Duncan O'Leary
Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.
at 9:38am on Tuesday, 14th March 2006
Amongst the wealth of useful things that we've been learning about New Zealand over the last few days, there have been a couple of reminders that you can't just pick up ideas/terms/concepts from the UK and translate them over here. A few people have pointed out to us that decentralization/devolution/empowerment is a nice idea, but when the population is only 4 million, the government is pretty local in any case.
And we've also learnt:
- That the 'New Labour' over here was a hard left offshoot of the labour party, led by those who felt the party was selling out to the right
- That 'multi-culturalism' is a right wing term here ' used to try to undermine the special place that the Maori have in New Zealand's society and government.
'and, finally, Simon and I both have a new favourite MP over here ' Nandor Tanzcos, the (opely dope-smoking), World's first Rastafarian MP, who made it into Parliament as a Green MP under the proportional representation system. More of that in Westminster please!
More soon, unless it all gets too much...!
Amongst the wealth of useful things that we've been learning about New Zealand over the last few days, there have been a couple of reminders that you can't just pick up ideas/terms/concepts from the UK and translate them over here. A few people have pointed out to us that decentralization/devolution/empowerment is a nice idea, but when the population is only 4 million, the government is pretty local in any case.
And we've also learnt:
- That the 'New Labour' over here was a hard left offshoot of the labour party, led by those who felt the party was selling out to the right
- That 'multi-culturalism' is a right wing term here ' used to try to undermine the special place that the Maori have in New Zealand's society and government.
'and, finally, Simon and I both have a new favourite MP over here ' Nandor Tanzcos, the (opely dope-smoking), World's first Rastafarian MP, who made it into Parliament as a Green MP under the proportional representation system. More of that in Westminster please!
More soon, unless it all gets too much...!
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