Posts by Rosie
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I support Sacha’s statement at the beginning of this thread. I think there should be some onus on managers improving their skills and taking responsibility for their hiring decisions. In NZ the level at which some interviews are carried out to establish if a person is suitable for a job would appear not to be high.
I am under the impression that in the UK there is employment discrimination law relating to hiring which means the employer is “guilty until proven innocent” of discriminating when they hire. For example, if a short person doesn’t get the job over someone else and makes a complaint they were discriminated against for being short, the onus is on the employer to produce the documentation which proves why they weren’t hired. It means everyone gets asked the same questions in an interview and the answers are written down and it’s all very structured (This is only in theory – I am sure lots of people have had rubbish interviews in the UK)).
Of course this sounds a bit harsh on employers but one benefit for companies who are doing this process properly is a big reduction in hiring the wrong people.Generally NZ mangers are pretty average and are not stepping up to the responsibilities of improving performance and getting the best out of their staff.
If you need to get rid of staff within the three month period because workload significantly drops off you should still have to justify yourself. Getting rid of someone (who was employed on a permanent contract) because you had a big job on that lasted two and a half months is not ok.
Of course a small business can have a disaster, lose a lot of work, and may want to use the three month period employment law to get rid of staff but they should definitely have to justify the dismissal.
Is the intention of this law to give the employee a 3 month long interview?
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In our office in Liverpool people observed two minutes silence. In town shop staff stood outside shops and many shoppers stood silently as well. Cars and taxis pulled over. Liverpudlians are perhaps not typically English in nature in that they are willing to wear their hearts on their sleeves when demonstrating their solidarity. Its one of the excuses that some other English people use to dislike them.
Unlike some other football tragedies this one doesn’t seem to go away because of the sense of justice not being done. Its very sad because families don’t seem to be able to move on. South Yorkshire police gave an apology recently and I hope things like that help.
I have lived here for about 5 years and am picking up on bits and pieces of the culture. Some time ago I was standing talking to my boyfriend’s aunty who ran the butty shop and newsagent at the back of the local train station waiting room. A man from out of town asked her “have you got the Sun love?”
“No, we don’t sell it” she informed him. He looked a bit confused so I reassured him, “You don’t want to read that anyway, it’s a shit paper, full of lies”
I practically felt like a local. -
If there are no required minimum treatment standards then sewage treatment is something that is subject to political will and can easily be put in the too expensive basket.
Regulation and privatisation has worked in the UK to increase treatment standards but paying around £330 a year in water bills so a private company can cream off some profits is hard to take. Best to go just for some regulation I think.
Although a supporter of the Green party I could never agree with their stance on Metro Water (Auckland City’s council owned business unit). Rather than a step towards privatisation I thought it was preventing it by catching up on upgrading neglected infrastructure by running it (more) separately to other council activities. -
Hi Islander - I am scratching my head trying to work out where the Big O might be but it sounds like an independent sort of place.
I haven't lived in NZ for over 5 years, so I am not that up to speed, but when I left all councils seemed to do things differently when it came to setting discharge consents and charging for the services.
I would agree on the privatisation of water. There should never be an excuse for that happening in NZ. It seems that, before water is privatised in a country, the infrastructure gets neglected for a long time. Then the government will say we can't possibly afford to bring this up to scratch we will have to let private finance pay for it (not that I think this is an excuse). I guess the UK and Argentina are examples of this.
However, despite my views on privatisation, I have worked with UK Water Companies for several years and I am yet to bump into the antichrist. They are doing a pretty good job of achieving upgrade targets. If they don’t they get fined.
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Do we think the government should impose some minimum national standards and targets for water and wastewater?
I see that the government couldn't stomach improving the drinking water standards (due to costs involved for rural communities). The same applies for the cost of improving wastewater.
Water and waste bills separate from your council rates would be a more transparent way of seeing where your money is going. It would help people remember that infrastructure improvements aren't free.
For all the bad points of the UK privatised water industry at least they have a government body which regulates standards (OFWAT) Also they have drivers to reach minimum EU standards.
Saying that, the UK has thousands of these sewer/ stormwater overflows, they just get regulated on how frequently they can overflow. To get rid of them would be very expensive.
What a shame they never thought of putting two sets of pipes in to begin with…..
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That gun in Edinburgh has always been fired at 1pm rather than noon. I guess if they fired it at noon they would have to fire it 12 times which would be hard on the nerves (and more expensive). Ships in the harbour used to set their clocks by it.
I liked the photo of you arriving back at Bob's house. Very nice.Reply: Ha -- thanks for the correction, Rosie. I guess, now that I think about it, that must be why they call it the one o'clock gun. I have corrected the article -- Cheers, DH
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Sorry Wammo, but it wasn't an English bird that won it was a Welsh woman.
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No, Keith. The Maori seats were introduced at a time when there was a property qualification to vote. It's one of life's delicious ironies that Maori men had universal suffrage about twenty years before their honky brethren. (The wahine, like their pakeha sisters, had to wait a little longer.)
Craig, I am not sure I am reading you right but its not universal suffrage if you need property to vote. When Maori seats were introduced Maori needed to have property to vote for the seats but collectively owned land didn’t count. Therefore to get representation through voting Maori needed to divide collectively owned land into Individual title. One result of this is it made selling land off to European settlers a lot easier because individuals didn’t need to come to a group agreement about selling. (Also, getting a survey and a tile for your land costs money which might need to be paid for with part of your land.) A good arrangement for the settlers. Also when the Maori seats were introduced I suspect there were more Maori than Europeans in the country. At the time having only 4 seats out of (I think about) 80 was used to restrict Maori voting power.
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I thought The Departed hung together better than Internal Affairs (though I don't speak Cantonese).
The love triangle thing was a little far fetched and the female lead looked disconcertingly like Heather Mills McCartney but I thought it improved the film (except for the sex scenes)Communicating with Morse code? I think it was reasonable to leave that out of The Departed.
I liked the rough Boston setting. I think they communicated a really good sense of the Boston location. I noticed the bagpipe link which was quite interesting considering Hong Kong and Boston are fairly different sorts of places but they both used bag pipes at police funerals.
One of the best films I have seen in a while. I thought Di Caprio was pretty good.
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In the UK I noticed that Helen Clark’s speech got a mention in The Independent on the 14th of Feb.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/australasia/article2268094.eceFood miles has had quite a bit of coverage in the UK lately. People are being told that they must buy local food to reduce their carbon contribution. NZ Kiwifruit and lamb have been singled out in some articles I have read.
I do not think we should underestimate the power of NZ’s export markets to keep this new “carbon-neutral New Zealand” idea afloat. It would make NZ look good, it might even pay for its self.
If NZ wants to keep selling to distant markets in the future we may need to prove what the impact of production and shipping is in comparison to food grown in Europe (and then NZ would have to stay ahead of Europe).
Perhaps NZ should develop a standard way of estimating the ‘carbon’ that goes into producing a piece of food. Say CO2 equivalent per kg of food. Perhaps start a carbon benchmark to compare products from different parts of the world.
Can you imagine all the forms farmers would have to fill in then….that would really give them something to complain about.