Posts by Keir Leslie
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Post primary like the Nats policy in large part because it offers chances for career development for dedicated & talented senior teachers with expertise in specific areas, a group well represented in the upper echelons of the PPTA, for obvious reasons. That career development has been missing from the profession forever, and is an ongoing sore point for the post-primary sector. It's a clever wedge between the post-primary and primary sectors, but I don't think it's that convincing to teachers in the context of entire education policies.
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Hard News: The Letter, in reply to Russell Brown,
Because once Cunliffe was caught out misleading the public on one aspect of the story, he's not going to come across as trustworthy on any other aspect? And likewise with the secret trust thing: he can hardly pose as a staunch defender of transparency in political donations after that. It's entirely predictable political rhetoric by the National Party, and it's effective, and there's no reason Cunliffe needed to leave those openings for them.
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Hang on, a letter to the Minister of Immigration as Minister of Immigration isn’t something Woodhouse has to OIA. It’s a letter to his office!
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Eeesh that's worse than I remember it.
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Up Front: Dropping the A-Bomb, in reply to blindjackdog,
Oh yeah I remember that issue of Canta. In fact, depressingly, I think I may have a copy of it somewhere. Canta was going through some weird issues at the time, I think there were some very poor editorial decisions made. It wasn't the only or the last time Uffindell revealed a striking tin ear for that kind of issue.
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Also, if you work for MoH you can't respond to people slagging you off. It's really bad form to drag civil servants into this kind of thing, especially by name, and I kinda think it's something that we should frown on as a community. Ministers are responsible for their departments, not the people who work for them. If you have a disagreement with a policy, have a go at the minister, not the civil servants.
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I don't think it's true that people prefer crap. It's perfectly possible to write good popular coverage of pop music and pop stars that sells. But that is harder work.
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But in the US that just creates the notorious revolving door to the private sector, and doesn't keep private sector wages down at all.
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I was just think about secondary tax problems the other weekend as well!
Agree that the principle of avoiding big bills at the end of the year is important, but surely there's a problem here in that causing cashflow issues for people on low incomes working multiple jobs is a really bad thing to do. Especially given that basically we're saying that you have to lend the government money, at no interest, with redemption at the government's schedule. If you're on $400 a week, you can be really really keen to have that $20 now and not in April, which is why people are willing to pay a lot for short term credit.
Also the poor interaction with the welfare system, but then that's just generally a depressing area of perverse incentives and bureaucratic annoyance.
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The Greens QE policy was about monetary policy — it just used Christchurch as a handy sink for all the money they were printing. It didn’t actually mean there’d be any more money spent, or any money spent sooner. It was quite a cynical ploy, I think.