Posts by Andre
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RIP Graham Brazier. What a dude! One of the only kiwi celebs I saw in the late 80's who would walk down the main street engaging randomly with everyone who took his interest. There may have been great drugs involved, but he approached me at least five times like this - just reaching out to people, interested. One of a kind.
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We had 117,000 migrants arrive in the year to July. Many are in reality escaping totalitarian regimes but are wealthy enough to do so. Most seem to invest primarily in housing.
Many then invite family to join them.
No-one has ever asked if we want to ship in a million more residents each decade without thought to the infrastructure needed to accommodate them until their death, let alone the superannuation bill required.
Imagine if we took 10,000 refugees and 107,000 migrants instead. The refugees would be more grateful - we wouldn't just be a stepping stone to Australia or a way to give their following elderly relatives free healthcare and super for example.
The refugees arriving in Europe currently are the best equipped to get there. 800,000 have arrived in Europe in the last year, with another 40 million potential followers still stranded on the way according to reports this week. These first refugees are more highly qualified and had the money to escape. I think they would add skills to our economy and wouldn't push our house prices up on arrival in the same way traditional migrants would. -
That Hundertwasser's flag wasn't included - just an updated version from someone else - shows how wrong the whole exercise is. I didn't realise how famous he was until I went to Germany - I even managed to buy a Hundertwasser Advent Calendar.
The story of an immigrant bonding with our young country and designing a flag based on indigenous art forms provides a story that melds with our nation's history.
That Otis Frizzell's flag design didn't make the top 4, yet a version that John Key likes being included twice with a minor colour change, shows how captured this whole process was from the beginning.
And if you were going to spend $26 million on the exercise, why on earth would you use cheap, nasty and ubiquitous display equipment like pull-up posters as the backdrop to your presentation, rather than spending a couple of thousand dollars more on something more impressive like lycra banners? Why didn't they actually print the flags rather than showing an AV representation from them? The "panel" must be flying first-class and staying in 5-star hotels, because the presentation equipment they're using must only be costing 0.01% of the budget. -
An interesting statistic, reported on Monday, shows alcohol sales have increased after marijuana was legalised in USA states like Colorado - the opposite to liquor industry expectations. I think this may be because users are able to budget better since there are no supply issues, or because the price of weed has decreased - and therefore they have more money left over to spend on booze. Either way, the alcohol companies should probably start backing decriminalisation or legalisation of marijuana based on these stats. I expect that like their US counterparts, the kiwi brewers would have resisted enshrining any competition from legal marijuana up until now (but this is a guess).
Marijuana should have been legalised 40 years ago - saving us billions of dollars in unpaid tax, saving hundreds of thousands of kiwis from punishment by the state for a victimless crime, removing a huge economic boost to criminal gangs and resulting in better health outcomes for users who would no longer be as likely to hide their habit from medical professionals etc.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/31/alcohol-industry-sales-marijuana-colorado -
When Frank Haden used to edit and write for publications I worked on I'd often quiz him on his Sunday Star Times columns. He was a nice man and could tackle topics like the launch of Kiwibank in a positive style and the Foreshore and Seabed Bill with no obvious bias. As an editor occasionally I was often surprised at how closely he'd followed a brief.
He explained that his role as an SST columnist was to report with a hard-edged non-PC bias - a brief he more than fulfilled. His KPI seemed to centre around the number of letters to the editor received following publication.
Hosking isn't a shadow to this great news-man, patron of the Press Club and editor of the Dominion Post among others. Frank would have been uncomfortable airing his views 65-hours-a-week. Thank goodness he never got that opportunity but, if he had, the result would have been much more eloquent and engaging than any prose Hosking ever summoned. Hosking writes multiple published short-length "journals" - doesn't that make him a journalist? -
The main prime-time TV current affairs analysis programme showing on the government-owned TV network should report for the people, not the government.
For years I could change channels between CloseUp and Campbell Live and see them running exactly the same stories. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that this situation changed and Campbell Live focused on stories the government would be less happy with. And we all know how that ended.
The main unbroken story currently is as follows - and who do you think is actually investigating it? There seems nowhere left on the spectrum beyond Bryan Bruce or internet-only media now Maori TV has also been saddled with government-friendly managers who respond immediately to the Minister when asked to dump stories.
What is Mike Sabin charged with? Did the PM really know of the allegations in June, yet allowed him to stand in an August election, costing millions in the subsequent by-election when he was charged?
Why?
This is the big story that will affect the next election - but you'd never hear it mentioned anywhere for fear of breaking the law. Background should still be given to it.
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The ozone layer depletion was also greeted with much scepticism from many quarters, until we all started suffering from extreme sunburn.
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Polity: Too much to swallow on the TPP, in reply to Sacha,
Opus were originally the Consultancy Division of the Ministry of Works. Since working of the Local Authority Engineering magazine in 1987, then NZ Local Government magazine in the early 90's and the Assn of Consulting Enginers of NZ media in the late 90's, I can confirm that most of our rates head overseas, whereas BITD these companies were owned by kiwis balancing whether succession to family was possible or whether immediate gains should be taken. The latter won and future generations and we lost.
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Did anyone else notice John Key's dog-whistle on Q+A when he said that under the TPPA we'd have no power to ban foreigners from buying NZ property, but that was okay because China isn't a signatory to the agreement? He seems to think that if most of our land is owned by non-Chinese foreigners, that would be fine. The financial colonisation of our country is the logical conclusion if we sign the TPPA - but apparently that's fine. The Chinese will still have to apply for a rubber stamp from the Overseas Investment Commission.
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As per my previous post we have reason to distrust the motivations and actions of many foreign governments and their backers.