My eleven year old daughter wrote her first letter to a Minister (Hekia Parata) last night, because she was so incensed to hear that her school may have to shed up to six teachers. I was very proud of her.

She attends a school that's a full year 1-8, not an intermediate, but it has the technology teachers that the surrounding schools make use of (kids are bussed in).

With the specialist funding changes, all the other schools in the area get extra teachers; her school not only loses six technology teachers, but has a bunch of extra specialist classrooms that will be empty.

@Sacha

Michael, that was probably the interview with Peter McKinley from AUT's school of local government, discussed in another thread here (maybe someone else can find it). Other experts disagreed with his optimism, and I believe even he subsequently changed his mind a bit, but I do not have a concise single reference to point you towards.

Thanks, that's about what I was looking for.

Andre: I'm not sure how that answers my question.

Bridgecorp clearly didn't have a controlling Statement of Intent in the same way that an SOE or CCO does -- what it did have was directors currently charged with Security Act violations, and I'm fairly confident that that is an exception, not a rule, with a CCO.

recordari: It would indeed.

Being from Wellington, I'm not sure I know what the proper model for Auckland is -- but I suspect at the moment there's a lot of heat being generated by assumptions that "all corporate bodies are evil by nature", which I don't think is the case.

Having said that, I agree with NSCSS (in that provided link) when they talk about "formal communication structures". But should such structures be in the Act, or should they be set up by the Council?

I heard someone on National Radio's 9 to Noon programme some weeks back discussing CCOs and how they can be controlled by detailed Statements of Intent. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to listen to the full discussion, so missed the end of it.

Could someone tell me how a detailed enough Statement of Intent would not form a suitable democratic control over the behaviour of a CCO?

Countries that have a low threshold, do they have trouble with stability? Thinking Israel here, any other examples?

The Weimar Republic electoral system didn't have a threshold, and had stability issues. There might have been some other reasons for the stability problems, though.

That's not results, that's just more reports of voter numbers. I want votes, dammit, real vote counts.

in practice that means cutting off a customer who has been the subject of three allegations of using their internet connection to infringe copyright

Where? Who says! This seems to be going around, but no one can tell me why the act requires a "reasonable policy" to determine that "appropriate circumstances" for cutting off a connection are that three allegations have been received.

Yes, there's a clause that says "repeatedly", but that doesn't imply three. There is also a clause describing a notification of allegation process, but that's for a different purpose (notifying the ISP that they are hosting on behalf copyright violating material, not that a user has been downloading stuff).

I'm not saying that the Act as implemented couldn't lead to such a process, but the Act as legislated doesn't say so.

Which is enough in and of itself to damn it in my book; it's entirely too vague. But no reason to keep harping on about "three strikes and you're out" and similar. People seem to be leaping to conclusions inadequate to the evidence I've seen so far.

The key event in the NewZealandInternetHistory is in 1987; the adoption of the Janet Gray Book protocols.

More information on the Gray Book naming scheme is available on Wikipedia.