Posts by Paul Williams
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I beg to differ, there are far worse in the common populace, especially in Queensland and points north.
You could well be right, despite living in Australia for 12 years, in reality, I live in a bubble - the inner west of Sydney - which is exceptionally liberal by comparison with the rest of the nation.
-
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Having done some quick reading up on the guy I think he is one of the lesser odious, a sub group of the same species that includes the Murdoch.
Singo, as he's affectionately known, and the likes of Alan Jones are the most unappealing face of Australian intolerance (and why Paul Henry didn't last over here, he's not nearly offensive enough to foot it with their like).
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Sacha,
which explains some of Boag’s comments as well. Who needs enemies..
Indeed. I didn't know this background and the mention up thread seemed a little unnecessary.
-
We’ll done Matthew [and stuff]
Necessary, reasonable? Public domain?
-
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to nzlemming,
Both are true. Fortunately, they might be a one term event such is their incompetence... so we can have the slightly less useless Labor party back... actually, there's a number of highly competent members in federal Labor, Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek being two of the standouts.
-
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to John Farrell,
Indeed. What does it say, though, about Key that a day after he sacks a Minister to get on message, she's back off message?
-
Remarkable lack of judgment! Sacked from Cabinet and surely advised to get out of the media, Ms Collins heads to twitter? Does National have whips?
-
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Rob Stowell,
And we’ll be in for 3 years of horrible partisan scrabble.
Indeed. The last federal Labor Government in Australia was largely coherent with this description... actually the current federal Lib/National coalition is too...
-
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to John Farrell,
John Ansell gets involved.
Ansell's just desperate for attention. It must be very distressing for him to not be a major part of this drama.
-
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to izogi,
Is it naive on my part to have an impression that NZ’s public service is actually pretty good, and it’s the political branch which is most susceptible to dodgy practices and conflicts of interest when handling accountability?
My experiences with the NZ public service are over a decade old, however generally they were good. Individuals were clear about their authorising environment, they acted reasonably with stakeholders, they were open to new approaches and were mostly interested in data/evaluation. Largely, the same is true in Australia. One of key differences, in my experience, is that the Australian public sector is a little more pragmatic and less inclined to closely follow policy 'scripts'.