Doing your nut

Idiot /Savant has just done his nut about the Chief Executive of the Department of Conservation telling a select committee that there will be no job losses in his department the day before announcing that 100 people will be losing their jobs.

Green MP Kevin Hague , who was on the committee, says he believed MPs were entitled to a more "careful and direct" response to their concerns.

It sounds like CE Al Morrison has misled the committee – on purpose. Idiot/Savant is calling for him to be sacked.

I’m not - and here’s why.

Firstly, Morrison knows how to answer questions. As a former senior journalist of both the (now) Dominion Post, and Radio New Zealand, he knows how to ask them too. He was asked whether any science positions would be lost. He replied he was not in a position to say.

Apparently, he still isn’t. So calls that Morrison misled the committee arose from him simply answering a direct question put to him. What is wrong with that?

In my experience some of the questions of select committee representatives are either misguided or pointless. Some are even patsy questions that give them the answer they already know. Some are worded in a way that does not give them the answer they desire. They are not "careful and direct" questions – and this appears to be another one of these.

If the member wanted to find out about job losses generally, the question should have been worded that way. It wasn’t. So why should Morrison be sacked for simply answering the question put to him?

However if any of the 100 jobs were science jobs, he has misled the committee, and he has lied to the media as well.

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Idiot

Hat tip No Right Turn

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When divorce is the wiser option

updated
No Right Turn has blogged on a report of a study conducted by Professor Kelly Musick and Dr Ann Meier of Cornell University on warring families whose parents have not yet split up because they still have kids at home - so divorce is the wiser option. Well, The Independent pretty much said that, so he uncritically accepted it. The news report actually said that the research was conducted among parents who stay together for the sake of the kids. "Stop Jimmy's mum and dad splitting, and Jimmy will be more likely to stay in school, on the right side of the law, and off drugs".

The research report - a revised 2008 report initially written in 2006 (which is perhaps why The Independent didn't link it, it's old news), noted that parental conflict does not appear to be associated with college attendance or early cohabitation. The report, Are Both Parents Always Better Than One? Parental Conflict and Young Adult Well-Being never implied that divorce is the wiser option, nor does it state that the parents interviewed were together purely for the sake of the kids.

It was actually a report on parental conflict, and in some instances compared two parent families with sole parent families. It was not research on whether parents plan to divorce because of that conflict. The report did, however say that children in two-parent families in the higher end of the conflict spectrum are often no better off than children in sole parent families. Unlike No Right Turn, the report did not say that these kids were considerably worse off, nor did it suggest that conflicting parents would be better to divorce.

Note to Idiot Savant at No Right Turn: Don't believe everything you read in The Independent, especially when it is opinion. Then you'll be less likely to report it as fact.

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