Posts by Terence Wood
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Violent political acts bring with them two threats, I think:
1. The acts themselves.
2. The reaction in terms of loss of civil liberties.And, accordingly, the DomPost article worries me in two completely different ways.
1. Some of the people involved in the training camps appear to be f**king LOONS. What in god's name were they thinking?
2. The police in New Zealand, if they are indeed the leakers, appear to have little respect for due process and a fair trial. And, in the long run, we need to be offering fair trials even to nut jobs.
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I guess the one constraint might be getting jurors. nevertheless I'm not convinced that we couldn't overcome this if we really wanted to.
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Russell,
I was unaware of that. I certainly hope that the same offer is made to the other detainees. Nevertheless, home detention is still detention of sorts and it doesn't really change the fact that those we presume to be innocent may have to live their lives under severe restriction for two years. My own preferred solution would be for us to fore-go tax cuts at the next election* and spend some money on our court system so that there isn't a two year wait for jury trials. To do anything else seems incompatible with the system of justice we profess to maintain.
I'm saying this not just because it seems unfair on the current batch of prisoners but also everyone else who goes through our court system.
*Warning pet cause. -
What Stephen and Rich said: Thanks Graeme; and two years seems like an awfully long time to detain people we presume to be guilty*.
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*Or, more accurately, our justice system presumes to be guilty. -
To everyone who has been advancing "phone services were crap in NZ pre-privatisation, now they're much better so that shows that privatisation was good" argument. Might I suggest that you look over the Tasman. There the telecommunications monopoly was, until recently, corporatised (not privatised) and guess what, they got a much better phone system than us.
Change was necessary in the 1980s, just not the change we got.
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Oh - you Aucklanders have cheered me up!
Here I was in a flunk about the fact that, here in Wellington, we are most probably going to get another term of mayor-for-life Prendergast. This is despite the fact that she has erected the most vacuous campaign billboards in the history of political campaigning.
But hey - at least we ain't going to elect Banks again. If you Aucklanders do that, then I think the Paraguians and Botswanans may indeed look on with wonder.
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Whenever I think about Mike Moore I end up recalling a tiny snippet memory of Mcphael and Gadsby (sorry about the spelling) parodying him.
"And then you put it in the Mike-rowave"
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The really depressing thing about that Moore column is not what it says about Labour (nothing, other than a reminder of the depths to which they plunged in the 1980s), nor even what it says about Moore himself (vacuous and grammatically challenged), but rather what it says about the quality of democracy in our country.
Democracies struggle to be better than the information flows within them. Yet here we have the Herald - the country's strongest newspaper - giving columns to a man who can't write and, from the evidence at hand, can't think either.
This isn't a partisan point: were I a right-winger I would be just as frustrated. There are much better critiques of the government that could be being made.
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Hi Don,
Ditto the other two above. As someone who has defended fair trade elsewhere I would love to know what is wrong with it.
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oh - rats. Sorry Danyl - now I see the direction of your sarcasm. I'll shuffle off now...