Posts by Joe Wylie
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Polity: Key Derangement Syndrome…, in reply to John Palethorpe,
Sometimes I sigh at how much focus there is on his past, like those depressingly repetetive folk banging on about a statement to the SFO over twenty years ago as if they're Woodward and Bernstein - or how he was a banker and isn't to be trusted. Labour ran that one in 2008 and look how it turned out?
As Ian Dalziel's concise history made clear, there are significant players in the Dirty Politics saga who were intimately involved with Key's ascendancy. Some of them are likely to be around long after Key, Winston, Dunne and the Maori Party have moved on.
Just because Nicky Hager, who can hardly be accused of suffering from the delusion that he's an amalgam of Woodward and Bernstein, failed to make a significant dent in Key's standing, it doesn't follow that his revelations should be consigned to an irrelevant past.
No amount of future-oriented punditry managed to predict that Key's flag hubris would probably cost him more political capital than anything revealed in Dirty Politics, but it's a hubris spawned by the same cynical manipulation of the electorate. We've seen it crash and burn before with the patronising personality cult attempted with the hapless Roger Sutton. Playing silly buggers with Matthew Hooton only gratifies and encourages the perpetrators.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Queenstown tonight, Ilam on the 17th, Dipton the 18th and so on...
Here's hoping there is an appetite for changing the upper echelons and direction by the grassroots...
Not in Ilam, where hell has long since frozen over. Brownlee conspicuously hasn't bothered to turn up at the ritual meet the candidates event for the past couple of elections at least. Like the current flag, which he's pretty much tacitly endorsed by his silence re. the tea towel, he seems to plan on being around for a while yet.
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
It has been quite a number of decades since people have been happy to leave decisions to the experts, especially questions of national identity. Decisions which are left entirely to the experts (e.g., Official Cash Rate, which drugs to buy) are quite rare.
Something about your comment suggests that you haven't spent a lot of time in post-quake Canterbury. BTW no-one appears to have tapped the hapless Roger Sutton to add his bit to the pro-change BS-fest. Bet it's been thought of, though.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to nzlemming,
Imagine seeing a leg of lamb in Europe with the new flag on it. Imagine our wine with the fern across the back of the bottle, as a sign of where it is produced.
Mark of the beast. This is pure vintage Mike Moore, in his lamburger incarnation as Minister of Overseas Trade and Marketing. Moore was given to appointing "cultural ambassadors" as part of his marketing push. When he anointed a couple of marching girls, one candidly admitted that explaining her role to foreigners might be a bit of a stretch, as "Australia and us are the only countries that have them".
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Hard News: What you lookin' at?, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
One might almost say they are in 'unchartered' waters...
:)
"It's fun to charter an accountant
And sail the wide accountancy..." -
Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to Barry -,
...and haven't stood for a national anthem since watching the movie "The Bedsittingroom" in about the year 1980.
Sounds about a decade late. Standing for the queen was a distant memory in 1980. BTW The Bed-Sitting Room featured a revised post-apocalyptic national anthem.
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Anyone remember the barrel-scraping flag antics of the terminal Muldoon era? (scroll down to "1980s revival"). Getting into a taxi back then that happened to be flying the NZ flag guaranteed you a driver with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Kaiangaroa forest.
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I prefer to go into the Gardens and be amazed at how all the beautiful plants and trees seemed to survive and Im so pleased they did.
The gardens were planned and planted by people who knew that they'd never live to see their vision come to fruition. That spirit seems very much alive among the ground-level activists shown in The Art Of Recovery documentary. Not much evidence of it among the comfortably-remunerated central planners, whose vision rarely seems to extend beyond ensuring their second pension.
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Up Front: Five, in reply to Sister Mary Gearchange,
There is a time and place to let go. Grieving forever, fostering the anger and helping it fester simply means you're emotionally dead.
No shit, Sigmund.