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Post 0

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 2:48amSanction this postReply
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You're pissin' gold, Lindsay.

Ross

Post 1

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 8:06amSanction this postReply
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Thanks for this, Linz. If I were registered to vote from here in Korea, then I'd certainly be giving Bernard and the Libz the thumbs up. But what a stomach-churning account of Don Brash's flip-flops this is! Hell, even Helen Clark has more integrity. I hope you send Brash a copy of this - *and* I hope the man suffers the torments of the damned over it. He and the Nats deserve each other. 

Post 2

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 5:54pmSanction this postReply
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Of National & the Health portfolio, as an example of Don Brash's "capitulation to marshmallow middleroaders," my article said:

Health is another portfolio at which Don Brash is promising to throw more money … this, in the full knowledge that all the while Dr Cullen has been doing the same, waiting lists have lengthened, personnel have fled and skill shortages have worsened. Only the bureaucracy has flourished. Again, Don Brash, the leader of a party committed to free enterprise, is not prepared to turn health over to free enterprise! He’d rather preserve the current Soviet-style, die-while-you-wait monolith.

Here's National's Health policy, just announced this morning:

Don Brash MP
National Party Leader
6 September 2005

National signals sensible middle path for health

A National Government will improve the efficiency of the struggling health system, restore accountability so taxpayers know they are getting value for money, and take a sensible middle path on health funding, National Party Leader Don Brash said today in announcing National’s health policy in New Plymouth.

“National will focus attention and health funding on the most vulnerable in our society, taking a sensible middle path between a fully universal and a fully targeted primary healthcare system,” Dr Brash said.

“National’s most immediate priorities in health are the package of moves announced today.”

National will:
Remove the uncertainty around negotiating an inflation adjustment in Aged Care funding with the 21 DHBs. National will ensure the inflation adjustment is passed on to Aged Care providers in a timely way. This will have an initial annual cost of around $24 million, exclusive of GST. National will also commit a further
$35 million per year into the Aged Residential Care contract from April 1, 2006 as a second step towards redressing Labour’s severe underfunding. National has already committed $19 million per annum to fund homecare workers’ travel costs.
Commit an additional one-off $100 million three-year package to slash elective surgery waiting lists. The funding will come from the additional $1 billion in revenue projected in the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update and will be contestable between the public and private sectors.
Boost funding to Pharmac by $75 million over the next three years to expand the availability of new drugs. National will also undertake a review of New Zealand’s pharmaceutical policy.
Retain the PHO system, but step back from the fully universal subsidy system introduced by Labour. National will retain universal doctor visit and prescription subsidies for those under 25 and those 65 and over. But universal subsidies for the rest of the working population will not be rolled out. Of the approximately
$180 million annually saved by 2007/08, around $70 million will be returned through increased subsidies to the genuinely needy. The Community Services Card will be replaced by a new Health Card, with simplified administration, higher qualifying income thresholds, and a boost in the value of the subsidy to $30 per doctor’s visit.

“The rest of the approximately $180 million annual savings made from not rolling out universal subsidies by 2007/08 will be spent on expanding the range of subsidised pharmaceuticals, on improved funding of aged care facilities, and on a range of child health, health promotion and disease prevention measures to be announced very shortly,” Dr Brash said.


Anyone see anything in there about getting the government out of health rather than trying to shore up the state monolith?

Ugh!

Linz

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Post 3

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 8:54pmSanction this postReply
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Couldn't have said it better myself, Lindsay, and I've been trying to for some months. :-)

Post 4

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 9:07pmSanction this postReply
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I should add that e-mails from one of Brash's advisers explicitly urging him to "buy his way to power" have just been leaked to the media. Seems Don took the advice. He certainly hasn't taken the advice in *my* e-mails to him! Nor has he shown any sign of learning anything from what he himself called my "headbutting" of him. :-)

Linz

Post 5

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 9:26pmSanction this postReply
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Linz wrote,

He certainly hasn't taken the advice in *my* e-mails to him!
 
You mean the ones where you told him to "fellate his way to power?"

Sounds like a hilarious scandal erupting in NZ-land.


Post 6

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 9:48pmSanction this postReply
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While I'll be casting my vote for the Libz, I sincerely hope the majority of the 99.9% that don't vote like me, vote for National. Their small efforts at liberalisation may not add up to much but their victory will at least remove that insufferable, grasping and increasingly dangerous bitch, Clark, and her bunch of eunuchs from power.

I for one will be celebrating *that* small mercy. In fact, I'll be revelling in a very unseemly gloat, & I don't care who witnesses it.

Ross

Post 7

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 10:28pmSanction this postReply
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"He certainly hasn't taken the advice in *my* e-mails to him!"

I'm happy to 'leak' them. Indeed, I know the very blog on which to do so. :-)

Post 8

Monday, September 5, 2005 - 11:22pmSanction this postReply
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Hahaha! You wish! I just looked at one in my Sent folder. It said:


Oy! Weasel words!! Why should taxpayers be *forced* to pay for *anyone's* pregnancies, self-employed or not?!

Bloody socialists!!

Same old same old after all. How disappointing.


I guess that was pretty typical. :-)


Post 9

Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - 12:05amSanction this postReply
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I'll vote Libertarianz too, if I manage to negotiate downloading the voting forms by remembering my address at the last election!

Regarding Don Brash: I get the feeling that his deeper convictions (as against his carefully developed political veil) are relatively libertarian. I will judge him by his actions once in power, and to the extent he moves the country towards or away from freedom. I think he is running on a false agenda in order to make himself electable. Typical political stuff. I won't lose any sleep over that, wouldn't expect any more or less from major parties that live and breathe the need for power. At least in his case (I hope) he is using deceipt to effect the right type of change.

Of COURSE he is not going to act like a Libertarianz Prime Minister, either before or after the election. If he wanted to be an activist for ideas, he'd join them, not National. He needs Libertarianz to create the groundswell of philosophical change. He owes them big time, and all the thanks you could ask for would be for him to push through any freedom-affirming measure that the dirty masses have come to find acceptable (again, thanks Libz and freedom activists).

I think Brash is a pragmatic but thoughtful man who understands classical liberalism. I say, all strength to him, I will be hoping that he finally manages to "ditch the bitch", and that the post election environment is sufficiently unsullied by filthy coalitions with the likes of Winston First to enable him to set the agenda. I hope taxes are reduced, the legal burden on businesses is relaxed, that government departments are killed off, etc, etc, and believe that he is the best hope of that happening in the next decade. If it does happen, many lives in this generation will be for the better. Fortunately, NZ politics (at big party level) is relatively free of the religious moralistic right and so social freedoms won (eg prostitution) over the last few years seem unlikely to be reversed.

Once he gets into power, let's see what he does, be brutal on him when he acts against freedom, and mightily supportive when he acts courageously to increase it. He'll need both.

David


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Post 10

Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - 12:31amSanction this postReply
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Don't forget this is the same Don Brash who spoke at SOLOC 2, spoke at the FreeRad's 10th birthday bash & spoke of his belief in individual freedom in an extensive FreeRad interview around the time of becoming leader. To see him backsliding as far as he has is extremely dismaying. Yes, his inner convictions probably remain the same—so how can he do what he's now doing, day after day? He said to me once he hadn't come into politics to be "same-old same-old." Yet that's what he now is. If he wins & does anything decent, it'll be discredited because he lied about about it. We libertarians—& especially Objectivist libertarians–must get used to the idea that we are never going to achieve our vision by deceit.

Linz

Post 11

Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - 6:23pmSanction this postReply
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I see that Peters, Mr Pragmatism himself, has decided to make no decision as to which side of the house he'll cosy up to. In effect, he's made a continuation of the Labour-Green "Axis of Stupidity" & another 3 years of that mangy-minged megalomaniac Clark, more likely.

It's also possible he just put the final nail in his own coffin. A lot more NZF voters may return to the Nats in an effort to force some certainty of outcome. Those who sit on fences often get a sore ass. This time it may be more like a good reaming.

What a thick-shit Peters is. Let's just ramp up the minimum wage. That'll fix things. As if productivity could be enhanced by a forced transfer of income from the capital side to the consumption side. Wastrel. More Muldoon in him than people think.

Ross

Post 12

Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - 6:42pmSanction this postReply
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Where the fuck is New Zealand anyways?  LOL, I keed, I keed.  It's half a world away from me, yet philosophically it is right next door.  I have been keeping up with this while at the same time reading more about the fight you are waging over there.  From what I grasp so far, it seems that you at least have the attention of the populous ear more than we do here in the states.  Keep it up and stay hard!

Post 13

Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - 4:28pmSanction this postReply
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Is this  "virulent critic of Don Brash" Mr Perigo from side on?
 
http://publicaddress.net/default,2498.sm#post2498 
 
Hayden


Post 14

Friday, September 9, 2005 - 2:13pmSanction this postReply
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Of National & the Health portfolio, as an example of Don Brash's "capitulation to marshmallow middleroaders," my article said...

That's nothing I predicted this all way back in 2003 ;-)

http://solohq.com/Articles/Bachler/The_New_Con.shtml


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