Posts by Emma Hart
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AndNZ First have said they want a referendum. I said some words. But actually, this takes out a few definite 'no' votes. Eight.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Lilith __,
Cycling through the Park would be much less exciting without that frisson of danger! :-)
The number of times I either fell in a bunker or got sprayed by the automatic sprinklers short-cutting through the park in the dark...
But yeah, the golf course is bizarre. You'd never be able to do that now if it weren't already there.
Lancaster Park is also just a short walk from the CBD, and could be a dedicated cricket ground.
Something needs to be done with that space, for sure. But it's not just that the stands of the stadium are munted, the ground - the actual Lancaster Park - is too. Rebuilding a cricket ground there could turn out to be more expensive than starting from scratch. I guess the same goes for what might have been the ideal place for it - the pitches at QEII.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The idea of a test-quality cricket ground on Hagley Park, a short walk from the CBD, also seems appealing
I seem to be the person in Chch who's in favour of the Hagley Oval upgrade. A proper for-real test cricket venue in Christchurch? Yes fucking please. Auckland doesn't currently have an international test ground. Parking is a concern, yeah, but there's no street parking round the Basin Reserve, either.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Idiot Savant,
Any marriage celebrant who refuses to solemnise the marriage of a non-Catholic is unlawfully discriminating on the basis of religion
That's the civil function, though, right? From a religious point of view, marriage is a sacrament, and the state can no more dictate whom they administer that it to than they can Last Rites.
And the sacrament should be the only thing the churches are worried about. But that would mean admitting that it has no legal status whatsoever, that "marriage" is just the bit where you sign the piece of paper. The rest is a "wedding". Churches do weddings.
So, a Catholic priest or an Anglican minister can say, "No, we're not going to bless your union with our sacrament, in our church." But currently that person is also, automatically, a civil celebrant. And in that capacity, they can't refuse to perform the state function (witnessing the marriage certificate) on the basis of sexual orientation.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
"please don't make the poor petal's martyr complex any bigger".
Yeah, I agree, and this is where I diverge from a few close friends and allies. If "we" play dirty on "them", all we actually do is get them sympathy. The people who were signing their petition "J. Iscariot", etc, now that's a great protest. It makes them look ridiculous without actually damaging them in any way they could complain about.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Gee,
Hoorah! (forgive me if she's said this publicly in the last day or two and I didn't see it.)
I am gob-smacked, Gee, well done. And yeah, at least as of this morning she was still down at marriageequality as being "unknown".
Given she voted in favour of defining marriage as being 'one man one woman'... well, something has changed.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Stewart,
If/when the bill gets passed and same-sex marriage is legal in Aotearoa, will churches be forced to enact the ceremonies?
No. They're already not forced to enact opposite-sex marriage ceremonies they disapprove of - ie the Catholic church is allowed to refuse to marry non-Catholics.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The current government loathe public transport, especially if it's seeking money for capital expenditure.
The light rail proposal for Chch - what people here call the Monorail - was... not your best example, though. If we were going to do rail for Chch, it should run to the growing commuter towns in Kaiapoi and Rolleston, and would mean moving the railway station back to the central city from its ridiculous location in Riccarton. The proposal in the draft plan was basically a city bus on rails.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's as is it's easier to draw plans with Big Things in them than to envisage how people might actually live in the new city.
This.
My problems are not so much with the details of the plan, as how this has been done, and how it will be. I mean, we had a plan for the Central City ages go, remember that? The council did it, and then the govt said, we're taking over and for a start you won't be needing the section that provides regulatory framework. Even on the Campbell Live piece last night they were talking about how the Free Market would "provide diversity". Yes, because that's how you get good urban design, the Free Market.
I am slightly concerned that, without top-down integration, we'll have the problem we had before, of areas where there's nothing for people who actually live here, big buildings that are empty most of the time. The convention centre, the stadium. The first plan talked about "pocket parks". Now we have this huge stretch of "green space" - with a desperately-needed playground, thankfully - but what's that space going to be like to negotiate at night?
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Russell Brown,
He's left himself a little out, but it does look like he's on board.
It does, though as Keith said on Twitter this morning;
I appreciate that he said it. I wish he’d done it immediately, because one gets a finger-in-the-wind impression now.
And, Colin Craig is going to burn a bunch of money on a campaign to "look intelligently at the differences between homosexual parenting and a Mum and a Dad". "Homosexual parenting". This should be hysterical.