Posts by Eddie Clark
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Craig - fair enough...
If you can go a week without a "but X did Y as well, so its not like we should only criticise Z" post, then I'll be truly impressed :P.
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Craig, the "everyone is as bad as each other, I'm a sensible tory that can see both sides" stuff is getting just a little old. You've been doing it for 5 years - do you have any other tricks? You're too often all meta and no content
Instead of attacking:
- Bernard Hickey's column
- People liking Bernard Hickey's column
- Russell's flippant rhetorical question
- People threatening to moveWhy don't you tell us what you think of the vague wishy washy policy prescriptions Key served up yesterday?
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Those links illustrate my beef with NZ fiction, of which Witi Ihimaera is part - everything is nostalgia, mysticism or nostalgic mysticism.
Really? That's what I like about NZ literature. And non-mimetic fiction is (critically, at least) treated with relative disdain in New Zealand. If its not depressing as all hell and prefereably containing some icky relationship it seems hard to get a decent review. Elisabeth Knox is one of our few cultural figures who as far as I can tell always reviews better overseas, because she doesn't conform to that paradigm.
Then again, I still prefer Maurice Gee's kids stuff to his adult stuff, which indicates a certain perspective...
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Ooo. Book club. Yes please.
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They'll go away in a sense, in that Maori, urban liberals and female voters will happily vote for the Maori Party, National and the Greens instead of Labour.
And I'm sure Trotter doesn't care. As long as Labour is eternally dedicated to endless class warfare, all will be fine in the world.
Phil, I hope you're right and that Goff (and Pagani) don't actually think that way.
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Russell:
but I wondered whether either the Crown or iwi signatories intended to (or even could) extinguish this particular aboriginal title in the process of signing their Treaty, which granted new, explicit rights.
In short - no. The Treaty didn't cede any property rights to the Crown. It (arguably) ceded sovereignty, but direct use rights over land weren't affected by the Treaty.
And even if you argued that they did, there's a well-established doctrine of both contractual and treaty (which is basically a contract between nations) interpretation which states that, where there is ambiguity in the text, all other things being equal it is resolved in favour of the party who was in a weaker bargaining position. Contra preferentum. So if there was ambiguity as to whether rights were extinguished to low-tide or high-tide, that would be resolved in favour of Maori. Thus - high tide.
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Mikaere - snap.
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Russell - the Ngati Apa case was never a Treaty case. It's about the common law of aboriginal title.
This is off the top of my head, but I was tutoring propert law at Vic the year the decision came out, and I think I can still remember what we were told about all of this (by Richard Boast, no less).
Basically, aboriginal title is held collectively by the (non-european) natives of the country that has the bad fortune not to have developed a legal system that looks complicated to whities. The natives retain that until the title is extinguised by the Crown. This doesn't happen until that land is purchased by the Crown, at which point the land is 'converted' to regular title and can be flogged off to settlers who jump off the boats from the UK.
The issue with Ngati Apa was that a lot of the Crown purchase deeds were mighty unclear about the exact boundaries. Specifically, they didn't say whether the purchase went down to the low tide mark or the high tide mark. So its this inter-tidal area that is at issue. The Court in Ngati Apa (completely consistently with overseas authorities, I understand) found that title to that area hadn't been acquired by the Crown, and therefore that aboriginal title hadn't been extinguished.
To prove that it continued to apply, though, Maori tribes would have needed to show continuous traditional use of that area. This is very difficult to prove, given the intervening time, lack of written records in some cases, and quite often Maori simply being blocked from using the tidal areas in question. This is what comforted Gault J, one of the most socially reactionary judges we've ever had inflicted on us, to side with the majority in Ngati Apa - the thought that even if they got the right in Court, Maori were unlikely to ultimately get anything.
None of this - NONE of it - was acknowledged by Labour, or reported in the media. Its what turned me off the last Labour govt - vile, racist, legally illiterate populism. The FS&S Act is, essentially, indifensible.
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Wow, that's a sour post from Mr Litterick. I think you actually have to be dead not to at least find Ladyhawke fun fluff, whatever you think of the long-lasting artistic merits thereof.
Although given the implicit comparison to the Dead C... I mean I have an enormous collection of pretentious hipstery records, but the Dead C are about as far from accessible as you can get.
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Russell - Sharples means 100%, I assume, because MTS is on FreeView and SKY Satellite. No network - none - in New Zealand has 100% terrestrial coverage.
So, simon g, some people are going to have to "eat satellite" no matter who wins the bid.
And Giovanni, please don't tell me you're a Leafs fan. A year living in TO taught me they're too crap to support.