Posts by Chris Waugh
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OnPoint: Spending "Cap" is Fiscal Anorexia, in reply to slarty,
climate change
What? The baby boomers are now responsible for the Industrial Revolution, too?
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The last Labour government's electoral finance law was a step in a dangerous direction, and it's vague murmurings of setting up government regulation of the media suggests it hasn't learned well...
But at the risk of finding myself on the pointy end of a "...let's not balance it up by equally stupidly comparing...":
Key and Joyce's arrogant, blustering, bullying response to the teapot recording reminded me disturbingly of many a Chinese government official's response to uncomfortable news made public. But whereas in China such official behaviour is mocked, apparently many in New Zealand sympathised. That worries me.
And while China shows the danger of government regulation and intimidation of the media for government and corporate transparency, Nicky Hager's comments in that article merc linked to on the role David Farrar and Cameron Slater played has me worried for a different reason. China, with parallel government and party administrations at every level of society and in every organisation, also does a good line in active Party guidance of the line the media should take on issues, and that, again, is dangerous for government and corporate transparency.
And I strongly suspect that an awful lot of Kiwis like strong, authoritarian leaders, and could be quite comfortable with a dictatorship that more or less let them go about their lives as they do right now. But that's the kind of country I live in, and it has its downsides.
So maybe, as Craig Young says, "part of the problem is the weak self-regulation of the NZ media industries", but I'd rather be bringing my family back to that than a Kiwi version of what we enjoy now, especially now that the internet lets us bite back.
So high on my wishlist for the incoming parliament is Labour and the Greens playing loud and clear the "National bullies the media to preserve it's hold on power" song.
But a more positive (for China) comparison: For all its government control and censorship, there is a lot more diversity of media voices here. People's Daily is the national-level Party mouthpiece. Global Times is hyper-nationalist. Anything in the Southern Daily group is going to be frequently courting trouble by taking a liberal line and pushing the censorship boundaries. On the desk next to me is a copy of 《炎黄春秋》(oh, wait, it does have an "English" name in the form of toneless Pinyin on the spine: Yanhuang Chunqiu) which pushes political views much more liberal than the government would prefer. And sure, China has a lot more people to sell to, which I'm sure helps. The internet makes it much easier to get a greater diversity of voices out there, but I do have to ask if that greater diversity is filtering in to the mainstream. So also high on my wishlist, although I don't expect it anytime soon, is some law on media ownership with a view to splitting up these huge media empires.
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Legal Beagle: Referendum '11: counting…, in reply to Sacha,
Did anyone cast a referendum vote without at the same time casting an election vote where the usual protections applied?
Referenda don't necessarily happen at the same time as elections, though, do they? I seem to remember one in the mid-90s about (wikipedia to the rescue!) the fire service happening between elections. So perhaps we should have the usual protections in place.
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes, in reply to Lilith __,
I think everyone should have lost that mindset a long time ago.
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Legal Beagle: Election '11: the special votes, in reply to Islander,
sub-editors are useless at maths (well-known fact) with or without gin. They are good at English.
ur, really really?
Um, yeah... Cos I frequently find myself ranting at basic spelling and grammatical mistakes in the pages of the Herald and Stuff.
And now to mark some essays.
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OnPoint: Brain Drain Et Cetera, in reply to Islander,
Oh, yes. Out in Taiyuan many years ago I had an American colleague who could hardly understand a word I said because I spoke too fast, and a Japanese colleague who could understand me just fine because she'd lived in Australia for a year and so was familiar with a similar dialect. Nowadays my accent has become so internationalised/milded that some Kiwis mistake me for a Brit, and (no offence to Brits intended, but) that hurts. But there ain't many other Kiwis around my neck of the woods - um, as in about none, although I do know of one living a few kms up the road, and there's quite a few scattered around Beijing - and work requires me to communicate easily and effectively with people from several countries, so the accent gets mild.
And it was so nice to have my Mum here for a month recently in part because I could talk to somebody who speaks the same dialect as me, and it's amazing how relaxing that can be.
So, yeah, "having to learn a new language" is not one of the criteria one uses to decide if one's migration, whether immi- or emi-, is real or not.
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Sacha,
I’m not sure how it seems from afar but this government has been specifically clueless on that front
If the view from my small corner of Beijing counts as afar, then that's exactly how it seems.
And because somebody mentioned something about Goff: When watching video of John Key bellowing "Show us the money!", I so desperately wanted to reach through the screen and a good 11,000 km of internet cabling, grab Goff by the scruff of the neck and yell at him to stop grinning like a dimwitted possum caught in headlights and shout back: "Show us the tax system you broke! Show us the economy you ran into the ground! Show us the surplus we left you!"
Meanwhile, later this morning I will walk to a building next to a subway construction site. And my car wasn't allowed on the road yesterday. Because even Beijing's formerly car-obssessed government has realised that in addition to causing air pollution, having everybody stuck in traffic jams is not actually good for the economy, and a good public transport system is actually a necessity. Oh, and doing things that create jobs makes much more sense than putting people out of work then blaming them for their unemployment. Maybe some of those National Party types responsible for transport policy could use a trip over here for a bit of reeducation?
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Wow, I'm one of 22 people aged between 20 and 24 to have moved to China in 1999, and one of 75 aged 25 to 29 to have made the same trip in 2002. I note the numbers are long term and permanent arrivals and departures, though, so my wife and I aren't included in the surprisingly low numbers for our age groups in 2010. Allow me to second, third and fourth comments on the smallness of NZ being a factor in the "brain drain". Small isn't bad, but it does have disadvantages. It was the need to find work that inspired both those two moves. And the much greater difference between income and cost of living really helps, too.
But I'm not convinced by suggestions of NZ's "provincialness". In a weird echo of comments I got as a student in NZ that studying French was a waste of time (Hello?! Studying foreign languages and cultures in a country entirely dependent on international trade a waste of time?!), I occasionally have people here in Beijing tell me I wasted my degree in French. Nope, not true, it's just not immediately obvious how having studied French could be useful to somebody teaching English in China. The people of Beijing, be they locals, migrants from other parts of China, or foreigners, can certainly be just as "provincial" as the people of Tianjin or Tawa. Still, it certainly would be good to see a bit more respect for foreign language and cross-cultural communication skills and overseas work experience in NZ.
So economics is one driving factor in the "brain drain" and therefore one area that needs some fixing to attract us diaspora types back. "Down-shifting" certainly has its attractions though, and when my half-Pakeha-half-Han family sat down to discuss where to educate our daughter, NZ's low pressure/reasonable results education system won out easily over China's high pressure/weak results system. I know we're not the only family to think the same way. So for crying out loud, don't break that!
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Hard News: Criminalising Journalism, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
OK, can I propose adding Berlusconi to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mugabe on the list of automatic failwhale comparisons to anyone in New Zealand politics?
No. Berlusconi is not anywhere near close to in the same league as Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, and Mugabe is quite a different kettle of fish. Berlusconi may well be sleazy, mendacious and power mad, but he has so far kept within the limits of the particular system and society he wishes to rule, and he never set about exterminating the "enemy of the people", so remains a perfectly legitimate object of comparison.
And for crying out loud, how can Helen Clark stepping down on losing an election be compared to Key and Banks allegedly plotting the future of Act before an election?
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to andin,
Oops, was I getting the wrong word? Sociopath may well be the word I should've used.