Posts by Matthew Hooton
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Death of Elvis because I came home from school and it was on TV instead of cartoons. I must have been five.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to simon g,
Quite a strong rebuttal! But I would be very interested in any scientific polling of knowledge of MMP. I suspect most people understand it perfectly well. Or at least as well as any other necessary background information, such as basic fiscal management.
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Speaker: The Government lost the election, in reply to Rob Stowell,
What a load of horse-radish. Why can’t some pundit somewhere say it: 61 seats gives you a government. When you can win or negotiate that, you have moral authority. Less than 61 seats? You have the ‘moral authority’ to be in opposition.
End of.Pundits say this all the time. And I think the public also knows it perfectly well. But a proportion of the public - usually supporters of the party that won the most votes - doesn’t like it. I really don’t see any evidence more civics education is needed.
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Hard News: Drugs and human rights, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Bennett WANTS to be challenged by academics and opponents. She wants to bash PC liberal lawyers and professors
Correct. And very astute of Jacinda Ardern not to rise to the bait and risk being seen to defend P dealers and gang members.
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Perhaps we’ll all become more forgiving in the future.
I expect we'll have to be. Or else almost no one will be able to become a political leader, judge, company CEO, or dog catcher. But the things we'll forgive will be more impulsive stupidity, not decisions and acts that unfold over several years.
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I don't follow this issue very closely but hasn't this been a massive slow u-turn by Peter Dunne?
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Russell Brown,
“You love the naan bread, right? The man who’s cooking this bread won’t be around if immigration [rules change]… I’d rather hire a Kiwi, but you know what, I can’t find them.”
Doesn't this tend to support the prime minister's comments that unemployed kiwis are all lazy or on drugs? And hasn't the blogo- and twitter-spheres already decided that was nonsense?
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to simon g,
It's not "anti-racist" - it's a policy that ignores the poor and welcomes the prosperous.
I'm not sure it welcomes the poor or the prosperous, but more those at the poorer end of the middle class who want to emigrate and can't get into Europe, US, Canada etc. I also (like you I think) see refugee policy as distinct from immigration policy - even doubling, trebling or quadrupling the quota would still mean our intake was a drop in the ocean both as a percentage of global refugees (obviously) but even as a percentage of our total net immigration.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to 81stcolumn,
Agree. Also, I think we fool ourselves if we think Chinese, Indian or Saudi parents send their beloved (maybe only) children to New Zealand as a first choice. The kids we get tend to be those who couldn't get into an English-language university in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore or Hong Kong. We are wonderfully patriotic in New Zealand but it also means we overestimate how others perceive us.
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The only problem with this post is that it ignores rule 97 of New Zealand politics: If Murray McCully were involved in organising a fund-raising sausage sizzle for his local hospice, he would find a way to find it corruptly. It may be the donation to the Clinton Foundation subsidiary is entirely legit despite this rule, but that would make it even more newsworthy given its uniqueness.