The makeup of the up-coming parliament (based on the preliminary vote). It’s more diverse than last term with a bigger proportion of women Maori and Asian background MPs.
The conclusions are based on the MPs’ previous occupations and not upbringing. Of course, Metiria Turie was one of the few MPs last term who had a working class upbringing, and we know how that ended. i think Cartmel Sepuloni may also have had a working class background.
The stats:
25 percent of the National Party caucus comes from a business background and 19 percent from a government sector background.
“Labour is much more government: 21 percent of their caucus, the main sector, is from a government background, 18 percent is from business. New Zealand First is 28 percent business—so they are the most business background party—18 percent from the education sector and 18 percent from a military police background. And the Greens: 43 percent of their current caucus comes from a union or activist background, 14 percent (i.e. one MP) comes from a government background and 29 percent is coming from business.”
Interesting that it is the greens that have a high number of MPs with a union or activist background amd least from the government sector. The Greens and NZ First have largest proportions from a business background (although Shaw’s business background was not terribly corporate, for-profit).
But what is the background of the remaining National MPs – that’d be 66%? Were they lay-abouts?
What’s with the “much more government” line? Nats = 19% from a government background. Labour = 21%. Big deal!
The differences between NZF and the Greens are more stark, but given that each has a really small caucus, they’re also (if not actually misleading) somewhat sensationalised. One person in a caucus of seven can hugely alter percentage points (with each individual being worth 14.3%).
Extracts from an article in the Herald 4 October, written by a former National MP, explain how the German MMP system has been modified to give the party with the most votes the initial opportunity to form a government.
“The German Constitution, Article 63, provides that the person who receives the votes of a majority of members of the Bundestag (lower chamber of the federal Parliament) shall be elected Federal Chancellor. If no person has a majority in the Bundestag the person who receives the largest number of votes shall be elected. If that person cannot win a majority at an election in the Bundestag within seven days, the Federal President can either appoint that person Chancellor or dissolve the Bundestag for a new general election.”
What follows are the thoughts of a layman, not a legal or political expert. I look forward to reading what others have to say.
So, let’s say these German rules currently apply in New Zealand where English is given the opportunity to be PM. English would be PM for seven days, on the basis that 59 seats (including Act) don’t give him the required majority. If he cannot gather the support required from other MPs’ to achieve a majority, within the seven day timeframe, he can then go to the Governor General and asks to be Prime Minister.
If the Governor General agrees he is then PM of a minority government. If there was a genuine opposition coalition of the majority Left that includes NZ First, Labour and the Greens they would presumably have a large say in how the country is run despite English being PM. In any event a good opportunity to work as a cohesive opposition.
If he is refused by the Governor General, we then have another electoral vote rather than provide Ardern, Peters and Shaw with an opportunity to form an alternative Government. The power goes back to the people not to any particular Party.
You want to provide the link? After all, it’s just as easy to copy and paste the link as it is to copy and paste a quote from it. Rather than make the rest of us waste time searching for it.
Now that I’ve found the link, the extract at the end has almost nothing to do with the rest of the opinion piece by Michael Cox. Who was a total non-entity as an MP, and clearly the thirty years since then have done nothing to improve his cognitive abilities.
With respect to the idea that only the leader of the party receiving the most votes may form the government, that’s crap. One of the main points of MMP is to include a wide variety of voices and opinions. Then the largest coalition of those voices that can work together form the government.
Making it so only the largest party can from the government hands way too much power back to established large party power structures, who will suppress variety of opinion in order to present the largest possible monolithic bloc. And make even harder for small parties to get traction.
Lets tell the Germans “that’s crap”. My intention is to get comments on the German system not the merits of Michael Cox. Shoot the messenger if you must.
You missed the bit where it says “IF no person has a majority in the Bundestag….”. A majority does not have to come from one party, it can be of any number of participants. So it is very possible for a person to become chancellor if his/her party does not have the most votes in parliament, just enough votes will do, from any party.
Completely nullifies the reason for MMP in the first place. For instance you could get a situation where the Nats had 35.5, Labour 35.3 Greens 14 NZF 12. Labour/Green could form a stable government (49.3 v 47.5) but would not be given the opportunity. The Nats couldn’t, so there would be a new election. Many other combinations would be possible if a new party got over 5%.
(On a practical note on Peter’s post, surely the week to form a government would start after the Special Votes had been counted. That would at least give 3 weeks to work out a government.)
Thanks for the comments. You would expect the week to start after special votes.
So maybe a modified system would give the largest Party the opportunity to make the first attempt at forming a majority Government? If they cannot do that the second largest Party then has the opportunity?
Why should any party be granted special privileges to form a government? What’s the problem with the current arrangement where the leader of the first coalition to say they have a majority of the house goes to the Governor General who presumably checks it out and if it seems legit, gives them the opportunity to prove it?
Andre has provided a valid reason why this kind of approach is a failure of recognising the democracy that can be provided by MMP.
If a group of like minded parties secures more than fifty percent of the vote, your proposal to adhere to the german method, would only provide space for the largest party vote, even if it was not part of that majority group.
Ultimately, meaning that despite MMP attempting to reflect the diversity of the electorate, the parties with the simplistic, most phatic policies and campaigning would be the ones who are most likely to garner the biggest block of votes, and be given the first priority to form a government.
Plus, under our system, the governor general is appointed by the PM (leader of the largest party in what would in this situation be the previous government). Surely that predisposes him/her to stick with the status quo if there is no decisive outcome from an election?
Thanks for the perspective. Have patience while I continue to think this through.
What we really need then is for the NZ public to always expect that the final vote simply indicates peoples party preferences, not a result. So if one party has 49% of the vote and, say, 5 others, have an even split each of the other 51% of the vote they can all decide equally amongst themselves the way forward to forming a government. There is no “winner” until a coalition is formed.
I heard yesterday that in 16 years time, or so, Europeans will be a minority in Auckland. It really is time we starting listening to different voices rzther than trying to shut them down to preserve a world view that hasnt really existed in a long time?
Putting aside the ramifications around MMP, denying the Leader of The Opposition the right to test the confidence of parliament in the event that the PM or leader of the largest party has failed to win a confidence vote would pretty much overturn the parliamentary conventions that we’ve inherited with our version the Westminster system.
Furthermore the article seems to be suggesting that, in the event, that the leader of the largest party in the Bundestag is unable to muster a majority in that house, the President can simply appoint that person Chancellor? So, in our case we would be allowing the sovereign to appoint the PM even if that person has failed to survive a confidence vote in the house?
While I’ve got lots of criticisms of our governing arrangements, the details around how parties can come together to form a governing coalition seem reasonable to me. So I’m waiting for a good argument against what we have now before I get interested in suggested alternatives. So far all I see is flailing distress from Nats that currently don’t have the right to rule they feel entitled to.
In the event that some convincing argument against what we now have actually comes up, then yeah, the points you’ve raised are a good argument against following the german model. Particularly since the two worst features of our overall MMP system, a high threshold and coat-tailing, were also apparently copied from a german model.
I think that lowering the threshold to 3% and getting rid of the coat-tailing loophole are the 2 easiest things we could do to improve our version of MMP. And I also thinks there’s a good chance it might happen now that National’s decade long shenanigans in Epsom and Ōhāriu are finished.
It would be good to have the experts reassure everyone of the merits of our system when compared to FPP and the German version. How do you counter the view that NZF have the balance of power?
The “experts” reviewed MMP after the last referendum in 2012 and arrived at the conclusion that the coat-tailing loophole should be scrapped and the threshold lowered to 4%. All of which the, then National government chose to ignore. http://www.elections.org.nz/events/past-events-0/2012-mmp-review/results-mmp-review.
And I don’t actually want to “counter” the view that NZFirst have the balance of power. The last 2 years has suggested the electoral outcome we find ourselves with. Get over it. Stop thinking in FPP and get on board with MMP. If National has spent the last decade doing that they might not have found themselves in the crappy position they’re in now.
The view that Peters holds the balance of power is totally accurate. Because of the choice of Green party members to effectively close the door on the idea of going into coalition with National thereby rejecting the possibility of holding the balance of power. If the Greens had chosen to be open to National, they too would hold the balance of power making any coalition negotiations much more interesting.
I think one (of many) fair ways of looking at that is that many NZF supporters would swing between Labour and National in the absence of a somewhat centrist party like NZF (or United Future in its heyday). So rather than consciously making the choice between Nat and Lab themselves, they are comfortable delegating that choice to Peters, in the expectation that NZF would also moderate any extreme ideas that make it in from the wings of whomever they go into coalition with. Keeping the bastards honest, if that phrase appeals.
So while I utterly detest Peters, I can respect the choice of his supporters. And if I’m completely honest, despite my loathing of Peters, I still prefer the idea of Nats having to keep Peters onside to the near-as-dammit absolute majority they’ve had the last nine years.
“OR the public and media could grow up politically and wait for negotiations to see which relationships will work for good government in the future?”
Ain’t that the bloody truth! The media (or rather what parades as a MSM/4th Estate) should. Some aspects of this ‘nation’ called NuZull/Aotearoa continue to baffle me.
This little nayshun that “punches above its weight”; is/used to be criticised for that “Tall Poppy syndrome”, all that sort of stuff is actually ultra-competitive (at least amongst the male population – and more lately the Sharlene’s and Shona’s (at the risk of being labelled a sexist cnut) trying to prove they have adequate testosterone levels in order to compete. They seem to care so much about what the rest of the Whurl thinks of us – let alone fellow Kiwis.
Battles between egos in media stars, Hosking/7 Blunt versus The Fucking Project hosted by a Jesssie who has 3 or so hours to undergo a lycra-clad conversion between RNZ and Eden Terrace – the former address where ‘I’m old school and in-depth’ to the latter where ‘I’m superficial and aha ha ha’ with a parade of Mediaworks staff with mortgages to pay to prop him up – and despite an occasional outburst in order to maintain the last vestiges of credibility.
Even the way Kiwis drive a bloody car has become a competition – and despite their penis length, they’re not actually that good at it. (You’ve got to push the pedal to the floor and race to the next red light ahead of someone who’s read the road ahead and realised that exercise was going to be a pointless exercise.)
It’s no surprise to me all the FPP thinking that’s been evident before AND after the 23rd September.
I’m not sure why it is that we’ve become so fucking yea/nah about various gains and so pig ignorant (1893 Women’s Suffrage); a contribution to LGBTI and YouMan! roights; the implementation of a proportional representation system (with all its inadequacies) that we’re so frikken insecure or ignorant about that we all see this past month or so as a competition that someone NEEDS to convincingly win.
After 30+ years of neoliberalism, I guess it should be no surprise, but it’s kind of uphill.shit.push – which, in the end is a “loser’s battle”
A law abiding gun-owner right up until, surprise, he wasn’t.
An Australian man who came to know Stephen Paddock intimately in recent years has offered the most detailed public portrait yet of the Las Vegas mass killer.
He said Paddock was a highly intelligent, strategic though “guarded” individual who won a fortune applying algorithms to gambling, and studied arguments for his right to own weapons under the US constitution.
Their encounters came via their respective girlfriends, Philippine-born sisters – one of whom, Marilou Danley, has returned to the US to be interviewed by the FBI in the wake of Paddock’s meticulously planned massacre.
Their acquaintanceship, through more than half a dozen encounters in the US and the Philippines between 2013 and 2015, revealed Paddock’s generosity – which had his overseas guests living in “palatial” style – and the existence of a “gun room” at his home in Mesquite, Nevada.
“Yes, I was familiar with him,” the man, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Guardian at his Brisbane home on Wednesday. “He was extremely intelligent, methodical, conservative – guarded – and strategic. A planning, thinking type of guy.”
If they were to apply Paddocks profile across the population how many US citizens would trigger an alert.
I’d suggest the bulk of US gun owners would come up which in itself tells you somethings very much amiss in America as their biggest terrorist threat is likely to be coming from their own citizens.
I guess it makes a change from the US govt and it’s backing of violent conflict outside of the USA.
The report in The Press on (killer) Paddock: 64 years, left no immediate hint of motive. He had 34 guns, and shot at least 59 people.
He was a retiree with penchant for gambling – but no criminal record.
‘Paddock was not known to have served in the military, or to have suffered from a history of mental illness or to have registered any inkling of social disaffection, political discontent or radical views on social media.’
I think he was just infected with a bad case of empty USA propaganda with the disadvantage of ‘Being Born in the USA’ and believing the empty bit in their Constitution about his Right to be Happy. Which as anyone who thinks knows is only a passing feeling, not appropriate as full-time goal for questing humans.
Paddock’s behaviour would seem the likely outcome for many of male humanity who succeed in getting money and then buying what they decide they want from life, and then find this doesn’t provide a satisfactory reason for living.
The rich man Howard Hughes ended up degraded after having a surfeit of his wealth, accomplished some personal goals, and finding nothing else to stimulate him. He got beyond wanting, living on chicken soup in the entire floor of a hotel where the windows were blacked out, sitting on a toilet for hours, long hair, long nails, and with someone managing his affairs for him. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1902376_1902378_1902405,00.html
On a lower level of wealth a guy from NZ killed his girlfriend Crystal or killed himself or someone else at his apartment in some Australian resort where he had retired after making money investing in some vitamin pill company. I
registered the negativity of this ‘successful’ investor, but his details weren’t worth remembering.
These individuals are unconnected to the real world where people actually work for their earnings, not just invest in likely profitable business or housing where they live off others striving and work. I think the term is rentier.
There will be more of these crazed individuals who show symptoms which psychiatrists do not deign to consider insane because of narrow definitions. Otherwise, we might recognise our world is daily near-insane, and I guess the trick-cyclists are just peas in the soup. And crazed individuals within the individualistic society seem to be proliferating in the neo liberal economic religious system imposed on us. In the free market, we have to be careful to look for real friends to give life with each other meaning as in The Three Musketeers – inseparable friends who live by the motto “all for one, one for all” (“tous pour un, un pour tous”). Individualistic men and women probably don’t have real friends, more drinking buddies, investor leads and suitable social partners but if we can only trust a few friends, a group separate from society, then do we actually have a society or is life another version of Game of Thrones?
You have to also question the wisdom of US law enforcement and the demand for every detail of the crime from the news media in these situations.
With every passing ‘massacre’, prospective lone-wolf gunmen get an ever more detailed blueprint on how to commit one of these crimes; e.g.: it was the gun smoke in the room setting off smoke detectors giving him away. Without that and, presumably a suppressor, he could have remained undetected for a lot longer than what he did.
Some how I think I’m going to end up like a lot of people thought our history that have fought for equal rights and who fought against the the establishment like Eddie Grant a controversial death it has happen many times through out our history . But I will keep for OUR Earth because we have only one Earth only one WORLD.
Big UPPS To those supermarkets taking the lead and banning plastic bags .
The big picture is all OUR people in a position to make changes that will benefit our environment should not wait for government . They need to take the lead and make these changes for our grandchildren future.
Governments are a complicated beast that need US to show them the right path to a brighter future.
P.S. It awesome to see MSM taking the lead and showing the fact,S on climate change Ka Pai
Eco Maori i agree plastic bag use should be banned.Should have already happen long before now.And feel its also good to see Greenpeace actively involved.However i fail to see banning any kind of bag as a workable answer.Shopping isn’t necessarily always a planned event for everyone.So why not allow replacement of plastic with paper?.Many more people would be likely to then get right behind the idea, and freely adopt that as change that’s easy to accept. I’d really like to understand why Greenpeace hasn’t taken up this approach .Perhaps somebody,here,can help explain why?
Catalonia is spectacularly rich compared with other parts of Spain. It’s got 16% of the population and 19% of the GDP. Barcelona gets massive tourism and has one of the biggest ports in Europe. Tarragona has one of the biggest chemical industries in Europe.
So of course they pay more taxes than the rest of the country, and more of it gets spent in poorer regions than where it came from. Doing what proper government does with taxes: redistribute from those with the average wealth, to those who need it more.
The Catalan government also owes E77b in public debt. They’ve been the biggest beneficiary of the special fund the Spanish government set up to get the regions going again after the protracted effects of the GFC. Catalan took far and away most of this facility to do good for its own people. But of course, that rich region and its on average wealthy and educated region wouldn’t have to pay that back if they struck out independently.
Tax. Debt.
No doubt calls for independence stirs the heart of old socialists and anarchists brought up on For Whom The Bell Tolls. But before you start asking for another Crimea, ask yourself: who benefits?
weka
I think it might have been on a placard at one of the demonstrations, though I didn’t see it in the linked article’s video (maybe one in the weekend). Ad seems to have seized on the idea that the Catalan independence movement is entirely economic; which seem to be overly simplifying matters, and ignoring history (such as the torture and execution of the last independent Catalan president by Franco’s regime).
However, I found it grimly amusing for a member of an heridatary Bourbon monarch (descendant those overthrown during the French revolution and whose father had been handpicked by Franco as his successor) to be lecturing those who had been engaged in a largely symbolic referendum on; “democratic principles of the rule of law”. The excessive reaction by the Spanish government in sending in their armoured goon squad was very counterproductive in assuring the Catalan people that they not oppressed.
I wondered about that too, would have been good to see the context. Madrid robbing Catalonia could refer to the election, or democracy, or independence etc.
Surprising precisely nobody, here is episode number 271,828,182,845,904,523,536,028,747,135,266,249,775,724,709,369,995 of awesomely blatant conservative political hypocrisy. In this case, rabidly “pro-life” politicians pressuring their mistresses to abort the unborn child they had fathered.
Episode number 271,828,182,845,904,523,536,028,747,135,266,249,775,724,709,369,996 of blatant pro-life hypocrisy.
9 million kids get insurance through CHIP. Congress is about to let its funding expire
On September 30, funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program expires. After Republicans took a rushed and ultimately failed run at repealing Obamacare one last time, the program’s spending authorization is now at imminent risk of lapsing.
On NBC, @SRuhle clarifies that her source says Tillerson didn’t just say moron — “he said F-ing moron"— Michael M. Grynbaum (@grynbaum) October 4, 2017
And to address the question in the cartoon: yes they did put something into the constitution to deal with that possibility. The Electoral College. It had one job. And failed.
So very english, the protester stooped as he was lead out, presumably so as not to disrupt too much.
And Corbyn, Corbyn, Corbyn he clearly has them rattled.
Reminiscent of the Tories here, spent more time talking about the ‘enemy’ rather than articulating their vision.
If our Tories articulated their vision then very few people would ever vote for them. And so they articulate the same vision as the Left while putting in place policies that bring about its antithesis.
She seems to suffer from some sort of acute stage-fright which might explain the dreadful coughing.
How that guy got anywhere near her with the P45 form is amazing and the Frida Kahlo bracelet and all the letters falling off the wall was just the icing on the cake.
SDHB are having public meetings fora next week to put a gloss of public consultataion on their; “strategy and action plan” through to 2030, particularly focusing on the hospital rebuild. The ODT is a bit vague on the details, but the SDHB facebook page has a scan of a print ad (probably from the ODT, I seldom see a physical copy these days). For Dunedin that is; 13:00-14:30 Tuesday 10/10, at the Barclay theatre in the museum. Nothing about whether you have to book to speak as with the public forum prior to the start of ordinary public advisory committee meetings.
This seems worth trying to make your voice heard at, if you can make it during workhours. Or you could just leave it up to the unelected SDHB in conjunction with an multinational professional services corporation to do what is best for the people of Otago:
SDHB and WellSouth were working with Ernst & Young to create the strategy and plan.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Ian Powell said the senior doctors’ union supported the move ”in principle”, but the health board would have difficulty convincing the public.
”They will be up against a difficulty in terms of what happened last time they developed a strategic plan and it was handled very poorly,” he said.
The public forums would be held in Dunedin on October 10, Invercargill the following day and Cromwell on October 12.
Queenstown resident and former Queenstown Lakes District councillor Kirsty Sharpe said the public forum in Cromwell was inconvenient for Queenstown residents.
It appeared the forums were being held at a time of day that suited DHB staff rather than the public, she said, and was also disappointed a forum would not be held in the resort.
”It’s cutting a lot of people out from going.”
SDHB did not respond yesterday to questions about why no forum was being held in Queenstown, or the timing of them
A friend of mine gasped when she saw the Vulcan episode of American Gods. “That’s Civic Religion!” she said. She’d been enrolled in religious studies and apparently one of the tools for understanding how states operate is to look as societies as religions or cults.
The creators of American Gods here explain why they created an episode not in the original book to look at this.
In today’s paper Herald Grant Bradley the aviation commentator has an article of the CEO of Air NZ speaking to an audience of 400 in the Business Section. The CEO says its “no time to slash and burn” with businesses looking for short term goals of cutting jobs, cutting investment and cutting customer services”. I would like to link this article but I cannot find it on the online Herald.
His words “the reality is that the business world is sadly littered with companies that are just cutting jobs and ultimately not fulfilling their purpose to do anything useful. That’s pretty sad”.
He goes to on say they Air NZ have greatly reduced the income parity between the genders and is endeavouring to make their company more sustainable – for example the recycling scheme where unsealed food/drinks left on trays will be recycled where its safely possible.
My first thoughts were of this National Government and previous Labour Governments which have sold off state owned assets purely to pay down debt and get that instant gratification of money in hand. No thoughts of the dividend stream that might still be coming in if they hadn’t been sold off. Also their customer service in all of their departments is a bloody disgrace especially at WINZ. The attrition of staff in departments and front line in essential departments is another serious problem.
Banks are another where customer service is next to nothing. It seems we have a way to go yet where customers are valued and staff treated with respect.
“words “the reality is that the business world is sadly littered with companies that are just cutting jobs and ultimately not fulfilling their purpose to do anything useful. That’s pretty sad”. ”
I take some heart that more and more businesses are operating beyond just bottom line return to shareholder or owner. More than 30 years ago. Still more need to transition but it is a start
It seems some in the media have caught on that the labour party are economically ‘orthodox’ rat bags. That if they stick with what they been saying (policy), nothing will change, actually just like the last 9 years it will only get progressively worse.
Well we are giving our daughter and son and inlaw a break we have 3 of there children till Sunday man they keep you on your toes 2 girls whom are blonde and very well behaved and our eldest grandson well he has a real full of life personality . We are very proud of our whole family we created. But when we were bring up our children I did not realize how much time goes into bring up children most of the time I was out there chasing the big money fishing and other various jobs. So most of the time I just past the money over and my wife did most of the hard yards bring up our family .
But when my daughters started having children this opened my eyes to the hard ship Lady’s go through carrying a baby for 9 months having no sleep for the first 6 months it is a 24 7 job bring up children and can be a very dangerous life threatening time giving birth and most males are totally unaware of these fact’s . For this reason we give our young lady’s all the help we can with bring up our grandchildren and this is one of the reason that I get the big picture . Which is we have one Mother Earth and we have to look after her as no one else is Kia Kaha
I love a bit of self awareness from a male who actually gets how hard a woman works when she becomes a mother. I still remember the absolute exhaustion I had from when I had my first child and then second . Right through till….. Can’t remember.Good on you. High five. Oh, and that was over 40 years ago.
Has anyone seen/read this? It exposes the smokescreen that trade is about encouraging democracy rather than a greedy grab to be first in. Remember how being in WTO woukd help China be more Democratic and better on Human Rights…
” To make matters worse, the Trump family have placed themselves conspicuously on China’s payroll, accepting future profits in the form of trademarks for both the Trump and Ivanka brands, and seeking Chinese investment in Kushner real estate projects. When China Labor Watch, a New York–based labor rights organization, published information on poor conditions in a factory where Ivanka’s brand-name shoes had recently been produced, China detained the group’s three field investigators, the only time CLW’s investigators have been detained for exposing the abuse of Chinese workers.2 ”
“Remember how being in WTO wou[l]d help China be more Democratic and better on Human Rights…”
Fark! That’s almost as big a lie as all the others the new neo-libs told us would happen – in the future, going forward, actually-as a matter of fact, to coin a phrase, so-to-speak.
Public Service reforms
The market the market as the natural leveler
Privatisations
etc
etc
etc
“Auckland ratepayers [are] now paying 6 percent more this year for council salaries. A staggering 52 percent of rates are now used by the council just to pay staff.”
…Mr Town (CEO)- who got a $34,000 payrise to $690,000…”
Note the article attacks democratically elected Phil Goff NOT the unelected CEO Town who earns $690,000 who is supposed to ‘run’ the council.
Not sure how much the Ports of Auckland get, or Metrowater CEO’s but probably more than Phil Goff.
Like Fonterra, it’s about time CEO salary is linked to real results, ratepayer (or in the case of Fonterra farmers) satisfaction, real public services and real results. Hard to see how the current situations of both organisations can meet normal measures of results.
Apparently Auckland council has some unbelievable dissatisfaction rate from ratepayers.
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“We wuz robbed!” is the classic cry of the disappointed losers of a closely contested sporting contest – it is very much to the credit of the Black Caps that we heard no such sentiment from them following the stunning ...
The Youth Parliament is being held this week, and some of the youth MPs are campaigning for a lower voting age:Molly Doyle, 17, is one Youth MP who wants this to change. She is part of a non-partisan campaign run ...
Up till now, Australia has made its living by digging up coal and exporting it to other countries, destroying the global climate in the process. But now they have a new option: exporting solar power:The desert outside Tennant Creek, deep ...
Later this month, thousands of people are expected to march to parliament as part of the #HandsOffOurTamaraki movement. At its heart, the movement is about preserving whānau and demanding that the state stop removing children from their whānau, hapū and iwi. ...
by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh The recent statements made by the former FARC commander, Carlos Lozada (legal name Julian Gallo), where, from his seat in Congress, he praised the Colombian Army demonstrate how low the farianos have sunk. Lozada began by ...
A Woman’s Place is on the Podium was a public meeting in London on 10 July to discuss women’s sports and the impact of transwomen competing against women. The venue was sold out with a packed hall of 750 people. ...
Last month I talked about the no-fly movement: people who refuse to fly or limit it to absolute necessity to avoid destroying the climate. Now, that movement has a somewhat surprising new member: Dutch airline KLM:Dutch airline KLM has launched ...
In the 1960's, humanity faced a terrible threat: global thermonuclear war. Nuclear weapons were uniquely destructive and dangerous, and if more countries got them, the logic of MAD and the pre-emptive strike would put us on a hair-trigger to destruction. ...
An occasional series where I will ponder allegations of anti-Semitism directed at the British Labour Party and its members.In this case, we are thinking about an allegedly anti-Semitic image shared by a Labour Party member. Its origins appear to be ...
Matariki has been and gone, but this year we saw a couple of op-eds arguing that it should be a public holiday, replacing the foreign monarch's fake birthday. And now, New Zealand Republic - a group which campaigns for an ...
The discussion on the quality of economic advice, which we reported last week, has spilled over into a discussion about whether so many senior appointments should be of non-New Zealanders. Recall I discussed the failure to develop career paths within ...
When Nicky Hager revealed US footage of the Operation Burnham raid, obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, one of the obvious questions was whether Ministers had seen it - and in particular, whether they'd been told that it ...
Northern Ireland is the Alabama of the UK: a backwards region where women and gay people are denied fundamental rights. But Westminster has just decided to fix that:MPs have voted resoundingly to extend same-sex marriage and access to abortion to ...
There's a problem with "synthetic cannabis", and not just the one you think. It's the name.We're in the midst of a wave of news stories that link synthetic drugs to serious harm, through deadly road accidents and accidental overdoses (which ...
Ranjit Kauri, The Dancing Maharani and Other Stories, Swansea, Head and Heart, 2019, £6.99; reviewed by Don Franks Working people are not the same country to country. Our struggles for a better life take place in surroundings of very different ...
Let's Do Them! All Jacinda Ardern has to do to clinch the 2020 General Election is frighten the bejesus out of the electorate by describing in the most graphic terms imaginable what will happen to all the positive beginnings her ...
It may be that we have all misinterpreted the somewhat surprising “bromance” between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. It has been all too easy to assume that it is Kim who is cosying up to Trump rather than the ...
by Michael Roberts So the full circle is completed. The corrupt pro-business conservative New Democracy party in Greece that was ousted by the anti-capitalist Syriza party in 2015 has been returned to office in yesterday’s general election, with an outright ...
When the Australian government passed a series of new spy laws over the last few years, they pinky-promised that they wouldn't use them to spy on journalists and subvert freedom of the press. They lied:The anti-encryption laws passed by the ...
From 1975 to 1989, the spy agencies of South America's right-wing military dictatorships cooperated in Operation Condor, a joint campaign of extermination against the continent's left. Roughly 400,000 people were imprisoned, 30,000 disappeared, and 60,000 murdered - kidnapped, tortured, executed, ...
When she was standing for office, Jacinda Ardern promised she would take abortion out of the Crimes Act. And to be fair, there was some early action on that, with an immediate referral of the issue to the Law Commission ...
When the government introduced the Zero Carbon Bill, people rightly asked what they planned to do to reduce transport emissions, which basicly had no policy at all other than the ETS. Today, they responded, announcing a "feebate" system which would ...
At almost every level, the problem with medicinal cannabis is a lack of good information. In the US, FDA regulations make it hard to research. Most doctors aren't familiar with what research there is and most patients don't know either. ...
Redline is critical of Corbyn for his political weaknesses, but he’s no anti-Semite. There is no substance to the McCarthyist witch-hunt being run by the right wing, and the pro-Israel lobby inside and outside the Labour Party in the UK. ...
The government's billion trees program is the sort of policy which could make a real difference to our emissions and the fight against climate change. But climate scientist Jim Salinger isn't convinced:The Forestry Minister Shane Jones' one billion trees won't ...
Last month the government was celebrating another surplus. Meanwhile, children are starving:One in five children are living in households where putting food on the table is a struggle, according to a new report from the Ministry of Health. It found ...
Show Me The Money! The alternative to state funding of infrastructure is, of course, to fund it by taking on massive amounts of private debt. On this issue, at least, Auckland mayoral challenger, Tamihere, has some solid points to make. ...
If we are to avoid making the earth uninhabitable, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to practically nothing over the next decade. But that will still leave us with the problem of the carbon we have already emitted, which ...
Former Waikato DHB CEO Nigel Murray allegedly misused public funds, spending more than $120,000 of public money on unjustified travel. He was forced to resign and the Serious Fraud Office began an investigation. But despite the SFO finding that the ...
Jeremy Corbyn, we are told, is being advised – not least by his deputy (as well as by some of his would-be successors) – that he must come “off the fence” on the Brexit issue if he wants to bolster ...
The End of Life bill has been read a second time and is now heading for the House for further debate. Personally, I support the proposal. I don't ever epect to take advantage of the Bill's provisions myself, but as ...
Before the substantive issue which this column is about – whether there has been a deterioration in the economic advice given to the government – a paragraph about the budget leaks.read more ...
Below is a translation of the editorial in the June 24 round of weekly workplace bulletins issued all over France by the revolutionary workers’ organisation Lutte Ouvriere. Last Saturday, 8,000 people took to the streets of Belfort (eastern France) to ...
Why hasn't Parliament followed the lead set by our local authorities and declared a climate emergency? The answer is the National Party:The Prime Minister’s admission that she is open to the idea of declaring a climate change emergency is nothing ...
Back in May the government released its Zero Carbon Bill. While much of the bill was welcome, there was one big exception: it contained a secrecy clause, requiring the Climate Change Commission to maintain secrecy over practically everything it does. ...
by Phil Duncan This past week has marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Stonewall Inn riots in Christopher Street, New York, the event generally regarded as kicking off the gay liberation movement. Quite a few articles have ...
Southland - land of coal-burning dairy farmers - has become the first region in the country to explicitly vote against declaring a climate emergency. Their reason? They didn't want to "devalue" the word "emergency". Its an argument addressed powerfully in ...
New Zealand has a problem with police chases: officers going after fleeing drivers like rabid dogs, without any consideration for proportionality or public safety, often with fatal results. And according to an in-depth article in the Guardian today, the UK ...
Welcome to another heaping helping of research publications related to climate change drivers and mechanisms, the effects of climate change and how we might yet grope our way into systems approaches to dealing with the mess we're making, despite ourselves. ...
Holly Lawford-Smith is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She’s currently writing a book about radical feminism. This article appeared on Feminist Current Academics should be standing together in defence of universities’ fundamental values: the ...
The Otago Daily Times has an in-depth article about the future of wind energy in New Zealand, and it is looking bright:The news that wind will play the leading role in New Zealand’s energy future was put up in lights ...
If the sight of schoolkids striking for a future has been filling you with hope, good news: they want you to join them on September 27:Students will take to the streets again demanding action on climate change, and this time ...
The People's "Friend": In this masterpiece of revolutionary propaganda, the homicidal political psychopath, Jean-Paul Marat, has been transformed by Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's most accomplished artist, into a martyred hero of the ordinary people of Paris. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, ...
The principle of one person, one vote doesn’t apply for local elections. In fact, you don’t even need to be a person to have voting rights. Welcome to the ratepayer roll. While the ratepayer roll accounts for less than 1% ...
I have been working my way through a 47,000 document tranche of declassified US government communications related to Argentina and the “Dirty War” of 1976-83. I grew up in Argentina in the period leading up to the March 24, 1976 ...
To express concern about foreign ownership and control in New Zealand is often to invite accusations of xenophobia and economic illiteracy. It is worthwhile, therefore, to rehearse the grounds for that concern, and to explore the various forms it can ...
It must be a day ending in Y because the Guardian - remember when it used to be a good paper1 - is running another spurious story about Corbyn's leadership being threatened over anti-Semitism.The headline the Guardian runs is: "MPs tell ...
A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Jun 23 through Sat, June 29, 2019 Editor's Pick When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope is contagious'Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and ...
A new digital platform aims to make it easier for small businesses to access services from multiple government agencies, leaving them more time to focus on their own priorities. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Small Business Stuart Nash ...
Million-dollar start to gun collection eventsPolice Minister Stuart Nash says a solid start has been made to the gun buyback and amnesty after the first weekend of community collection events. “Gun owners will walk away with more than ...
Police Minister Stuart Nash has praised Police and gun owners after the first firearms collection event saw a busy turnout at Riccarton Racecourse in Christchurch. “Police officers and staff have put a tremendous effort into planning and logistics for the ...
Seventy-eight new Police constables are heading out to the regions following today’s graduation of a new recruit wing from the Royal New Zealand Police College. Police Minister Stuart Nash says the record high number of new Police officers being recruited, ...
July 19 (BusinessDesk) - The government is looking to tighten control and impose harsher penalties after the Mycoplasma bovis outbreak revealed cracks in the country's stock management system. ...
Kia Anga Mua Ngā Hapū o Ngāpuhi (KAM) has reached a pivotal milestone following a hui yesterday at Waitangi with the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Andrew Little. ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union can reveal that the Government spent $133,530 on producing its ‘Wellbeing Budget’ document, a cost blowout largely driven by spending on graphic design and photography. The $133,530 price tag compares to $86,268 ...
Kahungunu Māori Language Awards. Nominations closed on 5 July 2019, and were judged by the Senior Management Team of Ngāti Kahungunu Iwi Incorporated. The judges wish to acknowledge the very high calibre of all nominations received making it a very ...
High Court of Australia Judge, Justice Stephen Gageler, will address recent criticism of court judgment delays in Australia, at the University of Canterbury (UC) on 23 July at 6.15pm. ...
This summary is provided to assist in the understanding of the Inquiry’s proceedings but does not constitute the official record. The full Minute is available at the link below. ...
The Tertiary Education Commission is laying charges under section 292A of the Education Act 1989 against three individuals for making a false representation for the purpose of receiving, or continuing to receive, free tertiary education from a tertiary education ...
New Zealand food businesses today welcomed a trio of new food safety tools, designed to make it faster, easier and more affordable to follow the rules and keep consumers safe. ...
AUT research shows that Māori children are almost four times more likely than those of European descent to be placed out of home by child protection services ...
The Government announced today that grants of up to $2,500 for energy efficient heaters are now available as part of the Government’s Warmer Kiwi Homes programme. ...
Fonterra’s use of coal has been the target of numerous grassroots campaigns in recent years. Last year 350 Aotearoa affiliated groups, Fossil Free Aoraki and 350 Nelson launched a petition dismissing the dairy giant’s initial target of no new ...
Information sessions on proposals for The Medicinal Cannabis Scheme take place in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch over the next fortnight. The sessions are open to anyone with an interest in learning more about the proposed scheme. ...
“Our children are our most vulnerable, most innocent victims and we do not want to see any more children harmed by these ‘known sex offenders’. The safety of our community must be the paramount consideration.” ...
“The announcement that Fonterra will immediately stop installing any new coal boilers or increasing capacity to burn coal is the signal that the biomass fuel supply industry welcomes” said Brian Cox, Executive Officer of the Bioenergy Association. ...
18 July 2019-- Coal Action Network Aotearoa (CANA) today welcomed Fonterra’s commitment to build no new coal plants, a “no brainer” for the climate crisis the world faces. The group has been urging this transition for six years now and ...
The increase in demand for cage-free eggs is set to continue according to animal rights organisation SAFE, who says the egg industry should expect this and prepare. ...
Wellington, New Zealand – 350 Pacific made a formal submission to the New Zealand Government’s Environment Parliamentary Select Committee on the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill, led by the Pacific Climate Warriors (PCWs) based in ...
There used to be a school of thought on the centre right side of politics that the best way to neuter the Greens as a political force would be to let them have a spell in government. Then, according to ...
Today (18 July) is Nelson Mandela International Day when the United Nations highlights the importance of humane conditions of imprisonment. In New Zealand our prisons are overcrowded and understaffed. At 214 prisoners per 100,000 people, we have the fifth ...
NZEI Te Riu Roa will take legal action over the lengthy delay in implementing pay increases for teachers. Novopay announced yesterday that teachers would have to wait until 11 September to see pay increases that they won when they settled ...
EDS has filed its submission on the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. The Bill sets targets for greenhouse gas reductions, provides for the government to set a series of carbon budgets, and sets up a new, independent, Climate ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union has identified an absurd case of mission creep at Wellington City Council: the decision to spend $21,750 on two Consumer NZ investigations into different brands of bike lights. ...
The Motor Trade Association is welcoming the release of the Government’s new draft road safety strategy. MTA Chief Executive Craig Pomare says the association is pleased to see vehicle safety has been made a priority in the Road to Zero ...
The Department of Conservation continue to repeat the same old story about attacks on staff and how it is affecting their role in protecting our precious wildlife. NZ herald https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12249704 ...
The government's silence on the fact that the country's second-largest milk processor is on the brink of becoming 25% Chinese Government owned has been deafening. ...
School Strike 4 Climate NZ welcomes the coalition Government’s endeavour to take action on reducing agricultural emissions but is disappointed at the weak stance that the Government has taken on the issue. ...
The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has issued a formal warning under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (AML/CFT Act) to seven reporting entities within the Regus Management Limited (RNZML) designated business ...
The Northland Regional Council (NRC) has voted to exclude all GM/GE precautionary provisions in its regional plan, despite years of community engagement showing support for such protection. There is a sense of betrayal following the way the NRC Chairman ...
New Zealand’s ‘mission-driven’ charities working in international aid are showing early signs of changing the way they work, in particular prioritising building the capacity and resilience of local communities to do their own development. ...
Teachers will have to wait until 11 September for pay increases won as part of their collective agreement negotiations settled in June, according to an update sent to schools today from Novopay. ...
July 16 (BusinessDesk) - Energy Minister Megan Woods says the government “won’t die in a ditch” if its goal of 100 percent renewable electricity generation isn't reached by 2035. ...
The Electricity Networks Association (ENA) is welcoming the Government’s response to the Interim Climate Change Committee (ICCC) Report released today. Graeme Peters, chief executive of the ENA, said one of the key recommendations, endorsed by the ...
An article* published this month in the Journal of Health Organization and Management raises questions over the way health board members are elected and whether the boards are even needed. ...
NZEI Te Riu Roa's kindergarten teacher members will vote on a proposed settlement to their collective agreement after four days of negotiations with the Ministry of Education and kindergarten employers. ...
Vector has today welcomed the ICCC’s report on Accelerated Electrification . Vector agrees that accelerating the electrification of transport and process heat will play a major role in reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Initiatives to ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union is calling on the Porirua City Council to cancel its underwriting of a proposed Canadian-led privately owned adventure park slated for public land after a similar project created a huge liability for Christchurch ...
Youth climate change campaigners Generation Zero welcome the Interim Climate Change Committee’s (ICCC’s) reports: Accelerated Electrification and Action on agricultural emissions ; which were finally released by the Government today, almost three months ...
Fish & Game New Zealand notes the announcement today that the Government and the intensive agriculture leadership have reached a ‘historic consensus’ and are exploring using a formal sector-government agreement instead of bringing agriculture ...
The independent Interim Climate Change Committee’s report on Accelerated Electrification was released today by the Minister for Energy and Resources, Hon Dr Megan Woods. ...
The independent Interim Climate Change Committee’s report Action on agricultural emissions was released today by the Minister for Climate Change, Hon James Shaw and the Minister of Agriculture, Hon Damien O’Connor. ...
Please find attached embargoed copies of two media statements from the Interim Climate Change Committee http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/1907/Embargoed_Interim_Climate_Change_Committee_Accelerated_electrification_MEDIA_STATEMENT.pdf ...
Greenpeace Executive Director, Dr Russel Norman, has reacted with disbelief that the Government’s latest climate proposal includes an option for dairy to voluntarily deal with their emissions over the next six years. ...
This week’s “Youth Parliament” is an expensive waste of time that promotes taxpayer-funded junketeering, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union . “We shouldn’t be training kids on the joys of the trough,” says Taxpayers’ Union spokesperson ...
Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones admitted on Q+A tonight that the state of New Zealand’s infrastructure planning is “dismal” and the government needs to get on with building “rather than writing more reports about it.” ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra [embedded content]University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Professor Deep Saini discusses the week in politics with Michelle Grattan – one with a reduced pace, despite the 24 ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and ...
Jacinda Ardern’s Melbourne trip wrapped up with nothing to show on longstanding trans-Tasman concerns, but was a potent reminder of her international appeal. ...
Pricing agricultural emissions first at the processor level - such as Fonterra - rather than right down at farm level stacks up as a gap measure says Catherine Leining. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Children and Technology, Western Sydney University Instagram is running a social media experiment in Australia and elsewhere to see what happens when it hides the number of likes on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Cross, Research Fellow, Curtin University Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au. Billabongs in the northern Kimberley are welcome ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling You’ve probably heard that this week marks 50 years since humans first set foot on the Moon – a feat that still boggles the mind given ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dennis Gentilin, Adjunct Fellow, Macquarie University As strange as it might sound, whistleblowers in Australia have reason to rejoice – so long as they are in the private sector. Thanks to new ...
The fourth season of Queer Eye drops today on Netflix. Sam Brooks reflects on his difficult relationship with the show, and where it sits in mainstream culture.For depressingly many people, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was an introduction not just to ...
The collapse of a multi-billion dollar deal to sell AMP's life insurance division to a British company for $3.6 billion is the fault of the companies, according to the Reserve Bank. ...
A poem by Miramar poet Geoff Cochrane.Channel HoppingStupa or Stuka?Weet-Bix or Welsh rabbit?Galactic aerodrome or Matchbox truck?*I’m young in my dreams, still young.*Beautiful Keanu’s wearing shades—antique shades with iodine-coloured lenses.*I’m young in my dreams, still young,and I still have some ...
For the month of July, Josie Adams is taking on the challenge of being low-waste. That means minimising plastics, emissions, and even recyclables. Each week we release her diary. This is week two.Read week one here.I’ll be honest, week two ...
By Royson Willie in Port Vila Two Vanuatu Daily Post journalists were literally given a pat-down by the police criminal investigation unit yesterday over a story they had written about the vehicle of the Chairman of the Public Service ...
By Gorothy Kenneth in Port Moresby Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape will visit Australia this weekend for a week-long state visit and the Bougainville independence referendum in less than three months is expected to be high on ...
Tougher laws governing the movement of animals and harsher penalties for non-compliance are on the table under an overhaul of two key pieces of legislation. ...
Wtf did we just watch?That sound you heard was a million furries screaming in ecstasy as their fantasy and everyone else’s nightmare came to life in the form of the first trailer for the live action version of Cats.Is it ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Three Women by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury, $35)Fucking ...
Tougher laws governing the movement of animals and harsher penalties for non-compliance are on the table under an overhaul of two key pieces of legislation. ...
As we mark the fiftieth anniversary the July 20th Moon landing Dr Nick Long reflects on what that's meant for New Zealand and considers the space 'gold rush' ahead. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine Griebsch, Specialist and Senior Lecturer in Small Animal Medicine, University Veterinary Teaching Hospital Sydney, Sydney School of Veterinary Science, University of Sydney Recently reported cases of the often fatal bacterial infection ...
My selection of the eight best morning news links from here and overseas, along with eight lunchtime lean-back long reads. Also, the full list of links, including Jacinda Ardern's trip to Australia, the big emissions report, Fonterra's coal move and a new ...
Heaven is a place on earth, and June is saving the world one ’80s pop hit at a time. Tara Ward recaps season 4, episode 9 of The Handmaid’s Tale. Praise be, for there was a tiny bit of good news ...
Finance companies say they shouldn’t have to be ‘fit and proper’ even though in some cases they charge more than the planned clampdown on high cost lending. A group of finance companies that charges well over the government’s proposed cap on ...
An ANZ shareholder is demanding the bank disclose more information about the sale of an Auckland residential property to its former chief executive and his family. ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s contentForeign Affairs and trade Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): The new, ...
Tara Ward sets out on a valiant quest to find the best apple in Aotearoa. The idea that every apple is a good apple is fake news. We’ve all got stories about shit experiences with apples, when it looked good on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Sarkissian, Operations Scientist, CSIRO The role Australia played in relaying the first television images of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the Moon 50 years ago this July features in the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lyndal Sleep, Research Fellow, Griffith University In Australia’s social security laws, the “couple rule” is used to determine if a person is in a relationship, tying access to Centrelink payments to the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Walker, Lecturer (Management), Victoria University of Wellington We live in a society obsessed with performance. For both young and old, competitions, awards and rankings are an inescapable feature of life. How ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Megan O’Connell, Honorary Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne One-third of all preschools may lack a qualified teacher in the next four years if nothing changes, my new modelling shows. Currently, half of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirsty Volz, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland Of all the mantras for modernism, the one I think most befitting for Australian mid-century modern houses is L’esprit Nouveau – The New Spirit. ...
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Skifield snowmaking a sign of the future, vaccination rates fall alarmingly, and construction industry encouraged to lower emissions.Snowmaking has saved the ski industry from disaster this year, after the weather ...
Joel Rindelaub explains why it's so important for those weighing on climate science to be transparent about their funding sources and conflicts of interest. ...
Neil Armstrong may have been the first man on the moon, but if we define the ‘space race’ as spaceflight capability, the Soviets won it hands down, writes Jennifer Frost. ...
Our government and leaders are (still) divided on the question of compulsory te reo Māori. Who’s for it, who’s against it, and who’s flip flopping around in the middle?Under article two of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the government pledges to ...
When teenagers today are being called upon to solve the problems of tomorrow, why aren’t they given the right to participate in democracy? Fourteen-year-old Oli Morphew makes the case for lowering the voting age. If you’re going to deprive someone of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University Australia’s relations with China will be further complicated by the news that Australian citizen Yang Hengjun is set to be charged with ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Kyne, Senior Research Fellow in conservation biology, Charles Darwin University More than 28,000 species around the world are threatened, according to the Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the International ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE), Charles Sturt University Two Australian universities, University of Technology Sydney and Curtin University, are conducting internal reviews of ...
Open Mike 05/10/2017 
Our conversations and push against specific supremacist and ultra-Nationalist groups, and the pseudo-intellectual underpinnings of them, need to mature at all levels. But in doing so, it’s going to have to include a more thorough and brutally honest self-examination ...3 hours ago
This week, in the wake of National's opposition to even talking about reducing agricultural emissions and Simon Bridges' refusal to recognise that there is a climate emergency, I've been saying that National is unfit to govern. And it looks like ...5 hours ago
Something I missed: not only did Youth MPs declare a climate emergency; they also launched a campaign to lower the voting age to 16:Youth Parliament week in Parliament has seen the establishment of Make it 16, a campaign to ...8 hours ago
I have been reading and listening to the aftermath of Trump’s comments about the four female first term Democratic representatives, all of whom are “people of color.” I found the US coverage interesting both as evidence of partisanship and the ...1 day ago
The proposed Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill treats biogenic methane emissions differently from all other carbon emissions. The latter are to be measured net so that emissions from fossil fuels can be offset by carbon stored in trees. ...2 days ago
by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh This article aims to answer a simple question, whether the conflict is only a rural one or whether it is also urban. The verb ‘to be’ is conjugated in the present tense as ,despite what some ...2 days ago
2 days ago
On Sunday July 7, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter announced their intention to review the Ministry of Health’s Funded Family Care policy and repeal Part 4Aof the 2000 NZ Public Health and Disability Act. These are festering injustices ...3 days ago
Belle is a lovely fifteen year-old border collie who belongs to our friends and neighbours at Bryan’s Beach, Michael and Judy Corboy. Belle, in her old age, can hardly see or hear, but – as a constant participant at social ...3 days ago
A Woman’s Place is on the Podium was a public meeting in London on 10 July to discuss women’s sports and the impact of transwomen competing against women. The venue was sold out with a packed hall of 750 people. ...5 days ago
An occasional series where I will ponder allegations of anti-Semitism directed at the British Labour Party and its members.In this case, we are thinking about an allegedly anti-Semitic image shared by a Labour Party member. Its origins appear to be ...1 week ago
1 week ago
2 weeks ago
Welcome to another heaping helping of research publications related to climate change drivers and mechanisms, the effects of climate change and how we might yet grope our way into systems approaches to dealing with the mess we're making, despite ourselves. ...2 weeks ago
The People's "Friend": In this masterpiece of revolutionary propaganda, the homicidal political psychopath, Jean-Paul Marat, has been transformed by Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's most accomplished artist, into a martyred hero of the ordinary people of Paris. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, ...2 weeks ago
The principle of one person, one vote doesn’t apply for local elections. In fact, you don’t even need to be a person to have voting rights. Welcome to the ratepayer roll. While the ratepayer roll accounts for less than 1% ...3 weeks ago
Image Credit: Blog Writing Tips. I notice a few regulars no longer allow public access to the site counters. This may happen accidentally when the ... 3 weeks ago
A new digital platform aims to make it easier for small businesses to access services from multiple government agencies, leaving them more time to focus on their own priorities. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Small Business Stuart Nash ...3 days ago
July 19 (BusinessDesk) - The government is looking to tighten control and impose harsher penalties after the Mycoplasma bovis outbreak revealed cracks in the country's stock management system. ...4 hours ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra [embedded content]University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Professor Deep Saini discusses the week in politics with Michelle Grattan – one with a reduced pace, despite the 24 ...57 mins ago
The Air Force's Boeing 757 has broken down in Melbourne, stranding media and forcing the Prime Minister on to last minute commercial flights. ...3 hours ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cherie Hugo, Teaching Fellow, Nutrition & Dietetics, Bond University The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety this week turned its attention to food and nutrition. The testimony of maggots in ...3 hours ago
Jacinda Ardern’s Melbourne trip wrapped up with nothing to show on longstanding trans-Tasman concerns, but was a potent reminder of her international appeal. ...4 hours ago
Pricing agricultural emissions first at the processor level - such as Fonterra - rather than right down at farm level stacks up as a gap measure says Catherine Leining. ...4 hours ago
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The makeup of the up-coming parliament (based on the preliminary vote). It’s more diverse than last term with a bigger proportion of women Maori and Asian background MPs.
However, it is largely represented by people with previously middle class occupations, according to a Bryce Edwards’ article on Newsroom.
The conclusions are based on the MPs’ previous occupations and not upbringing. Of course, Metiria Turie was one of the few MPs last term who had a working class upbringing, and we know how that ended. i think Cartmel Sepuloni may also have had a working class background.
The stats:
Interesting that it is the greens that have a high number of MPs with a union or activist background amd least from the government sector. The Greens and NZ First have largest proportions from a business background (although Shaw’s business background was not terribly corporate, for-profit).
But what is the background of the remaining National MPs – that’d be 66%? Were they lay-abouts?
What’s with the “much more government” line? Nats = 19% from a government background. Labour = 21%. Big deal!
The differences between NZF and the Greens are more stark, but given that each has a really small caucus, they’re also (if not actually misleading) somewhat sensationalised. One person in a caucus of seven can hugely alter percentage points (with each individual being worth 14.3%).
Extracts from an article in the Herald 4 October, written by a former National MP, explain how the German MMP system has been modified to give the party with the most votes the initial opportunity to form a government.
“The German Constitution, Article 63, provides that the person who receives the votes of a majority of members of the Bundestag (lower chamber of the federal Parliament) shall be elected Federal Chancellor. If no person has a majority in the Bundestag the person who receives the largest number of votes shall be elected. If that person cannot win a majority at an election in the Bundestag within seven days, the Federal President can either appoint that person Chancellor or dissolve the Bundestag for a new general election.”
What follows are the thoughts of a layman, not a legal or political expert. I look forward to reading what others have to say.
So, let’s say these German rules currently apply in New Zealand where English is given the opportunity to be PM. English would be PM for seven days, on the basis that 59 seats (including Act) don’t give him the required majority. If he cannot gather the support required from other MPs’ to achieve a majority, within the seven day timeframe, he can then go to the Governor General and asks to be Prime Minister.
If the Governor General agrees he is then PM of a minority government. If there was a genuine opposition coalition of the majority Left that includes NZ First, Labour and the Greens they would presumably have a large say in how the country is run despite English being PM. In any event a good opportunity to work as a cohesive opposition.
If he is refused by the Governor General, we then have another electoral vote rather than provide Ardern, Peters and Shaw with an opportunity to form an alternative Government. The power goes back to the people not to any particular Party.
You want to provide the link? After all, it’s just as easy to copy and paste the link as it is to copy and paste a quote from it. Rather than make the rest of us waste time searching for it.
Now that I’ve found the link, the extract at the end has almost nothing to do with the rest of the opinion piece by Michael Cox. Who was a total non-entity as an MP, and clearly the thirty years since then have done nothing to improve his cognitive abilities.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11929017
With respect to the idea that only the leader of the party receiving the most votes may form the government, that’s crap. One of the main points of MMP is to include a wide variety of voices and opinions. Then the largest coalition of those voices that can work together form the government.
Making it so only the largest party can from the government hands way too much power back to established large party power structures, who will suppress variety of opinion in order to present the largest possible monolithic bloc. And make even harder for small parties to get traction.
Lets tell the Germans “that’s crap”. My intention is to get comments on the German system not the merits of Michael Cox. Shoot the messenger if you must.
You missed the bit where it says “IF no person has a majority in the Bundestag….”. A majority does not have to come from one party, it can be of any number of participants. So it is very possible for a person to become chancellor if his/her party does not have the most votes in parliament, just enough votes will do, from any party.
I do understand that the majority can come from any number of parties. So in that respect it is no different to here.
+100 Andre
Completely nullifies the reason for MMP in the first place. For instance you could get a situation where the Nats had 35.5, Labour 35.3 Greens 14 NZF 12. Labour/Green could form a stable government (49.3 v 47.5) but would not be given the opportunity. The Nats couldn’t, so there would be a new election. Many other combinations would be possible if a new party got over 5%.
(On a practical note on Peter’s post, surely the week to form a government would start after the Special Votes had been counted. That would at least give 3 weeks to work out a government.)
Thanks for the comments. You would expect the week to start after special votes.
So maybe a modified system would give the largest Party the opportunity to make the first attempt at forming a majority Government? If they cannot do that the second largest Party then has the opportunity?
Why should any party be granted special privileges to form a government? What’s the problem with the current arrangement where the leader of the first coalition to say they have a majority of the house goes to the Governor General who presumably checks it out and if it seems legit, gives them the opportunity to prove it?
Andre has provided a valid reason why this kind of approach is a failure of recognising the democracy that can be provided by MMP.
If a group of like minded parties secures more than fifty percent of the vote, your proposal to adhere to the german method, would only provide space for the largest party vote, even if it was not part of that majority group.
Ultimately, meaning that despite MMP attempting to reflect the diversity of the electorate, the parties with the simplistic, most phatic policies and campaigning would be the ones who are most likely to garner the biggest block of votes, and be given the first priority to form a government.
The bland liars would retain their power – again.
Surely that is not what you are championing?
That’s exactly what he’s championing.
Plus, under our system, the governor general is appointed by the PM (leader of the largest party in what would in this situation be the previous government). Surely that predisposes him/her to stick with the status quo if there is no decisive outcome from an election?
Thanks for the perspective. Have patience while I continue to think this through.
What we really need then is for the NZ public to always expect that the final vote simply indicates peoples party preferences, not a result. So if one party has 49% of the vote and, say, 5 others, have an even split each of the other 51% of the vote they can all decide equally amongst themselves the way forward to forming a government. There is no “winner” until a coalition is formed.
I heard yesterday that in 16 years time, or so, Europeans will be a minority in Auckland. It really is time we starting listening to different voices rzther than trying to shut them down to preserve a world view that hasnt really existed in a long time?
Putting aside the ramifications around MMP, denying the Leader of The Opposition the right to test the confidence of parliament in the event that the PM or leader of the largest party has failed to win a confidence vote would pretty much overturn the parliamentary conventions that we’ve inherited with our version the Westminster system.
Furthermore the article seems to be suggesting that, in the event, that the leader of the largest party in the Bundestag is unable to muster a majority in that house, the President can simply appoint that person Chancellor? So, in our case we would be allowing the sovereign to appoint the PM even if that person has failed to survive a confidence vote in the house?
While I’ve got lots of criticisms of our governing arrangements, the details around how parties can come together to form a governing coalition seem reasonable to me. So I’m waiting for a good argument against what we have now before I get interested in suggested alternatives. So far all I see is flailing distress from Nats that currently don’t have the right to rule they feel entitled to.
In the event that some convincing argument against what we now have actually comes up, then yeah, the points you’ve raised are a good argument against following the german model. Particularly since the two worst features of our overall MMP system, a high threshold and coat-tailing, were also apparently copied from a german model.
“So far all I see is flailing distress from Nats that currently don’t have the right to rule they feel entitled to.”
Watching that with interest too.
The last two weeks of watching the echomen bouncing around in their echo chambers has been a study of idiocracy.
Bill has promised to march in the streets for his “right to govern”. Can’t wait.
I think that lowering the threshold to 3% and getting rid of the coat-tailing loophole are the 2 easiest things we could do to improve our version of MMP. And I also thinks there’s a good chance it might happen now that National’s decade long shenanigans in Epsom and Ōhāriu are finished.
It would be good to have the experts reassure everyone of the merits of our system when compared to FPP and the German version. How do you counter the view that NZF have the balance of power?
The “experts” reviewed MMP after the last referendum in 2012 and arrived at the conclusion that the coat-tailing loophole should be scrapped and the threshold lowered to 4%. All of which the, then National government chose to ignore.
http://www.elections.org.nz/events/past-events-0/2012-mmp-review/results-mmp-review.
And I don’t actually want to “counter” the view that NZFirst have the balance of power. The last 2 years has suggested the electoral outcome we find ourselves with. Get over it. Stop thinking in FPP and get on board with MMP. If National has spent the last decade doing that they might not have found themselves in the crappy position they’re in now.
The view that Peters holds the balance of power is totally accurate. Because of the choice of Green party members to effectively close the door on the idea of going into coalition with National thereby rejecting the possibility of holding the balance of power. If the Greens had chosen to be open to National, they too would hold the balance of power making any coalition negotiations much more interesting.
I think one (of many) fair ways of looking at that is that many NZF supporters would swing between Labour and National in the absence of a somewhat centrist party like NZF (or United Future in its heyday). So rather than consciously making the choice between Nat and Lab themselves, they are comfortable delegating that choice to Peters, in the expectation that NZF would also moderate any extreme ideas that make it in from the wings of whomever they go into coalition with. Keeping the bastards honest, if that phrase appeals.
So while I utterly detest Peters, I can respect the choice of his supporters. And if I’m completely honest, despite my loathing of Peters, I still prefer the idea of Nats having to keep Peters onside to the near-as-dammit absolute majority they’ve had the last nine years.
That’s my reading of it.
OR the public and media could grow up politically and wait for negotiations to see which relationships will work for good government in the future?
Shall we also follow Germanys 7 weeks annual leave each year and strong Unions or you just want to cherry pick the bits that help National?
“OR the public and media could grow up politically and wait for negotiations to see which relationships will work for good government in the future?”
Ain’t that the bloody truth! The media (or rather what parades as a MSM/4th Estate) should. Some aspects of this ‘nation’ called NuZull/Aotearoa continue to baffle me.
This little nayshun that “punches above its weight”; is/used to be criticised for that “Tall Poppy syndrome”, all that sort of stuff is actually ultra-competitive (at least amongst the male population – and more lately the Sharlene’s and Shona’s (at the risk of being labelled a sexist cnut) trying to prove they have adequate testosterone levels in order to compete. They seem to care so much about what the rest of the Whurl thinks of us – let alone fellow Kiwis.
Battles between egos in media stars, Hosking/7 Blunt versus The Fucking Project hosted by a Jesssie who has 3 or so hours to undergo a lycra-clad conversion between RNZ and Eden Terrace – the former address where ‘I’m old school and in-depth’ to the latter where ‘I’m superficial and aha ha ha’ with a parade of Mediaworks staff with mortgages to pay to prop him up – and despite an occasional outburst in order to maintain the last vestiges of credibility.
Even the way Kiwis drive a bloody car has become a competition – and despite their penis length, they’re not actually that good at it. (You’ve got to push the pedal to the floor and race to the next red light ahead of someone who’s read the road ahead and realised that exercise was going to be a pointless exercise.)
It’s no surprise to me all the FPP thinking that’s been evident before AND after the 23rd September.
I’m not sure why it is that we’ve become so fucking yea/nah about various gains and so pig ignorant (1893 Women’s Suffrage); a contribution to LGBTI and YouMan! roights; the implementation of a proportional representation system (with all its inadequacies) that we’re so frikken insecure or ignorant about that we all see this past month or so as a competition that someone NEEDS to convincingly win.
After 30+ years of neoliberalism, I guess it should be no surprise, but it’s kind of uphill.shit.push – which, in the end is a “loser’s battle”
Ah, so you want us to change the rules so that only National can form a government – got it.
I think we’ll pass.
A law abiding gun-owner right up until, surprise, he wasn’t.
An Australian man who came to know Stephen Paddock intimately in recent years has offered the most detailed public portrait yet of the Las Vegas mass killer.
He said Paddock was a highly intelligent, strategic though “guarded” individual who won a fortune applying algorithms to gambling, and studied arguments for his right to own weapons under the US constitution.
Their encounters came via their respective girlfriends, Philippine-born sisters – one of whom, Marilou Danley, has returned to the US to be interviewed by the FBI in the wake of Paddock’s meticulously planned massacre.
Their acquaintanceship, through more than half a dozen encounters in the US and the Philippines between 2013 and 2015, revealed Paddock’s generosity – which had his overseas guests living in “palatial” style – and the existence of a “gun room” at his home in Mesquite, Nevada.
“Yes, I was familiar with him,” the man, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Guardian at his Brisbane home on Wednesday. “He was extremely intelligent, methodical, conservative – guarded – and strategic. A planning, thinking type of guy.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/04/las-vegas-shooter-stephen-paddock-intelligent-gambler-gun-rights
If they were to apply Paddocks profile across the population how many US citizens would trigger an alert.
I’d suggest the bulk of US gun owners would come up which in itself tells you somethings very much amiss in America as their biggest terrorist threat is likely to be coming from their own citizens.
I guess it makes a change from the US govt and it’s backing of violent conflict outside of the USA.
The report in The Press on (killer) Paddock: 64 years, left no immediate hint of motive. He had 34 guns, and shot at least 59 people.
He was a retiree with penchant for gambling – but no criminal record.
‘Paddock was not known to have served in the military, or to have suffered from a history of mental illness or to have registered any inkling of social disaffection, political discontent or radical views on social media.’
I think he was just infected with a bad case of empty USA propaganda with the disadvantage of ‘Being Born in the USA’ and believing the empty bit in their Constitution about his Right to be Happy. Which as anyone who thinks knows is only a passing feeling, not appropriate as full-time goal for questing humans.
Paddock’s behaviour would seem the likely outcome for many of male humanity who succeed in getting money and then buying what they decide they want from life, and then find this doesn’t provide a satisfactory reason for living.
The rich man Howard Hughes ended up degraded after having a surfeit of his wealth, accomplished some personal goals, and finding nothing else to stimulate him. He got beyond wanting, living on chicken soup in the entire floor of a hotel where the windows were blacked out, sitting on a toilet for hours, long hair, long nails, and with someone managing his affairs for him.
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1902376_1902378_1902405,00.html
On a lower level of wealth a guy from NZ killed his girlfriend Crystal or killed himself or someone else at his apartment in some Australian resort where he had retired after making money investing in some vitamin pill company. I
registered the negativity of this ‘successful’ investor, but his details weren’t worth remembering.
These individuals are unconnected to the real world where people actually work for their earnings, not just invest in likely profitable business or housing where they live off others striving and work. I think the term is rentier.
There will be more of these crazed individuals who show symptoms which psychiatrists do not deign to consider insane because of narrow definitions. Otherwise, we might recognise our world is daily near-insane, and I guess the trick-cyclists are just peas in the soup. And crazed individuals within the individualistic society seem to be proliferating in the neo liberal economic religious system imposed on us. In the free market, we have to be careful to look for real friends to give life with each other meaning as in The Three Musketeers – inseparable friends who live by the motto “all for one, one for all” (“tous pour un, un pour tous”). Individualistic men and women probably don’t have real friends, more drinking buddies, investor leads and suitable social partners but if we can only trust a few friends, a group separate from society, then do we actually have a society or is life another version of Game of Thrones?
You have to also question the wisdom of US law enforcement and the demand for every detail of the crime from the news media in these situations.
With every passing ‘massacre’, prospective lone-wolf gunmen get an ever more detailed blueprint on how to commit one of these crimes; e.g.: it was the gun smoke in the room setting off smoke detectors giving him away. Without that and, presumably a suppressor, he could have remained undetected for a lot longer than what he did.
Totally agree.
Some how I think I’m going to end up like a lot of people thought our history that have fought for equal rights and who fought against the the establishment like Eddie Grant a controversial death it has happen many times through out our history . But I will keep for OUR Earth because we have only one Earth only one WORLD.
Big UPPS To those supermarkets taking the lead and banning plastic bags .
The big picture is all OUR people in a position to make changes that will benefit our environment should not wait for government . They need to take the lead and make these changes for our grandchildren future.
Governments are a complicated beast that need US to show them the right path to a brighter future.
P.S. It awesome to see MSM taking the lead and showing the fact,S on climate change Ka Pai
Eco Maori i agree plastic bag use should be banned.Should have already happen long before now.And feel its also good to see Greenpeace actively involved.However i fail to see banning any kind of bag as a workable answer.Shopping isn’t necessarily always a planned event for everyone.So why not allow replacement of plastic with paper?.Many more people would be likely to then get right behind the idea, and freely adopt that as change that’s easy to accept. I’d really like to understand why Greenpeace hasn’t taken up this approach .Perhaps somebody,here,can help explain why?
Those Catalan government idiots are going to get their asses kicked.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41498685
“Madrid nos roba” – “Madrid is robbing us”
Catalonia is spectacularly rich compared with other parts of Spain. It’s got 16% of the population and 19% of the GDP. Barcelona gets massive tourism and has one of the biggest ports in Europe. Tarragona has one of the biggest chemical industries in Europe.
So of course they pay more taxes than the rest of the country, and more of it gets spent in poorer regions than where it came from. Doing what proper government does with taxes: redistribute from those with the average wealth, to those who need it more.
The Catalan government also owes E77b in public debt. They’ve been the biggest beneficiary of the special fund the Spanish government set up to get the regions going again after the protracted effects of the GFC. Catalan took far and away most of this facility to do good for its own people. But of course, that rich region and its on average wealthy and educated region wouldn’t have to pay that back if they struck out independently.
Tax. Debt.
No doubt calls for independence stirs the heart of old socialists and anarchists brought up on For Whom The Bell Tolls. But before you start asking for another Crimea, ask yourself: who benefits?
“Madrid nos roba” – “Madrid is robbing us”
Where is that from? It’s not in the link.
weka
I think it might have been on a placard at one of the demonstrations, though I didn’t see it in the linked article’s video (maybe one in the weekend). Ad seems to have seized on the idea that the Catalan independence movement is entirely economic; which seem to be overly simplifying matters, and ignoring history (such as the torture and execution of the last independent Catalan president by Franco’s regime).
However, I found it grimly amusing for a member of an heridatary Bourbon monarch (descendant those overthrown during the French revolution and whose father had been handpicked by Franco as his successor) to be lecturing those who had been engaged in a largely symbolic referendum on; “democratic principles of the rule of law”. The excessive reaction by the Spanish government in sending in their armoured goon squad was very counterproductive in assuring the Catalan people that they not oppressed.
I wondered about that too, would have been good to see the context. Madrid robbing Catalonia could refer to the election, or democracy, or independence etc.
Surprising precisely nobody, here is episode number 271,828,182,845,904,523,536,028,747,135,266,249,775,724,709,369,995 of awesomely blatant conservative political hypocrisy. In this case, rabidly “pro-life” politicians pressuring their mistresses to abort the unborn child they had fathered.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/10/03/this_pro_life_congressman_was_caught_telling_his_extramarital_boo_to_get.html
Episode number 271,828,182,845,904,523,536,028,747,135,266,249,775,724,709,369,996 of blatant pro-life hypocrisy.
9 million kids get insurance through CHIP. Congress is about to let its funding expire
On September 30, funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program expires. After Republicans took a rushed and ultimately failed run at repealing Obamacare one last time, the program’s spending authorization is now at imminent risk of lapsing.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/27/16373494/chip-funding-reauthorization-congress
Happy happy….
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/tillerson-s-fury-trump-required-intervention-pence-n806451
Well he’s correct jo90 good post
Trumps old tweets. The Hallmark cards of Twitter: there’s one for every occasion. Even for when his Secretary of State calls him a fucking moron.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/4/16424248/how-is-there-always-a-tweet-trump
And to address the question in the cartoon: yes they did put something into the constitution to deal with that possibility. The Electoral College. It had one job. And failed.
Shows how captured by the system their elected officials are. The private vs public stance on many issues are at variance.
A case of saying whatever is required to get elected.
Theresa May’s disaster speech at the Conservative Party Conference…couldn’t have happened to someone more deserving….
….and the icing on the cake, she was wearing a bracelet depicting the proud Communist artist Frida Kahlo….it sounds like it could have all been scripted by the writers of The Thick Of It.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/theresa-may-frida-kahlo-bracelet-communist-cough-conservative-conference-a7982931.html
But before you start feeling even just a pang of sympathy for her….save it for people who are really suffering under her regime, as the evidence for the relationship between austerity and suicide mounts…
http://discoversociety.org/2017/02/01/suicides-linked-to-austerity-from-a-psychocentric-to-a-psychopolitical-autopsy/
So I say enjoy, have a giggle, a chuckle, it is one of the few times it is OK to laugh at someone else’s misfortune.
So very english, the protester stooped as he was lead out, presumably so as not to disrupt too much.
And Corbyn, Corbyn, Corbyn he clearly has them rattled.
Reminiscent of the Tories here, spent more time talking about the ‘enemy’ rather than articulating their vision.
If our Tories articulated their vision then very few people would ever vote for them. And so they articulate the same vision as the Left while putting in place policies that bring about its antithesis.
She seems to suffer from some sort of acute stage-fright which might explain the dreadful coughing.
How that guy got anywhere near her with the P45 form is amazing and the Frida Kahlo bracelet and all the letters falling off the wall was just the icing on the cake.
ffs that security is non existent – shocking.
Absolutely, just as well it wasnt the other P45, the kahr p45.
Commentary from Jonathan Pie:
Iain M Banks, AFAIK, coined the term “power junkie”. There are certain parallels one can draw with Wayne’s recent emissions.
It’s a pity the O,R and Y in COUNTRY didn’t fall off…..oh that would have been so good.
Haha. That’s what it was thinking. Shakespeare!
SDHB are having public meetings fora next week to put a gloss of public consultataion on their; “strategy and action plan” through to 2030, particularly focusing on the hospital rebuild. The ODT is a bit vague on the details, but the SDHB facebook page has a scan of a print ad (probably from the ODT, I seldom see a physical copy these days). For Dunedin that is; 13:00-14:30 Tuesday 10/10, at the Barclay theatre in the museum. Nothing about whether you have to book to speak as with the public forum prior to the start of ordinary public advisory committee meetings.
https://www.facebook.com/southerndhb/
http://www.southerndhb.govt.nz/pages/public-forum/
This seems worth trying to make your voice heard at, if you can make it during workhours. Or you could just leave it up to the unelected SDHB in conjunction with an multinational professional services corporation to do what is best for the people of Otago:
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/forums-chance-have-say-health-services
Work hours? Hmmmmm
Profiles in Craven Cowardice. Repug senators deflect and hide when asked about any kind of legislative response to the Las Vegas mass murder.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mass-shootings-las-vegas-gop_us_59d3ef64e4b04b9f9205baf4?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
Religious extremism courtesy of RWNJ’s – a gun shop in Dallas using Crusader imagery and citing biblical verses.
https://www.facebook.com/TEMPLARORDANCE/#
A friend of mine gasped when she saw the Vulcan episode of American Gods. “That’s Civic Religion!” she said. She’d been enrolled in religious studies and apparently one of the tools for understanding how states operate is to look as societies as religions or cults.
The creators of American Gods here explain why they created an episode not in the original book to look at this.
Two more sleeps then roll on 2pm when we will know the results of the Special Votes.
Radio NZ has just said in the 11 am bulletin that the meeting between NZFirst and National was all over in half an hour…?
Seems that way.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/97564343/nz-first-talks-with-national-labour
“Asked what sort of a reception he’d received, Peters replied, “take a wild guess”. “
In today’s paper Herald Grant Bradley the aviation commentator has an article of the CEO of Air NZ speaking to an audience of 400 in the Business Section. The CEO says its “no time to slash and burn” with businesses looking for short term goals of cutting jobs, cutting investment and cutting customer services”. I would like to link this article but I cannot find it on the online Herald.
His words “the reality is that the business world is sadly littered with companies that are just cutting jobs and ultimately not fulfilling their purpose to do anything useful. That’s pretty sad”.
He goes to on say they Air NZ have greatly reduced the income parity between the genders and is endeavouring to make their company more sustainable – for example the recycling scheme where unsealed food/drinks left on trays will be recycled where its safely possible.
My first thoughts were of this National Government and previous Labour Governments which have sold off state owned assets purely to pay down debt and get that instant gratification of money in hand. No thoughts of the dividend stream that might still be coming in if they hadn’t been sold off. Also their customer service in all of their departments is a bloody disgrace especially at WINZ. The attrition of staff in departments and front line in essential departments is another serious problem.
Banks are another where customer service is next to nothing. It seems we have a way to go yet where customers are valued and staff treated with respect.
“words “the reality is that the business world is sadly littered with companies that are just cutting jobs and ultimately not fulfilling their purpose to do anything useful. That’s pretty sad”. ”
I take some heart that more and more businesses are operating beyond just bottom line return to shareholder or owner. More than 30 years ago. Still more need to transition but it is a start
It seems some in the media have caught on that the labour party are economically ‘orthodox’ rat bags. That if they stick with what they been saying (policy), nothing will change, actually just like the last 9 years it will only get progressively worse.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/10/05/bryan-gould-to-labour-this-is-no-time-for-conventional-answers/
Someone’s…??…doppelganger..
https://thedailybanter.com/2017/10/ha-goodman-uses-republican-talking-points/
Hugh Hefner cured a ‘model’ of her eating disorder:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11929842
Now he’s dead, one more miracle like that and he can apply to the Pope for sainthood.
LOLOLOLOLOL
Well we are giving our daughter and son and inlaw a break we have 3 of there children till Sunday man they keep you on your toes 2 girls whom are blonde and very well behaved and our eldest grandson well he has a real full of life personality . We are very proud of our whole family we created. But when we were bring up our children I did not realize how much time goes into bring up children most of the time I was out there chasing the big money fishing and other various jobs. So most of the time I just past the money over and my wife did most of the hard yards bring up our family .
But when my daughters started having children this opened my eyes to the hard ship Lady’s go through carrying a baby for 9 months having no sleep for the first 6 months it is a 24 7 job bring up children and can be a very dangerous life threatening time giving birth and most males are totally unaware of these fact’s . For this reason we give our young lady’s all the help we can with bring up our grandchildren and this is one of the reason that I get the big picture . Which is we have one Mother Earth and we have to look after her as no one else is Kia Kaha
I love a bit of self awareness from a male who actually gets how hard a woman works when she becomes a mother. I still remember the absolute exhaustion I had from when I had my first child and then second . Right through till….. Can’t remember.Good on you. High five. Oh, and that was over 40 years ago.
Has anyone seen/read this? It exposes the smokescreen that trade is about encouraging democracy rather than a greedy grab to be first in. Remember how being in WTO woukd help China be more Democratic and better on Human Rights…
” To make matters worse, the Trump family have placed themselves conspicuously on China’s payroll, accepting future profits in the form of trademarks for both the Trump and Ivanka brands, and seeking Chinese investment in Kushner real estate projects. When China Labor Watch, a New York–based labor rights organization, published information on poor conditions in a factory where Ivanka’s brand-name shoes had recently been produced, China detained the group’s three field investigators, the only time CLW’s investigators have been detained for exposing the abuse of Chinese workers.2 ”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/12/chinese-world-order/
“Remember how being in WTO wou[l]d help China be more Democratic and better on Human Rights…”
Fark! That’s almost as big a lie as all the others the new neo-libs told us would happen – in the future, going forward, actually-as a matter of fact, to coin a phrase, so-to-speak.
Public Service reforms
The market the market as the natural leveler
Privatisations
etc
etc
etc
Maybe a good person to bring in on fisheries reform…
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41438279?ocid=socialflow_facebook&ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_source=facebook
Tea-service all set?
I have to go numbing my nut somewhere else.
For a last mention, cheese.
“Auckland ratepayers [are] now paying 6 percent more this year for council salaries. A staggering 52 percent of rates are now used by the council just to pay staff.”
…Mr Town (CEO)- who got a $34,000 payrise to $690,000…”
http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2017/10/bump-in-auckland-council-staff-earning-six-figure-salaries.html
Note the article attacks democratically elected Phil Goff NOT the unelected CEO Town who earns $690,000 who is supposed to ‘run’ the council.
Not sure how much the Ports of Auckland get, or Metrowater CEO’s but probably more than Phil Goff.
Like Fonterra, it’s about time CEO salary is linked to real results, ratepayer (or in the case of Fonterra farmers) satisfaction, real public services and real results. Hard to see how the current situations of both organisations can meet normal measures of results.
Apparently Auckland council has some unbelievable dissatisfaction rate from ratepayers.