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.
The new Victoria University Vice-Chancellor decided to have a forum at the university about free speech and academic freedom as it is obviously a topical issue, and the Government is looking at legislating some carrots or sticks for universities to uphold their obligations under the Education and Training Act. They ...
Do you remember when Melania Trump got caught out using a speech that sounded awfully like one Michelle Obama had given? Uncannily so.Well it turns out that Abraham Lincoln is to Winston Peters as Michelle was to Melania. With the ANZAC speech Uncle Winston gave at Gallipoli having much in ...
She was born 25 years ago today in North Shore hospital. Her eyes were closed tightly shut, her mouth was silently moving. The whole theatre was all quiet intensity as they marked her a 2 on the APGAR test. A one-minute eternity later, she was an 8. The universe was ...
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park in collaboration with members from our Skeptical Science team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Is Antarctica gaining land ice? ...
Images of US students (and others) protesting and setting up tent cities on US university campuses have been broadcast world wide and clearly demonstrate the growing rifts in US society caused by US policy toward Israel and Israel’s prosecution of … Continue reading → ...
Barrie Saunders writes – Dear Paul As the new Minister of Media and Communications, you will be inundated with heaps of free advice and special pleading, all in the national interest of course. For what it’s worth here is my assessment: Traditional broadcasting free to air content through ...
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 arguments for such a bold reform. ...
Peter Dunne writes – The great nineteenth British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, once observed that “the first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.” When a later British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, sacked a third of his Cabinet in July 1962, in what became ...
Ele Ludemann writes – New Zealanders had the OECD’s second highest tax increase last year: New Zealanders faced the second-biggest tax raises in the developed world last year, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says. The intergovernmental agency said the average change in personal income tax ...
We all know something’s not right with our elections. The spread of misinformation, people being targeted with soundbites and emotional triggers that ignore the facts, even the truth, and influence their votes.The use of technology to produce deep fakes. How can you tell if something is real or not? Can ...
This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Simon Clark. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). This year you will be lied to! Simon Clark helps prebunk some misleading statements you'll hear about climate. The video includes ...
It is all very well cutting the backrooms of public agencies but it may compromise the frontlines. One of the frustrations of the Productivity Commission’s 2017 review of universities is that while it observed that their non-academic staff were increasing faster than their academic staff, it did not bother to ...
Buzz from the Beehive Two speeches delivered by Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters at Anzac Day ceremonies in Turkey are the only new posts on the government’s official website since the PM announced his Cabinet shake-up. In one of the speeches, Peters stated the obvious: we live in a troubled ...
1. Which of these would you not expect to read in The Waikato Invader?a. Luxon is here to do business, don’t you worry about thatb. Mr KPI expects results, and you better believe itc. This decisive man of action is getting me all hot and excitedd. Melissa Lee is how ...
…it has a restricted jurisdiction which must not be abused: it is not an inquisitionNOTE – this article was published before the High Court ruled that Karen Chhour does not have to appear before the Waitangi Tribunal Gary Judd writes – The High Court ...
Lindsay Mitchell writes – One of reasons Oranga Tamariki exists is to prevent child neglect. But could the organisation itself be guilty of the same?Oranga Tamariki’s statistics show a decrease in the number and age of children in care. “There are less children ...
David Farrar writes: Graeme Edgeler wrote in 2017: In the first five years after three strikes came into effect 5248 offenders received a ‘first strike’ (that is, a “stage-1 conviction” under the three strikes sentencing regime), and 68 offenders received a ‘second strike’. In the five years prior to ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has surprised everyone with his ruthlessness in sacking two of his ministers from their crucial portfolios. Removing ministers for poor performance after only five months in the job just doesn’t normally happen in politics. That’s refreshing and will be extremely ...
TL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the two days to 6:06am on Thursday, April 25:Politics: PM Christopher Luxon has set up a dual standard for ministerial competence by demoting two National Cabinet ministers while leaving also-struggling ...
Hi,Today I mainly want to share some of your thoughts about the recent piece I wrote about success and failure, and the forces that seemingly guide our lives. But first, a quick bit of housekeeping: I am doing a Webworm popup in Los Angeles on Saturday May 11 at 2pm. ...
It is hard to see what Melissa Lee might have done to “save” the media. National went into the election with no public media policy and appears not to have developed one subsequently. Lee claimed that she had prepared a policy paper before the election but it had been decided ...
Open access notablesIce acceleration and rotation in the Greenland Ice Sheet interior in recent decades, Løkkegaard et al., Communications Earth & Environment:In the past two decades, mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated, partly due to the speedup of glaciers. However, uncertainty in speed derived from satellite products ...
Buzz from the Beehive A statement from Children’s Minister Karen Chhour – yet to be posted on the Government’s official website – arrived in Point of Order’s email in-tray last night. It welcomes the High Court ruling on whether the Waitangi Tribunal can demand she appear before it. It does ...
Mr Bombastic:Ironically, the media the academic experts wanted is, in many ways, the media they got. In place of the tyrannical editors of yesteryear, advancing without fear or favour the interests of the ruling class; the New Zealand news media of today boasts a troop of enlightened journalists dedicated to ...
It's hard times try to make a livingYou wake up every morning in the unforgivingOut there somewhere in the cityThere's people living lives without mercy or pityI feel good, yeah I'm feeling fineI feel better then I have for the longest timeI think these pills have been good for meI ...
In 1974, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, finding that the President was not a King, but was subject to the law and was required to turn over the evidence of his wrongdoing to the courts. It was a landmark decision for the rule ...
Every day now just seems to bring in more fresh meat for the grinder.In their relentlessly ideological drive to cut back on the “excessive bloat” (as they see it) of the previous Labour-led government, on the mountains of evidence accumulated in such a short period of time do not ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Megan Valére SosouMarket gardening site of the Itchèléré de Itagui agricultural cooperative in Dassa-Zoumè (Image credit: Megan Valère Sossou) For the residents of Dassa-Zoumè, a city in the West African country of Benin, choosing between drinking water and having enough ...
Buzz from the Beehive Melissa Lee – as may be discerned from the screenshot above – has not been demoted for doing something seriously wrong as Minister of ...
Morning in London Mother hugs beloved daughter outside the converted shoe factory in which she is living.Afternoon in London Travelling writer takes himself and his wrist down to A&E, just to be sure. Read more ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – The recent announcement of the University Advisory Group, chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, makes very clear where the Government’s focus and priorities lie. The remit of the Advisory Group is that Group members will consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector including: ...
Eric Crampton writes – The Reserve Bank of New Zealand desperately wants to find reasons to have workstreams in climate change. It makes little sense. They’ve run another stress test on the banks looking to see if they could find a prudential regulation case. They couldn’t. They ...
Rob MacCullough writes – Pundits from the left and the right are arguing that National’s Fast Track Bill that is designed to speed up infrastructure decisions could end up becoming mired in a cesspool of corruption. Political commentator ...
Looking at the headlines this morning it’s hard to feel anything other than pessimistic about the future of humanity.Note that I’m not speaking about the future of mankind, but the survival of our humanity. The values that we believe in seem to be ebbing away, by the day.Perhaps every generation ...
Swabbing mixed breed baby chicks to test for avian influenzaUh oh. Bird flu – often deadly to humans – is not only being transmitted from infected birds to dairy cows, but is now travelling between dairy cows. As of last Friday, Bloomberg News reports, there were 32 American dairy herds ...
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 ...
What is it with the mining industry? Its not enough for them to pillage the earth - they apparently can't even be bothered getting resource consent to do so: The proponent behind a major mine near the Clutha River had already been undertaking activity in the area without a ...
Photo # 1 I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to housing, as described here two years ago by copying and pasting from The ConversationWhat Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed land, ...
Buzz from the Beehive Reactions to news of the government’s readiness to make urgent changes to “the resource management system” through a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) suggest a balanced approach is being taken. The Taxpayers’ Union says the proposed changes don’t go far enough. Greenpeace says ...
I’m starting to wonder if Anna Burns-Francis might be the best political interviewer we’ve got. That might sound unlikely to you, it came as a bit of a surprise to me.Jack Tame can be excellent, but has some pretty average days. I like Rebecca Wright on Newshub, she asks good ...
Chris Trotter writes – Willie Jackson is said to be planning a “media summit” to discuss “the state of the media and how to protect Fourth Estate Journalism”. Not only does the Editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, think this is a good idea, but he has also ...
Graeme Edgeler writes – This morning [April 21], the Wellington High Court is hearing a judicial review brought by Hon. Karen Chhour, the Minister for Children, against a decision of the Waitangi Tribunal. This is unusual, judicial reviews are much more likely to brought against ministers, rather than ...
Both of Parliament’s watchdogs have now ripped into the Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMy pick of the six newsey things to know from Aotearoa’s political economy and beyond on the morning of Tuesday, April 23 are:The Lead: The Auditor General,John Ryan, has joined the ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Sarah SpengemanPeople wait to board an electric bus in Pune, India. (Image credit: courtesy of ITDP) Public transportation riders in Pune, India, love the city’s new electric buses so much they will actually skip an older diesel bus that ...
The infrastructure industry yesterday issued a “hurry up” message to the Government, telling it to get cracking on developing a pipeline of infrastructure projects.The hiatus around the change of Government has seen some major projects cancelled and others delayed, and there is uncertainty about what will happen with the new ...
Hi,Over the weekend I revisited a podcast I really adore, Dead Eyes. It’s about a guy who got fired from Band of Brothers over two decades ago because Tom Hanks said he had “dead eyes”.If you don’t recall — 2001’s Band of Brothers was part of the emerging trend of ...
Buzz from the Beehive The 180 or so recipients of letters from the Government telling them how to submit infrastructure projects for “fast track” consideration includes some whose project applications previously have been rejected by the courts. News media were quick to feature these in their reports after RMA Reform Minister Chris ...
It would not be a desirable way to start your holiday by breaking your back, your head, or your wrist, but on our first hour in Singapore I gave it a try.We were chatting, last week, before we started a meeting of Hazel’s Enviro Trust, about the things that can ...
Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure that the new Fast-Track Approvals Bill – currently being pushed through by the ...
Feel worried. Shane Jones and a couple of his Cabinet colleagues are about to be granted the power to override any and all objections to projects like dams, mines, roads etc even if: said projects will harm biodiversity, increase global warming and cause other environmental harms, and even if ...
Bryce Edwards writes- The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. ...
Michael Bassett writes – If you think there is a move afoot by the radical Maori fringe of New Zealand society to create a parallel system of government to the one that we elect at our triennial elections, you aren’t wrong. Over the last few days we have ...
Without a corresponding drop in interest rates, it’s doubtful any changes to the CCCFA will unleash a massive rush of home buyers. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: The six things that stood out to me in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Monday, April 22 included:The Government making a ...
Sunday was a lazy day. I started watching Jack Tame on Q&A, the interviews are usually good for something to write about. Saying the things that the politicians won’t, but are quite possibly thinking. Things that are true and need to be extracted from between the lines.As you might know ...
In our Weekly Roundup last week we covered news from Auckland Transport that the WX1 Western Express is going to get an upgrade next year with double decker electric buses. As part of the announcement, AT also said “Since we introduced the WX1 Western Express last November we have seen ...
TL;DR: The six key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 29 include:PM Christopher Luxon is scheduled to hold a post-Cabinet news conference at 4 pm today. Stats NZ releases its statutory report on Census 2023 tomorrow.Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivers a pre-Budget speech at ...
A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 14, 2024 thru Sat, April 20, 2024. Story of the week Our story of the week hinges on these words from the abstract of a fresh academic ...
The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. The Government says this will ...
This is a column to say thank you. So many of have been in touch since Mum died to say so many kind and thoughtful things. You’re wonderful, all of you. You’ve asked how we’re doing, how Dad’s doing. A little more realisation each day, of the irretrievable finality of ...
Identifying the engine type in your car is crucial for various reasons, including maintenance, repairs, and performance upgrades. Knowing the specific engine model allows you to access detailed technical information, locate compatible parts, and make informed decisions about modifications. This comprehensive guide will provide you with a step-by-step approach to ...
Introduction: The allure of racing is undeniable. The thrill of speed, the roar of engines, and the exhilaration of competition all contribute to the allure of this adrenaline-driven sport. For those who yearn to experience the pinnacle of racing, becoming a race car driver is the ultimate dream. However, the ...
Introduction Automobiles have become ubiquitous in modern society, serving as a primary mode of transportation and a symbol of economic growth and personal mobility. With countless vehicles traversing roads and highways worldwide, it begs the question: how many cars are there in the world? Determining the precise number is a ...
Maintaining a safe and reliable vehicle requires regular inspections. Whether it’s a routine maintenance checkup or a safety inspection, knowing how long the process will take can help you plan your day accordingly. This article delves into the factors that influence the duration of a car inspection and provides an ...
Mazda Motor Corporation, commonly known as Mazda, is a Japanese multinational automaker headquartered in Fuchu, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. The company was founded in 1920 as the Toyo Cork Kogyo Co., Ltd., and began producing vehicles in 1931. Mazda is primarily known for its production of passenger cars, but ...
Your car battery is an essential component that provides power to start your engine, operate your electrical systems, and store energy. Over time, batteries can weaken and lose their ability to hold a charge, which can lead to starting problems, power failures, and other issues. Replacing your battery before it ...
In most states, you cannot register a car without a valid driver’s license. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. Exceptions to the RuleIf you are under 18 years old: In some states, you can register a car in your name even if you do not ...
Mazda, a Japanese automotive manufacturer with a rich history of innovation and engineering excellence, has emerged as a formidable player in the global car market. Known for its reputation of producing high-quality, fuel-efficient, and driver-oriented vehicles, Mazda has consistently garnered praise from industry experts and consumers alike. In this article, ...
Struts are an essential part of a car’s suspension system. They are responsible for supporting the weight of the car and damping the oscillations of the springs. Struts are typically made of steel or aluminum and are filled with hydraulic fluid. How Do Struts Work? Struts work by transferring the ...
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. ...
A laundry list of additional costs for Tāmaki Makarau Auckland shows the Minister for the city is not delivering for the people who live there, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, and Mema Paremata mō Tāmaki-Makaurau, Takutai Tarsh Kemp, will travel to the Gold Coast to strengthen ties with Māori in Australia next week (15-21 April). The visit, in the lead-up to the 9th Australian National Kapa haka Festival, will be an opportunity for both ...
The Green Party has today launched a step-by-step guide to help New Zealanders make their voice heard on the Government’s democracy dodging and anti-environment fast track legislation. ...
The National Government’s proposed changes to the Residential Tenancies Act will mean tenants can be turfed from their homes by landlords with little notice, Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. ...
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is calling on all parties to support a common-sense change that’s great for the planet and great for consumers after her member’s bill was drawn from the ballot today. ...
A significant milestone has been reached in the fight to strike an anti-Pasifika and unfair law from the country’s books after Teanau Tuiono’s members’ bill passed its first reading. ...
New Zealand has today missed the opportunity to uphold the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, says James Shaw after his member’s bill was voted down in its first reading. ...
Today’s advice from the Climate Change Commission paints a sobering reality of the challenge we face in combating climate change, especially in light of recent Government policy announcements. ...
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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
Overseas models for regulating the oil and gas sector, including their decommissioning regimes, are being carefully scrutinised as a potential template for New Zealand’s own sector, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. The Coalition Government is focused on rebuilding investor confidence in New Zealand’s energy sector as it looks to strengthen ...
Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell has today released the Report of the Government Inquiry into the response to the North Island Severe Weather Events. “The report shows that New Zealand’s emergency management system is not fit-for-purpose and there are some significant gaps we need to address,” Mr Mitchell ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is today travelling to Europe where he’ll update the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Government’s work to restore law and order. “Attending the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva provides us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while ...
Associate Agriculture Minister, Mark Patterson, formally reopened the world’s largest wool processing facility today in Awatoto, Napier, following a $50 million rebuild and refurbishment project. “The reopening of this facility will significantly lift the economic opportunities available to New Zealand’s wool sector, which already accounts for 20 per cent of ...
Hon Andrew Bayly, Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing At the Southland Otago Regional Engineering Collective (SOREC) Summit, 18 April, Dunedin Ngā mihi nui, Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Ko Whanganui aho Good Afternoon and thank you for inviting me to open your summit today. I am delighted ...
The Government is delivering on its commitment to bring back the Three Strikes legislation, Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee announced today. “Our Government is committed to restoring law and order and enforcing appropriate consequences on criminals. We are making it clear that repeat serious violent or sexual offending is not ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has today announced four new diplomatic appointments for New Zealand’s overseas missions. “Our diplomats have a vital role in maintaining and protecting New Zealand’s interests around the world,” Mr Peters says. “I am pleased to announce the appointment of these senior diplomats from the ...
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Appointment viewing has been lost to the mists of time, but memories of Montana Sunday Theatre can still be conjured by hitting play on a particular piece of classical music. “You’re not going to be able to sell it.” Over 30 years on, Karen Bieleski still recalls how the task ...
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Asia Pacific Report From France to Australia, university pro-Palestine protests in the United States have now spread to several countries with students pitching on-campus camps. And students at Columbia and other US universities remain defiant as campuses have witnessed the biggest protests since the anti-Vietnam war and anti-apartheid eras in ...
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Toomaj and his resistance to tyranny through his songs have become an icon for the youth of Iran, so his sentence has hit the nation hard. Toomaj Salehi is not the first artist to pay the price for standing with the people. ...
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Working as a doctor in developing countries to help communities achieve better health outcomes is nothing short of a life goal for Jessica Tater. The University of Otago medical student has her sights firmly set on joining the international humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) when she qualifies ...
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The ministers responsible for green-lighting major projects need to be open about potential conflicts of interest, says Transparency International. ...
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The government can't just rely on axing public sector jobs and has to do more to cut spending, says the chief economist at a free market think tank. ...
Rock The Vote NZ, known for its advocacy for minor party unity and its role within the Freedoms NZ Coalition during the 2023 General Election, celebrates this merger as a strategic enhancement of its operational strength and outreach. ...
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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.
[deleted]
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.