Politics

I’m going to miss the magic cloud of Internet that follows me around. (at least, without it costing me per kilobyte..)
_hristine

One of the little perks of my work is getting a better (read: cheaper and more capable) cellphone plan that I’ve had previously. That’s nice and all, and after much deliberation I slapped a small data plan on it. It still costs less than I’ve been spending on my old plan, but I have a shiny new capability.

Sort of.

Kiwis and Aussies will be unsurprised to learn that $10/mo gets me a pitiful 100MB of data; any international reader from the first world will most likely be slack-jawed with amazement. This is a charge rate comparable to Actrix’s rates for international traffic two decades ago; at that point Actrix at least had the excuse that as and that they were one of the first ISPs in the world they were running on what was, at the time, horrifically expensive proprietary Unix hardware and, perhaps more importantly, New Zealand’s international Internet pipe was less than a half megabit for the whole country.

But still. Two decades.

Two things rammed it home for me: LCA2010 where I got to work with a warm, comfortable, CBD-encompassing cloud of 802.11 goodness courtesy of CityLink’s event sponsorship for a week, and Christine’s comment above. In Canada, whose inhabitants consider themselves horribly mobile Internet deprived, she enjoys a 6GB/mo plan. That would cost me $600 per month at the rates I’ve got.

...about the Wellington City Council’s efforts to “ban liquor consumption” in the city, but then I drank half a bottle of Rabbit Ranch’s Central Otago pinot noir. It was very nice indeed, but it has rather left me a little short on the word front.

There are three points that especially bug me around this, I guess:

• As Wellingtonista notes, this will most likely be open to abuse via “discretion”. I disagree with their proposed vector for abuse—I think it’s more likely to be “drinking while young” rather than “drinking while brown”, but the net effect will be the same. Near-middle-aged-me and my near-middle-aged friends will be able to quaff our favourite allegedly classy booze at picnics while our kids run riot in the Botannical Gardens. Twenty year olds will be getting a move-along with the threat of a night in the cells for doing exactly the same thing. This is the sort of thing that stinks on principle, and also undermines the police themselves.
• As they also note, there are ample, often very broad, easily enforcable laws about being drunk and a dickhead in a public place. Of course, they’re often ignored when it comes to socially sanctioned dickheadery (gigs, sports, etc), but it’s consistent with a trend of passing stupid, overbroad laws, usually explicitly intended to be used on “the youth” instead of enforcing existing ones.
• Finally, and this is one the Wellingtonista folks don’t have a hack at, but is the one that pisses me off the most, this doesn’t restrict “drinking in public” or “drunken behaviour” in Wellington one little bit. Is Cuba Mall private? Is Courtney Place private? Nope, but the council gives boozatoriums licenses to spill their shitfaced clientele all over these public spaces. And, of course, bars are all too happy to liquor patrons up and them kick them out when they become too much of a nuisance, leaving them to harass passers-by and make work for the cops later in the evening. If the council were serious about too much booze in the central city they might be asking why I can’t walk up Cuba Mall in the morning with my daughter without having to weave through winos propped up at pubs, puffing away and abusing random passers by for their entertainment. But, of course, those establishments have funnelled cash into the right pockets, unlike the aforementioned 20-somethings, so they’re Not Part Of The Problem.

(To add to my final point: in all the time I’ve lived in Wellington, I have yet—and I know I’m tempting fate by blogging this—yet to be bothered in the central city streets by aggressive drunks in any serious way; the near-punchups I’ve had to deal with have all happened in central city bars.)

…the Brits wanted him as EU President. Although I would have thought that whole “not believing in God makes you the same as a terrorist” thing and the related call for religions to unite to crush their enemies in a sort of latter-day Crusade would have been a bit of a problem.

…on how the Fairfax Group can save some money. Instead of outsourcing subbing to Australia, outsource writing political news to National Party PR people and fire your journalists. After all, writing like:

A high-powered government advisory group has spent the past six months debating how to fix New Zealand’s lopsided and unfair system.

…makes it clear you’re already doing the former, so you may as well get on with stop paying your reporters a salary they’re obviously no longer earning.

A land tax, of 0.1 per cent, possibly included in council rates, could cost the average homeowner $214 a year, raising more than $460 million and would be enough to fund a cut in the top personal tax rate to 30 cents in the dollar.

Yes, I can clearly see that I need more money at the expense of retirees who own their own homes. Also, I can see how it will be much fairer to shift the “tax burden” from “money I can spend” to “assets whose value I have no control over and no ability to realise an income from”.

There's something slightly odd about the sensation of watching the British Labour party overseeing strike-breaking. Part of that's obvious: a Labour Lord egging on the attempts to crush unionised labour is the sort of thing that could provoke not merely spinning in graves, but the rising of the dead. At what point, one wonders, does continuing to retain the Labour moniker become an act of gross dishonesty so barefaced that present generations of UK Labour pollies feels sufficiently embarrassed as to rename themselves?

The other part, though, is history: this is somewhat familiar. We don't have a House of Lords, of course, but our own Labour party went there more than two decades ago, with "Mad Dog" Prebble in the role Mandelson presently occupies. The British Labour party ought to consider how long the New Zealand version spent in the wilderness after it abandoned its base so thoroughly.

The wealth in the Caymans is staggering. Its hedge funds alone looks after $2.3tn (£1.4tn), according to figures last year, and its GDP places it as the world's 12th richest jurisdiction, despite a population of only 51,900.

When your entire economy is predicated on providing a way to allow citizens and businesses in other countries to evade taxes I can't imagine how you'd have the sheer effrontery to ask one of those countries to bail you out.

Let us remember that tax havens like the Caymens are not, as in the case of places like Ireland, offering favourable tax regimes to attract businesses; rather, they provide a way for people who wish to enjoy the amenities of first world nations—healthcare, policing, roading, and so on—while avoiding coughing up for any of those social institutions and services they avail themselves of. They are, in effect, parasite nations.

So good on the UK for telling them to fuck off.

"I fear you will have no choice but to consider new taxes – perhaps payroll and property taxes," Bryant wrote to Bush. "I understand, of course, that in so doing you will want to consider carefully the implications for Caymans' economy, including the financial services industry."

Ha-ha, indeed.

…rusty metal. I can’t help but wonder if the monarchy of Tonga is having its very own Marie Antoinette moment.

Pity the National PartyNew Zealand Herald couldn’t be arsed reporting on what the candidates really think before polling day.

I am reminded of Peter Dunne’s rise as the media’s annointed “Mr Sensible”, followed the same organs of opinion suddenly noticing he’d merged with the half of the Christian Coalition that were too extreme in some their views for Graham Capill’s taste.

Watching Winston Peters give what is likely to be his farewell speech I was struck, hard by a thought: what a waste.

Peters is an excellent speaker. His speech touched on many of the highlights of his career and the causes he cares about; the elderly, corruption. Later, especially on Maori TV, voices were added in support of something he didn’t really mention; as the first Maori MP elected to hold a general roll seat, and the first post-War Maori MP to exist outside the Labour/Ratana alliance, he had a certain inspirational quality as a Maori footing it outside that environment.

If that had been the summary of his career I could feel a real sense of sadness at his passing out of public life.

Instead, I find it tragic. Because Peters, expert politician, pioneer, battler against corruption, and so on, had his fatal flaw: he couldn’t stop supping with racists. The years he spent calling to the anti-immigrant and anti-Asian sentiments that poison some parts of our society were despicable. They helped make the country a less welcoming place for many of my fellow citizens, and he helped legitimise the some of the basest elements of politics. It will forever tarnish his name, and rightly so; it could all have been so different, and that’s the tragedy of it.

I would like to miss Winston. But I cannot.

I hear that Labour are considering Phil Goff as the new leader of the parliamentary party. I guess that seals 6 years for the National-ACT coalition, then.