Posts by Russell Brown
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Brad Kelley at One Good Move wrote a good post titled Why Obama?, looking for reasons to justify his decision to vote O, and noting a couple of instances where Obama appears to have been beholden to vested interests. It serves as notice that no one in that system is clean.
And Jim Lloyd wrote a nice reply, which includes a link to Lawrence Lessig's presentation on why he's backing Obama. The Lessig endorsement, I confess, did make me sit up and take notice.
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I grabbed the Cat Power version off eMusic on Wednesday, along with Satisfaction and a couple of others.
I was so pissed off: for two weeks Cat Power's newie, Jukebox, was "this album is not available for download in your country," so I told my darling to just spend the lavish amount of money that a CD costs these days.
When she brought it home, the eMusic version had suddenly become available in NZ. Bah.
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Looks like a lady to me ...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4392665a10.html
I'm thinking crazy person rather than terrorist though.
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I was in Manchester and was rather impressed by a couple of new buildings ...
You can go to much crazier places than that and see inspirational architecture. __Monocle__magazine had a story on a striking new hotel in Khartoum, of all places. Just not here.
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Got it now. My reading of Worik's post was that this economic exploitation was something he thought the government had it's eyes one, not iwi.
Ah. That reading hadn't occurred to me.
IIRC, the message from iwi with regard to the property rights associated with the FS&SB amounted to "great, now we can protect our taonga". Of course, the discussion did not get much further than this because the narrative quickly became one of analysing the government's proposals rather than developing a way forward that respected both hapu rights and those of ordinary beach-loving Kiwis.
We managed with lake beds with remarkably little drama ...
But I still think there was unhelpful rhetoric on all sides.
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I thought their whole campaign strategy was crap -- it seemed to run to 'Don Brash will eat your baby, trigger a race war and sell the whole country to Rupert Murdoch - by lunchtime', and nothing else had to be done. As I said at the time, it was weird watching the Government run a textbook feral opposition campaign, rather than the equally textbook 'we gave you sunshine, we gave you cute kittens -- more to come' shiny, happy government campaign.
I think the later, more feral anti-Brash stuff worked better than the diabolical (and diabolically expensive) baby-on-a-string campaign, but there's no doubt that National's advertising was a cut above.
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That creative team should make Labour political ads this year...
I really want a Big Mac.
Or some valium.
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Russell, are you really saying that hapu should have property rights taken away, in case they misuse their property ?
No. But Worik was speculating on the foreshore's value based on its potential for economic exploitation via mining and fish-farming. As far as I can tell, both of those are covered under separate regulation, but I suspect that, as a Green, he'd be horrified if any other party started talking about exploiting property rights to do that along a large stretch of New Zealand's coastline. (Although, as I said, the High Court indicated that we weren't looking at automatic rights to huge stretches of coastline.)
I agree that there was a role for the government in this in terms of finding a mutually agreeable way forward. But I do not agree that this role is best fulfilled by what amounts to a large-scale property rights confiscation purely on the basis of race.
No argument from me there, or from the Business Roundtable, which had the decency to stick with its absolute regard for property rights in the case of the F&S, as it did in opposing local loop unbundling in defence of Telecom's property rights.
It's worth noting that Telecom's property rights have also been legislated over in the name of the public good in recent years. The difference is, they go to go to court first ...
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Nigel McCulloch put on his sensible hat and sunscreen and talked to punters, playas and the staff who make it happen at the Big Day Out
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__Worik, I'm not sure if you understand the issue.__
I understand very well. I spent a lot of time huiing and listening to both sides during the passage of the Act.
Sorry, I didn't mean to seem patronising, you just weren't very clear in your first post.
But other people, who were in a good position to know, said that the test could be met for a lot of the shore line.
In which case it's unthinkable that the government wouldn't have become involved.
You cited fish-farming and mining on the stretch of beach between high and low tide in your first post: what would your reaction be if anyone else asserted a property right to pursue those activities around a majority of the national shoreline? Would that really be in the public interest?
But I'm more inclined to go with the High Court's view.
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