Posts by Richard Grevers
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I was about to observe on Friday night (but Russell closed the discussion at a nice conservative 10.40pm) that the "social filter" effect has become very strong - from what I was exposed to on my slice of the internet, National was almost universally loathed.
-
Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
Christchurch Central is tied at 100% of the vote counted. This is bad for my nerves!
Stuff wasn't prepared for the possibility of a tie - their results system shows Wagner the winner with a majority of 0
-
Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Gareth Ward,
Or do they need another seat?
They lose one vote by providing a speaker but that would leave them 61-60. I gather that your first electorate seat is never an overhang one, so if Maori Party stays below 1.4% there will be two overhang seats?
-
Banksie for speaker? :-)
It has almost become a tradition for the Greens to pick up an additional seat from the specials - at whose expense will be interesting.
-
Anyone figured how much National has to drop to in order to not be able to govern alone?
-
After a day spent repairing the front of the house and scraping paint, we drove across town to the school where my wife works/our daughter attends since we are much more a part of its community than the school near us. No one else there at 4pm but we knew the polling place manager so had a chat.
The "I've voted" stickers were useless and fell off after 10 minutes -
Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m disgusted by the whole thing. By the pointless war Tolley has fought with boards, principals, teachers and parents the length of the country. By the fact that they could foist this on the system without even a trial. By her arrogance. By the utter stupidity of defying advice and ignoring experience in favour of a soundbite.
Russell, I wanted to belatedly support your tweets about the stupidity of closing ORRS units. We have one at our school (and when Anne Tolley visited it, she only inspected the class which had the more capable kids). How can she not understand that Special needs classrooms are as mainstreamed as you can go for some children. Where once they were locked away in a special school, they can take part in school activities, and the other kids develop respect and tolerance for people who are not the same as them. But put a child with a mental age of 6 months (who isn't toilet-trained) in a general classroom and that tolerance will vanish. Plus I don't see how this can save money - the ORRS classes have 3 staff for 6 kids, but they would need a teacher-aide per child to cope in a general class. If the Auckland closures are a pilot, this will simpley shut these children out of the education system, not to mention imprisoning their parents as fulltime caregivers.
-
Right - fully caught up.
Party vote: Green
Electorate: Andrew Little (Johnathan Young has been rather like Key's mini-me around here, and we've just had pork-barrel promises over the Waiwhakaiho bridge).
MMP
Undecided on second pref - would either be STV or PVI had a play on www.onthefence.co.nz this arvo. Unsurprisingly my compatibility was 75% green, 73% Labour, but third at 72% was Mana - who I'd given no consideration to.
-
Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Richard C,
More than a little glum about all this. Perhaps naively, I thought Joyce’s bullying disregard for public transport would have more of an impact on the party vote up here, but seems not.
I seldom have truck with conspiracy theories, but the thought does come to mind that the World Cup opening night served to change the minds of many who had started to believe "public transport good, motorways bad". Was it national party activists pushing those emergency stop buttons?
-
Hard News: Last Words, in reply to James Millar,
…unless it’s for uneconomical white elephant motorway projects that are counterproductive to NZ’s long-term economic development and expose our economy to future oil shocks. Those are fine to spend money on.
Even without building another single metre of road, we have greater exposure to imported oil than any other developed economy. National are in absolute denial over this. Labour aren't much better, but at least they have an ingrained philosophical belief in public transport and railways. There's a good chance (50%?) the real oil shock will come in the next government's term - and by real I mean one that will shrink GDP by 20%, give us a 15%+ inflation hit and sink much of our capability for trade. The Greens are the only party that have grasped such concepts, but they've had to play it softly for fear of scaring off potential voters by appearing to be nutty doom merchants. Right - 5 pages of comments still to catch up!