I don’t usually pay much attention to the big NZ political blogs. At best, the usual suspects are occasionally insightful, but more often they suffer from varying degrees of simple minded egotism and/or outright vileness. However, like the million monkeys writing Shakespeare that they as a group resemble, every so often someone hits one out of the park:
It’s hard work at the best of times for political parties to attract good candidates. But it’s doubly so for the two main parties, because all the smaller parties are so quick to secure the urine-drinking bank-robbing identity-thieves, leaving National and Labour only the boring and sensible candidates to choose from.
Apart from the woman-bothering expense-rorting ones, those who end up in Parliament for the Nats or Labour often lack colour, but that’s probably because they’re not drinking their own piss…
The rest of it is well worth reading as well.
This election is going to be like the Rugby World Cup – pretty much a foregone conclusion but the also-rans will provide much entertainment.
This is 
The minimum youth wage is going away, also something I support if only to stop the half-baked student protests that used to break out occasionally. Instead there is now a “new entrant wage”, which is almost the same thing but will mostly apply only to students in part-time work. 16 and 17 year-olds in full-time work will quickly step up to the full minimum wage. I can’t imagine this will stop young workers getting exploited, but it is a step in the right direction.