Posts by linger
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
While the explicit content of some meetings, or some briefings may be properly [ sic : word missing], the existence of the meetings themselves will not,
I appreciate the self-referentiality of (presumably) the word “redacted” being redacted here, but I suspect it wasn’t intentional?
The use of exactly the same stock boilerplate non-response by several different ministers strongly suggests a coordinated strategy of obfuscation. It may well be that these individuals actually have had no relevant meetings as yet and don't wish to admit that fact; but you're right, it's information that should be made public.
-
Hard News: Harkanwal Singh: What really…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
So would you say that targetting foreign-national property-buyers was only cynically driven by a need not to [intentionally] target anyone who was an eligible voter in NZ?
(Which is a separate issue from the questionable validity of using "property buyers with Chinese-sounding names" as a proxy for that target group.) -
Hard News: Harkanwal Singh: What really…, in reply to WH,
40% of New Zealanders don’t own their own home. That’s about two million people.
It is important to check whether the first figure refers to individuals or households. The latter figure would be true only if you were including current children and infants as potential current individual homeowners, which seems … questionable!
-
Pretty sure Rich’s point was not that alcohol isn’t a drug: merely that alcohol is not treated socially as only a drug, in that we build rituals and crafts around its use. But the same is also true of other drugs in other societies. They’re all still drugs; the difference lies in whether they are given some additional social status.
[Oops. My browser failed to refresh, leaving nzlemming's post as the last one showing in this thread. I see things have since moved on. As you were.]
-
Possibly “Crocodile infested” was intended as a NZ musical reference (why else the initial capital?) rather than as a description of the wildlife.
-
For electorate MPs, resignation from a party doesn’t necessarily remove them from Parliament. What does the proposed bill do there? Are they automatically entitled to sit as an independent, or is a by-election forced? If they sit, or win election, as an independent, what subsequently prevents them from founding a new party? Does the proposed bill make any distinction between founding a new party and switching to a different established party (the latter being the specific outcome that such a bill would aim to prevent)?
For list MPs, presumably the argument against allowing them to take independent status is that the party identity is the only thing that got them into Parliament, and hence resignation from that party removes them from Parliament, with no process equivalent to a by-election applied to assess the contribution of their own personal (local) popularity to the party’s success. This seems slightly unfair, and it might be preferable to explore whether some kind of equivalent test could be introduced.
-
Up Front: Too Sexy for Your Site, in reply to TracyMac,
Though I take the point that it's often actually used as a block, "I don't need to know about it" is at least on the continuum through "it's none of my business" to the realisation "I don't get to have an opinion about it".
-
Hard News: Lorde, the council and the…, in reply to Moz,
“eat up your yummy Jesus bits, children. Tasty, tasty Jesus!”
-
Legal Beagle: Despite Simon Bridges'…, in reply to Sacha,
So the Nats are continuing their standard MO of bullshitting at every opportunity. In a sane world, people would stop taking them seriously.
-
Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to simon g,
Joyce has plenty of experience rubbishing others; where he has little experience is in NOT having his bullshit automatically believed by being in government. If he's performing poorly now, that says more about the NZ media's habitual leg-humping of National than about Joyce himself.