Reports are coming in saying, “the siege of Gaza, which Israel has fought so bitterly and for so long to maintain has ended.”
“The [Israeli-Hamas ceasefire] agreement signed on Wednesday states that all crossings into Gaza – presumably not just the Rafah border with Egypt but the ones on the Israeli side as well – will be open to the movement of people and goods.
Isreal and Palestine merge to form one singluar bicultural/multicultural state, where Arabs, Jews, and everyone else are treated as equal in a democratic secular state. Jerusalem to be internationalised as a free city for all peoples and faiths, under UN control. Will require both sides to make consessions, but people actually want to go out without worrying being blown to pieces by some fanatics.
It is reported that the Palistinians are moving new arms through their tunnels from Egypt, although 143 were destroyed, they still have many more which are being used.
In addition at the start of this skirmish they had 15,000 rockets of which only 15% were fired.
Cannot see Kumbaya yet.
It’s being reported? Er, no. It’s being alleged by an Israeli Government shill that the defenders of the Gaza ghetto had 15000 rockets. And these rockets are low tech; unguided and ineffective. On the other side, the invaders have the latest tech and overwhelming strength of numbers. Hardly a fair fight.
And just for fun, can I point out that only a couple of the Gaza rockets have ever landed on Israeli soil. Most are aimed at Palestinian land, stolen by the oppressor.
Except you’d never get either side to agree to a secular state, and demographically Israelis would be quickly outnumbered – so no. I do like the idea of Jerusalem being a free city.
Wow. This is world shaking news. This is almost as momentous as the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Surely the Separation Wall will fall next. We are seeing a complete reshaping of the whole Palestinian Israeli question.
Will these developments see a negotiated peace, where the Israelis have to organise an evacuation of the illegal settlements in the West Bank?
With the borders open can the refugees in Gaza return to their former lands and houses at least in the current occupied territories especially if they are freed up by the evacuation of the settlers?
This is unbelievable and a cause for great celebration and no doubt for the Palestians particularly.
Will there be a formal announcement of the two state solution?
Will Abbass bid to the UN for observer status, be upgraded to a request for full membership?
You, (and the Guardian editorialist), are reading a hell of a lot into a few lines of text.
the borders have been open to the movement of goods and people throughout the seige. It’s how stuff gets in and out, it’s tightly controlled, but not ‘closed’. Presumably during the last week they have been sealed.
Some would claim, and perhaps with good reason, that the All Blacks are probably the best (only) export promotion bill board we have.
Yet, watching a snippet of the Italian – New Zealand game, I could not help noticing the socks of both teams. The Italians were wearing the Canterbury clothing brand and the All Blacks, the Adidas motif …
Yes, proves the point , Canterbury capability and cred came off the back of many successful AB seasons. Now they are one of the premier international suppliers of tech gear for a range of sporting codes.
I was listening to the Secretary for Education on National Radio this a.m. and the ongoing bleating of how complex the payroll system is. The Secretary patiently explained how the gargantuan task of paying our Teachers would cripple Hercules, immobilize Job and probably break DangerMouse , even if Penfold and all the Argonauts popped in to lend a hand.
I began wondering how our Health workers manage to get paid then?
Home help, OT’s, Physios, Nurses, Locums, GP’s, even the Surgeons seem to get paid without weekly drama and that Industry has exactly the same parameters of complex issues the Secretary ascribed to Education.
If the Secretary of Education finds getting the teachers paid all too much then how on earth can we have any confidence that the Secretary is even remotely capable of doing the far more complex and important job of actually educating our kids?
I have a close friend in the senior government IT echelons, while it seems obvious to anyone with half a brain that one could and should replicate well operating IT (and other) systems throughout government and the public service this is not the way the aparatchiks operate as theirs is a system based on troughing, incompetence and reinvention of the wheel – often in non circular form.
And of course those hugely complex teacher payrolls with over 90,000 employees managed in the past, so not really a sudden revelation. Why such a surprise?
Don’t worry freedom, the health sector will be next (and I seem to remember some hooha in the 90s when they changed to a new computing system in hospitals)
I worked as a relief teacher for 10 years and not once did I have a problem with Datacom (the previous payroll company). Also they answered the phone instantly.
Teachers etc got paid ok under the old system without any problems, the old saying, if it ain’t broke, dont fix it.
My thoughts go out to those poor teachers etc that featured on Campbell Live, it’s a terrible
situation.
But the Ministry is still saying that if one has not been paid, then the school should write a cheque out of school funds. More paper work then a payback from someone to someone else. Hell of a way to run a business.
There appears to be a problem with accessing akismet this morning. Comments are lagging through the spam checks and I have this message showing.
Akismet has detected a problem. Some comments have not yet been checked for spam by Akismet. They have been temporarily held for moderation. Please check your Akismet configuration and contact your web host if problems persist.
They are getting through, but there can be a few minutes lag. The peak I have seen has been 8 comments queued and with a delay of a less than 2 minutes (displays comment time only to the minute).
We get these on the odd occasion. They usually only persist for 10 minutes or so. But this one has been running for somewhat longer.
Local NZ connection to root name servers are down ….
Nothing resolves , using hosts file for thestandard at the mo.
Someone should tell Telecom / sprint net
They need to switch their “Local” root server to “Cached-Only” mode 🙂
Been seeing a lot of high numbered port, DOS attacks last 3 – 4 months.
Mainly around the address translation ports, Turkey and southern north american origins.
Attacking “apple” ports as well.
I’d have expected it wouldn’t make a difference. The name -> IP would normally be cached in the server’s client DNS rather than having to resolve all of the time. And we are talking about comments being entered which is something that this site several times per minute during the peaks, and several minutes between for the rest of the NZ day.
Depends on what they set the TTL’s to I guess. If it was extremely short, then we might get DNS resolution lags. If there was a man in the middle attack on the DNS, then they’d set the TTL way up anyway.
More likely there is just maintenance or a DDOS. But this isn’t an area that I focus on that much. More jbc’s than mine.
DNS is a fundamental, slow it down and every spam engine in the world slows down.
And the TTL is meaningless unless u r in “cached-only” mode, it’ll still check the root server, it may time out, but slow is the end result.
It’s a last resort response to DNS DOS, which is what I think is happening , maintenance is not “down time” with revolving dns names etc.
In Peter Watkins’ remarkable BBC film, The War Game,which foresaw the aftermath of an attack on London with a one-megaton nuclear bomb, the narrator says: “On almost the entire subject of thermo-clear weapons, there is now practically total silence in the press, official publications and on TV. Is there hope to be found in this silence?”
The truth of this statement was equal to its irony. On 24 November, 1965, the BBC banned The War Game as “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. This was false. The real reason was spelt out by the chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Lord Normanbrook, in a secret letter to the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Burke Trend.
“[The War Game] is not designed as propaganda,” he wrote, “it is intended as a purely factual statement and is based on careful research into official material… But the showing of the film on television might have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the policy of the nuclear deterrent.” Following a screening attended by senior Whitehall officials, the film was banned because it told an intolerable truth. Sixteen years later, the then BBC director-general, Sir Ian Trethowan, renewed the ban, saying that he feared for the film’s effect on people of “limited mental intelligence”. Watkins’ brilliant work was eventually shown in 1985 to a late-night minority audience. It was introduced by Ludovic Kennedy who repeated the official lie.
What happened to The War Game is the function of the state broadcaster as a cornerstone of Britain’s ruling elite. With its outstanding production values, often fine popular drama, natural history and sporting coverage, the BBC enjoys wide appeal and, according to its managers and beneficiaries, “trust”. This “trust” may well apply to Springwatch and Sir David Attenborough, but there is no demonstrable basis for it in much of the news and so-called current affairs that claim to make sense of the world, especially the machinations of rampant power. There are honourable individual exceptions, but watch how these are tamed the longer they remain in the institution: a “defenestration”, as one senior BBC journalist describes it.
This is notably true in the Middle East where the Israeli state has successfully intimidated the BBC into presenting the theft of Palestinian land and the caging, torturing and killing of its people as an intractable “conflict” between equals. Standing in the rubble from an Israeli attack, one BBC journalist went further and referred to “Gaza’s strong culture of martyrdom”. So great is this distortion that young viewers of BBC News have told Glasgow University researchers they are left with the impression that Palestinians are the illegal colonisers of their own country. ….
The Government will build 10,000 new houses a year. Now let’s break that down.
10,000 houses a year is 192 houses a week. Now if you take the working week of 40 hours, that is 4.8 houses per hour. That is a new house every 13 minutes of the working week.
Hands up those who think the Government can build a new house every 13 minutes? If your hand is up, please keep it up and please join the queue for free trips to the North Pole to see Santa Claus.
So can anyone tell me who put forward this obviously unworkable shonky promise and were they on Team Cunliffe trying to discredit Shearer
Still not nearly enough. If by some miracle you can build a house in 500 hours that equates to just 8 houses a week. Still not near one every 13 minutes.
Someone is having a laugh that they allowed Shearer to make a claim that will be forever ridiculed. That was sabotage.
No perhaps fisiani and farrar and all the other pesimists and naysayers are right. The whole thing should be called off. It is just too hard. Everybody go home, the policy has been cancelled as it is impossible to provide less expensive housing in New Zealand……… ffs
The RWNJ logic (if we want to call it that) goes like this:
That’s a house every 13 minutes and nobody can build a house in 13 minutes thus the Labour party must be lying.
Yes, the RWNJs like Fisiani really are that stupid. They’re actually incapable of the basic maths to work out what it would take to build 10000 houses as they’ve just proven.
Care to actually point out the maths of how an EXTRA 10,000 homes can be built in the 40 hours of a 48 week effective working year, bad weather not included. (PS Modular house erection erection does not equate to having a house fit for habitation.)
Virtual Chocolate fish to the first delusionist to prove how it is possible.
I will not accept answers such as ” The Hogwarts school of carpentry” or “300,000 migrant Oompaloompas” or ” there are 170,000 ‘builders’ unemployed”
The only explanation of this mathematical brain fade is that someone has tried and succeeded in making Shearer look utterly incompetent. Perhaps it was just a decimal point in the wrong place.
1000 houses would only take 130 minutes each to construct.
100 would take 1300 minutes or 21.6 hours
Don’t even get me started on the shonky cost calculations………..
It takes two builders 8 weeks to build a 90m2 house (and that’s being generous). That’s two guys building 6 houses per year and we want 10,000 of them in one year. That means we need 1667 teams or 3334 builders.
Now, we actually already have several thousand builders already and many are presently under-employed or unemployed (there’s a reason why builders rates have gone from $34/hour plus to $25/hour) so we will have some spare capacity and possibly even enough without training up more builders and there is that 170k people unemployed some of which would be more than happy to become builders. Remember, the plan is 100k over ten years but it doesn’t have to start out at 10,000 in the first year (it would be nice but probably impractical).
As for the “shonky cost” well, personally, I think their being a little over generous myself especially if they go for medium or high density housing which they should do.
Really, the only things that are shonky are the RWNJs and their attempts at maths.
Two magical superworkers who can do the foundations, framing, plastering plumbing electrics, roofing and painting decorating in eight weeks. Oompa Loompa Land
I was hoping one of you would make a serious attempt .
Come on guys. You cannot defend the indefensible.
Look Fisiani it’s obvious you’ve got a bone too grind with bloggs.
But 10,000 completed homes is a goal, give it a few years.
We are currently building 10,000+- homes a year, if it takes two years then so be it consents means “started”.
Labour want to increase this number by a few hundred to a thousand per month
I.E. GROWTH IN THE BUILDING INDUSTRY.
Instantaneous gratification only exists in the drug addicts mind.
Not to big a stretch considering a basic custom built 90 m sq. house can be done in 12 weeks with two men.
We would always say 16 weeks, and usually take 14, not because the individual house took that long, but because we would have several on the go at once at different stages.
Cookie cutter houses would be even faster once the builders had some practice.
4 of us got a house for a TV show from foundations to roof in 10 days. Despite having to do a lot of demolition and working around bits of an old house.
And your ‘obviously’ means that a house really can be built every 13 minutes??????? Are you ‘aving a larf?
Please please make it the centerpiece of housing policy in 2014.
People may not be able to get to the polls due to laughing.
You cannot win an election without credibility.
Another “show me the money” moment.
I’ll spell it out really simply: Yes, we can as a matter of fact build a house every 13 minutes in NZ over and above the ones being built now (which is probably more than 1 every 13 minutes).
Fisi is the genius who thinks unemployment can’t be going up because ‘more people are employed than ever!’
It’s hard for most us to believe that he’s actually imagining two builders starting a house and 13 minutes later having it completed and moving on to the next one, but he has just admitted that he can’t grasp the concept of percentages so it’s not out of the question.
A skyscraper which could fit what…500 apartments? Built in 2 weeks…35 apartments per day say…WOW amazing what you can achieve when you put your mind and your brains to a problem. Instead of moaning that everything is just too hard.
Yep. amazing alright! The company’s next project is to construct the world’s tallest building. 220 floors, 838 metres, housing for 31,000 people. Ok, it’ll take a wee bit longer than the one in the video to put up …. a mere 90 days.
Even if we had to double the number of needed builders we could still do it. Really, building that number of extra houses every year is easy – barely even touching upon the total resources we have available as a country but you, and the other RWNJs, don’t want to hear that as it goes against the myth that’s been built up over the decades and centuries that we can’t afford to. It’s proof positive that the National Party and the economists that support them have NFI WTF they’re talking about or that they’re lying.
Generally speaking, if we’ve got the builders then we’ve got the rest. The builders will be the ones on site full time from the moment building starts to it’s completion. In other words, you’ll need significantly less of the other workers and they will be in proportion to the number of builders.
That said, there always seems to be a shortage of plumbers…
Builders and I mean qualified shouldn’t pick up a hammer for less than $45, pay peanuts you get monkeys, monkeys build leaky houses, all these extra builders are going to come from where ? 8000 hrs to train a carpenter, 4 years, or are they going to come flooding back for $25 an hr yeah right.
I hope Labour have the numbers to back this up and even if they do Shearer will never be able to remember then unless he writes them on the back of his hand.
Builders and I mean qualified shouldn’t pick up a hammer for less than $45
Considering how much legal work my nephew has been doing in regards to his building (You’d be amazed at the number of building contractors who don’t know the building code) I keep telling him he should be charging out at $120/hour. Nobody seems to want to pay that though and the most he’s got since 2k8 is $32/hour and that was on a single job. All the other times he’s either been unemployed or paid in the mid 20s and Chch actually pays less.
Ah, sorry you’re right, Labour is talking roughly 300k. So that’s $415 per week. Same criticism applies.
Fortunately I can now afford a mortgage, but with the arrival of my second child on a low income and a 160k mortgage, we could barely eat. Turned me into a decent vege gardener, but…
Is the intention for the Govt rather than private sector banks to do the lending?
Don’t want to assume / comment because it may be in their econ policy, just printed to read. But I’d like to see LVR’s, LVT as well as CGT and some re zoning to free up all the land banks, like Giltrap’s down Great North Rd, a lot of apartments could come onto the market if that land was developed, right in the middle of the city within walking distance of jobs, and the local retail / entertainment economy.
I gather work is being done, pressure applied to RBNZ to address the capital flow which is chasing yield from our interest rates.
$550.00 a week? Thats more than I get a week to feed me my partner a 17 year old and a 18 month-er. Buy a house ? Tui Time. And this is why I say Shearer is just way out of touch with the real people.
It’s $300 k, less deposit. So, say, 270k. Weekly payments of around $400. About what you’d pay for rent for a modest family home in that Auckland. And with land being cheaper in the provinces, that $270k might be $240k. Mortgage of $350 pw? That’s realistic for many young couples starting out, I would have thought.
Well, yeah, but then you’d be hard pressed to find a single income working class family on $35K. WFF would lift the household income substantially. But, realistically, both parents need to be working, at least initially, to afford a mortgage. A big ask in the current economy and with a government opposed to a living wage. Hell, opposed to full employment altogether.
Saving for the deposit does take years, but it is also evidence of the ability to budget that banks take into account when granting the mortgage. The banks will only lend to a point where the mortgage payment is the highest proportion of household expenditure. Can’t remember the exact cutoff, but I think the household is likely to need to bring in $800 pw to be granted a mortgage of around half that. So, maybe 40- 50k income and it becomes a runner at $350 – 400 pw payments. Any bankers out there? Can you shine a light on the actual percentages?
The point is increasing the supply of houses in the $300k range is also going to help the availability of rentals and houses in the cheaper ranges. Simple supply and demand.
We tried that Weka, they are now called leacky homes and are now costing you and me mill/bill….of $$ and lets not forget earthquakes, so houses now will have to be stronger than ever and water tight, for a while, till we all forget, and start building cheap houses again in about 10 years, maybe 15 this time.
Well, those houses weren’t actually “cheaper” to the buyer, they were just cheaper to the property developers because of corners cut, and it was the developers who walked away with the difference as profits.
I really think property developers get a bad rap CV , the problems start with the the drawing of plans and what the council will and won’t allow. Some developers will get away with whatever the council lets them get away with and so they all start cheating to keep up, you could liken it to cycling.
“Developing is akin to playing Russian roulette. You can pull the trigger and draw a blank, although why you would want to I can’t imagine, but, because of the addiction factor, developers keep on doing so until sooner or later inevitably they draw the bullet.”
Bob Jones:
Who lobbied for the council changes? Who lobbied for deregulation of the building industry (“self-regulation”)? Who manufactured, sold and profited from the fashionable new building materials which turned out to be rubbish?
Egypt’s President Mohammed Mursi has issued a declaration banning challenges to his decrees, laws and decisions.
The declaration also says no court can dissolve the constituent assembly, which is drawing up a new constitution.
President Mursi also sacked the chief prosecutor and ordered the retrial of people accused of attacking protesters when ex-President Mubarak held office.
Egyptian opposition leader Mohammed ElBaradei accused Mr Mursi of acting like a “new pharaoh”.
In a joint news conference held late on Thursday, Mr ElBaradai and other opposition figures described the declaration as a “coup against legitimacy” and called on Egyptians to take to the streets in protest.
I hear Jane Clifton was on the Panel today and discussing the Labour Party conference last weekend.
Did Jim Moira challenge her about a potential conflict of interest?
I tuned in briefly, recognised her voice, so tuned out. To my knowledge she wasn’t there – at least not on the conference floor. She wouldn’t have been far away though… waiting for yet more tid-bits from her new beau that she could then leak (on new beau’s behalf) to her journo pals.
Can YOU help collect signatures on the SIGNATHON for a couple of hours over this weekend?
Have YOU ‘switched off Mercury Energy’?
____________________________________________________________________________
PRESS RELEASE: “The Switch Off Mercury Energy community group urges New Zealanders opposed to asset sales to support the nation-wide SIGNATHON this weekend!” Switch Off Mercury Energy Spokesperson, Penny Bright.
This weekend, 24 -25 November 2012, there is a huge push all over New Zealand by the Keep Our Assets coalition to get the final 80,000 signatures required to help force a Citizens Initiated Referendum on the government’s proposed state asset sales.
At 300 places, from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South Island, New Zealanders will have an opportunity to sign this petition, which asks the House of Representatives to hold an ‘indicative referendum’ on the following question:
“Do you support the Government selling up to 49% of Meridian Energy, Mighty River Power, Genesis Power, Solid Energy and Air New Zealand?”
This Signathon site has over 300 collection points .
Those who can help collect signatures at any of these 300 collection points are encouraged to sign on to the one that’s most convenient, and turn up at the location on the day.
Those who can’t make it to one of the Signathon collection points but still have a bit of time to collect signatures on the weekend are being encouraged to download and print some petition forms for themselves.
“National – who campaigned in the 2011 election on asset sales – has only 59 out of 121 MPs – which is not a majority. No majority = no mandate for asset sales,” says a Switch Off Mercury Energy Spokesperson, Penny Bright.
“National were dependent on the votes of ACT Leader John Banks, MP for Epsom and United Future Leader Peter Dunne, MP for Ohariu for the passing of the Mixed Ownership Model Act – which scraped through the House 61 votes to 60.”
“The Switch Off Mercury Energy community group calls on New Zealanders to consider backing up your signatures for this referendum against asset sales, with further ‘people power’ action that will help stop the proposed sale of the first State-Owned electricity asset under the Mixed Ownership Act – Mighty River Power – by ‘switching off’ Mercury Energy.”
Mercury Energy is 100% owned by Mighty River Power, which is the first publicly owned state asset the current National Government is trying to privatise. Originally intended to start in September this year, due to public pressure the Government has delayed the sale until March 2013.
While delayed, asset sales have not stopped. This Switch Off Mercury Energy campaign aims to stop the Government’s first asset sale plans by making Mighty River Power and unattractive investment.
“Remember, ‘People power’ campaigns DO work!
In 2008, Contact Energy (already privatised), increased electricity prices 12% and doubled their Directors’ fees. After public outrage they lost over 40,000 customers within six months and their profit was cut in half!
For more information, on how to ‘Switch Off Mercury Energy’ and recommendations for where to ‘switch’ :
“…a far more frightening work than any of the nightmare novels of George Orwell.With the logic(oooh)
which is the great instrument of French thought, (Ellul) explores and attempts to prove the thesis that
propaganda, whether the ends are demonstrably good or bad, is not only destructive to democracy, it is
perhaps the most serious threat to humanity operating in the modern world.”-L.A Times
“The theme of Propaganda (sans italicisezation) Achtung ma cherie, I digress, is quite simply
that when our new technology encompasses any culture or society, the result is propaganda
(don’t quote me on that.score)
-Marshall McLuhan
oh well, wheels have rolled on since then…
Reading this article about data-centres and how much power they use when I noticed this passage:
Companies also guard their technology for competitive reasons, said Michael Manos, a longtime industry executive. “All of those things play into each other to foster this closed, members-only kind of group,” he said.
Yep, competition, keeping inefficiency high because people are chasing the almighty profit.
A group of CEOs led by Macy’s Terry Lundgren calling itself the Fix the Debt coalition is hoping for a deficit-busting austerity budget this holiday season—not a program to create American jobs.
Why? Because high unemployment “keeps their workers in check” by driving up competition for jobs, writes Lynn Stuart Parramore at AlterNet.
And the party of business in NZ is?
And their leader said?
Grr. The only positive out of this is getting rid of Garner.
Media and both sides of the political spectrum having a great time pissing up together.
Just having a fucking laugh really eh?
No wonder all of them are covertly against the democratisation of the labour party, their cosy little lifestyles would be completely fucked if the idea were to take hold across the political spectrum.
Leadership vote, on that note it isn’t over; first shot back me thinks. I’m thinking of joining the party again.
“a health sector source who worked closely with Cunliffe. He is the right type to lead New Zealand, she told the Herald , having character, brains, heart and being in “politics for all the right reasons”.
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It is hard to see what Melissa Lee might have done to “save” the media. National went into the election with no public media policy and appears not to have developed one subsequently. Lee claimed that she had prepared a policy paper before the election but it had been decided ...
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Mr Bombastic:Ironically, the media the academic experts wanted is, in many ways, the media they got. In place of the tyrannical editors of yesteryear, advancing without fear or favour the interests of the ruling class; the New Zealand news media of today boasts a troop of enlightened journalists dedicated to ...
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Mike Grimshaw writes – The recent announcement of the University Advisory Group, chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, makes very clear where the Government’s focus and priorities lie. The remit of the Advisory Group is that Group members will consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector including: ...
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Looking at the headlines this morning it’s hard to feel anything other than pessimistic about the future of humanity.Note that I’m not speaking about the future of mankind, but the survival of our humanity. The values that we believe in seem to be ebbing away, by the day.Perhaps every generation ...
Swabbing mixed breed baby chicks to test for avian influenzaUh oh. Bird flu – often deadly to humans – is not only being transmitted from infected birds to dairy cows, but is now travelling between dairy cows. As of last Friday, Bloomberg News reports, there were 32 American dairy herds ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
What is it with the mining industry? Its not enough for them to pillage the earth - they apparently can't even be bothered getting resource consent to do so: The proponent behind a major mine near the Clutha River had already been undertaking activity in the area without a ...
Photo # 1 I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to housing, as described here two years ago by copying and pasting from The ConversationWhat Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed land, ...
Buzz from the Beehive Reactions to news of the government’s readiness to make urgent changes to “the resource management system” through a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) suggest a balanced approach is being taken. The Taxpayers’ Union says the proposed changes don’t go far enough. Greenpeace says ...
I’m starting to wonder if Anna Burns-Francis might be the best political interviewer we’ve got. That might sound unlikely to you, it came as a bit of a surprise to me.Jack Tame can be excellent, but has some pretty average days. I like Rebecca Wright on Newshub, she asks good ...
Chris Trotter writes – Willie Jackson is said to be planning a “media summit” to discuss “the state of the media and how to protect Fourth Estate Journalism”. Not only does the Editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, think this is a good idea, but he has also ...
Graeme Edgeler writes – This morning [April 21], the Wellington High Court is hearing a judicial review brought by Hon. Karen Chhour, the Minister for Children, against a decision of the Waitangi Tribunal. This is unusual, judicial reviews are much more likely to brought against ministers, rather than ...
Both of Parliament’s watchdogs have now ripped into the Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMy pick of the six newsey things to know from Aotearoa’s political economy and beyond on the morning of Tuesday, April 23 are:The Lead: The Auditor General,John Ryan, has joined the ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Sarah SpengemanPeople wait to board an electric bus in Pune, India. (Image credit: courtesy of ITDP) Public transportation riders in Pune, India, love the city’s new electric buses so much they will actually skip an older diesel bus that ...
The infrastructure industry yesterday issued a “hurry up” message to the Government, telling it to get cracking on developing a pipeline of infrastructure projects.The hiatus around the change of Government has seen some major projects cancelled and others delayed, and there is uncertainty about what will happen with the new ...
Hi,Over the weekend I revisited a podcast I really adore, Dead Eyes. It’s about a guy who got fired from Band of Brothers over two decades ago because Tom Hanks said he had “dead eyes”.If you don’t recall — 2001’s Band of Brothers was part of the emerging trend of ...
Buzz from the Beehive The 180 or so recipients of letters from the Government telling them how to submit infrastructure projects for “fast track” consideration includes some whose project applications previously have been rejected by the courts. News media were quick to feature these in their reports after RMA Reform Minister Chris ...
It would not be a desirable way to start your holiday by breaking your back, your head, or your wrist, but on our first hour in Singapore I gave it a try.We were chatting, last week, before we started a meeting of Hazel’s Enviro Trust, about the things that can ...
Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure that the new Fast-Track Approvals Bill – currently being pushed through by the ...
Feel worried. Shane Jones and a couple of his Cabinet colleagues are about to be granted the power to override any and all objections to projects like dams, mines, roads etc even if: said projects will harm biodiversity, increase global warming and cause other environmental harms, and even if ...
Bryce Edwards writes- The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. ...
Michael Bassett writes – If you think there is a move afoot by the radical Maori fringe of New Zealand society to create a parallel system of government to the one that we elect at our triennial elections, you aren’t wrong. Over the last few days we have ...
Without a corresponding drop in interest rates, it’s doubtful any changes to the CCCFA will unleash a massive rush of home buyers. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: The six things that stood out to me in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Monday, April 22 included:The Government making a ...
Sunday was a lazy day. I started watching Jack Tame on Q&A, the interviews are usually good for something to write about. Saying the things that the politicians won’t, but are quite possibly thinking. Things that are true and need to be extracted from between the lines.As you might know ...
In our Weekly Roundup last week we covered news from Auckland Transport that the WX1 Western Express is going to get an upgrade next year with double decker electric buses. As part of the announcement, AT also said “Since we introduced the WX1 Western Express last November we have seen ...
TL;DR: The six key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 29 include:PM Christopher Luxon is scheduled to hold a post-Cabinet news conference at 4 pm today. Stats NZ releases its statutory report on Census 2023 tomorrow.Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivers a pre-Budget speech at ...
A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 14, 2024 thru Sat, April 20, 2024. Story of the week Our story of the week hinges on these words from the abstract of a fresh academic ...
The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. The Government says this will ...
This is a column to say thank you. So many of have been in touch since Mum died to say so many kind and thoughtful things. You’re wonderful, all of you. You’ve asked how we’re doing, how Dad’s doing. A little more realisation each day, of the irretrievable finality of ...
Identifying the engine type in your car is crucial for various reasons, including maintenance, repairs, and performance upgrades. Knowing the specific engine model allows you to access detailed technical information, locate compatible parts, and make informed decisions about modifications. This comprehensive guide will provide you with a step-by-step approach to ...
Introduction: The allure of racing is undeniable. The thrill of speed, the roar of engines, and the exhilaration of competition all contribute to the allure of this adrenaline-driven sport. For those who yearn to experience the pinnacle of racing, becoming a race car driver is the ultimate dream. However, the ...
Introduction Automobiles have become ubiquitous in modern society, serving as a primary mode of transportation and a symbol of economic growth and personal mobility. With countless vehicles traversing roads and highways worldwide, it begs the question: how many cars are there in the world? Determining the precise number is a ...
Maintaining a safe and reliable vehicle requires regular inspections. Whether it’s a routine maintenance checkup or a safety inspection, knowing how long the process will take can help you plan your day accordingly. This article delves into the factors that influence the duration of a car inspection and provides an ...
Mazda Motor Corporation, commonly known as Mazda, is a Japanese multinational automaker headquartered in Fuchu, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. The company was founded in 1920 as the Toyo Cork Kogyo Co., Ltd., and began producing vehicles in 1931. Mazda is primarily known for its production of passenger cars, but ...
Your car battery is an essential component that provides power to start your engine, operate your electrical systems, and store energy. Over time, batteries can weaken and lose their ability to hold a charge, which can lead to starting problems, power failures, and other issues. Replacing your battery before it ...
In most states, you cannot register a car without a valid driver’s license. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. Exceptions to the RuleIf you are under 18 years old: In some states, you can register a car in your name even if you do not ...
Mazda, a Japanese automotive manufacturer with a rich history of innovation and engineering excellence, has emerged as a formidable player in the global car market. Known for its reputation of producing high-quality, fuel-efficient, and driver-oriented vehicles, Mazda has consistently garnered praise from industry experts and consumers alike. In this article, ...
Struts are an essential part of a car’s suspension system. They are responsible for supporting the weight of the car and damping the oscillations of the springs. Struts are typically made of steel or aluminum and are filled with hydraulic fluid. How Do Struts Work? Struts work by transferring the ...
Car registration is a mandatory process that all vehicle owners must complete annually. This process involves registering your car with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and paying an associated fee. The registration process ensures that your vehicle is properly licensed and insured, and helps law enforcement and other authorities ...
Zoom is a video conferencing service that allows you to share your screen, webcam, and audio with other participants. In addition to sharing your own audio, you can also share the audio from your computer with other participants. This can be useful for playing music, sharing presentations with audio, or ...
Building your own computer can be a rewarding and cost-effective way to get a high-performance machine tailored to your specific needs. However, it also requires careful planning and execution, and one of the most important factors to consider is the time it will take. The exact time it takes to ...
Sleep mode is a power-saving state that allows your computer to quickly resume operation without having to boot up from scratch. This can be useful if you need to step away from your computer for a short period of time but don’t want to shut it down completely. There are ...
Introduction Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) has revolutionized the field of translation by harnessing the power of technology to assist human translators in their work. This innovative approach combines specialized software with human expertise to improve the efficiency, accuracy, and consistency of translations. In this comprehensive article, we will delve into the ...
In today’s digital age, mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. Among the vast array of portable computing options available, iPads and tablet computers stand out as two prominent contenders. While both offer similar functionalities, there are subtle yet significant differences between these two devices. This ...
A computer is an electronic device that can be programmed to carry out a set of instructions. The basic components of a computer are the processor, memory, storage, input devices, and output devices. The Processor The processor, also known as the central processing unit (CPU), is the brain of the ...
Voice Memos is a convenient app on your iPhone that allows you to quickly record and store audio snippets. These recordings can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as taking notes, capturing ideas, or recording interviews. While you can listen to your voice memos on your iPhone, you ...
Laptop screens are essential for interacting with our devices and accessing information. However, when lines appear on the screen, it can be frustrating and disrupt productivity. Understanding the underlying causes of these lines is crucial for finding effective solutions. Types of Screen Lines Horizontal lines: Also known as scan ...
Right-clicking is a common and essential computer operation that allows users to access additional options and settings. While most desktop computers have dedicated right-click buttons on their mice, laptops often do not have these buttons due to space limitations. This article will provide a comprehensive guide on how to right-click ...
Powering up and shutting down your ASUS laptop is an essential task for any laptop user. Locating the power button can sometimes be a hassle, especially if you’re new to ASUS laptops. This article will provide a comprehensive guide on where to find the power button on different ASUS laptop ...
Dell laptops are renowned for their reliability, performance, and versatility. Whether you’re a student, a professional, or just someone who needs a reliable computing device, a Dell laptop can meet your needs. However, if you’re new to Dell laptops, you may be wondering how to get started. In this comprehensive ...
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. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, and Mema Paremata mō Tāmaki-Makaurau, Takutai Tarsh Kemp, will travel to the Gold Coast to strengthen ties with Māori in Australia next week (15-21 April). The visit, in the lead-up to the 9th Australian National Kapa haka Festival, will be an opportunity for both ...
The Green Party has today launched a step-by-step guide to help New Zealanders make their voice heard on the Government’s democracy dodging and anti-environment fast track legislation. ...
The National Government’s proposed changes to the Residential Tenancies Act will mean tenants can be turfed from their homes by landlords with little notice, Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. ...
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is calling on all parties to support a common-sense change that’s great for the planet and great for consumers after her member’s bill was drawn from the ballot today. ...
A significant milestone has been reached in the fight to strike an anti-Pasifika and unfair law from the country’s books after Teanau Tuiono’s members’ bill passed its first reading. ...
New Zealand has today missed the opportunity to uphold the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, says James Shaw after his member’s bill was voted down in its first reading. ...
Today’s advice from the Climate Change Commission paints a sobering reality of the challenge we face in combating climate change, especially in light of recent Government policy announcements. ...
Minister for Disability Issues Penny Simmonds appears to have delayed a report back to Cabinet on the progress New Zealand is making against international obligations for disabled New Zealanders. ...
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 ...
Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell has today released the Report of the Government Inquiry into the response to the North Island Severe Weather Events. “The report shows that New Zealand’s emergency management system is not fit-for-purpose and there are some significant gaps we need to address,” Mr Mitchell ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is today travelling to Europe where he’ll update the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Government’s work to restore law and order. “Attending the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva provides us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while ...
Associate Agriculture Minister, Mark Patterson, formally reopened the world’s largest wool processing facility today in Awatoto, Napier, following a $50 million rebuild and refurbishment project. “The reopening of this facility will significantly lift the economic opportunities available to New Zealand’s wool sector, which already accounts for 20 per cent of ...
Hon Andrew Bayly, Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing At the Southland Otago Regional Engineering Collective (SOREC) Summit, 18 April, Dunedin Ngā mihi nui, Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Ko Whanganui aho Good Afternoon and thank you for inviting me to open your summit today. I am delighted ...
The Government is delivering on its commitment to bring back the Three Strikes legislation, Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee announced today. “Our Government is committed to restoring law and order and enforcing appropriate consequences on criminals. We are making it clear that repeat serious violent or sexual offending is not ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has today announced four new diplomatic appointments for New Zealand’s overseas missions. “Our diplomats have a vital role in maintaining and protecting New Zealand’s interests around the world,” Mr Peters says. “I am pleased to announce the appointment of these senior diplomats from the ...
New Zealand is contributing NZ$7 million to support communities affected by severe food insecurity and other urgent humanitarian needs in Ethiopia and Somalia, Foreign Minister Rt Hon Winston Peters announced today. “Over 21 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across Ethiopia, with a further 6.9 million people ...
Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith is congratulating Mataaho Collective for winning the Golden Lion for best participant in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. "Congratulations to the Mataaho Collective for winning one of the world's most prestigious art prizes at the Venice Biennale. “It is good ...
The Government is reforming financial services to improve access to home loans and other lending, and strengthen customer protections, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly and Housing Minister Chris Bishop announced today. “Our coalition Government is committed to rebuilding the economy and making life simpler by cutting red tape. We are ...
“China remains a strong commercial opportunity for Kiwi exporters as Chinese businesses and consumers continue to value our high-quality safe produce,” Trade and Agriculture Minister Todd McClay says. Mr McClay has returned to New Zealand following visits to Beijing, Harbin and Shanghai where he met ministers, governors and mayors and engaged in trade and agricultural events with the New ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has completed a successful trip to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, deepening relationships and capitalising on opportunities. Mr Luxon was accompanied by a business delegation and says the choice of countries represents the priority the New Zealand Government places on South East Asia, and our relationships in ...
New Zealand is demonstrating its commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions, and supporting clean energy transition in South East Asia, through a contribution of NZ$41 million (US$25 million) in climate finance to the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-led Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM). Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts announced ...
The Government is today releasing a list of organisations who received letters about the Fast-track applications process, says RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. “Recently Ministers and agencies have received a series of OIA requests for a list of organisations to whom I wrote with information on applying to have a ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Wellington Barrister David Jonathan Boldt as a Judge of the High Court, and the Honourable Justice Matthew Palmer as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Boldt graduated with an LLB from Victoria University of Wellington in 1990, and also holds ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford will lead the New Zealand delegation at the 2024 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) held in Singapore. The delegation includes representatives from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua and the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) Te Riu Roa. The summit is co-hosted ...
A stopbank upgrade project in Tairawhiti partly funded by the Government has increased flood resilience for around 7000ha of residential and horticultural land so far, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones today attended a dawn service in Gisborne to mark the end of the first stage of the ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters will represent the Government at Anzac Day commemorations on the Gallipoli Peninsula next week and engage with senior representatives of the Turkish government in Istanbul. “The Gallipoli campaign is a defining event in our history. It will be a privilege to share the occasion ...
Science, Innovation and Technology and Defence Minister Judith Collins will next week attend the OECD Science and Technology Ministerial conference in Paris and Anzac Day commemorations in Belgium. “Science, innovation and technology have a major role to play in rebuilding our economy and achieving better health, environmental and social outcomes ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon held a bilateral meeting today with the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Prime Minister was accompanied by MP Paulo Garcia, the first Filipino to be elected to a legislature outside the Philippines. During today’s meeting, Prime Minister Luxon and President Marcos Jr discussed opportunities to ...
The Government has announced that $20 million in funding will be made available to Westport to fund much needed flood protection around the town. This measure will significantly improve the resilience of the community, says Local Government Minister Simeon Brown. “The Westport community has already been allocated almost $3 million ...
The Government is proud to support the first ever Repco Supercars Championship event in Taupō as up to 70,000 motorsport fans attend the Taupō International Motorsport Park this weekend, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. “Anticipation for the ITM Taupō Super400 is huge, with tickets and accommodation selling out weeks ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced an increase to the Rates Rebate Scheme, putting money back into the pockets of low-income homeowners. “The coalition Government is committed to bringing down the cost of living for New Zealanders. That includes targeted support for those Kiwis who are doing things tough, such ...
The Coalition Government is investing in a project to boost survival rates of New Zealand mussels and grow the industry, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has announced. “This project seeks to increase the resilience of our mussels and significantly boost the sector’s productivity,” Mr Jones says. “The project - ...
Benefit figures released today underscore the importance of the Government’s plan to rebuild the economy and have 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “Benefit numbers are still significantly higher than when National was last in government, when there was about 70,000 fewer ...
The Government’s commitment to doubling New Zealand’s renewable energy capacity is backed by new data showing that clean energy has helped the country reach its lowest annual gross emissions since 1999, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. New Zealand’s latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory (1990-2022) published today, shows gross emissions fell ...
The Government is bringing the earthquake-prone building review forward, with work to start immediately, and extending the deadline for remediations by four years, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “Our Government is focused on rebuilding the economy. A key part of our plan is to cut red tape that ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his Thai counterpart, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, have today agreed that New Zealand and the Kingdom of Thailand will upgrade the bilateral relationship to a Strategic Partnership by 2026. “New Zealand and Thailand have a lot to offer each other. We have a strong mutual desire to build ...
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Transport Minister Simeon Brown have today announced the Coalition Government’s intention to extend port coastal permits for a further 20 years, providing port operators with certainty to continue their operations. “The introduction of the Resource Management Act in 1991 required ports to obtain coastal ...
Today’s announcement that inflation is down to 4 per cent is encouraging news for Kiwis, but there is more work to be done - underlining the importance of the Government’s plan to get the economy back on track, acting Finance Minister Chris Bishop says. “Inflation is now at 4 per ...
Refreshed health guidance released today will help parents and schools make informed decisions about whether their child needs to be in school, addressing one of the key issues affecting school attendance, says Associate Education Minister David Seymour. In recent years, consistently across all school terms, short-term illness or medical reasons ...
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones is streamlining high-level oceans management while maintaining a focus on supporting the sector’s role in the export-led recovery of the economy. “I am working to realise the untapped potential of our fishing and aquaculture sector. To achieve that we need to be smarter with ...
I was initially resistant to the idea often suggested to me that the Government should deliver an arts strategy. The whole point of the arts and creativity is that people should do whatever the hell they want, unbound by the dictates of politicians in Wellington. Peter Jackson, Kiri Te Kanawa, Eleanor ...
Pacific Media Watch Palestine solidarity protesters today demonstrated at the Auckland headquarters of Television New Zealand, accusing the country’s major TV network of broadcasting “propaganda” backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. About 50 protesters targeted the main entrance to the TVNZ building near Sky Tower and also picketed a side ...
Opinion by Lynley Hood. Forty years on from my 1985 Fulbright Grant, my disquiet over the war in Gaza evoked some troubling questions. The answer to my first question – What is the primary purpose of the Fulbright Programme? – was on the Fulbright NZ website. It says: US Senator, ...
The ministers responsible for green-lighting major projects need to be open about potential conflicts of interest, says Transparency International. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anastasia Powell, Professor, Family and Sexual Violence, RMIT University It has been a particularly distressing start to the year. There is little that can ease the current grief of individuals, families and communities who have needlessly lost a loved one to men’s ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne Lichen, the first described example of symbiosis.AdeJ Artventure/Shutterstock Once known only to those studying biology, the word symbiosis is now widely used. Symbiosis is the intimate ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kim Hemsley, Head, Childhood Dementia Research Group, Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University Olena Ivanova/Shutterstock “Childhood” and “dementia” are two words we wish we didn’t have to use together. But sadly, around 1,400 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University The government’s Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee has just published its second report. It was set up by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth in 2022 to provide: ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne The Queensland state election will be held in October. A YouGov poll for The Courier Mail, conducted April 9–17 from a sample ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amin Naeni, PhD candidate at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University There’s been much talk in recent months about what a possible second Donald Trump presidency in the United States could mean for Europe, Russia’s war in Ukraine, the ...
A brief round-up of submissions on the controversial proposed law. This is an excerpt from our weekly environmental newsletter Future Proof. Sign up here. Last week, submissions on the controversial Fast-track Approvals Bill closed just hours after the government released a list of stakeholder organisations who were sent letters advising how they could ...
A poem from Robin Peace’s new collection Detritus of Empire: feather / grass / rock. Cereal giving I see a woman’s hands, see her curious hands break a stalk as she walks through the tall prairie, the savannah, the steppe, wherever it was. See her idly bite the grass that ...
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 Hemingway’s Goblet by Dermot Ross (Mary Egan Publishing, $38)A handsomely produced (debossed cover, lovely ...
The Commissioner's decision validates the longstanding efforts of the local community and ensures that Awataha Marae will be managed to serve the needs of the local community, particularly for hosting tangihanga. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tristan Salles, Associate professor, University of Sydney Examples of Australian landscapes.Unsplash Seventy thousand years ago, the sea level was much lower than today. Australia, along with New Guinea and Tasmania, formed a connected landmass known as Sahul. Around this time – ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Felicity Castagna, Lecturer, Creative Writing, Western Sydney University Day Day Market, ParramattaPhoto: Garry Trinh I live on the edge of Parramatta, Australia’s fastest-growing city, on the kind of old-fashioned suburban street that has 1950s fibros constructed in the post-war housing boom, ...
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Reports are coming in saying, “the siege of Gaza, which Israel has fought so bitterly and for so long to maintain has ended.”
http://kiaoragaza.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/gaza-shows-limits-of-force/
My solution:
Isreal and Palestine merge to form one singluar bicultural/multicultural state, where Arabs, Jews, and everyone else are treated as equal in a democratic secular state. Jerusalem to be internationalised as a free city for all peoples and faiths, under UN control. Will require both sides to make consessions, but people actually want to go out without worrying being blown to pieces by some fanatics.
It is reported that the Palistinians are moving new arms through their tunnels from Egypt, although 143 were destroyed, they still have many more which are being used.
In addition at the start of this skirmish they had 15,000 rockets of which only 15% were fired.
Cannot see Kumbaya yet.
It’s being reported? Er, no. It’s being alleged by an Israeli Government shill that the defenders of the Gaza ghetto had 15000 rockets. And these rockets are low tech; unguided and ineffective. On the other side, the invaders have the latest tech and overwhelming strength of numbers. Hardly a fair fight.
And just for fun, can I point out that only a couple of the Gaza rockets have ever landed on Israeli soil. Most are aimed at Palestinian land, stolen by the oppressor.
The Archdruid report says that Israel’s time is going to get harder as the USA declines further
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.nz/2012/11/in-twilight-of-empires.html
Good luck policing that,,,
Nice sentiment millsy,
Israel appropriated land because Palistinians didn’t believe in Fencing ?
Communal grazing versus “Fenced” farming ?
Israel is the bigoted “Right Wing Authority” in the conflict M8!
No respect for another culture is the underlying cause.
Not disimilar from this interesting plan for the Palestinians..
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-24/why-palestinians-have-time-on-their-side.html
Except you’d never get either side to agree to a secular state, and demographically Israelis would be quickly outnumbered – so no. I do like the idea of Jerusalem being a free city.
Wow. This is world shaking news. This is almost as momentous as the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Surely the Separation Wall will fall next. We are seeing a complete reshaping of the whole Palestinian Israeli question.
Will these developments see a negotiated peace, where the Israelis have to organise an evacuation of the illegal settlements in the West Bank?
With the borders open can the refugees in Gaza return to their former lands and houses at least in the current occupied territories especially if they are freed up by the evacuation of the settlers?
This is unbelievable and a cause for great celebration and no doubt for the Palestians particularly.
Will there be a formal announcement of the two state solution?
Will Abbass bid to the UN for observer status, be upgraded to a request for full membership?
Good lord, steady on.
You, (and the Guardian editorialist), are reading a hell of a lot into a few lines of text.
the borders have been open to the movement of goods and people throughout the seige. It’s how stuff gets in and out, it’s tightly controlled, but not ‘closed’. Presumably during the last week they have been sealed.
Give it a week or two and it will be business as usual. The Israelis talk the talk but still haven’t learnt how to walk.
“Give it a week or two and it will be business as usual.”
That’s a pretty safe bet.
Some would claim, and perhaps with good reason, that the All Blacks are probably the best (only) export promotion bill board we have.
Yet, watching a snippet of the Italian – New Zealand game, I could not help noticing the socks of both teams. The Italians were wearing the Canterbury clothing brand and the All Blacks, the Adidas motif …
Yes, proves the point , Canterbury capability and cred came off the back of many successful AB seasons. Now they are one of the premier international suppliers of tech gear for a range of sporting codes.
Canterbury is majority owned by an English company now anyway
Wonder if our IRD is on to this.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/11/22/uk-australia-google-tax-idUKBRE8AL04Y20121122
Or is it too much for Finance, Revenue to cope with.
I was listening to the Secretary for Education on National Radio this a.m. and the ongoing bleating of how complex the payroll system is. The Secretary patiently explained how the gargantuan task of paying our Teachers would cripple Hercules, immobilize Job and probably break DangerMouse , even if Penfold and all the Argonauts popped in to lend a hand.
I began wondering how our Health workers manage to get paid then?
Home help, OT’s, Physios, Nurses, Locums, GP’s, even the Surgeons seem to get paid without weekly drama and that Industry has exactly the same parameters of complex issues the Secretary ascribed to Education.
If the Secretary of Education finds getting the teachers paid all too much then how on earth can we have any confidence that the Secretary is even remotely capable of doing the far more complex and important job of actually educating our kids?
For fucks sake what a bloody moron
Another worry is that some teachers are finding out that although their Kiwisaver and PAYE deductions have been made, they haven’t made it to the IRD.
I have a close friend in the senior government IT echelons, while it seems obvious to anyone with half a brain that one could and should replicate well operating IT (and other) systems throughout government and the public service this is not the way the aparatchiks operate as theirs is a system based on troughing, incompetence and reinvention of the wheel – often in non circular form.
And of course those hugely complex teacher payrolls with over 90,000 employees managed in the past, so not really a sudden revelation. Why such a surprise?
And what more
Levy reckons it will take ONE year to get it right!!!!
AND
Talent 0.5 have started to blame to schools for incorrect data entry.
Don’t worry freedom, the health sector will be next (and I seem to remember some hooha in the 90s when they changed to a new computing system in hospitals)
I worked as a relief teacher for 10 years and not once did I have a problem with Datacom (the previous payroll company). Also they answered the phone instantly.
Yes, but Cabinet Ministers didn’t have shares in Datacom, so they had to be axed.
Datacom…a NZ company.
Datacom seemed to manage fine.
Obvious that they had no cronies in National, though.
Teachers etc got paid ok under the old system without any problems, the old saying, if it ain’t broke, dont fix it.
My thoughts go out to those poor teachers etc that featured on Campbell Live, it’s a terrible
situation.
But the Ministry is still saying that if one has not been paid, then the school should write a cheque out of school funds. More paper work then a payback from someone to someone else. Hell of a way to run a business.
There appears to be a problem with accessing akismet this morning. Comments are lagging through the spam checks and I have this message showing.
They are getting through, but there can be a few minutes lag. The peak I have seen has been 8 comments queued and with a delay of a less than 2 minutes (displays comment time only to the minute).
We get these on the odd occasion. They usually only persist for 10 minutes or so. But this one has been running for somewhat longer.
Local NZ connection to root name servers are down ….
Nothing resolves , using hosts file for thestandard at the mo.
Someone should tell Telecom / sprint net
They need to switch their “Local” root server to “Cached-Only” mode 🙂
Been seeing a lot of high numbered port, DOS attacks last 3 – 4 months.
Mainly around the address translation ports, Turkey and southern north american origins.
Attacking “apple” ports as well.
clever
I’d have expected it wouldn’t make a difference. The name -> IP would normally be cached in the server’s client DNS rather than having to resolve all of the time. And we are talking about comments being entered which is something that this site several times per minute during the peaks, and several minutes between for the rest of the NZ day.
Depends on what they set the TTL’s to I guess. If it was extremely short, then we might get DNS resolution lags. If there was a man in the middle attack on the DNS, then they’d set the TTL way up anyway.
More likely there is just maintenance or a DDOS. But this isn’t an area that I focus on that much. More jbc’s than mine.
DNS is a fundamental, slow it down and every spam engine in the world slows down.
And the TTL is meaningless unless u r in “cached-only” mode, it’ll still check the root server, it may time out, but slow is the end result.
It’s a last resort response to DNS DOS, which is what I think is happening , maintenance is not “down time” with revolving dns names etc.
Been seeing a bit of it at work. Seems to have cleared up now.
RAM 🙂
oops, forgot
Spin. Support your local Red, or black.
“She’s mighty mighty, lettin it all hang out”
Masters of War meet Masters of Reality
some rollin radical people (such is plurality)
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=christian+anarchism&hl=en&tbo=u&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=8rWuUOPtK6nYigeT6oDYAw&sqi=2&ved=0CE0QsAQ&biw=1003&bih=499
-Dredd
As Gaza is Savaged Again, Understanding the BBC’s Role Requires More Than Sentiment
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33126.htm
by JOHN PILGER November 22, 2012
In Peter Watkins’ remarkable BBC film, The War Game,which foresaw the aftermath of an attack on London with a one-megaton nuclear bomb, the narrator says: “On almost the entire subject of thermo-clear weapons, there is now practically total silence in the press, official publications and on TV. Is there hope to be found in this silence?”
The truth of this statement was equal to its irony. On 24 November, 1965, the BBC banned The War Game as “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. This was false. The real reason was spelt out by the chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Lord Normanbrook, in a secret letter to the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Burke Trend.
“[The War Game] is not designed as propaganda,” he wrote, “it is intended as a purely factual statement and is based on careful research into official material… But the showing of the film on television might have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the policy of the nuclear deterrent.” Following a screening attended by senior Whitehall officials, the film was banned because it told an intolerable truth. Sixteen years later, the then BBC director-general, Sir Ian Trethowan, renewed the ban, saying that he feared for the film’s effect on people of “limited mental intelligence”. Watkins’ brilliant work was eventually shown in 1985 to a late-night minority audience. It was introduced by Ludovic Kennedy who repeated the official lie.
What happened to The War Game is the function of the state broadcaster as a cornerstone of Britain’s ruling elite. With its outstanding production values, often fine popular drama, natural history and sporting coverage, the BBC enjoys wide appeal and, according to its managers and beneficiaries, “trust”. This “trust” may well apply to Springwatch and Sir David Attenborough, but there is no demonstrable basis for it in much of the news and so-called current affairs that claim to make sense of the world, especially the machinations of rampant power. There are honourable individual exceptions, but watch how these are tamed the longer they remain in the institution: a “defenestration”, as one senior BBC journalist describes it.
This is notably true in the Middle East where the Israeli state has successfully intimidated the BBC into presenting the theft of Palestinian land and the caging, torturing and killing of its people as an intractable “conflict” between equals. Standing in the rubble from an Israeli attack, one BBC journalist went further and referred to “Gaza’s strong culture of martyrdom”. So great is this distortion that young viewers of BBC News have told Glasgow University researchers they are left with the impression that Palestinians are the illegal colonisers of their own country. ….
Read more…
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33126.htm
Posted from Kiwiblog
The Government will build 10,000 new houses a year. Now let’s break that down.
10,000 houses a year is 192 houses a week. Now if you take the working week of 40 hours, that is 4.8 houses per hour. That is a new house every 13 minutes of the working week.
Hands up those who think the Government can build a new house every 13 minutes? If your hand is up, please keep it up and please join the queue for free trips to the North Pole to see Santa Claus.
So can anyone tell me who put forward this obviously unworkable shonky promise and were they on Team Cunliffe trying to discredit Shearer
yep, and I see farrar gets panned by many kiwiblog punters for the clear silliness and empty-headedness of his post ha ha ha ha ha
Flailing around………. walking in circles ………. trying ever so hard to polish the Nats turds ……..
40 hours times 100 workers = 4000 hours per week.
Still not nearly enough. If by some miracle you can build a house in 500 hours that equates to just 8 houses a week. Still not near one every 13 minutes.
Someone is having a laugh that they allowed Shearer to make a claim that will be forever ridiculed. That was sabotage.
There are 170,000 unemployed …. even if you get 50,000 employed thats ….
5 workers per house per week, a modular house can be erected in 5 days.
How many houses in one week Fisiani ?
Of course we might want to take our time and get it right though.
No perhaps fisiani and farrar and all the other pesimists and naysayers are right. The whole thing should be called off. It is just too hard. Everybody go home, the policy has been cancelled as it is impossible to provide less expensive housing in New Zealand……… ffs
They’ve even “Invented Maths” that prove it!
Quantify the variable, don’t invent it out of thin air M8!
The RWNJ logic (if we want to call it that) goes like this:
That’s a house every 13 minutes and nobody can build a house in 13 minutes thus the Labour party must be lying.
Yes, the RWNJs like Fisiani really are that stupid. They’re actually incapable of the basic maths to work out what it would take to build 10000 houses as they’ve just proven.
Care to actually point out the maths of how an EXTRA 10,000 homes can be built in the 40 hours of a 48 week effective working year, bad weather not included. (PS Modular house erection erection does not equate to having a house fit for habitation.)
Virtual Chocolate fish to the first delusionist to prove how it is possible.
I will not accept answers such as ” The Hogwarts school of carpentry” or “300,000 migrant Oompaloompas” or ” there are 170,000 ‘builders’ unemployed”
The only explanation of this mathematical brain fade is that someone has tried and succeeded in making Shearer look utterly incompetent. Perhaps it was just a decimal point in the wrong place.
1000 houses would only take 130 minutes each to construct.
100 would take 1300 minutes or 21.6 hours
Don’t even get me started on the shonky cost calculations………..
There’s a lot more than 10,000 construction workers in New Zealand Fisiani.
157,000 at the moment.
http://www.careers.govt.nz/default.aspx?id0=10104&id1=6684D868-9D45-4202-8265-027A28B38DEE
Thanks, was looking but couldn’t find it.
boldly going where no man has gone before
Sweet, a breakdown of 2009 here …
http://www.dol.govt.nz/publications/lmr/construction-sector/summary.asp
It takes two builders 8 weeks to build a 90m2 house (and that’s being generous). That’s two guys building 6 houses per year and we want 10,000 of them in one year. That means we need 1667 teams or 3334 builders.
Now, we actually already have several thousand builders already and many are presently under-employed or unemployed (there’s a reason why builders rates have gone from $34/hour plus to $25/hour) so we will have some spare capacity and possibly even enough without training up more builders and there is that 170k people unemployed some of which would be more than happy to become builders. Remember, the plan is 100k over ten years but it doesn’t have to start out at 10,000 in the first year (it would be nice but probably impractical).
As for the “shonky cost” well, personally, I think their being a little over generous myself especially if they go for medium or high density housing which they should do.
Really, the only things that are shonky are the RWNJs and their attempts at maths.
Two magical superworkers who can do the foundations, framing, plastering plumbing electrics, roofing and painting decorating in eight weeks. Oompa Loompa Land
I was hoping one of you would make a serious attempt .
Come on guys. You cannot defend the indefensible.
Explain 3,500 building consents per month in 2004 Fisiani….
http://www.dbh.govt.nz/UserFiles/File/Sector%20info/key-indicator-reports/kir-construction.pdf
(Page 2)
The aim of KiwiBuilder is obviously to increase these numbers.
And why oh why are the numbers of workers declining under Nationals Governance Fisiani?
Explain 10,000 EXTRA completed homes and stop wasting time with the number of CONSENTS.
Oh and your other canard.
There are more people employed in New Zealand than at any time in history.
More people = more employed. There also happens to be the most people unemployed.
There’s a reason why such figures are stated a percentage – it’s because nominal counts are inaccurate.
Look Fisiani it’s obvious you’ve got a bone too grind with bloggs.
But 10,000 completed homes is a goal, give it a few years.
We are currently building 10,000+- homes a year, if it takes two years then so be it consents means “started”.
Labour want to increase this number by a few hundred to a thousand per month
I.E. GROWTH IN THE BUILDING INDUSTRY.
Instantaneous gratification only exists in the drug addicts mind.
Not to big a stretch considering a basic custom built 90 m sq. house can be done in 12 weeks with two men.
We would always say 16 weeks, and usually take 14, not because the individual house took that long, but because we would have several on the go at once at different stages.
Cookie cutter houses would be even faster once the builders had some practice.
4 of us got a house for a TV show from foundations to roof in 10 days. Despite having to do a lot of demolition and working around bits of an old house.
5 minutes ago the SUPER builders could knock it up in 8 weeks now its 16. You need to get your lines right. That doubles the number of Oompa Loompas
Obviously you cannot read Fizzer. Or have any knowledge at all of building.
It is 14 to 16 weeks because we are working on several houses at once.
The average for one house is obviously much less.
And that is for bigger than 90 sq m custom builds.
The guys who put up the same design all the time are faster even than us “super builders”.
And your ‘obviously’ means that a house really can be built every 13 minutes??????? Are you ‘aving a larf?
Please please make it the centerpiece of housing policy in 2014.
People may not be able to get to the polls due to laughing.
You cannot win an election without credibility.
Another “show me the money” moment.
I’ll spell it out really simply: Yes, we can as a matter of fact build a house every 13 minutes in NZ over and above the ones being built now (which is probably more than 1 every 13 minutes).
Fisi is the genius who thinks unemployment can’t be going up because ‘more people are employed than ever!’
It’s hard for most us to believe that he’s actually imagining two builders starting a house and 13 minutes later having it completed and moving on to the next one, but he has just admitted that he can’t grasp the concept of percentages so it’s not out of the question.
Poor old Fisi. Here’s an entire skyscraper being built in two weeks.
A skyscraper which could fit what…500 apartments? Built in 2 weeks…35 apartments per day say…WOW amazing what you can achieve when you put your mind and your brains to a problem. Instead of moaning that everything is just too hard.
Yep. amazing alright! The company’s next project is to construct the world’s tallest building. 220 floors, 838 metres, housing for 31,000 people. Ok, it’ll take a wee bit longer than the one in the video to put up …. a mere 90 days.
NZ is currently building 10,000+- homes a year Fisiani,
by your screwed up maths that is indeed one home every 13 minutes.
Even if we had to double the number of needed builders we could still do it. Really, building that number of extra houses every year is easy – barely even touching upon the total resources we have available as a country but you, and the other RWNJs, don’t want to hear that as it goes against the myth that’s been built up over the decades and centuries that we can’t afford to. It’s proof positive that the National Party and the economists that support them have NFI WTF they’re talking about or that they’re lying.
Generally speaking, if we’ve got the builders then we’ve got the rest. The builders will be the ones on site full time from the moment building starts to it’s completion. In other words, you’ll need significantly less of the other workers and they will be in proportion to the number of builders.
That said, there always seems to be a shortage of plumbers…
Builders and I mean qualified shouldn’t pick up a hammer for less than $45, pay peanuts you get monkeys, monkeys build leaky houses, all these extra builders are going to come from where ? 8000 hrs to train a carpenter, 4 years, or are they going to come flooding back for $25 an hr yeah right.
I hope Labour have the numbers to back this up and even if they do Shearer will never be able to remember then unless he writes them on the back of his hand.
“8000 hrs to train a carpenter, 4 years…”
Yeah. Imagine how many we could’ve trained in the last four years if National gave a fuck about unemployment.
Considering how much legal work my nephew has been doing in regards to his building (You’d be amazed at the number of building contractors who don’t know the building code) I keep telling him he should be charging out at $120/hour. Nobody seems to want to pay that though and the most he’s got since 2k8 is $32/hour and that was on a single job. All the other times he’s either been unemployed or paid in the mid 20s and Chch actually pays less.
A quick calculation on a bank calculator to look at the affordability of these *cheap* houses.
$400,000 @ 5.25% for 25 years = $550.00 per week.
This is not low income housing.
Yes, you are right. But who’s talking about $400k being low income housing? I recall the nats saying $380k was ‘affordable’. Is that what you mean?
Ah, sorry you’re right, Labour is talking roughly 300k. So that’s $415 per week. Same criticism applies.
Fortunately I can now afford a mortgage, but with the arrival of my second child on a low income and a 160k mortgage, we could barely eat. Turned me into a decent vege gardener, but…
Government should be able to do mortgages at 2.5% pa.
Is the intention for the Govt rather than private sector banks to do the lending?
Don’t want to assume / comment because it may be in their econ policy, just printed to read. But I’d like to see LVR’s, LVT as well as CGT and some re zoning to free up all the land banks, like Giltrap’s down Great North Rd, a lot of apartments could come onto the market if that land was developed, right in the middle of the city within walking distance of jobs, and the local retail / entertainment economy.
I gather work is being done, pressure applied to RBNZ to address the capital flow which is chasing yield from our interest rates.
Hmmmm that would be a break from neoliberalism and banksterism so I doubt it.
$550.00 a week? Thats more than I get a week to feed me my partner a 17 year old and a 18 month-er. Buy a house ? Tui Time. And this is why I say Shearer is just way out of touch with the real people.
Except it’s not $550 a week, David.
It’s $300 k, less deposit. So, say, 270k. Weekly payments of around $400. About what you’d pay for rent for a modest family home in that Auckland. And with land being cheaper in the provinces, that $270k might be $240k. Mortgage of $350 pw? That’s realistic for many young couples starting out, I would have thought.
Govt could offer zero deposit terms.
You’ll be hard pressed to find a single income working class family on $35K pa who has a $30K deposit.
Maybe a double income working class family on $60K can manage it
Well, yeah, but then you’d be hard pressed to find a single income working class family on $35K. WFF would lift the household income substantially. But, realistically, both parents need to be working, at least initially, to afford a mortgage. A big ask in the current economy and with a government opposed to a living wage. Hell, opposed to full employment altogether.
Saving for the deposit does take years, but it is also evidence of the ability to budget that banks take into account when granting the mortgage. The banks will only lend to a point where the mortgage payment is the highest proportion of household expenditure. Can’t remember the exact cutoff, but I think the household is likely to need to bring in $800 pw to be granted a mortgage of around half that. So, maybe 40- 50k income and it becomes a runner at $350 – 400 pw payments. Any bankers out there? Can you shine a light on the actual percentages?
The point is increasing the supply of houses in the $300k range is also going to help the availability of rentals and houses in the cheaper ranges. Simple supply and demand.
Helping anyone looking for a house.
why not just build cheaper houses?
We tried that Weka, they are now called leacky homes and are now costing you and me mill/bill….of $$ and lets not forget earthquakes, so houses now will have to be stronger than ever and water tight, for a while, till we all forget, and start building cheap houses again in about 10 years, maybe 15 this time.
Well, those houses weren’t actually “cheaper” to the buyer, they were just cheaper to the property developers because of corners cut, and it was the developers who walked away with the difference as profits.
I really think property developers get a bad rap CV , the problems start with the the drawing of plans and what the council will and won’t allow. Some developers will get away with whatever the council lets them get away with and so they all start cheating to keep up, you could liken it to cycling.
“Developing is akin to playing Russian roulette. You can pull the trigger and draw a blank, although why you would want to I can’t imagine, but, because of the addiction factor, developers keep on doing so until sooner or later inevitably they draw the bullet.”
Bob Jones:
Who lobbied for the council changes? Who lobbied for deregulation of the building industry (“self-regulation”)? Who manufactured, sold and profited from the fashionable new building materials which turned out to be rubbish?
sigh…
السيد مانكي
@Sandmonkey
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20451208
Egypt’s President Mohammed Mursi has issued a declaration banning challenges to his decrees, laws and decisions.
The declaration also says no court can dissolve the constituent assembly, which is drawing up a new constitution.
President Mursi also sacked the chief prosecutor and ordered the retrial of people accused of attacking protesters when ex-President Mubarak held office.
Egyptian opposition leader Mohammed ElBaradei accused Mr Mursi of acting like a “new pharaoh”.
In a joint news conference held late on Thursday, Mr ElBaradai and other opposition figures described the declaration as a “coup against legitimacy” and called on Egyptians to take to the streets in protest.
an interesting few lines of text
I hear Jane Clifton was on the Panel today and discussing the Labour Party conference last weekend.
Did Jim Moira challenge her about a potential conflict of interest?
I tuned in briefly, recognised her voice, so tuned out. To my knowledge she wasn’t there – at least not on the conference floor. She wouldn’t have been far away though… waiting for yet more tid-bits from her new beau that she could then leak (on new beau’s behalf) to her journo pals.
Key and Shearer are on Q & A this Sunday, TV One 9am …
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1211/S00502/qa-this-sunday.htm
Can YOU help collect signatures on the SIGNATHON for a couple of hours over this weekend?
Have YOU ‘switched off Mercury Energy’?
____________________________________________________________________________
PRESS RELEASE: “The Switch Off Mercury Energy community group urges New Zealanders opposed to asset sales to support the nation-wide SIGNATHON this weekend!” Switch Off Mercury Energy Spokesperson, Penny Bright.
Those who can help collect signatures at any of these 300 collection points are encouraged to sign on to the one that’s most convenient, and turn up at the location on the day.
Those who can’t make it to one of the Signathon collection points but still have a bit of time to collect signatures on the weekend are being encouraged to download and print some petition forms for themselves.
http://switchoffmercuryenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SOME-11-September-2012-Switch-off-leaflet6g.pdf ” concludes Ms Bright.
from the back of the hard copy from the fishpond
“…a far more frightening work than any of the nightmare novels of George Orwell.With the logic(oooh)
which is the great instrument of French thought, (Ellul) explores and attempts to prove the thesis that
propaganda, whether the ends are demonstrably good or bad, is not only destructive to democracy, it is
perhaps the most serious threat to humanity operating in the modern world.”-L.A Times
“The theme of Propaganda (sans italicisezation) Achtung ma cherie, I digress, is quite simply
that when our new technology encompasses any culture or society, the result is propaganda
(don’t quote me on that.score)
-Marshall McLuhan
oh well, wheels have rolled on since then…
-Pierrepoint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrepoint_(film).Tim,or was it pete? one of The Usual Suspects
go figure
pg.1
It was a dark and stormy night, all through the house…”I’m Bored…zzzzzzzzzz.
btw, lots of little bees carved or sculptered, here and there at St Matthews.boing
Reading this article about data-centres and how much power they use when I noticed this passage:
Yep, competition, keeping inefficiency high because people are chasing the almighty profit.
Holy Schemozzle Batman.To the IBM cave….
What Capitalists Want for Christmas
And the party of business in NZ is?
And their leader said?
Check this out:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10849297
Grr. The only positive out of this is getting rid of Garner.
Media and both sides of the political spectrum having a great time pissing up together.
Just having a fucking laugh really eh?
No wonder all of them are covertly against the democratisation of the labour party, their cosy little lifestyles would be completely fucked if the idea were to take hold across the political spectrum.
Gawd I hope the leadership vote happens in Feb.
Leadership vote, on that note it isn’t over; first shot back me thinks. I’m thinking of joining the party again.
“a health sector source who worked closely with Cunliffe. He is the right type to lead New Zealand, she told the Herald , having character, brains, heart and being in “politics for all the right reasons”.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10849606
How may polls due between now and Feb? Lets face it Shearer is going to sink back into obscurity, any media opportunities he gets he will fluff.