Archive for September, 2009

A beautiful mind – read it and weep

Written By: - Date published: 2:45 pm, September 9th, 2009 - 53 comments

An email doing the rounds of the women’s networks found its way to me today. It’s link to an article about the late Sophie Elliott, fomerly of Otago University and the essay she wrote on equity and  and equality. Sophie may have been heading to Treasury the week she was murdered but when you read […]

Fran lets the plan slip

Written By: - Date published: 2:40 pm, September 9th, 2009 - 22 comments

Fran O’Sullivan has rather given the game away on the MMP referendum. Frog has explained it so well, I can’t do better than repost it: Holding a referendum on MMP was discussed at cabinet on Monday 31 August 2009.  Yesterday Ms O’Sullivan informed Newstalk ZB drive time host Larry Williams of how this information was conveyed to […]

Wee gripes: speakering

Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, September 9th, 2009 - 7 comments

John when you say ‘overtly’ you mean ‘overly’. Like on Monday when you told Paul Henry “I’m not overtly stressed..”. Sometimes, you say something like ‘we’re not overtly planning X’ when you just mean ‘we’re not planning X’. Here’s a little hypothetical test. What’s wrong with this sentence? “I’m not overtly concerned by scuttlebug from various […]

Clueless

Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, September 9th, 2009 - 21 comments

John Key has admitted he didn’t bother to get detailed briefings before sending our SAS to kill and possibly die for a corrupt regime in Afghanistan: Hon Phil Goff: Was the Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade, John Allen, correct in stating on Q+A  on Television New Zealand on Sunday that ‘we didn’t advise the Government to send […]

Climate cast aways

Written By: - Date published: 11:25 am, September 9th, 2009 - 5 comments

That prolific climate campaign – Sign On – has been casting its mark across the Capital, with a new motif popping up on some unlikely arms and paws. The blue cast, which appears to have replaced Keisha and Lucy as the face of the campaign, has its origins in John’s unfortunate January faceplant. Presumably intended […]

Abuse of process

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, September 9th, 2009 - 7 comments

National put Parliament back into urgency yesterday. It is ramming through the extension to the retail deposit guarantee, the RMA amendments, changes to the Biosecurity Act (and something else that escapes my memory). The RMA changes are particularly contentious but we won’t get to know what the Government is planning until hours before it passes […]

Look what I found

Written By: - Date published: 9:00 am, September 9th, 2009 - 25 comments

Does anyone really believe a Treasury official just happened to accidentally drop a notebook full of secrets on The Terrace then one of only a couple of dozen political reporters in the country, Julian Robins from Radio New Zealand, just happened to pick it up, read it, and realise what he had found? Pull the other one.  I […]

Key’s lies on housing rort exposed

Written By: - Date published: 5:54 am, September 9th, 2009 - 13 comments

As I alluded to yesterday, the claims from John Key that he has slashed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the cost of ministerial housing are rubbish. The media did a pretty good job of exposing the lie (except TV3 who just had some junior reporter toeing Key’s line). Here’s how it works. Ministerial services […]

Backdown from Infratil?

Written By: - Date published: 5:00 pm, September 8th, 2009 - 3 comments

Infratil-run NZ Bus has called off its planned capital strike for tomorrow. The company had been going to prevent bus drivers and other staff who wanted to work from working. It has withdrawn that lock-out notice and presented a better offer to the workers. The workers have also withdrawn their notice of intention to work […]

Owning Auckland

Written By: - Date published: 2:52 pm, September 8th, 2009 - 17 comments

Last Friday the report of the Select Committee on Auckland was tabled in Parliament. The lack of media attention is a measure of how almost irrelevant this committee was. It has been clear for a long time that the decisions are being made by a small group around Key and Hide. The indefatigable Phil Twyford […]

Who is Kate Wilkinson taking aim at?

Written By: - Date published: 11:20 am, September 8th, 2009 - 20 comments

By John Ryall, SFWU National Secretary While The Standard readers know that the air traffic controllers were the excuse that Kate Wilkinson used to signal a repeal of parts of the 2008 Employment Relations Act (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Act, they are probably not aware of who is really going to be affected by […]

A rort is a rort is a rort

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, September 8th, 2009 - 48 comments

And by any other name it smells as bad. John Key has annouced a reform of the rules for ministerial accommodation allowance. A fixed, automatic allowance will now be paid to all out of Wellington ministers of $37,500 a year for their Wellington accomodation (or $30,000 if they own the house), slightly less than the highest spending ministers […]

Soak the rich

Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, September 8th, 2009 - 8 comments

Coming soon to a workplace near you, if Kate Wilkinson gets her way: According to this report by Roll on Friday, a receptionist formerly employed by a major US law firm is suing the firm, saying she had no choice but to wet herself. Rebecca Landrith was employed by Littler Mendelson, a leading employment law […]

Shock, Horror – Infratil managers strike for more pay!

Written By: - Date published: 8:12 am, September 8th, 2009 - 7 comments

Yesterday Infratil got their NZ Bus hand-puppets to announce that they will be going on strike. On Wednesday, if the bus-drivers refuse to donate their time freely to increase Infratil returns to investors, the company will remove bus-services from the commuters of Auckland. If the reasonable attempts of the bus drivers to increase their wages […]

Rod Oram: Burn after reading

Written By: - Date published: 7:36 pm, September 7th, 2009 - 22 comments

As usual Rod Oram presents an insightful argument: New Zealand’s climate change credibility is hanging by a thread. If the government indulges in bad politics on the Emissions Trading Scheme, the thread would snap. We would suffer instant, serious and long-term damage to our economy, environment and reputation. …Would National be so reckless? Logically it […]

Tim O’Reilly on “Gov 2.0”

Written By: - Date published: 4:52 pm, September 7th, 2009 - 26 comments

Five years ago Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “Web 2.0”. Now, in this post at TechCrunch, he argues it’s time for “Gov 2.0”. Gov 2.0 is about more than politicians using Facebook or Twitter or whatever, more than increased transparency, more than the government moving into the ‘cloud’. Too often, we think of government as […]

Michael Laws, ambassador

Written By: - Date published: 4:15 pm, September 7th, 2009 - 5 comments

From The Guardian: It used to be loony left local government that attracted ridicule. Now it is the outpourings of mad mayors. …[UK mayoral problems seem] mild in the pointlessness stakes compared with New Zealand mayor Michael Laws, who scribbled furious replies to two children when they asked him to adopt the Maori spelling for their […]

Angry sadsack still at it

Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, September 7th, 2009 - 27 comments

Michael Laws: get on with your job and stop prancing around on the media stage. Laws has put out a second (yes, a second) press release justifying being rude to some schoolkids who wrote to him. Apparently, Laws can think of no better use of his time and of Whanganui ratepayers’ dollars than continuing to […]

Going forward…

Written By: - Date published: 2:30 pm, September 7th, 2009 - 19 comments

Like r0b, I’m the new kid on The Standard’s block. Sounds like he got the cool initiation. I, on the other hand, had to go to a three hour meeting and, under brutal interrogation, denounce all my previous boyfriends with dubious political credentials. Plus they made me bring a plate. But I made it and […]

Heavy-handed tactics from NZ Bus

Written By: - Date published: 2:00 pm, September 7th, 2009 - 27 comments

Auckland bus drivers have been in negotiations with NZ Bus (which is owned by Infratil) for a 70 cent an hour pay rise. Currently, they’re on between $14.05 and $16.75 an hour for 13-hour shifts. Many workers are on split shifts, which means up to four hours a day of unpaid time between shifts. Negotiations […]

Political debate done right

Written By: - Date published: 12:37 pm, September 7th, 2009 - 3 comments

The last video I posted had Democratic Congressman Barney Frank taking the fight to a woman in the audience of a townhall meeting who had just compared the proposed health care reforms to Nazism. He finished by saying: “trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to have a conversation with a […]

Let’s have a proper debate

Written By: - Date published: 11:36 am, September 7th, 2009 - 16 comments

Larry Baldock (organiser of the “smacking” referendum) has decided to launch a petition for another referendum on whether such referenda should be binding. His agenda of course is to keep flogging the dead horse of the s59 debate. Two more years? No thanks. The only way that I can deal with the prospect is to […]

Flood Maps

Written By: - Date published: 10:42 am, September 7th, 2009 - 62 comments

Marty G’s last post just reminded me of this – visualise who goes under as the oceans rise with Flood Maps. And yeah, before you start, 14m is a big big rise. Just let it serve as a warning to all you Aucklanders to swap out those incandescent bulbs.

Climate change in action

Written By: - Date published: 9:26 am, September 7th, 2009 - 43 comments

The world’s oceans reached a record high temperature in July of 16.37 degrees, 0.59 degrees above the 20th century average. That might not sound a lot, and it wouldn’t be if we were talking about the variation in day to day temperature where you live, but we’re talking the whole world’s oceans. It takes an enormous amount […]

The mire

Written By: - Date published: 5:10 am, September 7th, 2009 - 16 comments

Last month’s Time magazine has an article that starts “to understand why the United States is losing in Afghanistan…” It’s a bombshell phrase, all the more for the fact that the reporter makes the statement in passing, as accepted fact. The article goes on to detail how Western money is going to fund the Afghan […]

Sohole.

Written By: - Date published: 2:24 pm, September 6th, 2009 - 8 comments

In Ponsonby there is a bloody great big hole which is all that remains of the unlamented DYC  Vinegar factory. It has been affording the locals some amusement between bouts in hearings. The site was to be a $250 million mall. The hole was dug last year. However it stopped abruptly when the development group […]

Climate change is racist

Written By: - Date published: 12:10 am, September 6th, 2009 - 18 comments

Climate change is racist. Not literally of course, but in the sense that how people are affected by climate change is going to be largely determined by race. Those who are going to suffer the most are not “white”. From The Herald summary of a recent study: The Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI) released today […]

The song of the sewer

Written By: - Date published: 3:20 pm, September 5th, 2009 - 17 comments

An old favourite came around on the playlist. It sounded like the ostriches that occupy the sewer and appear here for our entertainment… So I tracked down a live performance by Leonard Cohen. The Man from Uncle version with the studio soundtrack is pretty funny as well. Lyrics over the page… Everybody knows that the […]

A return to elected dictatorship?

Written By: - Date published: 1:17 pm, September 5th, 2009 - 53 comments

Back in the days of First Past the Post elections, we had what Geoffery Palmer termed ‘the fastest law in the West’ and the Prime Minister was effectively an elected dictator. The PM controlled Cabinet, the Cabinet controlled caucus of the majority party in what was by design a two-party system (in Parliament, there were […]

Diffusion of responsibility

Written By: - Date published: 7:30 am, September 5th, 2009 - 54 comments

Diffusion of responsibility means that the bigger the group the less chance that anyone in the group will take action. In a typical experiment people are left to wait in a room, which is rigged so that smoke starts coming in under a door. A person who is alone will usually leave the room and […]

Why blog?

Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, September 4th, 2009 - 23 comments

So, against my better judgement I’m now a card carrying Standardista. Finally managed to get through the initiation ceremony without fainting. I’ve been issued with a pass card and retina scanned for the Secret Standard Bunker buried deep beneath Parliament. I have access to the restricted mainframe codes and my own Swiss bank account. Q […]