Posts by David Slack
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You must have written your share of quacking speeches DS?
Guilty as charged.
Who the hell really listens to them anyway...although I'll never forget that Mike Moore election night speech.
And that's the point: the remarkable ones really are memorable, and enable you to form a strong impression about the speaker and about the ideas they're conveying. (Flattering or not.)
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My opening remarks were a throwaway observation about this growing tendency for politicians to speak of themselves in the third person. I’ll concede I could have treated him more fairly, given that his language suggests he sees the humour in it.
I don’t resile from what was the thrust of my criticism though: this is a speech that fails to offer what he told us it would.
Of course your first speech as leader will necessarily be broad, but if it is so broad and general that it fails to mark out your position in any clearly definable way (nor in any way that distinguishes your position from that of the Prime Minister you wish to replace), then the question: “what does John Key stand for” remains unanswered.
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Craig, neither shocked nor horrified, just making sure the fact does not go unremarked, which is the tendency during the honeymoon period.
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I think you're being negative.
Perhaps I am. But he's reputedly been thinking about having the job for quite some time, and he's gone through two election campaigns in which he's been asked to articulate his vision.
Moreover, he promised the speech would be something rather more than it proved to be.
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And that's a disgraceful pun, David. Wish I had thought of it.
Swelp me God, none intended. That's the usage.
Having said that, however, you are familiar with the roll call of Labour party members holding the office of Senior Whip in recent years?
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So much of it is generality that it's all entirely uncontentious.
What politician is not to going to argue for
"fair policies that encourage enterprise and hard work"
and a government that
"trusts people to get on with their lives and make the best choices for themselves.
He might like to think otherwise, but even your average social democrat will probably not disagree that:
"The government, of course, has an important role to play in the modern economy. But the appropriate role for the government is in the background, not in the foreground."And then, when he does, just briefly, get on to something a little more specific, he betrays the green-ness of the novice.
It is a mystery to me why the political Left acts as if it has a monopoly on environmental policies, when it is obvious to anyone who cares to look that all of us, across the political spectrum, with the exception perhaps of the Greens, have taken too long to put the protection of our environment at the forefront of our thinking.
I have a large box of speeches I churned out for the Minister of the Environment at the end of the 1980s that would suggest otherwise. He chose to keep that portfolio when he became Prime Minister because, he told the media, environmental policy was "so crucial". His party was talking about climate change a long,long time before Key and his National Party colleagues were bagging the Kyoto Protocol.
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Today's speech by Key is now up at Scoop
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As in "My Little Pwnies"
I've heard it used differently - to rhyme with twinned.
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Russell - do you think that the fact hager got 2 out of 3 things wrong with regards to hard news is any indication that there might be other errors in the book? Or do you think those were the only ones.
The errors were understandable. Several of us are actually unreconstructed Neocons in deep cover. Keith's not even Asian. We truly had Hager's ass confused.
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Worth tuning in: Rod Oram is on Nine to Noon right now talking about Key's economic direction. Key was interviewed in the first hour, but no audio on the site yet.