Posts by izogi
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Polity: The Taxpayers' Union rides again!, in reply to Alfie,
Is this group anything more than a front for team Key? Can they really claim to represent taxpayers, and if so, how widespread is their membership? Who provides their funding?
The issue isn't so much that it's claiming to represent taxpayers. It's that major media outlets give it blind credibility by accepting the claim that it represents people, and that same media is unlikely to beat itself up and make itself look stupid by investigating its own involvement. A couple of years back, Fairfax even directly collaborated with the Taxpayers' Union to produce that council spending report (labeled as waste, blah blah). This is the scenario that opponents are stuck with.
Beyond this, what the Taxpayers Union "is" is above board as long as you're happy to look up the Unions Register to establish that it's not actually a union, then (b) look it up in the Societies Register, view its rules and determine that it's a completely self-appointed board of a handful of people who can't be added to, removed, nor told what to do or say by the "membership". It's definitely nothing resembling an actual democratic union as defined in the Employment Relations Act.
A better description is a fan club.... but a fan club of what? It does seem to be signing up "members", but it's difficult to figure out who or how many by looking at the financial statements, or whether these people agree with everything it's saying. $5 to join, plus a voluntary donation. Year-ending December 2014 has $13,687.89 membership subscriptions (around 2,720 joins that year?) and $191,017.42 donations.
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Polity: Let the big lies flow, in reply to Nick Russell,
Don't blame the media for that. They don't have the resources to do independent analysis a lot of the time, so they will regurgitate anything that sounds plausible.
In other words, there's a serious problem with New Zealand's current state of democracy?
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Polity: Let the big lies flow, in reply to Nick Russell,
Doing hit jobs on Labour policies is basically what Kiwiblog and the Taxpayers Union do
To be fair, though, unless DPF is no longer on the self-appointed Board of the Taxpayers' Union (which is not actually a registered union for very good reason -- nice set of rules in the societies' register), Kiwiblog and the Taxpayers' Union are really just parallel mouthpieces for the same tiny handful of lobbyists, designed to multiply the volume of the message and feign credibility for the same statement in different domains. Sure, you can join the TU but the Board is largely immune to being dumped or instructed to represent certain views, and you're not allowed to vote on anything at an AGM except what the Board chooses to put before the membership.
That's not to suggest that it really helps to complain about this, because it's just how those guys do things, and various media isn't helping by eating it up and re-publishing press releases verbatim, often with little journalistic analysis. But it seems misleading to suggest that they're really separate entities with independently derived opinions on things.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Alfie,
I saw that this morning. Moreso than the TU, the fact that Fairfax, and others, just pick up their stuff and regurgitate it is really irritating. When Fairfax joined forces with the Taxpayers' Union a couple of years ago, for that Ratepayers Report thing (now apparently offline), it really tipped the balance for me.
The latest write-up on UBI is more about two funded lobby groups (Taxpayers' Fake Union and Morgan Foundation) blurting their predetermined opinions than about anything resembling journalistic analysis. On this occasion it's given the TU exactly what it wanted.
But that's also a symptom of today's media trying to compete with those who can now issue press releases and blogs and facebook posts direct with the public for free. When so many senior journalists shift to where the money is, in PR firms and political offices and lobby groups, it also shifts the source of who writes what shows in the media. -
Legal Beagle: Future Leaders for…, in reply to Marion Ogier,
Look at the sad turnouts at local and national elections. We need to acknowledge that. [...] Maybe if we get young people enthused, they will shame more adults into thinking, acting and voting about the things that really matter to us all.
Is there reason to think that there might be more engagement and better turnouts, especially with youth, if they were allowed to be more involved and have a say when still at school? If there were genuine reason to think that, then I think it'd be a great argument for lowering the voting age, among whichever others exist.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Alfie,
Once again John Key's propensity to lie is amazing.
He's not lying. He's making stuff true by saying it.
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Envirologue: 1080, "eco-terrorism" and agendas, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Thanks for that!
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Hard News: More than a bang on the head, in reply to Russell Brown,
Thanks for confirming. I went back and watched it just now and I think he must have accidentally misspoken... from around 18:25:
"...and of course, then, two or three minutes later the cameras were on him and he was wandering around in the dead ball area...clearly didn't know where he was. He was taken off, so that was a big relief."
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On the Dean Lonergan thing of 1991....
Rob Allen (brother of the mercurial All Black Nicky Allen, who suffered a fatal on-field concussion after a series of knocks over several years)
I wasn't following League in 1991 (I still don't), but I notice that Rob Allen commented on Media Take that Dean Lonergan was removed from the field a few minutes after returning, wandering obviously dazed and mindless in the dead ball area, or something.
I've tried to look it up and this account seems inconsistent with other accounts, like this Herald article from 2012, which incidentally also spoke to Rob Allen. In that one, Dean Lonergan himself seems to state that he continued to play the entire game after the initial 10 minutes off following all the convulsing.
Was he actually taken off the field a second time, or was Rob Allen mistaken with his comment on the show?
Edit: It's a bit of a shame that the Herald is hosting this Top 10 Moments in Kiwi League article from 2009, which ranks the moment as number 1 and more or less condones what happened.
"he returned after 10 minutes to play one of his finest games in national colours - not that he remembers it"
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Envirologue: 1080, "eco-terrorism" and agendas, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Actually harming people physically, probably.
As I read the Blackmail description in the Crimes Act (237, 238), it doesn't seem to cover the act of actually carrying out the threat. Blackmail in NZ seems to be specifically about making the threat in order to obtain an act or a benefit from another person.
But as far as I understand, there's no evidence that he had any intention to actually go through with the threat and kill babies. Is Blackmail where a person genuinely intended to carry out the threat worse than Blackmail where the person never intended to? That Stuff article isn't clear about what the mitigating factors were, but I wonder if it had something to do with it.
I'll happily give way to a real lawyer on this.