Establishment political analysts, posturing as anti-establishment, become the victims of their innate perceptual inadequacies. Poor old Chomsky, seemingly incapable of figuring out what's going on…
Chomsky’s approach has the effect of relativizing the regime’s crimes, which account for 90% of the victims and destruction. It seems that if the U.S. cannot be blamed for these crimes, then they are not very important.
Just goes to show how one's mental frame, often formed in an earlier era of history, continues to be deployed despite the world changing and making it distort one's view.
He observes that "Media systems have no answer for toxic polarisation." The key point is in the sub-text: public media is holistic by definition, private media is dualistic by definition. Media creates a triad. It functions as a medial conduit between the whole (body politic) and the parts (citizens). This three-in-one framing is metaphysics. You'll recall a similar triad that shaped the course of western civilisation: the christian trinity. Aristotle defined metaphysics as being beyond physics but it helps to interpret beyond as deeper.
Overall, it is fair to say that the digital revolution has helped make media more plural, participatory and protest-friendly. But its contribution to tolerant, diverse publics appears negligible or even negative. This is contrary to hopes two decades ago that the internet would help form a “digital public sphere” far more democratic and inclusive than pre-digital society. The 15 minutes of fame that digital media dishes out to people previously known as the audience does not necessarily add up to a national, let alone global, conversation that cuts across social and ideological divides. This is a problem because democracy is a highly demanding way to organise public life, requiring not only the freedom to speak but also a commitment to listen and to respect others’ equal rights even when consensus is elusive. But instead of enlarging common spaces for democratic deliberation, the global trend is towards political polarisation, according to the newly released annual report of the Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project.
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This is a co-design challenge. Media co-design is rarely evident – most people assume someone else will do it. Few become pro-active, but when they do, they must practise consensus politics to find common ground and collaborate effectively.
I’ve snipped two of your overlong copypasta. Generally short quotes to support your points or show what piece is about are good but not really long quotes. People can click through for whole article. Long quotes are occasionally useful but they cause problems for scrollers esp on phones when done a lot and there’s been an outbreak of them by a number of commenters lately.
The prof explains how social media corporatisation has perverted the original intent of the internet:
[overlong quote deleted]
So that establishes the basis for a leftist critique of corporatised social media, and any consequent collective project to re-engineer it into more of a commons…
We need a more fundamental overhaul, of the kind envisioned by a group of communication scholars and practitioners in their manifesto to create a Public Service internet. Released last June and signed by more than 1,200 scholars since, it calls for a publicly funded “Internet of the public, by the public, and for the public; an Internet that advances instead of threatens democracy and the public sphere, and an Internet that provides a new and dynamic shared space for connection, exchange and collaboration”. The manifesto also called for investments in public-service media.
Yet while the left & right maintain neoliberalism in western countries, activists will need to transcend democracy in their organising to make this happen!
What don’t you understand of weka’s note @ 2.1 to you?
Instead of being more succinct you’ve simply split one very large quote into a number of smaller but still sizeable ones.
As a rule of thumb I consider comments >200 words as being too long, depending on clarity of text and information content, of course. Most readers will switch off or not even bother reading such comment at all, which is an opportunity missed and possibly also a source of frustration, not the least because of the scrolling required to get past it.
I also like to see less pasted quoted text and more opinion and (political) points by commenters that can be debated here. I was taught at school to write things in my own words, first and foremost, and later on I was taught to quote and cite, but sparingly, as not to distract from the main text and message by me as the writer.
It seems to me that quite a few commenters here see TS as some sort of notice board or dumping ground for their little discoveries in mainstream and social media (especially Twitter and YouTube and less so of Facebook). This is not good for strong and high-quality debate! [206 words]
I think social media encourages it. People post their fav thing they found instead of writing their own thoughts and SM rewards this because it's just more clicks for them.
And it's easier to copy and paste than use our own words (same for me too, although I tend to paste tweets and let people click through if they want to read something).
Re Denis' last comment, it might just be a shorter version of what I deleted (which would be fine, I haven't looked).
With Minister Little forming a nationwide surgery waiting list, which includes a complete reassessment of every person on a waiting list that will be completed in November, health is going to turn into a massive media sink-hole for Labour.
And the hospital staff who have endured through COVID as well as the massive restructure also have to deal with perpetual daily abuse for doing their work.
My wife who worked at a hospital was told by her manager that she should come to work expecting to get hit and apparently destroyed all the incident reports that staff had been filling out for years. Serious incidents such as a staff member being knocked unconscious and suffering brain damage were never reported to OSH. We only found that out when we were helping her fight ACC.
Wife stopped working there as was too dangerous at her age / injuries. They lost a really good staff member as a result.
Fund the system all you like but if these types of issues cannot be resolved then we will always struggle to staff the service…..who in their right mind would want to place themselves in such a position.
Yes – imagining that National could, or would want to, solve this problem is mistaken. Their goal is to raise private sector profitability by lowering tax, labour costs, and regulatory burdens – with the resulting wealth windfall allowing their supporters to escape the public health system and go private.
But money alone won't really solve it either.
Medical specialists are effectively a cartel. They use the existence of health insurance to open private clinics with highly and uniformly extractive prices. This in turn adds to waiting lists in the public sector and forces the public sector to contract work out to those same private clinics. Meanwhile the medical schools and specialist colleges act as gatekeepers restricting the number of locally trained specialists.
The burden of ill health in the community is much higher than it needs to be and horribly extensive to treat medically. Proper prevention would attempt to deal with the food environment, low incomes and the mental stress of financial and housing insecurity. But any action on these is also resisted by business – and ultimately made difficult by our free trade agreements if we (say) wanted Coca Cola to eff off because of their contribution to diabetes and tooth decay.
Did you think people at the bottom wouldn't get angry? It is utterly wrong to take it out on staff, but the public health system has been a disgrace for years and years and while those who matter could afford private, whether through insurance or private means and seldom had to depend on it, we could just concentrate finance on critical care, (which is used by the wealthy), and let it rip apart. The poor died, and were disabled by its inadequacy and I can attest personally to people dying because of letting it just deteriorate and deteriorate. But hey, we didn't have the money, right?
But, we just spent billions that was never there – not until the 'middle class' felt concerned for their safety. And magically the money was available. Lock the whole country down, work from home and be serviced by couriers and supermarket staff. Money is no object, not when wealthy people feel threatened. The little people who have to depend on the public health system that we could never afford to fix.
It's impossible to communicate the frustration and despair of those this nation chose to throw under the bus, in so many ways, for so long.
This is not to denigrate the many hard-working and compassionate health workers, within a decrepit, underfunded, understaffed system.
Agree tc.
Ad has ignored the underlying cause of the current situation with our hospitals.
That is, the ideologically driven underfunding of public service entities by a former National government throughout the 1990s followed by the last National government allowing the flow of immigrants to rise dramatically without moving on the corresponding infrastructure to cope with them.
Instead, it is left for for the reader to assume that the current government is at fault and must take a beating despite the fact they are addressing the issue as fast as they can while at the same time grappling with a world-wide pandemic that has created huge delays and massive supply issues.
Top marks to Minister of Health, Andrew Little for tackling the problem head-on despite push back by opponents with vested interest in seeing his efforts fail. Eg. Matthew Hooton of DP fame.
And we’re starting to hear the familiar refrain: Labour have been government for 4/5 years – why haven’t they sorted out the health system.
Well, it took years of Natz governments to wreck it, it’ll take a few years of Labour governments to fix it!
In both housing and health National took the view that if it wasn't going to happen soon you would be taken off the waiting list. They then booted people off the waiting lists.
While at one level that is a pragmatic and sensible approach – why give people hope when there is none (it suits a target driven KPI mindset) it hides the actual need that exists and then it becomes very difficult to understand or assess unmet need.
The same as shifting costs from one department to another such as dental treatment – becomes part of the welfare costs and demand rather than health and health now has no idea what either the demand or unmet need is.
Then there is the real issue of fudging to meet targets – changing dates, ways of counting, rejecting new people, creating barriers for them to jump through etc.
Then there is the flood of growth as the government changes with people conflating previously hidden unmet demand with new demand. It isn't new demand it was always there.
Is this fiddle a reason house waiting lists have risen from ~7000 to ~25000 with Labour in office? I have been wondering about the change and why it has not been advertised that the demand was always there if surpressed.
They were quite open about it both in housing and health. Some of the increase is also due to the feeling by the public that Labour is more compassionate. Don’t know if any media look at the C&D numbers – i.e. have people just moved up the priority list.
"Changes to the way Housing New Zealand delivers state housing will make the system fairer for everyone, says Housing Minister Phil Heatley.
From 1 July, Housing New Zealand will start using an improved system to decide who gets a state house. The new system will mean that only those in the greatest need (A and B priority applicants) will be eligible for state housing, and will be placed on Housing New Zealand’s waiting list.
Those with lower housing needs (C & D priority applicants) will no longer be eligible for a state house, and instead will be helped in to other types of housing through Housing New Zealand’s Options and Advice Service."
"In 1998 there were 8,691 applicants on the State Housing Waiting List.
After the exclusion of lower priority applicants in 2011, the waiting list did not return to this level until June 2018 (8,704).
Housing New Zealand identified in 2011 that: “As at 30 September 2008 there were 3,166 applicants (excluding transfers) on the waiting list with a priority (‘A’ or ‘B’) housing need. By 30 September 2011 this had fallen to 1,971.
The decline in the waiting list appears to be linked to the introduction of the Corporation’s Options and Advice service, which was implemented nationally in June 2010. In the 12 months before implementation, around 56 percent of customers seeking housing assistance from the Corporation had a housing needs assessment. In the 12 months following implementation, this had decreased to 32 percent”.
The recent blow out of the State house waiting list is almost entirely due to the exponential increase in rental costs. People who 10 years ago could afford to rent in the 'open market' now can't do so, and are waiting for state housing (while in temp accommodation or crowding in with family).
The hospital waiting list increase is largely (but not entirely) attributable to the lockdowns from Covid, and the consequent delay of routine (and not so routine) surgery and treatment. One of the reasons that it's so bad in the Auckland Region, is that Auckland had more and longer lockdowns than anywhere else.
TBH I really doubt that the newly announced nationalization of the waiting lists is going to achieve much. It's shifting deckchairs on the Titanic. No hospital has operating theatres and surgical teams sitting twiddling their thumbs waiting for customers. And it has the potential to be massively unpopular (e.g. if you were on a 6-month waiting list for knee surgery, and it's now 18 months as people from the rest of NZ are flown in to fill up the spaces ahead of you). People waiting for treatment tend (rather naturally) to focus on themselves and their needs, not on what is 'fair' across NZ.
The proposal to issue ongoing contracts for routine surgery to private hospitals – may make a difference – but it certainly sounds … odd … coming from a Labour Government.
What is really needed is massive investment at the grass-roots level in public health. Still not seeing this (or any signs of it) from the Government. Where are the training incentives (fees-free for nurses, & radiologists), or the student loan forgiveness schemes for hard-to-staff areas, or the immigration fast-track for nurses and allied professionals, or the instruction to health boards to hire to the maximum cap, rather than depending on bureau staff for cover, or the mandate to crack open the medical guilds and actually start training as many doctors, dentists, and psychologists as we need as a country (not the number which will protect the high salaries of the current professionals).
It's all very well to blame National for '9-years of neglect' – but after 5 years we should see plans in place to remedy the deficit. And re-organizing the DHB administration is not the most urgent need in the health system.
The bulldozing of state houses has had an enormous impact in those areas where it happened. Often in areas where there is little capacity to rebuild.
This in turn increased demand which put up rents.
The pushing of the poor into the private sector was only ever going to push up rents. Whether this was done through kicking people off waiting lists, selling their state house or bull doxing their state house did not matter. Add immigration into the mix and you push demand even higher.
Decrease the supply while increasing the demand was only ever going to create one thing – an escalating viscous circle of unaffordable rents leading to higher state house waiting lists. Done by design by capitalist pigs.
You can't easily physically replace those bulldozed houses in some areas.
However, the exponential rise in the numbers on the State house waiting list – has come over the last 5 years – and ties in very closely with the similar increase in market rents (tied to the house price rise).
Labour haven't been (by and large) bulldozing state houses (though there has been some clearance in preparation for more intensive housing).
Nor has there been substantial immigration in the last 2 years.
This can only be down to people being priced out of open market rentals – which is pretty much an inevitable consequence of the frankly unsustainable housing market increases. They were bad under National, but have been even worse under Labour.
I'm not disagreeing with you I'm just pointing out that that situation exists because of a deliberate supply/demand equation back then that created a viscous circle that short of increasing supply can't be fixed. It was always going to escalate.
Reorganising the DHB administration is not the most urgent..
The pay and salary of Administrators and Managers is way too much (timed by each DHB) and is top heavy.
The practice of trickle down does not work in Health or anywhere.
Having been through 2 different local body amalgamations and re-organizations, and one commercial one, I can confirm that the salary budget won't be greatly reduced after the amalgamation. All of those managers retained/reappointed/hired are now supervising more staff, and responsible for more budget – so their salaries go up.
Usually there's a new layer of middle management added – since you can only have about 10-15 direct reports.
So, to take IT as an example. Yes, you'll only have one IT director after amalgamation. Their salary will be substantially greater than any of the incumbents (more staff/budget/responsibility); and there will be a new tier of middle managers instituted between that director and the people doing the actual work (since there would be too many for one person to supervise) – those people are unlikely to be paid as much as the previous individual IT heads – but will be a hefty proportion of that salary – or they won't retain them (see below for why that might be an issue). The combination is likely to match or even exceed the original combined IT salary budget.
And, that's setting aside any 'grandfathering' clauses – where existing staff retain their current salary when they are transferred to the new structure.
And any redundancy payouts and/or outsourcing/contracting arrangements. It's really, really common for a key person to miss out on a senior role and take redundancy, only for the organization to realize that they have critical knowledge, and need to be hired back in at a contractor salary to train their replacement. I've seen that happen multiple times. [Not just in local government, in corporate organizations as well].
Or for the organization to realize that that one key staff member had knowledge in 2 separate spheres – which aren't a common cross-over – so they need to hire 2 people to replace that key staff member…. Seen that happen, too.
Of course, it's also common in the commercial world for recruiters to be eyeing up companies going through restructure (which is a highly stressful time for the people working there), and offering the cream of the staff bonus contracts to jump ship to competitors.
I used IT as a deliberate example there – as those skills are readily transferrable and in short supply; AND one of the first actions of the new Health Board will apparently be to combine the different IT systems (I feel a frisson of horror – as I know just how complex this is going to be) – so local knowledge of the current individual systems will be absolutely critical. Novopay has nothing on just how badly this could go wrong….
In short, It takes time for waiting lists etc. to build up when you have a government that underfunds and undermines the public services and hospitals based on ideological claptrap as National did in the 90s and again from 2008 through to 2017. The hit started to become apparent after they lost the treasury benches.
Conversely, when a government increases funding and takes other practical measures to assist public services and hospitals, it takes equal time for the corresponding improvements to become apparent.
By the time this current term of office had ended, the improvements will be widespread and noticeable – provided Covid does not rear its uglier head again and send us back into lockdown mode. Fingers crossed.
Labour is definitely to blame for any problems with the Northland DHB and Whangarei Base Hospital. How do I know that? Because that's the perspective that Shane Reti has cultivated and fed. And in recent times he has been flavour of the month. Months. So apparently what he portrays has weight and veracity.
Reality? From 1975 until 2020 the Whangarei electorate (under whichever name) had National MPs. For three terms – 9 years Shane Reti was a member of that Health Board.
I know it's part of the game politicians play but I see his efforts in rousing the ignorant to do with health provisions in Northland as totally scummy.
Northland, besides having Labour MPs in its Maori seat and Vern Cracknell's three year term in the 1960s, has been lumbered itself with National MPs for just about forever. Their legacy is evident, not just in health provisions.
I dispute your claim that National had waiting lists under control. National's policies were to purge the waiting lists to make them look smaller so they could brag about it. That is not control, that is cynical manipulation.
National is equally responsible for the mess. They were government for nine years and they were repeatedly told that the population increases and immigration that were predicted for the next few decades would need significant investment – in facilities and people – but only put as little as they thought they could get away with.
National are always more interested in building multi billion dollar new roads and by-passes.
To build up the medical work force takes a decade and more but National were content to bring in overseas medics to make up any shortage. Now we struggle to get overseas medics because they are needed in other countries as well.
Internationally there is a shortage of doctors, nurses and support staff. They can't be magicked out of thin air and they naturally want to earn as much as they can so they gravitate to large economy countries where the pay is better.
All governments for the last 40 years are culpable. It started with Rogernomics and then continued with the 90s Bolger government when the first thing you saw when you approached a CHE (renamed public hospital) was the word "cashier".
“And the hospital staff who have endured through COVID as well as the massive restructure also have to deal with perpetual daily abuse for doing their work”
Ad, it may surprise you to here this coming from someone from a right wing perspective, but I think we need to bite the bullet and pay our medical staff a lot more.
Even looking from a right-wing, market driven perspective, and consistent with the principles I have explained previously about price controls causing shortages, it is clear we are in an international market for our medical people. Therefore if we want to retain them, we need to pay the going rate.
By trying to keep the wage rate for our medical staff significantly lower than what they can get in the likes of Australia, a price control has effectively been applied. The result of this will be an exodus of medical people overseas with resulting shortages.
Funding the health system properly could come about if we got rid of wasteful bureaucracy who make no or very little difference to what happens on the ground.
But no Labour sets up a Cancer Agency, is spending good health money on a health restructure, possibly a Mental Health Commission.
It all rises and falls on what the good Drs and Nurses do and whether they have the necessary equipment and drugs. Pay nurses and Dr more. Now. A lot more.
Of course Drs are going to work privately where they have better conditions and more controllable work loads. Who can blame them? And that's not even mentioning the pay.
well maybe, but the re structure is going to cost to establish.
why not concentrate on the real work force getting numbers and pay right, then cut bureacracy. And please for god's sake get rid of the cancer agency and don't re-establish the mental health commission………please. BTW what a waste of time and money the commission of enquiry in to mental health was. ……..
Thats bullshit Dukell, the waiting lists were manipulated under National and I know because I was one of the "waiting forevers ", the qualifying points kept getting raised for a hip operation. For the other hip as a solo farmer the wait was so long I would have had to pay for a replacement worker for me for 8 months, it was cheaper to pay for it privately. Got it done in 3 weeks and back working in another 3.
35 years ago TS my wife worked in Auckland A&E and assaults and arseholes were just as common then. She still works in A&E and Emergency care so she should know. It never recieved the drama-laden media coverage it does now.
“Anyone needing an operation should go private.” Really Ad?
Why? You will get the same surgeons!!
DHB's fudged their figures for years, did not supply security to protect staff, and underfunding of public services worsened the situation.
Many small private hospitals moved difficult cases back to the major local public hospital when an operation ceased to be straight forward. So the public system paid for major equipment while the private system took the cream of the easy cases.
Andrew can prove the need for more targetted funding through the waiting List.
I'm picking he went private because he could afford it, and he wanted to prevent someone, who could not afford to go private, the opportunity to take his place in the queue.
The idea that govts be allowed to govern seems questionable to some folk:
statements about the Crown’s obligations to Māori under the Treaty are about to be challenged in court in a case brought by the Water Users Group and led by prominent QCs Gary Judd and Grant Illingworth.
Their claim will test the correctness in law of Mahuta’s central claim, that partnership and active protection of Māori rights must lead to co-governance and in the form she proposes it.
At the core of the case is Mahuta’s contention that “iwi/Māori have rights and interests in Three Waters under the Treaty … and the structure and mechanisms [proposed] would give effective recognition to [these rights]… and would fulfil the Crown’s duty to comply with the principles of the Treaty”.
The Water Users Group is asking for the Crown Law advice to be released, so it can be examined and its reasoning tested in court. Mahuta has refused, which only raises questions about what the advice actually says, and about how robust that advice actually is. https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/128548570/three-waters-is-still-a-shameless-asset-grab
Yeah but the minister must act in accord with Labour's principle of non-transparent governance – otherwise she's likely to get replaced by her leader doing a reshuffle.
The WUG is in the running for the ugliest acronym of the year award (unless you'd rather go with TWUG). It's an incorporated society, so if you're a born stirrer you can stir the waters here: https://www.waterusers.org.nz/
It is legally contentious, says the WUG, that the Treaty requires the Crown to seize and share assets which did not exist when the Treaty was signed.
It'll be interesting to see the legal contending from both sides. The Crown was big on seizing assets throughout British history, but fairly small on sharing them – so precedent could be a bit of a problem. Whether the court will decide that the Treaty is binding on settler & current govts is a biggie. They could do a Mallard & duck for cover. Bishop senior ought to be commended for restraining himself from going feral (or perhaps the Stuff editor sent the diatribe back redlined with rewrite suggestions).
Not that comparable really pat. As a unionist with the Northern Store Workers Union I participated in a number of successful strikes that broke Muldoon’s wage freeze at Union Carbide, SuperLiquor, and various South Auckland manufacturing sites.
Multi Nationals took the piss with Muldoon, such as the oil industry and their transfer pricing methods that they used to circumvent the freeze.
Supermarkets have had “loss leader” promotions for years to get them in the doors.
Duopoly means just that. Even the low end Pak’n’Saves have been hammering the prices on basics during the last year.
When the private sector "do it"? Comparing a private company not raising its prices hardly bears the tiniest smidgen of comparison to a government dictating a wage freeze and a price freeze across a country.
Do you think the suppliers will see any difference?….or will the result be any different when the freeze is ended?
The criticisms that were applied to the comprehensive state imposed price freeze are as valid for this….the comparison is close enough to be worth considering.
The most curious feature (to me at least) is the abdication of policy to the corporations.
Just marketing stunt by Woolworths Australia. Go in to Countdown and buy a 1kg block of cheese that they will freeze the price on, then go to Pak n Save and buy same product as it will be cheaper
Yes, it is a marketing stunt (and it will be interesting to see what the other supermarkets do)….but it is wort remembering that the suppliers will not be protected from increased costs, and I expect the profit of Countdown will be unimpacted, and any loses incurred within the chain will be regained later.
Price is a function of only 2 inputs, labour and profit….which do you think will ultimately support this?
Both supermarket chains have very 'robust' negotiations with suppliers and you will probably find that it is actually their suppliers who would have been told by Countdown to freeze their price.
I very much expect the suppliers are expected to carry a portion of the risk…and the consumer will pick up the rest through cross subsidy….as stated I dont expect Countdowns profit to reduce.
"The problem is simple; given the fossil energy left, we need to ascertain what living on, say, 50% less energy in a post-growth world, would look like for New Zealand. We need to ascertain what infrastructure is worth pursuing (to Onslow or not to Onslow?) – and what would be a waste of the remaining time, energy and resources.
As it is energy and resources per capita, which is the valid measure (true poverty being a lack of both), a smaller population will be wealthier individually than a large one (another point those inside-the-box economists got totally wrong). So we need to have a discussion about maximum desirable population; a reasonable assumption being that it will be less than current, due to the reduction of energy/resource inputs. Better we go there proactively, than waiting for the natural overshoot/collapse sequence.
It is obviously better that we retain some form of social cohesion during the period ahead. The reduction of surplus energy, coupled with the ever-more of it required to maintain what we’ve already built, will threaten such cohesion. This too, has to be clearly understood; promise folk the undeliverable and they just get angry; at best they end up on your Parliament grounds in tents. At worst? But promise them ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’, being brutally honest about it, and they might just come with you. "
Not if we twist facts. Those who were on the parliamentary lawn were not there because they were sold lies. Rather they did not accept the message or the messenger. They wanted "their truth"
'Winter' is coming – time to 'rug up' and break out the Thermette.
The Copper Thermette is unfortunately on backorder until further notice. However, you are still welcome to place an order for a deferred payment and delivery. https://wilsonco.co.nz/product/copper-thermette/
BAU is incompatible with the IPCC scenario for a low carbon future,essentially growth needs to stop to constrain the population at 6.2b at 2100,or around the same as now at 2050.
Do they?….6 billion by 2100….that flies in the face of world bank and various other official projections…where , why and what is the basis of that claim?
Humans are around 34% of the worlds land based mammalian biomass,we respire around 3.5 t of co2 per person (which is the energy transformation of consumption and excretion) in its most simplistic form.There needs to be a significant decrease in gdp pp as we move to a global first step of around 28bbl of ff equivalents by 2050,which allows a reduction of population by 2100.
It may allow (havnt bothered to check the calculation) but my question is where in the IPCC scenarios do they assume a world population decrease of 25% by 2100?….you may make assumptions based on CO2 emissions based on population, that dosnt mean the IPCC has made the same assumptions.
The shared socio economic pathways are the models used to constrain GG growth by the IPCC, the SSEP 1 scenario that has 6.96b by 2100 is what is being enacted by the Paris agreement.
Of course the Pliocene was formative in the emergence of man,where Lucy and her daughters descended to the grasslands,becoming upright to reduce their water loss and decrease burn from the high UV regime,fortuitous some may think.
"Interestingly, the population projections in Figure 2-4 are not evenly distributed across the full range. Instead, they are grouped into three clusters. The middle cluster is representative of the central projections, with a range of about 10 to less than 12 billion people by 2100. The other two clusters mark the highest and the lowest population projections available in the literature, with between 15 and 20 billion at the high end and about 6 billion at the low end."
How demographics relates to climate change is very interesting.
There are quite a number of countries that are going to be hugely affected by demographics going forward. China is one of the major ones. Geopolitical scientist, Peter Zeihan has a lot to say about demographic trends in China.
According to Peter, China has one of the fastest aging populations in the world, largely due to the one-child policy that prevailed for a long time there. And, depending on which figures are used, China could halve its population as early as 2050.
That is a huge reduction in population for the largest population in the world. Russia is being affected in a similar way.
The demographic projection is for world population to peak at around 10 billion by 2100. But if Zeihan's most pessimistic projection for China halving by 2050, then the world population could peak a lot earlier and may not get as high as 10 billion.
The problem with just looking at population is that it doesn’t have a direct coupling to greenhouse gas emmissions. The rate of increase in personal affluence in places like China is actually a lot faster than the demographic decline.
Those two are linked. Effectively each person remaining has a greater proportion of the infrastructural wealth as population decreases. And their personal production of greenhouse gases rises accordingly.
Increasing personal affluence is the greatest driver of greenhouse gas production.
That is why a average US citizen currently produces directly and indirectly more greenhouse gas than citizens of almost eveey country in the world. They are also amongst the most affluent on average.
This is like the fallacy that planting trees is good at reducing fossil carbon in the atmosphere and oceans. It is only if you never cut them down or have forest fires for a thousand years or so. If neither of those are true, then all you have done is to produce a transient tiny reduction before the fossil carbon winds up in the oceans – and probably delayed sequestaion. Instead we should grow swamps.
You make some fair points there. But I think there are also some upsides to affluent societies with respect to the environment
I think affluent societies have more economic resource to apply to the problem if so long as they can be motivated to do so.
For instance, an affluent person may be able to purchase a new electric vehicle while someone from a poor country may only be able to afford an old second hand petrol car that isn't very efficient.
Or a more affluent country might be able to afford to invest in more renewable type energy whereas a poorer one might be more likely to use coal generation for instance.
A more affluent country might have the economic capability to find ways to recycle waste plastic whereas in a poorer country the plastic might end up in the river.
The health system has been struggling for many years. If people are uncertain about future changes, who remembers Ruth Richardson putting paying machines in wards in order to get admitted? That nutty idea didn't last long.Who remembers Jenny Shipley wanting to close Hutt Hospital or dramatically downgrade it? Given Wainuiomata, Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt have much increased populations that was utterly an crazy idea. And with only one way to get into Wellington from these places, any emergencies in rush hours would have needed helicopters.
The health system must be an impossible thing to budget for in many ways. That is because whatever is budgeted is never enough.
Most of us who have been around for awhile will have some minor issue that we live with, and because it doesn't inconvenience us, we just live with it.
For instance, I have a little finger that is a bit crooked because I think I broke it in a sporting accident years ago. It doesn't give me much trouble, so I don't bother about it. And, I expect I would still be on the waiting list by the time I died, given it isn't a pressing health issue. But, if there was endless health funding, I might get it sorted.
If that was multiplied across the population, then the health budget would need to be incredibly huge to accomodate all the latent health needs that people could get sorted if there were no limits.
Not surprisingly, Luxon/Seymour/Fed Farmers/groundswell are very muted at praising the scientists/government's success with M.Bovis elimination. Given the multi millions spent to do this, does that come into Luxon's complaint about spend, spend, spend.
If anyone else has grandparents that had to leave the north of Ireland pretty quickly after the Easter Rising, the thought of Sinn Fein actually getting a majority in the Northern Ireland Parliament (as they are now likely to do) is going to provoke a bit of feeling.
"…grandparents that had to leave the north of Ireland pretty quickly after the Easter Rising,…."
Why specifically the north of Ireland when the participants were at the other end of the country? Northern Ireland as a political entity didnt exist until 1920
It was long standing (religious and heritage/lineage based) and all over Ireland at various times.
Catholic/Protestant & various permutations with Catholic/Presbyterian, Catholic/Church of Ireland (Anglican)
Native Irish and 'planted' Irish
(granted land as part of Oliver Cromwell's Army in the south and settlers coming to the north under the auspices of a various large London Guilds in the 1600. The 12 guilds that were given control over Derry~Londonderry and the regions adjacent were the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Tailors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, and Clothworkers. The smaller guilds that joined them included the Cordwainers, Dyers, Scriveners, Upholders, Wax Chandlers, Tallow Chandlers, Broderers, Founders, Pewterers, and Fletchers.
I have a Presbyterian gt grandfather who emigrated to NZ from Co Londonderry in the mid 1880s 'for the good of his health', ostensibly bronchitis. My mother always said it was probably more like his health in a larger context of living or dead.
So they came to Auckland where despite planning by the Auckland City Council the religious Irish marched on each other's days as well as their own (St Patricks day 17/3 and the Apprentice Boys march (second Saturday in August) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprentice_Boys_of_Derry or to remember the the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July.
ACC then designed marching routes several blocks from each other but my grandmother said the groups always 'found' each other for a bit of heckling and roughing each other up.
My mother (Irish/Danish) used to say The Irish, what can you do with people who act as if the Battle of the Boyne happened yesterday' – it happened in 1690.
My Dad came from a proudly NZ-Irish family on the West Coast – 3 generations in NZ when he was born – but still regarded themselves as 'Irish'.
Until he did his great OE in the late 70s (when he was in his 50s) – and visited Ireland. His reaction: "For the first time, I knew I was a New Zealander, and how lucky I was that my grandfather emigrated (according to family legend, one step ahead of the law), to New Zealand"
'One step ahead of the law' is a good saying for my gt grandfather too……too much concern about religion lead to moving for the sake of his 'health'. He was adamant, according to my grandmother, his daughter, and thence to my mother about various family doings, ie he was the only child…..etc etc. I have since found a sister and a brother. My mother called him 'an international man of mystery'…..probably because he needed to leave and was not going to make it easy for anyone to track him.
I went to the place he had lived and the current lessees have left his property uncultivated with the fences still up and maintained as it was beautifully laid out and planted. He and his later family are known as plants people.
Yesterday I received come lovely feedback following my Star Wars themed newsletter. A few people mentioned they’d enjoyed reading the personal part at the beginning.I often begin newsletters with some memories, or general thoughts, before commencing the main topic. This hopefully sets the mood and provides some context in which ...
April 30 was going to be the day we’d be calling Mum from London to wish her a happy birthday. Then it became the day we would be going to St. Paul's at Evensong to remember her. The aim of the cathedral builders was to find a way to make their ...
Rob MacCulloch writes – Can’t remember the last book by a Kiwi author you read? Think the NZ government should spend less on the arts in favor of helping the homeless? If so, as far as Newsroom is concerned, you probably deserve to be called a cultural ignoramus ...
Eric Crampton writes – Grudges are bad. Better to move on. But it can be fun to keep a couple of really trivial ones, so you’re not tempted to have other ones. For example, because of the rootkit fiasco of 2005, no Sony products in our household. ...
A new report warns an estimated third of the adult population have unmet need for health care.Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāHere’s the six key things I learned about Aotaroa’s political economy this week around housing, climate and poverty:Politics - Three opinion polls confirmed support for PM Christopher Luxon ...
Today is May the fourth. Which was just a regular day when my mother took me to see the newly released Star Wars at the Odeon in Rotorua. The queue was right around the corner. Some years later this day became known as Star Wars Day, the date being a ...
Buzz from the Beehive Much more media attention is being paid to something Winston Peters said about former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr than to a speech he delivered to the New Zealand China Council. One word is missing from the speech: AUKUS. But AUKUS loomed large in his considerations ...
Is the economy in another long stagnation? If so, why?This is about the time that the Treasury will be locking up its economic forecasts to be published in the 2024 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) on budget day, 30 May. I am not privy to what they will be ...
The annual list of who's been bribing our politicians is out, and journalists will no doubt be poring over it to find the juiciest and dirtiest bribes. The government's fast-track invite list is likely to be a particular focus, and we already know of one company on the list which ...
In the weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Southern Israel I wrote about the possible 2nd, 3rd and even 4th order effects of the conflict. These included new fronts being opened in the West Bank (with Hamas), Golan … Continue reading → ...
Peter Dunne writes – It is one of the oldest truisms that there is never a good time for MPs to get a pay rise. This week’s announcement of pay raises of around 2.8% backdated to last October could hardly have come at a worse time, with the ...
David Farrar writes – Newshub reports: Newshub can reveal a fresh allegation of intimidation against Green MP Julie-Anne Genter. Genter is subject to a disciplinary process for aggressively waving a book in the face of National Minister Matt Doocey in the House – but it’s not the first time ...
The Treasury has published a paper today on the global productivity slowdown and how it is playing out in New Zealand: The productivity slowdown: implications for the Treasury’s forecasts and projections. The Treasury Paper examines recent trends in productivity and the potential drivers of the slowdown. Productivity for the whole economy ...
Winston Peters’ comments about former Australian foreign minister look set to be an ongoing headache for both him and Luxon. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for subscribers features co-hosts and , along with regular guests on Gaza and ...
These puppet strings don't pull themselvesYou're thinking thoughts from someone elseHow much time do you think you have?Are you prepared for what comes next?The debating chamber can be a trying place for an opposition MP. What with the person in charge, the speaker, typically being an MP from the governing ...
The land around Lyme Regis, where Meryl Streep once stood, in a hood, on the Cobb, is falling into the sea.MerylThe land around Lyme Regis, around the Cobb that made it rich, has always been falling slowly but surely into the sea. Read more ...
Buzz from the Beehive Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters was bound to win headlines when he set out his thinking about AUKUS in his speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. The headlines became bigger when – during an interview on RNZ’s Morning Report today – he criticised ...
The Post reports on how the government is refusing to release its advice on its corrupt Muldoonist fast-track law, instead using the "soon to be publicly available" refusal ground to hide it until after select committee submissions on the bill have closed. Fast-track Minister Chris Bishop's excuse? “It's not ...
As pressure on it grows, the livestock industry’s approach to the transition to Net Zero is increasingly being compared to that of fossil fuel interests. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / Getty ImagesTL;DR: Here’s the top five news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above ...
The New Zealand Herald reports – Stats NZ has offered a voluntary redundancy scheme to all of its workers as a way to give staff some control over their “future” amidst widespread job losses in the public sector. In an update to staff this morning, seen by the Herald, Statistics New Zealand ...
On Werewolf/Scoop, I usually do two long form political columns a week. From now on, there will be an extra column each week about music and movies. But first, some late-breaking political events:The rise in unemployment numbers for the March quarter was bigger than expected – and especially sharp ...
David Farrar writes – The Herald reports: TVNZ says it is dealing with about 50 formal complaints over its coverage of the latest 1News-Verian political poll, with some viewers – as well as the Prime Minister and a former senior Labour MP – critical of the tone of the 6pm report. ...
Muriel Newman writes – When Meridian Energy was seeking resource consents for a West Coast hydro dam proposal in 2010, local Maori “strenuously” objected, claiming their mana was inextricably linked to ‘their’ river and could be damaged. After receiving a financial payment from the company, however, the Ngai Tahu ...
Alwyn Poole writes – “An SEP,’ he said, ‘is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a ...
Our trust in our political institutions is fast eroding, according to a Maxim Institute discussion paper, Shaky Foundations: Why our democracy needs trust. The paper – released today – raises concerns about declining trust in New Zealand’s political institutions and democratic processes, and the role that the overuse of Parliamentary urgency ...
This article was prepared for publication yesterday. More ministerial announcements have been posted on the government’s official website since it was written. We will report on these later today …. Buzz from the BeehiveThere we were, thinking the environment is in trouble, when along came Jones. Shane Jones. ...
New Zealand now has the fourth most depressed construction sector in the world behind China, Qatar and Hong Kong. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 8:46am on Thursday, May 2:The Lead: ...
Hi,I am just going to state something very obvious: American police are fucking crazy.That was a photo gracing the New York Times this morning, showing New York City police “entering Columbia University last night after receiving a request from the school.”Apparently in America, protesting the deaths of tens of thousands ...
Winston Peters’ much anticipated foreign policy speech last night was a work of two halves. Much of it was a standard “boilerplate” Foreign Ministry overview of the state of the world. There was some hardening up of rhetoric with talk of “benign” becoming “malign” and old truths giving way to ...
Graham Adams assesses the fallout of the Cass Review — The press release last Thursday from the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls didn’t make the mainstream news in New Zealand but it really should have. The startling title of Reem Alsalem’s statement — “Implementation of ‘Cass ...
This open-for-business, under-new-management cliché-pockmarked government of Christopher Luxon is not the thing of beauty he imagines it to be. It is not the powerful expression of the will of the people that he asserts it to be. It is not a soaring eagle, it is a malodorous vulture. This newest poll should make ...
The latest labour market statistics, showing a rise in unemployment. There are now 134,000 unemployed - 14,000 more than when the National government took office. Which is I guess what happens when the Reserve Bank causes a recession in an effort to Keep Wages Low. The previous government saw a ...
Three opinion polls have been released in the last two days, all showing that the new government is failing to hold their popular support. The usual honeymoon experienced during the first year of a first term government is entirely absent. The political mood is still gloomy and discontented, mainly due ...
National's Finance Minister once met a poor person.A scornful interview with National's finance guru who knows next to nothing about economics or people.There might have been something a bit familiar if that was the headline I’d gone with today. It would of course have been in tribute to the article ...
Rob MacCulloch writes – Throughout the pandemic, the new Vice-Chancellor-of-Otago-University-on-$629,000 per annum-Can-you-believe-it-and-Former-Finance-Minister Grant Robertson repeated the mantra over and over that he saved “lives and livelihoods”.As we update how this claim is faring over the course of time, the facts are increasingly speaking differently. NZ ...
Chris Trotter writes – IT’S A COMMONPLACE of political speeches, especially those delivered in acknowledgement of electoral victory: “We’ll govern for all New Zealanders.” On the face of it, the pledge is a strange one. Why would any political leader govern in ways that advantaged the huge ...
Bryce Edwards writes – The list of former National Party Ministers being given plum and important roles got longer this week with the appointment of former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett as the chair of Pharmac. The Christopher Luxon-led Government has now made key appointments to Bill ...
TL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 10:06am on Wednesday, May 1:The Lead: Business confidence fell across the board in April, falling in some areas to levels last seen during the lockdowns because of a collapse in ...
Over the past 36 hours, Christopher Luxon has been dong his best to portray the centre-right’s plummeting poll numbers as a mark of virtue. Allegedly, the negative verdicts are the result of hard economic times, and of a government bravely set out on a perilous rescue mission from which not ...
Auckland Transport have started rolling out new HOP card readers around the network and over the next three months, all of them on buses, at train stations and ferry wharves will be replaced. The change itself is not that remarkable, with the new readers looking similar to what is already ...
Completed reads for April: The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling Carnival of Saints, by George Herman The Snow Spider, by Jenny Nimmo Emlyn’s Moon, by Jenny Nimmo The Chestnut Soldier, by Jenny Nimmo Death Comes As the End, by Agatha Christie Lord of the Flies, by ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
Have a story to share about St Paul’s, but today just picturesPopular novels written at this desk by a young man who managed to bootstrap himself out of father’s imprisonment and his own young life in a workhouse Read more ...
The list of former National Party Ministers being given plum and important roles got longer this week with the appointment of former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett as the chair of Pharmac. The Christopher Luxon-led Government has now made key appointments to Bill English, Simon Bridges, Steven Joyce, Roger Sowry, ...
Newsroom has a story today about National's (fortunately failed) effort to disestablish the newly-created Inspector-General of Defence. The creation of this agency was the key recommendation of the Inquiry into Operation Burnham, and a vital means of restoring credibility and social licence to an agency which had been caught lying ...
Holding On To The Present:The moment a political movement arises that attacks the whole idea of social progress, and announces its intention to wind back the hands of History’s clock, then democracy, along with its unwritten rules, is in mortal danger.IT’S A COMMONPLACE of political speeches, especially those delivered in ...
Stuck In The Middle With You:As Christopher Luxon feels the hot breath of Act’s and NZ First’s extremists on the back of his neck and, as he reckons with the damage their policies are already inflicting upon a country he’s described as “fragile”, is there not some merit in reaching out ...
The unpopular coalition government is currently rushing to repeal section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. The clause is Oranga Tamariki's Treaty clause, and was inserted after its systematic stealing of Māori children became a public scandal and resulted in physical resistance to further abductions. The clause created clear obligations ...
Buzz from the Beehive The government’s official website – which Point of Order monitors daily – not for the first time has nothing much to say today about political happenings that are grabbing media headlines. It makes no mention of the latest 1News-Verian poll, for example. This shows National down ...
It Takes A Train To Cry:Surely, there is nothing lonelier in all this world than the long wail of a distant steam locomotive on a cold Winter’s night.AS A CHILD, I would lie awake in my grandfather’s house and listen to the traffic. The big wooden house was only a ...
Packing A Punch: The election of the present government, including in its ranks politicians dedicated to reasserting the rights of the legislature in shaping and determining the future of Māori and Pakeha in New Zealand, should have alerted the judiciary – including its anomalous appendage, the Waitangi Tribunal – that its ...
Dead Woman Walking: New Zealand’s media industry had been moving steadily towards disaster for all the years Melissa Lee had been National’s media and communications policy spokesperson, and yet, when the crisis finally broke, on her watch, she had nothing intelligent to offer. Christopher Luxon is a patient man - but he’s not ...
Chris Trotter writes – New Zealand politics is remarkably easy-going: dangerously so, one might even say. With the notable exception of John Key’s flat ruling-out of the NZ First Party in 2008, all parties capable of clearing MMP’s five-percent threshold, or winning one or more electorate seats, tend ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is ...
Luxon will no doubt put a brave face on it, but there is no escaping the pressure this latest poll will put on him and the government. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political ...
This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler In the wake of any unusual weather event, someone inevitably asks, “Did climate change cause this?” In the most literal sense, that answer is almost always no. Climate change is never the sole cause of hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, or ...
Something odd happened yesterday, and I’d love to know if there’s more to it. If there was something which preempted what happened, or if it was simply a throwaway line in response to a journalist.Yesterday David Seymour was asked at a press conference what the process would be if the ...
Hi,From time to time, I want to bring Webworm into the real world. We did it last year with the Jurassic Park event in New Zealand — which was a lot of fun!And so on Saturday May 11th, in Los Angeles, I am hosting a lil’ Webworm pop-up! I’ve been ...
Education Minister Erica Standford yesterday unveiled a fundamental reform of the way our school pupils are taught. She would not exactly say so, but she is all but dismantling the so-called “inquiry” “feel good” method of teaching, which has ruled in our classrooms since a major review of the New ...
Exactly where are we seriously going with this government and its policies? That is, apart from following what may as well be a Truss-Lite approach on the purported economic “plan“, and Victorian-era regression when it comes to social policy.Oh it’ll work this time of course, we’re basically assured, “the ...
Hey Uncle Dave, When the Poms joined the EEC, I wasn't one of those defeatists who said, Well, that’s it for the dairy job. And I was right, eh? The Chinese can’t get enough of our milk powder and eventually, the Poms came to their senses and backed up the ute ...
Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is higher than for any other mayor ...
Buzz from the Beehive Pharmac has been given a financial transfusion and a new chair to oversee its spending in the pharmaceutical business. Associate Health Minister David Seymour described the funding for Pharmac as “its largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff”. ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government is trying to achieve and its ...
TL;DR: Here’s my top 10 ‘pick ‘n’ mix of links to news, analysis and opinion articles as of 10:10am on Monday, April 29:Scoop: The children's ward at Rotorua Hospital will be missing a third of its beds as winter hits because Te Whatu Ora halted an upgrade partway through to ...
span class=”dropcap”>As hideous as David Seymour can be, it is worth keeping in mind occasionally that there are even worse political figures (and regimes) out there. Iran for instance, is about to execute the country’s leading hip hop musician Toomaj Salehi, for writing and performing raps that “corrupt” the nation’s ...
Yesterday marked 10 years since the first electric train carried passengers in Auckland so it’s a good time to look back at it and the impact it has had. A brief history The first proposals for rail electrification in Auckland came in the 1920’s alongside the plans for earlier ...
The Government is again adding to New Zealand’s growing unemployment, this time cutting jobs at the agencies responsible for urban development and growing much needed housing stock. ...
With Minister Karen Chhour indicating in the House today that she either doesn’t know or care about the frontline cuts she’s making to Oranga Tamariki, we risk seeing more and more of our children falling through the cracks. ...
The Labour Party is saddened to learn of the death of Sir Robert Martin, a globally renowned disability advocate who led the way for disability rights both in New Zealand and internationally. ...
Labour is calling for the Government to urgently rethink its coalition commitment to restart live animal exports, Labour animal welfare spokesperson Rachel Boyack said. ...
Today’s Financial Stability Report has once again highlighted that poverty and deep inequality are political choices - and this Government is choosing to make them worse. ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to do more for our households in most need as unemployment rises and the cost of living crisis endures. ...
Unemployment is on the rise and it’s only going to get worse under this Government, Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said. Stats NZ figures show the unemployment rate grew to 4.3 percent in the March quarter from 4 percent in the December quarter. “This is the second rise in unemployment ...
The New Zealand Labour Party welcomes the entering into force of the European Union and New Zealand free trade agreement. This agreement opens the door for a huge increase in trade opportunities with a market of 450 million people who are high value discerning consumers of New Zealand goods and ...
The National-led Government continues its fiscal jiggery pokery with its Pharmac announcement today, Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall says. “The government has increased Pharmac funding but conceded it will only make minimal increases in access to medicine”, said Ayesha Verrall “This is far from the bold promises made to fund ...
This afternoon’s interim Waitangi Tribunal report must be taken seriously as it affects our most vulnerable children, Labour children’s spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime. ...
Te Pāti Māori are demanding the New Zealand Government support an international independent investigation into mass graves that have been uncovered at two hospitals on the Gaza strip, following weeks of assault by Israeli troops. Among the 392 bodies that have been recovered, are children and elderly civilians. Many of ...
Our two-tiered system for veterans’ support is out of step with our closest partners, and all parties in Parliament should work together to fix it, Labour veterans’ affairs spokesperson Greg O’Connor said. ...
Stripping two Ministers of their portfolios just six months into the job shows Christopher Luxon’s management style is lacking, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said. ...
Tonight’s court decision to overturn the summons of the Children’s Minister has enabled the Crown to continue making decisions about Māori without evidence, says Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for Children, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “The judicial system has this evening told the nation that this government can do whatever they want when ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The government's decision to reintroduce Three Strikes is a destructive and ineffective piece of law-making that will only exacerbate an inherently biased and racist criminal justice system, said Te Pāti Māori Justice Spokesperson, Tākuta Ferris, today. During the time Three Strikes was in place in Aotearoa, Māori and Pasifika received ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
Te Pāti Māori is disgusted at the confirmation that hundreds are set to lose their jobs at Oranga Tamariki, and the disestablishment of the Treaty Response Unit. “This act of absolute carelessness and out of touch decision making is committing tamariki to state abuse.” Said Te Pāti Māori Oranga Tamariki ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
The Government has delivered on its election promise to provide a financially sustainable model for Auckland under its Local Water Done Well plan. The plan, which has been unanimously endorsed by Auckland Council’s Governing Body, will see Aucklanders avoid the previously projected 25.8 per cent water rates increases while retaining ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters discussed the need for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and enhanced cooperation in the Pacific with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during her first official visit to New Zealand today. "New Zealand and Germany enjoy shared interests and values, including the rule of law, democracy, respect for the international system ...
The Minister Responsible for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop today released his decision on four recommendations referred to him by the Western Bay of Plenty District Council, opening the door to housing growth in the area. The Council’s Plan Change 92 allows more homes to be built in existing and new ...
Thank you, John McKinnon and the New Zealand China Council for the invitation to speak to you today. Thank you too, all members of the China Council. Your effort has played an essential role in helping to build, shape, and grow a balanced and resilient relationship between our two ...
The Government is modernising insurance law to better protect Kiwis and provide security in the event of a disaster, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly announced today. “These reforms are long overdue. New Zealand’s insurance law is complicated and dated, some of which is more than 100 years old. ...
The coalition Government is refreshing its approach to supporting pay equity claims as time-limited funding for the Pay Equity Taskforce comes to an end, Public Service Minister Nicola Willis says. “Three years ago, the then-government introduced changes to the Equal Pay Act to support pay equity bargaining. The changes were ...
Structured literacy will change the way New Zealand children learn to read - improving achievement and setting students up for success, Education Minister Erica Stanford says. “Being able to read and write is a fundamental life skill that too many young people are missing out on. Recent data shows that ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay says Canada’s refusal to comply in full with a CPTPP trade dispute ruling in our favour over dairy trade is cynical and New Zealand has no intention of backing down. Mr McClay said he has asked for urgent legal advice in respect of our ‘next move’ ...
The rights of our children and young people will be enhanced by changes the coalition Government will make to strengthen oversight of the Oranga Tamariki system, including restoring a single Children’s Commissioner. “The Government is committed to delivering better public services that care for our most at-risk young people and ...
The Government is making it easier for minor changes to be made to a building consent so building a home is easier and more affordable, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “The coalition Government is focused on making it easier and cheaper to build homes so we can ...
New Zealand lost a true legend when internationally renowned disability advocate Sir Robert Martin (KNZM) passed away at his home in Whanganui last night, Disabilities Issues Minister Louise Upston says. “Our Government’s thoughts are with his wife Lynda, family and community, those he has worked with, the disability community in ...
Good evening – Before discussing the challenges and opportunities facing New Zealand’s foreign policy, we’d like to first acknowledge the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. You have contributed to debates about New Zealand foreign policy over a long period of time, and we thank you for hosting us. ...
From today, passengers travelling internationally from Auckland Airport will be able to keep laptops and liquids in their carry-on bags for security screening thanks to new technology, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Creating a more efficient and seamless travel experience is important for holidaymakers and businesses, enabling faster movement through ...
People with an interest in the health of Northland’s marine ecosystems are invited to a public meeting to discuss how to deal with kina barrens, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones will lead the discussion, which will take place on Friday, 10 May, at Awanui Hotel in ...
Kiwi exporters are $100 million better off today with the NZ EU FTA entering into force says Trade Minister Todd McClay. “This is all part of our plan to grow the economy. New Zealand's prosperity depends on international trade, making up 60 per cent of the country’s total economic activity. ...
There are heartening signs that the extractive sector is once again becoming an attractive prospect for investors and a source of economic prosperity for New Zealand, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. “The beginnings of a resurgence in extractive industries are apparent in media reports of the sector in the past ...
The return of the historic Ō-Rākau battle site to the descendants of those who fought there moved one step closer today with the first reading of Te Pire mō Ō-Rākau, Te Pae o Maumahara / The Ō-Rākau Remembrance Bill. The Bill will entrust the 9.7-hectare battle site, five kilometres west ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has announced 25 new high-speed EV charging hubs along key routes between major urban centres and outlined the Government’s plan to supercharge New Zealand’s EV infrastructure. The hubs will each have several chargers and be capable of charging at least four – and up to 10 ...
The coalition Government will not proceed with the previous Government’s plans to regulate residential property managers, Housing Minister Chris Bishop says. “I have written to the Chairperson of the Social Services and Community Committee to inform him that the Government does not intend to support the Residential Property Managers Bill ...
The Government has announced an independent review into the disability support system funded by the Ministry of Disabled People – Whaikaha. Disability Issues Minister Louise Upston says the review will look at what can be done to strengthen the long-term sustainability of Disability Support Services to provide disabled people and ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has attended the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva and outlined the Government’s plan to restore law and order. “Speaking to the United Nations Human Rights Council provided us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while responding to issues and ...
The Government and Rotorua Lakes Council are committed to working closely together to end the use of contracted emergency housing motels in Rotorua. Associate Minister of Housing (Social Housing) Tama Potaka says the Government remains committed to ending the long-term use of contracted emergency housing motels in Rotorua by the ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay heads overseas today for high-level trade talks in the Gulf region, and a key OECD meeting in Paris. Mr McClay will travel to Riyadh to meet with counterparts from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). “New Zealand’s goods and services exports to the Gulf region ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford has outlined six education priorities to deliver a world-leading education system that sets Kiwi kids up for future success. “I’m putting ambition, achievement and outcomes at the heart of our education system. I want every child to be inspired and engaged in their learning so they ...
The new NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) App is a secure ‘one stop shop’ to provide the services drivers need, Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Digitising Government Minister Judith Collins say. “The NZTA App will enable an easier way for Kiwis to pay for Vehicle Registration and Road User Charges (RUC). ...
Whānau with tamariki growing up in emergency housing motels will be prioritised for social housing starting this week, says Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka. “Giving these whānau a better opportunity to build healthy stable lives for themselves and future generations is an essential part of the Government’s goal of reducing ...
Racing Minister Winston Peters has paid tribute to an icon of the industry with the recent passing of Dave O’Sullivan (OBE). “Our sympathies are with the O’Sullivan family with the sad news of Dave O’Sullivan’s recent passing,” Mr Peters says. “His contribution to racing, initially as a jockey and then ...
Assalaamu alaikum, greetings to you all. Eid Mubarak, everyone! I want to extend my warmest wishes to you and everyone celebrating this joyous occasion. It is a pleasure to be here. I have enjoyed Eid celebrations at Parliament before, but this is my first time joining you as the Minister ...
Associate Health Minister David Seymour has announced Pharmac’s largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff. “Access to medicines is a crucial part of many Kiwis’ lives. We’ve committed to a budget allocation of $1.774 billion over four years so Kiwis are ...
Hon Paula Bennett has been appointed as member and chair of the Pharmac board, Associate Health Minister David Seymour announced today. "Pharmac is a critical part of New Zealand's health system and plays a significant role in ensuring that Kiwis have the best possible access to medicines,” says Mr Seymour. ...
Hundreds of New Zealand families affected by Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) will benefit from a new Government focus on prevention and treatment, says Health Minister Dr Shane Reti. “We know FASD is a leading cause of preventable intellectual and neurodevelopmental disability in New Zealand,” Dr Reti says. “Every day, ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones today attended the official opening of Kaikohe’s new $14.7 million sports complex. “The completion of the Kaikohe Multi Sports Complex is a fantastic achievement for the Far North,” Mr Jones says. “This facility not only fulfils a long-held dream for local athletes, but also creates ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ engagements in Türkiye this week underlined the importance of diplomacy to meet growing global challenges. “Returning to the Gallipoli Peninsula to represent New Zealand at Anzac commemorations was a sombre reminder of the critical importance of diplomacy for de-escalating conflicts and easing tensions,” Mr Peters ...
Ambassador Millar, Burgemeester, Vandepitte, Excellencies, military representatives, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen – good morning and welcome to this sacred Anzac Day dawn service. It is an honour to be here on behalf of the Government and people of New Zealand at Buttes New British Cemetery, Polygon Wood – a deeply ...
Distinguished guests - It is an honour to return once again to this site which, as the resting place for so many of our war-dead, has become a sacred place for generations of New Zealanders. Our presence here and at the other special spaces of Gallipoli is made ...
Mai ia tawhiti pamamao, te moana nui a Kiwa, kua tae whakaiti mai matou, ki to koutou papa whenua. No koutou te tapuwae, no matou te tapuwae, kua honoa pumautia. Ko nga toa kua hinga nei, o te Waipounamu, o te Ika a Maui, he okioki tahi me o ...
Paul Goldsmith will take on responsibility for the Media and Communications portfolio, while Louise Upston will pick up the Disability Issues portfolio, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today. “Our Government is relentlessly focused on getting New Zealand back on track. As issues change in prominence, I plan to adjust Ministerial ...
Recreational catch limits will be reduced in areas of Fiordland and the Chatham Islands to help keep those fisheries healthy and sustainable, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The lower recreational daily catch limits for a range of finfish and shellfish species caught in the Fiordland Marine Area and ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed an important milestone in New Zealand’s hydrogen future, with the opening of the country’s first network of hydrogen refuelling stations in Wiri. “I want to congratulate the team at Hiringa Energy and its partners K one W one (K1W1), Mitsui & Co New Zealand ...
The coalition Government is delivering on its commitment to improve resource management laws and give greater certainty to consent applicants, with a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) expected to be introduced to Parliament next month. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has today outlined the first RMA Amendment ...
RNZ News A group of academic staff at New Zealand’s largest university have expressed concern at the administration’s move to block a protest encampment that was planned to take place on campus calling for support for the rights of Palestinians. This week, the University of Auckland warned that while it ...
Genterwocky After a hard days marching, Sir Doocey calls in at the Village Tavern For a pint of ale and a pork pie. The grim villagers stare at him. “Do not be travelling on the forest road,” warns a crusty old beak. “And why is that, antique peasant?” Grins Sir ...
Political conferences after a party returns to power are usually a chance for some healthy, even unhealthy backslapping. Yet National Party president Sylvia Wood’s address to its mainland representatives on Saturday hardly contained the unalloyed delight that one might have expected following National’s escape from the wilderness of opposition. Yes, ...
Comment: Almost half the world is voting in national elections this year and artificial intelligence is the elephant in the room. There are genuine fears AI-generated or AI-edited deepfakes will potentially manipulate election outcomes not just in the US and UK, but critically in countries such as India. For that ...
Ahead of the reality franchise’s return to New Zealand, allow us to introduce the eight brides and grooms. Chuck on a veil and tie back your man bun, because it’s time to say “I do” to a new season of Married at First Sight NZ. The reality TV “social experiment” ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Norton, Professor in the Practice of Higher Education Policy, Australian National University Every year on June 1, student debt in Australia is indexed to inflation. In 2023, high inflation pushed the indexation rate to 7.1%, the highest since 1990. This ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Changes in the May 14 budget will cut the student debt of more than three million people, wiping more than $3 billion from what people owe. The government will cap the HELP indexation rate ...
Asia Pacific Report The prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court (ICC) has appealed for an end to what it calls intimidation of its staff, saying such threats could constitute an offence against the “administration of justice” by the world’s permanent war crimes court. The Hague-based office of ICC Prosecutor ...
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk A women’s union in New Caledonia has staged a sit-in protest this week to support senior Kanak indigenous journalist Thérèse Waia, who works for public broadcaster Nouvelle-Calédonie la Première, after a smear attack by critics. The peaceful demonstration was held on ...
New Zealand Food Safety is monitoring overseas recalls of Indian packaged spice products manufactured by MDH and Everest due to concerns over a cancer-causing pesticide. ...
By Stephen Wright and Stefan Armbruster of BenarNews Fiji’s ranking in a global press freedom index has jumped into the top tier of countries with free or mostly free media after its government last year repealed a draconian law that threatened journalists with prison for doing their jobs. Fiji’s improvement ...
We might be in Invercargill but all anyone can talk about is Gore. Specifically, Salford Street. That’s where three-year-old Lachlan Jones lived, south of the centre of town, between the A&P Showgrounds and the Mataura River. Roughly 1.2 km away from the single level home he lived in with his ...
MONDAY I lined up the latest round of civil servants from city hall against the wall, and signalled for the firing squad to drop their rifles. I stepped up onto a wooden crate to look at the office workers in the eye. But that didn’t feel right, so I found ...
Keen hiker and second-year MSc student Liam Hewson wears two hats when he’s in the great outdoors. “The scientist in me appreciates nature and goes, ‘Oh, there’s that thing and there’s another thing,’ but then the tramper and the outdoorsy person in me thinks, ‘Cool bush.’” Born and bred in ...
After a long and illustrious career as a goal kicker, Dan Carter’s favourite way to unwind is… kicking goals. Why can’t he get enough of it? And what it’s like to watch him do it for an hour straight? A semicircle of people wielding cameras and phones has formed in ...
Dame Susan Devoy takes us through her life in television, including late night ER debriefs, her proudest CTI moment and the show she watches in secret. Quite aside from her four world champion squash titles, Dame Susan Devoy will likely go down in history as one of the best Celebrity ...
Hera Lindsay Bird reveals the best places in Ōtepoti to score more for your apocalypse-prep book hoard.Sometimes I get the feeling I’ve been killed in a car crash, and this second half of my life is just the brain unspooling itself, like one of those episodes of a hospital ...
ThreeNow’s new murder mystery series takes us on a dark, damp journey into the Australian wilderness.This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. High Country is ThreeNow’s new Australian eight-part crime drama, set in a remote part of the Victorian highlands. It tells ...
Introducing a new way to read The Spinoff every weekend. After nearly 10 years of being an online magazine, we’re finally embracing the weekend liftout. Despite our best efforts to convince you otherwise, writers and editors at The Spinoff don’t work weekend. It is through the sheer power of technology ...
Tip one: let yourself be nurtured by this big old man. Tip two: don’t ask him to adopt you. So, you’ve arrived at your first session with a new therapist. He tells you to make yourself comfortable and you opt for the tweed armchair, hoping it makes you look like ...
I didn’t know books could open you back up; that there were books that stayed with you, where reading was like a chemical event. I knew nothing.The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.Not too long ago, I was listening to the American ...
Former Olympic swimmer James Magnussen has already started training for the Enhanced games, though says he won’t start taking performance enhancing substances until about nine months out from the competition. The Australian world champion was the first athlete to be announced by Enhanced, but he says the organisation has had ...
Everyone thinks he’s dead. Every day they expect his body to be washed up along the coast. Most likely up Karitane way, the way the tide’s running. But nobody’ll be too surprised if his body’s never found. Even in death he wouldn’t have wished for such attention. He would have ...
Council members voted 21 to 4 in favour of Ahluwalia returning to the Laucala campus following a much-awaited meeting in Vanuatu this week. It comes as USP and its two unions — the Association of the University of the South Pacific Staff (AUSPS) and the Administration and Support Staff Union ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicola Henry, Professor & Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Social and Global Studies Centre, RMIT University Shutterstock Following an emergency meeting of the National Cabinet this week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a raft of measures to tackle the problem ...
Analysis - A poll showing the opposition is more popular than the government raises questions, politicians go through their 'trial by pay rise' and a Green MP loses her cool in the debating chamber. ...
The entire stretch of Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast will be subject to a joint customary marine title for two hapū, and extending up to four miles out to sea. A High Court judge has found the two groups, who during the case settled a dispute over boundaries for ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Hall, Lecturer, Media & Cultural Studies, Edith Cowan University A longstanding feud between TikTok and Universal Music Group seems to have finally reached an end, with both parties signing a deal that will see Universal-backed music returned to the social media ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siobhan O’Dean, Postdoctoral Research Associate, The Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney After several highly publicised alleged murders of women in Australia, the Albanese government this week pledged more than A$925 million over five years ...
Political parties have now fully disclosed the donations they received last year - with National getting more than double the cash of any other party. ...
A Pacific regionalism expert has called out New Zealand's Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters for withholding information from the public on AUKUS military pact. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard de Grijs, Professor of Astrophysics, Macquarie University Bruno Scramgnon/Pexels All systems are “go” for tonight’s launch of China’s next step in a carefully planned lunar exploration program. Placed on top of a powerful Long March 5 rocket, the Chang’e 6 ...
National returned a massive donation the day after a Newsroom story linked the donors to a property being investigated for operating unlawfully as a migrant workers’ hostel. The party’s 2023 donation filings, released on Friday, show it returned a $200,000 donation from Buen Holdings on August 23. That was the ...
Pacific Media Watch New Zealand has slumped to an unprecedented 19th place in the annual Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index survey released today on World Press Freedom Day — May 3. This was a drop of six places from 13th last year when it slipped out of its ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Black, Political Historian and Administrator Officer, Australian Historical Association, Australian National University Australia has had its fair share of public record-keeping controversies in recent years. Some have been mere farce, as in the case of two formerly government-owned filing cabinets (containing ...
Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light (HWPL), a United Nations-affiliated organization dedicated to fostering peace through civilian-led initiatives, has issued a statement in response to the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran. ...
A poem by Tessa Keenan, from AUP New Poets 10. Mātou These days we are a photograph; one of a farm strewn with cows that used to be bright harakeke or swamp. The kids point at it and say the sun sits behind a smudge (left by someone at Christmas); ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber, $25)The masterful Irish writer ...
Marriage and civil union statistics record the number of marriages and civil unions registered in New Zealand each year, and divorce statistics record the number of divorces granted in New Zealand each year. Key facts Marriages and civil unions In ...
Marriage and civil union statistics record the number of marriages and civil unions registered in New Zealand each year, and divorce statistics record the number of divorces granted in New Zealand each year. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lennon Y.C. Chang, Associate Professor of Cyber Risk and Policy, Deakin University Taiwan stands out as a beacon of democracy, innovation and resilience in an increasingly autocratic region. But this is under growing threat. In recent years, China has used a variety ...
In this excerpt from her new memoir, Dame Susan Devoy remembers her turn as star contestant on the 2022 season of Celebrity Treasure Island. The most anxious time of every day was pre-elimination, when you knew this could be your final day on the show. I felt such contradictory emotions, ...
A week that began in triumph ended in an all-too-familiar disaster for the Green Party. Duncan Greive asks if there’s something in the mission that breaks its best and brightest. A long, strange week for the Green party began with a fantastic poll result. On one level this is hardly ...
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist Vanuatu’s former prime minister and opposition MP Ishmael Kalsakau has stepped down — just two days after he confirmed he was the rightful opposition leader. Kalsakau, MP for Port Vila, confirmed to ABC’s Pacific Beat, and the Vanuatu Daily Post on Thursday that he ...
What’s to blame for the coalition’s choppy start? Six months in, and the mojo meter is in the doldrums. A new poll would put National out of power and sees its leader, Chris Luxon, sliding in popularity. How much is it about policy, how much coalition management and a perception ...
The striking report goes far beyond the proposed repeal of the Oranga Tamariki Act’s Treaty of Waitangi provision, and its impact should be felt far beyond the unique circumstances of the claim it addresses. Earlier this week, the Waitangi Tribunal released an interim report on the government’s proposed repeal of ...
The world has been experiencing a productivity slowdown, from which New Zealand has not been exempt. COVID-19 temporarily boosted labour productivity, but more recently, productivity has retreated. The overall trend since 2007 has been one of slow productivity ...
What’s more wasteful than spending $315k on syrup and machine maintenance? Trying to drum up a controversy about it.Cast your mind back to the pre-pandemic idylls of 2019. A “rat” was a disgusting rodent and not a self-administered plague test; the sixth Labour government was in power; and the ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Rose, Professor of Sustainable Future Transport, University of Sydney LanaElcova/Shutterstock Electric vehicles are often seen as the panacea to cutting emissions – and air pollution – from transport. Is this view correct? Yes – but only once uptake accelerates. Despite the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Giselle Natassia Woodley, Researcher and Phd Candidate, Edith Cowan University There is widespread agreement Australia needs to do better when it comes to gender-based violence. Anger and frustration at the numbers of women being killed saw national rallies over the weekend and ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Graham, Lecturer in Economics, University of Sydney Mark and Anna Photography/Shutterstock As home ownership moves further out of reach for many Australians, “rentvesting” is being touted as a lifesaver. Rentvesting is the practice of renting one property to live ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sukhmani Khorana, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW Sydney Netflix The new season of Heartbreak High is garnering mixed reviews. Critics are writing about the racy story lines, comparing it to other coming-of-age series about teenage relationships and ...
Bob Carr intends to launch legal action against Winston Peters and Julie Anne Genter is facing a second allegation of bullying. Both sucked the air out of an announcement on education, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in ...
In 1995, Sally Clark went out on her own in a bold and unorthodox attempt to join an illustrious group of equestrian riders conquering the world. In the days of glovebox road maps, brick cell phones, and the hit song How Bizarre, Clark refused to follow Sir Mark Todd, Blyth ...
Establishment political analysts, posturing as anti-establishment, become the victims of their innate perceptual inadequacies. Poor old Chomsky, seemingly incapable of figuring out what's going on…
Just goes to show how one's mental frame, often formed in an earlier era of history, continues to be deployed despite the world changing and making it distort one's view.
Professor of Media Studies examines the current state of the media/politics interface:
He observes that "Media systems have no answer for toxic polarisation." The key point is in the sub-text: public media is holistic by definition, private media is dualistic by definition. Media creates a triad. It functions as a medial conduit between the whole (body politic) and the parts (citizens). This three-in-one framing is metaphysics. You'll recall a similar triad that shaped the course of western civilisation: the christian trinity. Aristotle defined metaphysics as being beyond physics but it helps to interpret beyond as deeper.
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This is a co-design challenge. Media co-design is rarely evident – most people assume someone else will do it. Few become pro-active, but when they do, they must practise consensus politics to find common ground and collaborate effectively.
I’ve snipped two of your overlong copypasta. Generally short quotes to support your points or show what piece is about are good but not really long quotes. People can click through for whole article. Long quotes are occasionally useful but they cause problems for scrollers esp on phones when done a lot and there’s been an outbreak of them by a number of commenters lately.
The prof explains how social media corporatisation has perverted the original intent of the internet:
[overlong quote deleted]
So that establishes the basis for a leftist critique of corporatised social media, and any consequent collective project to re-engineer it into more of a commons…
The prof also mentions a non-market solution:
Yet while the left & right maintain neoliberalism in western countries, activists will need to transcend democracy in their organising to make this happen!
What don’t you understand of weka’s note @ 2.1 to you?
Instead of being more succinct you’ve simply split one very large quote into a number of smaller but still sizeable ones.
As a rule of thumb I consider comments >200 words as being too long, depending on clarity of text and information content, of course. Most readers will switch off or not even bother reading such comment at all, which is an opportunity missed and possibly also a source of frustration, not the least because of the scrolling required to get past it.
I also like to see less pasted quoted text and more opinion and (political) points by commenters that can be debated here. I was taught at school to write things in my own words, first and foremost, and later on I was taught to quote and cite, but sparingly, as not to distract from the main text and message by me as the writer.
It seems to me that quite a few commenters here see TS as some sort of notice board or dumping ground for their little discoveries in mainstream and social media (especially Twitter and YouTube and less so of Facebook). This is not good for strong and high-quality debate! [206 words]
I think social media encourages it. People post their fav thing they found instead of writing their own thoughts and SM rewards this because it's just more clicks for them.
And it's easier to copy and paste than use our own words (same for me too, although I tend to paste tweets and let people click through if they want to read something).
Re Denis' last comment, it might just be a shorter version of what I deleted (which would be fine, I haven't looked).
With Minister Little forming a nationwide surgery waiting list, which includes a complete reassessment of every person on a waiting list that will be completed in November, health is going to turn into a massive media sink-hole for Labour.
Hospital waiting lists: Painful wait for surgery pre-dates Covid-19, sufferers say | RNZ News
This story will bleed and lead forever.
And the hospital staff who have endured through COVID as well as the massive restructure also have to deal with perpetual daily abuse for doing their work.
Christchurch Hospital staff punched, spat on, sworn at and sexually harassed | RNZ News
Anyone who needs an operation and can afford it should go private.
Whatever was fixed about our hospital system now, is going to look more and more broken very rapidly.
Christchurch Hospital staff punched, spat on, sworn at and sexually harassed | RNZ News
WTF is wrong with people?
My wife who worked at a hospital was told by her manager that she should come to work expecting to get hit and apparently destroyed all the incident reports that staff had been filling out for years. Serious incidents such as a staff member being knocked unconscious and suffering brain damage were never reported to OSH. We only found that out when we were helping her fight ACC.
Wife stopped working there as was too dangerous at her age / injuries. They lost a really good staff member as a result.
Fund the system all you like but if these types of issues cannot be resolved then we will always struggle to staff the service…..who in their right mind would want to place themselves in such a position.
Absolutely, it's not just about the money.
How many times was her manager hit? None, of course. Only the front line staff in our hospitals take the knocks.
Doubtless the manager had an MBA too (Master of B—– all)
Agree Ad. Folks need reminding which governments slashed and burned our health system through the 90's.
Then that other govt who oversaw a 12% or so population rise yet allowed health to be 30% underfunded.
You get what you pay for in health and successive national govts have wilfully underfunded it so here we are.
Yes – imagining that National could, or would want to, solve this problem is mistaken. Their goal is to raise private sector profitability by lowering tax, labour costs, and regulatory burdens – with the resulting wealth windfall allowing their supporters to escape the public health system and go private.
But money alone won't really solve it either.
Medical specialists are effectively a cartel. They use the existence of health insurance to open private clinics with highly and uniformly extractive prices. This in turn adds to waiting lists in the public sector and forces the public sector to contract work out to those same private clinics. Meanwhile the medical schools and specialist colleges act as gatekeepers restricting the number of locally trained specialists.
The burden of ill health in the community is much higher than it needs to be and horribly extensive to treat medically. Proper prevention would attempt to deal with the food environment, low incomes and the mental stress of financial and housing insecurity. But any action on these is also resisted by business – and ultimately made difficult by our free trade agreements if we (say) wanted Coca Cola to eff off because of their contribution to diabetes and tooth decay.
Did you think people at the bottom wouldn't get angry? It is utterly wrong to take it out on staff, but the public health system has been a disgrace for years and years and while those who matter could afford private, whether through insurance or private means and seldom had to depend on it, we could just concentrate finance on critical care, (which is used by the wealthy), and let it rip apart. The poor died, and were disabled by its inadequacy and I can attest personally to people dying because of letting it just deteriorate and deteriorate. But hey, we didn't have the money, right?
But, we just spent billions that was never there – not until the 'middle class' felt concerned for their safety. And magically the money was available. Lock the whole country down, work from home and be serviced by couriers and supermarket staff. Money is no object, not when wealthy people feel threatened. The little people who have to depend on the public health system that we could never afford to fix.
It's impossible to communicate the frustration and despair of those this nation chose to throw under the bus, in so many ways, for so long.
This is not to denigrate the many hard-working and compassionate health workers, within a decrepit, underfunded, understaffed system.
We paid to shut the whole country down, Ad. What is the difference?
Agree tc.
Ad has ignored the underlying cause of the current situation with our hospitals.
That is, the ideologically driven underfunding of public service entities by a former National government throughout the 1990s followed by the last National government allowing the flow of immigrants to rise dramatically without moving on the corresponding infrastructure to cope with them.
Instead, it is left for for the reader to assume that the current government is at fault and must take a beating despite the fact they are addressing the issue as fast as they can while at the same time grappling with a world-wide pandemic that has created huge delays and massive supply issues.
Top marks to Minister of Health, Andrew Little for tackling the problem head-on despite push back by opponents with vested interest in seeing his efforts fail. Eg. Matthew Hooton of DP fame.
And we’re starting to hear the familiar refrain: Labour have been government for 4/5 years – why haven’t they sorted out the health system.
Well, it took years of Natz governments to wreck it, it’ll take a few years of Labour governments to fix it!
Except nobody votes on what happened in the 90s.
People vote on what is going to happen in the 20s. Who has the answers for the future?
How is it that waiting lists were completely under control under the last government and targets were being hit, despite apparently being underfunded.
Now it's apparently properly funded and everything is blowing out.
Can't really see how you can blame national for this hot mess
In both housing and health National took the view that if it wasn't going to happen soon you would be taken off the waiting list. They then booted people off the waiting lists.
While at one level that is a pragmatic and sensible approach – why give people hope when there is none (it suits a target driven KPI mindset) it hides the actual need that exists and then it becomes very difficult to understand or assess unmet need.
The same as shifting costs from one department to another such as dental treatment – becomes part of the welfare costs and demand rather than health and health now has no idea what either the demand or unmet need is.
Then there is the real issue of fudging to meet targets – changing dates, ways of counting, rejecting new people, creating barriers for them to jump through etc.
Then there is the flood of growth as the government changes with people conflating previously hidden unmet demand with new demand. It isn't new demand it was always there.
Is this fiddle a reason house waiting lists have risen from ~7000 to ~25000 with Labour in office? I have been wondering about the change and why it has not been advertised that the demand was always there if surpressed.
They were quite open about it both in housing and health. Some of the increase is also due to the feeling by the public that Labour is more compassionate. Don’t know if any media look at the C&D numbers – i.e. have people just moved up the priority list.
"Changes to the way Housing New Zealand delivers state housing will make the system fairer for everyone, says Housing Minister Phil Heatley.
From 1 July, Housing New Zealand will start using an improved system to decide who gets a state house. The new system will mean that only those in the greatest need (A and B priority applicants) will be eligible for state housing, and will be placed on Housing New Zealand’s waiting list.
Those with lower housing needs (C & D priority applicants) will no longer be eligible for a state house, and instead will be helped in to other types of housing through Housing New Zealand’s Options and Advice Service."
More info here.
https://planning.org.nz/Attachment?Action=Download&Attachment_id=5492
The recent blow out of the State house waiting list is almost entirely due to the exponential increase in rental costs. People who 10 years ago could afford to rent in the 'open market' now can't do so, and are waiting for state housing (while in temp accommodation or crowding in with family).
The hospital waiting list increase is largely (but not entirely) attributable to the lockdowns from Covid, and the consequent delay of routine (and not so routine) surgery and treatment. One of the reasons that it's so bad in the Auckland Region, is that Auckland had more and longer lockdowns than anywhere else.
TBH I really doubt that the newly announced nationalization of the waiting lists is going to achieve much. It's shifting deckchairs on the Titanic. No hospital has operating theatres and surgical teams sitting twiddling their thumbs waiting for customers. And it has the potential to be massively unpopular (e.g. if you were on a 6-month waiting list for knee surgery, and it's now 18 months as people from the rest of NZ are flown in to fill up the spaces ahead of you). People waiting for treatment tend (rather naturally) to focus on themselves and their needs, not on what is 'fair' across NZ.
The proposal to issue ongoing contracts for routine surgery to private hospitals – may make a difference – but it certainly sounds … odd … coming from a Labour Government.
What is really needed is massive investment at the grass-roots level in public health. Still not seeing this (or any signs of it) from the Government. Where are the training incentives (fees-free for nurses, & radiologists), or the student loan forgiveness schemes for hard-to-staff areas, or the immigration fast-track for nurses and allied professionals, or the instruction to health boards to hire to the maximum cap, rather than depending on bureau staff for cover, or the mandate to crack open the medical guilds and actually start training as many doctors, dentists, and psychologists as we need as a country (not the number which will protect the high salaries of the current professionals).
It's all very well to blame National for '9-years of neglect' – but after 5 years we should see plans in place to remedy the deficit. And re-organizing the DHB administration is not the most urgent need in the health system.
The bulldozing of state houses has had an enormous impact in those areas where it happened. Often in areas where there is little capacity to rebuild.
This in turn increased demand which put up rents.
The pushing of the poor into the private sector was only ever going to push up rents. Whether this was done through kicking people off waiting lists, selling their state house or bull doxing their state house did not matter. Add immigration into the mix and you push demand even higher.
Decrease the supply while increasing the demand was only ever going to create one thing – an escalating viscous circle of unaffordable rents leading to higher state house waiting lists. Done by design by capitalist pigs.
You can't easily physically replace those bulldozed houses in some areas.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/82009360/housing-new-zealands-biggest-loser
However, the exponential rise in the numbers on the State house waiting list – has come over the last 5 years – and ties in very closely with the similar increase in market rents (tied to the house price rise).
In the last year alone it's gone up by over 13%
https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/statistics/housing/housing-register.html
Labour haven't been (by and large) bulldozing state houses (though there has been some clearance in preparation for more intensive housing).
Nor has there been substantial immigration in the last 2 years.
This can only be down to people being priced out of open market rentals – which is pretty much an inevitable consequence of the frankly unsustainable housing market increases. They were bad under National, but have been even worse under Labour.
I'm not disagreeing with you I'm just pointing out that that situation exists because of a deliberate supply/demand equation back then that created a viscous circle that short of increasing supply can't be fixed. It was always going to escalate.
Having been through 2 different local body amalgamations and re-organizations, and one commercial one, I can confirm that the salary budget won't be greatly reduced after the amalgamation. All of those managers retained/reappointed/hired are now supervising more staff, and responsible for more budget – so their salaries go up.
Usually there's a new layer of middle management added – since you can only have about 10-15 direct reports.
So, to take IT as an example. Yes, you'll only have one IT director after amalgamation. Their salary will be substantially greater than any of the incumbents (more staff/budget/responsibility); and there will be a new tier of middle managers instituted between that director and the people doing the actual work (since there would be too many for one person to supervise) – those people are unlikely to be paid as much as the previous individual IT heads – but will be a hefty proportion of that salary – or they won't retain them (see below for why that might be an issue). The combination is likely to match or even exceed the original combined IT salary budget.
And, that's setting aside any 'grandfathering' clauses – where existing staff retain their current salary when they are transferred to the new structure.
And any redundancy payouts and/or outsourcing/contracting arrangements. It's really, really common for a key person to miss out on a senior role and take redundancy, only for the organization to realize that they have critical knowledge, and need to be hired back in at a contractor salary to train their replacement. I've seen that happen multiple times. [Not just in local government, in corporate organizations as well].
Or for the organization to realize that that one key staff member had knowledge in 2 separate spheres – which aren't a common cross-over – so they need to hire 2 people to replace that key staff member…. Seen that happen, too.
Of course, it's also common in the commercial world for recruiters to be eyeing up companies going through restructure (which is a highly stressful time for the people working there), and offering the cream of the staff bonus contracts to jump ship to competitors.
I used IT as a deliberate example there – as those skills are readily transferrable and in short supply; AND one of the first actions of the new Health Board will apparently be to combine the different IT systems (I feel a frisson of horror – as I know just how complex this is going to be) – so local knowledge of the current individual systems will be absolutely critical. Novopay has nothing on just how badly this could go wrong….
In short, It takes time for waiting lists etc. to build up when you have a government that underfunds and undermines the public services and hospitals based on ideological claptrap as National did in the 90s and again from 2008 through to 2017. The hit started to become apparent after they lost the treasury benches.
Conversely, when a government increases funding and takes other practical measures to assist public services and hospitals, it takes equal time for the corresponding improvements to become apparent.
By the time this current term of office had ended, the improvements will be widespread and noticeable – provided Covid does not rear its uglier head again and send us back into lockdown mode. Fingers crossed.
Labour is definitely to blame for any problems with the Northland DHB and Whangarei Base Hospital. How do I know that? Because that's the perspective that Shane Reti has cultivated and fed. And in recent times he has been flavour of the month. Months. So apparently what he portrays has weight and veracity.
Reality? From 1975 until 2020 the Whangarei electorate (under whichever name) had National MPs. For three terms – 9 years Shane Reti was a member of that Health Board.
I know it's part of the game politicians play but I see his efforts in rousing the ignorant to do with health provisions in Northland as totally scummy.
Northland, besides having Labour MPs in its Maori seat and Vern Cracknell's three year term in the 1960s, has been lumbered itself with National MPs for just about forever. Their legacy is evident, not just in health provisions.
I dispute your claim that National had waiting lists under control. National's policies were to purge the waiting lists to make them look smaller so they could brag about it. That is not control, that is cynical manipulation.
National is equally responsible for the mess. They were government for nine years and they were repeatedly told that the population increases and immigration that were predicted for the next few decades would need significant investment – in facilities and people – but only put as little as they thought they could get away with.
National are always more interested in building multi billion dollar new roads and by-passes.
To build up the medical work force takes a decade and more but National were content to bring in overseas medics to make up any shortage. Now we struggle to get overseas medics because they are needed in other countries as well.
Internationally there is a shortage of doctors, nurses and support staff. They can't be magicked out of thin air and they naturally want to earn as much as they can so they gravitate to large economy countries where the pay is better.
All governments for the last 40 years are culpable. It started with Rogernomics and then continued with the 90s Bolger government when the first thing you saw when you approached a CHE (renamed public hospital) was the word "cashier".
“And the hospital staff who have endured through COVID as well as the massive restructure also have to deal with perpetual daily abuse for doing their work”
Ad, it may surprise you to here this coming from someone from a right wing perspective, but I think we need to bite the bullet and pay our medical staff a lot more.
Even looking from a right-wing, market driven perspective, and consistent with the principles I have explained previously about price controls causing shortages, it is clear we are in an international market for our medical people. Therefore if we want to retain them, we need to pay the going rate.
By trying to keep the wage rate for our medical staff significantly lower than what they can get in the likes of Australia, a price control has effectively been applied. The result of this will be an exodus of medical people overseas with resulting shortages.
We're not going to get nice things unless the rich pay more tax.
Neither Labour nor National are requiring the rich to pay more tax.
So we are not going to get nice things.
remove the 'nice' and I'd broadly agree.
Funding the health system properly could come about if we got rid of wasteful bureaucracy who make no or very little difference to what happens on the ground.
But no Labour sets up a Cancer Agency, is spending good health money on a health restructure, possibly a Mental Health Commission.
It all rises and falls on what the good Drs and Nurses do and whether they have the necessary equipment and drugs. Pay nurses and Dr more. Now. A lot more.
Of course Drs are going to work privately where they have better conditions and more controllable work loads. Who can blame them? And that's not even mentioning the pay.
Funding the health system properly could come about if we got rid of wasteful bureaucracy
I'm pretty sure that is what the restructuring is for. I expect lots of duplication in each DHB to be removed.
well maybe, but the re structure is going to cost to establish.
why not concentrate on the real work force getting numbers and pay right, then cut bureacracy. And please for god's sake get rid of the cancer agency and don't re-establish the mental health commission………please. BTW what a waste of time and money the commission of enquiry in to mental health was. ……..
I think we need to work out what it will cost, and then work out how to fund it. so far as health goes.
It may also include reprioritising existing expenditure. Or a combination of the two. But I think it needs to happen.
Thats bullshit Dukell, the waiting lists were manipulated under National and I know because I was one of the "waiting forevers ", the qualifying points kept getting raised for a hip operation. For the other hip as a solo farmer the wait was so long I would have had to pay for a replacement worker for me for 8 months, it was cheaper to pay for it privately. Got it done in 3 weeks and back working in another 3.
35 years ago TS my wife worked in Auckland A&E and assaults and arseholes were just as common then. She still works in A&E and Emergency care so she should know. It never recieved the drama-laden media coverage it does now.
“Anyone needing an operation should go private.” Really Ad?
Why? You will get the same surgeons!!
DHB's fudged their figures for years, did not supply security to protect staff, and underfunding of public services worsened the situation.
Many small private hospitals moved difficult cases back to the major local public hospital when an operation ceased to be straight forward. So the public system paid for major equipment while the private system took the cream of the easy cases.
Andrew can prove the need for more targetted funding through the waiting List.
[deleted while we have a korero about this in the back end]
I'm picking he went private because he could afford it, and he wanted to prevent someone, who could not afford to go private, the opportunity to take his place in the queue.
Indeed it was his enormous ministerial magnanimity.
The idea that govts be allowed to govern seems questionable to some folk:
Yeah but the minister must act in accord with Labour's principle of non-transparent governance – otherwise she's likely to get replaced by her leader doing a reshuffle.
The WUG is in the running for the ugliest acronym of the year award (unless you'd rather go with TWUG). It's an incorporated society, so if you're a born stirrer you can stir the waters here: https://www.waterusers.org.nz/
It'll be interesting to see the legal contending from both sides. The Crown was big on seizing assets throughout British history, but fairly small on sharing them – so precedent could be a bit of a problem. Whether the court will decide that the Treaty is binding on settler & current govts is a biggie. They could do a Mallard & duck for cover. Bishop senior ought to be commended for restraining himself from going feral (or perhaps the Stuff editor sent the diatribe back redlined with rewrite suggestions).
Muldoon's wage/price freeze has been ridiculed by commentators for years.
https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/05/06/countdown-to-freeze-price-of-over-500-essentials-for-winter/
Maybe it becomes desirable when the private sector do it?
Not that comparable really pat. As a unionist with the Northern Store Workers Union I participated in a number of successful strikes that broke Muldoon’s wage freeze at Union Carbide, SuperLiquor, and various South Auckland manufacturing sites.
Multi Nationals took the piss with Muldoon, such as the oil industry and their transfer pricing methods that they used to circumvent the freeze.
Supermarkets have had “loss leader” promotions for years to get them in the doors.
Duopoly means just that. Even the low end Pak’n’Saves have been hammering the prices on basics during the last year.
So even unionists see it as desirable when the private sector do it… thats illuminating.
When the private sector "do it"? Comparing a private company not raising its prices hardly bears the tiniest smidgen of comparison to a government dictating a wage freeze and a price freeze across a country.
Do you think the suppliers will see any difference?….or will the result be any different when the freeze is ended?
The criticisms that were applied to the comprehensive state imposed price freeze are as valid for this….the comparison is close enough to be worth considering.
The most curious feature (to me at least) is the abdication of policy to the corporations.
Do you buy this? What they give with one hand they will take with the other.
Just marketing stunt by Woolworths Australia. Go in to Countdown and buy a 1kg block of cheese that they will freeze the price on, then go to Pak n Save and buy same product as it will be cheaper
Yes, it is a marketing stunt (and it will be interesting to see what the other supermarkets do)….but it is wort remembering that the suppliers will not be protected from increased costs, and I expect the profit of Countdown will be unimpacted, and any loses incurred within the chain will be regained later.
Price is a function of only 2 inputs, labour and profit….which do you think will ultimately support this?
Both supermarket chains have very 'robust' negotiations with suppliers and you will probably find that it is actually their suppliers who would have been told by Countdown to freeze their price.
I very much expect the suppliers are expected to carry a portion of the risk…and the consumer will pick up the rest through cross subsidy….as stated I dont expect Countdowns profit to reduce.
"The problem is simple; given the fossil energy left, we need to ascertain what living on, say, 50% less energy in a post-growth world, would look like for New Zealand. We need to ascertain what infrastructure is worth pursuing (to Onslow or not to Onslow?) – and what would be a waste of the remaining time, energy and resources.
As it is energy and resources per capita, which is the valid measure (true poverty being a lack of both), a smaller population will be wealthier individually than a large one (another point those inside-the-box economists got totally wrong). So we need to have a discussion about maximum desirable population; a reasonable assumption being that it will be less than current, due to the reduction of energy/resource inputs. Better we go there proactively, than waiting for the natural overshoot/collapse sequence.
It is obviously better that we retain some form of social cohesion during the period ahead. The reduction of surplus energy, coupled with the ever-more of it required to maintain what we’ve already built, will threaten such cohesion. This too, has to be clearly understood; promise folk the undeliverable and they just get angry; at best they end up on your Parliament grounds in tents. At worst? But promise them ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’, being brutally honest about it, and they might just come with you. "
https://www.interest.co.nz/public-policy/115678/murray-grimwood-outlines-why-and-how-be-believes-our-relationship-and
Can we handle the truth?
And took hook,line,sinker….and rod. That'll smart in the future….
'Winter' is coming – time to 'rug up' and break out the Thermette.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Hen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gigantic_Turnip
Indeed. We could also wish for a Giant Peach. Classic "Childrens" tale by Roald Dahl. Life in a Peach. (some macabre elements. Dahl…)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_and_the_Giant_Peach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_and_the_Giant_Peach_(film)
Was not quite as Peachy for some…who banned it. And a Disney film at that : )
BAU is incompatible with the IPCC scenario for a low carbon future,essentially growth needs to stop to constrain the population at 6.2b at 2100,or around the same as now at 2050.
https://twitter.com/OurWorldInData/status/1520347034812923904?cxt=HHwWgIC-ldbkrZkqAAAA
Unfortunately all the IPCC scenarios involve unproven and ENERGY INTENSIVE carbon extraction ….the time since Limits to Growth has been wasted.
The scenarios involve the stabilization of the worlds population as it is now eg around 8 b by 2050,and a reduction in population to 6b by 2100.
Do they?….6 billion by 2100….that flies in the face of world bank and various other official projections…where , why and what is the basis of that claim?
Humans are around 34% of the worlds land based mammalian biomass,we respire around 3.5 t of co2 per person (which is the energy transformation of consumption and excretion) in its most simplistic form.There needs to be a significant decrease in gdp pp as we move to a global first step of around 28bbl of ff equivalents by 2050,which allows a reduction of population by 2100.
It may allow (havnt bothered to check the calculation) but my question is where in the IPCC scenarios do they assume a world population decrease of 25% by 2100?….you may make assumptions based on CO2 emissions based on population, that dosnt mean the IPCC has made the same assumptions.
The shared socio economic pathways are the models used to constrain GG growth by the IPCC, the SSEP 1 scenario that has 6.96b by 2100 is what is being enacted by the Paris agreement.
https://t.co/KXOzXw4hkd
Bugger me …though it assumes an awful lot….much of it not unreasonable.
https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg2/index.php?idp=56#:~:text=According%20to%20all%20of%20the,than%20it%20was%20in%201990.
more reading needed
Of course the Pliocene was formative in the emergence of man,where Lucy and her daughters descended to the grasslands,becoming upright to reduce their water loss and decrease burn from the high UV regime,fortuitous some may think.
"Interestingly, the population projections in Figure 2-4 are not evenly distributed across the full range. Instead, they are grouped into three clusters. The middle cluster is representative of the central projections, with a range of about 10 to less than 12 billion people by 2100. The other two clusters mark the highest and the lowest population projections available in the literature, with between 15 and 20 billion at the high end and about 6 billion at the low end."
https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.php?idp=42
We are all Africans…..perhaps Lucy's real name was Eve.
i think we can disregard the high ends,which leaves a spread of 6-10,the latter would have a temperature regime of > 6 c,the former around 3c.
The Pliocene was where we had similar co2 (400-420ppm),temps 2to 3c above now,and no UV screen due to Supernova activity,let their be light.
And sea level was 25m higher….but that takes time, as may population decline (though also not) …indeed 6 billion may be generous, time will tell.
How demographics relates to climate change is very interesting.
There are quite a number of countries that are going to be hugely affected by demographics going forward. China is one of the major ones. Geopolitical scientist, Peter Zeihan has a lot to say about demographic trends in China.
According to Peter, China has one of the fastest aging populations in the world, largely due to the one-child policy that prevailed for a long time there. And, depending on which figures are used, China could halve its population as early as 2050.
That is a huge reduction in population for the largest population in the world. Russia is being affected in a similar way.
The demographic projection is for world population to peak at around 10 billion by 2100. But if Zeihan's most pessimistic projection for China halving by 2050, then the world population could peak a lot earlier and may not get as high as 10 billion.
The problem with just looking at population is that it doesn’t have a direct coupling to greenhouse gas emmissions. The rate of increase in personal affluence in places like China is actually a lot faster than the demographic decline.
Those two are linked. Effectively each person remaining has a greater proportion of the infrastructural wealth as population decreases. And their personal production of greenhouse gases rises accordingly.
Increasing personal affluence is the greatest driver of greenhouse gas production.
That is why a average US citizen currently produces directly and indirectly more greenhouse gas than citizens of almost eveey country in the world. They are also amongst the most affluent on average.
This is like the fallacy that planting trees is good at reducing fossil carbon in the atmosphere and oceans. It is only if you never cut them down or have forest fires for a thousand years or so. If neither of those are true, then all you have done is to produce a transient tiny reduction before the fossil carbon winds up in the oceans – and probably delayed sequestaion. Instead we should grow swamps.
This is why I wrote a series on the Kaya Identity.
You make some fair points there. But I think there are also some upsides to affluent societies with respect to the environment
I think affluent societies have more economic resource to apply to the problem if so long as they can be motivated to do so.
For instance, an affluent person may be able to purchase a new electric vehicle while someone from a poor country may only be able to afford an old second hand petrol car that isn't very efficient.
Or a more affluent country might be able to afford to invest in more renewable type energy whereas a poorer one might be more likely to use coal generation for instance.
A more affluent country might have the economic capability to find ways to recycle waste plastic whereas in a poorer country the plastic might end up in the river.
The health system has been struggling for many years. If people are uncertain about future changes, who remembers Ruth Richardson putting paying machines in wards in order to get admitted? That nutty idea didn't last long.Who remembers Jenny Shipley wanting to close Hutt Hospital or dramatically downgrade it? Given Wainuiomata, Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt have much increased populations that was utterly an crazy idea. And with only one way to get into Wellington from these places, any emergencies in rush hours would have needed helicopters.
The health system must be an impossible thing to budget for in many ways. That is because whatever is budgeted is never enough.
Most of us who have been around for awhile will have some minor issue that we live with, and because it doesn't inconvenience us, we just live with it.
For instance, I have a little finger that is a bit crooked because I think I broke it in a sporting accident years ago. It doesn't give me much trouble, so I don't bother about it. And, I expect I would still be on the waiting list by the time I died, given it isn't a pressing health issue. But, if there was endless health funding, I might get it sorted.
If that was multiplied across the population, then the health budget would need to be incredibly huge to accomodate all the latent health needs that people could get sorted if there were no limits.
Not surprisingly, Luxon/Seymour/Fed Farmers/groundswell are very muted at praising the scientists/government's success with M.Bovis elimination. Given the multi millions spent to do this, does that come into Luxon's complaint about spend, spend, spend.
If anyone else has grandparents that had to leave the north of Ireland pretty quickly after the Easter Rising, the thought of Sinn Fein actually getting a majority in the Northern Ireland Parliament (as they are now likely to do) is going to provoke a bit of feeling.
Sinn Fein eyes watershed win as polls close in N.Ireland | Reuters
The Easter Rising was in Dublin
It had impact everywhere.
You'll possibly be aware of about 6 decades of uprisings since.
"…grandparents that had to leave the north of Ireland pretty quickly after the Easter Rising,…."
Why specifically the north of Ireland when the participants were at the other end of the country? Northern Ireland as a political entity didnt exist until 1920
OMG Pat. It affected all Republicans simultaneously. The County militancy shifted sure but the political activism popped out all over the place.
If you say so.
It was long standing (religious and heritage/lineage based) and all over Ireland at various times.
Catholic/Protestant & various permutations with Catholic/Presbyterian, Catholic/Church of Ireland (Anglican)
Native Irish and 'planted' Irish
(granted land as part of Oliver Cromwell's Army in the south and settlers coming to the north under the auspices of a various large London Guilds in the 1600. The 12 guilds that were given control over Derry~Londonderry and the regions adjacent were the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Tailors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, and Clothworkers. The smaller guilds that joined them included the Cordwainers, Dyers, Scriveners, Upholders, Wax Chandlers, Tallow Chandlers, Broderers, Founders, Pewterers, and Fletchers.
I have a Presbyterian gt grandfather who emigrated to NZ from Co Londonderry in the mid 1880s 'for the good of his health', ostensibly bronchitis. My mother always said it was probably more like his health in a larger context of living or dead.
So they came to Auckland where despite planning by the Auckland City Council the religious Irish marched on each other's days as well as their own (St Patricks day 17/3 and the Apprentice Boys march (second Saturday in August) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprentice_Boys_of_Derry or to remember the the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July.
ACC then designed marching routes several blocks from each other but my grandmother said the groups always 'found' each other for a bit of heckling and roughing each other up.
My mother (Irish/Danish) used to say The Irish, what can you do with people who act as if the Battle of the Boyne happened yesterday' – it happened in 1690.
https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-the-battle-of-the-boyne/
My Dad came from a proudly NZ-Irish family on the West Coast – 3 generations in NZ when he was born – but still regarded themselves as 'Irish'.
Until he did his great OE in the late 70s (when he was in his 50s) – and visited Ireland. His reaction: "For the first time, I knew I was a New Zealander, and how lucky I was that my grandfather emigrated (according to family legend, one step ahead of the law), to New Zealand"
Our West Coast had the clearest Irish cultural presence for many decades and I fully get what you say.
My maternal grandfather's people were Irish miners on the West Coast. They lived in Blackball and their names are on memorials and tombstones.
'One step ahead of the law' is a good saying for my gt grandfather too……too much concern about religion lead to moving for the sake of his 'health'. He was adamant, according to my grandmother, his daughter, and thence to my mother about various family doings, ie he was the only child…..etc etc. I have since found a sister and a brother. My mother called him 'an international man of mystery'…..probably because he needed to leave and was not going to make it easy for anyone to track him.
I went to the place he had lived and the current lessees have left his property uncultivated with the fences still up and maintained as it was beautifully laid out and planted. He and his later family are known as plants people.
there are a couple of interesting scholarly items:
The Irish in Aotearoa
https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10523/10629/Irish%20in%20Aotearoa%20Report%20web%2020.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
and one by Brad Patterson under the auspices of the Stout Research Centre
https://www.nzmuseums.co.nz/collections/3000/objects/1090055/the-irish-in-new-zealand-historical-contexts-and-perspectives
The Economist on Chinese expansion.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/300581878/how-the-west-should-respond-to-chinas-search-for-foreign-outposts
An antidote to some local hysteria.