Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I doubt that there’s any shortage of police officers available to enforce the law on “party nights”. More about where they’re deployed, and how.
Two friends of mine – a Maori father and son – have a pretty jaundiced view of police priorities in the CBD.
On separate occasions in the past three years, they were both assaulted – dad jumped by a group after leaving the casino with a friend, both quite badly beaten and son stabbed in the hand on Queen St on a Friday night (and not even particularly late) when he tried to stop someone randomly coming at his mate with a knife as they were walking along.
In both cases the police simply weren’t interested. The father (a gentle, well-spoken man) was even told by a policeman he flagged down on Fanshawe Street that “brown guys fighting isn’t our problem”. The fuckers wouldn’t even call an ambulance for them.
I did try and get them to make complaints, but I could understand why they weren’t interested in engaging with the police again.
So there’s that.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Sacha,
Am I wrong in recalling that those schools with the best results receive better funding?
Not yet. Would be ideologically consistent though – reward those you’ve defined as ‘successes’.
I'm fairly sure the idea was floated last year, before the election. Alarmingly.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Euan Mason,
I still feel slightly twilight zonish when I write that, but I think JK believes it.
Quite possibly. In spite of all the evidence, it's a kind of right-wing truism.
But I think they also adopted the idea for political purposes before the 2008 election -- figuring, probably correctly, that it would resonate with potential voters.
And they also knew that there would be very strong objections from within the education sector -- which is why they shoved it through under urgency in the first couple of weeks in office. They didn't want the embarrassment of their own officials fronting up to a select committee and providing evidence about what a terrible idea it was.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to JacksonP,
All stick, no carrot, IMhO. Once they find out there are significant gaps, what is the policy for addressing it, and where is the funding coming from in a zero budget?
Quite. My guess is that there has been urgent advice from the MoE as to the coming consequences, so it's been thrown back to the ministry to try and sort something out.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Scott Chris,
League tables are an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of attempting to definitively describe a child’s relative academic ability.
Except they don't do that. They are a very narrow means of comparing schools' performance, one that has many perverse and undesirable effects. Read the Ian Schagen link in the post.
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I've just added this to the main post, but for an insight into the implications of "teaching to the test", please read Jolisa Gracewood's account of her experience as a parent in the US.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Greg Wood,
Oh I am really, really fucking angry now.
I'm honestly having trouble calming down. It's just a basic failure in the duty of care we expect of any government of any stripe. And it will have consequences for years to come.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to hanuman,
It’s easier to nurse a beer for an hour and a half if you’re already slaked and got a buzz on.
Yeah, that's totally fair enough. It's just a bit alarming the way some people seem to approach it.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Roger,
Then we just need to deal with the adults supplying drink to the kids. We really have an issue when schools wont let parents take their own children from a school ball to an after-ball because they can’t trust the parents not facilitate them to get pissed.
But the people vomiting and fighting in town very largely aren't 16 year-olds. They're officially adults.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Heather Gaye,
I assumed this would be the rule and not the exception, but as stated, I don’t generally frequent bars where drinking is the sole end.
Same. That's why I'm not inclined to shovel all the blame on licence holders.
What’s the viaduct like?
We all avoid it, don't we? It's not hard to see alarmingly drunk people down that end of town, but I'm not sure whether the drinking is all done in bars.
The QF Tavern on Queen Street (right near the Herald) seems to be a popular place for hard-out drinking -- cheap drinks -- but again, that's somewhere I wouldn't dream of going.
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