Alliance Tax Policy – Tomato Sauce – Petrol Prices – Bastion Point – MMP – Helen Clark – Election Date Editorial –
Wellington Central – Eating Or Not – Immunisation – East Timor Darwin – Bob Harvey – Poverty – Radio Wedding – Youth
Radio - Ansett
See http://www.nzherald.co.nz/ for full text...
ALLIANCE TAX POLICY: The Alliance is softening its tax policy, aligning its key increase in the top personal rate with
Labour. But it will go into the campaign with its eye on high earners and is proposing an 'executive surcharge' on
income above $75,000. The policy, which will be released today, is designed to blunt National's 'tax attack' by ensuring
the vast bulk of taxpayers remain untouched by the tax plans of a Labour-Alliance coalition.
TOMATO SAUCE: A piece of Kiwiana that has delivered splurts of tomato sauce for 30 years has captured the hearts of the
British - and provided a tasty export market for a local manufacturer. Britons, it seems, just can't get enough of our
bright red tomato-shaped plastic tomato sauce dispensers.
PETROL PRICES: Shell is putting up its petrol prices for the fifth time in less than three months - and further rises
seem likely as the price of crude oil continues to soar. Prices at Shell stations will go up 3c a litre from midnight
tonight.
BASTION POINT: Ngati Whatua has resurrected plans for a housing development on Bastion Pt - in the form of an upmarket
retirement village. Eastcliffe on Orakei, a joint development between Ngati Whatua o Orakei Maori Trust Board and Protac
Investments, will be targeted at retirees already living in the affluent surrounding suburbs.
MMP: It has to be voters' worst nightmare. Regardless of who actually wins the election, will the coalition talks go on
forever, as they did last time? And will we all be sitting down to Christmas dinner (four weeks later) or celebrating
the new millennium (five weeks later) with no Prime Minister, no Government and no clear idea of where the country is
going?
HELEN CLARK:Forget a week, six months can be a long time in politics, as Helen Clark discovered when she hit the
campaign trail in her Owairaka electorate yesterday. An 8-year-old constituent, Rawiri Nahu, studied first a billboard
photo, then the real-life version beneath it, and asked, "Is that you when you were young?"
ELECTION DATE - EDITORIAL: A date certainly concentrates the mind. The date National has set for its appointment with
the voters is about as late as constitutionally permitted, but even two months out the election suddenly looms large. A
late November ballot, even if it returns to a cycle broken since 1984, seems a little too late for good government now.
Elections are a catharsis, and after them the country needs to get on quickly. The date National has set leaves very
little time for a new or re-elected government to get down to business before the summer hiatus.
WELLINGTON CENTRAL: National's decision not to stand an election candidate in Wellington Central has strengthened Act's
hand there, a new poll suggests. The Evening Post-UMR Insight poll of 300 voters published yesterday shows support for
Act leader Richard Prebble rising 14 percentage points.
EATING OR NOT: Nutritionists dismiss as fantasy a spiritualist's claim she does not need to eat. Australian new-age
spiritualist Jasmuheen says she receives nutrition from an internal power source. She has been lecturing in Auckland,
but Scottish prosecutors are probing links between her teachings and a woman's death in the Highlands.
IMMUNISATION: New Zealand is now lagging behind Australia in child immunisation, says a local expert in the field. Dr
Nikki Turner, medical director of the Immunisation Advisory Centre in Auckland, has just returned from an international
immunisation conference in Manchester, England.
EAST TIMOR – DARWIN: HMNZS Canterbury sailed from Darwin last night for waters thick with Indonesian naval vessels. The
Indonesian Navy is manoeuvring around a growing multinational fleet of destroyers, frigates and other vessels supporting
United Nations operations on East Timor.
BOB HARVEY: Labour president Bob Harvey may have taken an instruction about leaving comment to the party's leader "too
literally." Mr Harvey, the colourful Waitakere mayor, declined interviews about the election date - set on Sunday as
November 27 - sparking suggestions that the party had gagged him after his embarrassing claim that the CIA was
implicated in the death of former Prime Minister Norman Kirk.
POVERTY: Even the brightest of our poor children are slipping behind their classmates as they get older. A study on New
Zealand 8-year-olds - involving a group of 550 children who have been tracked since they turned 5 - has found that some
of the most capable poor and Maori 5-year-olds had fallen behind their peers three years later.
RADIO WEDDING: The radio station staging the marriage of two strangers this week is in the middle of its twice-yearly
ratings battle. Darryl Paton, marketing manager of Hamilton radio station The Edge, said the promotion - Two Strangers
and a Wedding - was not part of a ratings war.
YOUTH RADIO: Angry independent radio stations have condemned the Government's announcement of a non-commercial youth
network, saying it placed their own futures under serious threat. The Government insisted the non-commercial youth
network would boost the New Zealand music industry here and overseas.
ANSETT: Ansett New Zealand is investigating claims that its pilots have been phoned and called scabs while in the air.
The airline and the Airline Pilots Association initially denied any knowledge of reports that pilots who had signed a
controversial new employment contract had been targeted while flying aircraft.