John Banks was given a very important job when government was formed after the November election, a position named Minister with Special Responsibility for Keeping His Month Shut for the Next 36 Months and Not Embarrassing the Government.
Would all of you who picked 26 weeks in the nationwide pool please raise your hands to claim your prizes. Judges will be around shortly to check your tickets.
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I don’t usually pay much attention to the big NZ political blogs. At best, the usual suspects are occasionally insightful, but more often they suffer from varying degrees of simple minded egotism and/or outright vileness. However, like the million monkeys writing Shakespeare that they as a group resemble, every so often someone hits one out of the park:
It’s hard work at the best of times for political parties to attract good candidates. But it’s doubly so for the two main parties, because all the smaller parties are so quick to secure the urine-drinking bank-robbing identity-thieves, leaving National and Labour only the boring and sensible candidates to choose from.
Apart from the woman-bothering expense-rorting ones, those who end up in Parliament for the Nats or Labour often lack colour, but that’s probably because they’re not drinking their own piss…
The rest of it is well worth reading as well.
This election is going to be like the Rugby World Cup – pretty much a foregone conclusion but the also-rans will provide much entertainment.
While I don’t like Don Brash (or the Act party), I have to admire the concept of announcing your availability to be the leader of an organisation that you don’t currently belong to.
I would also like to take this opportunity to say that I am interested in being captain of the All Blacks during this year’s world cup. I will be holding talks with the All Black management tomorrow, but if unsuccessful I will form my own rugby team and lead it to glorious victory on the field. I have backers and financial support – so there!
As the song goes, we don’t know how lucky we are in this country and one of the things we take for granted is our public health system. It may not be the most well-oiled machine, but if something needs doing then it gets done in a timely manner and nobody ends up bankrupt. New Zealand (along with most of the rest of the Western world) has decided that individual health is a public problem, so the public will support the individual if they get ill. It works out much cheaper for everyone, but that is just a nice bonus.
I have been watching the recent furore in the US where President Obama is busy trying to introduce something similar there. This being the USA (a strange place), half the public seems to be convinced that public health is some sort of evil plot to destroy capitalism, enslave the population, and end the American way of life™. These people are, of course, idiots but they are not wrong about the effects of public health being far-reaching.
In New Zealand, we have a mixture of public and private hospitals. Going public usually means joining a waiting list but is much (much!) cheaper, and urgent stuff gets done straight away. Private hospitals are more expensive but are usually much nicer to stay in and you don’t have to wait so long. The actual quality of care is comparable; it is common for medical professionals to work in both public and private hospitals so in many cases the same person will be performing the operation in either case. Health insurance is considered a bit of a nice-to-have.
Compare and contrast with the US: hospital care there is ridiculously expensive, much more so than the average private hospital in NZ. The reason for this is that everyone (everyone who counts, at least) has insurance. It doesn’t bother the insurance companies that the rates are so high because they arrange bulk discounts with the hospitals, a very cosy arrangement that benefits both parties but not the public. By law hospitals cannot refuse urgent treatment even if someone comes in without insurance, but the hospital charges the inflated amount anyway because they know that the few people who do manage to pay off the full amount will make up for some of the deadbeats.
But isn’t health insurance a great thing that everybody should have? Well, health insurance is a funny business even by funny insurance standards. If you insure a car and it breaks, the insurance pays out unless the car broke due to a known defect, in which case the manufacturer’s warranty will cover it. But with health insurance, a defect is called a pre-existing condition which no insurer will touch with a barge pole – and the manufacturer is conspicuous by His silence. Anyone unlucky enough to have a chronic long-term illness is an anathema to insurance companies – they don’t want to know. Someone who continually crashes their car will pay higher and higher premiums until they are forced to learn to drive or give up car ownership, but an ill person does not have that option.
One effect of high health-care costs that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere is the inflation of lawsuits. We have all heard the stories about people getting injured in car crashes (for example) suing the manufacturers of the car (or the city) for millions of dollars, even if they seem to be at fault. These lawsuits are not all about greed (although that may be a factor as well) but are a consequence of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in health costs. Often the insurance company or hospital will encourage the lawsuit just to get their money. It is a vicious circle.
I do not envy Obama. If he succeeds in his goal he will be remembered as a hero, but he seems besieged by loons, many of whom seem to be protesting against their own interests. If they react so badly to an NZ-style public health system, I shudder to think what would happen if they ever found out about ACC!
Anyway, my friend James is a (sane) American is trying to get a pro public heath website off the ground – National Health Care Does Not Suck. There is not much there at the moment, but hopefully it will turn into a nice repository of positive experiences with public health. On the other side of the coin, try this series of testimonials about bad experiences with US-style hospitals.
We don’t know how lucky we are in this country.
We don’t know how lucky we are.
“Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?”
Almost everyone I talk to about the 2009 Citizens Initiated Referendum agrees that the question is completely stupid to the point of being dishonest. The main problem is with the word Good, by including a judgement call in the question the “correct” answer is presupposed. A lot of advertising uses similarly constructed language, but nobody expects ads to present a balanced opinion.
So what are we supposed to do when faced with such a question? Both John Key and Phil Goff have indicated they will probably abstain, somewhat cowardly in my view. Both National and Labour supported the (minor) revision to the existing law that started this whole mess, the least their leaders could do is support the new law in public. It is also odd to see the Prime Minister seeming to advocate not voting in a democratic process, I would hope that he would be encouraging more democracy not undermining it.
I am voting yes. I think the changes to the law were sensible and necessary, and it seems that the only ones who disagree have a very odd outlook on families. Certainly the examples that were publicised of how unfair the new law was evaporated very quickly when the true facts of the cases became known.
Even if I was indifferent to the law (and maybe I am, I have no children) I would still be voting yes. I bitterly resent the fact the public money has been spent on a referendum that even its supporters acknowledge is useless. The people who forced it though with such ridiculous wording deserve as much scorn as we can muster and my feeling is that the humiliation of losing their own referendum would be richly deserved.
Every YES vote is another tablespoon of poo frosting on the huge poo cake the instigators of the referendum will be eating if there is a large YES turnout. And that is reason enough for me.
Today has thrown up some examples of what strange, dark times we live in.
Firstly the trailer for the live-action version of Where the Wild Things Are is released and turns out not to be a monumental travesty.
Then John Banks is quoted in the Herald saying something that I kinda-sortof-maybe actually agree with.
Has the world gone totally mad?
I am in a fragile state. If my expectations are shattered just once more today I may explode. All it would take is for me to find that the latest TV series from Japan is not incomprehensibly insane.
Phew! That was a close one!
It has irked me for a long time that although the President of the United States wields great power over the rest of the world, only US citizens get to vote. To be brutally honest it irked me a lot more when Bush II was in power, but I approve of the way our USAian cousins have voted this time. Obama seems exactly what the US and the rest of the world needs – someone thoughtful, honest and willing surround himself with actual experts instead of cronies. That fact that he can string two words together without stumbling is an added bonus.
And its not just me. The action figure industry thinks Obama is pretty cool. This Obama figure is way more bad-ass than the old George W Bush doll.
Finally the election is over for another 3 years – with the both the NZ and USA elections falling on the same week I was getting pretty sick of all the politics in our lives. It is unfortunate that the one election that will really affect our lives over the next few years was held on the other side of the world, but I can’t say I am unhappy with the way that one turned out. It’s not I think that Obama is the new messiah like some of his followers seem the believe, just that the thought of Palin as president after McCain’s inevitable return to the tomb gave me nightmares.
Saturday’s results did not please me so much, even though it was something of a foregone conclusion. Just about everything the Helen Clark government has done over the last 9 years I have agreed with, and I would have been content to see them get another term. Unfortunately I think they were getting a bit tired after so long in government and National certainly ran rings around them during the campaign. I don’t really have anything against National except that for the most part they are made up of the same moldy suits that we dumped in 1999 and they haven’t exactly been a robust opposition – hopefully they manage to get some new blood into cabinet.
As I write this, the new government is still being congealed. With any luck ACT will have very little influence – although they made a big song and dance about finally being part of the government in reality their support has been steadily dropping for a decade. National has been courting the Mäori party – I think they could do worse if they want to form a centralist government and such a coalition has the added bonus of royally pissing off Sir Rogor Douglas. Of the minor parties, only United Future could really be said to be happy. Although they lost 2 list MPs, Peter Dunne did manage to get into government again; perhaps he going for some sort of record.
New Zealand First must be smarting – at 4.21% they came close to the threshold. In some ways I will be sorry to see Winston go – I think he had really found his calling as Minister of Foreign Affairs. But in every other respect he seemed to invite all the criticisms that were leveled at him on a daily basis.
The bottom of the office results table makes for depressing reading, unless you take delight in the misfortunes of others. Both Residents Action Movement and The Republic of New Zealand Party did particularly poorly with 405 and 296 votes respectively, both below the 500 paid up members you need to register a political party in NZ. If not even your own members will vote for you, perhaps it is time to move on.