If National wins ...

[Joshuatree]

"Where else will the nation get their political compass from now?" lol this is wonderful stuff; get ye gone hosings who needs your political bias, brainwashing and pet peeves in a nation wide programme. Just hope and pray you dont pop up on another channel although Aussie tv would be the perfect place for you.

[777]

In view of the media help for National, it's a wonder there was a change of government. I happened to be watching 7 Sharp tonight, when Mike Hosking announced he and Toni Street are ending their time on the show from tomorrow.

I will really miss his right-wing pro-National rants on prime TV, free adverts while National was in power and leading up to the election. Where else will the nation get their political compass from now?

Actually, it made my week

Once again you come up with same old, same old. To say that people voted National because they were influenced by what's on the media is an insult to those voters. It must be how easily you are influenced by those left leaning commentators that you assume they are as well.

[minimoke]

Once again you come up with same old, same old. To say that people voted National because they were influenced by what's on the media is an insult to those voters. It must be how easily you are influenced by those left leaning commentators that you assume they are as well.

Paddy Gower leaving Political correspondent role but staying with Media works for national correspondent role. JayJay Harvey leaving the Edge but staying in Media Works for undisclosed role. Political Commentator?

[elZorro]

Paddy Gower leaving Political correspondent role but staying with Media works for national correspondent role. JayJay Harvey leaving the Edge but staying in Media Works for undisclosed role. Political Commentator?

Thanks for pointing that out about Paddy Gower. Some older Labour people are convinced he's a rat favouring right-wing policies, and more recently the Nats haven't been too pleased with his comments, where he tends to over-dramatise and sounded more left-leaning. I think maybe he became a bit more aware of what nine years of National being in power meant, and was signalling a required change. Like most reporters, he couldn't help but comment on the rising star, Jacinda Ardern.

Regardless, the next few years should be less adversarial and more progressive in the political arena, maybe less exciting for the likes of Gower and Hosking.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainmen...parkly-new-job

[Joshuatree]

Nationals divisive and confrontational combat behaviour continues , including attempted bullying and insulting the speaker all in an attempt to delay passing a bill. What great role model this party is for its country, not.

Tempers fray in the House

[winner69]

Nationals divisive and confrontational combat behaviour continues , including attempted bullying and insulting the speaker all in an attempt to delay passing a bill. What great role model this party is for its country, not.

Tempers fray in the House

Thought you were talking about Labour's behaviour over the last nine years

[Joshuatree]

Keep thinking.

[elZorro]

Thought you were talking about Labour's behaviour over the last nine years

I don't think they behaved like Jami Lee Ross and co, see about 14-15 minutes in, for the fireworks. They didn't get their way.

https://youtu.be/wK1EgVtUq_c

[dobby41]

I don't think they behaved like Jami Lee Ross and co, see about 14-15 minutes in, for the fireworks. They didn't get their way.

https://youtu.be/wK1EgVtUq_c

They wanted to go to lunch and had it delayed even longer by silly, time wasting theatrics.

[elZorro]

Here's another political commentator who is semi-retiring at the end of the year, Colin James. I wish him well in his retirement, he's been an astute observer.

Colin James's Otago Daily Timescolumn, 19 December 2017

A lifetimelearning. There comes a time.

Around the time I returned from London in 1978 a businessman punched a young journalist called Colin James. People in politics sympathised with me, some barely suppressing schadenfreude. That other, punched, Colin James went offshore soon after. No one punched this Colin James (me), at least not physically. The incident reinforced for me the merit for a journalist of humility.

Journalists live two lives: theinner and the craft. When David Lange died and the Greens stood in his memory opening their 2005 election campaign, I the journalist stayed sitting while I the inner person behind the journalist secretly stood. There was the same wrench when the Council of Trade Unions conference in 2015 stood in memory of the fine Peter Conway. Journalists are close in to events but never part of them. They meet the powerful and the celebrated. Some are seduced into thinking themselves their equals. They are then lost to journalism.

Journalists make no momentous decisions. Celebrity ill-becomes them. They are a channel through which the powerful and celebrated talk to the people and the people talk back. To others, the journalist seems greatly privileged to be alongside power and stardust. And the journalist is privileged. But not in the way most non-journalists think. The privilege is to spend a lifetime learning.

A journalist can ask questions of almost everyone and almost all will answer: the powerful and celebrated, the knowing and skilled, the repositories of arcane science or ways of thinking and the "ordinary" guardians of understanding of a community or of a simple truth or of a good way to live an "ordinary" life. They are all at the journalist's call. They all teach a journalist who listens.

Yet the journalist need not be expert or knowing or complete. The journalist needs understand only so much of a topic as readers-viewers-listeners want or need to know. The journalist has only to light on and illuminate an idea or project or nation or technology. No other occupation offers that intense opportunity -- to learn but not to have to know, to learn a little and move to the next learning.

For a half-century I have had that deeply enriching privilege. The utu is to listen with respect.

A journalist is sceptical, alert to lies, deceit, backside-covering and charlatanism. But not cynical. A cynic has stopped listening and learning. A journalist is open. If not, the communication channel that is the journalist will choke. The utu is also to write down or talk about the learning so that others can know what the journalist has learnt. For some, expression is journalism's pleasure. They are would-be writers and journalism is as close as they can get.

For me, writing it down was the grind. Words shuffled off the keyboard or sat stuttering. They often said to readers different things from what I thought I had said. Words, I found, are wilful and wayward. Nevertheless, for five decades generous editors and readers encouraged me in my attempts at this exacting craft. They privileged me to go on learning. So I have had a working life beyond any of my youthful imaginings. It usually scarcely felt like work. I often pinched myself: surely I can't be here doing this.

My beat was politics and policy, a high privilege. Since politics is power, I met those in power and their advisers and came to understand and respect them, even those I could not admire. Many I the inner person came quietly to like. Almost all in politics mean well. I learned they are different: they see, or affect to see, only one side of each many-sided story the journalist sees. And since politics seeps into almost every corner of a nation's life, I met thousands of interesting people from nearly every walk of life.

I met many more when I could put my email address under what I wrote and readers could write to me easily. Almost all were thoughtful and courteous. The tiny few who were angry or abusive almost all recovered the courtesy and decency that is in everyone when I replied with courtesy and respect. Most offered a fact I didn't know or an insight or way of thinking I hadn't come across or pointed to a source I hadn't tapped. Again, I learned. I met in this way many wise "ordinary" folk, who are, of course, not ordinary at all. Meeting them -- you -- through those emails was a big bonus, a validation of humility and respect.

There were others who never wrote. They -- you -- kept me in business by persisting with my tangled prose and thereby awarded me a lifetime's inestimable privilege of charting my -- our --nation-in-the-making. The Otago Daily Times set me on this path when young and in my twilight took me in again. It is 50 years since I first left the ODT, shortly afterwards to perch, perchance, in the parliamentary press gallery.

Now, as politics takes a fresh turn,into the post-baby-boom era, it has come time for this baby-boom fellow-traveller to take leave of his relentless weekly scribblings.

Thank you for having me.
......

PS.If you have read this far you will know that this is my last regular weekly column. I may write an article or two in future and the odd working paper and give the odd talk and so on. If you would like to be notified of these please email me. I will still put most of what I write on my website. It has been encouraging to have had nearly 1000 on this email list, so thank you.

Colin James, (64)-21-438 434, PO Box 9494, Marion Square, Wellington 6141, NewZealand ColinJames@synapsis.co.nz, www.ColinJames.co.nz