Posts by izogi
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True. Plus with an American audience of the NYT it possibly sounds like more of an exotic weirdness for a politician than some of the other allegations and scandals that have followed him around through the years.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Alfie,
This is the guy whose biggest scandal came after a waitress told the world about his strange, compulsive habit of pulling her by the ponytail every time he visited her cafe.
Granted that was a scandal, but trying to define it as his biggest scandal seems to be completely ignoring the happenings of the 2014 election, IMHO.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
B: those are a pretty anaemic and sad bunch of 'celebrities'
That's not a fair comment until you've compared it against the certaified Fairfax list of celebrities against change.
Lorde's mum Sonya Yelich-O'Connor, choreographer Parris Goebel, rower and politician Rob Hamill, actor Sam Neill, socialite Sally Ridge, and model Colin Mathura-Jeffree are amongst those against change.
Nah, i think any list with Dan Carter, Richie McCaw, Jim Bolger and Wolverine totally beats out the against-crowd. Beach towel it is!
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I think an example of the sort of stuff they might want to do is
Is there someone in these forums with considerable experience in local government who could comment on the types of tasks and the complexity which need to be achieved, and what's done and used at present? Without that, the whole thread (on this part of it) seems at risk of setting up a straw man before saying "yay, obvoiusly that's easy".
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Alfie,
Is the copyright thing related to Dirty Politics somehow, or is it just a National Party thing? I've lost track.
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Daniel Carr,
Anything a council wants to do can be done with open source software, so if you are paying vendors big fees, you have to justify this against saved labour.
I definitely don't disagree that there's some weird spending going on here, but what do you see councils as needing to do?
I've done some consulting with local councils, mostly around Australia but a few indirectly in New Zealand, mostly as part of a company that resells, supports and customises an EDRMS product. A major part of council operations seems to be managing property and rates issues, for which there are some considerably complex products they'll often pay for, and then pay for support. eg. Infor Pathway (built around Microsoft.Net), or TechOne Property & Rating. Then, on top of that, it'll often have to integrate with proper EDRMS systems for adequate record keeping, which are also often not OSS. Are there OSS or OSS-compatible substitutes out there which handle this type of stuff? Most of these systems have a certain degree of web interfaces, but I've also seen a lot of continuing use of the desktop apps.
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Polity: Key Derangement Syndrome…, in reply to linger,
Yep.
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Polity: Key Derangement Syndrome…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
An uninformed people will get restless. To assume it's all about hating on John is rubbish.
I agree. It's easy to pretend that it's specifically Key-hating when any number of Stuff, Herald and Facebook threads get substantial portions of comments expressing disgust at John Key (sometimes misspelled), even if he wasn't even mentioned in whatever spawned the conversation. Lots of criticism would probably be more appropriately-levelled at wider parts of the political branch of the government and how it operates, instead of just the nominee to the top. Otherwise you'd think that National could solve all its problems simply by unscrewing the PM, filing him away in Hawaii and screwing in a new bright and shiny PM who's untainted. Problem solved, right? Everyone likes the new one. But, realistically, National almost certainly can't make all those KDS sufferers like it by replacing the PM. Underneath the PM is still the same political machine that'll work the same way, implement the same policies, and that's the real problem that people have. Are people mad only at John Key, or is his name just the mechanism that many choose to express their anger?
But hey, just as Clark was before him, he's the guy at the top who's supposedly meant to be responsible. He's the person whose face is in all of the government's major campaigns and events. He is who people see and think of when they have problems. To an extent, the political branch of the government probably wants him to run interference, get in the way of blame and be the target for discontent as part of its PR strategy. It's not necessarily such a bad thing when he's out pulling hair, or saying embarrassing things on a radio show, even if that leads to "controversial" coverage. The more that coverage and arguments are about him, the less that they're about government policy or actions. After all, one of his great skills is, somehow, to be able to remain trusted by enough of the populace to retain their support, even if it increases the overall polarisation. He's much better at it than Helen Clark ever was.
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Hubbard:
Last year the government spent more than $94 billion. The cost of the flag referendum is therefore a mere 0.00027 per cent of the budget.
Thing is, there's always more money on this scale. If that's the argument, then why didn't we spend another $26 million on hip operations? If $26 million (or whatever it is exactly) hadn't gone towards organising a couple of flag referendums, it most likely would have gone towards paying off government debt, and become invisible to the populace, despite still going somewhere important. Government spending is about balancing this kind of stuff.
Hip operations are balanced against plenty of things: What about the high risk investment of trying to save the Kakapo? What about renevations to make parliament look nicer? What about keeping the propellers and guns working on each of the NZ Navy's frigates? What about income tax rates? People don't tend to complain so much about these sorts of things, and there are a large number of other possible spending targets that'd be unlikely to raise eyebrows. The fact that the government chose to spend this money on a flag change process as it's been executed, instead of anything else, and that so many people believe it's a bad appropriation, strongly suggests that the government's either done dreadful job of making the outcome of this process as valuable to the populace as any number of other things would be, or that it's done a hideous job of selling it.
Either way it's absolutely valid to question why the money's being thrown at this, and to make sure those who chose to spend it are fully aware of the discontent. I find the recent accusations that anti-government motivations are behind everyone who claims spending on the referendums is stupid to be quite insulting.
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
He really is agonising over this.
It seems like a very trivial thing to agonise over in the context of everything that our nation's columnists could be writing about. But that's been this entire circus since its beginning.