Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Big Night Outage, in reply to Scungo,
Meanwhile in Morningside, no power, no appearance on the outage map, no ability to register the outage and no clue as to likely resolution time. The infrequent utterances from Vector ask for patience and indicate incoming weather this afternoon may slow things down. The comms and social media team at Vector need to do better.
I have seen them acknowledge the outage to someone else in your neighbourhood on Twitter. But yeah, they should be able to do better than that.
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Hard News: Big Night Outage, in reply to Deborah,
I'm wondering a bit about the resiliency of the power network. If we are going to face more and more weird weather, we might need to be thinking about how to build a stronger network.
I think that's where the undergrounding comes in.
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Hard News: We should stop being…, in reply to andin,
who?
Ruban.
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And about those comments. Stuff’s homepage editor tweeted this last night.
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Speaker: The crisis is all around us,…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
If Curran had any brains she should work out she might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and issue a press release citing an irreversible break down in her trust and relationship with the RNZ board and her loss of confidence in the RNZ board & chairman. If that doesn’t get the desired result then just peremptorily fire the lot.
Holy shit. I can only imagine your response if a National government did anything of the kind. Try reading Nicky's essay again and see if that gets through.
Never mind that if, as reported, the board and CEO are unwilling to embrace the full-on TV channel Curran favours – that is, they don't to add an underfunded linear TV channel to their underfunded radio stations – they're quite probably right.
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The cutting of critical journalism at Māori Television (in particular the outstanding Native Affairs programme) appeared to be directly the outcome of government influence.
It was a bit more complicated than that. National’s appointment of one of its own, Georgina Te Heuheu, as chair of the Māori Television board may have been motivated by a desire to see a less aggressive news operation, but what happened to Native Affairs was about a different kind of politics.
The Native Affairs investigation into alleged fraud at the Kohanga Reo National Trust manifested a kind of background culture war in the Māori world. One side regarded the investigation as an affront to the mana of Dame Iritana Tawhiwhirangi and her family – and the Māori Party was quite clearly on that side.
At the same time, Jim Mather, who as CEO had been a good protector of his news and current affairs team, was departing. His replacement, Paora Maxwell, was appointed by the board in the face of the near-universal opposition of existing staff. They even refused a confidential briefing from Maxwell’s former employer, TVNZ. The very strong appearance is that he was hired at least in part to deal to senior members of the news and current affairs team.
Julian Wilcox was forced out and many others, Mihi Forbes and Carol Hirschfeld among them, ran for the exits. It was absolutely a purge on news and current affairs, but it was basically conducted by Māori against Māori.
Things have changed quite a lot since then, though. The culture of the board has shifted (and John Tamihere can take considerable credit there), Maxwell is gone and the background politics, as expressed in last year’s general election, have changed a lot. I think it is indeed a new dawn.
Basically, there is more to politics than the party that controls Parliament.
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Squeezing or cutting funding, or the threat of this, is a powerful way for governments to punish, reward or otherwise influence publicly funded news.
Which is why it was so disastrous for Clare Curran to even give the appearance of going around the system to influence the decisions of Radio NZ's board and CEO.
Whether she was intending to do that or not, even giving the appearance of doing so at a time when the government has yet to announce what share of the $38 million it has put up for public broadcast funding will go to RNZ was very bad.
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Hard News: The Unitec project: Something…, in reply to Sacha,
I'm intrigued by the apparent attempt to spread blame to an MP who wasn't in government at the time.
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Hard News: The Unitec project: Something…, in reply to Sacha,
Just like all the homes in National’s SHAs were ‘likely’ to be built – until those canny developers figured they could make more by landbanking and flicking it on unbuilt. Who could possibly have foreseen another market failure!
Quite. It's not realistic to pretend that the SHA model worked and got houses built (let alone affordable ones). It didn't.
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Hard News: The Unitec project: Something…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I will say I’d like to see serious effort to improve the already good cycle infrastructure. This density will only work if residents don’t all have three cars that need to be parked on the public roads. The Carrington Rd crossing has to be fixed and the route by the creek has to become a commuter route and not just a Sunday ride playground.
Yeah, it's a cert that the Carrington Road crossing will need fixing – but I'd really like to see them explore taking the crossing out of the equation and running the shared path under the bridge and directly to the Wairaka precinct.
A couple of other things have occurred to me. One is that the impending revamp of Chamberlain Park to open it to the community that owns it is going to be pretty crucial.
The other is that I fear the disruption is going to be a lot worse than it was for the Waterview project, where construction traffic was very well managed on the whole. Both routes to Carrington Road run through town centres and, ironically given its proximity to Waterview, there's no direct motorway access.
