I see that one of the impeccably researched references in your horseshit link includes a farrago of abuse aimed at the Jewish intellectual Antony Loewenstein from one Tzvi Fleischer of the extreme right wing AIJAC.
Keep it up Milt—a talkback hosting spot on NewstalkZB is the natural next step after all your hard work.
If my assessment of the merits of a particular theory were based on how Morrissey feels about one or other of the people involved, perhaps I’d care about that.
No, of course not. But extreme right groups like AIPAC are often unwittingly swept up and quoted by otherwise level-headed and sensible commentators. As has happened, sadly, in comment 1.1.1 on this thread.
Why don’t you actually attempt to refute the theory then, rather than shoot the messenger. For example it would be easy to write a lot of people on the left off as nutters, but that would be the easy option. Much better to actually consider and critique the respective arguments, don’t you think?
‘ most muslims are fundamentalists and incompatible with our society ”
and …. ‘ Its radical Islam preachers who are to blame for the rise in attacks on Muslims’
Muslims, on the other hand, are welcome in my country and my neighbourhood, because most that come to NZ are actually trying to escape those tyranny’s.
Oh and it’s a bit rich you quoting a mega-rich footballer who probably knows nothing of the consequences of Islamic extremism. I’m sure his personal security apparatus keeps him well away from danger.
Jenny_how to be Asshat …. The woman who cried wolf ….. and claimed Asshat was to blame for our christchurch subhuman supremacist murder spree .
To quote jenny_ how to be MadAss… ” ” The attack in Christchurch was conducted on the anniversary of the beginning of the popular revolt against Assad, by a gunman who self describes as a fascist””
Talk about some sicko propaganda Jenny_how to be cracked ass … and she did not stop there.
” “Jo Cox was assassinated by a fascist gunman because she supported the Syrian people against the regime.”
Jen Jenny ……..Watch this video that made joe90 start hating on me …. As my main complaint is it conflates the murderer and chemical weapons user ( with help from the usa & Britian ) …. Saddam with Gadaffi …..
….Jenny like Wayne Mapp has some peculiar posting habits which makes me doubt their sincerity or remorse over innocent people being killed…. that they have had a hand in.
But even Wayne would not touch this garbage …. ” Jo Cox was assassinated by a fascist gunman because she supported the Syrian people against the regime.”
“The attack in Christchurch was conducted on the anniversary of the beginning of the popular revolt against Assad, by a gunman who self describes as a fascist.”
“The normalisation and acceptance of fascism in Syria has emboldened and empowered fascists everywhere.” ……
Reason tries to conflate me with Wayne Mapp as somehow being implicated in Operation Burnham and the killing of innocent Afghan villagers
Jenny like Wayne Mapp has some peculiar posting habits which makes me doubt their sincerity or remorse over innocent people being killed…. that they have had a hand in.
In no way can it be imagined that I had a hand in innocent people being killed, this is a smear, not a fact.
” Jo Cox was assassinated by a fascist gunman because she supported the Syrian people against the regime.”
Jo Cox supported the Syrian people’s revolt against the Assad regime, this is a verifiable fact.
That fascists world wide support Assad’s genocidal war against his own people, is a verifiable fact.
That the attack in Christchurch was carried out on the internationally recognised anniversary of the start of the Syrian revolt against Assad, is a verifiable fact.
That the killer of Jo Cox and Heather Heyer and the killer in Christchurch and Norway all self identified as “fascists” is a verifiable fact.
“The normalisation and acceptance of fascism in Syria has emboldened and empowered fascists everywhere.”
Possibly this last by me, could be termed a judgment call, but it is more than backed up by a mass of evidence that indicates this.
New Wave of Neo-Nazis Take Inspiration from Russia and Assad, not Nazi Germany
The recent wave of neo-Nazism, most prominently evident in North America, has adopted traditional Nazi symbolism such as swastikas and Nazi salutes like “blood and soil.” Yet this movement has less to do with Nazi Germany, and much more to do with current political players such as Russia, Bashar al-Assad, and even ISIS….
The Facebook page of James Alex Fields, the white nationalist charged with the murder of Heather Hayer after he rammed a car into demonstrators in Charlottesville, is a dystopian microcosm of the kind of propaganda that populates the minds of these neo-Nazis. Among the plethora of images of swastikas, memes of Trump, and Pepe the Frog, Assad had a seemingly out of place presence on the white supremacist’s social media page. In one photo, Assad is depicted in full military uniform with the caption “UNDEFEATED.”
Yet Fields is not alone in his admiration for Assad in the growing neo-Nazi movement. In a video posted on Buzzfeed reporter Brandon Wall’s Twitter feed, three other men who took part in the Charlottesville hate rally are shown proudly affirming their support for Assad. One of them wears a t-shirt with the slogan “Bashar’s Barrel Delivery Co”, and says “support the Syrian Arab army and [expletive] fight against the globalists”, while the man filming replies with “Assad did nothing wrong” and “barrel bombs, hell yeah!”
Assad’s rise to popularity among America’s neo-Nazis perhaps began when David Duke tweeted in support of the Syrian president, describing him as an “amazing leader” and “a modern day hero standing up to demonic forces seeking to destroy his people and nation.” The series of tweets was accompanied by an image of Assad, in dark glasses and military apparel, similar to the one shared by Fields….
“I put this video link up for Wild Katipo …. after she called a shitty poster a wolf”
After watching the video this is my sentiments;
I think It is wise to see both sides of every story no matter what uncomfortable it seems to be watching the movie clip.
History is the founding evidence we need to plan a better way forward.
“There are none for dumb than those who will see or hear.”
Or maybe you may prefer; – “ignorance is bliss”
Or; – “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
For example, She decided not to read the critics’ reviews-ignorance is bliss.
Although its truth may be dubious at best, this idea has been expressed since ancient times.
The actual wording, however, comes from Thomas Gray’s poem, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1742): “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”
I like linking to people who put across my points of view better than myself …. and often with more information.
I find that a feeble excuse for not making an effort to put forward your point in your own words. And talking of “red herrings”, since when are clips of Julian Assange or whatever relevant to your comments dedicated to having a go at other commenters here because they, in your opinion, are “blatantly reprehensible” and “fish mongers” [sic]? Julian Assange has got nothing to do with your behaviour here! Please don’t conflate the people you link to with the commenters that you feel outraged about.
You’re continuing to act like a stalker with halitosis when you called Shadrach an idiot @ 1:14 pm and also had a go at Jenny @ 1:05 pm.
Please address the issue at hand without resorting to personal attacks.
It’s really weird, James, how often you reference your supposed attractiveness to commenters here. Is there anybody here who you haven’t implied is obsessed with you/ stalking you??
Just asking. ’cause I’ve noticed a pattern of behaviour from you…
IF the Kim Dotcom fight is anything to go by, yes. I don’t think the KDC legal fight will be over till about 2021 or 2022. Though if the Supreme Court says KDC can’t be extradited, it might be over by late this year. Still that would be 8 years since his arrest in Jan 2012.
I guess more like five years for Assange in the UK. Their courts have more experience of extradition, so many of the precedents have been well established. It won’t take a decade.
I guess more like five years for Assange in the UK
To send him to the US or to Sweden? Looks to me (with precisely zero legal expertise) sending Assange to Sweden should be a lot more straightforward than to the US. There’s some thorny questions about whether what the US accuses him of is even a crime, and he’s got at least some argument around the political aspects of it.
The other thing is that it might count for something that they already went through the Swedish thing once – even if they have to start over, appeals opportunities will be limited because the higher courts probably won’t want to relitigate the same points again – the lower courts have their guidance on the matters of substance.
Among other provisions Part 2 of the Act: Extradition to category 2 territories (non-European Arrest Warrant territories) removed the requirement on the USA to provide prima facie evidence in extraditions from the UK, requiring instead only reasonable suspicion.[5] This was necessary to redress the previous imbalance against the USA under the 1870 Act, as the UK did not have to provide the more onerous prima facie evidence to extradite from the USA. The requirement for the UK is to show probable cause. However, an independent legal review carried out by Sir Scott Baker found that “there is no significant difference between the probable cause test and the reasonable suspicion test. There is no practical difference between the information submitted to and from the United States.”[6]
And:
it allows the US to extradite UK citizens and others for offences committed against US law, even though the alleged offence may have been committed in the UK by a person living and working in the UK
As I have noted elsewhere, the US could have applied for extradition when they charged Manning. This was well before he went to Sweden. The allegation that the rape charges are simply a means to get Assange out of the UK, and off to the US – as some commentators here seem to believe – is just nonsense.
There’s also that the WaPo reported in 2013 that the Obama administration concluded they shouldn’t and wouldn’t go after Assange because of the potential chilling effects on unquestionably legitimate journalism – the so-called “New York Times problem”.
I’d be curious about how this new indictment came to be and exactly who was pushing for it. Certainly for the Ginger Genghis, any chilling effects on journalists would be a feature not a bug.
The tRump regime kicked it off by deciding to prosecute WikiLeaks, and last November an error let it out of the bag that Assange had been charged under seal.
Thanks. So it looks like Sessions was definitely part of the push for it. But it’s still not clear if the Persimmon Palpatine was also pushing it, or at most was ‘yeah, whatevs” if he ever heard about it.
He’s earned over a million bucks from his book. He could use that to illustrate an argument for higher taxes on high earners and the wealthy by talking about all the different sectors of society supported by taxes had to come together to make that possible.
But no, he just gets entitled and defensive about it.
“If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
“I didn’t know that it was a crime to write a good book which turns out to be a bestseller,”
Funny..
I note the “Free enterprisers” especially in the States, are the most expensive beneficiaries, of “socialist” tax dollars.
And favourable Government regulation.
Like the “business people” here who go on about “Pretty communists”, “useless people” and the like, as we, “socialists” bail out their failures, with our tax dollars.
But few really believe the “honesty” of ‘free enterprise’ as the word “free” does send a message of ‘no principals towards the society it wants to exploit’.
When you have a business.
An honest one, giving value for money, you realise how much you depend on regulation and state support, to keep you competitive, against the crooks and cowboys.
Businesspeople who argue for a smaller State, are delusional. Or, they are the crooks and cowboys!
how many businesses have you had now? If you need regulations to keep yourself competitive, you are a lazy business owner. Regulations are only there to make sure people play fair, if they don’t the market and the regulators find them out.
Socialists have never bailed out anyone. it’s normally business people getting there own tax dollars back.
But it’s amusing that a socialist hero like bernie finally sees the error of his ways
The business people getting bailed out, don’t pay taxes, you twit.
Thanks for confirming my point, about regulations keeping the market fair.
Which one are you TP? The crook or the cowboy. Or just a wannabee, successful who dreams that they world will one day see your brilliance, and make you rich, like so many right wingers?
“The only problem with socialism is that it allows the deluded to survive to adulthood, to claim it doesn’t work”.
The real laugh is that the f wits who don’t like socialism, would be the ones living in a cardboard box on the street, without our welfare state, under a “free market”, that paid them according to their capabilities.
I’m comfortable. I pay lots of tax. Too much given the attitudes of people who pay none and can’t manage businesses properly. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to pay it, jid rather pay less.
Anyone who makes out that socialism is the saviour of society is so sadly deluded there is no point talking to them. They won’t believe anything not socjalist no matter how societies fail under its yoke
Socialists have never bailed out anyone. it’s normally business people getting there own tax dollars back.
Wtf? Leaving aside the use of accountants to ensure that the business owner appears to have little income and qualifies for all kinds of transfers aimed at people who genuinely do have little income, in the last two weeks we’ve had Simon Bridges telling us that small businesses in NZ are only viable because the taxpayer subsidises low wages via Working for Families, and trucking companies announcing that they can’t stay in business if they have to actually comply with safety regulations.
The notion that New Zealand is a uniquely low wage economy simply doesn’t stack up. Wages in NZ are about the same percentage of per capita GDP as Australia. Our per capita GDP is about 30% lower than Aus, and so are our wages and salaries.
Another way of looking at it, is that the Gini index measuring inequality is about the same in both countries. That means average and mean wages will be roughly the same percentage of GDP per capita.
New Zealand’s problem is that Australia is significantly more wealthy, and has been for many decades, especially once the mineral boom really took off in the 1970’s. The gap has closed a little in the last ten years, but not a huge amount.
It is very hard to see how the gap will change much in the next ten years. If the gap closed to 20%, that would be a major gain for New Zealand.
And yet, Simon Bridges recognises the need for Working for Families (as did the previous Key/English National-led governments) and says there’s no way NZ businesses could cover that in the wages they offer. Perhaps Australia has a similar subsidy for employers, I don’t know.
Accommodation costs are probably the main reason that wages need to be subsidised via tax transfers in NZ, but it’s not the people who need two jobs and WfF to make ends meet who are causing those high accommodation costs, it’s the well-off like me who’ve bought multiple properties as a retirement fund, and successive governments that have encouraged runaway immigration in the interest of being able to show positive annual growth figures. For those WfF recipients, the news that their wages aren’t particularly low, it’s just that their accommodation costs are particular high, isn’t a particularly helpful piece of information.
In fact, workers share of the economy dropped sharply after your unfortunate experiment, and has never recovered.
The wage gap between us, and Australia would be even greater, 36%, if conservative Australian Governments hadn’t adopted aspects of your unfortunate experiment, more recently.
“New Zealand workers now receive among the lowest shares of the nation’s income in the OECD. In Denmark for example, with much stronger collective bargaining and unionisation supporting a high value economy, the share was similar to New Zealand’s in the late 1970s but has stayed there ever since. Yes, New Zealand does have a low wage economy”.
Despite all the evidence worldwide that trickle down and austerity doesn’t work, it still has all these supporters. Go figure.
Only Jim Bolger has the guts to admit you got it wrong.
The lower incomes to Labour, and the higher share to banking and capital depressing the communities wealth, is the reason for New Zealand’s stagnation, compared to Australia.
We had a boom in commodity sales and prices roughly equivalent to Australia over the same time period. The increase per capita was greater than theirs. So to attribute Australia’s higher wages to mineral booms, is self serving bullshit.
Assange’s ‘Conspiracy’ to Expose War Crimes Has Already Been Punished
by JOE EMERSBERGER, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, April 12, 2019
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should never have been punished for working with a whistleblower to expose war crimes. Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower, has done more time in prison, under harsher conditions, than William Calley, a key perpetrator of the My Lai massacre. Remarkably, Manning is in jail again, failed by organizations that should unreservedly defend her, as the US tries to coerce her into helping inflict more punishment on Assange.
As for Assange, he has already been arbitrarily detained for several years, according to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Its 2016 press release on the matter stated: “The expert panel called on the Swedish and British authorities to end Mr. Assange’s deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation.”
Now Assange could be punished even more brutally if the UK extradites him to the US, where he is charged with a “conspiracy” to help Manning crack a password that “would have” allowed her to cover her tracks more effectively. In other words, the alleged help with password-cracking didn’t work, and is not what resulted in the information being disclosed. It has also not been shown that it was Assange who offered the help, according to Kevin Gosztola (Shadowproof, 4/11/19). The government’s lack of proof of its charges might explain why Manning is in jail again.
The indictment goes even further, criminalizing the use of an electronic “drop box” and other tactics that investigate journalists routinely use in the computer age to work with a confidential source “for the purpose of publicly disclosing” information…..
Hi Morrissey, to bad you wern’t around a couple of days ago, you would have seen TRP and several other Standard Oil reactionaries roll around in Assanges arrest like dogs in shit, it was quite a sad spectacle to watch, and not at all a good look for what ever remains of the reputation of The Standard…well in opinion anyway.
Thanks for the FAIR link.
Ecuadorian President’s Motives for Surrendering Assange: Vengeance & IMF Loan?
“$4.2 billion IMF loan, submission to the US, and vengeance appear to have been President Moreno’s true motives for revoking Assange’s asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, says Ecuador’s former foreign minister Guillaume Long”
Thanks, Adrian. In fact I did have a look at the site but I was just too overwhelmed by the horror of that scene—it was like something out of Stalin’s Russia—to be able to formulate any response.
Your description of the behaviour of many of our Standardisti comrades is depressingly accurate. They’re not the only ones of course. As I type this I’m listening to Jim Mora talking, and sighing empathetically, on the radio. I wonder if the sight of Assange’s humiliation on Friday amused him as much as Assange’s suffering amused him in 2013….
A very good point. USA War criminals who participate in the most disgusting crimes get kid gloves treatment, if they even get to the point of being prosecuted. Calley, sentenced to life, then Nixon changed Calley’s sentence to house arrest, and he served three years.
My Lai was only the tip of the iceberg in Vietnam. The military and government simply didn’t want to know. Whistle blowers exposing criminal acts are hounded to the ends of the earth.
He must be ruing his preference for tRump when he was pretty much off the hook.
The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.
The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.
Support for Trump? He should have supported Clinton, who called for his trial as a criminal for his exposing of U.S. crimes in Iraq?
Of course he wanted Clinton to lose.
That means he “supported Trump”?
You do realize that the Mueller investigation has discredited the fantasies of the DNC and its hapless media parrots like Rachel Maddow forever? You’re allowed to stop quoting them if you want.
My comment wasn’t about the breach of international law per se, it was about the lack of reaction to it from the usual suspects here that one would expect to be very vocal.
But don’t expect them to understand that Andre. They can’t even understand the depths that tRump has now brought his country too. The latest tweeting of a video that included footage of Ilhan Omar* speaking and graphic images of the 9/11 terror attacks has to be one of his most despicable acts ever. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/12/ilhan-omar-democrats-trump-attacks-sanders-warren
* For those unfamiliar with this amazing young woman; Omar, emigrated to the US from Somalia as a refugee and became one of the first Muslim women in Congress
As a standalone act that attack on Omar would be despicable. But given the ball of toilet-bowl scrapings’ own history of trying to exploit 911 for his own self-gratification and benefit, the vileness is geometrically compounded.
This past week or so has seen a steep decline. The vileness and posturing of that inhumane being in the WH is getting worse by the day – everyday now it seems he plunges to a new low. I cannot for the life of me see how any self respecting Republican law maker can continue to sit by and watch. The country is in an absolute shambles. We thought Key was bad enough here – tRump is a thousand times worse.
I don’t think I can take much more of it. This is what it must have been like for sane folk around the world when Hitler rose to power in the 1930s.
What horrifies me: it was my father’s prediction 45 years ago that the next country to produce a ‘Hitler’ would be America. Yes I know, he was far from being the only one to do so.
And yes, Macro. Key was almost a saint in comparison. 😯
While tRump is busy using 9/11 to incite violence against a Muslim woman his regime is trying to illegally transfer nuclear technology to the country that produced most of the 9/11 hijackers
“With the exception of a handful of Omar’s progressive colleagues—including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—Democrats have largely been silent as the Minnesota congresswoman has faced vitriolic and racist smears from right-wing outlets, including the New York Post and Fox”
Senator Bernie Sanders called attacks on Omar “disgusting and dangerous” and said Omar would not “back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we”.
Senator Elizabeth Warren said: “The president is inciting violence against a sitting congresswoman – and an entire group of Americans based on their religion. It’s disgusting. It’s shameful. And any elected leader who refuses to condemn it shares responsibility for it.”
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana who has surged in 2020 polls, wrote: “After 9/11 we all said we were changed. That we were stronger and more united. That’s what ‘never forget’ was about. Now, a president uses that dark day to incite his base against a member of Congress, as if for sport. As if we learned nothing that day about the workings of hate.”
Buttigieg added: “The threats against the life of [Omar] make clear what is at stake.”
Among other candidates, former Hud secretary Julián Castro said he stood with Omar and “others targeted by the president’s anti-Muslim rhetoric”. Former congressman Beto O’Rourke said: “We are stronger than this president’s hatred and Islamophobia. Do not let him drive us apart or make us afraid.”
The California senator Kamala Harris wrote: “For two years, this president has used the most powerful platform in the world to sow hate [and] division. Putting the safety of a sitting member of Congress at risk [and] vilifying a whole religion is beyond the pale. I’ll be blunt – we must defeat him.”
President Trump confirmed Friday that he is considering a new policy of “placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” as he wrote in a tweet. “The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy — so this should make them very happy!”
There are three main responses to that. The first is that the president is likely trolling to get a rise out of liberals and to elicit some fist pumps from his base, but it’s fundamentally impractical. How would the president move thousands of migrants from, say, El Paso, to San Francisco? And conservatives would be OK with that kind of spending? Plus, migrants don’t have to remain in the jurisdiction into which the government releases them.
The second is that if Trump truly believes the people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum are dangerous threats to American neighborhoods, to concentrate them in areas where his political opponents hold sway is an egregious abuse of power. No president should intentionally undermine the public safety of communities, especially for political reasons.
“Here’s a message to President Trump: Seattle is not afraid of immigrants and refugees. In fact, we have always welcomed people who have faced tremendous hardships around the world. Immigrants and refugees are part of Seattle’s heritage, and they will continue to make us the city of the future,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Friday.
Abstract
Economic indicators in the United States document the poor economic straits in which Native Americans find themselves. Historically, scholars have explained delayed economic development using Linear Stage, Structural-Change, Dependency and Neoclassical Counter Revolution Models. All of these, however, are unable to fully explain the Native American case. We discuss the deficiencies of these models and point out the effects of constantly changing United States policies on Native American economic well-being. We present data from a survey of tribal government respondents about preferred business arrangements on the reservation to support greater attention to cultural identity in economic development studies. A model that incorporates cultural and sovereignty variables is presented.
It does not negate the fact that these cities are open to accepting others who have been forced to flee from their homes and families.
Alexis De Tocqueville IN Democracy in America suggested
“These are great evils; and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable. I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish; and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race of men will be no more. *i The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals. ”
[I leave this chapter wholly unchanged, for it has always appeared to me to be one of the most eloquent and touching parts of this book. But it has ceased to be prophetic; the destruction of the Indian race in the United States is already consummated. In 1870 there remained but 25,731 Indians in the whole territory of the Union, and of these by far the largest part exist in California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Dakota, and New Mexico and Nevada. In New England, Pennsylvania, and New York the race is extinct; and the predictions of M. de Tocqueville are fulfilled. —Translator’s Note.]
Oh gawd no. If I’m gonna have a crack at a post I’d rather my first go was on a topic where I’ve got some kind of insight that’s beyond what’s blatantly obvious to most.
In any case, I’ve still got hopes the current policy of whim-du-jour of the nepotistic narcissus and his kin (aided by Dobby’s demented evil twin) is a temporary aberration that will end in 21 months and two weeks.
Aren’t the police supposed to uphold law and order? I know they don’t always do that, and in fact often do the opposite, as we saw in London on Friday morning (NZ time).
But, seriously, the worst purveyor of violence in the world, the global guarantor and protector of terrorists and lawbreakers from Manila Tel Aviv is a “global cop”? Stop kiddin’ around.
The first one is relatively cheap, almost guaranteed to work, aimed at ending intolerable suffering, and not (yet) marketed by Big Pharma. The second one is usually ridiculously expensive, uncertain to be effective, may prolong, cause or aggravate suffering, and aggressively marketed by Big Pharma.
Wonder what is going wrong at Jetstar ? At least 3 flights out of Auckland cancelled on Friday because of engineering difficulties. And today a flight ex Wellington cancelled because of crewing issues. On Friday the long queue of frustrated customers at the help desk remarkably well behaved considering that only one person with a screen was able to assist – sadly not enough seats available to accommodate the twice bumped off Wellington bound passengers.
Another possible explanation is they didn’t have enough passengers to make the flight profitable, so canceled it. “Low cost” carriers are great for that. Can add to that not enough passengers paying enough to make it economic, could be a lot of people but they all bought really cheap fares.
Queenstown has been deathly quiet for the last few weeks and we hear through the trade that international tourists have stopped all around the country from mid / late March.
And to add to deathstar’s woes, they’ve got an aircraft on the ground in Queenstown tonight and a canceled flight to Melbourne. Same thing happened earlier in the week too, but that one was definitely a breakdown, and they couldn’t work around the ATC staffing issue so lost 2 flights.
Hi Cleangreen ; not sure about the freight question but there were certainly some angry passengers waiting 90 minutes for service at the help desk. Others were trying to get flights on Air NZ at amazingly high prices. I missed a special family event in Wellington yesterday because Jetstar couldn’t get me down there in time and now to find my booked return flight today cancelled means I may well have been trapped there.
Won’t be using Jetstar again ; their help desk at the airport was well under resourced and the on line help desk of no help whatsoever.
Yes that has put me right off Jetstar – I’ve seen their queues before, but 90 minutes and only one on desk. The stress too, what if they had to go to the toilet. Perhaps they keep a wide mouthed bottle behind the desk, a couple of towels?
Oh Brave New World of choice and private enterprise unfettered by those silly rules and controls.
I’ve forgotten – there was a recent limitation of flights by one of the airlines wasn’t there? Flights also held up recently because someone was sick in the control tower staffing. Are they running too lean on staff, slimming down till they can do everything by machine? Do I like this thought – no.
What they have really been doing is to listen to, and adopt, the dictates of the New Zealand Green Party.
They have accepted the opinion that we must reduce the amount of flying that goes on. Since the Green MPs are far to important to cut back on their taxpayer funded travel it is the General Public who have to miss out.
Consider yourself privileged that you can sacrifice your own interests so that James Shaw can have another junket to warmer climes.
DOC predicting a mega mast of seeding in the Native Beech Forests in the South Island hence a need for a big 1080 drop, it would be interesting to see some accurate qualitative science on this ?
when there is a mast thing it is pretty difficult to drive along a beech forest highway without the ‘plip plip…. plip…. plip……….’ of rodents popping under your tyres …..
The only thing to stop rodents breeding like mad is limits on food supply. This is not only a mast year it is a mega-mast year. The food supply is huge and the populations will subsequently be huge. When they run out of mast to eat they’ll start on the wildlife.
There should be more government intervention than there currently is. We need private help too. All hands on deck. Rodents and mustelids, trap em out of your neck of the woods if you can.
There is a lot of information on the above halo site but not much on the best way to go about it. It appears that if you put down some chew cards and check them out daily I suppose, then you will know the best place/s to put traps. The tunnel trap for $35 is the cheapest limited handling one. Have a look at the Schools info. They try to set out some details there. https://shop.predatorfreenz.org/
I’ve made a huge dent in the local rat population using a variety of home made bait stations.
Coincidentally, this morning our tui announced their winter arrival
We back on to a reserve and there seems to a never ending parade of possums to be exterminated so I’ve bought a Timms possum trap and I’m thinking about upping the ante and buying one of these, too.
At my place the usual pattern for possums is 2 or 3, then none for 6 or 8 weeks, then another 2 or 3. But I’ve dealt to 9 in the past 3 weeks (all females too, really weird).
Also had at least 7 rats ignore the bait stations outside and get up between the ground floor and upstairs. They’ll eat the bait I put there in desperation (and have probably died there too).
You’ll find out soon enough. When living on the farm had a similar solution to the rat problem – one obviously died in the wall. OMG! stunk for days!
The best solution was our little miniature long haired dashhound. One day I saw a rat sleeping in the sun in the doorway of the woodshed. Snuck back inside and brought the dog out – crept round so the rat wasn’t aware we were approaching – showed her the rat – 5 seconds later it was dead. Impressive! She was just as good on catching mice the cat brought in to play and let go. One day the cat had brought in a mouse and let it get away. The dog knew it was around – but it had disappeared into a sofa and wasn’t to be found. Next morning getting breakfast the dog was getting under my feet. “For goodness sake HoneyBear (that was her name) Go and find that mouse the cat brought in yesterday!” Next minute she was sniffing around the base of a standard lamp. I lifted the lamp off the floor and sure enuf there was the mouse. It was dead immediately after I lifted the lamp. It didn’t have a chance.
Whanganui has culverts for Africa, a legacy of child drownings in a city straddling a river, and they’re an extraordinarily good mass transport system for rodents. Consequently, if we don’t poison, we’re plagued by the fuckers.
And fronting a coastal reserve, the possums just keep on coming.
Oh yeah! I Kayaked down the Whanganui River a few years back. At night we would sit around a campfire and you could see dozens of gleaming eyes in the bush. I’ve never seen so many. They were in impressive condition. Obviously well fed. Maybe we could ship them back home – they are dying out in Aussie. Apparently the vegetation over there – gum leaves – has this effect of controlling their fertility so they don’t bred as profusely as they do here. At least that is what I was told by a mate in Queensland who studies these sorts of things.
Koalas are asleep most of the day – high on gum leaves apparently.
That’s a good question. It’s also difficult to answer. Most seeds in temperate climates have protective coats and can last a considerable amount of time. Some species are viable after decades, so, as one might imagine, they’ll be ingested long before they decay.
The ‘length of the mast season’ is approximately one Autumn (harvest season). Any gardener can observe actual harvests vary by species, microclimate, weather and zone for ‘productive’ trees. The same can be said of our natives. The length and extent of rodent and mustelid population booms will coincide with local availability and season of fruit set/drop. There will be a time lag where animal numbers peak after the food source peaks.
Then, the food source plummets, and we have stupidly large numbers of hungry rodents which in turn boost mustelid populations.
Ferrets, stoats and weasels might be just over the peak of a population boom as spring hits. They might effectively wipe native species out then.
Notice your hay fever is a bit worse this year? Mega mast years start with mega doses of pollen.
” The Government is partnering with some of New Zealand’s largest construction companies in a bid to tackle the sector’s reputation after company collapses and poor-quality builds.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, along with Fletcher’s Construction chief executive Peter Reidy and other industry players, have unveiled a new plan to tackle the problems that have led to high-profile building company collapses, poor-quality builds and skills shortages.
The plan would, according to Ardern, improve the construction sector’s culture and reputation, increase its workforce and deliver more houses.
“The wellbeing of New Zealanders is intrinsically linked to safe, durable and affordable homes, buildings and infrastructure,” she saidat today’s launch.”
Woefully lacking in any specifics, and peppered with the usual aspirational waffle.
And nothing on Beehive.govt.nz either.
We need a government run state housing building programme that excludes business.
This ‘government partnering with industry’ narrative smacks of SSDD.
We did have good tradesmen here in NZ in the past until Dr Nick Smith dissolved the Apprenticeship Schemes and left the training to the Industry and the Free Market Duh ?
The extensive range of skills, training and experience i gained, from an indentured apprenticeship in the 70’s, has benefited me, and every employer since.
Now. Apprentices come out of their time with a skill level equivalent to our first year.
Modern apprenticeships have no incentive for an employer to give good training, or the apprentice to stay with the employer. With apprentices mostly used as cheap unskilled labour, rather than trainees.
I’ve seen certificated people who have swept the floor for their entire apprenticeship. Not their fault, but, useless without several more years of training,
Which is why we favour, the ones we have trained, ourselves.
The rise of, unpaid, internship type training positions, means you have to have pretty flush parents, to complete an apprenticeship.
The situation is so dire, that only a very few get apprenticeships.
And. Before anyone says the kids aren’t motivated. All the time i was building i had kids ringing up weekly, begging for a chance. Still have many asking, for the way in, where I am now. I have to tell them it is very unlikely they will get time, let alone a job, as the tech puts through many more kids than can ever get employment.
Don’t see why Fletchers, a semi monopoly, who have made a fortune off tax payer dollars, should be favoured above the myriad of functional and competent small builders, in New Zealand.
the problem is deeper than that…there is a dearth of capable tradesmen to pass on the skills even if the real apprenticeships were on offer….but worse still is the lack of ability further up the chain….the inability of those overseeing the entire industry lacks the required knowledge especially in the regulatory fields.
30 plus years of dumbing down will take at least as long to remedy…if we can at all.
Good retirement job for the older builders, who can’t build anymore.
Some schools, including one I was involved with, are teaching hands on trades. Building houses, repairing cars etc.
Like the metalwork, woodwork etc of old.
May be the way forward.
Note. Regulatory agencies are run by taxi drivers, motel owners, accounting graduates and retired policemen, these days. Knowing anything about the industry you are supposed to be regulating is a career stopper. Or so the qualified people in these agencies, tell me.
No skill in Government to assess and let contracts.
taxi drivers and motel owners is stretching it but the end result is not dissimilar…..the attached is a frightening read that should be compulsory for anyone involved in the future of the industry.
“Treasury has long been completely staffed by laissez faire economic loons whose economic theories are detached from all reality, and don’t even work in theory. ”
““There were two queen bees in The Beehive – Treasury and the Ministry of Works and Development. One of them was going to be stung to death, and it wasn’t going to be Treasury.”
52. The MOWD was tasked through legislation with providing independent economic advice to the Government, and with care of the state of the entire public infrastructure of NZ, including local body infrastructure. As a result, it was a rival to the laissez faire loons at Treasury, and their plans.
53. Between 1984 and 1993, Treasury, aided and abetted by the likes of Douglas, Prebble, Palmer, Moore, Caygill, Richardson and Birch, visited the following devastation on the New Zealand construction industry: The MOWD was dismantled, with the ‘intellectual property’ flogged off to Malaysians,
The input of the MOWD into maintaining high standards of practice was lost,
The role of the MOWD in properly training vast numbers of engineers, technicians and especially draftsmen, a role that underpinned the private sector, was lost,
The similar role that Government departments such as NZED, NZ Railways and the like played was lost,
Highly competent design departments (which never designed a ‘leaky building’) at bodies like the Ministry of Education were destroyed,
The often highly competent and very efficient Engineering and Architecture departments of territorial authorities were destroyed. This has severely eroded the ability of the territorial authorities to adequately perform their duties as Building Consent Authorities, and
In an act of unabashed madness, Bill Birch destroyed the centuries old apprenticeship scheme, that had served this country, and especially the building industry, so well. ”
Just because I feel it needs an airing.
Thanks, Pat. That’ll be added to my “You asked for submissions then totally ignored them you stupid government you.” file.
I can walk into most any trade and find idiots posing as qualified these days. It wasn’t that long ago if I walked on a new job site there was plenty to learn and good people to teach it.
Now, they need an engineer to work a spirit level… 😀
Built a shed/greenhouse here using a clear hose and some sticks and string to survey the site. 16 m2 and $800 budget. Dead level, dead square, 20 years standing no issues yet.
I wouldn’t let our clown builders make me a shed. I have no doubt it would cost multiples of my budget and last up to the first decent storm.
I built a chicken coop out of bamboo that has been hit by a digger, and later was flattened by a stormfall tree. I replaced two lengths of bamboo, it’s still as functional as the day I made it.
If weather gets to the point it’s outright dangerous in conventional builds, you’ll find me in a low to the ground shell shaped bamboo house watching all the timber and iron fly past.
There will be a lot more failures of companies employing hundreds of people each in this year.
There aren’t any specifics, but anything that brings the whole of the industry leadership together to focus on avoiding failure is better than what we have had before. They would have to get deep into procurement policy across key agencies to solve any of it.
Kiwibuild together with HNZ and its subsidiaries should be able to go to the Commerce Commission and explain why it needs to manage the housing construction market i.e. deliberately decrease procurement competition.
But that is too hard at least for this term.
In the infrastructure and utilities market, we have seen Chorus running the fibre contracts and driving workers to work for near or less than minimum wage. Again a government contract – and clearly the government would prefer to get the job done rather than reopen the Chorus contract it has.
The governments’ core public agencies such as Kiwirail, NZTA, and HNZ, corral a majority of the market – and with it the fate of massive companies employing tens of thousands of us. The other big players like Auckland Transport and Watercare, Wellington Water and the like drive most of the rest.
In July, the government concluded an agreement with three telecom operators to relax the strict radiation standards in Brussels. But according to the Region, it is now impossible to estimate the radiation from the antennas required for the service.
“I cannot welcome such technology if the radiation standards, which must protect the citizen, are not respected, 5G or not,” Environment minister Céline Fremault (CDH) told Bruzz.
“The people of Brussels are not guinea pigs whose health I can sell at a profit. We cannot leave anything to doubt,” she added.
A pilot project is not feasible with the current radiation standards, and Fremault told Bruzz that she does not intend to make an exception.
The Brussels region has particularly strict radiation standards for telecom applications. The standard of 6 volts per metre has already led to problems in the past with providing fast mobile internet via 4G in the capital.
This week the canton of Vaud announced it would temporarily freeze permits to install new 5G transmitters. The resolution calls for a ban on 5G transmitter installation at least until the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) has finished its study into the effects of the new technology.
Other Swiss cantons are following the developments in Vaud. A similar parliamentary motion has been put forward in Geneva and the parliament of Valais will discuss the issue when it next sits.
i saw posted somewhere else that Sean Hannity has wiped every comment and interview question ever asked……..he apparently does not loves Assange anymore.
Rob MacCulloch writes – Can’t remember the last book by a Kiwi author you read? Think the NZ government should spend less on the arts in favor of helping the homeless? If so, as far as Newsroom is concerned, you probably deserve to be called a cultural ignoramus ...
Eric Crampton writes – Grudges are bad. Better to move on. But it can be fun to keep a couple of really trivial ones, so you’re not tempted to have other ones. For example, because of the rootkit fiasco of 2005, no Sony products in our household. ...
A new report warns an estimated third of the adult population have unmet need for health care.Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāHere’s the six key things I learned about Aotaroa’s political economy this week around housing, climate and poverty:Politics - Three opinion polls confirmed support for PM Christopher Luxon ...
Today is May the fourth. Which was just a regular day when my mother took me to see the newly released Star Wars at the Odeon in Rotorua. The queue was right around the corner. Some years later this day became known as Star Wars Day, the date being a ...
Buzz from the Beehive Much more media attention is being paid to something Winston Peters said about former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr than to a speech he delivered to the New Zealand China Council. One word is missing from the speech: AUKUS. But AUKUS loomed large in his considerations ...
Is the economy in another long stagnation? If so, why?This is about the time that the Treasury will be locking up its economic forecasts to be published in the 2024 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) on budget day, 30 May. I am not privy to what they will be ...
The annual list of who's been bribing our politicians is out, and journalists will no doubt be poring over it to find the juiciest and dirtiest bribes. The government's fast-track invite list is likely to be a particular focus, and we already know of one company on the list which ...
In the weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Southern Israel I wrote about the possible 2nd, 3rd and even 4th order effects of the conflict. These included new fronts being opened in the West Bank (with Hamas), Golan … Continue reading → ...
Peter Dunne writes – It is one of the oldest truisms that there is never a good time for MPs to get a pay rise. This week’s announcement of pay raises of around 2.8% backdated to last October could hardly have come at a worse time, with the ...
David Farrar writes – Newshub reports: Newshub can reveal a fresh allegation of intimidation against Green MP Julie-Anne Genter. Genter is subject to a disciplinary process for aggressively waving a book in the face of National Minister Matt Doocey in the House – but it’s not the first time ...
The Treasury has published a paper today on the global productivity slowdown and how it is playing out in New Zealand: The productivity slowdown: implications for the Treasury’s forecasts and projections. The Treasury Paper examines recent trends in productivity and the potential drivers of the slowdown. Productivity for the whole economy ...
Winston Peters’ comments about former Australian foreign minister look set to be an ongoing headache for both him and Luxon. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for subscribers features co-hosts and , along with regular guests on Gaza and ...
These puppet strings don't pull themselvesYou're thinking thoughts from someone elseHow much time do you think you have?Are you prepared for what comes next?The debating chamber can be a trying place for an opposition MP. What with the person in charge, the speaker, typically being an MP from the governing ...
The land around Lyme Regis, where Meryl Streep once stood, in a hood, on the Cobb, is falling into the sea.MerylThe land around Lyme Regis, around the Cobb that made it rich, has always been falling slowly but surely into the sea. Read more ...
Buzz from the Beehive Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters was bound to win headlines when he set out his thinking about AUKUS in his speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. The headlines became bigger when – during an interview on RNZ’s Morning Report today – he criticised ...
The Post reports on how the government is refusing to release its advice on its corrupt Muldoonist fast-track law, instead using the "soon to be publicly available" refusal ground to hide it until after select committee submissions on the bill have closed. Fast-track Minister Chris Bishop's excuse? “It's not ...
As pressure on it grows, the livestock industry’s approach to the transition to Net Zero is increasingly being compared to that of fossil fuel interests. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / Getty ImagesTL;DR: Here’s the top five news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above ...
The New Zealand Herald reports – Stats NZ has offered a voluntary redundancy scheme to all of its workers as a way to give staff some control over their “future” amidst widespread job losses in the public sector. In an update to staff this morning, seen by the Herald, Statistics New Zealand ...
On Werewolf/Scoop, I usually do two long form political columns a week. From now on, there will be an extra column each week about music and movies. But first, some late-breaking political events:The rise in unemployment numbers for the March quarter was bigger than expected – and especially sharp ...
David Farrar writes – The Herald reports: TVNZ says it is dealing with about 50 formal complaints over its coverage of the latest 1News-Verian political poll, with some viewers – as well as the Prime Minister and a former senior Labour MP – critical of the tone of the 6pm report. ...
Muriel Newman writes – When Meridian Energy was seeking resource consents for a West Coast hydro dam proposal in 2010, local Maori “strenuously” objected, claiming their mana was inextricably linked to ‘their’ river and could be damaged. After receiving a financial payment from the company, however, the Ngai Tahu ...
Alwyn Poole writes – “An SEP,’ he said, ‘is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a ...
Our trust in our political institutions is fast eroding, according to a Maxim Institute discussion paper, Shaky Foundations: Why our democracy needs trust. The paper – released today – raises concerns about declining trust in New Zealand’s political institutions and democratic processes, and the role that the overuse of Parliamentary urgency ...
This article was prepared for publication yesterday. More ministerial announcements have been posted on the government’s official website since it was written. We will report on these later today …. Buzz from the BeehiveThere we were, thinking the environment is in trouble, when along came Jones. Shane Jones. ...
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Hi,I am just going to state something very obvious: American police are fucking crazy.That was a photo gracing the New York Times this morning, showing New York City police “entering Columbia University last night after receiving a request from the school.”Apparently in America, protesting the deaths of tens of thousands ...
Winston Peters’ much anticipated foreign policy speech last night was a work of two halves. Much of it was a standard “boilerplate” Foreign Ministry overview of the state of the world. There was some hardening up of rhetoric with talk of “benign” becoming “malign” and old truths giving way to ...
Graham Adams assesses the fallout of the Cass Review — The press release last Thursday from the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls didn’t make the mainstream news in New Zealand but it really should have. The startling title of Reem Alsalem’s statement — “Implementation of ‘Cass ...
This open-for-business, under-new-management cliché-pockmarked government of Christopher Luxon is not the thing of beauty he imagines it to be. It is not the powerful expression of the will of the people that he asserts it to be. It is not a soaring eagle, it is a malodorous vulture. This newest poll should make ...
The latest labour market statistics, showing a rise in unemployment. There are now 134,000 unemployed - 14,000 more than when the National government took office. Which is I guess what happens when the Reserve Bank causes a recession in an effort to Keep Wages Low. The previous government saw a ...
Three opinion polls have been released in the last two days, all showing that the new government is failing to hold their popular support. The usual honeymoon experienced during the first year of a first term government is entirely absent. The political mood is still gloomy and discontented, mainly due ...
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Auckland Transport have started rolling out new HOP card readers around the network and over the next three months, all of them on buses, at train stations and ferry wharves will be replaced. The change itself is not that remarkable, with the new readers looking similar to what is already ...
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Packing A Punch: The election of the present government, including in its ranks politicians dedicated to reasserting the rights of the legislature in shaping and determining the future of Māori and Pakeha in New Zealand, should have alerted the judiciary – including its anomalous appendage, the Waitangi Tribunal – that its ...
Dead Woman Walking: New Zealand’s media industry had been moving steadily towards disaster for all the years Melissa Lee had been National’s media and communications policy spokesperson, and yet, when the crisis finally broke, on her watch, she had nothing intelligent to offer. Christopher Luxon is a patient man - but he’s not ...
Chris Trotter writes – New Zealand politics is remarkably easy-going: dangerously so, one might even say. With the notable exception of John Key’s flat ruling-out of the NZ First Party in 2008, all parties capable of clearing MMP’s five-percent threshold, or winning one or more electorate seats, tend ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is ...
Luxon will no doubt put a brave face on it, but there is no escaping the pressure this latest poll will put on him and the government. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political ...
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Education Minister Erica Standford yesterday unveiled a fundamental reform of the way our school pupils are taught. She would not exactly say so, but she is all but dismantling the so-called “inquiry” “feel good” method of teaching, which has ruled in our classrooms since a major review of the New ...
Exactly where are we seriously going with this government and its policies? That is, apart from following what may as well be a Truss-Lite approach on the purported economic “plan“, and Victorian-era regression when it comes to social policy.Oh it’ll work this time of course, we’re basically assured, “the ...
Hey Uncle Dave, When the Poms joined the EEC, I wasn't one of those defeatists who said, Well, that’s it for the dairy job. And I was right, eh? The Chinese can’t get enough of our milk powder and eventually, the Poms came to their senses and backed up the ute ...
Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is higher than for any other mayor ...
Buzz from the Beehive Pharmac has been given a financial transfusion and a new chair to oversee its spending in the pharmaceutical business. Associate Health Minister David Seymour described the funding for Pharmac as “its largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff”. ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government is trying to achieve and its ...
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span class=”dropcap”>As hideous as David Seymour can be, it is worth keeping in mind occasionally that there are even worse political figures (and regimes) out there. Iran for instance, is about to execute the country’s leading hip hop musician Toomaj Salehi, for writing and performing raps that “corrupt” the nation’s ...
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The Government is again adding to New Zealand’s growing unemployment, this time cutting jobs at the agencies responsible for urban development and growing much needed housing stock. ...
With Minister Karen Chhour indicating in the House today that she either doesn’t know or care about the frontline cuts she’s making to Oranga Tamariki, we risk seeing more and more of our children falling through the cracks. ...
The Labour Party is saddened to learn of the death of Sir Robert Martin, a globally renowned disability advocate who led the way for disability rights both in New Zealand and internationally. ...
Labour is calling for the Government to urgently rethink its coalition commitment to restart live animal exports, Labour animal welfare spokesperson Rachel Boyack said. ...
Today’s Financial Stability Report has once again highlighted that poverty and deep inequality are political choices - and this Government is choosing to make them worse. ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to do more for our households in most need as unemployment rises and the cost of living crisis endures. ...
Unemployment is on the rise and it’s only going to get worse under this Government, Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said. Stats NZ figures show the unemployment rate grew to 4.3 percent in the March quarter from 4 percent in the December quarter. “This is the second rise in unemployment ...
The New Zealand Labour Party welcomes the entering into force of the European Union and New Zealand free trade agreement. This agreement opens the door for a huge increase in trade opportunities with a market of 450 million people who are high value discerning consumers of New Zealand goods and ...
The National-led Government continues its fiscal jiggery pokery with its Pharmac announcement today, Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall says. “The government has increased Pharmac funding but conceded it will only make minimal increases in access to medicine”, said Ayesha Verrall “This is far from the bold promises made to fund ...
This afternoon’s interim Waitangi Tribunal report must be taken seriously as it affects our most vulnerable children, Labour children’s spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime. ...
Te Pāti Māori are demanding the New Zealand Government support an international independent investigation into mass graves that have been uncovered at two hospitals on the Gaza strip, following weeks of assault by Israeli troops. Among the 392 bodies that have been recovered, are children and elderly civilians. Many of ...
Our two-tiered system for veterans’ support is out of step with our closest partners, and all parties in Parliament should work together to fix it, Labour veterans’ affairs spokesperson Greg O’Connor said. ...
Stripping two Ministers of their portfolios just six months into the job shows Christopher Luxon’s management style is lacking, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said. ...
Tonight’s court decision to overturn the summons of the Children’s Minister has enabled the Crown to continue making decisions about Māori without evidence, says Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for Children, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “The judicial system has this evening told the nation that this government can do whatever they want when ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The government's decision to reintroduce Three Strikes is a destructive and ineffective piece of law-making that will only exacerbate an inherently biased and racist criminal justice system, said Te Pāti Māori Justice Spokesperson, Tākuta Ferris, today. During the time Three Strikes was in place in Aotearoa, Māori and Pasifika received ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
Te Pāti Māori is disgusted at the confirmation that hundreds are set to lose their jobs at Oranga Tamariki, and the disestablishment of the Treaty Response Unit. “This act of absolute carelessness and out of touch decision making is committing tamariki to state abuse.” Said Te Pāti Māori Oranga Tamariki ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
A laundry list of additional costs for Tāmaki Makarau Auckland shows the Minister for the city is not delivering for the people who live there, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters discussed the need for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and enhanced cooperation in the Pacific with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during her first official visit to New Zealand today. "New Zealand and Germany enjoy shared interests and values, including the rule of law, democracy, respect for the international system ...
The Minister Responsible for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop today released his decision on four recommendations referred to him by the Western Bay of Plenty District Council, opening the door to housing growth in the area. The Council’s Plan Change 92 allows more homes to be built in existing and new ...
Thank you, John McKinnon and the New Zealand China Council for the invitation to speak to you today. Thank you too, all members of the China Council. Your effort has played an essential role in helping to build, shape, and grow a balanced and resilient relationship between our two ...
The Government is modernising insurance law to better protect Kiwis and provide security in the event of a disaster, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly announced today. “These reforms are long overdue. New Zealand’s insurance law is complicated and dated, some of which is more than 100 years old. ...
The coalition Government is refreshing its approach to supporting pay equity claims as time-limited funding for the Pay Equity Taskforce comes to an end, Public Service Minister Nicola Willis says. “Three years ago, the then-government introduced changes to the Equal Pay Act to support pay equity bargaining. The changes were ...
Structured literacy will change the way New Zealand children learn to read - improving achievement and setting students up for success, Education Minister Erica Stanford says. “Being able to read and write is a fundamental life skill that too many young people are missing out on. Recent data shows that ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay says Canada’s refusal to comply in full with a CPTPP trade dispute ruling in our favour over dairy trade is cynical and New Zealand has no intention of backing down. Mr McClay said he has asked for urgent legal advice in respect of our ‘next move’ ...
The rights of our children and young people will be enhanced by changes the coalition Government will make to strengthen oversight of the Oranga Tamariki system, including restoring a single Children’s Commissioner. “The Government is committed to delivering better public services that care for our most at-risk young people and ...
The Government is making it easier for minor changes to be made to a building consent so building a home is easier and more affordable, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “The coalition Government is focused on making it easier and cheaper to build homes so we can ...
New Zealand lost a true legend when internationally renowned disability advocate Sir Robert Martin (KNZM) passed away at his home in Whanganui last night, Disabilities Issues Minister Louise Upston says. “Our Government’s thoughts are with his wife Lynda, family and community, those he has worked with, the disability community in ...
Good evening – Before discussing the challenges and opportunities facing New Zealand’s foreign policy, we’d like to first acknowledge the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. You have contributed to debates about New Zealand foreign policy over a long period of time, and we thank you for hosting us. ...
From today, passengers travelling internationally from Auckland Airport will be able to keep laptops and liquids in their carry-on bags for security screening thanks to new technology, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Creating a more efficient and seamless travel experience is important for holidaymakers and businesses, enabling faster movement through ...
People with an interest in the health of Northland’s marine ecosystems are invited to a public meeting to discuss how to deal with kina barrens, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones will lead the discussion, which will take place on Friday, 10 May, at Awanui Hotel in ...
Kiwi exporters are $100 million better off today with the NZ EU FTA entering into force says Trade Minister Todd McClay. “This is all part of our plan to grow the economy. New Zealand's prosperity depends on international trade, making up 60 per cent of the country’s total economic activity. ...
There are heartening signs that the extractive sector is once again becoming an attractive prospect for investors and a source of economic prosperity for New Zealand, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. “The beginnings of a resurgence in extractive industries are apparent in media reports of the sector in the past ...
The return of the historic Ō-Rākau battle site to the descendants of those who fought there moved one step closer today with the first reading of Te Pire mō Ō-Rākau, Te Pae o Maumahara / The Ō-Rākau Remembrance Bill. The Bill will entrust the 9.7-hectare battle site, five kilometres west ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has announced 25 new high-speed EV charging hubs along key routes between major urban centres and outlined the Government’s plan to supercharge New Zealand’s EV infrastructure. The hubs will each have several chargers and be capable of charging at least four – and up to 10 ...
The coalition Government will not proceed with the previous Government’s plans to regulate residential property managers, Housing Minister Chris Bishop says. “I have written to the Chairperson of the Social Services and Community Committee to inform him that the Government does not intend to support the Residential Property Managers Bill ...
The Government has announced an independent review into the disability support system funded by the Ministry of Disabled People – Whaikaha. Disability Issues Minister Louise Upston says the review will look at what can be done to strengthen the long-term sustainability of Disability Support Services to provide disabled people and ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has attended the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva and outlined the Government’s plan to restore law and order. “Speaking to the United Nations Human Rights Council provided us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while responding to issues and ...
The Government and Rotorua Lakes Council are committed to working closely together to end the use of contracted emergency housing motels in Rotorua. Associate Minister of Housing (Social Housing) Tama Potaka says the Government remains committed to ending the long-term use of contracted emergency housing motels in Rotorua by the ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay heads overseas today for high-level trade talks in the Gulf region, and a key OECD meeting in Paris. Mr McClay will travel to Riyadh to meet with counterparts from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). “New Zealand’s goods and services exports to the Gulf region ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford has outlined six education priorities to deliver a world-leading education system that sets Kiwi kids up for future success. “I’m putting ambition, achievement and outcomes at the heart of our education system. I want every child to be inspired and engaged in their learning so they ...
The new NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) App is a secure ‘one stop shop’ to provide the services drivers need, Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Digitising Government Minister Judith Collins say. “The NZTA App will enable an easier way for Kiwis to pay for Vehicle Registration and Road User Charges (RUC). ...
Whānau with tamariki growing up in emergency housing motels will be prioritised for social housing starting this week, says Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka. “Giving these whānau a better opportunity to build healthy stable lives for themselves and future generations is an essential part of the Government’s goal of reducing ...
Racing Minister Winston Peters has paid tribute to an icon of the industry with the recent passing of Dave O’Sullivan (OBE). “Our sympathies are with the O’Sullivan family with the sad news of Dave O’Sullivan’s recent passing,” Mr Peters says. “His contribution to racing, initially as a jockey and then ...
Assalaamu alaikum, greetings to you all. Eid Mubarak, everyone! I want to extend my warmest wishes to you and everyone celebrating this joyous occasion. It is a pleasure to be here. I have enjoyed Eid celebrations at Parliament before, but this is my first time joining you as the Minister ...
Associate Health Minister David Seymour has announced Pharmac’s largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff. “Access to medicines is a crucial part of many Kiwis’ lives. We’ve committed to a budget allocation of $1.774 billion over four years so Kiwis are ...
Hon Paula Bennett has been appointed as member and chair of the Pharmac board, Associate Health Minister David Seymour announced today. "Pharmac is a critical part of New Zealand's health system and plays a significant role in ensuring that Kiwis have the best possible access to medicines,” says Mr Seymour. ...
Hundreds of New Zealand families affected by Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) will benefit from a new Government focus on prevention and treatment, says Health Minister Dr Shane Reti. “We know FASD is a leading cause of preventable intellectual and neurodevelopmental disability in New Zealand,” Dr Reti says. “Every day, ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones today attended the official opening of Kaikohe’s new $14.7 million sports complex. “The completion of the Kaikohe Multi Sports Complex is a fantastic achievement for the Far North,” Mr Jones says. “This facility not only fulfils a long-held dream for local athletes, but also creates ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ engagements in Türkiye this week underlined the importance of diplomacy to meet growing global challenges. “Returning to the Gallipoli Peninsula to represent New Zealand at Anzac commemorations was a sombre reminder of the critical importance of diplomacy for de-escalating conflicts and easing tensions,” Mr Peters ...
Ambassador Millar, Burgemeester, Vandepitte, Excellencies, military representatives, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen – good morning and welcome to this sacred Anzac Day dawn service. It is an honour to be here on behalf of the Government and people of New Zealand at Buttes New British Cemetery, Polygon Wood – a deeply ...
Distinguished guests - It is an honour to return once again to this site which, as the resting place for so many of our war-dead, has become a sacred place for generations of New Zealanders. Our presence here and at the other special spaces of Gallipoli is made ...
Mai ia tawhiti pamamao, te moana nui a Kiwa, kua tae whakaiti mai matou, ki to koutou papa whenua. No koutou te tapuwae, no matou te tapuwae, kua honoa pumautia. Ko nga toa kua hinga nei, o te Waipounamu, o te Ika a Maui, he okioki tahi me o ...
Paul Goldsmith will take on responsibility for the Media and Communications portfolio, while Louise Upston will pick up the Disability Issues portfolio, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today. “Our Government is relentlessly focused on getting New Zealand back on track. As issues change in prominence, I plan to adjust Ministerial ...
Recreational catch limits will be reduced in areas of Fiordland and the Chatham Islands to help keep those fisheries healthy and sustainable, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The lower recreational daily catch limits for a range of finfish and shellfish species caught in the Fiordland Marine Area and ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed an important milestone in New Zealand’s hydrogen future, with the opening of the country’s first network of hydrogen refuelling stations in Wiri. “I want to congratulate the team at Hiringa Energy and its partners K one W one (K1W1), Mitsui & Co New Zealand ...
The coalition Government is delivering on its commitment to improve resource management laws and give greater certainty to consent applicants, with a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) expected to be introduced to Parliament next month. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has today outlined the first RMA Amendment ...
Overseas models for regulating the oil and gas sector, including their decommissioning regimes, are being carefully scrutinised as a potential template for New Zealand’s own sector, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. The Coalition Government is focused on rebuilding investor confidence in New Zealand’s energy sector as it looks to strengthen ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy, Australian National University Every year on June 1, student debt in Australia is indexed to inflation. In 2023, high inflation pushed the indexation rate to 7.1%, the highest since 1990. This ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Changes in the May 14 budget will cut the student debt of more than three million people, wiping more than $3 billion from what people owe. The government will cap the HELP indexation rate ...
Asia Pacific Report The prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has appealed for an end to what it calls intimidation of its staff, saying such threats could constitute an offence against the “administration of justice” by the world’s permanent war crimes court. The Hague-based office of ICC Prosecutor ...
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk A women’s union in New Caledonia has staged a sit-in protest this week to support senior Kanak indigenous journalist Thérèse Waia, who works for public broadcaster Nouvelle-Calédonie la Première, after a smear attack by critics. The peaceful demonstration was held on ...
New Zealand Food Safety is monitoring overseas recalls of Indian packaged spice products manufactured by MDH and Everest due to concerns over a cancer-causing pesticide. ...
By Stephen Wright and Stefan Armbruster of BenarNews Fiji’s ranking in a global press freedom index has jumped into the top tier of countries with free or mostly free media after its government last year repealed a draconian law that threatened journalists with prison for doing their jobs. Fiji’s improvement ...
We might be in Invercargill but all anyone can talk about is Gore. Specifically, Salford Street. That’s where three-year-old Lachlan Jones lived, south of the centre of town, between the A&P Showgrounds and the Mataura River. Roughly 1.2 km away from the single level home he lived in with his ...
Keen hiker and second-year MSc student Liam Hewson wears two hats when he’s in the great outdoors. “The scientist in me appreciates nature and goes, ‘Oh, there’s that thing and there’s another thing,’ but then the tramper and the outdoorsy person in me thinks, ‘Cool bush.’” Born and bred in ...
MONDAY I lined up the latest round of civil servants from city hall against the wall, and signalled for the firing squad to drop their rifles. I stepped up onto a wooden crate to look at the office workers in the eye. But that didn’t feel right, so I found ...
After a long and illustrious career as a goal kicker, Dan Carter’s favourite way to unwind is… kicking goals. Why can’t he get enough of it? And what it’s like to watch him do it for an hour straight? A semicircle of people wielding cameras and phones has formed in ...
Dame Susan Devoy takes us through her life in television, including late night ER debriefs, her proudest CTI moment and the show she watches in secret. Quite aside from her four world champion squash titles, Dame Susan Devoy will likely go down in history as one of the best Celebrity ...
Hera Lindsay Bird reveals the best places in Ōtepoti to score more for your apocalypse-prep book hoard.Sometimes I get the feeling I’ve been killed in a car crash, and this second half of my life is just the brain unspooling itself, like one of those episodes of a hospital ...
ThreeNow’s new murder mystery series takes us on a dark, damp journey into the Australian wilderness.This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. High Country is ThreeNow’s new Australian eight-part crime drama, set in a remote part of the Victorian highlands. It tells ...
Introducing a new way to read The Spinoff every weekend. After nearly 10 years of being an online magazine, we’re finally embracing the weekend liftout. Despite our best efforts to convince you otherwise, writers and editors at The Spinoff don’t work weekend. It is through the sheer power of technology ...
Tip one: let yourself be nurtured by this big old man. Tip two: don’t ask him to adopt you. So, you’ve arrived at your first session with a new therapist. He tells you to make yourself comfortable and you opt for the tweed armchair, hoping it makes you look like ...
I didn’t know books could open you back up; that there were books that stayed with you, where reading was like a chemical event. I knew nothing.The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.Not too long ago, I was listening to the American ...
Former Olympic swimmer James Magnussen has already started training for the Enhanced games, though says he won’t start taking performance enhancing substances until about nine months out from the competition. The Australian world champion was the first athlete to be announced by Enhanced, but he says the organisation has had ...
Everyone thinks he’s dead. Every day they expect his body to be washed up along the coast. Most likely up Karitane way, the way the tide’s running. But nobody’ll be too surprised if his body’s never found. Even in death he wouldn’t have wished for such attention. He would have ...
Council members voted 21 to 4 in favour of Ahluwalia returning to the Laucala campus following a much-awaited meeting in Vanuatu this week. It comes as USP and its two unions — the Association of the University of the South Pacific Staff (AUSPS) and the Administration and Support Staff Union ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicola Henry, Professor & Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Social and Global Studies Centre, RMIT University Shutterstock Following an emergency meeting of the National Cabinet this week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a raft of measures to tackle the problem ...
Analysis - A poll showing the opposition is more popular than the government raises questions, politicians go through their 'trial by pay rise' and a Green MP loses her cool in the debating chamber. ...
The entire stretch of Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast will be subject to a joint customary marine title for two hapū, and extending up to four miles out to sea. A High Court judge has found the two groups, who during the case settled a dispute over boundaries for ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Hall, Lecturer, Media & Cultural Studies, Edith Cowan University A longstanding feud between TikTok and Universal Music Group seems to have finally reached an end, with both parties signing a deal that will see Universal-backed music returned to the social media ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siobhan O’Dean, Postdoctoral Research Associate, The Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney After several highly publicised alleged murders of women in Australia, the Albanese government this week pledged more than A$925 million over five years ...
Political parties have now fully disclosed the donations they received last year - with National getting more than double the cash of any other party. ...
A Pacific regionalism expert has called out New Zealand's Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters for withholding information from the public on AUKUS military pact. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard de Grijs, Professor of Astrophysics, Macquarie University Bruno Scramgnon/Pexels All systems are “go” for tonight’s launch of China’s next step in a carefully planned lunar exploration program. Placed on top of a powerful Long March 5 rocket, the Chang’e 6 ...
National returned a massive donation the day after a Newsroom story linked the donors to a property being investigated for operating unlawfully as a migrant workers’ hostel. The party’s 2023 donation filings, released on Friday, show it returned a $200,000 donation from Buen Holdings on August 23. That was the ...
Pacific Media Watch New Zealand has slumped to an unprecedented 19th place in the annual Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index survey released today on World Press Freedom Day — May 3. This was a drop of six places from 13th last year when it slipped out of its ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Black, Political Historian and Administrator Officer, Australian Historical Association, Australian National University Australia has had its fair share of public record-keeping controversies in recent years. Some have been mere farce, as in the case of two formerly government-owned filing cabinets (containing ...
Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light (HWPL), a United Nations-affiliated organization dedicated to fostering peace through civilian-led initiatives, has issued a statement in response to the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran. ...
A poem by Tessa Keenan, from AUP New Poets 10. Mātou These days we are a photograph; one of a farm strewn with cows that used to be bright harakeke or swamp. The kids point at it and say the sun sits behind a smudge (left by someone at Christmas); ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber, $25)The masterful Irish writer ...
Marriage and civil union statistics record the number of marriages and civil unions registered in New Zealand each year, and divorce statistics record the number of divorces granted in New Zealand each year. Key facts Marriages and civil unions In ...
Marriage and civil union statistics record the number of marriages and civil unions registered in New Zealand each year, and divorce statistics record the number of divorces granted in New Zealand each year. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lennon Y.C. Chang, Associate Professor of Cyber Risk and Policy, Deakin University Taiwan stands out as a beacon of democracy, innovation and resilience in an increasingly autocratic region. But this is under growing threat. In recent years, China has used a variety ...
In this excerpt from her new memoir, Dame Susan Devoy remembers her turn as star contestant on the 2022 season of Celebrity Treasure Island. The most anxious time of every day was pre-elimination, when you knew this could be your final day on the show. I felt such contradictory emotions, ...
A week that began in triumph ended in an all-too-familiar disaster for the Green Party. Duncan Greive asks if there’s something in the mission that breaks its best and brightest. A long, strange week for the Green party began with a fantastic poll result. On one level this is hardly ...
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist Vanuatu’s former prime minister and opposition MP Ishmael Kalsakau has stepped down — just two days after he confirmed he was the rightful opposition leader. Kalsakau, MP for Port Vila, confirmed to ABC’s Pacific Beat, and the Vanuatu Daily Post on Thursday that he ...
What’s to blame for the coalition’s choppy start? Six months in, and the mojo meter is in the doldrums. A new poll would put National out of power and sees its leader, Chris Luxon, sliding in popularity. How much is it about policy, how much coalition management and a perception ...
The striking report goes far beyond the proposed repeal of the Oranga Tamariki Act’s Treaty of Waitangi provision, and its impact should be felt far beyond the unique circumstances of the claim it addresses. Earlier this week, the Waitangi Tribunal released an interim report on the government’s proposed repeal of ...
The world has been experiencing a productivity slowdown, from which New Zealand has not been exempt. COVID-19 temporarily boosted labour productivity, but more recently, productivity has retreated. The overall trend since 2007 has been one of slow productivity ...
What’s more wasteful than spending $315k on syrup and machine maintenance? Trying to drum up a controversy about it.Cast your mind back to the pre-pandemic idylls of 2019. A “rat” was a disgusting rodent and not a self-administered plague test; the sixth Labour government was in power; and the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Professor of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Monash University Ken stocker/Shutterstock In the wake of numerous killings of women allegedly by men’s violence in 2024, thousands of Australians have joined rallies across the country to demand action ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Henry Cutler, Professor and Director, Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, Macquarie University Oleg Ivanov IL/Shutterstock Waiting times for public hospital elective surgery have been in the news ahead of this year’s federal budget. That’s the type of non-emergency surgery ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Konstantine Panegyres, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne Amna Artist/Shutterstock One of the earliest descriptions of someone with cancer comes from the fourth century BC. Satyrus, tyrant of the city of Heracleia on the Black Sea, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Rose, Professor of Sustainable Future Transport, University of Sydney LanaElcova/Shutterstock Electric vehicles are often seen as the panacea to cutting emissions – and air pollution – from transport. Is this view correct? Yes – but only once uptake accelerates. Despite the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Giselle Natassia Woodley, Researcher and Phd Candidate, Edith Cowan University There is widespread agreement Australia needs to do better when it comes to gender-based violence. Anger and frustration at the numbers of women being killed saw national rallies over the weekend and ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Graham, Lecturer in Economics, University of Sydney Mark and Anna Photography/Shutterstock As home ownership moves further out of reach for many Australians, “rentvesting” is being touted as a lifesaver. Rentvesting is the practice of renting one property to live ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sukhmani Khorana, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW Sydney Netflix The new season of Heartbreak High is garnering mixed reviews. Critics are writing about the racy story lines, comparing it to other coming-of-age series about teenage relationships and ...
Bob Carr intends to launch legal action against Winston Peters and Julie Anne Genter is facing a second allegation of bullying. Both sucked the air out of an announcement on education, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in ...
In 1995, Sally Clark went out on her own in a bold and unorthodox attempt to join an illustrious group of equestrian riders conquering the world. In the days of glovebox road maps, brick cell phones, and the hit song How Bizarre, Clark refused to follow Sir Mark Todd, Blyth ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Beaglehole, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago niphon/Getty Images The number of people accessing medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in Aotearoa New Zealand increased significantly between 2006 and 2022. But the disorder is still under-diagnosed and ...
To celebrate the start of New Zealand music month, we look back at the best local tuneage that managed to weasel its way into Hollywood productions. There’s nothing quite like the thrilling zap of recognition when New Zealand weasels its way into a glamorous Hollywood production. Crack open a Tui ...
People trust other people more than institutions. So how can the media gain that trust through journalists without losing what’s important about the institution? Anna Rawhiti-Connell reflects on two years of curating the news for The Bulletin.Amonth ago, armed cops descended on my neighbourhood as calls to “lock your ...
Essay: If the Crown harms children, how do you hold it accountable? Analysis by Aaron Smale in light of the Waitangi Tribunal court decision. The post The Crown versus Māori Children appeared first on Newsroom. ...
Opinion: PFAS – per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances – are a class of thousands of man-made chemicals used widely in everyday consumer items such as textiles, packaging, and cookware, popular for their water, grease and stain-repellent properties. However, the very properties that make PFAS so attractive to manufacturers are also what ...
I put this viedeo link up for Wild Katipo …. after she called a shitty poster a wolf
The music starts about 6 mins 48 secs
The Wolf and bear ….. 11 mins 55 secs
I would describe the music as …. 2 minutes to midnight rock …… as the end depicts
A 1930s nazi style propaganda newsreel?
What the….
Do you really think this is good?
Intellectually challenged skin heads and fascists love this stuff.
Are you putting this stuff up as a parody or what?
http://www.amateinitiative.com/new_wave_of_neo_nazis_take_inspiration_from_russia_and_assad_not_nazi_germany
Intellectually challenged skin heads and fascists love this stuff.
As do intellectually-challenged socialists. It’s called horseshoe theory.
I see that one of the impeccably researched references in your horseshit link includes a farrago of abuse aimed at the Jewish intellectual Antony Loewenstein from one Tzvi Fleischer of the extreme right wing AIJAC.
Keep it up Milt—a talkback hosting spot on NewstalkZB is the natural next step after all your hard work.
If my assessment of the merits of a particular theory were based on how Morrissey feels about one or other of the people involved, perhaps I’d care about that.
That’s no defence of your putting up a link to an extreme right wing group to support your horseshit talk.
Not your best day so far, my friend.
Removing a duplicate comment
Wikipedia’s an extreme right-wing group, now?
No, of course not. But extreme right groups like AIPAC are often unwittingly swept up and quoted by otherwise level-headed and sensible commentators. As has happened, sadly, in comment 1.1.1 on this thread.
Why don’t you actually attempt to refute the theory then, rather than shoot the messenger. For example it would be easy to write a lot of people on the left off as nutters, but that would be the easy option. Much better to actually consider and critique the respective arguments, don’t you think?
Shadrach …… who posts things like …. ‘ most muslims are fundamentalists and incompatible with our society ”
and …. ‘ Its radical Islam preachers who are to blame for the rise in attacks on Muslims’
And who tried the anti semite smear on Ilhan Omar ….
Your an idiot worth ignoring Shadrach …. or do you stand by your views ?????
https://twitter.com/MesutOzil1088/status/1110170205748187136
‘ most muslims are fundamentalists and incompatible with our society ”
and …. ‘ Its radical Islam preachers who are to blame for the rise in attacks on Muslims’
I have never stated I hold those beliefs. Ever. What I have said is that Islam, as practised in countries with Islamic governments, is incompatible with a modern liberal democracy, but then that is self evident (https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world/iranian-who-removed-headscarf-sentenced-to-year-in-prison/ar-BBVVB6H?ocid=spartanntp).
Muslims, on the other hand, are welcome in my country and my neighbourhood, because most that come to NZ are actually trying to escape those tyranny’s.
Oh and it’s a bit rich you quoting a mega-rich footballer who probably knows nothing of the consequences of Islamic extremism. I’m sure his personal security apparatus keeps him well away from danger.
Jenny_how to be Asshat …. The woman who cried wolf ….. and claimed Asshat was to blame for our christchurch subhuman supremacist murder spree .
To quote jenny_ how to be MadAss… ” ” The attack in Christchurch was conducted on the anniversary of the beginning of the popular revolt against Assad, by a gunman who self describes as a fascist””
Talk about some sicko propaganda Jenny_how to be cracked ass … and she did not stop there.
” “Jo Cox was assassinated by a fascist gunman because she supported the Syrian people against the regime.”
Jen Jenny ……..Watch this video that made joe90 start hating on me …. As my main complaint is it conflates the murderer and chemical weapons user ( with help from the usa & Britian ) …. Saddam with Gadaffi …..
Gadaffi was no Saddam
https://www.bitchute.com/video/hUaWa8L9YPXL/
https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-11-04-2019/#comment-1606325
Reason tries to conflate me with Wayne Mapp as somehow being implicated in Operation Burnham and the killing of innocent Afghan villagers
Jenny like Wayne Mapp has some peculiar posting habits which makes me doubt their sincerity or remorse over innocent people being killed…. that they have had a hand in.
In no way can it be imagined that I had a hand in innocent people being killed, this is a smear, not a fact.
” Jo Cox was assassinated by a fascist gunman because she supported the Syrian people against the regime.”
Jo Cox supported the Syrian people’s revolt against the Assad regime, this is a verifiable fact.
That fascists world wide support Assad’s genocidal war against his own people, is a verifiable fact.
That the attack in Christchurch was carried out on the internationally recognised anniversary of the start of the Syrian revolt against Assad, is a verifiable fact.
That the killer of Jo Cox and Heather Heyer and the killer in Christchurch and Norway all self identified as “fascists” is a verifiable fact.
“The normalisation and acceptance of fascism in Syria has emboldened and empowered fascists everywhere.”
Possibly this last by me, could be termed a judgment call, but it is more than backed up by a mass of evidence that indicates this.
The Christchurch shooter was not a lone wolf. He was part of an international fascist movement.
reason regarding your post on 1
“I put this video link up for Wild Katipo …. after she called a shitty poster a wolf”
After watching the video this is my sentiments;
I think It is wise to see both sides of every story no matter what uncomfortable it seems to be watching the movie clip.
History is the founding evidence we need to plan a better way forward.
“There are none for dumb than those who will see or hear.”
Or maybe you may prefer; – “ignorance is bliss”
Or; – “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
For example, She decided not to read the critics’ reviews-ignorance is bliss.
Although its truth may be dubious at best, this idea has been expressed since ancient times.
The actual wording, however, comes from Thomas Gray’s poem, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1742): “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”
I note that you still cannot walk without questionable video clips as your crutches.
If you have a point to make, make it, and do so without the blatant innuendo.
Are you fishing for approval or support from other commenters for your crusade?
This is similar comments in three OMs in a row and it is becoming repetitive and boring.
The thing with gummy bear posting … is to put across your / my arguement …. in response to the fish mongers and all their red herrings ….
I like linking to people who put across my points of view better than myself …. and often with more information.
Like this video on Assange …. As it was James and julian assange that got incognito talking to me.
So we talk about Assange or james … or Wayne Mapp… aye incog ?
I find that a feeble excuse for not making an effort to put forward your point in your own words. And talking of “red herrings”, since when are clips of Julian Assange or whatever relevant to your comments dedicated to having a go at other commenters here because they, in your opinion, are “blatantly reprehensible” and “fish mongers” [sic]? Julian Assange has got nothing to do with your behaviour here! Please don’t conflate the people you link to with the commenters that you feel outraged about.
You’re continuing to act like a stalker with halitosis when you called Shadrach an idiot @ 1:14 pm and also had a go at Jenny @ 1:05 pm.
Please address the issue at hand without resorting to personal attacks.
You seem to have somewhat of an unhealthy obsession with me.
You really aren’t my type.
It’s really weird, James, how often you reference your supposed attractiveness to commenters here. Is there anybody here who you haven’t implied is obsessed with you/ stalking you??
Just asking. ’cause I’ve noticed a pattern of behaviour from you…
Um, maybe Puckish Rogue, whose affections are aimed so exclusively elsewhere?
Seems like there’s been a massive Wikileaks dump
https://nationandstate.com/2019/04/13/new-wikileaks-massive-file-dump/
Wonder if Assange’s arrest will prompt a new torrent of leaks
Well done Francesca with a large dossier of incidents.
That will begin a torrent of others alright
Today’s news on BBC;
Is that claims from Julian Assange’s legal team is warning that they will fight the extradition to Sweden and US.
“It will be a long protracted fight” they claimed.
IF the Kim Dotcom fight is anything to go by, yes. I don’t think the KDC legal fight will be over till about 2021 or 2022. Though if the Supreme Court says KDC can’t be extradited, it might be over by late this year. Still that would be 8 years since his arrest in Jan 2012.
I guess more like five years for Assange in the UK. Their courts have more experience of extradition, so many of the precedents have been well established. It won’t take a decade.
I guess more like five years for Assange in the UK
To send him to the US or to Sweden? Looks to me (with precisely zero legal expertise) sending Assange to Sweden should be a lot more straightforward than to the US. There’s some thorny questions about whether what the US accuses him of is even a crime, and he’s got at least some argument around the political aspects of it.
The other thing is that it might count for something that they already went through the Swedish thing once – even if they have to start over, appeals opportunities will be limited because the higher courts probably won’t want to relitigate the same points again – the lower courts have their guidance on the matters of substance.
Except under the UK – US extradition Treaty ratified by the US in 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK%E2%80%93US_extradition_treaty_of_2003
And:
As I have noted elsewhere, the US could have applied for extradition when they charged Manning. This was well before he went to Sweden. The allegation that the rape charges are simply a means to get Assange out of the UK, and off to the US – as some commentators here seem to believe – is just nonsense.
There’s also that the WaPo reported in 2013 that the Obama administration concluded they shouldn’t and wouldn’t go after Assange because of the potential chilling effects on unquestionably legitimate journalism – the so-called “New York Times problem”.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/julian-assange-unlikely-to-face-us-charges-over-publishing-classified-documents/2013/11/25/dd27decc-55f1-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b029304e118c
I’d be curious about how this new indictment came to be and exactly who was pushing for it. Certainly for the Ginger Genghis, any chilling effects on journalists would be a feature not a bug.
Yeah – I’ve been wondering that myself.
The tRump regime kicked it off by deciding to prosecute WikiLeaks, and last November an error let it out of the bag that Assange had been charged under seal.
http://archive.li/bQrJC
http://archive.li/0t6R1
Thanks. So it looks like Sessions was definitely part of the push for it. But it’s still not clear if the Persimmon Palpatine was also pushing it, or at most was ‘yeah, whatevs” if he ever heard about it.
Yeah! Now I remember that.
Bernie just doesn’t get it.
He’s earned over a million bucks from his book. He could use that to illustrate an argument for higher taxes on high earners and the wealthy by talking about all the different sectors of society supported by taxes had to come together to make that possible.
But no, he just gets entitled and defensive about it.
“If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
“I didn’t know that it was a crime to write a good book which turns out to be a bestseller,”
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/13/politics/bernie-sanders-millionaire-book-sales-tax-returns/index.html
What a surplus, a socialist achieves something for themselves and realises the errors of socialism and the benefits of free enterprise
Funny..
I note the “Free enterprisers” especially in the States, are the most expensive beneficiaries, of “socialist” tax dollars.
And favourable Government regulation.
Like the “business people” here who go on about “Pretty communists”, “useless people” and the like, as we, “socialists” bail out their failures, with our tax dollars.
Taxes which they avoid.
‘The eminent ‘voice of free enterprise’
But few really believe the “honesty” of ‘free enterprise’ as the word “free” does send a message of ‘no principals towards the society it wants to exploit’.
When you have a business.
An honest one, giving value for money, you realise how much you depend on regulation and state support, to keep you competitive, against the crooks and cowboys.
Businesspeople who argue for a smaller State, are delusional. Or, they are the crooks and cowboys!
how many businesses have you had now? If you need regulations to keep yourself competitive, you are a lazy business owner. Regulations are only there to make sure people play fair, if they don’t the market and the regulators find them out.
Socialists have never bailed out anyone. it’s normally business people getting there own tax dollars back.
But it’s amusing that a socialist hero like bernie finally sees the error of his ways
The business people getting bailed out, don’t pay taxes, you twit.
Thanks for confirming my point, about regulations keeping the market fair.
Which one are you TP? The crook or the cowboy. Or just a wannabee, successful who dreams that they world will one day see your brilliance, and make you rich, like so many right wingers?
“The only problem with socialism is that it allows the deluded to survive to adulthood, to claim it doesn’t work”.
The real laugh is that the f wits who don’t like socialism, would be the ones living in a cardboard box on the street, without our welfare state, under a “free market”, that paid them according to their capabilities.
I’m comfortable. I pay lots of tax. Too much given the attitudes of people who pay none and can’t manage businesses properly. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to pay it, jid rather pay less.
Anyone who makes out that socialism is the saviour of society is so sadly deluded there is no point talking to them. They won’t believe anything not socjalist no matter how societies fail under its yoke
More socialist societies doing rather well, actually.
Just compare blue states with red states in the USA.
Where is your successful free market capitalist State again.
Somalia, Honduras, San Salvadore, Mexico, Haiti, Appalachia?
Done well out of our “socialist” welfare State, eh?
Socialists have never bailed out anyone. it’s normally business people getting there own tax dollars back.
Wtf? Leaving aside the use of accountants to ensure that the business owner appears to have little income and qualifies for all kinds of transfers aimed at people who genuinely do have little income, in the last two weeks we’ve had Simon Bridges telling us that small businesses in NZ are only viable because the taxpayer subsidises low wages via Working for Families, and trucking companies announcing that they can’t stay in business if they have to actually comply with safety regulations.
The notion that New Zealand is a uniquely low wage economy simply doesn’t stack up. Wages in NZ are about the same percentage of per capita GDP as Australia. Our per capita GDP is about 30% lower than Aus, and so are our wages and salaries.
Another way of looking at it, is that the Gini index measuring inequality is about the same in both countries. That means average and mean wages will be roughly the same percentage of GDP per capita.
New Zealand’s problem is that Australia is significantly more wealthy, and has been for many decades, especially once the mineral boom really took off in the 1970’s. The gap has closed a little in the last ten years, but not a huge amount.
It is very hard to see how the gap will change much in the next ten years. If the gap closed to 20%, that would be a major gain for New Zealand.
And yet, Simon Bridges recognises the need for Working for Families (as did the previous Key/English National-led governments) and says there’s no way NZ businesses could cover that in the wages they offer. Perhaps Australia has a similar subsidy for employers, I don’t know.
Accommodation costs are probably the main reason that wages need to be subsidised via tax transfers in NZ, but it’s not the people who need two jobs and WfF to make ends meet who are causing those high accommodation costs, it’s the well-off like me who’ve bought multiple properties as a retirement fund, and successive governments that have encouraged runaway immigration in the interest of being able to show positive annual growth figures. For those WfF recipients, the news that their wages aren’t particularly low, it’s just that their accommodation costs are particular high, isn’t a particularly helpful piece of information.
You would say that, Wayne.
Wages are defined in terms of buying power.
In fact, workers share of the economy dropped sharply after your unfortunate experiment, and has never recovered.
The wage gap between us, and Australia would be even greater, 36%, if conservative Australian Governments hadn’t adopted aspects of your unfortunate experiment, more recently.
https://www.union.org.nz/economicbulletin202/
“New Zealand workers now receive among the lowest shares of the nation’s income in the OECD. In Denmark for example, with much stronger collective bargaining and unionisation supporting a high value economy, the share was similar to New Zealand’s in the late 1970s but has stayed there ever since. Yes, New Zealand does have a low wage economy”.
Despite all the evidence worldwide that trickle down and austerity doesn’t work, it still has all these supporters. Go figure.
Only Jim Bolger has the guts to admit you got it wrong.
The lower incomes to Labour, and the higher share to banking and capital depressing the communities wealth, is the reason for New Zealand’s stagnation, compared to Australia.
We had a boom in commodity sales and prices roughly equivalent to Australia over the same time period. The increase per capita was greater than theirs. So to attribute Australia’s higher wages to mineral booms, is self serving bullshit.
Britain’s version of “Sir” Bob Jones is getting caramelised on Twitter
https://twitter.com/Lord_Sugar/status/1116413655254540290
Assange’s ‘Conspiracy’ to Expose War Crimes Has Already Been Punished
by JOE EMERSBERGER, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, April 12, 2019
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should never have been punished for working with a whistleblower to expose war crimes. Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower, has done more time in prison, under harsher conditions, than William Calley, a key perpetrator of the My Lai massacre. Remarkably, Manning is in jail again, failed by organizations that should unreservedly defend her, as the US tries to coerce her into helping inflict more punishment on Assange.
As for Assange, he has already been arbitrarily detained for several years, according to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Its 2016 press release on the matter stated: “The expert panel called on the Swedish and British authorities to end Mr. Assange’s deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation.”
Now Assange could be punished even more brutally if the UK extradites him to the US, where he is charged with a “conspiracy” to help Manning crack a password that “would have” allowed her to cover her tracks more effectively. In other words, the alleged help with password-cracking didn’t work, and is not what resulted in the information being disclosed. It has also not been shown that it was Assange who offered the help, according to Kevin Gosztola (Shadowproof, 4/11/19). The government’s lack of proof of its charges might explain why Manning is in jail again.
The indictment goes even further, criminalizing the use of an electronic “drop box” and other tactics that investigate journalists routinely use in the computer age to work with a confidential source “for the purpose of publicly disclosing” information…..
Read more….
https://fair.org/home/assanges-conspiracy-to-expose-war-crimes-has-already-been-punished/
Hi Morrissey, to bad you wern’t around a couple of days ago, you would have seen TRP and several other Standard Oil reactionaries roll around in Assanges arrest like dogs in shit, it was quite a sad spectacle to watch, and not at all a good look for what ever remains of the reputation of The Standard…well in opinion anyway.
Thanks for the FAIR link.
Ecuadorian President’s Motives for Surrendering Assange: Vengeance & IMF Loan?
“$4.2 billion IMF loan, submission to the US, and vengeance appear to have been President Moreno’s true motives for revoking Assange’s asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, says Ecuador’s former foreign minister Guillaume Long”
The mozzie’s sockpuppet put in an appearance. An astonishingly low-key appearance, all things considered.
Thanks, Adrian. In fact I did have a look at the site but I was just too overwhelmed by the horror of that scene—it was like something out of Stalin’s Russia—to be able to formulate any response.
Your description of the behaviour of many of our Standardisti comrades is depressingly accurate. They’re not the only ones of course. As I type this I’m listening to Jim Mora talking, and sighing empathetically, on the radio. I wonder if the sight of Assange’s humiliation on Friday amused him as much as Assange’s suffering amused him in 2013….
https://morrisseybreen.blogspot.com/2018/01/an-unusually-inane-and-depraved-edition.html
Morrissey; about Mora he is a pathetic troll for national.
Especially when he says this;
MORA: Is it a human right to get enough sun?
He said that in a tone of great amusement.
A very good point. USA War criminals who participate in the most disgusting crimes get kid gloves treatment, if they even get to the point of being prosecuted. Calley, sentenced to life, then Nixon changed Calley’s sentence to house arrest, and he served three years.
My Lai was only the tip of the iceberg in Vietnam. The military and government simply didn’t want to know. Whistle blowers exposing criminal acts are hounded to the ends of the earth.
He must be ruing his preference for tRump when he was pretty much off the hook.
The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.
The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.
http://archive.li/wHEI0
Support for Trump? He should have supported Clinton, who called for his trial as a criminal for his exposing of U.S. crimes in Iraq?
Of course he wanted Clinton to lose.
That means he “supported Trump”?
You do realize that the Mueller investigation has discredited the fantasies of the DNC and its hapless media parrots like Rachel Maddow forever? You’re allowed to stop quoting them if you want.
Oh!! M you have the report then! Can you show us your copy?
Y’know, commentary here has been remarkably muted over the mandarin messiah greenlighting Israel holding on to the Golan Heights.
Could it be that those who would normally be frothing over outrages like this are reluctant to voice disapproval of their fake-bronzed beelzebub?
https://www.salon.com/2019/04/13/afraid-of-its-role-in-the-globalized-world-donald-trump-perverted-the-us-role-as-economic-global-cop/
You’ve led a sheltered life if you think breaches of international law started with Trump. They won’t end when he’s gone either.
My comment wasn’t about the breach of international law per se, it was about the lack of reaction to it from the usual suspects here that one would expect to be very vocal.
But don’t expect them to understand that Andre. They can’t even understand the depths that tRump has now brought his country too. The latest tweeting of a video that included footage of Ilhan Omar* speaking and graphic images of the 9/11 terror attacks has to be one of his most despicable acts ever.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/12/ilhan-omar-democrats-trump-attacks-sanders-warren
* For those unfamiliar with this amazing young woman; Omar, emigrated to the US from Somalia as a refugee and became one of the first Muslim women in Congress
As a standalone act that attack on Omar would be despicable. But given the ball of toilet-bowl scrapings’ own history of trying to exploit 911 for his own self-gratification and benefit, the vileness is geometrically compounded.
This past week or so has seen a steep decline. The vileness and posturing of that inhumane being in the WH is getting worse by the day – everyday now it seems he plunges to a new low. I cannot for the life of me see how any self respecting Republican law maker can continue to sit by and watch. The country is in an absolute shambles. We thought Key was bad enough here – tRump is a thousand times worse.
yep so true
I don’t think I can take much more of it. This is what it must have been like for sane folk around the world when Hitler rose to power in the 1930s.
What horrifies me: it was my father’s prediction 45 years ago that the next country to produce a ‘Hitler’ would be America. Yes I know, he was far from being the only one to do so.
And yes, Macro. Key was almost a saint in comparison. 😯
While tRump is busy using 9/11 to incite violence against a Muslim woman his regime is trying to illegally transfer nuclear technology to the country that produced most of the 9/11 hijackers
https://twitter.com/nprpolitics/status/1097901883107229699
But! But! Jared says they are such nice people!
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/world/middleeast/kushner-saudi-arabia.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/16/jared-kushner-trump-saudi-khashoggi-mbs
After all they gave him lots of money!
https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-real-estate-100-million-investment-saud-uae-2018-5/?r=AU&IR=T
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-administration-sued-after-saudi-prince-bragged-jared-kushner-was-his-872401
Notable lack of support and even outright denigration of Omar, and Ocasio Cortez, from old line Democrats.
Reminds me of the our Labour party, whenever someone making vaguely leftish statements, springs up.
Notable lack of support and even outright denigration of Omar, and Ocasio Cortez, from old line Democrats.
Such as??
NB: Pelosi isn’t one of them.
http://tinyurl.com/y5yj2yz3
“With the exception of a handful of Omar’s progressive colleagues—including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—Democrats have largely been silent as the Minnesota congresswoman has faced vitriolic and racist smears from right-wing outlets, including the New York Post and Fox”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/12/ilhan-omar-democrats-trump-attacks-sanders-warren
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/13/18309127/democrats-trump-ilhan-omar-tweet-9-11
“NB: Pelosi isn’t one of them.”
Got problems of her own,always be careful what you ask for.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1117242926654947328
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/enterthefray/la-ol-trump-migrnats-sanctuary-cities-20190412-story.html
Mobster – nice cities you have, pity if anything should happen to them.
Mayors – bring it.
https://twitter.com/LibbySchaaf/status/1117233768639549440
“Here’s a message to President Trump: Seattle is not afraid of immigrants and refugees. In fact, we have always welcomed people who have faced tremendous hardships around the world. Immigrants and refugees are part of Seattle’s heritage, and they will continue to make us the city of the future,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Friday.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/438731-seattle-mayor-pens-op-ed-saying-his-city-isnt-afraid-of-immigrants-amid
“in fact, we have always welcomed people who have faced tremendous hardships ”
Seattle looks like the kind of place to go to experience hardship.
https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness/the-roots-of-the-crisis
large indian homeless problem there ugly statistics.
That criticism could be levelled at almost all American cities.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf02712505
It does not negate the fact that these cities are open to accepting others who have been forced to flee from their homes and families.
Alexis De Tocqueville IN Democracy in America suggested
“These are great evils; and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable. I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish; and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race of men will be no more. *i The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals. ”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm#link2HCH0045
[I leave this chapter wholly unchanged, for it has always appeared to me to be one of the most eloquent and touching parts of this book. But it has ceased to be prophetic; the destruction of the Indian race in the United States is already consummated. In 1870 there remained but 25,731 Indians in the whole territory of the Union, and of these by far the largest part exist in California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Dakota, and New Mexico and Nevada. In New England, Pennsylvania, and New York the race is extinct; and the predictions of M. de Tocqueville are fulfilled. —Translator’s Note.]
https://twitter.com/MrFilmkritik/status/1116855370968911872
https://twitter.com/rluxford/status/1117136045550731267
francesca,
Perfectly said as the ‘deep state’ is a global control system that keeps all governments under control no matter who they are run by.
Really cg you conspiracy theories are getting worse by the day. Please stop reading Briebart.
Yeah, the cheese is getting really stinky.
Go on Andre, warm your cockles up and do a post on changing U.S. State Department policy.
Would do you good to stretch your legs.
Oh gawd no. If I’m gonna have a crack at a post I’d rather my first go was on a topic where I’ve got some kind of insight that’s beyond what’s blatantly obvious to most.
In any case, I’ve still got hopes the current policy of whim-du-jour of the nepotistic narcissus and his kin (aided by Dobby’s demented evil twin) is a temporary aberration that will end in 21 months and two weeks.
Thing is Andre your vocabulary is a wonder to behold. Not even TRP can match it. A post would keep us riveted for days. 😉
If you’re just looking for lolz, I could post the lists I steal names from. Oh what the hell, here ya go.
https://www.findnicknames.com/nicknames-for-donald-trump/
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/1/1/1616187/-Sean-Spicer-Pleads-for-Post-Election-Civility-Please-Stop-Mocking-Donald-Trump
http://www.aljacobsladder.com/idle-thoughts/childhood-name-calling.html
I’d have to spend a bit of time remembering some of the ones I made up myself.
And the winner is:
Fuckface von Clownstick
creator – Jon Stewart (who else).
😂
The U.S. is a “global cop”?
Aren’t the police supposed to uphold law and order? I know they don’t always do that, and in fact often do the opposite, as we saw in London on Friday morning (NZ time).
But, seriously, the worst purveyor of violence in the world, the global guarantor and protector of terrorists and lawbreakers from Manila Tel Aviv is a “global cop”? Stop kiddin’ around.
Can anyone please explain to me the difference between administering a drug to end life and withholding a drug to cure/prolong someone’s life ?
That’s why we need a law arout it so that confused people can work out one situation from another and see the difference.
The first one is relatively cheap, almost guaranteed to work, aimed at ending intolerable suffering, and not (yet) marketed by Big Pharma. The second one is usually ridiculously expensive, uncertain to be effective, may prolong, cause or aggravate suffering, and aggressively marketed by Big Pharma.
Wonder what is going wrong at Jetstar ? At least 3 flights out of Auckland cancelled on Friday because of engineering difficulties. And today a flight ex Wellington cancelled because of crewing issues. On Friday the long queue of frustrated customers at the help desk remarkably well behaved considering that only one person with a screen was able to assist – sadly not enough seats available to accommodate the twice bumped off Wellington bound passengers.
Patricia,
Could be that the load of extra freight was late to be delivered before the scheduled departure?
Another possible explanation is they didn’t have enough passengers to make the flight profitable, so canceled it. “Low cost” carriers are great for that. Can add to that not enough passengers paying enough to make it economic, could be a lot of people but they all bought really cheap fares.
Queenstown has been deathly quiet for the last few weeks and we hear through the trade that international tourists have stopped all around the country from mid / late March.
And to add to deathstar’s woes, they’ve got an aircraft on the ground in Queenstown tonight and a canceled flight to Melbourne. Same thing happened earlier in the week too, but that one was definitely a breakdown, and they couldn’t work around the ATC staffing issue so lost 2 flights.
Hi Cleangreen ; not sure about the freight question but there were certainly some angry passengers waiting 90 minutes for service at the help desk. Others were trying to get flights on Air NZ at amazingly high prices. I missed a special family event in Wellington yesterday because Jetstar couldn’t get me down there in time and now to find my booked return flight today cancelled means I may well have been trapped there.
Won’t be using Jetstar again ; their help desk at the airport was well under resourced and the on line help desk of no help whatsoever.
Yes that has put me right off Jetstar – I’ve seen their queues before, but 90 minutes and only one on desk. The stress too, what if they had to go to the toilet. Perhaps they keep a wide mouthed bottle behind the desk, a couple of towels?
Oh Brave New World of choice and private enterprise unfettered by those silly rules and controls.
I’ve forgotten – there was a recent limitation of flights by one of the airlines wasn’t there? Flights also held up recently because someone was sick in the control tower staffing. Are they running too lean on staff, slimming down till they can do everything by machine? Do I like this thought – no.
What they have really been doing is to listen to, and adopt, the dictates of the New Zealand Green Party.
They have accepted the opinion that we must reduce the amount of flying that goes on. Since the Green MPs are far to important to cut back on their taxpayer funded travel it is the General Public who have to miss out.
Consider yourself privileged that you can sacrifice your own interests so that James Shaw can have another junket to warmer climes.
Submissions to the 5G discussion document – NZ
I did not make a submission.
DOC predicting a mega mast of seeding in the Native Beech Forests in the South Island hence a need for a big 1080 drop, it would be interesting to see some accurate qualitative science on this ?
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12222071
I am not privy to DOC scientific reports, and have not been in these Native Beech Forests for 40+ years but is the rodent problem really that bad ?
when there is a mast thing it is pretty difficult to drive along a beech forest highway without the ‘plip plip…. plip…. plip……….’ of rodents popping under your tyres …..
The only thing to stop rodents breeding like mad is limits on food supply. This is not only a mast year it is a mega-mast year. The food supply is huge and the populations will subsequently be huge. When they run out of mast to eat they’ll start on the wildlife.
There should be more government intervention than there currently is. We need private help too. All hands on deck. Rodents and mustelids, trap em out of your neck of the woods if you can.
How long does the mast season last – when does it reach its peak? What can we do? I guess you would need to be fit and I am very not.
Trap in your own neighbourhood.
http://halo.org.nz/mast-season-perfect-time-get-trapping/
There is a lot of information on the above halo site but not much on the best way to go about it. It appears that if you put down some chew cards and check them out daily I suppose, then you will know the best place/s to put traps. The tunnel trap for $35 is the cheapest limited handling one. Have a look at the Schools info. They try to set out some details there.
https://shop.predatorfreenz.org/
I’ve made a huge dent in the local rat population using a variety of home made bait stations.
Coincidentally, this morning our tui announced their winter arrival
We back on to a reserve and there seems to a never ending parade of possums to be exterminated so I’ve bought a Timms possum trap and I’m thinking about upping the ante and buying one of these, too.
Had a big explosion in rat and possum numbers?
At my place the usual pattern for possums is 2 or 3, then none for 6 or 8 weeks, then another 2 or 3. But I’ve dealt to 9 in the past 3 weeks (all females too, really weird).
Also had at least 7 rats ignore the bait stations outside and get up between the ground floor and upstairs. They’ll eat the bait I put there in desperation (and have probably died there too).
You’ll find out soon enough. When living on the farm had a similar solution to the rat problem – one obviously died in the wall. OMG! stunk for days!
The best solution was our little miniature long haired dashhound. One day I saw a rat sleeping in the sun in the doorway of the woodshed. Snuck back inside and brought the dog out – crept round so the rat wasn’t aware we were approaching – showed her the rat – 5 seconds later it was dead. Impressive! She was just as good on catching mice the cat brought in to play and let go. One day the cat had brought in a mouse and let it get away. The dog knew it was around – but it had disappeared into a sofa and wasn’t to be found. Next morning getting breakfast the dog was getting under my feet. “For goodness sake HoneyBear (that was her name) Go and find that mouse the cat brought in yesterday!” Next minute she was sniffing around the base of a standard lamp. I lifted the lamp off the floor and sure enuf there was the mouse. It was dead immediately after I lifted the lamp. It didn’t have a chance.
Whanganui has culverts for Africa, a legacy of child drownings in a city straddling a river, and they’re an extraordinarily good mass transport system for rodents. Consequently, if we don’t poison, we’re plagued by the fuckers.
And fronting a coastal reserve, the possums just keep on coming.
Oh yeah! I Kayaked down the Whanganui River a few years back. At night we would sit around a campfire and you could see dozens of gleaming eyes in the bush. I’ve never seen so many. They were in impressive condition. Obviously well fed. Maybe we could ship them back home – they are dying out in Aussie. Apparently the vegetation over there – gum leaves – has this effect of controlling their fertility so they don’t bred as profusely as they do here. At least that is what I was told by a mate in Queensland who studies these sorts of things.
Koalas are asleep most of the day – high on gum leaves apparently.
That’s a good question. It’s also difficult to answer. Most seeds in temperate climates have protective coats and can last a considerable amount of time. Some species are viable after decades, so, as one might imagine, they’ll be ingested long before they decay.
The ‘length of the mast season’ is approximately one Autumn (harvest season). Any gardener can observe actual harvests vary by species, microclimate, weather and zone for ‘productive’ trees. The same can be said of our natives. The length and extent of rodent and mustelid population booms will coincide with local availability and season of fruit set/drop. There will be a time lag where animal numbers peak after the food source peaks.
Then, the food source plummets, and we have stupidly large numbers of hungry rodents which in turn boost mustelid populations.
Ferrets, stoats and weasels might be just over the peak of a population boom as spring hits. They might effectively wipe native species out then.
Notice your hay fever is a bit worse this year? Mega mast years start with mega doses of pollen.
It will be interesting to see the details…any detail…about this…
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12222200
and this…https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/112025068/prime-minister-launches-accord-to-repair-broken-building-sector
” The Government is partnering with some of New Zealand’s largest construction companies in a bid to tackle the sector’s reputation after company collapses and poor-quality builds.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, along with Fletcher’s Construction chief executive Peter Reidy and other industry players, have unveiled a new plan to tackle the problems that have led to high-profile building company collapses, poor-quality builds and skills shortages.
The plan would, according to Ardern, improve the construction sector’s culture and reputation, increase its workforce and deliver more houses.
“The wellbeing of New Zealanders is intrinsically linked to safe, durable and affordable homes, buildings and infrastructure,” she saidat today’s launch.”
Woefully lacking in any specifics, and peppered with the usual aspirational waffle.
And nothing on Beehive.govt.nz either.
We need a government run state housing building programme that excludes business.
This ‘government partnering with industry’ narrative smacks of SSDD.
Slightly more information on Natrad…https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/387037/government-announces-construction-industry-agreement
….but still no specifics. Yawn. Heard it all before.
We did have good tradesmen here in NZ in the past until Dr Nick Smith dissolved the Apprenticeship Schemes and left the training to the Industry and the Free Market Duh ?
Can certainly vouch for that.
The extensive range of skills, training and experience i gained, from an indentured apprenticeship in the 70’s, has benefited me, and every employer since.
Now. Apprentices come out of their time with a skill level equivalent to our first year.
Modern apprenticeships have no incentive for an employer to give good training, or the apprentice to stay with the employer. With apprentices mostly used as cheap unskilled labour, rather than trainees.
I’ve seen certificated people who have swept the floor for their entire apprenticeship. Not their fault, but, useless without several more years of training,
Which is why we favour, the ones we have trained, ourselves.
The rise of, unpaid, internship type training positions, means you have to have pretty flush parents, to complete an apprenticeship.
The situation is so dire, that only a very few get apprenticeships.
And. Before anyone says the kids aren’t motivated. All the time i was building i had kids ringing up weekly, begging for a chance. Still have many asking, for the way in, where I am now. I have to tell them it is very unlikely they will get time, let alone a job, as the tech puts through many more kids than can ever get employment.
We stuffed up didn’t we???
What happened to the thousands of tradespeople we were going to train up after the quakes??
Imported thousands of South Africans and Filipino’s instead.
So Fletchers could make a profit.
At least the Filipino’s are nice people, though woefully unskilled in Kiwi housebuilding.
Which is going to come back and bite us in a decade or so. Just like National’s other great achievement, Leaky homes!
While dickheads call the Maori kids in Northland without any jobs, “Lazy”.
And look!
Detail..of sorts…. https://www.constructionaccord.nz/
…and heading up the list of signatories is… Fletchers!
And, and, Fletcher boss Reidy heads the Accord development group.
What could possibly go wrong?
Sorry Labour supporters…this smells bad.
Yes.
Don’t see why Fletchers, a semi monopoly, who have made a fortune off tax payer dollars, should be favoured above the myriad of functional and competent small builders, in New Zealand.
Don’t they believe in capitalist competition?
The plan is not to rely on small builders, so no.
the problem is deeper than that…there is a dearth of capable tradesmen to pass on the skills even if the real apprenticeships were on offer….but worse still is the lack of ability further up the chain….the inability of those overseeing the entire industry lacks the required knowledge especially in the regulatory fields.
30 plus years of dumbing down will take at least as long to remedy…if we can at all.
Good retirement job for the older builders, who can’t build anymore.
Some schools, including one I was involved with, are teaching hands on trades. Building houses, repairing cars etc.
Like the metalwork, woodwork etc of old.
May be the way forward.
Note. Regulatory agencies are run by taxi drivers, motel owners, accounting graduates and retired policemen, these days. Knowing anything about the industry you are supposed to be regulating is a career stopper. Or so the qualified people in these agencies, tell me.
No skill in Government to assess and let contracts.
taxi drivers and motel owners is stretching it but the end result is not dissimilar…..the attached is a frightening read that should be compulsory for anyone involved in the future of the industry.
https://canterbury.royalcommission.govt.nz/documents-by-key/20120813.4973/$file/ENG.SCA.0002.RED.pdf
Oh my. Mr Scarry was not well pleased.
“Treasury has long been completely staffed by laissez faire economic loons whose economic theories are detached from all reality, and don’t even work in theory. ”
““There were two queen bees in The Beehive – Treasury and the Ministry of Works and Development. One of them was going to be stung to death, and it wasn’t going to be Treasury.”
52. The MOWD was tasked through legislation with providing independent economic advice to the Government, and with care of the state of the entire public infrastructure of NZ, including local body infrastructure. As a result, it was a rival to the laissez faire loons at Treasury, and their plans.
53. Between 1984 and 1993, Treasury, aided and abetted by the likes of Douglas, Prebble, Palmer, Moore, Caygill, Richardson and Birch, visited the following devastation on the New Zealand construction industry: The MOWD was dismantled, with the ‘intellectual property’ flogged off to Malaysians,
The input of the MOWD into maintaining high standards of practice was lost,
The role of the MOWD in properly training vast numbers of engineers, technicians and especially draftsmen, a role that underpinned the private sector, was lost,
The similar role that Government departments such as NZED, NZ Railways and the like played was lost,
Highly competent design departments (which never designed a ‘leaky building’) at bodies like the Ministry of Education were destroyed,
The often highly competent and very efficient Engineering and Architecture departments of territorial authorities were destroyed. This has severely eroded the ability of the territorial authorities to adequately perform their duties as Building Consent Authorities, and
In an act of unabashed madness, Bill Birch destroyed the centuries old apprenticeship scheme, that had served this country, and especially the building industry, so well. ”
Just because I feel it needs an airing.
Thanks, Pat. That’ll be added to my “You asked for submissions then totally ignored them you stupid government you.” file.
not pleased …and vindicated by recent events…i.e. NZTA, structural steel compliance etc
Not really a stretch.
MNZ was lead by a taxi driver then a motel owner, or was it the other way around.
As for the building industry regulators……..
MNZ?
Maritime New Zealand.
and who is the taxi driver/motel owner?… Sharyn Forsyth?
I can walk into most any trade and find idiots posing as qualified these days. It wasn’t that long ago if I walked on a new job site there was plenty to learn and good people to teach it.
Now, they need an engineer to work a spirit level… 😀
Built a shed/greenhouse here using a clear hose and some sticks and string to survey the site. 16 m2 and $800 budget. Dead level, dead square, 20 years standing no issues yet.
I wouldn’t let our clown builders make me a shed. I have no doubt it would cost multiples of my budget and last up to the first decent storm.
I built a chicken coop out of bamboo that has been hit by a digger, and later was flattened by a stormfall tree. I replaced two lengths of bamboo, it’s still as functional as the day I made it.
If weather gets to the point it’s outright dangerous in conventional builds, you’ll find me in a low to the ground shell shaped bamboo house watching all the timber and iron fly past.
There will be a lot more failures of companies employing hundreds of people each in this year.
There aren’t any specifics, but anything that brings the whole of the industry leadership together to focus on avoiding failure is better than what we have had before. They would have to get deep into procurement policy across key agencies to solve any of it.
Kiwibuild together with HNZ and its subsidiaries should be able to go to the Commerce Commission and explain why it needs to manage the housing construction market i.e. deliberately decrease procurement competition.
But that is too hard at least for this term.
In the infrastructure and utilities market, we have seen Chorus running the fibre contracts and driving workers to work for near or less than minimum wage. Again a government contract – and clearly the government would prefer to get the job done rather than reopen the Chorus contract it has.
The governments’ core public agencies such as Kiwirail, NZTA, and HNZ, corral a majority of the market – and with it the fate of massive companies employing tens of thousands of us. The other big players like Auckland Transport and Watercare, Wellington Water and the like drive most of the rest.
It feels like a really big case of “we hear you”.
Brussels – The site has a secure certificate issue. Link works.
http://www.brusselstimes.com/brussels/14753/radiation-concerns-halt-brussels-5g-for-now
In July, the government concluded an agreement with three telecom operators to relax the strict radiation standards in Brussels. But according to the Region, it is now impossible to estimate the radiation from the antennas required for the service.
“I cannot welcome such technology if the radiation standards, which must protect the citizen, are not respected, 5G or not,” Environment minister Céline Fremault (CDH) told Bruzz.
“The people of Brussels are not guinea pigs whose health I can sell at a profit. We cannot leave anything to doubt,” she added.
A pilot project is not feasible with the current radiation standards, and Fremault told Bruzz that she does not intend to make an exception.
The Brussels region has particularly strict radiation standards for telecom applications. The standard of 6 volts per metre has already led to problems in the past with providing fast mobile internet via 4G in the capital.
Swiss canton blocks 5G mobile rollout
This week the canton of Vaud announced it would temporarily freeze permits to install new 5G transmitters. The resolution calls for a ban on 5G transmitter installation at least until the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) has finished its study into the effects of the new technology.
Other Swiss cantons are following the developments in Vaud. A similar parliamentary motion has been put forward in Geneva and the parliament of Valais will discuss the issue when it next sits.
Horseshoe!
https://twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/796263508124037120
It’s a nice pic of Tulsi in his twitter background.
i saw posted somewhere else that Sean Hannity has wiped every comment and interview question ever asked……..he apparently does not loves Assange anymore.
lie with dog, get up with fleas
as true as ever.
heh
https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1116799873632940034
But joe! Russia never interfered in the 2016 elections./sarc
Talk about useful idiots. Sean is a prime example.
Do you really approve of David Duke supporting Assange?
I wouldn’t be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke
Capitalism is lot more important then Democracy says one of the white working class male with economic anxiety.
https://twitter.com/LaurenWern/status/763236840560271360