Posts by Hilary Stace
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Claiming ignorance of the law doesn't work for anyone else.
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Thank you for this update Rosemary. I can't believe how long these cases drag on for. It is also such a waste of resources. There has to be a better way.
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Thanks Chelle. As someone who accompanies a wheelchair user around the place quite a lot, I have a real horror of those little nasties in the footpath or curb cut which can suddenly trap a wheel. But your story shows just how complex and unique each person is. Every body is different and every person problem solves in their own way. There is no one size fits all in disability. It makes me even more grumpy about the recent tweet by the minister who finds disability and disabled people boring.
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Thank you Fiona. Well said. I was bemused by Bill English's comment that no one had really taken offence and that she had a lot of friends in the sector. I'm not sure where he got that impression from. If you work for an NGO which gets any government funding you are not allowed to do any advocacy (ie criticise government policies which might not be in the best interests of your members). So of course you have to be polite and agreeable if you want anything from this or any minister, and public servants have to be on their best behaviour at all times around a minister while telling them what they want to hear. But is this friendship?
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The report about disabled people living there mentioned they lived on the upper floors. Why? Lifts are dodgy at the best of times and evacuation in emergencies particularly fraught as specific skills and technology such as Evac Chairs and people trained to use them, are required. Even in many NZ high rise buildings, disabled people would struggle to get out of upper floors in fires or earthquakes.
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The Government's plan to collect client level data has been delayed while bugs in the system are sorted out. Let's hope that's the end of it. I suspect that the damage to public confidence has already been done and that it will result in resistance to completing the Census next year.
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On CNN yesterday they had the YouGov pollster man providing commentary. He was so interesting talking about their methodology which had got it almost exactly right. Each time a result came up he could explain why. Nothing much surprised him. He just exuded an enthusiasm of polling, understanding people and voting intention. Sort of like our Rob Salmond.
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Big Data is about numbers and will never be able to be qualitative. We will be able to pinpoint the person in a particular street with a particular condition and know where they shop or go to school and what they buy but will never know about the quality of their relationships and all that human stuff. Those jobs which are based on unique human relationships are unlikely to be replaced by big data any time soon although they might happen in a different way.
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think that left parties are much better at the strategic visioning policy thing that David mentions here, but they aren't often in government to implement them. And these ideas are hard to get into sound-bites so aspiring politicians are less likely to 'perform' well in the media, and so less likely to get elected. Housing, health, education and social policies are so inter-related. But when politicians from the left try to express these complex ideas they often get attacked by the interviewer with the 'how many, when, how much will it cost, yes or no?' questions.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The unfair comment related to Greg O'Connor, not Peter Dunne. Peter Dunne has been in Parliament for 30 years or so and some of it as my local MP. In the last decade or so he has had the infuriating habit of saying and doing nothing much until the last few weeks before an election and then coming out with a lot of liberal (or 'common sense') policy just in time to be noticed and re-elected. Once the election has passed and he has joined the latest government he goes quiet again. Last time it was his opposition to the TPPA which was widely reported in the local media. After the election he happily voted for it, denying his earlier opposition. So he might be saying stuff about cannabis law reform now but as to actually doing anything about it - highly doubtful.