Posts by Joe Wylie
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Capture: Auckland Pride Parade, in reply to JacksonP,
Very impressed by the Segway queens.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Jos,
A bowl full of sweet 100's
Encountered them for the first time the other day, fancy that. They taste every bit as good as they look in your great pic.
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Meh.
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Hard News: The Wogistan form book, in reply to Russell Brown,
NZ First voters traditionally have no clue who the hell they're voting in when they vote for Winston.
You're probably right, but Denis O'Rourke took the trouble to turn up to the Ilam Meet the Candidates event, which is more than Brownlee bothered to do. I don't know if there were any potential NZ First voters present, although the guy who heckled Maori Party candidate Rãhui Kãtene for opening her address in Te Reo probably fitted the stereotype.
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Hard News: The Wogistan form book, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
This really is a distraction from more pressing and serious matters.
Absolutely. Clowns like Prosser and his Australian equivalents - most of whose political careers were over by the mid-2000s - are a convenient smokescreen for the institutionalised nastiness that Key has sold us into with his deal with Gillard.
Prosser feeds the convenient myth that Australia's - and now NZ's - indefensibly inhumane attitude to refugees is driven by a groundswell from the political fringe, to which the civilised centre must reluctantly respond.
The reality is that it's been nurtured from the centre, until it's become a bipartisan fait accompli. Philip Ruddock, as John Howard's immigration Minister, pointedly wore his Amnesty International badge throughout the whole manufactured children overboard propaganda exercise. Despite calls for his membership to be revoked he brazened it out.
Any reaction from David Shearer will be very muted.
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Hard News: The Wogistan form book, in reply to John Holley,
His statements upset most NZers, but surely the fact that he is in a position to make such statements, highlight what a diverse democracy we have?
When I lived in Australia during Pauline Hanson's heyday I was surprised by the kind of people I met who claimed to be actually voting for her. All happily agreed that she was a nasty little nobody probably pumped up on prozac, but as they were compelled to vote she offered a means of giving the finger to a party system that they felt had turned its back on them. While they lacked a wider political consciousness they certainly didn't share Hanson's malice towards aboriginals and migrants. They simply didn't care about the broader implications.
I sensed something similar from the young relative who last election cheerfully told me that he'd decided to vote for Winston after the Banks tea party fiasco, as a way of getting back at Key. Unfortunately for that strategy Winston seems to be effectively nobbled by the behaviour of his shambolic bunch of ring-ins. Not just Prosser. At a time when he should be holding the Government's feet to the fire over Shipley's involvement with Mainzeal, even the ridiculous Brendan Horan is able to spoil his best lines.
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Fairfax carried a story this morning that unnamed NZ First MPs were privately ropeable over Prosser's self-outing. Presumably this is mostly Denis O'Rourke, aka NZ First's intellectual wing, who's unlikely to have anything to say since he went into permanent hissy fit mode back in October.
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Legal Beagle: A four-year parliamentary term?, in reply to James Caygill,
But I think Representative Democracy does need to be given a space where representatives can actually be allowed to represent, rather than looking constantly to the polls and voters to see if what they are doing is 'popular'.
With ECAN suspended because it didn't deliver the results that central government wanted, and the Chch City Council negotiating in secret, I'm finding that more than a little creepy. That's not what MMP was supposed to deliver, but it has.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Chris, have you experienced Beijing Gongti Richina Underwater World? Opened by Jim Bolger back in the day, along with the late Mainzeal it's supposedly part of Richina Pacific's curious empire.
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Yet, he isn’t above telling his audience how to feel
This is the guy who back in 2003, without a hint of irony, led off an item on a Bay of Plenty Waitangi claim with "Get ready to go ballistic on this".
