With the Chinese economy looking like it is recovering a bunch faster than that of the United States and Europe, New Zealand needs a fresh wave of highly connected, wealthy, democratically-minded Chinese to immigrate here.
We should open our doors to those in Hong Kong who want to flee the brutal new Security Law that is requiring most of the human rights groups to shut their social media accounts, destroying the last vestiges of resistance to Xi Jinping's endlessly tightening totalitarianism.
Who knows, perhaps some of those pro-democracy protesters could come in under refugee status now that as of today New Zealand has increased its refugee intake to 1,500.
Auckland and New Zealand generally need a fresh generation of bilingual speakers to provide entrepeneurship, capital and cultural diversity to redouble that which they brought here in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
And it would be a great example for New Zealand to stand on the world stage and be proud as a democratic, open society by opening their doors to those of Hong Kong who wish to come and who qualify.
Yes.., and perhaps we could embrace Drury's idea and start building luxury homes for these downtrodden 'elites' in a place like Queenstown. That would be the kind thing to do and it would also help our construction sector…
The natural place for Hong Kong expats is Auckland – that's where Mandarin and Cantonese communities are already very strong. We sure need to keep our construction workers engaged here.
Aahh..good ol' Ad, King of the short term thinkers..guess thats why he is such a avid supporter of this neoliberal centrist freemarket Labour, yep they really are made for each other.
I think Ad may be outside the box that you are in Adrian. He is just being pragmatic. We have to try and manage our way out of the mess that we are in. Just black and white solutions are not suitable, what is the right medicine for our illness, in the right amount. The problem is that we may not be able to control the amount of medicine and how often taken.
Lets just hang on a bit, we already have 1 million Kiwis with an automatic right to walk right in and a fair few of them are thinking of doing just that. Can we even accommodate them even if only 250,000 came without real housing and job problems.
Think of what they can do for our GDP. It has been our national (lower case) MO for years. How to grow the economy? More milk powder and more immigrants. Keeps the wages down and unemployment up. Sell a few SOE’s, give middle NZ a tax cut and raise GST, and Bob’s your uncle. Home owners have been creaming it. Apparently, farmers are now having an anal aneurism because the Greens had the temerity of proposing a wealth tax; over their dead animals bodies.
Let's bring back estate duty and stamp duty too and spread that tax burden fairly over the country on a percentage basis. That would be a case where percentages are fair for the poorer people, they always work from a base sum. Estate duty should be also on deemed portions in trusts, valued at present valuation, or at part of those market prices before a present slump.
There is no reason that three-year marriages should result in good payouts to partners, but the tax department can be always a bridesmaid and never a bride when it comes to getting a proportion of the loot built up on the reasonable reliability of this country’s laws and stability.
And an interesting piece in stuff on some of the australian crowd who make up potential returnees. About two thirds are potential returnees and I feel sympathy for persons 1 and 3 who appear to have left after being slugged by over competition in entry level employee markets and the low wage economy here.
Person 3 was more interesting. The NZ passport was a second passport and I estimate that out of a 30 year working life around 14 years had been spent here and 9 years in Australia. The net cash assets from this work life appeared to be around $100k (low?) and no mention of property ownership. It was not clear if an australian passport had ever been applied for. Now he is thinking of returning (to collect our welfare I assume) along with an american wife who appears to have never set foot in New Zealand. They could of course choose to return to the UK or the USA
I can't help feeling there is something very wrong with this scenario and we are allowing ourselves to be taken for a ride..
And yes I do know about the work issues under the Clark government and no at the time I did not approve of the decision.
Ad:
I don't want to be unkind but Auckland is basically a slum with high-rise buildings and a small elite that desperately holds on to yesteryears way of society strata. Hardy a place that screams value, democracy, planning, equality, etc….
Those who are used to that environment will not find anything wrong with it. Naturally.
I realise Ad is trolling, but "wealthy, democratically-minded" is probably an unconscious oxymoron on his part. The rich will always use their wealth to influence the democratic process and tip the table in their direction. The best immigrants for the long term health of a society are highly technically skilled (i.e. not 'business skills') and not wealthy. And if we go into the contents of their minds at all, we might want to add 'equality' and ' environmentally' to 'democratically'.
It really is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.
We need to dust off our histories of 1946. The worldwide migration this is going to force is going to make the post-Syrian European crisis look like a Mollie Woppie picnic.
I too assumed Ad was trolling – if only because he is suggesting that the "poor and huddled masses" who did all the hard work around the protests are going to be left behind to suffer. Very democratic not?
Plus I'd imagine that the wealthy have long since organised a bolt hole country. I certainly remember some coming here when Hongkong changed over staying just long enough for one of the couple to score residency, dumping their kids in the local schools and then bolting back to their real life in Hongkong. .
Colonel Comrade might be on the same page with you, he could 'liaise' with the new arrivals on behalf of the government (no, not our government). Just to maintain order.
Hong Kong Chinese – good idea Ad. They are keen, smart, good people, and more likely to be on our wavelength (outdated term) than many fleeing from CCP. Not a whole bunch though please at once, which will be impossible just now but include them by all means at the same time not forgetting to be ethical to other overseas people who have paid already, worked already, want to be NZs and are good ones. So the inevitable happens, we haven't been destroyed yet, and all those who can escape the shit of the big powers see us as a haven. (While many of the boofheads and the sweeties here want to throw that away and find the wealthy wonkers' lifestyles soo glamorous and desirable.)
I've been thinking along these lines myself, you more or less beat me to it Ad. Hong Kongers are different.
Most kiwis are fairly unaware of how China is not really a single coherent historic or cultural entity. In very broad terms it can be thought of in four major chunks, the bureacratic, military minded Han core in the northern Yellow River plain and centred in Beijing, the merchantile manufacturing minded groups of the Yangtze River represented by Shanghai as the largest city, the southern port cities of Hong Kong, Macau and Xian, and the fourth being the diverse ethnic groups of the central provinces.
The southern cities like Hong Kong were historically geographically isolated from Beijing and looked outward to the wider world, particularly in terms of trade and culture. Many Hong Kongers regard themselves as quite separate from the CCP run mainland and want absolutely nothing to do with it.. The passing of these new Security laws will prompt many to find ways to leave.
I've visited Hong Kong a few times, it’s a highly developed world city, full of surprises. Kiwis should welcome these people, they will bring much of real value with them.
… New Zealand needs a fresh wave of highly connected, wealthy, democratically-minded Chinese to immigrate here.
No we don't
Any Chinese that move here are likely to be sent by the Chinese government to fuck up our democracy
Auckland and New Zealand generally need a fresh generation of bilingual speakers to provide entrepeneurship, capital and cultural diversity to redouble that which they brought here in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
No, we need to settle what we've got into our own culture. Getting more of the same won't help.
Under the Key government heaps of property owners became millionaires overnight. So now Auckland is facing a housing crisis and a water crisis and record inequality. What does resident neoliberal Ad propose? More of the same.
I'm with you on this one DTB if Ad is serious. We've had these setting since the 90's and the one thing that really shows out is that our GDP per head has stayed static or gone backwards. Where are the factories and post processing plants and all the other benefits that were supposed to flow? Absolutely non existent.
Frankly for the average live out your life here citizen these policies have made their lives worse. The number of people that take part in a "global" workforce by having multiple passports and residency is tiny and over privileged. Yes houses may have gone up in value but if it's the only one you own then it's used for the basic service of "living in"
Hong Kong protesters would get a shock if they came here or say the UK, because they have better health system in HK They want freedom what, I saw a lot of American flags flying in those protest, a lot of NGO monies like NED funding anti mainland groups, there is more to life than HK dissidents money, no thanks, let them go to granny England or uncle Sam land.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, NED makes more than 1,600 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.
And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
Yes, read that. About time we opt out of the 5 eyes bullshit that keeps us non independent from the capitalist spy network. Oops, sorry I forgot we are a crapitalist country.
You mean not just 5 eyes but ramping up to a ball with feelers like a Covid-19, or a 360o degree surveillance? Or have a dynamic ball chasing us like in Prisoner on tv? Why have only one eye per country – that's so limiting.
We should take all the doctors, nurses (and some health tech people) and teachers who want to leave (albeit they would be better paid in Oz).
And others in skilled worker areas (albeit …) engineers/construction to IT/finance etc
And the business owners who would base here and pay tax locally on their drawings/dividends from their Hong Kong activities.
Most however will just seek British passports (to be safe) and end citizenship activity. But if China acts against those who choose this route, we might get lucky.
Things might be heating up for the "two guys in a steam bath". Yep, those two guys are Pootee and his fascist-dictator-wannabe puppet. More and more is coming out about Pootee maybe paying bounties being paid on American soldiers, and Marmalardo getting briefed about it and being utterly uninterested.
I'm struggling to come up with any previous example anytime anywhere of a significant national leader being so objectively crap that they have come under this kind of sustained brutal attack across a huge number of topics, from respected senior members of their own party.
Yup. But it really just confirmed informed speculation about what resolution was possible just from the known size of spy satellites. Ie, what can you from a telescope of X diameter (2.4m from memory) orbiting Y kilometres up.
Then there was the time Don Dementia outed Israeli assets to Lavrov and Kislyak while getting all chummy in the Oval Office.
You a fan of the idea that two wrongs make a right, are you? Even in cases such as this, where the tangerine turdgoblin is deeply involved in the genesis of both wrongs?
No, just that for some reason your focusing on the bounty which Trump has sweet FA to do with rather than the one which he (and other members of the US administration including Pelosi) can actually do something about.
Oh, so it's simple whataboutery then. I had thought your cognitive processes had advanced beyond that kind of simple distraction tactic, but evidently not. My bad.
And since the point apparently needs to be spelled out for you in simple terms, the issue is about how Benedict Donald has responded to the possibility of Russia putting a bounty on US soldiers much more than about the bounty itself.
… the possibility of Russia putting a bounty on US soldiers…
You will, of course, be providing evidence of this dastardly crime. Something the entirely anonymous source of this wild and woolly story has yet to do.
We are awaiting your dump of verifiable and irrefutable “good stuff” with great anticipation, my good friend.
Uh, no, that's for those in the intelligence services to do to the satisfaction of their masters, if any follow-up appears likely.
But you too seem to have totally missed the point in your rush to indulge in another one of your displays of public political masturbation. Which is Emperor PalPutin's problematic response to being presented with the intelligence assessment, much more than whether or not the assessment is accurate.
Andre I applaud your word du jour for the orange tambourine – you bring expressive colour into the discourse, and may you do so till he goes to a better place – somewhere in the rust belt where they will treat him to unceasing religious ceremonies and don't believe in building big hotels, and playing with the stock market.
…the Hellenistic Age. The Macedonian King Seleucus (died 281BC) and his Persian wife Apame ruled a hybrid kingdom that mixed Greek, Persian, Jewish, Bactrian, Armenian, Sogdian and Aramaean cultures and religions.
With new cities, religions and cultures, this melting pot encouraged the rise of a thriving connectivity that linked urban centres in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Syria (where many of the Hellenistic sites (such as Apamea) have been devastated in recent years by war and looting). The great city of Seleucia-on-Tigris/Ctesiphon, just south of Baghdad on the Tigris river in modern Iraq, became the western capital and centre for learning, culture and power for a thousand years…
…The Sasanians ruled a massive geopolitical entity from 224-751AD. They were builders of cities and frontiers across the empire including the enormous Gorgan wall. This frontier wall stretched 195km from the Caspian Sea to the mountains in Turkmenistan and was built in the 5th century AD to protect the Iranian agricultural heartland from northern invaders like the Huns….
Iranian cultural heritage has no one geographic or cultural home, its roots belong to all of us and speak of the vast influence that the Iranians have had on the creation of the world we live in today. Iran’s past could never be wiped off the cultural map of the world for it is embedded in our very humanity.
Could Iran be cleverer than today's western boofheads? Can we wonder why they got enraged at the west messing with them, brazenly killing one of their revered Generals, and previously installing a puppet figurehead – who they eventually abandoned ignominiously? Can we manage our way through to keep our heads above water now? 'We haven't much money so we'll have to think hard' Rutherford said or words to that effect.
Food for thought. Yes. I am filling my head with new information and it's getting full I think and pass it on in case someone else is interested. I have had an ordinary education and can see it wasn't satisfactory and now think that most of our education is directed away from learning about ourselves, the most important thing. That was said before 1744!
The proper study of Man, is Man. Alexander Pope
Author Profession: Poet
Nationality: English
Born: May 21, 1688
Died: May 30, 1744
In one odd sense the historic Iranian culture could be thought of as the USA of the ancient world, the two have a lot in common, but for quite different reasons.
Iran is geographically different to the USA in every conceivable way, but it all boils down to one factor: populated Iran is a fused, sprawling mountain system. Iran’s Zagros mountain chain fills the country’s entire southwestern third, while the Elburz dominates the northern third. The contemporary capital of Tehran sits on a plateau where the two chains meet. With an average peak elevation of 3000m, the two chains not only force out fairly reliable rainfall, but their valley floors tend to above 1000m. Unlike nearly everywhere else in the region, it actually rains in Iran where people live. Direct rainfall enables agriculture without necessarily requiring irrigation. Lower labor requirements free workers to do other things, like going to school, practicing a trade, composing a poem or waging war. Culture here has roots stretching back five thousand years.
Mountain living has other advantages. Anyone wanting to invade Iran must fight their way uphill into the Persian core and batter through every mountain line. This defensibility shapes Persia’s participation in international affairs. Iran isn’t a destination, but instead a knot of difficult territory that must be bypassed by those in Asia or Europe, it's just too hard to invade and hold. In this it's very much like the USA, it's geography has always made it secure.
Unlike the dozens of city-states and empires that have risen and fallen throughout the Middle East, the Persians have art, history and culture that isn’t short-lived, incidental or fused with foreign practice but instead anchored in millennia of continuity. The Persian language and Persian customs—conservatively—date back hundreds of generations.
But the same geography also forced them to become the first multi-cultural society. Each mountain valley had it's group and identity, making them a very heterogeneous society, but united in one thing … the terrain around them was even worse. This forced them develop an enduring Persian identity from all these disparate parts much earlier than anywhere else in the world.
Located on the Silk Road trade route the medieval Persians managed to sustain a remarkable medieval prosperity, but two things buggered this for them. One was the invention of deep water navigation by the Portuguese, enabling traders to completely bypass them. The other is more subtle; the thousands of mountain valleys and plateaus make internal transport very expensive, and there are few large centers with necessary pre-conditions to support industrialisation.
In many ways it's useful to think of the Persians as an ancient super-power, but one that has been sidelined by history and technology. They retain much of their cultural capital, but the nature of the land they live in has constrained their ability to adapt to the modern world.
A cosmopolitan culture for so long, yet that biodiversity got clamped into a binary theology, and most religious historians derive that of islam & christianity from Zoroaster. Here's non-academic recycling of that view:
Thus the binary syndrome that makes leftists hate Trump. Life is an
eternal struggle and combat with an evil Other
Now Abraham came from Ur, where the Akkadian civilisation had recycled the Sumerian pantheon of diverse gods & goddesses. So the Israelites went seriously off the rails in departing from their Hebrew progenitor. Historians who write about this usually blame the acquisition of monotheism from Akhenaton during the Hebrew settlement in the Nile delta centuries. Interesting how cultures long complex can shift into banal simplification!
Thanks Greywarshark, a great follow up of the series "The Silk Road" extract on Zorastrians the Muslims Persia and Iran cultures narrated by Joanna Lumley.
yes, welcome home, i hope you have enough money to last 6 – 12 month – cause on unemployment you will not even manage to rent a ditch, let alone eat.
welcome home honey, sadly i can't hire you, we are all gonna be shit outta luck once the wage subsidy subsides.
welcome home you and your whanau, hopefully you are not picky n choosy cause fruit picking might be your best bet, and for your wife/husband and the kids.
welcome home, to what ever you find here waiting for you.
Exactly. The returnees will fall roughly into three categories.
There was about 50,000 kiwis travelling short term, most of whom have gotten home, but there will be still a few who have been stuck in odd places who have not yet been able to organise a flight for one reason or another.
About 200,000 kiwis in Australia do not qualify for any support there. Eventually a fair fraction of them will be forced to return if they do not have secure jobs. Probably about 50% of them over the next six months. Most will be younger adults and will likely return to family here, but not a lot of other prospects.
Another large and hard to qualify chunk will be ex-pats who have been living and working all around the world. Many will have been earning a good income, and would return with capital and experience. How many is very hard to guess, because their decision points will all be unique based on their circumstances, but I would guess maybe another 100,000 or so over the next few years. A lot depends of just how turbulent the world becomes in that period.
interesting post redlogix. already people in the third category are spending money. houses are being bought and renovations happening at my beach, by cashed up kiwis returning. my real estate colleague confirms that sales and prices are up, mainly driven by incoming cash. dont think we are going to need to selloff any more kiwi citizenships for a while.
A fair few will be those who can do their work from anywhere in the world, and will return still employed in their current jobs. Safe trumps cosmopolitan for the next few years.
Others will become self employed contractors living here but applying for international jobs they can do on-line. Others will run on-line businesses and or offer themselves as consultants to local business in their industry sector.
Some will simply take the jobs that have been going to skilled migrants.
Some will simply spend a year holidaying here, or doing a post grad course, where it is safe.
As for the Oz Kiwi crowd who return, hopefully a lot are into construction/roading and building and truck driving – younger adults back to home with parents are ideal for seasonal work (camper van).
Then there are the jobs that semi-skilled migrants – couriers/service stations/IT/Chorus connections have been doing.
50,000 migrants coming in, not. The lack of 100,000 students this year eases the hospitality sector downturn impact on employment.
No they left in the first place because they could not get any jobs here. Cause the one thing NZ sucks are really is the creation of good jobs, future proof jobs with a pay above min wage that would allow them to pay life and student loans.
And now they are back here with no jobs, no real chance to get a job, and most of them don't come with truck loads of money because were ever they lived before they did so on a regular wage paying regular things like food, rent, insurance etc etc etc.
But yeah, nah nah, quite a few of them will do what ever they can as 250$ per week un-employemnt is too little to live and too much to die on. And so far i have yet to see a proposal from any of the empty suits to raise this to the level of the wage subsidy so as to prevent further hardship and misery. And i don't expect to see anything meaningful about unemployment to come anytime soon.
As for us being the Nr. 1, our wage subsidies are still keeping many afloat. Take that away and see what happens to our Society when you have somewhere between 10 – 20% unemployment (certain regions even higher – and i am being very charitable with the numbers as i would expect them to go into the high 20s low 30s) who can neither pay food or rent on the current benefit levels.
The current projection is unemployment at 9% below the original projection of 10%.
Some tourism economy regions of course will be around 20% – the question will be how many of those are residents/citizens and entitled to benefit support
There is a reason why the wage subsidy was extended – i think they call this flattening the curve.
I love all that pie in the sky wishful thinking. What ever gets people trhough the day.
But i will make sure to tell the people that are sending me their unsolicited CVs that they can just declare themselves contractors to get some 'work from home' jobs, or that they just start working in roading/building (skills and training is for suckahs), or that they just do a year living in a Van (Freedom camping with the whole family is fun 🙂 ) and so on and so forth.
the real number of unemployment will be known when the wage subsidy runs out and is replaced with nothing. Until then, you have no numbers to throw about.
the takeaway from this thread (apart from preparing for community resilience) is that worker rights is a big priority. If Ad and his peers' children end up fruit picking, best make sure they have better wages and work conditions than the economic migrants and working holiday crowd have had up until now. Fruit picking is honest work, about time we made it good work too.
While I don't know the profit margins involved, and with exports in 2019 worth $6.2B – An increase of $720M, and an industry valued at $9.5B, out of principle I wouldn't go fruit picking until the wages for the hard grafting workers reflected their real worth and value to the horticulture big boys.
When Moss was appointed, then Minister for Vulnerable Children Anne Tolley (pictured) dismissed questions in the media over whether she was the right person for the job. Photo: Lynn Grieveson
"The panel convened by Rennie to make the decision was an all-Pākehā lineup: deputy State Services Commissioner Debbie Power, secretary of education Peter Hughes"
Two of the creators of the highly toxic environment at WINZ – beggars belief that the current government (naively maybe) put anyone from that era of management back in there – or actually maybe it doesn't considering some of their actions to date towards the poorest in society – not increasing benefits as per the WEAG recommendations, making the homeless pay 25% of their benefit to pay for their motel rooms, getting rid of including underage partners in superannuation – all those things make poor peoples lives harder. I can see why she would appeal to them both – cut from the same managerial mould/(mold?). Fits nicely with the earlier comments about the managerial class that were made.
yeah, nah nah, not relevant at all to what i asked – the people sending me CVs have not lost jobs for bullying and chances are will not be hired for their bullying nature.
they are ordinary people who have come home to nothing much, if anything at all.
Sorry Sabine. You wrote "CV" and I'm afraid that forever those two letters will pull that image of Moss' CV into my mind.
What to do with the returning sons and daughters who thought their best futures were Overseas?
Sadly, not all will be of the 'highly trained and qualified in a specialist field' group that seem to have the welcome mat laid out. I'm not entirely convinced of the essentiality of making movies about virtual blue folk, but I do see the necessity of having experts dealing with the leaking shit pipes in Wellington.
So those who can't be gainfully employed in one of the multibillion dollar projects announced by Our Leaders over the past few weeks will have to 'pivot', I believe is the current parlance, and broaden their horizons or lower their expectations.
And perhaps consider voting for the Green party and their ending poverty policy.
Because it would go a long way towards mending the safety net.
If someone with a PhD in particle physics applies for an honestly advertised minimum wage casual job as a cleaner…hire them. Or not.
'pivot' has become so passe @Rosemary – everybody is pivoting and they need something new. There is a new word on the horizon. Forgot where I heard it, but immediately I did, "ultimately" I knew it'd become the new normal going forward (in that space).
"so"…….. the best creds for something like the position of OT CEO could be experience as a used car salesman, as long as you make it clear you're also "passionate" about what you do, AND "compassionate".
On the other hand, as Anne Tolley has reckons, being a mother might be sufficient, although I'm not sure how the likes of Jeremy Lambert could ever aspire to such an exceptional position of CEO of OT
I'm not entirely convinced of the essentiality of making movies about virtual blue folk,
Art is essential because it tends to reflect us.
If someone with a PhD in particle physics applies for an honestly advertised minimum wage casual job as a cleaner…hire them. Or not.
Most likely not. People who are over-qualified for a job don't get employed for that job and if there aren't any jobs around for what they're qualified for then they end up as long term unemployed. Its one of the ways that our present system wastes its people.
so people that are returning are starting to sending in CVs. What are we to tell them?
anyone got any ideas? Other then sorry mate you are overqualified for fruit picking?
tell them the truth. Tell them that we have no idea what NZ will be like in 12 months time, or the world. We might be ok-ish (think high unemployment but a still functioning economy). Or we might be in the middle of a major GFC and our main concern is to have enough food for the coming year. Or something in between, which is probably worse than the first two.
I'd suggest learning how to grow protein and carb crops if they don't already know. Also, get to know your neighbours and be kind to them. And get to know the people in your community that know how to build resilient communities and have been practicing this.
Yep, unemployment and not enough income sucks. That's been true for too many for too long already. Best we learn, fast, how to do things differently.
I told my kiwi friends that so long as they can stay overseas, i .e . still have their visas and jobs to stay overseas. Keep distance, wear a mask, shower in sanitizer and stay where you are. Nothing much to come here for unless you have oodles of cash which the people that i know overseas don't have. They went overseas in the first place because unemployment and under employment in NZ sucks and they were lucky enough to find employment elsewhere.
But to pretend that we are not going to have issues with high number of unemployment , people without the capacity to pay rent and food is foolish imo, and it seems that a lot of people like to rather be foolish then look at the world as it is. And maybe some people just hope that we can pretend it ain't that bad, (as generally it is done) but i doubt this time around we can.
I read your post on the greens, and frankly it is neither bold nor future orientated. (again, the socialist in me is finding both the Greens and Labour timid in their approach)
The one things the wage subsidy has shown us in NZ is that it is the minimum one needs to 'live', not extravagantly but just subsistence level. So again the unemployment min income proposed by the Greens is already 150$ short at the very least. For 320 you may find a rental, but you wont' be eating, nor paying electricity nor food. So redundant. If this is not the time to talk honestly about what it costs to simply stay alive (food, shelter, warmth) then it will never be the time. As for growing food, lol. We might want to stop pretending that we are not in a country wide drought for a start. Water is vital to growing food, and in certain parts of the country water is an expensive good. Growing food is for those that have homes, stable homes. Growing a tomato in a pot is a nice supplement, but you don't want to try to survive on it.
So i really really hope that someone in our government will finally just be bold. If only for a refreshing change.
As for telling people how to vote, i won't. Never did, never will. I don't believe that parties lead, its the people that bring about the changes. The suits will follow when they have to and not a minute before.
thanks for a considerate answer tho, i was wondering if anyone here still gave a shit about others.
Though lifting the rates must go hand in hand with rent controls otherwise increase just become a revenue source for landlords. Even the US has rent controls in most places e.g. restrictions on how much you can increase rent on your rental property in a year – even when tenants change.
Maybe it's the difference in perspective for those of us that were locked out of the 'getting ahead' economy decades ago. It's not that I don't have empathy for people losing their jobs, it's more that I think the solution to that isn't to try and make things like they were before only better. If people still want a big house and a late model car and a new smart phone and an overseas holiday every year, sorry, but the ecologies we are utterly dependent upon just can't sustain that.
$325/wk is a minimum guaranteed income. Not a maximum, and there is no suggestion that this is what people should live on. You appear to have fundamentally misunderstood the policy.
Not recognising the radical and bold approach to disabled people in the policy is hardly surprising. Working people are the really important ones right? Who cares if the Greens are proposing to stop treating disabled people like third class citizens and give them a substantial increase income as well as a dedicated income support department of their own.
Growing tomatoes is not growing protein and carb crops. If you don't understand this, and who grows food in NZ and how and why, maybe take the time to learn. Not everyone has to grow food, those that can should. Not all of those people own or rent land they can garden on. If we think unemployment is bad wait until we're wondering where our years supply of food is going to come from.
Yes, parliament follows us, but we still need them to enact laws. Like minimum wages and work conditions, benefit rates and so on.
Drought in NZ is largely a human created disaster (I don't mean climate change, but local land use practices). We don't have a country-wide drought, we have water shortages in some places because humans are too stupid to adopt the systems and tech that already exist to farm/garden regeneratively and with respect for water as part of nature. Humans have been growing food for tens of thousands of years in places with lower rainfall than NZ has currently. It's not rocket science, we are just ideologically blind.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem says the thousands of people who attend the July 3 celebration for Independence Day at Mount Rushmore with President Donald Trump will not be required to practice social distancing despite an increase in coronavirus cases across the country.
"We will have a large event at July 3rd. We told those folks that have concerns that they can stay home, but those who want to come and join us, we'll be giving out free face masks, if they choose to wear one. But we will not be social distancing," Noem, a Republican, said in an interview Monday night on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle."
Rebooting Your Life: 6 Steps You Can Follow to Find a New You
He has found a way to get over that problem for the time, and take other along on the road with him. He sounds like a Forrest Gump character – giving other people a boost as well as himself.
He is advocating for himself and others in need of compassion, and has a website and the heading above tells about his ideas for 6 mins I think. I didn't read it because I'm in the elderly group and at present is trying to reboot my democracy and everybody's life, mine being on the end of the plank. I have my own version and just give some ideas here and around as I go about just keeping the old you in good repair, with some time for appreciation of what good you do already have.
(You can see I have just been rereading Pollyanna, who is glad, very glad about the good things that happen and she manages to pass that on. Honestly, I have just been reading it – what was the mindset of people going through hard times in the past I asked myself? Pollyanna's we know. Another seems to keep on, to relate to others and help yourself and others.)
When Jock Anderson and Mihi Forbes agree that Jacinda has it exactly right re the border and Covid19, as they did on The Panel last night, National should be very scared. Anderson is notoriously conservative.
Anderson is also old – and maybe has a sense of his vulnerability to Covid. Meanwhile Muller demonstrates in recent interviews that his leadership style is to demand a type of impossible clairvoyance from his subordinates – insisting that there must be a plan (with timings) for an unknowable future.
Talking to the 18 yr old in the house last night. He is a tad over what he perceives to be the highly sensitive nature of folk concerning comedy and racism. Part of this is finding his own way with leaving home and being with a building crew and their conservative attitudes.
I mentioned 'punching-up' with comedy rather than down.
I want to give a shout out to Mihingarangi Forbes for her explanation around blackface.
In the context of Chris Lilley and his character Jonah from Tonga. She said that a Tongan teen/adolescent's stories are for a Tongan teen/adolescent to tell. When Chris Lilley occupies that space, there isn't room for a Tongan teen to be.
This helps me understand Brotown, in that the stories are for Kightley, Fane etc to tell.
Still a bit lost about Super City, Madeline Sami 'whitefacing' for a couple of her characters Linda and Ray. I figure it is about Pakeha being the dominant culture.
So should we reinterpret tv shows like Fawlty Towers, The Office and Little Britain as not successful comedy, but simply unfunny and offensive to too many groups of people..?
I can't see that happening. People need to laugh at themselves, the Greeks were doing similar comedy thousands of years ago.
Of course it's still successful comedy. Some of it is brilliant.
But things like brownface are at best an intelligent, sensitive comedian having more opportunity to appropriate the expression of a minority experience (albeit in a sympathetic manner) than someone in that actual demographic has to express their own experience in mainstream media. It doesn't make it unfunny. It does raise the question "why not someone who didn't need the makeup?"
The Fawlty thing is slightly different – I suspect recognition of the full harm that language causes makes it over-egg the effect they were going for. Audiences change over time, words change meaning, gain or lose emphasis. It's that sort of situation, imo.
I read a few years ago that English is a second language for more that 50% of the population. Spanish a high proportion of first language. If so perhaps the White folk are nervous?
PS World: Of the approximately 1.5 billion people who speak English, less than 400 million use it as a first language. That means over 1 billion speak it as a secondary language
Looking at where english is the dominant language, there's the US(330M) UK(67M) Canada(37M) Oz(25M) plus rats and mice. So yeah, less than 400M worldwide being english-first speakers is plausible. The vast majority of those are in the US, then UK.
The idea of english being a second language for more than 50% of the US population is utterly implausible. Non-hispanic whites alone are 60%, and even the majority of non-whites will be US born or arrived at an early age so grew up speaking english as their primary language.
There may be some large pockets where english is a second language for more than half the residents – Puerto Rico being the largest example, but no doubt there's some fairly large pockets along the southern border.
But maybe that comment was just some snark from a UK pedant.
All that is true Andre that English is the most spoken. Not sure if it covers those who speak say Spanish first but have to speak English to survive. Anyway I surrender.
The question of Māori representation on the New Plymouth District Council is being debated again. But the debate all went pear-shaped with the representatives of all people should have their say at the NPDC Te Huinga Taumatua iwi committee meeting.
Poet and activist Sonya Taylor, shouted down from the gallery "racists do not deserve a fair say." The meeting was adjourned while she left the chamber. As she left she noted "Racism getting a fair say is why the oppression of Māori folks has been what it has been up to this point,"
"… the move was overturned in 2015 when a citizen-initiated referendum voted against it by 21,000 votes to 4285."
The accusation of structural racism is well-founded given the only CIR that is legally binding on the NPDC is the question of Māori representation and this situation exists nowehere else in the country.
Credit to the NPDC that they're trying to get this law removed, but hey there's not going to be much support for that it seems.
Well, as someone who did actually vote for at least one Maori candidate to the NPDC last time, I see that 5:1 ratio as a consequence of historical inertia. Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_marae_in_Taranaki
Notice how the only marae in the city itself is in the outlying suburb of Bell Block – separated from the city proper by miles of countryside. There are three in/around Waitara a few miles further to the east, then just one each in Oakura & Inglewood a few miles to the west & south. Compare that to the list of maraes in south Taranaki to see the huge difference!
This population distribution is due to the original NZ company settlement in the year of the treaty, plus the genocide a generation earlier in which local tribes here were cleaned out by an invasion from Waikato tribes.
That structural racism doesn't accord with the dictionary definition (tacit, not overt) but I agree it does need to be flagged. A suitable political basis for that would be comparative analysis to maori representation in councils elsewhere – if that has been done on a treaty/quota basis. I've no idea what basis the protestors are using…
Many cities have a tenth set aside as fair from the takeover of land from Maori. They retained a tenth and that gives them their land by right or the right to have an argument if it starts being encroached on.
Taranaki got taken over by farmers and the Hawera blackface mentality is a carry-through. I don't know what era they are in, in their minds. Somewhere between post World War 2 and 1984 I'd say. Since then it's all been too confusing and there is a desire to retire to past highlights and memorials.
Yes, it's noticable to this day how proportionately-few Maori reside in New Plymouth compared to the rest of the district.
"a consequence of historical inertia"
Historical inertia alongside historical and current racism. People actually had to get themselves out of their chairs to instigate and vote in that referendum.
Structural racism can refer "to the ideologies, practices, processes, and institutions that operate at the macro level to produce and reproduce differential access to power and to life opportunities along racial and ethnic lines… embedded in societal-level institutions, policies, and practices"
I believe that definition covers what is going on with this.
"A suitable political basis for that would be comparative analysis to maori representation in councils elsewhere"
The articls states legally binding CIR only for Maori representation is unique to a NPDC. Even if the council and Maori agree on a representation model as in 2014. The people can vote it down. That's not a racist council, it's a racist act by the population.
One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia paid the Taliban to kill GIs as an attempt to pre-empt the findings into Russiagate’s origins….
Of course the Taliban story was mindlessly parroted by RNZ this morning…seems as if fake news is fine at most mainstream news outlets just as long as it supports ones own narrative…no need for pesky things like…gasp! evidence or credible named sources.
“The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.”
(my bold)
"How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity?
It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the Western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media."
Thanks, Brigid. Very good point. Our 'independent, privately-owned' press sometimes turns out to be even more bigoted and biased – but this must never be admitted.
Russiagate, that consumptive and sickly monstrosity conjured up from an ill-advised and disastrous mating of rogue CIA operatives and the discredited far right of the Democratic Party, is still wheezing and sputtering along, as can be seen by clicking on Comment No. 2 posted on this page at 8:41 a.m. today.
Dude Russian mercenaries are still Russians aren't they? Hell how is your memory? Was there not a time when Afganistan had a communist government and the USA supplied Osama Bin Laden with weaponry to kill soviet troops? I'm not talking morality-I 'm talking motivation – it seems like there's plenty to me……
Seems strange that the Pentagon chief Mark Esper says there's no corroborating evidence
U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said in a statement Tuesday night that while the Pentagon has “no corroborating evidence” to support the explosive report last week that the Russian military was offering Taliban-linked militants bounties to kill American troops, he will continue to make sure any potential threat is taken seriously.
National MP Alastair Scott is defending his wine company's claim of more than $170,000 from the Government wage subsidy during what has been called an outstanding season for winegrowers.
It might suit your anti-capitalism to see NZ go down the gurgler DTB but what about the children?
Actually, what about the country and managing to keep its head above water. It is hard enough keeping down the dream-sequence kiwis who still support National, the others would soon desert Labour if the economy went down. So it is good that the wine got picked, so that people could get paid, so that it could be sold, and so there is money flowing into the economy. Paid work at a living wage, that is the goal and making sure that people have good lives. That's a big one as the world goes down, ice floes melting faster than expected. Hell is people running away but going towards the edge and being powerless to stop them, and knowing it isn't a dream.
We still have hopes of being able to turn the tide at the present. A recession and things would only get worse. Let's make the most of this world-wide problem and pinch the government as much as possible to make changes while we have some advantage in the world. And also keep Labour in front to win again. Don't count on anything remaining stable, we have to help NZ as we won't get second chances from hereon in.
There are lots of basic improvements to be done, we won't be better off if facing a full-scale depression. Everybody who doesn't want to do anything until it is the 'Right Thing' is just continuing the same useless mindset that brought us to the present debacle.
It might suit your anti-capitalism to see NZ go down the gurgler DTB but what about the children?
Never said that.
So it is good that the wine got picked, so that people could get paid, so that it could be sold, and so there is money flowing into the economy.
Wine grapes, unlike eating grapes, are picked and then sold later (it says so in the article). In other words, the lockdown hasn't affected him at all. A drought would have affected him worse and I'd expect him to have plans for that eventuality as well.
And having money flowing into the economy is easy and doesn't need to have direct subsidies to businesses. Just give everyone $100/wk and local business would have kept going.
Nick Smith again today acting like a child in Parliament. His recalcitrant childish apologising should be compulsory viewing by the voters down his way. Hopefully the boundary change helps his demise.
For 45 years I manned polling booths and the worst anger I saw was directed at the orange felt tip pen that dried up. Aren't we lucky that our democracy is so benevolent.
Yes, but we can't sit back sleepily and take it for granted. It is slipping away, bit by bit starting even before 1984 but speeding up as time goes on.
Negative yesterday, negative today. Negative all year, according to one departing reader telling me I’ve grown strident and predictable. Fair enough. If it’s any help, every time I go to write about a certain topic that begins with C and ends with arrrrs, I do brace myself and ask: Again? Are ...
Bryce Edwards writes – It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just show a minimal amount of flux in public support ...
Inspirational: The Family of Man is a glorious hymn to human equality, but, more than that, it is a clarion call to human freedom. Because equality, unleavened by liberty, is a broken piano, an unstrung harp; upon which the songs of fraternity will never be played.“Somebody must have been telling lies about ...
Tax Lawyer Barbara Edmonds vs Emperor Justinian I- Nolo Contendere: False historical explanations of pivotal events are very far from being inconsequential.WHEN BARBARA EDMONDS made reference to the Roman Empire, my ears pricked up. It is, lamentably, very rare to hear a politician admit to any kind of familiarity ...
It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just show a minimal amount of flux in public support for the various parties in ...
Buzz from the Beehive Housing Minister Chris Bishop delivered news – packed with the ingredients to enflame political passions – worthy of supplanting Winston Peters in headline writers’ priorities. He popped up at the post-Cabinet press conference to promise a crackdown on unruly and antisocial state housing tenants. His ...
Ele Ludemann writes – The Reserve Bank is advertising for a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion advisor. The Bank has one mandate – to keep inflation between one and three percent. It has failed in that and is only slowly getting inflation back down to the upper limit. Will it ...
Last week former National Party leader Simon Bridges was appointed by the Government as the new chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA). You can read about the appointment in Thomas Coughlan’s article, Simon Bridges to become chair of NZ Transport Agency Waka KotahiThe fact that a ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Last week former National Party leader Simon Bridges was appointed by the Government as the new chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA). You can read about the appointment in Thomas Coughlan’s article, Simon Bridges to become chair of NZ Transport Agency ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read: Gavin Jacobson talks to Thomas Piketty 10 years on from Capital in the 21st CenturyThe SalvoLocal scoop: Green MP’s business being investigated over migrant exploitation claims StuffSteve KilgallonLocal deep-dive: The commercial contractors making money from School ...
It’s a home - but Kāinga Ora tenants accused of “abusing the privilege” may lose it. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The Government announced a crackdown on Kāinga Ora tenants who were unruly and/or behind on their rent, with Housing Minister Chris Bishop saying a place in a state ...
This is a guest post by Connor Sharp of Surface Light Rail Light rail in Auckland: A way forward sooner than you think With the coup de grâce of Auckland Light Rail (ALR) earlier this year, and the shift of the government’s priorities to roads, roads, and more roads, it ...
Note: As a paid-up Webworm member, I’ve recorded this Webworm as a mini-podcast for you as well. Some of you said you liked this option - so I aim to provide it when I get a chance to record! Read more ...
TL;DR: In my ‘six-stack’ of substacks at 6.06pm on Monday, March 18:IKEA is accused of planting big forests in New Zealand to green-wash; REDD-MonitorA City for People takes a well-deserved victory lap over Wellington’s pro-YIMBY District Plan votes; A City for PeopleSteven Anastasiou takes a close look at the sticky ...
Buzz from the Beehive Here’s hoping for a lively post-cabinet press conference when the PM and – perhaps – some of his ministers tell us what was discussed at their meeting today. Until then, Point of Order has precious little Beehive news to report after its latest monitoring of the ...
David Farrar writes – We now have almost all 2023 data in, which has allowed me to update my annual table of how labour went against its promises. This is basically their final report card. The promiseThe result Build 100,000 affordable homes over 10 ...
I’m a bit worried that I’ve started a previous newsletter with the words “just when you think they couldn’t get any worse…” Seems lately that I could begin pretty much every issue with that opening. Such is the nature of our coalition government that they seem to be outdoing each ...
Geoffrey Miller writes – Timing is everything. And from China’s perspective, this week’s visit by its foreign minister to New Zealand could be coming at just the right moment. The visit by Wang Yi to Wellington will be his first since 2017. Anniversaries are important to Beijing. ...
Depictions of Islam in Western popular culture have rarely been positive, even before 9/11. Five years on from the mosque shootings, this is one of the cultural headwinds that the Muslim community has to battle against. Whatever messages of tolerance and inclusion are offered in daylight, much of our culture ...
Last week Transport Minster Simeon Brown and Mayor Wayne Brown opened the new Auckland Rail Operations Centre. The new train control centre will see teams from KiwiRail, Auckland Transport and Auckland One Rail working more closely together to improve train services across the city. The Auckland Rail Operations Centre in ...
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Retiring former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson said in an exit interview with Q+A yesterday the Government can and should sustain more debt to invest in infrastructure for future generations. Elsewhere in the news in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 6:36am: Read more ...
Timing is everything. And from China’s perspective, this week’s visit by its foreign minister to New Zealand could be coming at just the right moment. The visit by Wang Yi to Wellington will be his first since 2017. Anniversaries are important to Beijing. It is more than just a happy ...
TL;DR: The key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to March 18 include:China’s Foreign Minister visiting Wellington today;A post-cabinet news conference this afternoon; the resumption of Parliament on Tuesday for two weeks before Easter;retiring former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson gives his valedictory speech in Parliament; ...
New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters’s state-of-the-nation speech on Sunday was really a state-of-Winston-First speech. He barely mentioned any of the Government’s key policies and could not even wholly endorse its signature income tax cuts. Instead, he rehearsed all of his complaints about the Ardern Government, including an extraordinary claim ...
A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 10, 2024 thru Sat, March 16, 2024. Story of the week This week we'll give you a little glimpse into how we collect links to share and ...
A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 10, 2024 thru Sat, March 16, 2024. Story of the week This week we'll give you a little glimpse into how we collect links to share and ...
“I’ve been internalising a really complicated situation in my head.”When they kept telling us we should wait until we get to know him, were they taking the piss? Was it a case of, if you think this is bad, wait till you get to know the real Christopher, after the ...
Happy fourth anniversary, Pandemic That Upended Bloody Everything. I have been observing it by enjoying my second bout of COVID. It’s 5.30 on Sunday morning and only now are lights turning back on for me.Allow me to copy and paste what I told reader Sara yesterday:Depleted, fogged and crappy. Resting, ...
Happy fourth anniversary, Pandemic That Upended Bloody Everything. I have been observing it by enjoying my second bout of COVID. It’s 5.30 on Sunday morning and only now are lights turning back on for me.Allow me to copy and paste what I told reader Sara yesterday:Depleted, fogged and crappy. Resting, ...
Happy fourth anniversary, Pandemic That Upended Bloody Everything. I have been observing it by enjoying my second bout of COVID. It’s 5.30 on Sunday morning and only now are lights turning back on for me.Allow me to copy and paste what I told reader Sara yesterday:Depleted, fogged and crappy. Resting, ...
.“$10 and a target that bleeds” - Bleeding Targets for Under $10!.Thanks for reading Frankly Speaking ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.This government appears hell-bent on either scrapping life-saving legislation or reintroducing things that - frustrated critics insist - will be dangerous and likely ...
“It hardly strikes me as fair to criticise a government for doing exactly what it said it was going to do. For actually keeping its promises.”THUNDER WAS PLAYING TAG with lightning flashes amongst the distant peaks. Its rolling cadences interrupted by the here-I-come-here-I-go Doppler effect of the occasional passing car. ...
Subversive & Disruptive Technologies: Just as happened with that other great regulator of the masses, the Medieval Church, the advent of a new and hard-to-control technology – the Internet – is weakening the ties that bind. Then, and now, those who enjoy a monopoly on the dissemination of lies, cannot and will ...
Been Here Before: To find the precedents for what this Coalition Government is proposing, it is necessary to return to the “glory days” of Muldoonism.THE COALITION GOVERNMENT has celebrated its first 100 days in office by checking-off the last of its listed commitments. It remains, however, an angry government. It ...
Bob Edlin writes – And what is the world watching today…? The email newsletter from Associated Press which landed in our mailbox early this morning advised: In the news today: The father of a school shooter has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter; prosecutors in Trump’s hush-money case ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Is another Green MP on their way out? And are the Greens severely tarnished by another integrity scandal? For the second time in three months, the Green Party has secretly suspended an MP over integrity issues. Mystery is surrounding the party’s decision to ...
For the last few years, the Green Party has been the party that has managed to avoid the plague of multiple scandals that have beleaguered other political parties. It appears that their luck has run out with a second scandal which, unfortunately for them, coincided with Golraz Ghahraman, the focus ...
TL;DR: The six newsey things that stood out to me as of 6:46am on Saturday, March 16.Andy Foster has accidentally allowed a Labour/Green amendment to cut road user chargers for plug-in hybrid vehicles, which the Government might accept; NZ HeraldThomas CoughlanSimeon Brown has rejected a plea from Westport ...
What seemed a booming success a couple of years ago has collapsed into fraud convictions.I looked at the crash of FTX (short for ‘Futures Exchange’) in November 2022 to see whether it would impact on the financial system as a whole. Fortunately there was barely a ripple, probably because it ...
Anybody following the situation in Ukraine and Russia would probably have been amused by a recent Tweet on X NATO seems to be putting in an awful lot of effort to influence what is, at least according to them, a sham election in an autocracy.When do the Ukrainians go to ...
TL;DR:Shaun Baker on Wynyard Quarter's transformation. Magdalene Taylor on the problem with smart phones. How private equity are now all over reinsurance. Dylan Cleaver on rugby and CTE. Emily Atkin on ‘Big Meat’ looking like ‘Big Oil’.Bernard’s six-stack of substacks at 6pm on March 15Photo by Jeppe Hove Jensen ...
Buzz from the Beehive Finance Minister Nicola Willis had plenty to say when addressing the Auckland Business Chamber on the economic growth that (she tells us) is flagging more than we thought. But the government intends to put new life into it: We want our country to be a ...
The Transport and Infrastructure Committee has reported back on the Road User Charges (Light Electric RUC Vehicles) Amendment Bill, basicly rubberstamping it. While there was widespread support among submitters for the principle that EV and PHEV drivers should pay their fair share for the roads, they also overwhelmingly disagreed with ...
Peter Dunne writes – This week’s government bailout – the fifth in the last eighteen months – of the financially troubled Ruapehu Alpine Lifts company would have pleased many in the central North Island ski industry. The government’s stated rationale for the $7 million funding was that it ...
See if you can spot the difference. An Iranian born female MP from a progressive party is accused of serial shoplifting. Her name is leaked to the media, which goes into a pack frenzy even before the Police launch an … Continue reading → ...
Ele Ludemann writes – The government is omitting general Treaty references from legislation : The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last Government in a bid to get greater coherence in the public service on Treaty ...
What was that judge thinking?Peter Williams writes – That Golriz Ghahraman and District Court Judge Maria Pecotic were once lawyer colleagues is incontrovertible. There is published evidence that they took at least one case to the Court of Appeal together. There was a report on ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read:Climate Scorpion – the sting is in the tail. Introducing planetary solvency. A paper via the University of Exeter’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.Local scoop:Kāinga Ora starts pulling out of its Auckland projects and selling land RNZ ...
Wellington’s massively upzoned District Plan adds the opportunity for tens of thousands of new homes not just in the central city (such as these Webb St new builds) but also close to the CBD and public transport links. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Wellington gave itself the chance of ...
It’s Friday and we’re halfway through March Madness. Here’s some of the things that caught our attention this week. This Week in Greater Auckland On Monday Matt asked how we can get better event trains and an option for grade separating Morningside Dr. On Tuesday Matt looked into ...
Something you might not know about me is that I’m quite a stubborn person. No, really. I don’t much care for criticism I think’s unfair or that I disagree with. Few of us do I suppose.Back when I was a drinker I’d sometimes respond defensively, even angrily. There are things ...
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The five things that mattered in Aotearoa’s political economy that we wrote and spoke about via The Kākā and elsewhere for paying subscribers in the last week included:PM Christopher Luxon said the reversal of interest deductibility for landlords was done to help renters, who ...
It was not so much the Labour Party but really the Chris Hipkins party yesterday at Labour’s caucus retreat in Martinborough. The former Prime Minister was more or less consistent on wealth tax, which he was at best equivocal about, and social insurance, which he was not willing to revisit. ...
Buzz from the BeehiveThe text reproduced above appears on a page which records all the media statements and speeches posted on the government’s official website by Melissa Lee as Minister of Media and Communications and/or by Jenny Marcroft, her Parliamentary Under-secretary. It can be quickly analysed ...
For forty years, Robert Muldoon has been a dirty word in our politics. His style of government was so repulsive and authoritarian that the backlash to it helped set and entrench our constitutional norms. His pig-headedness over forcing through Think Big eventually gave us the RMA, with its participation and ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Is the new government reducing tax on rental properties to benefit landlords or to cut the cost of rents? That’s the big question this week, after Associate Finance Minister David Seymour announced on Sunday that the Government would be reversing the Labour Government’s removal ...
Saudi Arabia is rarely far from the international spotlight. The war in Gaza has brought new scrutiny to Saudi plans to normalise relations with Israel, while the fifth anniversary of the controversial killing of Jamal Khashoggi was marked shortly before the war began on October 7. And as the home ...
Questions need to be asked on both sides of the worldPeter Williams writes – The NRL Judiciary hands down an eight week suspension to Sydney Roosters forward Spencer Leniu , an Auckland-born Samoan, after he calls Ezra Mam, Sydney-orn but of Aboriginal and Torres Strait ...
Ele Ludemann writes – Contrary to what many headlines and news stories are saying, residential landlords are not getting a tax break. The government is simply restoring to them the tax deductibility of interest they had until the previous government removed it. There is no logical reason ...
I can't remember when it was goodMoments of happiness in bloomMaybe I just misunderstoodAll of the love we left behindWatching our flashbacks intertwineMemories I will never findIn spite of whatever you becomeForget that reckless thing turned onI think our lives have just begunI think our lives have just begunDoes anyone ...
Michael Bassett writes – At first reading, a front-page story in the New Zealand Herald on 13 March was bizarre. A group of severely intellectually limited teenagers, with little understanding of the law, have been pleading to the Justice Select Committee not to pass a bill dealing with ram ...
How much political capital is Christopher Luxon willing to burn through in order to deliver his $2.9 billion gift to landlords? Evidently, Luxon is: (a) unable to cost the policy accurately. As Anna Burns-Francis pointed out to him on Breakfast TV, the original ”rock solid” $2.1 billion cost he was ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read:Jonathon Porritt calling bullshit in his own blog post on mainstream climate science as ‘The New Denialism’.Local scoop:The Wellington City Council’s list of proposed changes to the IHP recommendations to be debated later today was leaked this ...
TL;DR:Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said yesterday tenants should be grateful for the reinstatement of interest deductibility because landlords would pass on their lower tax costs in the form of lower rents. That would be true if landlords were regulated monopolies such as Transpower or Auckland Airport1, but they’re not, ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Tom Toro Tom Toro is a cartoonist and author. He has published over 200 cartoons in The New Yorker since 2010. His cartoons appear in Playboy, the Paris Review, the New York Times, American Bystander, and elsewhere. Related: What 10 EV lovers ...
The business section of the NZ Herald is full of opinion. Among the more opinionated of all is the ex-Minister of Transport, ex-Minister of Railways, ex MP for Auckland Central (1975-93, Labour), Wellington Central (1996-99, ACT, then list-2005), ex-leader of the ACT Party, uncle to actor Antonia, the veritable granddaddy ...
Hi,Just quickly — I’m blown away by the stories you’ve shared with me over the last week since I put out the ‘Gary’ podcast, where I told you about the time my friend’s flatmate killed the neighbour.And you keep telling me stories — in the comments section, and in my ...
The first season of Rings of Power was not awful. It was thoroughly underwhelming, yes, and left a lingering sense of disappointment, but it was more expensive mediocrity than catastrophe. I wrote at length about the series as it came out (see the Review section of the blog, and go ...
Buzz from the Beehive Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden told Auckland Business Chamber members they were the first audience to hear her priorities as a minister in a government committed to cutting red tape and regulations. She brandished her liberalising credentials, saying Flexible labour markets are the ...
Chris Trotter writes – TO UNDERSTAND WHY NEWSHUB FAILED, it is necessary to understand how TVNZ changed. Up until 1989, the state broadcaster had been funded by a broadcasting licence fee, collected from every citizen in possession of a television set, supplemented by a relatively modest (compared ...
Bob Edlin writes – The Māori Party has been busy issuing a mix of warnings and threats as its expresses its opposition to interest deductibility for landlords and the plans of seabed miners. It remains to be seen whether they follow the example of indigenous litigants in Australia, ...
Every year, in the Budget, Parliament forks out money to government agencies to do certain things. And every year, as part of the annual review cycle, those agencies are meant to report on whether they have done the things Parliament gave them that money for. Agencies which consistently fail to ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – Recent events in American universities point to an underlying crisis of coherent thinking, an issue that increasingly affects the progressive left across the Western world. This of course is nothing new as anyone who can either remember or has read of the late ...
The Government has accepted Labour’s change to the Road User Charge (RUC) discount for hybrid vehicles, meaning there will still be some incentive for people to buy greener vehicles. ...
Kicking the most vulnerable people out of state housing and pushing them towards homelessness will result in a proliferation of poverty and trauma across our most vulnerable communities. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader and MP for Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi has penned a letter asking MPs to support his members bill to remove GST from all food. The bill is expected to go through its first reading in parliament this Wednesday. “I’m calling on all political parties to support my ...
This year is about getting real with Kiwis and discussing the tough issues, as the National Government exacerbates inequality and divides New Zealand, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said ...
The Government adding Significant Natural Areas (SNAs) to its already roaring environmental policy bonfire is an assault on the future of wildlife that makes Aotearoa unique. ...
After 12 years of fighting to protect our moana we are finding ourselves back at square one and back at court. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency is sitting in Hawera to reconsider an application from Trans-Tasman Resources to dig up 50 million tonnes of the seabed in South Taranaki. This ...
Minister Shane Jones’ decision to step away from a seabed mining project is evidence of the murky waters surrounding the Government’s fast-track legislation. ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The Coalition Government’s miscalculation saga continues as it has forgotten an eyewatering $90 million gap in its interest deductibility cost figures, say Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds and Revenue Spokesperson Deborah Russell. ...
He Pou a Rangi Climate Change Commission has today released advice that says if the Government doesn’t act now New Zealand is at risk of not meeting its climate goals. ...
The Coalition Government has today confirmed it is abandoning first home buyers who are struggling to get ahead, says Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds. ...
The New Zealand public voted for a change in direction at the 2023 general election and that is exactly what this coalition government has been delivering in its first 100 days. There was an immediate focus on the economy, easing the cost of living, cracking down on law and order ...
The Government has left the health system as an afterthought, announcing half-baked targets at the last minute of their 100-day plan, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
Kiwis are still waiting for their promised cost of living support after 100 days of a National Government that is taking us backwards, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The National Government has spent its first 100 days stopping, cutting and reversing. They have scrapped stuff for stuff for the sake of it, without putting up any solutions of their own – and it’s hardworking New Zealanders who will pay for it. ...
100 days of National taking NZ backwardsThe National Government has spent its first 100 days stopping, cutting and reversing. They have scrapped stuff for stuff for the sake of it, without putting up any solutions of their own – and it’s hardworking New Zealanders who will pay for it. ...
The Government must commit to funding free and healthy school lunches, as thousands of people sign the petition to keep them, education spokesperson Jan Tinetti says. ...
If the Government was serious about moving families into public housing, they would build more houses so there is actually somewhere for people to go. ...
The free and healthy school lunches programme feeds our kids, helps them to learn, and saves families money – but it is at risk under this Government, education spokesperson Jan Tinetti said. ...
The Government’s proposed changes to Firearms Prohibition Orders (FPO) add almost nothing new and are merely an attempt to distract from its plans to loosen gun laws, police spokesperson Ginny Andersen and justice spokesperson Dr Duncan Webb said. ...
The great Victorian era English politician Lord Macauley stood in the British House of Parliament and said, "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm".He understood and outlined even way back then, the significant role and influence media have in a democracy. ...
The government’s attack on Māori health this week is committing tangata-whenua to a premature death, says Te Pāti Māori. “The government have begun their onslaught on Māori health with the abolishment of the Māori Health Authority and smokefree laws in the same day” said health spokesperson and co-leader, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. ...
New Zealand’s social workers are qualified, experienced, and more representative of the communities they serve, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “I want to acknowledge and applaud New Zealand’s social workers for the hard work they do, providing invaluable support for our most vulnerable. “To coincide with World ...
Cabinet has agreed to a reduced road user charge (RUC) rate for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. Owners of PHEVs will be eligible for a reduced rate of $38 per 1,000km once all light electric vehicles (EVs) move into the RUC system from 1 April. ...
Minister of Agriculture and Trade, Todd McClay, says that today’s opening of Riverland Foods manufacturing plant in Christchurch is a great example of how trade access to overseas markets creates jobs in New Zealand. Speaking at the official opening of this state-of-the-art pet food factory the Minister noted that exports ...
Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Wellington today. “It was a pleasure to host Foreign Minister Wang Yi during his first official visit to New Zealand since 2017. Our discussions were wide-ranging and enabled engagement on many facets of New Zealand’s relationship with China, including trade, ...
Kāinga Ora – Homes & Communities has been instructed to end the Sustaining Tenancies Framework and take stronger measures against persistent antisocial behaviour by tenants, says Housing Minister Chris Bishop. “Earlier today Finance Minister Nicola Willis and I sent an interim Letter of Expectations to the Board of Kāinga Ora. ...
Tēna koutou katoa. Greetings everyone. Thank you to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and the Honourable Simon Bridges for hosting this address today. I acknowledge the business leaders in this room, the leaders and governors, the employers, the entrepreneurs, the investors, and the wealth creators. The coalition Government shares your ...
Minister Winston Peters completed the final leg of his visit to South and South East Asia in Singapore today, where he focused on enhancing one of New Zealand’s indispensable strategic partnerships. “Singapore is our most important defence partner in South East Asia, our fourth-largest trading partner and a ...
Minister of Internal Affairs and Workplace Relations and Safety, Hon. Brooke van Velden, will travel to the Republic of Korea to represent New Zealand at the Third Summit for Democracy on 18 March. The summit, hosted by the Republic of Korea, was first convened by the United States in 2021, ...
ICNZ Speech 7 March 2024, Auckland Acknowledgements and opening Mōrena, ngā mihi nui. Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Nor Whanganui aho. Good morning, it’s a privilege to be here to open the ICNZ annual conference, thank you to Mark for the Mihi Whakatau My thanks to Tim Grafton for inviting me ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Lead Coordination Minister Judith Collins have expressed their deepest sympathy on the five-year anniversary of the Christchurch terror attacks. “March 15, 2019, was a day when families, communities and the country came together both in sorrow and solidarity,” Mr Luxon says. “Today we pay our respects to the 51 shuhada ...
Speech for Financial Advice NZ Conference 5 March 2024 Acknowledgements and opening Morena, Nga Mihi Nui. Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Nor Whanganui aho. Thanks Nate for your Mihi Whakatau Good morning. It’s a pleasure to formally open your conference this morning. What a lovely day in Wellington, What a great ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters held discussions in Jakarta today about the future of relations between New Zealand and South East Asia’s most populous country. “We are in Jakarta so early in our new government’s term to reflect the huge importance we place on our relationship with Indonesia and South ...
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters has announced that the Foreign Minister of China, Wang Yi, will visit New Zealand next week. “We look forward to re-engaging with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and discussing the full breadth of the bilateral relationship, which is one of New Zealand’s ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has today opened the new Auckland Rail Operations Centre, which will bring together KiwiRail, Auckland Transport, and Auckland One Rail to improve service reliability for Aucklanders. “The recent train disruptions in Auckland have highlighted how important it is KiwiRail and Auckland’s rail agencies work together to ...
The Government is proud to support the 10th edition of Crankworx Rotorua as the Crankworx World Tour returns to Rotorua from 16-24 March 2024, says Minister for Economic Development Melissa Lee. “Over the past 10 years as Crankworx Rotorua has grown, so too have the economic and social benefits that ...
Legislation implementing coalition Government tax commitments and addressing long-standing tax anomalies will be progressed in Parliament next week, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The legislation is contained in an Amendment Paper to the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill issued today. “The Amendment Paper represents ...
Associate Environment Minister Andrew Hoggard has today announced that the Government has agreed to suspend the requirement for councils to comply with the Significant Natural Areas (SNA) provisions of the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity for three years, while it replaces the Resource Management Act (RMA).“As it stands, SNAs ...
Agriculture Minister Todd McClay has classified the drought conditions in the Marlborough, Tasman, and Nelson districts as a medium-scale adverse event, acknowledging the challenging conditions facing farmers and growers in the district. “Parts of Marlborough, Tasman, and Nelson districts are in the grip of an intense dry spell. I know ...
The Government is helping farmers eradicate the significant impact of facial eczema (FE) in pastoral animals, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced. “A $20 million partnership jointly funded by Beef + Lamb NZ, the Government, and the primary sector will save farmers an estimated NZD$332 million per year, and aims to ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has completed a successful visit to India, saying it was an important step in taking the relationship between the two countries to the next level. “We have laid a strong foundation for the Coalition Government’s priority of enhancing New Zealand-India relations to generate significant future benefit for both countries,” says Mr Peters, ...
Cabinet has agreed to provide $7 million to ensure the 2024 ski season can go ahead on the Whakapapa ski field in the central North Island but has told the operator Ruapehu Alpine Lifts it is the last financial support it will receive from taxpayers. Cabinet also agreed to provide ...
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says the launch of a new mobile breast screening unit in Counties Manukau reinforces the coalition Government’s commitment to drive better cancer services for all New Zealanders. Speaking at the launch of the new mobile clinic, Dr Reti says it’s a great example of taking ...
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says the launch of a new mobile breast screening unit in Counties Manukau reinforces the coalition Government’s commitment to drive better cancer services for all New Zealanders. Speaking at the launch of the new mobile clinic, Dr Reti says it’s a great example of taking ...
Unlocking economic growth and land for housing are critical elements of the Government’s plan for our transport network, and planned upgrades to State Highway 29 (SH29) near Tauriko will deliver strongly on those priorities, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “The SH29 upgrades near Tauriko will improve safety at the intersections ...
Unlocking economic growth and land for housing are critical elements of the Government’s plan for our transport network, and planned upgrades to State Highway 29 (SH29) near Tauriko will deliver strongly on those priorities, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “The SH29 upgrades near Tauriko will improve safety at the intersections ...
Lower fruit and vegetable prices are welcome news for New Zealanders who have been doing it tough at the supermarket, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. Stats NZ reported today the price of fruit and vegetables has dropped 9.3 percent in the 12 months to February 2024. “Lower fruit and vege ...
Tēnā koutou katoa and greetings to you all. Chair, I am honoured to address the sixty-eighth session of the Commission on the Status of Women. I acknowledge the many crises impacting the rights of women and girls. Heightened global tensions, war, climate related and humanitarian disasters, and price inflation all ...
Tēnā koutou katoa and greetings to you all. Chair, I am honoured to address the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. I acknowledge the many crises impacting the rights of women and girls. Heightened global tensions, war, climate related and humanitarian disasters, and price inflation all ...
The coalition Government is supporting farmers to enhance land management practices by investing $3.3 million in locally led catchment groups, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced. “Farmers and growers deliver significant prosperity for New Zealand and it’s vital their ongoing efforts to improve land management practices and water quality are supported,” ...
Good evening everyone and thank you for that lovely introduction. Thank you also to the Honourable Simon Bridges for the invitation to address your members. Since being sworn in, this coalition Government has hit the ground running with our 100-day plan, delivering the changes that New Zealanders expect of us. ...
Recommendations from the Climate Change Commission for New Zealand on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) auction and unit limit settings for the next five years have been tabled in Parliament, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. “The Commission provides advice on the ETS annually. This is the third time the ...
The coalition Government is beginning its fight to lower building costs and reduce red tape by exempting minor building work from paying the building levy, says Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk. “Currently, any building project worth $20,444 including GST or more is subject to the building levy which is ...
Proposed changes to tax legislation to prevent the over-taxation of low-earning trusts are welcome, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The changes have been recommended by Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee following consideration of submissions on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill. “One of the ...
Assalaamu alaikum. السَّلَام عليكم In light of the holy month of Ramadan, I want to extend my warmest wishes to our Muslim community in New Zealand. Ramadan is a time for spiritual reflection, renewed devotion, perseverance, generosity, and forgiveness. It’s a time to strengthen our bonds and appreciate the diversity ...
Former Transport Minister and CEO of the Auckland Business Chamber Hon Simon Bridges has been appointed as the new Board Chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) for a three-year term, Transport Minister Simeon Brown announced today. “Simon brings extensive experience and knowledge in transport policy and governance to the role. He will ...
Good morning all, it is a pleasure to be here as Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology. It is fantastic to see how connected and collaborative the life science and biotechnology industry is here in New Zealand. I would like to thank BioTechNZ and NZTech for the invitation to address ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says he is looking forward to the day when three key water projects in Northland are up and running, unlocking the full potential of land in the region. Mr Jones attended a community event at the site of the Otawere reservoir near Kerikeri on Friday. ...
Associate Finance Minister David Seymour has today announced that the Government has agreed to restore deductibility for mortgage interest on residential investment properties. “Help is on the way for landlords and renters alike. The Government’s restoration of interest deductibility will ease pressure on rents and simplify the tax code,” says ...
Sport and Recreation Minister Chris Bishop will travel to Switzerland today to attend an Executive Committee meeting and Symposium of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Mr Bishop will then travel on to London where he will attend a series of meetings in his capacity as Infrastructure Minister. “New Zealanders believe ...
This year’s Pacific Language Weeks celebrate regional unity and the contribution of Pacific communities to New Zealand culture, says Minister for Pacific Peoples Dr Shane Reti. Dr Reti announced dates for the 2024 Pacific Language Weeks during a visit to the Pasifika festival in Auckland today and says there’s so ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Curran, Associate Professor of Ecology, Lincoln University, New Zealand Getty Images/Gerald Corsi In the latest move to reform environmental laws in New Zealand, the coalition government has introduced a bill to fast-track consenting processes for projects deemed to ...
Uber has argued it does not have as much control over drivers as the unions suggest, and wants a judgment ruling that drivers are employees and not contractors set aside and sent back to the Employment Court. The 2022 ruling followed a three-week hearing in which four drivers sought to ...
What can and can’t be purchased by disabled people or their carers has been slashed in an effort by the Ministry of Disabled People Whaikaha to save money. The purchasing guidelines, a set of rules that sets out what can be purchased using the various streams of Government disability funding, ...
The Treasury has published today a new Analytical Note by Tod Wright and Hien Nguyen, Fiscal incidence in New Zealand: The effects of taxes and benefits on household incomes in tax year 2018/19 . Analyses of the distributional impact of taxation and government ...
The Treasury has published today a new Analytical Note by Cory Davis, Boston Hart and Benjamin Stubbing, Household cost-of-living impacts from the Emissions Trading Scheme and using transfers to mitigate regressive outcomes . This Analytical Note ...
A coalition of public transport and climate organisations, united as ‘Transport for All’, is actively opposing the government’s transport proposals. The draft Government Policy Statement (GPS) includes plans for higher fares for public transport, ...
Greater Wellington is inviting feedback on proposed changes to its Revenue and Financing Policy. The Revenue and Financing Policy covers the Council’s various sources of funding, and how the cost of services is shared across the region. This includes ...
Labour has conceded it could have done more to deal with disruptive state housing tenants while in government but says the current coalition is going too far. ...
The band has asked their record label to issue a cease and desist to stop the NZ First leader using their 1997 hit to support his ‘misguided political views’. “I get knocked down, but I get up again,” blared through the speakers on Sunday as Winston Peters took the stage ...
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist Food rationing is underway in remote areas in Papua New Guinea’s Highlands following torrential rain and flash flooding. More than 20 people have been reported dead in Chimbu Province. In nearby Enga Province, the centre of last month’s massacre, a 15-year-old boy has been ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Hughes, Lecturer, Research School of Management, Australian National University After months of debate and intrigue, the AFL’s 19th and newest team, the Tasmania Devils, finally launched its jumper, logo and colours in Devonport this week. The Devils will wear green, ...
Brannavan Gnanalingam reviews the debut novel by Saraid de Silva.One of the most baffling things for children who move to a new country is what their parents’ (or grandparents’) lives were like prior to moving – for kids in particular, they’re too busy trying to fit in in their ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Gaunson, Associate Professor in Cinema Studies, RMIT University Narelle Portanier/Binge “If you don’t know who your mob are, you don’t know who you are,” Detective Andrea “Andie” Whitford (played by Leah Purcell) is told early into the new crime ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Klein, Associate professor, Australian National University It’s commonly accepted that women do the vast majority of caregiving in Australian society. But less appreciated is that Indigenous women do larger amounts of unpaid care than any other group. Working with the Aboriginal ...
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 Joe Biden and Donald Trump have both secured their parties’ nominations for the November 5 United States general election by winning a ...
Comment: There has been a striking contrast in trans-Tasman interest about Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi’s visit to New Zealand and Australia. While the Australian press has been full of articles about the visit – including his curious decision to meet with former prime minister and China booster Paul Keating ...
After years of pressuring banks and other institutions to stop investing in fossil fuels, climate campaigners are making some progress. So how does divestment work?For years, climate activists have been pushing banks and other big institutions to divest from fossil fuels. New research from climate advocacy group 350 Aotearoa ...
For Boba, Ethan and Ashley, K-pop is a place to belong, a way to express themselves, and a bridge to connect with others. The three young Polynesians are part of a K-pop fan community in Tāmaki Makaurau. It’s one of many that have sprung up worldwide as K-pop has gone ...
For Boba, Ethan and Ashley, K-pop is a place to belong, a way to express themselves, and a bridge to connect with others. This one-off documentary presents three intimate portraits of young Polynesians who are pulled into a Korean cultural phenomenon. K-POLYS is directed by Litia Tuiburelevu, Produced by Hex ...
There’s ample evidence demonstrating free school lunch programmes provide wide benefits across schools, households and communities according to public health researchers. ACT Minister David Seymour wants to reduce the spending on Aotearoa New Zealand’s ...
By Wata Shaw in Suva Fiji is facing an exodus of Fijians as many are leaving for overseas seeking employment and education and others are migrating, says Opposition MP Viliame Naupoto. Speaking in Parliament, he said: “His Excellency’s speech (Ratu Wiliame Katonivere) comes after a little over one year of ...
The Taxpayers’ Union is welcoming comments from Christopher Luxon this morning recommitting to ‘no new taxes’ as part of Budget 2024. “Mr Luxon’s refusal at the Post-Cabinet press conference yesterday to repeat the ‘no new taxes’ promise ...
SAFE is urgently calling on the Environment Committee to reject the Government’s Fast-Track Approvals Bill, and is urging New Zealanders to rally behind the call. The proposed Bill, currently under consideration with the Environment select committee, ...
Teammates who spend all their time picking fights with spectators are only helpful for the other team, writes Madeleine Chapman. Anyone who has ever played a team sport competitively, particularly as a child and particularly, for some reason, basketball, will know that there’s a lot of politics involved. While there ...
The long-running Wellington music festival is too focused on the Jim Beam-ness and not enough on the Homegrown-ness.There is something about Homegrown that’s difficult to place. A barely perceptible-ness. Like feeling a ghost is watching you from the corner of the room but when you look, there’s nothing there. ...
The latest Ipsos New Zealand Issues Monitor reveals that fewer New Zealanders believe crime / law and order is one of the top issues facing our country. In 2018, Ipsos New Zealand started tracking the key issues facing New Zealand. In this wave ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Griffiths, Deputy Program Director, Budgets and Government, Grattan Institute Australia’s political donations rules are woefully inadequate, but donations reform is finally on the agenda. The federal government has signalled its interest in reform and will soon begin briefing MPs on its ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Patrick Taylor, Chief Environmental Scientist, EPA Victoria; Honorary Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University Naiyana Somchitkaeo/Shutterstock A recent study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has linked microplastics with risk to human health. The study ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Albert Van Dijk, Professor, Water and Landscape Dynamics, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University Global climate records were shattered in 2023, from air and sea temperatures to sea-level rise and sea-ice extent. Scores of countries recorded their hottest year ...
As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a teacher explains why he and his partner are in frugal mode – and how they’re making it work. Gender: Male Age: 35Ethnicity: Pākehā Role: I am an intermediate school teacher and my partner is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Bendall, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University Binge Mary & George, the new British television drama series, depicts the real-life story of Mary Villiers and her son George, and their social climbing at the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Nassios, Associate Professor, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University This article is part of The Conversation’s series examining the housing crisis. Read the other articles in the series here. Australian state and federal governments spend money in many ways to ...
The finance minister is denying that there’s a $5.6b shortfall in paying for the government’s campaign promises, including tax cuts. At his post-cabinet press conference yesterday, the PM refused to rule out new taxes to pay for the cuts, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s ...
Kāinga Ora tenants abused by their neighbours are doubting the government's crackdown on disruptive tenants will make a difference on their behaviour. ...
Kāinga Ora is New Zealand’s biggest residential landlord, housing more than 180,000 vulnerable people in more than 67,000 properties. Yesterday the government announced a crackdown on its tenants who fall behind on rent. One longtime Kāinga Ora tenant shares her experience.For 18 years I lived in a 1960s standalone ...
Why does this myth persist, and what’s the real reason our skin is suffering?It’s one of the biggest international grievances New Zealanders hold, up there with the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and 1981’s underarm incident. We’re quick to tell international travellers that the world’s pollution led to the ...
When the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act was introduced in 2009 it was firmly targeted at gangs and drugs. The legislation means police no longer need a conviction to seize assets that criminals can’t prove were paid for legitimately, as long as their alleged offences are punishable by more than a ...
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Bob’s relationship with certain members of Lincoln’s academic staff continued to deteriorate in the 1990s. Others supported him publicly, though articles such as Roland Clark’s 1993 piece in Growing Today cannot have pleased the university management. Clark wrote that Bob was selling onions from the Biological Husbandry Unit to a ...
SailGP’s races feature in-your-face action, with agile, hydro-foiling catamarans tacking and jibing for the title over several days. However, public comments ahead of the global series’ return to New Zealand have left this past year’s controversy in the shadows, as a key appointment attracts criticism from dolphin advocates. A year ...
Opinion: We are fast approaching a fundamental change in prisons. As the number of people on custodial remand looks set to overtake the number of sentenced prisoners, the main function of prisons in New Zealand may become incarcerating un-sentenced people who may not be guilty of offending. We have already ...
A huge seven months lies in store for the White Ferns, beginning this week with the visit of England and culminating with the T20 World Cup in Bangladesh in September and October. Starting on Tuesday in Dunedin, the world ranked No. 2 visitors will play five T20s and three ODIs, ...
Opinion: In a move that has shocked road safety advocates across the country, the new Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, is poised to abandon the previous government’s speed limit reduction policy, particularly around schools. Even more alarmingly, he wants school speed limits to be variable rather than full-time, arguing ...
Auckland Council is opposing a fast-track development backed by Sir John Kirwan and Spark NZ, because it doesn’t meet stringent new climate adaptation requirements The post Surf-data centre faces new 3.8C climate warming rules appeared first on Newsroom. ...
The letters, which were published last week, were addressed to Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) Chairperson Megawati Sukarnoputri, National Democrat Party (NasDem) Chairperson Surya Paloh, National Awakening Party (PKB) Chairperson Muhaimin Iskandar, Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) President Ahmad Syaikhu and United Development Party (PPP) Chairperson Muhammad Mardiono. In ...
Evicting more people from state housing is ignorant to the consequences of poverty, the Greens say, but the Housing Minister says it's a privilege that can be taken away if abused. ...
Evicting more people from state housing is ignorant to the consequences of poverty, the Greens say, but the Housing Minister says it's a privilege that can be taken away if abused. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emerald L King, Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania IMDB Between Netflix’s 2023 live-action version of One Piece, and its latest take on Avatar: The Last Airbender, fans are once again asking: why are live-action anime adaptations so tricky to ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emerald L King, Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania IMDB Between Netflix’s 2023 live-action version of One Piece, and its latest take on Avatar: The Last Airbender, fans are once again asking: why are live-action anime adaptations so tricky to ...
The government says it still intends to deliver tax cuts by July, but will not lock them in until they have got them past their coalition partners. ...
Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII has hosted members of the Green Party Caucus at Tuurangawaewae Marae in Ngaaruawahia. The audience follows the King’s Hui-aa-Motu on 20 January, where more than 10,000 people gathered to discuss national ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dr Rachael Potter, Research Associate and Lecturer in Work and Organisational Psychology, University of South Australia Ground Picture/Shutterstock Pregnant women and workers with children are often unfairly treated by their bosses and colleagues, despite laws to protect against workplace discrimination ...
Reacting to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s refusal to rule out introducing new taxes at the budget, Taxpayers’ Union Campaigns Manager, Connor Molloy, said: “Today’s refusal to rule out new taxes suggests the Government is nothing more ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne Aila Images/Shutterstock Aged-care workers will receive a significant pay increase after the Fair Work Commission ruled they ...
He’s bringing ‘Sophie’ back, yeah. Goodshirt’s ‘Sophie’ music video is one of the most instantly recognisable New Zealand music videos of all time. Featuring a woman listening to the song on headphones while her entire house is burgled behind her, the video won the New Zealand music award for Best ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Blaxland, Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University A year ago, the AUKUS agreement was formally announced between Australian and UK Prime Ministers Anthony Albanese and Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden. The agreement mapped out the “optimal ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andreas Helwig, Associate Professor, Electro-Mechanical Engineering, University of Southern Queensland SmartS/Shutterstock Steam locomotives clattering along railway tracks. Paddle steamers churning down the Murray. Dreadnought battleships powered by steam engines. Many of us think the age of steam has ended. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carrie Leonetti, Associate Professor of Law, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau Victims who experience family violence in Aotearoa New Zealand are treated differently, depending on which part of the justice system they turn to for help. But a new member’s bill ...
With the Chinese economy looking like it is recovering a bunch faster than that of the United States and Europe, New Zealand needs a fresh wave of highly connected, wealthy, democratically-minded Chinese to immigrate here.
We should open our doors to those in Hong Kong who want to flee the brutal new Security Law that is requiring most of the human rights groups to shut their social media accounts, destroying the last vestiges of resistance to Xi Jinping's endlessly tightening totalitarianism.
Who knows, perhaps some of those pro-democracy protesters could come in under refugee status now that as of today New Zealand has increased its refugee intake to 1,500.
Auckland and New Zealand generally need a fresh generation of bilingual speakers to provide entrepeneurship, capital and cultural diversity to redouble that which they brought here in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
And it would be a great example for New Zealand to stand on the world stage and be proud as a democratic, open society by opening their doors to those of Hong Kong who wish to come and who qualify.
It's all dirty money though, isn't it. That's what cause the housing crisis in the first place so going back there can't be a good idea.
Racist much? Hardly just Hong Kong citizens who drove house prices upward.
Ad’s made a worthwhile point, and a stand In support of a nations democratic right
Let's sacrifice the poor and send even more Kiwis into the precariat so that we can boost our property portfolios. While claiming a cloak of virtue.
All money is dirty. Everything in the money-system is dirty.
Tell them this:
Welcome home.
"All money is dirty", but some monies are more dirty than others.
Yes.., and perhaps we could embrace Drury's idea and start building luxury homes for these downtrodden 'elites' in a place like Queenstown. That would be the kind thing to do and it would also help our construction sector…
The natural place for Hong Kong expats is Auckland – that's where Mandarin and Cantonese communities are already very strong. We sure need to keep our construction workers engaged here.
Aahh..good ol' Ad, King of the short term thinkers..guess thats why he is such a avid supporter of this neoliberal centrist freemarket Labour, yep they really are made for each other.
Good to see you're standing with the hard-right Trumpites and European xenophobes.
Chinese have been here for over a century and have proven to be an exceedingly hard-working, productive and culturally rich addition to New Zealand.
We are effectively in a 1946 moment, and it's about to roil the entire world.
This is where the real left get to stand up for people.
Er plenty of migrants have been hard working and productive. Should we assign particular characteristics to a race country or ethnic group?
I think Ad may be outside the box that you are in Adrian. He is just being pragmatic. We have to try and manage our way out of the mess that we are in. Just black and white solutions are not suitable, what is the right medicine for our illness, in the right amount. The problem is that we may not be able to control the amount of medicine and how often taken.
Proposing a stupid idea that will likely bring harm is not pragmatic.
ATM, that means leaving our borders closed.
Lets just hang on a bit, we already have 1 million Kiwis with an automatic right to walk right in and a fair few of them are thinking of doing just that. Can we even accommodate them even if only 250,000 came without real housing and job problems.
Think of what they can do for our GDP. It has been our national (lower case) MO for years. How to grow the economy? More milk powder and more immigrants. Keeps the wages down and unemployment up. Sell a few SOE’s, give middle NZ a tax cut and raise GST, and Bob’s your uncle. Home owners have been creaming it. Apparently, farmers are now having an anal aneurism because the Greens had the temerity of proposing a wealth tax; over their dead
animalsbodies.https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/net-migration-high-but-down-from-peak
Let's bring back estate duty and stamp duty too and spread that tax burden fairly over the country on a percentage basis. That would be a case where percentages are fair for the poorer people, they always work from a base sum. Estate duty should be also on deemed portions in trusts, valued at present valuation, or at part of those market prices before a present slump.
There is no reason that three-year marriages should result in good payouts to partners, but the tax department can be always a bridesmaid and never a bride when it comes to getting a proportion of the loot built up on the reasonable reliability of this country’s laws and stability.
And an interesting piece in stuff on some of the australian crowd who make up potential returnees. About two thirds are potential returnees and I feel sympathy for persons 1 and 3 who appear to have left after being slugged by over competition in entry level employee markets and the low wage economy here.
Person 3 was more interesting. The NZ passport was a second passport and I estimate that out of a 30 year working life around 14 years had been spent here and 9 years in Australia. The net cash assets from this work life appeared to be around $100k (low?) and no mention of property ownership. It was not clear if an australian passport had ever been applied for. Now he is thinking of returning (to collect our welfare I assume) along with an american wife who appears to have never set foot in New Zealand. They could of course choose to return to the UK or the USA
I can't help feeling there is something very wrong with this scenario and we are allowing ourselves to be taken for a ride..
And yes I do know about the work issues under the Clark government and no at the time I did not approve of the decision.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300045314/homeward-bound-struggling-kiwis-in-oz
[Link fixed]
Ad:
I don't want to be unkind but Auckland is basically a slum with high-rise buildings and a small elite that desperately holds on to yesteryears way of society strata. Hardy a place that screams value, democracy, planning, equality, etc….
Those who are used to that environment will not find anything wrong with it. Naturally.
It'd certainly bring in the Yankee dollar
Heh. Indeed.
I realise Ad is trolling, but "wealthy, democratically-minded" is probably an unconscious oxymoron on his part. The rich will always use their wealth to influence the democratic process and tip the table in their direction. The best immigrants for the long term health of a society are highly technically skilled (i.e. not 'business skills') and not wealthy. And if we go into the contents of their minds at all, we might want to add 'equality' and ' environmentally' to 'democratically'.
It really is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.
We need to dust off our histories of 1946. The worldwide migration this is going to force is going to make the post-Syrian European crisis look like a Mollie Woppie picnic.
I too assumed Ad was trolling – if only because he is suggesting that the "poor and huddled masses" who did all the hard work around the protests are going to be left behind to suffer. Very democratic not?
Plus I'd imagine that the wealthy have long since organised a bolt hole country. I certainly remember some coming here when Hongkong changed over staying just long enough for one of the couple to score residency, dumping their kids in the local schools and then bolting back to their real life in Hongkong. .
Colonel Comrade might be on the same page with you, he could 'liaise' with the new arrivals on behalf of the government (no, not our government). Just to maintain order.
Hong Kong Chinese – good idea Ad. They are keen, smart, good people, and more likely to be on our wavelength (outdated term) than many fleeing from CCP. Not a whole bunch though please at once, which will be impossible just now but include them by all means at the same time not forgetting to be ethical to other overseas people who have paid already, worked already, want to be NZs and are good ones. So the inevitable happens, we haven't been destroyed yet, and all those who can escape the shit of the big powers see us as a haven. (While many of the boofheads and the sweeties here want to throw that away and find the wealthy wonkers' lifestyles soo glamorous and desirable.)
good news about the refugee numbers.
Would be interesting to see our immigration settings changed to include democratically-minded 😈
I've been thinking along these lines myself, you more or less beat me to it Ad. Hong Kongers are different.
Most kiwis are fairly unaware of how China is not really a single coherent historic or cultural entity. In very broad terms it can be thought of in four major chunks, the bureacratic, military minded Han core in the northern Yellow River plain and centred in Beijing, the merchantile manufacturing minded groups of the Yangtze River represented by Shanghai as the largest city, the southern port cities of Hong Kong, Macau and Xian, and the fourth being the diverse ethnic groups of the central provinces.
The southern cities like Hong Kong were historically geographically isolated from Beijing and looked outward to the wider world, particularly in terms of trade and culture. Many Hong Kongers regard themselves as quite separate from the CCP run mainland and want absolutely nothing to do with it.. The passing of these new Security laws will prompt many to find ways to leave.
I've visited Hong Kong a few times, it’s a highly developed world city, full of surprises. Kiwis should welcome these people, they will bring much of real value with them.
No, we need to settle what we've got into our own culture. Getting more of the same won't help.
Under the Key government heaps of property owners became millionaires overnight. So now Auckland is facing a housing crisis and a water crisis and record inequality. What does resident neoliberal Ad propose? More of the same.
https://twitter.com/DIorioNathaniel/status/1278117381466984448?s=20
I'm with you on this one DTB if Ad is serious. We've had these setting since the 90's and the one thing that really shows out is that our GDP per head has stayed static or gone backwards. Where are the factories and post processing plants and all the other benefits that were supposed to flow? Absolutely non existent.
Frankly for the average live out your life here citizen these policies have made their lives worse. The number of people that take part in a "global" workforce by having multiple passports and residency is tiny and over privileged. Yes houses may have gone up in value but if it's the only one you own then it's used for the basic service of "living in"
Hong Kong protesters would get a shock if they came here or say the UK, because they have better health system in HK They want freedom what, I saw a lot of American flags flying in those protest, a lot of NGO monies like NED funding anti mainland groups, there is more to life than HK dissidents money, no thanks, let them go to granny England or uncle Sam land.
Byd0nz Which group do you belong to that uses acronyms as an in-group – NED? I looked on Wikipedia – guess it doesn't mean No evidence of disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NED
Under Organisations.
I guess it is a US term of which I remain as ignorant as they are of democracy. So –
.
Cleangreen might be interested in this one –
"New Engine Desperado", a type of UK railfan, see Glossary of United Kingdom railway terms
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, NED makes more than 1,600 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.
[Fixed typo in user name]
Well we are sure to help that then?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/420210/nz-broke-into-embassies-for-cia-and-mi6
https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-the-national-endowment-for-democracy
The classic quote
Yes, read that. About time we opt out of the 5 eyes bullshit that keeps us non independent from the capitalist spy network. Oops, sorry I forgot we are a crapitalist country.
Agree , but instead I think the whole 5eyes thing is ramping up
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1710/S00213/five-eyes-governments-on-encryption.htm
You mean not just 5 eyes but ramping up to a ball with feelers like a Covid-19, or a 360o degree surveillance? Or have a dynamic ball chasing us like in Prisoner on tv? Why have only one eye per country – that's so limiting.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Ffr1U7KMY
I'm pretty sure that the USians should stay out of other people's countries and their governance just like they want others to stay out of theirs.
If they still stick their nose in then they don't get to complain about Russia influencing their politics.
We should take all the doctors, nurses (and some health tech people) and teachers who want to leave (albeit they would be better paid in Oz).
And others in skilled worker areas (albeit …) engineers/construction to IT/finance etc
And the business owners who would base here and pay tax locally on their drawings/dividends from their Hong Kong activities.
Most however will just seek British passports (to be safe) and end citizenship activity. But if China acts against those who choose this route, we might get lucky.
Things might be heating up for the "two guys in a steam bath". Yep, those two guys are Pootee and his fascist-dictator-wannabe puppet. More and more is coming out about Pootee maybe paying bounties being paid on American soldiers, and Marmalardo getting briefed about it and being utterly uninterested.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-putin-approval-calls-us-cnn-steam-bath-a9593111.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nytBEWbwOkw
I'm just loving this Lincoln Project series. Such concision!
The interviews with the Project founders are also excellent.
Such a cornucopia of rich targets.
I'm struggling to come up with any previous example anytime anywhere of a significant national leader being so objectively crap that they have come under this kind of sustained brutal attack across a huge number of topics, from respected senior members of their own party.
I liked Pelosis theory, the intelligence agencies don't tell Trump because Trump would get on the phone and tell Putin.
Bound to be some of that going on. There's going to be a huge amount of fascinating stuff coming out in Darth Drumpfski's post-presidency.
via twitter – didn't he "declassify" a sat photo a while back, at much higher resolution than anything previously released?
Yup. But it really just confirmed informed speculation about what resolution was possible just from the known size of spy satellites. Ie, what can you from a telescope of X diameter (2.4m from memory) orbiting Y kilometres up.
Then there was the time Don Dementia outed Israeli assets to Lavrov and Kislyak while getting all chummy in the Oval Office.
How much is that bounty the US government has out on the Venezuelan president again?
You a fan of the idea that two wrongs make a right, are you? Even in cases such as this, where the tangerine turdgoblin is deeply involved in the genesis of both wrongs?
No, just that for some reason your focusing on the bounty which Trump has sweet FA to do with rather than the one which he (and other members of the US administration including Pelosi) can actually do something about.
Oh, so it's simple whataboutery then. I had thought your cognitive processes had advanced beyond that kind of simple distraction tactic, but evidently not. My bad.
And since the point apparently needs to be spelled out for you in simple terms, the issue is about how Benedict Donald has responded to the possibility of Russia putting a bounty on US soldiers much more than about the bounty itself.
… the possibility of Russia putting a bounty on US soldiers…
You will, of course, be providing evidence of this dastardly crime. Something the entirely anonymous source of this wild and woolly story has yet to do.
We are awaiting your dump of verifiable and irrefutable “good stuff” with great anticipation, my good friend.
Uh, no, that's for those in the intelligence services to do to the satisfaction of their masters, if any follow-up appears likely.
But you too seem to have totally missed the point in your rush to indulge in another one of your displays of public political masturbation. Which is Emperor PalPutin's problematic response to being presented with the intelligence assessment, much more than whether or not the assessment is accurate.
The Taliban dont need outside incentives to kill American soldiers
I have it on impeccable authority that it was Truthful Woodhouse who was the source, so there’s the evidence!
Andre I applaud your word du jour for the orange tambourine – you bring expressive colour into the discourse, and may you do so till he goes to a better place – somewhere in the rust belt where they will treat him to unceasing religious ceremonies and don't believe in building big hotels, and playing with the stock market.
Fair's fair.
https://twitter.com/ihatealexj/status/1277575886028574720
Edit
Hah. Iran was one of the smartest places in the world once, may be again.
https://theconversation.com/irans-cultural-heritage-reflects-the-grandeur-and-beauty-of-the-golden-age-of-the-persian-empire-129413
…the Hellenistic Age. The Macedonian King Seleucus (died 281BC) and his Persian wife Apame ruled a hybrid kingdom that mixed Greek, Persian, Jewish, Bactrian, Armenian, Sogdian and Aramaean cultures and religions.
With new cities, religions and cultures, this melting pot encouraged the rise of a thriving connectivity that linked urban centres in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Syria (where many of the Hellenistic sites (such as Apamea) have been devastated in recent years by war and looting). The great city of Seleucia-on-Tigris/Ctesiphon, just south of Baghdad on the Tigris river in modern Iraq, became the western capital and centre for learning, culture and power for a thousand years…
…The Sasanians ruled a massive geopolitical entity from 224-751AD. They were builders of cities and frontiers across the empire including the enormous Gorgan wall. This frontier wall stretched 195km from the Caspian Sea to the mountains in Turkmenistan and was built in the 5th century AD to protect the Iranian agricultural heartland from northern invaders like the Huns….
Iranian cultural heritage has no one geographic or cultural home, its roots belong to all of us and speak of the vast influence that the Iranians have had on the creation of the world we live in today. Iran’s past could never be wiped off the cultural map of the world for it is embedded in our very humanity.
Could Iran be cleverer than today's western boofheads? Can we wonder why they got enraged at the west messing with them, brazenly killing one of their revered Generals, and previously installing a puppet figurehead – who they eventually abandoned ignominiously? Can we manage our way through to keep our heads above water now? 'We haven't much money so we'll have to think hard' Rutherford said or words to that effect.
Thanks for the informative history lesson Greywarshark, certainly food for thought.
Food for thought. Yes. I am filling my head with new information and it's getting full I think and pass it on in case someone else is interested. I have had an ordinary education and can see it wasn't satisfactory and now think that most of our education is directed away from learning about ourselves, the most important thing. That was said before 1744!
one of the hardest quests in life is knowing yourself and peeling back the layers… good on ya m8
If they can shake off the iron foot of the theocrats, maybe.
In one odd sense the historic Iranian culture could be thought of as the USA of the ancient world, the two have a lot in common, but for quite different reasons.
Iran is geographically different to the USA in every conceivable way, but it all boils down to one factor: populated Iran is a fused, sprawling mountain system. Iran’s Zagros mountain chain fills the country’s entire southwestern third, while the Elburz dominates the northern third. The contemporary capital of Tehran sits on a plateau where the two chains meet. With an average peak elevation of 3000m, the two chains not only force out fairly reliable rainfall, but their valley floors tend to above 1000m. Unlike nearly everywhere else in the region, it actually rains in Iran where people live. Direct rainfall enables agriculture without necessarily requiring irrigation. Lower labor requirements free workers to do other things, like going to school, practicing a trade, composing a poem or waging war. Culture here has roots stretching back five thousand years.
Mountain living has other advantages. Anyone wanting to invade Iran must fight their way uphill into the Persian core and batter through every mountain line. This defensibility shapes Persia’s participation in international affairs. Iran isn’t a destination, but instead a knot of difficult territory that must be bypassed by those in Asia or Europe, it's just too hard to invade and hold. In this it's very much like the USA, it's geography has always made it secure.
Unlike the dozens of city-states and empires that have risen and fallen throughout the Middle East, the Persians have art, history and culture that isn’t short-lived, incidental or fused with foreign practice but instead anchored in millennia of continuity. The Persian language and Persian customs—conservatively—date back hundreds of generations.
But the same geography also forced them to become the first multi-cultural society. Each mountain valley had it's group and identity, making them a very heterogeneous society, but united in one thing … the terrain around them was even worse. This forced them develop an enduring Persian identity from all these disparate parts much earlier than anywhere else in the world.
Located on the Silk Road trade route the medieval Persians managed to sustain a remarkable medieval prosperity, but two things buggered this for them. One was the invention of deep water navigation by the Portuguese, enabling traders to completely bypass them. The other is more subtle; the thousands of mountain valleys and plateaus make internal transport very expensive, and there are few large centers with necessary pre-conditions to support industrialisation.
In many ways it's useful to think of the Persians as an ancient super-power, but one that has been sidelined by history and technology. They retain much of their cultural capital, but the nature of the land they live in has constrained their ability to adapt to the modern world.
A cosmopolitan culture for so long, yet that biodiversity got clamped into a binary theology, and most religious historians derive that of islam & christianity from Zoroaster. Here's non-academic recycling of that view:
Thus the binary syndrome that makes leftists hate Trump. Life is an
Now Abraham came from Ur, where the Akkadian civilisation had recycled the Sumerian pantheon of diverse gods & goddesses. So the Israelites went seriously off the rails in departing from their Hebrew progenitor. Historians who write about this usually blame the acquisition of monotheism from Akhenaton during the Hebrew settlement in the Nile delta centuries. Interesting how cultures long complex can shift into banal simplification!
Thanks Greywarshark, a great follow up of the series "The Silk Road" extract on Zorastrians the Muslims Persia and Iran cultures narrated by Joanna Lumley.
My friend, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying. Where could we meet?
I might be interested. Who did you buy it from and how much did you pay?
so people that are returning are starting to sending in CVs. What are we to tell them?
anyone got any ideas? Other then sorry mate you are overqualified for fruit picking?
Tell them this Sabine:
Welcome home.
yes, welcome home, i hope you have enough money to last 6 – 12 month – cause on unemployment you will not even manage to rent a ditch, let alone eat.
welcome home honey, sadly i can't hire you, we are all gonna be shit outta luck once the wage subsidy subsides.
welcome home you and your whanau, hopefully you are not picky n choosy cause fruit picking might be your best bet, and for your wife/husband and the kids.
welcome home, to what ever you find here waiting for you.
welcome home. You are on your own.
is that what you are talking about Ad?
Ours is now one of the most coherent, intact, and functioning civil societies on earth.
It's good if they brought money with them – and they usually bring it in by the truckload. That's why they went overseas in the first place.
The newcomers wont be picking fruit. More than likely our children will be.
Exactly. The returnees will fall roughly into three categories.
There was about 50,000 kiwis travelling short term, most of whom have gotten home, but there will be still a few who have been stuck in odd places who have not yet been able to organise a flight for one reason or another.
About 200,000 kiwis in Australia do not qualify for any support there. Eventually a fair fraction of them will be forced to return if they do not have secure jobs. Probably about 50% of them over the next six months. Most will be younger adults and will likely return to family here, but not a lot of other prospects.
Another large and hard to qualify chunk will be ex-pats who have been living and working all around the world. Many will have been earning a good income, and would return with capital and experience. How many is very hard to guess, because their decision points will all be unique based on their circumstances, but I would guess maybe another 100,000 or so over the next few years. A lot depends of just how turbulent the world becomes in that period.
New Zealand can cope with this.
interesting post redlogix. already people in the third category are spending money. houses are being bought and renovations happening at my beach, by cashed up kiwis returning. my real estate colleague confirms that sales and prices are up, mainly driven by incoming cash. dont think we are going to need to selloff any more kiwi citizenships for a while.
The internationalistas
A fair few will be those who can do their work from anywhere in the world, and will return still employed in their current jobs. Safe trumps cosmopolitan for the next few years.
Others will become self employed contractors living here but applying for international jobs they can do on-line. Others will run on-line businesses and or offer themselves as consultants to local business in their industry sector.
Some will simply take the jobs that have been going to skilled migrants.
Some will simply spend a year holidaying here, or doing a post grad course, where it is safe.
As for the Oz Kiwi crowd who return, hopefully a lot are into construction/roading and building and truck driving – younger adults back to home with parents are ideal for seasonal work (camper van).
Then there are the jobs that semi-skilled migrants – couriers/service stations/IT/Chorus connections have been doing.
50,000 migrants coming in, not. The lack of 100,000 students this year eases the hospitality sector downturn impact on employment.
Yes dear, also Lol. Lol. Lol.
No they left in the first place because they could not get any jobs here. Cause the one thing NZ sucks are really is the creation of good jobs, future proof jobs with a pay above min wage that would allow them to pay life and student loans.
And now they are back here with no jobs, no real chance to get a job, and most of them don't come with truck loads of money because were ever they lived before they did so on a regular wage paying regular things like food, rent, insurance etc etc etc.
But yeah, nah nah, quite a few of them will do what ever they can as 250$ per week un-employemnt is too little to live and too much to die on. And so far i have yet to see a proposal from any of the empty suits to raise this to the level of the wage subsidy so as to prevent further hardship and misery. And i don't expect to see anything meaningful about unemployment to come anytime soon.
As for us being the Nr. 1, our wage subsidies are still keeping many afloat. Take that away and see what happens to our Society when you have somewhere between 10 – 20% unemployment (certain regions even higher – and i am being very charitable with the numbers as i would expect them to go into the high 20s low 30s) who can neither pay food or rent on the current benefit levels.
The current projection is unemployment at 9% below the original projection of 10%.
Some tourism economy regions of course will be around 20% – the question will be how many of those are residents/citizens and entitled to benefit support
think unemployment will turn out to be a bitter disappointment for the nats.
some tourism areas will be well above that.
There is a reason why the wage subsidy was extended – i think they call this flattening the curve.
I love all that pie in the sky wishful thinking. What ever gets people trhough the day.
But i will make sure to tell the people that are sending me their unsolicited CVs that they can just declare themselves contractors to get some 'work from home' jobs, or that they just start working in roading/building (skills and training is for suckahs), or that they just do a year living in a Van (Freedom camping with the whole family is fun 🙂 ) and so on and so forth.
the real number of unemployment will be known when the wage subsidy runs out and is replaced with nothing. Until then, you have no numbers to throw about.
the takeaway from this thread (apart from preparing for community resilience) is that worker rights is a big priority. If Ad and his peers' children end up fruit picking, best make sure they have better wages and work conditions than the economic migrants and working holiday crowd have had up until now. Fruit picking is honest work, about time we made it good work too.
While I don't know the profit margins involved, and with exports in 2019 worth $6.2B – An increase of $720M, and an industry valued at $9.5B, out of principle I wouldn't go fruit picking until the wages for the hard grafting workers reflected their real worth and value to the horticulture big boys.
New Zealand horticulture exports grow to $6.2 billion
Your reply was to a misrepresentation of what I wrote. Not your best work.
As to unemployment figures, prepared to make a bet?
They send in a Grainne Moss CV… https://www.newsroom.co.nz/1248845/get-your-handbag-its-not-going-to-be-pleasant …problem solved.
Yep ……….. As I just sent to Bradbury's Open Mike:
Just another example of how good people get shat on in our neo-liberal public service
http://www.newsroom.co.nz/1270488/the-brave-new-world-of-oranga-tamariki
All the good intentions in the world result in SFA
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/201845427/hoani-jeremy-lambert-listening-to-our-kids
Jeremy looks pretty intense in that Newsroom photo.
Sweet fuck all indeed.
I wandered over to Newsroom for the link and found part 2…became so engrossed I damn near neglected my other duties.
Why the hell Moss is still there….I reckon this issue warrants it's own post.
PS…I have never heard of NUPE until today. Why is that?
Interesting that she was A tolley appointee (against advice).
Yes it was an engrossing read.
Tolley or Bennet?
When Moss was appointed, then Minister for Vulnerable Children Anne Tolley (pictured) dismissed questions in the media over whether she was the right person for the job. Photo: Lynn Grieveson
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/the-brave-new-world-of-oranga-tamariki
"The panel convened by Rennie to make the decision was an all-Pākehā lineup: deputy State Services Commissioner Debbie Power, secretary of education Peter Hughes"
Two of the creators of the highly toxic environment at WINZ – beggars belief that the current government (naively maybe) put anyone from that era of management back in there – or actually maybe it doesn't considering some of their actions to date towards the poorest in society – not increasing benefits as per the WEAG recommendations, making the homeless pay 25% of their benefit to pay for their motel rooms, getting rid of including underage partners in superannuation – all those things make poor peoples lives harder. I can see why she would appeal to them both – cut from the same managerial mould/(mold?). Fits nicely with the earlier comments about the managerial class that were made.
yeah, nah nah, not relevant at all to what i asked – the people sending me CVs have not lost jobs for bullying and chances are will not be hired for their bullying nature.
they are ordinary people who have come home to nothing much, if anything at all.
Sorry Sabine. You wrote "CV" and I'm afraid that forever those two letters will pull that image of Moss' CV into my mind.
What to do with the returning sons and daughters who thought their best futures were Overseas?
Sadly, not all will be of the 'highly trained and qualified in a specialist field' group that seem to have the welcome mat laid out. I'm not entirely convinced of the essentiality of making movies about virtual blue folk, but I do see the necessity of having experts dealing with the leaking shit pipes in Wellington.
So those who can't be gainfully employed in one of the multibillion dollar projects announced by Our Leaders over the past few weeks will have to 'pivot', I believe is the current parlance, and broaden their horizons or lower their expectations.
And perhaps consider voting for the Green party and their ending poverty policy.
Because it would go a long way towards mending the safety net.
If someone with a PhD in particle physics applies for an honestly advertised minimum wage casual job as a cleaner…hire them. Or not.
'pivot' has become so passe @Rosemary – everybody is pivoting and they need something new. There is a new word on the horizon. Forgot where I heard it, but immediately I did, "ultimately" I knew it'd become the new normal going forward (in that space).
"so"…….. the best creds for something like the position of OT CEO could be experience as a used car salesman, as long as you make it clear you're also "passionate" about what you do, AND "compassionate".
On the other hand, as Anne Tolley has reckons, being a mother might be sufficient, although I'm not sure how the likes of Jeremy Lambert could ever aspire to such an exceptional position of CEO of OT
Art is essential because it tends to reflect us.
Most likely not. People who are over-qualified for a job don't get employed for that job and if there aren't any jobs around for what they're qualified for then they end up as long term unemployed. Its one of the ways that our present system wastes its people.
Oh, I don't know. I'd pay a wee bit extra for a Thesis in Three with my double shot mocha.
Fruit picking season has been and gone in our region.
I hear farmers are in demand should they wish to farm.
anyone can be a farmer? Great. I will tell people to just be a farmer, i was told they are in high demand. lol.
There are already training programs underway
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/121989572/slow-start-to-35m-course-setup-to-fill-1000-vacant-dairy-jobs
Miss 15 wants to sign up when she is a bit older, it looks fantastic.
tell them the truth. Tell them that we have no idea what NZ will be like in 12 months time, or the world. We might be ok-ish (think high unemployment but a still functioning economy). Or we might be in the middle of a major GFC and our main concern is to have enough food for the coming year. Or something in between, which is probably worse than the first two.
I'd suggest learning how to grow protein and carb crops if they don't already know. Also, get to know your neighbours and be kind to them. And get to know the people in your community that know how to build resilient communities and have been practicing this.
Yep, unemployment and not enough income sucks. That's been true for too many for too long already. Best we learn, fast, how to do things differently.
Also, tell them to vote Green.
I told my kiwi friends that so long as they can stay overseas, i .e . still have their visas and jobs to stay overseas. Keep distance, wear a mask, shower in sanitizer and stay where you are. Nothing much to come here for unless you have oodles of cash which the people that i know overseas don't have. They went overseas in the first place because unemployment and under employment in NZ sucks and they were lucky enough to find employment elsewhere.
But to pretend that we are not going to have issues with high number of unemployment , people without the capacity to pay rent and food is foolish imo, and it seems that a lot of people like to rather be foolish then look at the world as it is. And maybe some people just hope that we can pretend it ain't that bad, (as generally it is done) but i doubt this time around we can.
I read your post on the greens, and frankly it is neither bold nor future orientated. (again, the socialist in me is finding both the Greens and Labour timid in their approach)
The one things the wage subsidy has shown us in NZ is that it is the minimum one needs to 'live', not extravagantly but just subsistence level. So again the unemployment min income proposed by the Greens is already 150$ short at the very least. For 320 you may find a rental, but you wont' be eating, nor paying electricity nor food. So redundant. If this is not the time to talk honestly about what it costs to simply stay alive (food, shelter, warmth) then it will never be the time. As for growing food, lol. We might want to stop pretending that we are not in a country wide drought for a start. Water is vital to growing food, and in certain parts of the country water is an expensive good. Growing food is for those that have homes, stable homes. Growing a tomato in a pot is a nice supplement, but you don't want to try to survive on it.
So i really really hope that someone in our government will finally just be bold. If only for a refreshing change.
As for telling people how to vote, i won't. Never did, never will. I don't believe that parties lead, its the people that bring about the changes. The suits will follow when they have to and not a minute before.
thanks for a considerate answer tho, i was wondering if anyone here still gave a shit about others.
Though lifting the rates must go hand in hand with rent controls otherwise increase just become a revenue source for landlords. Even the US has rent controls in most places e.g. restrictions on how much you can increase rent on your rental property in a year – even when tenants change.
Maybe it's the difference in perspective for those of us that were locked out of the 'getting ahead' economy decades ago. It's not that I don't have empathy for people losing their jobs, it's more that I think the solution to that isn't to try and make things like they were before only better. If people still want a big house and a late model car and a new smart phone and an overseas holiday every year, sorry, but the ecologies we are utterly dependent upon just can't sustain that.
$325/wk is a minimum guaranteed income. Not a maximum, and there is no suggestion that this is what people should live on. You appear to have fundamentally misunderstood the policy.
Not recognising the radical and bold approach to disabled people in the policy is hardly surprising. Working people are the really important ones right? Who cares if the Greens are proposing to stop treating disabled people like third class citizens and give them a substantial increase income as well as a dedicated income support department of their own.
Growing tomatoes is not growing protein and carb crops. If you don't understand this, and who grows food in NZ and how and why, maybe take the time to learn. Not everyone has to grow food, those that can should. Not all of those people own or rent land they can garden on. If we think unemployment is bad wait until we're wondering where our years supply of food is going to come from.
Yes, parliament follows us, but we still need them to enact laws. Like minimum wages and work conditions, benefit rates and so on.
Drought in NZ is largely a human created disaster (I don't mean climate change, but local land use practices). We don't have a country-wide drought, we have water shortages in some places because humans are too stupid to adopt the systems and tech that already exist to farm/garden regeneratively and with respect for water as part of nature. Humans have been growing food for tens of thousands of years in places with lower rainfall than NZ has currently. It's not rocket science, we are just ideologically blind.
Exactly Weka
Just like there is wealth enough to go around if its equitably distributed, there's enough water if its not squandered in non essential car washes etc
Community gardens are a valuable and initial step in providing food and building community.
We really do need to have a different mind set , insread of weeping and wailing we need to get in and start doing and helping where we can
6 months paid parental leave, starting today.
Top work Labour.
Come on you post-lockdown couples, get to work.
They're so fucked.
https://twitter.com/BLaw/status/1278000620214063109
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem says the thousands of people who attend the July 3 celebration for Independence Day at Mount Rushmore with President Donald Trump will not be required to practice social distancing despite an increase in coronavirus cases across the country.
"We will have a large event at July 3rd. We told those folks that have concerns that they can stay home, but those who want to come and join us, we'll be giving out free face masks, if they choose to wear one. But we will not be social distancing," Noem, a Republican, said in an interview Monday night on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/s-dakota-gov-noem-says-we-will-not-be-social-n1232507
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRRR-exVhs4&feature=youtu.be
Pro-life repugs got their death panels.
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https://twitter.com/stevenspohn/status/1278096633406906369
Has the guy in the image got an alien in his neck? He doesn't sound as if he'd be glad to see one though.
It's a tracheostomy tube.
https://twitter.com/stevenspohn/status/1071127811484737536
http://stevespohn.com/
Edit
http://stevespohn.com/rebooting-your-life/
Rebooting Your Life: 6 Steps You Can Follow to Find a New You
He has found a way to get over that problem for the time, and take other along on the road with him. He sounds like a Forrest Gump character – giving other people a boost as well as himself.
He is advocating for himself and others in need of compassion, and has a website and the heading above tells about his ideas for 6 mins I think. I didn't read it because I'm in the elderly group and at present is trying to reboot my democracy and everybody's life, mine being on the end of the plank. I have my own version and just give some ideas here and around as I go about just keeping the old you in good repair, with some time for appreciation of what good you do already have.
(You can see I have just been rereading Pollyanna, who is glad, very glad about the good things that happen and she manages to pass that on. Honestly, I have just been reading it – what was the mindset of people going through hard times in the past I asked myself? Pollyanna's we know. Another seems to keep on, to relate to others and help yourself and others.)
Darwinism at work.
When Jock Anderson and Mihi Forbes agree that Jacinda has it exactly right re the border and Covid19, as they did on The Panel last night, National should be very scared. Anderson is notoriously conservative.
Anderson is also old – and maybe has a sense of his vulnerability to Covid. Meanwhile Muller demonstrates in recent interviews that his leadership style is to demand a type of impossible clairvoyance from his subordinates – insisting that there must be a plan (with timings) for an unknowable future.
Talking to the 18 yr old in the house last night. He is a tad over what he perceives to be the highly sensitive nature of folk concerning comedy and racism. Part of this is finding his own way with leaving home and being with a building crew and their conservative attitudes.
I mentioned 'punching-up' with comedy rather than down.
I want to give a shout out to Mihingarangi Forbes for her explanation around blackface.
In the context of Chris Lilley and his character Jonah from Tonga. She said that a Tongan teen/adolescent's stories are for a Tongan teen/adolescent to tell. When Chris Lilley occupies that space, there isn't room for a Tongan teen to be.
This helps me understand Brotown, in that the stories are for Kightley, Fane etc to tell.
Still a bit lost about Super City, Madeline Sami 'whitefacing' for a couple of her characters Linda and Ray. I figure it is about Pakeha being the dominant culture.
So should we reinterpret tv shows like Fawlty Towers, The Office and Little Britain as not successful comedy, but simply unfunny and offensive to too many groups of people..?
I can't see that happening. People need to laugh at themselves, the Greeks were doing similar comedy thousands of years ago.
Of course it's still successful comedy. Some of it is brilliant.
But things like brownface are at best an intelligent, sensitive comedian having more opportunity to appropriate the expression of a minority experience (albeit in a sympathetic manner) than someone in that actual demographic has to express their own experience in mainstream media. It doesn't make it unfunny. It does raise the question "why not someone who didn't need the makeup?"
The Fawlty thing is slightly different – I suspect recognition of the full harm that language causes makes it over-egg the effect they were going for. Audiences change over time, words change meaning, gain or lose emphasis. It's that sort of situation, imo.
I think of the Carry On movies I watched as a kid , hopelessly unfunny now .They
relied on repressed sexuality,stereotypes about women and homosexuality and provided "naughty" thrills.
Viewed now on vintage TV they are just puzzling, but a great social history lesson
What could possibly go wrong in a country where everybody and their dog has a weapon of war.
https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1277974548441214976
http://archive.li/kpQgS
I read a few years ago that English is a second language for more that 50% of the population. Spanish a high proportion of first language. If so perhaps the White folk are nervous?
PS World: Of the approximately 1.5 billion people who speak English, less than 400 million use it as a first language. That means over 1 billion speak it as a secondary language
Looking at where english is the dominant language, there's the US(330M) UK(67M) Canada(37M) Oz(25M) plus rats and mice. So yeah, less than 400M worldwide being english-first speakers is plausible. The vast majority of those are in the US, then UK.
The idea of english being a second language for more than 50% of the US population is utterly implausible. Non-hispanic whites alone are 60%, and even the majority of non-whites will be US born or arrived at an early age so grew up speaking english as their primary language.
There may be some large pockets where english is a second language for more than half the residents – Puerto Rico being the largest example, but no doubt there's some fairly large pockets along the southern border.
But maybe that comment was just some snark from a UK pedant.
2017 stats in wikipedia say english well out in front in USA.
All that is true Andre that English is the most spoken. Not sure if it covers those who speak say Spanish first but have to speak English to survive. Anyway I surrender.
Nervous about being a minority because they know just how poorly minorities are treated, or something?
The question of Māori representation on the New Plymouth District Council is being debated again. But the debate all went pear-shaped with the representatives of all people should have their say at the NPDC Te Huinga Taumatua iwi committee meeting.
Poet and activist Sonya Taylor, shouted down from the gallery "racists do not deserve a fair say." The meeting was adjourned while she left the chamber. As she left she noted "Racism getting a fair say is why the oppression of Māori folks has been what it has been up to this point,"
Recall 2014 when then Mayor Andrew Judd called himself a recovering racist and supported the Māori ward proposal. And in this day and age, who wouldn't?
Well, the answer is here:
"… the move was overturned in 2015 when a citizen-initiated referendum voted against it by 21,000 votes to 4285."
The accusation of structural racism is well-founded given the only CIR that is legally binding on the NPDC is the question of Māori representation and this situation exists nowehere else in the country.
Credit to the NPDC that they're trying to get this law removed, but hey there's not going to be much support for that it seems.
Utterly shameful.
Well, as someone who did actually vote for at least one Maori candidate to the NPDC last time, I see that 5:1 ratio as a consequence of historical inertia. Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_marae_in_Taranaki
Notice how the only marae in the city itself is in the outlying suburb of Bell Block – separated from the city proper by miles of countryside. There are three in/around Waitara a few miles further to the east, then just one each in Oakura & Inglewood a few miles to the west & south. Compare that to the list of maraes in south Taranaki to see the huge difference!
This population distribution is due to the original NZ company settlement in the year of the treaty, plus the genocide a generation earlier in which local tribes here were cleaned out by an invasion from Waikato tribes.
That structural racism doesn't accord with the dictionary definition (tacit, not overt) but I agree it does need to be flagged. A suitable political basis for that would be comparative analysis to maori representation in councils elsewhere – if that has been done on a treaty/quota basis. I've no idea what basis the protestors are using…
Many cities have a tenth set aside as fair from the takeover of land from Maori. They retained a tenth and that gives them their land by right or the right to have an argument if it starts being encroached on.
Taranaki got taken over by farmers and the Hawera blackface mentality is a carry-through. I don't know what era they are in, in their minds. Somewhere between post World War 2 and 1984 I'd say. Since then it's all been too confusing and there is a desire to retire to past highlights and memorials.
Yes, it's noticable to this day how proportionately-few Maori reside in New Plymouth compared to the rest of the district.
"a consequence of historical inertia"
Historical inertia alongside historical and current racism. People actually had to get themselves out of their chairs to instigate and vote in that referendum.
Structural racism can refer "to the ideologies, practices, processes, and institutions that operate at the macro level to produce and reproduce differential access to power and to life opportunities along racial and ethnic lines… embedded in societal-level institutions, policies, and practices"
I believe that definition covers what is going on with this.
"A suitable political basis for that would be comparative analysis to maori representation in councils elsewhere"
The articls states legally binding CIR only for Maori representation is unique to a NPDC. Even if the council and Maori agree on a representation model as in 2014. The people can vote it down. That's not a racist council, it's a racist act by the population.
[Fixed typo in e-mail address]
Russiagate’s Last Gasp
One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia paid the Taliban to kill GIs as an attempt to pre-empt the findings into Russiagate’s origins….
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/06/29/ray-mcgovern-russiagates-last-gasp/
Of course the Taliban story was mindlessly parroted by RNZ this morning…seems as if fake news is fine at most mainstream news outlets just as long as it supports ones own narrative…no need for pesky things like…gasp! evidence or credible named sources.
Thanks Adrian
For others, tl;dr?
“The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.”
(my bold)
"How much of an unprincipled whore do you have to be to call yourself a journalist and uncritically parrot the completely unsubstantiated assertions of spooks while protecting their anonymity? How much work did these empire fluffers put into killing off every last shred of their dignity?
It really is funny how the most influential news outlets in the Western world will uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of self-awareness that Russia and China are bad because they have state media."
Thanks, Brigid. Very good point. Our 'independent, privately-owned' press sometimes turns out to be even more bigoted and biased – but this must never be admitted.
Russiagate, that consumptive and sickly monstrosity conjured up from an ill-advised and disastrous mating of rogue CIA operatives and the discredited far right of the Democratic Party, is still wheezing and sputtering along, as can be seen by clicking on Comment No. 2 posted on this page at 8:41 a.m. today.
Russian agents offering bounties on US soldiers …why would they do that ?
https://www.newsweek.com/total-f-russian-mercenaries-syria-lament-us-strike-killed-dozens-818073
Maybe?
Russian mercenaries and not actually Russia.
Dude Russian mercenaries are still Russians aren't they? Hell how is your memory? Was there not a time when Afganistan had a communist government and the USA supplied Osama Bin Laden with weaponry to kill soviet troops? I'm not talking morality-I 'm talking motivation – it seems like there's plenty to me……
Indeed
Seems strange that the Pentagon chief Mark Esper says there's no corroborating evidence
Fun facts…. vineyards were still able to harvest, wine was still sold in the supermarkets and it was a bumper grape crop this year.
As Blinglish of Dipton proved, the rich will always take any money that they can scheme to get their hands on – no matter how immoral that scheme.
It might suit your anti-capitalism to see NZ go down the gurgler DTB but what about the children?
Actually, what about the country and managing to keep its head above water. It is hard enough keeping down the dream-sequence kiwis who still support National, the others would soon desert Labour if the economy went down. So it is good that the wine got picked, so that people could get paid, so that it could be sold, and so there is money flowing into the economy. Paid work at a living wage, that is the goal and making sure that people have good lives. That's a big one as the world goes down, ice floes melting faster than expected. Hell is people running away but going towards the edge and being powerless to stop them, and knowing it isn't a dream.
We still have hopes of being able to turn the tide at the present. A recession and things would only get worse. Let's make the most of this world-wide problem and pinch the government as much as possible to make changes while we have some advantage in the world. And also keep Labour in front to win again. Don't count on anything remaining stable, we have to help NZ as we won't get second chances from hereon in.
See Susan St John on TDB – https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2020/07/01/when-will-labour-get-it-right-for-the-worst-off-children/
There are lots of basic improvements to be done, we won't be better off if facing a full-scale depression. Everybody who doesn't want to do anything until it is the 'Right Thing' is just continuing the same useless mindset that brought us to the present debacle.
Never said that.
Wine grapes, unlike eating grapes, are picked and then sold later (it says so in the article). In other words, the lockdown hasn't affected him at all. A drought would have affected him worse and I'd expect him to have plans for that eventuality as well.
And having money flowing into the economy is easy and doesn't need to have direct subsidies to businesses. Just give everyone $100/wk and local business would have kept going.
Actually, a recession is likely to do more for slowing climate change than keeping business going as per normal.
O O
The House sitting calendar still shows 1 July as the last sitting day?
Nick Smith again today acting like a child in Parliament. His recalcitrant childish apologising should be compulsory viewing by the voters down his way. Hopefully the boundary change helps his demise.
Meanwhile, in democratic Russia.
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https://twitter.com/ASLuhn/status/1277964917551685640
(sound off if you're squeamish)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ussia-journalist-david-frenkel-attack-police-video-mediazona-election-a9594351.html
The police stayed down a long time giving him the treatment!
For 45 years I manned polling booths and the worst anger I saw was directed at the orange felt tip pen that dried up. Aren't we lucky that our democracy is so benevolent.
Yes, but we can't sit back sleepily and take it for granted. It is slipping away, bit by bit starting even before 1984 but speeding up as time goes on.