Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Alfie,
The Herald are holding up young Scott as a shining example to the rest of us, although you'd have to ask exactly what kind of five star gourmet lunches were foresaken to generate that level of capital.
Once these property pieces have done their online headline dash, both the Herald and Stuff tend to have them live out their residual propaganda value alongside items touting the very kind of consumption their subjects claim to have renounced.
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Song of the Week - Voice of Baceprot, Javanese funk metal schoolgirls.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
All that's really happening is that the subsidies gone, so the renters get poorer and some non-socially housed rate taxpayers get richer.
There's evidence that any "subsidy" is a recent phenomenon, and that it's a symptom of the casino economy created by an overheated property market. Until recently, Christchurch City Council's social housing rents were set on the model that the enterprise was entirely self-funding. Then-Mayor Bob Parker's attempt to make a cash cow of Council housing by increasing rents by an unprecedented 25% in his first term was defeated in part by legally invoking Council's commitment to self-funded social housing.
During the Shipley era, when "market rentals" were introduced for state house tenants, many who found themselves driven to severe hardship were pleasantly surprised to discover that City Housing's self-funded rentals were significantly more affordable.
Last year Council housing was divested to a separate trust.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Moving 1000 social housing renters into home ownership could produce a net fiscal saving of $11.1 million over 15 years, BERL's data shows.
This seems to have been conventional wisdom until well within living memory. Once the property market overheated it all appears to have evaporated as if it had never been. I recall two cases of domestic purposes beneficiaries who, thanks to low-cost loans specifically for people in their circumstances, were paying off their own flats.
I don't know who administered these things, but they were definitely around in the pre-WINZ era. They didn't always succeed. One bit the dust in a forced mid-90s mortgagee sale after the unfortunate borrower took to feeding her repayments to the pokies. In the other case I recall, from the previous decade, a young mother diagnosed with an intellectual disability seemed to have sufficient supervision to be able to meet her commitments.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Moz,
On my first day at my first inner-city Sydney job the company smartarse asked me if it was true that people from NZ would look inside the back of a radio hoping to spot the little man inside. "Don't take any notice of that bastard", said the guy at the next desk. "He asked me the same thing about people from Penrith when he discovered that's where I'm from".
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Hard News: Friday Music: Disruption, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Patanga Crescent back in the 70s
From where you could see down into the backyard garden of the Chinese Embassy, where in that Gang of Four era all of the flowers were regulation red. Walking past on Tinakori Road after dark you could hear the steady pok...pok of ping pong from within. When Mao died you could go inside to sign the condolence book, which was flanked by a pair of real professional mourners snuffling into hankies.
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Speaker: Happy Race Relations Day, in reply to Rochelle Wilson,
I arrived in NZ in January 1977, a real hot summer in Palmerston North...
Palmy was the big smoke when I was a kid. About a decade and a half prior to your encounter I was in the Square, on a family late night shopping trip. It was capping week, and the Massey College (it was still a mere agricultural college then) haka party came charging through the crowd, scattering adults and children alike. They wore grass skirts and cardboard top hats, and were daubed with crude spirals representing tattoos. While I was astonished to see adults literally knocked off their feet I took my cues from my parents, who nervously laughed it off as youthful exuberance.
In 1968 the Canterbury University haka party, composed largely of engineering students, was accused at a student union meeting of a particularly nasty sexual assault. The accusation was read out by a male on behalf of the alleged victim, and was greeted by a bit of awkward chortling from representatives of the hostel where the supposed perpetrators lived. I don't believe that anyone went to the police. Things being the way they were back then there were probably good reasons not to.
Anyway thanks in no small part to Hone Harawira and a few of his pals we don't have haka parties any more.
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Hard News: E-cigarettes and the path of…, in reply to Alfie,
Hone Harawira would have it that I've just swapped one addiction for another. That may be true, but I know that I've swapped an addiction that was destroying my health and would eventually kill me for another that's at least 95% less harmful, tastes a damned sight better, costs less than a quarter of the price and is a lot more fun. It's a no-brainer.
Harawira's spouting puritanical nonsense. Both smoking and vaping feed the same addiction. As you've testified, vaping is vastly less damaging, and may literally be a life-saver for those unfortunately disposed by their genetic makeup to nicotine dependence.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Sound and Light, in reply to Alfie,
I'm sick of visiting Stuff and the Herald -- two of NZ's major news sites -- and finding their lead story is bloody Adele. Again.
Maybe Fairfax would have been better to have sat on their fatwa against Facebook until the Adele thing had blown over. That and the five minute mass hate on horrid, horrid Justin Bieber
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Legal Beagle: A war crimes inquiry; or…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I suspect none of the war crimes investigations carried out by MPs in other countries included allegations against a former Chief of Defence and Governor-General, the current Chief of Defence, the current Chief of the Army, and the Deputy Chief of the Army.
Allegations against such figures, or their US equivalents, were at least implied in the accusatory letters from enlisted eyewitnesses to their elected representatives detailing the events that eventually led to prosecutions over the My Lai massacre.
The US army's response to the inevitable political pressure was to ensure that responsibility was quarantined to the lowest ranks possible in the chain of command. By identifying SAS influence in senior ranks as the root of the NZ army's current problem, Hager and Stephenson appear to be pre-empting the standard military response of scapegoating blame to lower ranks. It's far from clear to me how involving the civilian police will increase the likelihood of a resolution where such concerns are genuinely addressed.
