Happy New Year

Best wishes for 2010 to everyone.

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Fisiani

Happy New Year Welcome to 2010 and the joy of having a National led government saving the country.
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January 1, 2010 12:35am
starboard

…wake me up when they stop pandering to maori and actually start running the country for all New Zealanders rather than creating separatism…its not what we voted for Key and it will be your downfall come 2011.
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January 1, 2010 4:44am
cha

Have a great 2010 all, even you starbored, ya miserable sack of bones!.
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January 1, 2010 5:39am
Grant Michael McKenna

It is what I voted for, and what the majority of New Zealand voted for. ACT voters voted for something different, good on them- but I’m not an ACT voter. I am a taxpayer, and am now off to work [as a caregiver to autistic adults] because a metric shitload of beneficiaries depend on me.
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January 1, 2010 5:58am
starboard

and what the majority of New Zealand voted for

..bullshit..your living in fairy land if you believe that.
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January 1, 2010 7:15am
Manolo

“It is what I voted for, and what the majority of New Zealand voted for.”

You’re a man with low expectations, since you voted for the continuation of the failed polices of the last nine years.

You voted for keeping the shambles of the bloated welfare state, which encourages bludgers. You voted for higher taxes, which do nothing for the productive sectors of society. You voted for favouritism along racial lines, where racists are given special treatment. You voted for weak or non-existent political leadership, confined to smiling, making inane remarks, and passing the buck to incompetent ministers.

Your expectations are very low indeed.
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January 1, 2010 7:32am
Countess

Higher taxes ?
Dont you mean broken promises of lower taxes.

And tell Ireland about cutting taxes for the productive sectors , they have the lowest business tax rate in Europe.
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January 1, 2010 7:51am
Pete George

Best wishes to everyone, hoping we can all have a more positive and more productive year.
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January 1, 2010 8:34am
TripeWryter

Happy new year – happy new decade will have to wait another year :-}

The first of 20 orpington eggs in the incubator hatched early this morning. Two more are showing signs of following.

The children are feeling very protective.

Various adults nursing hangovers.
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January 1, 2010 8:40am
Inventory2

Happy New Year to you too DPF, and thanks again for the effort you put in to providing us with a forum to share our respective worldviews. May 2010 be a successful year for you and those close to you.
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January 1, 2010 8:48am
reid

“they have the lowest business tax rate in Europe”

Yes and it built them into the Celtic Tiger during 1995-2000. Shame that Clark didn’t listen to one of the architects who came to speak to her about it in 2001. If she had, we’d be much better off now.

And if you think their current issues are related to what they did, think again. Their problem was high inflation due to rapid growth which affected property and raised household debt. So when things crashed in 2007, they were very poorly positioned to ride it out.

Their engine room was fine, their throttle-control wasn’t. Oh but for the same problem here.

And it’s easy, according to that architect.

Focus on selected industries: they chose IT and Bio-informatics (number-crunching for genetic research). The latter requires 4-5 IT specialists for every scientists so they chose synergistically.

Build your universities around that focus.

Create low-tax zones in selected areas and encourage multi-nationals to set-up shop. They chose high-unemployment regions. (That was probably the bit Clark didn’t like: gasp – low taxes for multinationals!?$#@).

That’s it, in a nutshell. That strategy made Ireland the world’s top software exporter in 2000 – they were bigger than the US.

Sure, Ireland has the EU on its door-step. That doesn’t mean that same formula won’t work here.

One thought for a possible industry. AGW.

Sure, it’s scientific bollocks and read this excellent article from today’s GD thread – thanks Rod, great link). But who cares? It’s a political firestorm and its driven by politics and science depends on it for funding so as the article says, they’re not going to try and solve it because that cuts off the golden goose.

And the politicians show no signs of it going away, quite the opposite.

It’s a perfect industry for us. We have major economic risk areas that could be mitigated by adopting the Irish strategy. One of those is our predominance on ag and another is the air-miles issue.

These incentivise us to get heavily into genetics to control animal emissions and clean transportation as well as expand our traditional ag research. In addition there is very high demand for accurate measurement systems particularly in areas like forestry – how do you accurately measure the extent of carbon sinks in a forest for example.

It’s a perfect industry for us in which to replicate the Irish strategy because the knowledge and tools we develop are not only highly exportable and have huge potential global demand, it also mitigates those risk areas and as a side benefit, retains our critical clean-green branding, if we were to become one of the world’s top knowledge and resource centres in the spooky and scary world of the AGW global fantasy.

Not only that, but by orienting our universities toward that all the lefties in them would be so pleased they’d probably all start voting National just after they stopped gaily dancing the maypole and signing their folk songs as I believe they often do.

If we did it right multinational corporations in all sorts of industries would flock here because they all want to take advantage of this new and emerging money-maker. By “doing it right,” one of things I mean is that we’d need to seriously expand from our current ag focus into really hard sophisticated and expensive science in genetics and transportation. The Greens and others who object to GE need to be roughly shoved aside – it’s about saving the planet, people. We need heavy investment in hard engineering like hydrogen fuel cells etc.

You get the picture. Why not? It’s definitely doable by us, provided there’s a strong and directed political will and it’s definitely a global opportunity.
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January 1, 2010 9:06am
Scorpio

Happy New Year one and all. Especially DPF.
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January 1, 2010 9:12am
fredinthegrass

Happy New Year everyone.
Thanks DPF for continuing to Foment Happy Mischief,
and allowing us all to express ourselves – the good the bad and the ugly.

We sent aloft several “lanterns” – felt guilty on hearing the mayhem we might have caused,
then realised in the sparsely populated rural area we lived in the only alarm we could cause
was to some farmer who had wandered outside to “see a man about a dog” and, having enjoyed
a few ales, ran inside to his beloved saying he had just seen a UFO. All he got in reply was
“sit down ya silly old fool and eat ya gruel”!
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January 1, 2010 10:26am
gravedodger

A happy and rewarding New Year to you DPF and thanks again for just being here.
Kind regards Murray
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January 1, 2010 2:41pm
lofty

A happy & prosperous new year to all, (except that wanker billyborker), and thanks to you DPF for the blog.
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January 1, 2010 7:17pm

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