Posts by Isaac Freeman
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
Perhaps I'd better clarify. The salary seems high to me too, but if it's the same salary that other people are getting for the same job, that's not evidence of nepotism.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Greg Dawson,
All well and good as an argument, provided you completely ignore the salaries being paid for these "entry level" positions.
Well, true. I was perhaps a bit glib to call them entry level. But I don't see that the salary is a problem in itself.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
When did teacher / teacher-union bashing become a national sport…?
To be fair, we also blame parents, students, the gummint, corporate fatcats and the media.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to merc,
Re schools, I ask again, what (in easy simple to understand words please) is broken?
I've always thought that from the perspective of Wellington it's not so much a question of what's broken as what the government has any control over. There's not a lot a central bureaucracy can do about the day-to-day quality of teaching in classrooms. Ultimately you just have to trust that teachers know what they're doing, but that doesn't sit well when you're expected to come back to voters in three years with successes to report.
You can't do much about recruiting good teachers. There's not enough money to decrease class sizes. There's nothing really wrong with the teachers you have that can be improved. There are, if you're honest, no revolutionary new education techniques waiting to be implemented. There's very little you can feasibly point to and say you've improved it.
Thus, governments tend to get obsessed with assessment and school governance. These are really minor aspects of education, but they're the only areas in which you can make changes without significantly increasing the budget.
Of course it's sensible to construct some kind of narrative about what's broken to justify your actions. But the actual actions you take are determined mainly by the need to do something and the limit range of things you can possibly do.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Seems to be the standard gold rush model. Doesn't matter how you did at school, you still get issued with an iPad when you board the EQC gravy train.
I dunno. EQC had to hire a lot of people very fast, and it's hardly unusual for people to get entry-level positions in their parents' organisations. Unless there's positive evidence of favouritism, there doesn't seem much here to bother about.
Sadly, it's also not unusual for people in the building trade to go bankrupt. It's a bloody difficult industry, where lots of different companies are sharing one pool of client money, and everyone has to make payroll. One dodgy operator, or even a run of honest mistakes, can knock down other innocent companies like dominoes. Even more so in a market like this, where there's an enormous amount of work to be done urgently, and the insurance companies have yet to release much of the funding.
I wouldn't assume that someone's a risk just because they've been involved in a failed company in the past. -
Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Tom Semmens,
How does crony capitalism makes money out of charter schools? Some snake oil son-of-a-bitch friend of the National party will suddenly discover an interest in education and set up a corporation to run a charter school in South Auckland.
Sounds like a business plan. For PR purposes, I'd suggest they also employ a professional education consultant to come up with some vague and visionary new approach to education that the stuffy state schools are too old-fashioned and union-bound to understand. It should involve iPads.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to BenWilson,
I haven't spent much time, but the glaring missing constituency there is the rural vote.
Tru dat. They have their own party in Australia, why not New Zealand?
The Conservatives' election materials did seem to put a lot of emphasis on farming being the backbone of the economy, so presumably they're angling for the rural vote.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
For instance: Greens 28%, Labour 20%, Mana 2% giving 63/121 seats to Grn/Lab/Mana.
It's an interesting scenario, and it's amazing how much more plausible it seems with Mr Election Blob at the top of it.
I'd be very interested to know how whether the Labour Party have any contingency plans for a situation like this. It could leave them with a lot of senior disappointed MPs who expected ministerial posts that they no longer have access to. It it wasn't managed very carefully, I fear it could tear Labour apart, just as it did the Alliance, New Zealand First and (if you treat them as a coalition of factions rather than a monolithic party) the Fourth Labour Government.
I also believe that until there is a major economic crash, which will most likely happen sometime in the next 10 years, NZ will keep sleep-voting for right-wing governments. The scenario I’m looking at above is *after* we get the $5 a litre petrol, banks closed for multiple weeks, power cuts and food queues.
Fair enough, and obviously this is where the big deep trends are taking us. But it's hard to know the timeframe, depending as it does on the delaying power of collective denial. I think there's a good chance of another Labour-led government before we get a Greens-led one. But it could all change tomorrow.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to David Hood,
And in those cases why shouldn’t perspective right-little-supporters vote National anyway if they are going to be dictating policy.
Well, they'd have to perceive their party as having different but complementary values from National, rather than being just "right".
The modern right is (loosely speaking and waving hands a lot) a coalition between economic liberals and social conservatives. These aren't necessarily a single constituency, but National is trying to cater for them both. Different MPs in National lean one way or another, not so much because they disagree with the other perspective, but just because of what personally motivates them more.
I don't follow the positions of National MPs closely, but I think it would be fair to say that the economic liberals are currently in the ascendancy. This would certainly account for why ACT has failed: as you say, ACT voters might as well vote National. But social conservatives will feel their concerns aren't getting as much attention, and will be more likely to consider an alternative party.
At the moment, the closest thing to a significant social conservative party is New Zealand First, which is clearly not a prospect that pleases National. If the Conservative Party could replace New Zealand First as the party of choice for social conservatives, an economic liberal National would have a strong coalition partner who can pull in the voters they have are least able to serve themselves.
In addition, this would allow the economic liberal leadership of National to consolidate their own position within their own party.
I'm sure someone who'd spent more time around the National Party than me could identify other schools of thought that might be better served by their own parties.
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<q>Man, I am explainy today. I am aware that I am talking about abstractions, and don’t have to walk the talk of running a real political party.
Maybe so but you are making a lot of sense to me.</q>
Ah, good. Then there are... almost two of us.
And anyway, is their really any such thing as a pure abstraction in politics?
That probably depends on how you feel about Saint Anselm's Ontological Argument, and whether you can still reasonably call it "politics" if it involves divine intervention.