Posts by Kyle Matthews
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How would the public service get supervised? I know they are all consumatte professionals, but the idea of a democracy is that the elected government and parliament controls policy (Officials advise, Ministers decide).
I'm happy for their to be a minister supervising the bureaucracy. I'm just not sure that we need two Ministers to supervise the non-existent world cup bureaucracy, one surely is enough.
The purpose of having associate ministers seems to mostly be to throw bones at particular people, and to involve many people in making one pie. Neither of which seem necessary. If the Minister of whatsit needs advising by other MPs, he can take all the advice he wants, they don't all need to have signed warrants to prove how important they are.
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namely the requirement to print contact information on placards, clothing and the like as it is under the EFA.
To me this seems relatively uncontroversial.
If you see some expensive advertising up during the election, and you wonder "well I wonder who paid for that, someone's spending a lot of money". The way you find out who paid for it is that it says it in the bottom corner. In theory at least, it provides public accountability. If you know about all the advertising out there with a person's name on it, you could total up the cost of that advertising, and bingo, you know how much that person spent.
I presume that any electoral type advertising which doesn't have an attribution could be removed, but I might be wrong about that.
Whether or not you should have to put it on clothing and whatnot is another issue. That really comes down to the definition of advertising. I could easily come up with some ways to advertise just using clothing which I'm sure could help my campaign, so context is pretty important.
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Naming the melt-down of American financial institutions after an ethnic Jewish foodstuff might be taken the wrong way in some quarters.
Yeah good point. I don't want to promote anti-semitism.
Grifffim maybe. Loosely based on Global Financial Meltdown. (It needed three f's to not have a Google hit).
Umm. Lucky someone checked?
Surely when everyone googles it they'll just put in two fs and they'll never find it, and we'll end up obscure?
We'd need to run a "Your 'Global Financial Meltdown' has three fs" campaign. 1. Foreclosure; 2.Fiduciary ; and 3. Fucked. Advertising changes minds don't ya know.
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So some organisation with nameless but extremely wealthy backers can spend many millions on an advertising and PR campaign to convince people that massive tax cuts are really important for the future of the economy, or that privatisation of the water supply will save them lots of money.
Those sound suspiciously like issues which relate to the election. In fact, I think both of them are Act policies at the very least.
Your example was about the illegal detention of my family, which is unlikely to be an election issue.
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The organic ones are fine, but the ones dreamed up by some marketing department are fingernails down blackboard.
All Blacks is an organic name. It's just been taken over and pushed well down the line by the NZRFU.
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28 Ministers, plus Lockwood. That's almost one quarter of parliament.
I'm increasingly in favour of capping Ministerial budgets, or rules, so that they can only have about 20. We have so many associate ministers of wanting to dip my finger into this little thing here. It'd be nice to just have a Minister of doing the actual work occasionally.
Maybe we should get someone in from the private sector to review it.
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He'll own question time though. "Your starter for three..."
lol.
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Never give your fears a human face. Some people will know a George that is nothing at all like what we're going through, and complain, and others will know some right prick of a George and think it's entirely appropriate.
So, in support of West Wing, I vote we call it bagel. Which is nothing like it, so it's a slightly surreal placeholder.
Oh no, too many syllables. Umm. What about just 'bag'?
That way we could say "wow, we're really in the bag now", "it's black in the bag", and when people and institutions fall over financially, they could have been 'bagged'.
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Nick Smith: Minister for Climate Change Issues
There's an open-ended Ministry :)
I might phone him up and ask him to fix my roses, and sort my dogs out. Now that I believe that I can blame those issues on climate change.
And we have two Ministers responsible for the Rugby World Cup. Great.
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