Posts by giovanni tiso
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Anybody who's heard Nina Simone talk (oh so movingly) about her classical influences would surely cease at once to crap on about the indigenous folk and the hip hop as if they existed in a sealed off world that doesn't need any other musical tradition in order to thrive?
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From Rudman's piece on the granny today, data that might be of interest to our resident fund-cutters:
How much does the Government think a public broadcasting network should cost? New Zealand already spends less on this per capita than most of the other First World countries we like to compare ourselves with.
A research paper prepared for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage by Unitec School of Communications dated December 2005, shows that of the 30 OECD countries, New Zealand's spending per capita on public broadcasting was at $45.2, well below the mean of $66. The Australians paid $83.2 each, the British, $143.6, the Swiss and Norwegians, $163.6 and Icelanders, $216.3.
At the bottom was Mexico with no public broadcasting, the USA, on $1.85 per capita and Turkey on $5.26.
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Yay indeed!
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Our new Curriculum was carefully thought out to support that. How the hell a flexible curriculum is supposed to mesh with National Standards has not been thought out, because the first was based on careful research into the strengths of NZ schools and the second on knee-jerk implementation of imported ideology.
I'm really not so sure about that. Schools had to measure achievement in numeracy and literacy before the introduction of the standards, and report on that achievement. From what I hear from the teachers and the principal of the school I am involved with, the issues have more to do with the language in which the reporting is couched (you go tell a five year old or a kid with a learning disability that he or she is "well below expectations") and how the standardisation of the reporting lends itself to league tables. But if a school doesn't chart the progress of children in those core areas via standardised assessment tools, then that school is not doing its job.
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__Call me elitist if you like__
I think you're doing just fine on your own, Paul.
I was going to go with: boy, has that horse bolted. I think the stable might have changed hands a couple of times in fact.
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There's a reason that commercial talk radio is full of ads for magnetic mattresses, pollen and other nostrums -- that's one of the few categories advertised to old folks. Would Concert or National be able to air advertising for such products? I think there'd be an outcry.
Followed by a dramatic improvement in the nation's posture.
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(Poor old Shostakovich - not much fun being an "elite" composer in Stalinist Russia. One day you're in, the next day you're surplus to requirements. Why, thank goodness we're not like that these days!).
Hah! Well, that does it. If you give me a postal address I shall promptly send you this book.
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Toss the grannies! No, the unemployed! Ooh, I know, the harpsichordist...
It's always the harpsicordists, isn't it? That's why you can barely find one these days.
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A concert station that the private market won't provide? OK, I'll buy that. Ad-free concert music? How is that important to the nation?
Because we need commercial free spaces, and we have precious few left. Because it's hard to sneak ads into Onegin. Because it would take sponsorship money away from other places where it's currently spent. Because we don't need to do it. Because it's the thin end of the wedge into opening RNZ proper to sponsorship, and nobody wants that. But none of those reasons bother me as much as how we waltzed into having this conversation, happily conceding a huge amount of ground to the privatisers of every single last fucking thing.
Grarrrr!! Tiso smash!
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So your argument is "it wouldn't save much, so it's not worth doing"?
I'm still waiting for somebody to convince me that anything needs doing at all. I want to expand public services, not reduce them. It seems that we have run out of money, except for tax cuts and funding private schools. Now if you'll excuse me I'm bowing out of this conversation because I am in turn running out of desks.