The Donghua Liu saga has just got even more dangerous for the John "drop the insinuation then duck" Key as The Herald is forced to publish an altered statement from Mr Liu that changes much of his original statement.
It now appears that Mr Liu is claiming to have donated $2000.00 to the Hawkes Bay Rowing Club Branch of the NZ Labour Party and $60,000+ to The Yangzte Concrete Factory Branch of the NZ Labour Party to give the "honorable members a luxury cruise as a reward for their hard work making concrete for honorable building projects."
The claim that he purchased a bottle or bottles of wine at a Labour Party Auction on June 3 2007 has also been shot down in flames as searchers have now identified the auction being one run by The Midland's Hawkes Bay Wine Charity at which no wine was sold at the inflated price Mr Liu claims to have bid. The Herald's new story now has Rick Barker receiving the bottle of wine from Mrs Liu rather than, as was originally alleged "giving it to her." The Herald is certainly back tracking all over the place on this story.
I look forward to the front Page apology to David Cunliffe, the NZ Labour Party and the long suffering NZ public who have had to put up with irresponsible reporting from the paper for far too long.
Left, Rick Barker receiving a bottle of wine from Donghua Liu's (top right) partner Juan Zhang. Photo / Supplied, NZ Herald
The questions need to be asked loudly, clearly and many, many times to John "Scuttle and Run" Key, Cameron Slater, Jami-Lee Ross and others close to Maurice Williamson and Donghua Liu "Who wrote the original statement for Mr Liu and who fed it to Key and Jared Savage?" and "Did Mr Liu really understand what he was signing because, as Mr Williamson claims Mr Liu speaks and reads minimal English?"
POST SCRIPT: 1) The Fairfax stable is now asking questions about the Herald's reporting and the Key involvement in the Donghua Liu situation. About time the blow torch was applied to the links between The Herald and the Ninth Floor of the Beehive.
2) Radio New Zealand Morning Report Political journalist declares that the Liu story doesn't stack up (27.6.14).
3) NZ Herald attempts to back off from its inept reporting by lampooning itself in an editorial claiming to be a crusading, reputable news-sheet and reducing the alleged "donations" from Liu to $38,000 in a series of anonymous donations over several years to different un-named MPs.
On Sunday the Buddhist Temple in Botany celebrated Buddha's birthday with a multi-cultural event. The local politicians were out and about as guests of the Monastery.
Here's what happened when the local Labour Candidate, Tofik Mamedov, introduced himself to the National candidate, Jami-Lee Ross and offered to wish him well in the campaign.
Get me out of here. I'm really, really uncomfortable around working candidates, especially the Labour ones.
This article is highly pertinent when read against the neo-liberal employment law reforms being propounded by the National-Act government's Simon Bridges and his side-kick Jami Lea Ross. It demonstrates the fallacies that their anti-Union, anti-worker logic is based on.
Flexicurity
– Remember the flexicurity model that was launched by the European
Commission in the mid 2000’s? Claiming that there existed such a thing
as a ‘golden triangle of flexicurity’ (see illustration below), the
Commission urged member states and trade unions to give up on job
protection in exchange for adequate unemployment benefits and active
labour market policies.
The inspiration for this was clearly found
in Denmark with the country being hailed as the perfect illustration of
how a flexible labour market with low restrictions on employers to fire
workers could still offer high security of employment.
Source: OECD Employment Outlook 2004
In
this context, the latest OECD Employment Outlook from the summer of
2013 is extremely interesting. In this publication, the OECD thoroughly
reviewed its database on job protection indicators. In particular, job
protection arrangements resulting from collective bargaining practice
and case law have now been included more systematically than was the
case before. This implies that these new OECD indicators should provide
an improved picture of reality, in particular when weak job protection
in labour law is corrected by collective bargaining agreements and/or
case law imposing additional and more stringent job protection.
Flexicurity, what flexicurity?
This
review of the OECD database leads to surprising conclusions, in
particular regarding the system of flexicurity in Denmark. The graph
below shows the newly estimated employment protection indicators for
regular (open ended) contracts, thereby also adding job protection in
case of collective dismissals. The value of the employment protection
legislation (EPL) indicator in the graph is obtained by applying weights
to these two sub indicators, with regular contract protection counting
for 70%, and collective dismissal protection for 30%. Indicator values
close to zero indicate a very low level of job protection, whereas
scores going up to an indicator value of 5 or 6 point to employers
experiencing extreme difficulties in firing workers.
Protection of regular workers against individual and collective dismissals, 2013
The
graph shows that Denmark does not have a labour market that is
particularly flexible. With an indicator value of 2.3, the level of job
protection in Denmark is not below but exactly at the OECD average. It
can also be seen that regular contracts and collective dismissals in
Denmark are protected at a level that is similar to Germany, Spain and
Greece. Also, Danish job protection is not very much below the levels of
job protection registered in France and Italy. Meanwhile, the gap in
job protection between Denmark and the flexible Anglosaxon labour
markets is significant, with the UK and the US at values as low as 1.5
and 1. In practical terms, the 2.3 score for EPL in Denmark translates
into 4 (2) months of advance notification for a white collar (blue
collar) worker having 4 years of tenure in the job, with additional
notification periods, procedures and delays in case it concerns a
collective dismissal.
Delving deeper into the history of the
statistics allows us to further back up the conclusion that the OECD has
been widely off the mark on this all these years. In the final graph we
see the values for the sub-indicators on job protection of regular
contracts for the year 2004 as estimated by the OECD back in 2004,
(source: the OECD 2004 Employment Outlook). These are then compared
with the EPL values for the same year 2004 which are now to be found in
today’s 2013 OECD database. From this comparison, it is clear what has
happened. Back in 2004 the OECD (the blue bars in the graph) estimated
that regular jobs in Denmark were poorly protected with an indicator
value of just 1.5. Based on the estimates done in 2004, Denmark could
indeed be characterised as having a flexible labour market, with the
degree of job protection as low as in the UK and Ireland and
substantially below continental countries such Germany or France. (Look at the poor protection NZ has for individual regular jobs compared to Denmark on which this article is based. Note there are no protections for collective employment protections recorded for NZ either.)
Now
look at the red bars, registering the current OECD estimate from 2013
of the level of regular job protection back in 2004. This turns the
picture completely around. For Denmark, the new estimate for 2004 now
comes out substantially higher, at a value of 2.1. This actually means
that, in contrast to the estimates from the earlier database, Danish
workers in 2004 were benefiting from a level of job protection that is
twice as high as in the UK and is not far removed from the job
protection levels of France and Germany.
A
similar comparison (not shown here) can be done on the other
sub-indicator, the protection of jobs in case of collective dismissals.
Its conclusion is that, in case of collective dismissals, Danish workers
were as strongly protected as German workers and even more protected
than their French or Italian colleagues.
All
of this actually means that the whole policy of flexicurity, as it has
been promoted all these years by the European Commission, has been based
on a statistical illusion. The argument according to which the success
of labour market performance in Denmark can be put down to the fact that
workers and not their jobs are being protected is simply not correct.
Through its system of collective bargaining, Danish workers are being
offered robust levels of job protection. The true peculiarity and
advantage of the Danish system lies in the fact that Denmark invests
heavily in both passive and active labour market policies. (Note the conclusion... it is certainly damning for New Zealand's employment and productivity statistics.)It does not
lie with employers having the possibility of easy firing.
This attitude is the one we have come to expect from John Key... a total lack of moral responsibility in the selfish quest for aggrandisment.
John Key's cold hearted refusal to recognise the responsibility of the State to compensate the families who lost loved ones in the Pike River disaster and the recent appearance of the Jammy-Lea Ross / Ports of Auckland / Slater-Lusk framed anti-worker, anti-Union bill and the up-coming Simian Bridges created Employment law amendments are a reflection of the attitudes expressed by this pointed cartoon.
Those that drive companies into the ground and then demand and receive a taxpayer funded bail out are those"entitled" to a golden deluge rewarding them for their incompetence while those that work and positively contribute to the economy are to be squeezed and vilified for daring to claim and fight for protection and their rights.
The attitude of Key to the families of Pike River reflects the beliefs of the complaining "Banker" in this cartoon.
Massey's Cossacks used to attack strking workers in 1913... resurrected by Botany MP, Jami-Lee Ross.
The close won defeat of the Ports of Auckland inspired anti-worker bill, sponsored by the often unseen Botany MP, Jami-Lee Ross, should be seen as a brief flicker of sanity in a Parliament that has been held in a time warp that alternates between the mid nineteenth century and the McCarthyite madness of the 1950s ever since the election of the Key-Joyce dominated National government. (if, as the Bellman predicts, the Collins faction gains ascendency watch out for the National Party to regress further into hard-line conservatism).
Jami-Lee’s bill was a combination of Nineteenth century draconian worker exploitation and anti-Union rhetoric of the McCarthyite “50s and the Muldoon “80s which, in a more rational and realistic parliament, been laughed out of the debating chamber as well as being heartedly ridiculed by critical media analysis with Jami-Lee being publicly pilloried for being the privileged chump he so capably parades around the House.
The bill capably demonstrated that Jami-Lee is no more that a shallow, inexperienced, privileged and easily manipulated MP who is at the beck and call of those with anti-worker political and management agendas and who should not have been rewarded with the “dignity” of having his bill treated as a serious and thoughtfully drafted piece of legislation.
Empty rhetoric from the Nats to disguise their true agenda
The National Business Review reported that Jami-Lee had been advised on the wording and purpose of his bill by the management of the Ports of Auckland whose anti-employment contract and anti-worker agendas demanded the strike breaking provisions written into the bill. Rumour also had it that the bill had been further worked over by the young Nats who reef fish around the Slater-Lusk blog-site group. Given that the NBR report and the rumoured involvement of the Slater-Lusk group is true then one must seriously question the ability of Jami-Lee to be seen as an MP who genuinely has the needs of concerns of his constituents at heart. Instead one must see him as being the easily manipulated tool of those whose self interests over-ride the common good.
Unfortunately for NZ workers the National-Act government have an equally obnoxious piece of anti-worker, anti-union legislation waiting in the wings- the Simon Bridges (he of the “If I shout and bluster loud enough I’m telling the truth” persuasion) sponsored “Employment Relations Amendment Bill” which is designed to strip workers of fundamental work place rights. On the other hand, here is what the Labour MPs have been saying about the Ross-Bridges bills.
The Bridges’ Bill probably explains why the National-Act caucus voted en-bloc for the Jami-Lee bill as, if they did vote it down, it would have made Simon Bridges look powerless and ineffective and expose the flaws in his Employment Relations Amendment Bill.
