Open mike 10/03/2012

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, March 10th, 2012 - 25 comments
Categories: open mike - Tags:

Open mike is your post. For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.

The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the link to Policy in the banner).

Step right up to the mike…

25 comments on “Open mike 10/03/2012 ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. mickysavage 1
    10 March 2012 at 6:38 am

    Big respect to Councillor Cathy Casey who recently tried to get the Auckland Council to discuss POAL but was eventually booted out of the meeting because of her attempts.

    There is a meeting of the Accountability and Performance committee where Richard Northey has placed the issue on the agenda.  This meeting is vital.  With enough councillors insisting on POAL engaging in good faith bargaining Len may be steeled up to do something.  The agenda is here.

    Some of the councillors are staunch, Casey, Coney, Hulse, Northey, Walker, Filipana amongst them. Some are totally anti no matter what.  Penrose, Wood, Raffles, Webster included.

    A few are waverers and pressure could work.  These include Anae, Walker, and Gouldie.  Contact your local councillor.  Let them know what you feel about the issue. 

  2. marty mars 2
    10 March 2012 at 7:07 am

    Prob already put up by mickey but jeepers I had a laugh looking at some of these photos – good humour.

    http://www.facebook.com/johnkeylooksatthings

    I wonder tho – if you live by the sword, you die by the sword and I’m sure all sides have some photos best left hidden. Taking the piss out of key is the smart idea because it gets to the heart of his insecurities, his needing to be liked.

  3. Descendant Of Smith 3
    10 March 2012 at 8:04 am

    Surely it’s time the council did something about renting out crap homes and if not them the all powerful CERA.

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/6553330/Top-dollar-asked-for-slum-flats

    The racism isn’t surprising either.

    Favourite landlord / rental manager trick is to park around the corner from the house and arrange to meet the person and when they drive up ring them on their cellphone if they are Maori and to say it’s been let. If it’s someone who is pakeha then then drive over to meet them.

    When my Maori staff get told that the flat they apply for has just this minute been rented I get my pakeha staff to ring up and gee it’s still available.
    Short sharp experience on discrimination in this country.
     
     

    • just saying 4.1
      10 March 2012 at 9:23 am

      Highly recommended. Thanks for posting that link ULS

      Really sad to be watching the slow but inexorable death of the Labour/social democratic movements.
      Can’t seem to look away, or just accept the reality and watch the process with detached curiosity.
      Being angry at the sell-outs and the betrayers is probably a huge waste of energy, and a distraction from getting on with the things that can be changed, truth be told.

      I’m also chilled at times by cheer-leaders of the woo-hoo-At- Last-The Revolution-Is-Finally-Coming brigade, because the ‘collateral damage’ of what will most likely happen will also be widespread, brutal and visited first and worst, on the most vulnerable. Acting as though these ‘little people’ don’t matter because the end will jusitify the means, and that the increasing suffering and oppression of the many should be celebarated as the lead-up to something glorious, seems to share a little too much with the right-wing mind-set for my liking.

    • Draco T Bastard 4.2
      10 March 2012 at 1:09 pm

      +1

      Labour will continue to cave in to the capitalists and the rich and NZ will continue to go backwards losing all the advances that Labour have made in their history.

      • Bill 4.2.1
        10 March 2012 at 1:43 pm

        Hmm. Not sure what it means to say Labour will lose any advances. Labour has only been a convenient platform for political careerists for quite some time now. And they will find another convenient platform by and by.

        But yes, we look likely to lose a lot of the advances we made and yes, the Labour Party was the mechanism that made some of those advances possible.

  5. rosy 5
    10 March 2012 at 8:54 am

    Has Paula Bennett lost the plot completely?
    For parents on social security benefits who are required to find work…

    Options include improving the timing and location of the before and after-school Oscar (out-of-school care and recreation) programme.

    “I propose refocusing the Oscar funding system in order to target specific locations and settings to fill these service gaps,” Ms Bennett said.

    That included areas where low-income parents needed affordable out-of-school care to allow them to work.

    “We will consider home-based care, or babysitting networks, which are more responsive for care outside standard hours and are able to cater for smaller groups of children.”

    Ms Bennett said formal early childcare education was not always the best way for children to be looked after.

    “I agree that we need more childcare centres in the right place so that we are particularly giving access to those that don’t have it now.” In some smaller communities, centres were not viable, she said.

    “We just constantly have this, that only fully qualified people can look after children and it’s not the reality of what happens for families on a day-to-day basis.

    “Parents aren’t always fully qualified, neither are grandparents.”

    The Government was still grappling with how it could help fund more informal childcare, Ms Bennett said.

    The improvements to OSCAR are on the money. But it’s one thing having unqualified parents and grandparents minding toddlers, but people with no vested interest in the children and have no trust relationship with parents have no place looking after children in an unsupervised relationship?

    I don’t think this fits at all well with the aim to reduce NZs appalling child abuse statistics. This is a tragedy waiting to happen if parents are forced to leave children with unfamiliar, unsupervised/unreferenced, unqualified care-givers.

    • prism 5.1
      11 March 2012 at 9:39 pm

      @rosy
      Warehouse the children that”s the idea. The Simpsons had a good episode where Maggie was sent to the Ayn Rand Kindergarten School for independent toddlers or something. They managed to make it amusing when Maggie raided the locker where all the dummies were locked away as encouraging neediness for unsatisfactory artificial supports which should be eliminated as early as possible. The dummies are distributed quick-smart and when the wardress/matron enters the open play area, there are rows of contented babies and the sound of mass sucking. I wonder if we could get Domestic Poorer Bennefit, onto a coming Simpson program?

      I have seen some unpleasant video clips of the neglect that little children in some USA child centres have been subjected to. The thing is that the right wing don’t always like their own children, and feel aggrieved at having to consider the welfare of other people’s.

      • Vicky32 5.1.1
        12 March 2012 at 2:47 pm

        Warehouse the children that”s the idea

        It’s only going to get worse now that there is not a minimum number of staff at centres who have to be trained. I still receive dozens of job alerts for ECE positions, but now, most of them are for casual relievers. (I loathe other peoples’ children, that’s just me, I am not an RWNJ, but I wonder how many untrained centre staff secretly feel the same, but as they need a job, and who doesn’t, they’ll do the job?)
        Is it really all about any more than changing disposable nappies anyway? I didn’t work until my son was 9, but I took him to playcentre and kindergarten, where he was educated properly in a way appropriate to his development.
        Sandra Coney once said, and I agree with her, that in the 1960s, mothers  were not allowed to work, (with some exceptions) – and then, from the 1990s, mothers were/are not allowed not to work! (Even if they have good reason to not want to/be able, such as being a single parent, or the mother of a child with issues/disabilities.)

  6. phillip ure.. 6
    10 March 2012 at 9:08 am

    http://whoar.co.nz/2012/lsd-may-aid-alcoholism-treatment/

    (ed:..i have written previously of living in a squat of four terrace houses in (then an inner-city slum) sydney in the seventies..

    ..and of a squat-mate..one who was a.w.o.l. from the air force..

    ..who went on a mission to cure alcoholics with acid..

    ..so at various time on arrival home you were greeted by him and some random (often smelly) street-alcoholic..tripping off their little nuts..

    ..it would seem he was on to something..that airforce-a.w.o.l.-squat-mate..)

    phil-at-whoar.

  7. Dv 7
    10 March 2012 at 9:50 am

    I thoght this was a very pertinent comment from gordon Campbell at Scoop

    http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2012/03/09/gordon-campbell-on-defences-failed-civilianisation/

    One of the tried and true maxims of management is that business hates uncertainty – because, don’t you know, business can’t be done in a climate where the rules keep on changing, and where CEOs lack a firm foundation on which to base their decisions.
    Somehow, this wisdom is rarely extended to the work force, who – evidently – are expected to become ever more productive in a climate of total insecurity, where the rules and their roles keep on being changed, where their jobs and career paths are constantly being restructured and where casualisation and contracting out ensures there is little capacity to make any reliable plans for the future. CEOs, it seems, require certainty – but everyone else is expected to thrive on its exact opposite.

    • KJT 7.1
      10 March 2012 at 11:04 am

      CEO’s require lots of money to motivate them to do their jobs.
       
      Everyone else just needs to do it for love!

  8. idlegus 8
    10 March 2012 at 10:43 am

    Here http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Court-Crafar-decision-not-embarrassing—Williamson/tabid/506/articleID/26078/Default.aspx (4 mins in) Maurice Williamson says he rejected Kim Dotcoms aplication to buy the Chrisco mansion (I’m not just a rubber stamp), yet here http://www.3news.co.nz/Kim-Dotcom-and-the-Govt-Minister-who-said-NO/tabid/311/articleID/245892/ we find that Maurice Williamson actually approved it, & it was Simon Power that rejected the aplication.

  10. johnm 10
    10 March 2012 at 11:58 am

    JAPANESE WHALERS HEAD HOME WITH ONLY A THIRD OF THEIR ILLEGAL QUOTA. VICTORY FOR THE DEDICATED PEOPLE OF SEASHEPHERD.

    Seashepherd shows that people of true integrity and courage can do amazing things. Our Cowardly governments down under are quite literally incapable of doing any hard ball diplomacy with the Japs on this issue.

    link: http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/2012/03/08/the-whalers-head-home-1352

    link: http://www.radioaustralianews.net.au/stories/201203/3449811.htm?desktop

    Also those who support the Japs in their killing like Michael Laws (Whales are just the same as cows,(animals we eat) then why the fuss? And those Kiwis wrapped by the might is right drug who thought the deliberate sinking of the Ady Gil was just dandy like Rugby, the big boy rolled the smaller-Hang your heads in shame. Real Men have done it!

    [lprent: SHOUTING again! I reduced them to a better size. I’m getting tired of warning. ]

    • Vicky32 10.1
      11 March 2012 at 5:07 pm

      Seashepherd shows that people of true integrity and courage can do amazing things

      I heard that on the radio on Friday, and my thought was “they’re idiots”. Green Day sprang to mind, as I heard this heavy American voice gloating about disrupting whaling.
      IMO, animals are infinitely less important than people. Sea Shepherd evidently doesn’t agree. 🙁

  11. Campbell Larsen 11
    10 March 2012 at 1:15 pm

    “An 0800 Government – requiring state tenants and beneficiaries to use the internet, call centres and smartphones to make appointments – is a ticking time bomb of bad news.”

    h/t Vernon Small

    • RedBaron 11.1
      10 March 2012 at 7:31 pm

      Pity Vernon didn’t say a bit more.

      1. Who in their right mind thinks that internet connections, computers and smartphones are rife amongst state tenants and beneficiaries . The costs of set up and remainng connected would be beyond the financial resources of most in this group.

      2. If they have a phone at all it’s likely to be prepaid and possibly shared. Hanging on for a call centre to answer eats up funds – can’t see too many of these phones being on the unlimited plans.

      3. Many would have difficulty affording the bus fare to the local library if it has internet – never mind the joy of catching the bus backwards and forwards with small children – as they do remote question and answer.

      What they are really saying is that they don’t want people to access the services at all.

      Shades of the budget airline that dealt with its huge wad of complaints by closing the complaints centre….

  12. lprent 12
    10 March 2012 at 2:20 pm

    Bloody hell. I just looked at the front page. The top 3 posts have hands in the front page image and so does the front page bananna ad.



    Oh well trivia over. Back to working on this plugin.

  13. William Joyce 13
    10 March 2012 at 3:21 pm

    Good on ya Iceland!! Now go after your Banksters.
    More countries should follow in your footsteps.
     

    Former PM, Geir Haarde, whose trial began this week, could face up to two years in jail if convicted over country’s 2008 economic collapse. – The Guardian

     

  15. Doug 15
    10 March 2012 at 7:44 pm

    Marsman

    NZ Herald.
    Despite the numbers, former left wing MP Willie Jackson described the turnout as “disappointing”

  16. M 16
    10 March 2012 at 9:59 pm

    ‘Most human beings waft about with the tides of time as passengers; spectators watching events unfold from the sidelines. Those who swim against the currents, or who attempt to change their flow altogether, are usually rare and confounding to the masses. Therefore, that which the masses consider extremism is often merely that which they consider far outside what they have grown accustomed.

    Frankly, history has proven over and over again that the majority is usually wrong about most things. Groups and collectives do not create, or discover, or advance humanity. Only individuals are capable of this. All great concepts begin as seeds within independent people, and then spread like wildfire as they educate others. A society that strives for artificial normality and collectivist harmonization is a society on the verge of chaos and death. Only free hearts and minds give man hope of survival.’

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-how-become-american-extremist-style

    Interesting article and not just for Americans.

  17. Don 17
    11 March 2012 at 1:12 am

    One thing that is great about US politics is that if the Presidency is corrupt it can be impeached ie all those responsible together
    A law like that in NZ and we could have this treasonous lot out by the end of the year

    What right have they got to lie about what they have planned for this country and call it governing the country .
    Most of this govt has done sfa to prove they have the ability and integrity to rule us

    OH YEAH OUST THE LOT OF THEM BEFORE THEY DO ANY MORE DAMAGE

The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.