Posts by Alex Coleman
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Cracker: RIght On., in reply to Kyle Matthews,
For such a small party, it’s really had to build a pretty big tent to fit all it’s arms in.
Ha!
So now that Key has ruled out Brash of finance, and said it's 'highly unlikely' he'll get a top job, and said that ACT has extremist views...
...I do think it's only fair that the country knows what sort of position an extremist would be likely to hold in any future government. Especially given the state sector reforms they are signaling. With amalgamated super ministries and the like an extremist could be quite powerful in the wrong place.
Seeing the PM has seen fit to rule him out of finance, will he rule him out of welfare or labour?
Education?
Please, won't somebody think of the children?
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Cracker: RIght On., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
You know that the Maori seats can only be abolished by Act of Parliament, which a pretty substantive “by your leave”.
So if Brash had won in 05 and abolished the seats, how would have that been with Maori leave? I not only don't recall him saying he was planning on any consultative hui, I seem to have gained the impression that doing away with that sort of PC-gone-maddism was a large part of the point.
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Cracker: RIght On., in reply to Kyle Matthews,
If Act positions itself as a more philosophically right-wing liberal party – economic and socially,
Given the John Banks angle, I'm not convinced that's the plan.
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Hard News: More Secrets and Lies, in reply to 3410,
and the threadbare plausible deniability at every level of this story, from Clark to Key, from Goff to Mapp, from Ferguson to Mateparae, and so on, will go without serious challenge just like everything else.
I'm not sure they pulled the plausibility off. The Red Cross lines look like demonstrable lies.
Full respect to Jon Stephenson and Simon Wilson. Thank you both. Also to the SAS members who acted as sources.
Hopefully some of the editors and Journo's in the dailys can keep the story going. This is the sort of story people go into journalism for, innit?
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Hard News: Perverse Entertainment, in reply to Grant McDougall,
As for Palin and Bachmann being “over already” I can but hope. Apart from Obama actually losing, my next biggest fear politically is Palin winning.
I'm slowly convincing myself that the GOP doesn't actually want to win; that they have moved on from politics being anything other than a fundraising exercise. That's not to say that they will try not to win, only that if they do it will be incidental.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
There is a very obvious reason why Brash’s speech succeeded at Orewa. It was designed to shock and it tapped into popular sentiment
Well, kinda. But here is the Herald report of Bill English's speech to the party conference in 02:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=3512357
In a keynote speech to the party's conference in Christchurch, Mr English said Labour was marching New Zealand down the road of separatism.
He offered around 400 delegates a policy promising one rule for all "where rights come from a common citizenship, not from ethnic identity".
The Government was backtracking from a promise to legislate to ensure public ownership of the seabed and foreshore, Mr English claimed.
New Zealand was a society of converging ethnic groups with shared values, that should be covered by a single set of rules.
Mr English pledged a National government would close the books on new historical treaty claims within a year and clear up the 900 claims on the books within five years.
He also repeated promises to scrap the Maori seats and end tokenism, but said National could still work with Maori groups.
I think Brash's speech was more inflammatory perhaps, (re-reading it again it's still brutal)
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0401/S00220.htm
... but I can't find a copy of English's speech to compare them. The point is though that the message wasn't new, the leader was.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Rex Widerstrom,
Am I alone in hearing a faint echo of “Waah waah waaaaah!” in the background?
Nope. Though the sheer audacity of Lhaws complaining about media lynch mobs nearly drowns it out.
His complaint seems to be that liberals, boo hiss, outsource their lynching to the police; when everyone knows a proper lynch mob just heads out on to the street and starts dishing out black-eyes to anyone who looks a bit looty.
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I believe none of them take on a job that difficult for trivial reasons whether those tend towards service or power.
I like to think so too Sacha.
I also wonder though, if the loss in whatever quality it is that we are talking about in senior politicians is a result of modern politics itself.
As if the change isn’t so much that as pollies spend time in the game they lose their spark, but rather that in order to win, in order to lead a large broad based party to victory, the spark has to, at the least, be hidden.
I wonder this because of the way modern politics is done. Somewhere in the nexus of our media, comms theory, and campaign science the spark becomes a negative in terms of that next necessary vote.
The base of a party needs to believe that the spark is just being hidden, and that the stuff coming out of the leaderships’ mouths is just sloganeering to gain those marginal voters (voters whom the base hopes will be disappointed by the reality of the person hiding beneath the bs rhetoric).
I genuinely think the leaders themselves believe this. That they are not betraying the base, but just making some uncomfortable, but necessary for the end result, noises.
Where it all falls apart is that it is rotten to its core. Those marginal voters don’t become less marginal after an election. The game doesn’t stop. Those soundbites and practised message lines that are tossed out to catch a marginal demographic aren’t, in fact, extraneous to the values of a party. They are the issues an election is won on. They are the mandate.
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to Ben Winters,
No economist I know has any interest in defending the rich. Most, however, will defend property rights and advise against expropriation, and the main beneficiaries of this respect for the law is not the rich and powerful, who have access to the resources they need to defend themselves without the law, but the poor, who do not.
The law can defend and exact 'expropriation', and 'property rights' are defined by the law and can take many forms.
So it seems a little off to say that defending a particular type of 'property rights' is 'respecting the law'. It might be, or it might not be; depending on what the law is.
Are you saying that if a policy of 'expropriation' is put in place then the rich will do what they can to frustrate the law?
That would seem to be true, but it seems quirky to frame it as 'defending themselves without the law'.
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There's a couple of things I don't understand, and they might be stupid things, but hey, I'm not proud.
If the idea is that prices are the most efficient way of finding out who really needs the stuff; and if you need a govt subsidised work around to make sure that the people who really really need the stuff can afford it, then the idea is a bit broken. No?
Where does the govt get this info about who to subsidise? If that is info the govt already has, then what info is gained from the pricing business?
Secondly, (and it's probably already been talked about but I just don't recognise the language being used), if someone has a large supply of money, then each dollar isn't worth as much to them as someone who has a small supply of money. This seems to make sense to me, and if it is true then it would follow that if you have potloads of money then it doesn't mean that you being prepared to spend twice as many dollars as usual on petrol means you need it more. It could well just mean that the extra money isn't worth very much to you at all. What's $500?
If that makes any sense at all, then the defences of gouging start to look like reasons for the wealthy to avoid sharing the inconveniences of the broader population.