Posts by izogi
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Sacha,
I wasn't paying attention at the time but it looks as if it wasn't plain sailing when she was there. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=383926
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Sacha,
Thanks for the link.
Stuff published this story today, according to my RSS feed, but they had deleted it by the time I clicked through!
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Polity: Custard, in reply to Sacha,
I hope so. Even if Labour can get a positive Party Vote Labour message out this election, which its candidates comprehensively and altruistically get behind ahead of their own local ambitions, it'll be an improvement.
I still can't shake that dreadful 2008 re-election campaign from my head, which was largely built around trying to tell people they shouldn't trust John Key... ergo "we're your only option even if you hate us". Honestly it shouldn't be any wonder, in hindsight, that voters ditched Labour for an opposition so full of confidence. Then I read posts like Rob's, above, nearly 8 years later, which is entirely about how useless and muddled and untrustworthy National's Ministers are (nothing new), and still with no convincing explanations of how and why Labour Ministers will supposedly be better.If people are voting on competence and personal impressions, and keeping in mind that most people's exposure to parliamentary debate, if any, is via sound-bites which are filtered through popular media, then where are, for example, the convincing messages explaining how Grant Robertson and Andrew Little are running rings around Bill English and John Key? Where's the promotion of how Annette King and Chris Hipkins make much more competent Ministers of Health and Education than Jonathan Coleman and Hekia Parata? How about making a big deal of David Shearer's extensive Foreign Affairs qualifications compared with Murray McCully's repeated muddling around?
Sorry, Rob. I appreciate that it's not so simple. I just don't see this stuff. All I see is regular (albeit justified) finger-pointing about current government incompetence, which unfortunately is all too common to the point that it runs off people's skin, and a week later it's old news... because what are people going to do about it? From what I can tell other people are also not seeing messages about why Labour's supposedly so great. I think Labour needs to focus lots on explaining why it's going to be fundamentally better at running things day-to-day, instead of just pointing out why the government's hopeless at it.
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Polity: Custard, in reply to Joe Wylie,
I'm not sure of the detail of employers being required to have a rational reason, but the law seems to do a concise job of ensuring that employers don't have any obligation to provide that reason to the employee, nor be concerned about the employee taking action against them because of it.
The explanation on MBIE's employment website says nothing about requiring a reason (or not), but does say that the employee would not be able to take a personal grievance.
Looking more directly at the law, which I guess is 67, 67A and 67B of the Employment Relations Act...
* 67A(2) says that the employer can dismiss the employee, and the employee cannot bring a personal grievance or other legal proceedings regarding the dismissal.
* 67B(2) seems to say the same thing a second time.
* 67B(3) states that the employee can bring personal grievances for any of the other standard reasons (sexual/racial harassment, discrimination, and a bunch of others) which I guess are for things which might occur during the time of employment before dismissal, but explicitly not for unjustified dismissal.
* 67B(5)(a) absolves the employer of the obligation to let the employee access information about a potential decision to end their employment, and absolves the employer of their usual obligation to allow the employee to comment on any such information or potential decision.
* 67B(5)(b) states that the employer is not required to provide a reason to the employee.
So, I take it Labour's proposal is to require that the employee be told why they're being dismissed, yet still prevent them from doing anything about it no matter how unfair or unjustified it is? What other avenues would there be? Could an employee then supposedly complain to a government authority that would be capable of investigating and prosecuting? -
I more or less agree with everything Rob's said, but pointing to deficiencies and incompetence in the government is such an easy thing in recent times. It all gets reported, and then the next day comes. I routinely run into people who are sick of the government, but they're sick of all politicians because what Rob's described is, to them, what government is, no matter who's running things. They go out and vote anyway, usually for the status quo because change would be more of a risk, or because it's the devil they know, or something like that.
What am I supposed to think after reading this? If the point is meant to be that a Labour-led alternative would be better, then I wish there were more in here about what Labour would be doing, why Labour's people are superior, would make highly competent and better Ministers who are less prone to screwing up, and how it'd overall be better.
Otherwise it's just asking people to vote for the least worst instead of the best. For a party which typically does better when those most susceptible to not bothering to vote actually get out and vote, I don't think this type of writing is likely to lead to a successful strategy.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Angela Hart,
But [Carrick Graham] said he was surprised that the action had been launched, as there had been a number of interactions with Professor Swinburn over the past few years which were friendly.
I wonder if those interactions were before or after Nicky Hager's book was published.
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to Bart Janssen,
there are thousands of towns with strong gun control regulations - they don't make the news because they are boring and moderate
How does that work? Given the constitutional stuff, to what extent can a town or municipality in the USA get away with regulating guns?
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to ,
It’s hard to know how many of them had firearms licences, but it’s safe to say they acted irrationally, some of them where mentaly unwell and each of them
had access to at least one gun.Is it reasonable to say that when suitably inadequate gun controls meet a suitably inadequate mental health system, something like the USA emerges? Or is there more to it?
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to Angela Hart,
The guts have just been pulled from the Mountain Safety Council run safety training and license testing process, presumably for cost savings.
It started properly more than a year ago when the MSC decided to drop a comprehensive programme of outdoor safety courses. It ditched nearly all of its volunteer instructor and training programmes, dropped its role in setting accepted safety standards, and shifted to some kind of stand-offish model that's seemingly based around issuing pamphlets and press releases telling people to be safe. Here is a pretty venn diagram alongside an explanation.
For some reason the MSC specifically retained its firearms safety courses, but evidently that hasn't lasted long.
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Access: Fighting seclusion with…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
He also got a decent word into the I've Been Thinking section of Back Benches last night (8-June-2016). They don't seem to have it up on the youtube channel yet.