Posts by Kyle Matthews
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and we look up in three years and suddenly notice that we've, like, privatised the air in public parks or something.
Now that's just silly Danielle, they'll never get away with that.
What they'll do is privatise the air over private property. Then when the air moves over public parks, it will still be in private ownership, and you'll have to pay a small levy to use it.
Any air owned by the public which is used by private companies will similarly be levied, but this amount will be over-offset by tax credits, because we want to encourage growth, and times are tough, don't ya know?
It'll be the Private-Public-Partnership-on-Air-Usage.
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I like this bit from the National-Act Agreement Appendix on the Climate Change Select Committee:
hear views from trade and diplomatic experts on the international relations aspects of this issue
Always good to have the important issues of the day shoved into the cupboard because they made be bad for getting on with other countries and making money.
This is the same tosh that National was doing a couple of decades ago with Nuclear Free, which they since changed their minds on.
Act's now got them doing it for Climate Change. Can we have a right-wing government with vision for a change?
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You call it the freedom to advertise. That's fair, but the freedom to advertise is part of freedom of speech. We limit and restrict both (including around elections), but that doesn't mean one isn't just a subset of the other.
The point isn't about advertising itself being restricted.
The point is that money to spend on advertising is restricted. That's not stopping people doing it, it's simply limiting it in quantity (and possibly quality). The distinction is very important and gets lost when people start off on "it's about freedom of speech". Money should never be considered to be equivalent to freedom of speech. If it is, then richer people have more freedom of speech than poorer people, and that should never be a principle we follow.
Rich people should be as free as anyone to shout to the masses, and the media about everything they want, just as much as any person who has less money. What they shouldn't be able to do is spend thirty times as much money thrusting their message in front of the eyes of voters.
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Pardon me if I find the outrage four months after the fact somewhat less than convincing.
I'm not sure why it's come out now, but it's possible that the TV show agreed not to talk about it until after the election.
But umm, eye on the ball. Future Act MP drunk and disorderly and talking crap.
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And yet those full page ads (which I believe run well north of ten grand a throw) Labour was running on a near-daily basis during the last week of the campaign in the Herald, didn't seem to help very much at all.
The fact that there are bad campaigns, and bad products from time to time, doesn't disprove the general thesis.
placing more restrictions and conditions on freedom of speech isn't a symptom of forward momentum in the democratic idiom.
The ability to spend money on advertising isn't freedom of speech.
The ability to stand up and say things and have them reported in the media is freedom of speech.
You're talking about freedom to advertise. Which we restrict in a number of ways in NZ, including around elections.
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I don't mean to harsh the general amity, but that's his frigging job -- you stand for an electorate, you should bloody know what that entails if you win. Constituency clinics and going to various events are not some optional extra you "find time for", it's your damn job.
And if you can't do that, as well as ministerial duties, you can always decline to accept the warrant. Or you shouldn't be offered it in the first place.
As my original post pointed out, he wasn't just doing his electorate, and his ministerial posts, he was also doing a whole 'nother minister's work as well. And he hasn't complained, at least as far as I know, about the extra work. Just done it, and competently at that.
I also know that his electorate office used to deal with a lot of work from outside the electorate, because a neighbouring MP's office wasn't particularly satisfactory in that regard.
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more money certainly buys more ad/space time kyle, but isn't creativity far more difficult to calculate, surely? isn't the success of an ad pretty intrinsically linked to the product being advertised?
Ah yup. Which doesn't change the fact that advertising influences people's decisions, and more money means more of it. This isn't rocket science.
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Yeah, starting from the Ducks (goons).
Oh, did they defeat your team again Giovanni? Man, sorry about that.
(Though, I'd happily flick Perros from the Ducks, a policy of carrying a player that is basically there to fight... not what I consider sport. Replace him with a player that is there to, y'know, score goals.)
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It's not tricky. Advertising influences people's behaviour. More money buys more and better advertising.
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He has a sharp intellect, was always on top of the issues whatever they were, but also knew and acknowledged that others in the particular gathering had lived experience that gave them expertise on the issues under discussion that he didn't and couldn't have.
He's a Dunedin man and apparently a very good electorate MP.
I'm not sure what Hodgson is like in Wellington and in the trenches, but he's an OK electorate MP - always has lots of time for the students assocation and is on campus regularly, which is pretty good given his Ministerial responsibilities.
I remember once when he took over the portfolios of another minister who had been stood down, and I was talking to him at a party a few days later. His biggest complaint was that his diary had just been mashed together with another minister's diary. He was at that time I think running 7 or 8 portfolios, a couple of them major ones. He's also a major party strategist and has played a big role in the past 9 years.
Not a great speaker, but a fairly encyclopedic mind.