Posts by Rob Hosking
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I though she lived in Manurewa now?
Yeah, but she and hubby got fed up waiting for the Waterview Motorway to go through so they could burgle all those nice folk in Pt Chev.
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David,
You did your best to get 'Deborah Hill Cone' and 'spanking' into the same sentence didn't you?
Come on. Admit it...
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On Barnett:
There are people posting here who are somewhat better connected than I am within the Labour Party (to put it mildly) and this may be just a Bowen Triangle (I refuse to use the term 'Beltway') thing, but I was given to understand some time ago Barnett didn't want a Cabinet post & had decided he could do more about the things he cared about as an MP putting up private member's bills.
If so, that's a rarity in NZ politics, but quite common in UK Parliament, historically anyway. Of course it has six times the number of MPs we have (and about five times as many ministers).
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I have a rellie who said she decided to vote for Beyer after Paul Henry made her baby cry. Sound eminently rational to me as Eddie adores me, and is therefore a fine judge of character. :)
My daughter really likes Bill English. She thinks he's one of the Wiggles, even though we haven't seen Bill on screen in day glo colours.
Maybe he's saving that for Budget Day.
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Just as a point of information: the first attempt in NZ to decriminalise homosexuality was introduced by a National MP - Venn Young in (I think) 1974.
It was defeated - from memory, when it came to a vote, a lot of MPs from both parties had urgent business out of town that day.
But, hell, if you think Wilde was courageous in sticking to her guns in 1985 (and she certainly was), how about a Nat from a rural electorate in 1974?
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And have you seen Alan Bollard in the last couple of days? Draw your own conclusions.
Funny you should say that...got a press release this arvo saying he would not, as adverted, be fronting a press conference on Wednesday about the RBNZ's latest Financial Stablity Report.
Something about him being overseas. Hah.
David's effort put a whole new light on that transparent piece of spin.
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Hey, I know the Copyright Must Change thread has had its problems, but that's perhaps slightly too harsh.
I don't see how you can get those two mixed up.
The copyright threat is interminable.
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@ MARK: That was glorious.
I hadn't seen the Nat Film Unit flick but I remember the series - esp. that Bastille Day test. It was an epic.
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A couple of things:
Firstly, I don't know if you noticed but I ain't making this a 'Labour bad/National good' argument. Partisan face-pulling tends to make things less rather than more clear, as well as being a bit of a bore.
Secondly: productivity. If there is any change there tends to be a lag before it shows up in any statitistics - I was told why, once, but the subtleties eluded me then and still do. But I did a bunch of interviews with various sector groups in the late 1990s and it was about the only thing the CTU economist (Peter Conway) and the Manufacturers Federation ceo (Simon ARnold) agreed on.
Thirdly, we actually don't - depsite your re-assertion of this - have a particularly literate or numerate workforce. To re-state what I said earlier, whatever the average might be we've got a large group at the bottom end of the scale on both these measures.
A lot of those were unemployed 10-12 years ago but have been drawn into the workforce over recent years.
That's a good thing, obviously, But it has the paradoxical effect of pulling down the average per capita output per worker (I have seen some Dept of Labour stuff on this, it is probably now somewhere on their web site).
Finally: your comment about productivity issue resting with decisions made by business and not govt : I'd say it rests pretty much with both.
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Rob, I think the improvement in business investment was from a very low base
Oh, very true. But don't forget I was responding to Matthew's comment that businesses regard capital expenditure as a dirty word. I was simply saying may have been true 15-20 years ago but not so more recently.