Posts by Paul Brislen
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Morgan Nichol,
hmmmm. Might need an accent.
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I'd like to add PAWOTY as the Public Address Word of the Year because it's the last player picked and it deserves an outing.
Only question - do you pronounce it paw-outty or pa-wotty.
Hmmm.
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Bigly.
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Oh we should collect such terms. For instance, in Welsh there is "hiraeth". From the wiki:
"homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire[ for the Wales of the past.
Oxford and Merriam Webster define Hiraeth as: (noun) "a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that never was".
And now I must go look at pictures of rain swept hills for a bit.
Keep up the good work, David.
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Lovely to have you back David. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, I've discovered.
Write a little each day and you'll be amazed where you get to. I have written almost one hundred thousand tweets and all I've got to show for it is a chip on my shoulder. You will do better I'm sure.
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Let me tell you about the 20 year struggle to get access to the report that defines our snapper fishing industry.
Oh wait, I can't because after asking for nearly 20 years (yes, twenty years) the report is lost and cannot be produced. Yet our policy relies on it.
MPI needs to be fully reviewed and quickly before it's too late.
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Well said, Tim, and I couldn't agree more.
LegaSea is the recreational fishing lobby group and we've called for a Commission of Inquiry into MPI and its handling of all these matters.
A Commission of Inquiry is defined like this:
A Commission of Inquiry (Commission of Inquiries Act 1908)
An inquiry under the Commissions of Inquiry Act 1908 should be considered when the situation is so unusual that no other approach will do, such as:
there is considerable public anxiety about the matter
a major lapse in Government performance appears to be involved
circumstances giving rise to the inquiry are unique with few or no precedents
the issue cannot be dealt with through the normal machinery of Government or through the criminal or civil courts
the issue is in an area too new, complex or controversial for mature policy decisions to be taken.
The type of inquiry is decided upon after discussions between Ministers and officials, with advice from Crown Law Office and State Services Commission as required.
We believe MPI's obvious capture by the industry needs to be reviewed at this level, not via an internal process which has no end date given and whose terms of reference are to look purely at the reports we know have been made public, not at the systemic issues inherent.
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I find it hard to believe the government, senior ministers and all, are spending so much time defending a position based on its value to us of $24 million a year.
There has to be more to it than that and that, frankly, worries me.
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Perhaps the best outcome of having a cancer diagnosis was the realisation that I'm on borrowed time, that we all are, and that frankly I'm not going to not be there for my family unless there's a damned good reason.
Being at the office is not that reason.
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(Takes deep breath) I have to disagree with you on one point, Graeme, regarding the process.
There have been complaints about the flag consideration and referendum process. There are other ways we could have done it (I supported one at the select committee) but this is fair way of doing it.
In this day and age a flag is something of an anachronism. We no longer need a rallying point around a piece of fabric to differentiate our side from the others. The fog of war doesn't descend in quite the same way, so the need for a banner is pretty much gone.
A modern flag is a representation of what a nation stands for. It's a way of saying who we are as a people and the one thing this whole process lacked was any discussion around this point at all.
Legend has it (that is, I read it somewhere on the internet so it must be true) that when Apple first approached Belkin to make accessories for its new device Belkin wasn't allowed to know what the device (the iPod) did. Instead they were shown a set of connectors so they could work on devices that would connect via the correct port. Belkin is supposed to have pointed out that they won't know what accessories to make until they know the device's purpose and that caused much consternation in the Apple camp.
I don't know, it's probably rubbish but I like the story and can't help but see the parallels with our flag process. We're being asked to define how we represent ourselves without first deciding what "we" are.
I guess it's not the process itself which I have a problem with, it's the lack of a wider context. Maybe you were right all along, Graeme.
I'll be voting to keep the current flag on the basis that if we vote for the new one that's it, our one chance to chose a flag is done for at least a generation. Can you imagine the fun that would be had if we decide to revisit our new flag choice in 20 years time? No, this is it for a long time to come, possibly for ever because the need for a flag is pretty much nonexistent.
Voting for no change now means we can have another go when we decide to discuss who we are and what it means to be a New Zealander and that's a debate worth having.