Posts by Matthew Poole
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Surely there are a couple of journalists who could study up on what teachers actually want and comment on a SINGLE THING other than pay
Yamis, my nugget about pay being somewhat secondary to conditions was gleaned from those news reports. They're putting the information in there, but pay will keep getting hammered until the PPTA says "This is not a pay dispute. It's a conditions dispute" and keeps on repeating that message every time a journalist asks for a quote. Allowing Tolley, Key and the media to frame the question, and then answering only that question, means it'll continue to be portrayed as a pay dispute. Most of the electorate won't join the dots unless they're told there are dots to join.
-
I have this idea that the after tax real wage was what they eventually settled on as proof they were closing the wage gap with Australia.
Yes, pretty much. And the media never screamed "BULLSHIT!" at them over it, either. It was regurgitated happily, with no sign of contrary opinion, despite the fact that it would've taken 10 minutes on the OECD website to determine that, when comparing relative levels of income between countries, gross incomes are used because it's pretty much impossible to meaningfully calculate the after-tax income of a person in any jurisdiction in any kind of generalised way.
Even a non-expert in the subject who'd been reporting on the House for a while should've had a BS sensor that was running in over-drive, and sought out comments from their friendly economics commentator. It's not like there's a shortage of academics (or bank economists, for that matter) who'll give a journo a few minutes for a juicy quote in the next-day's daily paper. -
Kieth does a fine job of explaining why he feels those are not valid measures and that the government is spinning for Africa, and I agree with him - but that's a job for a commentator/analyst, not a news reporter.
The job for a reporter would be to find someone to explain how B'linglish is spinning, not just parrot his words ad nauseum. Which is, I think, what people are getting at.
I like that journalists (supposedly) don't write their opinions as fact, but they do a very poor job at getting someone like a statistician or economist to comment on the pontifications of gummint misers. That is balance. -
On the topic of teachers' pay, I do wonder if they'd settle for the extra manglement units and hard caps on class sizes along with a minor pay increase. The impression I'm getting is that most of their gripe relates to class sizes and NCEA workload rather than rates of pay.
-
I forget who said it, but a certain head of state reputedly said, "People with full bellies don't make revolutions."
Variously attributed to this fine gentleman or this one. Of course, the latter may well have been parrotting the former.
[edit: What happened to my Preview button?! RUSSELL!?]
-
Martin, you mean there's an untapped market for wacky piss-take ideas? I thought Libertarianz had that cornered?
-
Yup, but not as private as never even giving the information.
Of course, but there are clear social benefits from the collection of the information, assuming one doesn't live in a true libertarian paradise[tm] where anything that you want is provided entirely at your expense and discretion.
And I suspect even a true libertarian paradise[tm] would struggle to handle matters such as school construction without accurate indicators of how many school-age children reside in a particular area, unless said true libertarian paradise[tm] just put each child in their own learning pod and the pod travelled with the child to be clustered with other learning pods at whichever school happened to attract that child's parents' education dollar.
-
I certainly get the feeling that P Grower's general distrust of the census is less about a disagreement with the collection of information and more related to his other activities.
As a point of interest, information gathered pursuant to the Statistics Act 1975 is considered to be so private that its release cannot even be ordered by a court. It can only occur as evidence in a prosecution brought under the Act or in accordance with the provisions of the Act relating to use of statistical information. That's pretty private, IMHO.
-
JT, got some linky love for us to look at?
-
One thing that I'm very puzzled about is the Sheila Dikshit thing. I worked with an Indian guy at my last job whose surname is Dixit, and he said it's pronounced Dik-shit in India. In NZ, to avoid having deal with the likes of PH, he goes with the Dix-it pronounciation.
So have the NZ media got horribly confused, or is the Dixit/Dikshit thing actually a common transposition in India?