Speaking of Dirty, question of the day. What happened to Dirty Politics and all the information left with Gower. Now I read Gower had his eye damaged and was in hospital but surely paddy has read it by now and can start spilling the dirt to take some of the gleam off national or was Raw Shark duped. If Raw Shark was duped by Gower I wonder if he will reappear if National and MSM continue there DP tactics which it appears they are.
I noticed everything went damn quiet on the Herald as soon as O’Sullivans name was implicated!!!
How was O’Sullivan’s name implicated. I understood there wasn’t a lot of stuff left that wasn’t already in the book or that had been posted by whaledump.
However, there’s plenty in all that, already public info for the MSM to be pursuing. They’ve just let the whole nasty mess drop. Instead, they are labeling anything a little bit attacking “dirty politics”, providing rear guard smoke and mirrors.
Slater was the one who instigated the injunctions. Worked a treat in closing down reporting of the issues before the election. Now Team Nat-Slater has far less to gain from pursuing the issues/case.
This issue is well traversed by Russell Brown et al on Hard News. You may find substantive comments there which address your concerns. Pundit also might help with the ‘It’s gotta be down to media conspiracy” meme.
MSM in NZ seems woefully weak and some commentators are clearly and shamefully partisan, but this anti-MSM reflex from the left is often counterfactual and deservedly Standard posters come in for some mockery because of it.
@ Galeandra this anti-MSM reflex from the left is often counterfactual and deservedly Standard posters come in for some mockery because of it.
You deserve mockery for your quaint, naive comments. In fact they are typical of the complacent, conformist, accepting sort of NZer we all were who allowed the present developments by embracing Rogernomics.
Now that a few people are trying to drag the majority from this destructive coma of acceptance, it shocks the addicted.
Don’t rock the boat, don’t criticise, don’t put your ideas forward, don’t demand better, who do you think you are making complaints. Follow those in charge without question, they know best, everything will be justified in the end, and those ends will be golden and worthy of the sacrifices caused by the means.
Jam tomorrow for some and, for the most, compliance or else is the true end – that is the wisdom that observation teaches, substantively.
What’s this MSM your talking about Galeandra? All I see is a corporate media, driven by the profit motivator. Fair enough, that’s their buzz. Just remember if your going to play the game in the interests of profit – you are open to criticism from a non-profit, or socialist perspective, also a green one, and/or a feminist perspective.
I think if you try thinking, you will find a few more perspectives the media, which uses as it base – the profit motivation – can be critiqued on.
To blame us for doing analysis and criticism of the media as it currently stands – is like blaming a fish for living in water.
@ Galeandra
Why if you are left do you spend your time criticising others who are left. And why if I disagree with you is it ad hominem comment? Why can you throw negatives around and then react against a spirited reply?
If you are so wise then you will know that one of the problems with the left is that they splinter into squabbling factions. If the idea is to get a strong left movement going, and you are wise, and informed and clever etc. then why wouldn’t you support the good ideas, then say why others are lacking and look to amalgamate the good ideas into a strong and yet flexible philosophy and entity?
Wikipedia ad hominem, is a form of criticism directed at something about the person one is criticizing, rather than something (potentially, at least) independent of that person.
@ phillip
I think that enough evidence of MSM dirty tricks and bias has been presented here to justify our criticisms. And you can have your own separate viewpoint but this does not diminish our findings when they are based on observation and fact. If they are not then you can present the source and your interpretation of what was said to justify your position and show TS commenters their error.
Well, well, well…… so having a ‘wrong’ opinion equates with “You deserve mockery for your quaint, naive comments” and references to my complacency and selfishness.
Just another shitty little attempt to shoot the messenger, which I think my original comment was about. Why don’t you follow up the sources I referenced before you let fly. Move out outside the truthy bubble, perhaps.
FYI, my inclination is harder left than most folks, and I used to spend quite a lot of time here but too many just want to interview their own keyboards. Labour still sucks but I try to support them even when the caucus let their politics of self-interest get in the way.
I don’t go in for ad hominums, I do grow tired of the faffing and whining that posters so liberally spray around, and sadly, I do read a lot of scathing posts elsewhere about “te Standard’ and the siege mentality that pervades its posts.
This issue is well traversed by Russell Brown et al on Hard News.
Some of us demand more sober sources than Public Address.
Pundit also might help with the ‘It’s gotta be down to media conspiracy” meme.
Pundit is an “establishment” blog written mostly by insiders. The last thing you are going to find there is genuinely critical analysis.
MSM in NZ seems woefully weak and some commentators are clearly and shamefully partisan.
That’s always been true. This time seems somewhat different to me and people in my social circle. Media bias is not new in New Zealand. Collusion between media and political parties of the kind exposed by Hager does seem to be something new, as was the relentless media campaign against Cunliffe by TV3, Stuff and the Herald. I’ve seen that done overseas, but never here.
Now if you want to claim that there was no relentless series of hit pieces on Cunliffe over the past year, I don’t think I have anything further to say to you. It was patently obvious to anyone watching, and denials just aren’t credible.
Holding the media solely responsible for the election result is hardly credible, but who is actually doing that? To say that the media had no role in it is equally silly. But that’s largely irrelevant – they didn’t do their job. The media in this election were poor and in many cases actively partisan. It doesn’t really help that most of them are stupid, but you’d think that they could make more of their admittedly meagre talents.
you could read a little wider here and find many on the left hold the Left responsible for its failures. it is you who chooses to characterise the comments here on the defeat as being
media bad
left hard done by
you stated Standard poters deserve the mockery, not some posters.
most people i read here commenting about the media have also commented on other aspects of Labours demise from internal squabbling, lack of connection to middle nz and much more.
you make such a bald statement as that and then shrink into a shell cos someone took umbrage?
I actually posted this on Open Mike yesterday, but it very much relates to what you are saying, and I think it’s an important issue…
.
“Leadership and policy are not the same thing. The parliamentary leader may well be the front man for party policy but does not get to create policy to suit themselves.
.
By extension then, does it really make sense to say that this leader took the party left, or that that leader would take it right etc?
.
Or is their solid evidence to suggest that I’m being naive?”
Quick disclosure: In future I will be dropping the handle HH (too evocative of Labour’s historic mana) and I will be posting under the name Cave Johnson.
[karol: thanks for letting people know. Flagging it to the moderators]
Yeah, that’s a good point and so the Labour people who want to go left need to ask where the policies are decided and why aren’t Labour’s policies the ones they want?
I recall the left saying that Labour had great policies and that the Nats had no policies. And now you are saying Labour either had no policies, or the ones they had were toxic.
I found your idiosyncratic writing style outrageously funny so I thought I’d have a crack at it.
It reminded me of someone who’s just hanging on to his bar stool (ergo the probably callous reference to our favourite tory opinionator). But then today I realized it has a striking resemblance to the diction of Rorschach (where Rawshark gets his name from) from the Watchmen. So now when I read your comments I hear Rorschach, which is pretty annoying.
Leadership campaign details are out. 14 meetings from 22 October (Wellington first) to South Auckland on November 11.
Voting results then announced November 18.
Seriously.. Labour should have kept the Goff-father after 2011. Probably would have won on Sept 20 but no… Let’s go all out internecine warfare in the public domain after every election loss.
Yes, Phil Goff should have stayed on as Labour leader for at least 6 months, to stabilise Labour after a big defeat. He was growing into the job as well. And Labour’s poor party vote performance could not simply be laid at Goff’s feet; there were many campaign management team decisions which led to a poor party vote campaign.
And FFS, this was a John Key Govt after just one term.
But Goff moved on after a lack of support from the pro-Robertson camp who was demanding change, and Goff didn’t have it in him to defend a bad election result. The thing they all had in common: none of them liked DC so the idea of installing David Shearer, with Grant Robertson as deputy, was born.
I agree. Goff was good. Still is. Now the Labour caucus members should put their egos/prejudices aside, get united and show their full loyal support to Cunliffe instead of spending heaps of cash on an unnecessary destabilising contest at this stage. Everything has some risk. Changing the leader now perhaps has the biggest risk of all.
CV, personally I put Goff in the Shearer category of too indecisive, can’t think on his feet, is a terrible orator.
As the leader gets the most press and announces the big things he’s got to have wits. The only time I’ve seen Cunliffe struggle was when Key set him up on the CGT for the family home. I believed DC’s reasoning, he was caught off guard there was not tax on family home or trust homes.
Robertson is a good orator too, Just doesn’t have the PM stature He’s short squat and can’t keep his shirt tucked in. At times Robertson looks like some random plucked off the sidewalk thrust into a suit he’s not fit to wear.
To me Goff clearly beats Shearer in the oratory and thinking on his feet stakes. That is not saying much – Goff does have a lot of experience to fall back on. But it’s not enough against John Key.
As for your description of Robertson. Yeah that laser guided bomb struck the designated target pretty hard.
Goff should have stayed long enough to hand over to Cunliffe and not a second more. In 1985 I was visiting various Labour MPs as part of a HART initiative to sound them out on the subsequently cancelled racist rugby tour. Goff was the only one who refused to see us. Helen Clark gave my friend and I more than half an hour.
Since that time, the only time I’ve had any respect for Goff was when he visited Yasser Arafat against the wishes of the Zionist regime.
Yeah I don’t think there are many people here that disagree with that, most people for better or for worse thought at the time that Goff should have stayed on.
This blog has to have the greatest comments sections I’ve come across, but I do get frustrated by a lot of the “What Labour needs to do is…” opinionating. Tho alongside that there are also quite a lot of insightful criticisms of the party.
It seems to me that a lot of commenters have done a lot of yards in political activism, but then there are a lot of armchair critics. and I seriously believe that praxis is intrinsic to socialism. So my point is, OK thanks for all your opinions, but what actually the fuck are you doing/have you done about anything?
I know it could be construed as snobby, but there’s an unreality about language that isn’t grounded in work or experience. Or as Marx said: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
In my experience I have found it very hard to be *extremely* negative while I’m engaged in positive, constructive activism. So I take it as a sign of unhealthy disengagement when commenters reveal a kind of towering negativity about their subject.
The upside of the dairy price collapse, which after this monings Fonterra GDT auction drop ( http://www.globaldairytrade.info/en/product-results/whole-milk-powder/ ) is many of our environmental problems will be reduced. Because farming is about to become grass based as opposed to supplementary feed based, which will reduce output and reduce the nitrogen runoff into waterways.
Bank economists are arguing that it is cyclical, but it will be interesting to see if that proves correct…given what USA and Europe are doing this may be more structural, in which case many NZ dairy farmers will be forced off their farms with too much debt. This is scary times for our economy and the collapse of the national party’s key economic driver.
“..and of course soon we have the release of mufree….which is milk made from yeast..which looks/tastes/behaves the same as cow milk..(i.e..baking/cheese-making etc..)”
Put your astute observationalist punditry to the test and make a prediction in which year sales of genetically modified/engineered milk from a lab will out sell cows milk in NZ.
A. 2015
B. 2016-2020
C. 2020 – To absolutely never in a million years.
Where are you reading/hearing a market glut for 5 years. I have read it will balance out over 2015. Personally I think it will be longer than that but I am interested where you read 5 years?
“A record payout to New Zealand dairy farmers last year is setting the stage for a global milk glut that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts will last half a decade.”
You’ll note that article (July 2014) was predicting a forecast price of NZ$7/kg milk solids. The latest forecast from Fonterra on 24 September was NZ$5.30 and now the ANZ has cut its forecast to $4.85 & Westpac to $4.80
And you’ll note that the second article states “This sits well below the average cost of production for farmers and will have a significant impact on discretionary spending,”
Agee PU. It is interesting that the Bloomberg article wasn’t picked up. TV3 news balmed the entire collapse of the dairy market on the unpredictable Russian ban on Dairy…not mentioning the very predictable oversupply from USA and Europe and drop in cost of cow feed (wheat) by 25% in USA.
Thanks: Yes that is interesting. It quotes Rabobank in there and it is Hayley Moinahan from Rabo NZ who is talking up some sort of recovery next year…which is really difficult to see happening given the over supply. To put things in contxt, for there to be oversupply then factories/dryers had to be built…they arnt going to de-commission new plant and equipment immediately, this is why commodities tend to do what they do…I was in the paper industry for a while and that industry is even worse than dairy. The big question is whether this downturn is cyclical or structural…if structural then we (NZ) is in the shit…so to speak.
Diversions can only work for some time.
The bribe of no CGT will wear thin as house prices stall and the economy tanks.
Key needs the TPP quickly to lock in the sale of the country to corporate interests and before enough people realise what’s happening.
if labour cannot acknowledge that they created pike river against public opposition.
if labour cannot acknowledge that the dismantled the mines safety regime against public opposition.
if labour cannot apologise to the families of the 29 miners
they should turn out the lights and shut the door on their way out!
1. Labour allowed Pike River to be investigated, National opened it up for commercial use
2. National dismantled mine safety in the 1990s, Labour was reviewing the legislation when National were elected in 2008 at which point National dropped the review
3. It’s National that should be apologising and coughing up the compensation
@ phillip
Labour was slow, weak, wet and deleterious in its duty to its constituents the workers in dangerous industries. (Other words for deleterious are injurious, destructive, prejudicial, ruinous. All are entirely appropriate. The free market gives you a choice – so feel free to choose freely.
(Also nocent is a synonym for destructive – what a great word for politician’s wrongdoing.)
Yes, they took too long to look at it but at the same time not everything can be done in a day and they did get round to looking at it. National stopped even the belated looking.
DTB. You are very kind to Labour. Fact of the matter is that they were far too slow and cautious, spent a lot of energy carefully straddling the centre and fending off dirty politics attacks (eg shower heads, speeding to rugby games).
Interesting to see quite a lot of political columnists presently bagging the Greens for not selling out on their principles. I conjecture that what has happened is the election results which saw the majority of voting New Zealanders ignoring the moral reasons for not supporting National/ACT/etc has created a new amoral political universe that said columnists feel the need to somehow drag the Green Party and its supporters into. Sorry mates, us non-National/ACT etc voters may have lost the election but we remain on the right side of the moral universe which feels good inside. You can takeaway our rights but you can’t buy our souls.
@Phillip ure…why did Labour not agree to a coalition deal with the Greens before the Election?….that is part of your answer
the Election showed many of the potential Left alliance coalition Parties worked for themselves and not in collaborative concert…this was their undoing!
personally i think what Labour did to Hone and Int/MANA was unforgivable too….there was the possibility of 4 Left MPS ruled out for a Left coalition in that stupid little manouvre
….and as for rejecting the Maori Party as a coalition partner before the Election…this was crazy
and agreed in hindsight the Green Party should have called off the candidate
They can’t afford to do that due to the increase in advertising spending that the electorate candidate represents. In other words, to get the party name in front of more people they need the electorate candidates.
Everyone keeps going on about parties not working well in MMP and part of that is that in FPP, which the electorates still are, there are only two possible choices. And those two choices effectively come down to National (or who they tell people to vote for) or Labour and it will stay that way until such time as we bring in preferential voting for electorates.
I really, really wish people would drop this specious argument about Ōhariu. All this discussion about tactical voting without any realistic understanding or analysis about when that tactical voting will work and when it won’t.
I’m not even going to link to my original comment – I’m just going to paste it here, again! 😡
“I think people are too easily seduced by the 900+ vote majority in Ōhariu into thinking Ginny Andersen could have won.
Look at the party vote distribution – 16,686 out of 32,698 voted National (leaving aside the 977 Conservative votes, 222 ACT & 241 United Future). The combined Green/Lab Party vote was 12,306. If there had been any hint of an accomodation between the Greens & Labour at the candidate level then the 5,000+ National voters who voted for Hudson would have simply switched to keep Dunne in. (If there’s one thing National voters know it’s how to follow directions from “Dear Leader”).
Ōhariu is not the old Onslow seat, its not even Ohariu-Belmont. It’s now a firmly National seat. Dunne has simply moved right as his seat has moved right. When the Hairdo retires it will return a National member (unless they stitch up some deal with the Conservatives to coattail the Conservative vote).
I’m not saying that tactical voting isn’t important – and that the Left needs to work out when it is important and when it isn’t (and that also means that sometimes Labour is going to have to surrender an electorate seat to someone else on the Left – oh I don’t know – say a seat like TTT!).”
Congratulations to David Farrar. Kiwiblog has been accepted as a member of the Online Media Standards Authority.
It doesn’t mean that I like the blog. At the very best it is a personal blog, and he openly stands for “mischief”. I see the mischief in the way that he reports “accurately” but too often uses “facts” out of context, to suggest a conclusion that suits National. In other words it is a National propaganda blog, rather than a blog of the right, even if he periodically highlights a minor issue he personally disagrees with. And nothing of course stops selective reporting
Another issue that is worth noting is that there have been many criticisms of media standards, with regard to political reporting over this last election, that I think have a lot of justification. Main stream media will be quick to claim that they are neutral, and criticisms are made by all “sides” of politics, simply because they do not like negative publicity. This is partly true, but it’s also partly simply an excuse to ignore criticism. The main concerns I have is the open bias that is now accepted from people generally considered in the past to be reporting news. I have no concerns about people providing opinion, when that is clearly their role. But when others are given anchor roles in “news” type programmes, and are permitted to be openly political, I’m much more concerned. I’ll single out Mike Hosking, for an example of the worst of the worst. I’m less concerned about obvious subtle bias from a lot of others on the left, and the right.
Regardless, I’ll still say that I am pleased that Farrar has taken the action that he has. It’s a step in the right direction, and as the first blog to take this action, he deserves some accolades.
Farrar himself does not claim to be a journalist, distinguishing blogs from MSM. It’s a wise distinction. And he also openly says his blog is from the “right”. Open biases are less of a concern than hidden biases. Those on the “left” of the political spectrum, would be foolish not to periodically, and regularly understand what is being written on right leaning blogs.
I presume his joining means that standards will be maintained from the 1st October. It’s a pity that the example of Dirty politics from kiwiblog, exposed on this site, in the last week, is not subject to his “new” standards.
Refer to: Dirty Kiwiblog, 26 Sept 2014
“.I presume his joining means that standards will be maintained from the 1st October. It’s a pity that the example of Dirty politics from kiwiblog, exposed on this site, in the last week, is not subject to his “new” standards….”
he could have had better standards without joining a group. its hard to avoid the notion its a new way to make himlook reasonable… just another strategy.
The new “standards” don’t cover anything like the two track strategy or abuse of power as exposed by Hager. Where it does focus on accuracy, etc,, they are pretty weak:
PART A – STANDARDS THAT RELATE TO THE INFORMATION PUBLISHED
Standard 1 Accuracy
Publishers should make reasonable efforts to ensure that news and current affairs content is accurate and/or does not mislead in relation to all material points of fact.
Guidelines
1a. Comment or opinion (to which this standard does not apply) must be clearly distinguished from factual content.
1b. If the content is edited publishers should take care to ensure that the extracts and abridgments used are not a distortion of the original event or the overall views expressed.
Standard 2 Balance on Controversial Issues
Taking account of the Context in which the content is published publishers should make reasonable efforts to ensure that where the content deals with controversial issues of public importance it makes due reference to a reasonable range of significant viewpoints on the issue.
Guidelines
2a. In determining whether there has been due reference to a reasonable range of significant viewpoints the publisher will consider:
the opportunities provided for those with significant viewpoints to contribute to the content;
whether the issue or topic is clearly presented from a particular perspective
So, not much different from what is done on most blogs and/or in the MSM… which still manages to be pretty inaccurate in its biases.
The rest of the standards are just about things like issues related to matters of sex and violence, for the most part, defamation, etc… most of it already covered by laws.
No doubt DPF will use it as a badge of not doing ‘Dirty Politics” of manipulation and deception, feeding such to the MSM, etc….. but it ain’t necessarily so in reality. There are clauses about not doing deception…. but ….?
Selling out our sovereignty – NZ data sent overseas, law enforcement processes, data matching, privacy intrusion – all conducted by foreign nationals in a foreign data centre now. All automatically sucked up by the NSA – where/when you go in your car/how long you stay there/who was in your vehicle with you etc.
“My hope is that we will be able to pull it back. It is important to me that I leave my personal brand, which is reasonably statesman-like, and I’m not into any form of gutter politics. I’m distraught that this has occurred.”
– A statesman is usually a politician, diplomat or other notable public figure who has had a long and respected career at the national or international level.
– “The greasy little fulla in the blue suit”
Labours gift to National would be a Cunliffe win 🙂
A message to the Darling of Ilam, James Dann – you say if David Cunliffe wins the leadership race you will leave the Labour Party. And you demand that if David Cunliffe loses the race, he should leave Parliament altogether. Well, to be absolutely consistent and even-handed how about this? If Grant Robertson loses the race, HE should have to leave Parliament too!! Fairness above all surely, James! Or is that not the way you roll?
I see John Armstrong in the Herald is once again telling David Cunliffe to give up and go away. Ground hog day. Can anybody do a timeline showing the number of times that Armstrong and others at the Herald have called for Cunliffe’s resignation in the year since he became leader? – It feels like I have read the same article a hundred times. Hope he continues to disobey them.
Here we go .. Monsanto’s GMO pressure on NZ farmers .. look at this loon on return from his free and no doubt well- sponsored trip. If this is released into NZ, it won’t matter who the leader of any party is .. we will be rendered useless by Monsanto.
Dirty Monsanto tricks makes Dirty Polltics look like a Peanuts cartoon.
Watch this space and oppose it when and where you can, please …. imo it is the BIGGEST issue we face.
Yup. NZ under Key’s TPPA. Read it and weep for what ‘clean and green’ used to mean.
The loss of safe food and total desecration of our environment by glyphosate and then glyphosate-resistant weeds will be Key’s legacy if this is permitted through.
Glorious leader John, too stupid, thick and pig-ignorant to know any better. But so well-paid ….
Oh FFS mate the real risk of GMO food isn’t to individual human health, it is the systemic and potentially catastrophic threat that GMOs pose to the global ecosystem.
Exactly right but I’m not suggesting we should just accept full instigation of GMO’s but what I am saying is that GMO research, as a science, could give real benefit to mankind so we should be using it where safe – such as with Golden Rice as a prime example.
GMO, the science, is sound and well tested and studied and long should it continue to be so.
Take a look at the credentials of that site, Contrarian.
Their team consists of journalists, not scientists and a quick search (Sourcewatch) indicates that that site could be politically motivated (while I have already found online articles by them accusing real scientists of having ‘political motivations’).
Just from a very, very brief search, I find that website suspicious.
I’m not talking about the site, but the studies (the site I linked to aggregates them hence my linking to it). The vast, overwhelming, majority of studies into GMO’s and human health have found them to be completely safe. Very very few studies have highlighted serious problems and many that have done have been shown to be lacking in scientific rigor.
I am not suggesting GMO’s are always safe and should be used with impunity rather I am saying that test after test they have been shown to be effective and they should continue to rigorously tested for safety in an ongoing manner as we do currently to ensure their safety.
I really haven’t got the time to go and check all those links in that dodgy GLP website, nor your other links.
These types of checks require finding out the funding of the sites too – that GLP site ‘said’ they weren’t funded by large companies but I just happened to do a reasonable search, to discover they are strongly linked with a dodgy train of funding.
I’d rather stick to Union of Concerned Scientists, who acknowledge the problem with big money affecting science from the outset. Thanks for providing the links, though just the same, perhaps others will read them 🙂
My main problem with what you said was ‘ but GM food has been proven to be extremely safe for human consumption.’
I really don’t think scientists have established that GM food has been proven ‘extremely safe,’ yet and suggest to you that exaggerating facts, and making sweeping statements in the current climate of pseudo-scientific arguments that ‘Merchants of Doubt’ detailed, is a really, really, bad idea if you wish to be persuasive.
The reason children are deficient in Vitamin A is because of POVERTY. In India there is plenty of food with vitamin A, namely papaya, but poor people can’t afford to buy it.
So how will poor people afford golden rice?
Maybe Monsanto ( is it them who make it) will subsidise it as a publicity stunt
Sure – but barring an overnight miracle which will eradicate poverty and ensure everyone worldwide has enough good food to eat starting today, Golden Rice offers a safe and easily accessible alternative while the world sorts its shit out.
heh -the old vitamin A argument still got legs has it?
And prior to industrial mono-culture supplanting traditional farming techniques, do you think that just maybe (say) avocados would have been interspersed with whatever other main variety of crop was being grown, and that people could have satisfied their vitamin A needs through the simple act of growing and eating some foods rich in vitamin A?
That’s great but given we are in a post industrial mono-culture supplanting traditional farming techniques culture what do you say we make use of immediately available substances until such a time as we can return to an era of traditional farming?
Those without power are always provided, by those with power, with the ‘worst option’ and also the ‘best option’ – one leads them to instant destruction; the other leads them deeper and deeper into the bowels of the prison/ the workhouse/ the labour camp.
I’m being a bit dramatic but hopefully you get my point.
The solution is to regain power – real power. Not over others, but over one’s own life.
Back when we were nomadic we had a much more varied diet. As that was true of most of our evolution that means that we’ve evolved to have a varied diet. The problem now is that we don’t have such a varied diet.
The answer isn’t GMOs which really don’t produce anything more than the natural ecosystem – that’s another physical impossibility sown as the answer that the rich pour upon us. The answer is to massively vary our diet again. Our farms* to be turned into food forests because they have that variety and are also sustainable.
* I also include the vertical forests that can be grown in cities
Until we have participatory democratic control of the state, we should have nothing to do with GM food. In the meantime, the safety or otherwise is basically irrelevant. We need to maintain our food sovereignty, not hand it over to corporations.
This NZ Fed Farmers farmer who travelled on Monsanto’s ticket is too dense to understand the run-off ramifications of thousands of tonnes of poisonous glyphosate into our water ways. omfg
Competition for Jim Mora, Danny Watson and Larry “Lackwit” Williams:
RadioLIVE has an equally crap afternoon chat show
Thursday 2 October 2014, 2:15p.m.
By chance, I strayed on to RadioLIVE this afternoon and heard this asinine banter. It took only a minute or so, but I fear it never got any better. I doubt it could have gotten any worse. The only interesting thing in it is how Rodney “Perk Taker” Hide unwittingly reveals just how ignorant and right wing he really is…..
RODNEY “PERK TAKER” HIDE: You can’t respect a leader who cries when he loses! You might cry in wartime, when the Russians are coming for you!
WILLIE JACKSON: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
CHRIS TROTTER: Haw haw haw!
WILLIE JACKSON: Yeah, I remember Roger Federer crying after he lost a match to Nadal. It made me want to S-S-S-SPEW.
CHRIS TROTTER:[pompously and condescendingly] Haw haw haw! Rodney, you are indulging in what the Germans call schadenfreude, which means taking delight in the misfortune of others. And I would be doing just the same as you if the boot was on the other foot. Haw haw haw!
WILLIE JACKSON: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
ALISON MAU: So does the Labour Party need a knuckle-dragging neanderthal to lead it, as these guys seem to think? Tell us what YOU think after the break…..
At this point I could take no more, and stopped listening.
Well of course you stopped listening, I don’t blame you I mean Radiolive is very popular so listening to them might mean you get an idea of what the majority of Kiwis are thinking
A hapless, ill-informed pogue unwisely attempted to defend the indefensible….
Well of course you stopped listening, I don’t blame you I mean Radiolive is very popular
Errrr, no it’s not. Its audience share is extremely low. Possibly the choice of their cutting-edge management to sound exactly like NewstalkZBigotry was not the smartest move.
….so listening to them might mean you get an idea of what the majority of Kiwis are thinking
So Willie Jackson, Perk Taker Hide and Lord Haw Haw Trotter are representative of “the majority of Kiwis”, are they? What are you smoking today? I hope you’re not going to try to drive a car any time soon.
and that we can’t have that
Sarcasm is never an effective tactic, my muddleheaded friend.
About the only thing I agree with there is this bit:
People with terrible judgement were once shunned and mocked but now New Zealand’s business, entertainment and media communities are proudly led by gibbering, empty-headed morons.
In a most unusual step, I had Tim Barnett, Labours general secretary, request that I remove the Clayton Cosgrove post.
Rather than make this leadership issue more corrosive than it already is and because I am sometimes moderately cooperative to polite requests. I have removed it from public view. It will be restored back to being visible after the election is completed.
Unfortunately Tim tried to ring me (always a bad idea when I am working), so I only noted that he’d emailed when I pulled my head out of some code and hooked out to home for mail. If anyone ever does want to get hold of me, I’d suggest txting. I look at those every few hours.
Having been offline for the past 5 days, I was just in the process of catching up what I had missed seeing when the Clayton Cosgrove post disappeared.
What was Tim Barnett’s actual stated reason lprent?
Last week I asked the following question on this site:
Could someone please tell me who are the Labour MPs responsible for leaking confidential caucus information to the media? Let them be named and shamed.
I’m grateful to Karen Price for her twitter comment because I suspect she has inadvertently confirmed the chief culprits are Clayton Cosgrove and Trevor Mallard. Since it has been going on for a very long time, I consider them to be traitors and they should be removed from parliament.
“While aware of the motivations behind the piece. I am firmly of the view that it has the potential to damage the Party.”
Personally I think that what Cosgrove was doing was somewhat more dangerous longer term (as my post was demonstrating, I literally copied his tactics in the Herald and made them somewhat more extreme).
However I’m always a sucker for a request from a party organisation of the left (less so for politicians).
Yes. Not in the beltway though. In the beltway there is only pain. Pain and revenge. Pain and revenge and perks. Ok, pain, revenge, salaries, and perks, and that’s it.
Duncan Garner also confirms who the ABCers are. But the conclusions he goes on to draw from that and recent developments, totally ignores the role of Labour Party members – it’s all Thorndon Bubble for Garner. I guess that’s where he lives.
He ends totally putting the boot into the Labour Party.
He begins supporting Karen Price:
But, Karen Price is actually right: The ABC club never died when Cunliffe became leader – they just retired to the corner and got more bitter and twisted. It’s no secret who they are: Trevor Mallard is the life president, Clayton Cosgrove, chief plotter, David Shearer, general-secretary, Stuart Nash, head of communications, Annette King, camp mother, Grant Robertson the uncle, Phil Goff, kaumatua, and the errant ABC kids are Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins and Kris Faafoi.
I believe many of this crew ran electorate campaigns, so they could get back in and nail Cunliffe should he lose. They wanted to stack the caucus with ABCers, that’s also why they were desperate for Kelvin Davis to win in the north. He’s no fan of Cunliffe either.
But, after saying all that, defying logic, Garner then says Cunliffe should resign.
I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again: Labour has been heading this way for some time. The powder keg has blown. Cunliffe does not have the support of his caucus. They do not want him; neither do Kiwi voters.
He should have seen all this last week and gone quietly for the good of the party, and the cause, but he has chosen to hit the nuclear option. It is his own personal revenge at the ABCers. It’s breathtakingly arrogant. Which part of election spanking does he not understand?
What part of letting the LP members and affiliates have a say, does Garner not understand?
You do wonder what Slater and his mates have on these media folk.
Hager said at one of the meetings he spoke at that many of the media came up to him and asked if the files he’d seen included anything on them.
unfortunately most journalists are owned in that they are paid by a msm corporation and they have editors to make sure they stay in line
this is why we need a Left owned radio station ( and tv channel)
…the crap that my son comes home with from listening all day to commercial radio while driving is disturbing….people need alternative Left radio and real education …especially young people…but all people… young and old and middle aged
Nice of Garner to name the ABCs but he misses the whole point. Labour isn’t split between people who like Cunliffe and those that can’t stand him. It’s split between neoliberals and lefties. Funny you forgot to mention that Duncan, given it’s the reason the ABCs exist.
Does this mean no free discussion on the ABCs role in undermining the democratic will of Labour members can be discussed on this site?
And no discussion of which Labour MPs have been leaking to the media and what they have been leaking?
Sad to see debate closed down.
After Vance wrote a column that was critical of Cunliffe, responding to a tweet which said the column “sums everything up extremely well”, Ms Price tweeted: “No it sums up Andrea Vance very well. She’s unidimensional and unbalanced. Grant’s been feeding her for years.”
South Korea looks to implement an interesting plan to stimulate the economy:
Mr Choi’s scheme, submitted to South Korea’s parliament this week, will tax companies’ cash piles on the grounds that corporate stinginess is holding the country back.
“These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed,” Monbiot explains. “Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires.”
Expecting these governments to protect the biosphere, Monbiot adds, makes no more sense than “expecting a lion to live on gazpacho.”
Why should that be the case? Over recent decades, analysts and activists have made all sorts of links between the increasing degradation of our global environment and the increasing concentration of our global wealth.
The super rich, for starters, stomp out a huge carbon footprint. The best symbol of this stomping? That may be the private jet.
More and more evidence that we just cannot afford the rich.
I left the You Tube file to run while doing the dishes after dinner. And then had to sit down and watch most of it. Thanks for pointing this out. There are lots of useful stuff there to develop for discussion.
Very very useful stuff…his point that there is more inequality in the top 1% to 2% than in the bottom 98% was utterly telling; also the idea that more equality would actually greatly help most of those in the top 10% by stopping the 1% and the 0.1% from racing away from them.
The ultra-rich have done very, very well out of the pandemic. Globally, the wealth of the ten richest people rose by US$540 billion last year, enough money to pay for the pandemic in its entirity. And in New Zealand, local billionaire Graeme Hart saw his wealth increase by almost NZ$3.5 ...
Postmodernism has long been looked upon as an indecipherable ideology and a source of amusement. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, had a hoax article published in ‘Social Text’ an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. In ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Anew study in Nature Sustainability incorporates the damages that climate change does to healthy ecosystems into standard climate-economics models. The key finding in the study by Bernardo Bastien-Olvera and Frances Moore from the University of California at Davis: The models have been underestimating the ...
In a recent interview with RNZ (14th of January), NZ Council of Civil Liberties Chair Thomas Beagle, in response to Simon Bridges condemnation of the post-Trump Twitter purge of local far Right and other accounts, said the following: “Cos the thing about freedom of expression is that it’s not just ...
Let’s be clear: if Trump is not politically killed off once and for all, he will become a MAGA Dracula, rising from the dead to haunt US politics for years to come and giving inspiration to his wretched family of grifters and thousands of deplorables well into the next decade. ...
Since its demise as an imperial power, and especially its deindustrialisation under Thatcher, the UK's primary economic engine has been its role as a money laundry, using its network of overseas territories as tax havens to enable rich people around the world to steal from the societies they live in. ...
Last month OMV quit the Great South Basin and surrendered its offshore exploration permits outside of Taranaki. This month, Australian-owned Beach Energy has done the same: Beach Energy Resources New Zealand has decided to abandon all of its oil and gas exploration permits off the South Island coast, including ...
The new Northland case has been linked to the South African strain of Covid-19, one of a number of new, more contagious Covid variants. Here’s how they emerge and why. Let’s start with the basics. The genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for Covid-19 is a strand of RNA ...
MARVIN HUBBARD, US citizen by birth, New Zealand citizen by choice, Quaker and left-wing activist, has been broadcasting his show, "Community or Chaos", on Otago Access Radio for the best part of 30 years. On 24 November last year, I spoke with him about the outcome of the 2020 General ...
This is a guest blog post by Daniel Tamberg, Potsdam, co-founder and director of SCIARA GmbH. The non-profit organisation SCIARA is developing and operating a flexible software platform for scientific simulation games that allows thousands of players to explore, design and understand possible climate futures together. Decision-makers in politics, business, ...
Yesterday's Gone: Cold shivers are running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante. A change is gonna come. ONE COULD ...
Is it possible to live and let live in the post-Trump era? The online campaign to vilify Christopher Liddell, ex-White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant to Trump, makes for an interesting case study. Liddell is a New Zealander whose illustrious career in corporate America once earned him plaudits ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 17, 2021 through Sat, Jan 23, 2021Editor's Choice12 new books explore fresh approaches to act on climate changeAuthors explore scientific, economic, and political avenues for climate action ...
This discussion is from a Twitter thread by Martin Kulldorff on 20 December 2020. He is a Professor at Harvard Medical School specialising in disease surveillance methods, infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety. His Twitter handle is @MartinKulldorff #1 Public health is about all health outcomes, not just a single ...
The Treasury forecasts suggest the economy is doing better than expected after the Covid Shock. John Kenneth Galbraith was wont to say that economic forecasting was designed to make astrology look good. Unfair, but it raises the question of the purpose of economic forecasts. Certainly the public may treat them ...
Q: Will the COVID-19 vaccines prevent the transmission of the coronavirus and bring about community immunity (aka herd immunity)? A: Jury not in yet but vaccines do not have to be perfect to thwart the spread of infection. While vaccines induce protection against illness, they do not always stop actual ...
Joe Biden seems to be everything that Donald Trump was not – decent, straightforward, considerate of others, mindful of his responsibilities – but none of that means that he has an easy path ahead of him. The pandemic still rages, American standing in the world is grievously low, and the ...
Keana VirmaniFrom healthcare robots to data privacy, to sea level rise and Antarctica under the ice: in the four years since its establishment, the Aotearoa New Zealand Science Journalism Fund has supported over 30 projects.Rebecca Priestley, receiving the PM Science Communication Prize (Photo by Mark Tantrum) Associate Professor ...
Nothing more from me today - I'm off to Wellington, to participate in the city's annual roleplaying convention (which has also eaten my time for the whole week, limiting blogging despite there being interesting things happening). Normal bloggage will resume Tuesday. ...
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weaponscame into force today, making the development, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal in international law. Every nuclear-armed state is now a criminal regime. The corporations and scientists who design, build and maintain their illegal weapons are now ...
"Come The Revolution!" The key objective of Bernard Hickey’s revolutionary solution to the housing crisis is a 50 percent reduction in the price of the average family home. This will be achieved by the introduction of Capital Gains, Land, and Wealth taxes, and by the opening up of currently RMA-protected ...
by Daphna Whitmore Twitter and Facebook shutting down Trump’s accounts after his supporters stormed Capitol Hill is old news now but the debates continue over whether the actions against Trump are a good thing or not. Those in favour of banning Trump say Twitter and Facebook are private companies and ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Democrats now control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade, albeit with razor thin Congressional majorities. The last time, in the 111th Congress (2009-2011), House Democrats passed a carbon cap and trade bill, but it died ...
Session thirty-three was highly abbreviated, via having to move house in a short space of time. Oh well. The party decided to ignore the tree-monster and continue the attack on the Giant Troll. Tarsin – flying on a giant summoned bat – dumped some high-grade oil over the ...
Last night I stayed up till 3am just to see then-President Donald Trump leave the White House, get on a plane, and fly off to Florida, hopefully never to return. And when I woke up this morning, America was different. Not perfect, because it never was. Probably not even good, ...
Watching today’s inauguration of Joe Biden as the United States’ 46th president, there’s not a lot in common with the inauguration of Donald Trump just four destructive years ago. Where Trump warned of carnage, Biden dared to hope for unity and decency. But the one place they converge is that ...
Dan FalkBritons who switched on their TVs to “Good Morning Britain” on the morning of Sept. 15, 2020, were greeted by news not from our own troubled world, but from neighboring Venus. Piers Morgan, one of the hosts, was talking about a major science story that had surfaced the ...
Sara LutermanGrowing up autistic in a non-autistic world can be very isolating. We are often strange and out of sync with peers, despite our best efforts. Autistic adults have, until very recently, been largely absent from media and the public sphere. Finding role models is difficult. Finding useful advice ...
Doug JohnsonThe alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year. In 2015, for instance, around 75,000 people visited the Chicago Botanic Garden to see one of their corpse flowers bloom. More than ...
Getting to Browser Tab Zero so I can reboot the computer is awfully hard when the one open tab is a Table of Contents for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and every issue has more stuff I want to read. A few highlights: Gugler et al demonstrating ...
Timothy Ford, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Charles M. Schweik, University of Massachusetts AmherstTo mitigate health inequities and promote social justice, coronavirus vaccines need to get to underserved populations and hard-to-reach communities. There are few places in the U.S. that are unreachable by road, but other factors – many ...
Israel chose to pay a bit over the odds for the Pfizer vaccine to get earlier access. Here’s The Times of Israel from 16 November. American government will be charged $39 for each two-shot dose, and the European bloc even less, but Jerusalem said to agree to pay $56. Israel ...
Orla is a gender critical Marxist in Ireland. She gave a presentation on 15 January 2021 on the connection between postmodern/transgender identity politics and the current attacks on democratic and free speech rights. Orla has been active previously in the Irish Socialist Workers Party and the People Before Profit electoral ...
. . America: The Empire Strikes Back (at itself) Further to my comments in the first part of 2020: The History That Was, the following should be considered regarding the current state of the US. They most likely will be by future historians pondering the critical decades of ...
Nathaniel ScharpingIn March, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down major cities in the U.S., researchers were thinking about blood. In particular, they were worried about the U.S. blood supply — the millions of donations every year that help keep hospital patients alive when they need a transfusion. ...
Sarah L Caddy, University of CambridgeVaccines are a marvel of medicine. Few interventions can claim to have saved as many lives. But it may surprise you to know that not all vaccines provide the same level of protection. Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you ...
Back in 2016, the Portuguese government announced plans to stop burning coal by 2030. But progress has come much quicker, and they're now scheduled to close their last coal plant by the end of this year: The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 ...
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, ...
RNZ reports on continued arbitrariness on decisions at the border. British comedian Russell Howard is about to tour New Zealand and other acts allowed in through managed isolation this summer include drag queen RuPaul and musicians at Northern Bass in Mangawhai and the Bay Dreams festival. The vice-president of the ...
As families around the world mourn more than two million people dead from Covid-19, the Plan B academics and their PR industry collaborator continue to argue that the New Zealand government should stop focusing on our managed isolation and quarantine system and instead protect the elderly so that they can ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 10, 2021 through Sat, Jan 16, 2021Editor's ChoiceNASA says 2020 tied for hottest year on record — here’s what you can do to helpPhoto by Michael Held on Unsplash ...
Health authorities in Norway are reporting some concerns about deaths in frail elderly after receiving their COVID-19 vaccine. Is this causally related to the vaccine? Probably not but here are the things to consider. According to the news there have been 23 deaths in Norway shortly after vaccine administration and ...
Happy New Year! No, experts are not concerned that “…one of New Zealand’s COIVD-1( vaccines will fail to protect the country” Here is why. But first I wish to issue an expletive about this journalism (First in Australia and then in NZ). It exhibits utter failure to actually truly consult ...
All nations have shadows; some acknowledge them. For others they shape their image in uncomfortable ways.The staunch Labour supporter was in despair at what her Rogernomics Government was doing. But she finished ‘at least, we got rid of Muldoon’, a response which tells us that then, and today, one’s views ...
Grigori GuitchountsIn November, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, made an attention-grabbing announcement: More than 30 of its most prestigious journals, including the flagship Nature, will now allow authors to pay a fee of US$11,390 to make their papers freely available for anyone to read ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer Imagine a major climate change law passing the U.S. Congress unanimously? Don’t bother. It turns out that you don’t need to imagine it. Get this: The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed ...
“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie ...
TheOneRing.Net has got its paws on the official synopsis of the upcoming Amazon Tolkien TV series. It’s a development that brings to mind the line about Sauron deliberately releasing Gollum from the dungeons of Barad-dûr. Amazon knew exactly what they were doing here, in terms of drumming up publicity: ...
Since Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, US presidents have joined an informal club intended to provide support - and occasionally rivalry - between those few who have been ‘leaders of the free world’. Donald Trump, elected on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ and a constant mocker of his predecessors, ...
For over a decade commentators have noted the rise of a new brand of explicitly ideological politics throughout the world. By this they usually refer to the re-emergence of national populism and avowedly illiberal approaches to governance throughout the “advanced” democratic community, but they also extend the thought to the ...
The US House of Representatives has just impeached Donald Trump, giving him the dubious honour of being the only US President to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans voted for impeachement, making it the most bipartisan impeachment ever. The question now is whether the Senate will rise to the occasion, and ...
Kieren Mitchell; Alice Mouton, Université de Liège; Angela Perri, Durham University, and Laurent Frantz, Ludwig Maximilian University of MunichThanks to the hit television series Game of Thrones, the dire wolf has gained a near-mythical status. But it was a real animal that roamed the Americas for at least 250,000 ...
Tide of tidal data rises Having cast our own fate to include rising sea level, there's a degree of urgency in learning the history of mean sea level in any given spot, beyond idle curiosity. Sea level rise (SLR) isn't equal from one place to another and even at a particular ...
Well, some of those chickens sure came home bigly, didn’t they… and proceeded to shit all over the nice carpet in the Capitol. What we were seeing here are societal forces that have long had difficulty trying to reconcile people to the “idea” of America and the reality of ...
In the wake of Donald Trump's incitement of an assault on the US capitol, Twitter finally enforced its terms of service and suspended his account. They've since followed that up with action against prominent QAnon accounts and Trumpers, including in New Zealand. I'm not unhappy with this: Trump regularly violated ...
Peter S. Ross, University of British ColumbiaThe Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern ...
Susan St John makes the case for taxing a deemed rate of return on excessive real estate holdings (after a family home exemption), to redirect scarce housing resources to where they are needed most. Read the full article here ...
I’m less than convinced by arguments that platforms like Twitter should be subject to common carrier regulation preventing them from being able to decide who to keep on as clients of their free services, and who they would not like to serve. It’s much easier to create competition for the ...
A growing public housing waiting list and continued increase of house prices must be urgently addressed by Government, Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson said today. ...
A Waitomo-based Jobs for Nature project will keep up to ten people employed in the village as the tourism sector recovers post Covid-19 Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “This $500,000 project will save ten local jobs by deploying workers from Discover Waitomo into nature-based jobs. They will be undertaking local ...
Minister for Climate Change, James Shaw spoke yesterday with President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. “I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Mr. Kerry this morning about the urgency with which our governments must confront the climate emergency. I am grateful to him and ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Hon Nanaia Mahuta today announced three diplomatic appointments: Alana Hudson as Ambassador to Poland John Riley as Consul-General to Hong Kong Stephen Wong as Consul-General to Shanghai Poland “New Zealand’s relationship with Poland is built on enduring personal, economic and historical connections. Poland is also an important ...
Work begins today at Wainuiomata High School to ensure buildings and teaching spaces are fit for purpose, Education Minister Chris Hipkins says. The Minister joined principal Janette Melrose and board chair Lynda Koia to kick off demolition for the project, which is worth close to $40 million, as the site ...
A skilled and experienced group of people have been named as the newly established Oranga Tamariki Ministerial Advisory Board by Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis today. The Board will provide independent advice and assurance to the Minister for Children across three key areas of Oranga Tamariki: relationships with families, whānau, and ...
The green light for New Zealand’s first COVID-19 vaccine could be granted in just over a week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said today. “We’re making swift progress towards vaccinating New Zealanders against the virus, but we’re also absolutely committed to ensuring the vaccines are safe and effective,” Jacinda Ardern said. ...
The Minister for ACC is pleased to announce the appointment of three new members to join the Board of ACC on 1 February 2021. “All three bring diverse skills and experience to provide strong governance oversight to lead the direction of ACC” said Hon Carmel Sepuloni. Bella Takiari-Brame from Hamilton ...
The Government is investing $9 million to upgrade a significant community facility in Invercargill, creating economic stimulus and jobs, Infrastructure Minister Grant Robertson and Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene have announced. The grant for Waihōpai Rūnaka Inc to make improvements to Murihiku Marae comes from the $3 billion set ...
[Opening comments, welcome and thank you to Auckland University etc] It is a great pleasure to be here this afternoon to celebrate such an historic occasion - the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This is a moment many feared would never come, but ...
The Government is providing $3 million in one-off seed funding to help disabled people around New Zealand stay connected and access support in their communities, Minister for Disability Issues, Carmel Sepuloni announced today. The funding will allow disability service providers to develop digital and community-based solutions over the next two ...
Border workers in quarantine facilities will be offered voluntary daily COVID-19 saliva tests in addition to their regular weekly testing, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. This additional option will be rolled out at the Jet Park Quarantine facility in Auckland starting on Monday 25 January, and then to ...
The next steps in the Government’s ambitious firearms reform programme to include a three-month buy-back have been announced by Police Minister Poto Williams today. “The last buy-back and amnesty was unprecedented for New Zealand and was successful in collecting 60,297 firearms, modifying a further 5,630 firearms, and collecting 299,837 prohibited ...
Upscaling work already underway to restore two iconic ecosystems will deliver jobs and a lasting legacy, Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “The Jobs for Nature programme provides $1.25 billion over four years to offer employment opportunities for people whose livelihoods have been impacted by the COVID-19 recession. “Two new projects ...
The Government has released its Public Housing Plan 2021-2024 which outlines the intention of where 8,000 additional public and transitional housing places announced in Budget 2020, will go. “The Government is committed to continuing its public house build programme at pace and scale. The extra 8,000 homes – 6000 public ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has congratulated President Joe Biden on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States of America. “I look forward to building a close relationship with President Biden and working with him on issues that matter to both our countries,” Jacinda Ardern said. “New Zealand ...
A major investment to tackle wilding pines in Mt Richmond will create jobs and help protect the area’s unique ecosystems, Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor says. The Mt Richmond Forest Park has unique ecosystems developed on mineral-rich geology, including taonga plant species found nowhere else in the country. “These special plant ...
To further protect New Zealand from COVID-19, the Government is extending pre-departure testing to all passengers to New Zealand except from Australia, Antarctica and most Pacific Islands, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “The change will come into force for all flights arriving in New Zealand after 11:59pm (NZT) on Monday ...
Bay Conservation Cadets launched with first intake Supported with $3.5 million grant Part of $1.245b Jobs for Nature programme to accelerate recover from Covid Cadets will learn skills to protect and enhance environment Environment Minister David Parker today welcomed the first intake of cadets at the launch of the Bay ...
The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown have announced passengers from the Cook Islands can resume quarantine-free travel into New Zealand from 21 January, enabling access to essential services such as health. “Following confirmation of the Cook Islands’ COVID ...
Jobs for Nature funding is being made available to conservation groups and landowners to employ staff and contractors in a move aimed at boosting local biodiversity-focused projects, Conservation Minister Kiritapu Allan has announced. It is estimated some 400-plus jobs will be created with employment opportunities in ecology, restoration, trapping, ...
The Government has approved an exception class for 1000 international tertiary students, degree level and above, who began their study in New Zealand but were caught offshore when border restrictions began. The exception will allow students to return to New Zealand in stages from April 2021. “Our top priority continues ...
Today’s deal between Meridian and Rio Tinto for the Tiwai smelter to remain open another four years provides time for a managed transition for Southland. “The deal provides welcome certainty to the Southland community by protecting jobs and incomes as the region plans for the future. The Government is committed ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has appointed Anna Curzon to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). The leader of each APEC economy appoints three private sector representatives to ABAC. ABAC provides advice to leaders annually on business priorities. “ABAC helps ensure that APEC’s work programme is informed by business community perspectives ...
The Government’s prudent fiscal management and strong policy programme in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic have been acknowledged by the credit rating agency Fitch. Fitch has today affirmed New Zealand’s local currency rating at AA+ with a stable outlook and foreign currency rating at AA with a positive ...
The Government is putting in place a suite of additional actions to protect New Zealand from COVID-19, including new emerging variants, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “Given the high rates of infection in many countries and evidence of the global spread of more transmissible variants, it’s clear that ...
$36 million of Government funding alongside councils and others for 19 projects Investment will clean up and protect waterways and create local jobs Boots on the ground expected in Q2 of 2021 Funding part of the Jobs for Nature policy package A package of 19 projects will help clean up ...
The commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Ruapekapeka represents an opportunity for all New Zealanders to reflect on the role these conflicts have had in creating our modern nation, says Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Kiri Allan. “The Battle at Te Ruapekapeka Pā, which took ...
At 5am today, cock’s crow, the embargo lifted on the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlist. Here are the books in the race, followed by thoughts from poetry editor Chris Tse and books editor Catherine Woulfe. A shortlist of four books in each category will be announced March 3, with ...
Ignoring those QR codes when you drop into the supermarket? Can’t be bothered when you grab a coffee? The people serving you notice, and you’re freaking them out.So far, New Zealanders’ use of the Covid-19 Tracer app has been notably woeful. Food industry workers who’ve watched streams of customers walk ...
Steve Braunias reveals the longlist of the 2021 Ockham New Zealand book awards Apart from one or two unfortunate omissions which cast doubt on the sanity and intellectual acumen of judges, especially the nobodies who judged this year's non-fiction, the longlist for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand book awards is ...
By Lulu Mark in Port Moresby Papua New Guinea’s biggest hospital is straining to provide medical services to the growing population of the capital Port Moresby – with an estimated growth rate of 3 percent annually, a medical executive says. Port Moresby General Hospital chief executive officer Dr Paki Molumi ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Nationals who attend Thursday’s memorial service in Tweed Heads for Doug Anthony, who died last month aged 90, may muse on the contrast between the state of their party when he led it and now. ...
Returning to quarantine-free travel in 2021 doesn't just need a vaccine, but a way to check whether arriving passengers are actually immune to the virus. A smart Kiwi science start-up is working with a global biometrics giant to make that happen. A deal signed between Kiwi research and development company Orbis Diagnostics, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caitlyn Forster, PhD Candidate, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney This summer’s wetter conditions have created great conditions for flowering plants. Flowers provide sweet nectar and protein-rich pollen, attracting many insects, including bees. Commercial honey bees are also thriving: ...
Lotto scratchie tickets featuring the pop band Six60 are being withdrawn after a public backlash. In a statement, Lotto NZ said there had been a mutual decision made with the band to remove the tickets from sale following the negative feedback, and it offered an apology. The band faced criticism, both ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Russell Dean Christopher Bicknell, Post-doctoral researcher in Palaeobiology , University of New England Shell-crushing predation was already in full swing half a billion years ago, as our new research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveals. A hyena devouring ...
Vodafone has suspended advertising on the radio station amid calls for talkback host John Banks to be taken off air after yet another racist outburst. Alex Braae reports. In an alarming segment of talkback radio, former Auckland mayor John Banks endorsed the views of a caller who described Māori as a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Welch, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland When a COVID-19 case was found in Northland last Sunday, Aotearoa’s second-longest period with no detected community case came to an end. ESR scientists worked late into Sunday night to obtain a whole genome sequence ...
He has the perfect moustache, an exceptional mullet, and he uses terms like ‘face hole’ on national TV. Who or what is Dr Joel Rindelaub?I was drawn in by the moustache, but it was the mullet that really kept me there. Watching TVNZ’s Breakfast yesterday morning I was fixated. Often, ...
We’ll never be royals with nearly a quarter of declined baby names featuring “Royal” in some form or another. Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs has released the list of names declined in 2020 by the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and ...
After a raft of inquiries delving into and recommending what should be done about the politically beleaguered Orangi Tamaraki, along with the briefing papers we suppose he has been given, we imagined Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis would have no more need for expert advice. Wrong. He has ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Ho, Senior Lecturer and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University There’s a common assumption men take longer than women to poo. People say so on Twitter, in memes, and elsewhereonline. But is that right? What could explain it? And if ...
Just as sexuality is a spectrum, so too is asexuality. In Ace of Hearts, members of New Zealand’s asexual community talk about the challenges and misconceptions of identifying as ace.First published November 17, 2020.Ace of Hearts is part of Frame, a series of short documentaries produced by Wrestler for The Spinoff.“A ...
Sam Brooks wasn’t allowed to watch kids TV as a kid. Now, as a 30 year old man, he watches it for the first time.My mother’s approach to parenting was unorthodox. I wrote weekly book reports on top of my actual homework, I did maths equations in Roman numerals and ...
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk More leading Indonesian figures have made racial slurs against Natalius Pigai, former chair of the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) – and all West Papuans, says United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda. “Since the illegal Indonesian invasion in 1963, Indonesian ...
“The Government’s failure to even conduct a standard cost-benefit analysis for the most expensive infrastructure project in New Zealand’s history is mind-bogglingly arrogant,” says New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke. “A ...
The Ministry of Health is today drawing backlash from the local New Zealand vaping industry following its release of proposed regulations for the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act. Vaping Trade Association New Zealand (VTANZ) President, ...
Sophie Gilmour and Simon Day are joined by special guest Hugo Baird, co-owner of Grey Lynn’s Honey Bones and Lilian, to talk about opening new pub Hotel Ponsonby.Auckland is a city of many bars but few really good pubs – the kind of places you’d be just as comfortable going ...
The appointment of an advisory board for Oranga Tamariki is welcome and should be a step toward a total transformation of the care and protection system to a by Māori, for Māori approach, Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft said today. Minister ...
Taking control of your financial wellbeing can have cascading positive impacts for your life and it can also be fun. With the help of the team at Kiwi Wealth, we’ve compiled some simple tricks for balancing your books in 2021. There’s something about the beginning of a new year, especially after ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kris Gledhill, Professor of Law, Auckland University of Technology As we know, getting into New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult. There are practicalities, such as high airfare and managed isolation costs. And there are legal requirements, including pre-flight testing, mandatory ...
New Zealand faces the risk of a generation being locked out of the housing market unless land is freed up and more houses built, National Party leader Judith Collins says. ...
On Sunday, Stuff published a months-long investigation by Alison Mau detailing allegations of harassment and exploitation within the local music industry.The piece, ‘Music industry professionals demand change after speaking out about its dark side’, includes allegations of inappropriate behaviour and abuse of power by male artists, international acts and executives; ...
“The Government is all at sea on timelines for Australia and New Zealand’s respective vaccine roll-outs, with the worst news coming from the mouth of Pfizer Australia CEO Anne Harris,” says ACT Leader David Seymour. “Yesterday, under increasing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Higgins, Senior Research Fellow, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised the US would demonstrate “global leadership on refugees”. Once elected, he pledged to vastly increase refugee resettlement in the US. If history is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Baumann, Casual Academic, School of Social Sciences & Psychology, Western Sydney University Among the many hard truths exposed by COVID-19 is the huge disparity between the world’s rich and poor. As economies went into freefall, the world’s billionaires increased their already ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jan Lanicek, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW On January 27 communities worldwide commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz — the largest complex of concentration camps and extermination centres during the Holocaust. This is the first year the International ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorinda Cramer, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Australian Catholic University The summer break is over, marking a return to the office. For some, this ends almost a year of working from home in lockdown. Some analysts are predicting it might also mark an enduring ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for January 27, keeping you up to date with the latest local and international news. Reach me on stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur members make The Spinoff happen! Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato New Zealand has a strong history of protecting and promoting human rights at home and internationally, and prides itself on being an outspoken critic and global leader in this area. So, when the most ...
Good morning and welcome to the Bulletin. In today’s edition: Collins outlines the plan forward for National, no spread of Covid spotted yet in Northland, and students return for climate protest.In front of a Rotary Club at the Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland, National leader Judith Collins yesterday set out her ...
*This articlefirst appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. The tourism industry isn't holding its breath for a trans-Tasman travel bubble being in place after Australia temporarily closed its borders to New Zealand. New Zealanders could be waiting even longer for a full trans-Tasman bubble, with the ...
We continue our week-long examination of New Zealand writer Roderick Finlayson with an essay by Anahera Gildea on cultural appropriation Every night at 7pm sharp, my Irish Catholic father and his eight siblings would have to kneel on the carpet of the living room, facing the freshly polished nudity of ...
Children's Minister Kelvin Davis will have independent eyes and ears across Oranga Tamariki over the next five months as the Government tries to change the work and practices of the ministry. The Government has created a Māori-led watchdog to oversee how the children's ministry, Oranga Tamariki, deals with parents and ...
A Covid reset will force costly and inflexible cities to take a hard look at their planning systems, or people will vote with their feet. Broken urban planning systems make for misery even in the best of times. If land use and housing regulations prevent metropolitan areas from growing up or out as ...
When an Auckland school classroom went up in flames in December last year, exploding asbestos over neighbouring houses, five separate government agencies were involved. Yet stressed residents dealing with the aftermath on their homes say the response felt chaotic and uncoordinated; even local MPs who got involved couldn't get the information they wanted. Hundreds of thousands of ...
The pandemic has accelerated the trend of doing our banking online instead of in person. This rapid digital embrace has, in turn, sped up the closure of many smaller bank branches. But, as Mark Jennings writes, there are new branches springing up with a different look and purpose. Auckland’s Wynyard ...
Corrina Gage has represented New Zealand in a trio of water sports. But it's her love for waka ama - and the opportunities it gives paddlers from 5 to 85 - that keeps her racing and coaching around the world. Lake Karāpiro is quiet and still now. But last week, it was all noise ...
Telling a Rotary Club audience that housing is a serious problem and they should care deeply about it landed flat but took some daring from the National leader, writes Justin Giovannetti.Judith Collins’ level of control over the National Party is still a question best answered by a shrug.Elevated to her ...
A gang turf war gripped the South Auckland suburb in late 2020, forcing schools to lock down and armed police to patrol the streets. Community leaders are now warning the cycle of violent retribution could continue in 2021, unless radical interventions are made.The violent altercations that loomed large in Ōtara ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, University of Melbourne In this series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen. When I first heard that Rowan Atkinson was to put on Maigret’s velvet-collared overcoat, I wondered ...
Auckland writer Olivia Hayfield* explains how she resurrected 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe to star in her new novel, Sister to Sister. Olivia Hayfield is a pen name. Real name: Sue Copsey. When I’m planning my modern retellings of historical tales, I read widely on the characters and see who leaps out at ...
The Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine could be approved as early as next week, Marc Daalder reports Medsafe will be asked to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine against Covid-19 on February 2, the Government has announced. The Medicines Assessment Advisory Committee (MAAC) is an independent panel that provides advice on some medicine approvals in ...
COMMENT:By Bryan Kramer, PNG’s Minister of Police who has defended Commissioner Manning’s appointment today in The National My last article, announcing that I intend to make a submission to the National Executive Council (NEC) to amend the Public Service regulation to no longer require the Commissioner of Police to ...
The Point of Order Trough Monitor was triggered today by the announcement of a $9 million handout for Southlanders – sorry, some Southlanders. The news came from the office of Grant Robertson who, as Minister of Finance, prefers to invest public money rather than give it away – especially when ...
Few people outside of her campaign team gave Chlöe Swarbrick any chance of winning in Auckland Central this year – but the Green Party MP was too busy to listen. Here’s how they turned the electorate green.First published November 12, 2020.Three Ticks Chlöe is part of Frame, a series of short ...
Interactions between parents and healthcare providers could have a big impact on the wellbeing of our children, according to new research. The way parents and healthcare providers interact has lasting implications for children’s health, new research has found – and that includes immunisation uptake.Released today, the report is based on research ...
The Opposition starts the political year calling for emergency, temporary legislation to free up house building National leader Judith Collins has set five priorities for her party over the next three years - but excluded climate change, education and Crown-Māori relations. Giving her first 'state of the nation' speech as party ...
One of the biggest challenges facing the Ardern government is in public health. New Zealand may have escaped the pressures heaped on other health systems by the Covid-19 pandemic but its health service has had its problems, not least those exposed in the first report from Heather Simpson and her ...
New Zealand’s Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins has revealed that 14 close contacts of the Northland community case have returned negative test results. Yesterday he announced two close contacts – her husband and hair dresser – were negative. In his tweet, Hipkins described the news as “encouraging”. However, New ...
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the arbitrary and opaque experiments that Google is conducting with its search engine in Australia, with the consequence that many national news websites are no longer appearing in the search results seen by some users. The Australian, ABC, Australian Financial ...
Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta says councils can take stronger action against companies dumping contaminated waste water, even though they have identified loopholes in the law on fines. ...
Drag Race Down Under, part of the popular RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise, is filming in New Zealand. In their own words, local drag talent share what drag means to them and how it might be impacted by the show.RuPaul’s Drag Race is, quite simply, a television phenomenon. Love it or ...
For a long time, weighted blankets were considered a specialist device. Now they’re popular with even the most normal sleepers.Growing up, Temple Grandin spent time on her aunt’s cattle ranch in America, watching cow after stressed cow enter a squeeze chute and come out calm as the dead sea. She ...
Increased provisional tax thresholds, immediate low-value asset write offs and allowing the deferral of tax payments and use of money interest (UOMI) write offs were the most popular tax measures introduced by the Government to help businesses survive ...
The latest fleeing driver statistics show the numbers of incidents sky-rocketing out of control through 2020 with Police deciding the only tactic is to give up on chasing altogether, says Sensible Sentencing Trust. “The inconvenient truth is ...
With new revelations of the appalling racism behind Israel’s refusal to provide Covid-19 vaccines to 4.5 million Palestinians under its occupation and control, PSNA has renewed our call for the government to speak out alongside the United Nations ...
The Youth of NZ will be standing up for climate action once again, on January 26th outside of Parliament for School Strike 4 Climate NZ’s 100 Days 4 Action campaign rally. “COVID-19 may have stopped us in our tracks in the past. However, I tend ...
Speaking of Dirty, question of the day. What happened to Dirty Politics and all the information left with Gower. Now I read Gower had his eye damaged and was in hospital but surely paddy has read it by now and can start spilling the dirt to take some of the gleam off national or was Raw Shark duped. If Raw Shark was duped by Gower I wonder if he will reappear if National and MSM continue there DP tactics which it appears they are.
I noticed everything went damn quiet on the Herald as soon as O’Sullivans name was implicated!!!
How was O’Sullivan’s name implicated. I understood there wasn’t a lot of stuff left that wasn’t already in the book or that had been posted by whaledump.
However, there’s plenty in all that, already public info for the MSM to be pursuing. They’ve just let the whole nasty mess drop. Instead, they are labeling anything a little bit attacking “dirty politics”, providing rear guard smoke and mirrors.
@ karol..
..unused material was given to apn..fairfax..and tv3..
..this is what the court-case/injunctions have been all about..
..so we should see it rolling out soon/when all the ducks are in a row/oia’s answered..
Rawshark said all the most important stuff was already public, when he disappeared. Hager said something similar.
There’s plenty of issues to be pursued on the already-public stuff… OIA’s and other investigations.
oh well..!..one of us will be correct..
..as i think there is lots still to come..
..so you really think this big/expensive legal-battle..
..that fairfax/apn/tv3 have been involved in..
..trying to get injunctions against publication lifted..
..has been over nothing..?
Slater was the one who instigated the injunctions. Worked a treat in closing down reporting of the issues before the election. Now Team Nat-Slater has far less to gain from pursuing the issues/case.
This issue is well traversed by Russell Brown et al on Hard News. You may find substantive comments there which address your concerns. Pundit also might help with the ‘It’s gotta be down to media conspiracy” meme.
MSM in NZ seems woefully weak and some commentators are clearly and shamefully partisan, but this anti-MSM reflex from the left is often counterfactual and deservedly Standard posters come in for some mockery because of it.
+1
@ Galeandra
this anti-MSM reflex from the left is often counterfactual and deservedly Standard posters come in for some mockery because of it.
You deserve mockery for your quaint, naive comments. In fact they are typical of the complacent, conformist, accepting sort of NZer we all were who allowed the present developments by embracing Rogernomics.
Now that a few people are trying to drag the majority from this destructive coma of acceptance, it shocks the addicted.
Don’t rock the boat, don’t criticise, don’t put your ideas forward, don’t demand better, who do you think you are making complaints. Follow those in charge without question, they know best, everything will be justified in the end, and those ends will be golden and worthy of the sacrifices caused by the means.
Jam tomorrow for some and, for the most, compliance or else is the true end – that is the wisdom that observation teaches, substantively.
fair do’s warbles..
..i pour as much shit on the corporate media as anyone..
..and there is more than enough material to be getting on with..
..each and every day..
..so i see no need to make shit up about them..
..and of course they have not been able to publish..
..because of injunctions..etc..
..claiming it is part of a supression-conspiracy (favouring key/national) on their part..
..is just ridiculous..
..and i think this is all that galeandra is saying/pointing out..
What’s this MSM your talking about Galeandra? All I see is a corporate media, driven by the profit motivator. Fair enough, that’s their buzz. Just remember if your going to play the game in the interests of profit – you are open to criticism from a non-profit, or socialist perspective, also a green one, and/or a feminist perspective.
I think if you try thinking, you will find a few more perspectives the media, which uses as it base – the profit motivation – can be critiqued on.
To blame us for doing analysis and criticism of the media as it currently stands – is like blaming a fish for living in water.
@ Galeandra
Why if you are left do you spend your time criticising others who are left. And why if I disagree with you is it ad hominem comment? Why can you throw negatives around and then react against a spirited reply?
If you are so wise then you will know that one of the problems with the left is that they splinter into squabbling factions. If the idea is to get a strong left movement going, and you are wise, and informed and clever etc. then why wouldn’t you support the good ideas, then say why others are lacking and look to amalgamate the good ideas into a strong and yet flexible philosophy and entity?
Wikipedia
ad hominem, is a form of criticism directed at something about the person one is criticizing, rather than something (potentially, at least) independent of that person.
@ phillip
I think that enough evidence of MSM dirty tricks and bias has been presented here to justify our criticisms. And you can have your own separate viewpoint but this does not diminish our findings when they are based on observation and fact. If they are not then you can present the source and your interpretation of what was said to justify your position and show TS commenters their error.
Well, well, well…… so having a ‘wrong’ opinion equates with “You deserve mockery for your quaint, naive comments” and references to my complacency and selfishness.
Just another shitty little attempt to shoot the messenger, which I think my original comment was about. Why don’t you follow up the sources I referenced before you let fly. Move out outside the truthy bubble, perhaps.
FYI, my inclination is harder left than most folks, and I used to spend quite a lot of time here but too many just want to interview their own keyboards. Labour still sucks but I try to support them even when the caucus let their politics of self-interest get in the way.
I don’t go in for ad hominums, I do grow tired of the faffing and whining that posters so liberally spray around, and sadly, I do read a lot of scathing posts elsewhere about “te Standard’ and the siege mentality that pervades its posts.
Thanks you for concern. Have a good day.
Comes in, makes a contentious statement, throws toys and takes off in a sook once challenged.
Claims to be of the “harder left” variety.
With skin that thin, no wonder we are losing 😀
Some of us demand more sober sources than Public Address.
Pundit is an “establishment” blog written mostly by insiders. The last thing you are going to find there is genuinely critical analysis.
That’s always been true. This time seems somewhat different to me and people in my social circle. Media bias is not new in New Zealand. Collusion between media and political parties of the kind exposed by Hager does seem to be something new, as was the relentless media campaign against Cunliffe by TV3, Stuff and the Herald. I’ve seen that done overseas, but never here.
Now if you want to claim that there was no relentless series of hit pieces on Cunliffe over the past year, I don’t think I have anything further to say to you. It was patently obvious to anyone watching, and denials just aren’t credible.
Holding the media solely responsible for the election result is hardly credible, but who is actually doing that? To say that the media had no role in it is equally silly. But that’s largely irrelevant – they didn’t do their job. The media in this election were poor and in many cases actively partisan. It doesn’t really help that most of them are stupid, but you’d think that they could make more of their admittedly meagre talents.
you could read a little wider here and find many on the left hold the Left responsible for its failures. it is you who chooses to characterise the comments here on the defeat as being
media bad
left hard done by
you stated Standard poters deserve the mockery, not some posters.
most people i read here commenting about the media have also commented on other aspects of Labours demise from internal squabbling, lack of connection to middle nz and much more.
you make such a bald statement as that and then shrink into a shell cos someone took umbrage?
yes it did. defending himself in another case cos he says he has no, oney but a QC for the injunction… mission accomplished.
“Gower had his eye damaged” What by, or who by are the questions
the abc’ers have a lot to answer for..
..not only did they undermine cunliffe from day one..
..their control of the policy-process..
..ensured that cunliffe was sent to campaign with an empty-policy satchel..
..with nothing for those people he was talking to/inspiring..
..when labour were polling at 35-37%..
..plus there was parkers’ vote-killing brainfart…the raise the pension-age clanger..
..that went down like a cup of cold sick…
..had cunliffe been given policies that backed that 35%-37% rhetoric..
..cunliffe wd now be prime minister..
..and the abc’ers stopped those policies..
..it is easy to conclude the abc’ers cost labour/progressives the election..
..and those same bastards now trying to blame cunliffe for the poor result..
..is kinda puke-inducing..
..and a bunch of lies..
I actually posted this on Open Mike yesterday, but it very much relates to what you are saying, and I think it’s an important issue…
.
“Leadership and policy are not the same thing. The parliamentary leader may well be the front man for party policy but does not get to create policy to suit themselves.
.
By extension then, does it really make sense to say that this leader took the party left, or that that leader would take it right etc?
.
Or is their solid evidence to suggest that I’m being naive?”
Quick disclosure: In future I will be dropping the handle HH (too evocative of Labour’s historic mana) and I will be posting under the name Cave Johnson.
[karol: thanks for letting people know. Flagging it to the moderators]
Yeah, that’s a good point and so the Labour people who want to go left need to ask where the policies are decided and why aren’t Labour’s policies the ones they want?
you’re too fucking gnomic.
…. if you
… wanted ….
to…
be…
…more hooton…
…than hoot..o…n…
………
…… why not
just be terse instead?
Phil U – 100% agree !
Phillip Ure …your analysis is spot on….and now they want to elect a Leader before the Election analysis is out!
…it is almost corrupting the process of the leadership debate and selection
…especially if DC cops all the blame and loses to Robertson ( who is absolutely a Labour Party Election disaster imo)
Writing the same points over and over again is easy.
Have you got anything else we haven’t read 30 times since yesterday?
i don’t think i’ve seen anyone else argue the empty-policy-satchel case..
..(and no..i am not commencing a dialogue with you..i am just pointing that out..)
Fact check your rants bruv – Daily often repeated claims = Empty head of a one trick pony.
..Fucken..Bo(a)re…eh..?..
Speaking of one trick ponies, are you going to have a go at Mr Ure today?
Hang on you lot 🙂
I recall the left saying that Labour had great policies and that the Nats had no policies. And now you are saying Labour either had no policies, or the ones they had were toxic.
So were the policies great, or were they toxic?
@ Allen …some things bear much repetition ….talking to children and talking politics
( besides which I thought you were talking to me until I realised you were talking to Phil….who actually does have interesting stuff to say)
michael parkin gives a very good impersonation of an empty-headed fool..
..(and he calls cosgrove ‘cosy’..chuckling about ‘cosy’ making up shit about the cunliffes..)
..he really is piece of fucken work..
…………………..if…..
you….
have…
a …..
drinking……
….problem…..
get…..
…..help…..
i don’t use alcohol..dear boy…
..far too declasse..eh…?
and the newest benchmark of/for declasse..is clayton cosgrove..
.(.or ‘cosy’ as tvone sock-puppet michael parkin calls him..)
..for just making stuff up about the cunliffes..
..or just ‘having a go”..
as sock-puppet parkin admiringly sneered this morn…
..(and hopefully this is the nadir in this relentless anti-cunliffe campaign being waged..
..i think cosgrove has taken it as low as it can go..)
lol…agree about Cosgrove
i’ve also noticed that alcohol use..especially the longer it goes on..
..dulls the brain of the user..
..have you noticed that in yrslf..?
Thanks for your concern.
I found your idiosyncratic writing style outrageously funny so I thought I’d have a crack at it.
It reminded me of someone who’s just hanging on to his bar stool (ergo the probably callous reference to our favourite tory opinionator). But then today I realized it has a striking resemblance to the diction of Rorschach (where Rawshark gets his name from) from the Watchmen. So now when I read your comments I hear Rorschach, which is pretty annoying.
“..I found your idiosyncratic writing style outrageously funny so I thought I’d have a crack at it. .”
..harder than it looks..?
Leadership campaign details are out. 14 meetings from 22 October (Wellington first) to South Auckland on November 11.
Voting results then announced November 18.
Seriously.. Labour should have kept the Goff-father after 2011. Probably would have won on Sept 20 but no… Let’s go all out internecine warfare in the public domain after every election loss.
Ffs.
Yes, Phil Goff should have stayed on as Labour leader for at least 6 months, to stabilise Labour after a big defeat. He was growing into the job as well. And Labour’s poor party vote performance could not simply be laid at Goff’s feet; there were many campaign management team decisions which led to a poor party vote campaign.
And FFS, this was a John Key Govt after just one term.
But Goff moved on after a lack of support from the pro-Robertson camp who was demanding change, and Goff didn’t have it in him to defend a bad election result. The thing they all had in common: none of them liked DC so the idea of installing David Shearer, with Grant Robertson as deputy, was born.
I agree. Goff was good. Still is. Now the Labour caucus members should put their egos/prejudices aside, get united and show their full loyal support to Cunliffe instead of spending heaps of cash on an unnecessary destabilising contest at this stage. Everything has some risk. Changing the leader now perhaps has the biggest risk of all.
CV, personally I put Goff in the Shearer category of too indecisive, can’t think on his feet, is a terrible orator.
As the leader gets the most press and announces the big things he’s got to have wits. The only time I’ve seen Cunliffe struggle was when Key set him up on the CGT for the family home. I believed DC’s reasoning, he was caught off guard there was not tax on family home or trust homes.
Robertson is a good orator too, Just doesn’t have the PM stature He’s short squat and can’t keep his shirt tucked in. At times Robertson looks like some random plucked off the sidewalk thrust into a suit he’s not fit to wear.
To me Goff clearly beats Shearer in the oratory and thinking on his feet stakes. That is not saying much – Goff does have a lot of experience to fall back on. But it’s not enough against John Key.
As for your description of Robertson. Yeah that laser guided bomb struck the designated target pretty hard.
Goff should have stayed long enough to hand over to Cunliffe and not a second more. In 1985 I was visiting various Labour MPs as part of a HART initiative to sound them out on the subsequently cancelled racist rugby tour. Goff was the only one who refused to see us. Helen Clark gave my friend and I more than half an hour.
Since that time, the only time I’ve had any respect for Goff was when he visited Yasser Arafat against the wishes of the Zionist regime.
Ahhh that’s informative, Murray.
Yeah I don’t think there are many people here that disagree with that, most people for better or for worse thought at the time that Goff should have stayed on.
Labour should – – –
I do – – — —
can you decode that?
@ chooky..
..psst..!..(hic!)…i think he has alcohol-issues…
Yeah sorry for being unhelpfully terse.
This blog has to have the greatest comments sections I’ve come across, but I do get frustrated by a lot of the “What Labour needs to do is…” opinionating. Tho alongside that there are also quite a lot of insightful criticisms of the party.
It seems to me that a lot of commenters have done a lot of yards in political activism, but then there are a lot of armchair critics. and I seriously believe that praxis is intrinsic to socialism. So my point is, OK thanks for all your opinions, but what actually the fuck are you doing/have you done about anything?
I know it could be construed as snobby, but there’s an unreality about language that isn’t grounded in work or experience. Or as Marx said: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
In my experience I have found it very hard to be *extremely* negative while I’m engaged in positive, constructive activism. So I take it as a sign of unhealthy disengagement when commenters reveal a kind of towering negativity about their subject.
The upside of the dairy price collapse, which after this monings Fonterra GDT auction drop ( http://www.globaldairytrade.info/en/product-results/whole-milk-powder/ ) is many of our environmental problems will be reduced. Because farming is about to become grass based as opposed to supplementary feed based, which will reduce output and reduce the nitrogen runoff into waterways.
Bank economists are arguing that it is cyclical, but it will be interesting to see if that proves correct…given what USA and Europe are doing this may be more structural, in which case many NZ dairy farmers will be forced off their farms with too much debt. This is scary times for our economy and the collapse of the national party’s key economic driver.
@ saarbo..
..there is a market-glut predicted for the next five years..
..which will continue to drive prices down..(fonterras’ latest price-predictions are laughably optimistic..)
..and of course soon we have the release of mufree..
..which is milk made from yeast..which looks/tastes/behaves the same as cow milk..(i.e..baking/cheese-making etc..)
..this is made with minimal environmental-footprint..(no dirty rivers..)..
..will be much cheaper that cow-milk..
..and will not need to be chilled..(it does not ‘go off’..)
..these twin-storms mean that longterm the dairy industry is pretty much fucked..
..and what concerns me is how so many iwi are pouring their treaty-settlement money into an industry –
– that could be compared with bridle-makers/stable-owners..
..just before the advent of the motor-car..
“..and of course soon we have the release of mufree….which is milk made from yeast..which looks/tastes/behaves the same as cow milk..(i.e..baking/cheese-making etc..)”
Put your astute observationalist punditry to the test and make a prediction in which year sales of genetically modified/engineered milk from a lab will out sell cows milk in NZ.
A. 2015
B. 2016-2020
C. 2020 – To absolutely never in a million years.
f.g.i. (for general information..)
..i understand mufree is not genetically-modified..gm..
..apparantly the manufacturing system is remarkably similar to the one used to make insulin..
Or D. About the same time Quorn replaces the bacon in my sandwich.
@phillip ure
Where are you reading/hearing a market glut for 5 years. I have read it will balance out over 2015. Personally I think it will be longer than that but I am interested where you read 5 years?
@ saarbo..it was in a reputable int publication..(sorry..can’t remember which..)
..a couple of months ago..
..they pointed out that the white-gold rush into dairy has happened globally..
..and there are big operations coming on-stream..on top of what is already there..
..and the prediction was this wd all lead to a glut lasting at least five yrs..
..which is pretty grim news for the nz economy…
I have vague recollections of reading it .. and found it in my history folder:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-11/milk-output-expansion-poised-to-spur-5-year-world-surplus.html
By Phoebe Sedgman Jul 12, 2014 5:09 AM GMT+1200
“A record payout to New Zealand dairy farmers last year is setting the stage for a global milk glut that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts will last half a decade.”
chrs kiwiri..
it’s a shame our corporate media doesn’t cover the important stories/’stuff’….
..i wonder what faff/nonsense they were headlining on july 12 th..?
Thanks Kiwiri.
You’ll note that article (July 2014) was predicting a forecast price of NZ$7/kg milk solids. The latest forecast from Fonterra on 24 September was NZ$5.30 and now the ANZ has cut its forecast to $4.85 & Westpac to $4.80
And you’ll note that the second article states “This sits well below the average cost of production for farmers and will have a significant impact on discretionary spending,”
shit..!..that is serious..
..and should our corporate media be covering this..?
..hell no..!..they’re busy..they have cunliiffe stories/dire-predictions to dream up..
And the ANZ/Westpac forecasts were on the basis that “assuming a modest bounce back in global prices.”
Agee PU. It is interesting that the Bloomberg article wasn’t picked up. TV3 news balmed the entire collapse of the dairy market on the unpredictable Russian ban on Dairy…not mentioning the very predictable oversupply from USA and Europe and drop in cost of cow feed (wheat) by 25% in USA.
‘coming up in the news at 10.30..
..patrick gower asks again..
..the question everyone wants the answer to..
..’is this the final nail in david cunliffes’ coffin..?’
..we have pictures of the nail..!..
..and paddy interviews the coffin..’..
Thanks: Yes that is interesting. It quotes Rabobank in there and it is Hayley Moinahan from Rabo NZ who is talking up some sort of recovery next year…which is really difficult to see happening given the over supply. To put things in contxt, for there to be oversupply then factories/dryers had to be built…they arnt going to de-commission new plant and equipment immediately, this is why commodities tend to do what they do…I was in the paper industry for a while and that industry is even worse than dairy. The big question is whether this downturn is cyclical or structural…if structural then we (NZ) is in the shit…so to speak.
+100 Saarbo
Dairy price drop.
How the government handles this will be interesting.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11334946
have you heard about the flag referendum…
Diversions can only work for some time.
The bribe of no CGT will wear thin as house prices stall and the economy tanks.
Key needs the TPP quickly to lock in the sale of the country to corporate interests and before enough people realise what’s happening.
if labour cannot acknowledge that they created pike river against public opposition.
if labour cannot acknowledge that the dismantled the mines safety regime against public opposition.
if labour cannot apologise to the families of the 29 miners
they should turn out the lights and shut the door on their way out!
1. Labour allowed Pike River to be investigated, National opened it up for commercial use
2. National dismantled mine safety in the 1990s, Labour was reviewing the legislation when National were elected in 2008 at which point National dropped the review
3. It’s National that should be apologising and coughing up the compensation
+1
nine yrs not long enough for labour to fix that..?
..that is one long ‘review’…
@ phillip
Labour was slow, weak, wet and deleterious in its duty to its constituents the workers in dangerous industries. (Other words for deleterious are injurious, destructive, prejudicial, ruinous. All are entirely appropriate. The free market gives you a choice – so feel free to choose freely.
(Also nocent is a synonym for destructive – what a great word for politician’s wrongdoing.)
Yes, they took too long to look at it but at the same time not everything can be done in a day and they did get round to looking at it. National stopped even the belated looking.
i guess if you wanted to try to retrieve a shard of credibility..
..(‘heyy!..c’mon..!…we were looking..!..)
..you cd try that on..
..but yeah..nah..eh..?
..and nine years is quite a bit longer than ‘a day’..eh..?
..who was the minister then..?
..which of these abc’ers was it..?
..labour and national are both guilty of criminal neglect..
that’s the thing with those abc’ers..
..they’ve all got so much baggage to lug around..
..they almost need permanent porters..
Even nine years isn’t long enough to do everything.
Really, you’re the one with credibility issues.
but definitely long enough to do something..
They did do something, quite a bit in fact – they just hadn’t gotten around to doing that.
DTB. You are very kind to Labour. Fact of the matter is that they were far too slow and cautious, spent a lot of energy carefully straddling the centre and fending off dirty politics attacks (eg shower heads, speeding to rugby games).
Interesting to see quite a lot of political columnists presently bagging the Greens for not selling out on their principles. I conjecture that what has happened is the election results which saw the majority of voting New Zealanders ignoring the moral reasons for not supporting National/ACT/etc has created a new amoral political universe that said columnists feel the need to somehow drag the Green Party and its supporters into. Sorry mates, us non-National/ACT etc voters may have lost the election but we remain on the right side of the moral universe which feels good inside. You can takeaway our rights but you can’t buy our souls.
ah..!..a green..!..a talking one..!..(rare in these parts..it seems..)
..care to tell us why you greens gifted peter dunne his 11th term in parliament..?
..much as you have also gifted him his seat in the elections before..
..cd you explain for us just how exactly your doing that..
..is in any shape or form..’on the right side of the moral universe’..
..eh..?
..i’m having difficulty seeing that..myself..
..what you did there may make you ‘feel good inside.’..
..it makes me feel like puking..
..i mean..was it even discussed/debated..?
..what the inevitable outcome of yr vote-splitting wd be..?
..and honestly..!..i have also had an irony-o.d. over this one..
..as dunne is the man who kept the green party out of office..way back when..eh..?
(..and this is how you repay him..?..as they say..)
..you could have taken dunne out at the election..
..why the hell didn’t you..?
..and..how he must laugh…eh..?
..at you..
@Phillip ure…why did Labour not agree to a coalition deal with the Greens before the Election?….that is part of your answer
the Election showed many of the potential Left alliance coalition Parties worked for themselves and not in collaborative concert…this was their undoing!
personally i think what Labour did to Hone and Int/MANA was unforgivable too….there was the possibility of 4 Left MPS ruled out for a Left coalition in that stupid little manouvre
….and as for rejecting the Maori Party as a coalition partner before the Election…this was crazy
i feel the greens should have had the nous to make a unilateral decision not to stand a candidate in ohariu..
..had they not..dunne wd be gone..
..dunne won by 900+ votes..
..the green candidate got 2,400+ electorate votes..
..how..in any way..can this not be braindead on the part of the greens..?
Bingo
…yes well maybe there are some dumb Greens?.
..and agreed in hindsight the Green Party should have called off the candidate
…but as I say there are extenuating circumstances
….and maybe the Green vote in that Electorate surprised everyone
in ohariiu there are 2,400+ of them..
..yes..the greens should have not stood a candidate..that much is pretty much unarguable..
..what ‘extenuating circumstances’ cd there possibly be..
..no..this has happened election after election..
..dunne is there/been able to do all the damage he did..
..because the green party split the vote..
,.and thus serially gift him the seat…
They can’t afford to do that due to the increase in advertising spending that the electorate candidate represents. In other words, to get the party name in front of more people they need the electorate candidates.
Everyone keeps going on about parties not working well in MMP and part of that is that in FPP, which the electorates still are, there are only two possible choices. And those two choices effectively come down to National (or who they tell people to vote for) or Labour and it will stay that way until such time as we bring in preferential voting for electorates.
thinks:..’hmm..!..some advertising revenue..?
..or get rid of peter dunne..?
..let’s go with the revenue..!..eh..?’
Do you know the difference between spending and revenue?
I really, really wish people would drop this specious argument about Ōhariu. All this discussion about tactical voting without any realistic understanding or analysis about when that tactical voting will work and when it won’t.
I’m not even going to link to my original comment – I’m just going to paste it here, again! 😡
“I think people are too easily seduced by the 900+ vote majority in Ōhariu into thinking Ginny Andersen could have won.
Look at the party vote distribution – 16,686 out of 32,698 voted National (leaving aside the 977 Conservative votes, 222 ACT & 241 United Future). The combined Green/Lab Party vote was 12,306. If there had been any hint of an accomodation between the Greens & Labour at the candidate level then the 5,000+ National voters who voted for Hudson would have simply switched to keep Dunne in. (If there’s one thing National voters know it’s how to follow directions from “Dear Leader”).
Ōhariu is not the old Onslow seat, its not even Ohariu-Belmont. It’s now a firmly National seat. Dunne has simply moved right as his seat has moved right. When the Hairdo retires it will return a National member (unless they stitch up some deal with the Conservatives to coattail the Conservative vote).
I’m not saying that tactical voting isn’t important – and that the Left needs to work out when it is important and when it isn’t (and that also means that sometimes Labour is going to have to surrender an electorate seat to someone else on the Left – oh I don’t know – say a seat like TTT!).”
Hi Phillip – I too would have been in favour of the Greens not having a candidate stand against Dunne.
chrs for answering..fambo..
..was it even discussed..?
..do you know why they didn’t make that decision not to stand a candidate..?
..the thought-processes behind that fascinate me..
..what on earth cd the ‘we must stand!’ case have been..?
+100 fambo
Congratulations to David Farrar. Kiwiblog has been accepted as a member of the Online Media Standards Authority.
It doesn’t mean that I like the blog. At the very best it is a personal blog, and he openly stands for “mischief”. I see the mischief in the way that he reports “accurately” but too often uses “facts” out of context, to suggest a conclusion that suits National. In other words it is a National propaganda blog, rather than a blog of the right, even if he periodically highlights a minor issue he personally disagrees with. And nothing of course stops selective reporting
Another issue that is worth noting is that there have been many criticisms of media standards, with regard to political reporting over this last election, that I think have a lot of justification. Main stream media will be quick to claim that they are neutral, and criticisms are made by all “sides” of politics, simply because they do not like negative publicity. This is partly true, but it’s also partly simply an excuse to ignore criticism. The main concerns I have is the open bias that is now accepted from people generally considered in the past to be reporting news. I have no concerns about people providing opinion, when that is clearly their role. But when others are given anchor roles in “news” type programmes, and are permitted to be openly political, I’m much more concerned. I’ll single out Mike Hosking, for an example of the worst of the worst. I’m less concerned about obvious subtle bias from a lot of others on the left, and the right.
Regardless, I’ll still say that I am pleased that Farrar has taken the action that he has. It’s a step in the right direction, and as the first blog to take this action, he deserves some accolades.
Farrar himself does not claim to be a journalist, distinguishing blogs from MSM. It’s a wise distinction. And he also openly says his blog is from the “right”. Open biases are less of a concern than hidden biases. Those on the “left” of the political spectrum, would be foolish not to periodically, and regularly understand what is being written on right leaning blogs.
I presume his joining means that standards will be maintained from the 1st October. It’s a pity that the example of Dirty politics from kiwiblog, exposed on this site, in the last week, is not subject to his “new” standards.
Refer to: Dirty Kiwiblog, 26 Sept 2014
“.I presume his joining means that standards will be maintained from the 1st October. It’s a pity that the example of Dirty politics from kiwiblog, exposed on this site, in the last week, is not subject to his “new” standards….”
he could have had better standards without joining a group. its hard to avoid the notion its a new way to make himlook reasonable… just another strategy.
The new “standards” don’t cover anything like the two track strategy or abuse of power as exposed by Hager. Where it does focus on accuracy, etc,, they are pretty weak:
So, not much different from what is done on most blogs and/or in the MSM… which still manages to be pretty inaccurate in its biases.
The rest of the standards are just about things like issues related to matters of sex and violence, for the most part, defamation, etc… most of it already covered by laws.
No doubt DPF will use it as a badge of not doing ‘Dirty Politics” of manipulation and deception, feeding such to the MSM, etc….. but it ain’t necessarily so in reality. There are clauses about not doing deception…. but ….?
https://www.facebook.com/cunliffeforleader
If you haven’t already signed this, and you support DC for leader, please click!
So Auckland city is about to come under a “mass surveillance” program after a contract awarded to HP????
Is this worse than the GCSB issue?
It seems more “personal” which is a worry?
and reported as a shiny new IT innovation.
Selling out our sovereignty – NZ data sent overseas, law enforcement processes, data matching, privacy intrusion – all conducted by foreign nationals in a foreign data centre now. All automatically sucked up by the NSA – where/when you go in your car/how long you stay there/who was in your vehicle with you etc.
aside from ‘who was in car with you?’..
..i-phones already do all that..
You can choose not to buy an iphone.
indeed..i just thought that many current i-phone owners wd not know that..
..it was more a public-service announcement/warning to them..
“My hope is that we will be able to pull it back. It is important to me that I leave my personal brand, which is reasonably statesman-like, and I’m not into any form of gutter politics. I’m distraught that this has occurred.”
– A statesman is usually a politician, diplomat or other notable public figure who has had a long and respected career at the national or international level.
– “The greasy little fulla in the blue suit”
Labours gift to National would be a Cunliffe win 🙂
You talking John Key or DPF there?
A message to the Darling of Ilam, James Dann – you say if David Cunliffe wins the leadership race you will leave the Labour Party. And you demand that if David Cunliffe loses the race, he should leave Parliament altogether. Well, to be absolutely consistent and even-handed how about this? If Grant Robertson loses the race, HE should have to leave Parliament too!! Fairness above all surely, James! Or is that not the way you roll?
Choices, choices! Is it OK if just James Dann leaves? Like, now?
Like yesterday, preferably.
ah, but where is he going?
you raised this yesterday? It’s a good question. I don’t think the guy has thought that far ahead.
In case you missed it – the truth is out the right wing hate the poor.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/conservative-party-conference-david-cameron-accidentally-says-tories-resent-the-poor-9768106.html
Now the British PM admits it.
The NZ Labour Party has had more than 2000 new members join in the last week…Vote David Cunliffe 🙂
How brill is that, Barfly?? So David Cunliffe is SO SO unpopular is he?
I see John Armstrong in the Herald is once again telling David Cunliffe to give up and go away. Ground hog day. Can anybody do a timeline showing the number of times that Armstrong and others at the Herald have called for Cunliffe’s resignation in the year since he became leader? – It feels like I have read the same article a hundred times. Hope he continues to disobey them.
@ westiechick..
..heh..!..it is becoming farcical..
..you could almost build a drinking game around every time gower says..
‘..’is this the last nail in cunliffes’ coffin?’..
..they are all fucken hysterical..bordering on demented..
..i am up early in the morning finding stories for whoar..
..and christie always starts his morning with a cunliffe-moan…
Here we go .. Monsanto’s GMO pressure on NZ farmers .. look at this loon on return from his free and no doubt well- sponsored trip. If this is released into NZ, it won’t matter who the leader of any party is .. we will be rendered useless by Monsanto.
Dirty Monsanto tricks makes Dirty Polltics look like a Peanuts cartoon.
Watch this space and oppose it when and where you can, please …. imo it is the BIGGEST issue we face.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/agribusiness/10555565/Farmer-calls-for-debate-on-GM-potential
Bully boy tactics ahead.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/04/a_battle_in_paradise_how_gmos_are_tearing_a_tropical_utopia_apart/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/14/kauai-anti-gmo-lawsuit_n_4593043.html
Yup. NZ under Key’s TPPA. Read it and weep for what ‘clean and green’ used to mean.
The loss of safe food and total desecration of our environment by glyphosate and then glyphosate-resistant weeds will be Key’s legacy if this is permitted through.
Glorious leader John, too stupid, thick and pig-ignorant to know any better. But so well-paid ….
I’m no fan of Monsanto but GM food has been proven to be extremely safe for human consumption and beneficial in a lot of ways.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water etc.
‘proven to be extremely safe for human consumption’
Where do you get your info from?
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/genetic-engineering/risks-of-genetic-engineering.html#.VCzRChZAYt4
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/genetic-engineering/risks-of-genetic-engineering.html#.VCzRChZAYt4
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2013/07/30/the-intensifying-debate-over-genetically-modified-foods/
I think you are missing the point I am getting at here – particularly when it comes to “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water etc”
Golden Rice is a GE product which is safe from human consumption and beneficial to children who have Vit A deficient diets.
Also I get my information from the vast majority of scientific literature.
http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/10/08/with-2000-global-studies-confirming-safety-gm-foods-among-most-analyzed-subject-in-science/
Oh FFS mate the real risk of GMO food isn’t to individual human health, it is the systemic and potentially catastrophic threat that GMOs pose to the global ecosystem.
Exactly right but I’m not suggesting we should just accept full instigation of GMO’s but what I am saying is that GMO research, as a science, could give real benefit to mankind so we should be using it where safe – such as with Golden Rice as a prime example.
GMO, the science, is sound and well tested and studied and long should it continue to be so.
WTF.
Take a look at the credentials of that site, Contrarian.
Their team consists of journalists, not scientists and a quick search (Sourcewatch) indicates that that site could be politically motivated (while I have already found online articles by them accusing real scientists of having ‘political motivations’).
Just from a very, very brief search, I find that website suspicious.
Check out the book ‘Merchants of Doubt’.
I’m not talking about the site, but the studies (the site I linked to aggregates them hence my linking to it). The vast, overwhelming, majority of studies into GMO’s and human health have found them to be completely safe. Very very few studies have highlighted serious problems and many that have done have been shown to be lacking in scientific rigor.
Here are some more (42):
http://www.agbioworld.org/biotech-info/articles/biotech-art/peer-reviewed-pubs.html
And more (600 in total I believe):
http://genera.biofortified.org/viewall.php
I am not suggesting GMO’s are always safe and should be used with impunity rather I am saying that test after test they have been shown to be effective and they should continue to rigorously tested for safety in an ongoing manner as we do currently to ensure their safety.
I really haven’t got the time to go and check all those links in that dodgy GLP website, nor your other links.
These types of checks require finding out the funding of the sites too – that GLP site ‘said’ they weren’t funded by large companies but I just happened to do a reasonable search, to discover they are strongly linked with a dodgy train of funding.
I’d rather stick to Union of Concerned Scientists, who acknowledge the problem with big money affecting science from the outset. Thanks for providing the links, though just the same, perhaps others will read them 🙂
My main problem with what you said was ‘ but GM food has been proven to be extremely safe for human consumption.’
I really don’t think scientists have established that GM food has been proven ‘extremely safe,’ yet and suggest to you that exaggerating facts, and making sweeping statements in the current climate of pseudo-scientific arguments that ‘Merchants of Doubt’ detailed, is a really, really, bad idea if you wish to be persuasive.
+ 100 Blue Leopard
The reason children are deficient in Vitamin A is because of POVERTY. In India there is plenty of food with vitamin A, namely papaya, but poor people can’t afford to buy it.
So how will poor people afford golden rice?
Maybe Monsanto ( is it them who make it) will subsidise it as a publicity stunt
Sure – but barring an overnight miracle which will eradicate poverty and ensure everyone worldwide has enough good food to eat starting today, Golden Rice offers a safe and easily accessible alternative while the world sorts its shit out.
(as far as “how can they afford it” it is given away almost for free as humanitarian aid – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice#Distribution and http://www.goldenrice.org/Content1-Who/who.php)
heh -the old vitamin A argument still got legs has it?
And prior to industrial mono-culture supplanting traditional farming techniques, do you think that just maybe (say) avocados would have been interspersed with whatever other main variety of crop was being grown, and that people could have satisfied their vitamin A needs through the simple act of growing and eating some foods rich in vitamin A?
That’s great but given we are in a post industrial mono-culture supplanting traditional farming techniques culture what do you say we make use of immediately available substances until such a time as we can return to an era of traditional farming?
The means are the ends, TheContrarian.
Those without power are always provided, by those with power, with the ‘worst option’ and also the ‘best option’ – one leads them to instant destruction; the other leads them deeper and deeper into the bowels of the prison/ the workhouse/ the labour camp.
I’m being a bit dramatic but hopefully you get my point.
The solution is to regain power – real power. Not over others, but over one’s own life.
Ah well fuck it then
Not at all.
By all means use ‘Golden Rice’ for Vitamin A.
Just don’t be under the illusion that it comes along as a ‘free lunch’. Know what’s being lost.
The trade-off between life/security and freedom has always been around.
So has the tendency for people to take advantage of other people who are at a disadvantage – and to set the frame in which those others operate.
Back when we were nomadic we had a much more varied diet. As that was true of most of our evolution that means that we’ve evolved to have a varied diet. The problem now is that we don’t have such a varied diet.
The answer isn’t GMOs which really don’t produce anything more than the natural ecosystem – that’s another physical impossibility sown as the answer that the rich pour upon us. The answer is to massively vary our diet again. Our farms* to be turned into food forests because they have that variety and are also sustainable.
* I also include the vertical forests that can be grown in cities
The naïveté is cute.
Until we have participatory democratic control of the state, we should have nothing to do with GM food. In the meantime, the safety or otherwise is basically irrelevant. We need to maintain our food sovereignty, not hand it over to corporations.
This NZ Fed Farmers farmer who travelled on Monsanto’s ticket is too dense to understand the run-off ramifications of thousands of tonnes of poisonous glyphosate into our water ways. omfg
Sad to Simon Cunliffe quit. Only been in the job a year and had a heckuva time.
Really nice guy, used to be my cricket coach.
Competition for Jim Mora, Danny Watson and Larry “Lackwit” Williams:
RadioLIVE has an equally crap afternoon chat show
Thursday 2 October 2014, 2:15p.m.
By chance, I strayed on to RadioLIVE this afternoon and heard this asinine banter. It took only a minute or so, but I fear it never got any better. I doubt it could have gotten any worse. The only interesting thing in it is how Rodney “Perk Taker” Hide unwittingly reveals just how ignorant and right wing he really is…..
RODNEY “PERK TAKER” HIDE: You can’t respect a leader who cries when he loses! You might cry in wartime, when the Russians are coming for you!
WILLIE JACKSON: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
CHRIS TROTTER: Haw haw haw!
WILLIE JACKSON: Yeah, I remember Roger Federer crying after he lost a match to Nadal. It made me want to S-S-S-SPEW.
CHRIS TROTTER: [pompously and condescendingly] Haw haw haw! Rodney, you are indulging in what the Germans call schadenfreude, which means taking delight in the misfortune of others. And I would be doing just the same as you if the boot was on the other foot. Haw haw haw!
WILLIE JACKSON: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
ALISON MAU: So does the Labour Party need a knuckle-dragging neanderthal to lead it, as these guys seem to think? Tell us what YOU think after the break…..
At this point I could take no more, and stopped listening.
Well of course you stopped listening, I don’t blame you I mean Radiolive is very popular so listening to them might mean you get an idea of what the majority of Kiwis are thinking
and that we can’t have that
A hapless, ill-informed pogue unwisely attempted to defend the indefensible….
Well of course you stopped listening, I don’t blame you I mean Radiolive is very popular
Errrr, no it’s not. Its audience share is extremely low. Possibly the choice of their cutting-edge management to sound exactly like NewstalkZBigotry was not the smartest move.
….so listening to them might mean you get an idea of what the majority of Kiwis are thinking
So Willie Jackson, Perk Taker Hide and Lord Haw Haw Trotter are representative of “the majority of Kiwis”, are they? What are you smoking today? I hope you’re not going to try to drive a car any time soon.
and that we can’t have that
Sarcasm is never an effective tactic, my muddleheaded friend.
Missing your regular takes on Mora’s panel.
Always enjoy your reviews.
Interesting article from Pheobe Fletcher (Punditt) , on DC and the PR shortcomings of the labour Party. http://www.pundit.co.nz/content/how-david-cunliffe-is-like-scarlett-johansson
Interesting article from Pheobe Fletcher (Punditt) , on DC and the PR shortcomings of the labour Party. http://www.pundit.co.nz/content/how-david-cunliffe-is-like-scarlett-johansson
http://dimpost.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/is-new-zealand-ready-for-an-openly-inane-prime-minister/
– Are we ready?
About the only thing I agree with there is this bit:
Because it actually happens to be true.
In a most unusual step, I had Tim Barnett, Labours general secretary, request that I remove the Clayton Cosgrove post.
Rather than make this leadership issue more corrosive than it already is and because I am sometimes moderately cooperative to polite requests. I have removed it from public view. It will be restored back to being visible after the election is completed.
Unfortunately Tim tried to ring me (always a bad idea when I am working), so I only noted that he’d emailed when I pulled my head out of some code and hooked out to home for mail. If anyone ever does want to get hold of me, I’d suggest txting. I look at those every few hours.
Having been offline for the past 5 days, I was just in the process of catching up what I had missed seeing when the Clayton Cosgrove post disappeared.
What was Tim Barnett’s actual stated reason lprent?
Last week I asked the following question on this site:
Could someone please tell me who are the Labour MPs responsible for leaking confidential caucus information to the media? Let them be named and shamed.
I’m grateful to Karen Price for her twitter comment because I suspect she has inadvertently confirmed the chief culprits are Clayton Cosgrove and Trevor Mallard. Since it has been going on for a very long time, I consider them to be traitors and they should be removed from parliament.
“While aware of the motivations behind the piece. I am firmly of the view that it has the potential to damage the Party.”
Personally I think that what Cosgrove was doing was somewhat more dangerous longer term (as my post was demonstrating, I literally copied his tactics in the Herald and made them somewhat more extreme).
However I’m always a sucker for a request from a party organisation of the left (less so for politicians).
BTW: There is life offline?
There is life offline?
Yes. Not in the beltway though. In the beltway there is only pain. Pain and revenge. Pain and revenge and perks. Ok, pain, revenge, salaries, and perks, and that’s it.
Ah the Collins experience
The plaque on the wall behind the gimp suit, abandon hope all ye who enter here. Collins……
I need a long bath to get that out of my head. Maybe a psychiatric recluse for a while.
Damn you.
Was there another Rawshark dump?
Political careers begin with smiles but tend to end in tears …
Indeed there is, but I must confess to having had some withdrawal symptoms.
Edit: OMG I’ve just seen it. Geez… I’m floored!!!
+100 Anne….”I’m grateful to Karen Price for her twitter comment ….I consider them to be traitors and they should be removed from parliament”.
Duncan Garner also confirms who the ABCers are. But the conclusions he goes on to draw from that and recent developments, totally ignores the role of Labour Party members – it’s all Thorndon Bubble for Garner. I guess that’s where he lives.
He ends totally putting the boot into the Labour Party.
He begins supporting Karen Price:
But, after saying all that, defying logic, Garner then says Cunliffe should resign.
What part of letting the LP members and affiliates have a say, does Garner not understand?
i like the first part.!!!!
…the second part he is hedging his bets and talking crap for his masters…he is a halfway good journalist
You do wonder what Slater and his mates have on these media folk.
Hager said at one of the meetings he spoke at that many of the media came up to him and asked if the files he’d seen included anything on them.
Our owned media.
unfortunately most journalists are owned in that they are paid by a msm corporation and they have editors to make sure they stay in line
this is why we need a Left owned radio station ( and tv channel)
…the crap that my son comes home with from listening all day to commercial radio while driving is disturbing….people need alternative Left radio and real education …especially young people…but all people… young and old and middle aged
….where is Dotcom?
Nice of Garner to name the ABCs but he misses the whole point. Labour isn’t split between people who like Cunliffe and those that can’t stand him. It’s split between neoliberals and lefties. Funny you forgot to mention that Duncan, given it’s the reason the ABCs exist.
I just knew it was a cold day in hell.
I should have never wholly agree with you Iprent.
Great read whilst it lasted.
Does this mean no free discussion on the ABCs role in undermining the democratic will of Labour members can be discussed on this site?
And no discussion of which Labour MPs have been leaking to the media and what they have been leaking?
Sad to see debate closed down.
have you seen such discussion being shut down? I haven’t.
Interesting that Vance in Robertson’s attack dog.
After Vance wrote a column that was critical of Cunliffe, responding to a tweet which said the column “sums everything up extremely well”, Ms Price tweeted: “No it sums up Andrea Vance very well. She’s unidimensional and unbalanced. Grant’s been feeding her for years.”
Thoughts?
That abuse of power rewards corrupt journalists?
That Vance is so stained by her own filth that nothing she writes has any intrinsic worth?
That Nicky Hager was wrong to not publicly expose the treacherous hacks of the so-called fourth estate?
That Price is simply pointing out that Vance has no clothes?
That Price is way too honest to ever become a politician ?
That Vance, like most of the MSM, don’t do any actual journalism just act as a conduit for others messages ?
+100 tc
South Korea looks to implement an interesting plan to stimulate the economy:
Yep, looking to tax large stockpiles of money.
Communism by stealth! Oh, the Humanity!
RSA Replay: Inequality and the 1%
Seems I’m not the only one who realises that we can’t afford the rich.
Why an Unequal Planet Can Never Be Green
More and more evidence that we just cannot afford the rich.
I left the You Tube file to run while doing the dishes after dinner. And then had to sit down and watch most of it. Thanks for pointing this out. There are lots of useful stuff there to develop for discussion.
Very very useful stuff…his point that there is more inequality in the top 1% to 2% than in the bottom 98% was utterly telling; also the idea that more equality would actually greatly help most of those in the top 10% by stopping the 1% and the 0.1% from racing away from them.
.
Leunig, perhaps referring to Dirty Politics
lol…great cartoon