Posts by Russell Brown
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Ben, I'll be raising your points with Maia tomorrow.
She wrote this last year:
What is the most dangerous activity you can engage in? If you guessed doing illegal drugs, you would be wrong. Extreme sports like big wave surfing, heli-skiing, cave diving, white-water rafting and mountain climbing all have a higher rate of risk to life and limb. Yet the question of a ban on these behaviors beloved by "adrenaline addicts" is viewed as ludicrous, even when the risk of death, say, in climbing Mount Everest once (until recently, about 1 in 3) is greater than the annual risk of dying from heroin addiction (around 1% to 4%).
Or consider mundane activities like driving: Car accidents are responsible for 1% of annual deaths nationwide. Cigarettes and alcohol do at least as much, if not more, harm to each user than heroin or cocaine. Alcohol, cocaine and heroin have a 3% to 15% rate of addiction, depending on how it is measured—and tobacco's rate is higher. Yet the risks don't align well with their legal and social status, especially when you consider that marijuana is safer than any of the legal drugs.
The reasons for this inconsistency around risk are complicated. Driving has huge personal and economic benefits. Risky sports are seen as noble challenges that foster the human will toward exploration, adventure and growth. When it comes to nonmedical drug use, however, discussion of benefits tends to be either dismissed as delusional or stifled in favor of “risk” talk.
I mention these facts not to promote drug use. That I feel compelled to immediately include such a disclaimer underlines my point: Our values shape our perception of risk and the way we make drug policy. If we recognize only the risks and ignore the benefits, we fail to understand that the real problems are addiction and harm—not the substances themselves and the people who use them.
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Hard News: Circumstance and coincidence, in reply to Michael Meyers,
To me, the “misleading statements” from Key are the real issue and the Kim Dotcom stuff is very circumstantial. Charitably I would forgive a misremembering or two from John Key since his memory appears to be pretty poor but I’m not sure that any of his statements around the hiring process were true. Why lie so much and so obviously?
Which in itself is reason for journalists to stay on the case.
Key's claim of no foreknowledge of the Dotcom raid is also increasingly difficult to believe, especially given that he lied so freely about another element of the story. And, as I noted, appointing someone as the country's top spy then moving him a month later to a job you've known was coming up for five years was a very odd thing to to do.
Overall, last night’s story felt like a Winston Peters-style smoking gun rather than an actual conspiracy.
They've been working on this story for a long time and apparently felt they had enough for an update. I doubt they think they've nailed it yet, but last night was interesting.
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Hard News: Circumstance and coincidence, in reply to Pete George,
Charles Finny has added to the discussion on Fletcher’s appointment.
That’s useful. But it doesn’t explain the lies and evasiveness around the circumstances of his appointment, if it was simply a shoulder-tapping of a highly-qualified New Zealander.
It also seems to represent a really remarkable degree of disorganisation to have appointed Mataparae to such an important role and then announce a month later that he’d be moving on to be governor general. Governor-generals serve a five year-term – everyone knows when a replacement will be required. How on earth would you accidentally appoint the guy you want to another very senior role when you’ve had five freakin’ years to think about a successor?
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Hard News: Circumstance and coincidence, in reply to Matt Crawford,
RB - you've anglicised the spelling of Maarten Wevers.
Ta. Fixed.
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Paul Buchanan discusses the report with Sean Plunket.
Edit: At about 7.45 Buchan advances a theory I've not heard before -- that Dotcom refused to allow US intelligence access to his files, when the US feared that extremists were using Megaupload to covertly communicate by uploading and downloading files. But his theory is undermined by his error in thinking that Megaupload offered end-to-end encryption to protect the theoretical extremists. It didn't. The new service, Mega, is encrypted, Megaupload wasn't.
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Hard News: Circumstance and coincidence, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Whoops, my bad. I pasted the wrong link into the post. Fixed now.
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Access: Your Relationship With Disability, in reply to Alister,
First post!
Nice one. Welcome in.
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A: No. I think I have characteristics of attention deficit disorder, but I don’t regard it as a disability.
B: Yes. Both my sons are on the autism spectrum. I do feel that this category might benefit from a distinction between parenting and other family relationships. The former is, I think, a particular challenge.
C: Yes! Also, neighbours, with varying disabilities for more than a decade. Supporting neighbours is important and not always easy.
D: No.
E: Only in the sense that publishing blogs and fronting for interviews is work.
F: As a parent, yes. Formally, no.
G: I could always know more, but my children have taught me a lot. About the world.
H: …
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Speaker: Let's talk about class, in reply to Sacha,
Didn’t Labour initiate a review far too late in their term whose recommendations the Nats ignored when they came into office?
I think that’s covered in the Proposals for Reform part of the Royal Commission’s report:
In 2005 the government issued a 10-year strategy to improve New Zealand’s poor record in health and safety. In 2009 DOL received submissions on the strategy from employers, unions and experts, which painted a sobering picture of the administration of the legislation by DOL and the department’s lack of capacity.
In 2011 the government issued a three-year action plan that identified five industries for priority attention. The strategy paid little attention to high-hazard industries. The risks in high-hazard industries are not revealed by personal safety statistics, such as injury rates, on which the strategy relied. Data on process safety (including preventative measures, analysis of high-potential incidents and assessment of safety plans) is required. This requirement has been known for 40 years and its implications have been widely discussed internationally.
Government strategy and action plans must give proper weight to the risks posed by high-hazard industries.
So yes, the current government inherited a pretty good opportunity to address the problem in mining (and forestry, for that matter), and didn’t.