Posts by Russell Brown
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Take it up with Russell I/S, I was commenting on his going hyperbolic over the 2004 version of the same table.
I think "colourful" is a better description than hyperbolic ...
But the point stands: Prebble said NZ's govt spending as a proportion of GDP was almost the highest in the OECD, when in fact it is below the median.
And you only get to say it's growing fast because it was so low for Cullen's first five years. The difference between this year's figure and that for 1999, National's last year in office, is marginal.
There's a PDF version of the table here for people who found the Excel document unwieldly.
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Either way it is emphatically not the second lowest in the OECD, and saying he is "raving, drooling out of his tiny mind wrong ..." on that basis strikes me as a little unfair.
You've found a sense in which Prebble might conceivably be right, and decided that must be what he said!
He said our government spending was "amongst the highest in the OECD" and yet even in the 09 projections, we're below the median. He was completely wrong.
Even the rate-of-growth measure is blown out by virtue of coming after the very disciplined performance in the first five years of government, when everyone was urging Cullen to open his wallet. As I noted, the difference between 1999 and 2008 is really marginal.
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So perhaps Prebble was referring to the rate of growth and was misquoted. Either way I think you owe him an apology.
Eh?
Prebble said "Government expenditure as a percent as GDP is now one of the highest in the OECD."
The table you link to (thanks, by the way) shows that on the 2009 projections, there are 15 of 28 OECD countries above New Zealand on that measure, and a cluster of countries around it.
For 2008, the figure is 42%. In 1999, the last year National set a budget, it was 41%. In the five years that followed, it ran under 40%. If you check Table 33 on the same speadsheet, you'll see government debt was radically reduced in that time. New Zealand now has one of the strongest public balance sheets in the OECD.
You explanation for this is that Prebble was "misquoted".
And I'm supposed to apologise?
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In the case of the OLU debate, if the Archives have a recording that they made, or to which they have been assigned the copyright, then well and good. But if they merely have a copy of someone else's recording, then they have no copyright in that recording and are actually breaching copyright by charging for its use. However, given that it's the Archives, you can be pretty sure that they'll have the copyright issue well under control.
Depends what you mean by "they made". Sound Archives' recording comes from the TV broadcast, although I couldn't tell you whether it was recorded directly from the TV or provided to them (it sounds pretty good).
TVNZ's copy will be the recording it made directly from the international broadcast -- it didn't produce the event or originate the broadcast.
I wish anyone good luck should they try and explore any copyright held by the Oxford Union. I tried calling them for that purpose, and spoke to several students who hadn't heard of this Lange chap and didn't seem terribly focused on what I was saying to them.
Finally, TVNZ Archives will often levy what amounts to a copyright license for material in which its copyright is questionable. That's not all bad, in that cost-recovery keeps an archive going, but there's a hell of a lot of stuff kept locked up by dubious assumptions of copyright.
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Mr Brown, is similarity of name an important factor on your show when you are picking guests?
Not at all. Indeed, I can see it's going to make things tricky ...
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OECD figures from Stats NZ.
Bingo! And Prebble is not just wrong, he's raving, drooling out of his tiny mind wrong ...
"New Zealand has [the ] second-lowest government spending in OECD"
Rich, want some coffee? Email me.
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I've yet to see my Stridulators 7" single ...
Now there is a classic.
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BTW, I had to rush out after posting this morning, and didn't extend an invitation to tomorrow evening's Media7 recording.
The topic is Fonterra -- and whether its (ahem) sacred cow status in the media has been foreclosed by the milk scandal. We're looking at shit going into streams and why it's taken five years to become a story.
Waikato Times editor Bryce Johns is on our panel, as is Bryce Johnson, of Fish and Game New Zealand, and John Hutchings, the senior Fonterra executivewho’s been handling the implementation of the Clean Streams Accord.
If you can join us early evening tomorrow, click the little envelope thing under my name to the left there and let me know asap.
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In my experience, the cat would have licked its arse then fallen asleep, while the dog gnawed through the mic cord. That would have been infinitely more informative.
I LOL'd.
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But did you like the track?
Yes!
Praising a muso for his PR skills is like praising a writer for his penmanship.
No, I mean for the whole way he does his art and owns his own stuff. Jeez, picky ...
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