Haskell is something like pass-by-name. At least staff only gets evaluated at most once. But it's definitely not pass-by-value, since not everything gets evaluated down to a value.
Your argument would get ensnared by that of the original post. If you take the description of Java's passing semantics, and s/object/thunk/ and s/primitive/unboxed value/, you get a perfect description of Haskell's passing semantics.
