Interesting piece from Campbell Live this evening on the disbanding of E-Can and the disenfranchising of the province with the cancellation of the 2010 election. Good to see the significance of this decision finally being recognised by national media. Remember Nick Smith said one of the reasons he did this was because he was ‘wary of the outcome’ of the election. And it was all done under urgency. In the circumstances you can understand why one of the Councillors in the story feels under National and ACT she is living in a dictatorship.
Dictatorship
And of course, the news clip didn’t mention the minister’s potential conflict of interest involving his brother.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/national/3607131/Minister-criticised-for-role
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/3599207/Sacking-right-decision
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10639684
And not the 1st time he’s had a run-in with the law:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/764568
If the conflict of interest turns out to be true, then I would have thought this kind of thing happened in Suharto’s Indonesia.
Yes good to see at least a mention of it on Campbell Live.
The report in the Press today outlines the intent of Carter and Smith to get more water for irrigation 6 months ago – before the Creech Report. Scary stuff!
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/3603344/Papers-disclose-concern-over-ECan-water-rules
Can we please get some civics education happening in this country so that more people are aware of what a real democracy with democratic values and institutions able to work to safe guard the public good independent of political interference looks like.
Testing to see if I am still suffering the interference of moderation from the party that claims to despise dictatorship.
In discussions with Clare Curren, she said provided it is kept clean, ammicable and supported by reasonable evidence the Labour MP’s welcome my post’s and look forward to robust debate. I dont believe any post since has breached what was agreed in that conversation, so why do I find my self once again suffering editorial interference.
I don’t know what time the editors allowed my last post to go up lastnight, but for those who may have already gone to bed I include a link below, have a read you will see for yourselves I am know enemy of the Labour movement, I believe it is the only thing that can save us from the dictatorship we are suffering, but only if it takes a good hard look at its self warts and all:
http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2010/04/21/super-city-a-crime-says-herald/comment-page-1/#comment-47744
Lets show each other respect, be open and honest in robust amicable debate, Clare Curren said sounds good to her, I said sounds good to me, so what happened please?
Hi Iain, basically it was way too long, and that is one of the flags that causes posts to go into moderation. It is then a matter of how quickly one of us gets to look at the comments. Anyway, we do appreciate you showing an interest. We think Red Alert is a pretty open forum, and we look forward to your participation, Grant.
You will get posts moderated if they are too long, and most people will not bother reading them anyway.
I live in Canterbury and have watched for 20 years, Ecan has taken an extraordinary long time to come up with its water plan, which will probably take them another 20 years to implement, in other words it will be worthless. The regional council experiment has failed. The people of Auckland being the most vocal but up and down the country the same arguments are played out. The regional council of Canterbury has proved ineffective in stopping the environmental degradation that has occurred in their 20 years of operation. WCOs are not dependent on the regional council and Labour got a water plan for Waitaki in a reasonable timeframe by writing Ecan out of the process.
Local govt policy in the last Labour manifesto said nothing about this, just mentioning the Auckland Royal Commission. Which should have been a nationwide review. The issues are the same around the rest of NZ, too many politicians and too much politics. I expect National will put LG reform in their next manifesto and it will be implemented and there will be lots of protest but I am one of those people who has detested the constant political bickering between RCs and TAs.
The obvious way forward is that the RC model has to look much more like the DHBs which are firmly in league with their Ministry, if you believe that there is a place for regional councils at all as a lot of what they do needs a lot more help from central government than has happened so far, and some of their functions should be transferred to the central government.
Wow, I didn’t know you could write a post that was too long!
Given the size of some here I wonder how big that post was?
Ya better watch out s wampy those dairy farmers will drain all dem s wamps.
swampy , what nonsense to say the regional council experiment has failed. How ever you going to deal with regional issues of land use, transport, river/flood control and water quality if its only done on a piecemeal local body basis.
The DHB situation, being under the thumb of the governmemt is because they recieve ALL their funding from the goverment. If the central government is going to pay to run the regional councils then they can have more decisions.
BTW Did Tim Smith successfully defend his charges of disorderly behaviour or did he like the charges he faces now, say all that and then plead guilty. The apples dont fall far from the tree when it comes all bluff and bluster
Labour MP Pete Hodgson, speaking during the general debate today, said that in June last year Environment Canterbury, accompanied by police, visited the property of Tim Smith and 21 charges were subsequently laid against him.
Mr Hodgson said Mr Smith subsequently pleaded guilty on all counts.
Swampy said “I live in Canterbury and have watched for 20 years, Ecan has taken an extraordinary long time to come up with its water plan, which will probably take them another 20 years to implement, in other words it will be worthless. The regional council experiment has failed.
The bureaucratic structures are always secondary to the will power, motivations and competence of the people in those structures.
The bureaucratic structures/processes may have contributed to 10-20% of the problem at most.
A closer eye has got to go on to the motivations, competence and talent of the people within the organisation. And especially how they are led from the top levels.
In other words the quality and leadership of people in those organisations matter first and foremost, and a restructure usually just puts the same (or similar minded) people in place.
This is why there is often such a sense of deja vu from the public when the next new structure is announced because the old one didn’t work.
Your statement that the regional council experiment has failed may indeed be true, but the question is, was it because of the structure or because of bad leadership within. (Or both).
But isnt it better for us all to have our water, flood protection, possum extermination, land control etc etc in the hands of the government. They are better at dealing with this than local bodies. Rodney hide is just the man to sort out all of these issues, can anyone honestly see anyone protesting against water issues in canterbury if Rodders or Nick Smith was in charge?
Seriously though, there are issues with regional councils, some are toothless, others are too agresive and most have conflicts of interest, that is why they put there names forward to be voted for in the first place. You cant truly get bi-partisan board members. But goverment should back off, we get to vote for regional councils every 3 years that is our democratic right.
Well this is an interesting discussion. Now that particular review is being led by Guy Salmon, who is a Bluegreen who also sits on the Land Water Use thingy that has been as they put it “torpedoed” by this legislative move.
As you know the biggest issue for Canterbury has been the political conflict between the rural and urban factions. Suppose the RC was split in two as suggested, who do you think would be in control of the South Canterbury RC and what net effect would that have?
Salmon says that five RCs are effectively controlled by farming interests. How much likelihood does that make that these RCs are weak on environmental issues particularly relating to farming? 3 RCs nationwide are responsible for almost half of prosecutions, 2 have not made any.
The Clean Streams Accord is a central govt initiative, not from RCs. None of the RCs have made any initiative to clean up streams in the period prior to the govt bringing this in 2002. Majority of RCs have not done anything about wetlands mentioned in this accord.
Enforcement should be a national function as it is in the majority of OECD countries, take the politics out of it. What means currently exists for enforcement in Auckland, Nelson and Gisborne where unitary authorities already exist?
What is there to stop the local authorities of Canterbury from moving towards UAs anyway?
One of the hardest things to do in life is to admit when you have screwed up and made an ass of yourself. Sadly I am about to do just that. When I first started to post at Red Alert there were some tetchy moments with some moderators who may have thought I am something that hopefully time will prove I arn’t, thats an enemy of the Labour movement, however, developing events have disclosed that my suspicions of the level of moderator interference have been increased by something I had not previously struck in other blogs, including my own. That is the moderation of the length of post, thus I admit to making an ass of myself and unreservedly apoligise for any false accusations when moderation was caused due to length.
I have spent a decade plus gathering research of the impact of foreign financiers upon the economic development, or otherwise, of NZ, and putting it in easily understandable form for the citizens with little spare time, I am now kicking myself because I know that, for some, such a misunderstanding will forever reduce the credibilty of my research.
Could the moderators please advise just what the criteria for length is?
It is sad to hear people say that anything of length won’t be read. We have 12,000 odd years off precedence of history since the age of reason, it is just sometimes impossible in 20 sec bites to qualify issues that require an explanation of what shaped them and how they might be improved.
I agree they must be kept interesting, hopefully I can make mine that, or even with all the research in the world it will be for not much.
Iain, you’re going to find that a lot of people younger than 30 are going to struggle with a lengthier, linear treatise – this is a simple development of them multitasking and training to absorb massive amounts of small factoids in an associative manner in an online world. Not everyone is the same of course, some young people are quite happy to read an entire Harry Potter book from start to scratch no probs.
If you haven’t already check out how Ha-Joon Chang does it in his books “Reclaiming Development” and “Bad Samaritans”; they make a few of the same points as you are interested in.
And yes, highly speculative movements of capital are extremely damaging to smaller economies who find it difficult to manage the economic impact of a billion dollars pouring in over a few weeks and then leaving again a few weeks later. And of course, long term movement of capital out of a country is very bad as well if there are not greater amounts of capital coming in and being retained.
PS to previous post,
I would like to put forward an observation for ammicable debate, It appears that you are only allowed a couple of links per post in moderation settings?
Thus, unlike other blogs I have taken part in, you cant put up a point of interest from another source then link to that source to save the trouble of rewriting the evidence you wish to put that somebody else has already put together, commonsense in my opinion, provided the link names the source.
Having post moderated to a couple of links only compells you to write more and IMHO seems to be out of balance with lenght moderation.
I can here the protectors against long posts growling already, but I respectfully susgest that in a post of this level that is a direct interactive forum with those that might hopefully oneday again, gain the position of first among equals leading the nation, that indepth and sometimes inlength detailed debate would be even more tolerated than elsewhere, not less?
@Iain –
It can get hard if there are lots of long comments, especially on the screen.
Right Spud. To move the page down you have to put down the beer to grab the mouse. You could even spill the beer or drown the mouse.
Hi Loota,
We could drive the speculators away overnight and return stability to the realsector by regulating that all monies exchanged into Kiwi dollars cant be exchanged back for a minimum of 30 days, very similar to what Malaysia did, against all advise from international agency, only to remain the most stable during the Asian Crisis. There would be an initial flight of speculative capital, but Malaysia proved that the longterm genuine dividend investor would come provided you have a stable socio-economic environment, because that after all is a very important ingredient in assets retaining value, they don’t retain value if they are getting destroyed in civil unrest every couple of years.
This would of course only be a good start until we reclaimed our economic sovereignty and started spending our own money supply into circulation, without interest attached, to build productive social infrastructure. When it is said that the US and Britain are printing more money at present, they are of course actually just monetising more debt via the swap the govt bond for electronic bits process in a most inflationary unproductive way. I ask anyone to explain to me why we would go to a foreign third party, allow them to monetise our govt bonds with bebt book entry electronic bits as payment then put the assets built up as colateral, why would we not issue our on money supply, and why would it not be recognised as backed by the very same value the third party was going to accept as colateral.
Loota, you like economics, explain for me this, if 97% of money supply enters circulation as interest bearing debt owed to private banking network, need to borrow to produce, factor debt into sale price, consumer has to borrow to consume, given that only principal enters circulation, where does the money to pay the interest come from?