Posts by Tom Semmens
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The modern media environment all but rules out meaningful secondary employment for MPs beyond the most gimmicky or apple pie. Accusations of rorts, double dipping and undue influence with sinister undertones of corruption would fly thick and fast at any politician who had a serious job outside the house.
It seems to me the real discussion here is whether or not we think it is desirable to have a professional political class that may bring a range of technocratic skills to parliament but which ultimately has a greater loyalty to the oligarchy of the political party that secures their career than to the wider voting public. It seems to me events in Europe and the United States are showing us in spades the dangers of handing democracy over to professional politicians and technocrats, and that the rise of extremist parties across Europe is as much to do with having seemingly impossible to get rid of tweedle-dum tweeddle-dee mainstream political establishments as the actual economic crisis.
I remember being at Kaiteriteri beach when I was about 7 or 8 and seeing Bill Rowling spend most of the day chatting to constituents.
One of the reasons voters generally regard list MPs as inferior to electorate MPs is the feeling that list MPs owe their loyalty to a shadowy party oligarchy who create the party lists. The top two dozen or so list MPs in both Labour and National are safe in the knowledge that they basically have a job for life with around 50% (or more) of New Zealand voters voting along tribal lines. Electorate MPs are thought to have at least some loyalty to and connection with their electorate voters outside the rarefied world of the Thorndon bubble.
the idea that we have created a class of ideologically flexible, technocratic professional politicians is largely unwelcome and unwanted by the wider public, and I would contend that it is an unforseen and undesirable outcome of MMP, caused by placing the selection of party lists in the hands of a cartel of elite cadre political parties with tiny memberships compared to their heydays back in the 1960s and 1970s. indeed, the power MMP confers on political party courtiers to select candidates creates a perverse incentive to NOT have properly functioning, democratic political parties since to do so would threaten the control these unrepresentative courtiers, careerists and political opportunists currently exercise over our candidate selection processes.
It seems to me the solution is not to agonise about whether or not the bunch of self serving bastards in our political elites should have wider experience of life, but rather to insist that list candidates are selected by regulated, democratic means from within the ranks of mass membership parties. My view is that to be able to register to compete as a party on the party list you should have a paid-up membership that is at least 1% of all enrolled voters, or around 30,000 members. I think that mass membership of political parties (possibly along with term limits) would largely ensure the sort of problems discussed here would simply fix themselves.
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Attacking the government as a bunch of ignorant, ill informed Philistines for whom shutting down TVNZ 7 was probably the easiest cost cutting decision they made that day is probably accurate. But that doesn’t mean the channel gets away with being blame free. In the end it cannot be escaped that the curious vapidity of TVNZ 7’s content is what has done it in. Ultimately there was enough of a kernel of truth in the accusations of the station being nothing but a make work scheme for a self-styled liberal intelligentsia for lot of the mud to stick. Was TVNZ REALLY public television for ALL New Zealanders? Whenever I watched it everything seemed so… well, earnest and dull. The station lacked passion and urgency, a feeling that somehow it was doing and saying something important enough to DEMAND public funding. Too often – be it Emily Perkins or Russell Brown or Linda Clark – its tone was detached, cool and observational rather than organic, fired up and involved. The only show which had a regular pulse was Back Benchers, and that show was, to put it politely, uneven at the best of times.
The charge that it was a lot of middle class liberal whiteys having chummy conversations with each other about the media or books with no real relevance to the lives of Joe Six Pack on Struggle Street who's taxes funded it has, if you are honest, some truth to it.
I am not saying there isn’t a need for the earnestness of The Court Report, some books reviews or a laidback media show but where was the balance? Where was the fun? Where was the TVNZ 7 content that makes some of Maori T.V. so likeable and very much like what a public broadcaster should be? Where are the shows on TVNZ 7 like MTV’s Boil Up, Hunting Aotearoa, Marae DIY, Tao and the take off of it’s in the Bag? Public TV is about connecting with people in Levin and Lumsden as well as Grey Lynn and Kelburn. To be honest, I am not sure who is to blame for the content decisions made around TVNZ 7. More than likely TVNZ has both completely forgotten what public broadcasting should like and white anted the station, and sneering anti-intellectuals like Mike Hosking’s don’t need a second invitation to put the boot in.
Arguing over the egregious and deliberate use of false numbers to justify the shutting of TVNZ 7 is to my mind ultimately missing the wood for the trees. At the end of the day, even the defenders of TVNZ 7 cannot deny it is being shut down because it didn’t make itself essential enough to a wide enough spectrum of New Zealanders to muster enough support to justify its funding and its existence in the face of a hostile government.
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The thing coming through from TV sources today is that it’s probably the overseas producers who’ve complained about Fyx.
Clearly not TVNZ or Sky then who officially complained. They probably shopped Fyx to the filth though.
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. SoHo airs new episodes a week after the USA, yet nearly everyone I know who watches the show is just downloading it because a) they can’t be bothered waiting a week, or b) they can’t be bothered waiting for SoHo.
But I think habit has something to do with this as well. Once, we had the habit of planning to be watching channel one at 8.30pm on Monday for the latest episode. But what if I am baking a batch of ANZAC biscuits on Monday night for a morning tea at work tomorrow? Like a lot of people I have grown accustomed to watching things when I want. That might mean idling away a mild hangover on a Saturday afternoon with a few episodes of the Walking Dead I haven’t got around to watching yet as much as watching something hot off the torrents. My flatmate has every episode of Family Guy ever made, and often is the weekend mornings when we hear the voices of the Griffiths family mingle with the smells of our coffee perk and bread maker. Much is made these days about how the next retail revolution is all about personalised products, design your own tee shirts, beer bottle labels, whatever. Trying to force people to watch media content at times of someone else’s choosing just isn’t going to work in a world full of people increasingly accustomed to personalised instant gratification.
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The only reason I keenly await the arrival of a rugby mad Russian is I believe that that (along with the Rapture) is more likely to occur in my lifetime than any of our neo-liberal elite imposing any sort of broadcasting regulation on Sky.
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And, increasingly, to watch those shows, it’s necessary to pay Sky TV a lot of money (for things you may not wish to buy) to watch them on Soho.
My view is Sky is extremely vulnerable to competition because of the way they treat their customers. Sky are generally regarded as racketeers intent on extracting monopoly rents. They’ve shifted all the decent TV off their basic packages simply so they can charge you more to watch them. I guarantee when they have enough people on the plans that include SoHo and the Arts Channel, they’ll create another walled off space and shift all the new shows into that to soak their captive customers just a little bit more.
Complicated, isn’t it?
So reputably was the Gordian knot, but like Alexander people have simply sliced through the problem via the internet.
Outside sport, I seldom plan to watch particular scheduled TV shows anymore. I’ve just fallen out of the habit. Anyone with half a brain can find the shows they want (or may want) to watch within 24 hours of them screening. Far better to do a bit of downloading and watch “Game of Thrones” in three hour Sunday night (curry & lager night at our house!) sessions with the flatties.
The resentment at Sky’s predatory pricing and abysmal service runs deep in me at least, I loath having to spend my money with such an outfit simply because I have no choice if I want to watch rugby. so once I find someone in Russia who likes Super 15 and All Black rugby enough to stream it live (or with a short delay, I am not fussed) reliably, I will take great pleasure in phoning Sky and telling they can shove their monopoly right up their arses.
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Cunliffe’s telecommunications reform expedited things like number portability, which had been dismissed as too hard for, like, a decade.
You know that once the engineers were allowed to talk to each other about this the guts of the technical solution was literally sketched out on some bits of A4 in about half an hour?
To hard my arse.
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The big story in the Herald this morning is the Editorial:
Banks must resign over gift scandal
I guess when he opened the Herald this morning over breakfast Banksie got the same sort of feeling of abandonment Kim Dotcom felt in remand, but with the compensation of having china teacups.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So he’s betting that there is no phone record, interesting gamble.
Phone records are normally only stored by phone companies for around three-six months in an easily retrievable format. I am not sure of the current regulatory environment for keeping them for longer, but even if they are it would be in off-line storage formats of uncertain reliability.
Assuming it was a mobile call, if John Bank's keeps his itemised phone records going back to 2010 then I'd be burning them all around now.
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One thing I find a bit puzzling about all of this, is why? Why did Banks bother to claim the Sky City donations as anonymous?
John Banks on casinos, 1997:
“They’re wide boys, they’re flash boys, they’re big boys and they can take it. Because the little people of this country have been sucked, hung, drawn, quartered, bled by these people in these casinos,”
John Banks is a man who takes his reputation and integrity seriously. So seriously that he would willingly conspire to conceal anything that calls it into question…
The Kim Dotcom thing is more straight forward IMHO, and it is straight snobbery from John Banks. It is essential for the anxious nouveau riche to have unimpeachable credentials when moving amongst their better bred establishment peers. Many and varied have been those who have had clearly held their noses when discussing the vulgar, jolly and annoyingly very, very wealthy Mr. Dotcom – who to makes matters worse seems to not care not a jot about who is who. Such a continental indifference to class, where will it all end, with the French?
So when his “friend” Kim Dotcom came looking for a brother to help him out when he got into a sticky bit of bother with the Godzillasaurus of all establishments, it was all about deniability delivered with as much froideur as a self made shopkeeper from Whangarei can plausibly manage.