Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Media Take: The creeping…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
To a point-scoring partisan suckhole it all comes down to semantics.
Not helping, Joe. I'm happy to have people offer different perspectives here, and I think it's possible to critique the perspective without attacking the person like that.
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A scorching Dom Post editorial on the same topic:
The Official Information Act seeks to give the people access to government as of right. If the government blocks or impedes that access, it is spurning that right.
Key's statement was bad enough. It was worse to hear the Chief Ombudsman, Dame Beverley Wakem, the people's top watchdog in their battle for information, respond so feebly. Asked on Radio New Zealand if she was concerned about Key's remark, she said she was not because she did not know what he had in mind when he made the remark.
In fact, it was obvious what he had in mind. He was talking about gaming the legislation for political purposes. Wakem should have seen this as treating the legislation with contempt and she should have told him off in ringing terms.
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One more thing worth noting from Fish’s speech: the malign effect of the “no surprises” policy, which sees nearly every released funnelled through a ministerial office and, effectively, be subject to ministerial sign-off.
So you can have good, decent public servants acting with the public interest and the law uppermost in mind – and that can all be undone by the inevitably political process of running it by the minister first.
As Fish notes, it also leads to self-censorship – so officials will learn to redact the “surprising” parts before they surprise (or embarrass) the minister.
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Hard News: Media Take: The creeping…, in reply to Alastair Thompson,
I hope the NZ Herald will.post the presentation. I wish I had been there. Was it videoed by them.
No. It was Chatham House rules, but that only applied to the interaction with the officials, not the text of the speech itself.
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I’ll tell you one thing about the decline of music retail that’s good for the consumer: the pricing.
I bought one of the Sony 4CD compilations from JB HiFi this morning: Pure 60s – 136 songs (most of which you’d like to have on a jukebox) for $9.99. That’s about seven cents a song.
Yeah, I could play them all on Spotify, but having them ripped to lossless on my hard drive is pretty cool too.
Only problem: metadata. Gracenote is a mess for this sort of compilation, and you sometimes have to choose a tracklisting without being able to see it first. I still don’t know how to get rid of the Japanese tracklisting I picked for a soul compilation, short of laboriously re-entering every detail myself.
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Hard News: Friday Music: There have been…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
- Slugbucket hairy breath monster – handwrought in Fimo by Chris Knox…
Holy shit! Story please!
I do really enjoy your Friday ephemera, Ian. Maybe we should have you do a photo-post some time?
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Hard News: Friday Music: There have been…, in reply to Jack Harrison,
Oh, grandad is liking Mantis. I will never look at Fiji the same again.
Me too. And I was most surprised to discover that I know their manager.
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Hard News: Friday Music: There have been…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
That’s far too simple and elegant a solution, Bob. Stop it. :)
You could take the idea a step further and have Paul Henry do his bit before anyone arrives.
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Hard News: Friday Music: There have been…, in reply to Alan Perrott,
With all due respect to Nick A and co I find them an odd choice, but I imagine the intent was to introduce something less wrinkled than usual
I know there was quite a bit of discomfort with the way Shona Laing was treated by the crowd last year -- she deserved her time for a speech, but by that time at the Music Awards, people are getting boisterous, and there's not a lot you can do about that. There's some feeling that the legacy part deserves its own time and space.
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I was enjoying a ride in Wednesday's splendid Spring weather when I happened to pass a shoot for Westside Story, the prequel to Outrageous Fortune.
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