Category: imported_guest
I dislike the Maori seats, which are both racist and undemocratic. Introduced as a short-term measure, they should have been abandoned decades ago. Why not allocate Asian, left-handers, Pacific Islanders or even homosexuals special seats.
It would be nice to believe that the current election campaign would consist of well-informed debate on important issues. Ideally, there would be a good airing of the best alternative policies. Politicians, armed with the facts, would debate openly without being tied to agendas, hidden or otherwise. Let’s be honest, though. That is not what is happening. Nevertheless, according to some theories, the world is rational, everyone is logical, and there is no false information!
Engaging a panelbeater to design an intersection is unwise. It is equally silly to leave to arrogant and at times duplicitous parliamentarians unfettered control of the voting system of which they are beneficiaries.
It’s all a bit unreal, the credit crunch, but if there’s a message coming out of it, it’s engraved on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe: Don’t Panic.
The idea that the US financial crisis presages the end of capitalism – the dream of Marxists down the ages – doesn’t pass the laugh test. It took no time for local members of the anti-capitalist brigade to appear from under stones. Trade unionist Matt McCarten told us in the Herald on Sunday of 28 September that “free market capitalism doesn’t work and never has”. Presumably he thinks China ’s amazing success in lifting millions out of poverty over the last 30 years stems from rigid adherence to communist economic principles!
National sovereignty remains a vexed issue across the world. In the contemporary climate sympathetic to the ambiguity which gives rise to such a contradictory notion as the international community the very notion of national sovereignty is ironic.
In an op-ed in a Polish weekly I commented recently on a remarkable decrease of global temperature in 2008, and over the past decade. Not surprisingly the op-ed evoked a strong reaction from Polish co-workers of IPCC, denying the existence of cooling. Surprising, however, was that the criticism dwelled upon a “global climatic conspiracy”, and “colossal international plot”. I did not use these words nor even hinted at such an idea. The idea was probably apparent from the data and facts I presented, showing weaknesses of the man-made global warming hypothesis. Without irrational political or ideological factors, it is really difficult to understand why so many people believe in human causation of the Modern Warm Period, which was never plausibly proved by scientific evidence. Some of these factors I will discuss here.
Many years ago when I first joined the staff of a teacher’s college, education practice in the primary sector was dominated by the notion of ‘open-plan’. No more single-cell classrooms. Instead, there would be large, well-resourced, open spaces with several teachers offering their different expertise to a much larger, broadly structured group of students. At a Board of Studies meeting, early in my time at the college, someone (not me) asked ‘what were the supposed benefits of the model’, since there were some obvious disadvantages in terms of order and the quality of the learning environment. A couple of senior colleagues undertook to do the research. They reported at a subsequent meeting that there was little evidence that open-plan was better and (as the questioners had supposed) substantial evidence of disadvantage.
There is currently a growing body of literature being produced by scholars in many parts of the world which suggests that traditional cannibalism – of the sort that was practiced by Maori in New Zealand – either never occurred at all, or that if it did, it was done to perform for Europeans, and was not a part of the true culture of those ‘performers’. This sort of historical revisionism seems to elevate the novelty of an academic position above what I have always considered to be the primary object of any historical endeavour: to try to move closer to what Gibbon termed ‘the naked, unblushing truth’ of the past.
The major impediment to growth in New Zealand is our poor productivity performance. With the general election approaching, the New Zealand Chambers of Commerce ( NZCCI ) has just released its three-yearly Election Manifesto and we have decided to focus on the policies needed to correct this poor productivity performance. This document provides a pragmatic stance on business and economic policy issues for political parties to consider - both before and after the election – if we are to improve our productivity growth rate.
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