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October 2, 2008 8:00am by David Farrar

General Debate 02 October 2008

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General Debate

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WraithX

Danyl Mclauchlan – just so I can get an idea of where you’re coming from: do you or do you not also support scholarships for whites only and heterosexuals only?
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October 2, 2008 7:36pm
Nefarious

Don’t lie WraithX.

You can’t possibly be gay. If you were then surely you would vote Labour.

You don’t type like a gay person. Are you sure you are not just confused?

About the vote I mean. Those right wingers are all bigots and discriminate against homosexuals.

Don’t they?
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October 2, 2008 7:38pm
Buggerlugs

The State Service Commission annual report for the year ending June 2008 records that the head of the Social Development Ministry Peter Hughes had a pay package worth between $530,000 and $539,000.

(speechless)
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October 2, 2008 7:52pm
WraithX

Nefarious: I can assure you that I am gay 🙂 If you need proof, I can provide it – but you must be male aged at the oldest 30 (this is somewhere I can legally discriminate!) and willing to try new things 🙂

I have actually never voted Labour – in all my gay days! Though (it is with some discomfort that I say this) I did once vote for the Alliance. Needless to say, since growing up and thinking intelligently about things, Rodney and Roger get my vote this year and did last time.
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October 2, 2008 7:55pm
first time caller

Yawn
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October 2, 2008 7:55pm
dad4justice

Buggerlugs – that Peter Hughes prick makes me soooo angry, as the Ministry of Social Underdevelopment chief of shit is worth about the price of a bag of peanuts. These government parasites are pathetic blunderers who need a short sharp short !!!
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October 2, 2008 8:10pm
noskire

Just settling down to an hour or two of stress-relief on BF2. Phone rings.

Pollster: “Hi I’m (name deleted for reasons of short-term memory loss) from Consumer Link. Would you care to take part in a brief political poll?”

Me: “Sure, but tell me who commissioned the poll first.”

Pollster: “Umm, I’m not sure. Probably the Government I guess.”
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October 2, 2008 8:18pm
Redbaiter

“Danyl Mclauchlan – just so I can get an idea of where you’re coming from: do you or do you not also support scholarships for whites only and heterosexuals only?”

Danny won’t answer that. Too hard. He can only answer questions couched in pseudo liberal terminology and based on pseudo liberal thought patterns. As with so many arrogant and elitist pseudo liberals, if you don’t think or write in the way he approves of, you don’t exist, and your opinions are “inadmissible”, or worse, “inappropriate” (the real kiss of death).
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October 2, 2008 9:55pm
OECD rank 22 kiwi

Wow!, the country is in recession and all anyone in New Zealand wants to debate about is what poofs do.

Labour really has buggered up the backside New Zealand society. The question is whether New Zealand enjoyed it? 😉

Judging by the last two elections the answer would be YES!.

The Tourism marketing board might want to pick up that angle when promoting New Zealand to the rest of the world.
Just imagine the slogan on television the world over:

NEW ZEALAND, 100% PURE TAIL PIPE ACTION
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October 3, 2008 12:00am
Glutaemus Maximus

The State Service Commission annual report for the year ending June 2008 records that the head of the Social Development Ministry Peter Hughes had a pay package worth between $530,000 and $539,000.

(speechless)

All based on Parkinsons Laws. The beauracratic pyramid. The more people in your department, the more you earn. Then we wonder why public workers multiply.

Gadzooks.

Still it is a hard job with all that pressure of competition, and uuuuuum?
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October 3, 2008 1:28am
OECD rank 22 kiwi

What a waste of taxpayer money. National is OK to continue the waste. It’s two thumbs up from John Key.

ACT on the other hands wants to kick ass and take names regarding taxpayer money being wasted in the public sector.
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October 3, 2008 1:46am
Glutaemus Maximus

The sex lives of potatoe men, and now the spawning, and population explosion in the Public Sector.

Parkinson’s Law
Prof. Cyril Northcote Parkinson

‘WORK EXPANDS SO AS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE FOR ITS COMPLETION’
General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase ‘It is the busiest man who has time to spare.’ Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half an hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar box in the next street. The total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil.

Granted that work (and especially paperwork) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned. A lack of real activity does not, of necessity, result in leisure. A lack of occupation is not necessarily revealed by a manifest idleness. The thing to be done swells in importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent. This fact is widely recognized, but less attention has been paid to its wider implications, more especially in the field of public administration. Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson’s Law and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear. The importance of Parkinson’s Law lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is controlled.

The validity of this recently discovered law must rest mainly on statistical proofs, which will follow. Of more interest to the general reader is the explanation of the factors underlying the general tendency to which this law gives definition. Omitting technicalities (which are numerous) we may distinguish at the outset two motive forces. They can be represented for the present purpose by two almost axiomatic statements, thus: (1) ‘An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals’ and (2) ‘Officials make work for each other.’

To comprehend Factor One, we must picture a civil servant, called A, who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial, but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy: a normal symptom of middle age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies. He may resign; he may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B; he may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. There is probably no instance, however, in history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both. It is essential to realize at this point that C and D are, as it were, inseparable. To appoint C alone would have been impossible. Why? Because C, if by himself, would divide the work with A and so assume almost the equal status that has been refused in the first instance to B; a status the more emphasized if C is A’s only possible successor. Subordinates must thus number two or more, each being thus kept in order by fear of the other’s promotion. When C complains in turn of being overworked (as he certainly will) A will, with the concurrence of C, advise the appointment of two assistants to help C. But he can then avert internal friction only by advising the appointment of two more assistants to help D, whose position is much the same. With this recruitment of E, F, G and H the promotion of A is now practically certain.

Seven officials are now doing what one did before. This is where Factor Two comes into operation. For these seven make so much work for each other that all are fully occupied and A is actually working harder than ever. An incoming document may well come before each of them in turn. Official E decides that it falls within the province of F, who places a draft reply before C, who amends it drastically before consulting D, who asks G to deal with it. But G goes on leave at this point, handing the file over to H, who drafts a minute that is signed by D and returned to C, who revises his draft accordingly and lays the new version before A.

What does A do? He would have every excuse for signing the thing unread, for he has many other matters on his mind. Knowing now that he is to succeed W next year, he has to decide whether C or D should succeed to his own office. He had to agree to G’s going on leave even if not yet strictly entitled to it. He is worried whether H should not have gone instead, for reasons of health. He has looked pale recently – partly but not solely because of his domestic troubles. Then there is the business of F’s special increment of salary for the period of the conference and E’s application for transfer to the Ministry of Pensions. A has heard that D is in love with a married typist and that G and F are no longer on speaking terms – no-one seems to know why. So A might be tempted to sign C’s draft and have done with it. But A is a conscientious man. Beset as he is with problems created by his colleagues for themselves and for him – created by the mere fact of these officials’ existence – he is not the man to shirk his duty. He reads through the draft with care, deletes the fussy paragraphs added by C and H, and restores the thing to the form preferred in the first instance by the able (if quarrelsome) F. He corrects the English – none of these young men can write grammatically – and finally produces the same reply he would have written if officials C to H had never been born. Far more people have taken far longer to produce the same result. No-one has been idle. All have done their best. And it is late in the evening before A finally quits his office and begins the return journey to Ealing. The last of the office lights are being turned off in the gathering dusk that marks the end of another day’s administrative toil. Among the last to leave, A reflects with bowed shoulders and a wry smile that late hours, like grey hairs, are among the penalties of success.
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October 3, 2008 4:29am
Glutaemus Maximus

This is the power of Matrix in perfect harmony with people politics.

The real worry is when these Public Sector Numbers of Staff, qualify for Pension Rights which are now completely unaffordable in the real world.

Protected, index linked, widow/widower benefits, and very generous final salary terms. That is why the push is always on to get to the top of the heap in any department.

This is a ticking bomb!! And a very big one.
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October 3, 2008 4:45am
RRM

WraithX:
“RRM, I am gay. I totally disagree with you. I have lived in New Zealand most of my life, and Britain for 3 years; I have not been discriminated against in any way. If anything, I have been discriminated in favour of – something I strongly disapprove of. Frankly RRM, I, and I am sure many other gays, would prefer it if the left would stop trying to “help” us – we don’t need help. In fact, suggesting we do is demeaning.”

Well I can’t really argue with that.
But there are two particular prejudices that I see and hear all the time in day-to-day life in our “fair” country, (namely: “The gays this…” and “The Asians this…”) and those two in particular grate with me because I know enough “gays” and “asians” to not like those attitudes one bit!
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October 3, 2008 12:15pm
goodgod

I assume that the candidate for the homosexual scholarship would have to have sex with someone who was gay and be either observed by the board or have sex with a gay on the board. How else could you be sure? Maybe just a collection of stereotypical “gay traits”?

Must have bald head
Must like theatre
Must have a camp accent
Must wear pink or know how to mix it out of Dulux colour range…

Yawn.

So really it will be friends giving friends money.

Which really sums up the utter stupidity of the idea.
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October 3, 2008 6:59pm

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