The praiseworthy and the pitiful

Written By: - Date published: 1:59 pm, March 6th, 2009 - 16 comments
Categories: the praiseworthy and the pitiful - Tags:

Adrian Orr and Brian Fallow‘s pieces on the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and the economics of long-term investment in a declining market. A+ The same arguments you’ve seen here and neat rebuttals of this ‘we’re borrowing to invest’ nonsense. Orr, the head of the Fund whose reputation is unquestioned, sums it up nicely by stating the ” measure of financial success is whether the returns to the fund over decades (not randomly selected days, weeks, months, or year-to-year) are above the cost of government borrowing.” – long-term, not year-to-year. This debate was only ever an excuse for undermining the Fund and with it the future of superannuation. Hopefully, the issue is now put to rest.

Anonymous emailer on Key’s cycleway “Nah, it’s not for you. It’s more of a Shelbyville idea” A Gold

John Armstrong’s ‘I wasn’t endorsing National’s secretive moves to slash the public service, I was just writing from their point of view’ comment on The Standard E The problem, John, is that you are always writing from National’s point of view. Even if think you’re hiding your ideology and writing objectively, it’s obvious and oft-remarked that you think Key’s the bees-knees. Look at yesterday’s piece. You manage to miss the part in Question Time where Key lied to Parliament by saying “we’re working on a skills strategy” and, instead, glowingly remarked how the Nat MPs loved Paula Bennett’s subsequent “that’s so last year” dissing of this tripartite (Govt, BizNZ, CTU) plan to increase productivity. All your references to Labour are disparaging. Points on for commenting. Points off for the ‘I hate people who don’t use their real names’ schtick, it’s the final refuge of those who can’t win on argument.

Any media who didn’t think reporting Key being caught in a clear lie in Parliament was worth reporting F Failure as fourth estate, again.

One News anchor on the Fire at Will law “means employees can be fired after a 90 day probation period” Shudder During. Not after, during a 90 day probation period. How many eyes went over that before it was said? The reporter, the editor, the anchor… None of them knew that it was wrong, despite this law having been a topic of major coverage on their own news show four times since 2006?

16 comments on “The praiseworthy and the pitiful ”

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  1. mickysavage 1
    6 March 2009 at 2:52 pm

    Dare I say it but Lockwood Smith may deserve to be considered praiseworthy because of his performance as speaker which has been far better than I thought it would be.

    I can’t believe I just said that …

    • Felix 1.1
      6 March 2009 at 2:59 pm

      Seconded.

    • lprent 1.2
      6 March 2009 at 3:05 pm

      Hate to agree, but having listened to a couple of question times, I’d say that so far he has been doing a more than adequate job (so far).

      Shortly I may even have to remove the prefix to his name. I’ve referred to him as Lockjaw Smith ever since my parents moved into his electorate. He never impressed me as either a minister or a local MP (although he is probably representative of his electorate).

      Perhaps he has found his forte… Be interesting to see how he holds up ove the next few years

    • Felix 1.3
      6 March 2009 at 3:34 pm

      Lynn, agreed. A couple of years of the pressure of the job could well wear out his good intentions.

      But so far not bad at all.

      • Steve Pierson 1.3.1
        6 March 2009 at 5:27 pm

        I actually think he was pretty bad this week. He intentions around getting better answers from ministers are good but he’s running into trouble as Labour insists he live up to the goal. Labour have been clever enough to start asking very specific questions and then complaining if they aren’t answered (still havent’ cottoned on that they would be better off asking one part questions though, ministers only need address one question when multiple ones are asked, which still lets ministers off the hook quite often).. of course, ministers don’t want to answer specific questions, they want to try to get hits on Labour. Lockwood is caught in a position of either having to constantly insist his own party collegues re-answer questions or not live up to the standards he set early on, provoking long points of order debates.

        And he’s misspeaking or getting things dead wrong quite often.

        Still, his intentions are good and if he can go someway toward getting higher quality question times, that’s something.

        At least he doens’t have to contend with constant yelling from the Opposition backbenches like Wilson did. A few years back, I went to question time with some foreign VIPs, and was completely embarrassed by National’s behaviour.

        • mickysavage 1.3.1.1
          6 March 2009 at 8:10 pm

          SP

          I did not say “good”, I said “far better than I thought it would be”.

          You are right about Labour’s questioning. They need to stop throwing words into the questions and ask one single unambiguous question and then complain when the nats do not answer it.

        • Felix 1.3.1.2
          7 March 2009 at 10:35 am

          Absolutely, those multi-part Qs need sorting out.

  2. gingercrush 2
    6 March 2009 at 3:13 pm

    Can I give Annette King an F for her dismal performance in the house yesterday. The questions she asked of Judith Collins (who herself has been rather dismal) should have been a king hit but for some reason it fell completely apart.

  3. Tigger 3
    6 March 2009 at 3:57 pm

    Did Hone Harawira’s crazy press release about Labour and the S&F miss the deadline for this? Nothing like a slap in the face when someone’s trying to offer you an olive branch.

    • Steve Pierson 3.1
      6 March 2009 at 5:20 pm

      Yeah, fair call. but we can’t have all negatives… try to balance the praseworthy with the pitiful… plus no-one thought to put it in. Amateur.

  4. Snail 4
    6 March 2009 at 5:28 pm

    I’d guess Joe — have-a-go Joe has been here for a read during the week.. likely when part of the subject was journalism’s future. Then again it could have been TT(take the link for who).

    Whatever, congratulations!

    Sorry, not on topic, yet appropos at end of week copy. Hope you don’t mind…

  5. Quoth the Raven 5
    6 March 2009 at 7:04 pm

    I like This Modern World. This recent one is good. It hasn’t taken Americans long to see they didn’t vote for change.

  6. George.com 6
    6 March 2009 at 10:44 pm

    Does Bennetts “Thats so last year” comment on the skill strategy show where Nationals thinking is. Paula, a skills strategy should not be “last year”, it should be here and now. Heavens forbid, how many times have we been told we have a skills shortage in this country. Labour made a start with the modern apprenticeship scheme. National should be focussing on skills and upgrading skills. If we want to come out of the despression with some ability to prosper as economy, we need to deal with the skills issue this year, and next year and the year after. No, it isn’t “so last year”. Get with it. We need a far better strategy from the government than simply pointing people in the direction of the local WINZ office.

  7. Pascal's bookie 7
    6 March 2009 at 11:14 pm

    And on the just-fucking-shoot-me-already front I see they are going to get Paul Holmes on the Agenda replacement TV1 Sunday AM talkfest.

  8. Steve Withers 8
    7 March 2009 at 1:15 am

    The Herald as whole is essentially now corrupt. They consistently misrepresented the S92a issue as ISP cutting off people who illegally downloaded copyrighted material…..rather than mention the REAL ISSUE which was that they were only *accused* of doing so.

    The Herald consistently avoided using the word accused when describing the furore around S92a.

    Dave Crampton called them up to remonstrate on this omission and they said it was ‘too late” to fix it that day…..and then repeated the very same omission the next day.

    Sadly typical of how the Herald is now a political actor and apologist for the National Party…..as the Dominion Post has been since Richard Long took over that paper in 1990.

    Time for some media ownership reform. Foreign media billionaires have far too much influence and we who live here have far too little.

  9. TghtyRighty 9
    7 March 2009 at 4:54 pm

    roy morgan, a+ or f- depending on which side of the fence your on. possibly a passing c for the continuation of the rogue polls

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