Frowning week: Farms / Dotcom / Unions / Breakfast TV

I can’t get along with the media this week, or the bits of it that have caught my eye and attention, It might be the back to work blues, it might be that I’m sitting in an office and the sun and blue sky are outside being annoying. However these are the things that this week, in particular, made me frown, for either reason of Faux Outrage or otherwise.

Crafar Farms, a NZ$200 million bid to buy them by a Chinese Company that sees them lease them back to Landcorp. It’s not that big of a deal. The amount of land is paltry in comparison to similar overseas land investments in New Zealand sanctioned by both the Labour and National governments, past and present.

: Image by Szymon Stoma via Flickr

Dont get me wrong on this, Allowing the sale to any foreign entity based on “well they did it, we’re going to do it” isn’t exactly a way to run a country. Their bid however, and we’re an open country, is the highest bid and apparently a good price. Jingoism and Xenophobia are two words that come to mind. This is an emotional play by the opposition parties to gather doom clouds over the recently elected and current government, it’s not about ownership of farms. The current government by not engaging in any words on this is not making itself any friends, and it’s position looks stubborn and appears contrary to “the will of the people” who are the people that are the opposition party, not the real people. OF course asked a question like “Should a chinese person buy our land” is always going to be a NO!, and this is what joe public has in their mind now, it’s not going to end well.

Kim Dotcom. A foreign national resident in New Zealand (as am I, I’d like to point out). Founder/Owner of a hosting site Megaupload.com he’s had charges of alleged piracy and allowing piracy of material to the tune of some US$500million.

He’s a bit of a wide-boy and would, in my opinion, do a runner, or make it as hard as possible to be found if he chose. Not sure what the ongoing faux outrage is with this. I am impressed with the media’s use of close cropped head shots that appear to highlight mr.Dotcom’s chubbyness. But this is a side-show to an underlying problem where law has not kept up with technology, sharing the latest TV show, or Film from the US that may not get to NZ for 3 months or more – what outcome does the producer hope to get, people want it now, the same producers have avalanched us with reality tv shows in real-time for ages, and suddenly they’re not in control.

Ports of Auckland. An Employer who want to drag’s it’s work ethic into the modern era.

: Image via Wikipedia

My understanding is that an employed worker has a shift/roster, and is available to work. My understanding also is that should a ship dock half way though that time slot the worker can continue to work through untill the ship is unloaded and that counts as overtime, even if for the first portion of that roster there is no work available – so time for free. What it seems the ports want to do is normalise a working schedule, based on modern technology that says “A bot will arrive at this time and you are required to work for x hours as part of your roster. It’s not decided the day before, shipping companies know pretty much to the hour where their fleets are. The unions are against this for many reasons, mostly to do with self empowerment and grandiose self importance.

BreakfastTV, we’ve rebelled against the machine and have taken flight to TV3, where there appears to be News being covered in a newsy kind of way, and not 30 second segments of recycled quick cut clips of tabloid headlines and pet stories. TVOne has really shot itself int he foot with a new set, atrocious front people and a format that really is brain-dead.