2008 June

What National May Bring

Over at Scoop, Gordon Campbell continues his most excellent analysis, tea-leaf reading, crystal ball gazing, kremlinology and other such methods to try and divine what policies a National-lead government might grace our country with, should they win the upcoming election.

He’s split it into two parts because of the sheer amount of information (never thought you’d hear that about National’s Policy, eh?). Part 1 focuses on Education, Health, Economy and Law & Order while Part 2 tackles Telecommunications, Environmental Policies and Industrial Relations.

Well worth a read, for people on both sides of the fence and especially for those still sitting on it.

Take #2: Smacktion!

photo credit: ersatzspeiche

Don’t be fooled by the Kiwi Party, they are in fact just the Destiny Party in rather poor drag. Which is blatently obvious by the fact that they’re next to Family Fist – right behind the attempt to repeal the anti-smacking law.

They’ve managed to scrounge up enough signatures to submit it again, mostly I hear by picketing events like rugby games. Fair enough, nothing wrong with a bit of democracy! It’s also likely the referendum will happen at the same time as the election, although I imagine that the Labour party will fight tooth and nail to postpone it – possibly to make it Nationals problem to deal with this shitfight.

First things first, remember that this bill wasn’t scraped through parliament with opposition, both major parties and a few minor ones voted for with a very small minority against. Do we not live in a representative democracy?

What I don’t get is why the religious fundies persist with their “Save the fetus, thrash the child” policy? Why is it the Family Fist’s and the Kiwi Parties that get behind this kind of stuff?

Anyway, Stuff has a look at things:

Kiwi Party Leader Larry Baldock handed over more than 390,000 signatures backing the call for a referendum on the question: “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand”.

No surprises here. Why not “Should ‘reasonable force’ be a valid defence in child abuse cases?”. We all know why, because they’re interested in pushing agendas, throwing weight around and “I told you so’s”. Unfortunately that has very little to do with actual justice.

Also some very interesting statistics in the article.

Material provided by the Government showed over the six months between September and April police attended 288 child assault incidents.

In the three months prior to this 111 incidents were attended.

Of the 288 incidents, 13 involved “smacking”,

This was up from three in the previous period.

None of the incidents resulted in a prosecution.

Of the 288 incidents, 69 involved “minor acts of physical discipline.

Of those only four resulted in prosecution, one did not proceed and was treated through diversion.

Obviously, statistics coming from the Government aren’t to be trusted. They don’t count the people who’s houses were invaded by armor clad stormtroopers and dragged off with bags over their heads.

From what I can divine out of those statistics, it says that 13 cases were attended by police that involved smacking. No prosecutions made for parents giving their child a “loving smack”. However, 69 incidents “minor acts of physical discipline”, i.e. low level child abuse, resulted in four prosecutions. Four prosecutions of child abuse that won’t be able to use the “reasonable force” get-out-of-jail free card. Sounds like it’s working to me.

Granny Herald Sinks Lower

New Zealands most prestigious, respected and widely circulated news outlet gets its grubby little hands on a copy the lost corrections dossier. Bad News. Even worse is they decide to continue their plunge into tabloid-isim by shirking journalistic responsibility and printing some of the sensitive information contained within.

Corrections Minister Phil Goff was alarmed by the dossier incident. He said the information could be misused.

Really? You mean like published in the nations largest newspaper?

Conservapedia: The Biggest Joke on the Internet

The other day I had the misfortune of stumbling across Conservapedia, obviously the conservative and religious answer to Wikipedia. Since then, I’ve become more and more drawn in by it. Browsing Conservapedia during my lunch hour with a mouth full of food, occasionally stopping mid-chew to reflect on the brazen ridiculousnes of it all, is a common sight at my desk.

So I decided to share the choice cuts of awesomeness with thou, gentle reader, so you can save yourself browsing the toxic mess and go straight to the gold. So without further fuss, “Top 10 reasons to blame Democrats for soaring gasoline prices”: Continue reading »

Rudd’s Labor Brings Back Work Rights

It seems that the Government in Australia are starting to finally act like their namesake, despite a worrying pitch to the right which even had staunch Howard supporters nodding their head in approval.

The Labor-lead government have started to undo the damage caused by the Liberal Party by firstly throwing out the shocking “WorkChoices” package and bringing in a set of Employment Standards to restore the rights of workers in Australia to the howls from the opposition party telling us they “might increase the cost of employing people”. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was the point.

Some standards include a 38-hour work week, lots of changes to both paid and unpaid leave, redundancy and changes to termination laws as well.

Update: Looks like The Standard got here first. With the same links. Damnit. But they do have a link to the actual legislation so peruse at your leisure.

TechTidBit: Try the New Firefox 3.0

Today is Download Day for Mozilla’s new release of Firefox, the big 3.0. Mozilla touts over 15,000 improvements with this new version over Firefox 2 and label this the fastest, most secure browser yet and absolute gold for power users

And having used the beta and release candidate versions for a while now, they might just be right…

With this release, Mozilla hope to reach a new world record of software downloaded in a 24 hour period. We’re almost 8 hours into it so far and have almost 2.5 million downloads, about half of the 5 million they hope to achieve. You can track the progress here although their counter is not quite up to date. Also, their site is taking an absolute hammering at the moment so you might need to be patient.

I have to say that Mozilla has done an excellent job marketing Firefox, from sponsoring events to a full grassroots campaign named SpreadFireFox they are actually taking back the web and showing how things can be done in the nu-media. With valuable partnerships with companies such as Google, it goes to show that even free software can make great money!

If you want to give it a shot, and you should especially if you’re still using Internet Exploder, you can grab it here. If you like Firefox, You might also be interested in their mail application Thunderbird.

The A-Word

A cunningly-timed attack on the current state of New Zealand abortion laws by a pro-life group has set the blogosphere abuzz. Obviously, their idea is to target this issue as an “election issue” and pull the stake out of this nightmare for the next election, much like ACT have done with Roger Douglas.

I will not spout my my views on abortion here, as they have been repeated ad nausium throughout the liberal blogs and even on Kiwiblog. Ultimately, in my opinion, it’s not an issue of “killing babies”, it’s an issue of woman’s rights.

Also, note that this is not a partisan issue. If anything becomes of this it will be a conscience vote in Parliament and then it’d be a case of knowing your MP and where he or she stands on the issue, regardless of the party line.

An interesting link from Ari’s post on Still Trucking is an essay from the New York Times called “The Bad Old Days” which I had stumbled across a few days earlier. This article is a very difficult read but I believe an important one.

So I’ll leave this here with some other very interesting links which are well worth a read. A Change of Heart is a very brave account by a woman who was pro-life but has since recognised that choice is the most important. The other article is titled “The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion” which consists of a series of accounts and anecdotes from clinic staff who treat the women who take the choice they would deny other women. This is a very eye-opening read about the drives of such people and well worth 10 minutes of your time to check out.

National Poll Dancers

Hillary Expected to Drop Out

photo credit: Litandmore

Hillary Clinton, in the running for Democratic Party nominee, is expected to drop out on Tuesday night. She has summoned her top donors and supporters together on Tuesday night where she is expected to step down and endorse narrow front-runner Barack Obama.

From the Huffington Post article:

Obama and Clinton spoke Sunday night and agreed that their staffs should begin negotiations over post-primary activities, according to reliable sources. In addition to seeking Obama’s help in raising money to pay off some $20 million-plus in debts, Clinton is known to want Obama to assist black officials who endorsed her and who are now taking constituent heat, including, in some cases, primary challenges from pro-Obama politicians.

It’s been common knowledge for a while that Hillary’s campaign is straining under mounting debt. It’s interesting that Obama’s campaign will be assisting with paying down the debt in the Hillary campaign which I’m sure that some may interpret as a bribe. Since the last few primaries, there was no conceivable way for Hillary to make up the candidates she needed to take the nomination (even with the MA/FL vote backtrack) so this is actually the best course of action.

Some doubt Obama’s ability to go up against the Republican machine of fear, uncertainty, doubt and spin but his job is going to be made all the more harder with the polarising and cult of personality politics that Hillary has been playing by dragging out her failed campaign. Unfortunately there are some very unsavory, extremist supporters (on both sides of the fence) that will make things a lot more difficult than they needed to be for the Democratic Party who need unity, but instead end up with a split down the middle fanbase.

Now that she’s out of the way, someone’s going to have to deal with Ralph Nader who has reared his ugly head again as an independent threatening to split the democratic vote again.

Keith Ng Cuts the Cheese

Keith Ng has been running a series of posts disputing and correcting facts spurted by our beloved politicians. The basic premise being is that our ministers and spokespeople have research units to deliver them the facts which they frequently ignore and “pull the figures out of their compost heap”.

This morning, Keith delivers a severe fisking to the Greens and other cheese-mongers with the morning milk.

Trumping the Herald’s “28% price rise”, Jeanette Fitzsimons has taken whinge-mongering to new heights with her claim that there has been 60% rise in the price of milk (and that Fonterra and the supermarkets are to blame).

It’s not true. It’s really, really not true.

According to StatsNZ’s Food Price Index, the average price of 2 litres of milk in April 2008 was $3.22. The price in April 07 was $2.62. That gets us to 28% — let’s chalk that other 32% up to rounding error, eh? But how about we look over the slightly longer term?

2008: $3.22
2007: $2.62
2006: $3.15
2005: $3.12
2004: $2.96

Even ignoring the fact that Fitzsimons pulled the 60% figure out of her compost heap, her claim is still fundamentally bullshit. If we choose *any* point of comparison other than 2007, the current price of milk is completely and utterly un-goddamn-remarkable.

There needs to be more of this kind of fact checking to keep our politicians honest. Unfortunately, this kind of analysis frequently gets swept under the rug and doesn’t get to the people that were influenced, further adding to the axiom “A lie can run around the world before the truth gets it’s boots on”.

This is the work the mainstream media should be doing. This is the job of a journalist or a reporter to fact check information before they regurgitate party press releases to the people in extenso, not the job of a blogger with the reach of a small-town rag.