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5:30 pm, September 23rd, 2024 - 26 comments
Categories: Daily review -
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Daily review is also your post.
This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Don’t forget to be kind to each other …
pricks
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David Seymour’s anti red-tape ministry got a $30 million boost as ministers wrangled over May’s Budget.
Documents released by Treasury reveal that in the month before Nicola Willis’ first budget, ministers agreed to increase the Ministry for Regulation’s funding by $7.5m a year from what was already earmarked.
It came as other agencies were forced to make cuts worth $1.5 billion a year to fund the coalition government’s programme — an exercise the new regulations ministry was exempt from.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/350421998/red-tape-ministry-got-budget-boost-while-other-agencies-made-cuts
The nut jobs have come up with a new strategy to explain Wellington's woes; blame lazy public service workers and their WFH culture.
Hoskins this morning and Stupidity-Allen this afternoon have clearly been directed by offices in the beehive to divert attention away from blaming government austerity measures toward, you guessed it, workers themselves, to blaming those affected.
Despite Wellington being the outlier in terms of retail and hospitality decline, the government and its media proxies are trying to convince us its lazy workers and bike lanes apparently specific to Wellington rather than the effect of firing thousands of people which has brought a such a chilling atmosphere to the capital.
They'll continue this narrative until it's embedded.
When you create a "hideous atmosphere" amongst those you directly employ, you a giving the nod to everyone living in a hideous atmosphere. This is exactly what we are seeing play out in the mood of the nation.
https://www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/350424104/hideous-atmosphere-health-nz-staff-await-redundancy-decisions?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=2&utm_source=localised_module#cxrecs_s
Supposed lefties attacking Labour are letting this government get away with murder.
Here ya go, the PSA actually outlining this coordinated distraction:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/528792/government-s-anti-working-from-home-move-a-total-distraction-union
I was surprised he was not on top of his numbers – it's 6500 nearing 7000.
And we're seeing SFA from the opposition about the horror show unfolding in health under Reti and Levy.
Theyre kicking the crap out of system that responded magnificently to covid, was rebuilding mental health after the shonky 9 year funding shortfall etc.
Health professionals are in short supply globally so Oz is loving this welcoming our well trained and english savvy workforce.
Haters and wreckers folks.
RIP Pauline Hanna – this trial being very publically played out in the media has put this poor woman on trial while her husband has been let off the hook well and truly. Having worked in a legal office in my youthful years, has left an indelible imprint on my psyche and I do take interest in trials which tend to play out in the media. I have also had a turn at Jury Duty in the High Court in Auckland, back in the early 2000s, which was a real eye opener – my fellow 11 jurors who were from a very wide walk of Auckland life all took our role and task very seriously and came to a unanimous verdict on an unpleasant case. Back to the Polkinghorne case, after reading Paula Penfolds interview with Madison Ashton I do wonder, did the Police botch their investigation into this matter. I'm inclined to think so, as I personally thought Pauline was strangled to death, but at the same time thought Philip would get acquitted, as he had a good barrister who did a brilliant job in defending his client. I've had these uneasy feelings about a few high profile murder cases in which the defendant has been acquitted or convicted, but what do I know!! I do know a bloke who is a barrister & solicitor who has presided over a couple of high profile cases and I know who I would want to defend me if I ever got into a spot of bother!
Weathy white people rarely get convicted in New Zealand, and often get very light sentences. Look at that South African who murdered her three kids in Timaru.
You seem to be confusing sentencing with conviction.
If you want to argue that sentencing isn't colour-blind – then you'll need to provide an apples-with-apples example.
I find Polkinghorne to be a totally despicable human being – but it seems clear that the evidence wasn't clear enough to convict him (in the jury's eyes). Just like it wasn't clear enough to convict Kahui.
I must say I felt coverage of the trial to be a little over the top.
We seemed to be privy to a lot of sensationalised info, reported feverishly each day.
Top that off with two competing podcasts, it was all a bit voyeuristic.
Condolences to Pauline Hanna's whanau.
Distraction, distraction, distraction …. while everyone's sifting through the gory details of the case, dutifully served up by a compliant media, government can quietly get on with its various hatchet jobs, safe in the knowledge that hardly anyone's looking in their direction.
Too true.
Bill Hicks, American Philosopher and comedian talked about this in the '90s. About Bush War 1:
"Gosh, since I was here, we had a war, that’s pretty weird, huh? A war? Wasn’t really a war, you know, a war is when two armies are fighting, so, I don’t know if you could call it a war, exactly, you know. The Persian Gulf Distraction, is more like it, I think."
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2003/01/20/late-comedians-words-relevant-in-war-climate/
Legacy media plays it's part too, salaciously drip feeding the latest details in their news bulletins. Gotta keep them ratings up.
And its over but they keep going.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350420790/p-polkinghorne-eye-surgeons-secret-meth-addiction
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350422658/polkinghorne-murder-trial-sex-worker-madison-ashton-breaks-her-silence-reveals
I couldn't understand why the case was so media driven. Never known anything like it in the past! A possible valid point you have made Obtrectator.
Oh, I think that the Grace Millane case was equally as intensely media driven (and equally as distasteful in its revelations of the details of the private life of the victim).
The jury in their wisdom concluded it was a suicide. But everyone knows who drove her to do it.
To my mind he will be suffering a severe form of punishment for the rest of his life. His decadent and debauched life style has been exposed for all to see. He will not be able to go anywhere without being recognised. Friends and associates will avoid him like the plague. In a kind of a way he will be in a prison of his own making.
They jury didn't conclude that it was suicide at all!
They simply decided that the Crown hadn't produced sufficient convincing evidence that Polkinghorne murdered her.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/crime/philip-polkinghorne-murder-trial-jury-to-resume-deliberations-today/SEI2TKWMOJA7BK5MNNJZLELIOI/
I would dearly love to have the option of the Scottish verdict 'Not proven'.
Yes you are right. They did not come to a definitive conclusion. Have to say I didn't follow the trial too closely.
I hope the jurors get all the support and counselling they need after such a harrowing and emotional experience.
“Polky” found not guilty, as he should have been from even a casual observer's view. He was though exposed as a bit of a debauched chap, but who of us that did not grow up in Sunday School, does not know such a character or two? What were the coppers thinking in this case really…
Me, I did not follow the trial at all.
https://www.justice.govt.nz/courts/jury-service/after-the-trial/
Unlikely. I’ve only vaguely followed this case.
What the jury almost certainly concluded was not that it was suicide. Most likely they simply determined that the prosecution had not met its required burden of proof to justify a a murder verdict. The prosecution have to prove it beyond reasonable doubt.
In effect the jury concluded that it was possible that the death was from suicide or even some other cause apart from murder and it would be unreasonable to return a guilty verdict on the evidence that the prosecution had presented.
This isn’t surprising. It reads like the prosecution case was mostly circumstantial and inferred but no direct evidence. It really is a high bar for circumstantial evidence to prove. Especially since it usually depends almost entirely on expert evidence, and on inferred circumstantial evidence.
I was a jury that came to the same conclusion after 4 weeks of trial of expert evidence. It took about 4 days in the jury room to get to a 10-2 verdict of not guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
Most of the jurors assumed probable guilt at the start of the trial and probably even through to the end of prosecution case.
By the end, only two thought guilty for sure. In essence, when pressed, their view was that the police and prosecution wouldn’t have brought the case if they hadn’t thought the accused was guilty. The presumption of guilt syndrome and trust in the authorities.
Most of the jurors at the end who voted not guilty probably still thought that it was possible the accused was guilty.
I know that I did. Personally I assumed innocence at the start and listened really closely to the prosecution case to see if it would change my mind. But there wasn’t anything substantive apart from the opportunity and absence of alternative other explanations for the fatality.
Which meant in essence that jury decision was being made on expert evidence which was a probability game of ‘highly unlikely’ based on very small medical sample sizes. Which meant that anyone who’d done statistics in depth (two of us) just looked at deviations, sampling skews, and limits of confidence wound up lacking confidence in the expert evidence – even before the defence brought on their own expert witnesses.
I’d take a bet that the same informed the jury in this case.
My only juror experience was being rejected by police/prosecution when I would not swear on a bible (seems silly to have to trust in an establishment cult religion authority source to discern the guilt of otherwise of a fellow citizen).
How long ago was that? Or which country?
You have been able to just affirm rather than take an oath in NZ as long as I have been interested. Ummm… here
and what the difference is here
It was merely the decision to not affirm on the bible and the challenge was then immediate.
Wellington New Zealand
That is just a lawyer exercising a challenge.
There isn't much information given to them apart from name, address, and stated occupation (ie what is in the printed electoral roll) at best. I think that the lawyers in NZ might get that on the day.
They don't know who will actually be up for selection until you start filing in for a case. So they're just doing a lot of guesswork based on what they can see about age, gender, appearance, attitude, and .
The challenger simply didn't think that you'd be a good recipient for their particular line of bullshit and they exercised one of their limited challenges. Since both the prosecution and defence have challenges it tends to even out. As an overall view the prosecution generally looks for people who can pay attention during a long and usually boring trial, and the defence usually looks for implicit sympathy votes.
Ummm… Community Law has a better description than the MoJ
In NZ, the latter paragraph usually doesn't happen unless there is a really obvious disability, or in smaller community courts where people know each other, or where the defendant or police know the potential juror.
Here's an example of the introduction of disruptor tech reducing rather than increasing people's choice and creating more complications. We've seen Airbnb steal rental accomodation from low income people all over the world, now the use of Chat GPT is forcing schools to move to complicated forms of assessment and probably, eventually exam formats:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/528800/schools-abandon-take-home-assignments-after-artificial-intelligence-used-to-cheat
Basically, a magnificent new disruptor has removed the ability for students to research assignments, write reports, and learn under their own steam.
Luxon has a memory problem.
@spider_hoof
Yet again Christopher Luxon is living in the past and trying to force the rest of us back there as well. I am 100% sure @CLRenney could have explained this better….
https://xcancel.com/spider_hoof/status/1838145589663687081
That should be on prime time TV