Posts by Kumara Republic
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I don't agree with the Libz on many things, but Lindsay Perigo hit the nail on the head with a surprising daisy-cutter on the Roundtable:
I myself have poured scorn at every opportunity on the Treasury-ACT-Roundtable efficiency-obsession. My most tasteless, and therefore favourite, taunt is that, had these people been around at the time of the Nazis' gassing of Jews, their primary concern would have been the impact of the gas bill on the government's budget deficit, not the use to which the gas was put.
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The politics of selfishness will be with us forever. It's up to those few of us with good ideas to keep pushing them until they get traction, and then push them through the process, attempting to keep the dilution to a minimum.
It seems only an Icelandic meltdown would fix that. Or the Waxman-Markey Act.
Seriously though, there's another idea that wasn't explored in the original post. Remove all tax benefits that encourage housing speculation (exempting the family bach of course). Better still, levy a "McMansion tax" to discourage inefficient land use.
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What bothers me is there isn't an Auckland Star to bring another POV to the citizen. The news media is quick to arrogate to itself the privileges of their freedoms, but it seems they are seldom interested in their responsibilities in the modern democratic state, which I doubt can actually function in the long run without a strong and responsible media. The whole point of media ownership laws is to ensure they perform their function at all, not tell them what to say or do.
There's hope yet. One less prolefeed rag corrupting the populace.
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Strong reform of media governance laws - in particular in relation to ownership models (would it be a good idea to legally require all newspapers and news magazines published in N.Z. to be owned by not-for-profit trusts and the like?), in relation to forbidding foreign (read rent-extracting Australians and Canadians) ownership and in having anti-monopoly laws to break up oprganisations like Sky TV would go a long way to naturally re-populating our newsrooms with actual journalists.
Welcome to the age of New Yellow Journalism. The least that could be done would be to bring said media companies under the aegis of the Commerce Act.
The Press Council was formed in an age before media companies were publicly listed, and has been left ineffectual since their emergence.
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I agree with you about the RWC. Major sports events are a bad news magnet (see many Olympics passim): stories of unfinished construction will be a media staple for the next 2 years.
The Big Owe, anybody?
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Especially when it so closely resembles a clenched arsehole -- which deserves some kind of award for truth in branding, but otherwise...
I am reminded of an anagram for "information superhighway" coined during the Netscape age:
"Oh oh, wiring snafu. Empty air."
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Remember that what was nominally anti-terorism legislation in the UK was used to pursue Icelandic banks.
It's a legal truism that extreme cases make bad law and anything that comes in under the guise of "fighting terrorism" and "getting tough on crime" will be used and abused outside its supposed intent. It will be abused by the police who know that even applied incompletely, such legislation is still very useful for harassment, intimidation and suppression of people they don't like.
And how far off would it be from declaring a "permanent state of emergency"?
I am reminded of Richard Prebble's remark after 9/11 where he compared the flour-bombing of Eden Park in 1981 to crashing jetliners into skyscrapers.
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IIRC, the US etymology of 'white trash' is pretty racist, because it implies that all black people are *already trash*, but the white folks need to be demarcated into trashy/not trashy.
For that purpose, the more race-neutral term 'trailer trash' is often used in its place.
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..But then again, perhaps I am a disinformation agent of the double-barreled bourgeois, terrified that you may be all too close to exposing our secret underground club in the catacombs beneath Christ's College, where powerful genetic inbreds indulge in their penchant for ritual sodomy while dressed in 19th Century British naval uniforms on a full moon?
Speaking of Christs Col, the "Auckland Grammar Nazis" reminded me of far too many yobbos I encountered at that place. An inverse proportional relationship between the size of their wallets and their intellectualism.
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More engaging, but still bloody annoying. Yes, ping the media for grotesque over-kill but can that be done without sneering at people who I think have perfectly legitimate reasons to be repulsed?
What the Grammar boys did was utterly moronic, but at the same time the media had a bad case of Prolefeed.
One's a knuckle sandwich, and the other's a kick in the balls.