Election Special: How John Key and National will create 170,000 new jobs

A New Zealand Gerald Exclusive

Leaked government documents reveal how National plans to allay doubts over their ability to create 170,000 jobs over the next four years. National will implement an entirely new form of job creation scheme, the focus of which will be the nationwide production and delivery of menhirs. In the leaked documents Bill English recommends that John Key tell the nation's jobless: "Me think you able sell heap big heap menhirs plenty quick."

EMA: “New Zealand can be minor-free by 2050”

by Nicolas Fouquet, New Zealand Gerald’s chief political commentator. Additional distorting by Augustus Finknottle.

The embattled Employers and Manufacturers Association looks set to cause further controversy this week after the leaking of an EMA government briefing document entitled Make Money, not Babies.

The 134-page report outlines radical plans to encourage young New Zealand women to undergo “productivity-realignment surgery” upon leaving school, so as to “maximise their workplace performance” and “outsource the cost-inefficient process of bearing and rearing children”.

The proposals call for an unprecedented raft of industry and government subsidies for women who sign up to the scheme, which is to be called “Babysaver”. These include free tertiary tuition, guaranteed employment and/or deployment on UN peacekeeping missions, and generous grants towards a first home.

According to the document, “The inefficiency of menstruating women in the workforce, the tremendous resources wasted on educating minors, and the cumulative effects of brain drain” mean that the “overall benefit-cost ratio for each child born in New Zealand is 0.4 at best”.

To turn this situation around, the government should invest those resources in attracting “the best talent from around the globe” by recruiting young people “raised and educated in other countries”. Female new arrivals to New Zealand would be given free productivity-realignment surgery as part of a revamped “Welcome Package” which would also feature fast-tracked citizenship and lifetime EMA membership.

The resulting savings on “obstetric and paediatric healthcare, child and youth services, kindergartens and schools” would be used to fund attractive salary packages for migrants, yielding a “substantially superior overall return on taxpayer investment”.

If the government adopts all the recommendations contained in Make Money, not Babies, the EMA is confident that New Zealand will be “minor-free by 2050” and one of the world’s best-performing economies.

The leaked document is likely to provoke further anger against the EMA in a week that has seen demonstrators hurl (unused) tampons at its Auckland office in protest against the inflammatory remarks made by the association’s CEO, Alasdair Thompson, last Thursday. Thompson, who is also the country’s most famous after-dinner speaker, told a talkback radio host that women were less productive in the workforce because of their periods and child-bearing tendencies.

While Green Party co-leader and Australian Russel Norman criticized the EMA’s proposals as being “shithouse”, the Prime Minister’s office described the document as “not without merit”.

Meanwhile, Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly confirmed Sunday that she had been confronted by Thompson in 2009 about her relationship with John Key, in Washington, DC.

At a dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s restaurant – about which Thompson reportedly quipped: “The name alone is a mouthful” – Thompson approached Kelly and allegedly made lewd comments about the relationship she had with Key, who married his wife Bronagh when he and the First Lady were both teenagers.

When asked to comment on the allegations the Prime Minister’s office described them as “not not without merit”.

According to the New Zealand Herald’s source, who was present at the dinner, “[Thompson] asked [Kelly] what the relationship was between her and John Key. There was sexual innuendo. Then he said he asked John Key, the last time he saw him, [if] he [Key] fancied Helen.”

The source said Kelly was visibly upset by the comments and told Thompson: “That’s disgusting.”

As Kelly walked away, Thompson allegedly shouted: “It’s a joke. You’re beautiful, you know.” According to the Herald, Kelly has confirmed the account. She would not comment further on the incident.

The EMA did comment on Thompson’s latest gaffe, dismissing it as a bit of harmless fun. In an unprecedented move, Thompson will today be asked to explain himself to the board without the aid of sexist jokes and is no longer allowed to speak to female members of the media.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for Thompson: he is now more in demand than ever as an after-dinner speaker and is about to embark on a 6-month nationwide tour of working men’s clubs.

It's a kind of magic: Budget 2011

Bill English has always considered himself to be the mutt’s nuts, and with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp, it must be conceded that there is something top-doggish about his appearance. But the reality is very different. As he staccato barked his way through his third budget yesterday, he resembled nothing so much as a career con man whose latest parole had been granted only on the condition that he learn how to read.

A “remedial English” was what was being dangled in front of us yesterday, a carrot attached to a stick attached to a spin-doctored John Key. Now remedial English lessons are of course pitched at the lowest common denominator. They rely heavily on stories – students are read stories, they read stories and they write stories. Kids are forever being told to use their imagination, and the stories judged to be the best by teachers are invariably those that are the most imaginative. The very imaginative story Bill English told us yesterday starred the nameless wizards at the Treasury, a sort of Hogwarts for adults, who have conjured up the following happy ending:

And lo, GDP growth will reach 4 per cent in the coming year, followed by 3 per cent and 2.7 per cent rises. No less than 170,000 new jobs will be created in the next four years. In 2015 the country will be back in surplus and everyone will live happily ever after. 

It sounds rather like the Book of Revelation in reverse: lots of suspiciously exact figures and a promise of Heaven, rather than Hell, on Earth. This week Stephen Hawking, long hailed as the greatest mind on the planet, was quoted as saying:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Unfortunately, we live in a universe in which some components of the human brain stop working but do not stop overall brain function. The technical names for these components are “common sense”, “higher reasoning” and “grip on reality”. Bill English’s budget is an assault on all of these. The Government is manufacturing a positive ending in the same way reality TV producers do. “It’s a kind of magic,” National is singing through Auto-Tune in our karaoke parliament, “There can be only one.”

John Key: Making Poor People History

Isn't John Key the best prime minister ever? He is so cool that my favourite magazine M2 has made him Man of the Year! And thanks to John I now understand poverty and how to fix it. It turns out than poor people are only poor because they make poor choices. And most poor people were born into poor families which means that poverty is genetic like Down syndrome. New Zealand scientists are trying to isolate the poverty gene and when they do there will be no more poor people (who are usually brown) and only rich people (who are usually white). Won't that be great?

Make sure you VOTE JOHN in 2011!