Written By: - Date published: 6:39 pm, April 6th, 2008 - 15 comments
From the Sunday Star Times: A new poll suggests that National Leader John Key may be up against a bigger obstacle than he thought in knocking Prime Minister Helen Clark off she is the person New Zealanders most admire after Sir Edmund Hillary. The much-loved mountaineer topped the Roy Morgan Poll with 17.4 per cent support, followed by …
Written By: - Date published: 12:36 pm, March 18th, 2008 - 8 comments
After reading Steve’s piece about suicide prevention and the subsequent comments I’ve decided a short history lesson on this issue is needed. In the late eighties and early nineties the mental health model was shifted from an institutional model to the ‘recovery model’. Effectively this meant mental health patients were shifted from facilities such as …
Written By: - Date published: 2:02 pm, March 5th, 2008 - 16 comments
When I wrote to the MPs asking them for their thoughts on John Key’s “we would love to see wages drop” quote (results here), Nick Smith’s bio page reminded me of this little gem: Ah, the Brash-Smith dreamteam. Pity it couldn’t quite last the whole three weeks.
Written By: - Date published: 9:53 am, February 19th, 2008 - 38 comments
When a society goes through trauma, one of the first results is a drop in the birth-rate. People choose not to have children in a time of strife and uncertainty. When good times return, the birth rate bounces back. The pattern could be seen worldwide following the two world wars. In Eastern Europe, where economic …
Written By: - Date published: 5:16 pm, January 25th, 2008 - 11 comments
New Zealand Labour movement activists will support Irish unionists – the political sort – who wish to remove Reform Prime Minister Massey’s statue from Limavady in Northern Ireland’s Derry County. Massey is remembered without affection by trade unionists here for the mounted special police known as “Massey’s Cossacks” who were used to hunt down strikebreakers …
Written By: - Date published: 5:24 pm, December 3rd, 2007 - 17 comments
Am halfway through “Kiwi Keith”, Barry Gustafson’s portrait of our third-longest serving Prime Minister. He obviously had something, as he was picked out as a young man by Reform’s Coates and others as having leadership potential from his early days crop-farming in Motueka. As a young MP, after surviving the Reform-United Coalition defeat in 1935, …
Written By: - Date published: 12:44 pm, October 16th, 2007 - 3 comments
Just had this sent through to me by a Levin reader. The reference to the Federation of Labour and getting the army in to sort out the workers should have been a dead giveaway that the piece was thirty years old, but in the timewarp that is Levin you never can be too sure…
Written By: - Date published: 11:36 am, October 13th, 2007 - 1 comment
On the morning of October the 12th 1917 845 New Zealand soldiers lost their lives in a failed attack on Bellvue Spur during the Battle of Passchendaele. At commemorations held in Flanders yesterday, Peter Kennedy, The New Zealand Ambassador to Belgium reffered to the attack of that morning “the greatest disaster in New Zealand’s history, …
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