Posts by Joe Wylie
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Hebe,
Perhaps it's telling that the Press appear to have decided against opening online comments on that particular piece.
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Capture: Capture One, in reply to JacksonP,
Huey, Dewey, and Louie?
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Hard News: When A City Falls, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I wonder if part of the problem is that a lot of people who’ve seen it talk about crying, and people think: nah, not today thanks.
I wouldn't know about outside of Christchurch, but the mood abroad seems to be almost a stampede to forget. It's particularly evident in the callously dismissive attitudes towards the minority who've lost out badly to the quakes. Rather less so, but perhaps equally telling, in the sanitized and mesh-fenced CTV building site, where photos and other mementoes to those who died there are still renewed as they deteriorate in the weather.
Someone's even attached a framed corkboard to the fence, but there's no official provision or endorsement of the real need for ongoing grieving.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Thomas Johnson,
BSA win!
But Tower were of the understanding that they'd been issued with a genuine nudge & wink-level loophole. While it didn't actually bear the Government imprimatur there was no way it'd intervene, no matter how loudly those who'd paid their premiums in good faith complained about effectively being told to go jump.
Damn that pesky BSA. Someone better talk to Gerry.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Kumara Republic,
As I've previously mentioned, MMP is the closest we have to an upper house. The alternative is Muldoonism or Sir Joh.
When Bolger expressed his preference for an upper house back when MMP was first mooted, someone commented that he already had one in the form of the Business Roundtable.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Emma Hart,
. . . an electorate that nobody was talking about as a marginal before the election.
Burns's 2008 majority was 935 votes, down from Tim Barnett's 2005 figure of 7,836.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Hebe,
. . . it's off to the mechanic to replace the shock absorbers from the sinkholes in the road, the air filters from the dust, and it goes on.
We don't have the energy, and most families I know are keeping going, just, hanging on until the Christmas holiday.
I don't know how you cope with the dust. When I had to leave Avonside for the comparatively solid substrate of Sockburn after the September quake I wasn't too keen, until those dust clouds appeared. Microfine particles that find their way through gaps you didn't know existed.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Sacha,
the result is, in large part, some shining endorsement of National’s post-#eqnz actions
Sadly somewhat true though. If citizens and their representatives felt strongly otherwise they could have organised and voted accordingly. They didn’t.
I can assure you that a good many of them did. Gerry Brownlee had the numbers, and correctly calculated that the severely disadvantaged could be safely ignored. You may recall the Avonside Blog post linked to earlier that drew some sobering parallels with the Occupy movement and the plight of those disadvantaged by the quakes:
Brownlee didn’t bother to campaign this past election. Apart from appearing in consumer mode at the City Mall reopening, he’s been too busy. It’s worked like a dream.
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes, in reply to Ben Austin,
I don't know the guy, but he did spend an awfully long time as a National MP and old habits die hard for all of us
How about Winston? In the 1986-87 glory days of the Lange Government Banks and Peters were probably the two most voluble and visible opposition MPs. While I can't recall the author of the piece (Denis Welch?), I clearly remember a Listener article from the time describing them as the two horsemen of the socialist apocalypse.
While Winston would likely reject the term he's remained an unreconstructed Muldoon socialist, in that he delivers to a constituency carved out by the politics of division. Banks has happily identified with Muldoon in the past, to the point of hosting his radio show when the old horror was indisposed. Although his political instincts are at least as divisive as Winston's he'll never deliver to the voters, only to those he's struck deals with. No gold cards from Banksie.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Christopher Dempsey,
Or will ACT self destruct before then?
The last shred of ACT futtered out when Parliament wound up and Douglas et al toddled off to ill-deserved obscurity. What's left is the stolen identity of a dead party.