Nat Radio/Nat Parks/Nat Party

SK isn't this an interesting set of contrasting values:

I don't think much of ratings anyway. Jst under ten yrs ago I was picked to have an AC Nielson box for television ratings and I was stoked as knew Coro and rugby wd have a severe dip and X-games and X-files were gonna bounce up.

Ea box in one household supposedly representing quite a large proportion of NZ viewers. But at the time my thn partner and I watched everything through a projector which had Sky, nintendo, xbox and 3 video decks all running through multimedia switchers. Their technician spent two full days trying to get it to work then gave up saying he cdn't get it to go and I ended up complaining to the company that by not being able to keep up with tech savy people they were misreprestning their 'guess' of who watched the news as opposed to who watched southpark

Haha I always get my heckles up whn people look at my pierced goth person and automatically think I'm a greenie rent a protester. I swing both ways. Hate Sue Bradford. Very Pro Whale. Hate vivisection. Pro gay rights.  hate GE concerned mothers. pro atheism. and dont get me started on social policy and my belief as a woman that woman who have kids by more than one different father shd have to voluntarily agree to be steralised before being receiving state money

So a woman is in a relationship with someone, they have a child, and then later break up.  She then meets someone new, they have a loving relationship and have a child together.  But they wouldn't be allowed to have a third child otherwise they wouldn't get any state money, including Working for Families?
Excluding the likely human rights issues surrounding this, it isn't practical.

I shd have clarified "solo mothers" as in woman who have multiple kids with multiple partners. there are thousands of them in NZ and why shd my tax's pay for their lifestyle whn as a female many of us including myself are quite capable of being sexually active without having child after child. everyone can slip up once... multiple times (including slip ups of choosinf terrible fathers) is laziness

and i was brought up by a solo mother myself

seeing this has become the eugenics thread and not the thread about national parks and national radio and sydney gold coast united national party, I thought I'd add this convincing argument about national standards and league tables.

According to sauce: Torchwood, league tables will be used by politicians to decide which children to give to aliens!

This has to be the achingly clearest example of why we need a quality public broadcaster.

John Stewart and the Daily Show does his bit at calling out talking points media in a country with an extremely low spend on public broadcasting.

that's Socialist talk, where mediocrity and lowest common denominator rules.
Ratings are everything
Donald Trump didn't get to be the MAN BY POO POOING RATINGS
If you can't get advertising your not good enough
Keep NZ Beautiful.

Some things need to provide a service, others need to provide a profit. Is RNZ a service or is it essentially a SOE?

By no means am I a raving leftie, but I do lean left of center. I hate what the Green party has become. I have never given them my vote but I had always respected their presence in the New Zealand parliament as the alternative voice some of our citizens have. Now they just seem to take issue with everything that is being proposed, even common sense stuff - I think Fitzsimons knew that and did her last good deed with the National government - insulation - and jumped ship.

There is no way the current Green party can mount a successful block on the current proposal to mine our National parks. The track record of government initiatives isn't good, and if this is stuffed up then this government will go down as the worst government this century so far.

All this focus on putting us in line with Australia? Why are we looking over the ditch for our benchmark on our standards of living? Are we Australia? It would certainally help the Nix if we were but seriously, lets focus on ourselves for a moment.

But, you get what you vote for. Even those I know who worked for the Nats before the election have jumped ship now. I'm just bunkering down until the next election now - how bad could it get?

Had to travel 'oop north today.  Listened to Nat Rad all the way up and back - very enjoyable and good in depth reporting. 

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/3488434/Mining-in-conservation-land-proposal

Personally, I think we have to make a decision.

A: stop whining because the countries so poor and can't "catch up to Australia" or,
B: Mine the huge amounts of wealth, we've got an opportunity lets go for it

Personally,
- I don't think its that much land as environmentalists would have you believe.
- It wouldn't affect tourism because they're pretty out of reach areas and their are plenty of other national parks. Profits would dwarf any losses of tourism anyway.

Your thoughts?

Great Barrier - hell no.
Coromandel - would need to be pretty out the way
West Coast near Reefton - sure, unless there are exceptional circumstances why not.

It really depends on the situation. I'm not gonna say no to everything, but some places just really shouldn't be considered. I mean Great Barrier - c'mon!

if we want to 'catch up' to Australia
then Compulsory Unionism, 6 Day Trading and National Awards.

why is mining and mining alone going to get us this magical parity with Australia?
framing the argument into such tightly lined parameters is another hallmark of a totalitarian state. We have a decision here for sure, but it's not just about mining it's actually about whether many of us are ever going to develop independent thinking. Rest assured the Government do not want this and neither do their paymasters.

Oz has a lot of wealth from mining...

Become a fan.

People seem to forget we blew a massive hole in a mountain to help build a power plant on Lake Manapouri in the middle of Fiordland.

Manapouri is one of the coolest places I've ever been. And the trip thru the powerstation is awesome :P

Nick Smith introduced this legislation in 1997 saying:

It does increase the protection on those special parts of New Zealand that, as Minister of Conservation, I am delighted to see removed from the prospect of mining, while not going so far as to eliminate the prospects for those areas that can reasonably be mined with minimal effects to provide jobs.

What has changed? Nothing in terms of the special parts of New Zealand that need protection under Section 4. 

But now Kate Wilkinson is a weak conservation minister.

And how will 'we' benefit from this mining?

For starters there is no real idea of the value. We don't know- despite all the feel-good figures thrown around.
Read here:

http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2010/03/23/campbell-the-government%E2%80%99s-greenlight-to-mining/ and http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2010/03/16/gordon-campbell-the-economics-of-mining-doc-land/

Schedule 4 land- National Parks- belong to all of us as remarkable sites to preserve for our children. To allow mining in it is a sale of our assets to private and probably Australian interests. In fact are National Parks are not even an asset we can sell- we have a duty to preserve them.

This is not a step-change, nor is it a creation of a new on-going industry- it is a smash and grab and it has happened to us before. Telecommunications is still a mess because of the haste and lack of care previously shown. If we have untapped resources they won't be getting less rare and of lower value you would think. There is no reason for haste in mining conservation land.

The main Australian export is coal. To China. We don't have any resources like this. And as Foal pointed out the only reason that the whole population benefits from this is that they have a country of strong union based work rights that gives their workers good wages, superannuation, redundancy and  penalty rates like time and a half or double time on the weekend. And more.

Do you even notice that they have taken away basic rights like breaks, wanting to weaken unjustified dismissal protection (effectively extending their 90 day fire-at-will probation) and decreasing the real minimum wage with the last minimal increase.

This is cynical. They think that like their move on ACC we will let them.

I appreciate the sentiment Uber, but like previous sales of state assets I don't think this is an effective way to increase our national wealth. After all with our welfare-for-corporates we pay $225,000 of subsidy per job to the Ti Wai point alumnium smelter already, while consumers have been stung on power prices.

I'll say again

 

Nope. UG has hit it right on the head.

martinb - don't want to get into a commie vs fascist debate but I don't see how workers rights translates into increased national wealth, rather a different distribution of that wealth.

I'm not arguing that it translates into increased wealth- but that the distribution of mining wealth through out Australia is much more even because of it. Australian mineral wealth equals higher wages in fair part due to workers rights, the issue that toppled John Howard.  It's related to the paragraph above about Australia.

It's the asset sales argument there, based on our past records here. Was a bit of a post script, but clear enough in the sentence I think.

Uber gave the example of the development to build TiWai smelter. At the moment they reckon it would be a net benefit to NZ if we closed it.  Sadly, it's a heavily subsidised industry run by a foreign company.

I'm a proud Kiwi social democrat my friend, not an Italian  and pragmatic with it.

If someone says a change is 'revenue neutral' I ask then why do it? And if our National Parks are going to be taken from us and we are all going to benefit I want to know how.


martinb2010-03-23 23:22:20

Right I'm completely behind on all this (live under a rock you see).  So someone give it to me short and sharp - is it just mining for various minerals that are in demand worldwide or is it for coal to burn of what?

Just took the initiative to read the article - appears to be a bit of both.

In my opinion, if it annoys environmentalists (I don't mean sensible, reasonable ones - I'm talking about the crazy ones) then go for it and any profits that'll come out of it are just a bonus.
loyalgunner2010-03-23 23:05:03

Yeah id have to say I dont really know the extent of the mining that they are looking at doing,so cant really comment. Though John Key coming out and saying there will be no open cast mining is a relief.

John Key also said in the election campaign categorically that there will be no rise in GST.

And Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

OK, something more recent... How about John Key just last week saying that the Forest and Bird claims that the Govt were looking at mining Gt Barrier, Coromandel and Paparoa were 'hysteria'.

Point is, you can't take what he says at face value.aitkenmike2010-03-24 14:33:25

Well hopefully he speaks the truth this time. Open cast mines

He was referring to the greenies who were running around like every river in NZ was going to blow up and the media was milking it. Which is a 'hysteria' imo.Michael2010-03-24 19:53:29

If that is the case then I apologise. My understanding is that it was on the report itself.

No you're right Mike.

According to the Herald he was talking about the reaction to the leaked plan to mine our protected National Parks.

see:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10633100
here
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10632200

and here:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10633188

Michael is a tad forgiving.

Well, I still think the media was being a bit hysterical before the plans even got released. Now we've actually seen the plans a lot of the country is actually starting to welcome the idea.Michael2010-03-27 17:48:28

The media has a tendency to hype everything, I sometimes loathe watching the news for the crazy spins they put on things.