Posts by Joe Wylie
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I bought NZ PhotoForum back in 1977 when these pics were the cover story, and I'm not even a photographer. Wonderful to see again.
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Ultimately, what I’m concerned about is whether our primary motivation is to deal with the institutional problems, or just to assign blame.
I really can’t follow you there Isaac. To me the primary concern is that we treat the performance of those who supposedly serve the greater good as a matter of state interest, rather than as the private affairs of a despot. That’s why I raised the earthquake recovery issue in relation to the charter schools thing, as there seems to be little disagreement about that ‘initiative’ being open to deliberate abuse.
The allegations raised by the Press won’t be decided by online readers’ comments. If that were the case, Arie Smith-Voorkamp would still be in custody. Right now the balls are in the EQC and Verifact Australia’s courts. At least the EQC has responded. Verifact, despite operating their own whistleblower hotline (for entirely commercial purposes) have done nothing to dispel the very real perception that they’re exploiting our misfortune with the kind of rapacity that we'd once assumed to be confined to the third world.
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Capture: Colour is the new black, in reply to David Hood,
Thanks for the Pixietown info David, I'll definitely check it out next time I'm in those parts. The version I saw in my childhood was an elaborate tent sideshow, if you didn't mind the funkiness you certainly got your moneysworth. It was divided into themed areas, including a water-filled aquatic section complete with a pixified German submarine.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Sacha,
If there’s any meaningful public accountability in this country, the EQC's Ian Simpson will be required to do rather more than point an expensive consultant at his critics. Wherever contracts are awarded, be it with consultants or the likes of Verifact, potential favours are incurred, which may be called on later. Jenny Shipley, for example, hardly needs another lucrative gig such as the CERA oversight role awarded to her by Brownlee. Simply asking for transparency isn’t tantamount to an accusation of wrongdoing.
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Capture: Colour is the new black, in reply to David Hood,
Pixietown at the Early Settlers Museum.
Well thank you, I always wondered what happened to Pixietown. Do they still have the nudist colony, with perverts peering over the fence, or the horribly gory dental surgery, where the dentist attacks a patient's jaw with a brace and bit?
I'd like to know more about where Pixietown originated. I've heard that it used to be stashed at Tahunanui when it was off the road, on the property of a guy who built his own observatory from which he photographed UFOs. Unfortunately he built too close to some large pine trees, and falling cones punctured the observatory dome.
In the late 70s I met a model railway enthusiast who'd made stuff for Pixietown. He'd recently been to Disneyland, and couldn't stop talking about the animatronic hillbilly bears he'd seen there. Their sheer technical finesse had shattered his will to contribute further to poor old Pixietown.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
Well thanks for that Isaac.
That doesn’t mean nobody’s to blame, just that the first person to have a finger pointed at them isn’t necessarily the sole cause of all problems.
Perhaps there’s something of a rabble-rousing tone about Van Beynen’s article, an attempt to excite the envy of the proletariat before moving on to the next distraction. His earlier piece on the EQC’s dealings with Verifact Australia could perhaps be criticised for playing to nationalistic sentiments. It would be a pity though to read them as such.
The ‘first person to have a finger pointed at them’ in Van Beynen’s piece is the teenage son of an EQC official. I don’t find the article to be an attempt to deflect blame onto him or any of the others named. Instead they’re presented as evidence of a possible culture of cronyism and corporate entitlement in the organisation. A significant number of Cantabrians have been severely disadvantaged by the earthquakes, and despite having insured in good faith they now find themselves with little recourse. The Government has cynically banked on their being a minority, and the election result appears to have vindicated that strategy. In the present climate of legislated unaccountability and poor communication, the media’s watchdog role is more vital than ever.
You’ve suggested that the EQC is “an organisation that suddenly had to do a job it was never designed for”. It’s an argument that appears to have found favour with the Government when applied to insurance companies, who have been able to weasel from honouring their full replacement policies by invoking the paper fiction of declaring red zoned properties repairable. Fortunately for all those throughout NZ who’ve paid their levies in the good faith assumption that a Government institution offered a degree of coverage for the very type of natural disaster that we’ve experienced, it’s not an across the board option for the EQC.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
. . . the as-yet-unproven accusation of nepotism against one person feels to me like a distraction that could allow deeper problems to go unnoticed.
Such as?
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Hard News: Most Discursive Website, in reply to Richard Aston,
I like the idea that black holes are the anus of the universe - all those scientists thinking they are some kind of gateway to a parallel universe and it turns out they were just taking the crap.
An idea explored by Canadian comics genius Chester Brown in his classic Ed the Happy Clown:
Ed is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit . . . While in prison, an unnamed character finds himself unable to stop defecating. His faeces fill up the jail, engulfing Ed. When he emerges, he finds the head of his penis has been replaced with the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from Dimension X, a place much like Ed's but in which the people are considerably smaller. The dimension had a waste problem, which they tried to solve by dumping it into a hole to another dimension. The hole turned out to be the anus of the man who couldn't stop defecating. Reagan's body was left in Dimension X, and the professor, who was the discoverer of the inter-dimensional portal, travels to Ed's dimension to find the head, eventually making contact with the authorities of Ed's world.
You never forget great art, however scatological.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
Culture of waste? Inflated salaries? Rushed hiring process? An organisation that suddenly had to do a job it was never designed for? Stressed people throwing money at problems because there's no time to organise a better process?
Fiscal Tourettes? Circumstantial Kleptomania? Good-heavens-no-that-sort-of-thing-only-happens-in-the-third world?
Perhaps any sufficiently advanced cock-up is indistinguishable from corruption.
Food for thought eh Isaac?. Perhaps you'll be putting in a word for this overstressed bumbler when he comes up for sentence. The $21,208 restitution sought seems pretty small beer compared to what's being 'inadvertently' creamed off from the EQC.
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The chopper proper.
