Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Though, as usually happens, I expect The Standard to promptly restore the cosmic balance of cretinous partisanship.
Actually I thought their lead article is pretty good: Labour grassroots revolt against Quake Act betrayal.
Membership appalled, MPs out of touch. Looks a little like the feelings around here.
I normally only visit the standard when someone links to it from here, same as kiwiblog.
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I gather the new press secretary is the staffer who has previously complained about Garrett's attitude to women. The fun never ends.
I'm sensing a race to be the first to get the book on the shelves. Be a fascinating read. I'm going to suggest a title of "Fucking morons I used to work with".
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The Police, just as they did with Mr Slater.
Yes, but the police there were stepping in to protect a the person who the order was protecting - the victim of the crime.
Given that this order is protecting Garrett, and he's chosen to announce it to the world, and is asking lawyers how it can be lifted, it would be a farcical prosecution.
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On top of two greens voting for the banning of street prostitution in Manukau City Council (see hand mirror), the greens have had a bad week in parliament.
I miss Sue and Nandor.
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One solution suggests itself: make the party membership requirement proportional to the size of the party list. Thus, a party fielding only a handful of candidates would need only 500 members (as at present), while a party wanting to field 100 candidates would need 10000.
For what benefit? How does that give members any more control over party lists?
And when did who was 20 to.... whatever on the Green, Act etc party lists ever matter except as an academic exercise?
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Except with MMP's party lists it isn't. I would like to see as an essential MMP reform an absolute limit on how long you can serve in the house of representatives, maybe nine or twelve years. My view is if you can't achieve anything in that amount of time then get out, parliament isn't a soft option for time servers on a good salary. Such a time limit would also automatically see off the grossly entitled Chris Carter's of this world, and ensure a decent turnover of people in parliament.
Chris Carter is going to be like Hitler. An example that can be used to argue for everything, only not very well. The list of damn good MPs that you'd chop off halfway through their career at 12 years is a rather long one, start with linger's (umm, Birch :P) and keep adding.
One other reform I am of a mind to like is to change the currently derisory 500 member requirement to register as a political party to contest the party lists to something much, much more robust - say 10,000 or 15,000 paid up, signed up, bone fide members.
Also making it virtually impossible to build a new political party. But keep going.
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Surely there's been enough booze wasted in Canterbury the past couple of weeks?
In Dunedin we drink the alcohol first, and then smash the bottle. Best of both worlds.
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@ Kyle. So, you had a bad experience but surely you are not arguing that your experience negates all scholarship?
Oh no. I thought my degree was very useful and mostly enjoyable, particularly my honours dissertation which actually had a life beyond submission - several people read it a year out of interest as well as academia, and it got a large story in the ODT in 2003.
But the reading involved, particularly of historical theorists - I felt like history had sucked my brain out and replaced it with a robotic reading, note-taking, memorising and regurgitating machine. It needed healing and I spent a couple of years re-reading pulpy fiction that I'd bought when I was a teenager and avoiding the non-fiction section of the library all together.
When vile little snots like Clint Heine are dispensing moral lectures ...
He was a child when he was studying here in the mid-1990s, and I get every impression he still hasn't grown up.
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The sooner we bring in limits on the pay and tenure of our elected representatives the better.
I think the current limits on their tenure are called elections.
The immediate reactions about changing the crimes act etc, they're not the likely thing. Apart from anything else they'd be electoral suicide.
It's the fringe things that could be done. Canterbury needs to get back on its feet again - let's approve those dairy farms. Building codes smilding codes?
Democracy wouldn't die by having its head cut off, it'll slowly wither by a hundred small cuts. Each one the media can look at and say "government is pushing the limits" but never completely call them out on.
I would have liked to have seen the Greens vote against. To me they've always done well for taking principled stands, and this one looks to me like a winner in the long term. They might get burnt a little now, but come election time it would look like a reason to vote for them.
Plus on a principles vs pragmatism sliding scale, this one seems to fall on the principles side.
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A friend of mine did English honours at Otago in the early '90s and he said doing so "destroyed my love of reading for about a year afterwards".
See also history honours. Took me about three years to start wanting to read history non-fiction again.