I do not stand for John Key’s defeatist talk

I’ve heard it all before. In the 1980s, the New Zealand Government promised that, with the introduction of Goods and Services’ Tax (GST), people would be better off, because it would mean more money in our pockets.    With the proposal to hike GST to 15 per cent under the current government, Prime Minister John […]

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Learned misbehaviours

Preparing for one of my Swedish speeches, I came across this, which I delivered in India in December 2008: If you ever get to read Michael Lewis’s writings about the US financial industry, you’ll learn that a lot of people within there do not know what they are doing or why they are doing it. […]

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Convention holds us back, but Wellington wants to move forward

We all expected someone to go on about ‘experience’ sooner or later when it came to my mayoral campaign. Mr Bertrand Brown, I thank you for raising it in the comments at the Stuff website. And this is a genuine thanks, not one of those BS ‘with respect’ ones, as you signal that it’s time […]

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As the 2010s dawn, there’s a vacuum on the internet

Rick Klau’s action today in restoring Vincent’s Social Media Consortium blog got me putting things into perspective.    We know sites like Blogger and Vox are free, but what happens when they fail?    Vox, the Six Apart blogging service, had been where I had put my personal posts—as well as a bunch of private […]

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A new website and Facebook fan page for my mayoral campaign

Four years ago, I asked readers of the Beyond Branding Blog if they wanted to see me blog at my own space. The responses were all positive, and this blog was born.    Earlier tonight, after being egged on by two friends, I posed the question on Twitter and Facebook: should there be a ‘Jack […]

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The 2010 mayoral election is about job creation and transparency

The Fairfax Press has been talking about how Wellingtonians are expected to bail out some loss-makers, such as the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. And that the decision to do this has been made behind closed doors. The city’s debt is over $200 million—we were looking at very similar numbers at the time of the 2007 local […]

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