Posts by Lynn Yum
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Access: Privacy and the right to consent…, in reply to Sacha,
Horse long-bolted. Govt has made that decision for us several years ago and they have been assembling the infrastructure since. Would be good if it became an election issue but most of us citizens have no idea what’s going on with it so a lot of awareness to build.
Privacy issues in general aren’t really in people’s mind. House price, economy, traffic, health, education, law and order (in no particular order…) are generally in people’s mind more. And I don't blame them. But since Snowden my eyes are wide open.
“Privacy is freedom” is perhaps the best one line explanation I’ve heard on why privacy is important. It is both a technical and a philosophical issue, so you can’t really expect the general public to go gaga about this. But I talk the ears off anyone who would listen.
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Access: Privacy and the right to consent…, in reply to mark taslov,
My memory was a bit hazy on the Fuller case. So nothing really came out of it? That just sounds all wrong. Paula Bennett has a track record of character assassination, the latest was against Hurimoana Dennis. So I understand the worry that someone in MSD can use the information collected for abuse.
I'm being a bit contrarian here, but my understanding is that data mining will make the welfare budget more effective, thus helping more people. There is of course privacy concerns on the other hand. So a political discussion is need. We need to agree on what is acceptable information gathering and sharing, and what isn't acceptable, and be prepared to change as we go along. (e.g. default opt-in information sharing rather than opt-out, since psychologically people are subjected to default bias, etc.)
This is a brave new world we are living in, the new tools are right there, we just have to use it properly.
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The thing with Paula Bennett is that it was completely wrong for her to leak that kind of information, and most probably illegal under the Privacy Act. I’m kind of surprised that the police didn’t try to prosecute her (or did they?).
Isn’t the Privacy Act the elephant in the room here? As long as the voluntary sector always preface services with “we will share your data to MSD in order to get funding” etc., then information sharing would be legal.
This of course will be a burden to the voluntary sector and by extension to vulnerable people. Because in my experience as a volunteer in the social sector, information disclosure can be a “cost” to using a completely free service, i.e. some people just don’t want their demographic information taken down, at all. But the really vulnerable ones will not be affected because they will be desperate for help, the information “cost” is worth it.
I do see the point of the data collection, it is to identify patterns so as to address problems more smartly, e.g. if certain people from a certain demographics keep falling through, what are the causes? With data analysis, you can do precision strike on the causes rather than carpet bombing.
The balancing act may be a so called "chinese wall" ring fencing MSD client data (c.f. financial sector), over and above what is required of the Privacy Act. So e.g. short of a court order, MSD information will NOT be shared at all, even with related agency such as CYFS (or whatever the hell it is now called).
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As someone living under the iron heels of Jonathan Coleman (ok I jest) I am pretty envious of the Mt. Albert by-election: a real contest rather than a coronation.
From what I can hear Ardern is clearly the candidate who did most of her homework, and sounded the most impressive, even though I doubt some of her ideas. (e.g. Having lived with light rail in Melbourne and Hong Kong, I can say first hand that light rail is sloooooooow, so I doubt people in Mt. Albert will like it very much in practice.)
Based on the actual result it kind of confirmed one of my suspicions about the red-green alliance: that Labour will cannibalise the Greens votes, while the Greens can't get enough greeny National voters to switch. All the stars are aligned right now for a greater push for the environmentalist vote, like water quality and so on, but it would be interesting to see if the Greens can pull it off.
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Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
But certainly the idea that only journalism and educational documentaries are worthy is silly. Reality TV can be amazingly good at connecting people to others who are different from themselves, for example.
What I want to get at is to ask how we should see a public broadcaster in a NZ market environment. My understanding is that there are at least two kinds of thought as to what public broadcasters should do:
1. the public broadcaster should plug the gap left untouched by commercial broadcasters. (i.e. public broadcaster addresses the market failure in the cultural space).
2. the public broadcaster should just be broadly representative of NZ culture, regardless of what commercial broadcasters are doing.
For case #1, if Masterchef et. al. is already commercially viable, the public broadcaster would not do those, and should do programming that otherwise would not have been commercially viable but still reflective of NZ, like nature doco, or investigative journalism that doesn't pay the bills but still valuable. The public broadcaster would NOT be competing with the commercial broadcasters.
For case #2, it would be the BBC model. It will be directly competing with commercial broadcasters. My understanding is that commercial broadcasters in UK always cry foul that BBC is taking their lunch because BBC is subsidised by taxpayers (licensing fee) while commercial broadcasters have to stand on their their own feet.
Case #1 would sound to me politically and economically plausible. Politically the right (with some convincing) will support that. The left will be on board by default. And the funding required would also be less than case #2 because case #1 is not doing the full spectrum of programming, just special interest programming. But this kind of public broadcaster may be typecast as elitist because it will NEVER do popular programme in principle. It is to plug the market failure.
Case #2 would cost a lot, but public broadcaster in this role is truly representative of NZ. (That would be reverting TVNZ back to the big state broadcaster as opposed to de facto commercial broadcaster it now is.) The problem with this politically is from the right: that in a free society, the state should not fund a broadcaster providing ONE voice that claims to be representative of NZ. Unlike CCTV in China or Russia Today (or even BBC), it should be up to the people (and the market) to decide what NZ culture should be.
Looming above all this is how technology is changing the media landscape, where every broadcaster is bleeding into the territory of another via the internet. I get that not all people use the internet to access the media (by choice or due to circumstance), but the trend to convergence is here, and I think it should be a factor in deciding what public broadcaster should be and how it is funded.
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Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to Jason Kemp,
I’m curious about how streaming TV has changed the landscape on all of this. My experience over the past 3-4 years is that I have watched more great TV on Netflix than I ever did on broadcast.
*Put hand up*. Same here. The change of media landscape driven by technology needs to be factored in when it comes to what to do with TVNZ.
RNZ is an interesting case IMO, because they have evolved with technology, and they have a wide variety of programmes. Not glossy TV programme with fancy graphics. Just a voice on the radio or a podcast talking about local issues. They use technology to reach a larger audience than they would otherwise reach only with radio. They are a public broadcaster already, just with a smaller scope. So why not just give them a bigger budget and task them to reach a even wider audience?
I agree that local programming is more than just journalism, so TOP’s focus is just too narrow. So what exactly do people want from a public broadcaster that reflect NZ culture in the first place? More Masterchef NZ? The Block? Shorty Street? Can someone provide some concrete example? You look at BBC, they do everything under the sun, from nature doco to Doctor Who. They even commissioned Top of the Lake. Are we expecting a NZ public broadcaster to do THAT kind of range?
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Rich Lock,
Can you provide an example of an article on The Guardian that meets this goal?
I’m not saying they aren’t there, but the number of articles I’ve seen that do what you say needs doing (aimed at Trump voters, extending a hand halfway, in good faith), is zero.
It goes both ways, right? They are a leftwing paper. What they can do to find common ground is to shift their own lefty views more to the centre rather than shifting the Trumpian right to the centre. Publishing that Davidson article, from what I see, is doing just that. Thomas Frank is another example. Here is another.
Look I'm not saying they don't have a whole lot of lefty articles saying more or less the same thing on repeat. They do, day in day out. But after the Trump win (and Brexit) at least they try to burst their own bubble. They even have a handy series. The very act of bursting the bubble is about finding common ground with others rather than living in our own universe.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Rich Lock,
Michelle Obama said ‘when they go low, we go high’, which, ok, yes, fine. But that tells you your opponent will go low. By all means keep your own arguments Marquis of Queensbury, clean and above the belt, but never forget that they’ll be aiming to kick you in the nuts as hard as they can at every opportunity.
Sure, the other side plays dirty, But the best lies are half truths. If we take the high road, the truth has to be fished out from the muck and be taken seriously. This is also a useful tactic to persuade the other side: when you are meeting them half way it shows that you are debating in good faith. However, if someone spits at this kind of good faith, it is a sure sign that debating with that particular person is a waste of time.
However Trump don't do pitched battle, this is a running war. We see new dead cat every day (or with every tweet). At some point we have to stop being lawyerly and stop replying to every single unsubstantiated claim. Instead we need to ask why some people are still listening to Trump. If we want to go high we have to meet these people half way. Or at least, meet the ones who also show good faith. The Guardian publishing an article from the Trumpian right is one way to show good faith.
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Rich Lock,
They seem to have some sort of recently-implemented, ill-thought-out, half-baked limp-wristed kumbaya editoral thought process about bursting the liberal bubble, meeting-in-the-middle, or whatever.
Wait, isn't that a good thing? It is a self-awareness that acknowledges in the very recent past, they were not receptive to the full spectrum of opinions in UK and US. The more agreeable bits of what John Daniel Davidson said, that the election of Trump is an America revolt against globalisation/business-as-usual, has been said by e.g. Thomas Frank on the Guardian as well. But still this issue, that globalisation isn't working for everyone, deserves even more attention IMO. This is the same force behind Brexit.
In the current online political climate, anything said by the other side is automatically dismissed. No wonder Paul Mason got savaged in the same paper for advocating some form of Brexit from the left wing democratic perspective. The polarisation is at the point where everything Trump does is ceaselessly and automatically mocked and opposed (e.g. bathrobe. Seriously?).
So I applaud the Guardian for being more contrarian, and trying to see the argument from the other side.
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Legal Beagle: New Zealand rockets up the…, in reply to izogi,
I'm not sure if it is more biased towards business POV. TI's index is like meta index. Three of the source indexes are: Political Risk Services, World Justice Project and The Bertelsmann Foundation, which are statedly not catering to business but academics, the general public and governments.
I think it is more of a case of New Zealand banking on previous reputation. All the recent Dirty Politics stuff, all the gory John Banks/Kim Dotcom mess don't seem to register externally. Or maybe there are simple data entry errors as Graeme mentioned.
No one should be complacent about corruption in New Zealand, it should have no place here (or anywhere else) but it still happens. But I'm sure some politicians would like to pat themselves on their back having seen this TI report.