Posts by Stephen Judd
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to talkie_toaster,
We should talk about it without singling out a group of people who have regularly been singled out as a sinister presence, yes.
And yeah, if our message -- not our analysis, which I've stipulated I'm happy to entertain, but our message -- reads as racist, that should give us pause. I go back to the summary that other people reported to me. I'm not basing that reading on my own super-sensitive antennae.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to talkie_toaster,
1. I think the methods provide a pretty plausible conclusion. The idea that unregulated foreign buying is causing problems is not the controversy here.
2. I'm quite happy to be less racist than thee. Thank you. From my perspective, you're basically arguing that reinforcing a racist discourse is ok as long as it's in support of achieving our policy aims. It's not, and it's not even necessary. The ignored elephant isn't cashed up buyers from other countries, it's how New Zealand's nationalism is intertwined with not very covert racism. Talk all you like about ignoring lived experience -- the lived experience of minorities is that this shit bleeds into their daily life in this country. But you're quite happy to ignore that.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to talkie_toaster,
faux-outrage
Are you saying what people say about their feelings is bad faith lies? I think that’s the obvious way to understand “faux-outrage”, but feel free to correct me. For the record, I am very genuinely angry.
about statements that were not made and conclusions that were not drawn.
So here’s how I heard about this. I got up on Saturday morning, at my friends’ house, because I was visiting Auckland for a boozy social weekend. I was seedy but cheerful because we’d up up until 1am catching up over beer. And Matt says to me “I just read in the Herald that Labour are saying people with Chinese surnames are buying all the houses.” And from there my head started to throb. I didn’t read it and twist it, I just listened to how a reasonable apolitical person summarised it to me.
Tom can tell me I’m patronising about the salt of the earth real people who are not like the faux people on handwringing soppy forums like this one. but I’ve spent enough time canvassing to know that most don’t read the news for detail and think about it hard, they receive an impression that gets massaged to fit with their existing understanding of the world. So being precious about “I didn’t make that statement, I didn’t draw that conclusion” is useless if you could reasonably predict how what you’ve said will be understood. Dog whistle. Peep peep peep. All the worse if unintentional in my view, because that would imply incompetence.
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I just wrote and cancelled my regular donation to the party with the message that it can restart when we have three clear months without race-baiting or hippy punching.
As someone who belongs to another ethnic minority where people stereotype about money and leap to conclusions based on names, this shit makes my skin crawl.
Political messaging is different from rational discourse over policy and you don’t get a pass for Bayesian inference when there’s a thick layer of racist implication on top.
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Apologies for the digression, but I can't believe I missed that Owen McShane had died. Always had a soft spot for him -- knew his brother and niece, and had cordial if implacably opposed correspondence from time to time.
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Eric Crampton of the NZ Initiative has been vocal expressing his concern that SIBs here will fail because of excessive monitoring and bureacracy.
I've been thinking about this, and the above made me realise. In a normal market, service users evaluate quality and change suppliers themselves. I don't like the results I'm getting for myself, and I go elsewhere.
Here though, the purchaser and the consumer of services are not the same. And the consumers have no voice (prisoners) or have strong barriers to acting effectively (mental health consumers). So there must be strong independent controls in place, audit regimes and inspection and so on. We know from experience that self-inspection is not reliable and leads to gruesome mis-reporting. The only other party that can monitor effectively is the state.
So the idea of a SIB-funded service being lightly monitored as a requirement for it to succeed is a bit of a laugh really.
The other thing that bugs me about this is that SIB funding is presented as a way for government to conduct experiments or pilots away from the dead hand of bureaucracy. But the thing about the kinds of service in question is that they are very high stakes. Get them wrong, and people die. Very different from the average business taking risks where the worst outcome is people lose money. The conservatism and risk aversion is there for a very good reason. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
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Hard News: Campbell interviewed, in reply to NBH,
Good management is an art and a skill in its own right, and – like the ability to teach or communicate to ‘lay’ audiences – it doesn’t automatically go hand-in-hand with professional expertise.
Amen. While I will rail against the cult of management and managerialism with everyone else, nonetheless good management is a thing, ideally coupled with the appropriate technical/professional background. People with no training for it in management jobs can be pretty terrible too.
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Pardon me if I don't find Kerry Bolton a credible reference on immigration, or indeed anything.
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Hard News: The epitome of reason, in reply to Roger Lacey,
Why do they never refer to their track record of sound economic management, budget surpluses, Kiwisaver, the Cullen Fund etc.?
But we do! Those messages just don't get reported most of the time, because they don't fit the stereotype. The Very Serious People of NZ media have decided that National are competent economic managers and Labour are loonies, and that is that.
There is a whole other debate about what constitutes sound, what kinds of deficits are good vs bad, who did most/least to moderate the property sector, and so on, of course.