Seems it’s not only the Labour Party that courts don’t have any jurisdiction over.

Crusading lefty journos are exempt too. Jock Anderson at NBR has an article (Paid) where TV3 claims they were right and the Judge wrong in the case of fraudster Tracey Gwendoline Hibberd.

Hibberd went on Campbell Live in May 2011 claiming her (© Copyright Protected – The National Business Review 86)qualification documents were real, when a jury subsequenty found them to be false.

In the item, Mr Campbell – clearly swallowing what Hibberd claimed – pronounced to his audience Hibberd’s diploma “looks legit to us”.

The reporter who did the story was Mihingarangi Forbes.

When Ms Forbes asked a rhetorical question in the item about Hibberd: “Would she lie to the nation on television?” Judge Wade answered with: “Yes she would and, yes, she did.”  Read more »

Unite Union is taking on McDonalds, apparently over what they call “stolen wages and stolen breaks”.

Unite claims $2.5m “Stolen Wages, Stolen Breaks” against McDonald’s

Unite are submitting an employment authority case against McDonald’s today for unpaid breaks that the union estimates has resulted in unpaid wages of $2.5 million.

“We have wage and time records from two stores (one a McCopco store and one a franchisee) for the last four months that confirm a consistent pattern of not paying for lost lunch breaks – as they are required to do under the collective agreement,” said Unite National Director Mike Treen.  Read more »

He can always become a press secretary…TVNZ has a lot to answer for. It seems they have become the hatchery for Labour party candidates and mouthpieces…either that or they are actually embedded journalists, who are then brought in from the cold.

How  many months now have I been highlighting the idiocy that those Journalists, Trained and Skilled at the NZ Herald continue to perpetrate on its readers?

Today, I nearly fell off my chair when a hurried correction to a serious error was published.  And to ensure everyone knew about this serious lapse in NZ Herald publishing standards, bossman Tim Murphy even Tweeted about it personally.

Personally!

Must have been some mistake, don’t you think?  I mean, we’ve seen so many.  What could possibly require such urgent action followed by such immediate promotion of the corrected material?

The NZ Herald.  They let any errors slide, unless it is a crossword.

Priorities.

Mike Hosking had a great editorial on NewstalkZB this morning.

The numbers don’t appear to lie or in this case even mislead – there are fewer people leaving for Australia. Not just that, there are more people coming here from all over the world. This is from Stats NZ yesterday.

Yes an I blogged about that earlier and how Labour’s scam is now failing.

Let’s look at Australia first. This was always going to happen given Australia was always going to end up in the sort of trouble it has. When we panic about the people leaving the country the way we did a year back, we were made to feel like we were inferior and any number of TV shows couldn’t wait to line up the endless parade of people saying things like “there are more jobs over there” or “there is more money over there” or “NZ doesn’t offer me anything”. Or other TV shows would line up comparison couples – one in Sydney, one in Wellington – and they’d compare shopping lists and school fees and weather forecasts. It turned into this dumb sort of game where NZ came second and we’re supposed to feel stink.  Read more »

Grass, an adult card game that has been on the shelves for decades, is currently being sold at Toyworld.  It was only time before some nit picking busybody managed to get a newsie interested in the story.

Sarah Dunn to the rescue!

An adult card game which lets players pretend to be cannabis-dealing kingpins is being sold at Toyworld Nelson.

In Grass, players use cards to mimic dealing cannabis, stealing from one another and protecting their “stash” to amass drug money. Individual cards include “Steal your neighbour’s pot”, “Catch a buzz” and “Lust conquers all”.

“Like the real thing, it’s easy to learn,” say the tongue-in-cheek instructions. “We suggest that you begin gradually with Grass, till you get used to it.”

At Toyworld, it hangs in the puzzles section next to decks of playing cards and games like Uno.

Grass is out of the reach of most little hands, but would stand out to any older children who could identify the distinctive cannabis leaf emblazoned on the packaging.

Read more »

Shinya Kimura – Chabott Engineering from Henrik Hansen on Vimeo.