Kiwiblog

The SST reports Te Papa has an exhibition which includes tribute to Taito Phillip Field for his “unwavering commitment to his community”.

This is the same Te Papa that has a quiz promoting Labour Party membership.

Two issues here.

1) I am very surprised that Te Papa would include any politician still in Parliament as part of a display. It is politically inappropriate to do so, especially with such subjective phrases as “unwavering commitment to his community”.

2) Even if one did have such a display, you think they would have the common sense to remove that part of it once the MP is facing a police inquiry into their actions.

No (2) is not so much the issue. No (1) should never have happened. Active politicians should not be eulogised by Te Papa.

While of course I would never ever condone people removing their clothes in mixed company, one does have to laugh at Antarctica New Zealand discovering a Canterbury University student did a strip a week or two ago at Scott Base.

I mean if one ever wanted a story to tell your friends after a few drinks, how can you beat “Well this one time, I stripped off at the South Pole”.

I think we can presume that unlike Ruapehu ski lodge stripping, one is not forced to do a victory lap naked around the hut!

The SST has a review of a documentary called paper clips. Basically it is about a school class which is trying to collect six million paper clips, to symbolically represent the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

It’s a simple concept but such a powerful one, even just thinking about it. You see the reality is most of us have problems relating to huge numbers, I can’t comprehend how what was then *four* times the population of New Zealand was slaughtered. I can’t relate to that. But you know if one saw six million paper clips and realised each one represented an individual tragedy, then you start to comprehend the enormity of the horror.

A film I must make time to go see.

Nicola Boyes in the SST deals with the very sad litany of Corrections failure and corruption.

* A SST investigation found Rotorua Corrections officers are allowing inmates’ families and friends in the court’s back door, bringing in food, drugs, money and other contraband.

* Police had begged the probation service – run by Corrections – to recall Graeme Burton to jail five weeks before he allegedly went on a shooting rampage.

* Claims by a Dutch couple recruited to work at Rimutaka Prison that officers were being bribed by gangs and prisoners had unlimited access to drugs.

* Claims that a smorgasbord of drugs is available to Mt Eden prison inmates, sold under guards’ noses.

* Reform programmes being run in the prisons leading to higher rates of recidivism.

* Claims from the Prison Officers Association that prison managers turn a blind eye to violent assaults in prisons in order to claim bonuses.

Of all the bad decisions made by this Labour Government, the one which I think was most harmful for society, and the most deplorable was taking Auckland Remand Prison from private management, despite first class reviews, and turning it over to the Corrections Department.

Kerre Woodham writes in the HOS about the CYFSWatch site. I agree with some of her criticisms as they relate to the language used such as referring to one social worker as a “fat pig”.

But Kerre goes a massive step too far when she for not just that blog to be shut down, but “any site that doesn’t identify its contributors“.

That is a horrendous invasion of privacy. It would close down almost every discussion forum and blog on the Internet. Kerre seems unable to appreciate that there are often very legitimate reasons for people not to identify themselves.

And has Kerre considered what would be needed to enforce her regime? You’d have to have the Government force all blogs to register and get approval to operate, with those not complying being shut down.

The irony is that there is a Government which is considering exactly what Kerre has called for. They are considering whether they should make all their citizens blog under their real names. That’s the People’s Republic of China!

If people comment on this thread, please do not slag off Kerre. Attack her views, not her. For my part I like most of what she writes, but her call for the shutting down of any site which does not identify its contributors is just plain wrong.

The Herald reports:

A turf war has erupted between Palmerston North and New Plymouth over which of the central North Island towns deserves a spot on an iconic board game.

The board being Monopoly of course. And the simple answer is neither of course. Mt Ruapehu is a far far superior choice to represent the Central North Island. Hell a gravel road near Taihape would be a better choice.

One can vote at the Monopoly site.

An insightful column by John Armstrong on the Maori Party where he notes that for the first time Maori stand on the brink of gaining political power – rather than just court-derived power.

MMP is about to enter a fresh phase, one in which all the parties represent recognisable blocs of the electorate. The personality cults are on the way out. Jim Anderton must be thinking about retirement. It will be touch and go whether New Zealand First makes it back into Parliament at the next election.

That is an interesting scenario. On the left you may have Labour and Greens, on the right National and ACT and in the centre a Maori and a “family values” party.

Some on the left are focused on that the Maori Party is not pure and is not a party of the left (incidentally they actually do vote with Labour on key issues far more than they vote against) because the Maori Party has advocated for work for the dole. I think it is silly to paint them as left or right (Jordan partly agrees, but then asserts they always vote right in the end) – they want to achieve the best for Maori and don’t care what labels are applied to a policy, so they will support any policy they think is beneficial for Maori.

Now that is not to mean that just because they sincerely believe a policy is good for Maori, means it is and one has to agree with them. They do not have a monopoly on political wisdom for Maori, just as the Greens don’t on environmental issues.

Interesting to read here that the LA Times is “reorganizing the newspaper’s newsroom into an around-the-clock operation with an emphasis on breaking news on its Web site and offering expanded coverage in its print edition.”

For many people this is the age of the 24 hour news cycle. Moe and more people want news more frequently than once a day.

A fascinating story I missed from Wednesday. The Made from New Zealand project is to be launched on Waitangi Day and one of the people they asked for support was John Key. John purchased a dozen limited edition t-shirts in support, out of his own money. He also agreed to a request to attend a media attended rehearsal of building a gaint silver fern.

Suddenly then Trevor Mallard gets involved and says he wants to buy 400 t-shirts. Not with Trevor’s own money you realise, but with taxpayers money. And as Trevor tells the organisers he is looking to buy 400 (with our money) he also tells the organisers to “keep the campaign apolitical”. And suddenly the organisers uninvite John Key.

If you think there is no connection, I have a bridge for sale. And hey it only cost the Government $40,000 of our money,

It’s on at very weird times like midnight but a really funny show I’ve been watching is Coupling.

It has three guys and three gals in it (but is not Friends) and deals with their dating and lovelife attempts. Two of the guys are socially incompetent and provide most of the humour. You actually wince at some of the scenes. Each episode is pretty much stand alone.

One key aspect of the show is it often shows encounters from both the male and female perspective. So a lot of the humour plays on the different ways men and women see things.

If you have My Sky or a another good recorder, worth giving it a try.

The Unlimited Potential function was a lot of fun. Around 60 people there and the five of us all made our predictions. I was first up and my predictions were:

* The big hit of 2007 will be the device which combines mobile broadband, Google Earth, and GPS

* NZ will have its first spam murder: A spammer will be outed by John Campbell, and then be found dead a few days later

* Telecom CFO Marco Bogoievski will be come the Chief Executive Officer, but despite this Xtra will drop below 50% market share for the first time. Vodaphone will be on target to become the biggest telco by 2010

* Peter Jackson will win US $290 million off New Line Cinema, but no studio will then want to work with him. Bored, he stands for and becomes Mayor of Wellington.

In the straw vote only two brave people went along with my predictions. The predictions which got the most support were from Mauricio Freitas of Geekzone. They were:

* Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung will leave the company by May 2007

* Econet Wireless will not deliver the third cellular network in New Zealand, again, in 2007.
It may actually fold, leaving investors with nothing

* Windows Vista released after 5 years of development: it is full of eye candy and some real new features. However, it will fail to get into small and medium businesses this year, and unlike Windows 95 companies will not be pressured by employees to migrate to this new OS

* The MSM won’t get blogs. But they will keep trying by renaming their columnists as “bloggers”.

* The Queen will abdicate in July 2007

The last one was regarded as very ballsy.

There’s several reports on the night online. You can check out what Tom Beard said, Hamish MacEwan, Mauricio Freitas
Ken Lewis, and Jason Dykes.

Hopefully UP will get us all back at the end of the year to see who really won!

Quite a few bloggers are registering for the Virtual Super 14. Andrew Falloon suggested I set up a challenge for all the bloggers who want to take part. A challenge means every member of that challenge can see the scores of every other member. This means you don’t need to have everyone individually add everyone else to their mates list.

If you want to join the competition, the details are:

Challenge name: NZ Bloggers
Challenge password: dpf

Naturally the person leading each week gets bragging rights!

No Right Turn highlights the convictions of two election workers in Ohio for trying to avoid a re-count by pre-selecting “good” ballots for a random check.

It is important to put into context that the discrepancy here was 20 votes in a state won by 118,000. This is not a Florida.

Some people try to paint this as a Republican issue, but those who recall the 1960 election know better.

The problem isn’t Republicans running elections or Democrats running elections but having any politicians running elections.

The United States has many strengths, but one of its weaknesses is the lack of a neutral elections service, and indeed to some degree the lack of a neutral wider public service.

The problem though is not easily solved. The US is a Federation, and it has a constitution. The US Government can not just set up a federal elections service. Elections, even to federal office, are conducted by the States.

Two Select Committees are trialling allowing people to send in their select committees electronically rather than physically having to post 20 copies in. This is to be welcomed and not before time. There has been informal methods of doing this in the past. When I worked in Parliament for National, we would offer an e-mail address people could electronically send submissions to, for key bills, and then just photocopy off the 20 copies ourselves. Of course only tended to do that for bills we were very against, to help get like minded submissions. We actually would copy and pass on supportive ones also.

The current rules would sometimes produce deep ironies. I recall when an ad appeared in newspapers on the reduction of paperwork bill, and called for 20 copies of submissions to be posted in

Anyway kudos to the Office of the Clerk for this initiative.

Hat Tip: No Right Turn

Insolent Prick goes through Labour’s Caucus and List. A certain common recurring theme is found.

Blair Mulholland has a photo set of New Zealand’s future Queen. Almost enough to make one a Monarchist. Except you then start thinking about how weird it is this girl who has never ever even spent an hour in New Zealand will be Queen of New Zealand one day, if we don’t change.

Liberty Scott blogs on how a 29 year old sex offender posed as a 12 year old boy to attend school. Ho even did his homework to fit in. Luckily nothing happened at school but his makeup and costume was so good that two men he met online thought he was 12 and slept with him. So one has the bizarre case where they slept with a 29 year old yet are charged with attempted child molestation as they thought he was a minor.

Michael Earley got assaulted by the driver passenger of DNU511 which is registered to Brooke Sian O’Malley of Glen Eden, Auckland. The Police are notified yet no action yet.

And in a rare move, Cactus Kate praises a National MP – Craig Foss for his blog post re capital gains tax in response to Jordan.

The Family Court has now published (before the High Court ordered them to stop doing so) a chronology of events in the Jayden Headley case.

There are 95 judicial events listed! 28 of them involved a full judicial conference.

That cost alone must be many hundreds of thousands of dollars. I assume both sides were on legal aid, plus all the costs of the Judge and Court.

Then add onto that the costs of the counsellors, psychiatrists etc who have done multiple assessments. And you also have the agencies such as Barnardos who supervised the scheduled hand-overs and were presumably paid to do so.

And finally you have the cost of the Police in relation to the kidnapping.

I would not be surprised if this one dispute has not cost the taxpayer over one million dollars. I bet that you and me have paid for everyone of Kay Skelton’s 22+ lawyers.

UPDATE: According to commenters the father (poor bastard) was not on legal aid and had to pay his own way.

An image to haunt her forever. Mind you I recall watching a quiz show where someone couldn’t answer “Which day of the week does Ash Wednesday fall on”. The quizmaster even prompted her saying “It is not a trick question”. Is there a site somewhere with the stupidest answers to quiz questions on it?

Stolen from Sideswipe

UPDATE: Great thing about blogs – the commenters add value. Appears to be fake, doctoroed from this page.

Jan Cameron moving to Australia because of our tax rules is a golden example of what happens when the Government won’t be flexible. And she is far from the only high net worth individual to have fled.

In this case she actually wants to donate a portion of her income to charity, but nope.

If Cameron manages a 10% return on capital then her income would be around $30 million a year, so that is $12 million a year in lost tax revenue.

This is why the tale of the ten restaurant diners is again worth repeating:

Everyday 10 men go to their local restaurant for dinner, the bill for all ten comes to $100.

If it was paid the way we pay our taxes, the first man would pay nothing, the second $1, the third $2, fourth $3, fifth $4; the sixth would pay $7; the seventh $10; the eighth $12; the ninth $15. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $46.

They ate in the restaurant every day until the owner threw them a curve. He reduced the cost of their meal by $20. Now dinner for the 10 only costs $80. The first four still eat for free. The $20 savings among the remaining six gets split. The men realize that $20 divided by 6 is $3.33, but if they subtract that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would end up being paid to eat their meal.

The owner decided that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill proportionally and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so the second man paid nothing, the third $1, fourth $2, fifth $3; the sixth would pay $6; the seventh $8; the eighth $10; the ninth $12. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $38.

Outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. ‘I only got a dollar out the $20,’ declared the sixth man pointing to the tenth, ‘and he got $8!’ ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got eight times more than me!
‘That’s true,’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks.’ ‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor.’ The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn’t show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They were $38 short!

And that is how our tax system works.

The Herald today profiles Chris Finlayson. Chris is very experienced in the area of Treaty settlements and his appointment to this role for National is great. He will be respected by all parties.

I also like his quote:

Does the party need to be more centrist and, if so, why?

I always talk about liberal conservatism and the party’s always best when it has both those traditions alive and well. Coming back to the first question, the other big thing that’s dawned on me is that regardless of what people might think of the big two parties being Tweedledum and Tweedledee, there are profound differences and I see those differences.

Wayne Brown has set up a blog where he is posting copies of his newspaper columns. Hopefully we may get some additional content also.

Anyone who has flown domestically outside the major cities will know there is no security scanning on the smaller flights, so the shock headline over Sikhs with daggers on a flight is no big thing.

Personally I think it is fine to have a policy that very small regional flights are unlikely to be a target, and have lesser standards of screening. Just as there is also enhanced screening on international flights.

Rod Drury blogged a link to a Rankr site. This site uses Alexa data to show the 5,000 websites most visited by NZers in the last week. It’s great to get some NZ only data.

No 1 is Google, No 2 Trade Me, No 3 MSN etc. Great to see Wikipedia at No 12.

I just squeezed into the Top 100, at position 99. For a non commercial site with just one part-time author I’m pretty thrilled with that. I’m just below the main Telecom site at No 95.

Being a competitive type (ask my friends about board games with me – not pretty) I of course like to see who I ahead of. Some interesting ones:

112 Kiwibank
124 Ferrit (ha – they should advertise with me!)
136 IRD
138 VUW
150 Slashdot
157 Geekzone
158 WWE (take that McMahon)
183 Scoop
196 World of Warcraft
272 New Zealand Girls (my Estonians are hotter
286 TV3
322 newzealand.com (Govt paid $1 mil for the domain!)
488 Computer World
573 Public Address
633 Radio NZ
828 NZ Govt (www.govt.nz)
882 NewstalkZB
1024 Dine Out
1129 Wellington CIty
1162 Greens
1361 ODT
1812 Working for Families (after the $15 million ad campaign)
2063 The Listener
2245 Te Ara (cf to Wikipedia)
3103 Just Left
3149 SIr Humphrey’s
3185 No Right Turn
3753 Investigate Magazine
4876 Whale Oil

They only cover the top 5,000 (out of 100 million+ sites so anywhere in top 5,000 is good). I couldn’t find any other blogs in the top 5,000 but may have missed some.

This tells me I really need to get serious about coming up with a proper advertising strategy for this blog, targetted at NZ advertisers.

The news today that Taito Philip Field is refusing to co-operate with the Police inquiry into his actions is potentially a godsend for Helen Clark.

I shouldn’t give advice which will only help Labour, but I would rather for the sake of the NZ Parliament, the PM does the right thing.

While any person who is being investigated by the Police has the right not to co-operate, it is incompatible with being an MP and lawmaker, to exercise this right and retain their party’s support. You can be an uncooperative defendant or you can be an MP, not both.

So Helen has a wonderful opportunity. She needs to bury the Field issue but needed an excuse to take action now where she has stonewalled in the past. This is it.

On Monday morning she should front up to her weekly press conference and say “Tomorrow at Caucus I will be moving a motion to expel Taito Philip Field as a Labour MP. I expect the support of Caucus for this. It is unacceptable to my party and government that an MP refuses to co-operate with a Police inquiry into serious charges relating to his conduct as an MP”.

If Helen does this, she will gain praise from her party members, the unions, the media and the public. It will defuse one of the few “nasty” issues unresolved from 2006.

I should hope that she doesn’t do it, and she lets the stench linger longer. But to be honest some things are more important than politics, and this is one of them. She should be bold and do what is right. Field has provided her with the perfect ammunition to use against him.

Goodness, even for a self confessed “media whore” like me, it has been overkill the last two days. On top of the three or four interviews I mentioned yesterday, today I am on both Prime News and TV Three News on the CYFS Watch blog. Both interviews focusing mainly on whether it can be easily removed and restored.

Also I will be on National Radio’s The Panel at around 4.20 pm today discussing the publicity about Jenny Gibbs being unable to get a broadband connection in East Auckland.

What was amusing with the two TV interviews is that both interviewers I’ve actually know personally. One flats with friends of mine and the other used to date another friend of mine. Wellington really is a small place!

Bruce SImpson at Aardvark has a CYFS story which is well worth a read. It’s about his dealings with them when his teenage daughter wanted to adopt out her baby. What is especially interesting is how CYFS policy can almost have the weight of law, but without the normal checks and balances of law making.