Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: "Because we can", in reply to Kumara Republic,
And in Canada, there's another Bennett that became infamous during the Great Depression.
That's it. She is the Highlander.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Russell Brown,
Because, as I have attempted to explain to you, it isn't true.
Yes, the explanation came some days after I posted that. And I'm not alleging any sort of conspiracy.
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The detail of the speech having been workshopped at Kiwi Foo is almost too good to be true.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
there's no reason we shouldn't look to find way to turn NZ's reputation as an honest independent and incorruptible nation into money. After all, it works for the Swiss.
Yes, Switzerland is honest, independent and incorruptible, and not at all a place where people of other nationalities hide their money.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I would suggest killing the subsidy and letting the universities set fees at market rates would help with that.
Let's only have rich scientists!
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Which suggests to me we have a structural oversupply of scientists. Instead of spending more money on science education, we should start spending less, and wait for the market to equalise. It's econ 101.
A free market solution! How could it possibly fail? Seriously, though, if Shearer actually intends to run with this thing, which I very much doubt, it will take a radical reorientation of taxation and public expenditure. So interesting too that he's taken as his explicit model a conservative one-term politician. Or rather, it would be interesting if he was actually serious about this.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
That is a fuck load of money. We encourage people into engineering and sciences like mad.
We do, and they get the bulk of the Marsden money, but that still doesn't mean that there are jobs waiting for them at the end of their degree. In order for the situation that Shearer envisages to come about we won't just need to increase the investment in education, but also, and massively, in research centres, and not just in the sciences.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Bart Janssen,
And yes if you want the encourage the brightest to become scientists and engineers who can innovate a new economy
None taken.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s reasonable to be suspicious of Shearer on this, but to describe his words as “indistinguishable” from Key’s seems objectively incorrect.
You are mixing a specific policy speech (Key) with a broad political speech (Shearer). Go back and reread any of Key's direction-setting speeches and you'll find that the language is exactly the same. Example, from Key's 2007 state of the nation speech, his first as leader of the opposition therefore the most pertinent comparison:
I have said before that I believe in the welfare state and that I will never turn my back on it.
We should be proud to be a country that looks after its most vulnerable citizens. We should be proud to be a country that supports people when they can't find work, are ill, or aren't able to work.
But we should be ashamed that others remain on a benefit for years even though work is available to them. That is no way forward for them and it is no way forward for New Zealand.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to merc,
Yes, not too tired for this as this is an important point - Shearer is Key's doppelgänger.
Well, not quite, John Key's speechwriter is much better than Shearer's.