Posts by Luke Williamson
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So all those civil service jobs, the 10% higher than Auckland salaries and the whopping extra funding for anything in the arts/culcha in Welly are all paid for by . . . Peter Jackson? Just take some responsibility as the capital city - it's not personal. We all know and like at least one person from Welly.
SORRY! cancel all that - don't want to start an Aucks/Welly battle. -
A plus for CCOs would be seeing somebody actually make a decision about something in Auckland without running a public "competition" first. "Hey, I know, we're going to come up with a budget for Super Auckland for 2011 but let's have a competition first and see if someone out there can come up with a really good one. Come on kids, get your calculators out and we can all have ownership of the new Super budget." Then we can discuss it sensibly in the pages of the NZ Herald.
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And by the way, if significant savings wasn't the point of super sizing the city, what was?
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On the one hand, I really don't want to pay anymore rates than necessary but, on the other hand, I see this transition cocking up so badly that it may just lead to National losing the next election - and that pleases me greatly. Throw in some mining in conservation land, some renewed commercial whaling, a bit of beneficiary bashing and it all looks good for another change of gummint. All we need now is a credible opposition to get off their arses and exploit the opportunity.
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The Nats are moving so fast now that it's hard to know what to be irate about without spreading my ire to thinly. Super Auckland, mining conservation land, nabbing blue fin tuna and today John and Paula have announced a new open season on dole bludgers. I've only heard a few details but it sounds like another battle field for any with liberal tendencies.
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Agreed on Kuariki Andre. It just saddens me to see the journos prodding and prodding to try and get some newsworthy reaction while offering nothing positive for a young man who has got off to a disastrous start. The whole HOS story reeks, I think. The basis for going there in the first place is suspect, sending two women is suspect and not just getting up and walking out when it was obvious that the situation was unpleasant is suspect. The media are going to continue to hound him until he messes up big time again, despite the fact that he looks like he'll do it all by himself anyway.
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Logically, you'd do better to put your "smart' child in the school that was achieving at a lower standard so that they topped everything, got the best grades, gained confidence, etc. etc. Friend of mine from school deliberately avoided being accredited for UE so that he would be in with "all the dummies" in the external exams at the end of the year and come out on top. Ah, the good old days of scaling . . .
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As an "involved" parent - i.e. I go to the parent-teacher evenings, go on school trips, check the homework, monitor the results, help set goals for the children, etc. - I honestly couldn't want for much more information than the schools give us here in Warkworth. There are reports home, parent-teacher interviews, website information, meetings to set out what NCEA means and how children can get the most out of it, and on and on. I can e-mail any of the teachers any time and they get back to me. They are even pro-active about identifying how our children are going at school. All the information is there if you want it from well-trained professionals. There will always be teachers who are better than other teachers but that is reality. The days of the truly awful teachers who I can remember from my secondary school days, I think, are over. They don't survive the new system.
The Herald headline should have been "88% of parents don't even understand this new system!" That colours every other question they ask. -
Quick review of the Indonesian tidal wave of 2004 is a good reminder that it is not so much the height of the wave as the volume of water behind it. Unlike your normal beach breaker, it just keeps on surging around, past or through anything in its way. A couple of metres of tsunami (sp correct this time I hope) can do vastly more damage than your average 2m breaker at the beach.
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Referendum: Do you think tsumami should be larger than 50cm as part of good parenting?