Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to 3410,
Mike Hosking weighs in
I had to laugh at there isn’t a shred of evidence that he did [anything wrong]. There's his return, and two members of KDC's staff who say that there was a phone call of thanks. The bodyguard took the call, and then called the staffer who deposited the cheques to say the money had gone through, or so the story goes (I can't find the article I read it in). The word of two people rather outweighs the word of one person, particularly when the one has a very vested interest in their story being the one that's accepted as truth.
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Act are a convenient fig leaf for National's genuine policy planks, to be sure, but let's not forget that if Banks leaves Parliament and there's a by-election the period between his resignation and the election of a new MP leaves the whole government hanging on the largesse of the Maori Party in the event of a confidence vote: or a supply vote, for that matter, given the very near proximity of this year's Budget. (And doesn't the Opposition traditionally call a confidence motion on Budget Day?)
Given the general disquiet across the entire population about a lot of National's policies (asset sales, casino, Crafar, welfare reform...), and the reported leap in Labour's fortunes, the Maori Party has to be feeling a bit of pressure to revisit their attachment to National. Based on the latest Herald poll, a coalition of the not-government parties plus Maori Party would have clear domination of the House. If I were Key I wouldn't be feeling so comfortable about having to rely on the Maori Party to keep me in power if Epsom comes up for grabs. This latest ruckus will also not be good for National's short-term image - the stench might even be sufficiently corrosive to strip away a fair chunk of the teflon.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Banks probably thinks he is safe in claiming that he doesn’t know which PARTICULAR 25k donation came from who
However, looking at the law, I don't see that one washing. Perhaps Graeme can comment better, but I just don't read that law as written to allow a known donor of a specific sum of money to be listed as anonymous. The process for being a proper anonymous donor is well-known (you deposit cash as "A. Nonymous" or <blank>, or you go through a lawyer's trust fund) and doing anything else isn't donating anonymously, especially if a sum of money previously discussed suddenly appears in your bank account in the particular configuration previously discussed.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to Hebe,
However, National would need to renounce a lot of their political positions in order to be in any way acceptable to the Greens' members. Remember, the Green Party list is decided by the membership, as is the Party leadership, and if they started getting overly cosy with the National Party as it stands they'd find themselves all looking into the grave of their political careers at the next election because they'd be collectively voted off the Green Party island by a membership who don't want a bar of the neo-liberal economic consensus.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to nzlemming,
There's a reason the Blubbery Cetacean's lair is considered unholy ground by much of the sane portion of society.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to Russell Brown,
Whale Oil
We appreciate your sacrifice, Russell. Deity knows I wouldn't go in there!
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MMP maths will probably award National an additional list seat
How so? There's no MMP at play in a by-election, unless I've misunderstood something. Goldsmith is a list MP, if he gets elected by Epsom he resigns his list seat and it gets filled by whoever's next on National's list. Act disappears, because they have no list MPs, Goldsmith takes the electorate seat currently occupied by Banks, and there is no net change in anything of substance in the calculus of Parliament.
Or does the MMP maths get re-jigged under by-elections? That sounds like a remarkably effective way to fuck with the composition of Parliament. -
Hard News: It's Choice, bro, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
paint that house in Grey Lynn gray and house price inflation (sorry; property appreciation)
I don't find much to appreciate about block after block of uniformly-coloured properties. But maybe that's just me.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Russell, I know the competition on offerings has been from the bottom, but they're still not competing by being open about their contention ratios. The biggest ISPs are the biggest because of marketing power and customer intertia (especially Xtra) rather than because they offer the best deals. They could refuse to announce their contention ratios and still be the biggest and everyone else in the game knows it, so why bother potentially losing a commercial edge?
Also, an ISP that got their announced contention ratio wrong would face action under the FTA, so why take on that risk? Easier just to let customer word-of-mouth get the word around on ISPs who have shit contention ratios. -
Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Andrew E,
Here, the information seems to be top secret. Or is this because the contention ratios have dropped so much (and speeds increased so much) that they’re now largely irrelevant to anyone who isn’t doing something very bandwidth intensive?
They’ve always been secret. ISP engineers mutter amongst themselves over beverages, but only in general terms. Juha may have a better understanding of why, but my take is that it’s down to the fundamentally unhealthy nature of our ISP scene, where the historically-largest bandwidth provider also owned the largest retail ISP and the second-largest retail ISP was owned by another major bandwidth provider. In that environment, the biggest players are never going to say what their contention ratios are because it’s an insight into just how thoroughly (particularly in Telecom’s case) the wholesale side is giving the retail side a huge leg-up over the competition.
I don’t think they’ve dropped dramatically, either. International capacity is still quite expensive, and margins are very tight. The less capacity that’s required, the better. A competition over contention ratios would only be good for the very biggest ISPs with the most commercial negotiating power, and I just don’t see them willingly going there.