Eamon Sloan

  Virginia Fallon – Ranting. The Dominion Post publishes an occasional column written by Virginia Fallon. The same column appears in a number of other Stuff newspapers and on the Stuff website. Her column of yesterday (24 th June) covered the subject of Aotearoa and carried on as an ageist rant directed squarely at Winston Peters. And believe it or not, aimed equally as squarely at oldies in general, to the point of comparing them to dogs suffering canine senility! There are two points to this post. The first is to deal with Virginia Fallon’s insults.            Quoting Virginia Fallon: Also, most families have a Winston of their own: an older relative who stubbornly refuses to adapt, so spends their latter years stumbling about in a world they no longer understand. But a bit like the family dog who goes senile and lunges incontinently at the children, we keep them about because, in spite of their increasingly unacceptable behaviour, we know...

  The Terrorism Conference The recent terrorism conference in Christchurch seems to be have been ordered to coincide with the United Nations Counter Terrorism week starting 20 th June. The UN website has an interesting list of events scheduled and I expect New Zealand would have drawn on the UN format for the local effort. Link: https://www.un.org/counterterrorism/2021-counter-terrorism-week Back to the local affair where a few delicate feathers were ruffled here and there. Islam’s representatives considered that they were not formally recognised in the first place and then found fault with the Jewish council’s direct but highly relevant references to Middle East terrorist groups (Hezbollah in particular). The Islamics staged a walkout to make their point. I have always regarded walkouts as cheap and shoddy attention-seeking gestures. They scored a few inevitable headlines and that’s about all. Andrew Little got in on the act by saying the Jewish council’s remarks were p...

  More on Love Letters to/from an Editor Last week I was criticising the Dominion Post over the Editor’s new rules for letter writers. I had at one point thought I would stand back for a while but itchy keyboard fingers got the better of me. I tossed in a letter about the Insight article published on Sat 12 th June. Bingo, the letter made it through, intact, and was published today. The bad news is that according to Lady Fifield’s new rules I cannot submit another letter for a whole month. Anna Fifield is the Dominion Post editor. For interest sake etc. the letter reads as follows: The Insight article (Dominion Post, 12th June) did not offer a single cogent argument for English language speakers to take up use of the Maori language. The article comes across mainly as a litany of responses to various criticisms – some of which as debating points were admittedly unhelpful. The opening question of the article was: Why is a minority still threatened by use of the Maori language? I don...

  Love Letters to/from an Editor?   The Dominion Post Editor has recently begun enforcing a policy of one letter per reader per month. I checked with the editor and her reply is that a reader/writer is expected to submit one letter only per month – not several or more from which one might be selected. In the “Letter from the Editor” (Dominion Post: Opinion Page B4, 5 th June) the rationale given by her is that too many of the same letter-writer names are hogging the space.   The editor wants to bring more new names to the letters page. There are quite a number of fish hooks in this little issue. Some of the fish hooks are bound not to bring in a huge number of new letter writers. Regular writers will have had their letters published through the letters editor considering, for we hope good reasons, that the letter was worthy of prominence in the first place. To me the “too many of the same names” argument does not hold water. There are a lot of good letter writers...

  Maori Health Authority – Do we need it? A Maori Health Authority is to be set up as one of the recommendations of the Simpson review – full title: Health and Disability System Review – Final Report . The review could not really agree on whether a Maori Health Authority should hold full commissioning powers and has “kicked for touch” so to speak. Andrew Little going in the opposite direction seems to have agreed to the idea, possibly to please the Maori political masters. He has told us nothing of how a Maori Health Authority might operate; except to say it could have a commissioning role rather than an advisory role, plus it could hold some form of veto rights – but veto rights over what? He provided a typically “woolly” sort of answer. I am not sure if we should be so worried about the concept of veto rights which could well die a natural death. But here are a few thoughts on the issue. No one knows whether veto rights could be traded on and off in the back rooms somewhere? ...