Posts by Joe Wylie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
What happened was easy to predict: the government threw a small amount of money at one part of the problem (without doing much to fix any of the drivers that are making people poorer in the first place). They walked away looking compassionate and pragmatic with the voting public, and the progressive movement didn’t do much to change the story from one of personal responsibility to systemic causality. It was a tactical failure – but also a failure in strategic messaging.
The real reason National was able to pull this off was Labour's legacy of having done nothing when they had the opportunity to reverse the savage welfare cuts that happened under Bolger and Shipley. The same applies to strategically drip-feeding apparent largesse to iwi. Clark sent armed police onto a Tuhoe schoolbus, Key sends a peacemaking police commissioner. While I'm not disputing the importance of how language may be used to frame issues, leaving these kinds of gaping holes in your legacy lends an undeserved eloquence to even the meanest practical gestures.
-
Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to Russell Brown,
Not having a crack at the Race Relations Conciliator might have been a good idea too.
Twyford seems determined to play this out as a hole-digging contest.
-
Former Canterbury district commander Dave Cliff has been "loaned" from Wellington traffic duties to oversee the winding-down of CERA.
According to Canterbury Communities' Earthquake Recovery Network spokeswoman Leanne Curtis, Cliff 'came across as trustworthy and empathetic in the weeks after the February 2011 quake.' As some may recall, Cliff's 'empathy' appeared to fail him when he presided over the shameful post-quake scapegoating of a young disabled man.
-
Hard News: Media Take Takes a Break, in reply to ,
Fight club, that’s an unfortunate phrase – for anyone remanded in custody. It’s domestic violence. But it’s a remand prision, everyone detained there is presumed to have done something wrong, so it’s less not ok:(
It’s also unfortunate that it takes the use smuggled technology to illegaly film the domestic violence, for it to be taken seriously. Can’t we be a little bit more egalitarian?:(
Fight club certainly packages it as occurring within a tidily defined and dehumanised social caste. The contrast with attitudes to the 2006 prison van murder of Liam Ashley is disturbing. Once the victim was portrayed as a North Shore boy gone astray, the Kiwiblog condemnation of the "oxygen thief" who'd had it coming abruptly switched to a kind of tribal grief.
-
Polity: Too much to swallow on the TPP, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I see what you did with the cows :)
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Not just…, in reply to Russell Brown,
BTW that Fugs album at the right hand front has a nice Matthew Arnold track.
That is some serious hippy shit.
The Fugs were very heavy on the English Lit references. These days, that kind of thing is probably higher on the endangered list than hippies.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Not just…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Steeped in history is Florence …
Far out.
BTW that Fugs album at the right hand front has a nice Matthew Arnold track.
-
Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to Rich Lock,
good depictions of women in literature written by men.
Patrick White.
-
Polity: Land of the brave little kids, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Thanks Katharine, I'd just assumed they were still out there. In the 1950s all primary school kids, including those in Catholic schools, had their sight and hearing tested in school time by state-employed nurses. Yet another example of our slow slide from 1st world status?
-
Polity: Land of the brave little kids, in reply to Katharine Moody,
One comparative aspect where NZ falls short is in not having school nurses.
When did NZ's school nurses go missing? While it's been some time since it's been an issue for me, we certainly had them right through the 80s.