Just heard on the 6am news there’s a push for privately managed isolation facilities.
OMG, are we impervious to lessons from Victoria? Do we really want a clusterfuck like Melbourne here?
The government may not be perfect in its management of quarantine, but if a problem arises they can throw money at it. A private firm will inevitably cut corners to make more profit.
Keep capitalism far away from our boarder protection management – please!
Yep, the richies want to be in charge / making profit while the rest of us take all the risks and get "jobs jobs jobs" (at minimum wage, zero-hours, no security and be grateful for it you miserable peasants)
So they want to bring in their rich mates supposedly to fix the economy? Well after 30 odd years of this stuff the bulk of the population could barely fund themselves for a 4 week stay at home – so as far as I am concerned its a failed idea and they can get stuffed. Just like private quarantine is a failed idea.
Why does the news media give so much time to just 20 people – when they are like this one.Deplatform them. Why on earth did he get one of the quarantine spaces after not bothering to be here for 2 decades.
Among them was Pooj Prenna, who recently returned to New Zealand with his family, after 20 years overseas.
And why does Helen Clark continue to want to be associated with these people. She's starting to look like Tony Blair- can't some one have a word with her.
And Prenna after 20 years out of the country and not bothering he comes back and gets an invitation to the forum and starts to tell the rest of us what to do. Well lets tax him on his worldwide interests. (appears to be a silicon valley capitalist)
Why does the news media give so much time to just 20 people
Because they're rich.
And why does Helen Clark continue to want to be associated with these people.
She may have been principled when she opposed the purchase of the Airforce strike fighters but since then she's been in government where had to collude with business to get anything done. Basically, she's drunk the cool-aid that its business that does things and not government.
Yeah I get the rich bit – but there's more of us than them and we are the one's that are gunna vote. And since the rich have done little for the masses these last 30 years we certainly aren't going to be much poorer if we ignore them now or preferably charge them some real high taxes.
And ignore them we should.
Actually the taxes should be the push back. All reporters should ask these over entitled bods if they are willing to stump up more in taxes.
And as I say regardless of how much kool aid Helen has drunk she needs to stop making the life of the current labour party more difficult. She is being used by these righties as cover for the hard right agenda behind their views.
So Key and co would like to make money out of isolation and quarantine? (Never waste a crisis..Right!!)
Where is their billion dollars each insurance against failure?(No insurance against a pandemic usually, and we don't want Private collection of Profits and Public paying for failures)
Which hospitals will be used if and when they let the virus in? Private?/Public???
Would they charge people to use their hospitals?
Whose country do they plan to poach Doctors and Nurses from?
Where will they obtain their testing kits PPE and general staff?
Yeah, agree with that 100%. I have never ever heard so much fucking winging by the right since this virus thing has started. The so-called rugged everybody stands on their own two feet, no such thing as a free lunch no passengers in this world etc etc etc right are there for assistance and handouts until you want to fucking vomit. Every time I hear the news there is some other right-wing prat winging how hard done by they are, and how MUCH better they can do it, or what a stuff up this administration has caused.
The next catch cry is going to be Private Enterprise can do everything SOOOOOO much better than governments and controlling the quarantine is just another one of them. Well if this administration buckles and allows private enterprise to run it. there have to be some strict ground rules. For starters, if any person breaks out of a privately run quarantine, the company running the isolation is instantly fined $100 000 to cover the cost of the police having to apprehend the offender and also creating the risk of spreading the virus in the community.
No private quarantine would be one election platform I'd really like. I'd be furious if they buckled – this is an opportunity to do things so much better for all the rest of us.If there had to be a punishment then I'd have the personal guarantees of all this crowd – any breach they get slung out off the country.
I'd like to think the government is testing public opinion regularly.
I consider $100,000 a very low and therefore "unsuitable fine", because the private company would include this into the costs running the operation.
How about every "business leader", including ex-PM Helen Clark, John Key, that wants to open the borders or a private organisation running the quarantine for economical gains put their bodies where their big mouth is (see newspaper, radio TV etc.)… for each "escape" at least one year prison for the glorious business leaders in case of non-infection, increased to at least five years in case of causing community transmission?
Would be interesting to see how many would still promoting it.
Covid 19 coronavirus: Travellers would not escape quarantine under National, Judith Collins says
…
People would not be escaping quarantine and managed isolation if National was in charge, leader Judith Collins says.
Collins said on Newstalk ZB this morning she had "zero tolerance" for coronavirus, and that Covid-19 "simply would not be allowed in" under her party's watch.
I guess they have snipers shooting escapees? Or National party members patrolling around the facilities.
Oh, and the virus definitely doesn't care about Judith Collins.
You know the only reason Collins wants to spend up large on Wellingtons roads was because of the traffic congestion which made her late for a hair appointment.
Time for some of these peeps to get with the plot.
Actually, I'm quite happy for them to not get the plot and the longer the better. That way they continue to prove that they're last centuries problems just trying to hang on to being relevant and, most importantly, not a solution to today's issues.
Very good idea satty, but I prefer my idea otherwise it will cost us money keeping the parasites in prison unless part of their sentence is that they pay for their own jail time. Good idea though.
…. and put all the returning kiwis in Jucy vans to free up the best hotels for wealthy tourists and students – and the spokesperson for this idea is the Jucy owner.
That actually isn't a bad idea Matiri. We don't want to let prejudice about business blind us to where they can be directly useful in times of crisis like this.
Privately run managed isolation… you mean like quarantining people in private hotels and paying them to manage the day to day issues? Huh, we should have thought of that sooner. /sarcasm
Of course not. She wants a mixture of containers and tents on Sommes Island run jointly by SERCO and MSD and to be able to shoot those who get too sick then bury them in the harbour. One of the most clear-thinking, strategic and pragmatic leaders we’ve ever had.
So the people behind this are the Alpe’s, that’s Jucy. They are most likely in the crap right now.
Key was prompting this a few days ago, wearing which hat, ANZ chair, or his personal interest.
A few questions need to be asked about what’s going on here, and who’s interests are being prompted. It’s looking like a select few before the wider New Zealand
It’s looking like a select few before the wider New Zealand
It is. To manage the population the capitalists need to manage what information that the population is getting and that's the job for the privately owned MSM.
"Why don't we let in rich Americans who want to build a house in New Zealand? Who cares? They're in Mangawhai or somewhere, they are going to create thousands of jobs.
"Why do we care if someone who lives in New York wants to spend $10 million building a house in Auckland, using NZ craftsmen and NZ tradespeople?"
Why do we care if rich Americans put even more pressure on our recourses using scarce tradespeople to build houses that will likely sit empty? Good god John Key is so stupid! It’s no wonder the housing problem became a crisis under his watch. The man is so blinded by his own self-interest that he simply cannot see the bigger picture."
John Key is so full of it. Why would they create thousands of jobs?
I think you'll find that by "houses" Key means "castles" and by "jobs" he means "serfdom". All that mountainous Central Otago landscape isn't going to plough and plant itself with wheat now is it ? — @brettroberts
Someone went to the trouble of actually working out the numbers that Key and pals couldn’t be bothered with. Guess what, it doesn’t add up
OMG, are we impervious to lessons from Victoria? Do we really want a clusterfuck like Melbourne here?
The capitalists want in of the money that the government is spending and, considering that it is a necessary service, they'll be able to low bid to get the job and then ramp up the expenses to make a higher profit.
Think this needs to be viewed in the context of NZs primary economic strategy which exists across parties (and may explain the involvement of the likes of Key and Clark, strange bedfellows indeed)…..growth via population.
Watching Weka scramble around on the Standard trying to beg left wing voters to vote Greens is glorious isn’t it? It’s like Green activists spend 3 years alienating the electorate and then realise months before the election that their woke middle class identity politics virtue signalling hasn’t won them any friends. Surprise, surprise.
Unfair to blame Weka for the Greens seeming woke. Censoring an 80 year old feminist because the alphabet soup tribe claimed she hurt their feelings was a collective idiocy, for which they are still evading moral responsibility. Given enough rope, the Green leftists used it to hang themselves, using the old rationale `if we don't hang together, we'll hang separately. Their belief system did them in – can't blame individuals.
If Labour don’t win an outright majority, the Green negotiating team will need to prioritise the policy they want passed in the first 100 days so they can show voters meaningful change and don’t end up in the same position of barely getting over 5% they are in now. That would require the kind of strategic forward thinking the Greens haven’t managed to show over the last 3 years.
This notion of Bomber’s that any group of leftists are innately capable of strategic thinking seems suspiciously like blind faith. I haven't seen leftists in Aotearoa do it ever, and I've been watching them since the late 1960s.
Fuck Bomber, I'm ex Mana ex Māori Party ex Alliance voting Greens (I did last election too). People like him, Tau Henare, NZ1st & the rabid RWs fearmongering over the Greens just strengthens my resolve.
Me too! And I hope that the Labour part of the coalition is nudged along by some of the Greens policies, in an 'aiming for the moon but might it hit a star' way as part of a consensus….but always the direction is forward.
All Parties in NZ have to be poked with a stick to stick to their supposed goal of doing the best for NZ. I've voted Greens for yonks and mixed with good people, but many tend to be loving of the environment, and looking at people as if they have invaded Eden.
The problem with such lefties is the tendency to spout high-minded stuff about green matters, and follow the latest thought on how to be, but all having different ideas about how those thoughts should be infused in real-life practices. More discussion needed to be done about how, and how practically to reach the established and tabled goals, and just how many ethical barriers should be included or put aside as being too precious. It may be that there is a more pragmatic and robust side to the Greens with Shaw, I hope so.
Bomber is a jackass. So removed from any relevancy he used to have back in the late 1990's and early 2000's as to become more a sideshow than anything serious
A pre moderated blog that lets misogynist comments through from idiots who aren't allowed to post here anymore. Not a great claim to fame for a left leaning blog.
And despite all that really important stuff from a wide range of writers, the true worth of the site is laid bare by what’s permitted under the topics in the comments.
it may surprise you that many blogs are written for readers not commenters. I don't like the commenting policy there either, but plenty of people don't like TS' policy 😉
It doesn't surprise me, why would it? I know the purpose of blogs/media/social pretentiousness etc, yet I still think the moderators allowing posts through underneath topics, like calling you "a bitch", for example, doesn't leave TDB with much left wing credibility, unless you think those readers you're talking about don't view the comments, or it doesn't matter if they do.
If I authored topics there, I'd be pretty vocal about what the moderators are happy to pass under Bradbury's posts. I'd be wondering if they really had a left wing core underneath the important stuff if they let shit like that pass. Maybe some of them will write something and show some lefty credentials.
Next time someone uses the bitch word here I'll be all over it, but I'm not sure if most people don't read the comments, and definitely not convinced that would be enough of an excuse to permit that sort of crap anyway.
Regardless, an interesting editorial position from someone running one of the leading left wing blogs in NZ.
No I was talking about the relevance he used to have which has diminished considerably. But whatever – I don't have enough skin in this game to carry on
I think you might put it more like this John S, that Bomber keeps looking and thinking and remembering that we have come right through the 20th century and mucked it up. He has had to change from what was thought relevant then. Perhaps it is you who are trailing behind in a cloud of exhaust and nostalgia. There is no blame on you if you are as many of us have that problem. But it has to be overcome, so keep those cogs whirring.
The transie crowd then went ahead and cancelled Jill because their feelings got hurt
As a gay man I have no time for the transie crowd calling me tranphobic because I don't see transmen as men. They're not. And for them to try and force me to see them as men, is outright homophobic.
I'm gay because that's what nature decreed. I have no sexual attraction to women. It's very much 100% toward men. A man has a penis. Transmen do not. They may have an imitation penis but at the end of the day, they are still biologically female. All the testosterone pills in the world will not change that fundamental fact of science.
To have transmen decry me as transphobic because I have no sexual attraction to them makes them homophobic by denying my reality. Transmen (and transwomen) are not men or women and shouldn't be so quick to lambast homosexuals because we have no sexual attraction toward them. That's homophobic and denies our biochemical response. I have met transmen, and there's an innate reaction to them and recognition that they're actually female, and not truly male. Pheromones make all the difference.
Trans people can feel who they are, but their current MO of criticising homosexuals as transphobic because we are same sex attracted, is why there is such antipathy in a large section of the gay community towards trans activists. It does appear that the worst activists are straight men who would never themselves, sleep with a transwoman because again, heterosexuality has an element of sexual attraction. A straight man can't have a family with a transwoman unless it's an adopted family. I've never had a definitive answer from any straight male activist as to whether they would sleep with a transwomen, yet some of them have said they would sleep with a transman which just goes to show that if there's a vagina, and not a penis, a straight man really is sexually attracted to the female genitalia, rather than male.
The argument is far more nuanced than the simplistic "transwomen are women" or "transmen are men" argument that is constantly peddled. Of course you can't really have a good discussion about it and explain your viewpoint without activists generally leaping straight to "you're transphobic" rather than appreciate that it's far more complex than they appreciate.
I have a transexual aunty, and I also have transgender friends. I have no problem with them. I do have a problem with activists ignoring the fact that homosexuality is "same sex" and not "same gender" attraction, by and large.
that's a really good explanation of that side of it thanks.
I'll add that the terms 'woman' and 'man' get used differently by different people. Here you clearly use them to mean biological sex. Sometimes people use the terms to mean gender/roles rather than bio sex.
(yep, that's a whole can of worms, just wanted to bring it into the discussion because it's such a sticking point and point of people talking past each other).
The two separate meanings present a massive impediment to public debate. Unfortunately the debating tactic of claiming that, the alternate positions use of the terms imposes unacceptable context on the discussion, is common.
Frequently this extends as far a claiming a biological (scientific) understanding is anti-trans (or in other contexts sexist, racist etc…).
But the only likely outcome when this happens is both sides will talk past each other because their terms are mutually incompatible. Usually this just insulates the two arguments from each other rather than leading to allowing a challenge to either sides positions.
In order to understand how this came about it may be important to consider that post-modern philosophical underpinnings of many of these radical ideas reject both logic and a scientific understanding of the world and instead begin by claiming reality is constructed by some form of widely shared beliefs (also called a social construct). Were this true then it does follow that somebody could/can change sex by imagining it to be so and convincing sufficient others to believe it so.
My observation is that both sides of the war have weaponised semantics, as you say they each use the words their own way when speaking to each other* and as well as making useful communication possible it creates a lot of aggro.
I understand why each side has done that, and the issues are actually complex beneath the semantics, but it's hard to see how any progress can be made while this continues (and I think it will).
*as well as to everyone else, so people coming to the debate fresh end up completely confused. Also, society has historically used the term gender and sex interchangeably so much that now there is a new meaning for gender we don't even have consistent language in law now.
There are some significant problems with the trans movement, that aggressive trans activists (TRAs) tend to gloss over, outlined thoughtfully by J K Rowling.
Yeah, I like the clarity of your analysis too James. I came across this recently:
Third gender, or third sex, is a concept in which individuals are categorized, either by themselves or by society, as neither man nor woman. It is also a social category present in societies that recognize three or more genders. The term third is usually understood to mean "other"; some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth, fifth, and "some" genders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
Quite an eye-opener for me, it was. I had no idea of the deep context documented by professional researchers.
Clearly there's a realistic basis for public policy around urinals: addition of a third option to the traditional binary. Existence of the biological third option defeats the habitual binary when identified in so many diverse cultural contexts & throughout history.
while it makes sense that most straight men won't be bothered, there's a clear conflict between some trans activist politics and women's sex-based rights. My suggestion at this point is, if you are new to this debate, to take a step back and be willing to be on a steep learning curve around gender, sex, and the TA/gender critical feminist war. It's complex, and the clusterfuck of the debate is nothing like I have seen anywhere else in 40+ years of politics. If you are not new, then you already know what I am talking about and your question is a set up.
So early in the morning! Can you keep your edge right till election time? Please – it sharpens the conversation. What sif you don’t like cauliflower, broccoli is very very good for you and greener.
Sewing the seeds of discontent the left uniting is a very unusual occurence .It seems the right have been afflicted badly by the aberration more recently airing their Dirty linen(politics) in public.
Given enough rope, the Green ideological leftists idiots used it to hang themselves, using the old rationale `if we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately. Their belief system did them in – can’t blame individuals.
With my little adaptation in the quote, that is a good description of my views on Bomber and his ilk with their lack of toleration for ideas outside of their MAD silos. Same for those massive numbers of factional warriors in their little in groups on the right or religions or even amongst scientific and academic communities or in whole industries.
Since the 1970s I’ve watched with awe at the ability of a lot of ideologues of many ilks to dance on the head of a pin to gain their own position whereby they can denounce the ideas of others – when I can’t tell the difference between the denounced and the denouncer.
Then there are a pile of people who don’t indulge in point scoring games and who manage to cooperate despite their differences. In politics these tend to form larger political parties. In businesses they form corporations.
The ideological divide that I always see isn’t between left and right, green and free-market, religious (including atheists) and agnostic. But it between the those who can cooperate for the common good and those who find that beneath them.
This notion of Bomber’s that any group of leftists are innately capable of strategic thinking seems suspiciously like blind faith. I haven’t seen leftists in Aotearoa do it ever, and I’ve been watching them since the late 1960s.
Same for any group outside of traditional bureaucrats (who do seem to want to run on rails for decades – but seldom get the chance). For instance, businesses rarely maintain a strategic direction for more than about 3 years unless they are largely controlled by a single person. Infrastructure development and military tend to be better over longer strategic directions, but that is largely because of the length of their purchasing cycles.
The myth of strategic direction by a group is almost an axiom inside any MBA course. You’ll see cost shaving measures happening over longer periods of time – because they provide a continuing economic return. But you seldom see a genuine strategic direction last more than a few years when it isn’t caused by a underlying technology shift. For instance the JIT inventory strategies in the 1980s arising from better computer systems and better distribution links. Of the off-shoring of manufacturing as freight and air links and comms systems improved world wide.Or any number of other management fads that have been shored up by a change in the underlying tech.
But if you look closely at any organisation that is made up of groups of people, what you’ll see is a series of strategies competing, and a awful lot of creative story telling to explain the continuity in quite large shifts in strategic direction over very numbers of years. What you won’t see very often in any coherent strategic directions lasting for a decade or more.
I’d have to say that the Greens and before that Values have been remarkably consistent by comparison. Of course in NZ they have never really had access to sufficient power to start having to protect it. It’d be interesting to see what they’d do with it. Maybe this time
Yes, that's true, your generalised point about ideology & group coherence in relation to social context that is in perennial flux. Consistency and strategy based on it worked better when the pace of change was slower. That pace shift between '60s & '70s made much strategic thinking irrelevant – except at the geopolitical level, where stasis ruled.
The ideological divide that I always see isn’t between left and right, green and free-market, religious (including atheists) and agnostic. But it between the those who can cooperate for the common good and those who find that beneath them.
Because holism transcends binary divides. Focus on common ground is holist by nature – few adopt it as praxis. Focus on the common good inspired us in the early years of the Greens economic policy development. I recall Jeanette Fitzsimons advising us to read this:
For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Substainable Future, H.E. Daly and J.B. Cobb, Jr. 1990.
What Bomber forgets is that aside from silly distractions the Greens are the only party that take the future of NZ seriously, in context of the calamities that are coming. COVID is just the opening act.
Yeah but the question of alien life seems irrelevant to the story about our collapsing ecosystem (I don’t think there are any aliens out there, personally. Musk, Branson, Bezos are going to space and shitting on the Earth)
Everyone is dead and space is terra nullius? Or they learned their lesson and are hiding out in the trees again (metaphorically speaking), minding their own business.
seriously if we are waiting for a party to finally, finally do something other then sign meaning less paper (cause yeah, they are still signing on paper – hopefully recycled) then we are truly doomed.
the change will come when people understand that they have to change.
Sadly the Green Party is no more future orientated then any other Party. They live from election to election and hopefully a paycheck.
Anyone who consideres electric cars a greener option then standard cars cause 'fossil fuel' consumption, while pretending that the mining for lithium is NOT fossil fuel mining is neither green nor the answer to a better life.
So really you want change? Change yourself first, your community next and when the change is so far gone that they various beige suits hanging on the government tit can't refuse to acknowledge that change in the population anymore they will come to the party and not a day early.
But the most ineffective Party pretty much anywhere on this planet has been the Green Party.
referencing Dennis' point above about strategy, it's not possible for any party to do what you want, because most NZers won't vote for such a party. The Greens tread the fine line between what is needed and what is possible. That people like you and Bradbury continue to slag off the Greens is a failure of imagination on your part, which prevents seeing the strategy and most likely who the Greens actually are. Pfft, as if you're the only person that knows that EVs won't save the day and as if people in the GP don't understand cradle to grave. The Green Party cut their teeth on this stuff before you were even thinking about politics, and it's bizarre what prejudices people let blind them to the way out of our current dilemmas.
Yes, personal and then community change is absolutely necessary, but we don't have time to rely on that alone (and again, where is the strategy? It's not like people having been saying what you just said my whole life, it's not enough). The people in parliament are individuals who live in communities too, and many of them want real change.
Lithium production doesn't have to be fossil fuel dependent. That it mostly is at the moment is simply because it's cheaper that way, for now. But there's a bunch of alternative methods to getting the lithium, such as building a geothermal power station and extracting the lithium from the superheated groundwater going through the power station.
Understand its in the process of being scaled up for commercial production. If successful, I assume it could be deployed at other geothermal power stations.
Back in the late 90s/early noughties there was also Pacific Lithium's attempt to extract lithium from seawater here. But I was never sure whether that really was a good faith attempt to build a genuine productive business or just Robin Johannink grifting investors.
if the most ineffective party pretty much anywhere on this planet (hyperbole much?) are the greens, why is so much of what they have been banging on about, now mainstream thinking?I would say, in the BIG picture, the greens have been remarkably successful.
that's quite funny given Bradbury has spent more than three years running round slagging off the Greens, and actively undermining them, every chance he gets.
I'm not a GP activist, but people can call me a green activist. My preference would be that we had MANA and the Mp still in parliament, and others, and then I'd have more to write about.
I'd still be about the strategy though and will argue this with anyone that cares to: if actual lw policy matters, then the Greens have a significantly more lw policy platform than any other major party in this election. Hence the urge to vote for them. My personal political position is probably better described as deep green politics, and the GP are the best chance of us ever getting there.
But in the meantime, fucking climate change blows every other argument and stupid bullshit leftwing bitch fest out of the water.
My personal political position is probably better described as deep green politics, and the GP are the best chance of us ever getting there.
Exactly. I differ from you only on the political positioning required to get there – but I have had to drift with the times on that point recently. National's obduracy withstood the attempt by their progressives to steer their ship more cleverly, so the toxic culture within will defeat consensus politics for a while yet.
What is still missing is economic policy based on the commons. Both the left and right refuse to even think about that, yet it is the essential component for sustainable economics. Permaculture teaches design-based thinking, so I keep expecting it to emerge there. To provide that new design requires invention, so back in the '80s I conceived a synthesis of equity and enterprise as the conceptual basis for progress. Yet even permaculturalists haven't realised that yet. Too imaginal…
As written, as you quoted. Can't see how anyone could simplify further. But if you were fishing for framing to help explain it, I didn't get that far.
Green policy formulation in the first couple of years involved compiling elements deemed essential (UBI & true-cost accounting, for instance, pollution & natural resource taxes plus others). Members suggested & discussed in person when the working group met, policy drafts got amended subsequently by JF & posted to members for further comment. Then the Alliance hit & the process was shelved.
Since I was advocating something radical that hadn't been done before, I don't blame any of the others for being averse to integrating principles from the political left & right. Transcending binary belief systems is never easy.
I tend to view it from a human rights perspective as well as the economic view. Economics is all about efficiency of operations, costs & benefits quantised. When you transcend it via noticing that values are more qualities than quantities, and those drive behaviour more powerfully, then it becomes a question of how stuff gets shared.
By stuff, I mean mostly money & power, of course! So if society incorporates a conceptual framework empowering equity, people get a more equal share as of right. The convergence of legal provision on the principle is usually the structural problem: govts pretend to honour the principle while minimising the amount of provision. You know that.
Democracy allows them to get away with it. If they were bound by a charter of rights that included the provision, and their employment as MPs contracted them to legislate accordingly, public perception of the validity of wealth-sharing would be raised accordingly. People would see their entitlement to wealth-sharing as a human right.
Now the status quo does simulate this situation, since our government endorsed the UN covenant that specifies the several rights to sharing in the economy. Have you read those sections? In theory, our govt is bound to deliver. In practice, the delivery is ever arguable in extent.
So I advise strengthening the left hand side of the synthesis (equity) to reduce the gap between pretence & reality. As for the rhs (enterprise), I've always advised supplementing bau with collective endeavour. Traditional co-ops are a useful model but the operational lack seems to be around education and training: nobody provides! So generations keep passing the opportunity by out of ignorance. Remember Mondragon originated in 1956, yet the model has failed to replicate globally.
How could a working model of successful synthesis of both equity and enterprise fail to replicate? Mass psychology. Leftists promoting working together as an ideal instead of doing it in real life. Centrists being too lazy to think about it. Rightists being too scared to change.
In recent decades I've trended to the view that the paradigm shift required in politics can only get triggered by mass desperation. As we've seen recently, the inertial effect of complacency is even able to withstand a pandemic!
slagging off the Greens, and actively undermining them
Yes, I've noticed that too – I got 'silenced' from his blog for pointing out same. I can't work out what his agenda around that is supposed to be. He's built a small but vociferous army of absolute Green haters; not for anything policy-related, just due to dumb gotcha stuff he hears in the MSM.
I'm guessing some of it is because of his antipathy towards identity politics, which no doubt is in part due to the shit thrown at him by parts of the left over some of his behaviour.
Might be a bad cultural fit issue with the Greens too. He's not the only one that can't get over that.
Brain, perhaps. Since I wrote in support of it as a strategic initiative at the time. However you may recall that the Green movement originated as holistic (non-binary), and I became part of it that year (1968) on that basis, and it became overtly politic with a slogan expressly stating that it was neither right nor left in the early '80s.
Consequently the MoU was a centrist/leftist collaboration. I do understand that anyone in the leftist bubble will be unable to see it as such, of course. Bubble inevitably warp inhabitants away from reality.
So I ought to acknowledge that it was genuine evidence of leftists doing strategic thinking, eh? While simultaneously pointing out that it was a twin-tribe thingy.
"I do understand that anyone in the leftist bubble will be unable to see it as such, of course." Genuinely don’t understand why you would choose to believe that – simply having fun tilting at leftist windmills?
Sometimes absolutist reckons and wind-ups are written with such dismissive authority that gullibile readers might mistake them for facts – IMHO, of course.
One featured a progressive black Dem vs establishment black Dem battle:
Cori Bush, a progressive activist and veteran of the racial justice protest movement, defeated 20-year incumbent Missouri Rep. William Lacy Clay in a Democratic primary on Tuesday, a stunning victory for the party's insurgent left. The US House seat, based in St. Louis, has been held by Clay and his father, former Rep. William Clay Sr., one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, since 1969.
Bush, who challenged Clay in 2018 and lost, was the first candidate launched by Justice Democrats, the progressive group dedicated to toppling moderate Democratic congressional incumbents. "We've been called radicals, terrorists, we've been dismissed as an impossible fringe movement — that's what they called us," Bush said in her victory speech. "But now, we are a multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational, mass movement united in demanding change, in demanding accountability, in demanding that our police, our government, our country recognize that Black lives do, indeed, matter."
Bush's second attempt to unseat Clay, who won in 2018 with 57% of the primary vote, was backed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led group that champions the Green New Deal, and other leftist and progressive leaders, including Jamaal Bowman, who ousted Rep. Eliot Engel in New York during the state's June primary.
"Not me, US," Bush tweeted overnight, after her win was confirmed, echoing Sanders' campaign slogan in 2016 and 2020.
Bulldozer Gerry. Made the Christchurch quakes worse by demolishing everything with no regard for heritage and people's valuable stuff (literal fortunes) in the red zone. Stuffed up the rebuild. Has no regard for airport security.
sometime in the next year, we will all stare into the financial abyss. At that point, we will be well beyond the scope of the previous recession, and we will have either exhausted the remedies that spared the system last time or found that they won’t work this time around. What then?
I was part of the group that structured and sold CDOs and CLOs at Morgan Stanley in the 1990s. The two securities are remarkably alike. Like a CDO, a CLO has multiple layers, which are sold separately. The bottom layer is the riskiest, the top the safest. If just a few of the loans in a CLO default, the bottom layer will suffer a loss and the other layers will remain safe. If the defaults increase, the bottom layer will lose even more, and the pain will start to work its way up the layers.
Readers who are financially literate ought to read the detailed analysis – I'll just copy the sections other readers can comprehend, to illuminate the scenario.
The financial sector isn’t like other sectors. If it fails, fundamental aspects of modern life could fail with it. We could lose the ability to get loans to buy a house or a car, or to pay for college. Without reliable credit, many Americans might struggle to pay for their daily needs.
It is a distasteful fact that the present situation is so dire in part because the banks fell right back into bad behavior after the last crash—taking too many risks, hiding debt in complex instruments and off-balance-sheet entities, and generally exploiting loopholes in laws intended to rein in their greed. Sparing them for a second time this century will be that much harder.
Gabby I am reading Lindsey Davis and her character Falco who is a spy for the leaders, wealthy of Rome and he has to dodge all sorts including people who pop out with knives, like you who pop up to snipe. In the game that my sons spends time on-line, the spy is the one who jumps you from nowhere. It keeps him on his toes so to speak.
They've all been doing it since Reagan came in and said "Government is the problem". Wall St has been rolling back the New Deal and taking over the US government for decades now. A sham of democracy.
"Why don't we let in rich Americans who want to build a house in New Zealand? Who cares? They're in Mangawhai or somewhere, they are going to create thousands of jobs. Why do we care if someone who lives in New York wants to spend $10 million building a house in Auckland, using NZ craftsmen and NZ tradespeople?"
Golfing and tourism resorts built by two American billionaires, including the Tara Iti golf course near Mangawhai, received almost $1 million in wage subsidies between them during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Forget Roger Douglas, Prebs & co, subsidies are socialism at work! It's left/right win/win all over the place! He's reacting to this
The coronavirus pandemic sent the US economy plunging by a record-shattering 32.9 per cent annual rate last quarter
And he's alerting us to a collective gymnastics conundrum, via bad grammar:
Key said central government and the business community needed to be able to rapidly change course as information becomes available, even if such moves were disconcerting. "There is no elegant way of dismount a galloping horse."
Interesting he said Mangawhai. Cos of course he’s a member of the country’s most exclusive golf course there, Tara iti. Which is the cornerstone of a big really pricey real estate development that an American developer is doing.
The UK – It sounds like The Treasury is treating people as pawns again and the Government is playing russian roulette. Britain is heading for an unemployment crisis of Biblical proportions by the end of the year unless the Treasury's policy is torn up very soon. Businesses will start ‘shedding’ jobs rapidly in September as the furlough scheme dials down to 70pc of wages. It will reach a grim crescendo when support stops altogether at the end of October, long before the economy is in any fit state to absorb the army of unemployed.
“It is one of the biggest policy mistakes in modern British history,” said Nobel laureate Chris Pissarides from the London School of Economics.
What should governments be doing. What should the officials be doing, how should they cope with the changing ideas of governments. I may have put this up but it is worth repeating.
Lebanon's cabinet declared a two-week state of emergency in the capital city and handed control of security in the capital to the military following a massive explosion in Beirut that killed at least 135 people and injured 5,000 others.
The explosion on Tuesday sent shockwaves across the city, causing widespread damage as far as the outskirts of Beirut.
Officials said they expect the death toll to rise further as emergency workers dig through the rubble to search for survivors.
Beirut's city governor Marwan Abboud said up to 300,000 people have lost their homes and authorities are working on providing them with food, water and shelter.
Lebanon is in such a bad 'state' that its government can't look after the country properly. Instead they are like the National Party, looking after themselves and their friends, looking for personal advantage instead of managing the country for all the people doing the stodgy, practical things.
Who wants to be first in the world with edgy risky new measures – first being lauded for going naked into the neolib world – Grace Mullane virtually did that, now she is dead. We are vulnerable in our way.
We need to be aware of our vulnerability and keep looking after each other and the country tenaciously. No-one else will do it, we have to do it for ourselves.
There's just a huge crater where the warehouse full of ammonium nitrate once stood. The explosion registered as a M3.3 earthquake. Somewhere around 5% the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
Somewhere around 5% the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
So, approximately 750 ton of TNT equivalent. Really, Little Boy wasn't all that powerful as far as nukes go and you can't really compare the damage of an air-burst nuke to that done by a conventional ground explosion either.
Yeah, I get really irritated when people make senseless comparisons.
Leaving Brexit was an example of totally inadequate simple-majority law unsatisfactory for matters that change the system of the country. It was far different than an election that was part of the system. That decision has left the UK in a political hole it will never climb out of. Tried and true lefties say ' the people voted for it', for lies! They didn't have a clue what perversion of a political ploy they were falling for.
Houses for Ordinary people are The True Real resolve of Kiwis – not Rugby.
The persons who care for New Zealanders are not the Banks. For they exist night and day to squeeze every bit of fiscal Life out of the pockets of ordinary families and persons. Banks are Shylocks in new shirts. Ask Shakespeare.
They have even removed hundreds and thousands of NZeders out of once owned homes, and sold them off into the sweet arms of Landlords.
Landlords, as you know, demand monstrously cruel Rents and laugh at the poor they entrap.
The Wealthy people glutton on, receiving every perk the poor receive. Incredible crazy Gluttony !
The Excessive Land shall be demanded. The required Housing must be built and maintained. The Wealthy have had their fun. Haven't they ?
Else, New Zealand will be the world's laughing stock. Slaves.
All these economic decisions are rational given the market conditions set up by *government* of every stripe since Roger Douglas and his merry band of reverse robin hoods came along in their trojan horse and shafted ordinary kiwis
Unfortunately most of the world has got pulled into the freemarket neolib system and the housing problem is widespread. What to do without pulling the whole house of cards down on our heads? Perhaps we will be like Lebanon.
Or like the UK out of the EU and with huge loans still to repay – however we should remember that they ended up with a huge amount to pay to the USA after WW2 – through their lend-lease agreement etc. It made sense to join the European Common Market after that. Now they have decided to leave and pal up with the individualistic USA, a co-operative world is too common for those moguls, and the UK wants to plunder other pastures no doubt.
I think this may use up my quota of stupid questions for the month, but what happens if say ACT, NZ1 and the Greens all fall just below 5% and none of them win an electorate seat? And at the same time both Labour and National fall below 50% for the party vote?
How does this work in terms of forming a govt? Does Labour have to form a coalition with National?
In that scenario the party votes for those under 5% would be distributed proportionately.
If in the unlikely event Labour got 47% and National 45% Labour would be the government with National nipping at their heels. It would take just one or maybe two by-elections to fall from Labour to National to have a change of government.
If both parties ended up even, then we'd have a hung Parliament after redistribution and face another election.
OT: isn't it amazing that NZ only had one by-election this term when Jonathan Coleman left. Usually there's about 3 or more.
Which is why the Greens policy is preferential voting for both electorates and parties. Helps make sure that the parties that people actually prefer are elected.
Then whichever of Nats or Labour got the most votes gets to form the government. They will divvy up the 120 seats in relative proportion to their party vote. Say it was Labour 48% and Nat 44%, then Labour would get 63 seats (48% vote share*120 seats/92% total qualified non-wasted vote) and the Nats 57 seats (or maybe 62 and 58 depending on how the Sainte Lague formula works it out).
Not a silly question methinks. Could happen, so worth considering. I believe a national unity govt would be the framing deployed. They could also call it neoliberals disunited, eh? Would make fun political posturing a cultural norm until deckchair-arranging began to pall for all, whereupon the attraction of another election (mid-term) would suck their Titanic into an ocean vortex…
I know it deserves a full post in itself, but well done to this government and in particular Ministers Parker and O'Connor for the passage of the gazetting of the National POlicy Statement on Freshwater, National Environmental Standards for Freshwater, regulations on stock exclusion, and regulations on measurement and reporting on lakes and rivers;
The regulations that go into force reasonably quickly from this include:
• Requiring councils to give effect to Te Mana o Te Wai by prioritising the health and wellbeing of our waterways
• Halting further loss of natural wetlands and streams
• Setting higher health standards at swimming spots
• Putting controls on high-risk farm practices such as winter grazing and feedlots
• Setting stricter controls on nitrogen pollution and new bottom lines on other measures of waterway health
• Requiring urban waterways to be cleaned up and new protections for urban streams
• Preserving and restoring the connectivity of New Zealand fish species’ habitats
• Requiring mandatory and enforceable farm environment plans
• Making real-time measuring and reporting of data on water use mandatory.
They've also made special provision for vegetable growing areas which are critical for national supply, such as Pukekohe and the Horowhenua. The acid needs to go on Auckland Horizons councils to clean up these areas, even with the apparent carve-outs.
Looking forward to regional councils actually putting resource into enforcement and prosecution to get the turnaround we need.
I have mentioned that before lockdown and yes, my fear has proven correct. The majority of new unemployment cases are women.
But hey 'shovel' ready jobs are being offered. Billions being poured in shovel ready. 🙂
And women running small businesses to create an income for themselves in a society that gives few fucks of job creation for women can apply for a 'government loan' (fully refundable) or go to Winz for some much needed bullshittery in order to get nothing, cause they may share the home with a bloke aka the 'mealticket'.
I seriously hope that long term Labour will do better then that, but then Labour needs poor people, and poor women are always good to squeeze some more votes about. Right, cause 'we fight for women', and their children. One denied benefit at a time.
Without wanting to sound cynical, is there any actual breakdown analysis on this figure?
What sort of jobs we are talking about etc?
Would imagine the first people that lost their jobs were part timers that are more likely to be female (kids and things) and in hospitality (which basically shut down and is screwed) which is also more likely to be female.
Hospitality jobs, Front of house, waitresses, room maids, house keepers. Retail – all of them and more going due to self ordering and self check outs. All that retail usually also comes with office staff – production staff etc and a lot of those are also women.
So not sure what you are nitpicking about.
But yes, lets ignore the fact thatof 11.000 thousand that went on the dole 10.000 are women. And i would assume that the employment opportunities commissionar got the numbers from Winz.
Also from here a list of companies that shed jobs – Air NZ on top of the list, i would assume that a lot of the ground staff is female, a lot of the on plane staff are female.
Paying care giving jobs a decent wage would likely transfer some into that industry although I know it's not for all.
Getting over stereotypes.
Giving them some priority for courses on driving trucks and ag machinery. When ever I see agricultural areas complaining about lack of labour I think – offer part time hours and get some women trained who are well embedded in the community. Problem solved for the next decade
A lot are hospo I think. So very good argument for not extending any of the under 30 work/travel visa’s as they expire .as a lot of that work is hospo or seasonal.
i totally agree, all these women in their retail, hospitality, air NZ, cruise ship jobs etc should just move somewhere rural, be thaught how to drive a tractor and run a milking machine and all is sorted.
Yeah, right Tui.
10.000 out of 11.000 newly unemployed are women. Or did you miss that with you quick fix of bashing unde 26 year old fruit picking tourists. Mind, these women can get themselv a little camper van, bid farewell to hubby and children and just go fruit picking and sleeping in a dorm. Right? Even better, if they are single mums they can just go fruitpicking and their kids can too, right?
Good fucking grief.
This is why women in this country are among the poorest. Because there are too many that simply don't give a shit about how others do so as long as it affects not them.
Never mind that the Government has yet to actually do anything for women so far. Oh but they won't, right kinder gentler bullshit.
Err I wasn't suggesting anything like fruit picking actually and I am certainly not bashing women. I wanted to be sure that women are considered and taken onto the good number of courses being run at the moment ( and there are apparently airline pilots on some ) that lead to some of the better paid rural jobs – some of which are contracting ( driving grape pickers for example). A lot of these don't require moving to the back blocks but maybe to secondary towns like Nelson, Blenheim, Hastings Palmerston North. – or some of them may even want assistance to get HT licences to drive trucks- which generally seems to be better paid than care giving – funny that. Then there are all the trades courses – generally more women are taking these up – but we do want to make sure that any barriers are dealt with.
So no the "put the kids in the camper van and go somewhere" was not part of my thinking simply an assumption on your part so please don't sledge me about it.
Likewise hospo. Yes I have registered that we are talking about women and yes a large number of jobs seem to be from this industry and the numbers are also I assume locals eligible for welfare. But overall of out total hospo jobs pre covid a very large number (well over 2/3rds seem to be filled with those on short term visa's including the short term travel/work visa's.) There seems to be no reason to grant extensions on these visa's despite petitions and that would not have happened to any great extent pre covid so why do we not try to have locals filling our local hospo jobs? Nothing snide about that .
Do women overall need more support – right across the economy that would be a yes.
Behind a viral photo of a crowded hallway at a high school in Georgia, a potentially dire situation is brewing. Students, teachers, and parents fear the Paulding County school’s rushed reopening plans may be spiraling out of control just two days after students — who said they were told they could face expulsion for remaining home — returned to class despite reports of positive coronavirus cases among students and staff.
North Paulding High School, about an hour outside Atlanta, reopened Monday despite an outbreak among members of its high school football team, many of whom, a Facebook video shows, worked out together in a crowded indoor gym last week as part of a weightlifting fundraiser.
Does anyone know if it's legit for a sitting, albeit leaving MP such as Paula Bennett to be moonlighting for a full week of morning talkback shows on Newshub's Magic Radio especially during election cycle They're already dedicated 24/7 to trying to get the National Party into govt but what part of this and the discussions can be separated from campaign advertising $$?
ha! Huruhuru also means pubic hair. Look Waghorn, rule of thumb, if you're unsure whether naming something from someone elses culture is appropriation or not, maybe don't do it, who needs the headache.
I never write Winston Peters off. I remember the political idiots from National, Act, and the dipshit side of the left doing that in 1999, 2008, 2011, and today.
What those wishful politically dumb numpties forget is three things. He has a constituency for his brand of politic, those people are exactly the right kind of paranoid to ignore pollsters asking them who they’d vote for, and they all vote.
That is why the NZF vote on election days is always higher than virtually all of the polls by a few percent. While the greens is usually lower (lots of non voters there).
About the only thing that might mitigate that long term trend this time is Shane Jones. I am so glad he isn’t Labour any more. He is a real undisciplined pain to have around any political party.
Good probability. He has actually delivered the goodies – unlike the bridges that Bridges promised in a past by-election.
The issue would be if he could figure out how to retain the seat in subsequent elections. Electorate work is a long tedious detailed process of getting down with the distressed in an electorate. It doesn’t lend itself to the big-noting and meaningless rhetoric that Shane Jones is so well known for.
Yes, National's failure to screw over the NZ public as they wished in this case. As they couldn't say that they use personal attacks against Labour/Greens.
Jacinda always speaks in very clear language without ambiguity as she did again today. No umms or ers. Love her or hate her you wont misunderstand her.
Collins seems to jumble her sentences so that the meaning is ambiguous. And Collins spent most of her time today sneering and belittling. (As did Brownlee.)
Grant Robinson is still wedded to the delusional neoclassical/liberal school of economics. Most of Labour are and that is why they can't do the transformation that we need.
Yup, once the MMT lens is understood, it opens up a whole lot of progressive policy choices. These policies under a neoliberal view point are very difficult to justify.
Their billboards read, "Back your Future". With the greatest respect to the NZF voting demographic, their future will mostly have been planned and locked in some time ago.
Last election their billboards read, "Had Enough?"
TL;DR: In today’s ‘six-stack’ of substacks at 6.06pm on Tuesday, March 19:Kāinga Ora’s dry rot The Spinoff DailyBill McKibben on ‘Climate Superfunds’ making Big Oil pay for climate damage The Crucial YearsPreston Mui on returning to 1980s-style productivity growth NoahpinionAndy Boenau on NIMBYs needing unusual bedfellows Urbanism SpeakeasyNed Resnikoff's case ...
Negative yesterday, negative today. Negative all year, according to one departing reader telling me I’ve grown strident and predictable. Fair enough. If it’s any help, every time I go to write about a certain topic that begins with C and ends with arrrrs, I do brace myself and ask: Again? Are ...
Bryce Edwards writes – It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just show a minimal amount of flux in public support ...
Inspirational: The Family of Man is a glorious hymn to human equality, but, more than that, it is a clarion call to human freedom. Because equality, unleavened by liberty, is a broken piano, an unstrung harp; upon which the songs of fraternity will never be played.“Somebody must have been telling lies about ...
Tax Lawyer Barbara Edmonds vs Emperor Justinian I- Nolo Contendere: False historical explanations of pivotal events are very far from being inconsequential.WHEN BARBARA EDMONDS made reference to the Roman Empire, my ears pricked up. It is, lamentably, very rare to hear a politician admit to any kind of familiarity ...
It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just show a minimal amount of flux in public support for the various parties in ...
Buzz from the Beehive Housing Minister Chris Bishop delivered news – packed with the ingredients to enflame political passions – worthy of supplanting Winston Peters in headline writers’ priorities. He popped up at the post-Cabinet press conference to promise a crackdown on unruly and antisocial state housing tenants. His ...
Ele Ludemann writes – The Reserve Bank is advertising for a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion advisor. The Bank has one mandate – to keep inflation between one and three percent. It has failed in that and is only slowly getting inflation back down to the upper limit. Will it ...
Last week former National Party leader Simon Bridges was appointed by the Government as the new chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA). You can read about the appointment in Thomas Coughlan’s article, Simon Bridges to become chair of NZ Transport Agency Waka KotahiThe fact that a ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Last week former National Party leader Simon Bridges was appointed by the Government as the new chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA). You can read about the appointment in Thomas Coughlan’s article, Simon Bridges to become chair of NZ Transport Agency ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read: Gavin Jacobson talks to Thomas Piketty 10 years on from Capital in the 21st CenturyThe SalvoLocal scoop: Green MP’s business being investigated over migrant exploitation claims StuffSteve KilgallonLocal deep-dive: The commercial contractors making money from School ...
It’s a home - but Kāinga Ora tenants accused of “abusing the privilege” may lose it. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The Government announced a crackdown on Kāinga Ora tenants who were unruly and/or behind on their rent, with Housing Minister Chris Bishop saying a place in a state ...
This is a guest post by Connor Sharp of Surface Light Rail Light rail in Auckland: A way forward sooner than you think With the coup de grâce of Auckland Light Rail (ALR) earlier this year, and the shift of the government’s priorities to roads, roads, and more roads, it ...
Note: As a paid-up Webworm member, I’ve recorded this Webworm as a mini-podcast for you as well. Some of you said you liked this option - so I aim to provide it when I get a chance to record! Read more ...
TL;DR: In my ‘six-stack’ of substacks at 6.06pm on Monday, March 18:IKEA is accused of planting big forests in New Zealand to green-wash; REDD-MonitorA City for People takes a well-deserved victory lap over Wellington’s pro-YIMBY District Plan votes; A City for PeopleSteven Anastasiou takes a close look at the sticky ...
Buzz from the Beehive Here’s hoping for a lively post-cabinet press conference when the PM and – perhaps – some of his ministers tell us what was discussed at their meeting today. Until then, Point of Order has precious little Beehive news to report after its latest monitoring of the ...
David Farrar writes – We now have almost all 2023 data in, which has allowed me to update my annual table of how labour went against its promises. This is basically their final report card. The promiseThe result Build 100,000 affordable homes over 10 ...
I’m a bit worried that I’ve started a previous newsletter with the words “just when you think they couldn’t get any worse…” Seems lately that I could begin pretty much every issue with that opening. Such is the nature of our coalition government that they seem to be outdoing each ...
Geoffrey Miller writes – Timing is everything. And from China’s perspective, this week’s visit by its foreign minister to New Zealand could be coming at just the right moment. The visit by Wang Yi to Wellington will be his first since 2017. Anniversaries are important to Beijing. ...
Depictions of Islam in Western popular culture have rarely been positive, even before 9/11. Five years on from the mosque shootings, this is one of the cultural headwinds that the Muslim community has to battle against. Whatever messages of tolerance and inclusion are offered in daylight, much of our culture ...
Last week Transport Minster Simeon Brown and Mayor Wayne Brown opened the new Auckland Rail Operations Centre. The new train control centre will see teams from KiwiRail, Auckland Transport and Auckland One Rail working more closely together to improve train services across the city. The Auckland Rail Operations Centre in ...
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Retiring former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson said in an exit interview with Q+A yesterday the Government can and should sustain more debt to invest in infrastructure for future generations. Elsewhere in the news in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 6:36am: Read more ...
Timing is everything. And from China’s perspective, this week’s visit by its foreign minister to New Zealand could be coming at just the right moment. The visit by Wang Yi to Wellington will be his first since 2017. Anniversaries are important to Beijing. It is more than just a happy ...
TL;DR: The key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to March 18 include:China’s Foreign Minister visiting Wellington today;A post-cabinet news conference this afternoon; the resumption of Parliament on Tuesday for two weeks before Easter;retiring former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson gives his valedictory speech in Parliament; ...
New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters’s state-of-the-nation speech on Sunday was really a state-of-Winston-First speech. He barely mentioned any of the Government’s key policies and could not even wholly endorse its signature income tax cuts. Instead, he rehearsed all of his complaints about the Ardern Government, including an extraordinary claim ...
A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 10, 2024 thru Sat, March 16, 2024. Story of the week This week we'll give you a little glimpse into how we collect links to share and ...
A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 10, 2024 thru Sat, March 16, 2024. Story of the week This week we'll give you a little glimpse into how we collect links to share and ...
“I’ve been internalising a really complicated situation in my head.”When they kept telling us we should wait until we get to know him, were they taking the piss? Was it a case of, if you think this is bad, wait till you get to know the real Christopher, after the ...
Happy fourth anniversary, Pandemic That Upended Bloody Everything. I have been observing it by enjoying my second bout of COVID. It’s 5.30 on Sunday morning and only now are lights turning back on for me.Allow me to copy and paste what I told reader Sara yesterday:Depleted, fogged and crappy. Resting, ...
Happy fourth anniversary, Pandemic That Upended Bloody Everything. I have been observing it by enjoying my second bout of COVID. It’s 5.30 on Sunday morning and only now are lights turning back on for me.Allow me to copy and paste what I told reader Sara yesterday:Depleted, fogged and crappy. Resting, ...
Happy fourth anniversary, Pandemic That Upended Bloody Everything. I have been observing it by enjoying my second bout of COVID. It’s 5.30 on Sunday morning and only now are lights turning back on for me.Allow me to copy and paste what I told reader Sara yesterday:Depleted, fogged and crappy. Resting, ...
.“$10 and a target that bleeds” - Bleeding Targets for Under $10!.Thanks for reading Frankly Speaking ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.This government appears hell-bent on either scrapping life-saving legislation or reintroducing things that - frustrated critics insist - will be dangerous and likely ...
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Subversive & Disruptive Technologies: Just as happened with that other great regulator of the masses, the Medieval Church, the advent of a new and hard-to-control technology – the Internet – is weakening the ties that bind. Then, and now, those who enjoy a monopoly on the dissemination of lies, cannot and will ...
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Bob Edlin writes – And what is the world watching today…? The email newsletter from Associated Press which landed in our mailbox early this morning advised: In the news today: The father of a school shooter has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter; prosecutors in Trump’s hush-money case ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Is another Green MP on their way out? And are the Greens severely tarnished by another integrity scandal? For the second time in three months, the Green Party has secretly suspended an MP over integrity issues. Mystery is surrounding the party’s decision to ...
For the last few years, the Green Party has been the party that has managed to avoid the plague of multiple scandals that have beleaguered other political parties. It appears that their luck has run out with a second scandal which, unfortunately for them, coincided with Golraz Ghahraman, the focus ...
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What seemed a booming success a couple of years ago has collapsed into fraud convictions.I looked at the crash of FTX (short for ‘Futures Exchange’) in November 2022 to see whether it would impact on the financial system as a whole. Fortunately there was barely a ripple, probably because it ...
Anybody following the situation in Ukraine and Russia would probably have been amused by a recent Tweet on X NATO seems to be putting in an awful lot of effort to influence what is, at least according to them, a sham election in an autocracy.When do the Ukrainians go to ...
TL;DR:Shaun Baker on Wynyard Quarter's transformation. Magdalene Taylor on the problem with smart phones. How private equity are now all over reinsurance. Dylan Cleaver on rugby and CTE. Emily Atkin on ‘Big Meat’ looking like ‘Big Oil’.Bernard’s six-stack of substacks at 6pm on March 15Photo by Jeppe Hove Jensen ...
Buzz from the Beehive Finance Minister Nicola Willis had plenty to say when addressing the Auckland Business Chamber on the economic growth that (she tells us) is flagging more than we thought. But the government intends to put new life into it: We want our country to be a ...
The Transport and Infrastructure Committee has reported back on the Road User Charges (Light Electric RUC Vehicles) Amendment Bill, basicly rubberstamping it. While there was widespread support among submitters for the principle that EV and PHEV drivers should pay their fair share for the roads, they also overwhelmingly disagreed with ...
Peter Dunne writes – This week’s government bailout – the fifth in the last eighteen months – of the financially troubled Ruapehu Alpine Lifts company would have pleased many in the central North Island ski industry. The government’s stated rationale for the $7 million funding was that it ...
See if you can spot the difference. An Iranian born female MP from a progressive party is accused of serial shoplifting. Her name is leaked to the media, which goes into a pack frenzy even before the Police launch an … Continue reading → ...
Ele Ludemann writes – The government is omitting general Treaty references from legislation : The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last Government in a bid to get greater coherence in the public service on Treaty ...
What was that judge thinking?Peter Williams writes – That Golriz Ghahraman and District Court Judge Maria Pecotic were once lawyer colleagues is incontrovertible. There is published evidence that they took at least one case to the Court of Appeal together. There was a report on ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read:Climate Scorpion – the sting is in the tail. Introducing planetary solvency. A paper via the University of Exeter’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.Local scoop:Kāinga Ora starts pulling out of its Auckland projects and selling land RNZ ...
Wellington’s massively upzoned District Plan adds the opportunity for tens of thousands of new homes not just in the central city (such as these Webb St new builds) but also close to the CBD and public transport links. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Wellington gave itself the chance of ...
It’s Friday and we’re halfway through March Madness. Here’s some of the things that caught our attention this week. This Week in Greater Auckland On Monday Matt asked how we can get better event trains and an option for grade separating Morningside Dr. On Tuesday Matt looked into ...
Something you might not know about me is that I’m quite a stubborn person. No, really. I don’t much care for criticism I think’s unfair or that I disagree with. Few of us do I suppose.Back when I was a drinker I’d sometimes respond defensively, even angrily. There are things ...
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The five things that mattered in Aotearoa’s political economy that we wrote and spoke about via The Kākā and elsewhere for paying subscribers in the last week included:PM Christopher Luxon said the reversal of interest deductibility for landlords was done to help renters, who ...
It was not so much the Labour Party but really the Chris Hipkins party yesterday at Labour’s caucus retreat in Martinborough. The former Prime Minister was more or less consistent on wealth tax, which he was at best equivocal about, and social insurance, which he was not willing to revisit. ...
Buzz from the BeehiveThe text reproduced above appears on a page which records all the media statements and speeches posted on the government’s official website by Melissa Lee as Minister of Media and Communications and/or by Jenny Marcroft, her Parliamentary Under-secretary. It can be quickly analysed ...
For forty years, Robert Muldoon has been a dirty word in our politics. His style of government was so repulsive and authoritarian that the backlash to it helped set and entrench our constitutional norms. His pig-headedness over forcing through Think Big eventually gave us the RMA, with its participation and ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Is the new government reducing tax on rental properties to benefit landlords or to cut the cost of rents? That’s the big question this week, after Associate Finance Minister David Seymour announced on Sunday that the Government would be reversing the Labour Government’s removal ...
Saudi Arabia is rarely far from the international spotlight. The war in Gaza has brought new scrutiny to Saudi plans to normalise relations with Israel, while the fifth anniversary of the controversial killing of Jamal Khashoggi was marked shortly before the war began on October 7. And as the home ...
Questions need to be asked on both sides of the worldPeter Williams writes – The NRL Judiciary hands down an eight week suspension to Sydney Roosters forward Spencer Leniu , an Auckland-born Samoan, after he calls Ezra Mam, Sydney-orn but of Aboriginal and Torres Strait ...
Ele Ludemann writes – Contrary to what many headlines and news stories are saying, residential landlords are not getting a tax break. The government is simply restoring to them the tax deductibility of interest they had until the previous government removed it. There is no logical reason ...
I can't remember when it was goodMoments of happiness in bloomMaybe I just misunderstoodAll of the love we left behindWatching our flashbacks intertwineMemories I will never findIn spite of whatever you becomeForget that reckless thing turned onI think our lives have just begunI think our lives have just begunDoes anyone ...
Michael Bassett writes – At first reading, a front-page story in the New Zealand Herald on 13 March was bizarre. A group of severely intellectually limited teenagers, with little understanding of the law, have been pleading to the Justice Select Committee not to pass a bill dealing with ram ...
How much political capital is Christopher Luxon willing to burn through in order to deliver his $2.9 billion gift to landlords? Evidently, Luxon is: (a) unable to cost the policy accurately. As Anna Burns-Francis pointed out to him on Breakfast TV, the original ”rock solid” $2.1 billion cost he was ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read:Jonathon Porritt calling bullshit in his own blog post on mainstream climate science as ‘The New Denialism’.Local scoop:The Wellington City Council’s list of proposed changes to the IHP recommendations to be debated later today was leaked this ...
TL;DR:Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said yesterday tenants should be grateful for the reinstatement of interest deductibility because landlords would pass on their lower tax costs in the form of lower rents. That would be true if landlords were regulated monopolies such as Transpower or Auckland Airport1, but they’re not, ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Tom Toro Tom Toro is a cartoonist and author. He has published over 200 cartoons in The New Yorker since 2010. His cartoons appear in Playboy, the Paris Review, the New York Times, American Bystander, and elsewhere. Related: What 10 EV lovers ...
The business section of the NZ Herald is full of opinion. Among the more opinionated of all is the ex-Minister of Transport, ex-Minister of Railways, ex MP for Auckland Central (1975-93, Labour), Wellington Central (1996-99, ACT, then list-2005), ex-leader of the ACT Party, uncle to actor Antonia, the veritable granddaddy ...
Hi,Just quickly — I’m blown away by the stories you’ve shared with me over the last week since I put out the ‘Gary’ podcast, where I told you about the time my friend’s flatmate killed the neighbour.And you keep telling me stories — in the comments section, and in my ...
The first season of Rings of Power was not awful. It was thoroughly underwhelming, yes, and left a lingering sense of disappointment, but it was more expensive mediocrity than catastrophe. I wrote at length about the series as it came out (see the Review section of the blog, and go ...
Buzz from the Beehive Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden told Auckland Business Chamber members they were the first audience to hear her priorities as a minister in a government committed to cutting red tape and regulations. She brandished her liberalising credentials, saying Flexible labour markets are the ...
Chris Trotter writes – TO UNDERSTAND WHY NEWSHUB FAILED, it is necessary to understand how TVNZ changed. Up until 1989, the state broadcaster had been funded by a broadcasting licence fee, collected from every citizen in possession of a television set, supplemented by a relatively modest (compared ...
Bob Edlin writes – The Māori Party has been busy issuing a mix of warnings and threats as its expresses its opposition to interest deductibility for landlords and the plans of seabed miners. It remains to be seen whether they follow the example of indigenous litigants in Australia, ...
Every year, in the Budget, Parliament forks out money to government agencies to do certain things. And every year, as part of the annual review cycle, those agencies are meant to report on whether they have done the things Parliament gave them that money for. Agencies which consistently fail to ...
The Government has accepted Labour’s change to the Road User Charge (RUC) discount for hybrid vehicles, meaning there will still be some incentive for people to buy greener vehicles. ...
Kicking the most vulnerable people out of state housing and pushing them towards homelessness will result in a proliferation of poverty and trauma across our most vulnerable communities. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader and MP for Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi has penned a letter asking MPs to support his members bill to remove GST from all food. The bill is expected to go through its first reading in parliament this Wednesday. “I’m calling on all political parties to support my ...
This year is about getting real with Kiwis and discussing the tough issues, as the National Government exacerbates inequality and divides New Zealand, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said ...
The Government adding Significant Natural Areas (SNAs) to its already roaring environmental policy bonfire is an assault on the future of wildlife that makes Aotearoa unique. ...
After 12 years of fighting to protect our moana we are finding ourselves back at square one and back at court. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency is sitting in Hawera to reconsider an application from Trans-Tasman Resources to dig up 50 million tonnes of the seabed in South Taranaki. This ...
Minister Shane Jones’ decision to step away from a seabed mining project is evidence of the murky waters surrounding the Government’s fast-track legislation. ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The Coalition Government’s miscalculation saga continues as it has forgotten an eyewatering $90 million gap in its interest deductibility cost figures, say Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds and Revenue Spokesperson Deborah Russell. ...
He Pou a Rangi Climate Change Commission has today released advice that says if the Government doesn’t act now New Zealand is at risk of not meeting its climate goals. ...
The Coalition Government has today confirmed it is abandoning first home buyers who are struggling to get ahead, says Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds. ...
The New Zealand public voted for a change in direction at the 2023 general election and that is exactly what this coalition government has been delivering in its first 100 days. There was an immediate focus on the economy, easing the cost of living, cracking down on law and order ...
The Government has left the health system as an afterthought, announcing half-baked targets at the last minute of their 100-day plan, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
Kiwis are still waiting for their promised cost of living support after 100 days of a National Government that is taking us backwards, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The National Government has spent its first 100 days stopping, cutting and reversing. They have scrapped stuff for stuff for the sake of it, without putting up any solutions of their own – and it’s hardworking New Zealanders who will pay for it. ...
100 days of National taking NZ backwardsThe National Government has spent its first 100 days stopping, cutting and reversing. They have scrapped stuff for stuff for the sake of it, without putting up any solutions of their own – and it’s hardworking New Zealanders who will pay for it. ...
The Government must commit to funding free and healthy school lunches, as thousands of people sign the petition to keep them, education spokesperson Jan Tinetti says. ...
If the Government was serious about moving families into public housing, they would build more houses so there is actually somewhere for people to go. ...
The free and healthy school lunches programme feeds our kids, helps them to learn, and saves families money – but it is at risk under this Government, education spokesperson Jan Tinetti said. ...
The Government’s proposed changes to Firearms Prohibition Orders (FPO) add almost nothing new and are merely an attempt to distract from its plans to loosen gun laws, police spokesperson Ginny Andersen and justice spokesperson Dr Duncan Webb said. ...
The great Victorian era English politician Lord Macauley stood in the British House of Parliament and said, "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm".He understood and outlined even way back then, the significant role and influence media have in a democracy. ...
The government’s attack on Māori health this week is committing tangata-whenua to a premature death, says Te Pāti Māori. “The government have begun their onslaught on Māori health with the abolishment of the Māori Health Authority and smokefree laws in the same day” said health spokesperson and co-leader, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. ...
"The Government is moving quickly to realise an additional $46 million in tariff savings in the EU market this season for Kiwi exporters,” Minister for Trade and Agriculture, Todd McClay says. Parliament is set, this week, to complete the final legislative processes required to bring the New Zealand – European ...
New Zealand’s social workers are qualified, experienced, and more representative of the communities they serve, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “I want to acknowledge and applaud New Zealand’s social workers for the hard work they do, providing invaluable support for our most vulnerable. “To coincide with World ...
Cabinet has agreed to a reduced road user charge (RUC) rate for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. Owners of PHEVs will be eligible for a reduced rate of $38 per 1,000km once all light electric vehicles (EVs) move into the RUC system from 1 April. ...
Minister of Agriculture and Trade, Todd McClay, says that today’s opening of Riverland Foods manufacturing plant in Christchurch is a great example of how trade access to overseas markets creates jobs in New Zealand. Speaking at the official opening of this state-of-the-art pet food factory the Minister noted that exports ...
Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Wellington today. “It was a pleasure to host Foreign Minister Wang Yi during his first official visit to New Zealand since 2017. Our discussions were wide-ranging and enabled engagement on many facets of New Zealand’s relationship with China, including trade, ...
Kāinga Ora – Homes & Communities has been instructed to end the Sustaining Tenancies Framework and take stronger measures against persistent antisocial behaviour by tenants, says Housing Minister Chris Bishop. “Earlier today Finance Minister Nicola Willis and I sent an interim Letter of Expectations to the Board of Kāinga Ora. ...
Tēna koutou katoa. Greetings everyone. Thank you to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and the Honourable Simon Bridges for hosting this address today. I acknowledge the business leaders in this room, the leaders and governors, the employers, the entrepreneurs, the investors, and the wealth creators. The coalition Government shares your ...
Minister Winston Peters completed the final leg of his visit to South and South East Asia in Singapore today, where he focused on enhancing one of New Zealand’s indispensable strategic partnerships. “Singapore is our most important defence partner in South East Asia, our fourth-largest trading partner and a ...
Minister of Internal Affairs and Workplace Relations and Safety, Hon. Brooke van Velden, will travel to the Republic of Korea to represent New Zealand at the Third Summit for Democracy on 18 March. The summit, hosted by the Republic of Korea, was first convened by the United States in 2021, ...
ICNZ Speech 7 March 2024, Auckland Acknowledgements and opening Mōrena, ngā mihi nui. Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Nor Whanganui aho. Good morning, it’s a privilege to be here to open the ICNZ annual conference, thank you to Mark for the Mihi Whakatau My thanks to Tim Grafton for inviting me ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Lead Coordination Minister Judith Collins have expressed their deepest sympathy on the five-year anniversary of the Christchurch terror attacks. “March 15, 2019, was a day when families, communities and the country came together both in sorrow and solidarity,” Mr Luxon says. “Today we pay our respects to the 51 shuhada ...
Speech for Financial Advice NZ Conference 5 March 2024 Acknowledgements and opening Morena, Nga Mihi Nui. Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Nor Whanganui aho. Thanks Nate for your Mihi Whakatau Good morning. It’s a pleasure to formally open your conference this morning. What a lovely day in Wellington, What a great ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters held discussions in Jakarta today about the future of relations between New Zealand and South East Asia’s most populous country. “We are in Jakarta so early in our new government’s term to reflect the huge importance we place on our relationship with Indonesia and South ...
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters has announced that the Foreign Minister of China, Wang Yi, will visit New Zealand next week. “We look forward to re-engaging with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and discussing the full breadth of the bilateral relationship, which is one of New Zealand’s ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has today opened the new Auckland Rail Operations Centre, which will bring together KiwiRail, Auckland Transport, and Auckland One Rail to improve service reliability for Aucklanders. “The recent train disruptions in Auckland have highlighted how important it is KiwiRail and Auckland’s rail agencies work together to ...
The Government is proud to support the 10th edition of Crankworx Rotorua as the Crankworx World Tour returns to Rotorua from 16-24 March 2024, says Minister for Economic Development Melissa Lee. “Over the past 10 years as Crankworx Rotorua has grown, so too have the economic and social benefits that ...
Legislation implementing coalition Government tax commitments and addressing long-standing tax anomalies will be progressed in Parliament next week, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The legislation is contained in an Amendment Paper to the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill issued today. “The Amendment Paper represents ...
Associate Environment Minister Andrew Hoggard has today announced that the Government has agreed to suspend the requirement for councils to comply with the Significant Natural Areas (SNA) provisions of the National Policy Statement for Indigenous Biodiversity for three years, while it replaces the Resource Management Act (RMA).“As it stands, SNAs ...
Agriculture Minister Todd McClay has classified the drought conditions in the Marlborough, Tasman, and Nelson districts as a medium-scale adverse event, acknowledging the challenging conditions facing farmers and growers in the district. “Parts of Marlborough, Tasman, and Nelson districts are in the grip of an intense dry spell. I know ...
The Government is helping farmers eradicate the significant impact of facial eczema (FE) in pastoral animals, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced. “A $20 million partnership jointly funded by Beef + Lamb NZ, the Government, and the primary sector will save farmers an estimated NZD$332 million per year, and aims to ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has completed a successful visit to India, saying it was an important step in taking the relationship between the two countries to the next level. “We have laid a strong foundation for the Coalition Government’s priority of enhancing New Zealand-India relations to generate significant future benefit for both countries,” says Mr Peters, ...
Cabinet has agreed to provide $7 million to ensure the 2024 ski season can go ahead on the Whakapapa ski field in the central North Island but has told the operator Ruapehu Alpine Lifts it is the last financial support it will receive from taxpayers. Cabinet also agreed to provide ...
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says the launch of a new mobile breast screening unit in Counties Manukau reinforces the coalition Government’s commitment to drive better cancer services for all New Zealanders. Speaking at the launch of the new mobile clinic, Dr Reti says it’s a great example of taking ...
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says the launch of a new mobile breast screening unit in Counties Manukau reinforces the coalition Government’s commitment to drive better cancer services for all New Zealanders. Speaking at the launch of the new mobile clinic, Dr Reti says it’s a great example of taking ...
Unlocking economic growth and land for housing are critical elements of the Government’s plan for our transport network, and planned upgrades to State Highway 29 (SH29) near Tauriko will deliver strongly on those priorities, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “The SH29 upgrades near Tauriko will improve safety at the intersections ...
Unlocking economic growth and land for housing are critical elements of the Government’s plan for our transport network, and planned upgrades to State Highway 29 (SH29) near Tauriko will deliver strongly on those priorities, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “The SH29 upgrades near Tauriko will improve safety at the intersections ...
Lower fruit and vegetable prices are welcome news for New Zealanders who have been doing it tough at the supermarket, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. Stats NZ reported today the price of fruit and vegetables has dropped 9.3 percent in the 12 months to February 2024. “Lower fruit and vege ...
Tēnā koutou katoa and greetings to you all. Chair, I am honoured to address the sixty-eighth session of the Commission on the Status of Women. I acknowledge the many crises impacting the rights of women and girls. Heightened global tensions, war, climate related and humanitarian disasters, and price inflation all ...
Tēnā koutou katoa and greetings to you all. Chair, I am honoured to address the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. I acknowledge the many crises impacting the rights of women and girls. Heightened global tensions, war, climate related and humanitarian disasters, and price inflation all ...
The coalition Government is supporting farmers to enhance land management practices by investing $3.3 million in locally led catchment groups, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced. “Farmers and growers deliver significant prosperity for New Zealand and it’s vital their ongoing efforts to improve land management practices and water quality are supported,” ...
Good evening everyone and thank you for that lovely introduction. Thank you also to the Honourable Simon Bridges for the invitation to address your members. Since being sworn in, this coalition Government has hit the ground running with our 100-day plan, delivering the changes that New Zealanders expect of us. ...
Recommendations from the Climate Change Commission for New Zealand on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) auction and unit limit settings for the next five years have been tabled in Parliament, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. “The Commission provides advice on the ETS annually. This is the third time the ...
The coalition Government is beginning its fight to lower building costs and reduce red tape by exempting minor building work from paying the building levy, says Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk. “Currently, any building project worth $20,444 including GST or more is subject to the building levy which is ...
Proposed changes to tax legislation to prevent the over-taxation of low-earning trusts are welcome, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The changes have been recommended by Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee following consideration of submissions on the Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill. “One of the ...
Assalaamu alaikum. السَّلَام عليكم In light of the holy month of Ramadan, I want to extend my warmest wishes to our Muslim community in New Zealand. Ramadan is a time for spiritual reflection, renewed devotion, perseverance, generosity, and forgiveness. It’s a time to strengthen our bonds and appreciate the diversity ...
Former Transport Minister and CEO of the Auckland Business Chamber Hon Simon Bridges has been appointed as the new Board Chair of the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) for a three-year term, Transport Minister Simeon Brown announced today. “Simon brings extensive experience and knowledge in transport policy and governance to the role. He will ...
Good morning all, it is a pleasure to be here as Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology. It is fantastic to see how connected and collaborative the life science and biotechnology industry is here in New Zealand. I would like to thank BioTechNZ and NZTech for the invitation to address ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says he is looking forward to the day when three key water projects in Northland are up and running, unlocking the full potential of land in the region. Mr Jones attended a community event at the site of the Otawere reservoir near Kerikeri on Friday. ...
Associate Finance Minister David Seymour has today announced that the Government has agreed to restore deductibility for mortgage interest on residential investment properties. “Help is on the way for landlords and renters alike. The Government’s restoration of interest deductibility will ease pressure on rents and simplify the tax code,” says ...
Sport and Recreation Minister Chris Bishop will travel to Switzerland today to attend an Executive Committee meeting and Symposium of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Mr Bishop will then travel on to London where he will attend a series of meetings in his capacity as Infrastructure Minister. “New Zealanders believe ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Lupton, SHARP Professor, Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Centre, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, UNSW Sydney kitzcorner/Shutterstock The assertion from Queensland’s chief health officer John Gerrard that ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University Shutterstock Why are musicians so keen to get played on the radio? It can’t be because of the money. In Australia they are paid at rates so low they ...
"Farmers make a point not to tell our urban cousins how to live, yet Chlöe from central Auckland is hell-bent on having her say about farmers," says ACT Rural Communities spokesman Mark Cameron. “On her first day in the House as Green ...
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards – Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards. It’s been a tumultuous time in politics in recent months, as the new National-led Government has driven through its “First 100 Day programme”. During this period there’s been a handful of opinion polls, which overall just ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Curran, Associate Professor of Ecology, Lincoln University, New Zealand Getty Images/Gerald Corsi In the latest move to reform environmental laws in New Zealand, the coalition government has introduced a bill to fast-track consenting processes for projects deemed to ...
Uber has argued it does not have as much control over drivers as the unions suggest, and wants a judgment ruling that drivers are employees and not contractors set aside and sent back to the Employment Court. The 2022 ruling followed a three-week hearing in which four drivers sought to ...
What can and can’t be purchased by disabled people or their carers has been slashed in an effort by the Ministry of Disabled People Whaikaha to save money. The purchasing guidelines, a set of rules that sets out what can be purchased using the various streams of Government disability funding, ...
The Treasury has published today a new Analytical Note by Tod Wright and Hien Nguyen, Fiscal incidence in New Zealand: The effects of taxes and benefits on household incomes in tax year 2018/19 . Analyses of the distributional impact of taxation and government ...
The Treasury has published today a new Analytical Note by Cory Davis, Boston Hart and Benjamin Stubbing, Household cost-of-living impacts from the Emissions Trading Scheme and using transfers to mitigate regressive outcomes . This Analytical Note ...
A coalition of public transport and climate organisations, united as ‘Transport for All’, is actively opposing the government’s transport proposals. The draft Government Policy Statement (GPS) includes plans for higher fares for public transport, ...
Greater Wellington is inviting feedback on proposed changes to its Revenue and Financing Policy. The Revenue and Financing Policy covers the Council’s various sources of funding, and how the cost of services is shared across the region. This includes ...
Labour has conceded it could have done more to deal with disruptive state housing tenants while in government but says the current coalition is going too far. ...
The band has asked their record label to issue a cease and desist to stop the NZ First leader using their 1997 hit to support his ‘misguided political views’. “I get knocked down, but I get up again,” blared through the speakers on Sunday as Winston Peters took the stage ...
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist Food rationing is underway in remote areas in Papua New Guinea’s Highlands following torrential rain and flash flooding. More than 20 people have been reported dead in Chimbu Province. In nearby Enga Province, the centre of last month’s massacre, a 15-year-old boy has been ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Hughes, Lecturer, Research School of Management, Australian National University After months of debate and intrigue, the AFL’s 19th and newest team, the Tasmania Devils, finally launched its jumper, logo and colours in Devonport this week. The Devils will wear green, ...
Brannavan Gnanalingam reviews the debut novel by Saraid de Silva.One of the most baffling things for children who move to a new country is what their parents’ (or grandparents’) lives were like prior to moving – for kids in particular, they’re too busy trying to fit in in their ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Gaunson, Associate Professor in Cinema Studies, RMIT University Narelle Portanier/Binge “If you don’t know who your mob are, you don’t know who you are,” Detective Andrea “Andie” Whitford (played by Leah Purcell) is told early into the new crime ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Klein, Associate professor, Australian National University It’s commonly accepted that women do the vast majority of caregiving in Australian society. But less appreciated is that Indigenous women do larger amounts of unpaid care than any other group. Working with the Aboriginal ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne Joe Biden and Donald Trump have both secured their parties’ nominations for the November 5 United States general election by winning a ...
Comment: There has been a striking contrast in trans-Tasman interest about Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi’s visit to New Zealand and Australia. While the Australian press has been full of articles about the visit – including his curious decision to meet with former prime minister and China booster Paul Keating ...
After years of pressuring banks and other institutions to stop investing in fossil fuels, climate campaigners are making some progress. So how does divestment work?For years, climate activists have been pushing banks and other big institutions to divest from fossil fuels. New research from climate advocacy group 350 Aotearoa ...
For Boba, Ethan and Ashley, K-pop is a place to belong, a way to express themselves, and a bridge to connect with others. The three young Polynesians are part of a K-pop fan community in Tāmaki Makaurau. It’s one of many that have sprung up worldwide as K-pop has gone ...
For Boba, Ethan and Ashley, K-pop is a place to belong, a way to express themselves, and a bridge to connect with others. This one-off documentary presents three intimate portraits of young Polynesians who are pulled into a Korean cultural phenomenon. K-POLYS is directed by Litia Tuiburelevu, Produced by Hex ...
There’s ample evidence demonstrating free school lunch programmes provide wide benefits across schools, households and communities according to public health researchers. ACT Minister David Seymour wants to reduce the spending on Aotearoa New Zealand’s ...
By Wata Shaw in Suva Fiji is facing an exodus of Fijians as many are leaving for overseas seeking employment and education and others are migrating, says Opposition MP Viliame Naupoto. Speaking in Parliament, he said: “His Excellency’s speech (Ratu Wiliame Katonivere) comes after a little over one year of ...
The Taxpayers’ Union is welcoming comments from Christopher Luxon this morning recommitting to ‘no new taxes’ as part of Budget 2024. “Mr Luxon’s refusal at the Post-Cabinet press conference yesterday to repeat the ‘no new taxes’ promise ...
SAFE is urgently calling on the Environment Committee to reject the Government’s Fast-Track Approvals Bill, and is urging New Zealanders to rally behind the call. The proposed Bill, currently under consideration with the Environment select committee, ...
Teammates who spend all their time picking fights with spectators are only helpful for the other team, writes Madeleine Chapman. Anyone who has ever played a team sport competitively, particularly as a child and particularly, for some reason, basketball, will know that there’s a lot of politics involved. While there ...
The long-running Wellington music festival is too focused on the Jim Beam-ness and not enough on the Homegrown-ness.There is something about Homegrown that’s difficult to place. A barely perceptible-ness. Like feeling a ghost is watching you from the corner of the room but when you look, there’s nothing there. ...
The latest Ipsos New Zealand Issues Monitor reveals that fewer New Zealanders believe crime / law and order is one of the top issues facing our country. In 2018, Ipsos New Zealand started tracking the key issues facing New Zealand. In this wave ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Griffiths, Deputy Program Director, Budgets and Government, Grattan Institute Australia’s political donations rules are woefully inadequate, but donations reform is finally on the agenda. The federal government has signalled its interest in reform and will soon begin briefing MPs on its ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Patrick Taylor, Chief Environmental Scientist, EPA Victoria; Honorary Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University Naiyana Somchitkaeo/Shutterstock A recent study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has linked microplastics with risk to human health. The study ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Albert Van Dijk, Professor, Water and Landscape Dynamics, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University Global climate records were shattered in 2023, from air and sea temperatures to sea-level rise and sea-ice extent. Scores of countries recorded their hottest year ...
As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a teacher explains why he and his partner are in frugal mode – and how they’re making it work. Gender: Male Age: 35Ethnicity: Pākehā Role: I am an intermediate school teacher and my partner is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Bendall, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University Binge Mary & George, the new British television drama series, depicts the real-life story of Mary Villiers and her son George, and their social climbing at the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Nassios, Associate Professor, Centre of Policy Studies, Victoria University This article is part of The Conversation’s series examining the housing crisis. Read the other articles in the series here. Australian state and federal governments spend money in many ways to ...
The finance minister is denying that there’s a $5.6b shortfall in paying for the government’s campaign promises, including tax cuts. At his post-cabinet press conference yesterday, the PM refused to rule out new taxes to pay for the cuts, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s ...
Kāinga Ora tenants abused by their neighbours are doubting the government's crackdown on disruptive tenants will make a difference on their behaviour. ...
Kāinga Ora is New Zealand’s biggest residential landlord, housing more than 180,000 vulnerable people in more than 67,000 properties. Yesterday the government announced a crackdown on its tenants who fall behind on rent. One longtime Kāinga Ora tenant shares her experience.For 18 years I lived in a 1960s standalone ...
Why does this myth persist, and what’s the real reason our skin is suffering?It’s one of the biggest international grievances New Zealanders hold, up there with the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and 1981’s underarm incident. We’re quick to tell international travellers that the world’s pollution led to the ...
Bob’s relationship with certain members of Lincoln’s academic staff continued to deteriorate in the 1990s. Others supported him publicly, though articles such as Roland Clark’s 1993 piece in Growing Today cannot have pleased the university management. Clark wrote that Bob was selling onions from the Biological Husbandry Unit to a ...
SailGP’s races feature in-your-face action, with agile, hydro-foiling catamarans tacking and jibing for the title over several days. However, public comments ahead of the global series’ return to New Zealand have left this past year’s controversy in the shadows, as a key appointment attracts criticism from dolphin advocates. A year ...
Opinion: We are fast approaching a fundamental change in prisons. As the number of people on custodial remand looks set to overtake the number of sentenced prisoners, the main function of prisons in New Zealand may become incarcerating un-sentenced people who may not be guilty of offending. We have already ...
A huge seven months lies in store for the White Ferns, beginning this week with the visit of England and culminating with the T20 World Cup in Bangladesh in September and October. Starting on Tuesday in Dunedin, the world ranked No. 2 visitors will play five T20s and three ODIs, ...
Opinion: In a move that has shocked road safety advocates across the country, the new Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, is poised to abandon the previous government’s speed limit reduction policy, particularly around schools. Even more alarmingly, he wants school speed limits to be variable rather than full-time, arguing ...
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Loading…(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){var ql=document.querySelectorAll('A[quiz],DIV[quiz],A[data-quiz],DIV[data-quiz]'); if(ql){if(ql.length){for(var k=0;k<ql.length;k++){ql[k].id='quiz-embed-'+k;ql[k].href="javascript:var i=document.getElementById('quiz-embed-"+k+"');try{qz.startQuiz(i)}catch(e){i.start=1;i.style.cursor='wait';i.style.opacity='0.5'};void(0);"}}};i['QP']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','https://take.quiz-maker.com/3012/CDN/quiz-embed-v1.js','qp'); Got a good quiz question?Send Newsroom your questions. The post Newsroom daily quiz, Tuesday 19 March appeared first on Newsroom. ...
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Just heard on the 6am news there’s a push for privately managed isolation facilities.
OMG, are we impervious to lessons from Victoria? Do we really want a clusterfuck like Melbourne here?
The government may not be perfect in its management of quarantine, but if a problem arises they can throw money at it. A private firm will inevitably cut corners to make more profit.
Keep capitalism far away from our boarder protection management – please!
SERCO – they've got form!
We need a quarantine island so people can't escape
Dunedin has an island literally named "quarantine island". Most harbours with islands plonked quarantine facilities on one of them.
It was one of those things that was routine before antibiotics and vaccines.
Yep, the richies want to be in charge / making profit while the rest of us take all the risks and get "jobs jobs jobs" (at minimum wage, zero-hours, no security and be grateful for it you miserable peasants)
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/422856/covid-19-business-leaders-push-for-privately-run-managed-isolation
So they want to bring in their rich mates supposedly to fix the economy? Well after 30 odd years of this stuff the bulk of the population could barely fund themselves for a 4 week stay at home – so as far as I am concerned its a failed idea and they can get stuffed. Just like private quarantine is a failed idea.
Why does the news media give so much time to just 20 people – when they are like this one.Deplatform them. Why on earth did he get one of the quarantine spaces after not bothering to be here for 2 decades.
Among them was Pooj Prenna, who recently returned to New Zealand with his family, after 20 years overseas.
And why does Helen Clark continue to want to be associated with these people. She's starting to look like Tony Blair- can't some one have a word with her.
And Prenna after 20 years out of the country and not bothering he comes back and gets an invitation to the forum and starts to tell the rest of us what to do. Well lets tax him on his worldwide interests. (appears to be a silicon valley capitalist)
Because they're rich.
She may have been principled when she opposed the purchase of the Airforce strike fighters but since then she's been in government where had to collude with business to get anything done. Basically, she's drunk the cool-aid that its business that does things and not government.
Yeah I get the rich bit – but there's more of us than them and we are the one's that are gunna vote. And since the rich have done little for the masses these last 30 years we certainly aren't going to be much poorer if we ignore them now or preferably charge them some real high taxes.
And ignore them we should.
Actually the taxes should be the push back. All reporters should ask these over entitled bods if they are willing to stump up more in taxes.
And as I say regardless of how much kool aid Helen has drunk she needs to stop making the life of the current labour party more difficult. She is being used by these righties as cover for the hard right agenda behind their views.
So Key and co would like to make money out of isolation and quarantine? (Never waste a crisis..Right!!)
Where is their billion dollars each insurance against failure?(No insurance against a pandemic usually, and we don't want Private collection of Profits and Public paying for failures)
Which hospitals will be used if and when they let the virus in? Private?/Public???
Would they charge people to use their hospitals?
Whose country do they plan to poach Doctors and Nurses from?
Where will they obtain their testing kits PPE and general staff?
We see you John Key.. You go plank.
Never waste a crises, there's profits to be had with no downside. Risk is all on us !
Yeah, agree with that 100%. I have never ever heard so much fucking winging by the right since this virus thing has started. The so-called rugged everybody stands on their own two feet, no such thing as a free lunch no passengers in this world etc etc etc right are there for assistance and handouts until you want to fucking vomit. Every time I hear the news there is some other right-wing prat winging how hard done by they are, and how MUCH better they can do it, or what a stuff up this administration has caused.
The next catch cry is going to be Private Enterprise can do everything SOOOOOO much better than governments and controlling the quarantine is just another one of them. Well if this administration buckles and allows private enterprise to run it. there have to be some strict ground rules. For starters, if any person breaks out of a privately run quarantine, the company running the isolation is instantly fined $100 000 to cover the cost of the police having to apprehend the offender and also creating the risk of spreading the virus in the community.
No private quarantine would be one election platform I'd really like. I'd be furious if they buckled – this is an opportunity to do things so much better for all the rest of us.If there had to be a punishment then I'd have the personal guarantees of all this crowd – any breach they get slung out off the country.
I'd like to think the government is testing public opinion regularly.
+100%
I consider $100,000 a very low and therefore "unsuitable fine", because the private company would include this into the costs running the operation.
How about every "business leader", including ex-PM Helen Clark, John Key, that wants to open the borders or a private organisation running the quarantine for economical gains put their bodies where their big mouth is (see newspaper, radio TV etc.)… for each "escape" at least one year prison for the glorious business leaders in case of non-infection, increased to at least five years in case of causing community transmission?
Would be interesting to see how many would still promoting it.
Just saw this article (NZ Herald):
I guess they have snipers shooting escapees? Or National party members patrolling around the facilities.
Oh, and the virus definitely doesn't care about Judith Collins.
Geez Nobody escapes when judith is in charge!!
Remember when she was in charge of prisons.
Thing is, as soon as someone did escape, Collins would be spouting excuses left, right and centre for the private enterprise that did a worse job.
Is she going to chain them to the walls?
Before or after turning central wellington into a motorway?
There's a quiet revolution going on out here. Time for some of these peeps to get with the plot.
You know the only reason Collins wants to spend up large on Wellingtons roads was because of the traffic congestion which made her late for a hair appointment.
she gets her hair done????…man they need to be fired.
Actually, I'm quite happy for them to not get the plot and the longer the better. That way they continue to prove that they're last centuries problems just trying to hang on to being relevant and, most importantly, not a solution to today's issues.
Answer to satty @1.3.1.2
Very good idea satty, but I prefer my idea otherwise it will cost us money keeping the parasites in prison unless part of their sentence is that they pay for their own jail time. Good idea though.
So right 1000%
…. and put all the returning kiwis in Jucy vans to free up the best hotels for wealthy tourists and students – and the spokesperson for this idea is the Jucy owner.
[Fixed error in user name]
[Fixed error in user name]
That actually isn't a bad idea Matiri. We don't want to let prejudice about business blind us to where they can be directly useful in times of crisis like this.
It's a terrible idea.
MPs, insulated from the failures of neoliberalism by comfortable remuneration, are able to imagine it is something other than an abject failure.
Privately run managed isolation… you mean like quarantining people in private hotels and paying them to manage the day to day issues? Huh, we should have thought of that sooner. /sarcasm
(from @yortw)
Has Helen offered her rentals as isolation facilities?
Why don't you ask her?
Would she tell me?
Of course not. She wants a mixture of containers and tents on Sommes Island run jointly by SERCO and MSD and to be able to shoot those who get too sick then bury them in the harbour. One of the most clear-thinking, strategic and pragmatic leaders we’ve ever had.
Right o…..
So the people behind this are the Alpe’s, that’s Jucy. They are most likely in the crap right now.
Key was prompting this a few days ago, wearing which hat, ANZ chair, or his personal interest.
A few questions need to be asked about what’s going on here, and who’s interests are being prompted. It’s looking like a select few before the wider New Zealand
It is. To manage the population the capitalists need to manage what information that the population is getting and that's the job for the privately owned MSM.
"
Why do we care if rich Americans put even more pressure on our recourses using scarce tradespeople to build houses that will likely sit empty? Good god John Key is so stupid! It’s no wonder the housing problem became a crisis under his watch. The man is so blinded by his own self-interest that he simply cannot see the bigger picture."
http://thejackalman.blogspot.com/2020/08/key-is-fool.html
John Key is so full of it. Why would they create thousands of jobs?
I think you'll find that by "houses" Key means "castles" and by "jobs" he means "serfdom". All that mountainous Central Otago landscape isn't going to plough and plant itself with wheat now is it ? — @brettroberts
Someone went to the trouble of actually working out the numbers that Key and pals couldn’t be bothered with. Guess what, it doesn’t add up
https://twitter.com/clintvsmith/status/1291132437460742144?s=21
The capitalists want in of the money that the government is spending and, considering that it is a necessary service, they'll be able to low bid to get the job and then ramp up the expenses to make a higher profit.
Vulture capitalists always have an eye for a bargain. An old person falling over is an opportunity to nick their wallet while they are distracted.
An economy on the rocks means it’s time to
stealprivatise assets at fire sale pricesHow do you get share in Serco, how much each? Or Black hawk done or whatever predator is around when people get shut away for a time.
Roblogic sees things so clearly that it must be through the eyes of a child. Better get sunglasses for protection robl…
“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.“ Mt 10:16
Think this needs to be viewed in the context of NZs primary economic strategy which exists across parties (and may explain the involvement of the likes of Key and Clark, strange bedfellows indeed)…..growth via population.
He's being provocative, but does pose an interesting question: "what sort of Green Party does a Labour majority Government want?"
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2020/08/05/what-green-party-does-a-labour-majority-government-want/
Unfair to blame Weka for the Greens seeming woke. Censoring an 80 year old feminist because the alphabet soup tribe claimed she hurt their feelings was a collective idiocy, for which they are still evading moral responsibility. Given enough rope, the Green leftists used it to hang themselves, using the old rationale `if we don't hang together, we'll hang separately. Their belief system did them in – can't blame individuals.
This notion of Bomber’s that any group of leftists are innately capable of strategic thinking seems suspiciously like blind faith. I haven't seen leftists in Aotearoa do it ever, and I've been watching them since the late 1960s.
Fuck Bomber, I'm ex Mana ex Māori Party ex Alliance voting Greens (I did last election too). People like him, Tau Henare, NZ1st & the rabid RWs fearmongering over the Greens just strengthens my resolve.
Right there with you on that. (although I've always voted Green the sentiment is the same).
I'll be giving my party vote to the Greens this election because I want them to be part of the government. Red and Green like Christmas
Me too! And I hope that the Labour part of the coalition is nudged along by some of the Greens policies, in an 'aiming for the moon but might it hit a star' way as part of a consensus….but always the direction is forward.
All Parties in NZ have to be poked with a stick to stick to their supposed goal of doing the best for NZ. I've voted Greens for yonks and mixed with good people, but many tend to be loving of the environment, and looking at people as if they have invaded Eden.
The problem with such lefties is the tendency to spout high-minded stuff about green matters, and follow the latest thought on how to be, but all having different ideas about how those thoughts should be infused in real-life practices. More discussion needed to be done about how, and how practically to reach the established and tabled goals, and just how many ethical barriers should be included or put aside as being too precious. It may be that there is a more pragmatic and robust side to the Greens with Shaw, I hope so.
Bomber is a jackass. So removed from any relevancy he used to have back in the late 1990's and early 2000's as to become more a sideshow than anything serious
He runs one of the two largest left wing blogs in NZ.
A pre moderated blog that lets misogynist comments through from idiots who aren't allowed to post here anymore. Not a great claim to fame for a left leaning blog.
they have a wide range of writers, some of whom are covering really important stuff.
And despite all that really important stuff from a wide range of writers, the true worth of the site is laid bare by what’s permitted under the topics in the comments.
it may surprise you that many blogs are written for readers not commenters. I don't like the commenting policy there either, but plenty of people don't like TS' policy 😉
It doesn't surprise me, why would it? I know the purpose of blogs/media/social pretentiousness etc, yet I still think the moderators allowing posts through underneath topics, like calling you "a bitch", for example, doesn't leave TDB with much left wing credibility, unless you think those readers you're talking about don't view the comments, or it doesn't matter if they do.
If I authored topics there, I'd be pretty vocal about what the moderators are happy to pass under Bradbury's posts. I'd be wondering if they really had a left wing core underneath the important stuff if they let shit like that pass. Maybe some of them will write something and show some lefty credentials.
most readers don't read the comments.
I have zero interesting in a slanging match with TDB. Plenty of problems on TS around issues for women btw, if you want to dig into that.
Next time someone uses the bitch word here I'll be all over it, but I'm not sure if most people don't read the comments, and definitely not convinced that would be enough of an excuse to permit that sort of crap anyway.
Regardless, an interesting editorial position from someone running one of the leading left wing blogs in NZ.
Yeah he used to have TV shows, be on panels etc etc.
Now he just runs an echo chamber of a blog.
… and hangs out with Damien Grant.
what are TDB’s reader stats like?
No idea
so you just want to slag him off? Whatever you don't like about him, it doesn't make sense to say TDB has no validity or relevance.
No, I am talking about his relative relevance.
yes, you said he is irrelevant, and I pointed out that he runs one of the largest lw blogs in NZ.
No I was talking about the relevance he used to have which has diminished considerably. But whatever – I don't have enough skin in this game to carry on
I think you might put it more like this John S, that Bomber keeps looking and thinking and remembering that we have come right through the 20th century and mucked it up. He has had to change from what was thought relevant then. Perhaps it is you who are trailing behind in a cloud of exhaust and nostalgia. There is no blame on you if you are as many of us have that problem. But it has to be overcome, so keep those cogs whirring.
More mischief making from a media flogging their narrative.
My how fearful some are of the potential for significant change.
Who’s the “80 year old feminist” and who “censored” her? Who makes up this BS?
Jill Abigail wrote this
The transie crowd then went ahead and cancelled Jill because their feelings got hurt
As a gay man I have no time for the transie crowd calling me tranphobic because I don't see transmen as men. They're not. And for them to try and force me to see them as men, is outright homophobic.
http://www.google.com/amp/s/lesbian-rights-nz.org/2019/09/02/the-feminist-article-the-green-party-has-banned/amp/
Do you care that much if someone wants to be called "man" "woman" or whatever? As a straight man I couldn't care less what people want to be called.
That's likely why your viewpoint differs to mine.
I'm gay because that's what nature decreed. I have no sexual attraction to women. It's very much 100% toward men. A man has a penis. Transmen do not. They may have an imitation penis but at the end of the day, they are still biologically female. All the testosterone pills in the world will not change that fundamental fact of science.
To have transmen decry me as transphobic because I have no sexual attraction to them makes them homophobic by denying my reality. Transmen (and transwomen) are not men or women and shouldn't be so quick to lambast homosexuals because we have no sexual attraction toward them. That's homophobic and denies our biochemical response. I have met transmen, and there's an innate reaction to them and recognition that they're actually female, and not truly male. Pheromones make all the difference.
Trans people can feel who they are, but their current MO of criticising homosexuals as transphobic because we are same sex attracted, is why there is such antipathy in a large section of the gay community towards trans activists. It does appear that the worst activists are straight men who would never themselves, sleep with a transwoman because again, heterosexuality has an element of sexual attraction. A straight man can't have a family with a transwoman unless it's an adopted family. I've never had a definitive answer from any straight male activist as to whether they would sleep with a transwomen, yet some of them have said they would sleep with a transman which just goes to show that if there's a vagina, and not a penis, a straight man really is sexually attracted to the female genitalia, rather than male.
The argument is far more nuanced than the simplistic "transwomen are women" or "transmen are men" argument that is constantly peddled. Of course you can't really have a good discussion about it and explain your viewpoint without activists generally leaping straight to "you're transphobic" rather than appreciate that it's far more complex than they appreciate.
I have a transexual aunty, and I also have transgender friends. I have no problem with them. I do have a problem with activists ignoring the fact that homosexuality is "same sex" and not "same gender" attraction, by and large.
that's a really good explanation of that side of it thanks.
I'll add that the terms 'woman' and 'man' get used differently by different people. Here you clearly use them to mean biological sex. Sometimes people use the terms to mean gender/roles rather than bio sex.
(yep, that's a whole can of worms, just wanted to bring it into the discussion because it's such a sticking point and point of people talking past each other).
The two separate meanings present a massive impediment to public debate. Unfortunately the debating tactic of claiming that, the alternate positions use of the terms imposes unacceptable context on the discussion, is common.
Frequently this extends as far a claiming a biological (scientific) understanding is anti-trans (or in other contexts sexist, racist etc…).
But the only likely outcome when this happens is both sides will talk past each other because their terms are mutually incompatible. Usually this just insulates the two arguments from each other rather than leading to allowing a challenge to either sides positions.
In order to understand how this came about it may be important to consider that post-modern philosophical underpinnings of many of these radical ideas reject both logic and a scientific understanding of the world and instead begin by claiming reality is constructed by some form of widely shared beliefs (also called a social construct). Were this true then it does follow that somebody could/can change sex by imagining it to be so and convincing sufficient others to believe it so.
My observation is that both sides of the war have weaponised semantics, as you say they each use the words their own way when speaking to each other* and as well as making useful communication possible it creates a lot of aggro.
I understand why each side has done that, and the issues are actually complex beneath the semantics, but it's hard to see how any progress can be made while this continues (and I think it will).
*as well as to everyone else, so people coming to the debate fresh end up completely confused. Also, society has historically used the term gender and sex interchangeably so much that now there is a new meaning for gender we don't even have consistent language in law now.
There are some significant problems with the trans movement, that aggressive trans activists (TRAs) tend to gloss over, outlined thoughtfully by J K Rowling.
That is thoughtful… and very disturbing.
Yeah, I like the clarity of your analysis too James. I came across this recently:
Quite an eye-opener for me, it was. I had no idea of the deep context documented by professional researchers.
Clearly there's a realistic basis for public policy around urinals: addition of a third option to the traditional binary. Existence of the biological third option defeats the habitual binary when identified in so many diverse cultural contexts & throughout history.
I have a gay son, and relate so much to what you had to say. Thanks.
while it makes sense that most straight men won't be bothered, there's a clear conflict between some trans activist politics and women's sex-based rights. My suggestion at this point is, if you are new to this debate, to take a step back and be willing to be on a steep learning curve around gender, sex, and the TA/gender critical feminist war. It's complex, and the clusterfuck of the debate is nothing like I have seen anywhere else in 40+ years of politics. If you are not new, then you already know what I am talking about and your question is a set up.
Thanks. Thats the first time I heard about the story of the GP from a reasonable source.
“What is the difference between leftists and cannibals? “Cannibals don’t eat their friends.”
Attributed to Lyndon Johnson
Greens eat greens.
Those salad days are in the past.
life is but a melon, cauliflower
So early in the morning! Can you keep your edge right till election time? Please – it sharpens the conversation. What sif you don’t like cauliflower, broccoli is very very good for you and greener.
"vegetable rights and peace!"
— Neil, the Young Ones
I won’t dare telling you how to suck egg because I’d end eating humble pie.
Sewing the seeds of discontent the left uniting is a very unusual occurence .It seems the right have been afflicted badly by the aberration more recently airing their Dirty linen(politics) in public.
With my little adaptation in the quote, that is a good description of my views on Bomber and his ilk with their lack of toleration for ideas outside of their MAD silos. Same for those massive numbers of factional warriors in their little in groups on the right or religions or even amongst scientific and academic communities or in whole industries.
Since the 1970s I’ve watched with awe at the ability of a lot of ideologues of many ilks to dance on the head of a pin to gain their own position whereby they can denounce the ideas of others – when I can’t tell the difference between the denounced and the denouncer.
Then there are a pile of people who don’t indulge in point scoring games and who manage to cooperate despite their differences. In politics these tend to form larger political parties. In businesses they form corporations.
The ideological divide that I always see isn’t between left and right, green and free-market, religious (including atheists) and agnostic. But it between the those who can cooperate for the common good and those who find that beneath them.
Same for any group outside of traditional bureaucrats (who do seem to want to run on rails for decades – but seldom get the chance). For instance, businesses rarely maintain a strategic direction for more than about 3 years unless they are largely controlled by a single person. Infrastructure development and military tend to be better over longer strategic directions, but that is largely because of the length of their purchasing cycles.
The myth of strategic direction by a group is almost an axiom inside any MBA course. You’ll see cost shaving measures happening over longer periods of time – because they provide a continuing economic return. But you seldom see a genuine strategic direction last more than a few years when it isn’t caused by a underlying technology shift. For instance the JIT inventory strategies in the 1980s arising from better computer systems and better distribution links. Of the off-shoring of manufacturing as freight and air links and comms systems improved world wide.Or any number of other management fads that have been shored up by a change in the underlying tech.
But if you look closely at any organisation that is made up of groups of people, what you’ll see is a series of strategies competing, and a awful lot of creative story telling to explain the continuity in quite large shifts in strategic direction over very numbers of years. What you won’t see very often in any coherent strategic directions lasting for a decade or more.
I’d have to say that the Greens and before that Values have been remarkably consistent by comparison. Of course in NZ they have never really had access to sufficient power to start having to protect it. It’d be interesting to see what they’d do with it. Maybe this time
Then there are a pile of people who don’t indulge in point scoring games and who manage to cooperate despite their differences.
Probably most of what I've typed here in the past five years or more, has an underlying motivation that could be summarised in that one sentence.
Effective political operators are not about 'winning or losing', but on achieving useful gains that everyone can live with.
QFT
When I see either of those terms, a red flag goes up immediately. Same with “right” and “wrong”.
Yes, that's true, your generalised point about ideology & group coherence in relation to social context that is in perennial flux. Consistency and strategy based on it worked better when the pace of change was slower. That pace shift between '60s & '70s made much strategic thinking irrelevant – except at the geopolitical level, where stasis ruled.
The ideological divide that I always see isn’t between left and right, green and free-market, religious (including atheists) and agnostic. But it between the those who can cooperate for the common good and those who find that beneath them.
Because holism transcends binary divides. Focus on common ground is holist by nature – few adopt it as praxis. Focus on the common good inspired us in the early years of the Greens economic policy development. I recall Jeanette Fitzsimons advising us to read this:
For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Substainable Future, H.E. Daly and J.B. Cobb, Jr. 1990.
The notion is ancient & eternal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_good
Professor Reich brought it up to date a couple of years ago. I haven't watched this talk he gave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNLOdRMgaDY
but here's the book… https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564303/the-common-good-by-robert-b-reich/
What Bomber forgets is that aside from silly distractions the Greens are the only party that take the future of NZ seriously, in context of the calamities that are coming. COVID is just the opening act.
https://twitter.com/hyperbolicTom/status/1289331671578243072?s=20
Did you read the bit about Fermi's Paradox, roblogic?
Yeah but the question of alien life seems irrelevant to the story about our collapsing ecosystem (I don’t think there are any aliens out there, personally. Musk, Branson, Bezos are going to space and shitting on the Earth)
Everyone is dead and space is terra nullius? Or they learned their lesson and are hiding out in the trees again (metaphorically speaking), minding their own business.
yep. It's the old left, who have tagged the environment on to their politics but still don't really get it.
seriously if we are waiting for a party to finally, finally do something other then sign meaning less paper (cause yeah, they are still signing on paper – hopefully recycled) then we are truly doomed.
the change will come when people understand that they have to change.
Sadly the Green Party is no more future orientated then any other Party. They live from election to election and hopefully a paycheck.
Anyone who consideres electric cars a greener option then standard cars cause 'fossil fuel' consumption, while pretending that the mining for lithium is NOT fossil fuel mining is neither green nor the answer to a better life.
So really you want change? Change yourself first, your community next and when the change is so far gone that they various beige suits hanging on the government tit can't refuse to acknowledge that change in the population anymore they will come to the party and not a day early.
But the most ineffective Party pretty much anywhere on this planet has been the Green Party.
It isn't easy being Green.
https://youtu.be/rRZ-IxZ46ng
referencing Dennis' point above about strategy, it's not possible for any party to do what you want, because most NZers won't vote for such a party. The Greens tread the fine line between what is needed and what is possible. That people like you and Bradbury continue to slag off the Greens is a failure of imagination on your part, which prevents seeing the strategy and most likely who the Greens actually are. Pfft, as if you're the only person that knows that EVs won't save the day and as if people in the GP don't understand cradle to grave. The Green Party cut their teeth on this stuff before you were even thinking about politics, and it's bizarre what prejudices people let blind them to the way out of our current dilemmas.
Yes, personal and then community change is absolutely necessary, but we don't have time to rely on that alone (and again, where is the strategy? It's not like people having been saying what you just said my whole life, it's not enough). The people in parliament are individuals who live in communities too, and many of them want real change.
no substantial change will happen until shit hits the fan…..
best we keep preparing then.
Lithium production doesn't have to be fossil fuel dependent. That it mostly is at the moment is simply because it's cheaper that way, for now. But there's a bunch of alternative methods to getting the lithium, such as building a geothermal power station and extracting the lithium from the superheated groundwater going through the power station.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/04/vulcan-is-a-step-closer-to-net-zero-carbon-lithium-production/
Li from geothermal fluid is being done in the lab in NZ (in conjunction with silica extraction at Ohaaki).
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/117664525/taup-company-successfully-extracts-lithium-from-geothermal-fluid
Understand its in the process of being scaled up for commercial production. If successful, I assume it could be deployed at other geothermal power stations.
Back in the late 90s/early noughties there was also Pacific Lithium's attempt to extract lithium from seawater here. But I was never sure whether that really was a good faith attempt to build a genuine productive business or just Robin Johannink grifting investors.
if the most ineffective party pretty much anywhere on this planet (hyperbole much?) are the greens, why is so much of what they have been banging on about, now mainstream thinking?I would say, in the BIG picture, the greens have been remarkably successful.
that's quite funny given Bradbury has spent more than three years running round slagging off the Greens, and actively undermining them, every chance he gets.
I'm not a GP activist, but people can call me a green activist. My preference would be that we had MANA and the Mp still in parliament, and others, and then I'd have more to write about.
I'd still be about the strategy though and will argue this with anyone that cares to: if actual lw policy matters, then the Greens have a significantly more lw policy platform than any other major party in this election. Hence the urge to vote for them. My personal political position is probably better described as deep green politics, and the GP are the best chance of us ever getting there.
But in the meantime, fucking climate change blows every other argument and stupid bullshit leftwing bitch fest out of the water.
Oh really?
Yep I'm gonna party vote green even tho the id politics stuff is annoying. Their policies are proper left and they take CC seriously.
(unfortunately I'm in epsom & also have to swallow a dead rat (goldsmith) this election to try and get rid of ACT)
My personal political position is probably better described as deep green politics, and the GP are the best chance of us ever getting there.
Exactly. I differ from you only on the political positioning required to get there – but I have had to drift with the times on that point recently. National's obduracy withstood the attempt by their progressives to steer their ship more cleverly, so the toxic culture within will defeat consensus politics for a while yet.
What is still missing is economic policy based on the commons. Both the left and right refuse to even think about that, yet it is the essential component for sustainable economics. Permaculture teaches design-based thinking, so I keep expecting it to emerge there. To provide that new design requires invention, so back in the '80s I conceived a synthesis of equity and enterprise as the conceptual basis for progress. Yet even permaculturalists haven't realised that yet. Too imaginal…
What was the simplest way you worked out to describe it?
As written, as you quoted. Can't see how anyone could simplify further. But if you were fishing for framing to help explain it, I didn't get that far.
Green policy formulation in the first couple of years involved compiling elements deemed essential (UBI & true-cost accounting, for instance, pollution & natural resource taxes plus others). Members suggested & discussed in person when the working group met, policy drafts got amended subsequently by JF & posted to members for further comment. Then the Alliance hit & the process was shelved.
Since I was advocating something radical that hadn't been done before, I don't blame any of the others for being averse to integrating principles from the political left & right. Transcending binary belief systems is never easy.
Smaller words might help.
"economic policy based on the commons."
Can you please talk about that a bit more?
Guillotines?
I tend to view it from a human rights perspective as well as the economic view. Economics is all about efficiency of operations, costs & benefits quantised. When you transcend it via noticing that values are more qualities than quantities, and those drive behaviour more powerfully, then it becomes a question of how stuff gets shared.
By stuff, I mean mostly money & power, of course! So if society incorporates a conceptual framework empowering equity, people get a more equal share as of right. The convergence of legal provision on the principle is usually the structural problem: govts pretend to honour the principle while minimising the amount of provision. You know that.
Democracy allows them to get away with it. If they were bound by a charter of rights that included the provision, and their employment as MPs contracted them to legislate accordingly, public perception of the validity of wealth-sharing would be raised accordingly. People would see their entitlement to wealth-sharing as a human right.
Now the status quo does simulate this situation, since our government endorsed the UN covenant that specifies the several rights to sharing in the economy. Have you read those sections? In theory, our govt is bound to deliver. In practice, the delivery is ever arguable in extent.
So I advise strengthening the left hand side of the synthesis (equity) to reduce the gap between pretence & reality. As for the rhs (enterprise), I've always advised supplementing bau with collective endeavour. Traditional co-ops are a useful model but the operational lack seems to be around education and training: nobody provides! So generations keep passing the opportunity by out of ignorance. Remember Mondragon originated in 1956, yet the model has failed to replicate globally.
How could a working model of successful synthesis of both equity and enterprise fail to replicate? Mass psychology. Leftists promoting working together as an ideal instead of doing it in real life. Centrists being too lazy to think about it. Rightists being too scared to change.
In recent decades I've trended to the view that the paradigm shift required in politics can only get triggered by mass desperation. As we've seen recently, the inertial effect of complacency is even able to withstand a pandemic!
Yes, I've noticed that too – I got 'silenced' from his blog for pointing out same. I can't work out what his agenda around that is supposed to be. He's built a small but vociferous army of absolute Green haters; not for anything policy-related, just due to dumb gotcha stuff he hears in the MSM.
I'm guessing some of it is because of his antipathy towards identity politics, which no doubt is in part due to the shit thrown at him by parts of the left over some of his behaviour.
Might be a bad cultural fit issue with the Greens too. He's not the only one that can't get over that.
NZ examples of leftist strategic thinking exist, e.g. the 2016 Labour/Green MoU. Is it your eyesight or your brain that’s letting you down?
Brain, perhaps. Since I wrote in support of it as a strategic initiative at the time. However you may recall that the Green movement originated as holistic (non-binary), and I became part of it that year (1968) on that basis, and it became overtly politic with a slogan expressly stating that it was neither right nor left in the early '80s.
Consequently the MoU was a centrist/leftist collaboration. I do understand that anyone in the leftist bubble will be unable to see it as such, of course. Bubble inevitably warp inhabitants away from reality.
So I ought to acknowledge that it was genuine evidence of leftists doing strategic thinking, eh? While simultaneously pointing out that it was a twin-tribe thingy.
Sometimes absolutist reckons and wind-ups are written with such dismissive authority that gullibile readers might mistake them for facts – IMHO, of course.
CNN has a review of several primaries here: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/05/politics/primary-results-takeaways-august-4/index.html
One featured a progressive black Dem vs establishment black Dem battle:
Good, the Clays sound like the yanker version of monarchy.
Thats a huge win.
I remember her taking on Clay in the doco Knock Down The House.
Perseverance paid off.
I see a Newshub headline on my device this morning. Looks like National's put its policy out : something about Collins saying Ardern is 'weak.'
I don’t think that Collins attacking Ardern directly is going to be much of a vote winner. It will just be to get the base worked up.
Collins "Ardern is weak, the successful Covid response is because of Bloomfield"
Brownlee "Bloomfield is scaremongering, what does he know that he isn't telling us!!!"
Key "Open the borders"
Clarke "Privatise quarantine"
Hosking "Don't get tested, freedom!!!"
Bomber "Greens are scary"
etc…
What he is telling us Gerry is that he knows what you fuckers are capable of.
What Gerry is also saying is "aren't you guys lucky I'm nowhere near the controls of power", indeed we are Gerry, and very thankful.
Bulldozer Gerry. Made the Christchurch quakes worse by demolishing everything with no regard for heritage and people's valuable stuff (literal fortunes) in the red zone. Stuffed up the rebuild. Has no regard for airport security.
https://twitter.com/TryRadicalism/status/1290746244805976064?s=20
A capitalist examines the prospects of system crash: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/coronavirus-banks-collapse/612247/
Readers who are financially literate ought to read the detailed analysis – I'll just copy the sections other readers can comprehend, to illuminate the scenario.
Incomprehensible, especially the last two sections.
Playing dumb, eh? Yet clever enough to have postponed it until the danger of being selected as a Labour list candidate is safely past. 😏
It’s official, you’re talking gibberish. No wonder I cannot parse 84.3 ± 0.9% (95% CI) of your comments.
That's not a flash suit you're wearing, those tailors put one over on you.
Gabby I am reading Lindsey Davis and her character Falco who is a spy for the leaders, wealthy of Rome and he has to dodge all sorts including people who pop out with knives, like you who pop up to snipe. In the game that my sons spends time on-line, the spy is the one who jumps you from nowhere. It keeps him on his toes so to speak.
Still, we shouldn't criticise the private sector for proposing campervans as acceptable accommodation.
Trump rolled back all the laws enacted by the Obama admin.
So ponzi schemes , huge bonuses for bankers etc all the worst banking practices have been allowed to flourish to levels much worse than the GFC.
They've all been doing it since Reagan came in and said "Government is the problem". Wall St has been rolling back the New Deal and taking over the US government for decades now. A sham of democracy.
Dark knight gives Nats economic policy: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=12354064
Forget Roger Douglas, Prebs & co, subsidies are socialism at work! It's left/right win/win all over the place! He's reacting to this
And he's alerting us to a collective gymnastics conundrum, via bad grammar:
Key should fuck off to Hawaii, easier to suck up to rich Americans over there.
https://twitter.com/alans_world/status/1291071252791046144?s=20
Interesting he said Mangawhai. Cos of course he’s a member of the country’s most exclusive golf course there, Tara iti. Which is the cornerstone of a big really pricey real estate development that an American developer is doing.
Covid-19 is upsetting all and WTF – politicians are starting to resign in droves as it's not worth the money, too much stress, just too hard./sarc?
It is quite alarming, Sweden has had a stable level of Covid-19 cases, but to no avail economically. The last quarter was down 8.9% as their trading partners aren't up to trading. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/08/05/sweden-suffers-record-plunge-despite-lighter-lockdown/
The UK – It sounds like The Treasury is treating people as pawns again and the Government is playing russian roulette.
Britain is heading for an unemployment crisis of Biblical proportions by the end of the year unless the Treasury's policy is torn up very soon.
Businesses will start ‘shedding’ jobs rapidly in September as the furlough scheme dials down to 70pc of wages. It will reach a grim crescendo when support stops altogether at the end of October, long before the economy is in any fit state to absorb the army of unemployed.
“It is one of the biggest policy mistakes in modern British history,” said Nobel laureate Chris Pissarides from the London School of Economics.
Only half of the 9.6 million furlough jobs have so far come back. There must be a high risk that premature fiscal tightening will abort the recovery and lead to bitter social conflict, spelling the political death of this Government.…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/08/05/economic-consequences-mr-sunak/
Yet – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/05/bbc-spends-38-million-call-centres-staff-chase-over-75s-licence/
What should governments be doing. What should the officials be doing, how should they cope with the changing ideas of governments. I may have put this up but it is worth repeating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIYfiRyPi3o
*fuck*
https://twitter.com/cnni/status/1291033723471663104
Lebanon's cabinet declared a two-week state of emergency in the capital city and handed control of security in the capital to the military following a massive explosion in Beirut that killed at least 135 people and injured 5,000 others.
The explosion on Tuesday sent shockwaves across the city, causing widespread damage as far as the outskirts of Beirut.
Officials said they expect the death toll to rise further as emergency workers dig through the rubble to search for survivors.
Beirut's city governor Marwan Abboud said up to 300,000 people have lost their homes and authorities are working on providing them with food, water and shelter.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/lebanon-eyes-state-emergency-deadly-beirut-blast-live-200804234925493.html
I hope Jacinda urgently demands a review of the fertiliser stockpiles around NZ.
We tend to put fertiliser works out of town because they have a habit of blowing up. This isn’t the first one to go up, with similar consequences
The Oklahoma city bomber was horribly effective with just 3 tons of the stuff. Beirut had 2,700 tons.
This one was a ship in port, 581 fatalities when 2000 tonne went up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster
This one was a fert plant a few year ago, fortunately out of town but a good bang Still killed 15 on site
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explosion
Lebanon is in such a bad 'state' that its government can't look after the country properly. Instead they are like the National Party, looking after themselves and their friends, looking for personal advantage instead of managing the country for all the people doing the stodgy, practical things.
Nov.2019 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-protests-causes-explainer/explainer-why-is-lebanon-in-an-economic-and-political-mess-idUSKBN1XG260
Skyscrapers towering over the city landscape. I wonder who owns those? https://www.focus-economics.com/countries/lebanon
15/7 More money is not the answer to Lebanon's troubles : Any financial aid to Lebanon should be tied to a material commitment by its elites to undertake long-needed reforms. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/money-answer-lebanon-troubles-200714113658835.html
3/8 Beware of the looming chaos in the Middle East : The region in 2020 is in much worse shape than in 2010. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/beware-looming-chaos-middle-east-200803042230463.html
And we have the USA setting us up – rocket launching aiming at where?
Unmanned AI driven aircraft developed by USA Boston interests – why here? https://nelsonweekly.co.nz/2020/08/no-pilots-no-problem/
https://newzealand.ai/insights/a-new-partnership-will-create-a-strong-ai-community-in-nelson
https://newzealand.ai/
Who wants to be first in the world with edgy risky new measures – first being lauded for going naked into the neolib world – Grace Mullane virtually did that, now she is dead. We are vulnerable in our way.
We need to be aware of our vulnerability and keep looking after each other and the country tenaciously. No-one else will do it, we have to do it for ourselves.
A little stirring music from Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie with banjos!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcbqCssiBUc
that demolished grain silo held 85% of the countries stock pile. It is going to be a hard winter for the Lebanese.
the levels of disability resulting from that are mindblowing too.
There's just a huge crater where the warehouse full of ammonium nitrate once stood. The explosion registered as a M3.3 earthquake. Somewhere around 5% the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
2700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate in ONE place..
Frigging hell. Good thing that the explosion itself would have disrupted the explosion going full on.
What were they thinking? That is just daft piling all of that in a warehouse.
We stored that smelting byproduct in a flood-prone area by the Mataura River.
Probably find the ammonium nitrate in the warehouse was "temporary" when they confiscated it, but never got the funding to move or dispose of it…
Yeah – there is never anything as permanent as a temporary solution.
So, approximately 750 ton of TNT equivalent. Really, Little Boy wasn't all that powerful as far as nukes go and you can't really compare the damage of an air-burst nuke to that done by a conventional ground explosion either.
Yeah, I get really irritated when people make senseless comparisons.
Brexit in a nutshell.
https://twitter.com/MPIainDS/status/1290292769089626114
https://twitter.com/TheNewEuropean/status/1290971014487322624
Q. What was the winning margin of that indicative, not conclusive, vote on Brexit?
A. Leave 17,410,742 – 51.89% Remain 16,141,241 – 48.11% Turnout of registered voters 72.21%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum
Leaving Brexit was an example of totally inadequate simple-majority law unsatisfactory for matters that change the system of the country. It was far different than an election that was part of the system. That decision has left the UK in a political hole it will never climb out of. Tried and true lefties say ' the people voted for it', for lies! They didn't have a clue what perversion of a political ploy they were falling for.
It needed a 55% or 60% super majority, or there should have been a confirmatory referendum once people had more information on the outcome.
The Liberal Democrats fucked it up big time by attacking Corbyn rather than joining with him in his stance.
Cameron was a fool to commission the referendum…but a genius compared with Boris.
Brexiters continually went on about 17 million people wanted the outcome without saying once that 16 million didn't.
Houses for Ordinary people are The True Real resolve of Kiwis – not Rugby.
The persons who care for New Zealanders are not the Banks. For they exist night and day to squeeze every bit of fiscal Life out of the pockets of ordinary families and persons. Banks are Shylocks in new shirts. Ask Shakespeare.
They have even removed hundreds and thousands of NZeders out of once owned homes, and sold them off into the sweet arms of Landlords.
Landlords, as you know, demand monstrously cruel Rents and laugh at the poor they entrap.
The Wealthy people glutton on, receiving every perk the poor receive. Incredible crazy Gluttony !
The Excessive Land shall be demanded. The required Housing must be built and maintained. The Wealthy have had their fun. Haven't they ?
Else, New Zealand will be the world's laughing stock. Slaves.
All these economic decisions are rational given the market conditions set up by *government* of every stripe since Roger Douglas and his merry band of reverse robin hoods came along in their trojan horse and shafted ordinary kiwis
Unfortunately most of the world has got pulled into the freemarket neolib system and the housing problem is widespread. What to do without pulling the whole house of cards down on our heads? Perhaps we will be like Lebanon.
Or like the UK out of the EU and with huge loans still to repay – however we should remember that they ended up with a huge amount to pay to the USA after WW2 – through their lend-lease agreement etc. It made sense to join the European Common Market after that. Now they have decided to leave and pal up with the individualistic USA, a co-operative world is too common for those moguls, and the UK wants to plunder other pastures no doubt.
Speaking of Banks
I am listening to John Bank's covering for the normal dude on talk back this morning.
I'd forgotten what a patronising prat he is
It' all that wax in his ears.
I think this may use up my quota of stupid questions for the month, but what happens if say ACT, NZ1 and the Greens all fall just below 5% and none of them win an electorate seat? And at the same time both Labour and National fall below 50% for the party vote?
How does this work in terms of forming a govt? Does Labour have to form a coalition with National?
I must be missing something here.
In that scenario the party votes for those under 5% would be distributed proportionately.
If in the unlikely event Labour got 47% and National 45% Labour would be the government with National nipping at their heels. It would take just one or maybe two by-elections to fall from Labour to National to have a change of government.
If both parties ended up even, then we'd have a hung Parliament after redistribution and face another election.
OT: isn't it amazing that NZ only had one by-election this term when Jonathan Coleman left. Usually there's about 3 or more.
Forgive my ignorance and it is pure lack of knowledge of history, but have we ever had a hung election in NZ?
No.
But 2020 has told us that all bets are off.
Although given how diabolical National are, it's unlikely to happen this year.
Pretty fair assessment Lol
Which is why the Greens policy is preferential voting for both electorates and parties. Helps make sure that the parties that people actually prefer are elected.
Then whichever of Nats or Labour got the most votes gets to form the government. They will divvy up the 120 seats in relative proportion to their party vote. Say it was Labour 48% and Nat 44%, then Labour would get 63 seats (48% vote share*120 seats/92% total qualified non-wasted vote) and the Nats 57 seats (or maybe 62 and 58 depending on how the Sainte Lague formula works it out).
https://www.electionresults.govt.nz/electionresults_2017/statistics/sainte-lague-formula.html
Not a silly question methinks. Could happen, so worth considering. I believe a national unity govt would be the framing deployed. They could also call it neoliberals disunited, eh? Would make fun political posturing a cultural norm until deckchair-arranging began to pall for all, whereupon the attraction of another election (mid-term) would suck their Titanic into an ocean vortex…
I know it deserves a full post in itself, but well done to this government and in particular Ministers Parker and O'Connor for the passage of the gazetting of the National POlicy Statement on Freshwater, National Environmental Standards for Freshwater, regulations on stock exclusion, and regulations on measurement and reporting on lakes and rivers;
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA2008/S00045/new-rules-in-place-to-restore-healthy-rivers.htm
The regulations that go into force reasonably quickly from this include:
• Requiring councils to give effect to Te Mana o Te Wai by prioritising the health and wellbeing of our waterways
• Halting further loss of natural wetlands and streams
• Setting higher health standards at swimming spots
• Putting controls on high-risk farm practices such as winter grazing and feedlots
• Setting stricter controls on nitrogen pollution and new bottom lines on other measures of waterway health
• Requiring urban waterways to be cleaned up and new protections for urban streams
• Preserving and restoring the connectivity of New Zealand fish species’ habitats
• Requiring mandatory and enforceable farm environment plans
• Making real-time measuring and reporting of data on water use mandatory.
They've also made special provision for vegetable growing areas which are critical for national supply, such as Pukekohe and the Horowhenua. The acid needs to go on Auckland Horizons councils to clean up these areas, even with the apparent carve-outs.
Looking forward to regional councils actually putting resource into enforcement and prosecution to get the turnaround we need.
I too feel elated whenever politicians facilitate "the passage of the gazetting of" things.
The gazetting, in particular, always gets my heart rate up.
Done with half a day of Parliamentary time to celebrate it.
Cheers.
I have mentioned that before lockdown and yes, my fear has proven correct. The majority of new unemployment cases are women.
But hey 'shovel' ready jobs are being offered. Billions being poured in shovel ready. 🙂
And women running small businesses to create an income for themselves in a society that gives few fucks of job creation for women can apply for a 'government loan' (fully refundable) or go to Winz for some much needed bullshittery in order to get nothing, cause they may share the home with a bloke aka the 'mealticket'.
I seriously hope that long term Labour will do better then that, but then Labour needs poor people, and poor women are always good to squeeze some more votes about. Right, cause 'we fight for women', and their children. One denied benefit at a time.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018758209/covid-19-attention-must-be-paid-to-jobs-for-women-during-recovery-employment-opportunities-commissioner
Without wanting to sound cynical, is there any actual breakdown analysis on this figure?
What sort of jobs we are talking about etc?
Would imagine the first people that lost their jobs were part timers that are more likely to be female (kids and things) and in hospitality (which basically shut down and is screwed) which is also more likely to be female.
Hospitality jobs, Front of house, waitresses, room maids, house keepers. Retail – all of them and more going due to self ordering and self check outs. All that retail usually also comes with office staff – production staff etc and a lot of those are also women.
So not sure what you are nitpicking about.
But yes, lets ignore the fact thatof 11.000 thousand that went on the dole 10.000 are women. And i would assume that the employment opportunities commissionar got the numbers from Winz.
Also from here a list of companies that shed jobs – Air NZ on top of the list, i would assume that a lot of the ground staff is female, a lot of the on plane staff are female.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12336053
from here a few numbers which industry has shed how many jobs and talking about the second wave of unemployment
https://www.careers.govt.nz/job-hunting/whats-happening-in-the-job-market/covid-19-and-the-labour-market/#:~:text=In%20New%20Zealand%20many%20workers,businesses%20lost%20about%2024%2C000%20employees.
the spin off also has something to say about that
https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/05-08-2020/why-the-hell-has-new-zealands-unemployment-rate-just-gone-down/
re – under utiliastion rate….lol
shovel ready. Yeah, sure . Tui!
Paying care giving jobs a decent wage would likely transfer some into that industry although I know it's not for all.
Getting over stereotypes.
Giving them some priority for courses on driving trucks and ag machinery. When ever I see agricultural areas complaining about lack of labour I think – offer part time hours and get some women trained who are well embedded in the community. Problem solved for the next decade
A lot are hospo I think. So very good argument for not extending any of the under 30 work/travel visa’s as they expire .as a lot of that work is hospo or seasonal.
i totally agree, all these women in their retail, hospitality, air NZ, cruise ship jobs etc should just move somewhere rural, be thaught how to drive a tractor and run a milking machine and all is sorted.
Yeah, right Tui.
10.000 out of 11.000 newly unemployed are women. Or did you miss that with you quick fix of bashing unde 26 year old fruit picking tourists. Mind, these women can get themselv a little camper van, bid farewell to hubby and children and just go fruit picking and sleeping in a dorm. Right? Even better, if they are single mums they can just go fruitpicking and their kids can too, right?
Good fucking grief.
This is why women in this country are among the poorest. Because there are too many that simply don't give a shit about how others do so as long as it affects not them.
Never mind that the Government has yet to actually do anything for women so far. Oh but they won't, right kinder gentler bullshit.
Err I wasn't suggesting anything like fruit picking actually and I am certainly not bashing women. I wanted to be sure that women are considered and taken onto the good number of courses being run at the moment ( and there are apparently airline pilots on some ) that lead to some of the better paid rural jobs – some of which are contracting ( driving grape pickers for example). A lot of these don't require moving to the back blocks but maybe to secondary towns like Nelson, Blenheim, Hastings Palmerston North. – or some of them may even want assistance to get HT licences to drive trucks- which generally seems to be better paid than care giving – funny that. Then there are all the trades courses – generally more women are taking these up – but we do want to make sure that any barriers are dealt with.
So no the "put the kids in the camper van and go somewhere" was not part of my thinking simply an assumption on your part so please don't sledge me about it.
Likewise hospo. Yes I have registered that we are talking about women and yes a large number of jobs seem to be from this industry and the numbers are also I assume locals eligible for welfare. But overall of out total hospo jobs pre covid a very large number (well over 2/3rds seem to be filled with those on short term visa's including the short term travel/work visa's.) There seems to be no reason to grant extensions on these visa's despite petitions and that would not have happened to any great extent pre covid so why do we not try to have locals filling our local hospo jobs? Nothing snide about that .
Do women overall need more support – right across the economy that would be a yes.
Undoing everything The Black Guy did.
https://twitter.com/NGrossman81/status/1291104766240661507
can you feel the economic anxiety of the white male working class of the US?
did you hear about her fucking emails and her lack of stamina?
oh well, to bad.
Poor people's lives are less important that rich guys profit. After all, its easy to replace the poor person killed to continue raking in the profit.
Today is the 75th Anniversary of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our species is unsurpassed at self-destruction.
https://twitter.com/TheSpinoffTV/status/1291101672232673282?s=20
And stupidity.
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1291163858950918152
https://twitter.com/Freeyourmindkid/status/1290626349426671617
Behind a viral photo of a crowded hallway at a high school in Georgia, a potentially dire situation is brewing. Students, teachers, and parents fear the Paulding County school’s rushed reopening plans may be spiraling out of control just two days after students — who said they were told they could face expulsion for remaining home — returned to class despite reports of positive coronavirus cases among students and staff.
North Paulding High School, about an hour outside Atlanta, reopened Monday despite an outbreak among members of its high school football team, many of whom, a Facebook video shows, worked out together in a crowded indoor gym last week as part of a weightlifting fundraiser.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/georgia-school-reopening-photo-paulding-county
Does anyone know if it's legit for a sitting, albeit leaving MP such as Paula Bennett to be moonlighting for a full week of morning talkback shows on Newshub's Magic Radio especially during election cycle They're already dedicated 24/7 to trying to get the National Party into govt but what part of this and the discussions can be separated from campaign advertising $$?
https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/122353535/threats-abuse-for-huruhuru-shop-owners-over-hairy-te-reo-meaning
I thought we wanted te reo in every day usage.
This is the second article in a fortnight were shop owners are getting shit for using it .
The other one was a restaurant in Auckland..if I recall rightly
ha! Huruhuru also means pubic hair. Look Waghorn, rule of thumb, if you're unsure whether naming something from someone elses culture is appropriation or not, maybe don't do it, who needs the headache.
So bullies get to set the rules , righto!!
Did we just see Winston's last ever speech in parliament?
I am guessing yes
I never write Winston Peters off. I remember the political idiots from National, Act, and the dipshit side of the left doing that in 1999, 2008, 2011, and today.
What those wishful politically dumb numpties forget is three things. He has a constituency for his brand of politic, those people are exactly the right kind of paranoid to ignore pollsters asking them who they’d vote for, and they all vote.
That is why the NZF vote on election days is always higher than virtually all of the polls by a few percent. While the greens is usually lower (lots of non voters there).
About the only thing that might mitigate that long term trend this time is Shane Jones. I am so glad he isn’t Labour any more. He is a real undisciplined pain to have around any political party.
I think Shane Jones will win the Northland seat.
Good probability. He has actually delivered the goodies – unlike the bridges that Bridges promised in a past by-election.
The issue would be if he could figure out how to retain the seat in subsequent elections. Electorate work is a long tedious detailed process of getting down with the distressed in an electorate. It doesn’t lend itself to the big-noting and meaningless rhetoric that Shane Jones is so well known for.
A gracious, eloquent Adjournment debate speech by the Prime Minister, followed by one full of personal attacks by the Leader of the Opposition.
The contrast between the two speeches should be a marker for our approach to voting on election day.
The opposition aren't supposed to point out a govts failings before an election now?
I take it you missed Labours speeches in the house before the last election?
There's a difference between pointing out political disappointments and personal attacks.
"political disappointments"
Is this the term for failure now Lol
Yes, National's failure to screw over the NZ public as they wished in this case. As they couldn't say that they use personal attacks against Labour/Greens.
Jacinda always speaks in very clear language without ambiguity as she did again today. No umms or ers. Love her or hate her you wont misunderstand her.
https://ondemand.parliament.nz/parliament-tv-on-demand/?itemId=215321
Collins seems to jumble her sentences so that the meaning is ambiguous. And Collins spent most of her time today sneering and belittling. (As did Brownlee.)
https://ondemand.parliament.nz/parliament-tv-on-demand/?itemId=215322
More MMT talk starting to appear in the news
https://www.interest.co.nz/news/106385/grant-robertson-remains-committed-reducing-government-debt-long-term-saying-modern
It's a shame Grant Robertson has dismissed it so quickly.
Grant Robinson is still wedded to the delusional neoclassical/liberal school of economics. Most of Labour are and that is why they can't do the transformation that we need.
Yup, once the MMT lens is understood, it opens up a whole lot of progressive policy choices. These policies under a neoliberal view point are very difficult to justify.
You'll probably find this interesting.
Thanks for sharing, will have a listen when I get some time.
James Shaw with a couple of zingers in his last speech in the house this term.
"There's Labour: 'Let's keep moving.' New Zealand First: 'Let's not.'
“You can almost see the ads can’t you?” said Shaw. “New Zealand First: You can stop progress.
“Act are making a bold play for the assault rifle vote, with: ‘The Act Party – more deadly than serious.’
“And National have settled on a new leader with a new slogan: ‘Why vote for the lesser evil?'”
Their billboards read, "Back your Future". With the greatest respect to the NZF voting demographic, their future will mostly have been planned and locked in some time ago.
Last election their billboards read, "Had Enough?"
Winston, I think we have.
If Grace Mullane's murderer loses his appeal, can his sentence be adjusted, due to his utter lack of remorse?
+100
Well said.