Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Just in case things aren't surreal enough for your taste, Fresh allegations Todd Barclay invented complaints against the staff member he secretly recorded
"I had received complaints about the conduct of a staff member from members of the public and I referred the matter to Parliamentary Services," Mr Barclay told the NZ Herald in March.
"As the legal employer of support staff, they acted as they deemed appropriate and embarked on a disciplinary process.
"It is an employment matter and as I've said in the past I can't go into details through the media.”
However, a letter from Parliamentary Services's general manager David Stevenson, cited by the Newsroom, says no such complaints against Ms Dickson were ever lodged with them.
"Parliamentary Service has neither received any complaint about you [Dickson] nor has it carried out any employment investigation or taken any disciplinary action against you,” Stevenson's letter said.
I've worked for an MP, and believe me Parliamentary Services are efficient to a fault. . If you're going to drag it into a political scandal, you better have all your receipts. It sure as hell will.
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Why is [he] being allowed to remain?
Because as David Slack (not exactly a water-carrier for this government or National) just pointed out on Morning Report, because National has a constitution and processes around candidate selection and de-selection. And Bill English is no more able to unilaterally sack a duly elected MP who has become a political liability than Helen Clark was when Taito Philip Field turned into a sleaze magnet.
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Hard News: Grenfell: a signal moment, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
Seems like a big job/responsibility for unpaid Board members
If you dig a little deeper into the website, the KCTMO is run by a fifteen member board, four of whom are appointed by the Kensington and Chelsea Council, and three "independent members" who are required by law to have relevant experience and skills. They're also responsible for a three member executive team, and I guess if they aen't up to the job they're paid to do, we're going to find out in heart-breaking detail soon enough.
I don't have a copy of the Management Agreement between the Council and TMO sitting in front of me, but I really hope the resident board members don't end up getting thrown to the wolves. You don't have to be paid to be more than competent at often huge jobs, as the many many organisations dependent on volunteers right here can attest.
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I realise the Queen's not going to go over to Downing Street and relieve Theresa May of the keys to the nation. But Britain can not and must not go on like this.
No, they can't -- and even if the Queen kicked off a constitutional crisis in a fit of justifiable rage, it wouldn't answer how ministerial responsibility for housing standards got split three ways (which is a recipe for disaster) and why none of them seem to have been talking to each other. Nor would I want to be anyone in the Kensington & Chelsea Council or Greater London Authority who literally has their names on the sign-off for the multi-million-pound renovations of Grenfell Tower.
Yes, Russell, you're right that this is political. But if I was a public housing tenant in the UK today - no matter who control my local council - I'd be praying everyone wakes the fuck up and starts paying attention to the politically unsexy, never makes the papers stuff about consents processing and regulatory management that tends to get buried at the bottom of sub-committee agendas.
Lives really can literally depend on them.
Even Theresa May was diminishing any sort of responsibility here with what I thought was a very wishy-washy statement about maybe investigating something in a while and maybe learning something from it.
Uh, OK. I know Theresa May doesn't have many friends around here, but IDK what anyone could have said to make anyone happy. Corbyn, May and Sadiq Kahn all seem to be getting it in the neck for somehow "politicizing a tragedy" while not being political enough. I know we're on a 24 hour news cycle blah blah fucking blah, but it is really that hard to literally let the ashes cool and the dead be counted?
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But in a way, Trump's feeble account of the decision is worse. He has done the same thing, swinging wildly against phantoms, on the matters of NATO and trade agreements, but this seems on a new level.
I'd argue this is exactly what happens when you put a cowboy New York oligarch in the White House who hasn't served a single day as a public servant who can't rip up a treaty as easily as you stiff a contractor. (And yes, I looked up the North Atlantic Treaty, which the United States signed and ratified in 1947. Article 5 is not a suggestion, or a vague recommendation the United States can dip out of when the President is having a bad day.)
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I'll just leave this here:
Local elections: Tories gain over 550 seats as Labour and Ukip votes plunge.
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Some of them are definitely human: one responded with telling (and amusing) indignation to my customary greeting, “How’s the weather in St Petersburg?”, demanding to know whether I was racist against Russians. You blew your cover there, dude.
Aw, damn… the only time I regret dropping the “report and block” hammer and missing that. Even then, they’re rather easy to detect – I wonder if they understand (or much care) it only takes a couple of clicks to reveal a string of identically worded replies obviously triggered by a keyword.
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New Zealand Rugby and other employers might be better served by treating drug use the way they do (or should) alcohol use: be aware of problematic use, test for actual impairment, counsel
Exactly - my partner worked in the rail industry for over fifty years, but management and unions put a lot of time and effort into coming up with drug/alcohol policies beyond just randomly flinging around piss cups.
And, yes, that included "culture change" Kiwirail management having beer fridges & drinks cabinets removed from offices, on the sensible grounds that it really wasn't a good look while elsewhere drinking on the job would be grounds for dismissal.
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Hard News: Mt Albert: Cooperating,…, in reply to Russell Brown,
They'd have lost, like they did last year in Roskill, and that would have been a symbolically awful start to election year for the new leader.
Sure - and it's no state secret that National has roughly the same ground force in Mount Albert that Labour does in North Shore. And coldly cynical as it may sound, National got what they wanted out of this -- becuase the by-election didn't turn into a referendum on the government.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Nice story, bro.
It would be even better if it wasn't coming from people who sneer at those who have spend an awful lot of time listening to Trump and his supporters because they don't have a lot of choice in the matter.
I get that we live in a world where it is infinitely more offensive to call a bigot a bigot than to be one. And there's always going to be people like you telling women, PoC and LGBT to shut the fuck up every damn time they don't say what you want to hear.
Tough.