Posts by Brian Murphy
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Score Keith!!!! ^5
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10647023
Looks like the chickens are home!
From the article
But Imperial Tobacco's New Zealand sales and marketing director, Tony Meirs, last week told a Maori Affairs select committee the company was providing the ACR with public relations resources through Omeka Public Relations.
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According to the Sensible Sentencing Offender database (which I am not holding out as a paragon of truth) 3 of Baileys' co-offenders are also at large.
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A bit off topic here, but I am truly impressed by the Haralds' picture of drug making equipment from Victoria ave. see here
I never knew you needed so little. And when I see fans and cookers in peoples kitchens in the future well, let alone tupperware...
More material for Mike Sabin and his how to spot a P user/ P lab courses I guess.
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And Helen Clark lead a government that was quite happy to profiteer off addicts to the tune of billions of dollars in excise tax on tobacco and alcohol
Was that really profiteering, or were the users contributing to their downstream costs?
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Is crime down?
I thought it was.
The Harald Saturday http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10610657&pnum=0
Violent crime in Counties Manukau increased 69 per cent between 2004 and last year.
Police Minister Judith Collins, also the MP for Papakura, said Counties Manukau was the country's fastest-growing district and residents deserved the extra 300 frontline police promised by 2011 to keep their neighbourhoods and families safe.
The crime increasing by 69%, how does that look alongside the rest of the country? and when you factor in the population increase? And what sort of percentage is 300 new cops?
Then is another year "sitting in the sun with their mates" going to stop whatever the long chain of events is, that led to the imaginative solution of sitting someone on their stove to get their PIN from happening again?
There is a whole front page there that the SST didn't need to pay for.
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I am 100% with Tony there. It would be great to get people thinking. Just not happenning with the current mainstream media though.
There is much more to be asked, should Mikeys punishment be costing the job of whoever else would be spinning the discs?
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Representative democracy and parliamentary law-making are just as binary. How would it be any different if 49.7% of MPs voted yes, and 50.3% voted no on legislation that would mean Switzerland would join the European economic area?
With representative democracy you are a step removed, it was not all those Swiss Germans that voted the other way, but their representatives. Or country bumpkins, or mainlanders...
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Referenda are a little binary too, in 1992 the Swiss (78.7%) of them at least voted 49.7% yes and 50.3% no to joining the European economic area.
Since then they have been negotiating their way into the bits of Europe they want to be part of. A time consuming and expensive process.
That particular referendum was split very much along cultural lines.
After something like that you still have to live next to your neighbours the next day, and accept the result.
So representative democracy where there feels like you have a connection to your representative and can influence him/her is more likely to achieve the better compromise.
At large elected councillors on a top down run supercity seems a far cry from that, so in that case living with referenda may be the better alternative.
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I suspect they are also white and middle class, but it does not seem to affect the rigor they apply to looking at crime and punishment.
To me going in to bat against Garth McVicar and David Garrett counts more.
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By the way, back at the beginning this discussion was about imprisonment and the way we imprison so many people here in New Zealand.
The people at The “Rethinking Crime and Punishment” project are people who apply themselves to this issue and more, restorative justice etc, and they are looking for money to continue with their project.
They provide a credible, thought out alternative to the Sensible Sentencing Trust on the issues related to crime and punishment in New Zealand.
Do check out their web site Rethinking Crime and Punishment and support them if you like what you read.
You'll always be hearing from the McVicar side only if these guys quit.