Kiwiblog

The Destiny DVD has been cleared by the censor, as of course it should be. Banning speech is almost never the answer.

The irony is that the tape includes a personal attack on the chief censor, Bill Hastings. Why? Because Bill is a “self-confessed gay”. How dare a gay person hold a job! And is Tamaki a “self-confessed bishop”?

Tamaki slams Hastings for the “perverted” content increasingly seen on television. Never mind that Hastings has no role at all in what is allowed to be shown on TV.

It also ignores that any decisions of Hastings can be appealed to a board, and if I am not mistaken the board actually tend to be more liberal than Hastings in terms of what they permit under the law.

Bren has watched the DVD and has his comments on it. Also new blogger Looking in NZ comments on it.

Most of all I recommend people read Dave Crampton, a committed Christian, on how Tamaki does not speak for him, and calls for church leaders to start to speak up and reject him. Hear hear.

With what is basically the 5th of the six public polls (SST poll) confirming things are neck and neck, this is looking to be the closest election (in terms of position going into the campaign) since probably 1981.

Personally I hope Sir George Chapman is right with what he calls his fiteen year rule. Which is every fifteen years, a Labour Government gets thrown out. Happened in 1960, 1975 and 1990.

Also of significance in the poll are 69% of NZers supporting tax cuts, including 61% of Labour voters. The simple reality is one can not deliver an $8 billion surplus and claim there is no room for some tax relief.

I expect to see a few more weeks of assault on the viability of tax relief, and then there is seriously at least a 50% chance that Labour will themselves announce tax relief as a policy.

The final speaker on Saturday was Bill English who not only skewered Labour on education, but also clearly laid out a starkly different approach. Bill got a massive standing ovation at the end of his speech – it was literally a command performance. I would say most delegates are more excited over the possibility of getting Bill to be Minister of Education than over tax cuts.

In the evening we had the formal dinner. I am a sucker for these as I love it when everyone dresses up nicely, and this year it was especially classy. Miss Ten was literally looking Miss Twelve in a brand new dress she only purchased that day, Boblet was radiating warmth and class, Hutt Girl was stylish and sophisticated, and Naki Girl looking very unprovincial and charming in her outfit. It was a great, fun night. My hangover had even receded enough that I was drinking again.

This afternoon, after conference, one of my oldest and best friends – Tory Girl – and I are having a lengthy drinking, sorry catchup, session at the waterfront, as has been over a year since she was last in Wellington. So by Monday I think I will be off alcohol again.

A reader e-mailed me this extract from the Maori Party constitution:

4.4 All decisions of the Council shall be by consensus (Consensus may be defined as “the view of the majority”).

Heh that is so funny. Defining consenus as a majority vote!

Aaron has worked for me for the last couple of years. He is a great guy, and one of the best staff members I have had. He has been taking time off to train for the NZ Ironman which is a 3.8km swim, 180km bike, and a 42.2km run all in a single day, all within a 17 hour time limit.

Why would anyone do this?

Aaron is competing to raise money for people who have the terminal genetic lung disease, cystic fibrosis.

After the break you can read all about why Aaron is doing this. You can also download and read his diary here (600k word doc).

Most importantly you can go here and help Aaron make his target.

The causes don’t get much better than this, in my book.
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A good article at Silent Running, showing why hate speech laws are a bad thing.

I’m on the arts show, Frontseat, which screens this Sunday at 10.25 pm on TV One.

I was interviewed by Julie Hall on Bit Torrent file sharing software, how it works, why people use it, and what implications it has for television studios etc.

Was a fun interview, so will be interesting to see how the whole clip comes together.

Cathy has blogged on why she sleeps with married men, and vice-versa. And also on bastards she has known.

And just because I can, here’s a photo of Cathy at one of the bars in Hong Kong, when I was visiting last month.

Personally I think Cathy should give up helping companies to dodge tax, and become a columnist for a women’s magazine – would be hilarious.

David Slack has put together a calculator which calculates how much people will get from tax cuts, and what cutting various spending areas will save, to fund the tax cuts.

Now David is a leftie, and it is designed to turn you off tax cuts. It does the usual little tricks like expressing the cash to taxpayers as a weekly figure, and presents the total cost as an annual figure, rather than also a weekly per capita figure. It is meant to scare you off.

It also makes some bogus assumptions such as that if one got rid of the wananaga (which I do not actually advocate) a third of their students would enrol in universities and hence almost save no money.

But regardless of all that, I love playing with it. Both to see how much one can get back, with various options, but also the pure pleasure from clicking yes to abolish various daft government schemes.

Great to see Australia using their anti-spam legislation to prosecute one of the major league spammers.

I’m hoping that the NZ anti-spam bill will at least make it into Parliament before the election, and it will get passed into law in early 2006.

Having legislation will not stop spam by any means. However it will be part of the solution (along with education, technical filters etc), and allow action to be taken against NZers who spam, using overseas providers. There are a few of them about, and some are suspected to be pretty major league themselves.

I’m disappointed that the new Air NZ aircraft will not have Internet access. When flying internationally, I hate losing 12 – 30 hours of productivity. Once Internet access is offered by rivals, I will try to exclusively fly on such airlines.

I suspect many people will be like me in that regard, and wonder if Air NZ has looked at the revenue gain against the costs of such a service.

Helen Clark has indicated she supports a change to the NZ Flag. On this one we agree. Have blogged heaps on this before, so won’t repeat arguments except to say I really would like one which is distinctive, even from a distance away.

Heh it’s a great term, and it went down very well at the conference. I can see the term sticking.

Morning sessions has been the traditional attack speech by the Deputy Leader, a ‘do not be complacent’ warning from Don, and a wish-list from Mayor Kerry as to what she wants for Wellington.

Also had the line-up of the 65 candidates (well 64 of them as one is in Geneva!) which should give some nice photos for the media.

I’m actually working (as stage manager) at the conference, so will generally only blog during breaks.

A story this morning in the NZ Herald on the Telecom outage.

As usual, comments get abridged, so I’ll just elaborate a wee bit more here.

I made four main points:

1) Freak accidents do happen where you get two outages at the same time, so one should not be too judgemental.

2) However as Russell Brown has pointed out, greater use of neutral Internet peering exchanges would held mitigate the effects of such outages, as the better connectivity Telcos have, the more resistant one is to such accidents crippling the Internet.

3) Companies which critically need to stay connected, such as the NZ Stock Exchange, should have more than one Telco connection, so if events like earlier this week happen, they don’t close down. The .nz registry for example has connectivity through both major Telcos, and also have locations in both Auckland and Wellington, so that it should ne incredibly rare to ever have an outage that lasts hours instead of minutes

4) Both for reasons of stability, but also to cope with the exponentially growing demands, more money needs to be invested in Telco infrastructure.

Bad = Wine & Beer

Worse = Wine, Beer, Port, Black Russians and Liquor Shots

Worst = Having to get up at 6 am the next morning to be at conference by 7am

This will be a long day.

NZ First has positioned itself as being anti-immigration and wanting to tighten up on numbers and eligibility for immigrants to come here. They even promise DNA tests to prove family relationships.

Yet yesterday they were complaining that NZIS were forcing an family to provide documents to prove their children were genuine?

How can this inconsistency be explained? Oh, it’s easy according to No Right Turn – the family (as in those not already NZers) are white. I can’t disagree with him.

I mean this is the party whose Deputy Leader rails against immigrants, despite being one himself!

Michael Cullen is so desperate to reduce the surplus, that he is now making major spending decisions, just *four weeks* after the budget, based simply on *one month’s* tax receipts being over budget. Even Mickey Mouse would be horrified if his name was applied to this.

I am all for spending more on the roads. But by jeeves you don’t just sit there month by month and say “Hey last month got us some extra dosh, so lets spend it now”. What the hell has happened to budget cycles and fiscal credibility.

Incidentially National’s pledge to spend all the petrol tax on the roads, is costed as part of the long-term sustainability of doing so, not a desperate pre-election gimmick to lower the surplus before Treasury has to publish PREFU.

Now I am a Republican, but comparing the lovely Zara Philips to Paris Hilton is just cruel!!

I can’t resist noting however the irony that next week, New Zealand will be getting its first visit (since he was a toddler anyway) from our future King – William. And why he is visiting New Zealand, the country he will one day reign over? So he can cheer on a foreign rugby team to beat the All Blacks!

I still remember vividly the first week or so after Orewa. Labour painted Don Brash as a desperate pathetic racist for his speech. Minister after Minister lined up to take a crack at him. Then the polls came out, and they panicked.

Now, 18 months on, and just a few weeks before the 2005 election, they have announced they will change more than a third of its ethnically targeted programmes and well over half of the rest could be altered or axed once further reviews are done.

Don Brash, quite seriously, has arguably achieved more for New Zealand than any Opposition Leader of recent times.

He is quite right, however, that it is doubtful the Government would adopt a fundamental change in direction, pointing out it “constantly finds new ways of disguising its double standards on race-based funding”

Let’s recall that this is still the same Government that put funding limits on all tertiary institutes *except* wananga. And look how that turned out. And also the Government that rammed through a law change which legislates for local authorities to set up Maori only wards – possibly the most objectionable separatist step to date.

It looked for a couple of weeks that Auckland Deputy Mayor Dick Hubbard was actually going to get promoted to his old job of Mayor. But as the Herald points out, Bruce Hucker is firmly Mayor in all but name.

I think the statement by Bruce Hucker “There is no problem between the mayor and me” will go down as about as credible as “Peace in our time”.

I suspect there is going to be a huge backlash in 2007, against both Hubbard and Hucker.

This one is only 16 questions and pretty unscientific. Still always good fun.

Your IQ Is 140

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Genius

Brian Boyko has some billboards, including one with my name on it, so I have to link!

There have been so many great designs over the last month or so, it would be great to collate them all together. I’m really too busy to do it, but if someone had the time to go onto all the NZ sites and take copies of all the designs, placing them on one page, that would be a great public service. Maybe a couple of pages – one for the Lab?Nat ones and one for the Lab/Nat/ACT ones?

UPDATE: Span’s got a nice religious one.

One of the fun things about being involved with InternetNZ, is the massively wide range of issues you get involved in. This week has been almost non-stop, and moving your concentration from one issue to another is a challenge.

Monday was reading a report to prepare for a conference call on how to do a Enum trial in NZ.

Tuesday was a (very good) meeting with David Cunliffe (IT Minister) on around a dozen issues ranging from anti-spam legislation to the Telco Act Review.

Wednesday was meeting with the DIA Censorship Office, the Classification Office and Netsafe on helping restrict access to illegal child pornography. After that had a Technical Committee meeting.

Today was a (also very good) meeting with Nandor Tanczos (Green IT Spokesperson) and his adviser on half a dozen issues ranging from open source software to creative commons to anti-spam legislation. Lots of areas of common agreement.

Then straight after that was a meeting with our legal and technical advisers to help prepare for the two day commerce commission hearing in July on the unbundled bitstream service determination. Now reading papers for a tele-conference tonight on upcoming international meetings.

Tomorrow is a full-day Council meeting and membership workshop (as in how to get more members, what should we provide to our members) plus a farewell dinner for the Council, as it is the final meeting before the AGM.

Despite the workload, I’m actually greatly enjoying my brief spell as the Acting President. As I said the range of issues is intellectually fascinating, where it can go from complex technical arguments to talks about European patent law.

Just minutes after writing how I suspect Labour are stage managing a massive pressure campaign to panic National into releasing its policy early, I read Russell Brown saying “If John Key wants to demonstrate that economist Peter Harris is wrong when he says National’s tax and spending promises don’t add up, he would seem better advised to do so by releasing the numbers”

And then I see Jordan Carter saying “SHOW US YOUR NUMBERS, NATIONAL. If this isn’t your plan, prove it. If it is, be up front about it.”

The plan is obvious. Invent the most extreme interpretations of what it could be, have everyone scaremonger on it, and then use the refusal of National to panic and shows its hand, to scream loudly that it must all be true.

In case anyone is unconvinced, have a look at the Dom Post article which quotes from, get this, “Labour’s qualitative research”.

So Labour Party focus groups are now the basis of judging what National will do!!!

I predict within ten days the phony $7 billion claimed cost will have reached $10 billion. Perhaps I should run a sweep-stake on how high Labour will go with its claims. I could see $15 billion, but doubt even they think they can go much past that.

Cathy is soliciting suggestions for topics to write about. Cathy has a capitivating and hilarious writing style, so suggest away. I’ve made my one!