The Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club

On the Sunday Newspaper Brunch Club today at 11am, Sky Digital 65, with the best political news team on television, Mat McCarten Herald on Sunday columnist, Bomber from Alt, Ben Thomas from the NBR and the last man to be convicted of sedition in NZ, blogger Tim Selwyn.

News that caught my eye –
1: Two months out from hurricane season, more than 40 000 families are still in emergency trailer homes.

2: Petra on Sunrise – when will the sunset on sunrise and my solution for them to win the ratings battle, Wallace vs the MPs on TVNZ 7, he did a good job, it was a good show, it’s just the MPs are surprisingly ruder than anyone guessed.

3: Craccum stolen by Chinese students angry that Falun Gong has an advert in Craccum, who would have expected censorship through theft by the largest dictatorship on the planet? Expectations are that it could happen again tomorrow. It is possible to discuss immigration concerns in this country without the words xenophobe and racist being thrown around, but Peter Brownshirt isn’t the one to lead the debate is he? How can NZ First be credible to crow about Asian immigration while signing a free trade deal that will create enforced migration from China? Should we be signing trade deals with the largest dictatorship on the planet?

4: SFO powers slashed, with finance companies falling over due to deals so complex that experts and the people signing the deals have no idea how they work, do the police really have the financial forensics required to investigate complex deals like this? With the swallowing of the SFO by the Police, there was no way the Police could gain the right to compel answers like the SFO did, and their focus seems to be much more gang and organized crime related suggesting white collar crime won’t be the focus at all, disbanding the SFO still seems like a really bad idea, the Police have trouble keeping up with their core functions like answering 111 calls within an hour and take 4 years to investigate one of their own, Rob Pope, so asking them to tackle serious white collar fraud seems to be a crime too far.

5: US B1 bomber crahes and explodes in Qatar – they cost $283 Billion each

6: Not so moderate now – Williamson and Smith admit they don’t believe in Global warming and here is John Key doing so well in the polls by recasting National as moderate to appeal to all those female voters they didn’t win last time, the question is, with Roger Douglas in the mix, can John Key restrain the radical right? He has shown in his drive for moderation that he had no problems cutting lose any connection to the religious right, but could John Key really hold back Roger Douglas, a man who would have spent every day since being kicked out of power, rocking in a dark room asking over and over again, “Where did it go wrong, where did it go wrong, where did it go wrong” – and concluding that he didn‘t go far enough and if one day he gets the chance to rectify it, he would. Last time it was the fish n chips club, will it be the Otto Woo and 42below club he starts this time to start making radical changes within a National-Act party?

STORY 1 – Firefighter dies, seven seriously injured, in deadly blaze – sst
A fireman died and seven others were seriously injured after they were caught up in a huge explosion and blaze at a dairy coolstore in Tamahere on the south-east outskirts of Hamilton.
A very sad story for all of us and dreadful for the families of the firefighters involved - not much to say on this story other than how proud you feel when you hear how many people rushed in right afterwards to help.

STORY 2 – STORY 2 – Fairer sex out in the cold - hos
Some of New Zealand's most powerful businesswomen have called for companies to improve diversity on their boards after a blighting report from the Human Rights Commission showed a dearth of female directors. There are only 45 female directors in the stock market's top 100 companies and they represent just 8.65 per cent of 624 board directorships.
Retirement Commissioner Diane Crossan goes onto say that the private sector take a “less-professional route” in selecting who goes on boards, and effectively claims it’ an old boys network. If NZ doesn’t come up with effective pro-family policies that help women continue their careers we will forever be reliant on Immigration to prop up our population base.

STORY 3 – The new wealth divide - sst
WORK HARD, get a good qualification, get a good job, get ahead. Right? Not necessarily. The rules for success, learned at your mother and father's knee, have been thrown out the window. In the space of just five short years, a tsunami of wealth has swept across New Zealand, engulfing the fortunate in riches and leaving others stranded in its wake. New figures show in just five years between 2001 and 2006 net household wealth per capita doubled yes, doubled. That means a household's assets, such as property and investments, less liabilities such as debt.
Well, well, well, the haves get more the have nots get less, landowning NZers who have profited from massive windfalls with no capital gain tax whatsoever have helped create a property speculation bubble about to burst by 30%, we asked Cullen this week if he should have put a capital gains tax in place to prevent this, he said it wasn’t part of his philosophy and there just weren’t the numbers to pass an idea like that, so is it a case of while the poor hurt it isn’t politically expedient, but if the middle classes start getting squeezed we can’t move fast enough? Does the Lombard collapse with their mainly NZ property portfolio suggest very hard times for the have nots? When will we see a massive jump in mortgagee sales?

STORY 4 – Mugabe defiant as poll battle goes to court - sst
Zimbabwe's main opposition party is going to court to force the release of results from the presidential poll one week ago and President Robert Mugabe signalled he planned to fight to extend his 28-year rule.
To everyone’s horror he’s not standing down – what can be done now? China and South Africa are the main benefactors to his regime, does the pressure have to go on them?

STORY 5 – Boisterous boys need more male teachers - hos
Men involved in early childhood education are lobbying for more "boy-friendly" childcare. The 167 men among more than 15,000 preschool teachers have formed the newly incorporated EC Men NZ, which aims to boost their representation to 10 per cent within a decade.
‘Feminization of school education’ – did anyone else find those comments from a private boys school slightly self interested? Didn’t once hear about the accepted history of bullying in all boy schools, the fagging that must ceremoniously be followed up and that such humiliation is ‘part of being a man’ – I think the ‘masculinization’ of education has a hell of a lit more to answer for

FINAL WORD – Does anyone else notice how Paul Henry is starting to use Bill O’Reilly tactics by reading out all the sycophantic emails with all the harsh ones to make him look ‘fair and balanced’ in the no spin zone? Dr Michael Cullen on Let’s be Frank replays at 10pm tonight, and Oliver interviews Auckland Mayor John Banks on Tuesday 8.30pm – oh and we finally play my interview with the Venezuelan Ambassador on Green Core, this Wednesday 8pm