Posts by Tom Semmens
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
It seems to me that the fantastic to be in Auckland summer we've just had/are having isn't just the result of a miracle or lucky happenstance. Since the Supercity was set up a lot of rationalisation and standardisation has taken place and council run summer events are better organised and better advertised and better attended than ever.
The new super council has shown with two mega weekends that it can help Auckland pull off with effortless aplomb multiple events even one of which would stretch lesser councils elsewhere. Perhaps it is time to give some accolades to the new council and it's staff, and recognise that perhaps some of the fruits of amalgamation are coming to pass.
-
Reading the transcript, one can't help but get the impression that this minister is completely out of her depth.
-
Tertiary Education Minister Stephen Joyce’s statement that universities need to “think more strategically and move more quickly on areas like online learning and MOOCs” suggests what might be in store.
We could be barely be bothered to raise a feeble groan as our universities plunged out of the top 200 in the world. Instead our philistine masters, egged on by the anti-intellectuals that infest the right wing dominated media, rush to do more of the same and to cap spending, dumb down courses, funnel money into bloated salaries for corporatised governance boards and generally do everything they can to give public money to their mates in their mad free market crusade.
Our whole society is riddled with a strange cultural defeatism, as if we’ve given up as to hard our forebears wish for us to take our place in first world by being a better Britain, and have decided all we can manage and all we deserve to be is as good as Chile without the military.
-
One only had to see the distainful arrogance of Collin’s initial reaction to media daring to question her on the appropriateness of her cosy relationship with Oravida to wonder if her political radar hasn’t been a bit skewed by spending to much time with Chinese business people/government officials and forgetting that things are *ahem*, *cough* done differently there to what we still expect here in NZ.
Three of the five immigration/inappropriate ministerial behaviour scandals I can think of in the last few years involve China. The wider issue to me is our general complacency when it comes to the possibility that the corruption and cronyism that is routine in China isn’t already starting to rub off on our politicians and business class. Certainly, John Key’s style of governance – where democracy and principles of public sector consultation are firmly kept in box marked ‘do not open’ in favour of 'doing deals' – is of a style that is practically begging for corruption to become the norm.
As we get increasingly dependent on a country that barely even pays lip-service to the of the rule of law and has zero interest in a free media or public accountability we need to start putting in place concrete measures, new laws and new institutions to deal with potential corruption. I mean, who doesn’t think Cameron Slater wouldn’t start running smears against anyone the Chinese government didn’t like as long as he got a free holiday to Hong Kong once a year and several large envelopes of cash accidentially left in his room if it was all strictly legal and he had the opportunity?
-
Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Hebe,
To me the main difference lies in some Labourites who are entrenched in smokestack industrial-age concepts and thinking…
Or possibly it’s roots are in people who object to being lectured to like this.
Perhaps the Labour party is, just possibly, an organisation that doesn’t like being patronised by high and mighty middle class tofu eaters impatient with their antediluvian “smokestack industrial-age concepts and thinking”.
Especially when those doing the patronising have never actually been in government, or have a the faintest idea about where jobs for ordinary people might come from once they’ve shut down the smoke stacks, dismantled the industries, tied up half the fishing fleet, reduced the farming effort, stopped all mining, destroyed the transport sector etc etc etc.
Just saying.
-
Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Shane Jones should give it up and go and be CEO of his slave-fishing operation again
To quote Lincoln when told by US Grant’s enemies that Grant was a boozer, “…I cannot spare this man, he fights!”
And a bit more fighting mongrel from the rest of Labour's useless and lazy frontbench deadwood a bit earlier in the piece and Labour wouldn’t be in the polling pickle they currently find themselves.
-
How to get the kids voting? Here is One Direction showing how to at least get them thinking.
it is the sort of innovative approach to political engagement completely absent in this country. -
Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Well, to paraphrase the cops - nothing good ever happened south of Greenlane, nor north of Milford.
-
However, Auckland’s diversity can be overstated…
Generally, for the chattering classes "Auckland" is the old tramway suburbs.
-
I go back a long way, to pre-web days and BBS, and I remember the change in tone in Usenet as access broadened out from universities and research institutes, and I remember the emergence of trolling and the handwringing about netiquette.
So do I. Thinking about it, internet culture was shaped by geeks going gangbusters with mensa-grade nastiness.
The pileons and zingers are one part of Twitter, but only a part – it also sustains a supportive and gentle community of semi-friends. It has its merits and its place.
i am sure it does, but as a platform it seems to me to have been designed primarily to operate at the juvenile level (“Look at me! I’m in New York!” + selfie or "hangin' with ma girl, sweet!") and people are taking it way to seriously as a medium of communication.