Posts by Tom Semmens
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It is hard not to see this governments education policy as simple class war on behalf of it's middle class supporters.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to linger,
I agree with you, I just don't think lauding the sort of public order that a repressive regime like China's can achieve is in any way useful when discussing the problems of a free society.
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…it got me wondering why the tribal NZer/westerner has this strange tendency not simply to get drunk but to ‘act out/ up’, there is a degree of self discipline or social responsibility that remains intact…
I am not sure what point you are trying to make here. Are you suggesting we need a totalitarian government that happily butchers it own people and lets gangs of xenophobic goons beat up women in the street for being out with a foreigner?
Because that is SOOO the society I want to live in.
We have occasional public order problems because in this country we don’t live under the repressive weight of Confucianist social control and a harsh totalitarian dictatorship that cares nothing for due process or human rights. Our young people “act out/up” because they can do so in the knowledge that if they are arrested due process will be followed and they are completely without fear of arbitrary and savage extra-judicial state brutality.
To that extent I suppose our angsting over the drinking laws and public order informs us that we are concerned for human liberty and freedoms just that little bit more than the Chinese communist party, who I doubt have much to teach us on that score.
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I was talking to a couple of 22 year old backpacker girls from the UK (yes, they WERE that fabled beast – Essex girls) in a Queenstown bar the other week and they reckon New Zealand is a bit of a promised land as far as being a young backpacker looking for fun. Safe, relaxed dress standards (important when eveything you posess has to fit in a pack), liberal drinking hours, cheap alcohol and lots of healthy young men who are *ahem* willing to to do their bit for international relations meant they were loving N.Z. That is a pretty enlightening perspective on our liquor laws, which seem to make having a good time almost to easy for young and inexperienced drinkers.
To Len Brown’s credit, he clearly wasn’t prepared to get railroaded by the media into a kneejerk moral panic response. The idea that you punish bars with early closing because people pre-load in the car and (as one bar owner pointed out in K road) we have 24x7 off licenses right next to bars is a bit stupid.
If we want to curb liquor consumption, get the stuff out of supermarkets, stop all off-licence sales after 9pm on Friday to midday on Monday and set a minimum price for alcohol. Then see where we go from there.
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Congratulations :)
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…Will someone please rid us of these Treasury priests..?
I would love to see Treasury gutted of its policy advice role and that function moved to a contestable, external tendering process where the government can ensure it gets top advice with contractual SLA's as an incentive to get it right. Even Treasury would have to approve of that, surely?
But a left wing government moving against Treasury would be dangerous, since it would an effective assault on the one of the foundation blocks of the neo-liberal hegemony and would be seen as so. Such a move could spark a full scale capitalist revolt. In 2000 a change of government and some mild reform of employment law saw the last Labour administration given a glimpse in the "winter of discontent" of what the neo-liberal business establishment would do if even slightly threatened. And Labour was elected then with a clear mandate to raise taxes and generally put a stop to the radicalism and vandalism of the Richardson/Birch era.
That is not to mean I don't think a Labour/Greens government should do away with Treasury policy advice role. Treasury, together with the colonisation by its acolytes of the senior civil service, has made a mockery of the idea that our senior civil service is non-political. But the left has to be cleared eyed about the possible political and economic consequences of moving against such a fundamental pillar of neo-liberalism in this country.
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FWIW, Roughan is one of the stable of editorial writers. Working out out which ones are by him is a game I like to play at home.
I reckon he almost certainly wrote this crackpot editorial
recently calling for the Northern Busway to be turned into another lane for cars, given that his previous form makes it is obvious that his sole source of knowledge of public transport is the view through the window of his Landrover Discovery of those damned buses zooming along his roads.But I suppose he has at least SEEN a bus. OTOH, it looks like his views on education are be based on nothing more than the sour grapes of a right wing baby boomer Pakeha whose team has just got a spanking.
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That total of 56,000 includes affiliated unions. I am not sure if affiliated membership should count in terms of actual, signed up party members. My guess for both Labour and National is less than 10,000 each of those.
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Given that only two of our parties would qualify, you're basically saying that only National and Labour should be allowed to offer MPs for list seats.
At 30,000 members I would strongly doubt Labour and National would currently qualify either! But the idea that you would suddenly say "righto chaps, from tomorrow you need 30,000 paid up members or else" is a bit silly, I imagine you'd have three-six years to comply. I suppose you could argue it might be SM by stealth, but I have always been of the view that in New Zealand we focus excessively on the mechanism of our democratic clock instead of making sure it keeps good time; In other words, a healthy democracy can exist under any number of systems so long as they are free and fair.
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You mean do it roughly like the Greens do.
Last time I suggested something like this there was a great whine from the Greens on here, who regarded being asked to come up with a mass membership party as something akin to a plot aimed specifically at them - an attitude I thought betrayed both their bourgeoise complexion and a deep held fear that they cannot persuade the electorate to adopt their views if mass participation is the norm.
But yes, something like that but with the addition of the requirement for a mass membership.