Posts by Jason Kemp
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I think many who used to vote Labour are already voting Green. Based on the performance of the Green party over the last few years I would expect them to largely keep their 15ish % of the vote and maybe even do better.
I get why Labour won't do a deal before hand and I hope that doesn't back fire on them but they really need to step it up. It seems like Labour is missing in action on most days of the week. They need to stop being the invisible party and get back into view and take a leadership role.
As for Winston - he needs to be on permanent fishing leave. He is an entertaining character but the stakes are too high to be playing childish games.
I was profoundly disappointed that Helen Clark shafted the Greens ( twice) and I don't want to see that happen again. Like many voters I expect the Greens to be a full coalition partner if Labour pulls its head out of the sand and starts campaigning.
Where is Matt McCarten? And why is Deborah Manning on the team now? What is that about?
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A great start Sacha. Thanks for that talk at our 2010 wordcamp on disabilities and what that means for web accessibility - it opened up a range of perspectives for developers and other web users to build into their projects.
On a more personal note - have since discovered that the real "impairments" out there often belong to people who don't know they have the equivalent of giant blind spots in their thinking or activities.
A little self awareness can go a very long way and I trust that this blog will provide a thoughtful space to expand an informed discussion on this topic.
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It is an indictment on the Trust to not be grown up enough to invite dialogue with the Native Affairs team.
In the herald today "It is the view of the Kohanga Reo movement that the intrusion by the Crown is unwelcome." – really.
The trust gets paid just over $2.5m to administer $80m in funding and it can’t front up to a media team that just wants to find out what is going on.
The EY report was a whitewash as it missed the point of the investigation. It’s not like the private subsidiary has other sources of funding…
Clearly the funding is from the government and the governance structure needs to be squeaky clean. It is not and there is a sense of entitlement and misplaced bravado coming from the Trust.
If it has any insight ( at all) it needs to include Native Affairs and any other media inside the loop and clean its house – if that is needed.
In legal terms it is almost like the Trust has declared Native Affairs as a "hostile witness" and that is a pointless strategy.
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What I get from all of this is that news media take the surveys and then make up whatever they want to editorialise on. And that is regardless of what a more careful analysis might show.
In the US there is a huge volume of polls around the election and FiveThirtyEight was able to use those to calibrate some more meaningful insights. I don’t think we get real analysis here for the most part.
From having seen other election cycles in NZ I know that what happens is that the two main parties will get closer (as the election approaches.)
Also ( MMP notwithstanding) it is very hard for one grouping to make it 3 elections in a row and so to some extent that pushes the momentum over to a Labour led grouping.
It is - however Labours election to lose. There does still seem to be very little coming from Labour that will win votes and they need to fix that promptly.
I would think going in as underdog is a good thing as it may get more people to the polling booths on the day. But in my view I hear a lot more sense coming from the Greens than I do from Labour at this point.
Also Winstone - he is a Rasputin / Rumplestiltskin character who sleeps between elections and only really wakes up during the election campaign.s so he can do some more dog whistling.
As for conservatives, internet party and ACT. We don’t need any more grandstanding idiots in parliament. I don’t see that any of them have real support bases at all.
The internet party has some policies that sound interesting but nothing that the Greens or Labour couldn’t co-opt.
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I hope they close the internet party down before it starts. OK some people have fees to bill and so they are working on a set of policies but it seems to be very much the wrong way around to have a party with no announced policies.
I'm sure the Greens / and/or Labour could come up with some internet related policies that would be more likely to get traction. The catch 22 is if any voters are serious about those proposals - having them adopted by a coalition with a chance of winning is a much more pragmatic bet.
Unless the internet party is mostly a flag waving exercise and maybe a think tank at best - it needs to be dropped.
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There is an old saying “follow the money” and in many ways data based journalism offers a point of focus. I like the idea that there is greater analysis of the data in the way that stories are picked and presented on the new 538 site.
We live in an age where information can be overwhelming and so having some form of data rubric will hopefully produce better quality analysis of the stories out there. A kind of evidence based journalism if it pans out.
They aim to cover “five major subject areas — politics, economics, science, life and sports.”
And there is a manifesto of sorts called What the Fox Knows
The only one I’m not interested in is sports and I skipped that on the earlier versions of the site and in the book but 4 out of 5 sounds interesting.
Anyway the manifesto is well worth reading and I will be following the site to see where it goes on some of these topic areas.
As Nate says
"The point is that data journalism isn’t just about using numbers as opposed to words. To be clear, our approach at FiveThirtyEight will be quantitative — there will be plenty of numbers at this site. But using numbers is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce good works of journalism."
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An excellent post but where is the Labour opposition on the alternatives? I had to look up google to find out who the Labour party spokesperson is on Education.
As a parent of a year 8 child in the current system I am very interested in the best possible outcomes but what I see is schools in conflict and that can't be the best situation for teachers or students.
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Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Not quite - Fonterra has a number of dairy farms in China already
OUR FARMS IN CHINA -
It turns out that Mt Roskill has used the local schools as a safe zone already.
“Mt Roskill has 7-8 kms of off road cycle paths and roads have been engineered around local schools making them safer for children to walk to. His goal is for every child in Mt Roskill to either walk or ride to school creating a model for the rest of the country. A member of Cycle Action Auckland he initiated a recent highly successful workshop with NZBus to improve relationships between bus drivers and cyclists.”
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I have cycled around Auckland for 30 years and even using cycle lanes, tracks and lesser used roads where possible it is getting worse out there and not better.
There are clearly choke points around the city that need special attention like the Parnell Rise. Cycle Action have a list of projects but it doesn’t look like Parnell Rise is on there.
Clearly we need to start somewhere and maybe near schools would be a special zone to prioritise.
For example a danger spot near me seems to be the over bridge from St Lukes Rd to MoTaT. If you want to cross the motorway to go left ( Western Springs College & Pasadena + other schools) you can’t. You have to cross the pedestrian crossing and walk down the footpath on the right hand side of the bridge or take your life in your hands and ride over a narrow bridge as the cycle lane disappears right there.
Also – the cycle lane on St Lukes Rd gets blocked by cars quite often but at least there is a cycling lane.
A very long time ago I had my first serious crash on Vincent St outside the central police station when a police car unexpectedly came out as I came down that hill. I bounced right over the car to the other side and the kind policeman paid to replace my front wheel & other repairs and gave me a lift to where I was going.
I was in shock but I always wondered how that accident got written up and I doubt that it did. The policeman was clearly in the wrong and it could have been much worse.
I have cycled in Wellington, Melbourne, Sydney & SF and felt much safer than I do in most places in Auckland. Hopefully it is time for a serious sea change here.