Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Oh, here's a nice quote:
I think a David Shearer led Labour Party will pose more of a threat to National, than any alternative leader.
David Farrar in the Herald, back in late 2011.
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I don’t really get the alcohol thing. When I travel for work, I always charge the entire cost of a meal, including any booze. I try not to go overboard, obviously.
Certain National Ministers were drinking a bottle of whiskey a night and charging it to the taxpayer. Others were treating themselves to $400 bottles of wine. Neither of which would get signed off by many private companies.
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Bill Ralston has subsequently expressed the same view: that Jones is the one who’d keep National’s strategists awake nights.
I don’t have access to the same senior MPs as Espiner and Ralston, but I have talked to a couple of National senior staffers who consider the idea of a Jones-led Labour Party completely absurd, for reasons which are obvious to everyone except our senior political journalists. At the moment they’re briefing against Cunliffe, as in: ‘People think Cunliffe will be good but he won’t because he’s too weird,’ or whatever. Which suggests to me that they think the winner will be Cunliffe so they’re pre-emptively undermining him.
I think the Nats are mostly just sad that Shearer's gone.
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If there’s any good news, it’s that one will expect New Zealand to do anything in the foreseeable future. We ought to be glad of that.
I don't think that's quite right. The Defense force will want to do something because they always do, and the press gallery will want us to do something because its interesting and exciting to write about war. There's not much we can actually do, and no one else who wants us to do it, but those factors will press for our involvement.
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Capital Gains Tax – a move which one Government Minister told me made absolute sense, but was ‘political suicide’.
It's always quite popular with the public whenever the CGT policy gets polled - but MPs, their senior staff and senior political journalists all tend to have most of their wealth in investment properties, so the idea of taxing that wealth is dismissed as 'political suicide'.
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it would be sweet if Bernard Orsman and his paper stopped treating local government - not just in Auckland but the other local authorities in it's circulation area - like some ghastly reality show/popularity contest.
New Zealand's Got Auckland's Next Top Got Mayoralty Quest
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You're right - I didn't even check the Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilians_in_Japan
There is a significant community of Brazilians in Japan, consisting largely but not exclusively of Brazilians of Japanese ethnicity. They also constitute the largest number of Portuguese speakers in Asia, greater than those of formerly Portuguese East Timor, Macao and Goa combined.
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I haven't been following this story too closely, but Japan is a very conspicuous place to be a foreigner, especially if you don't speak the language - and it's a difficult language to learn. The idea that a bunch of Brazilian criminals could all move over and set up a protection racket targeting sports stars is - to me - highly implausible.
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I don't have anything against soft-news stories per se, but they do seem to act as a gateway drug to anti-journalism: advertorials (the lavish news coverage of the KFC double-down burger was probably the nadir of this in NZ journalism) and faux-controversies ('was New Zealand originally settled by a race of Nodic immortals? John Ansell says Yes!').
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Thanks Graeme - you're a (domestic) national treasure.