Posts by Keir Leslie
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Mahuta does have an 18 year track record to look back on - I'm expecting a competent but non-flashy execution, which is well above replacement spox for the Labour Party at the moment - remember, the last guy to have this portfolio was Shane Jones...
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If you think about it, Little has only ranked the top 12, plus five who’re likely to be moving on at the next election if not sooner. I suspect Wall, Whaitiri, Williams, Faafoi, Curran Salesa will all have good odds of moving up next time there’s a reshuffle and some of the more senior MPs move on.
[Wall has a reputation for not being the easiest to work with. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it may be a factor at a time when Little is trying to smooth troubled waters.]
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Bill English has an Hons degree in English from Victoria (and a BCom from Otago, but that may not have had a great deal of accounting or finance in it), Cullen had a PhD in economic history from Edinburgh (while Gordon Brown had one in history from Edinburgh), Birch was a surveyor from Waikato, Richardson was a lawyer as was Caygill. Last finance minister to have had a specific qualification and actual experience in accounting was Roger Douglas and look how that turned out.
Finance is a political role - you aren't actually going out and doing deals on the markets yourself.
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I don't think it's behind Animal Rights - unranked MPs are listed by year of first entry... Still, disappointing it's so far south.
I think Ruth may be being given the message it's time to think about moving on - certainly she's part of the King/Goff/Mallard era that's been given very polite but pointed positions.
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Also, Andrew Little shouldn't take an electorate. As long as he's leader he'll get in on the list, and when he stops being leader that's probably the time for him to move on from Parliament anyway, as it is for a couple of the other ex-leaders in the Labour caucus.
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Thing is, the CGT is more popular than Labour. If anything, Labour drags down the popularity of the CGT, not the other way around. If it goes, it goes, whatever, but it's a mistake and it'll be a terrible shame.
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Does't the use of "1 or more" suggest that specific terrorist acts must be made out? Or is that a red herring?
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The cops don't need to be corrupt for this to be a bad thing. They don't need to be intentionally chilling speech for them to be chilling speech.
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Ultimately I think any claims about how excessive or unreasonable the action was are basically baseless given how little anyone outside the case knows of the specifics of the event, and how little we generally know about what’s typical for police in such a scenario.
But equally, you have no reason to think that the action was reasonable. Also, no offence, but "I don't know anything about this subject area, so everyone else must be equally ignorant" is kinda patronising and offensive.
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it’s unreasonable to assume the worst.
Why is it unreasonable to assume the worst? These are literally the people that brought us the Red Devils case, the various botched murder investigations over the past 25 years, the Urewera Raids, the Kim Dotcom raid, breaking kids' faces at parties, etc. etc. I don't trust the cops, and I don't expect anyone else to.