Posts by Tinakori
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Hard News: Anzac Day II, in reply to Sacha,
Jerry Mateparae and Peter Cosgrove, NZ and Australia respectively, both former Generals, and after the service they both went to Canberra for service over there.
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Hard News: Anzac Day II, in reply to JacksonP,
The Wellington dawn service was very big and the only two speakers aside from the padre running the show were the two Governors General. Aside from the size the service was exactly the same as all those I have attended with our two boys as they became old enough to be interested in attending. And the service was pretty much as I remember it from attending with my own father, very focused on those who served and not a lot said about wider issues. I think the dawn service was always traditionally for the servicemen and women and the rest of the population went to the later morning one.
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Envirologue: What has Neoliberalism Done…, in reply to Sacha,
Well the job losses in the private sector, especially in agriculture were driven by changing terms of trade which meant we got far less for what we exported. Governments tried to prop up agricultural producers and encourage other industries but that was never a long term solution. Freezing works closing down was a symptom of the long term lack of demand for what sheep and beef farmers produced and not a temporary blip in market conditions. When your largest export industry is on the ropes everyone suffers - farmers, processing workers, and all the service industries supporting agriculture. It also makes it much harder to sustain high taxation and highly inefficient government owned entities like the railways and the post office. It's no mystery why things changed and very little of it had to do with ideology.
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Envirologue: What has Neoliberalism Done…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Well as a young journalist on an evening paper working lots of hours outside of the standard working hours it took a very high proportion of all that extra money. The change in take-home income was very,very noticeable when the tax reforms of the mid 80s kicked in. In previous jobs like the freezing works the effect was just as noticeable. I suspect this was why the appeal of the Douglas tax changes reached deep down into the working population.
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Envirologue: What has Neoliberalism Done…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Well the definition of plenty was not exactly something Warren Buffet would recognise. Anyone working long hours at a pretty standard labouring or semiskilled job soon found themselves paying tax at the 60% rate. Then, as now, the only way a high tax economy will raise the required revenue, is for the high taxes to cut in at relatively low levels of income.
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
A very good summation of the situation. Journalism is also a house with many rooms only one of which - and by no means the largest - is about holding power or governments to account. Sport, horse racing (decreasingly) farming (the Dom's Posts farming pages are almost the best thing in the paper), lifestyle, Hey Martha stories (hey Martha, wtf is this?), family tragedies, crime, lost/cute pets , the weather , book and movie reviews, the ads etc, etc all make up the daily diet of what interests consumers of journalism. If holding Government's to account was of overwhelming interest to the wider world there would be an awful lot more of it on all media outlets and it would make money, as old style magazine TV current affairs shows like the US 60 minutes did for CBS for many years. While I watch Campbell Live I can also see why I am among an increasingly small number of people who do so. It has pretty much one emotional tone and leaves you in no doubt of where it stands, which are also the main reasons why it appeals to a niche audience. That exclusionary and hectoring approach also renders the format wholly unsuitable for a public television channel. Fine for commercial TV not for publicly funded TV.
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Hard News: Haphazardly to war, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The US fracking revolution is undermining the role of Saudi Arabia as an oil producer, that's the key reason the Saudis are pumping as much as they can - to depress the oil price and reduce future investment in fracked wells. There's a significant debate as to whether this is an effective strategy because some argue the cost of fracking is going down all the time and many wells are now much cheaper to move into production than in even the recent past.
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Wasn't the decision to contribute troops in Afghanistan the reason Labour's coalition partner, the Alliance, blew up? Most of the members couldn't cope with being on the same side as the Great Satan, as the Ayatollah Khomeini called the US.
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Hard News: Garbage in, garbage out, in reply to BenWilson,
There's quite a big market for stories about Bad things being done to Good people, which is fine, but not much market for highly technical stories about policy and how it is made and how it works. Many, many years ago - when Colin James was the editor - the NBR did a lot of it. It basically gave you the story behind the story. The Listener too did quite a bit of it and most print and TV stations had specialist reporters who had some sense of how the world worked behind the press release or the Minister's speech. But with their elimination and fewer eyeballs on the job we are left to the tender mercies of what political journalists say and what politicians say. That's important but it's only a sliver of what actually happens when policy is made and implemented.
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Broad strokes of the brush based on lots of time in newsrooms and lots of time with people good at numbers, an empirically based observation in other words.