Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: The uncooling of the inner West, in reply to ,
Mangere Bridge
Some of my younger whanau sold up in Mangere Bridge a few years ago, which enabled them to buy mortgage free in Dunedin. They did have to go back into hock for some extensive terraforming, as the Mornington terrain isn't readily conducive to offstreet parking.
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Hard News: TVNZ: Emptied out, in reply to Ben Austin,
My confusion was more as to why the government hasn’t decided to sell their stake in the broadcaster, given it has been fully commercial for sometime
Well y'know it's been a whole quarter-century since TVNZ employees were vandalising the outdoor advertising for the then upstart TV3, with apparent tacit approval from their own top level.
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to nzlemming,
It only works if you’re not up-front about it. Gibbs has been buying Epsom’s vote since forever.
Maybe Gibbs isn’t upfront about it, but when Boag & Hooton were tearing strips off one another not so long ago they paused to enthusiastically hi-five each other over what a splendid wheeze the Epsom rort would once again prove to be.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Tom Scott nails it …. more than once
Thanks, but surely that first link's Sharon Murdoch's work?
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Was it upstairs in what became Shands in Hereford st or was it in Cashel ?
Shands in Hereford is right, I was wrong about the ReStart site. Some amazing locations could be had for a pittance, like the office space under the dome of the Regent Theatre.
I couldn’t get my head past ‘Oxus’ which was over by the river, near the Bridge of Remembrance… (I think..)
I remember spotting that one a few years earlier. Definitely gone by the later 1970s.
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
That’d be him!
Perhaps you recall Quasimodo, his emporium from around 1976, upstairs where the ReStart Mall is now. Alan (Allan?) Franks was always one to take the suburbs to the stars, the kind of Christchurch he inhabited seemed full of possibilities.
Still, the last I ever saw him he was a barman at the Gluepot. When he recommended what I heard as a 'housewife' I expected an ironically named cocktail. Instead he poured me a chilled semillon, which turned out to be the house white.
About Gopas: There's a story I heard from one of his students from the latter part of his career, about coming across the great man in an Ilam street after dark with his ear pressed to the pavement. In keeping with the arcane subject matter of his late period ballpoint drawings he was listening to the internal workings of the planet. Perhaps he was eavesdropping on the buildup to the earthquakes.
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
*inspired by a crazy night at Mollett Street – when someone or other (Alan Franks maybe?)
That'd be the Allan Franks whose talents included artist's model par excellence.
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Hard News: Media Take: The creeping…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Not helping, Joe. I’m happy to have people offer different perspectives here, and I think it’s possible to critique the perspective without attacking the person like that.
It would have been better if I'd refrained. That said, I can't see any way around cultivating a level of self-abasement in order to pretend that certain "different perspectives" are offered in good faith.
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Hard News: Media Take: The creeping…, in reply to Tinakori,
There most definitely were not in the Bolger governments. I can think of one outside the Prime Minister’s Office and they were a former electorate secretary. They also did not have the political advisor title. I can think of some troubleshooters in various offices but they weren’t political advisors and usually did not work full-time. I can also think of some private sector people but they didn’t do political advice other than informally. Matthew Hooton was there but he was a 20 year old speechwriter. Press secretaries did most of the work of what Labour’s political advisors subsequently carried out but many Ministers in National were not interested in having political advice of any kind. For good or ill they thought they and other cabinet ministers provided all the political advice required. They were probably right! Labour introduced political advisors for all in 1999, slavishly following, as ever, the UK Labour Party.
To a point-scoring partisan suckhole it all comes down to semantics.
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I recall Greens wanting Labour to make a deal with Labour before the Election.
You might also recall Shane Jones's blatant slagging of the Greens in the very week that he was shamelessly flirting with Judith Collins. All of the current Labour leadership contenders appear to have been equally blindsided by the Jones cuckoo in their nest.