March 2006

Pity Parker has already resigned

by Whaleoil March 31, 2006
It is a pity that David Parker has already resigned as Energy Min­is­ter as he could have gone over the loom­ing power cri­sis that he staked his future on not occuring.
Yet less than a month after his assur­ances we have the experts say­ing ;
[quote]“By all cri­te­ria, the sit­u­a­tion is worse than it was in 1992 and much worse than 2003,“[/quote]
and
[quote]The “pos­si­bil­ity” of rolling power black­outs can­not be ruled out[/quote]
I agree with their final assess­ment, “We might get by with unusu­ally heavy rain, but that is a $660 mil­lion gam­ble. The time is close for action, not crossed fin­gers”.
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is this another disfunctional council?

by Whaleoil March 31, 2006
In what can only be described as bizarre, Christchurch Mayor Gary Moore has sup­pos­edly “forced” a pledge of loy­alty from his coun­cil­lors in sup­port of embat­tled Chief Exec­u­tive Les­ley McTurk.
 
No sooner he had done, were calls from some that the “pledge” had been obtained under duress.
 
The Cheif Exec­u­tive is under pres­sure with some say­ing there is a higher than should be turnover of staff at the council. 
 
Appar­ently Moore is pissy because ques­tions are being asked where the infor­ma­tion could only have come from councillors.
 
Now here is my point. Coun­cil­lors are elected by the ratepay­ers to admin­is­ter pol­icy in the city. Chief Exec­u­tives are employed by the coun­cil to enact the pol­icy.  If a coun­cil­lor thinks that there are some per­for­mance issues then quite rightly they should be ask­ing the hard ques­tion, not line­ing up in blind loy­alty behind what the mayor thinks.
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[cough] Bullshit [cough]

by Whaleoil March 31, 2006
A promi­nent astonomer has basi­cally called Sky TV on their bull­shit excuse for loss of cov­er­age from the Optus B1 satellite.
 

[quote]“I can’t for the life of me under­stand how the eclipse could have blocked out enough light, because the satel­lite must be in the shade for a rea­son­able length of time anyway

“The satel­lite fol­lows a geo­cen­tric orbit, which means it goes around the earth at exactly the same speed as the earth is rotating.

“I think they are just think­ing of things to blame.“[/quote]

 

 
 
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Selective Democracy??

by Whaleoil March 31, 2006

Ear­lier in the year we cov­ered the Maori rep­re­sen­ta­tion farce that the Manukau City Coun­cil was going through try­ing to estab­lish spe­cial race based Maori seats.

They didn’t quite get there, but they decided instead to estab­lish a Maori, for what, we’ve yet to find out. Not only was this com­mit­tee fun­da­men­tally unde­mo­c­ra­tic in itself, but it only just scrapped through on the Mayor’s cast­ing vote.

Democ­racy seems to have taken another fatal blow last night at the Manukau City Coun­cil when the Coun­cil decided to only allow those Maori who are on the Maori elec­toral roll to be appointed to the committee.

The rea­son for the exclu­sion? Appar­ently you can only be a real Maori if you choose to be on the Maori roll.

This effec­tively says to the 13,500 Maori decen­dents who choose to be on the gen­eral roll that they are not really Maori. They’ve prob­a­bly made this choose because they recog­nise the dis­crim­i­na­tory way in which race-based poli­cies are used.

And guess how many votes it passed by?? Yep — just the cast­ing vote. It seems democ­racy is very selec­tive in Manukau City.

- Con­tro­ver­sial issues are passed with­out major­ity approval.
– Poli­cies are based on race, not need.
– And you are dis­crim­i­nated against because of the elec­toral roll you choose to be on.

Its about time How­ick and Paku­ranga broke away and joined Auck­land City!

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B1 sattelite for sale on TradeMe">Optus B1 sattelite for sale on TradeMe

by Whaleoil March 31, 2006
Some wag has put up an auc­tion on Trademe fo;
[quote]One slightly used dig­i­tal TV broad­cast satel­lite. Seems to be mis­be­hav­ing at the moment, unsure what the prob­lem is, so bid at your own risk.

Pre­vi­ously worked fine broad­cast­ing encrypted TV.

User is respon­si­ble for main­te­nance, and once pur­chase has taken place we will take no respon­si­bil­ity for spon­ta­neous de-orbiting.[/quote]

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Al-Herald Editorial: Israel now must talk to Hamas

by Whaleoil March 30, 2006
Why ever for?
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Remember — “There is no waste in the Public Sector”

by Whaleoil March 30, 2006
Remem­ber the election…surely you do? Clark and Cullen repeat­edly say­ing that tax cuts were unaf­ford­able, they only ben­e­fit the rich and that to fund them National was say­ing that they would trim waste from the Pub­lic Sec­tor that didn’t exist.
You remem­ber now?
Well how is this for waste in the Pub­lic Sec­tor ?
[quote]Energy Min­is­ter Trevor Mal­lard and the Greens’ gov­ern­ment spokes­woman on energy, Jeanette Fitzsi­mons, yes­ter­day announced that the four year-old National Energy Effi­ciency and Con­ser­va­tion Strat­egy was to be dumped. For­mer energy min­is­ter Pete Hodg­son unveiled the strat­egy in 2001, along with a $79-million, five-year bud­get, which aimed to increase energy effi­ciency by 20 per cent by 2012, and to increase the use of renew­able energy by between 19% and 42%. But a review of the Government’s energy-efficiency strat­egy, released yes­ter­day, found that the per­cent­age of energy use com­ing from renew­able resources was actu­ally falling.[/quote]
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The solution is “Slug Slam”

by Whaleoil March 30, 2006
Chris Carter fresh from his ill informed deci­sion on Whanga­mata marina is also now sit­ting on a deci­sion whether Solid Energy can get at $400 mil­lion worth of coal.
 
So why is the Con­ser­va­tion min­is­ter decid­ing this? Well because there is a pop­u­la­tion of frig­gin snails liv­ing on top of the coal , and his approval is needed if the plan to move the snails will be successful.
 
Oh for fucks sake they are frig­gin snails, get the bull­doz­ers mov­ing and damn the stu­pid invertebrates.
 
New Zealand is fast becom­ing a farce under this gov­ern­ment. For fucks sake if this was any other coun­try the deci­sion would be “Snails, what snails, I don’t see any snails”.
 
If I was any major cor­po­ra­tion in new Zealand and dis­cov­ered snails on my asset, I would shut up and lay the slug slam.
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Here Kitty, kitty

by Whaleoil March 29, 2006
A woman drove 7km’s today unaware that a kit­ten was hold­ing on for dear life near the fuel tank.
 
She only noticed when she stopped and heard meow­ing com­ing from the under­side of the car.
 
Bizarrely the Fire Ser­vice was called in to use air bags to res­cue the stu­pid feline.
 
I would have thought a bul­let or bat was more useful.
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It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest

by Whaleoil March 29, 2006
Philip “El Jefe” Field reck­ons he is in the clear , and I wouldn’t be sur­prised in the least if he was “cleared”.
 
Chances are good for him, he is a Labour Party mem­ber, one of Helen’s pets and he helped rort the elec­torate in South Auck­land that gave Labour the election.
 
Yep I would say chances are extremely good that he will be “cleared”.
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Braaaack, braaaak, Bu-GAWK

by Whaleoil March 29, 2006
A few days ago, the National Party in Epsom was con­tacted by ACT’s new board mem­ber for Auckland.

The pur­pose of the call was to chal­lenge Richard Worth to a debate with Rod­ney Hide on cam­pus regard­ing the drink­ing age lim­its (Epsom MPs only at the debate).

Appar­ently the response was that Worth was happy to debate Hide on Cam­pus, but only if drug lib­er­al­i­sa­tion was also dis­cussed, and the media were invited. The ACT offi­cial didn’t think this was rel­e­vant, but Worth’s spokesman was quite insis­tent that the two issues were linked together, and any­way, the issue would be of inter­est to Epsom peo­ple and the media because of Hide’s pub­lic con­tra­dic­tions on the subject.

The two rang off with Worth’s response for the debate being made clear.

Within 3 min­utes of being given Worth’s reply, ACT’s man rang back and said the debate was off with Richard and ACT would find another MP for Rod­ney to debate with.

It’s not often that some­one chick­ens out of their own debate challenge!

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Classic Soperism…my, my hasn’t the worm turned

by Whaleoil March 29, 2006
Barry Soper opines at New­sTalkZB .

[quote]In this coun­try we are small beer. The biggest dan­ger to Head Girl Helen would seem to be her secu­rity detail which whizzes around behind her limmo. She has been tail ended by them on no fewer than four occasions!

But secu­rity was the order of the day when the British leader arrived in Auck­uoloafa last night. We were assem­bled well in advance for a photo op, the hand­shake that even arch ene­mies are expected to give for the cameras.

The phoney one has the most extra­or­di­nary set of pearly whites which he con­stantly flashes. There is no need to air brush that lot. The Head Girl could only look on in wish­ful awe![/quote]

Clas­sic stuff.

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Consumer Confidence falls to 5 year low

by Whaleoil March 28, 2006
The gov­ern­ment is doing exceed­ingly well .
Along with forg­ing paint­ing, speed­ing bliss­fully unaware throught he coun­try­side, rort­ing elec­tion expenses, bash­ing pro­tes­tors, lying to Par­lia­ment, fal­si­fy­ing doc­u­ments, run­ning imi­gra­tion scams they can now add tank­ing a boom­ing economy.
The lat­est West­pac Con­sumer sur­vey is out and shows con­sumer con­fi­dence at a five and half year low.
And West­pac reck­ons worse is to come.
Funny how every­one else except the His­tory Teacher can see the writ­ing on the wall.
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OECD, yippee">2nd behind Ireland in the OECD, yippee

by Whaleoil March 28, 2006
Yes, you read the head­line cor­rectly, in fig­ures today New Zealand is indeed in the top-half of the OECD in fig­ures recently released. Indeed not just the top-half but in fact sec­ond place with only Ire­land in front of us.
 
Now for the bad news.
 
The fig­ures are for for the num­ber of tertiary-educated peo­ple who have moved over­seas. New Zealand has 24.4 per cent of its New Zealand-born tertiary-educated pop­u­la­tion liv­ing in other OECD countries.
 
Is this the top-half of the OECD that Labour envisaged?
 
But wait theres more “top-half” fig­ures Labour can jus­ti­fi­ably be proud of;
  • New Zealand has the third high­est pro­por­tion of adults in prison, with 132 adults per 100,000 pop­u­la­tion being impris­oned, behind the Czech Repub­lic with 150 and the United States with 469.
  • Kiwis are the most likely to be vic­tims of car theft and bur­glary, with 2.7% of the pop­u­la­tion report­ing being the vic­tim of car theft in 2000, and 4.3% being the vic­tims of burglary.
  • New Zealand was also found to be one of 10 coun­tries with 50% or more adults being defined as over­weight or obese.
  • New Zealand has the sev­enth high­est num­ber of over­weight or obese peo­ple, with 56.2% of Kiwi adults in that category.

What an out­stand­ing achieve­ment by Labour.

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El Jefe wants his job back

by Whaleoil March 28, 2006
Philip “el Jefe” Field has inti­mated that he wants his job back if cleared by the long over­due inquiry.
 
Given this gov­ern­ments record of declar­ing prima facie evi­dence of crimes as being cleared this is entirely likely.
 
The Her­ald bizarrely also says the report that we have all been wait­ing on for six months is “due for release soon”.
 
If Field and Parker are restored to the min­istry then with­out a doubt we will not be liv­ing in a “cor­rup­tion free” country.
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