Back to work time

Written By: - Date published: 11:55 pm, January 9th, 2013 - 24 comments
Categories: admin, infrastructure, internet, The Standard - Tags:

Thought I’d share this portrait of my holidays….

xmas_and_new_year

This is why we’re a bit slack about posts of the Xmas-New year period. At various times over the last five end of years we’ve tried having lot of posts, few posts, and at the end of 2011 we mostly had OpenMike (and the least drop in visitor numbers – looks like people like making their own fun). The pattern always looks much the same.

Page views start falling through December with visit numbers dropping a lot less (people read pages fewer times), then abruptly drop just before the 25th. The 25th is invariably the worst day of the year. We get a spike a few days after Christmas day as people realize there is nothing much to do. But then they sink back into a summer turpitude until work is inflicted upon them again (ie about now) when our page views start rising rapidly. Then it becomes worthwhile writing posts again.

Nice for me. It means that there is one part of the year that I can safely move servers without doing the allnighters.

The primary server has been moved out into the offshore cloud far away from the expensive costs of having to pay for the costs of the Southern Cross cable monopoly. The ~5% of our traffic from human readers offshore wasn’t a problem. However the searchbots (most recently the bloody bingbot) and spambots causing us to exceed our “free” datacap on overseas traffic. This was $3/GB when we started on the old server and is now $1/GB.

However it has cost us thousands of dollars in variable per GB charges since I moved the server back to NZ in 2011. Does nasty things to the site’s operating budget. For instance in November it cost $103 extra because the Bing searchbot tried to read the entire site including every comment link. They nearly did a million page views in November and 600k in December. The really irritating thing is that we get very few incoming searches from Bing. I’ve now constrained Bing to a more limited diet.

But now the server is back offshore, I can budget without those dratted gouging variable costs from the Southern Cross cable monopoly. Because of the cloudflare content delivery network I don’t need dedicated servers any more. We were heading up to the main server straining on 30-40% of the available processing power prior to using cloudflare. These days the same server seldom uses more than 10%. So in doing the shift we sould drop the size of server required and the base cost of running a server has dropped dramatically. And that is despite the ever increasing numbers of visitors, comments, and page views over the last two years.

So my current limit is set at 800GB per month for all traffic and I’ll review if I need to lift that later this month.

24 comments on “Back to work time ”

  1. xtasy 1

    Hey Lprent – I already feel very happy with the “cloud’ outsourcing, as it is a bit like “cloud nine” to me.

    Maybe the NZ SIS and others will find it a bit more difficult to track and trace us in future, that is a very optimistic kind of “hope” of course.

    Otherwise saving costs makes sense, and cloud server use is now the norm, so we move with them times.

    Thanks for all!

  2. lprent 2

    Ok – off to bed. Caching appears to be better tuned.

  3. Bob Simmons 3

    The difference between say, Fisher and Paykell moving overseas to save costs (which you lefties were pissing yourselves over) and you moving your website overseas to save cost is?

    Both make good business sense, yet one is worse then the other?

    I smell hypocrite.

    • Colonial Viper 3.1

      Shit Bob you must think you are hot stuff.

      In the first case, hundreds of skilled NZers lost jobs, the country lost significant manufacturing capability and ownership of the company and its IP was transferred to the Chinese, to enrich wealthy shareholders.

      In the second case, The Standard stopped paying monopoly rents on the Southern Cross Cable to overseas corporates and overseas shareholders.

      • MrV 3.1.1

        More convenient bullshit from the human colonic viper.
        Fact is you are directly leading to lost internet hosting activity etc in NZ. But you fail to see the hypocrisy here

        Fact:So you’d rather have your NZ visitors pay those “monopoly rents on the Southern Cross Cable to overseas corporates and overseas shareholders.” – and don’t forget to ad the bogeyman to your list. Boo.
        Fact:If you hosted in NZ most traffic is NZ based so wouldn’t be routed onto the cable.
        Fact:You can configure your site so external crawlers are limited traffic-wise.

    • lprent 3.2

      I thought that I made it pretty clear in the post that the main problem was paying for overseas traffic that we have little control or use for. Why should we pay for the overseas parasites? They aren’t our readership who are 95% on the local network. Why should we pay that money to a gouging near monopoly effectively owned by offshore interests? It isn’t like they’re investing in NZ because that would involve their destroying their own monopoly that sucks the life out of local businesses trying to develop locally.

      Whereas the rationale for F&P to move their production offshore was because they were largely selling into a global market where the freight for both purchases for the Bill of Materials (BOM) and the freight for market was a large part of the basic cost. The labour savings just aren’t that much of a cost in the BOM and wasn’t the main reason for the move. They kept the development, R&D, and much of the marketing here and communicated via the net with the production closer to suppliers and markets. In other words they kept the high paying intellectual property and jobs here. That is exactly what NZ wants and needs. We don’t want to be a low wage economy.

      I have no argument that there was a business logic to the F&P production move decision. I have no idea why you think I would – but I suspect it has to do with one of those rather stupid myths that some of the right like to cling to. I suspect what you smell is the rectal stench of your own bigotry.

      The actual argument here was that the National government is completely crap at fostering businesses and jobs here. But I guess taht was somewhat too subtle for your observational abilities. That the government who should be managing our structural infrastructure for businesses allows a profit gouging monopoly here like the Southern Cross cable is just plain daft. Effectively they should be trying to fix that market distortion so that businesses (like the export businesses I work for) don’t automatically move their servers offshore.

      As bandwidth requirements for running offshore sales and production operations increase, it will become more and more of a pain to maintain businesses here. If NZ businesses working largely offshore continue to have the life sucked out of them by the parasites then they will move both the server systems and eventually development offshore, taking those high paying jobs away.

      BTW: Unlimited bandwidth inside NZ was paid by the base charge on the server. However over the last two years when the server was back in NZ we wound up paying nearly as much for the overseas traffic as we did for all of the traffic inside the country. More inmportantly it was unscheduled and largely uncontrollable costs for something that we didn’t want nor need. Paradoxically moving to the other side of the Southern Cross both increases the costs to our actual readers as they will have increased charges on their ISP bills, while decreasing our site bills. It will actually increase costs to NZ consumers of our site.

      But in neither case are the bills in proportion to either the costs of running the Southern Cross nor to pay for new cables that will be required in the medium term (not that they’re doing that anyway). It is simple profit gouging.

      • Steve H 3.2.1

        L,

        The reason that they couldn’t get investors for a new cable was that it isn’t needed.

        It is no-where near capacity, and there are upgrades happening to it as we speak. And can you name me a company which charges less and less for its services every year, like SCCS does?

        The reason nobody invested was because it doesn’t make sense to an investor – build something which will lose you money long term providing a service which is dirt cheap anyway?

        • lprent 3.2.1.1

          That is the problem. It isn’t dirt-cheap to people providing content online. If it was then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

          Dirt cheap is what the local network costs. The Southern Cross was and still is outrageously expensive by comparison.

          This site does between 400Gb and 700Gb per month if I didn’t put constraints on it. The majority of that traffic is inside NZ. But typically between 150GB and 250GB of that traffic comes from offshore. Most of that is from searchbots, most of the remainder is from spambots, and a small fraction is from humans.

          But it means that if I had 250GB of traffic from overseas – drop the 25GB of “free” limit from the hosting provider, and say 25GB from the actual overseas readers. Then at $1/GB we’re coughing up $200 for traffic that isn’t readers. The server cost was only $233/mo. And of course to make it worse we’re paying 15% tax on that to a lazy government.

          The pricing structures of the Southern Cross distort the market.Now some of that we want – searchbots for instance. While they could operate their searchbots on the local network, they don’t? Why? Because they don’t get charged for the southern cross – they force the cost on to us.

          Now look at this the other way. We just moved our servers offshore so we don’t get penalized for running a server in NZ by the Southern Cross. This means that literally hundreds of GB’s more traffic has to go over the Southern Cross from our servers into NZ. Ok so someone has to pay for that. It goes on the bills of the readers. Our move offshore has probably added slightly to the already very high ISP costs of local users.

          Meanwhile our local servers industry dies because there are market distortions

          BTW: It is pretty noticeable that the only time that the costs actually reduce on the Southern Cross is when people start talking about putting in more cables

        • mike e vipe e 3.2.1.2

          S#*t Head what utter trash monopolies charge what their research shows the market will pay`!
          One of the main reasons why the morgan push for another cable failed was that the charges the US government wanted to charge to let it come on shore in the US made it enviable they had vested interests in keeping the existing southern cross cable as a monopoly one being they want us to start paying for content on the internet ie Rupert Murdoch and mates!

          • Steve H 3.2.1.2.1

            Thats silly, Mike – why would the US government not want to make money off 2 providers?

            Do some math, 2 is bigger than 1.

            @ lprent, why not ban bing then? As you say, nobody uses it to search your site and then you could have save some cash.

            It sounds like you don’t want to accept that on one hand you complain about ISP’s charging too much, but on the other hand you take advantage of user pays, causing cost to ISP’s

            • lprent 3.2.1.2.1.1

              I’d love to. I even went so far as to find out all of their current searchbot IP’s ranges.

              However when I compared it to the actual ranges of bingbot IP’s requesting data from our site, I found that the list was quite incomplete (and I verified that they were in fact real bingbots). A quick hunt around google showed that everyone has the same problem.

              This means that I can’t kill at the firewall by refusing a connection. I have to ban using the agent at apache. But by the time it gets that far into the server it becomes a bit of a waste of time. I’m still paying for the request data and the CPU time to throw them off.

              Eventually I just went into the bing webmaster tools and got them to limit themselves.

              Not to mention that they are merely the worst of the current crop of search bots from slurp to baidu to google. And the innumerable spambots where there are no civilising tools. It would be a never-ending task. Strategically it is smarter to bypass the problem. I’d change cable suppliers, but there isn’t any other choice apart from satellite latency. So I’ve done the next best thing.

              This isn’t exactly a paid job and I don’t have time to fight bots on behalf of the Southern Cross cable. It is easier to remove our site from the costs. It is unfortunate that Southern Cross will wind up penalizing our readers instead, but that is less of a problem to me than wasting my time.

    • Mary 3.3

      Your comment is as silly and non-sensical as something Cameron Slater would say.

      • Steve H 3.3.1

        HOw is his comment nonsense?

        You guys are all for “keeping jobs and everything in new zealand to be paid for by everyone but the end user”, then your dear blog owner goes and makes it user-pays, to save some cash

        He’s just as bad as a corporate, but I don’t see you guys getting all angry about him doing so.

        Keep The Standard in New Zealand!

        [lprent: So you’re going to contribute. Good to hear – so how much? And when can I expect to see it? ]

        • Colonial Viper 3.3.1.1

          To repeat my earlier comments for the Right Wingnuts

          http://thestandard.org.nz/back-to-work-time/#comment-571732

          In the first case (Fisher & Paykel), hundreds of skilled NZers lost jobs, the country lost significant manufacturing capability and ownership of the company and its IP was transferred to the Chinese, to enrich wealthy shareholders.

          In the second case, The Standard stopped paying monopoly rents on the Southern Cross Cable to overseas corporates and overseas shareholders.

          • Steve H 3.3.1.1.1

            So you support competition then? Odd, I’m sure in some of your other posts you write are for supporting government owned monopoly’s on things like power.

            Government owned Air NZ was great, wasn’t it?

            • McFlock 3.3.1.1.1.1

              Are you really that incapable of understanding that a person’s opinions on different things can vary according to the characteristics of each different thing, yet still be part of a single coherent and consistent world-view?

            • ropata 3.3.1.1.1.2

              err, Air NZ went bust under the “guidance” of Brierly and their mates in the NZX. Don’t you recall the Labour govt bailout of $1 billion? Air NZ is now 80% govt owned and doing much better with responsible leadership.

              • Colonial Viper

                So you support competition then? Odd, I’m sure in some of your other posts you write are for supporting government owned monopoly’s on things like power.

                Critical infrastructure and services must be government owned. Monopolies like that need to be kept out of the hands of the profiteering private sector.

    • tc 3.4

      F&P was sold Bob try and keep up. The standard has reduced it’s costs so that it can continue to deliver on it’s charter and play a role in NZ society….spot the difference, use crayons if it helps.

  4. QoT 4

    Bing = the devil.

    I seriously hate Bing, primarily because if I encounter it, it means I’m being forced to use a computer which doesn’t have Firefox/Chrome.

    • lprent 4.1

      I have never seen bing itself. Just their bots rampaging and the webmaster tools. Coming to think of it I haven’t used Windows 7, apart from booting up on it long enough to download and burn an ubuntu disk at work. There is half of a terabyte disk with windows there that I never use. And I forgot the damn password.

      There is a vista partition on my laptop, that I will be putting windows 8 in the next few weeks. I want to do some testing of some cross compiling using MinGW/gcc to make sure I know what I have to check.

  5. SHG (not Colonial Viper) 5

    searchbots (most recently the bloody bingbot) and spambots causing us to exceed our “free” datacap on overseas traffic

    robots.txt, learn it, love it.

    • lprent 5.1

      Of course that is set automatically, and is in fact a virtual file. The problem is that each individual bingbot bot seems to follow it individually (if at all). And of course most of the bots simply ignore it.

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    A chronological listing of news and opinion articles posted on the Skeptical Science  Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Nov 26, 2023 thru Dec 2, 2023. Story of the Week CO2 readings from Mauna Loa show failure to combat climate change Daily atmospheric carbon dioxide data from Hawaiian volcano more ...
    4 days ago
  • Affirmative Action.
    Affirmative Action was a key theme at this election, although I don’t recall anyone using those particular words during the campaign.They’re positive words, and the way the topic was talked about was anything but. It certainly wasn’t a campaign of saying that Affirmative Action was a good thing, but that, ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    4 days ago
  • 100 days of something
    It was at the end of the Foxton straights, at the end of 1978, at 100km/h, that someone tried to grab me from behind on my Yamaha.They seemed to be yanking my backpack. My first thought was outrage. My second was: but how? Where have they come from? And my ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    4 days ago
  • Look who’s stepped up to champion Winston
    There’s no news to be gleaned from the government’s official website today  – it contains nothing more than the message about the site being under maintenance. The time this maintenance job is taking and the costs being incurred have us musing on the government’s commitment to an assault on inflation. ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    5 days ago
  • What's The Story?
    Don’t you sometimes wish they’d just tell the truth? No matter how abhorrent or ugly, just straight up tell us the truth?C’mon guys, what you’re doing is bad enough anyway, pretending you’re not is only adding insult to injury.Instead of all this bollocks about the Smokefree changes being to do ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    5 days ago
  • The longest of weeks
    Hello! Here comes the Saturday edition of More Than A Feilding, catching you up on the past week’s editions.Friday Under New Management Week in review, quiz style1. Which of these best describes Aotearoa?a. Progressive nation, proud of its egalitarian spirit and belief in a fair go b. Best little country on the planet c. ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    5 days ago
  • Suggested sessions of EGU24 to submit abstracts to
    Like earlier this year, members from our team will be involved with next year's General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). The conference will take place on premise in Vienna as well as online from April 14 to 19, 2024. The session catalog has been available since November 1 ...
    5 days ago
  • Under New Management
    1. Which of these best describes Aotearoa?a. Progressive nation, proud of its egalitarian spirit and belief in a fair go b. Best little country on the planet c. Under New Management 2. Which of these best describes the 100 days of action announced this week by the new government?a. Petulantb. Simplistic and wrongheaded c. ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    6 days ago
  • While we wait patiently, our new Minister of Education is up and going with a 100-day action plan
    Sorry to say, the government’s official website is still out of action. When Point of Order paid its daily visit, the message was the same as it has been for the past week: Site under maintenance Beehive.govt.nz is currently under maintenance. We will be back shortly. Thank you for your ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    6 days ago
  • DAVID FARRAR: Hysterical bullshit
    Radio NZ reports: Te Pāti Māori’s co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer has accused the new government of “deliberate .. systemic genocide” over its policies to roll back the smokefree policy and the Māori Health Authority. The left love hysterical language. If you oppose racial quotas in laws, you are a racist. And now if you sack ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    6 days ago
  • Skeptical Science New Research for Week #48 2023
    Open access notables From this week's government/NGO section, longitudinal data is gold and Leisorowitz, Maibachi et al. continue to mine ore from the US public with Climate Change in the American Mind: Politics & Policy, Fall 2023: Drawing on a representative sample of the U.S. adult population, the authors describe how registered ...
    6 days ago
  • ELE LUDEMANN: It wasn’t just $55 million
    Ele Ludemann writes –  Winston Peters reckons media outlets were bribed by the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund. He is not the first to make such an accusation. Last year, the Platform outlined conditions media signed up to in return for funds from the PJIF: . . . ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    6 days ago
  • Weekly Roundup 1-December-2023
    Wow, it’s December already, and it’s a Friday. So here are few things that caught our attention recently. This Week in Greater Auckland On Monday Matt covered the new government’s coalition agreements and what they mean for transport. On Tuesday Matt looked at AT’s plans for fare increases ...
    Greater AucklandBy Greater Auckland
    6 days ago
  • Shane MacGowan Is Gone.
    Late 1996, The Dogs Bollix, Tamaki Makaurau.I’m at the front of the bar yelling my order to the bartender, jostling with other thirsty punters on a Friday night, keen to piss their wages up against a wall letting loose. The black stuff, long luscious pints of creamy goodness. Back down ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    6 days ago
  • The Hoon around the week to Dec 1
    Nicola Willis, Chris Bishop and other National, ACT and NZ First MPs applaud the signing of the coalition agreements, which included the reversal of anti-smoking measures while accelerating tax cuts for landlords. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The five things that mattered in Aotearoa’s political economy that we wrote ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    6 days ago
  • 2023 More Reading: November (+ Writing Update)
    Completed reads for November: A Modern Utopia, by H.G. Wells The Vampire (poem), by Heinrich August Ossenfelder The Corpus Hermeticum The Corpus Hermeticum is Mead’s translation. Now, this is indeed a very quiet month for reading. But there is a reason for that… You see, ...
    6 days ago
  • Forward to 2017
    The coalition party agreements are mainly about returning to 2017 when National lost power. They show commonalities but also some serious divergencies.The two coalition agreements – one National and ACT, the other National and New Zealand First – are more than policy documents. They also describe the processes of the ...
    PunditBy Brian Easton
    7 days ago
  • Questions a nine year old might ask the new Prime Minister
    First QuestionYou’re going to crack down on people ram-raiding dairies, because you say hard-working dairy owners shouldn’t have to worry about getting ram-raided.But once the chemist shops have pseudoephedrine in them again, they're going to get ram-raided all the time. Do chemists not work as hard as dairy owners?Second QuestionYou ...
    More than a fieldingBy David Slack
    7 days ago
  • Questions a nine year old might ask the new Prime Minister
    First QuestionYou’re going to crack down on people ram-raiding dairies, because you say hard-working dairy owners shouldn’t have to worry about getting ram-raided.But once the chemist shops have pseudoephedrine in them again, they're going to get ram-raided all the time. Do chemists not work as hard as dairy owners?Second QuestionYou ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    7 days ago
  • Finally
    Henry Kissinger is finally dead. Good fucking riddance. While Americans loved him, he was a war criminal, responsible for most of the atrocities of the final quarter of the twentieth century. Cambodia. Bangladesh. Chile. East Timor. All Kissinger. Because of these crimes, Americans revere him as a "statesman" (which says ...
    No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant
    7 days ago
  • Government in a hurry – Luxon lists 49 priorities in 100-day plan while Peters pledges to strength...
    Buzz from the Beehive Yes, ministers in the new government are delivering speeches and releasing press statements. But the message on the government’s official website was the same as it has been for the past several days, when Point of Order went looking for news from the Beehive that had ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    7 days ago
  • DAVID FARRAR: Luxon is absolutely right
    David Farrar writes  –  1 News reports: Christopher Luxon says he was told by some Kiwis on the campaign trail they “didn’t know” the difference between Waka Kotahi, Te Pūkenga and Te Whatu Ora. Speaking to Breakfast, the incoming prime minister said having English first on government agencies will “make sure” ...
    Point of OrderBy poonzteam5443
    7 days ago
  • Top 10 at 10 am for Thursday, Nov 30
    There are fears that mooted changes to building consent liability could end up driving the building industry into an uninsured hole. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Here’s my pick of the top 10 news and analysis links elsewhere as of 10 am on Thursday, November 30, including:The new Government’s ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    7 days ago
  • Gordon Campbell on how climate change threatens cricket‘s future
    Well that didn’t last long, did it? Mere days after taking on what he called the “awesome responsibility” of being Prime Minister, M Christopher Luxon has started blaming everyone else, and complaining that he has inherited “economic vandalism on an unprecedented scale” – which is how most of us are ...
    7 days ago
  • We need to talk about Tory.
    The first I knew of the news about Tory Whanau was when a tweet came up in my feed.The sort of tweet that makes you question humanity, or at least why you bother with Twitter. Which is increasingly a cesspit of vile inhabitants who lurk spreading negativity, hate, and every ...
    Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel
    7 days ago
  • Dangling Transport Solutions
    Cable Cars, Gondolas, Ropeways and Aerial Trams are all names for essentially the same technology and the world’s biggest maker of them are here to sell them as an public transport solution. Stuff reports: Austrian cable car company Doppelmayr has launched its case for adding aerial cable cars to New ...
    7 days ago
  • November AMA
    Hi,It’s been awhile since I’ve done an Ask-Me-Anything on here, so today’s the day. Ask anything you like in the comments section, and I’ll be checking in today and tomorrow to answer.Leave a commentNext week I’ll be giving away a bunch of these Mister Organ blu-rays for readers in New ...
    David FarrierBy David Farrier
    1 week ago
  • National’s early moves adding to cost of living pressure
    The cost of living grind continues, and the economic and inflation honeymoon is over before it began. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: PM Christopher Luxon unveiled his 100 day plan yesterday with an avowed focus of reducing cost-of-living pressures, but his Government’s initial moves and promises are actually elevating ...
    The KakaBy Bernard Hickey
    1 week ago
  • Backwards to the future
    Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has confirmed that it will be back to the future on planning legislation. This will be just one of a number of moves which will see the new government go backwards as it repeals and cost-cuts its way into power. They will completely repeal one ...
    PolitikBy Richard Harman
    1 week ago
  • New initiatives in science and technology could point the way ahead for Luxon government
    As the new government settles into the Beehive, expectations are high that it can sort out some  of  the  economic issues  confronting  New Zealand. It may take time for some new  ministers to get to grips with the range of their portfolio work and responsibilities before they can launch the  changes that  ...
    Point of OrderBy tutere44
    1 week ago
  • Treaty pledge to secure funding is contentious – but is Peters being pursued by a lynch mob after ...
    TV3 political editor Jenna Lynch was among the corps of political reporters who bridled, when Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters told them what he thinks of them (which is not much). She was unabashed about letting her audience know she had bridled. More usefully, she drew attention to something which ...
    Point of OrderBy Bob Edlin
    1 week ago
  • How long does this last?
    I have a clear memory of every election since 1969 in this plucky little nation of ours. I swear I cannot recall a single one where the question being asked repeatedly in the first week of the new government was: how long do you reckon they’ll last? And that includes all ...
    More Than A FeildingBy David Slack
    1 week ago
  • National’s giveaway politics
    We already know that national plans to boost smoking rates to collect more tobacco tax so they can give huge tax-cuts to mega-landlords. But this morning that policy got even more obscene - because it turns out that the tax cut is retrospective: Residential landlords will be able to ...
    No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant
    1 week ago

  • Minister sets expectations of Commissioner
    Today I met with Police Commissioner Andrew Coster to set out my expectations, which he has agreed to, says Police Minister Mark Mitchell. Under section 16(1) of the Policing Act 2008, the Minister can expect the Police Commissioner to deliver on the Government’s direction and priorities, as now outlined in ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    12 hours ago
  • New Zealand needs a strong and stable ETS
    New Zealand needs a strong and stable Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) that is well placed for the future, after emission units failed to sell for the fourth and final auction of the year, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says.  At today’s auction, 15 million New Zealand units (NZUs) – each ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    13 hours ago
  • PISA results show urgent need to teach the basics
    With 2022 PISA results showing a decline in achievement, Education Minister Erica Stanford is confident that the Coalition Government’s 100-day plan for education will improve outcomes for Kiwi kids.  The 2022 PISA results show a significant decline in the performance of 15-year-old students in maths compared to 2018 and confirms ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    1 day ago
  • Collins leaves for Pacific defence meeting
    Defence Minister Judith Collins today departed for New Caledonia to attend the 8th annual South Pacific Defence Ministers’ meeting (SPDMM). “This meeting is an excellent opportunity to meet face-to-face with my Pacific counterparts to discuss regional security matters and to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to the Pacific,” Judith Collins says. ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    3 days ago
  • Working for Families gets cost of living boost
    Putting more money in the pockets of hard-working families is a priority of this Coalition Government, starting with an increase to Working for Families, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says. “We are starting our 100-day plan with a laser focus on bringing down the cost of living, because that is what ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    3 days ago
  • Lake Onslow pumped hydro scheme scrapped
    The Government has axed the $16 billion Lake Onslow pumped hydro scheme championed by the previous government, Energy Minister Simeon Brown says. “This hugely wasteful project was pouring money down the drain at a time when we need to be reining in spending and focussing on rebuilding the economy and ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    4 days ago
  • NZ welcomes further pause in fighting in Gaza
    New Zealand welcomes the further one-day extension of the pause in fighting, which will allow the delivery of more urgently-needed humanitarian aid into Gaza and the release of more hostages, Foreign Minister Winston Peters said. “The human cost of the conflict is horrific, and New Zealand wants to see the violence ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    6 days ago
  • Condolences on passing of Henry Kissinger
    Foreign Minister Winston Peters today expressed on behalf of the New Zealand Government his condolences to the family of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who has passed away at the age of 100 at his home in Connecticut. “While opinions on his legacy are varied, Secretary Kissinger was ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    6 days ago
  • Backing our kids to learn the basics
    Every child deserves a world-leading education, and the Coalition Government is making that a priority as part of its 100-day plan. Education Minister Erica Stanford says that will start with banning cellphone use at school and ensuring all primary students spend one hour on reading, writing, and maths each day. ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    6 days ago
  • US Business Summit Speech – Regional stability through trade
    I would like to begin by echoing the Prime Minister’s thanks to the organisers of this Summit, Fran O’Sullivan and the Auckland Business Chamber.  I want to also acknowledge the many leading exporters, sector representatives, diplomats, and other leaders we have joining us in the room. In particular, I would like ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    7 days ago
  • Keynote Address to the United States Business Summit, Auckland
    Good morning. Thank you, Rosemary, for your warm introduction, and to Fran and Simon for this opportunity to make some brief comments about New Zealand’s relationship with the United States.  This is also a chance to acknowledge my colleague, Minister for Trade Todd McClay, Ambassador Tom Udall, Secretary of Foreign ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    7 days ago
  • India New Zealand Business Council Speech, India as a Strategic Priority
    Good morning, tēnā koutou and namaskar. Many thanks, Michael, for your warm welcome. I would like to acknowledge the work of the India New Zealand Business Council in facilitating today’s event and for the Council’s broader work in supporting a coordinated approach for lifting New Zealand-India relations. I want to also ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    1 week ago
  • Coalition Government unveils 100-day plan
    Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has laid out the Coalition Government’s plan for its first 100 days from today. “The last few years have been incredibly tough for so many New Zealanders. People have put their trust in National, ACT and NZ First to steer them towards a better, more prosperous ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    1 week ago
  • New Zealand welcomes European Parliament vote on the NZ-EU Free Trade Agreement
    A significant milestone in ratifying the NZ-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was reached last night, with 524 of the 705 member European Parliament voting in favour to approve the agreement. “I’m delighted to hear of the successful vote to approve the NZ-EU FTA in the European Parliament overnight. This is ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    2 weeks ago
  • Further humanitarian support for Gaza, the West Bank and Israel
    The Government is contributing a further $5 million to support the response to urgent humanitarian needs in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, bringing New Zealand’s total contribution to the humanitarian response so far to $10 million. “New Zealand is deeply saddened by the loss of civilian life and the ...
    BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz
    3 weeks ago

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