Posts by Matthew Poole
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But what's this Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill they've sprung out of nowhere? Screwing over tenants in favour of landlords again...?
Presumably it's some of the outcomes from this. Dare I say it, vintage National. And they've only been in power for six months!
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Ooooooooooh, those miserable sodding bastards. They're running it along part of the designated rail corridor. That has two effects.
1) No Avondale-Southdown line in the foreseeable future, because the path it would've taken will now be occupied by a motorway, and
2) The designation of at least some land is already done. Opponents, eat yer hearts out! -
To give people some idea of just how abnormal the constitution rules for the ATA are, here are some requirements for existing boards of various state commissions, drawn from their respective founding statutes.
Electoral Commission, s8 Electoral Act 1993:
(1) The Electoral Commission shall consist of—
(a) the Secretary for Justice:
(b) the Chief Judge of the Maori Land Court:
(c) 1 person who shall be appointed by the Governor-General:
(d) 1 person who shall be—
(i) a Judge of the District Court or of the High Court or of the Court of Appeal or of the Supreme Court; or
(ii) a retired Judge of any of the courts specified in subparagraph (i).NZ Fire Service Commission, s6 Fire Service Act 1975:
(2) In appointing members of the Commission, the Minister shall have regard to—
(a) Their personal attributes; and
(b) The need for the members of the Commission to have between them experience in—
(i) Public administration; and
(ii) Business and economic management; and
(iii) Finance; and
(iv) Fire engineering and senior operational firefighting; and
(c) The need for at least one of the members to be experienced in fire engineering or senior operational firefighting.Local Government Commission, s33 Local Government Act 2002:
(1) The Commission consists of 3 members appointed by the Minister.
(2) One member of the Commission—
(a) must have a knowledge of tikanga Maori; and
(b) is to be appointed after consultation with the Minister of Maori Affairs.Securities Commission, s11 Securities Act 1978:
(4) The Minister must not recommend a person for appointment as a member of the Commission, unless, in the opinion of the Minister, the person is qualified for appointment, having regard to the functions and powers of the Commission, by virtue of the person's knowledge of, or experience in, industry, commerce, economics, law, accountancy, public administration, or securities.
It's totally "jobs for the boys", and they're not even being subtle about it. In the absence of online versions of the Bills, I'll quote from the draft Local Government (Auckland Reorganisation) Bill, s11:
(1) The Transition Agency must have a governing body consisting of a chairperson and no fewer than 2 but no more than 4 other members appointed by the Minister.
That's it. The rest of s11 just lists the functions of the body and specifies "that the Minister must notify appointments ... in the Gazette as soon as practicable after making them." Yay for competent oversight by neutral persons. Not.
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Joshua, not looking like they're online yet. Gotta love that engagement of the democratic process, when legislation affecting the home city of 1/3 of the population isn't even available for consideration before it gets debated.
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Having seen the draft bills for the Auckland reconstruction (I'm quoted by proxy in a Greens release this morning about the secondment of existing councils' staff to the Auckland Transitional Agency), I can safely say that no matter how much of a "jobs for the boys" look the MFAT appointment appears to be it's nothing against what will be done for the ATA. The Reconstruction Bill has no requirements whatsoever for experience or competence on the part of those who're appointed by the Minister. It's a board of 3-5, being Chair plus 2-4, and that's the extent of it. The Minister can appoint anyone they wish, achieve any composition they desire, and there's not even a requirement for a token lay person or iwi rep.
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Repeated assertion does not a logical argument make. Why do almost all countries apart from NZ and the mad Americans have such a system?
And most of those countries have much higher rates of firearms crime than NZ, too. Higher rates of illegal ownership, higher rates of intentional firearms-related deaths, etc. Obviously registration is such a panacea.
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Shay, pistols are a routine recovery during drug raids. And Molenaar wasn't using a handgun against the cops, he was using a rifle. Those are readily available, and modifying a semi-auto into a full-auto is a fairly minor engineering activity for someone with the right knowledge.
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I don't have any philosophical problems with requiring gun registration
Neither do I. My objections are entirely practical, and fiscal. I hate seeing taxpayer money wasted on exercises in futility, that have been demonstrated as futile in other countries. Politicians are meant to be beyond the stage of mental development that forces three-year-old children to touch the stove just to find out for themselves that it's hot, after watching their sibling get burned, but it appears that the ones running the country are still three and still have to fuck up for themselves. Privatised prisons, at a time when the rest of the world are moving away from them, for example.
Hopefully a registry will never be more than a wet dream of Alpers', but given the unwillingness to learn from foreign experience I'm yet to be convinced. -
Smuggling weapons into NZ is a piece of cake. We have one of the largest EEZs on the planet, and thousands of kilometres of remote coastline. Customs has said many times that there's no way they can patrol the whole border and keep things from coming through.
Given that there's cocaine being smuggled in on Russian freighters, through NZ ports, firearms coming the same way are a given. It's just a matter of demand. The criminal element have no difficulty getting hold of firearms by stealing them, or buying them from people who have previously stolen them, so importation isn't a big need. Plus, of course, until a firearm gets seized by the police and they try and track its genesis, who's to know if it was imported legally or otherwise?
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And yet even in the UK, criminals don't.
That article is scary. With a population that's about 60% of NZ's, and under some of the most draconian firearms laws in the world, Manchester had over 3,000 incidents of firearms crime in 15 months and gunshots in an urban area were common.
NZ's laws are nowhere near as strict, we have no registration requirement (though given that pistols are gangs' weapons of choice that's not accurate either), and we have no real problem with firearms. Clearly registration isn't helping in the UK, and neither are harsh penalties for non-compliance.