Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: The humanity, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Guess they haven’t come North.
Maybe it's a Southern phenomenon that's headed that way. Some old farming acquaintances I caught up with in the lower NI in December 2012 remarked on the recent influx of 'foreign' workers, but didn't seem too clued as to their nationalities.
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Hard News: The humanity, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I’d like evidence of Filipino on farms. Haven’t seen any up North and word gets around. I’ve seen young just out of school farmhands and managers that are not the owners but no Filipinos.
I have no idea of total numbers, but from the two I've had the privilege of getting to know I understand there are at least hundreds in Mid-Canterbury alone. If there are cases of abuse or exploitation I get the impression that they'd be exceptional. Changing employers seems to be as common as it is with NZers.
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Hard News: The humanity, in reply to nzlemming,
Is it the dawning of the Age of Aquariums?
Right ...Tiny Tim's ancient global warming anthem.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Creon Upton,
You know, for the last twenty years or so we’ve had outraged puritans, from, I don’t know, Kim Hill to John Banks, reviling this “postmodernism” thing that’s been taught in the universities
It’s more like twenty years since anyone’s prattled about the horrors of ‘postmodernism’. The real assault on academic privilege, or perhaps more importantly the vital role of qualified academic public opinion, has long since been ramped up into something vastly more dangerous.
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Moz,
Howard’s attempt to teach civics
That was a particularly nasty example of the kind of rule the political roost triumphalism that poisoned the Howard era. The intention was to reduce the historical component of ‘civics’ to a bedtime story, by effectively locking off discussion of what Howard termed ‘black armband’ issues. The involvement of Howard’s favourite historian, the aggressively reactionary Keith Windschuttle, turned the program’s treatment of aboriginal issues into a form of state sanctioned holocaust denial.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Interestingly one of the biggest lobbying organisations pushing for statehood for PR and/or DC is the flag manufacturing lobby ….
In Shanghai?
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Surely Australia must be a State by now?
A few things to be worked out first. Back at the height of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon there was a proposal that a referendum be held on whether Queensland should secede from the Commonwealth, with all Australians getting to vote on the issue.
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Speaker: Compulsory voting and election turnout, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Well,if I just draw a cock on my ballot paper rather than not turning up because I can’t afford to pay the fine or would rather not end up with a court date what exactly have we learned?
I've taken that option - though my chosen image was tailored to an issue of the day - in Australia. The dickspoiler vote is something of a grand tradition there.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to John Armstrong,
I should clarify: not that John Armstrong. I really should get around to amending my handle one of these days..
He's the one that sucks.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Felix Marwick,
I’m not dissing Hager’s book. It had some very valuable material in it and shone some light into some dark places. But a lot of its impact was that it collected events from over a period of five to six years and gathered them in one place. That gave it some real punch. The stories that I, and others, wrote happened individually and were (I suspect) passed over as being a bit beltway and of limited interest.
Appreciated. Yet at the time Slater appeared to be being groomed for family-friendly prime time - the contrived Canon win, endorsement by Hosking, 'personality' piece in the Herald - any dissenting voices seemed rather muted.