Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to Jim Cathcart,
And how exactly does Len Brown address this? He doesn’t and he can’t.
Those last two words speak a lot to the irrationality of your position. Brown is a mid-size fish in a very, very large pool, one where the biggest fish are parochial buffoons like Joyce, English and Brownlee. His ability to actually influence the factors that are making Auckland housing wildly affordable is very, very limited, especially since he's got a council heavily composed of people who are thoroughly in the thrall of the "we've got our leafy suburbs, you new entrants can fuck off to the edges of suburbia" crowd. He can try and get the council to support intensification, which is really the only thing the council can do to meaningfully improve affordability (knocking $30k in consent costs off the price of a new build is rapidly becoming an invisible rounding error), but he's one voice and one vote. The macro policies, around jobs, foreign ownership, tax incentives, they're all out of his hands.
So you think Brown is worthless because he's not doing anything to address housing affordability (amongst other things), then you come out and explicitly recognise that he can't do anything about housing affordability in any meaningful way because he's a regional politician in a country where nearly all the power rests with central government and the current occupants of the national capitol are morons who wouldn't know good housing policy if it got dropped on their heads by a witch on her way to a date with a falling domicile. -
Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to david kinniburgh,
He was booed at the Auckland Nines and was asked not to attend a community military tattoo this weekend.
No fact checking, just continuing to present the disgruntled Sharon Stewarts views as the truth.
Which bit is inaccurate? That he was booed at the Nines? Or that Sharon Stewart asked him not to come to the Howick Military Tattoo? I thought both were grounded in fact, if a little over-egged in her description.
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Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to Russell Brown,
He and the other four are basically deadweight on council.
Which is particularly sad when you consider that Denise Krum, from Tamaki, is newly-elected in place of the very long-serving Richard Northey. She won, as best I could see (as a resident of the ward), on the back of the most expenditure on billboards and concerted use of her school board connections to leaflet-drop the ward. That she'd been the councillor for barely long enough to work out where to sit before signing up behind Brewer and Quax to call for Brown to resign was not at all a good beginning. I haven't heard a peep out of her since, though, unlike her rowdy new compatriot from Howick.
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Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to Russell Brown,
I had a look to say what Whaleoil readers ... thought about this.
Well, I'm not sure one could describe quite what appears as the majority of the comments on WO as the result of "thought", but I'll let it slide.
Your sacrifice is noted and appreciated. -
Can the NZ media avoid bias? is the short-version headline. So irony.
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Hard News: The Mayor's marginal enemies, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s usually a bad sign when the story angle is in the passive voice.
Ignoring that you gave Steve Curtis the credit for my quote, I have concluded that it's a bad sign when any story on Auckland's governance/transport/planning/etc has Orsman's byline.
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And don't forget that when Brown opened the Panmure transport interchange:
Questions were also raised about the level of security shadowing the mayor
Questions were indeed raised, by one Bernard Orsman, and promptly discredited by Auckland Transport. But we can't forget that the questions were raised, and never mind the explanation.
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Hard News: The Cycle Frolic, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Additional information from ACC:
from 2008 through 2012 for cyclist and pedestrian collisions there were a total of 19 claims by cyclists and 26 claims by pedestrians.
That's 42.3% of claims by cyclists and 57.7% of claims by pedestrians.
The numbers of claims are so low that they won’t be any more granular because it’s theoretically possible to identify individual claimants, which is fair enough.
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Hard News: The Uses of Dotcom, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
fundamental journalistic standards.
In countries where journalists working for major outlets are expected to have standards, you might have a point.
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Hard News: The Uses of Dotcom, in reply to linger,
He's the PM. Be grateful they don't treat his fundamental bodily functions as news! (Though I'm not entirely convinced they don't report some of them as official policy.)