Posts by Tom Semmens
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
wonder if many of our decision-makers/politicians have either never been poor or chosen to forget it.
Bryce Edwards has recently made a very interesting post on this, which includes the following comment from John Minto:
"...Based on our national profile we should have about 7 MPs from amongst the unemployed and half our parliamentarians from jobs earning less than the median income of around $39,000 per annum. I doubt there would be more than five percent of current MPs in that category and not a single MP would have entered parliament from a job paying less than $15 an hour despite 450,000 New Zealanders being in this category. Our parliament is dominated by professionals, intellectuals and business people many of whom sniffily comment they have had to take a pay cut to come to parliament. I’d hazard a guess that around 90% of MPs entered parliament from jobs in the top 30% of incomes. The result is a parliament of the well-off, by the well-off and for the well-off..." -
An off topic question, but after tonights news it is bugging me - has anyone else noticed how Stephen Joyce is always interviewed in super close-up? What is that all about? Does he insist he is filmed that way? If so, isn't that kinda creepy, and what does it tell us about the nature of this government media management?
-
I love the Pasifika festival. The shameful lack of coverage it gets is also always the first piece of evidence for the prosecution when one wants to argue the MSM is all about white middle class capture.
-
Don't get me wrong, a rugby crowd will yell, and boo, and shout, and swear. But they don't really do flags or chants.
I can't agree with you. The idea that New Zealand was a dysfunctional, monochrome Polish shipyard populated by grim Jack Mulgans prior to the Rogernomics revolution is one of the most annoyingly pernicious myths there is. I remember growing up in a prosperous province with it's own paper(s), ZB station - it even had it's own soft drink factory (Gilberts) and department store (McGuers). Thursday night was late night shopping night and the streets would throng with crowds of an egalitarian societies prosperous working class - wharfies, freezing workers, and the like. Rugby crowds were ferociously provincial and seem to have made prodigious amounts of noise from rattles, stomping of feet and yelling. It was the ripping of the heart out of provincial New Zealand in the long provincial depression from the mid 1980's to the late 1990's that killed a certain vibrancy that existed, and saw the closing and meaning of the provincial mind that is still with us, and seems to me reflected in the crowds that show up for rugby these days.
-
New Zealand rugby fans just aren't the chanting, singing type.
Wasn't always so. The myth of the passionless people is just that. I was taken as a small boy to the mammoth 13-11 encounter at McLean Park between Hawkes Bay and the 1977 Lions and my overwhelming memory of that day now is of noise, of a unique and peculiar roar of the New Zealand provincial rugby crowd. What a roar rugby crowds used to make in the big matches!! None of this namby pamby chanting and shirt waving. It was the kind of hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck raising roar that you imagined would have greeted the arrival of the gladiators in the amphitheatre. That roar is gone from rugby crowds now, probably killed forever by professionalism. It is telling that Phoenix, which for all it’s foreign players and playing of the most professional game there is basically perceived as a team of local heroes, is getting crowd support the detached pro rugby setup can only dream about.
Personally, I think the jury is still on whether or not the Phoenix is genuine phenomena or just a backlash by a stale and bored public sick and tired of wall-to-wall rugby for ten months of the year. -
New Zealand is hardly likely to suffer a water shortage, being both pluvial and Plinian.
-
called Plinian after a young eye witness.
Please don't tell me that is a quote from Te Papa.
-
I had to check where my friends were after the big quake in Chile - fortunately, they were all in Madrid and Miami, where they remained for a few days before flying back to Santiago. The interesting feedback has been that the parts of the country built by and for the elite are badly shaken and slightly cracked but more or less intact. They’ve got broken mirrors and tellys and the like but the electricity was back quickly, the water never stopped and life is now going on again as normal.
The jokes about wind up power appliances are not that silly listening to what my Chilean friends have to say. The only social tool that remained fully working was facebook; my Chilean friends say that FB went into overdrive for both businesses and friends checking in and confirming their family/employees/friends status, relieving not just people but i would have thought also taking pressure off the telephone network. Given the internet was initially planned to allow communication in the event of global nuclear holocaust that does make sense.
Like Haiti, it seems the mobile network has been more immediately resilient than the landlines and operated for a day or two until batteries went flat - time enough to confirm loved ones in battered areas were alive but that was all. Communications then went down and until these American satellite phones arrived all contact was lost. It seems to me then that the need for resilient, independent independent power (solar, wind up, treadmill, whatever) supplies both great and small to support the wireless internet and the mobile phone network are THE key requirement in an earthquake. Some of that might require extensive forward planning (backup generators that might run using multi-fuel options, solar panels, etc) but little things like wind up chargers for mobiles, laptops and radios/torches can and should easily be designed, built and stockpiled ahead of a disaster.
-
Undoubtably the Herald, as part of it's ongoing desire to serve the aims of strengthening the dictatorship of the kleptocratariat, bolstering the political unity and ideological conformity of the people and rallying them behind the Party and the Great Leader in the cause of the great project, will declare a mighty victory over the foreign devils of the IRB, who have been routed from their lairs and sent packing with their tails between their legs.
In other news, Anne Tolley reveals we've always been at war with Eastasia. -
Mind you, a venue like Kingsland's main street that can only hold 1/60th of the Eden Park crowd would suit Act down to the ground..
People keep saying this without pausing to consider that Nixon Park is only 600 or 700m away.