Sorry not sorry

The only reason a senior MP would go on a hiding to nothing by standing in an electorate he couldn’t possibly win would be if he was desperately seeking publicity.

Labour’s Epsom candidate David Parker must have thought the strategy wasn’t working so he sought more publicity by asking for a guest post on Kiwiblog.

He was given plenty of rope. He didn’t hang himself but he did tangle himself up with it and fall flat on his face when he said the Sensible Sentencing Trust had bought a place on Act’s list for David Garrett through a large donation to the party.

It must be a difficult concept for a leftwing politician, so used to unions, to grasp. But most lobby groups are not politically aligned and don’t donate to political parties.

The SST and Act Party both immediately refuted the statement.

As soon as the lie was exposed, blog host David Farrar posted an update saying the statement was wrong.

Very belatedly Parker asked for this to be added:

Garth McVicar has today (25 October) said that the Sensible Sentencing Trust has not made donations of money to any political party, including Act. It appears from his statement that the only gift the Trust itself made to Act was David Garrett. What donations, if any, came from members of the so-called Sensible Sentencing Trust to Mr Garrett or Act  I do not know.

That’s a very sorry example of how to show you’re not sorry.

No voluntary organisation can control what its members do with their own money and what they do as individuals is their own business unless they choose to publicise it.

Had anyone made a large donation the party is required by law to declare it.

It would be difficult to know if an individual donor was a member of the SST or any other organisation unless they said so. Most voluntary organisations respect the privacy of their members and don’t make their membership public.

I don’t know enough about the law to know if what was written was actionable.

But like most not-for-profit groups , largely run on the goodwill of volunteers, the SST will need every cent it raises for its own work and this slur on its integrity will damage its ability to fund raise.

However, the greater damage is that which was self-inflicted. Mud spatters the one who throws it and this episode has left Parker looking both petty and dirty.

Top two inches

Labour’s decision to have no campaign launch is possibly the first time in history that a political party has given up the opportunity to get a wee bit of free publicity.

It might be lack of money, it might be the inability to muster sufficient troops, it might be fear that a campaign launch would do more harm than good.

Whatever it is, it’s a peculiar strategy and the launch isn’t the only thing that is missing from Labour’s campaign.

The top two inches are missing from the photos of several candidates on the party’s hoardings.

Is it artistic perspective, or a subliminal message about the intellectual rigor that’s missing from the party as evidenced by its campaign strategy and back to the 70s policy?

October 27 in history

312  Constantine the Great was said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross.

939 Edmund I succeeded Athelstan as King of England.

1275  Traditional founding of the city of Amsterdam.

1524 Italian Wars: The French troops laid siege to Pavia.

1553  Condemned as a heretic, Michael Servetus was burned at the stake.

1644  Second Battle of Newbury in the English Civil War.

1728 James Cook, British naval captain and explorer, was born (d. 1779).

1795  The United States and Spain signed the Treaty of Madrid, which established the boundaries between Spanish colonies and the U.S.

1811 Isaac Singer, American inventor, was born (d. 1875).

1838  Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued the Extermination Order, which ordered all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated.

1858  Theodore Roosevelt, 26th USA President, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was born (d. 1919).

1870 Marshal François Achille Bazaine with 140,000 French soldiers surrendered to Prussian forces at Metz in one of the biggest French defeats of the Franco-Prussian War.

1904 The first underground New York City Subway line opened.

1914  Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet, was born (d. 1953).

1914   The British super-dreadnought battleship HMS Audacious (23,400 tons), was sunk off Tory Island by a minefield laid by the armed German merchant-cruiser Berlin.

1916  Battle of Segale: Negus Mikael, marching on the Ethiopian capital in support of his son Emperor Iyasus V, was defeated by Fitawrari abte Giyorgis, securing the throne for Empress Zauditu.

1922  A referendum in Rhodesia rejected the country’s annexation to the South African Union.

1924  The Uzbek SSR was founded in the Soviet Union.

1932  Sylvia Plath, American poet, was born (d. 1963).

1939 John Cleese, British actor and writer, was born.

1943  New Zealanders from 8 Brigade, New Zealand 3rd Division, helped their American allies cleared Mono Island of its Japanese defenders.

1945  Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, President of Brazil, was born.

1948  Léopold Sédar Senghor founded the Senegalese Democratic Bloc.

1950 Fran Lebowitz, American writer, was borhn.

1953  British nuclear test Totem 2 was carried out at Emu Field, South Australia.

1954  Benjamin O. Davis Jr. became the first African-American general in the United States Air Force.

1958  Simon Le Bon, English singer (Duran Duran), was born.

1958  Iskander Mirza, the first President of Pakistan, was deposed in a bloodless coup d’état by General Ayub Khan, who had been appointed the enforcer of martial law by Mirza 20 days earlier.

1961  NASA launched the first Saturn I rocket in Mission Saturn-Apollo 1.

1962  Major Rudolf Anderson of the United States Air Force became the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane was shot down in Cuba by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile.

1964  Ronald Reagan delivered a speech “A Time for Choosing” which luanched his political career.

1967  Catholic priest Philip Berrigan and others of the Baltimore Four protest the Vietnam War by pouring blood on Selective Service records.

1970  Alama Ieremia, All Black, was born.

1971  The Democratic Republic of the Congo was renamed Zaire.

1973  The Cañon City meteorite, a 1.4 kg chondrite type meteorite, struck in Fremont County, Colorado.

1981 The Soviet submarine U 137 ran aground on the east coast of Sweden.

1986  The British government suddenly deregulated financial markets, leading to a total restructuring of the way in which they operated in the country, in an event referred to as the Big Bang.

1988   Ronald Reagan decided to tear down the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow because of Soviet listening devices in the building structure.

1991 Turkmenistan achieved independence from the Soviet Union.

1992  United States Navy radioman Allen R. Schindler, Jr. was murdered by shipmate Terry M. Helvey for being gay.

1994  The U.S. prison population topped 1 million for the first time.

1994 Gliese 229B was the first Substellar Mass Object to be unquestionably identified.

1997 October 27, 1997 mini-crash: Stock markets around the world crashed because of fears of a global economic meltdown. The Dow Jones Industrial Average  fell 554.26 points to 7,161.15. For the first time, the New York Stock Exchange activated its “circuit breakers” twice during the day eventually making the controversial move of closing the Exchange early.

1999  Gunmen opened fire in the Armenian Parliament, killing Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, Parliament Chair Karen Demirchyan, and 6 other members.

2005 Riots began in Paris after the deaths of two Muslim teenagers.

2005 The SSETI Express micro-satellite was successfully launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

O’Connor for Tamaki

National’s Tamaki electorate has selected SImon O’Connor as the party’s candidate.

A media release from electorate chair Andrew Hunt says:

A shortened selection process was conducted after Tamaki MP Allan Peachey announced his decision to stand aside at the election.

Simon is an active member of the National Party. He has held numerous offices, and managed
a variety of projects for the Party. Among them, he has been a Deputy Regional Chair, an Electorate Chair, Campaign Manager, and strategist, and a list candidate in 2008.

He is currently a Contracts Manager for Southern Cross Health Society, negotiating agreements with medical specialists and hospitals around the country. He recently completed a Masters in Political Studies at the University of Auckland with First Class Honours. He holds three other degrees and trained for several years to be a Catholic Priest. Though he completed his training, he did not seek ordination. Instead, he sought wider involvement in the community to make
a practical, hands-on difference.

 

Domestic milk prices likely to fall

Fonterra chair Sir Henry van der Heyden says domestic milk prices are likely to fall.

That reflects a fall in the price on international markets which is the major influence on domestic prices.

The news comes a day after the company announced a reduction in the forecast payout for the current season.

Do the people who want subsidies for consumers when prices rise also want subsidies for farmers now they’re falling?

Gas returning to essential services including dairy processing

Hospitals and other essential services, including most dairy factories in the upper North Island, are getting gas supplies returned after the break in the Maui gas pipeline.

As coordinator of the gas emergency, Auckland-based network operator Vector said the company was working methodically to excavate at the site of the pipeline break, at a site north of New Plymouth, near White Cliffs.

The work was “methodical” and proceeding in 300 millimetre increments to ensure the safety of workers at the site, and to prevent any further damage to the pipe.

The cause of the weld break is unknown at this stage. Replacement pipe is already at the site, ready for installation once the pipe is exposed.

The return of supply to affected customers is unlikely to be immediate, as systems need to be repressurised where they have been bled of gas that was in the pipe before yesterday’s“curtailment” notice to all gas users other than households.

Fonterra warned yesterday it would have to dump about 30 million litres of milk a day at a cost of around $20m after the gas outage forced it to close 15 of its 17 factories.

This couldn’t happen at a worse time as most herds are at or near peak supply in a season of high production.

There is also concern about the environmental impact from dumping all that milk.

Attention now must focus on fixing the pipeline and restoring supplies.

When that’s done some questions need to be asked over security of supply, quality of infrastructure and the need for a Plan B when normal supply is interrupted.

7/10

7/10 in NZ History Online’s weekly quiz.

The answer to the question on when diesel engines largely replaced steam surprised me because there were still lots of them when I was a child.

I grew up close to one of the South Island’s steepest sections of railway line.

The sight and sound of steam engines building up steam before they began the ascent is one of my abiding childhood memories.

National to tighten bail laws

Justice Minister Simon Power has announced a series of changes to bail laws aimed at improving public safety.

The changes build on work the Government achieved in its first 100 days in office to reverse Labour’s 2007 decision which made it
easier for defendants to get bail.

“This announcement fulfils the other half of our 2008 election promise to review aspects of the bail system,” Mr Power said.

The changes were canvassed in a public consultation document released in March which was open to public submissions.

“These changes are designed to achieve the right balance between public safety and a defendant’s right to be considered innocent
until proven guilty, and to not be arbitrarily detained.”

If National is relected the proposals will be included in a Bail Amendment Bill to be introduced to Parliament early next year.

They include:

Reversing the burden of proof to target defendants arrested for the worst crimes and those at highest risk of offending while on bail:

• Defendants charged with murder  or serious class A drug offences will have to prove they don’t pose a risk to the public or their trial in order to be granted bail, as opposed to the prosecution having to prove a defendant poses a risk of absconding, interfering with witnesses or evidence, or offending while on bail. The reverse burden for murder recognises the seriousness of the offence while
  for class A drug offences it recognises that a third of defendants offend while on bail.
• Widening the list of violent and sexual offences where the reverse burden of proof applies to those with a history of such offending to include sexual conduct with a young  person under 16, kidnapping, aggravated burglary, and assault with intent to rob. This focuses on defendants with the highest risk of committing serious offences while on bail, rather than those with the highest rates  of offending on bail (which may include non-serious or trivial offences).

Improving the integrity of the bail system:

• To confirm current practice,  making it clear in legislation that bail will not be granted in return for  information. Public safety and a fair trial must be the primary concern when deciding whether to grant bail. Bail should not be used as a bargaining chip in return for information from the criminal underworld.
• Increasing the penalty for failure to answer Police bail so that the offence is punishable by up to three months’ imprisonment, in addition to the existing penalty of a fine of up to $1000.
• Reducing the number of  situations where a defendant is “bailable as of right” because some of these offences can cause serious harm to others (e.g. abandoning children, injury by an unlawful act, and failing to provide the necessaries of life).
• Putting the electronically monitored bail regime into legislation to ensure it is administered consistently and effectively.

Strengthening bail for young offenders: 

• Making defendants aged 17 to 19 years old who have previously served a prison sentence subject to the standard (adult) tests for bail, rather than the strong presumption in favour of bail that currently applies (a court may remand a defendant of this age in custody only if it is satisfied there is no other course of  action acceptable in the circumstances, or if the reverse burden of proof  applies). Between 2004/09 more than half of young defendants in this category offended while on bail.
• Enabling the court to detain defendants under 17 years of age who significantly or repetitively breach bail conditions. Currently, unless it is a particularly serious breach of bail conditions there is little police can do to immediately act on a breach.
• Enabling police to uplift young defendants found in breach of court-imposed curfews, and return them home or to a place where they will comply with the curfew.

“New Zealanders have a right to feel safe in their homes and their communities and these changes reinforce that.

“These changes will improve public confidence in the bail system and ensure that bail will be harder to get in marginal cases where the court would previously have had no choice but to release a defendant on bail.”

The changes will result in some increased costs, such as additional costs for legal aid, and costs resulting from more defendants spending time in prison pending trial. The estimated cost for this is up to $4.5 million which will come from existing baselines.

There is a large grey area between the rights of accused people and public safety. These proposals are tough and err on the side of safety.

Payout forecast down, milk to be dumped

Dairy has been New Zealand’s good economic news story but yesterday brought a double dose of and news.

Fonterra’s payout forecast was revised down and farmers in the North Island will have to dump milk after a gas leak shut down processing plants.

The revised payout forecast is for $6.70 to $6.80 for fully shared up farmers, 45 cents lower than the opening forecast made in May.

Fonterra Chairman Sir Henry van der Heyden said the lower Farmgate Milk Price forecast reflected a continued softness in commodity prices and a stronger New Zealand dollar.

“This softness of commodity prices has been reflected on Fonterra’s online trading platform Global Dairy Trade (GDT), which has experienced eight successive price falls – and one uptick – since May,” said Sir Henry. 

Overall, the GDT-Trade Weighted Index is down 15.7% since May 3 when the opening forecast of $6.75 per kgMS was announced.

Coupled with ongoing foreign exchange volatility and overall global economic uncertainty, the Board had revised down the Fonterra Farmgate Milk Price forecast.

Sir Henry said the opening forecast had anticipated an initial softening of international dairy prices, followed by a recovery.

“We aren’t yet seeing the recovery of international dairy prices we initially anticipated and we are also dealing with a much stronger New Zealand dollar.

“Higher prices often lead to increased supply into global markets from our global competitors, as well as reduced demand.  We are seeing this and it is impacting prices.”

The Board does its best to provide accurate forecasts to ensure farmers can adjust budgets where necessary.

This downwards revision is a reminder of the need to budget conservatively and confirms the wisdom of using last season’s record payout to decrease debt.

The announcement was followed by news that Fonterra will have to waste $20m of milk a day after a break in the Maui gas pipeline north of New Plymouth forced it to close 15 of its 17 processing sites in the upper North Island.

The news from Fonterra isn’t all bad, the season has started well.

Good weather has boosted pasture growth and contributed to record production in most of the country, although that will be cold comfort to those who have more milk to dump.

Trade is the key – first steps to FTA with Chinese Taipei

Quote of the day:

Trade is about specialization. Specialization is the heart and soul of productivity growth, which in turn is the key to the elimination of absolute poverty –  Trade Minister, Tim Groser in his addres for the annual Ralph Hanan Memorial Lecture.

This contradicts the widely held view many on the left harbour about the advantages of protection and trade barriers.

The address incldues other gems:

More and more people and communities on the planet have discovered that the competition for resources does not need to involve war, but is better organized through mutually profitable exchange, buttressed by the rule of law, both domestic and international.

What has changed is not human nature, but technology. Because of technology, the opportunities for trade are now extraordinary. It is rapidly falling transport and communication costs that have created the phenomenon of the global supply chain . . .

When transport was expensive, trade had to be in highly priced goods to justify the expense of getting them to market. Now transport costs are relatively low it is cost effective to send low price goods within and between countries.

The industrial model of vertically integrated production – you try to make everything – is almost certainly the wrong model. “100% made in New Zealand”, while a crowd pleaser as a slogan, is absolutely the wrong slogan for higher real wages and a prosperous future.

There will be honourable exceptions – goods that are from top to bottom nearly 100% NZ value added and yet remain internationally competitive in the process. Further, given our extraordinary primary resource strengths, there may be rather more such successful examples in New Zealand’s future than would be the case in most developed countries. But by and large, we need to move beyond this idea of “100% made in New Zealand” to embrace the extraordinary opportunities of the global supply chain.

Local production and independence have their place but they are not always the right model.

This is where New Zealand needs to position itself – as a small, diverse and sophisticated producer of ‘bits’ in the global supply chain. Trade in intermediate goods is now some 60% of world trade; trade in intermediate services is even higher, according to OECD definitions.

The examples he gives is aircraft. We can’t make and export them but we can, and do, manufacture some of the parts which are needed to make them in other places.

The address also highlighted the inefficiency, high costs and general stupidity of the way our economy used to operate:

Through rigid import licensing and massive tariff barriers, we force-fed vertically integrated production in New Zealand for the domestic market. I remember that when we started to scope out the CER negotiation, our exports of manufactured goods were some pitifully small percentage of total NZ exports.

If we could not make it 100% in New Zealand, we had a simple solution: we sent officials and business people to Tokyo or Detroit and said: “pull your TV, Sony-san, to bits and export the bits to New Zealand where we will re-assemble them. And while you are at it, Mitsubishi-san and Mr Ford, send us bits of your cars so we can re-assemble them here in NZ”.

It was a money-go-round and subsidy racket made possible only by having a highly successful mono-cultural agricultural export economy with unlimited access to the middle class of what had been the most powerful country in the world – Great Britain. The moment the UK joined the then EEC, the skids were under us. It was the start of a massive challenge to NZ to build new political, business and trade policy platforms.

It’s hard to believe that some political parties would take us back to days.

If you sit down and ask yourself why have we not made a faster adjustment to this new trading world, and why all those OECD comparative charts have us flat-lining from the mid 1970s you may be underestimating the gulf between the reality of NZ trade strategy yesterday and today.

But ladies and gentlemen, don’t throw in the towel yet on this small but fascinating country of ours. We have engineered a revolution, if you are allowed to use that term to describe something that has required a quarter of a century. And this lies at the heart of my deep belief, that New Zealand is now poised to enter a new period of highly successful wealth creation over the next quarter of a century.

As with our earlier success, if we make it happen, it will be based around superior export performance, and again to the middle class of the world’s most important economies as it was in the early 20th Century. It is just that the power has shifted and we have needed to shift with it.

He then gives the case for rational optimism:

All the ingredients are there and we just need to put them together, piece by piece. I have concentrated tonight on our future as a niche manufacturing and services exporter, not agriculture. Nothing alters my view that agriculture is going to play as large a part in our future as it has in our past and our relationship with the emerging economies lies at the heart of that judgment. I think Sir Graeme Harrison, Chairman and founder of ANZCO, is absolutely right with his metaphor: agriculture is New Zealand’s Silicon Valley. The choice was never agriculture or non-agriculture. We need superior exporting performance from all sides of our economy to build our future.

Quite – agriculture is one of our strengths and given our natural advantages in converting grass to protein for a hungry world, it will continue to be so. But we shouldn’t have all our eggs in the agricultural basket.

Of course we need to see our way through this current deeply difficult international situation in the developed world, and we will. And of course we will need consistently sophisticated leadership from our political, business, farming and technology leaders to build successfully on this new trading platform. These leaders need to be looking through the front windscreen to where we are going as a country, not the rear-vision mirror at where we have been.

Central to this new trading platform are our trading relationships with the emerging economies. The bedrock here is our relationship with Australia, the CER and the wider economic relationship around the CER.

The next most important trading partner is China.

We are uniquely well placed to build that economic relationship, because we are the only developed country in the world to have a comprehensive FTA with the world’s second largest economy.

But we also, intriguingly, are the only country in the world to have a matching comprehensive FTA with the second element in the wider Chinese economic area – our FTA with Hong Kong, which we signed in 2009. And tonight I am delighted by the news that we have initiated the first step that may lead us in a year or so being the first economy in the world, other than China itself of course, to join the three points in the Chinese economic triangle together.

Tonight I have issued a brief press statement welcoming a sparsely worded press release from the New Zealand Commerce and Industry Office in Taipei (NZCIO) and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Wellington announcing that they had agreed to explore the feasibility of an economic cooperation agreement between New Zealand and the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu (Chinese Taipei).

To use its WTO nomenclature, Chinese Taipei is an important trading partner for New Zealand and even after its WTO accession maintains a number of high barriers to our exports.

New Zealand signed a FTA with China in 2008 and a Closer Economic Partnership with Hong Kong in 2009. The FTA with China has been spectacularly successful.

I am hopeful that any eventual economic cooperation agreement with Chinese Taipei will see substantial growth in exports to this important economy. It is not just important for our goods exporters. It is an important source of tourists, students and investment as well.

This is both a trade and diplomatic coup. Relations between Beijing and Taipei are at best delicate and talking to one has in the past required ignoring the other.

That our FTA with China has been so successful and that we are now taking the first, albeit tentative, steps towards economic co-operation with Chinese Taipei is internationally significant.

October 26 in history

306  Martyrdom of Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki.

1597  Imjin War: Admiral Yi Sun-sin routed the Japanese Navy of 300 ships with only 13 ships at the Battle of Myeongnyang.

1640 The Treaty of Ripon was signed, restoring peace between Scotland and Charles I of England.

1689  General Piccolomini of Austria burned down Skopje to prevent the spread of cholera. He died of cholera soon after.

1774  The first Continental Congress adjourned in Philadelphia.

1775  King George III went before Parliament to declare the American colonies in rebellion, and authorised a military response to quell the American Revolution.

1776  Benjamin Franklin departed from America for France on a mission to seek French support for the American Revolution.

1795  The French Directory, a five-man revolutionary government, was created.

1811  The Argentine government declared the freedom of expression for the press by decree.

1825 The Erie Canal opened – passage from Albany, New York to Lake Erie.

1859 The Royal Charter was wrecked on the coast of Anglesey, north Wales with 459 dead.

1860  Meeting of Teano. Giuseppe Garibaldi, conqueror of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, gives it to King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy.

1861  The Pony Express officially ceased operations.

1865  Benjamin Guggenheim, American businessman, was born (d. 1912).

1881  The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

1883  Napoleon Hill, American writer and philosopher, was born (d. 1970).

1905 Norway became independent from Sweden.

1909 Itō Hirobumi, Resident-General of Korea, was shot to death by Korean independence supporter Ahn Jung-geun.

1912  First Balkan War: The capital city of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, was unified with Greece on the feast day of its patron Saint Demetrius. Serbian troops captured Skopje.

1916 François Mitterrand, President of France, was born (d. 1996).

1917   Battle of Caporetto; Italy was defeated by the forces of Austria-Hungary and Germany. The young unknown Oberleutnant Erwin Rommel captured Mount Matajur with only 100 Germans against a force of over 7000 Italians.

1918  Erich Ludendorff, quartermaster-general of the Imperial German Army, was dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany for refusing to cooperate in peace negotiations.

1921  The Chicago Theatre opened.

1936  The first electric generator at Hoover Dam went into full operation.

1940  The P-51 Mustang made its maiden flight.

1942 The Women’s Jurors Act enabled women to sit on juries in New Zealand.

1942  Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands: U.S. aircraft carrier, Hornet, was sunk and another aircraft carrier, Enterprise, was heavily damaged.

1943 World War II: First flight of the Dornier Do 335 “Pfeil”.

1944  World War II: The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended with an overwhelming American victory.

1947  Hillary Rodham Clinton, 67th United States Secretary of State, was born.

1947 The Maharaja of Kashmir agreed to allow his kingdom to join India.

1948  Killer smog settled into Donora, Pennsylvania.

1955  After the last Allied troops left the country and following the provisions of the Austrian Independence Treaty, Austria declared permanent neutrality.

1955 – Ngô Đình Diệm declared himself Premier of South Vietnam.

1958  Pan American Airways made the first commercial flight of the Boeing 707 from New York City to Paris, France.

1959  The world saw the far side of the Moon for the first time.

1964 Eric Edgar Cooke became last person in Western Australia to be executed.

1967  Mohammad Reza Pahlavi crowned himself Emperor of Iran and then crowned his wife Farah Empress of Iran.

1977 The last natural case of smallpox was discovered in Merca district, Somalia. The WHO and the CDC consider this date the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the most spectacular success of vaccination.

1979  Park Chung-hee, President of South Korea was assassinated by KCIA head Kim Jae-kyu. Choi Kyu-ha becomes the acting President.

1984  ”Baby Fae” receives a heart transplant from a baboon.

1985  The Australian government returns ownership of Uluru to the local Pitjantjatjara Aborigines.

1992 The London Ambulance Service was thrown into chaos after the implementation of a new CAD, (Computer Aided Despatch) system which failed.

1994 Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty

1995  Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Mossad agents assassinated Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shikaki.

1999  Britain’s House of Lords voted to end the right of hereditary peers to vote in Britain’s upper chamber of Parliament.

2000  Laurent Gbagbo took over as president of Côte d’Ivoire following a popular uprising against President Robert Guéï.

2002 Moscow Theatre Siege: Around 50 Chechen terrorists and 150 hostages die when Russian Spetsnaz stormed a theatre building in Moscow, which had been occupied by the terrorists three days before.

2003  The Cedar Fire, the second-largest fire in California history, killed 15 people, consumed 250,000 acres (1,000 km²), and destroyed 2,200 homes around San Diego.

Sourced from NZ History Online & WIkipedia.

Thank goodness the ABs won the cup

It’s only 10 degrees and trying to rain.

It doesn’t bear thinking how much worse the weather would have been had the All Blacks not won the Rugby World Cup!

PREFU will show choice is clear

If you’ve been on the Herald or Stuff websites you might have noticed National’s ads showing the choice is clear.

On the left is a bloke in a red hat with a stop sign, on the right is a bloke in a blue hat with a go sign.

Arrows point left to stop and right to go forward.

The clarity of the choice will be confirmed when Finance Minister Bill English delivers the PREFU – Pre-election fiscal update – this afternoon.

When Labour Finance Minister Michael Cullen delivered the 2008 PREFU it forecast 10 years of deficits. Under their stewardship, New Zealand was already in recession and Labour didn’t have a workable plan to change that.

In spite of the financial and natural disasters which have beset us since then, National is forecasting a return to surplus earlier than that with policies which rebalance the economy away from  taxing and spending towards savings, investment and export-led growth.

That is a significant achievement and a reminder that the choice is clear – going backwards under Labour or forwards with National.

P.S.

We have Ruth Richardson to thank for the opening of the books. Until National, at her urging, changed the law which requires governments to open  the books before the election, opposition parties had no idea about the state of the national accounts until after the election.

 

Old enough to marry too young to vote

Sue Bradford is shocked that 25% of people aged 18 to 24  haven’t yet enrolled to vote.

Her answer? Reduce the voting age.

I’m not sure of the logic in this. Without addressing why young people aren’t enrolling, won’t reducing the age just increase the number of young people who don’t enrol?

Regardless of that, there is no compelling reason to reduce the voting age.

One argument for doing so is that people can marry at 16. Those who use that, forget to add that this is only permissble with parental consent.

Besides, marriage is personal. A marriage that goes wrong will have a direct impact only on the couple involved and any children they might have.

That’s sad but the damage is relatively limited, the consequences of bad government impact on us all. There are more than enough older people who are sufficiently ill-informed to impose bad governments on us without adding young people to the enfranchised.

The policies Bradford and her party, Mana, advocate might appeal to young people:

* Lowering the voting age to 16 and including civics education in the school curriculum from primary school onwards.   
*Ending youth unemployment by focused Government support for  job    creation, alongside  free access to quality training and education,    including trade training programmes for young Maori (and others).    
* Abolishing discrimination in the benefit system which sees    young people 18 -24 granted less to live on than those aged 25 and over,    despite living costs being identical.   
* Working towards ensuring  that in future graduating students    enter the workforce free of the burden of student debt.      

But while young people might get temporary benefit, they, and the rest of us, would have to pay the long term cost.

Singing from the same song sheet

When you’re the Prime Minister you attend a whole lot of events and do things which get you publicity.

That’s part of the job and it’s about the position.

It’s also about the person – one PM would be more likely to be invited to the opera, another would be more likely to be invited to car races.

It might sometimes be about the party. A Labour PM might be more likely to get an invitation to some events and a National one to others.

But most invitations are to the Prime Minister as Prime Minister, regardless of who it is and which party s/he leads.

Major events like the Rugby World Cup generate a lot of publicity and the Prime Minister gets some of it by virtue of being there.

It’s not much fun watching it when you’re in opposition. Yesterday Labour bloggers got upset about it and Labour MP Stuart Nash tweeted:

People will get their fill of politicians over the next 5 weeks. Make today ‘politics free’ and a celebration of rugby.

Fair enough you might say until you look at Keeping Stock’s photo . It shows Phil Goff in non-political black but the women he’s with are wearing Labour party t-shirts.

It’s another, albeit very minor, reminder that Labour has difficulty singing from the same song sheet.

 

 

 

Greens straying towards state control of media

They just can’t help themselves can they?

Just as the Green Party was trying to prove it isn’t like a watermelon with a green shell hiding the red inside, it comes out with a media policy that includes state regulation .

The Green Party wants to make independent media watchdog the Press Council answerable to the Government.

The idea, outlined in the party’s broadcasting policy, involves creating a “Broadcasting Commission” that would set, monitor and enforce rules such as minimum local content quotas.

Will that be on all channels and stations or just the publicly owned ones? Will they decree when this local content is broadcast and make us listen to and watch it too? Who is going to pay for it, and how?

Did they watch the excellent series of New Zealand films on Sunday Theatre a few weeks ago? They were funded by the Platinum Fund through New Zealand On Air which got the money National redirected when it canned the charter.

There is an argument about whether there should be publicly funded broadcasting at all. But if we’re going to have it, it’s much better to fund quality programmes people watch instead of imposing arbitrary quotas and funding programmes that would have been produced anyway or others that few want to watch.

The policy document also suggests the Greens would want the commission to have ultimate authority over the Press Council. . .

. . . the Greens would bring the Advertising Standards Authority, Broadcasting Standards Authority and the Press Council into “a common framework based on the principle of responsible self-regulation”.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority is a statutory body funded by the Government but the Press Council and the Advertising Standards Authority are industry-funded independent bodies.

Are they going to give public money to these independent bodies, or will they expect industry-funded organisations to do their bidding?

Either way, the party is straying into the very dangerous territory of state control of the media.

Quote of the day

“Today people feel good, but on November 26 people go in there and in the end they decide on whether you’re going to get the accounts in order and whether you’re going to lead the country in the right direction.” – John Key

The election campaign has been a bit of a phoney war so far.

The Rugby World Cup has taken a fair bit of media oxygen and a lot of people don’t know the election, and referendum on the electoral system, are only five and half weeks away.

In the next 32 days there will be campaign launches and policy announcements.

There will also almost certainly be some off-message moments which get headlines.

On November 26 those of us who choose to exercise our right to vote will do so for a variety of reasons.

Regardless of what they are, most of us will do so in the hope that the parties which form the next government are ones which will take us in the right direction.

I hope there are enough of us who understand we won’t go in the right direction by veering left.

October 25 in history

1147  The Portuguese, under Afonso I, and Crusaders from England and Flanders conquered Lisbon after a four-month siege.

1147  Seljuk Turks annihilated German crusaders under Conrad III at the Battle of Dorylaeum.

1415 The army of Henry V of England defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt.

1616  Dutch sea-captain Dirk Hartog made second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil, at Dirk Hartog Island off the Western Australian coast.

1747  British fleet under Admiral Sir Edward Hawke defeats the French at the second battle of Cape Finisterre.

1760 George III became King of Great Britain.

1813  War of 1812: Canadians and Mohawks defeated the Americans in the Battle of Chateauguay.

1825  Johann Strauss II, Austrian composer, was born (d. 1899).

1828 The St Katharine Docks opened in London.

1838 Georges Bizet, French composer, was born (d. 1875).

1854  The Battle of Balaklava during the Crimean War (Charge of the Light Brigade).

1861  The Toronto Stock Exchange was created.

1881 Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter and sculptor, was born (d. 1973).

1888 Richard E. Byrd, American explorer, was born (d. 1957).

1900  The United Kingdom annexed the Transvaal.

1917 Traditionally understood date of the October Revolution, involving the capture of the Winter Palace, Petrograd.

1920  After 74 days on Hunger Strike in Brixton Prison, England, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney died.

1924  The forged Zinoviev Letter was published in the Daily Mail, wrecking the British Labour Party’s hopes of re-election.

1938 The Archbishop of Dubuque, Francis J. L. Beckman, denounced swing music as “a degenerated musical system… turned loose to gnaw away at the moral fibre of young people”, warning that it leads down a “primrose path to hell”.

1941 Helen Reddy, Australian singer was born.

1941 Anne Tyler, American novelist, was born.

1944 Heinrich Himmler ordered a crackdown on the Edelweiss Pirates, a loosely organized youth culture in Nazi Germany that had assisted army deserters and others to hide from the Third Reich.

1944  The USS Tang under Richard O’Kane was sunk by the ship’s own malfunctioning torpedo.

1944  Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history,  between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the U.S. Third and U.S. Seventh Fleets.

1945 China took over administration of Taiwan following Japan’s surrender to the Allies.

1949 IHC was founded.

1962  Cuban missile crisis: Adlai Stevenson showed photos at the UN proving Soviet missiles were installed in Cuba.

1962   Nelson Mandela  was sentenced to five years in prison.

1971  The Christchurch-Dunedin overnight express, headed by a J^A-class locomotive, ran the last scheduled steam-hauled service on New Zealand Railways (NZR), bringing to an end 108 years of regular steam rail operations in this country.

1977  Digital Equipment Corporation released OpenVMS V1.0.

1980  Proceedings on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction concluded.

1983  Operation Urgent Fury: The United States and its Caribbean allies invaded Grenada, six days after Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and several of his supporters were executed in a coup d’état.

1991 Three months after the end of the Ten-Day War, the last soldier of the Yugoslav People’s Army left the Republic of Slovenia.

1995 A commuter train slammed into a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, killing seven students.

1997 Denis Sassou-Nguesso proclaimed himself the President of the Republic of the Congo.

2009 The 25 October 2009 Baghdad bombings killed 155 and wounded at least 721.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Froligozene - rejoice, be happy.

All Blacks vs Derby Council

Only Monty Python could do this: