Posts by Russell Brown
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I have never felt in any danger in innercity Christchurch in the wee-small hours, mainly because I take the normal precautions any city-dweller takes, ie: using well-lit main streets and taxis where possible. Are Aucklander's really such whining pansies. There are parts of the Auckland CBD I wouldn't dream of setting foot in after dark.
Oh alright, sorry. But the Chch CBD does seem more out of hand to me than the Auckland one on a Saturday night. Nowhere else has had to resort to the one-way door policy, and the differences in the experience with party pills are extraordinary. It just seems different.
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Conservatives arguing over how Conservative political thought might/should be affected by evolution strikes me as a real recognition that evolution could have consequences outside the lab and classroom.
Ah Neil, if only you were as generous to the Greens over genetic modification ...
But they're not debating how their philosophy should change: quite a few of them are saying "it challenges our philosophy, therefore we should refuse to believe it."
I'm put in mind of Stephen Colbert's observation that "reality has a known liberal bias."
I'm down with the final paragraph of that story:
As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.”
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Yet I still think the city is taking a bit of a bad rap here. The stats don't come through with a portrait of a city in deperate thrall to out-of-control violence- and that's not the experience I get from inhabitants, either.
No, but there is - and there was when I grew up - the particular kind of random violence you described above.
Point well made about separation in Auckland: I don't know much about the south or the east, but the Auckland CBD feels a lot safer - more predictable - than the centre of Christchurch on a Saturday night.
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I grew up in Wellington's answer to Chch, Upper Hutt. It's white, violent and scary. At least half of our parties in 6th/7th form would end when the local skinheads got wind of where we were and would turn up to bash everyone they could.
What is it with skinheads ruining other people's parties? And then they complain about having nothing to do ... I risked a thumping a couple of times in Auckland (does Auckland still even have skinheads any more?) just telling them to fuck off, but it seemed to work. They were born followers.
And it appears that the Christchurch incident was preceded by a skirmish with skinheads. Not that that's any excuse for getting in a car and murdering random strangers.
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Yes as Mr Higgins has indicated, rural youth are clearly allowed to run wild and unsupervised, possibly because their parents wanted time-off for key parties and other tawdry activities they didn't want their kids to see.
I see what you're saying, but I think that's a different issue.
Herne Bay is full of the latchkey children of self-obsessed parents, and I know one mum who's appalled at the way that her daughter's 16yo friends are expected to find their own way home from parties and other places.
But ... that scene's not accompanied by the kind of weird, arbitrary violence you'd see in Christchurch when I was young and, apparently, in the present day. In Auckland, I've never seen the kind of massive queues of kids outside meat-market pubs that we saw at midnight on the last Saturday night I spent in Christchurch. It's quite full-on.
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The drinking age is the same accross NZ - however, this sort of idiocy only seems to take place in certain places - rural NZ, including Christchurch.
Oddly enough, we recently did a story on the radio show trying to work out why Christchurch had such an out-of-control culture with party pills.
The differences between the matching studies at the Christchurch and Auckland hospital emergency departments are truly striking.
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Is this just one person texting or widespread? Was it the hosts' invitation? I couldn't find the reference in the links in Russell's post.
It came out in the Close Up interview with two kids last night. Perhaps it wasn't part of all the text messages, but it was certainly part of some of them. I've been a little surprised it hasn't been mentioned more often.
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I've heard all the arguments about how 'hard' it would be to have a split drinking age but I really don't see the difficulty.
Me neither. I've heard the arguments to that effect but they've never struck me as very robust.
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Quick, everybody, abandon thread!
Yes. Lacking for the moment a technical means of doing so (which I'll investigate today) I'm calling this thread closed. Malcolm, two grown-ups have had and settled a disagreement and that is it. So please, nobody post:
THREAD IS OVER.
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the stick I'm talking about was the threat to legislate a 20% quota if it wasn't voluntarily met..I'm not giving that credit to NZoA but to Helen's government.
Yes - and to the much-maligned Marian Hobbs in particular. As I said in the original post, the other thing on the table there was the Youth Radio Network, which doubtless prompted radio to consider which was the lesser of two evils.
But I still think you and robbery are selling NZ On Air a bit short. Before Labour came in the hit discs got NZ music in the hands of programmers who (bizarrely) didn't really audition it or know how to source it.
The problem, again, is that NZ On Air is a broadcast funding agency. Its targets are all about hours on radio, and things get tricky when it goes beyond that.
That threat is still implied today but I think the only potential party of government after the next election that would continue to wave it would be Labour. And without it...watch all the AOR / CHR stations slowly pull their percentages back.
And the self-governing nature of the targets scheme means they can do that fairly easily. But, again, let's give commercial radio some credit. I always thought the high-water mark was when I walked into a shop and heard More FM not just playing a Goldenhorse record during Music Month, but hosting a live-to-air. I gather that was a consequence of DJs petitioning the programmer to get on board.
Not sure what Fur Patrol sold but Cool Bananas sold 50k and the Dance Exponents over 60k of their debut, plus close to 100k of their comeback...bigger than most of the biggies in the 2000s apart from Bic I think.
The sheer staying power of the Exponents is extraordinary, but it's worth noting that between the debut and the comeback they had a few that didn't go so well.
I think the difference in the post-2000 period was that you had years in which several acts went multi-platinum. I think Nesian Mystik's debut was about 65,000, Goldenhorse's about 45,000, Che Fu 30,000 and 50,000, Scribe 85,000. I think the Fat Freddy's album is past 100,000 now.
The D4 sold bugger-all here but about 90,000 worldwide, and, of course, Hailey Westenra's 'Pure' did two million worldwide. Signing her probably saved Universal's NZ office from closure.
Another good thing that happened during that period was the reform of the NZ Music Awards, which had been largely crap. The "academy" voting system and the dropping of sales criteria meant that Dimmer could win rock album of the year without selling as much as certain other acts. (The Phoenix Foundation's Pegasus went gold, but in general the bands we like don't sell a whole lot.)
On the other hand, it was pretty evident to look at the finalists last year that it hadn't been a banner year.
One more thing: rights income, either from synchronisation or APRA. I think that's made a difference to a few people.
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