Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I still haven’t seen anyone explain exactly how. Bit of a waste, really.
People have said he’s aloof and arrogant, but that’s still too simplistic an explanation.
Overweening ambition, I gather. He is said to rate himself quite highly. I'm sure there is in fact something in it, and he may yet have a bit to learn about personal interactions.
My mum thinks he's arrogant and smarmy. So there's that to work on too.
But as I said in describing the Foo session that unfortunately had way too much read into it by some people, Cunliffe was very impressive talking about economic policy.
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to BenWilson,
Totally. I’d go with the charitable reading – economic development is a plenty ambitious enough portfolio for Cunliffe’s talent, and it’s not like Shearer has said his mind is made up on everything and there’s no room for any of his colleagues to have opinions.
Quite. And I think it's entirely valid to read Cunliffe's words as an indication of his thinking -- as well as an approach to the activists. My view remains that an opportunity was missed to put him up as the across-government foil to Steven Joyce. He'd have been great at that, not least because he's much more able than Joyce, who runs the country as what he is: a former commercial radio proprietor.
Cunliffe is so sharp in these speeches -- and yet seems to have alienated so many in his own caucus. That's what he needs to work on.
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Hard News: Telling stories about us, in reply to Hilary Stace,
One of the best documentaries I have ever seen is Gerard Smythe’s Out of sight out of mind about the de-institutionalisation of Templeton.
Gerard's work is such a strong argument for for the non-formatted auteur documentary in New Zealand. I haven't seen that one, but his Alun Bollinger doco was magic.
For some fortuitous reason it did get a screening on free to air TV, just before Christmas 2004. However, I doubt that a recent documentary in that genre, Mental Notes, about psychiatric institution survivors, will get a TV release. For some reason programmers think we just want to watch reality TV shows.
To be fair, that's probably because a large promotion of those of us in the all-important target demographics do want that. Which isn't to say that a strong documentary can't hold an audience -- it's just hard getting the audience to watch in the first place.
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to Steve Curtis,
Some people still dont get it .
Fay is one member of a consortium of buyers which includes iwi, for twelve individual farms. Whether he is a good farmer or not, the law doesnt require him or any other NZ citizens to get permission to buy the land.Fay’s the leader of the consortium, which includes two iwi groups. And given his appalling record of asset-stripping, as noted by Cunliffe, that does not make me feel comfortable. I find his sudden recourse to economic nationalism unconvincing. As I’ve written before, in my ideal world, he and Richwhite would be arrested at the border.
It would seem that Shanghai Penxin have skirted around the requirements of stewardship of the land or even dairying experience by getting the government to run the farms and milk the cows for them
It’s not the government, it’s Landcorp, an SOE. And they haven’t really “skirted around” the requirements, so much as publicly met them. They’ve even indicated a willingness to sell two of the farms to the iwi groups. Do you have an issue with them beyond the fact that they’re Chinese?
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Hard News: Telling stories about us, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Who he?
Werner Herzog surely...Ha ha! Spelling from the original, but I've corrected it to save her blushes.
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to John Morrison,
Having read the speech, Cunliffe says ‘here is the problem’ – neo-liberalism. Ok, that’s the problem, what solutions did he offer beyond no asset sales and taking more control of the economy?
To be fair, it was billed as the first in a series of speeches. I'm genuinely interested to see what he presents.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to Ross Francis,
The big story in the Herald this morning is the Editorial:
Banks must resign over gift scandal
Not just stand down during the inquiry -- resign.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to Hebe,
Going with Winston and The Hair made good MMP sense for Labour
Not long term.
But the point is that the Greens couldn’t provide Labour with the votes to form a government – and Dunne and Peters, who refused to be part of a government with the Greens, could.
I looked up what I wrote at the time, and it could have been different had the Greens achieved one more seat – they were 1426 votes short.
Anyway, I'll try and write a post where we can have the Labour discussion ...
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Legal Beagle: The law may be that stupid, in reply to Natalie Smith,
For instance, I believe that Sky City is one of the main benefactors of John Walker’s “Field of Dreams” charity. What sort of pay back will they want from John in return of their preference to his charity?
I think you’ll find it’s the opposite. Walker’s charity gets its income from non-Sky pokie trusts, and he’s vocally against Sky expanding.
Councillor Sir John Walker, however, is extremely concerned about the impact of increasing the number of pokies at SkyCity, which return 2.5 per cent of net profit to community groups, and reducing the number of pokies in clubs and bars, which return a minimum of 37.12 per cent of net income to community groups.
The former Olympian – who did not respond to the survey – has said the effect would be to reduce the amount of funding for projects like his John Walker Find Your Field of Dreams, which teaches thousands of young children in South Auckland to swim.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Also, speaking of mathematical possibilities, what on earth do you mean, `how Labour treated the Greens in ‘05’? The Greens didn’t have the numbers, NZ First and UF did. Sucks to be the Greens, but you can hardly hold that against Labour.
I grew weary of trying to explain that in online discussions. The sad thing is, the Greens were only a few votes off an additional list seat which would have greatly strengthened their case.
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