Hard News: The Near Future
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Voting for the Prime Minister is actually one of the few things we feel like we're doing during our tri-annual "act like we're a democracy" festivities.
Nice.
I think if it is going to be a festival we need dancing and colourful outfits.
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Say, Red, Blue, Green, Black and Purple? If the dancing involves body-slamming your partner on national TV, I think we're already there!
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What would we put inside our portable shrine tho......
Also elections could do with more beer.
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Our shrine is that sacred place where we tick a box of our choosing with a sacred pen, thus discharging in full any responsibility we could possibly have about how our society is to be run. It's a cathartic moment for many. Others, like myself, see it as a symbolic act with little significance other than to ourselves.
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I am probably one of those people. I try to ignore politics (politics does sometimes come and find me via public address however) but I enjoy the ritual of voting. It is however, probably about efficacious as fanning incense toward your head in the hopes of passing your exams.
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Also elections could do with more beer.
At the last election, whilst whooping and hollering at every .01 increase for the Light Side, we had vodka jelly shots - red for Labour, lime for the Greens and Orange for the election enrolement people.
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True, but the common usage is to say that the PM was 'elected' if they were the leader of the party at the time of the election. So it's not really snide - it's a distinction that's not less important because it is less formal.
Well, it is snide - unless it's now going to become PA house style to refer to both Geoffrey Palmer and Jenny Shipley as "a former Prime Minister, however brief and unelected". Now, if anyone wants to put up a serious argument for 1) electing our executive separately from the legislature, and/or 2) changing the law so the resignation of a sitting PM automatically leads to a general election, I'm paying attention. But Moore was a lawful and legitimate Prime Minister, and I don't see how the length of his residency atop the greasy poll, or the way he got there, bears any relationship to the quality (or otherwise) of his piece in Wednesday's Herald. Surely it would have been badly written, tendentious nonsense even if it had been penned by the shade of Kiwi Keith (Nation winning four our of six general elections contested under his leadership, and serving a little under twelve years as PM).
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That is sooo Wellington. Oh my god that is what is going to happen to me living here!
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Damn... that's not right. Holyoake resigned as PM and National leader in February 1972, and it was Jack Marshall in the hot seat when the Nats were turfed out later that year. So, National won four out of five elections contested under his leadership.
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elections could do with more beer
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That is sooo Wellington. Oh my god that is what is going to happen to me living here!
You say that like it's a bad thing!
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WH,
and I think Moore is wrong, just like you
Fine, you're not going to change my mind, and I'm not going to change yours
It took me a little while to figure out what happened there, but I think Stephen meant that he agreed with Craig, and not that he thought that Craig was wrong like Moore is.
Wick, it's one hour to beer o'clock.
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What is wrong with Fair Trade coffee?
Sorry, I missed all these question. FT coffee isn't evil, it just isn't all that great either. The rules have been made up in the West to suit Western feelings of guilt over some pretty shonky ROI models to producers.
As a result of the rules lots of deserving producers miss on the value of an FT label whilst others are in a position of overproducing due to the high prices they receive in an artificially cornered market.
What we *really* should be looking at is how agriculture is treated in terms of trade barriers and the massive control supermarket corps have over the supply chain.
We in the West effectively have placed triple barriers against producers - trade, supermarket control and now a shonky labeling system.
We give enough of a fuck to pick a nice label coffee but not so much that we change the systems that really screw over developing countries.
Hope this helps.
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Weston:
I thought we were agreeing on some things, and respectfully disagreeing on others - which, blessedly, is the norm around here rather than the depressing exception.
Anyhow, time to go torture some lamb chops into something approximately in the vicinity of an edible evening mealr...
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I would be interested to learn more about coffee and trade but I don't want to sidetrack the thread.
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But that's what threads are for! PAS threads anyway...
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But Moore was a lawful and legitimate Prime Minister, and I don't see how the length of his residency atop the greasy poll, or the way he got there, bears any relationship to the quality (or otherwise) of his piece in Wednesday's Herald.
It's his biggest claim to any credibility, so contextualizing it is worthwhile. If he'd just been that guy who was once on the WTO, he might have thought it worthwhile to put a bit more effort into what he wrote, or the Herald might have taken more care about publishing it. But no, he trades on the former glory of having once been the PM. Putting exactly what kind of PM he was in context is not irrelevant. The shortest reigning one in NZ history, and particularly hypocritical in his little rag on HC over rolling Labour leaders due to the fact that was the only way he ever had a sniff at power.
So yeah, what he wrote was crap regardless. But it was also hypocritical crap from someone whose true place in the momentous events that he shits on from some non-existent moral highground is worth remembering. He's like a bitter old Muldoon himself, but nowhere near as witty or noteworthy. At least when Muldoon made snide comments in his failing years you would think "yup, at least he really knew about what went on in there". With Moore it's more like "riiight, the guy who realized his only shot at being the PM was doomed to last 3 months, but he took it anyway. He probably knows a lot about rolling predecessors, and not much else".
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A couple of points:
Moore was at the heart of Labour's infighting for years, whether or not he made PM, so he does have some insight into what's going on.
Yeah, I think a lot of what he wrote was hypocritical. Not sure he was essentially wrong though, [although the 'personal destruction' thing was overkill since he didn't provide the evidence to back it up]
A few things I think stick in his craw: one is that it was Clark, according to the histories I've read, who went to Palmer and said 'stand down, we'll lose less badly under Moore than we will under you'.
It's not just that it was Clark who then rolled him. Labour, under Moore, nearly won the 1993 election, and one of the reasons they didn't was Clark's backers downed tools in the last week of the campaign and did sod all. They didn't want to win under Moore.
The funny thing is a lot of people voted Labour at that election who couldn't stand Moore. I was at a party full of Labour supporters and when Moore came on and did that bizarre 'it will be a long cold night...' speech the heckling of the TV screen was deafening. When it died down I asked in a loud voice how many of those yelling had just voted for the party led by that guy there were a few sheepish grins and wry shrugs.
When I went into the gallery a few years after that Moore used to bring around his own press releases. He didn't trust the Labour press secs. He was very much a man out on his own.
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Thanks Rob, an interesting insight into an era of NZ history that I wasn't around for.
It would probably help to have had a fly-on-the wall's account of the Labour caucus's late-80s Ashburton retreat, where an imported 'facilitator' ran role-playing sessions in a desperate bid to get the squabbling factions to co-operate. All fairly macho stuff as accounts from the time had it, about surviving a plane crash in the Canadian outback. Unlike Survivor, though, co-operation was the keyword. As always with politicians, naked competition is for lesser mortals.
When infighting later broke out in parliament among the Labour ranks Muldoon, by then a backbencher, heckled "Bring back the touchy-feely man!" This was a passing reference to Lange's comment that the recently-held travelling roadshow of public hearings on social welfare reform would not be some kind of 'touchy-feely' event.
You're rgiht, Ben - in his twilight years he was a witty old bastard, although more bastard than witty.
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Kowhai - 2 cents about coffee & labour.
Trade Aid Coffee would have to be pretty good, at least morally. They claim to pay 50% more than others but that doesn't mean it is fair. The Timor Leste speaker at Parihaka 06 had a real issue with so called fair trade over that.
And my little gripe. Trade Aid business model relies on volunteer (slave?) labour of little old grannies - Don't tell the Business Round Table or you'll undermine the Barista pay claims.
Labours Pacific Island Labour Programme = NZ Slavery
NZAid June 07 has a nice write up and for what was written you'ld have little reason but to agree with it. Problem it doesn't mention the removal of human rights of these worker. No right to strike for pay or conditions & no right to transfer their labour and thereby have the ability to improve their pay & conditions.
They are indentured labourers, slaves.The need for this legislation = NZ doesn't like Brown People & Dawn Raids make bad international TV
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Umm.....I can't see the link to Dawn Raids, am I missing something?
If you volunteer you can leave. Period. I know I have.
Disclosure: I volunteered for Trade Aid on Krd many moons ago. I did about two shifts and then didn't go back. I was young, unreliable and selfish. I didn't feel like indentured labour.
However feel free to tell me more, I am interested (like most NZers) in coffee.
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.........off out but
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And my little gripe. Trade Aid business model relies on volunteer (slave?) labour of little old grannies
My mum volunteers at the Raglan Trade Aid. While she is kind of little and old (though not a granny, which is all my fault), most of the Raglan volunteers are much younger.
Yeah, they don't get paid, but I think everyone who volunteers at a place like that gets something out of it - meeting people, work experience, warm fuzzy feelings, the generous staff discount.
Also, Trade Aid coffee is pretty good.
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The bulk of trade aid products are useless charity crap. Coffee & no sweat clothing have the potential to break that mold which is why I want more from them and their moral crusade.
Trade Aid business model transfers the under payment of workers from Timor (if you believe their hype) to NZ. As a business model (which is one of its claims) this is not sustainable or fair. Volunteer where ever you like but Trade Aid making claims about the business model being ethical are wrong & certainly no other NZ business can compete with free NZ labour.
Dawn Raids have everything to do with fair trade (but not coffee). NZ & Texas seem to have pretty similar policies here. We need workers but don't want (name your ethnic underclass) to live alongside us. So will put them in a limbo of semi legal workers in NZ but no support for their dependant families (NZ school & Health care) as they stay in the islands.
The reason for these policies is that when our economy takes a dive we don't want the same 'problem' as the 70s/80s. NZ doesn't want PI labourers to live here. -
Sue,
People volunteer to collect for daffodil Day, does that make them slave labour?
Trade Aid might not be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. It's a better more ethical business model than say supre.See it's very easy to point fingers when someone or a company is doing a little bit of good, becuase oh gosh it's not doing everything everything perfect so it must be evil.
and on the coffee note, fair trade is not a perfect concept either. Illy refuse to use the fair trade label becuase they pay coffee growers above fair trade prices.
Does that make fair trade branded coffee a sham? hell no
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