Posts by Rachel Prosser
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Auckland Uni's ploy of whipping up middle class hysteria via the scarcity of educational resources is a coup of marketting.
I think the "limit" I saw for one course was 150% the current enrolment! It's all about the marketing.
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Mark Sainsbury
"Whether the charity relates to our competitors, or ourselves, makes no difference;"
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Would love to see Jon Stewart's take on Mark Sainsbury's show tonigh. He's reporting in a slightly Fox-news ish way on KidsCan.
A touch of sourgrapes from TV One not getting the Telethon?
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You wouldn't be a lawyer, by any chance?
Oi!!!
cheap shot.
And also, utterly unfair. Not that I'm practising as a lawyer any more but "underhand cheating" was the last thing we did.
Maybe it's the area I practiced, but there was considerable pressure to always play by the rules - letter and spirit, and we spent most of our time advising others of the rules they had to play by too.
In addition, anything you did was subject to review, and risk-taking was discouraged.
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State School, like our National Anthem, Courts, NZDF, Parliment etc, are all Anglican with some allowances for difference
Not so. Section 77 of the Education Act is the successor from an 1890s act that was one of the four pieces of social legislation aimed at maintaining New Zealand as an egalitarian society.
Education was to be "free, secular and compulsory"
The other pieces of legislation, if I remember School Certificate History correctly, were the votes for women act, the IC & A Act which established tripartite wage bargaining, and a social security act which established a modest social security pension (based on a third of a working man's wage) available to those who were poor, of good character (designed to exclude criminals, drunkards and wife-deserters) and who applied in a public court session.
There's a really interesting history of pensions here
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I kind of thought that checking these things was what Ministers had staff *for*, but I guess with all those cuts to bureaucracy they've got to do their own work these days. Clearly there are some bugs still to be worked out.
I'm sure the advice is available - it's a pretty straightforward case for government lawyers to advise on.
But you can only advise a Minister if they ask for the advice.
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My first instinct when reading the Paula Bennett release was that it's gone beyond the usual bounds. The Privacy Commissioner's site has this guidance:
6. Someone goes to the media about a Department's decision to stop their benefit and is quoted as saying it shows the unfairness of the policy.
The Minister could comment in a way that discloses no further information than is already in the report (for instance explaining how the policy is designed to apply and why it says what it does). If the individual has misrepresented the facts on which the Department's actions were based, the Minister could say that there are some undisclosed facts which give a somewhat different picture and, if the individual would authorise release of further details from the Department's files, the Minister would be happy to oblige. Again, these facts could be set out in a letter to the individual and the media duly informed.
In the current case two things leap out. First, the women were not told their information would be released (which goes against the ethos of the Privacy Act, the aim of which is to give people control and knowledge of how their private information is and will be used)
Second, some of the information released (e.g. about the woman's previous cleaning business failure) seems to go beyond what is relevant to the issue in the media. The article was looking at the effect of the policy on single parents retraining.
The minister was reframing the issue to be about whether or not the women have a received their fair share of help.
As Sir Humphrey Appleby would say, the Minister has adopted the tactic of playing the (wo)man not the ball.
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Also, interesting article in the Times on Mary Lamb, who spent time in an asylum after murdering her parents, was released into her brother's care and was home quite soon after.
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I think the key thing here is choice. Do we have a reasonable expectation that we should be able to consume news without hearing every gory detail?
Somehow its the gratuitous nature of the reporting that gets to me. It's the fact that news has become "reality tv", and overdramatised, and yes it's about ratings, and what sells advertising, and what makes those adverts effective (having been horrified by the news, the advertising offers us comfort - buy my product and feel better about the world).
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The curious thing is, down the line, an artisan baker somewhere will advertise their bread as "no folic acid added" (analogy here - unpasteurised cheeses.)
Also, the thing about 11 slices - someone read Chip and Dave Heath's book "Made to Stick" on that one - , but if you're getting the equivalent of 7 slices then the added folate in 4 slices (or the amount an average woman would consume) might get you up to the recommended amount.
Although I have no idea what the difference would be on the hypothetical average woman/average gestation about getting the equivalent of 8 slices, 10 slices, or 12 slices of folic acid would be on your baby's spina bifida risk. I wonder if it's a tipping point scenario?