Twenty-five neo mastiff crosses and bulldog crosses have been rounded up at a Northland property where a man was killed in a suspected mauling.
Exactly how many dogs were at the property to begin with was unclear, or whether they belong to the man who was killed, as they weren’t registered, he said.
I recall the uproar over Staffi dogs around 10 -15 years ago. The Staffordshire terrier is a fantastic little dog. Full of personality and affection. Easy to train and highly social. Its not the dogs, its their human owners who are the problem. A property with 25 large dogs roaming free and untrained… a recipe for disaster.
This looks like a breeder/horder situation that got out of hands. I am quite sorry for the bloke, but even sorrier for the dogs. They neither asked to be on that property nor did they ask for neglect and abuse.
Housesitter with a number of dogs, one of the dogs had a lot of puppies. The man who was killed didn’t own the dogs, they belonged to someone who was staying with him.
Probably not related. The feral dogs…an awful situation up here… and I was speaking with someone not long ago who was attacked and bitten whilst walking part of the Te Paki Coastal Track. She went out and purchased a .22, and will never tramp without it in future. Truly feral…cunning as shit house rats… and virtually impossible to trap and as hard to shoot. Poison has been suggested….and the rather bizarre and cruel idea to plant meat impregnated tampons with the view that the dogs will eat them and they'll expand in the throat and stomach. (This guy was serious.) The dogs will travel along Te Oneroa a Tohe and visit 'civilisation' via the access roads. One such road is very near to us and we watch our wee flock very carefully. Have had a couple of scares. Luckily our fencer, a local, put barbed wire atop the sheep netting to deter predators, four legged and two.
The tragedy out west was also too close to home for a mate of ours who is from there and until the details were released, things were a bit tense. Sounds like the guy was trying to get the owner of the dogs to move on…for obvious reasons. For the life of me I don't understand how anyone could afford to feed such massive dogs. You'd need a fairly good income.
I couldn't imagine being able to feed that many dogs either, although it's hard to tell how many were adult dogs. Maybe he was selling them and this paid for the food? But even the logistics of that much food on someone else's property when you're not set up for it. I guess if he was hunting that would help.
Horrendous for that family and community. The dog owner's life now irreversibly changed too. MSM don't seem to be saying anything about him, but I guess more details will follow.
"And animal control!" … in my experience of having had dogs in the past, animal control seems to keep their eyes on good responsible dog people, than those irresponsible people who allow their poor unregistered dogs to roam free, some unfortunately being seriously injured or killed on a road.
One example: In public an Animal Control Officer yelling, shouting and threatening an elderly retired couple and their dog who every morning very early, rain or shine, all seasons, would walk the local beach, cleaning up rubbish and taking it home to dispose of. The reason for the animal control officer's outburst … the dog was on the beach 20 minutes after the 9am curfew had passed, which as far as I know was a one off as far as the elderly couple were concerned! The elderly man tried to talk rationally to the animal control officer, who wouldn't listen and warned them to get their dog off the beach or they "will be impounded and them finded" I witnessed this event first and tried to explain to the ACO about the couple's regular early morning beach cleaning activities. I was told to mind my own business and move on! I reported the incident to the council. Their response? The animal control officer was doing his job!
A pity the ACOs don't do their job concerning feral animal owners!
So far there have been at least four sightings of packs of the dogs, with DoC closing the campsite and tracks to protect visitors to the region from the threat of being attacked.
"This is the first time that we've heard of aggressive behaviour to people," says Abraham Witana, acting operations manager of DoC Kaitai.
He said it now looks like the situation might be getting worse, with the latest sighting by a local driver last weekend.
"They saw a pack of six dogs and a small litter of puppies."
Baigent told The Project the dogs already slaughter our most treasured native birds.
"Once they get a taste for kiwi, dogs will go through and will take a lot of them. They'll systematically work their way through.
"They don't eat kiwi, they just love the thrill of the chase."
Today on The Detail, RNZ Northland reporter Nita Blake-Persen talks to Sharon Brettkelly about the war on feral dogs in the Far North.
"It boggles my mind that this is still able to happen in a country where we're striving for Predator Free Aotearoa, to have packs of feral dogs which are not only a threat obviously to wildlife but also to stock and potentially humans," she says.
Blake-Persen tells how campers and trampers at Cape Reinga earlier in the year spotted the packs of wild dogs loitering around.
"They were pretty freaked out. You don't expect to see wild dogs in New Zealand".
This week the East Asia Summit held this year in Cambodia, was attended by representatives of America, Russia and China – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and China Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Reporting on the East Asia Summit, RT the Russian official media outlet of the Russian Federation, quoted Sergei Lavrov on the world situation.
S.L.“Our American colleagues demonstrate permissiveness” for themselves in international affairs “every time they try to assert their dominance”
S.L.“The Americans have taken up a course of suppressing any independence,”
S.L.“understand the futility of a policy according to which you can just turn a blind eye to one situation, one crisis created by the US, and expect that everything will be more or less OK there,” S.L.
S.L.“They decided to turn Ukraine into a menace for Russia and for many years ignored the racist policies of the Kiev regime, which has been destroying everything Russian… they violated the principles of indivisible security, which they signed up for at the highest level and which they simply trampled upon,”
S.L.“Similarly, in the case of [US House speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, they [the Americans] ignored their own principles, which they proclaimed publicly,”
Echoing Lavrov's comments on Taiwan, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi following comments were quoted by RT
W.Y, “a serious violation of the One China policy”
W.Y. “vulgar comedy,”
W.Y. “serious consequences”
W.Y. “a serious violation of the One China policy”
Referring to China's military exercises in reaction to Pelosi's visit.
Hitler did not invade Poland out of concern for the persecution of Poland's German speaking minority.
Putin did not invade Ukraine out of concern for the persecution of Ukraine's Russian speaking minority.
World War One was not fought because an Arch Duke was assassinated in Kosovo.
World War Three will not be fought because an old lady visited Taiwan.
The underlying cause of global conflict and world war is the same as the underlying cause of pollution and climate change. Infinite economic growth on a finite planet, is running up against the physical and man made borders of the planet.
So you suggest as economic growth is the driver of conflicts.Russia's military operation is a very rational undertaking, no different to the actions of many other nations.
Human beings are rational creatures, every thing we do has a reason, or rationale.
The rationale for climate change is economic growth. If we don't pollute. Our economic and political rivals will, and outcompete us.
The rationale for war is economic growth, if our economic growth is limited and constrained by their uni-polar domination of the globe, we will try to replace it with our multi-lateral domination of the globe. If necessary, with force.
You ask, is it rational?
Is poverty in the midst of immense wealth rational?
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on who you are asking.
Is increasing our carbon emissions year on year rational?
Is filling up our oceans with plastic rational?
Maybe, maybe not. But it is profitable.
Instead of asking if doing these things is rational. A better question might be; Is it right"
Is it right to engage in mass slaughter to achieve a multi-polar world?
The underlying cause of global conflict and world war is the same as the underlying cause of pollution and climate change. Infinite economic growth on a finite planet, is running up against the physical and man made borders of the planet.
Whilst the impossibility of infinite growth is undeniable, I don't think that this is the cause of world wars. Michael Hudson, for example, alludes to a conflict between opposing economic philosophies – not capitalism versus communism, but between rentier capitalism and productive capitalism. Hudson says:
"The New Cold War is dividing the world into two contrasting economic systems
NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the catalyst fracturing the world into two opposing spheres with incompatible economic philosophies. China, the country growing most rapidly, treats money and credit as a public utility allocated by government instead of letting the monopoly privilege of credit creation be privatized by banks, leading to them displacing government as economic and social planner. That monetary independence, relying on its own domestic money creation instead of borrowing U.S. electronic dollars, and denominating foreign trade and investment in its own currency instead of in dollars, is seen as an existential threat to America’s control of the global economy.
U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall. Imposing trade and financial sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries that resist U.S. diplomacy, and ultimately military confrontation, is how America intends to “spread democracy” by NATO from Ukraine to the China Seas.
The West, in its U.S. neoliberal iteration, seems to be repeating the pattern of Rome’s decline and fall. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the One Percent has always been the trajectory of Western civilization. It is a result of classical antiquity having taken a wrong track when Greece and Rome allowed the inexorable growth of debt, leading to the expropriation of much of the citizenry and reducing it to bondage to a land-owning creditor oligarchy. That is the dynamic built into the DNA of what is called the West and its “security of contracts” without any government oversight in the public interest. By stripping away prosperity at home, this dynamic requires a constant reaching out to extract an economic affluence (literally a “flowing in”) at the expense of colonies or debtor countries."
– make the first 25.000 earned tax free – that would be a great tax cut for low earners whilst it will be a little nothing for the very rich. I base this on the min cost of a rental in NZ.
– he could drop GST, give some high praises to his predecessors in N and simply state that the times are tough, and offer a lower GST or no GST on such things as electricity bills, water bills, doctor bills, school fund bills, food / school uniforms, public transport and fwiw, raise some revenue by increasing GST on say make up, booze, overseas travel, luxury cars, boats, planes – large and small etc etc etc
.
reducing expenditure
I am sure we can find money that is spend but has no results to show for and spending could be cut. Perks for Ministers could be cut. Housing allowances for Ministers could be cut. Wages for ministers could be cut. Less Propaganda Peddlers for NZTransport etc etc.
Investing
continue to invest in Health Care, Education, Infrastructure etc.
Fwiw, L could do this too, as could any other Party. That none of them actually do is the interesting part.
…and/or a Wealth Tax….by far the best way to redistribute wealth fairly and supported by the Green Party (and incidentally supported by thinking people like Parker in the current Labour government)
Which is where any proposal for a wealth tax comes unstuck. The truly wealthy will be able to structure their affairs to dodge it, lawyers and their ilk will have a field day, but the accidentally wealthy will end up having to sell their homes.
Ah yes – the 'vested interests' problem. A 20% quota of parliamentary representatives drawn from the ranks of the truly ‘poor' might be a temporary fix, at least until they had received their first few pay cheques.
Actually Sortition as a form of governance looks promising….though there would be I imagine quite a number who decline, much like jury selection….but it is certainly more likely to be truely representative.
Local government could be a trialling point but if it proved workable it could be applied at a national level….of the options I see available it is the one that appeals to me most (even though it may have some potential issues)…of course it is a pipe dream as it is not likely to occur short of absolute disaster, and probably not even then.
I think a WT can be written which is hard to get around, but I agree that with this government, which has been pathetic in relation to trusts which have been set up in there 1000's to avoid the 39% tax rate and for other reasons/avoidance (to claim Working for Families for instance), there is little hope of a rigorous WT regime eventuating.
Such a regime might well happen though if you Party Vote Green.
I am sure we can find money that is spend but has no results to show for and spending could be cut. Perks for Ministers could be cut. Housing allowances for Ministers could be cut. Wages for ministers could be cut. Less Propaganda Peddlers for NZTransport etc etc."
Great soundbites but the $ saved wouldn't even be a rounding error on a tiny part of government expenditure.
The perceived problem with tax cuts is that "rich pricks" get it too. You could eliminate this by having the tax free allowance followed by a higher (than now) tax rate.
So, using your 25k, a tax rate of 33% from then would mean someone on 70k would now pay 15k tax (compared to 14k now). So that would give a meaningful tax cut for low earners whilst not costing too much (by giving it to everyone). You could make the tax at 70k the same if the tax free level was set a a slightly higher 27,500 (and no-one under 70k would pay more tax). It still means less tax received by the govt, but probably a better way to target lower paid than other methods currently used (the current IRD payments, for example).
For the expenditure, fiddling with MPs allowances would make little difference. Taking 250k off them (so basically no salary) would save 30m a year, which would mean just 20 cents a week if passed on to 3m taxpayers.
Cutting wasteful expenses is worthwhile though, as the savings can be used in better ways – more nurses, teachers etc or just paying the existing ones better. But not tax cuts.
Yeah, but if you passed that 30 mil onto the tax payer via Mike King then you get a whole lot of mental healthcare counseling paid for which would be a much better return to the tax payer, but maybe that would demand creative thinking and that is not something i would expect a government doodaa to do. Think and creatively at that.
Of course you could send everyone 37 cents in a transaction that a bank might charge you a dollar + for. And i could totally see the doodaas on either side of the aisle talk about that just the way you do. LOL – Go figure.
You could also ensure that PAYE is paid directly to IRD on payday when the wages are paid to employees.
This would help stop employers stealing their workers money and identify earlier businesses in trouble. You could also stop large corporates having policies such as paying bills in 3-6 months so their smaller suppliers get paid to help their cashflow.
We lose hundreds of millions of dollars in tax every year to failed businesses.
and we could make tax avoidance illegal with a few years of hard labour attached to it too. 🙂
there would be many many ways to address spending without having to actually cut services. Just start limiting excesses and willful wastage for a starter.
This is long(ish) and might get frowned-upon, but it's interesting 🙂
''For just as established religions assume the maleness of God, just as psychoanalysis and Freud assumed the maleness of libido, so have the social sciences- and in particular anthropology- assumed the generic maleness of human evolution. Both popular and academic anthropological writers have presented us with scenarios of human evolution that feature, almost exclusively, the adventures and inventions of man the hunter, man the tool maker, man the territorial maker, and so forth.
Woman is not comprehended as an evolutionary or evolutionizing creature. She is treated rather as an auxiliary to a male-dominated evolutionary process; she mothers him, she mates him, she cooks his dinner, she follows around after him picking up his loose rocks. He evolves. She follows. He revolutionizes. She adjusts. If the book jackets don’t give us pictures of female homo sapiens being dragged by their hair through 2 or 3 million years of he-man evolution, we are left to assume this was the situation.
This, despite the known fact that among contemporary and historic hunting-and-gathering people, as among our remote hunting-and-gathering ancestors, 75 to 80 percent of the group's subsistence comes from the women's food gathering activities. This, despite the known fact that the oldest tools used by contemporary hunter gatherers, and the oldest most primal tools ever found in ancient sites, were women's digging sticks. This, despite worldwide legends that cite women as the first users and domesticators of fire.
This, despite the known fact that women were the first potters, the first weavers, the first textile-dyers and hide-tanners, the first to gather and study medicinal plants- i.e., the first doctors- and on and on. Observing the linguistic interplay between mother and infants, mothers and children, and among work-groups of women, it is easy to speculate on the female contribution to the origin and elaboration of language. That the first time measurements ever made, the first formal calendars, were women's lunar markings on painted pebbles and carved sticks.
And it is thoroughly known that the only "God image" ever painted on rock, carved in stone, or sculpted in clay, from the Upper Paleolithic to the Middle Neolithic- and that's roughly 30,000 years- was the image of a human female."
-"The Great Cosmic Mother", Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor
Interesting Robert. A close relative of mine is tied to a Church which lives on the father being the head of the house. Hilarious watching the wife quietly running the show while appearing to be subservient. Decision making is a lesson in lop-sided negotiation. And he still believes that men are superior.
Hate to break it to you heathen but in real life Catholic churches are mostly run by women. Priests are harder to find and often locums. In the non-Catholic structured churches it's disproportionately female in Ministry.
But yinno, carry on with the tired ignorant bullshit assumptions.
Male imagery had asserted dominance in Gobekle Tepe and quickly across most of the Turkish Upper Chalcolithic. Some dense combination of tax, fenced property, and the dense hierarchies required for urban living did it. Followed quickly by bureaucracy, organised armies, and then written language.
Spiritual nostalgia just ain't what it used to be.
everyone knows that women run things at that level Ad. Sane cultures are honest about it.
The quote in Robert's comment is about how male dominated societies such as ours tell the story of humanity, and how this erases women's culture. Victors write history. Patriarchy is only 5,000 years old though, so probably a blip we will recover from if we don't fry ourselves first.
Gobekle Tepe is one of a full region of tepe that are saying the same story, and it started at least as far back as 9,000 BC. You can't extract patriarchy, property rights and language.
yep, patriarchy didn't arise overnight, it was a process over time and multiple cultures.
Some say coming down from the trees in the first place was a mistake. But I think it's fair to say that once we started planting crops en masse, we need armies to protect the now settled farming cultures, and that meant controlling the means of human reproduction. It's still the basis of patriarchy now, only in civilised cultures we distance ourselves from this reality.
Women invented time, when we shifted from estrus to a menstrual cycle the same length of time as the moon phase. We also invented post-fertility when we developed menopause, this allowing the great cultural leaps forward for humans because grandmothers helped raise children and look after the tribe.
(of course, nature invented those things in women, but the point is poetically made).
Once women started menstruating cyclically instead of via estrus, for women time would have taken on an obvious, in your face meaning. Embodied, not abstract.
Of course there are natural cycles that affect many forms of life. I was pointing to one in particular.
let me put it another way. How females evolved biologically had a big impact on the evolution of human cultures and societies. Female fertility cycles are threaded all through human history and culture. It's just that men have been privileged by the patriarchal systems of recent millennia and thus understanding of those cycles and the roles they play has been distorted and/or rendered invisible. Just like in Sjoo and Mor's examples of technology.
So it's not just 'that's it'. It's that how women contribute and live in the world as females matters, to women, and to human societies. Being female isn't incidental, it's core.
No, you were claiming a specific epistemic privilege for women over men because of menstruation.
But I didn't. All I did was talk about women. Didn't say anything about men, nor did I imply anything. It's your philosophical framework that read something about privilege over men (a common problem in the patriarchy). As if it's just not possible for women to be important in their own right.
However, there was clearly a reproductive advantage in older women assisting with raising grandchildren (and/or as a repository of wisdom), since those genetic traits persisted. If there were no 'fitness' advantage, then the trait would not be universally expressed (if a woman lives long enough, she's going to go through menopause)
Grandmothers who were around and involved had more grandchildren…. How natural selection works.
Remember last year when Australia had all those Covid cases and deaths in Victoria and NSW and it seemed out of control compared with NZ? Well Australia now has less deaths per million than NZ-it has had Covid under better control than NZ for months now.
Actually for all intents and purposes we are currently at parity. 2/m isn't much of a difference. And Australia is at a very different point in their wave cycle – a lot more people died getting to where they are now compared to NZ.
You are entirely missing my point which is that NZ was much much better in terms of deaths/million months ago, but the trend of Covid deaths has been much worse in NZ than OZ over the last few months and there is no sign of this changing.
Take a look at the graphs in the website I referenced above.
I'm not missing your point, you're reading the data wrong. First, cumulative – overall we've lost a lot fewer people compared to Australia per capita, which if you will insist on making it a competition, is the important number. Second, their per capita numbers right now are going to be moving down because they are coming out of an infection wave. We're just hitting our second or third wave.
First, cumulative – overall we've lost a lot fewer people compared to Australia per capita…
That’s been true until now, but no longer. NZ has been rapidly overhauling Aussie's (cumulative total) 'Deaths/1M pop' metric. Wasn't expecting the switch to happen until the end of August, but, as BG correctly noted, it's happening now.
That is the infection rate which is not what I am talking about.
Case numbers are notoriously badly reported so the infection rate is highly unreliable. Death rates are more certain (in fact very certain) and so are far more reliable.
Up to 100,000 most of the half-starved North Korean soldiers could conscripts rumoured to be sent to bolster Vladimir Putin’s forces fighting Ukraine will head for the hills at the first opportunity they get according to Russian reports.
One can now self identigy as disabled and chronically ill? Can such a person be denied benefits if challenged on that self Id? And how do you quantify 'disabled' and 'chronically' ill. And then, why bother in the first place?
There are people who do self ID as disabled who aren't disabled. I doubt this is what the Society of Authors means, but it's getting harder to tell. There's a still a taboo on self IDing into an ethnic group.
I posted this from twitter, it is them who are asking for 'self identified' disabled people. '
I am asking for someone to translate into easy english for me how someone self id's as disabled.
Maybe you need to explain your own thoughts to me.
a. why do you conflate this self id with that of men who want access to places for women ( again, i am excluding Transwomen/Transmen who transitioned from self id, to make my point clear).
b. why do you assume that i like you conflate this self ID with that of men who want access to places for women.
Being disabled is not a case of being born in the wrong the body, it is not a mental illness, it is not some passing body dysphoria, being disabled is medical, permanent, and makes navigating live quite a bit different and harder for those that have to live with disabilities and chronic pain.
I guess that this operates the other way, too, though. There are people (including, presumably, authors) who may have a 'disability' but do not self-identify as disabled.
I am asking for someone to translate into easy english for me how someone self id's as disabled.
As someone with an invisible disability, how I choose to relate to the world is often a choice. I can hide my disability. I can make it visible. In that there's something about identity. Not such a big thing for me but it matters because otherwise other people get to define me and my disability.
It's not Self ID so much as 'identify as' someone who has a disability (as Belladonna points out, not everyone does). It stops other people from determining what disability or a person's disability means. This matters because there's such a lot of bullshit in society around disability, prejudice, ignorance and so on. Including in institutions.
There are all sorts of problems with tying this to Self ID and I think them using the term self in the tweet is a bit mistake because it shifts it from identifying as, to being something akin to gender identity and then we have all the issues of disability fluidity and basically making shit up.
I have no uterus, thus can't have children. I could now identify as 'chronically ill' and in need of medication – hrt, and disabled as i can not have children.
I choose not to identify as such as i believe that 'disabled' and 'chronically ill' should be reserved for those that have medical issues that forced them to need different measures of support to manage society. I.e. wheel chair ramps, wider doors to shop entrances, disabled toilets, specific care, medical needs that outweigh mine and those similar to mine many many times. There is a difference between not being perfectly healthy and being chronically ill and disabled. (This comment does not relay in any way to you Weka and your health.)
One does not identify as 'chronically ill' one is, one can not opt out of this state. I can self id as a fertile women any day i will nevertheless never birth a child as i do not have the biological capacity for it. Again, it is biology vs imagination. In this case it is more of a state of 'telling us that you are chronically ill' so that we can accept your story. Surely a little bit more of gate keeping should be given, considering the prestige of these awards.
Mind in Mexico a court has argued in favor of 'self id' age. Maybe we are in clown world.
But the Court decided to rule in a general way on highly debatable anthropological and moral issues, such as the meaning of “identity” and the jurisdiction of our personal decisions when it comes to defining it. Topics on which there is no consensus even within the most specialized sectors.
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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 ...
“It hardly strikes me as fair to criticise a government for doing exactly what it said it was going to do. For actually keeping its promises.”THUNDER WAS PLAYING TAG with lightning flashes amongst the distant peaks. Its rolling cadences interrupted by the here-I-come-here-I-go Doppler effect of the occasional passing car. ...
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 ...
Been Here Before: To find the precedents for what this Coalition Government is proposing, it is necessary to return to the “glory days” of Muldoonism.THE COALITION GOVERNMENT has celebrated its first 100 days in office by checking-off the last of its listed commitments. It remains, however, an angry government. It ...
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 ...
TL;DR: The six newsey things that stood out to me as of 6:46am on Saturday, March 16.Andy Foster has accidentally allowed a Labour/Green amendment to cut road user chargers for plug-in hybrid vehicles, which the Government might accept; NZ HeraldThomas CoughlanSimeon Brown has rejected a plea from Westport ...
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, ...
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 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 ...
Pacific Media Watch Earthwise hosts Lois and Martin Griffiths. Earthwise presenters Lois and Martin Griffiths on Plains FM 96.9 community radio talk to Dr David Robie, a New Zealand author, independent journalist and media educator with a passion for the Asia-Pacific region. David talks about the struggle to raise awareness ...
Pacific Media Watch Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent who was held for 12 hours at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, says Israeli forces rounded up Palestinian journalists at the facility and made them kneel on the ground for hours, while naked and blindfolded. “The occupation forces handcuffed and blindfolded us ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Wood, Program Director, Energy, Grattan Institute chinasong, Shutterstock Electricity customers in four Australian states can breathe a sigh of relief. After two years in a row of 20% price increases, power prices have finally stabilised. In many places they’re ...
Chumbawamba have reportedly issued the deputy PM a cease-and-desist notice after he used their song 'Tubthumping' before his state of the nation speech. ...
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 ...
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25 neo mastffs and bull dog crosses !. On one property. Yea, how the fuck was THAT not a problem?
And other feral dogs previously stalking Humans.
Yep , past time for a major cull. And Dog Control !!
Damn near breaks my heart to hear about good dogs (all dogs are good dogs) ending up like this because of feral men (most likely)
Currently typing this from bed which my two boys (staffi cross and doberman mastiff cross) have graciously allowed me to share
Not often I agree with Pucky, but he's right in this instance.
As Sherlock Holmes said: "You never find a bad dog in a good family!"
But, as usual, the dogs will pay the price for human abuse!
With you PR.
I recall the uproar over Staffi dogs around 10 -15 years ago. The Staffordshire terrier is a fantastic little dog. Full of personality and affection. Easy to train and highly social. Its not the dogs, its their human owners who are the problem. A property with 25 large dogs roaming free and untrained… a recipe for disaster.
This looks like a breeder/horder situation that got out of hands. I am quite sorry for the bloke, but even sorrier for the dogs. They neither asked to be on that property nor did they ask for neglect and abuse.
Housesitter with a number of dogs, one of the dogs had a lot of puppies. The man who was killed didn’t own the dogs, they belonged to someone who was staying with him.
https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/08/05/family-of-man-killed-say-he-was-attacked-by-friends-dogs/
I did not see that story yet.
Sad for everyone involved.
But this is then not a story of 'feral' dogs attacking a human and killing a human.
agreed. The man dying from the dog attack and the feral dogs are two separate incidents (not related as far as I can tell).
Probably not related. The feral dogs…an awful situation up here… and I was speaking with someone not long ago who was attacked and bitten whilst walking part of the Te Paki Coastal Track. She went out and purchased a .22, and will never tramp without it in future. Truly feral…cunning as shit house rats… and virtually impossible to trap and as hard to shoot. Poison has been suggested….and the rather bizarre and cruel idea to plant meat impregnated tampons with the view that the dogs will eat them and they'll expand in the throat and stomach. (This guy was serious.) The dogs will travel along Te Oneroa a Tohe and visit 'civilisation' via the access roads. One such road is very near to us and we watch our wee flock very carefully. Have had a couple of scares. Luckily our fencer, a local, put barbed wire atop the sheep netting to deter predators, four legged and two.
The tragedy out west was also too close to home for a mate of ours who is from there and until the details were released, things were a bit tense. Sounds like the guy was trying to get the owner of the dogs to move on…for obvious reasons. For the life of me I don't understand how anyone could afford to feed such massive dogs. You'd need a fairly good income.
I couldn't imagine being able to feed that many dogs either, although it's hard to tell how many were adult dogs. Maybe he was selling them and this paid for the food? But even the logistics of that much food on someone else's property when you're not set up for it. I guess if he was hunting that would help.
Horrendous for that family and community. The dog owner's life now irreversibly changed too. MSM don't seem to be saying anything about him, but I guess more details will follow.
"one of the dogs had a lot of puppies"
"Bitches", surely. One of the bitches 🙂
How many, is it known?
Birthing bodies is the correct term nowadays
I'm a cat person 😺
Robert,they tried that nonsense up here, DCC ;with female 'dogs' instead of,well you know bitches.
That was from,newly appointed Lawyers within said Org.
One of the dog sale sites for farm dogs kept getting banned on Facebook due to the word bitch being used , algorithms ain't so bright.
"And animal control!" … in my experience of having had dogs in the past, animal control seems to keep their eyes on good responsible dog people, than those irresponsible people who allow their poor unregistered dogs to roam free, some unfortunately being seriously injured or killed on a road.
One example: In public an Animal Control Officer yelling, shouting and threatening an elderly retired couple and their dog who every morning very early, rain or shine, all seasons, would walk the local beach, cleaning up rubbish and taking it home to dispose of. The reason for the animal control officer's outburst … the dog was on the beach 20 minutes after the 9am curfew had passed, which as far as I know was a one off as far as the elderly couple were concerned! The elderly man tried to talk rationally to the animal control officer, who wouldn't listen and warned them to get their dog off the beach or they "will be impounded and them finded" I witnessed this event first and tried to explain to the ACO about the couple's regular early morning beach cleaning activities. I was told to mind my own business and move on! I reported the incident to the council. Their response? The animal control officer was doing his job!
A pity the ACOs don't do their job concerning feral animal owners!
Easier to pick on the elderly with the friendly, trained dog instead of the aggressive ferals with the untrained dogs…
Brutal thumbnail from the media arm of the National Party.
The end of the runway is approaching for the airline pilot…
More like a few sweaty passengers grabbing the stick yelling , PULL UP PUUL UP
"…from the media arm of the National Party."
Don't you mean the team of $55m?
Anyway, the Bish hits back Fired-up Chris Bishop slams 'useless, incompetent' Labour, says National fully backs Christopher Luxon | Newshub.
Go the Bish :>
This week the East Asia Summit held this year in Cambodia, was attended by representatives of America, Russia and China – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and China Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Reporting on the East Asia Summit, RT the Russian official media outlet of the Russian Federation, quoted Sergei Lavrov on the world situation.
S.L.“Our American colleagues demonstrate permissiveness” for themselves in international affairs “every time they try to assert their dominance”
S.L.“The Americans have taken up a course of suppressing any independence,”
S.L.“understand the futility of a policy according to which you can just turn a blind eye to one situation, one crisis created by the US, and expect that everything will be more or less OK there,” S.L.
S.L.“They decided to turn Ukraine into a menace for Russia and for many years ignored the racist policies of the Kiev regime, which has been destroying everything Russian… they violated the principles of indivisible security, which they signed up for at the highest level and which they simply trampled upon,”
S.L.“Similarly, in the case of [US House speaker] Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, they [the Americans] ignored their own principles, which they proclaimed publicly,”
Echoing Lavrov's comments on Taiwan, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi following comments were quoted by RT
W.Y, “a serious violation of the One China policy”
W.Y. “vulgar comedy,”
W.Y. “serious consequences”
W.Y. “a serious violation of the One China policy”
Referring to China's military exercises in reaction to Pelosi's visit.
Antony Blinken was quoted by R.T.
A.B. "There is no possible justification”
A.B. “cease these actions.”
https://www.rt.com/news/560313-lavrov-taiwan-us-blinken/
Hitler did not invade Poland out of concern for the persecution of Poland's German speaking minority.
Putin did not invade Ukraine out of concern for the persecution of Ukraine's Russian speaking minority.
World War One was not fought because an Arch Duke was assassinated in Kosovo.
World War Three will not be fought because an old lady visited Taiwan.
The underlying cause of global conflict and world war is the same as the underlying cause of pollution and climate change. Infinite economic growth on a finite planet, is running up against the physical and man made borders of the planet.
So you suggest as economic growth is the driver of conflicts.Russia's military operation is a very rational undertaking, no different to the actions of many other nations.
🙄
Human beings are rational creatures, every thing we do has a reason, or rationale.
The rationale for climate change is economic growth. If we don't pollute. Our economic and political rivals will, and outcompete us.
The rationale for war is economic growth, if our economic growth is limited and constrained by their uni-polar domination of the globe, we will try to replace it with our multi-lateral domination of the globe. If necessary, with force.
You ask, is it rational?
Is poverty in the midst of immense wealth rational?
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on who you are asking.
Is increasing our carbon emissions year on year rational?
Is filling up our oceans with plastic rational?
Maybe, maybe not. But it is profitable.
Instead of asking if doing these things is rational. A better question might be; Is it right"
Is it right to engage in mass slaughter to achieve a multi-polar world?
Is it right to engage in mass slaughter to achieve a multi-polar world?
We have a multi-polar world at present. Long may it last.
When we assess what is right' or wrong ,we should dispense with …double standards.
'According to The New York Times, over a five-year period US forces carried out more than 50,000 strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.'
US drone strikes killed thousands of civilians: report | News | DW | 19.12.2021
Now do newly obtained Kremlin documents reporting tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia and Syria.
//
'According to The New York Times, over a five-year period US forces carried out more than 50,000 strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.' Blazer
Blazer I don't need to assess if that is wrong. It is wrong.
But what are you saying Blazer, when Russia does the same thing?
Are you saying, because the US does it, it makes it OK for Russia to do it?
Be honest now
No,I was referring to…'double standards'.
The underlying cause of global conflict and world war is the same as the underlying cause of pollution and climate change. Infinite economic growth on a finite planet, is running up against the physical and man made borders of the planet.
Whilst the impossibility of infinite growth is undeniable, I don't think that this is the cause of world wars. Michael Hudson, for example, alludes to a conflict between opposing economic philosophies – not capitalism versus communism, but between rentier capitalism and productive capitalism. Hudson says:
"The New Cold War is dividing the world into two contrasting economic systems
NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the catalyst fracturing the world into two opposing spheres with incompatible economic philosophies. China, the country growing most rapidly, treats money and credit as a public utility allocated by government instead of letting the monopoly privilege of credit creation be privatized by banks, leading to them displacing government as economic and social planner. That monetary independence, relying on its own domestic money creation instead of borrowing U.S. electronic dollars, and denominating foreign trade and investment in its own currency instead of in dollars, is seen as an existential threat to America’s control of the global economy.
U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall. Imposing trade and financial sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries that resist U.S. diplomacy, and ultimately military confrontation, is how America intends to “spread democracy” by NATO from Ukraine to the China Seas.
The West, in its U.S. neoliberal iteration, seems to be repeating the pattern of Rome’s decline and fall. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the One Percent has always been the trajectory of Western civilization. It is a result of classical antiquity having taken a wrong track when Greece and Rome allowed the inexorable growth of debt, leading to the expropriation of much of the citizenry and reducing it to bondage to a land-owning creditor oligarchy. That is the dynamic built into the DNA of what is called the West and its “security of contracts” without any government oversight in the public interest. By stripping away prosperity at home, this dynamic requires a constant reaching out to extract an economic affluence (literally a “flowing in”) at the expense of colonies or debtor countries."
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-the-end-of-western-civilization
Hudson's summation is brilliant and needs a wider audience.
Nationals fiscal formula…
'Lend me your ear…New Zealand…I will increase spending on health,education and infrastructure,whilst giving tax cuts and reducing expenditure'.
Its 'Luxonomics'……stupid.
thing is if he were honest he could
tax cuts
– make the first 25.000 earned tax free – that would be a great tax cut for low earners whilst it will be a little nothing for the very rich. I base this on the min cost of a rental in NZ.
– he could drop GST, give some high praises to his predecessors in N and simply state that the times are tough, and offer a lower GST or no GST on such things as electricity bills, water bills, doctor bills, school fund bills, food / school uniforms, public transport and fwiw, raise some revenue by increasing GST on say make up, booze, overseas travel, luxury cars, boats, planes – large and small etc etc etc
.
reducing expenditure
I am sure we can find money that is spend but has no results to show for and spending could be cut. Perks for Ministers could be cut. Housing allowances for Ministers could be cut. Wages for ministers could be cut. Less Propaganda Peddlers for NZTransport etc etc.
Investing
continue to invest in Health Care, Education, Infrastructure etc.
Fwiw, L could do this too, as could any other Party. That none of them actually do is the interesting part.
Add a windfall tax, a capital gains tax and a financial transaction tax and it’s good to go
yep.
…and/or a Wealth Tax….by far the best way to redistribute wealth fairly and supported by the Green Party (and incidentally supported by thinking people like Parker in the current Labour government)
Wealth Tax – no downside at all unless you're wealthy, in which case you can probably afford and/or dodge it easily enough.
Which is where any proposal for a wealth tax comes unstuck. The truly wealthy will be able to structure their affairs to dodge it, lawyers and their ilk will have a field day, but the accidentally wealthy will end up having to sell their homes.
Is it possible to wean the truly wealthy off their addiction to tax dodging?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/128814781/signs-suggest-the-rich-are-trying-to-dodge-new-tax–heres-whats-being-done-about-it
It can only be dodged easily enough if it is designed so….unfortunately those designing often have vested interests.
Ah yes – the 'vested interests' problem. A 20% quota of parliamentary representatives drawn from the ranks of the truly ‘poor' might be a temporary fix, at least until they had received their first few pay cheques.
Or the Irish model (of deliberative democracy) looks to have some potential…randomly selected citizens assemblies to assess expert advice
Democracy is founded on random selection called sortition in ancient Greece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
to ensure random selection,the Kleroterion was used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion
Actually Sortition as a form of governance looks promising….though there would be I imagine quite a number who decline, much like jury selection….but it is certainly more likely to be truely representative.
And bonus, the end of Party politics!
Thanks for that info. Worth a go in NZ – like empanelling a (big) jury.
It would be a better selection for local government,where local issues should dominate,rather then train fully paid professional politicians.
Local government could be a trialling point but if it proved workable it could be applied at a national level….of the options I see available it is the one that appeals to me most (even though it may have some potential issues)…of course it is a pipe dream as it is not likely to occur short of absolute disaster, and probably not even then.
I think a WT can be written which is hard to get around, but I agree that with this government, which has been pathetic in relation to trusts which have been set up in there 1000's to avoid the 39% tax rate and for other reasons/avoidance (to claim Working for Families for instance), there is little hope of a rigorous WT regime eventuating.
Such a regime might well happen though if you Party Vote Green.
I'll be party voting Green, their Wealth Tax advocacy being but one reason.
Good man…(and it should have been "their 1000's" above of course.)
Don't you mean an envy tax?
That would assume I need any more money which I don't.
Well said Sabine. What you have written above is largely something I can unusually agree with.
"reducing expenditure
I am sure we can find money that is spend but has no results to show for and spending could be cut. Perks for Ministers could be cut. Housing allowances for Ministers could be cut. Wages for ministers could be cut. Less Propaganda Peddlers for NZTransport etc etc."
Great soundbites but the $ saved wouldn't even be a rounding error on a tiny part of government expenditure.
Oh there are more soundbites to list, but its like with everything, if you save enough of the pennies it soon becomes money.
Or as an old saying goes, enough chickenshit piled up high makes a nice mountain of manure. – somewhat loosely translated.
The perceived problem with tax cuts is that "rich pricks" get it too. You could eliminate this by having the tax free allowance followed by a higher (than now) tax rate.
So, using your 25k, a tax rate of 33% from then would mean someone on 70k would now pay 15k tax (compared to 14k now). So that would give a meaningful tax cut for low earners whilst not costing too much (by giving it to everyone). You could make the tax at 70k the same if the tax free level was set a a slightly higher 27,500 (and no-one under 70k would pay more tax). It still means less tax received by the govt, but probably a better way to target lower paid than other methods currently used (the current IRD payments, for example).
For the expenditure, fiddling with MPs allowances would make little difference. Taking 250k off them (so basically no salary) would save 30m a year, which would mean just 20 cents a week if passed on to 3m taxpayers.
Cutting wasteful expenses is worthwhile though, as the savings can be used in better ways – more nurses, teachers etc or just paying the existing ones better. But not tax cuts.
Yeah, but if you passed that 30 mil onto the tax payer via Mike King then you get a whole lot of mental healthcare counseling paid for which would be a much better return to the tax payer, but maybe that would demand creative thinking and that is not something i would expect a government doodaa to do. Think and creatively at that.
Of course you could send everyone 37 cents in a transaction that a bank might charge you a dollar + for. And i could totally see the doodaas on either side of the aisle talk about that just the way you do. LOL – Go figure.
You could also ensure that PAYE is paid directly to IRD on payday when the wages are paid to employees.
This would help stop employers stealing their workers money and identify earlier businesses in trouble. You could also stop large corporates having policies such as paying bills in 3-6 months so their smaller suppliers get paid to help their cashflow.
We lose hundreds of millions of dollars in tax every year to failed businesses.
agree on that one.
and we could make tax avoidance illegal with a few years of hard labour attached to it too. 🙂
there would be many many ways to address spending without having to actually cut services. Just start limiting excesses and willful wastage for a starter.
This is long(ish) and might get frowned-upon, but it's interesting 🙂
''For just as established religions assume the maleness of God, just as psychoanalysis and Freud assumed the maleness of libido, so have the social sciences- and in particular anthropology- assumed the generic maleness of human evolution. Both popular and academic anthropological writers have presented us with scenarios of human evolution that feature, almost exclusively, the adventures and inventions of man the hunter, man the tool maker, man the territorial maker, and so forth.
Woman is not comprehended as an evolutionary or evolutionizing creature. She is treated rather as an auxiliary to a male-dominated evolutionary process; she mothers him, she mates him, she cooks his dinner, she follows around after him picking up his loose rocks. He evolves. She follows. He revolutionizes. She adjusts. If the book jackets don’t give us pictures of female homo sapiens being dragged by their hair through 2 or 3 million years of he-man evolution, we are left to assume this was the situation.
This, despite the known fact that among contemporary and historic hunting-and-gathering people, as among our remote hunting-and-gathering ancestors, 75 to 80 percent of the group's subsistence comes from the women's food gathering activities. This, despite the known fact that the oldest tools used by contemporary hunter gatherers, and the oldest most primal tools ever found in ancient sites, were women's digging sticks. This, despite worldwide legends that cite women as the first users and domesticators of fire.
This, despite the known fact that women were the first potters, the first weavers, the first textile-dyers and hide-tanners, the first to gather and study medicinal plants- i.e., the first doctors- and on and on. Observing the linguistic interplay between mother and infants, mothers and children, and among work-groups of women, it is easy to speculate on the female contribution to the origin and elaboration of language. That the first time measurements ever made, the first formal calendars, were women's lunar markings on painted pebbles and carved sticks.
And it is thoroughly known that the only "God image" ever painted on rock, carved in stone, or sculpted in clay, from the Upper Paleolithic to the Middle Neolithic- and that's roughly 30,000 years- was the image of a human female."
-"The Great Cosmic Mother", Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor
source link?
Here's a pdf of the complete text
Interesting Robert. A close relative of mine is tied to a Church which lives on the father being the head of the house. Hilarious watching the wife quietly running the show while appearing to be subservient. Decision making is a lesson in lop-sided negotiation. And he still believes that men are superior.
Hate to break it to you heathen but in real life Catholic churches are mostly run by women. Priests are harder to find and often locums. In the non-Catholic structured churches it's disproportionately female in Ministry.
But yinno, carry on with the tired ignorant bullshit assumptions.
Male imagery had asserted dominance in Gobekle Tepe and quickly across most of the Turkish Upper Chalcolithic. Some dense combination of tax, fenced property, and the dense hierarchies required for urban living did it. Followed quickly by bureaucracy, organised armies, and then written language.
Spiritual nostalgia just ain't what it used to be.
everyone knows that women run things at that level Ad. Sane cultures are honest about it.
The quote in Robert's comment is about how male dominated societies such as ours tell the story of humanity, and how this erases women's culture. Victors write history. Patriarchy is only 5,000 years old though, so probably a blip we will recover from if we don't fry ourselves first.
Gobekle Tepe is one of a full region of tepe that are saying the same story, and it started at least as far back as 9,000 BC. You can't extract patriarchy, property rights and language.
yep, patriarchy didn't arise overnight, it was a process over time and multiple cultures.
Some say coming down from the trees in the first place was a mistake. But I think it's fair to say that once we started planting crops en masse, we need armies to protect the now settled farming cultures, and that meant controlling the means of human reproduction. It's still the basis of patriarchy now, only in civilised cultures we distance ourselves from this reality.
Women invented time, when we shifted from estrus to a menstrual cycle the same length of time as the moon phase. We also invented post-fertility when we developed menopause, this allowing the great cultural leaps forward for humans because grandmothers helped raise children and look after the tribe.
(of course, nature invented those things in women, but the point is poetically made).
Birds react to day and night, month and season, year and generation. They did it well before even mammals arose.
So it's just wrong even poetically to claim the 'invention of time' for women.
Once women started menstruating cyclically instead of via estrus, for women time would have taken on an obvious, in your face meaning. Embodied, not abstract.
Of course there are natural cycles that affect many forms of life. I was pointing to one in particular.
No, you were claiming a specific epistemic privilege for women over men because of menstruation.
Time may well be gendered insofar as different cycles get registered, but that's it.
let me put it another way. How females evolved biologically had a big impact on the evolution of human cultures and societies. Female fertility cycles are threaded all through human history and culture. It's just that men have been privileged by the patriarchal systems of recent millennia and thus understanding of those cycles and the roles they play has been distorted and/or rendered invisible. Just like in Sjoo and Mor's examples of technology.
So it's not just 'that's it'. It's that how women contribute and live in the world as females matters, to women, and to human societies. Being female isn't incidental, it's core.
But I didn't. All I did was talk about women. Didn't say anything about men, nor did I imply anything. It's your philosophical framework that read something about privilege over men (a common problem in the patriarchy). As if it's just not possible for women to be important in their own right.
However, there was clearly a reproductive advantage in older women assisting with raising grandchildren (and/or as a repository of wisdom), since those genetic traits persisted. If there were no 'fitness' advantage, then the trait would not be universally expressed (if a woman lives long enough, she's going to go through menopause)
Grandmothers who were around and involved had more grandchildren…. How natural selection works.
Not sure why you started with however, this is exactly what I was pointing to.
The quote "nature invented these things".
Natural selections operates across a a suite of behaviours and variations which may be more or less adaptive. Nature doesn't invent.
not everyone expresses ideas so literally Belladonna.
Interesting – but the first gods were not necessarily anthropoid.
Remember last year when Australia had all those Covid cases and deaths in Victoria and NSW and it seemed out of control compared with NZ? Well Australia now has less deaths per million than NZ-it has had Covid under better control than NZ for months now.
NZ 472/m
Australia 470/m
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Actually for all intents and purposes we are currently at parity. 2/m isn't much of a difference. And Australia is at a very different point in their wave cycle – a lot more people died getting to where they are now compared to NZ.
You are entirely missing my point which is that NZ was much much better in terms of deaths/million months ago, but the trend of Covid deaths has been much worse in NZ than OZ over the last few months and there is no sign of this changing.
Take a look at the graphs in the website I referenced above.
I'm not missing your point, you're reading the data wrong. First, cumulative – overall we've lost a lot fewer people compared to Australia per capita, which if you will insist on making it a competition, is the important number. Second, their per capita numbers right now are going to be moving down because they are coming out of an infection wave. We're just hitting our second or third wave.
That’s been true until now, but no longer. NZ has been rapidly overhauling Aussie's (cumulative total) 'Deaths/1M pop' metric. Wasn't expecting the switch to happen until the end of August, but, as BG correctly noted, it's happening now.
Australia has an infection fatality rate of 1 per 785 cases,the NZ IFR is 1 in 1007.
That is the infection rate which is not what I am talking about.
Case numbers are notoriously badly reported so the infection rate is highly unreliable. Death rates are more certain (in fact very certain) and so are far more reliable.
Comes in around what was forecast by Baker in 2020,an order of magnitude over the influenza IFR and consistent with an excess death mortality.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-average-baseline?country=NZL~AUS
It's like two bald men, fighting over a comb!
It's a bit weird that you find the fact that Oz has handled Covid better than NZ unworthy of a sensible comment.
There's something wrong with these people.
https://twitter.com/LauraJedeed/status/1555559384347983879
Up to 100,000most of the half-starved North Koreansoldiers couldconscripts rumoured to be sent to bolster Vladimir Putin’s forces fighting Ukraine will head for the hills at the first opportunity they getaccording to Russian reports.ifi
https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/100000-north-korean-soldiers-could-be-sent-to-bolster-putins-forces-fighting-ukraine/news-story/1126782c8c5e6fe08a8ad2d9fa38dff0
Not if they only send troops with families back home…
100k-300k North Korean defectors would likely disagree.
I don't know that I'd defect if I had family in NK especially knowing what might happen to them
I guess there's always those who can
What???
[deleted]
Luxon is expendable and he’ll be replaced if/when necessary because it’s all about the team winning, not the ‘captain’.
One can now self identigy as disabled and chronically ill? Can such a person be denied benefits if challenged on that self Id? And how do you quantify 'disabled' and 'chronically' ill. And then, why bother in the first place?
https://twitter.com/Soc_of_Authors/status/1555156215042396163
You are equating self ID'ing as disabled and chronically ill with self ID'ing as a woman, all for culture war purposes.
Have you thought this through?
how about you explain your own thinking.
There are people who do self ID as disabled who aren't disabled. I doubt this is what the Society of Authors means, but it's getting harder to tell. There's a still a taboo on self IDing into an ethnic group.
No, i think they made it to Self ID and then they threw everything and the bathwater out of the window.
identifying as disabled predates Self ID though, so I think it's more complicated than that.
i don't.
I posted this from twitter, it is them who are asking for 'self identified' disabled people. '
I am asking for someone to translate into easy english for me how someone self id's as disabled.
Maybe you need to explain your own thoughts to me.
a. why do you conflate this self id with that of men who want access to places for women ( again, i am excluding Transwomen/Transmen who transitioned from self id, to make my point clear).
b. why do you assume that i like you conflate this self ID with that of men who want access to places for women.
Being disabled is not a case of being born in the wrong the body, it is not a mental illness, it is not some passing body dysphoria, being disabled is medical, permanent, and makes navigating live quite a bit different and harder for those that have to live with disabilities and chronic pain.
So frankly, just for once, Do better.
I guess that this operates the other way, too, though. There are people (including, presumably, authors) who may have a 'disability' but do not self-identify as disabled.
As someone with an invisible disability, how I choose to relate to the world is often a choice. I can hide my disability. I can make it visible. In that there's something about identity. Not such a big thing for me but it matters because otherwise other people get to define me and my disability.
It's not Self ID so much as 'identify as' someone who has a disability (as Belladonna points out, not everyone does). It stops other people from determining what disability or a person's disability means. This matters because there's such a lot of bullshit in society around disability, prejudice, ignorance and so on. Including in institutions.
There are all sorts of problems with tying this to Self ID and I think them using the term self in the tweet is a bit mistake because it shifts it from identifying as, to being something akin to gender identity and then we have all the issues of disability fluidity and basically making shit up.
Sorry, not sure that is easy English.
I have no uterus, thus can't have children. I could now identify as 'chronically ill' and in need of medication – hrt, and disabled as i can not have children.
I choose not to identify as such as i believe that 'disabled' and 'chronically ill' should be reserved for those that have medical issues that forced them to need different measures of support to manage society. I.e. wheel chair ramps, wider doors to shop entrances, disabled toilets, specific care, medical needs that outweigh mine and those similar to mine many many times. There is a difference between not being perfectly healthy and being chronically ill and disabled. (This comment does not relay in any way to you Weka and your health.)
One does not identify as 'chronically ill' one is, one can not opt out of this state. I can self id as a fertile women any day i will nevertheless never birth a child as i do not have the biological capacity for it. Again, it is biology vs imagination. In this case it is more of a state of 'telling us that you are chronically ill' so that we can accept your story. Surely a little bit more of gate keeping should be given, considering the prestige of these awards.
Mind in Mexico a court has argued in favor of 'self id' age. Maybe we are in clown world.
Rather then call for self 'id writers with health issues they should just have called for writers with different abilities and chronic illnesses.