Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I felt an unexpected surge of pride in celebrating ANZAC day (I’d just pinned on a poppy) when Checkpoint announced the ‘Anzac of the year’ was Louise Nicholas. Came out of left field, but if that’s what the RSA et al really want to celebrate this year, I’m pretty bloody pleased.
Yes. I heard that and thought, well, that's a good thing.
-
Interesting Checkpoint interview just now with the Australian author of Anzac's Long Shadow. Staggeringly, the Abbott government is spending $300 million on this year's extravaganza.
-
Anyway, thanks all. I had actually been struggling with what to say about this, but I just stopped what I was doing this morning and wrote the post. It's a relief to discover I'm far from the only one feeling this way.
-
Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to Hebe,
But fake trenches in the Auckland CBD?
Billed by TVNZ as Don’t miss out on this.
Meanwhile, Stuff has How to get in the trenches on Anzac Day
The trenches were a place that young men died, not an amusement park ride.
-
Another bit of edit-tracking, by Peter Aranyi.
-
This just got a whole lot more distasteful.
The waitress says she was deceived into sitting down with her employers and talking to Rachel Glucina on the pretence that Glucina was to help them prepare a press statement making it clear her beef wasn't with the company.
She says the interview and pictures taken on this pretence were then used in Glucina's front page lead story in this morning's Herald.
Sordid.
-
Envirologue: What has Neoliberalism Done…, in reply to Rich Lock,
If I recall correctly, there was a fairly big stink over the way the water/sewage issue was handled around the tme of the super-city, Rodney having his fingers in the till or something similar (I may be mistaken). Plus which, I also recall the main water pipe runing north into the city bursting a few years back, so I wouldn’t be suprised if a lot of the money spent on the pipes is basically ‘sticking plasters’ to keep a cranky old system running the best they can.
There has been a core of opposition to the Watercare Services model since it was corporatised in 1992, most notably via Penny Bright and her allies on the Water Pressure Group, but there is no doubt that it rescued a water and sewage system that had been neglected for decades – chiefly because successive tory councils deferred maintenance and improvement so they could promise lower rates.
Given that it charges for an essential service (and is now a CCO), it’s perhaps not really a great example of old-fashioned public provision, but it is still 100% publicly owed – despite the absurd recommendation that it be sold off in the “Birch Report” prepared for the first John Banks council. (The Birch Report was frequently absurd.)
Among other things, it has conducted the Mangere Wastewater Treatment Plant upgrade, described thus in this Otago University course paper:
From 1998-2005, the Mangere Wastewater Treatment Plant upgrade constituted the biggest environmental restoration programme ever undertaken in New Zealand (see figure 6). The project cost $450 million and represented the largest infrastructure investment in a generation. The treatment plant provided uninterrupted services during the upgrade. The completed plant uses primary (mechanical), secondary (biological) and tertiary (filtration and ultraviolet radiation) methods to treat wastewater and has the capacity to meet Auckland’s growing population needs for the next 30 years. New technologies that were implemented in during the upgrade have created a 10,000 fold reduction in pathogens in treated wastewater that is discharged into the harbour, allowed for the 500 hectares of oxidation ponds to be returned to the Manukau Harbour as well as initiating the restoration of 13 kilometres of shoreline (see figures 7 and 8) along with reducing the water treatment cycle from 21 days to 13 hours in length (Wastewater information sheet 1, 2012).
It was a lot more than a sticking plaster.
-
Speaker: Christchurch: how did it come…, in reply to Sacha,
Downsides like the collapse of public infrastructure, yes.
It also didn’t work. Deficits continued after Proposition 58 because there was no conceivable means of enforcement.
The major cause of California’s screaming fiscal problems was 1978’s Proposition 13, by which a bunch of mostly older property owners screwed the property tax system in their own favour and made it almost impossible to fund schools. It was a generational disaster.
Perils of direct democracy.
-
Envirologue: What has Neoliberalism Done…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Not sure why this is considered so vile and impossible. To a great degree it’s where the ability to pay for public services came from.
New Zealand government revenue as a proportion of GDP isn't markedly different now to what it was in in 1980. The difference between that and expenditure was the stupendous quantities of money we had started borrowing to run the country.
-
Envirologue: What has Neoliberalism Done…, in reply to richard,
(Not saying that things are just ducky today, but the 1970s and early 80s was not a golden age I would want to return to.)
Indeed. It was also the time of the The Tour, massive and wasteful subsidies to farming, quixotic wage and price freezes, Dawn Raids, crippling interest rates and a currency crisis. Muldoon won two elections without even a plurality of votes. It wasn't a golden age.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 331 332 333 334 335 … 2279 Older→ First