#gordoncampbell — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #gordoncampbell, aggregated by home.social.
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"That said, there would also be some wealthy winners from any tax reforms based on an LVT. The researcher/academic Dr Harpreet Singh has recently argued that some of Opportunity’s donors would see their wealth remain relatively untouched by any directional shift in the tax burden based on an LVT."
#GordonCampbell, 2026
https://werewolf.co.nz/2026/08/gordon-campbell-on-opportunitys-turn-in-the-political-spotlight/
Now this is a much stronger argument, although as Campbell admits a few paragraphs back ...
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"An LVT levied on urban land owned by landlords and property speculators would surely be passed on to tenants in the form of rent increases."
#GordonCampbell, 2026
https://werewolf.co.nz/2026/08/gordon-campbell-on-opportunitys-turn-in-the-political-spotlight/
Apparently this is a "centre-left" arguments against Opportunity policy. Inconveniently for Campbell, this is *exactly* the argument the NatACTs raised against Robertson's policy of removing tax deductibility from mortgage interest;
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On Tom’s Midnight Garden By Philippa Pearce https://www.allforgardening.com/1918726/on-toms-midnight-garden-by-philippa-pearce/ #art #books #ClassicChildren'sBooks #garden #GordonCampbell #Newsworthy #Scoop #TopScoops #YANovel
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"People have also lost the right to cast a special vote for their local MP in the electorate where they normally reside, should they happen on election day to be out of their home electorate – due to being, say, a student temporarily living in another city, or being on holiday, or travelling on business."
#GordonCampbell, 2026
https://werewolf.co.nz/2026/07/gordon-campbell-on-the-centre-rights-attempt-to-steal-the-election/
WTSF?!
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Coda:
"... unless the citizens assembly concept is endowed with veto powers over the actions of the Executive and/or of elected local councils – and that’s unlikely – it would amount to little more than am exhausting PR exercise, given that there would not be a meaningful devolution of power."
#GordonCampbell, 2026
https://werewolf.co.nz/2026/07/gordon-campbell-on-nationals-rejection-of-opportunity/
True. To be more than performative, Parliaments must convert citizens' recommendations into legislation they're obliged to pass.
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"Given the vast, oceanic depths of Luxon’s unpopularity, traditional National Party voters who can’t stand Winston Peters or David Seymour have been looking at Opportunity. Perhaps they’re seeing a younger version of themselves, one that’s more representative of the conservative values that National used to promote, before it surrendered to the ideologues of the free market."
#GordonCampbell, 2026
https://werewolf.co.nz/2026/07/gordon-campbell-on-nationals-rejection-of-opportunity/
Eh? Campbell is losing his touch.
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"On publication in 2008, The Hunger Games was accused of being a rip-off of the Japanese action movie Battle Royale, which also features a televised fight to the death among teenage schoolkids . Well, so did the 1987 Schwarzenegger science fiction movie The Running Man, and the 2001 film Section 7."
#GordonCampbell, 2026
https://werewolf.co.nz/2026/07/gordon-campbell-on-the-hunger-games-by-suzanne-collins/
Really? The Running Man film was based on a novel published in 1982, 17 years before the novel the Battle Royale film was based on. So ...
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"Hopefully someone – maybe Winston Peters? – will raise this issue with Modi when he visits here. Why is India expecting New Zealand firms to invest in India when for the best part of a decade, India’s own corporates have lacked the confidence to invest in their own country? Why is there such a reluctance?"
#GordonCampbell, May, 2026
https://werewolf.co.nz/2026/05/gordon-campbell-on-labours-vanishing-act/
Imagine Dogwhistle Peters still took politics that seriously. That Winston is long gone, displaced by a sad self-parody.
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𝗧𝗕𝗥 𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲: 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘀 -
A real grab-bag of titles this month. And yes, I am far behind on my Stephen King and SG Jones reading!
#books #literature #bookreviews #bookworm #tbrpile #tbrlist #ndstevenson #stephenking #holly #stephengrahamjones #amyking #olivialaing #albertomanguel #gordoncampbell #elodiedurand #mattdinniman
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"Time and again though, our Pacific neighbours have told New Zealand that the imminent threat they face is from climate change, not from China. If Willis belonged to a serious government, she would be more inclined to be “sending billions of dollars offshore” to mitigate the effects of climate change, rather than in prepping for war with our main trading partner."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
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"There have been other benefits for Portugal from de-criminalisation. Thanks largely to officially supported needle swaps, confirmed HIV cases fell from 1,287 in 2001 to just 16 in 2019."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2511/S00036/on-why-we-should-de-criminalise-personal-drug-use.htm
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"For gangs, the Misuse of Drugs Act (1975) has been one of the best recruiting tools they’ve ever had. Criminalisation of a raft of illicit drugs not only provides them with a wildly lucrative black market.
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Once users are prosecuted and get sent to jail, gangs offer not only a vital form of self-preservation on the inside, but are (often) the only willing employer waiting on the outside."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2511/S00036/on-why-we-should-de-criminalise-personal-drug-use.htm
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"It probably goes without saying that Luxon’s asset sales plan is a throwback to the 1980s, and to the privatisation excesses of the fourth Labour government that continue to cripple our economy ... Talking of which, we sold Air New Zealand and then had to buy it back when the private sector ran it into the ground. Christopher Luxon used to run the same airline. He knows the history of failure behind what he is proposing."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2511/S00026/on-asset-sales-and-targeting-the-homeless.htm
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"The marker dominance of the banking cartel and the supermarket duopoly have been left untouched. Far less attention though, has been given to what has been taken away. Routinely, all three coalition parties rail against Big Government. It is part of their political DNA. In reality however, the centralised power of the corporate state has vastly increased under this government."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
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"So far, the oil proceeds have not led to significant diversification of the Timorese economy, or to much in the way of private sector development. Successive Timor-Leste governments have pinned their hopes on the Greater Sunrise liquefied natural gas field — estimated to have a potential worth of over US$33 billion— as the country’s economic saviour."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
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"... the advocates of a social media ban for kids under 16 appear willing to ignore the privacy implications that the proposal would have *for everyone*. For a glimpse into the void, check out the United Kingdom’s Offcom advice page on the subject, which cheerily makes a case for wholesale privacy intrusions, with a minimum of reliable safety rails."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
The OffCom page Gordon links to is;
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Oh no, I'm wrong. More like 12-14 iRex deals per frigate;
"With luck, the fully kitted out version will cost (not quite) double the basic construction cost, but a conservative estimate would still put the final tab for New Zealand’s two ships at between $6-8 billion dollars."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2510/S00070/on-our-looming-spending-spree-on-japanese-frigates.htm
This tells you everything you need to know about this govt's priorities. It's not cutting spending, and it's certainly not building critical infrastructure.
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"As the influential Diplomat website reports, Japan’s defence budget for fiscal year 2025 stated that the basic construction cost per improved Mogami-class vessel was 105 billion yen, or $NZ 1.194 billion. That basic unit cost to us may well be higher, since we will be paying either Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) in Japan, or the Henderson shipyards in Western Australia to build the ships for us."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2510/S00070/on-our-looming-spending-spree-on-japanese-frigates.htm
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About a week ago, #GordonCampbell threw cold water on the prospect of regime change in 2026;
"National can win with Luxon regardless. This country hasn’t had a genuine one term government since the Labour government of 1957-1960. (If Norman Kirk hadn’t died, his government would probably have been re-elected in 1975.)"
I'm not so sure. In 2019 there was equally good reason to think a one-party majority would never happen under MMP.
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"To recap: tens of thousands of people working in construction and in the public service have lost their jobs. The retail economy has tanked - in Wellington in particular. GDP has shrunk. Although the services sector constitutes about 60% of the New Zealand economy, it has been in ongoing contraction for 19 months in a row. Consumer spending has dried up etc etc."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
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As usual, Gordon hits the nail right on the head;
"... talk of creating a viable under 16 barrier to social media looks more like an abject version of performative politics. It seems to be all about the gesture, in that it offers a way for politicians to claim they care about the kids, even though their economic and welfare policies are often saying the exact opposite."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2510/S00011/on-the-social-media-ban-for-young-kids.htm
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"14,000 babies are about to die of starvation in Gaza, with food sent by the world sitting on the other side of a wall, and once again the British establishment is focused on us. We deny this ‘offence’ and will vehemently defend ourselves.
This is political policing. This is a carnival of distraction. We are not the story. Genocide is..."
Irish rap group Kneecap, quoted by #GordonCampbell 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2505/S00054/on-wealth-taxes-and-capital-flight.htm
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Another excellent column by Gordon Campbell, from a couple of weeks ago, on the crusade against social media use by under-16s.
Campbell looks beyond the obvious privacy risks created by enforcing age limits, to the corporate conservative roots of the policy's Australian variant (particularly Rupert Murdoch's role in it). He mentions the way it violates teens' human rights, and limits their access to peer support;
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2505/S00025/on-the-parental-panic-over-young-kids-online.htm
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"Basically, since the US is no longer a reliable defence partner, India has been presented with an opportunity to serve as a significant counterweight to China in the future defence alignments now taking shape in the Indo-Pacific."
#GordonCampbell,2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2504/S00048/papal-picks-and-india-as-a-defence-ally.htm
Oh Gordon really? You're leaning in to the Asia-Pacific equivalent of the "Gulf of America"? Why?
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"But hold on. If the new normal is chaos, the old normal wasn’t that great, either. We have had over 30 years of economic policies that have – deliberately, as a point of policy principle – sacrificed secure well-paying jobs and replaced them with low paying insecure ones, relentlessly prioritised shareholder profits over the social good, deferred investment in people, technology and infrastructure ..."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
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"... that old tagline with polls 'if an election were held tomorrow' is deeply misleading. Election campaigns create a different lens. Aussies liked Dutton last year when he was savaging a government they didn’t like very much – but they don’t like Dutton much this year, once he seemed seriously likely to form the next government. In NZ, Labour should not make a similar mistake with the current polls, and assume that Chris Hipkins is electable."
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2504/S00019/on-peter-duttons-fading-election-prospects.htm
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"Among the many, many items on the NZDF wishlist that taxpayers will be expected to fund is this:
'accommodation, messing and dining modernisation'
Hmm... so we cut the quality of the lunches that help thousands of school kids to learn, but spend the money instead on improving the dining experience available to our defence forces. Will the average cost of this“messing and dining” upgrade be allowed to exceed $3 a meal for lunch?"
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2504/S00019/on-peter-duttons-fading-election-prospects.htm
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"China has been using a speech that Ronald Reagan made back in 1987 to highlight the shortcomings in Trump’s tariff policies. Reagan, the Great Communicator, makes a very good case against the use of tariffs in developed economies. Yet it is truly weird to see Reagan’s speech being circulated on X by the Chinese ... All part of China’s attempt to portray itself as the new and best champion of a multilateral trading system ..."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2504/S00029/on-why-the-us-stands-to-lose-the-tariff-wars.htm
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"US customers will have to pay more for the essentials, and foreign suppliers will seek other markets elsewhere. Sourcing these goods and services at home will be very costly – there’s a reason why they were outsourced in the first place – and will take decades."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2504/S00029/on-why-the-us-stands-to-lose-the-tariff-wars.htm
I'm very surprised to see Gordon say this. They were outsourced to take advantage of cheaper labour in countries with weak worker protections and break the labour movement at home.
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"This Commerce Commission report looks like being something of a landmark in New Zealand’s ability to monitor and regulate its monopoly/duopoly/cartel forms of market power. These concentrations of market power are pervasive in almost every sector of the New Zealand economy."
#GordonCampbell, 2025
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