Posts by Ben Thomas
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"What ‘income gap’ are they talking about? GDP per capita or wages or what?" It's not a goal, it's a pamphlet.
The important part of the support agreement isn't necessarily the goal - it's the agreed stipulation that to reach that goal (however vague) requires productivity growth of 3% per year. Productivity growth (however you feel about the idea) is an indicator that has an agreed measure currently - so it provides a kind of KPI for government.
I would posit this is actually a new step for a supply arrangement, that at the very least will be interesting to observe in practice. (Not least for the opposition holding government to account.)
And note also the following paragraph about annual reporting on that target, which means it will be harder to shelve if it's looking difficult to achieve (as per some of Clark's loftier vision statements).
I won't link-whore, but there's a piece on the NBR site expanding on this for anyone interested.
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The Progressives say they are polling very well internally (by which they mean 2 seats). I don't for a second believe they have enough money for polling outside Wigram, so I'm guessing they share info with Labour.
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I/O: but were willing to let that 5% go at $250 and that bid happened to be the one that set the market price. Major hydro has not stopped generating during this time.
Yep, absolutely. But then the question's just reset as to why the opportunity cost on that margin is more than, say, $240 or $245 - and that reflects future demand and prices. The point that Whirinkai comes on line at $200 reflects a watermark for what could be considered "high" spot prices.
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I/S: totally. But it afflicts residential consumers and reporters the same way. The dailies' coverage of electricity issues seems to veer unevenly between "blackout threat looms!" and "why do power companies keep raising prices?"
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Yo Keith,
Two things:You were right to call Brownlee on his exaggeration of the risk of blackout. Perhaps he couldn't have been expected to resist the temptation of jumping on the media bandwagon about the "crisis", given some of the more excitable rags.
Nonetheless, there was a shortage of supply. Whirinaki wasn't running at full tilt - fair cop - but Whirinaki was only ever intended to run rarely ("one in sixty year" conditions are those most usually quoted). It's contracted by the electricity commission to kick in when the spot price of electricity reaches $200/MWhr. The reason? It's an inefficient and expensive generator. (Prices normally hover around $60-80/MWhr). Over this summer prices were reaching $500/MWhr.
So, there was no threat of a blackout, really: but that's different from there not being a shortage. Our market is very good at managing demand thorugh - you guessed it - big price spikes to reflect scarcity. Everyone who could afford to buy power at those prices (that includes residential customers on fixed rates) was supplied; hence, no blackout. Again, that's different from making sure that everyone who wanted any amount of electricity at normal prices was supplied.
You suggest there was no shortage, because Whirinaki was only generating because the hydro dams were conserving water. True. But think about what that means: the consequences downstream of releasing that water (for even two and a half times its normal price) would have been severe enough in terms of blackouts and defaulting on contracts that even a 250% mark up wasn't worth it to the generator.
So, Brownlee had a point, it just wasn't the one either of you thought he was trying to make.
Finally, the press gallery and its Media 101 judgments of our politicians. I sometime feel like they're all just auditioning for post-election jobs as spin doctors. Kudos, Keith, kudos.
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The Labtests debacle was much worse than what Hausmann did.
I haven't read the HBDHB report yet, but I covered the Medlabs case pretty closely.
Bierre and the ADHBs got a bit of a bum rap on that case. Justice Asher, in the High Court, effectively invented a new form of conflict of interest in order to overturn the decision: the argument was not that Bierre abused his position to win the tender, but that by being on the board (__before__ the tender) he instinctively had a better understanding of what the board was looking for from a proposal on community labtesting (a far cry from actually seeing the RFP ahead of time).
Bierre didn't know about Medlabs' position - that's because it was utterly opaque about its cost structure under the contract with the DHBs. That was one of the big points of contention when it again submitted a highball tender. Asher J basically overturned the contract with Bierre saying that in order to be fair to Medlabs the board should have formally pointed out its expectations from Medlabs to reduce costs etc even though these issues had already been broached at a senior level with (company) management.
And he said that, having been on the board at the time it had formed opinions on community lab testing (again, before the RFP was put out) there was nothing - nothing - Bierre could have done to manage that conflict. Most lawyers in the area say this was an impossibly high standard to put on Bierre and the DHBs, and I'm not sure how Hausman (or many other DHB members) would fare if measured against it.
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if it means people like you won't be able to phone-spam with your expensive astroturf campaigns
Russell, "Astroturf" specifically refers (as the name suggests) to "fake grass-roots" - rich backers covertly setting up and funding supposedly community based lobbies. Boscawen has been totally up front about his ties to Act, his wealth, and his personal contribution in funding the campaign almost singlehandedly.
You can criticise his politics if you wish, but not his transparency or honesty.
I only bring up what is a small point because this year the Beehive's been a little too quick to accuse opponents of"hidden agendas" (especially around the EFB; but even when National announced its PPP policy intentions, the government was screaming about "hidden agendas". Call me an idiot, but what was hidden?).
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It has definitely been a good week to be Jim Anderton. Next targets of his regulatory purview: rock'n'roll music, and close-dancing between boys and girls.
As Craig touches on, Anderton's megaphone diplomacy on suicide epidmiology is, frankly, crap. And he ignores any evidence that doesn't fit his preconceived notions. An example? Certainly:
The NZPA story about his objections to The Bridge mention that when barriers were erected on Grafton Bridge, the suicide rate at the bridge went down, and immediately spiked again when the barriers were removed. What it doesn't mention is that the suicide rate in Auckland was unaffected in each case, and even the number of suicides from bridge-jumping was unchanged. It just moved people off that particular bridge. Yet, in the NZPA piece, Anderton is banging on about barriers again.
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Damian, you have spoken for the people.
Leaving aside the issue of whether jokes are like songs or (even more of a stretch) paintings, what strikes me about stand-up comedy is that the rate of production is just so low.
Granted, the Rolling Stones are retreading their greatest hits. But at their peak they were releasing a new studio album every, what, year or so? And greatest hits suggests a significant ouevre in the first place. Note the difference between people heading out to hear 3 hours of Stones' classics, and Wheatus trudging around the country to play Teenage Dirtbag to whomever will listen. Hitting a good routine and sticking with it for years strikes me as much more like the latter.
Sure, it's hard to write comedy. And it's hard to imagine a Russell Brown of laffs who belts out ten minutes of great new material every day before lunch. But surely comedians don't stop being funny people. If you have a comedian who's been doing this for over a decade - you'd think about 10% of his or her funniest stuff would issue from the last year. -
Hager also cites me in 'The Hollow Men'; in the chapter on the media's uncritical acceptance of National’s sloganeering. The date and title, and the one (yes, one) word he quotes from the column are correct. That’s about it.
He quotes the one word (“striking”) from an NBR column in August 2005 to support his contention that “mostly, though, the media commentary was not interested in the accuracy or integrity” of National’s billboard campaign, only its cleverness.
That column did refer in passing to National’s “striking billboard campaign” (at the end of a list of factors influencing the polls), and also mentioned “National’s slick propaganda”. But the column was about neither.
Earlier passages were in fact devoted to the contradictions between National’s immigration policy and Brash’s public pronouncements on the issue (I would modestly suggest these passages were concerned with the ‘accuracy’ and ‘integrity’ of that week’s policy launch. The billboards were of course, by mid August, old news).Self-indulgent excerpt from the column follows:
[National’s]
new immigration policy promises a four-year "probation" for new New Zealanders and a doubled stand-down period for accessing benefits.
As much as National leader Don Brash tried to distance himself from what he called the "crude prejudice" of New Zealand First, his conflation of Chinese students - "those who insist on their right to spit in the street" - and African refugees - "those who demand the right to practise female circumcision" - bespoke an appeal to prejudice in the policy's announcement, if not its design. It is, after all, hard to imagine anyone being deported for spitting.
This obscured the fact National's policy actually liberalised entry for certain categories of migrants.
Hager is not a fraud, as Michael Bassett would have it. The material, as usual, is sound – but the conclusions he draws from it can be wanting, and there’s evidence of some sloppiness in his secondary research (by which I mean the example above and the misattribution of Russell’s column).