Posts by Rob Hosking
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aah i love it when i read about someone else's life and think "thank christ i'm not the only one"!!!!
Yeah, me too.
Felt much less alone in the world since I saw that film about George III.
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Carmen's dead, baby. Carmen's dead.
But perhaps she has a twin sister or a doppelganger cousin...Or it turns out someone only dreamt she was dead, and she reappears in the shower?
Could work.
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I like how the Shorty serial killer storyline has become something that almost everyone cares about - it's come up as a topic of conversation at every social event I've been to lately.
Must be an Auckland thing...actually that's not quite true. It's become a fixture in this house over recent months. I try to fight it, but if you're in the room you get sucked in to the Soap Opera Plot Death Star....
Disappointed, though, at how the acting and writing have deteriorated since I last looked at the programme sometime in the mid-1990s.
Bring back Theresa Healey, whatever her character's name was, and Waverley. They were hilarious.
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I like 'Urewera' - it means burnt bollocks, btw, which could prove useful metaphorically.
And in defence, or at least explanation, of Stuff using 'Beltway' - it's kind of a joke which got out of hand. It's an imported word, yeah, but it kind of took off last year when the PM used it to describe the Phillip Field story as a 'beltway issue' that only a few journos and political obsessives were interested in.
The DomPost journos retaliated by putting 'The Beltway' on their door in the gallery. And when they were hunting names for a blog this year, it kind of naturally followed on.
I don't have any words to nominate myself for this year but I'm picking 'dividend' for 2008, to describe tax cuts.
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It may have been on that one as well, but it was definitely on Banana Dominion.
Still have my copy. Also the original EP, 'Too Lazy'.
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The Key DVD reminded me of UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who did a video with a similar approach in the run up to their 1987 election.
Similarly low-policy-content. That's not what they're for.
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I think the core concern is that the PPP structure may not be an optimal form of procurement. Generally the private sector partner wants to be paid, and won't participate if it won't be.
There's an element of that, sure. But one of the issues is, firstly, that if you go the PPP route you could get something built earlier, even if you have to pay a bit more. Because you get the greater efficiencies by getting it earlier, its worth it.
Secondly you get the "deeper capital markets" which Cullen, Dalziel, Hodgson, Cunliffe et all have been banging on about for years. If we're putting money into the Cullen Fund and KiwiSaver, it has to be invested somewhere to get a return. And long term infrastructure projects are a very good investment. If the money - some of it - isn't invested in NZ infrastructure projects, it'll go into offshore ones.
One of the big issues with PPPs is who owns the risk. This is where projects in the UK and Australia have come to grief: if it doesn't pay off there's a tussle between the govt and the private provider over who gets burned, and by how much.
And, as I said earlier, there's a difficulty in NZ with economies of scale, especially outside Auckland. Getting away from IT for a minute: about 10 years ago some people got very excited about using PPPs to fund the Transmission Gully route. Treasury - which liked PPPs at the time (they're less keen now) did some work on it and came back saying it would only work if the toll was set at $18 a trip. (This is 1998 money, btw).
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Re: investment from Cullen Fand and/or KiwiSaver:
What I've heard from people in the funds management industry is there would not necessarily have to be a govt directive to invest more in broadband and related ventures.
This is because, as I think Cunliffe alluded to, there is an appetite for such investment on the investor side of the equation anyway. It's just that at the moment there isn't as much opportunity as their could be, locally, so it goes offshore.
There's a 'home country' bias in most investments: there are emotional/nationalistic reasons for this, but also practical ones. Investors are more likely to know more about what they are investing in, or at least they have a better opportunity to 'kick the tyres'.
The argument is that were the govt to allow more public/private partnerships, not only for broadband but roads and the like, the fund managers looking after both the Cullen Fund and the KiwiSaver monies would be bound to invest in them, just as part of having a normal balanced portfolio. There would be no need for any directive from the govt that they do so.
There's a lot of ideological resistance to PPPs in the current govt, simply because they fear that once they're allowed for broadband and roads, the next step will be schools, hospitals and prisons.
Personally I've got no problem with private investment in schools, hospitals and prisons. I have a few concerns about the practicality of PPPs - there's some tricky economies of scale issues in a country this size.
No ideological difficulties though. I want my kid well educated and, if she gets sick, healed, but I don't give a damn about who owns the building those activities are done in.
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Grant McD wrote:
Danielle, Robyn, you're comments on down-sizing your music collection has freaked-out the "inner Rob Fleming" in the male music geeks here. ;)
But we all know, don't we, that 'High Fidelity' is not only a work of fiction but it really belongs in the Fantasy section.
People don't use music as a vehicle for emotions they can't otherwise deal with, or use them to cling onto their past. Never happen in the real world.
Robyn wrote:
I won't mention, then, the times in the past when I sold a few CDs in order to pay the rent. Though, having said that, I mostly only ever sold stuff I hated. Mostly...
Oh, yes.
Been there. Done that. Flinched under the contemptuous sneer of the cool dude behind the counter as he surveyed my previous musical tastes before offering a ridiculously low price, or, even worse, put some of them in a pile to one side and said 'we're not interested in those...'
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Sign of the times:
A notice outside a cafe in Courtenay Place: 'Head Chef Wanted. Tuhoe an advantage.'