Apparently there was a small, and quiet change recently where the Hansard transcripts started going out unedited. Cost cutting. Obviously, communicating Parliament’s work to the public is a low priority—but communicating to elected MP’s?

A big part of the problem may be the police fear that the public can't handle the police making mistakes. Whether or not it's true, I get the impression that a great deal of Kiwis believe that that fudging and distorting facts to fit the initial accident or assesment is an ongoing, repeating, systematic problem within the NZ police culture.

Yes, I think it’s exactly that – the immediate correction of inaccuracies – that sets it apart.

I think the blood donation meme would be an interesting one to look at, as that would be fairly straightforward to track.

You made me really wish I had written a script to dump copies of the firehose of #eqnz tweets as it was happening; getting back archives out of Twitter might be a pain in the ass. Maybe someone else has been doing this?

I remember the first waves of cheerleading about Twitter and the way it would ‘revolutionize’ news. I recall rolling my eyes, and imagining the inevitability of Chinese whispers and epic misinformation memes. Sure, this does happen, but Twitter has consistently turned out to be more reliable in these situations than I ever would have imagined.

The immediacy is amazing too. I’m convinced that the information I was seeing on Twitter was more accurate and up-to-date than the news networks could keep up with.

Perhaps it’s a statistical thing. If one person says something, it’s like hmm, ok... if a few more people are saying the same thing, an ambient sense of awareness builds fairly quickly.

Yes, Joyce is an archetypal Hollow Man, if ever there was one. A demonstration of what happens when petty buck snivelling noveau riche gain control of public office.

Though I would add that there's a significant historical/ideological context in the way that rail infrastructure was deliberately neglected and degraded since the late 1960's. New Zealand moved from being a railways culture to a car culture very rapidly in the late 20th century, and it's no coincidence that this progression is intricately linked to the long term collapse of the welfare state.

My comment was probably based on having read similar rhetoric from advocates of public transport in opinion columns, but that's hardly a fair judgment of the wider community who *do* have a much more balanced view, sorry.

Personally, I find it very difficult to understand what seems not just reticence, but outright hostility towards funding a rail loop and a CBD tunnel. In my view, that's the *least* possible work that can be done to build a viable long term transport system.