article included on Stuff.

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"National legislature – Supreme People's Assembly, unicameral, 687 members elected directly for five-year terms.
Last election – September 2003, Next election due – 2008."

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Oh you'd think there are elections, just like us, especially if the term one-party state confused you, you'd now be relaxed. It is just another country, a bit like all the others really. Of course let's not say the elections have one candidate, the choice is yes and no, and turnout and majorities are 100% respectively for both pretty much. No. Let's not list the estimated 150,000 political prisoners in gulags. No.

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Can't have Winston asking about the children in gulags, or the most abominable human rights record in the world now can we?

The immoral plead to the amoral

Notwithstanding the blunders involving the arrest of extreme leftwing activists for firearms offences and claims of terrorism, one of New Zealand's highest profile cheerleaders for Al Qaeda's greatest attack is now wanting to go to a body that puts Cuba and Syria on its Human Rights Council.

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In other words a woman who clapped and cheered when the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed is now running to an international body that treats North Korea, New Zealand, Syria, Sweden and Burma as moral equivalents.

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According to Stuff, Annette Sykes (who for some inexplicable reason can still command some respect in the media) is going to go to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples. A body which has as its full time, Western taxpayer funded job, to criticise Western governments for treatment of Indigenous peoples, whilst treating the corrupt ridden tinpot quasi-democracies of Africa as being great models of decolonised empowerment. You know, the type of body that throws stones at New Zealand but ignores Zimbabwe, because (after all) Robert Mugabe is indigenous and we all know indigenous people are peaceful and kind to their own people.

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Besides Annette makes odd statements which seem to indicate that Tuhoe didn't have a community before the 1990s "When are the computers and the cell phones that have actually made this whole community absolutely impossible to communicate with going to be returned to this community", it does raise the question as to why Tame Iti says they have nothing to hide when of course they DID try to hide evidence, as Not PC points out.

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The braindead media of course will do next to no investigation into the philosophies and ideologies of those charged, or even question Tame Iti on his Maoist background, you know like real interviewers do. Or maybe they are a bit scared of him?

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Of course now there is going to be a Hikoi - curious of course for those of us with jobs, or who own businesses that one can afford to spend a week ambling down the countryside. I for one wouldn't really mind if Tuhoe declared independence over the vast tracts of publicly owned land, and their own private land in the Ureweras. Good luck to them, but the money from Wellington would come to a grinding halt. Let them have self-determination.