"I am the Minister of Resources. I look forward to leading the debate, changing the law, enabling gas and oil exploration - wealth development - to take place yet again in NZ. Mining is coming back as well, and if there is a mineral, if there is a mining opportunity, and it's impeded by a blind frog, goodbye freddy."
In diesen Beitrag der RNZ habe ich auf einen Kommentar reagiert und die RNZ hat mit Hinweis auf ihre Netiquette mal wieder zensiert. Diese Zensur zeigt einmal wieder schön wo der Hammer bei der RNZ hängt.
"Mayors sign letter opposing changes to Māori wards"
Go NZ mayors!
"A Hawke's Bay mayor says the government's proposed changes to Māori wards are racist, because councils can create other wards without requiring a referendum."
NatACT First's cancellation of 3 Waters has forced councils across the country into massive rates hikes and service cuts, so they can absorb the rising costs of bringing neglected water infrastructure up to standard. The local government elections in 2025 will be a chance for citizens to reject councillors who bought into the anti-3 waters propaganda.
Political ShowerThought; if central govt sets a standard for something, it ought to fund local government to bring their infrastructure and services up to that level. If a local govt body sets a standard for themselves, it's reasonable for its ratepayers to foot the bill in full.
For example, if it's up to councils to decide whether to supply water and in what condition, they pay. But if the govt mandates they supply drinkable water, they ought to subsidise the cost of doing so.
"A plan to update the system for regulating our media content has been running under the radar for years. Some of the agencies that do it now backed the move to one single body, but this week the government dumped it over fears it could cramp free expression online."
Thoughts on this? My knee-jerk anarchist response is that democratic governance has no place in decisions about citizens' expression, online or otherwise. But...
... I'm aware that in a highly unequal capitalist society, the expressions of different people and organisations have very different scales of "reach". So maybe there is a place for regulation to create and maintain pro-democracy media environments. As always, the devil is in the details.
"We're also competing against a lot of people in politics who come along and say... it's those rich people's fault, we'll just take even more money off them and give it to you."
This is the fundamental lie of neoliberal politics. A total inversion of the truth, which is that neoliberal parties say 'it's those poor people's fault, we'll just take the money off them and give it to you', and they do.
What social democratic parties like the Greens, TPM and TOP say is that people only get obscenely rich because the state allows them to plunder - or does it for them - from funds that could be used to fund public infrastructure and services. They propose that we stop doing this, so the real wealth created by the workers and professionals of this country can be shared fairly across the population, instead of hoarded by a few hundred neo-feudalist families.
A classic example is the food situation. According to a recent article on food rescue projects in the NZ Listener magazine (May 11-17), enough food is produced in Aotearoa to feed 40 million people. Yet every week 7% of kiwis - a population of roughly 5 million - go hungry.
Yet what does the new government Seymour is part want to do? Cut funding for school lunches, while giving a tax cut to landlords, who are - compared to those struggling to get enough to eat - comfortably wealthy.
As I've mentioned before, there was a time when traditional newspapers being outcompeted into oblivion by network media would have seemed like good news to me. But that was when most network media were community-controlled and non-commercial. Locally-based, commercial outlets being driven out of business by corporate-owned propaganda machines, masquerading as neutral 'social media' platforms, was not the outcome I was hoping for.
As others have pointed out, in social media - like the fediverse - what people see is determined by what accounts they subscribed to (or "follow"), and what the people operating those accounts are posting. A platform stops being social media the moment the visibility of posts is determined instead by recommendation algorithms. At which point they become recommendation media.
I definitely want to see social media replace recommendation media as the dominant form in network media. But I've come to believe there's also a place for media where we can consistently find the work of professional journalists. Which means we need, as societies, secure sources of funding for entities that employ and support fulltime journalist.
The big questions we urgently need to answer, are how do we pay for that, and - closely related - how do they secure editorial independence?
The story of the diverse community media renaissance on Aotea (Great Barrier Island) suggests that media storytelling and representation might work better when produced at a local scale, even if it's more commercially profitable at the largest possible scale.
"We don't have free speech in Australia. That's not part of our constitution, it's part of the American constitution, and because of that our defamation laws are such that Ben Robert Smith can sue... and it just drags all this stuff through the courts, and millions of dollars are spent, and everyone comes out of it badly."
First, it may not be specifically protected in the Australian constitution, but they definitely have free speech. Otherwise the government would be free to tell Mumbrella and other news outlets what they can publish, like the CCP can and do with media outlets based in China.
Second, I'm not sure exactly how defamation laws work in the US, but people can most definitely sue if they believe they're misrepresented. The 2nd amendment protections for free speech constrain Congress, not the courts.
"[Current Affairs TV shows] still rate really well in Australia. They do hard reporting (but) they have a kind of tabloid magazine format. Morally, they go beyond the pale a lot of times. There's trickery involved in getting stories. They'll pay money, you know, as we've seen with Bruce Lehrmann. But ethically, they fall short at times and the networks get sued."
#NathanJolly, Deputy Editor, media news website Mumbrella
I watched 7 Sharp recently. It was mostly promotion disguised as news. Not sure we're really getting bang for buck considering what gets spent making these shows.
Those decrying cultural spaces on campus for Māori and Pacifica know very well that "segregation" is not what they are. Some of them were alive in the 1960s when real segregation policies still excluded Māori from many public spaces. Despite being staunchly anti-racist since high school, even I didn't know about these until the recent documentary about them.
"In a modern democracy... You have to have responsiveness and you have to have public involvement in the decisions all the time, not just the time of elections.
What happens in NZ is we tend to go to sleep between the elections and there isn't enough public involvement in the decision-making system. We need in this country much more deliberative democracy if we are not to go the way they've gone in the US or Britain ..."
@scattermutant
> I am a complete amateur when it comes to history or any field of the law. Just spouting my opinions.
Same, same. Keep it up!
I think Rata is profoundly wrong on many points (see the rest of the thread), but counter-intuitively I value her willingness to be so badly wrong in public. Listening to many experts, especially where they disagree, and debating it out in public fora, is how knowledge generated by the work of experts is translated into democratic consensus.
"I think that as politicians we also have to look in the mirror and say; are we engaging the public? Because actually when the issues are put in front of people, and it seems like it's going to be a very important decision and there are real alternatives, turnout does go up."