How far will the bitter and nasty right wing faction of old white men go in their determination to turn everything into another round of culture war?
Well, in the case of Karl Du Fresne (a creeping Jesus if there ever was one) it runs as far as going into bat for child molesters because, you know, white male.
“…Now, Cardinal Pell. Did he sexually molest two choir boys in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne? A jury decided he did, …”
That is f**king right you pathetic piece of shit Du Fresne. he was convicted. By a jury. After a fair trial. But no, you think you should defend him because you are a screaming emotional cripple who clings to the authoritarian catholic church like dung to a blanket and would prefer kiddy fiddlers walk free to conservative white male clerics in positions of authority being held to account.
They will always be with us, the issue is that they have platforms all over the place. Way out of proportion to their actual numbers. We need a means of de-platforming them.
Agreed. Du Frsne’s misplaced sense of being a victimised white male has landed him in a very bad place with this one. He just can’t see what his own retrograde ideology has done to him.
a racist ageist rant I don’t think ethnicity or race are predeterminstic for kiddy fiddlers I think the last big nz case was a Samoan rugby coach Nor does that suggest such activities a predisposed to Polynesians as you are trying to suggest it is a white, make agre problem, looser
Is Netanyahu really “white”?
What is the definition of “white” these days anyway?
I thought the jewish people came from Arabia and eastern med?
Arabia’s not white is it? Nor eastern med?
It is very confusing
Rubbish. All because one group is acting like kneejerk reactionary schoolchildren doesn’t require the other to respond to those self-indulgent wankers. You are demanding response before the considerations are made.
To me, I see one side going ten rounds before the first bell has been rung. They’ll exhaust themselves dancing and prancing round the canvas then, when the debate actually begins, they’ll have nothing new to say.
And they’ll get crucified as the self-interested tax dodging sacks they are (imo).
I don’t think the public remembers the shit these people sprout for months on end. Another scandal, another news cycle, gone in the hot wind it arrived on.
Let’s wait for the actual debate. We’re not all reeds in this wind.
We the Bleeple, I suspect your argument is fatally flawed.
The “self interested tax dodging sacks” are winning the argument currently, and because of that, Peters and NZF will hang the coalition out to dry on this.
By the time the PM has given the NZF required exemptions to farmers, small businesses and the NZX, the money left in the “fairness payments” bucket will be minimal and the Govt wont have $8b to give as income tax breaks. The working poor will feel let down once again.
And without any real money for the “fairness payments” whats the point of the CGT in the first place?
Then the Cullen Tax Group will be written off as Jacindas very expensive vanity project with no gains for anyone (except those on the committee)
Time will tell if your view is the one that comes to pass, or whether my view is the one which comes to pass
Ad,
What makes you think O’Connor will be advocating CGT for farmers? Given the PM’s statements about her concerns for farmers and small business, it will be much more likely that O’Connor will be singing a duo with Peters.
He was on RNZ this morning trying to defend against Natipnal’s inroads in rural communities on tax issues.
Peters will defend similar rural territory at Cabinet, but more harshly. Tax reform at a sectoral level is lost in the provinces and the remaining ground is in Auckland.
But think about the chidren! It has become a cliche’ because so often they and their parents are passed over as the tax parade goes by. A sick joke that refers to the cry so often heard and so little listened to.
Beneficiaries should not be limited in what they can earn. They should’t be checked every week and their benefit adjusted down. Every month okay and encourage it, adjust a little at the end of six months. Reward effort and determination.
Now they may be left with little for their work to spend after tax and removal of benefits and repayment of grants. How about the equivalent of $2 an hour and then transport and extra child care costs taking care of that.
Stick that in your pipes and smoke it you Taxed with Working Group.
National isn’t winning the debate – far from it. Just look at the comments on any stuff article that is anti the CGT and people are mostly all for the CGT. They’re also saying the stuff Labour would want them to say – that it’s not fair to tax income from work different to income from non-work.
Stuff is a left-wing website.
They’re also desperately hoping the government buys them, which is why there are so many articles promoting Ardern and this Labour government.
The ‘average kiwi’ who owns there own home and is not interested in exploiting those who have no option but to rent is going to be better off with the tax adjustments.
The Government are giving the opposition 2 months of rope, and they are doing a very nice job of hanging themselves.
To not pay something on a fortune is hard to do when the theme is “Fairness”
So ordinary people are going… “Wait up.. I pay on every dollar, and they want to pay nothing? Now that’s not fair”
The Right can’t defend the indefensible, so they are losing friends and support.
The Government can come in and suggest serious change in April, which would have seemed impossible before this.
This woman is remarkable. She has made New Zealanders examine “Fairness”
It has opened minds to what have been accepted patterns of behaviour and helped put a new view and perspective on some accepted forms of greed.
Thank you J A. We are seriously considering how some are taxed and some are not and are ready to change that.
But then you get this quick change of tack from the Hosk today over at the fish wrap:
“The soft bigotry of low expectation.” And that is the aspiration of this government, isn’t it? You don’t want to turn up for a work interview? No problem…………………..”
Kat who do you get that from? No Government website. Just yesterday there were 20 newly employed with training in place to plant manuka for the honey industry. This is full time and leading to qualifications, which will assist the next tranche.
The right have always blamed the unemployed. Don’t help them do it. Cheers
They start these lies and hope they will be repeated.
Patricia, you are correct the “fish wrap” is not a govt website, it is however the conveyor of low brow commentary and political bias on a daily basis.
My comment in reply to yours was to highlight your point that while the opposition and its poodles are busy hanging themselves on the rope from the TWG discussion, a quick change of tack in the media, namely from the “fish wrap” appears necessary as a brief diversion.
Soper, Young, etc etc are all far, far to untypical of average New Zealand to have a clue what the public actually think – they are engaged in a giant confidence trick, where being an old, financially secure, white and old of touch person who are convinced that interviewing each other and establishment vested interests is presented as being in touch with the zeitgeist of the nation.
In fact, they just represent narrow sectional interests – and the decline of MSM makes their views of little importance anyway.
However, many on the right have vested interests and these will be examined as the debate proper starts.
Those on the left with large assets (Jones) will have to declare they are not letting those influence their attitudes.
A problem to consider is the fairness of tax on reparations to Maori, however, they seldom sell, so there should be a way through that.
When the Government produces tables showing how large holders of capital will be affected compared to those with basic or no assets, there will be an epiphany.
We are discussing the % of tax paid on earnings from all sources.
A whole industry has been developed to assist the asset rich to avoid tax.
I know they’re irrelevant, but we’re not all trained to think critically or investigate multiple sources. It would be of use to the public to see just how these Nat mouthpieces have self-interest at heart.
P.S. Whatever happened to Swill-Cone? Surely CGT has caused more neurosis to report on.
Unfortunately in most situations those that do live in places in that state would not welcome an order to vacate. With falling available rentals and masses of applicants “You’ll need to find another place” is bleak news for those previously obliged to settle for sub-standard options of that ilk.
Raising the standards of NZ rentals and tapping into a bit of that cash cow milk are great initiatives. I’m concerned that our government are ill prepared for the equal and opposite forces these initiatives will initiate.
I think a trending increase in the number of people that are eligible for and waiting for Government housing is an indication that my fears are not ill-founded.
There are plans afoot to address your concerns Marty. The govt have employed inspectors, they’ve started with the govt housing stock. I think these people will move on to policing compliance amongst the private sector.
Just as tenants have their tribunal outcomes made public, landlords do too. The bloodsuckers you speak of would hate nothing more than having to pay a tenant and the govt $5000 because the wind whistles through their let. It would be good if via non compliance fines, the dept was almost self funding.
I think the slumlord tally will plummet. These are of course all good things.
But….as I say, there will be repercussions, we could and should be prepared for them.
The scum are upgrading their hovels because they have to.
Thing is, people have been living in these hovels because they can afford them ($200)* but the scum are chucking them out while they do $10/20k worth of work. And when these not quite hovels anymore do come back on the rental market, the scum have jacked the rents ($370)* beyond the former tenant’s means.
I seem to recall that the Government, as landlord (via Housing Corp) also has rented out substandard dwellings to desperate folk.
Maybe the trick would to bring their own properties up to scratch (apparently they had heaps of empty ones too) and rent those out first, before bitching about private landlords.
When pressed on whether he would be open to the use of genetic modification to help combat climate change, Minister Shaw told Corin Dann, “I want to see what the science says about that and what the Science Ethics Committee would say about that. I would be led by the science on it.”
Well, this raises the question as to whether NZ (?) scientists should be funded to undertake scientific research into other uses of GE to tackle other problems such as pest control. Or is it a matter of the end justifies the means? Sounds a bit too much like National to me …
If GE will transform pasture farming, protecting it from the effects of climate change and ensuring farm-resilience and sustainability, surely industry driven by the market and smart farmers, will invest in the technology.
Surely.
Scientific evidence is one main input into a healthy debate that looks at risks, benefits and economic returns as well. In a holistic way that looks at the whole of society and not just at a few fractions with invested interests (!) or ideological agendas.
the trouble being you cannot model the risks ie they are irreducible eg Nalimov
We can say that the nature of change in biology is random, since it is
impossible to find an expression for a sufficiently detailed description
that is considerably shorter than the “most complete” description of the
observed phenomenon. In other words, it is not possible to construct a
model of a generator of mutations in terms of ordinary cause-effect relations,
i.e., it is not possible to find the causes that unambiguously
generate the full diversity of observed mutations. Having found that the
nature of change is random, we are greatly surprised that there does not
exist an ordinary probabilistic description of the observed phenomena.
An ordinary statistical description of phenomena is possible if, on the
basis of the results of observations carried out on a small sample, we can
calculate the distribution parameters which make it possible to obtain an
idea of the behavior of the complete sequence of phenomena. In the case
of biological changes, observations made on a small sequence of
phenomena do not yield information about the subsequent behavior of
the system. In such a case, averaged characteristics have no significance.
The individual manifestations of the phenomena are important, irrespective
of their probability of occurrence.
I liked it for it’s simple format – ask five experts about the health implications compared to conventional diet. No brow beating, no ethical jabs, just a health focus.
I don’t really care what helps people eat less meat, some just get defensive when the ethics arguments are put up – so having health argued by several professionals is very useful.
Nice one Steve Kearney. I ran some of the sideline stuff for the Warriors games once, Steve’s huge!
Thanks for posting this mauī.
Yes, v.g. Stephen Kearney and family!
It is very encouraging seeing how more and more NZers are understanding and experiencing the health and environmental benefits of plant-based whole-food eating and it is attracting less of the knee-jerk fear reaction that it used to from threatened individuals in our mainstream ‘animal-slaughter-dependent’ country.
The knee-jerk fear reaction of the thousand or more households in my burg dependent on the meat industry for their livelihoods will probably be along the lines of WTF are we going eat.
Nice illustration – cheers.
Do you think they are fearing for their livelihoods, or what they are going to eat, or both!?
A little bit of knowledge would help them in either case.
The majority are seasonal workers so they know all about both fearing for their livelihoods and how tough it is to feed themselves during the off-season.
This appears to be going a little off-topic from the thread Joe. To bring it back in: seems then that they would be gainfully employed in plant based food production when the ‘vegan-green-peril’ fully takes over.
By then they will have learnt a full range of tasty vegan recipes, other than ‘lettuce and mayo’. They will be healthier and realise how much more affordable it is to feed themselves and their families on a meat-free, dairy-free diet.
seems then that they would be gainfully employed in plant based food production
I reckon I’ve heard something along those lines before. Oh, that’s right, like Douglass and Prebble before them, Bolger and Richardson assured us that new employment opportunities would abound…and then they proceeded to destroy literally thousands of jobs and tore the heart out of my community. Ain’t gonna happen again.
Yeah good point. The freezing works in several small towns are the major employers.
For myself, I don’t think NZ is going to lose all its dairy/meat production but we’ll have to bring herds down to carrying capacity, and diversify for resilience sake… but ultimately, rotational grazing is the HOW TO of sustainable meat production, with a few tweaks (reduce/remove salts and cides, replant many trees, biodiversity earthworks and water storage, on-site production of feedstock, trees on anything > 15 degrees…) NZ could lead the way in regenerative agriculture.
We are in pole position to create the best food in the world due to our distance from everything, good soils and high rainfall.
Once we’ve learned to keep and grow soil and capture and slow rain (they’re connected), we will not only be productive, but resilient.
I can’t see veganism as the future. I can see diets altering to encompass more plants both for human and planetary health. The freezing worker will still be here, but maybe not so many. there will be more work with trees, bees, aquaculture, fruits, nuts, medicines…
Its very different isn’t it? People making an informed choice about what they eat may certainly disrupt our ‘all eggs in one basket’ (pun intended) animal slaughter industry to some extent. Its hardly comparable to an ideological elite’s top-down imposition of neoliberalism on our lives.
We do need to ‘de-platform’ the ‘right wing angry middle class’ among us.
They only add anger and absolutely no positive resolution to any issue that we need to discuss with “a cool head”.
If they can’t make ‘constructive comments’ – they should be banned.
This was a very good article over on the Daily Blog that I commented on with constructive ways to “define who best to vote for over one issue we need to discuss.
So with the tax reform issue we need a similar voting platform to make our current leaders and (candidates) to define what they will vote for.
As we are the problem currently, – since we are lazy and just vote for these lazy useless Governments; – who just sit on the fence and do nothing; – all while the planet burns.
I am ashamed as I should be so I am 100% behind our young for standing up to show that we need to also get off our butts and get in the action also.
Vote out any lazy politician and Local Body councillor who refuses to stand up and join the fight to save our planet.
As this year being our ‘Local body Elections time’ we need to hold all those ‘potential Local Body candidates to account on climate change!!!
We need to have them all sign a questionnaire on climate change, and publish their plans to “commit” to vote for climate change!!!!
cleangreen
You are talking about making sure that politicians do what the people and the land need them to. And I think that is what a working democracry should be about.
We thought we had one, that was at least tottering along sometimes, and then making changes and getting better. Then the whole thing was overthrown by cutting government away and its regulations (the fat) and supposedly introducing a lean, fit model. Only it leaned too far and fell over! Hah.
Now we need participatory democracy. The people need to form a group of practical people looking to the future, each one with an interest in one of the major drivers of an
enterprise society perhaps transport, agriculture in general including horticulture, manufacturing in general, employment and understanding thoroughly the way that Stats gathers and presents figures for official is there a Household Labour Survey and why or not? Education and its value today, technology spread smothering traditional writing and communication, also what is driving the politicians, advisors, bureaucrats – who yanks their strings, provides the models they follow?
Then we get a picture of what is happening. You have reliable, informed academics who will give you an ear and perhaps address a meeting of keen learners. Then we can draw up rough plans for what is needed, bring the figures in to fill them out, make reasonable estimates of cost, look at who or what would be affected by it, perhaps that site is environmentally vulnerable, perhaps that local landowner would object even if it is public land, even if it is a necessary step for the good of the community. How can he/she be brought into the loop, be smoozed?
There was an interview this morning with a Mayor on the West Coast. He and one of his cohort organised some work without going through the required steps.l
He said they did it because it looked as if there was going to be a repeat of the flood that washed out their sewage ponds. They managed to avoid this and have done apparently a fairly good job of protection with a stopbank or something.
People have to do this, get full information, and then press hard for necessary steps. You cleangreen appear to be doing this in Gisborne. No doubt you have worked out a case for getting quick address to your problems, with steps that even the most reluctant decision maker must notice are straightforward and cogent.
I was reading a bit from David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell.
He starts a new Part with Ecclesiastes 9:11 –
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.
So I guess we just hope our time will last long enough to give us the chance.
Lol. ‘There was blame on both sides’.
To take away their platform in the kindest possible way?
After all it surely isn’t so urgent that we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings!
I reckon bugger elections and democracy clean green, you and bunch of teenagers ( preferably suitably left and woke ) just determin the criteria and what constitutes correct thinking and then select who should be in council and in parliament
Thanks mauī, again I appreciate your posts today.
This is fascinating and I hope some of our right wing trolls who are fond of spouting their version of the truth here get an opportunity to watch (and think about) this.
Was rife on the East Coast 1980’s to early 1990’s basically organised crime, some of the Maori Trust Blocks got hammered, one block at Te Arararoa lost 100 x breeding cows and a Station in the Waikura Valley lost 300 x 2 tooth breeding ewes, this ain’t just the odd animal for the freezer.
Truck @ trailers required for these sort of numbers.
I imagine Mr Shaw may be getting a little bit nervous.
After almost a year of the MSM ignoring the total stuff up by his Department in their attempt to hold a Census Stuff is starting to run stories about it. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/111052779/365-days-and-still-counting-census-2018-results-nowhere-to-be-seen
Young James has spent all that time with a blindfold on and his hands jammed over his ears while he, ever more desperately, claims that everything will turn out all right, and anyway “it wasn’t my fault”.
Well tough luck James. It was your fault and your refusal to do anything about it should cause you sacking.
Have a look in the linked article. You don’t have to accept my opinion.
As Auckland University Statistician Andrew Sporle says
“”It’s a bit of a disaster, we don’t know how bad, but we know it’s a disaster.”
He said it appeared Stats NZ’s follow through after the initial response, which was adequate, had faltered.”
In other words it was what happened after the Census that has caused the havoc and Shaw is totally responsible for that.
Shaw also claims that it will not be possible to arrange a Census in 2021. What that means is that he, and his Department, have wasted 12 months that could have been put into organizing it.
Economist Brian Easton has also commented on Shaw’s Shambles. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/111044133/census-mess-can-be-resolved-with-a-new-one-in-2021
Brian, who certainly doesn’t lean to the right says that the Census is unlikely to be accepted by a Court as meeting the statutory obligations that exist. He is also quite scathing about the argument that it is impossible to run a proper one in 2021.
As he says.
“Stats NZ has claimed that it takes three years (instead of two years and nine months) to run a new census. But I am told that if it uses the existing good parts of the 2018 census with the 2013 enumerator system, it will take 18 months to organise.
So it could start the task as late as this September. All it requires is leadership, although it may be sensible to bring back (sometimes out of retirement) the team that ran the 2013 enumeration.”
Well Mr Shaw is supposedly the leader. Unfortunately he has demonstrated he is anything but a good one.
There is a lovely old US saying about people like James Shaw.
“Piss or get off the pot”.
As most people will recognize it means stop procrastinating an do something.
Mr Shaw appears to be incapable of doing anything. He should resign.
If he won’t then the PM should follow the US idiom. She should sack him.
Now there is a man who isn’t afraid to demonstrate his antipathy to a politician.
You do realize that the delay we “managed to cope with”, and which was 2 years not 5 years by the way, was due to the Christchurch earthquake?
Now you are quite happy to delay the Census by 5 years and happily go from 2013 to 2123 to get any sensible results.
I am not a great enthusiast for Mr Shaw as a Minister of the Crown, as people who read what I say about him here may be aware. To put it briefly I think he has been useless.
However I really wouldn’t go as far as you do and describe his activities as being a great deal more of a disaster than the Earthquake was.
That’s nice dear. I’m sure that you absolutely adore the dishy Mr Shaw.
What do you rate him at on a scale of 0 to 10?
Actually don’t bother. If someone wants to be a Minister of the Crown I don’t care how he is rated by the ladies. I only care about whether he can do the job and Shaw has been an abject failure.
But you know that don’t you?
Shock! – I agree with you about the Census stuff up.
Not ready to blame JS like you have though. Being a Green supporter, I will try very hard to understand what his part in this was – let’s see how he handles it when the results are published.
I fear, like Brian Easton, that any fudged results they manage to cook up will not satisfy a Court that they are of a legally sufficient quality. The thing a true leader would have done was to recognize that possibility immediately after the results were in doubt and start a parallel path of preparing to rerun the exercise in 2021. This could have been done at the same time as they were trying to patch up the data.
They should also have tried to quickly get more people into the field to try and contact the people who were missed. Chase up those people who had done the job in 2013 and recruit as many of them as possible. They at least had once been trained.
It would appear that Shaw, in the time between becoming Minister and the Census didn’t satisfy himself that it was going to be on track on the day. He still seems to be in a complete state of denial even a year after the fiasco. It was his job to ask questions of the Officials and satisfy himself that the answers made sense.
You did notice that MR (or Dr) Sporle said that the problems only occurred after the Census date. Up till then things were going OK. If all the problems started 5 or 6 months after the current lot took office an attempt to blame it all on National is only something a person like you or the current PM would attempt.
The pm doesn’t do that. She always picks up responsibility for her patch.
I didn’t read what your wrote about James Shaw. I will if I have time. I had read that the f ups were down to previous govt, but realize that that may not be the case
Ok alywyn, just read the article. You have selectively used quotes to implicate Shaw. The review of what went wrong is due mid 2019. The follow up you referred to would have been designed under national. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but actually you were spinning.
Hah, bloody hah.
I have been complaining about the stuffed up Census since a few weeks after it took place. The second I saw the percentage of the population that had responded I thought that it couldn’t possibly be rectified.
Lots of people on this site claimed that everything was OK and that of course they would get usable numbers.
Well they were wrong and an awful lot of other people are now saying the same things that I have been saying for the best part of a year.
You may not care about statistics, or the Census.
That is because you are an ignorant fool. Read Easton’s article that I linked to and then ask yourself how they can possibly settle on electorate boundaries, the number of Maori seats, allocations to DHBs or money going to schools without a valid Census? The law requires that they get it right.
Claiming that people, and by implication you, aren’t interested merely demonstrates how stupid you really are. But then your comments show that on almost every occasion you burst into song here.
I think they could make reasonable guesses on DHBs. Maori electorates won’t have changed much because the previous government made sure they couldn’t get ahead. Schools might be an issue. It’s a pity the Nats didn’t collect data on all the money flooding into the country via property investment.
I suppose he is far to busy arranging his next little jaunt to attend a conference on how to fly less which will be held in some exotic far distant place.
Heh Bozo. The only real job you have is Statistics and their major task is the Census. Do your job you lazy sod.
The hard part is going to be generating the political will.
.
“Right now, we have about ninety per cent or ninety-five per cent of the technology we need,” Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, told me. In a series of papers, Jacobson and his colleagues have laid out “roadmaps” to a zero-emissions economy for fifty states, fifty-three towns and cities, and a hundred and thirty-eight other countries, with a completion date of 2050. Just as in the Democrats’ Green New Deal, the central element of these roadmaps (and others) is converting the electric grid to clean energy by shutting down power stations that rely on fossil fuels and making some very large investments in wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal facilities. Jacobson said this could be completed by 2035, which is only five years beyond the target set out in the Green New Deal. At the same time, policymakers would introduce a range of measures to promote energy efficiency, and electrify other sectors of the economy that now rely heavily on burning carbon, such as road and rail transport, home heating, and industrial heating. “We don’t need a technological miracle to solve this problem,” Jacobson reiterated. “‘The bottom line is we just need to deploy, deploy, deploy.”
Convert all land-based energy use to electric. Short flights go to electric, long-haul will need biofuels. There’s a good chance shipping will find small modular nuclear reactors to be the best option.
I can’t think of a better way to boost the economy than doing all the R&D, manufacturing and infrastructure work needed to make that happen.
Reactors for use in shipping are a tenth the size or less of land-based electricity generation reactors. So a Fukushima or Chernobyl or Three Mile Island accident has negligible probability of happening, simply because the thermal runaway issues are exponentially related to reactor size.
In a ship, there’s always coolant available right there. Unlike Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima which all had loss of cooling as a key part of what went wrong.
The radioactive material is always inside a seriously grunty containment vessel, so dropping a steaming pile of uranium on the seabed just aint gonna happen. The worst case scenario is breaking off the coolant lines going in and out of the containment vessel so seawater can go in and out of the containment vessel. Which will release a very small amount of radioactive material with the initial flushing out of the coolant that will very quickly dilute and dissipate.
After that, to release radioactive material, they will need to be dissolved into the seawater. The concentration of uranium in seawater is already quasi-saturated, so it’s going to be just barely above background levels.
So no, there wouldn’t suddenly be three-headed fish on the menu in the BOP. By any rational assessment, the worst-case ecosystem damage done by a hypothetical nuke-powered Rena would be much less than the actual damage done by the actual bunker oil spilled by the actual Rena.
But we’ve had decades of overhyped scare stories about the nuclear boogeyman, so rational assessment probably aint gonna count for squat if we’re ever called on to figure out how we feel about nuke-powered ships in our ports.
edit: Here’s an industry puff-piece on existing marine use of nuclear propulsion. Glossy spin to be sure, but it’s still a useful illustration of the scope of what’s already out there.
Apparently at Chernobyl they were doing some kind of test that involved fucking with the cooling system.
Three Mile Island had sequential failures of cooling components. IIRC, starting with pumps, then a valve stuck open. Shitty operator interface design contributed to operators not correctly understanding what was going wrong and then taking incorrect steps to try to fix it.
I can’t see that we’re ever actually gonna be called on the consider the question.
Oil prices would have to be up over $200/barrel, maybe $300, to make nukes look economically attractive to shipping companies. The only way I see that happening is a worldwide carbon price of at least $300/tonne CO2e that captures shipping as well. Maybe more like $600 or $1000/tonne. On an industry that is remarkably successful at avoiding getting taxed and regulated.
When you consider the Soviet/ Russian Nuclear accidents over the yrs, it’s a ticking time bomb waiting to go pop like Chernobyl or like their Nuke Subs or Ships. Just google earth/ maps of the Northern Fleet dockyards and see all their Nuclear Subs and their Cruisers in various states of this disrepair.
I think even Greenpeace has a piece on this wee monster of ticking time bomb?
Greenpeace’s knee-jerk anti-nuclear-power stance is one of the reasons I’ve gone off them.
To me, closing down an already built running nuclear power station somewhere like Germany, just because nuclear, makes no sense at all. For starters, the big environmental costs have already been incurred, like the original build, irradiation of the guts of it on startup etc. The ongoing marginal environmental cost of continued operation is pretty minimal.
Then there’s the way shortfalls in electricity production from shutting a nuke is likely to be made up by burning coal. Which is vastly more environmentally damaging than nuclear, even counting Fukushima and Chernobyl and TMI and all the others.
Yet Greenpeace is right at the forefront of demanding nuke power plants be shut down. It’s quite the environmental and climate own goal.
I do agree that shutting down the German Nuclear Power plants is just plain crazy and as you said doesn’t make any sense at all. But I do think Greenpeace concerns on this wee ticking time bomb is quite valid, given the track record of the Russians to run a Nuclear Power safety.
BM, did you ever see the footage from the Jap Coast Guard Vessel (about the same size of one of the RNZN OPV’s) riding the Tsunami waves some 50 plus km’s offshore? The ship was lucky to get to the crest of wave and nearly didn’t have a enough herbs to get over the second and third waves.
In the event of an accident, atmospheric dispersal of radioactive debris in a low population area (at sea for instance) might be less harmful to humans, but dispersal by ocean current would be disastrous for marine life and coastal communities, potentially for thousands of kilometres.
True, but if it’s close inshore when a Tsunami hits. I wouldn’t want to be near that thing in a month of Monday’s, even if I had a bucket full of iodine pills while wear a noddy suit at the same time.
I think Andre below, pretty well sums up my thoughts on this.
Fukushima was a fuck up evidently the cooling systems weren’t serviced properly and helped cause the melt down, stupid place to build s Nuclear Plant – Stupid Yanks Again ?
The general concept has some merits. It’s an example of where the rooskies have kept going with reactor developments and may be in a pretty good position if a market for small modular reactors ever develops.
The reactors are essentially the same design the rooskies have successfully used for quite a while in icebreakers. They’re modestly sized (150MW thermal, 35MW electrical compared to Chernobyl reactors being 3200MW thermal 1000MW electrical each), so if shit goes down with them it won’t be much shit.
Things I don’t like about them are: Russian engineering and manufacturing and respect for safety and the environment ain’t the greatest, they’re old design pressurised water reactors that rely on active control systems working at all times, and PWRs produce a lot of radioactive waste relative to power generated.
There are newer reactors designs that respond to complete loss of control and power by depowering using the laws of physics rather than active control, which I find much more comfortable. There’s also newer designs that essentially burn their waste rather than requiring somewhere very secure to store the waste for a very long time (maybe rooskies don’t care about secure storage for the waste).
So I’ve got quite mixed thoughts on that particular application of nuclear tech.
Should add, the cost looks way up there. Wikipedia reckons the project cost will be around USD336 million for a 70MW electricity output. That’s around $5/watt of electrical output. Although since it’s Murmansk, they’re probably taking quite a bit of its output directly as heat.
For comparison, utility-scale wind and solar are on the order of $0.50/watt.
Never ever ever gonna be viable for on-land generation in New Zealand. We’ve got so much wind, geothermal and maybe even solar if needed that we just won’t need something that expensive and politically unpopular on land.
The alien unicorns will have arrived and started excreting working fusion plants out their back ends long before we tap out our renewables potential.
But if the world ever gets serious about eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, we may have a choice of either accepting nuke-powered ships in our ports or shutting ourselves off from the rest of the world.
To be honest BM, I don’t think Nuclear Power would be practical in NZ from a risk, safety and cost POV. A Nuclear Power station would’ve got done in the 50’s-late 60’s if NZ’s history in the Atomic age is anything to by.
but not now as the muppets in Treasury would have a fit, before the anti Nuke mob even got their finger out of their digit to organise any protest. Hell the Treasury Muppets are already having fits over the 20B DCP over 15- 20yrs last announce by the “No Mates Party and reconfirm by the current Government, so you think they will support this?
Complexity of operation and maintenance is a very good argument against quite a few classes of reactor design. Including all the pressurised water and light water reactor designs I’m aware of. Ironically, those designs are also the easiest to get regulatory approval for, since they’re based on legacy designs with long histories. Most expensive to actually build, too, because of the complexity, but the easier approval process counteracts that. That roosky nukes-on-barge thing BM linked to is one of those legacy type PWRs.
Several of the outfits working on newer next-gen reactors are specifically targeting outright eliminating maintenance requirements and simplifying operation to the point of making the reactor itself basically a “big battery” from the users point of view. At least the nuke thermal part, anyway, converting heat to electricity or mechanical power won’t ever be quite that simple. The containment vessel for all the radioactive bits would be all in one unit, fueled at the factory for several years of operation. Then when it’s depleted, the entire unit is pulled out and replaced with a refurbished refuelled unit, and the old one goes back to the factory for refurb and refuel.
If you can be bothered scrolling through the big article linked below you’ll find brief descriptions of several of these efforts. But none of them look anywhere near becoming commercial reality.
Safe, storage of large amounts of hydrogen is an issue, but scientists reckon it is, solvable. Note: The dangers of storing large quantities of gas or petrol.
Making hydrogen, of course requires a large source of sustainable electricity. Which New Zealand has the capability.
Unless we get the Holy Grail, Fusion, which is decades away, if ever. Continued nuclear energy for transport, remains unlikely.
Handling hydrogen is way way more difficult and dangerous than handling liquid fuels. Hydrogen embrittlement of metals, the way seals have to be metal-to-metal contact because hydrogen permeates through and reacts with polymers so quickly, hydrogen’s very wide range of explosive concentrations in air, the way hydrogen fires are nearly invisible to the naked eye (they put out a shitload of UV though)…
The round trip efficiency of using electricity to split water for hydrogen to mechanical work is very low. I don’t see us having enough excess of electricity any time soon to make that route to widespread use of hydrogen viable.
I reckon what might make hydrogen viable is if any of the teams working on photocatalytic hydrogen production has a breakthrough, or one of the lab methods of generating hydrogen from hydrocarbons without releasing CO2 has a breakthrough. One of the most interesting efforts in that area is bubbling methane up through molten metal, which releases nearly pure hydrogen and the carbon becomes a solid floating on top of the molten metal. Presumably like a sooty powder.
In the early noughties when the prospect of a hydrogen economy looked more likely, there was a fluffy of articles talking about risks to the ozone layer from leaked hydrogen. That question seems to have died off, but I haven’t found whether it was shown to be a non-issue, or whether it just reflects an assessed low probability of widespread hydrogen use.
Auckland City Council have Resource Consent to dump toxic sludge out of Auckland Viaduct Harbour into the pristine waters of Great Barrier Island so some rich wankers can have a silly little boat race in Auckland Harbour ?
I see nothing of the sort in the link provided. He said she said – no big deal. But if you need that illusion to help you get chubby by all means who am I to judge.
I just watched the full exchange and the PM clearly owned it.
The only thing I agree with is that yeah, it was funny.
Of course, you and the Herald shills are free to pretend to see it differently.
The acting leader of the nat party should be renamed ‘Slicks’, not for his hair, or love for big oil, but for the fact he get’s no traction when the red rain pours.
Your a funny chap there James, Jacinda neither lost it or Bridges looked in control, but you’re right it was a little funny. The Prime Minister ended still with a smile on her face and the Leader of the National Party looked like he was about to burst into tears. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
I can’t think why National’s only asking questions about the Cullen report. They’ve decided that recommendations in it are exactly what’s going to happen, the Government’s going to do everything suggested.
Surely they have the imagination to work out what’s going to come out of other reviews and can put the heat on the Government about the decisions they’ve already made to instigate all recommendations. You know, make it all up – should be easy from the fantasyland they’re in.
But if you dig deeper (not that I could give a fuck because of gNat and NZTA muppetry, AND if you consider the Levin Mayor’s contributions today to the debate) ….. it all couldn’t have happened to such ideologically driven peeps.
If you go back over the years from the dismantling of MOW, to out-saucing – even where bitumen is available (primarily from a private monopoly), Hark at Thee for trying to scream foul now.
Shudda Cudda Wudda.
I mean!!!!! this same shit happened before FFS on that same route.
Is there anyone among elected government representatives that has yet got past the flagellation phase of pandering to their ‘officials’ (who LEAST OF ALL have your best interests at heart)
As things pan out, I’m actually seriously worried about the Coalition and in particular some with Ministerial responsibilities.
For some, there some really FUCKING EASY gains to be made (e.g. with Immigration, OR with Land Transport, or various other things that could be done via Ministerial regulatory and ‘last chance’ options).
Doesn’t seem to be happening so far (and it’s what????? 12 -15 months)
Are some of them actually masochists do you think?
Why not email or write an actual letter just to show some of us know how* to the various Ministers you would like to test for masochism and see if you can penetrate their defence mechanisms.
(*Our city post office has just been abandoned for no reason except ideology. Here in Nelson it is very busy in the tourist season and we had a nice central location which is all being given over to Kiwi Bank. With a different design we could have given Kiwi bank pride of place and had a simpler post office set up but no it has to go to the back of a nearby private book and stationery shop. Bloody Post Office dimwits and vandals. They have made up their mind that it’s a dying business and are speeding it on its way – just too unimaginative to keep it going with a simpler business model that differs depending on the site and location.)
I’m on the move again @grey, so difficult to give you a full reply atm, but I have done so in the past as have others from various advocacy groups, unions, and so on – AND provided instances (cases) where people have been let down – either through under-resourcing, inexperience, or just sheer muppetry.
What is annoying is that in many many instances, the failings (MBIE, NZTA, Health, DHBs, WINZ, HNZ etc.) is all a matter of record.
And though I don’t necessarily agree with NZ1’s approach to some of our PS (the Senior ranks), I can understand their frustration.
Unless there is some sort of reform of the PS, it is going to be hard for this coalition to be “transformational”.
Immigrant worker exploitation (for example) could AT LEAST be minimised, along with its flow on effects in driving down wages quite easily. I’m wondering whether the only reason a couple of simple steps haven’t been taken is because there is fear that a flood of complaints might overwhelm the Labour Inspectorate – but which to do you more important? I’d suggest trying to minimise the exploitation and eventually holding the exploiters to account trumps anything based on past bad policy advice.
Kia ora The AM Show Its cool that today is international Wahines day for equality its is a cause that Eco Maori champions. They won’t let a truly powerful Artificial Intelligence program to give financial advice to the masses as the billionaire won’t be able to ripp us off.
Its more than just sports that is fixed in our society.
The Hokatika Wild foods festival would be great to go and see there are Alot of bush food that we could harvest that we don’t even know about it would be good for the environment and organic as well
Why is Fonterra selling its silver ware its stupid are some of the people in the know lining Tip top up to buy cheap and than resell making huge profits at the expense of farmers selling is also not logical when interest rates are at historical lows.???????????????????. With the Rugby The people who control the World don’t want a team called the All Blacks domanating World Rugby don’t let the bigots win.
Nice money Phil Goff has good control of Auckland he is doing a great job.
Our return armed forces personnel NZDF do need more care I see all Around the world that they are suffering mental fatigue physically disabled but I would never let my Mokopunas go to war no one wins in war. judy its all very well that you’re child can afford private education but most people can not hence our government invested in our future with the money given to our youths education.
Sir Michael Cullen has more Good knowledge on the tax system than the whole of the national party. There moto is giving more to the wealthy and take more from the poor. Anyperson with a logical brain can work out that is a unsustainable model when money is consentrated in a few hands. Te tangata te tangata te tangata when everyone ha enough KAI all te tangata are healthy and happy when only a few have all the KAI nobody is happy Ka kite ano
Don’t believe the sandflys lieing spinning about what’s going on in my life at the minute. You can not compare my situation with ANYONE else’s it Eco Maori. For one they will and have use everything at their disposal to try and LOCKME UP the power of the states spy’s and NOTHING if they had one shread of evedince they would have locked me up druged me up and carry on shitting on the common people. Ana to kai. Some Eco Maori Music for the minute. https://youtu.be/tgIqecROs5M
I read a bit about this plite happening to Our Native Amercian and Canada Wahine Cousins I could not believe what I had read I waited for some more information on the subject Its SHOCKING that these Wahine from Amercia and Canada are missing and 4 to 5 x as much as whites WTF in a first world country this should not be happening. The aurthoritys could find them or what happened to them but because tangata whenua/ people of the land cultures are being suppressed all around the world they DONT GIVE A SHIT.
REDress exhibit highlights epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women
Haunting outdoor art installation by Canadian artist Jaime Black is on display at Washington DC Museum
The REDress Project, an outdoor art installation by Métis artist Jaime Black at Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. Photograph: Katherine Fogden/National Museum of the American Indian
T
hirty-five red dresses hung on winter-bare trees lining the Riverwalk along the National Museum of the American Indian. A woman pushing a stroller stopped to watch the garments twist in the wind, staring at the smallest dress in the collection – one that would fit a little girl.
The REDress Project is a haunting outdoor art installation in Washington DC by Canadian artist Jaime Black meant to symbolize the epidemic of violence against indigenous women and girls.
“Every visitor will have a different experience with the dresses,” said Machel Monenerkit, the deputy director of the National Museum of American Indian. “But you cannot walk through this installation and not have some emotional experience.”
For years and at astonishing rates, Native women in the United States, Canada and across the continent have gone missing or been murdered. Native American women are 10 times more likely to be murdered and four times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the national average, according to a recent report by the US Commission on Civil Rights.
But in the era of #MeToo and after the first two Native American women were elected to Congress in 2018, there is a renewed effort to account for the disappearances and prevent future tragedies. Ka kite ano links below .
Kia ora Te ao Maori News I say that those youth justice prison are training grounds for our tamariki to learn bad habits off the harden tamariki that are in their it needs to have more than just a Maori name it needs to be run by Maori as we will teach them good principles and love them not loave them and treat them like a treasure not dirt.
Tipuni Kokori is only a shell compare to the Mana funding it once had and Eco Maori says it need more funding to help Maori tangata and businesses.
Sports is a good way for OUR tamariki to climb up to their maximum heights on their ladders of life. I was to busy trying to building my Maunga plus we live in the wopwops to concentrate on my tamariki sport te Wahine was sleeping. That’s good to know to karakia to the Stars
Ka pai Ken the break dancer Tau toko smoke free I hear that the Olympic committee is considering having break danceing in the Olympic. Ka kite ano
Te billionares oil barron climate change suppressors do obey any rules mans or GOD,s keep up the good mahi tamariki /good work children
Student climate change strike: Rules don’t matter when you’re fighting for your future
OPINION: I have a memory of my grandfather saying that, when he was young, children were to be seen and not heard. Reflecting on it now, I suspect that I was being naughty at the time and he was suggesting that I might consider being seen and not heard.
On March 15, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young people are intending to walk out of their classrooms. They will take to the streets to protest decades of complacency and inaction on climate change, on the part of the adults whose first responsibility should have been the future these kids will inherit.
Since the “School Strike 4 Climate” was announced, a number of adults have expressed apparent concern for the impact that taking time out of school will have on the education of these young students.
But I don’t remember any concern for the impact on my schooling when I was marshalled out of class for a morning so I could wave to a fast-passing limousine bearing Prince Charles and Lady Diana on their visit to Wellington in 1983.
It wouldn’t have helped bring an end to apartheid if protesters had rented side-line advertising space during half time at the All Blacks v Springboks test matches in 1981.
And homosexual law reform wouldn’t have happened if gay rights activists had stayed in the closet and out of sight.
Should kids be skipping school to shout about inaction on climate change? I wish they didn’t feel they had to. I wish they weren’t left feeling like they have to fight for their futures.
That’s why I, as your Green Party minister in this Government, will make sure we bring the Zero Carbon Bill into law.
That law will establish an important certainty in Aotearoa New Zealand, that we can and must reduce the greenhouse gas pollution which is overheating our planet and threatening the delicate balance that maintains our existence.
There may once have been a time when it was considered right and proper that children should be seen and not heard. But when our children feel like they’re fighting for their future, this is not that time.
James Shaw is the co-leader of the Green Party and the Minister for Climate Change. Ka kite ano links below.
Eco Maori Say Kia Kaha Mana Wahine pay equity Equality will give ladys the power to fight for a good cause Wahines Mana if power is money and the men are given 10 to 100 x more money than Wahine if we do close the wage gap than we will never get EQUALITY for Wahine
United States women’s football team sues for equitable pay
Players for the US women’s national football team have filed a gender discrimination lawsuit seeking pay that is equitable to that of their male counterparts
The action comes just three months before the team will defend its title at the women’s World Cup in France.
The players allege that they have been subject to ongoing “institutionalised gender discrimination,” including unequal pay, despite having the same job responsibilities as players on the men’s national team. The 28 members of the current national team player pool joined in the class-action lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation, which was filed Friday in federal court in Los Angeles under the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The players are seeking equitable pay and treatment, in addition to damages including back pay.
`And hopefully in that way it inspires women everywhere.”
The US Women’s National Team Players Association was not party to the lawsuit, but in a statement said it “supports the plaintiffs’ goal of eliminating gender-based discrimination by USSF.”
The US Soccer Federation didn’t have an immediate comment.
The USSF has maintained in the past that much of the pay disparity between the men’s and women’s teams results from separate collective bargaining agreements.
The women’s team set up its compensation structure, which included a guaranteed salary rather than a pay-for-play model like the men, in the last labor contract. The players also earn salaries – paid by the federation – for playing in the National Women’s Soccer League.
The women receive other benefits, including health care, that the men’s national team players don’t receive, the federation has maintained.
This is not the first time the players have sought equitable compensation and conditions. Ka kite ano links below P.S There was nothing wrong with our best mens sports team so why has it been turned insideout
Hi,It’s almost Christmas Day which means it is almost my birthday, where you will find me whimpering in the corner clutching a warm bottle of Baileys.If you’re out of ideas for presents (and truly desperate) then it is possible to gift a full Webworm subscription to a friend (or enemy) ...
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In 1998, in the wake of the Paremoremo Prison riot, the Department of Corrections established the "Behaviour Management Regime". Prisoners were locked in their cells for 22 or 23 hours a day, with no fresh air, no exercise, no social contact, no entertainment, and in some cases no clothes and ...
New data released by the Treasury shows that the economic policies of this Government have made things worse in the year since they took office, said NZCTU Economist Craig Renney. “Our fiscal indicators are all heading in the wrong direction – with higher levels of debt, a higher deficit, and ...
At the 2023 election, National basically ran on a platform of being better economic managers. So how'd that turn out for us? In just one year, they've fucked us for two full political terms: The government's books are set to remain deeply in the red for the near term ...
AUSTERITYText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMy spreadsheet insists This pain leads straight to glory (File not found) Read more ...
The NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi are saying that the Government should do the right thing and deliver minimum wage increases that don’t see workers fall further behind, in response to today’s announcement that the minimum wage will only be increased by 1.5%, well short of forecast inflation. “With inflation forecast ...
Oh, I weptFor daysFilled my eyesWith silly tearsOh, yeaBut I don'tCare no moreI don't care ifMy eyes get soreSongwriters: Paul Rodgers / Paul Kossoff. Read more ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob HensonIn this aerial view, fingers of meltwater flow from the melting Isunnguata Sermia glacier descending from the Greenland Ice Sheet on July 11, 2024, near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. According to the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE), the ...
In August, I wrote an article about David Seymour1 with a video of his testimony, to warn that there were grave dangers to his Ministry of Regulation:David Seymour's Ministry of Slush Hides Far Greater RisksWhy Seymour's exorbitant waste of taxpayers' money could be the least of concernThe money for Seymour ...
Willis is expected to have to reveal the bitter fiscal fruits of her austerity strategy in the HYEFU later today. Photo: Lynn Grieveson/TheKakaMōrena. Long stories short, the six things that matter in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Tuesday, December 17 in The Kākā’s Dawn Chorus podcast ...
On Friday the government announced it would double the number of toll roads in New Zealand as well as make a few other changes to how toll roads are used in the country. The real issue though is not that tolling is being used but the suggestion it will make ...
The Prime Minister yesterday engaged in what looked like a pre-emptive strike designed to counter what is likely to be a series of depressing economic statistics expected before the end of the week. He opened his weekly post-Cabinet press conference with a recitation of the Government’s achievements. “It certainly has ...
This whooping cough story from south Auckland is a good example of the coalition government’s approach to social need – spend money on urging people to get vaccinated but only after you’ve cut the funding to where they could get vaccinated. This has been the case all year with public ...
And if there is a GodI know he likes to rockHe likes his loud guitarsHis spiders from MarsAnd if there is a GodI know he's watching meHe likes what he seesBut there's trouble on the breezeSongwriter: William Patrick Corgan Read more ...
Here’s a quick round up of today’s political news:1. MORE FOOD BANKS, CHARITIES, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SHELTERS AND YOUTH SOCIAL SERVICES SET TO CLOSE OR SCALE BACK AROUND THE COUNTRY AS GOVT CUTS FUNDINGSome of Auckland's largest foodbanks are warning they may need to close or significantly reduce food parcels after ...
Iain Rennie, CNZMSecretary and Chief Executive to the TreasuryDear Secretary, Undue restrictions on restricted briefings This week, the Treasury barred representatives from four organisations, including the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi, from attending the restricted briefing for the Half-Year Economic and Fiscal Update. We had been ...
This is a guest post by Tim Adriaansen, a community, climate, and accessibility advocate.I won’t shut up about climate breakdown, and whenever possible I try to shift the focus of a climate conversation towards solutions. But you’ll almost never hear me give more than a passing nod to ...
A grassroots backlash has forced a backdown from Brown, but he is still eyeing up plenty of tolls for other new roads. And the pressure is on Willis to ramp up the Government’s austerity strategy. Photo: Getty ImagesMōrena. Long stories short, the six things that matter in Aotearoa’s political economy ...
Hi all,I'm pretty overwhelmed by all your messages and emails today; thank you so very much.As much as my newsletter this morning was about money, and we all need to earn money, it was mostly about world domination if I'm honest. 😉I really hate what’s happening to our country, and ...
A listing of 23 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, December 8, 2024 thru Sat, December 14, 2024. Listing by Category Like last week's summary this one contains the list of articles twice: based on categories and based on ...
I started writing this morning about Hobson’s Pledge, examining the claims they and their supporters make, basically ripping into them. But I kept getting notifications coming through, and not good ones.Each time I looked up, there was another un-subscription message, and I felt a bit sicker at the thought of ...
Once, long before there was Harry and Meghan and Dodi and all those episodes of The Crown, they came to spend some time with us, Charles and Diana. Was there anyone in the world more glamorous than the Princess of Wales?Dazzled as everyone was by their company, the leader of ...
The collective right have a problem.The entire foundation for their world view is antiscientific. Their preferred economic strategies have been disproven. Their whole neoliberal model faces accusations of corporate corruption and worsening inequality. Climate change not only definitely exists, its rapid progression demands an immediate and expensive response in order ...
Just ten days ago, South Korea's president attempted a self-coup, declaring martial law and attempting to have opposition MPs murdered or arrested in an effort to seize unconstrained power. The attempt was rapidly defeated by the national assembly voting it down and the people flooding the streets to defend democracy. ...
Hi,“What I love about New Zealanders is that sometimes you use these expressions that as Americans we have no idea what those things mean!"I am watching a 30-something year old American ramble on about how different New Zealanders are to Americans. It’s his podcast, and this man is doing a ...
National has only been in power for a year, but everywhere you look, its choices are taking New Zealand a long way backwards. In no particular order, here are the National Government's Top 50 Greatest Misses of its first year in power. ...
The Government is quietly undertaking consultation on the dangerous Regulatory Standards Bill over the Christmas period to avoid too much attention. ...
The Government’s planned changes to the freedom of speech obligations of universities is little more than a front for stoking the political fires of disinformation and fear, placing teachers and students in the crosshairs. ...
The Ministry of Regulation’s report into Early Childhood Education (ECE) in Aotearoa raises serious concerns about the possibility of lowering qualification requirements, undermining quality and risking worse outcomes for tamariki, whānau, and kaiako. ...
A Bill to modernise the role of Justices of the Peace (JP), ensuring they remain active in their communities and connected with other JPs, has been put into the ballot. ...
Labour will continue to fight unsustainable and destructive projects that are able to leap-frog environment protection under National’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. ...
The Green Party has warned that a Green Government will revoke the consents of companies who override environmental protections as part of Fast-Track legislation being passed today. ...
The Green Party says the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update shows how the Government is failing to address the massive social and infrastructure deficits our country faces. ...
The Government’s latest move to reduce the earnings of migrant workers will not only hurt migrants but it will drive down the wages of Kiwi workers. ...
Te Pāti Māori has this morning issued a stern warning to Fast-Track applicants with interests in mining, pledging to hold them accountable through retrospective liability and to immediately revoke Fast-Track consents under a future Te Pāti Māori government. This warning comes ahead of today’s third reading of the Fast-Track Approvals ...
The Government’s announcement today of a 1.5 per cent increase to minimum wage is another blow for workers, with inflation projected to exceed the increase, meaning it’s a real terms pay reduction for many. ...
All the Government has achieved from its announcement today is to continue to push responsibility back on councils for its own lack of action to help bring down skyrocketing rates. ...
The Government has used its final post-Cabinet press conference of the year to punch down on local government without offering any credible solutions to the issues our councils are facing. ...
The Government has failed to keep its promise to ‘super charge’ the EV network, delivering just 292 chargers - less than half of the 670 chargers needed to meet its target. ...
The Green Party is calling for the Government to stop subsidising the largest user of the country’s gas supplies, Methanex, following a report highlighting the multi-national’s disproportionate influence on energy prices in Aotearoa. ...
The Green Party is appalled with the Government’s new child poverty targets that are based on a new ‘persistent poverty’ measure that could be met even with an increase in child poverty. ...
New independent analysis has revealed that the Government’s Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) will reduce emissions by a measly 1 per cent by 2030, failing to set us up for the future and meeting upcoming targets. ...
The loss of 27 kaimahi at Whakaata Māori and the end of its daily news bulletin is a sad day for Māori media and another step backwards for Te Tiriti o Waitangi justice. ...
Yesterday the Government passed cruel legislation through first reading to establish a new beneficiary sanction regime that will ultimately mean more households cannot afford the basic essentials. ...
Today's passing of the Government's Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill–which allows landlords to end tenancies with no reason–ignores the voice of the people and leaves renters in limbo ahead of the festive season. ...
After wasting a year, Nicola Willis has delivered a worse deal for the Cook Strait ferries that will end up being more expensive and take longer to arrive. ...
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has today launched a Member’s Bill to sanction Israel for its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as the All Out For Gaza rally reaches Parliament. ...
After years of advocacy, the Green Party is very happy to hear the Government has listened to our collective voices and announced the closure of the greyhound racing industry, by 1 August 2026. ...
In response to a new report from ERO, the Government has acknowledged the urgent need for consistency across the curriculum for Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) in schools. ...
The Green Party is appalled at the Government introducing legislation that will make it easier to penalise workers fighting for better pay and conditions. ...
Thank you for the invitation to speak with you tonight on behalf of the political party I belong to - which is New Zealand First. As we have heard before this evening the Kinleith Mill is proposing to reduce operations by focusing on pulp and discontinuing “lossmaking paper production”. They say that they are currently consulting on the plan to permanently shut ...
Auckland Central MP, Chlöe Swarbrick, has written to Mayor Wayne Brown requesting he stop the unnecessary delays on St James Theatre’s restoration. ...
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says Health New Zealand will move swiftly to support dozens of internationally-trained doctors already in New Zealand on their journey to employment here, after a tripling of sought-after examination places. “The Medical Council has delivered great news for hardworking overseas doctors who want to contribute ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has appointed Sarah Ottrey to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). “At my first APEC Summit in Lima, I experienced firsthand the role that ABAC plays in guaranteeing political leaders hear the voice of business,” Mr Luxon says. “New Zealand’s ABAC representatives are very well respected and ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has announced four appointments to New Zealand’s intelligence oversight functions. The Honourable Robert Dobson KC has been appointed Chief Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants, and the Honourable Brendan Brown KC has been appointed as a Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants. The appointments of Hon Robert Dobson and Hon ...
Improvements in the average time it takes to process survey and title applications means housing developments can progress more quickly, Minister for Land Information Chris Penk says. “The government is resolutely focused on improving the building and construction pipeline,” Mr Penk says. “Applications to issue titles and subdivide land are ...
The Government’s measures to reduce airport wait times, and better transparency around flight disruptions is delivering encouraging early results for passengers ahead of the busy summer period, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Improving the efficiency of air travel is a priority for the Government to give passengers a smoother, more reliable ...
The Government today announced the intended closure of the Apollo Hotel as Contracted Emergency Housing (CEH) in Rotorua, Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka says. This follows a 30 per cent reduction in the number of households in CEH in Rotorua since National came into Government. “Our focus is on ending CEH in the Whakarewarewa area starting ...
The Government will reshape vocational education and training to return decision making to regions and enable greater industry input into work-based learning Tertiary Education and Skills Minister, Penny Simmonds says. “The redesigned system will better meet the needs of learners, industry, and the economy. It includes re-establishing regional polytechnics that ...
The Government is taking action to better manage synthetic refrigerants and reduce emissions caused by greenhouse gases found in heating and cooling products, Environment Minister Penny Simmonds says. “Regulations will be drafted to support a product stewardship scheme for synthetic refrigerants, Ms. Simmonds says. “Synthetic refrigerants are found in a ...
People travelling on State Highway 1 north of Hamilton will be relieved that remedial works and safety improvements on the Ngāruawāhia section of the Waikato Expressway were finished today, with all lanes now open to traffic, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.“I would like to acknowledge the patience of road users ...
Tertiary Education and Skills Minister, Penny Simmonds, has announced a new appointment to the board of Education New Zealand (ENZ). Dr Erik Lithander has been appointed as a new member of the ENZ board for a three-year term until 30 January 2028. “I would like to welcome Dr Erik Lithander to the ...
The Government will have senior representatives at Waitangi Day events around the country, including at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, but next year Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has chosen to take part in celebrations elsewhere. “It has always been my intention to celebrate Waitangi Day around the country with different ...
Two more criminal gangs will be subject to the raft of laws passed by the Coalition Government that give Police more powers to disrupt gang activity, and the intimidation they impose in our communities, Police Minister Mark Mitchell says. Following an Order passed by Cabinet, from 3 February 2025 the ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Justice Christian Whata as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Whata’s appointment as a Judge of the Court of Appeal will take effect on 1 August 2025 and fill a vacancy created by the retirement of Hon Justice David Goddard on ...
The latest economic figures highlight the importance of the steps the Government has taken to restore respect for taxpayers’ money and drive economic growth, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. Data released today by Stats NZ shows Gross Domestic Product fell 1 per cent in the September quarter. “Treasury and most ...
Tertiary Education and Skills Minister Penny Simmonds and Associate Minister of Education David Seymour today announced legislation changes to strengthen freedom of speech obligations on universities. “Freedom of speech is fundamental to the concept of academic freedom and there is concern that universities seem to be taking a more risk-averse ...
Police Minister, Mark Mitchell, and Internal Affairs Minister, Brooke van Velden, today launched a further Public Safety Network cellular service that alongside last year’s Cellular Roaming roll-out, puts globally-leading cellular communications capability into the hands of our emergency responders. The Public Safety Network’s new Cellular Priority service means Police, Wellington ...
State Highway 1 through the Mangamuka Gorge has officially reopened today, providing a critical link for Northlanders and offering much-needed relief ahead of the busy summer period, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.“The Mangamuka Gorge is a vital route for Northland, carrying around 1,300 vehicles per day and connecting the Far ...
The Government has welcomed decisions by the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) and Ashburton District Council confirming funding to boost resilience in the Canterbury region, with construction on a second Ashburton Bridge expected to begin in 2026, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Delivering a second Ashburton Bridge to improve resilience and ...
The Government is backing the response into high pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in Otago, Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard says. “Cabinet has approved new funding of $20 million to enable MPI to meet unbudgeted ongoing expenses associated with the H7N6 response including rigorous scientific testing of samples at the enhanced PC3 ...
Legislation that will repeal all advertising restrictions for broadcasters on Sundays and public holidays has passed through first reading in Parliament today, Media Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “As a growing share of audiences get their news and entertainment from streaming services, these restrictions have become increasingly redundant. New Zealand on ...
Today the House agreed to Brendan Horsley being appointed Inspector-General of Defence, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “Mr Horsley’s experience will be invaluable in overseeing the establishment of the new office and its support networks. “He is currently Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, having held that role since June 2020. ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says the Government has agreed to the final regulations for the levy on insurance contracts that will fund Fire and Emergency New Zealand from July 2026. “Earlier this year the Government agreed to a 2.2 percent increase to the rate of levy. Fire ...
The Government is delivering regulatory relief for New Zealand businesses through changes to the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act. “The Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill, which was introduced today, is the second Bill – the other being the Statutes Amendment Bill - that ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed further progress on the Hawke’s Bay Expressway Road of National Significance (RoNS), with the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) Board approving funding for the detailed design of Stage 1, paving the way for main works construction to begin in late 2025.“The Government is moving at ...
The Government today released a request for information (RFI) to seeking interest in partnerships to plant trees on Crown-owned land with low farming and conservation value (excluding National Parks) Forestry Minister Todd McClay announced. “Planting trees on Crown-owned land will drive economic growth by creating more forestry jobs in our regions, providing more wood ...
Court timeliness, access to justice, and improving the quality of existing regulation are the focus of a series of law changes introduced to Parliament today by Associate Minister of Justice Nicole McKee. The three Bills in the Regulatory Systems (Justice) Amendment Bill package each improve a different part of the ...
A total of 41 appointments and reappointments have been made to the 12 community trusts around New Zealand that serve their regions, Associate Finance Minister Shane Jones says. “These trusts, and the communities they serve from the Far North to the deep south, will benefit from the rich experience, knowledge, ...
The Government has confirmed how it will provide redress to survivors who were tortured at the Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital Child and Adolescent Unit (the Lake Alice Unit). “The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care found that many of the 362 children who went through the Lake Alice Unit between 1972 and ...
It has been a busy, productive year in the House as the coalition Government works hard to get New Zealand back on track, Leader of the House Chris Bishop says. “This Government promised to rebuild the economy, restore law and order and reduce the cost of living. Our record this ...
“Accelerated silicosis is an emerging occupational disease caused by unsafe work such as engineered stone benchtops. I am running a standalone consultation on engineered stone to understand what the industry is currently doing to manage the risks, and whether further regulatory intervention is needed,” says Workplace Relations and Safety Minister ...
Mehemea he pai mō te tangata, mahia – if it’s good for the people, get on with it. Enhanced reporting on the public sector’s delivery of Treaty settlement commitments will help improve outcomes for Māori and all New Zealanders, Māori Crown Relations Minister Tama Potaka says. Compiled together for the ...
Mr Roger Holmes Miller and Ms Tarita Hutchinson have been appointed to the Charities Registration Board, Community and Voluntary Sector Minister Louise Upston says. “I would like to welcome the new members joining the Charities Registration Board. “The appointment of Ms Hutchinson and Mr Miller will strengthen the Board’s capacity ...
More building consent and code compliance applications are being processed within the statutory timeframe since the Government required councils to submit quarterly data, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “In the midst of a housing shortage we need to look at every step of the build process for efficiencies ...
Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey is proud to announce the first three recipients of the Government’s $10 million Mental Health and Addiction Community Sector Innovation Fund which will enable more Kiwis faster access to mental health and addiction support. “This fund is part of the Government’s commitment to investing in ...
New Zealand is providing Vanuatu assistance following yesterday's devastating earthquake, Foreign Minister Winston Peters says. "Vanuatu is a member of our Pacific family and we are supporting it in this time of acute need," Mr Peters says. "Our thoughts are with the people of Vanuatu, and we will be ...
The Government welcomes the Commerce Commission’s plan to reduce card fees for Kiwis by an estimated $260 million a year, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly says.“The Government is relentlessly focused on reducing the cost of living, so Kiwis can keep more of their hard-earned income and live a ...
Regulation Minister David Seymour has welcomed the Early Childhood Education (ECE) regulatory review report, the first major report from the Ministry for Regulation. The report makes 15 recommendations to modernise and simplify regulations across ECE so services can get on with what they do best – providing safe, high-quality care ...
The Government‘s Offshore Renewable Energy Bill to create a new regulatory regime that will enable firms to construct offshore wind generation has passed its first reading in Parliament, Energy Minister Simeon Brown says.“New Zealand currently does not have a regulatory regime for offshore renewable energy as the previous government failed ...
Legislation to enable new water service delivery models that will drive critical investment in infrastructure has passed its first reading in Parliament, marking a significant step towards the delivery of Local Water Done Well, Local Government Minister Simeon Brown and Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly say.“Councils and voters ...
New Zealand is one step closer to reaping the benefits of gene technology with the passing of the first reading of the Gene Technology Bill, Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Judith Collins says. "This legislation will end New Zealand's near 30-year ban on gene technology outside the lab and is ...
Te Pāti Māori has had to adopt a new way of debating, operating and even thinking in Parliament in response to the Government’s “onslaught” against te ao Māori, co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer says.In an end-of-year interview with Newsroom, the Te Tai Hauauru MP reflected on how 2024 has differed from her ...
Opinion: The latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science report was announced earlier this month, yet it didn’t get the flurry of media attention and political hand-wringing that typically accompanies these announcements. This might be because it presented good news, or you could argue, no news; the results paint a ...
NewsroomBy Dr Lisa Darragh, Dr Raewyn Eden and Dr David Pomeroy
At long last, The Spinoff shells out for a nut ranking. The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a member today.It recently came to The Spinoff’s attention ...
I was one of hundreds of people who lost my government job this week. Here’s exactly how it played out. The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a ...
Summer reissue: One anxiously attentive passenger pays attention to an in-flight safety video, and wonders ‘Why can’t I pick up my own phone?’ The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up ...
Summer reissue: Why do those Lange-Douglas years cast such a long shadow 40 years on? The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a member today. First published June ...
Loading…(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){var ql=document.querySelectorAll('A[data-quiz],DIV[data-quiz]'); if(ql){if(ql.length){for(var k=0;k<ql.length;k++){ql[k].id='quiz-embed-'+k;ql[k].href="javascript:var i=document.getElementById('quiz-embed-"+k+"');try{qz.startQuiz(i)}catch(e){i.start=1;i.style.cursor='wait';i.style.opacity='0.5'};void(0);"}}};i['QP']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','https://take.quiz-maker.com/3012/CDN/quiz-embed-v1.js','qp');Got a good quiz question?Send Newsroom your questions.The post Newsroom daily quiz, Monday 23 December appeared first on Newsroom. ...
The Government’s social housing agency has backed out of a billion-dollar infrastructure alliance that would have built about 6000 new homes in Auckland – less than 18 months after signing a five-year extension.Labour says the decision to rip up the contract and sell off existing state houses could lead to ...
ByKoroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor New Zealand’s Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) says impending bad weather for Port Vila is now the most significant post-quake hazard. A tropical low in the Coral Sea is expected to move into Vanuatu waters, bringing heavy rainfall. Authorities have issued warnings to people ...
Cosmic CatastropheThe year draws to a close.King Luxon has grown tired of the long eveningsListening to the dreary squabbling of his Triumvirate.He strolls up to the top floor of the PalaceTo consult with his Astronomer Royal.The Royal Telescope scans the skies,And King Luxon stares up into the heavensFrom the terrestrial ...
Spinoff editor Mad Chapman and books editor Claire Mabey debate Carl Shuker’s new novel about… an editor. Claire: Hello Mad, you just finished The Royal Free – overall impressions? Mad: Hi Claire, I literally just put the book down and I would have to say my immediate impression is ...
Christmas and its buildup are often lonely, hard and full of unreasonable expectations. Here’s how to make it to Jesus’s birthday and find the little bit of joy we all deserve. Have you found this year relentless? Has the latest Apple update “fucked up your life”? Have you lost two ...
Despite overwhelming public and corporate support, the government has stalled progress on a modern day slavery law. That puts us behind other countries – and makes Christmas a time of tragedy rather than joy, argues Shanti Mathias. Picture the scene on Christmas Day. Everyone replete with nice things to eat, ...
Asia Pacific Report “It looks like Hiroshima. It looks like Germany at the end of World War Two,” says an Israeli-American historian and professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University about the horrifying reality of Gaza. Professor Omer Bartov, has described Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza as an ...
The New Zealand government coalition is tweaking university regulations to curb what it says is an increasingly “risk-averse approach” to free speech. The proposed changes will set clear expectations on how universities should approach freedom of speech issues. Each university will then have to adopt a “freedom of speech statement” ...
Report by Dr David Robie – Café Pacific. – COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone New York prosecutors have charged Luigi Mangione with “murder as an act of terrorism” in his alleged shooting of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month. This news comes out at the same time as ...
Pacific Media Watch The union for Australian journalists has welcomed the delivery by the federal government of more than $150 million to support the sustainability of public interest journalism over the next four years. Combined with the announcement of the revamped News Bargaining Initiative, this could result in up to ...
Comment: If we say the word ‘dementia’, many will picture an older person struggling to remember the names of their loved ones, maybe a grandparent living out their final years in an aged care facility. Dementia can also occur in people younger than 65, but it can take time before ...
Piracy is a reality of modern life – but copyright law has struggled to play catch-up for as long as the entertainment industry has existed. As far back as 1988, the House of Lords criticised copyright law’s conflict with the reality of human behaviour in the context of burning cassette ...
MONDAY“Merry Xmas, and praise the Lord,” said Sheriff Luxon, and smiled for the camera. There was a flash of smoke when the shutter pressed down on the magnesium powder. The sheriff had arranged for a photographer from the Dodge Gazette to attend a ceremony where he handed out food parcels to ...
It’s a little under two months since the White Ferns shocked the cricketing world, deservedly taking home the T20 World Cup. Since then the trophy has had a tour around the country, five of the squad have played in the WBBL in Australia while most others have returned to domestic ...
As he makes a surprise return to Shortland Street, actor Craig Parker takes us through his life in television. Craig Parker has been a fixture on television in Aotearoa for nearly four decades. He had starring roles in iconic local series like Gloss, Mercy Peak and Diplomatic Immunity, featured in ...
The Ōtautahi musician shares the 10 tracks he loves to spin, including the folk classic that cured him of a ‘case of the give-ups’. When singer-songwriter Adam McGrath returns to Kumeu’s Auckland Folk Festival from January 24-27, he’s not planning on simply idling his way through – he wants the late ...
Alex Casey spends an afternoon on the job with River, the rescue dog on a mission to spread joy to Ōtautahi rest homes.Almost everyone says it is never enough time. But River the rescue dog, a jet black huntaway border collie cross, has to keep a tight pace to ...
Asia Pacific Report Fiji activists have recreated the nativity scene at a solidarity for Palestine gathering in Fiji’s capital Suva just days before Christmas. The Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre and Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network recreated the scene at the FWCC compound — a baby Jesus figurine lies amidst the ...
By 1News Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver and 1News reporters A number of Kiwis have been successfully evacuated from Vanuatu after a devastating earthquake shook the Pacific island nation earlier this week. The death toll was still unclear, though at least 14 people were killed according to an earlier statement from ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Scully, Professor in Modern History, University of New England Bunker.Image courtesy of Michael Leunig, CC BY-NC-SA Michael Leunig – who died in the early hours of Thursday December 19, surrounded by “his children, loved ones, and sunflowers” – was the ...
How far will the bitter and nasty right wing faction of old white men go in their determination to turn everything into another round of culture war?
Well, in the case of Karl Du Fresne (a creeping Jesus if there ever was one) it runs as far as going into bat for child molesters because, you know, white male.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/111003072/three-white-men-who-dominate-public-conversation
“…Now, Cardinal Pell. Did he sexually molest two choir boys in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne? A jury decided he did, …”
That is f**king right you pathetic piece of shit Du Fresne. he was convicted. By a jury. After a fair trial. But no, you think you should defend him because you are a screaming emotional cripple who clings to the authoritarian catholic church like dung to a blanket and would prefer kiddy fiddlers walk free to conservative white male clerics in positions of authority being held to account.
What a piece of shit .
They will always be with us, the issue is that they have platforms all over the place. Way out of proportion to their actual numbers. We need a means of de-platforming them.
I was just gob smacked that he would defend a convicted child molester purely because of who the molester is.
Agreed. Du Frsne’s misplaced sense of being a victimised white male has landed him in a very bad place with this one. He just can’t see what his own retrograde ideology has done to him.
a racist ageist rant I don’t think ethnicity or race are predeterminstic for kiddy fiddlers I think the last big nz case was a Samoan rugby coach Nor does that suggest such activities a predisposed to Polynesians as you are trying to suggest it is a white, make agre problem, looser
Is Netanyahu really “white”?
What is the definition of “white” these days anyway?
I thought the jewish people came from Arabia and eastern med?
Arabia’s not white is it? Nor eastern med?
It is very confusing
This near-silence from government on tax now looks a deliberate tactic to kill reform.
Looks like the Tax Group dissenting view will win.
Rubbish. All because one group is acting like kneejerk reactionary schoolchildren doesn’t require the other to respond to those self-indulgent wankers. You are demanding response before the considerations are made.
That is National’s tactics. Who the fuck are you.
National is leading the debate in the media and Parliament, and winning.
O’Connor won’t be able to counter Peters in Cabinet, and it will be lost on its impact outside the cities.
Robertson is lifting his bat on this one.
To me, I see one side going ten rounds before the first bell has been rung. They’ll exhaust themselves dancing and prancing round the canvas then, when the debate actually begins, they’ll have nothing new to say.
And they’ll get crucified as the self-interested tax dodging sacks they are (imo).
I don’t think the public remembers the shit these people sprout for months on end. Another scandal, another news cycle, gone in the hot wind it arrived on.
Let’s wait for the actual debate. We’re not all reeds in this wind.
Notice commentary from the Minister of Finance, Minister of Revenue, or Prime Minister in this segment last night on the tax proposals?
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/consultation-needed-timing-potential-capital-gains-tax-law-change-winston-peters?variant=tb_v_1
Me neither.
This actual debate is now.
We the Bleeple, I suspect your argument is fatally flawed.
The “self interested tax dodging sacks” are winning the argument currently, and because of that, Peters and NZF will hang the coalition out to dry on this.
By the time the PM has given the NZF required exemptions to farmers, small businesses and the NZX, the money left in the “fairness payments” bucket will be minimal and the Govt wont have $8b to give as income tax breaks. The working poor will feel let down once again.
And without any real money for the “fairness payments” whats the point of the CGT in the first place?
Then the Cullen Tax Group will be written off as Jacindas very expensive vanity project with no gains for anyone (except those on the committee)
Time will tell if your view is the one that comes to pass, or whether my view is the one which comes to pass
Ad,
What makes you think O’Connor will be advocating CGT for farmers? Given the PM’s statements about her concerns for farmers and small business, it will be much more likely that O’Connor will be singing a duo with Peters.
He won’t.
He was on RNZ this morning trying to defend against Natipnal’s inroads in rural communities on tax issues.
Peters will defend similar rural territory at Cabinet, but more harshly. Tax reform at a sectoral level is lost in the provinces and the remaining ground is in Auckland.
But think about the chidren! It has become a cliche’ because so often they and their parents are passed over as the tax parade goes by. A sick joke that refers to the cry so often heard and so little listened to.
Beneficiaries should not be limited in what they can earn. They should’t be checked every week and their benefit adjusted down. Every month okay and encourage it, adjust a little at the end of six months. Reward effort and determination.
Now they may be left with little for their work to spend after tax and removal of benefits and repayment of grants. How about the equivalent of $2 an hour and then transport and extra child care costs taking care of that.
Stick that in your pipes and smoke it you Taxed with Working Group.
National isn’t winning the debate – far from it. Just look at the comments on any stuff article that is anti the CGT and people are mostly all for the CGT. They’re also saying the stuff Labour would want them to say – that it’s not fair to tax income from work different to income from non-work.
Stuff is a left-wing website.
They’re also desperately hoping the government buys them, which is why there are so many articles promoting Ardern and this Labour government.
BM = right wing website.
“Stuff is a left-wing website.”
Fuck that’s funny.
The ‘average kiwi’ who owns there own home and is not interested in exploiting those who have no option but to rent is going to be better off with the tax adjustments.
Works for me and around 80% of the population.
Yes Kevin I never saw STUFF as left wing. lol lol
We really should be hearing this much more often and loudly.
Stuff’s about as left-wing as the late, not-at-all-lamented Margaret Thatcher.
So I took up your challenge and pulled out the latest Stuff article on the matter.
The comments are thoughtful, but the article makes the same point I am: the Minister responsible is not making any running on this at all.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/111028930/sir-michael-cullen-steps-back-into-politics-with-debatable-claims-about-cgt#comments
Why leave any government-supporting debate to Dr Cullen?
The government will not win this policy issue unless it fights for it.
i checked the latest Stuff article on it.
Featured Cullen, made same points as me.
Comments section was thoughtful but ovrerall v negative.
Maybe. But if so, it’s going to look like a victory for National and the angry, middle-class media.
All of whom vote.
Ardern looks like she prefers two terms ahead of tax reform.
Probably better not to start flinching before you see the enemy’s fire.
If Labour wimp out on the CGT they’ll set us back yet another generation.
Ad I disagree.
I think they knew the right would go OTT.
The Government are giving the opposition 2 months of rope, and they are doing a very nice job of hanging themselves.
To not pay something on a fortune is hard to do when the theme is “Fairness”
So ordinary people are going… “Wait up.. I pay on every dollar, and they want to pay nothing? Now that’s not fair”
The Right can’t defend the indefensible, so they are losing friends and support.
The Government can come in and suggest serious change in April, which would have seemed impossible before this.
This woman is remarkable. She has made New Zealanders examine “Fairness”
It has opened minds to what have been accepted patterns of behaviour and helped put a new view and perspective on some accepted forms of greed.
Thank you J A. We are seriously considering how some are taxed and some are not and are ready to change that.
But then you get this quick change of tack from the Hosk today over at the fish wrap:
“The soft bigotry of low expectation.” And that is the aspiration of this government, isn’t it? You don’t want to turn up for a work interview? No problem…………………..”
Kat who do you get that from? No Government website. Just yesterday there were 20 newly employed with training in place to plant manuka for the honey industry. This is full time and leading to qualifications, which will assist the next tranche.
The right have always blamed the unemployed. Don’t help them do it. Cheers
They start these lies and hope they will be repeated.
Patricia, you are correct the “fish wrap” is not a govt website, it is however the conveyor of low brow commentary and political bias on a daily basis.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12209999
My comment in reply to yours was to highlight your point that while the opposition and its poodles are busy hanging themselves on the rope from the TWG discussion, a quick change of tack in the media, namely from the “fish wrap” appears necessary as a brief diversion.
That is a good reminder Kat. I should read things twice.. I’m getting old!! lol
How can we track the assets of Aunty Young, Hangry Hooten, Bury Souper et al? How vested are these interests. The public has the right to know.
Soper, Young, etc etc are all far, far to untypical of average New Zealand to have a clue what the public actually think – they are engaged in a giant confidence trick, where being an old, financially secure, white and old of touch person who are convinced that interviewing each other and establishment vested interests is presented as being in touch with the zeitgeist of the nation.
In fact, they just represent narrow sectional interests – and the decline of MSM makes their views of little importance anyway.
That is not a mistake anyone in Parliament makes.
Yes Ad parliamentarians do make mistakes.
However, many on the right have vested interests and these will be examined as the debate proper starts.
Those on the left with large assets (Jones) will have to declare they are not letting those influence their attitudes.
A problem to consider is the fairness of tax on reparations to Maori, however, they seldom sell, so there should be a way through that.
When the Government produces tables showing how large holders of capital will be affected compared to those with basic or no assets, there will be an epiphany.
We are discussing the % of tax paid on earnings from all sources.
A whole industry has been developed to assist the asset rich to avoid tax.
The comparisons will galvanize opinion IMO.
I know they’re irrelevant, but we’re not all trained to think critically or investigate multiple sources. It would be of use to the public to see just how these Nat mouthpieces have self-interest at heart.
P.S. Whatever happened to Swill-Cone? Surely CGT has caused more neurosis to report on.
Landlords care – we mean it maaaaaaaan.
“Amid the hype around the unusual ad, what’s been overlooked is that someone is currently paying to rent the property. This is someone’s home.”
https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/111051624/heres-the-dirty-secret-lurking-in-that-nasty-house
A rare moment of conscience from Susan Edmunds. Perhaps the industry is finally getting the wake-up all it and the country so desperately needs.
looks to me the industry is advertising the fact that literally they can own a dumb and find someone desperate enough to rent it.
Unfortunately in most situations those that do live in places in that state would not welcome an order to vacate. With falling available rentals and masses of applicants “You’ll need to find another place” is bleak news for those previously obliged to settle for sub-standard options of that ilk.
Raising the standards of NZ rentals and tapping into a bit of that cash cow milk are great initiatives. I’m concerned that our government are ill prepared for the equal and opposite forces these initiatives will initiate.
I think a trending increase in the number of people that are eligible for and waiting for Government housing is an indication that my fears are not ill-founded.
No they won’t want to vacate and the scum bloodsucker leech landlord won’t fix it up to MINIMUM standards. Tough one hmmm
There are plans afoot to address your concerns Marty. The govt have employed inspectors, they’ve started with the govt housing stock. I think these people will move on to policing compliance amongst the private sector.
Just as tenants have their tribunal outcomes made public, landlords do too. The bloodsuckers you speak of would hate nothing more than having to pay a tenant and the govt $5000 because the wind whistles through their let. It would be good if via non compliance fines, the dept was almost self funding.
I think the slumlord tally will plummet. These are of course all good things.
But….as I say, there will be repercussions, we could and should be prepared for them.
The scum are upgrading their hovels because they have to.
Thing is, people have been living in these hovels because they can afford them ($200)* but the scum are chucking them out while they do $10/20k worth of work. And when these not quite hovels anymore do come back on the rental market, the scum have jacked the rents ($370)* beyond the former tenant’s means.
(anecdata)*
I seem to recall that the Government, as landlord (via Housing Corp) also has rented out substandard dwellings to desperate folk.
Maybe the trick would to bring their own properties up to scratch (apparently they had heaps of empty ones too) and rent those out first, before bitching about private landlords.
Maybe they could do both those things Hungry Hangnail.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1903/S00049/student-climate-change-strike-gets-backing-from-gov-minister.htm
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/government-led-science-genetic-modification-climate-minister?variant=tb_v_1
Well, this raises the question as to whether NZ (?) scientists should be funded to undertake scientific research into other uses of GE to tackle other problems such as pest control. Or is it a matter of the end justifies the means? Sounds a bit too much like National to me …
If GE will transform pasture farming, protecting it from the effects of climate change and ensuring farm-resilience and sustainability, surely industry driven by the market and smart farmers, will invest in the technology.
Surely.
Scientific evidence is one main input into a healthy debate that looks at risks, benefits and economic returns as well. In a holistic way that looks at the whole of society and not just at a few fractions with invested interests (!) or ideological agendas.
the trouble being you cannot model the risks ie they are irreducible eg Nalimov
We can say that the nature of change in biology is random, since it is
impossible to find an expression for a sufficiently detailed description
that is considerably shorter than the “most complete” description of the
observed phenomenon. In other words, it is not possible to construct a
model of a generator of mutations in terms of ordinary cause-effect relations,
i.e., it is not possible to find the causes that unambiguously
generate the full diversity of observed mutations. Having found that the
nature of change is random, we are greatly surprised that there does not
exist an ordinary probabilistic description of the observed phenomena.
An ordinary statistical description of phenomena is possible if, on the
basis of the results of observations carried out on a small sample, we can
calculate the distribution parameters which make it possible to obtain an
idea of the behavior of the complete sequence of phenomena. In the case
of biological changes, observations made on a small sequence of
phenomena do not yield information about the subsequent behavior of
the system. In such a case, averaged characteristics have no significance.
The individual manifestations of the phenomena are important, irrespective
of their probability of occurrence.
Thank you Stephen,
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/league/110982655/stephen-kearney-goes-meet-free-as-warriors-coach-builds-dynasty-at-warriors
Good article on plant-based diet in NZH today:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=12209282
I liked it for it’s simple format – ask five experts about the health implications compared to conventional diet. No brow beating, no ethical jabs, just a health focus.
I don’t really care what helps people eat less meat, some just get defensive when the ethics arguments are put up – so having health argued by several professionals is very useful.
Nice one Steve Kearney. I ran some of the sideline stuff for the Warriors games once, Steve’s huge!
Interesting… thanks. Food for thought. No.. plants for thought.
stuffed it up – the headline – didn’t they. Meet-free! Was that a Freudian slip from a meat-eater?
Yes noticed that too grey!
Thanks for posting this mauī.
Yes, v.g. Stephen Kearney and family!
It is very encouraging seeing how more and more NZers are understanding and experiencing the health and environmental benefits of plant-based whole-food eating and it is attracting less of the knee-jerk fear reaction that it used to from threatened individuals in our mainstream ‘animal-slaughter-dependent’ country.
The knee-jerk fear reaction of the thousand or more households in my burg dependent on the meat industry for their livelihoods will probably be along the lines of WTF are we going eat.
Nice illustration – cheers.
Do you think they are fearing for their livelihoods, or what they are going to eat, or both!?
A little bit of knowledge would help them in either case.
The majority are seasonal workers so they know all about both fearing for their livelihoods and how tough it is to feed themselves during the off-season.
This appears to be going a little off-topic from the thread Joe. To bring it back in: seems then that they would be gainfully employed in plant based food production when the ‘vegan-green-peril’ fully takes over.
By then they will have learnt a full range of tasty vegan recipes, other than ‘lettuce and mayo’. They will be healthier and realise how much more affordable it is to feed themselves and their families on a meat-free, dairy-free diet.
I reckon I’ve heard something along those lines before. Oh, that’s right, like Douglass and Prebble before them, Bolger and Richardson assured us that new employment opportunities would abound…and then they proceeded to destroy literally thousands of jobs and tore the heart out of my community. Ain’t gonna happen again.
Yeah good point. The freezing works in several small towns are the major employers.
For myself, I don’t think NZ is going to lose all its dairy/meat production but we’ll have to bring herds down to carrying capacity, and diversify for resilience sake… but ultimately, rotational grazing is the HOW TO of sustainable meat production, with a few tweaks (reduce/remove salts and cides, replant many trees, biodiversity earthworks and water storage, on-site production of feedstock, trees on anything > 15 degrees…) NZ could lead the way in regenerative agriculture.
We are in pole position to create the best food in the world due to our distance from everything, good soils and high rainfall.
Once we’ve learned to keep and grow soil and capture and slow rain (they’re connected), we will not only be productive, but resilient.
I can’t see veganism as the future. I can see diets altering to encompass more plants both for human and planetary health. The freezing worker will still be here, but maybe not so many. there will be more work with trees, bees, aquaculture, fruits, nuts, medicines…
Its very different isn’t it? People making an informed choice about what they eat may certainly disrupt our ‘all eggs in one basket’ (pun intended) animal slaughter industry to some extent. Its hardly comparable to an ideological elite’s top-down imposition of neoliberalism on our lives.
Yes AB
We do need to ‘de-platform’ the ‘right wing angry middle class’ among us.
They only add anger and absolutely no positive resolution to any issue that we need to discuss with “a cool head”.
If they can’t make ‘constructive comments’ – they should be banned.
This was a very good article over on the Daily Blog that I commented on with constructive ways to “define who best to vote for over one issue we need to discuss.
So with the tax reform issue we need a similar voting platform to make our current leaders and (candidates) to define what they will vote for.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2019/03/06/guest-blog-bryan-bruce-planned-student-protest-gets-my-vote/
We need ‘all of us adults shamed’ into action!!!
As we are the problem currently, – since we are lazy and just vote for these lazy useless Governments; – who just sit on the fence and do nothing; – all while the planet burns.
I am ashamed as I should be so I am 100% behind our young for standing up to show that we need to also get off our butts and get in the action also.
Vote out any lazy politician and Local Body councillor who refuses to stand up and join the fight to save our planet.
As this year being our ‘Local body Elections time’ we need to hold all those ‘potential Local Body candidates to account on climate change!!!
We need to have them all sign a questionnaire on climate change, and publish their plans to “commit” to vote for climate change!!!!
Or the public should not vote for them.
“self preservation is the strongest principal’ – https://www.icomos.org/venicecharter2004/petzet.pdf
I sit on the Southland Regional Council, clean green 🙂
cleangreen
You are talking about making sure that politicians do what the people and the land need them to. And I think that is what a working democracry should be about.
We thought we had one, that was at least tottering along sometimes, and then making changes and getting better. Then the whole thing was overthrown by cutting government away and its regulations (the fat) and supposedly introducing a lean, fit model. Only it leaned too far and fell over! Hah.
Now we need participatory democracy. The people need to form a group of practical people looking to the future, each one with an interest in one of the major drivers of an
enterprise society perhaps transport, agriculture in general including horticulture, manufacturing in general, employment and understanding thoroughly the way that Stats gathers and presents figures for official is there a Household Labour Survey and why or not? Education and its value today, technology spread smothering traditional writing and communication, also what is driving the politicians, advisors, bureaucrats – who yanks their strings, provides the models they follow?
Then we get a picture of what is happening. You have reliable, informed academics who will give you an ear and perhaps address a meeting of keen learners. Then we can draw up rough plans for what is needed, bring the figures in to fill them out, make reasonable estimates of cost, look at who or what would be affected by it, perhaps that site is environmentally vulnerable, perhaps that local landowner would object even if it is public land, even if it is a necessary step for the good of the community. How can he/she be brought into the loop, be smoozed?
There was an interview this morning with a Mayor on the West Coast. He and one of his cohort organised some work without going through the required steps.l
He said they did it because it looked as if there was going to be a repeat of the flood that washed out their sewage ponds. They managed to avoid this and have done apparently a fairly good job of protection with a stopbank or something.
People have to do this, get full information, and then press hard for necessary steps. You cleangreen appear to be doing this in Gisborne. No doubt you have worked out a case for getting quick address to your problems, with steps that even the most reluctant decision maker must notice are straightforward and cogent.
I was reading a bit from David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell.
He starts a new Part with Ecclesiastes 9:11 –
So I guess we just hope our time will last long enough to give us the chance.
De-platforming needs to be non-coercive or else we become the thing we abhor.
Lol. ‘There was blame on both sides’.
To take away their platform in the kindest possible way?
After all it surely isn’t so urgent that we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings!
I’m all for hurting their feelings, their wallets (especially) and anything else that works – short of violence or suspension of the rule of law.
Excellent.
I reckon bugger elections and democracy clean green, you and bunch of teenagers ( preferably suitably left and woke ) just determin the criteria and what constitutes correct thinking and then select who should be in council and in parliament
That, is called the National party!
Nandor Tanczos discusses the permaculture hui coming in April, in our food forest, in Riverton.
https://www.accessradio.org/Player.aspx?eid=64c26ccb-14ee-4074-9ae2-7085737b5109
Well done Robert.
https://twitter.com/tvrain/status/1102958278777102336
Lol. But the same thing would happen in The States. Or here, but with perhaps slightly less force.
More from the Gallow at Oxford. Absolutely superb.
Thanks mauī, again I appreciate your posts today.
This is fascinating and I hope some of our right wing trolls who are fond of spouting their version of the truth here get an opportunity to watch (and think about) this.
Meooow🐈
You knew it didn’t you, that Mike Hosking would go all orgasmic about Paula Bennett?
That it’d be about benefits?
Paula’s gang patch.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D07E3DQU0AAWAy3?format=jpg&name=large
I love lead? I guess working with Simon would make you ask people to shoot you.
🤣🤣🤣
Is that the sartorial equivalent of retweeting yourself?
Farmers need protection from livestock rustling.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1903/S00034/nz-first-pushes-for-tougher-livestock-rustling-measures.htm
Government is looking at it. The miniature horses deaths are an indication of a certain level of callous skulduggery that can exist in rural areas.
Was rife on the East Coast 1980’s to early 1990’s basically organised crime, some of the Maori Trust Blocks got hammered, one block at Te Arararoa lost 100 x breeding cows and a Station in the Waikura Valley lost 300 x 2 tooth breeding ewes, this ain’t just the odd animal for the freezer.
Truck @ trailers required for these sort of numbers.
I imagine Mr Shaw may be getting a little bit nervous.
After almost a year of the MSM ignoring the total stuff up by his Department in their attempt to hold a Census Stuff is starting to run stories about it.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/111052779/365-days-and-still-counting-census-2018-results-nowhere-to-be-seen
Young James has spent all that time with a blindfold on and his hands jammed over his ears while he, ever more desperately, claims that everything will turn out all right, and anyway “it wasn’t my fault”.
Well tough luck James. It was your fault and your refusal to do anything about it should cause you sacking.
Have a look in the linked article. You don’t have to accept my opinion.
As Auckland University Statistician Andrew Sporle says
“”It’s a bit of a disaster, we don’t know how bad, but we know it’s a disaster.”
He said it appeared Stats NZ’s follow through after the initial response, which was adequate, had faltered.”
In other words it was what happened after the Census that has caused the havoc and Shaw is totally responsible for that.
Shaw also claims that it will not be possible to arrange a Census in 2021. What that means is that he, and his Department, have wasted 12 months that could have been put into organizing it.
Economist Brian Easton has also commented on Shaw’s Shambles.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/111044133/census-mess-can-be-resolved-with-a-new-one-in-2021
Brian, who certainly doesn’t lean to the right says that the Census is unlikely to be accepted by a Court as meeting the statutory obligations that exist. He is also quite scathing about the argument that it is impossible to run a proper one in 2021.
As he says.
“Stats NZ has claimed that it takes three years (instead of two years and nine months) to run a new census. But I am told that if it uses the existing good parts of the 2018 census with the 2013 enumerator system, it will take 18 months to organise.
So it could start the task as late as this September. All it requires is leadership, although it may be sensible to bring back (sometimes out of retirement) the team that ran the 2013 enumeration.”
Well Mr Shaw is supposedly the leader. Unfortunately he has demonstrated he is anything but a good one.
There is a lovely old US saying about people like James Shaw.
“Piss or get off the pot”.
As most people will recognize it means stop procrastinating an do something.
Mr Shaw appears to be incapable of doing anything. He should resign.
If he won’t then the PM should follow the US idiom. She should sack him.
SFW, we managed to cope with a five year delay.
Now there is a man who isn’t afraid to demonstrate his antipathy to a politician.
You do realize that the delay we “managed to cope with”, and which was 2 years not 5 years by the way, was due to the Christchurch earthquake?
Now you are quite happy to delay the Census by 5 years and happily go from 2013 to 2123 to get any sensible results.
I am not a great enthusiast for Mr Shaw as a Minister of the Crown, as people who read what I say about him here may be aware. To put it briefly I think he has been useless.
However I really wouldn’t go as far as you do and describe his activities as being a great deal more of a disaster than the Earthquake was.
Alwyn you are all wrong .We actually rate Shaw and don’t rate your opinion.
The organisation was done by National. But you know that and you are redirecting.
That’s nice dear. I’m sure that you absolutely adore the dishy Mr Shaw.
What do you rate him at on a scale of 0 to 10?
Actually don’t bother. If someone wants to be a Minister of the Crown I don’t care how he is rated by the ladies. I only care about whether he can do the job and Shaw has been an abject failure.
But you know that don’t you?
Shock! – I agree with you about the Census stuff up.
Not ready to blame JS like you have though. Being a Green supporter, I will try very hard to understand what his part in this was – let’s see how he handles it when the results are published.
I fear, like Brian Easton, that any fudged results they manage to cook up will not satisfy a Court that they are of a legally sufficient quality. The thing a true leader would have done was to recognize that possibility immediately after the results were in doubt and start a parallel path of preparing to rerun the exercise in 2021. This could have been done at the same time as they were trying to patch up the data.
They should also have tried to quickly get more people into the field to try and contact the people who were missed. Chase up those people who had done the job in 2013 and recruit as many of them as possible. They at least had once been trained.
It would appear that Shaw, in the time between becoming Minister and the Census didn’t satisfy himself that it was going to be on track on the day. He still seems to be in a complete state of denial even a year after the fiasco. It was his job to ask questions of the Officials and satisfy himself that the answers made sense.
Alywin own the census stuff up as the Nats, which it was or f off
You did notice that MR (or Dr) Sporle said that the problems only occurred after the Census date. Up till then things were going OK. If all the problems started 5 or 6 months after the current lot took office an attempt to blame it all on National is only something a person like you or the current PM would attempt.
The pm doesn’t do that. She always picks up responsibility for her patch.
I didn’t read what your wrote about James Shaw. I will if I have time. I had read that the f ups were down to previous govt, but realize that that may not be the case
Ok alywyn, just read the article. You have selectively used quotes to implicate Shaw. The review of what went wrong is due mid 2019. The follow up you referred to would have been designed under national. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but actually you were spinning.
Remember about the boy who cried wolf
Actually Ardern did claim it was all National’s fault.
That was her first reaction. It also ignored the fact that National increased the money to run the Census from about $90 million in 2013 to $120 million in 2018.
Is that really a case of them being cheap skates?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/109424122/prime-minister-blames-national-for-census-debacle-says-stats-nz-warned-them-of-budgetary-constraints
That’s funny. Using the name “Shaw” and “leader” in the same sentence.
He’s got his incompetent predecessor to blame.
I suggest you see my comment at 14.3.1.
I guess I must include you in the foolish little trio rather than only the duo of fools.
Maybe he’s wrong wally. I mean when Pricksmith stuffs things up they stay stuffed up.
Fantastic that alwyn has been reduced to complaining about the census.
Statistically, statistics are not something a lot of people care about.
Hah, bloody hah.
I have been complaining about the stuffed up Census since a few weeks after it took place. The second I saw the percentage of the population that had responded I thought that it couldn’t possibly be rectified.
Lots of people on this site claimed that everything was OK and that of course they would get usable numbers.
Well they were wrong and an awful lot of other people are now saying the same things that I have been saying for the best part of a year.
You may not care about statistics, or the Census.
That is because you are an ignorant fool. Read Easton’s article that I linked to and then ask yourself how they can possibly settle on electorate boundaries, the number of Maori seats, allocations to DHBs or money going to schools without a valid Census? The law requires that they get it right.
Claiming that people, and by implication you, aren’t interested merely demonstrates how stupid you really are. But then your comments show that on almost every occasion you burst into song here.
I think they could make reasonable guesses on DHBs. Maori electorates won’t have changed much because the previous government made sure they couldn’t get ahead. Schools might be an issue. It’s a pity the Nats didn’t collect data on all the money flooding into the country via property investment.
” Maori electorates won’t have changed much”.
Of course not. You aren’t concerned in the slightest that if they use the figures they have there may be one less Maori Electorate?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/111003171/mori-electorate-seat-at-risk-due-to-census-2018-debacle?rm=m
And it doesn’t really matter that there are tens of millions of dollars that may be mis-allocated to each of the DHBs.
It is good to see that Jimmy Shaw isn’t concerned though. He apparently prefers to be in a position of “I know nothing”.
It seems to be the case that he hasn’t even shown enough interest to ask for a briefing on the matter.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/111074980/stats-minister-james-shaw-yet-to-take-advice-on-key-census-2018-risks
I suppose he is far to busy arranging his next little jaunt to attend a conference on how to fly less which will be held in some exotic far distant place.
Heh Bozo. The only real job you have is Statistics and their major task is the Census. Do your job you lazy sod.
The hard part is going to be generating the political will.
.
“Right now, we have about ninety per cent or ninety-five per cent of the technology we need,” Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, told me. In a series of papers, Jacobson and his colleagues have laid out “roadmaps” to a zero-emissions economy for fifty states, fifty-three towns and cities, and a hundred and thirty-eight other countries, with a completion date of 2050. Just as in the Democrats’ Green New Deal, the central element of these roadmaps (and others) is converting the electric grid to clean energy by shutting down power stations that rely on fossil fuels and making some very large investments in wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal facilities. Jacobson said this could be completed by 2035, which is only five years beyond the target set out in the Green New Deal. At the same time, policymakers would introduce a range of measures to promote energy efficiency, and electrify other sectors of the economy that now rely heavily on burning carbon, such as road and rail transport, home heating, and industrial heating. “We don’t need a technological miracle to solve this problem,” Jacobson reiterated. “‘The bottom line is we just need to deploy, deploy, deploy.”
http://archive.li/kUiGN
Yup.
Convert all land-based energy use to electric. Short flights go to electric, long-haul will need biofuels. There’s a good chance shipping will find small modular nuclear reactors to be the best option.
I can’t think of a better way to boost the economy than doing all the R&D, manufacturing and infrastructure work needed to make that happen.
Hear hear!
I wonder how the people of the bay of plenty would have felt if the rena was nuclear powered.
That disaster created my favorite meme (that I made)
Rocks Tar Economy.
I was surprised when it didn’t take off 😀
Reactors for use in shipping are a tenth the size or less of land-based electricity generation reactors. So a Fukushima or Chernobyl or Three Mile Island accident has negligible probability of happening, simply because the thermal runaway issues are exponentially related to reactor size.
In a ship, there’s always coolant available right there. Unlike Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima which all had loss of cooling as a key part of what went wrong.
The radioactive material is always inside a seriously grunty containment vessel, so dropping a steaming pile of uranium on the seabed just aint gonna happen. The worst case scenario is breaking off the coolant lines going in and out of the containment vessel so seawater can go in and out of the containment vessel. Which will release a very small amount of radioactive material with the initial flushing out of the coolant that will very quickly dilute and dissipate.
After that, to release radioactive material, they will need to be dissolved into the seawater. The concentration of uranium in seawater is already quasi-saturated, so it’s going to be just barely above background levels.
So no, there wouldn’t suddenly be three-headed fish on the menu in the BOP. By any rational assessment, the worst-case ecosystem damage done by a hypothetical nuke-powered Rena would be much less than the actual damage done by the actual bunker oil spilled by the actual Rena.
But we’ve had decades of overhyped scare stories about the nuclear boogeyman, so rational assessment probably aint gonna count for squat if we’re ever called on to figure out how we feel about nuke-powered ships in our ports.
edit: Here’s an industry puff-piece on existing marine use of nuclear propulsion. Glossy spin to be sure, but it’s still a useful illustration of the scope of what’s already out there.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-powered-ships.aspx
Evidently the servicing on the cooling system had been neglected at Fukushima.
Apparently at Chernobyl they were doing some kind of test that involved fucking with the cooling system.
Three Mile Island had sequential failures of cooling components. IIRC, starting with pumps, then a valve stuck open. Shitty operator interface design contributed to operators not correctly understanding what was going wrong and then taking incorrect steps to try to fix it.
I can’t imagine the servicing of a third world flagged merchant fleet will be anything to write home about.
Or servicing Third World Nuclear Power Plants ?
Thanks
I can’t see that we’re ever actually gonna be called on the consider the question.
Oil prices would have to be up over $200/barrel, maybe $300, to make nukes look economically attractive to shipping companies. The only way I see that happening is a worldwide carbon price of at least $300/tonne CO2e that captures shipping as well. Maybe more like $600 or $1000/tonne. On an industry that is remarkably successful at avoiding getting taxed and regulated.
Sigh. We’re all gonna fry.
What do you reckon of this?
A ticking time bomb?
Seems somewhat risky. 🤣
When you consider the Soviet/ Russian Nuclear accidents over the yrs, it’s a ticking time bomb waiting to go pop like Chernobyl or like their Nuke Subs or Ships. Just google earth/ maps of the Northern Fleet dockyards and see all their Nuclear Subs and their Cruisers in various states of this disrepair.
I think even Greenpeace has a piece on this wee monster of ticking time bomb?
Greenpeace’s knee-jerk anti-nuclear-power stance is one of the reasons I’ve gone off them.
To me, closing down an already built running nuclear power station somewhere like Germany, just because nuclear, makes no sense at all. For starters, the big environmental costs have already been incurred, like the original build, irradiation of the guts of it on startup etc. The ongoing marginal environmental cost of continued operation is pretty minimal.
Then there’s the way shortfalls in electricity production from shutting a nuke is likely to be made up by burning coal. Which is vastly more environmentally damaging than nuclear, even counting Fukushima and Chernobyl and TMI and all the others.
Yet Greenpeace is right at the forefront of demanding nuke power plants be shut down. It’s quite the environmental and climate own goal.
I do agree that shutting down the German Nuclear Power plants is just plain crazy and as you said doesn’t make any sense at all. But I do think Greenpeace concerns on this wee ticking time bomb is quite valid, given the track record of the Russians to run a Nuclear Power safety.
Gets around the earthquake issue.
What about the Tsunami issue?
Wouldn’t even notice it.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/03/11/tsunami.cruise.ships/index.html
But that thing will always be close to shore, won’t it? That’s where the power is needed.
Can’t see it motoring out to open water at the drop of a hat.
You can have it anchored 10k offshore and just run a power cable back.
Treat it like an oil rig, the Taranaki rigs are a long way offshore.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/map/8934/taranaki-oil-and-gas-fields-2006
BM, did you ever see the footage from the Jap Coast Guard Vessel (about the same size of one of the RNZN OPV’s) riding the Tsunami waves some 50 plus km’s offshore? The ship was lucky to get to the crest of wave and nearly didn’t have a enough herbs to get over the second and third waves.
Cables, ok.
In the event of an accident, atmospheric dispersal of radioactive debris in a low population area (at sea for instance) might be less harmful to humans, but dispersal by ocean current would be disastrous for marine life and coastal communities, potentially for thousands of kilometres.
True, but if it’s close inshore when a Tsunami hits. I wouldn’t want to be near that thing in a month of Monday’s, even if I had a bucket full of iodine pills while wear a noddy suit at the same time.
I think Andre below, pretty well sums up my thoughts on this.
Fukushima was a fuck up evidently the cooling systems weren’t serviced properly and helped cause the melt down, stupid place to build s Nuclear Plant – Stupid Yanks Again ?
The cooling systems were taken out by the tsunami …. they were badly / cheaply sited .
The general concept has some merits. It’s an example of where the rooskies have kept going with reactor developments and may be in a pretty good position if a market for small modular reactors ever develops.
The reactors are essentially the same design the rooskies have successfully used for quite a while in icebreakers. They’re modestly sized (150MW thermal, 35MW electrical compared to Chernobyl reactors being 3200MW thermal 1000MW electrical each), so if shit goes down with them it won’t be much shit.
Things I don’t like about them are: Russian engineering and manufacturing and respect for safety and the environment ain’t the greatest, they’re old design pressurised water reactors that rely on active control systems working at all times, and PWRs produce a lot of radioactive waste relative to power generated.
There are newer reactors designs that respond to complete loss of control and power by depowering using the laws of physics rather than active control, which I find much more comfortable. There’s also newer designs that essentially burn their waste rather than requiring somewhere very secure to store the waste for a very long time (maybe rooskies don’t care about secure storage for the waste).
So I’ve got quite mixed thoughts on that particular application of nuclear tech.
Should add, the cost looks way up there. Wikipedia reckons the project cost will be around USD336 million for a 70MW electricity output. That’s around $5/watt of electrical output. Although since it’s Murmansk, they’re probably taking quite a bit of its output directly as heat.
For comparison, utility-scale wind and solar are on the order of $0.50/watt.
Not a viable option then?
Not that I could see Kiwis excepting the concept of a floating nuclear power plant.
Any government that allowed this would be hung drawn and quartered.
Never ever ever gonna be viable for on-land generation in New Zealand. We’ve got so much wind, geothermal and maybe even solar if needed that we just won’t need something that expensive and politically unpopular on land.
The alien unicorns will have arrived and started excreting working fusion plants out their back ends long before we tap out our renewables potential.
But if the world ever gets serious about eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, we may have a choice of either accepting nuke-powered ships in our ports or shutting ourselves off from the rest of the world.
To be honest BM, I don’t think Nuclear Power would be practical in NZ from a risk, safety and cost POV. A Nuclear Power station would’ve got done in the 50’s-late 60’s if NZ’s history in the Atomic age is anything to by.
but not now as the muppets in Treasury would have a fit, before the anti Nuke mob even got their finger out of their digit to organise any protest. Hell the Treasury Muppets are already having fits over the 20B DCP over 15- 20yrs last announce by the “No Mates Party and reconfirm by the current Government, so you think they will support this?
Yeah right mate.
You haven’t seen the state of technical maintenance, on every, FOC ship we have taken over. Except for AHTSV’s.
Sometimes the paintwork looks good, and often the paperwork.
The quality of technical maintenance on the equipment and engines, has been, without exception, abysmal.
Let your average cost cutting “Flag of Convenience” shipping company manage a nuclear plant!
You must be fucking, joking!
Hydrogen is really the only promising technology, at present, for ship fuels.
It has it’s own dangers, however.
Note though, a diesel ship has at least 30 times less emissions per ton.mile, than trucks.
Complexity of operation and maintenance is a very good argument against quite a few classes of reactor design. Including all the pressurised water and light water reactor designs I’m aware of. Ironically, those designs are also the easiest to get regulatory approval for, since they’re based on legacy designs with long histories. Most expensive to actually build, too, because of the complexity, but the easier approval process counteracts that. That roosky nukes-on-barge thing BM linked to is one of those legacy type PWRs.
Several of the outfits working on newer next-gen reactors are specifically targeting outright eliminating maintenance requirements and simplifying operation to the point of making the reactor itself basically a “big battery” from the users point of view. At least the nuke thermal part, anyway, converting heat to electricity or mechanical power won’t ever be quite that simple. The containment vessel for all the radioactive bits would be all in one unit, fueled at the factory for several years of operation. Then when it’s depleted, the entire unit is pulled out and replaced with a refurbished refuelled unit, and the old one goes back to the factory for refurb and refuel.
If you can be bothered scrolling through the big article linked below you’ll find brief descriptions of several of these efforts. But none of them look anywhere near becoming commercial reality.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/small-nuclear-power-reactors.aspx
https://www.ship-technology.com/features/featureis-there-a-future-for-hydrogen-powered-ship-propulsion-5731545/
https://grist.org/article/a-ferry-that-runs-on-hydrogen-fuel-cells-is-coming-to-san-francisco/
Safe, storage of large amounts of hydrogen is an issue, but scientists reckon it is, solvable. Note: The dangers of storing large quantities of gas or petrol.
Making hydrogen, of course requires a large source of sustainable electricity. Which New Zealand has the capability.
Unless we get the Holy Grail, Fusion, which is decades away, if ever. Continued nuclear energy for transport, remains unlikely.
Handling hydrogen is way way more difficult and dangerous than handling liquid fuels. Hydrogen embrittlement of metals, the way seals have to be metal-to-metal contact because hydrogen permeates through and reacts with polymers so quickly, hydrogen’s very wide range of explosive concentrations in air, the way hydrogen fires are nearly invisible to the naked eye (they put out a shitload of UV though)…
The round trip efficiency of using electricity to split water for hydrogen to mechanical work is very low. I don’t see us having enough excess of electricity any time soon to make that route to widespread use of hydrogen viable.
I reckon what might make hydrogen viable is if any of the teams working on photocatalytic hydrogen production has a breakthrough, or one of the lab methods of generating hydrogen from hydrocarbons without releasing CO2 has a breakthrough. One of the most interesting efforts in that area is bubbling methane up through molten metal, which releases nearly pure hydrogen and the carbon becomes a solid floating on top of the molten metal. Presumably like a sooty powder.
In the early noughties when the prospect of a hydrogen economy looked more likely, there was a fluffy of articles talking about risks to the ozone layer from leaked hydrogen. That question seems to have died off, but I haven’t found whether it was shown to be a non-issue, or whether it just reflects an assessed low probability of widespread hydrogen use.
I am aware of the likely costs of new reactor designs, for ships. As well as the PR issues.
I don’t think shipping companies will go there.
Probably a little bit pissed off.
Auckland City Council have Resource Consent to dump toxic sludge out of Auckland Viaduct Harbour into the pristine waters of Great Barrier Island so some rich wankers can have a silly little boat race in Auckland Harbour ?
Sssh city pollution good . Country pollution bad .
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/03/watch-jacinda-ardern-and-simon-bridges-in-fiery-debate-over-m-ori-capital-gains-tax-exemptions.html
Jacinda losing it in the house today.
Very funny. Bridges looks firmly in control.
I see nothing of the sort in the link provided. He said she said – no big deal. But if you need that illusion to help you get chubby by all means who am I to judge.
Rolling a turd in glitter only works if it’s still moist. The tax debate is as dry as a desert coprolite.
I just watched the full exchange and the PM clearly owned it.
The only thing I agree with is that yeah, it was funny.
Of course, you and the Herald shills are free to pretend to see it differently.
The acting leader of the nat party should be renamed ‘Slicks’, not for his hair, or love for big oil, but for the fact he get’s no traction when the red rain pours.
Your a funny chap there James, Jacinda neither lost it or Bridges looked in control, but you’re right it was a little funny. The Prime Minister ended still with a smile on her face and the Leader of the National Party looked like he was about to burst into tears. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
Did Slick get cwoss and cwy jimbo?
Jimmy you have finally arrived we have been waiting all day.
Some of us have things to do.
Glad you have been thinking of me all day – I haven’t given you a second thought.
LOL
I can’t think why National’s only asking questions about the Cullen report. They’ve decided that recommendations in it are exactly what’s going to happen, the Government’s going to do everything suggested.
Surely they have the imagination to work out what’s going to come out of other reviews and can put the heat on the Government about the decisions they’ve already made to instigate all recommendations. You know, make it all up – should be easy from the fantasyland they’re in.
An issue has finally emerged that they care about.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/111065215/kpiti-expressway-needs-25-million-worth-of-repairs-just-two-years-after-opening
tempted to just say “lol”
But if you dig deeper (not that I could give a fuck because of gNat and NZTA muppetry, AND if you consider the Levin Mayor’s contributions today to the debate) ….. it all couldn’t have happened to such ideologically driven peeps.
If you go back over the years from the dismantling of MOW, to out-saucing – even where bitumen is available (primarily from a private monopoly), Hark at Thee for trying to scream foul now.
Shudda Cudda Wudda.
I mean!!!!! this same shit happened before FFS on that same route.
Is there anyone among elected government representatives that has yet got past the flagellation phase of pandering to their ‘officials’ (who LEAST OF ALL have your best interests at heart)
As things pan out, I’m actually seriously worried about the Coalition and in particular some with Ministerial responsibilities.
For some, there some really FUCKING EASY gains to be made (e.g. with Immigration, OR with Land Transport, or various other things that could be done via Ministerial regulatory and ‘last chance’ options).
Doesn’t seem to be happening so far (and it’s what????? 12 -15 months)
Are some of them actually masochists do you think?
Why not email or write an actual letter just to show some of us know how* to the various Ministers you would like to test for masochism and see if you can penetrate their defence mechanisms.
(*Our city post office has just been abandoned for no reason except ideology. Here in Nelson it is very busy in the tourist season and we had a nice central location which is all being given over to Kiwi Bank. With a different design we could have given Kiwi bank pride of place and had a simpler post office set up but no it has to go to the back of a nearby private book and stationery shop. Bloody Post Office dimwits and vandals. They have made up their mind that it’s a dying business and are speeding it on its way – just too unimaginative to keep it going with a simpler business model that differs depending on the site and location.)
I’m on the move again @grey, so difficult to give you a full reply atm, but I have done so in the past as have others from various advocacy groups, unions, and so on – AND provided instances (cases) where people have been let down – either through under-resourcing, inexperience, or just sheer muppetry.
What is annoying is that in many many instances, the failings (MBIE, NZTA, Health, DHBs, WINZ, HNZ etc.) is all a matter of record.
And though I don’t necessarily agree with NZ1’s approach to some of our PS (the Senior ranks), I can understand their frustration.
Unless there is some sort of reform of the PS, it is going to be hard for this coalition to be “transformational”.
Immigrant worker exploitation (for example) could AT LEAST be minimised, along with its flow on effects in driving down wages quite easily. I’m wondering whether the only reason a couple of simple steps haven’t been taken is because there is fear that a flood of complaints might overwhelm the Labour Inspectorate – but which to do you more important? I’d suggest trying to minimise the exploitation and eventually holding the exploiters to account trumps anything based on past bad policy advice.
Kia ora The AM Show Its cool that today is international Wahines day for equality its is a cause that Eco Maori champions. They won’t let a truly powerful Artificial Intelligence program to give financial advice to the masses as the billionaire won’t be able to ripp us off.
Its more than just sports that is fixed in our society.
The Hokatika Wild foods festival would be great to go and see there are Alot of bush food that we could harvest that we don’t even know about it would be good for the environment and organic as well
Why is Fonterra selling its silver ware its stupid are some of the people in the know lining Tip top up to buy cheap and than resell making huge profits at the expense of farmers selling is also not logical when interest rates are at historical lows.???????????????????. With the Rugby The people who control the World don’t want a team called the All Blacks domanating World Rugby don’t let the bigots win.
Nice money Phil Goff has good control of Auckland he is doing a great job.
Our return armed forces personnel NZDF do need more care I see all Around the world that they are suffering mental fatigue physically disabled but I would never let my Mokopunas go to war no one wins in war. judy its all very well that you’re child can afford private education but most people can not hence our government invested in our future with the money given to our youths education.
Sir Michael Cullen has more Good knowledge on the tax system than the whole of the national party. There moto is giving more to the wealthy and take more from the poor. Anyperson with a logical brain can work out that is a unsustainable model when money is consentrated in a few hands. Te tangata te tangata te tangata when everyone ha enough KAI all te tangata are healthy and happy when only a few have all the KAI nobody is happy Ka kite ano
Don’t believe the sandflys lieing spinning about what’s going on in my life at the minute. You can not compare my situation with ANYONE else’s it Eco Maori. For one they will and have use everything at their disposal to try and LOCKME UP the power of the states spy’s and NOTHING if they had one shread of evedince they would have locked me up druged me up and carry on shitting on the common people. Ana to kai. Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
https://youtu.be/tgIqecROs5M
I read a bit about this plite happening to Our Native Amercian and Canada Wahine Cousins I could not believe what I had read I waited for some more information on the subject Its SHOCKING that these Wahine from Amercia and Canada are missing and 4 to 5 x as much as whites WTF in a first world country this should not be happening. The aurthoritys could find them or what happened to them but because tangata whenua/ people of the land cultures are being suppressed all around the world they DONT GIVE A SHIT.
REDress exhibit highlights epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women
Haunting outdoor art installation by Canadian artist Jaime Black is on display at Washington DC Museum
The REDress Project, an outdoor art installation by Métis artist Jaime Black at Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. Photograph: Katherine Fogden/National Museum of the American Indian
T
hirty-five red dresses hung on winter-bare trees lining the Riverwalk along the National Museum of the American Indian. A woman pushing a stroller stopped to watch the garments twist in the wind, staring at the smallest dress in the collection – one that would fit a little girl.
The REDress Project is a haunting outdoor art installation in Washington DC by Canadian artist Jaime Black meant to symbolize the epidemic of violence against indigenous women and girls.
“Every visitor will have a different experience with the dresses,” said Machel Monenerkit, the deputy director of the National Museum of American Indian. “But you cannot walk through this installation and not have some emotional experience.”
For years and at astonishing rates, Native women in the United States, Canada and across the continent have gone missing or been murdered. Native American women are 10 times more likely to be murdered and four times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the national average, according to a recent report by the US Commission on Civil Rights.
But in the era of #MeToo and after the first two Native American women were elected to Congress in 2018, there is a renewed effort to account for the disappearances and prevent future tragedies. Ka kite ano links below .
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/07/redress-exhibit-dc-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women
Some Eco Maori Music for the Minute.
Kia ora Te ao Maori News I say that those youth justice prison are training grounds for our tamariki to learn bad habits off the harden tamariki that are in their it needs to have more than just a Maori name it needs to be run by Maori as we will teach them good principles and love them not loave them and treat them like a treasure not dirt.
Tipuni Kokori is only a shell compare to the Mana funding it once had and Eco Maori says it need more funding to help Maori tangata and businesses.
Sports is a good way for OUR tamariki to climb up to their maximum heights on their ladders of life. I was to busy trying to building my Maunga plus we live in the wopwops to concentrate on my tamariki sport te Wahine was sleeping. That’s good to know to karakia to the Stars
Ka pai Ken the break dancer Tau toko smoke free I hear that the Olympic committee is considering having break danceing in the Olympic. Ka kite ano
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
Te billionares oil barron climate change suppressors do obey any rules mans or GOD,s keep up the good mahi tamariki /good work children
Student climate change strike: Rules don’t matter when you’re fighting for your future
OPINION: I have a memory of my grandfather saying that, when he was young, children were to be seen and not heard. Reflecting on it now, I suspect that I was being naughty at the time and he was suggesting that I might consider being seen and not heard.
On March 15, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young people are intending to walk out of their classrooms. They will take to the streets to protest decades of complacency and inaction on climate change, on the part of the adults whose first responsibility should have been the future these kids will inherit.
Since the “School Strike 4 Climate” was announced, a number of adults have expressed apparent concern for the impact that taking time out of school will have on the education of these young students.
But I don’t remember any concern for the impact on my schooling when I was marshalled out of class for a morning so I could wave to a fast-passing limousine bearing Prince Charles and Lady Diana on their visit to Wellington in 1983.
It wouldn’t have helped bring an end to apartheid if protesters had rented side-line advertising space during half time at the All Blacks v Springboks test matches in 1981.
And homosexual law reform wouldn’t have happened if gay rights activists had stayed in the closet and out of sight.
Should kids be skipping school to shout about inaction on climate change? I wish they didn’t feel they had to. I wish they weren’t left feeling like they have to fight for their futures.
That’s why I, as your Green Party minister in this Government, will make sure we bring the Zero Carbon Bill into law.
That law will establish an important certainty in Aotearoa New Zealand, that we can and must reduce the greenhouse gas pollution which is overheating our planet and threatening the delicate balance that maintains our existence.
There may once have been a time when it was considered right and proper that children should be seen and not heard. But when our children feel like they’re fighting for their future, this is not that time.
James Shaw is the co-leader of the Green Party and the Minister for Climate Change. Ka kite ano links below.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/111139469/student-climate-strikes-rules-dont-matter-when-youre-fighting-for-your-future
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
https://youtu.be/LHCob76kigA
Eco Maori Say Kia Kaha Mana Wahine pay equity Equality will give ladys the power to fight for a good cause Wahines Mana if power is money and the men are given 10 to 100 x more money than Wahine if we do close the wage gap than we will never get EQUALITY for Wahine
United States women’s football team sues for equitable pay
Players for the US women’s national football team have filed a gender discrimination lawsuit seeking pay that is equitable to that of their male counterparts
The action comes just three months before the team will defend its title at the women’s World Cup in France.
The players allege that they have been subject to ongoing “institutionalised gender discrimination,” including unequal pay, despite having the same job responsibilities as players on the men’s national team. The 28 members of the current national team player pool joined in the class-action lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation, which was filed Friday in federal court in Los Angeles under the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The players are seeking equitable pay and treatment, in addition to damages including back pay.
`And hopefully in that way it inspires women everywhere.”
The US Women’s National Team Players Association was not party to the lawsuit, but in a statement said it “supports the plaintiffs’ goal of eliminating gender-based discrimination by USSF.”
The US Soccer Federation didn’t have an immediate comment.
The USSF has maintained in the past that much of the pay disparity between the men’s and women’s teams results from separate collective bargaining agreements.
The women’s team set up its compensation structure, which included a guaranteed salary rather than a pay-for-play model like the men, in the last labor contract. The players also earn salaries – paid by the federation – for playing in the National Women’s Soccer League.
The women receive other benefits, including health care, that the men’s national team players don’t receive, the federation has maintained.
This is not the first time the players have sought equitable compensation and conditions. Ka kite ano links below P.S There was nothing wrong with our best mens sports team so why has it been turned insideout
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/football/world-game/111154110/united-states-womens-football-team-sues-for-equitable-pay