Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Hard News: Show some decency, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Though I hear Coventry is nice this time of year…
Coventry is not nice at any time of year. It's a boghole. I've heard it described as "the armpit of England".
The post-war cathedral is pretty cool though.Also, tenders are evil when you’re a buyer.
I agree Izogi - though I have sold by tender, and it certainly got us a good price at the time.
Tenders seem to be a particular feature of the Wellington market, popularised by Leaders (who had large market share) in the 2000s. At the time I attributed some of the rise in property prices to their use, though of course it would be difficult to prove that. Auckland persists with auctions, which I would never use as a vendor, but I wonder whether their price rises would be even worse if tenders were more popular. -
Yes. Unfortunately I think the best way out of the housing bubble at this point would be for house prices to stay the same in absolute (not relative) terms, but for a bit more than average (recent) inflation to happen. If house prices actually fell, then there would be a lot of people who bought at the height of the market for their own occupancy rather than for speculation, who will end up with negative equity and feeling pain.
However, inflation seems to be frowned on, so this solution seems unlikely.
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Are there any instances of the Electoral Commission making dubious rulings about songs denegrating the left? Or is it just the right that get this sort of protection? Or (more probably) is it only the right that have protest songs written about them?
At the moment it's feeling very difficult not to look at the stance the Electoral Commission has taken, and look at who their Minister is, and not just wonder a little about the "independence" thing.
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In my little rural school in the Coromandel, we had a visiting Bible studies teacher. I told my fervently atheist step-father, in the hope he'd write me a note to be excused (so I could read instead, which I always would have rather done than anything else). He came along to the first session, and to my disgust said it was fine and that knowing what was in the Bible was good general knowledge to have.
Part of that though was that (from the little I remember) that particular teacher was very much about telling the stories and not at all about the "you better believe this or you'll suffer for it". If it had been the latter I'm sure I would have been excused.Hawea Area School in 1978 was heavily religious. We practised handwriting by copying out hymns. There were not only prayers in assembly, but a class prayer at the beginning of every day. I found it pretty weird, and it made me uncomfortable. I could never bring myself to say "Amen" because it felt wrong to say something I didn't believe.
However: I read the Bible from cover to cover in my early teens (OK, I admit to having skipped a few of the "begat" chapters), but not out of religious interest. And it really has been good general knowledge to have. For example, you really can't understand Spanish literature in depth without a good knowledge of bible stories, and ideally Catholic imagery as well (which I picked up elsewhere).
Thing is though, that it was, as Ben Wilson described, very easy to acquire that knowledge. With the world now a bigger place, and New Zealand more diverse, I would like it if the stories behind Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism were as accessible.
My own children - my son is at a primary school with a diverse student body. I think he did come home once when he was quite young worried because Ahmed (not his real name) had said that my son and all his family were going to go to hell because we weren't Muslim, but we dealt with that, and I think the school goes out of its way to avoid discussing religion at all in class so as to avoid potential conflict; while at the same time respecting and recognising celebration of different religious festivals. It's a delicate line, but I think they do well.
My daughter is at a private school where they have compulsory RE up to Year 10. I can think of few greater hells to inflict on a priest than having to teach religion to a bunch of cynical young people who see the subject as only marginally different from a free period. I can only assume they still teach it because it's a condition of their school charter or bequest or something.
So I came through school attempts at Christian indoctrination unscathed, but that's not an endorsement. I would say a big fat "No." to "religious/bible/christian studies/education/whatever" in state schools. I'd be very happy to see comparative religion taught, but not until secondary school social studies - at primary school it's just too easy to get it wrong.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Emma Hart,
It’s also central to Christian doctrine that non-Christians go to Hell,
Emma, that may be what you interpreted from your exposure to Christian doctrine, but Hell is not necessarily central to Christian doctrine, nor the requirement that non-Christians end up there.
A brief, non-scientific sample:
My husband’s Catholic upbringing had Hell being the result of bad behaviour rather than lack of Christianity.
In discussions with my high-school close friend who was a dedicated Christian, her view was that it wasn’t lack of Christianity that was the problem on its own, so much as the rejection of God – if you’d never been told about Jesus, you couldn’t be punished for not being a Christian (I found that problematic: why go convert heathens who didn’t know about Jesus, when they apparently had a better chance of getting to heaven if they didn’t know… but I digress).
Also, my dedicated evangelist cousin takes the view that “hell” is not so much the fiery lake of burning sulfur (Revelations 21:8), as the discovery, upon death, that God exists, but that you will be forever “shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power” (2 Thessalonians 1:9).
The main point to this is that “Christian” is a very very broad word encompassing a huge range of biblical interpretations, or even views on how literally the Bible should be taken, and it’s as risky to say that Christianity means any one view as it is to say Feminism means any one view.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Pete George,
I haven’t seen anything yet that contradicts this.
I haven't seen anything yet that would make me trust a single word that Slater says or writes.
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Pete, I'm not sure that those leaks count as playing dirty behind the scenes. For a start, with the possible exception of the Richard Worth business, which I don't remember well, the other matters are all actually about politics. Those leaks were all things in which there was public interest.
The problem with the SIS release of documents on Goff to Slater is not that the documents were released - it is with the fact they were released only to Slater, and that the PM's office was apparently involved in advising Slater on just how to ask to get them; and the current possibility that Key has lied about whether his office had anything to do with that release.
I'm not arguing Goff is squeaky clean - I really never got a sense of what he was like at all, which was part of the problem with his leadership - but leaking doesn't count as dirty politics all on its own.
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Maybe, but I'm fairly certain that if something like the Rainbow Warrior happened now, there would be a way to at least let the PM know immediately after the fact.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
But, but, (my butt) he was on holiday now. say Harold
Yes, because Prime Ministers on holiday don’t ever have arrangements in place in case their Director of the SIS needs to contact them.
In this case, though, I doubt very much that the PM’s office would have thought this was something they needed to bother the PM about while he was on holiday. It was clearly in the PM’s interests to release the documents. If I were Key, and Tucker had phoned me on the encrypted line to ask whether it was OK to release the docs to Slater, I’d be saying “Really? You really needed to interrupt my golf game to ask me that?”
However, I don’t think it lets Key off the hook for being involved, just off the hook on whether he talked to Tucker about it. Being on holiday on the dates given doesn’t mean he wasn’t in NZ when Slater was tipped off on the wording for how to ask for them.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Pete Sime,
Yes, fair enough. Also, there would be ways to redact it that showed WO's [limited] humanity without the detail.