Posts by Rich of Observationz
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The Herald *is* a biased, authoritarian-conservative paper, just like the (English) Daily Mail. Unlike the Mail, it hides its bias behind little tricks like the one above.
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Didn't Greg O'Connor from the Police Association say that under the proposed legislation the Police would be forced to investigate each and every reported case of time-shifted recording?
They don't investigate car thefts or burglaries, so why should time-shifted recordings be especially privileged.
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copyright owners always have the option of contracting out of all of the permitted acts
I have no problem witn this provided that at the time of purchase they get a contract signed and witnessed by their agent and the purchaser.
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Lex: Out of interest (non-geeks can stop reading now) what does happen if a piece of Linux software installs a shareable library under /usr/local somewhere and another one wants to do the same, but with a different, incompatible version. (which amounts to a DLL conflict)?
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I'd use a Mac if it would run Windows.
Actually, can't Intel-based macs boot Windows?
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what till you see the premiums after storm surges flood downtown auckland
I'm 50m up. The only floods we get are from faulty plumbing.
I'm waiting for a big storm to wash the overpriced sandbar of Papamoa away and create the Isle Of Maunganui.
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We already have such people. They're called MPs
As I say, 49 of them on the government side. Including first-termers and those on the way out. Against how many "policy-level" public servants? A thousand?
Che, I'm not suggesting that the vast majority of delivery-side public servants should be politically appointed.
What I am suggesting is that a government is elected with a set of policies and is entitled to use the public service to implement those policies. For instance, if the government was elected to implement social market economics, it isn't really helpful to have a large proportion of Treasury public servants committed to unfettered capitalism. (Equally, if a National government wants to wreck NCEA, they shouldn't have to work with an education department stubbornly opposed to this).
are you suggesting political appointments over merit-based ones?
I'm suggesting these appointments would be mostly additional to the career public service.and to which party should they be affiliated? the largest government party, or all the parties in current governmental coalition?
I'd suggest that they might not be actual party members. It might be part of a C&S agreement that a support party gets to nominate a certain number of advisers.and to whom are they accountable?
Parliament (through the minister), the courts and ultimately the electorate. -
On the journalism front, I've said before that I don't really like the pseudo-impartiality thing in NZ journalism. I'd rather that people came out as left- or right- wing than tried to claim to be an impartial analyst.
Notwithstanding who Joanna Black and Jane Clifton are married to, I'd consider them to be basically tories, just from the tone of their writing. There's nothing wrong with the Listener's owners deciding to transition it from a left-leaning to a right-leaning magazine and employing people accordingly - I just wish they'd be upfront about it.
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Yes, but.
There are only 49 government MPs to choose ministers from, and 28 actual ministers (including 2 from minority parties). With, I would guess, several hundred high level public servants, this doesn't provide much political control - and we do expect the government to be accountable for the execution of its policies.
You can understand a desire to have the core team in departments being at least in part "one of us" (to quote Mrs Thatcher).
I'd suggest that without going down the US route of making all senior PS political appointees, we would do well to have a layer of a few hundred people on "single parliament" contracts.
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I thought Raf's figure of 4bln for bank profits was a bit high. The actual number is made up of:
ANZ National: 635mln
Westpac: 216mln
BNZ: 330mln
ASB: 440mlnTotal: 1621mln