And here’s something else: he seems to associate with a whole bunch of people who seem intent on emailing each other in very odd phrases (what on earth is a ‘pizza related map’ and why would such a ‘map’ be drawn on a ‘hankerchief’???).
Don’t bother trying to please the left wing, it’s not worth it.
By the way, Mexico is complaining that Trump policies have now cost them 3600 well paid manufacturing jobs which were going to move out of the USA to Mexico.
James Clapper is arguably the most notorious liar in the world;
So why is RNZ National treating him as a serious and credible source? Summer Report, RNZ National, Friday 6 January 2017, 8:25 a.m.
I’m sure I was not the only person to listen with interest when perky Summer Report host Anusha Bradley read out from her script that a “leading security analyst” is “more certain than ever” that Russian hackers were working for Donald Trump. It was not until at least thirty seconds into her spiel that Bradley revealed who this “leading security analyst” was: James Clapper, the utterly discredited Director of National Intelligence.
In case you’ve forgotten, James Clapper is the man who lied under oath to Congress, and denied that the NSA was illegally collecting data on American citizens. It was seeing Clapper lying to Congress that prompted Edward Snowden to blow the whistle on the whole of the massive, illegal, unconstitutional NSA spying regime. “Sort of the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. … Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back.” [1]
None of this seemed to matter to Anusha Bradley, or to “our U.S. correspondent Kevin McAleese”, who chuntered on for a minute or so, recycling Clapper’s anti-Russian rhetoric as if he were a credible source. We are accustomed to RNZ National presenters being naïve (Jesse Mulligan, Bryan Crump), ill-informed (Jesse Mulligan), even nasty (Jim Mora, Noelle McCarthy). But this morning’s performance by Anusha Bradley and her “U.S. correspondent” was as bad, as foolish, and as flagrantly dishonest as anything I have ever heard on any radio station, anywhere.
Not sure that I can ever remember chuntering but it seems fairly clear that the Russians did influence the outcome of the American election as did James Comey.
Okay the cybertrail hasn’t been published yet but I suspect it will be soon.
Good spotting, Scott! I used the word carelessly and imprecisely. I should have just written: “Kevin McAleese said….” His lazy and shoddy journalism is what damns him: he doesn’t need any help from me.
… but it seems fairly clear that the Russians did influence the outcome of the American election as did James Comey.
There is no evidence of Russian influence.
Okay the cybertrail hasn’t been published yet but I suspect it will be soon.
Well, we at least have the word of the world’s most discredited liar to boost our confidence.
This “Indivisible” guide is very much written for an American audience, but a bit of word substitution and tweaking and it is a fantastic slacktivist/occasional activist/activisit guide for NZ as well. I love the inclusion, for example, of suggested call dialogues. The left here needs to publish them so people who might not go on a protest know who to call, and how to manage the conversation!
Apparently it is going down a treat amongst Democrats in the USA, who are finally waking up to the fact that they now have oppositional, parliamentary style politics and they’ve allowed the equivalent of the right wing of the ACT party win power in state after state for the GOP.
But all the poaching of Tea Party organising model will only work if the primary agency for the left is left wing and progressive in the first place, which brings us to the tactic which the representative wing of a political party fears the most: The purge. Nothing gets the attention of a fat cat political careerist like seeing their colleagues getting dumped one by one… Thinking specifically of New Zealand, Up to now, everyone has played nice in New Zealand on this – or rather, they’ve been bullied, browbeaten and purged by MPs whose vigilance in stamping out dissent in the local party sheeple is why Labour is now a hollow shell of a political party – an elite cadre party of like minded careerist technocrats is far, far easier to control than one full of opinionated people who refuse to be bullied. In terms of the purge, in nowadays seems you need an external but affiliated organisation (Momentum or the Tea Party, may God forgive my soul for mentioning them together in the same sentence) to smash the layers of institutional defenses establishment political parties have built to protect their careerist and managerialist cadres.
Some MPs are already reasonably leftist, or pragmatic enough, to be dragged to the left. But many are simply to committed to neo-liberal ideology and/or beneficiaries from their close ties to the neo-liberal establishment to be saved. For them, forced retirement or de-selection challenges should beckon. A time traveller from the 1935 Labour party would be confused to discover the current labour party has no plan to radically reform Labour relations, fully fund “free” education, openly and fulsomely oppose free trade agreements that damage local wages and conditions or support proper progressive taxation of the rich – and will only reluctantly and listlessly pick elements of those things when threatened with open revolt.
The left’s chosen vehicle must grow an ideological backbone if it wants to be able to co-opt the organising tools of their opposition. Any who refuse to do so should be kicked into touch.
For the benefit of the more simple-minded among us, would someone please write a comprehensive list of Labour mps and where they stand on this spectrum. If you are living outside the beltway the information available is patchy to say the least and sources unreliable. We rely on a msm which, as we are clearly aware, is no better than it ought to be and if you read the likes of Chris Trotter you could be forgiven for tearing your hair out and running screaming into the bushes with the total confusion of it !
I personally am only beginning to sneak back to Labour after leaving them as a result of the foreshore and seabed fiasco.
What would be great, assuming that Labour wishes to be seen as philosophically and ideologically in opposition to National, is to have Labour candidates come on here and answer questions from those of us who are quite desperate for change but have lost trust in all of those who aspire to lead.
@Morrissey – hopefully Labour learnt from that, the strategy’s effectiveness or lack of, showed in their election results.
Helping your opponent in their denial is not a winning strategy.
If Labour didn’t know what to do, they should stay out of it and deflect it back to the real protagonists Natz vs Hager. By minimising it and calling it a ‘distraction’ helped the Natz and angered the Labour supporters who are sick of the establishment denials on these issues.
What waypoints tell you that Labour has undergone a “change in the right direction”?
In my view, nothing has changed in the perpetuation of the same careerist ‘hanging on for dear life because I can’t get $150K pa in any other job’ Labour attitude and culture from those days.
Have you heard anything from Labour about the UBI lately? How about anything around a commitment to keep national super? Or any remarks that basic benefits need to be increased?
You appear to want National to have a fourth term, so there really is no point in discussing this with you CV. Plus the whole poisoning not just the well, but the ground around it thing, ffs.
So Labour hasn’t said anything about NZ Super, benefit levels or a UBI lately then, eh? Interesting. They still have 6-7 months before the election so I guess they better start.
I’ve already said elsewhere that it’s 2:1 for a National win next (whoops THIS) year, which will increase further for National if they play the shell game that I am expecting.
At this stage I am picking the extreme upper limit party vote for LAB+GR at 43% to 44%.
Like I said, no point in talking with you while you’ve got your shit-tinted glasses on. You can frame it as a prediction, but everything I have seen from you in the past year suggests that you also want Labour to lose. Your political actions support this. You are abusing your power and I’m not playing that game any more.
“Shit tinted glasses” are probably preferable to having your head buried in the sand. CV is right – we still need Labour to get a voice and say something instead of just barking at passing cars. We need a confident and worthy opposition….. the clock is ticking.
Yeah but that wasn’t what I was referring to about CV at all. I’m happy to clarify if it’s not clear, but I really think you are misleading about what I was saying and doing.
Are you saying that I have my head buried in the sand? Care to provide some evidence of that?
Thanks for taking off the red tinted glasses and for putting putting on corrective, prescription (not prediction) glasses, Colonial Viper. Real Labour supporters must want to face reality and make themselves see clearly in order to hold caucus members, particularly the careerists and old driftwood, to account.
Unlike CV, I’ve never voted Labour, and only voted to the left of Labour. I’m not a Labour supporter, and neither are many in this thread.
The inability to engage with ideas in real terms is pretty tedious and a big part of the problem here. Of course Labour need to be held accountable. That’s nothing to do with what I was saying about CV though.
I’m quite happy to engage with ideas “in real terms”. Eg. I commented on your post the other day about how consumerism was a battle of the 1970s which had long since been lost and the left had no new ideas about it since then.
But you didn’t want to engage with that idea in real terms and shifted my comment off your post.
CV you know how the party works. Policies are released incrementally and the party policy platform contains the general principles. Can you decist from misrepresenting the position all the time. People will suspect you are getting your lines from Hooton.
I was referring to the Party’s performance of late. Sorry weka, I was in no way referring to you re head in the sand. Perhaps I should have used “one”.
Thanks for clarifying garibaldi. There’s hardly anyone here who is happy with Labour’s performance. That’s a different thing than wanting them to lose. So I will in fact take a Labour voter with their head in the sand over the ethically bankrupt politics that CV now pushes with his shit-stained glasses on. And to be clear, I’m not talking in any way at all about not criticising Labour.
Fortunately those aren’t the only choices and there is more to be gained from working constructively (including critiques) than poisoning the well.
As for Labour, I’ve long held the view that they are who they are and it’s better strategy to support them in small incremental shifts so that we get enough reprieve that the real change can be done elsewhere. If Labour fails now, that gives National another term, and that IMO is catastrophic for NZ.
I’ve put this challenge out to CV in the past, and he’s never responded meaningfully, but even if one were to think that a 4th National term might galvanise a true shift in NZ politics for something else good to arise, I’ve yet to see any evidence presented for how that might happen. Much more likely that we would have photo-fascism entrenched even further in NZ as well as more of our ability to effect change stripped from us.
Yes, many of us want a truly left wing party in NZ. We don’t have one. It’s not possible for Labour to be what we want them to be (if you disagree please explain how that could happen).
Time to get on with the work of making what we can with that.
I’ll tell you what I don’t like about Labour. They claim they are a broad church but from the evidence I have seen in the past few years, they lean to the centre right (eg Stuart Nash) and reject the left (eg Hone Harawira). The image of Chris Hipkins visciously attacking David C during the great non-event coup is also etched in my brain.
“I’ll tell you what I don’t like about Labour. They claim they are a broad church but from the evidence I have seen in the past few years, they lean to the centre right (eg Stuart Nash) and reject the left (eg Hone Harawira). The image of Chris Hipkins visciously attacking David C during the great non-event coup is also etched in my brain.”
sure, and there’s plenty of things I don’t like about them too. Nevertheless, they are the only way we are going to have a centre-left govt by the end of the year, so what’s the strategy now?
I’ve put this challenge out to CV in the past, and he’s never responded meaningfully, but even if one were to think that a 4th National term might galvanise a true shift in NZ politics for something else good to arise, I’ve yet to see any evidence presented for how that might happen.
Why would there be “any evidence” today for something which might hypothetically happen some time years in the future?
What was the evidence 12 months ago that Trump would be President of the USA today?
Did that lack of evidence back then preclude Trump becoming President?
I didn’t have any evidence when I picked a clear and significant Trump victory; I just read the political tea leaves.
Well said weka. If we want to see a Government that isn’t a National one this year then we need to see Labour maximise its vote. Some lefties might not be a fan of Labour, but Labour are still going to make up at least 50% of a leftist block in Government. If you’re a Green or NZF voter you need them to do well, your chances rely on their success.
The last few weeks of the year I felt were good ones for Andrew Little. He looked more confident and fired up infront of camera and that’s good for everyone. I’m fine with them not chasing the UBI or anything else that might scare the horses for now… Just keep getting the hits in on our woeful housing situation and that’s half the job done.
Thanks, I don’t see a lot of MSM, so often don’t have a good sense of what Little is doing unless I go look.
(I would add that if people want a centre left govt then they shouldn’t vote NZF. Peters might choose National, or he might choose Labour in which case he will hold Labour to the right. Either way it’s not going to shift us left and it could be downright disastrous).
” If Labour fails now, that gives National another term, and that IMO is catastrophic for NZ.”
Yes I totally agree which is why I made the initial request
The guide is great because what is says is if you don’t like a GOVERNMENT policy, you don’t go and occupy a National party MPs office. You go and occupy the office of a LABOUR MP who won’t come out and oppose it when you ask him or her. So you don’t need to know a “spectrum” – you just ask your local MP for an unequivocal position on an issue, and if they won’t give you one you go and sit in their office or get you and 1000 people to keep ringing them until they turn up and explain why. The pressure is on YOUR SIDE to grow some balls, and take the fight to the right.
I would add that it needs some strategy, or at least some degree of thoughtfulness. Going into an election year, the focus needs to be on policy and direct action against those MPs (and presumably LECs) who aren’t moving left, and avoiding Labour bashing for the sake of it. I’d say it needs to happen now, rather than closer to the election.
I’d like to know what the selection process is, and a timeline on that.
And I’d love to see people on The Standard organising around this. Time we stopped arguing about shit and did something.
It will be great if many of us can visit the local Labour MP offices & blog updates about how often they are not around. I know my mates and I can name half a dozen who are hardly around (may I list them here?) and we can compare notes or a real-time record
( It will be great if many of us can visit the local Labour MP offices )
I recently moved to Pukekohe in south Auckland and thought I would go along to a local branch meeting it’s been a while. I went onto Labour’s web site and I cannot even find if they have one.
“The pressure is on YOUR SIDE to grow some balls, and take the fight to the right.”
I wonder if Labour hopeful (again) Laila Harre took the opportunity to tell her mate Nikki Kaye just how bloody lucky she was that her cancer diagnosis didn’t cost her her job.
Perhaps Laila took the opportunity to remind Nikki of the many people who where not so fortunate, whose employers threw them to the wolves and who got literally the bum’s rush when they were forced to apply to WINZ for support.
On this site most of the commenters, who choose to shred Labour’s MPs on a regular basis for being so-called neo-liberals, are not even members of the party and I suspect have never been members. However, they seem to be of the view they know more about Labour’s MPs than those of us who are members and have been for many years.
I drifted away from Labour around 1983/4 because I was sick of the [then] in-fighting. I didn’t understand the nuts and bolts of it at the time, but in retrospect can appreciate it was the Douglas clan (not always Douglas himself but his hangers-on in the Party) who were behind most of the problems. I rejoined 15 years ago after Helen Clark came to power.
Since the departure of the Douglas crew and their member acolytes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Labour has been slowly returning to its roots (albeit in a modernised version) and that can be evidenced in the types of policies I know they are planning to put forward this election year. For some people it has been too slow, but to reinvent a political party is not an easy task and it takes time to get everyone back on board again. In this respect, Andrew Little is doing a magnificent job and I am no longer as pessimistic as I was about Labour’s election chances… as I was a year or two ago.
I know there are one or two ‘light to moderate’ neo-liberals still in caucus but they are bowing out at the end of this term. Others – like for example Annette King – have well and truly re-embraced their former Labour values. Indeed I’m sure they never lost them… just put them in a cupboard for safe keeping until the time was right to bring them out again.
Perhaps those of us on the inside can appreciate the extent of the advances that have been made in recent years, but others have yet to catch up. I know CV will disagree but he appears to have had some major run-ins with the Party (I don’t know the details, just what he has revealed here) which are negatively impacting on his judgement. I’m hoping one day he will feel able to re-connect.
“On this site most of the commenters, who choose to shred Labour’s MPs on a regular basis for being so-called neo-liberals, are not even members of the party and I suspect have never been members.”
Guilty as charged, but in my defense I have tried to find enough in Labour and/or the Greens policy to give me reason to sign up.
Both have to do better.
(Oh, and I should maybe re email Annette King about a particular issue (that is within the scope of her responsibilities) and see if her re connection with true Labour roots has progressed far enough for her to challenge the Nats over their lies and deception.)
But maybe not. I did make an approach to Ruth Dyson about the same issue in person, in her office, and oh my goodness gracious me….
We left her office stunned, and shaking our heads that she would say what she did…and realised that as far as our particular issue…Labour was a predominant player in fucking things up.
And if they’ll do that for people with disabilities….
Fair enough comments Rosemary McDonald. Certainly Labour needs to to do better when it comes to policy presentation. They need to be short, sharp and easy to understand for the majority of voters. The long versions can be set aside for us political tragics who like to wallow in the complexities of policy or who have a vested interest (like yourself) in specific policy planks. 🙂
Btw, I wasn’t impressed with Ruth Dyson as a minister in the Clark government. I didn’t know much about her but some of her media responses left a lot to be desired. She was rarely definitive and liked to talk about “looking at options” but never said what those options were. Someone else who is very good like that is Nick Smith.
The wallowing thing…yes, I am focused on non -ACC disability issues and especially the family carer issue. This particular subject I know inside out…including the history under Labour.
Labour could have sorted this. Should have sorted this. Didn’t…but worse…allowed for a system where those who were willing to take a punt at being caught out could circumvent the non- payment of family carers policy.
Ruth Dyson knew this was happening when we spoke with her in early 2013…”It was only a policy not the law”. When this government made the policy that had been determined to be discriminatory actual law…well…I wonder to this day if Ruth Dyson knew that this was going to happen…and the outrage from Labour in the House that day in May 2013 was just pantomime.
Almost as if this suspicion of mine had been broadcast…a commentor on another site told of how exactly that solution (of making the Policy law) was being touted by the Ministry of Health and Crown Law back before the Family Carers case went to the Human Rights Tribunal in 2008…under Labour.
You know, from my point of view…policies and manifestos and candidate bios are all very nice and good…but being honest, truthful, showing a very high level of integrity, is even better.
I know Labour failed this test over the family carers case….in how many other areas of government responsibility did they also neglect to be honest and transparent?
Labour is history in terms of political, popular and ideological relevance. They are no longer needed, but are instead taking up space on the political spectrum which could be better used.
Nope – if the Little/King leadership team had the ability to “reconnect with people” they wouldn’t have left it until 7 months before the election to demonstrate it.
Last year I kept hearing: the affable John Key is the only real asset this National Government has which is keeping them afloat. Without his popularity, National would be gone!
Now that John Key is history and the monotonous expressionless English is in charge, this election should be a walkover for Labour. Shouldn’t it?
Unless of course, you and me are correct in our analysis (which we are).
“Yes CV i agree Labour is finished as a political force , those who continue to support them guarentee national party victory”
I’m genuinely curious as to how you see that working. If Labour are finished and we shouldn’t vote for them or support them in any way, then what else can happen apart from National getting a 4th term? Can you please explain your thinking? e.g. do you think a new left wing party will arise this year and win the election? Or do you think that the Greens will get enough votes to win the election and govern on their own?
” … write a comprehensive list of Labour mps and where they stand on…”
I smiled at that bit, picturing a serious interview with John Key, him answering the question about what his MPs believe. “I believe they believe what I tell them to believe. And believe me they do if they want to believe they have any future chances.”
“For the benefit of the more simple-minded among us, would someone please write a comprehensive list of Labour mps and where they stand on this spectrum.”
I’d be happy to collate and put up a post on that if people here want to make the list. It would need to be evidence based, and we could do it in the sense of a lay-persons guide to the Labour Party. For those of us that don’t know Labour well, there is plenty in the public domain, both words/actions from MPs themselves, as well as analysis in the media (blogosphere, social and mainstream). We could pick say five MPs to focus on at a time and go out and do the research, bring it back to comments, get feedback and then it can go into a post.
I think having an outline of how Labour works internally, including the selection process, would be important too.
That sounds like a great idea – thank you Weka. Like you, I fail to see what the alternative is if Labour can’t make it as the dominant, or at least equal party in power. I’m reading all this hand wringing, but as you suggest, too much of that and we’ll wind up with a 4th term for the Natz
JanM, Rosemary McD et al – Chris Trotter is not a friend of Labour – he’s harbouring some sort of snitch from way back which keeps him blindfolded as to what Labour is actually doing.
When you ask where Labour MPs stand on “this spectrum” – what do you mean? A simple left – right answer, or a bit more detail …… and for that maybe you could look at Labour’s policy platform – formulated after the last election debacle among much debate and argument between Party members and remnants of the neo-lib rightwing bloc . It can be found here https://www.google.co.nz/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=nzlp%20policy%20platform
This is what Labour policy for the 2017 election will be based on.
I’m not so sure it’s an ideological problem, seems more to be lack of talent.
Take the frequent talk about ‘moving more to the centre’ as an example. The general argument is that Labour needs more votes from the centre ergo they need to move politically and ideologically further to the right to capture those votes.
The corollary to that argument is moving to the right will lose votes from the left, the consequent strategy being to pass those votes to the Greens and get them back through a Labour/Green coalition..
That argument is predicated on the rationale that you can’t please both at the same time; you either go for the centre or you go for the left. It seems more a pragmatic approach than an ideological one.
My thinking is meh, this is New Zealand where a good 75% of the population would be considered ‘left’ in pretty much any other country. Just how hard is to to create a policy platform that would satisfy both the left and enough of the middle to capture 50% of the votes? … to my mind it should be a doddle for anyone with a bit of talent.
“I’m not so sure it’s an ideological problem, seems more to be lack of talent.”
Inclined to agree….compounded by special/personal interests.The Future of Work Commission is a glaring example…2 years work to produce what? if labour (or anyone else for that matter) could produce a comprehensive and clear policy prescription for a transitioning society they would be home and hosed (IMO)
Monbiot has made the same point about the left in general worldwide……its called leadership.
The future of work commision simply highlights how automation would exacerbate challenges around inequality & low productivity that New Zealand already faces. Its anti bureaucratic in nature, but not by nature?
Neoliberalism conditions you to believe that value is in paper work. It’s starts on the level of a guy checking to see if you use the rooms in your house properly. Moving up the neoliberal pyramid you have police who spend most of there time filling out paper work but the message is the same, value is in paper work. Then you’ve got managers who’s function seems to revolve around if some one gets payed to much. Derivatives traders which is a really fancy form of paper is at the top of the neoliberal pyramid because they earn the most.
To reevaluate what it means to work means finding away to destroy this mountain of paper work we’ve created that adds no value to the real economy.
Yeah. I’ve tried to avoid even commenting on that Future of Work because every time I see it mentioned I get the recurring image of Nero and his fiddle.
I don’t wish to belittle their work but I can’t see the point of it, they’re not in power they just look to be indulging themselves there.
“Take the frequent talk about ‘moving more to the centre’……” That is media opinion, DH – and is not what Labour is actually talking about.
As Andrew Little has said a couple of times – in his connections with NZers as he goes around the country – everyone he meets considers themselves “middle NZ” (except for the 1%) – so he’s talking to people who are having difficulty getting a home, who have been made redundant, farmers, business people, others who are in work, people who have been ill, etc etc – all of them considering themselves “middle NZ”
Labour is a true left wing party! Promise! Labour will show their true left wing values after we give them power! Why do people not believe this!!! Wreckers and haters!!!!!
I would have thought it’s because they understand they can’t govern alone and have seen how trying to act as a FPP party in an MMP environment has failed them.
Well, I tried to give a bit of background for you JanM but perhaps you already knew it. You’ve got to say Labour is a far better party now than it was seven years ago. Cohesive with good policy coming up and believe me… some outstanding candidates on offer this election starting with the highly talented Michael Wood. Compare them to the types on offer from the National Party and they outflank them in every respect.
Anne , do you know how much “deadwood” Labour is going to shed? Seems to me they need to fair bit of it, just like National has done already. Too many right wingers still in the Labour caucus.
Bearing in mind Labour’s numbers were decimated in 2011 and 2014 so there aren’t as many to be culled as in the National Party:
Clayton Cosgrove, Ruth Dyson, Damien O’Conner (not sure about him but think so) Su’a William Sio and I think one of the Maori electorate MPs might be going . David Shearer has already gone. I’m picking there might be one or two others who have yet to declare they’e going. All in all it looks like at least 8 MPs will be gone by the next election. That opens up a good chance some very bright and talented younger aspirants will enter the caucus. To name two of them Deborah Russell and Claire Szabo. There are others.
Lionel explains how to maximally prosecute the case of 4 black youth in Chicago who kidnapped, tied up, abused, tortured a mentally handicapped white Trump supporter
While yelling invective like “fuck Trump” and “fuck white people.” The alleged perpetrators live streamed their activities. The video is still available on the internet.
He discusses if this is a “hate crime.” Also what if the alleged perpetrators have priors, and what would need to be done to maximise their sentencing.
Also imagine the inverse situation: 4 white youth who kidnapped, tied up, abused, tortured a mentally handicapped black Obama supporter.
While yelling invective like “fuck Obama” and “fuck black people.
Very fucked up (and I strongly suspect) drug induced bullshit.
A ‘hate crime’? I have doubts.
Politically motivated? No.
Kick their collective arses from here to now, but as for pretending this sort of evil nonsense is hugely unusual and then blowing it upout of context to be something it’s not in order to score some point or other? Nah.
Very fucked up (and I strongly suspect) drug induced bullshit.
If it were four young white men who had done exactly the same to a young black intellectually disabled Obama supporter while shouting “fuck blacks” and “fuck Obama” there would be much clearer hate and political motivations, no?
I would even expect President Obama to address the incident in front of the White House press corp. If it had been carried out by white men.
Anyhow, Cook County prosecutors have now filed charges of aggravated kidnap, hate crime, aggravated unlawful restraint and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
I’m not sure it’s intellectually dishonest if he actually thinks that way. But he is certainly the nastiest sack of shit I’ve had the misfortune to interact with in the recent past.
All hating and wrecking, trying to be a saboteur. Not a single useful considered criticism, not even a valid challenge to viewpoints we get from the likes of BM, Puckish, et al. Just nasty slogans hating on Labour, Greens, Democrats. All the while spreading hate propaganda and fake news all over the site, while trying to get opinion and facts he doesn’t like labelled fake news and trying to trash the idea that there really are objective facts.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t see a guy who devotes such ingenuity and diligence to stiffing his employees and contractors as “pro-working class.” Try looking at his actions, rather than his tweets and blowhard speeches.
That bullshit could just have easily revolved around some football team or a religious belief. The rhetoric just served as a vehicle for the abuse and isn’t in and of itself very important.
Your other point about Trump supporters being physically attacked, if true, hasn’t got sweet fuck all to do with this wee group of shit heads being shit.
So no, I won’t be writing angry tweets about what these folk did in Chicago. They are already in jail. They will be punished, I am sure, to the fullest extent of the law, but I’ve written about case after case after case of drug offenses and incidents of sexual assault and even murders committed by white folk where the system gave them a helping hand. The Stanford swimmer, Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping a woman, but spent a summer in jail for it instead of the 10 to 20 years he deserved, comes to mind.
Black folk and white folk both use and sell drugs at almost identical rates, with the rates for whites actually being slightly higher in both categories, but African-Americans are sent to prison at four to 10 times the rates of whites for various drug offenses.
Black folk are held super-responsible for every mistake and criminal offense made. We rarely have to march for justice in our communities. American prisons are full of black folk who are being held responsible for every mistake they’ve ever made.
Now I actually see thousands of other whites saying I caused this assault. Of course I reject that foolishness altogether. What’s most disturbing is that I hardly see many whites who are particularly angry about the crime speaking sympathetically about the victim. They are mainly using it to advance their racist agenda and demonize random black folk who had nothing to do with such a thing. Furthermore, I have routinely seen tens of thousands of African-Americans standing up and fighting and protesting for white victims of police brutality and toxic masculinity. The Alt-Right Movement does not care about violence in this country. Thousands of whites murder people every year, but you’d be hard pressed to find a protest or march headed by their movement on white on white crime.
As I type, the top trending topic in the country is now #BLMKidnapping. BLM stands for Black Lives Matter. The people in the video never even suggested such a thing. The Black Lives Matter Movement has never advocated such a thing. I have never advocated such a thing.
Pretty much. Not that that is itself new, but there is something additional going on now where people feel emboldened in promoting ideas that are at the least aligned with white supremacist views e.g. that all racism is equal, that racism is simply how one person treats another, that structural racism isn’t a real thing. I see this happening more in the US, but CV’s comment seemed a fairly classic example of it and I’m guessing we will see more of it in NZ. I noted the other day that Bradbury’s recent post where he is complaining about not being allowed to speak because he is a white man is another example. Different, but maybe part of the same shift happening in the culture. Traditionally we would expect both CV and Bradbury’s comments to come from the right or conservatives or small parts of the left, but now we have these voices becoming larger within left wing spaces.
Bradbury’s recent post where he is complaining about not being allowed to speak because he is a white man
Curiously, Bradbury has said a lot about the Sir Mad B story in the last few days – a flurry of posts, while saying the MSM have more important stories/issues they should be focusing on.
Arthur Edington once said If your theory clashes with the second law of thermal dynamics I can give you no hope, there is nothing for it but to collapse in the deepest humiliation.
Even environmentalists haven’t discovered a theory of production that fits with in the laws of thermal dynamics.
By definition, anything that comes from several points across the globe has a huge carbon footprint.
Drowsy M. Kram is correct. It’s thermodynamics, not thermal dynamics.
We can get a rich function that relates to labour/capital/energy inputs (that hasn’t happened yet). Once you’ve got energy related to parts of production, it talks to a relationship between the 2nd law of thermodynamics and so on, then it will be possible to make links to entropy/wast/ecology issues which economics has failed to do.
I talked to an overseas employment expert/philosopher recently and he was full of praise for Grant Robertson’s Future of Work project. He said it was world leading in scope and vision. I expect we will hear more about aspects of it this year (but hopefully in a form that is clear, succinct and easy to understand).
You gotta be kidding. A mish mash of a report clearly put together by different authors, few cohesive themes, with some chapters far better prepared than others which appeared simply slapdash thrown together.
@JoyFL ….do you really think so ?……I dont, not in election year.
I would prefer they kept to simple policies i..e. Kiwi Build ….and placed Future of Work as a behind the scenes driver.
Good piece here on the Israeli motive of keeping occupied territories just that, occupied. They do this to deny 3 Million Palestinians a vote.
Amazing that Jews in settlements are allowed to vote but Palestinians are not. And Israeli supporters like to say Israel is the only democracy in the region…
The Israeli electoral franchise extends to Jewish settlers in the occupied territories but there is no vote for the nearly three million Palestinians in those territories. If Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the West Bank it would have to give everyone the vote. It has used an endlessly prolonged peace process to save itself from having to do this.
Israel has options.
It can annex the occupied territories, extend the franchise to everyone and accept that Jews are a minority.
Or it can withdraw to a more modest and legally less suspect geographical area within the limits set by the UN in 1947.
Take note RWers who regularly want to deny the poor their piece of the pay pie:
“The CEO of a popular fast food chain said this week that he was “stunned” to see profits soar each time California passed minimum wage increases.
In an interview with KQED on Tuesday, Wetzel’s Pretzels CEO Bill Phelps admitted that his investors were worried about how a 2014 wage hike would impact the business. “Like most business people I was concerned about it,” Phelps said.
For years, opponents of minimum wage increases have argued that wage hikes mean fewer jobs because businesses have to raise prices and cut hours to cover the additional expenses. But Phelps said that his sales skyrocketed after a California law forced businesses to raise wages in 2014.
“I was shocked,” Phelps recalled. “I was stunned by the business.”
The same thing happened earlier this year when California raised the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour, Phelps said.”
Debt “connected” to the President-elect’s companies adding up to more than US$1 billion ($1.4b) is owed to more than 150 financial institutions, the Wall Street Journal reported overnight.
The revelation has prompted renewed concern about a potential conflict of interests minefield when Trump takes office in two weeks’ time.
According to the Journal, the loans were divided, repackaged and then sold in the form of bonds over the past five years, with some of them personally guaranteed by Mr Trump – who previously estimated his companies’ debt obligations at US$315 million.
Trump has made it clear that people who work at a senior level in his Administration will not be able move on and then lobby for corporations (5 year ban) and foreign countries (life time ban).
A good piece that illustrates the difference between shoddy journalism and fake news. A distinction that even Glenn Greenwald can’t seem to get his head around, to his discredit.
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has signaled to congressional Republican leaders that his preference is to fund the border wall through the appropriations process as soon as April, according to House Republican officials.</i?
Over the past year and a half, dozens of Palestinian men, women and children have been killed, even though they could have been overpowered while they were still alive. The difference between them and Azaria is that he was videotaped.
by AMIRA HASS, Haaretz, Jan. 5, 2017
There’s one thing on which Palestinians agree with Elor Azaria and his supporters: that he wasn’t the only one, he just had the bad luck to be videotaped without his knowledge. Palestinians agree with Azaria and his supporters that he was complying with the norm and did exactly what other soldiers do – namely, shoot with intent to kill even when nobody’s life is in danger.
Palestinians agree with Azaria that the system discriminated against him. It’s just that they believe dozens of other soldiers and policemen should also have stood trial.
Like Azaria himself, Palestinians are wondering why he stood trial while the soldiers who killed Hadeel al-Hashlamoun of Hebron were never even investigated by the Military Police. She, too, was lying on the ground, after soldiers shot her from a distance at a checkpoint because she held a knife (which no soldier was even scratched by). And then, while she was lying there, they continued shooting her in the upper body. (This was on September 22, 2015, and Hebron residents attribute the subsequent outbreak of lone-wolf attacks to this incident.)
On June 11, 2010, Maxim Vinogradov, a Border Policeman, “confirmed the kill” of Ziad Jilani, who was already lying on the ground, shot and wounded, after having run over other policemen with his car in Jerusalem’s Wadi Joz neighborhood. The prosecution decided against indicting Vinogradov, accepting his ridiculous claim that he feared Jilani had a bomb. He was in the heart of a Palestinian neighborhood – why would he blow himself up there?
Fadi Alloun of Isawiyah was also lying on the ground, after having stabbed an Israel in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood on October 4, 2015. An anonymous policeman shot him to death after passersby encouraged him to do so. In this case, there was video footage from a cell phone, but it wasn’t enough for any steps to be taken against the killer.
Sara Hajuj of Bani Naim pulled a knife on Border Policemen inside the security-inspection room of a Hebron checkpoint on July 1, 2016. They sprayed her in the face with pepper spray and fled the room. Then one of them shot her, while she was alone in the room and didn’t endanger anyone.
On June 2, 2016, Ansar Hirsheh crossed the checkpoint at Anabta, where pedestrian traffic is forbidden, on foot. She had a knife in her belongings, but she didn’t endanger anyone. And there was no reason why the four armed, trained soldiers who surrounded her couldn’t have overpowered her without killing her.
Over the past year and a half, dozens of Palestinian men, women and children have been killed, even though according to both eyewitnesses and common sense, they could have been overpowered while they were still alive. Some, it later turned out, hadn’t even attempted to commit an attack. Dozens of soldiers, Border Policemen and checkpoint guards are walking free among us after having killed Palestinians who posed no danger to their lives. The defense establishment portrayed them as having acted properly.
The boundary between self-defense and nationalist vengeance has been completely blurred. This is the atmosphere in which Azaria operated.
Therefore, the message sent by the military court judges stands out for its rarity: Elor Azaria violated the rules of engagement, so he was convicted. But the message the Israeli defense establishment sends to its soldiers and policemen is equally loud and clear: “Take care that you aren’t videotaped when you do the deed. We know how to downplay the value of photographs taken by Palestinian security cameras and bury the testimony of Palestinian eyewitnesses. But we still haven’t found the solution to close-up, professional video footage.”
I ran across a recent essay from The Brothers Krynn, which attempts to map common horror monsters onto the Seven Deadly Sins: https://canadianculturecorner.substack.com/p/horror-monsters-and-vice My interest, however, is not in the meat of the piece, but rather the opening paragraph: It is an interesting fact that in recent decades, Vampires have ...
Buzz from the Beehive Transport Minister Simeon Brown dutifully issued advice to all road users to keep safe on our roads during the Easter weekend. He encouraged them to stay safe, plan their journeys ahead of time, and be patient with other drivers while travelling around this Easter long weekend. ...
Oliver Hartwich writes – New Zealanders recently learned about a new feature film. It will be about former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – and taxpayers will subsidise it to the tune of NZ$800,000. Ardern had nothing personally to do with either the film or the subsidy. But her government’s ...
TL;DR: Here’s the top six news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above that was recorded yesterday afternoon above between and The Kākā’s climate correspondent : An independent review panel into the emergency response to Cyclone Gabrielle in Hawkes Bayconcluded “that ...
There are now only a few days left to give feedback on the Draft Government Policy Statement (GPS) on Land Transport 2024-34 (see our earlier post this week on GPS submission guides). As we’ve reported, the GPS is a disaster for Local Government, so we were particularly interested to hear ...
Willis has pledged to go ahead with the debt-funded tax cuts, despite growing opposition from her own supporters worried about appearing fiscally irresponsible. 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 ...
Open access notables A survey of interventions to actively conserve the frozen North, van Wijngaarden et al., Climatic Change:The frozen elements of the high North are thawing as the region warms much faster than the global mean. The dangers of sea level rise due to melting glacier ice, increased ...
Bryce Edwards writes – New Zealand’s biggest-ever political donations scandal is finally at an end. But what is the conclusion? No one can really be sure. The Court of Appeal released its judgement on Tuesday about the Serious Fraud Office case against the NZ First Foundation. On ...
In 2015, then-Prime Minister John Key announced plans for a huge ocean sanctuary around the Kermadec Islands, banning fishing and mining from 15% of Aotearoa's EEZ. It was bold, it was ambitious, and it suggested that National might actually care about the environment. Except they fucked it up: Key failed ...
1. Who has just been given the accolade New Zealander of the Year?a. The Kokakob. The Cook Strait Ferryc. Fair God. Dr Jim Salinger 2. Which of these is an affront to decent society?a. Dame Edna Everageb. Mrs Doubtfire c. Dr. Frank-N-Furterd. Brian 3. Who is Penny Simmonds?a. The aspiring actress in Big ...
New Zealand’s biggest-ever political donations scandal is finally at an end. But what is the conclusion? No one can really be sure.The Court of Appeal released its judgement on Tuesday about the Serious Fraud Office case against the NZ First Foundation. On the face of it, the court found ...
Buzz from the Beehive Waves of rain are set to lash much of the North Island during Easter Weekend as a low-pressure system forms east of New Zealand, according to a weather forecast published in the past day or so. Niwa was warning of a “moisture-laden” long weekend, with rain expected ...
Look around us…Nicola Willis’ promises of balancing the books, of cutting spending without reducing services, and of delivering game changing tax cuts are disappearing before her eyes.Everyday we see stories of violent crime ending in horrific injuries, or worse. The cost of living worsens, whereas the PM claimed renters would ...
TL;DR: My top six news of note on the morning of Thursday, March 28 include:The Government will have to borrow between $10 billion to $15 billion more than previously expected in order to make up for a slowing economy and to pay for $14.9 billion of tax cuts, according to ...
This story by Naveena Sadasivam and Kate Yoder was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The long-awaited jobs board for the American Climate Corps, promised early in the Biden administration, will open next month, according to details shared exclusively ...
Should landlords be able to deduct the interest on the loans they take out to bankroll their property speculation? The US Senate Budget Committee and Bloomberg News don’t think this is a good idea, for reasons set out below. Regardless, our coalition government has been burning through a ton of ...
Treasury’s first report on the economy since the change of government presents a damning indictment of Labour’s economic management. The problem for National is that it is so damning that logically, coupled with a rapidly slowing economy, Finance Minister Nicola Willis should respond to it by postponing or even cancelling ...
Budget tensions are becoming evident within the Coalition Government. Winston Peters made numerous political points in his speech to the NZF annual conference. But the attack on his own government’s fiscal policies raised issues of substance. ‘Today in the Sunday Star Times, journalist and former advisor to the Labour ...
Buzz from the Beehive The media – sure enough – have been binging on Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ release of the Budget Policy Statement and a statement headed Government announces Budget priorities This assures us – or rather, this parrots the Luxon team mantra – that the Budget “will deliver ...
The Ides of March brought me COVID followed by a bereavement. No wonder they tell you to be careful of them.I’m home now and have resumed the interrupted recuperation. Very much looking forward to getting back to regular things. Meanwhile, some thoughts…OneThis new Prime Minister guy just keeps getting more dire. ...
News that the Chinese ATP 40 cyber-hacking unit penetrated parliamentary internet networks in 2021 has renewed concerns about the PRC’s malign intentions in Aotearoa. But is the hack that significant given the length of time that has passed since its … Continue reading → ...
When Parliament passed the Intelligence and security Act in 2017, they assured us all that it was full of safeguards. Any intrusive surveillance of New Zealanders would be subject to a "triple lock", requiring the approval of the Minister and (supposedly independent) Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants, as well as post-facto ...
Eric Crampton writes – Richard Harman’s Politik newsletter provides a bit of the context that ought to have been showing up in other media reports on potential reductions in public service staffing. Media has been reporting on staffing cuts on the order of about 7%. Is that ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – It’s becoming increasingly apparent that many perceive free speech to have become the preserve of the politically right wing, the religiously conservative, the libertarian fringe, the anti-trans, the anti-Māori and…. well, just fill in with whatever groups or individuals you don’t like and don’t ...
Don Brash writes – As everybody who is not blind and deaf is aware, there is a huge political preoccupation with climate change at the moment, a widespread (though by no means unanimous) belief that global temperatures are rising mainly as a result of the greenhouse gases created ...
TL;DR: My six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy on Wednesday, March 27 include:Chris Bishop laid out his vision for filling Aotearoa-NZ’s $100 billion infrastructure deficit in a speech yesterday, emphasising user pays and private funding, but failed to say how to achieve bipartisanship on population, public borrowing and ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Former Finance Minister Grant Robertson and former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins have been conveying how unhappy they are with the tax system. Last week in his valedictory speech, Robertson called for the introduction of a wealth or capital gains tax. And this week Hipkins ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
Buzz from the Beehive China has loomed large in Beehive considerations over the past 24 hours, largely because of that country’s mischief-making in the cyber espionage department. Two media statements emerged on that subject hard on the heels of the PM baulking at questions put to him on RNZ’s Morning ...
Chris Trotter writes – WHY IS THE NATIONAL PARTY doing so much for landlords, property developers, trucking, and construction companies, and so little for everybody who isn’t already pretty well-off? It’s as if protecting landlords’ investments and building apartments and roads now constitute the whole of National’s ...
Bryce Edwards writes – When she was campaigning to be Minister of Finance last year, Nicola Willis pledged that she would resign from the job if she failed to deliver tax cuts in her first Budget. Now, it’s that pledge, along with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s ...
Robert MacCulloch writes – The Reserve Bank has doubled staff numbers in five years to 510, with personnel costs rising to $80 million in 2023 from $32 million in 2018 – up by a whopping 150%. I guess when you print $50 billion and flood markets with liquidity, ...
The furore. In case you didn’t notice there was a controversy in the weekend involving dolphins in a little town off the South Island. Don’t panic, they haven’t declared independence and resumed whaling, this was simply a sailing event.The problem began when racing was cancelled on the opening day of ...
For 20 years or more, the case for a meaningful capital tax gains has been mulled over and analysed to death, including by the tax working group chaired by Sir Michael Cullen. More than once, the International Monetary Fund has said a CGT would be a good idea for New ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read: The Public Health Communications Centre (PHCC) call for urgent preventive action and a risk assessment survey of long covid in this briefing noteLocal scoop: NZ road deaths surpass OECD rates, so why is the govt reversing safety plans? ...
This story was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. This story is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising ...
This is a guest post from Robert McLachlan Global warming is accelerating; 2023 was off the charts. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. In New Zealand, transport accounts for half of all fossil fuels burnt. In the Emissions Reduction Plan, transport emissions fall 41% by 2035. As the ...
Labour productivity has been receding rapidly over the past two years, reversing a post-lockdown rise. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy as at 6:26am on Tuesday, March 26 include:Workers have been treading water in output per hour worked for 12 years, ...
TL;DR: The key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 2 include:Today, Parliament resumes sitting at 2pm for the second week of a two-week session. Officials for SIS and GCSB report their annual reviews in public to the Intelligence and Security Select Committee from 5.10pm.Tomorrow, ...
Faced with a barrage of criticism over the promised tax cuts from usually supportive commentators, Finance Minister Nicola Willis yesterday reaffirmed her intention to include them in this year’s Budget. The Government is up against it over the cuts just about every way it turns. Commentators like Fran O’Sullivan, Matthew ...
Here’s my pick of today’s substack posts as of 6:26pm on Monday, March 25: writes via his substack that Market-rate housing will make your city cheaper writes via his substack about the problems talking to double-cab ute (truck) drivers about their vehicles. today about moments of radicalisation in ...
Buzz from the Beehive Just before Christmas, Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivered something that was pitched as a mini-budget and brayed about the decisive action being taken to repair the Government books and support income tax relief in Budget 2024. In a statement headed Fiscal repair job underway. she introduced ...
My sister Belinda asked Dad yesterday what one word would describe Mum best. He said: vivacious.If you only knew her from the photos on the slideshow we've made for today,you might wonder about that, because the camera tended to lie with Mum.If ever she saw a camera pointed at her, she ...
There are two major public consultations closing in the next week, Auckland Council’s Long Term Plan (LTP), and the draft Government Policy Statement on Land Transport (GPS). Closing dates and times: LTP closes Thursday 28 February, at 11.59pm – a minute to midnight! GPS closes Tuesday 2 April, at 12pm noon – note that’s ...
From Kiwiblog’s David Farrar – Bryce Wilkinson writes: Senior Fellow Bryce Wilkinson’s analysis reveals that since March 2009, New Zealand has spent $158 billion more overseas than it has earned, but its NIIP has only fallen by $32 billion.Statistics New Zealand shows that receipts from overseas reinsurers have ...
Is she hinting that the Coalition Government will have to back down on key promises it made in Opposition? Brian Easton writes – The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is telling an evolving story about her fiscal challenges. In Opposition she was confident that she could ...
Dear Nicola Willis,Right now you’ve probably got lots of competing demands coming at you. Ministers who’ve inherited quite a mess, or so you’ve told us, looking for money in the budget to improve things. I imagine that’s why they came to parliament - to make things better.You’ll have to make ...
The Local Government, Transport and Auckland Minister hasthreatened councils with intervention if they don’t merge water assets to take them off balance sheet, just as the now-repealed Three Waters plan directed. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My six things of note this morning for Monday, March 25 include:Simeon ...
A listing of 36 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 17, 2024 thru Sat, March 23, 2024. Story of the week Thanks to John Mason having the stamina to sit down to watch "Climate - the Movie" ...
This morning the Q&A programme had Simeon Brown on to talk about National’s replacement for Three Waters. In case anyone’s forgotten the three are - drinking water, waste water, and sewerage. It’s quite important not to get them mixed up. In much the same way that you wouldn’t want to ...
Today’s newsletter comes with a mini-podcast conversation between me and my buddy Liv Tennet, talking about her time as a child actor in Lord of the Rings. It’s a conversation with a lot of giggles as she talks about falling off a horse, and becoming a meme. Read ...
The Desmog Climate Disinformation Database documents, "individuals and organisations that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming." It's a who's who of the organised climate change denial movement, in other words. In ...
Bob Edlin writes – A High Court judge has decided miscreants who have mana – or who claim to have mana – should be treated differently from miscreants who have none. It’s a ruling that suggests indigenous law-breakers have a better chance of securing a discharge without conviction ...
Welcome to the first, and possibly last, edition of Brickbats, Bouquets and Bull’s Wool. In which I’ll take a look at the events of the last week or so, and rate them.In such ratings the numbers usually have more to do with the opinions of the reviewer, than the actual ...
Roger Partridge writes – My earlier column this month, New Zealand’s highest court could be facing a turning point, prompted a flood of feedback from business readers and lawyers alike. A common query was what Parliament can do to restrain an overreaching judiciary. This week I discuss two steps Parliament ...
TL;DR: In today’s ‘six-stack’ of substacks at 6.16pm on Friday, March 22: writes about New Zealand's Building Boom—And What the World Must Learn From It over at his substack. challenges the Auckland Council’s use of a 3.8 degrees of warming forecast to oppose a wave-park and data centre project ...
Is she hinting that the Coalition Government will have to back down on key promises it made in Opposition?The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is telling an evolving story about her fiscal challenges. In Opposition she was confident that she could deliver her promised income tax cuts. Appointed minister, she ...
Buzz from the Beehive Ministers of the Crown have drawn attention to one sector of the science sector which is unlikely to be subjected to heavy spending cuts, a state-funded broadcaster which is doing nicely, thank you, and a sporting event that had $5.4 million from the public purse puffed ...
Abbott’s Freestyle Libre sensors allow continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). The sensor is applied to the back of the patient’s arm, with a thin filament under the skin measuring glucose levels constantly. But it costs around $100 per sensor and must be replaced once every 14 days. Photo by BSIP/Universal Images ...
The Inspector General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) recently released a report in which he exposes the existence of a foreign intelligence partner-controlled technological “capability” inside the headquarters of the GCSB, NZ’s 5 Eyes-affiliated signals intelligence collection and analysis agency. … Continue reading → ...
Peter Dunne writes – Nearly three decades after the introduction of MMP and multiparty governments there should be a greater level of understanding about their finer points than often appears to be the case. The reaction to the despicable outburst from the Deputy Prime Minister at the weekend highlights ...
The sweet kisses from fruit of summerHave slowly been turning dullerYou say, "those times"And "remember the daysWhen we went outside and there still was the shade?"Taking no reason into play…Autumn. Clear, blue days shortening to longer nights, growing colder. Aotearoa.That’s us. The temperature dropping, the looming car crash - so ...
Bryce Edwards writes – “It is often said that behind every great man is a great woman”. This is the pitch by the National Party Botany electorate branch to attend their “Ladies Afternoon Tea with Amanda Luxon”. For $110 including GST, you can turn up on Saturday 20 April ...
David Farrar writes – The Electoral Commission has published the expense returns for political parties for the 2023 election. I’ve put them in a table with how many votes a party got so we can see the spend per vote. National only spent $3.34 for every vote they got, almost ...
Winston Peters’ headline-making actions over the past week may have been a show of political power intended to strengthen his hand in Budget negotiations. It was no accident that his State of the Nation speech was as it was. He made it as New Zealand First Leader, not as Deputy ...
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:Former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson bowed out of politics this week, giving a series of exit ...
Graham Adams writes — If you love the law or sausages, as the saying goes, best not to look too closely at how they are made. And after watching the orgy of self-pity when Newshub’s closure was announced on February 28, television journalism should definitely be added to the list of those ...
Venerable New Zealand political commentator, Chris Trotter (https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/), is a sad creature these days. Once one of the most reliable Leftist writers out there – Economic Left at that – Trotter seems to have absorbed the worldview of Auckland culture-war obsessives. It is not for me to categorise what he ...
The Coalition Government’s plan to ‘get Auckland moving’ is a cuts cover-up that will ultimately cost Aucklanders more to move around the city, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Slashing the Ministry of Pacific Peoples by 40% will have a devastating impact on pacific communities and further highlights how little this government cares about anything other than cutting taxes for the wealthiest few. ...
Labour has proposed an urgent inquiry to investigate the ever-increasing profits of supermarkets, aiming to lower costs for shoppers and food producers alike, says Labour Spokesperson for Commerce and Consumer Affairs Arena Williams and Primary Production Spokesperson Cushla Tangaere-Manuel. ...
With 14% of jobs on the line at the Ministry for Ethnic Communities, the responsible Minister Melissa Lee is failing to stand up for the very communities she’s meant to be representing. ...
COURT OF APPEAL: TRIFECTA OF VICTORY FOR NZ FIRST, TRIFECTA OF FAILURE FOR OPPONENTS For the third time since April 2020, New Zealand First has defeated the Serious Fraud Office and all those complicit in a malicious attack against a political party going about its lawful business in a lawful ...
The Green Party stands with people who live in public housing, people in dire housing need, experts and advocates in demanding better than the Government’s archaic approach to housing those who need our support the most. ...
New Zealand has recently lost the hosting rights of some major international sporting events including the America’s Cup, the Rugby Championship, Netball World Cup, and the Wellington Sevens. We are now at a huge risk of losing SailGP as well. And it won’t stop there. The recent issues with SailGP ...
A Member’s Bill drawn this week would modernise insurance law and make things fairer and more transparent for consumers, Christchurch Central MP Duncan Webb said. ...
The Minister for Disability Issues has confirmed she was aware of funding issues in mid-December and did nothing to stop it. On 14 March, she signed off on changes that were announced and implemented on 18 March without any consultation with disability communities. ...
Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter says her members' bill is an opportunity for the coalition government to plug the gap in electric vehicle incentives. ...
The National Government continues to talk about irresponsible tax cuts that will only drive up inflation, despite the country entering a technical recession. ...
The Minister for Disability Issues must act urgently to reinstate flexibility around the funding for disability support and apologise to disabled carers. ...
This story has been initiated by a leftie shill reporter who proactively sought to call a member of a former band, which disbanded twelve years ago, give their biased appraisal of what was said in my speech, and concocted a ham-fisted attempt at a story that does nothing but show ...
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. ...
Many in the mainstream media have taken what was said in New Zealand First’s State of the Nation Speech in Palmerston North on Sunday and deliberately, deceitfully, and ignorantly misrepresented what I said and why I said it. The headlines and commentary on the news stated that I compared ‘co-governance ...
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 ...
Good afternoon. Thank you for, in your very busy lives, turning up to this meeting today. On October 14th last year New Zealanders overwhelmingly voted for change. That is exactly what this new government is bringing. New Zealand First campaigned to ‘take back our country’ and stop the disastrous economic ...
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. ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed the passing of legislation to move light electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) into the road user charges system from 1 April. “It was always intended that EVs and PHEVs would be exempt from road user charges until they reached two ...
New Zealand is strengthening its ability to combat illegal fishing outside its domestic waters and beef up regulation for its own commercial fishers in international waters through a Bill which had its first reading in Parliament today. The Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill 2023 sets out stronger ...
Economists Carl Hansen and Professor Prasanna Gai have been appointed to the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee, Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced today. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is the independent decision-making body that sets the Official Cash Rate which determines interest rates. Carl Hansen, the executive director of Capital ...
Apartment owners and buyers will soon have greater protections as further changes to the law on unit titles come into effect, Housing Minister Chris Bishop says. “The Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Act had already introduced some changes in December 2022 and May 2023, and ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters will travel to Egypt and Europe from this weekend. “This travel will focus on a range of New Zealand’s traditional diplomatic and security partnerships while enabling broad engagement on the urgent situation in Gaza,” Mr Peters says. Mr Peters will attend the NATO Foreign ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown is encouraging all road users to stay safe, plan their journeys ahead of time, and be patient with other drivers while travelling around this Easter long weekend. “Road safety is a responsibility we all share, and with increased traffic on our roads expected this Easter we ...
About 1.4 million New Zealanders will receive cost of living relief through increased government assistance from April 1 909,000 pensioners get a boost to Superannuation, including 5000 veterans 371,000 working-age beneficiaries will get higher payments 45,000 students will see an increase in their allowance Over a quarter of New Zealanders ...
Ensuring social housing is being provided to those with the greatest needs is front of mind as the Government restarts social housing tenancy reviews, Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka says. “Our relentless focus on building a strong economy is to ensure we can deliver better public services such as social ...
The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary will not go ahead, with Cabinet deciding to stop work on the proposed reserve and remove the Bill that would have established it from Parliament’s order paper. “The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill would have created a 620,000 sq km economic no-go zone,” Oceans and Fisheries Minister ...
Dam safety regulations are being amended so that smaller dams won’t be subject to excessive compliance costs, Minister for Building and Construction Chris Penk says. “The coalition Government is focused on reducing costs and removing unnecessary red tape so we can get the economy back on track. “Dam safety regulations ...
The coalition Government is expanding the medium-scale adverse event classification to parts of the North Island as dry weather conditions persist, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced today. “I have made the decision to expand the medium-scale adverse event classification already in place for parts of the South Island to also cover the ...
The passing of legislation giving effect to coalition Government tax commitments has been welcomed by Finance Minister Nicola Willis. “The Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill will help place New Zealand on a more secure economic footing, improve outcomes for New Zealanders, and make our tax system ...
Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Judith Collins and Tertiary Education and Skills Minister Penny Simmonds today announced plans to transform our science and university sectors to boost the economy. Two advisory groups, chaired by Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, will advise the Government on how these sectors can play a greater ...
The Budget will deliver urgently-needed tax relief to hard-working New Zealanders while putting the government’s finances back on a sustainable track, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The Finance Minister made the comments at the release of the Budget Policy Statement setting out the Government’s Budget objectives. “The coalition Government intends ...
The coalition Government will look at options to address a zoning issue that limits how much financial support Queenstown residents can get for accommodation. Cabinet has agreed on a response to the Petitions Committee, which had recommended the geographic information MSD uses to determine how much accommodation supplement can be ...
Cabinet has agreed to a short extension to the final reporting timeframe for the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care from 28 March 2024 to 26 June 2024, Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden says. “The Royal Commission wrote to me on 16 February 2024, requesting that I consider an ...
The coalition Government is delivering an $18 million boost to New Zealanders needing to travel for specialist health treatment, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says. “These changes are long overdue – the National Travel Assistance (NTA) scheme saw its last increase to mileage and accommodation rates way back in 2009. ...
The Government is recognising the innovative and rising talent in New Zealand’s growing space sector, with the Prime Minister and Space Minister Judith Collins announcing the new Prime Minister’s Prizes for Space today. “New Zealand has a growing reputation as a high-value partner for space missions and research. I am ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has confirmed New Zealand’s concerns about cyber activity have been conveyed directly to the Chinese Government. “The Prime Minister and Minister Collins have expressed concerns today about malicious cyber activity, attributed to groups sponsored by the Chinese Government, targeting democratic institutions in both New ...
Independent Reviewers appointed for School Property Inquiry Education Minister Erica Stanford today announced the appointment of three independent reviewers to lead the Ministerial Inquiry into the Ministry of Education’s School Property Function. The Inquiry will be led by former Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully. “There is a clear need ...
State Highway 1 across the Brynderwyns will be open for Easter weekend, with work currently underway to ensure the resilience of this critical route being paused for Easter Weekend to allow holiday makers to travel north, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Today I visited the Brynderwyn Hills construction site, where ...
Introduction Good morning to you all, and thanks for having me bright and early today. I am absolutely delighted to be the Minister for Infrastructure alongside the Minister of Housing and Resource Management Reform. I know the Prime Minister sees the three roles as closely connected and he wants me ...
New Zealand stands with the United Kingdom in its condemnation of People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-backed malicious cyber activity impacting its Electoral Commission and targeting Members of the UK Parliament. “The use of cyber-enabled espionage operations to interfere with democratic institutions and processes anywhere is unacceptable,” Minister Responsible for ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Judith Collins today announced New Zealand will provide logistics support for the upcoming Solomon Islands election. “We’re sending a team of New Zealand Defence Force personnel and two NH90 helicopters to provide logistics support for the election on 17 April, at the request ...
The European Union Free Trade Agreement Legislation Amendment Bill received Royal Assent today, completing the process for New Zealand’s ratification of its free trade agreement with the European Union. “I am pleased to announce that today, in a small ceremony at the Beehive, New Zealand notified the European Union ...
Public consultation on the terms of reference for the Royal Commission into COVID-19 Lessons has concluded, Internal Affairs Minister Hon Brooke van Velden says. “I have been advised that there were over 11,000 submissions made through the Royal Commission’s online consultation portal.” Expanding the scope of the Royal Commission of ...
Hardworking families are set to benefit from a new credit to help them meet their early childcare education (ECE) costs, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. From 1 July, parents and caregivers of young children will be supported to manage the rising cost of living with a partial reimbursement of their ...
A specialised Independent Technical Advisory Group (ITAG) tasked with preparing and publishing independent non-binding advice on the design of a "green" (sustainable finance) taxonomy rulebook is being established, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. “Comprising experts and market participants, the ITAG's primary goal is to deliver comprehensive recommendations to the ...
Defence Minister Judith Collins has thanked the Chief of Army, Major General John Boswell, DSD, for his service as he leaves the Army after 40 years. “I would like to thank Major General Boswell for his contribution to the Army and the wider New Zealand Defence Force, undertaking many different ...
25 March 2024 Minister to meet Australian counterparts and Manufacturing Industry Leaders Small Business, Manufacturing, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly will travel to Australia for a series of bi-lateral meetings and manufacturing visits. During the visit, Minister Bayly will meet with his Australian counterparts, Senator Tim Ayres, Ed ...
Government commits almost $3 million for period products in schools The Coalition Government has committed $2.9 million to ensure intermediate and secondary schools continue providing period products to those who need them, Minister of Education Erica Stanford announced today. “This is an issue of dignity and ensuring young women don’t ...
Good morning, it’s great to be here. First, I would like to acknowledge the New Zealand Institute of Building Surveyors and thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning. I would like to use this opportunity to outline the Government’s ambitious plan and what we hope to ...
Minister for Pacific Peoples Dr Shane Reti has announced the Government’s commitment to the Auckland Secondary Schools Māori and Pacific Islands Cultural Festival, more commonly known as Polyfest. “The Ministry for Pacific Peoples is a longtime supporter of Polyfest and, as it celebrates 49 years in 2024, I’m proud to ...
Before moving onto the substance of today’s address, I want to recognise the very significant and ongoing contribution the Breast Cancer Foundation makes to support the lives of New Zealand women and their families living with breast cancer. I very much enjoy working with you. I also want to recognise ...
New Zealand has notched up a first with the launch of University of Canterbury research to the International Space Station, Science, Innovation and Technology and Space Minister Judith Collins says. The hardware, developed by Dr Sarah Kessans, is designed to operate autonomously in orbit, allowing scientists on Earth to study ...
Introduction Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today and I’m sorry I can’t be there in person. Yesterday I started in Wellington for Breakfast TV, spoke to a property conference in Auckland, and finished the day speaking to local government in Christchurch, so it would have been ...
The Coalition Government is contributing more than $1 million to support the establishment of an emergency multi-agency coordination centre in Northland. Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell announced the contribution today during a visit of the Whangārei site where the facility will be constructed. “Northland has faced a number ...
New Zealanders have enjoyed a broader range of voices telling the story of Aotearoa thanks to the creation of Whakaata Māori 20 years ago, says Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka. The minister spoke at a celebration marking the national indigenous media organisation’s 20th anniversary at their studio in Auckland on ...
Commercial catch limits for some fisheries have been increased following a review showing stocks are healthy and abundant, Ocean and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The changes, along with some other catch limit changes and management settings, begin coming into effect from 1 April 2024. "Regular biannual reviews of fish ...
COMMENTARY:By Ronny Kareni Since the atrocious footage of the suffering of an indigenous Papuan man reverberates in the heart of Puncak by the brute force of Indonesia’s army in early February, shocking tactics deployed by those in power to silence critics has been unfolding. Nowhere is this more evident ...
Analysis - Nicola Willis is holding firm on tax cuts despite the economic outlook being worse than forecast and critics urging her to wait, writes Peter Wilson for The Week In Politics. ...
Opposition MPs and unions are criticising a proposal by New Zealand’s Ministry of Pacific Peoples to cut staff by 40 percent. The country’s largest trade union — The Public Service Association — says the ministry has informed staff that it is looking to shed 63 of 156 positions. Opposition MPs ...
A poem by Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2024 featured poet Carin Smeaton. Daughtr of the 90s when she gets promoted to usherette a baby blu eel carries her all the way up to mothership she’s hovering high she lets the underaged in to see keanu reeves she lets the only lonely ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin. Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. My earlier article – Can ‘Good’ be the Greater Evil? – looked at the issue of how wars should end, and how Good versus Evil ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 AMMA by Saraid de Silva (Moa Press, $38)A stunning debut novel reviewed by Brannavan ...
From Steve Martin to Ricky Stanicky, a pick’n’mix of things worth watching and listening to this long weekend. This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. If you’re at a loss for something to occupy yourself with this Easter, don’t panic: The Spinoff’s got ...
Jesus had dinner with his 12 disciples right before he died. Noted historian Madeleine Chapman finds out who really deserved to be there.First published in 2018 but let’s be honest, the subject is timeless. As you sit on your couch this Easter Sunday, eating a chocolate egg you know ...
The newly-promoted Northern League club is on a mission to return to the National League for the first time in two decades. Plenty about domestic football in New Zealand has changed in that time – but the sense that this amateur competition is not an entirely level playing field remains. ...
Comment: Every year on February 2, a dozen men in tuxedos and top hats approach the burrow of a groundhog in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania and entice the beaver-like rodent to emerge and predict the weather. If the groundhog, named Punxsutawney Phil, sees its own shadow when it is summoned, legend ...
Loading…(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){var ql=document.querySelectorAll('A[quiz],DIV[quiz],A[data-quiz],DIV[data-quiz]'); if(ql){if(ql.length){for(var k=0;k<ql.length;k++){ql[k].id='quiz-embed-'+k;ql[k].href="javascript:var i=document.getElementById('quiz-embed-"+k+"');try{qz.startQuiz(i)}catch(e){i.start=1;i.style.cursor='wait';i.style.opacity='0.5'};void(0);"}}};i['QP']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','https://take.quiz-maker.com/3012/CDN/quiz-embed-v1.js','qp'); Got a good quiz question?Send Newsroom your questions. The post Newsroom daily quiz, Friday 29 March appeared first on Newsroom. ...
Auckland Council has put a deadline on new weather-impacted property owners applying for categorisation as government funding looks set to run out. Councillors have voted to support a deadline of September 30 for property owners who haven’t accessed support to come forward and engage with the council’s recovery office. It ...
NONFICTION 1 BBQ Economics by Liam Dann (Penguin Random House, $40) “It’s official,” wrote Dann nine days ago in the Herald, where he works as business editor at large, “we’re in recession.” Yeah, great. He delivered the bad stats: “GDP fell 0.1 percent in the December 2023 quarter, compared with ...
By Anneke Smith, RNZ News political reporter A petition urging the New Zealand government to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people has been tabled in the House. More than 200 people gathered on Parliament’s forecourt today and they were met by MPs from Labour, the Greens and Te ...
Pacific Media Watch The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog RSF (Reporters Without Borders) has appealed for information about the “disappearance” of Palestinian journalist Bayan Abusultan. She was reportedly last seen on March 19 among people “sequestered” in this week’s raid and siege of Al Shifa hospital by Israeli troops in ...
EDITORIAL:The Jakarta Post It happens again and again; indigenous Papuans fall victim to Indonesian soldiers. This time, we have photographic evidence for the brutality, with videos on social media showing a Papuan man being tortured by a group of plainclothes men alleged to be the Indonesian Military (TNI) members. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Director of the Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Policy & Associate Professor, New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity A strange and eclectic range of activities takes place across these few weeks of the year. Some ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Panizza Allmark, Professor Visual & Cultural Studies, Edith Cowan University It’s Easter weekend, which means many of us will be kicking back with the greatest hits on repeat. But whether you’re a boomer, or an ‘80s or ’90s kid, you might be ...
RNZ Pacific Fiji’s Acting Public Prosecutor has filed an appeal against the sentences of former prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama and suspended police chief Sitiveni Qiliho in their corruption case. Bainimarama was granted an absolute discharge for attempting to pervert the course of justice while Qiliho received a conditional discharge with ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arosha Weerakoon, Senior Lecturer and General Dentist, School of Dentistry, The University of Queensland Casezy idea/Shutterstock How does toothpaste work? What did people use before toothpaste was invented? – Amelia, age 7, Meanjin (Brisbane) Thanks for your ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brett Hallam, Associate professor, UNSW Sydney IM Imagery/Shutterstock Solar SunShot is well named. The Australian government announced today it would plough A$1 billion into bringing back solar manufacturing to Australia, boosting energy security, swapping coal and gas jobs for those ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Dix, Research Fellow in Nutrition & Dietetics, The University of Queensland Easter is the time for chocolate. The shops are full of fantastically packaged and shiny chocolates in all shapes and sizes, making trips to the supermarket with children more challenging ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Felton, Adjunct Senior Researcher, University of South Australia Even in a stubborn cost-of-living crisis, it seems there’s one luxury most Australians won’t sacrifice – their daily cup of coffee. Coffee sales have largely remained stable, even as financial pressures have ...
Mining company Trans-Tasman Resources has unexpectedly withdrawn its application for a consent to suck the valuable metals vanadium and titanium from the Taranaki seafloor, as it apparently wagers on the Government’s new fast-track process. It had spent two-and-a-half days putting its case to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision-making committee, at ...
Contrary to the Associate Minister of Education’s claims, analysis of Healthy School Lunches Programme - Ka Ora, Ka Ako assessments has revealed it provides excellent value for the taxpayer dollar, as a groundswell of public opposition to Government ...
Greenpeace says wannabe Taranaki seabed miner Trans-Tasman Resources is likely banking on Christopher Luxon’s fast-track process to side-step proper scrutiny of its Taranaki seabed mining proposal by bailing out of the Environmental Protection Agency hearing ...
Kiwis Against Seabed mining today slammed Australian owned would-be seabed miner Trans Tasman Resources (TTR) for abandoning its application to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to mine the seabed of the South Taranaki Bight. The company ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Attwell, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia Ground Picture/Shutterstock Months after COVID vaccines were introduced in 2021, governments and private organisations mandated them for various groups. Health and aged care workers were among the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak, CEO and Founder of Diraq, UNSW Sydney Diraq For decades, the pursuit of quantum computing has struggled with the need for extremely low temperatures, mere fractions of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin or ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne A national Essential poll, conducted March 20–24 from a sample of 1,150, gave the Coalition a 50–44 lead including undecided, a reversal ...
The Taxpayers’ Union has today made a formal request under the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information () for information held about how New Zealand Members of Parliament are spending taxpayer ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Nelson, Honorary Principal Fellow, The University of Melbourne A Byzantine depiction of the Eucharist in Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv.Jacek555/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA A nasty quarrel arose in the 11th century over what kind of bread should be used in holy ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Hesp, Professor, Flinders University Patrick Hesp In some parts of Australia, coastal dunes are retreating from the ocean at an alarming rate, as waves carve up the beach and wind blows the sand inland. But coastal communities are largely ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke Heemsbergen, Senior Lecturer, Digital, Political, Media, Deakin University With an impressive 60% of the US smartphone market, Apple is undeniably big, but not a clear monopoly. Yet, years of innovation by Apple have effectively given the company its own exclusive ...
Whether you’re facing layoffs or are just an emotional junior staffer, it’s always a good idea to scout out a good crying place before you need it. It’s an incredibly hard time for Wellington. Across the city, thousands of public servants are hearing tough news about redundancies and layoffs. Government ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Miller-Jones, Professor, Curtin University Nuclear explosions on a neutron star feed its jets. Danielle Futselaar and Nathalie Degenaar, Anton Pannekoek Institute, University of Amsterdam, CC BY-SA How fast can a neutron star drive powerful jets into space? The answer, it ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daryl Adair, Associate Professor of Sport Management, University of Technology Sydney Earlier this week, independent MP Andrew Wilkie accused the AFL of conducting “off the books” illicit drug testing to identify players using substances of abuse, then inappropriately withdrawing them from matches ...
The Government’s announcement that it will scrap plans for a vast marine sanctuary around the Kermadec Islands is ‘shameful’ and will make it impossible for Aotearoa New Zealand to meet its international commitments, says the World Wide Fund for Nature ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland Shutterstock The federal government has bowed to pressure from the car industry, announcing it will relax proposed emissions rules for utes and vans and delay enforcement of the new standards ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzanne Rutland, Professor Emerita, University of Sydney In his latest book, Jewish Life in Medieval Spain, Jonathan Ray focuses on the tumult of the 14th century in Spain – a time of the plague, civil strife and war between the two largest ...
While creating a slate of world-class shows, Whakaata Māori also developed a generation of world-class creatives. Television is an odd word. It mixes the Ancient Greek and Latin languages, and its most literal meaning is “far-off sight”. In the contemporary and living language of te reo Māori, “whakaata” as a ...
Yesterday the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza. This significant step and the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza prompted an urgent debate in the New Zealand Parliament. Leader ...
The Government’s decision to reduce access to continuous glucose monitors (CGM) not only threatens the lives of children with type 1 diabetes and increases the potential for ‘Dead in Bed’ syndrome, but also threatens the health of their parents an ...
Apples are available year-round, but the wide variety on offer involves intensive scientific research – and large-scale commercialisation. What’s beautiful, red, sweet and crunchy? Tony Martin’s favourite kind of apple: Sassy. The CEO of apple and pear breeding organisation Prevar, Martin’s fondness for Sassy represents professional success as well as ...
Family violence specialist service Shine is calling on employers to stop asking for proof of domestic violence in order for employees to access domestic violence leave. The call comes five years after the introduction of the Domestic Violence ...
The Deputy Chairperson of the Finance and Expenditure Committee is calling for public submissions on the Budget Policy Statement 2024. The Budget Policy Statement 2024 (BPS) sets out the Government's priorities for the 2024 Budget. It explains the approach ...
Brutal government spending cuts that will see the size of the Ministry for Pacific Peoples slashed by 40% will hit Pasifika communities hard, the PSA says. The Ministry has told staff that it is seeking voluntary redundancies, and to redeploy and reassign ...
I live with five people I mostly love, but our different ideas about generosity are starting to really irk me.Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nzDear Hera,This is a bit of a random one but here goes. I’m 22 and work an OK job (OK meaning I get paid ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria Nicholas, Senior Lecturer in Language and Literacy Education, Deakin University Earlier this month, the New South Wales government announced it would roll out programs for gifted students in every public school in the state. This comes amid concerns gifted school ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Rudge, Law lecturer, University of Sydney Massachusetts General Hospital In a world first, we heard last week that US surgeons had transplanted a kidney from a gene-edited pig into a living human. News reports said the procedure was a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Tombs, Howard Paterson Chair of Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago The 5th-century Maskell panel showing Jesus in a loincloth.British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA When Jesus is shown on the cross, he is almost always depicted wearing a loincloth around ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Panizza Allmark, Professor Visual & Cultural Studies, Edith Cowan University Shutterstock When you think about a red object, you might picture a red carpet, or the massive ruby in the Queen’s crown. Indeed, Western monarchies and marketing from brands such ...
COMMENTARY:Jewish Voice for Peace The UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza on Monday — and for the first time since the beginning of the Israeli military’s genocide of Palestinians, the United States abstained rather than vetoing it. Security Council resolutions are legally binding, ...
Asia Pacific Report A New Zealand investigative journalist and author says the US spy system hosted by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) appears to be a controversial intelligence system used in global capture-kill operations. Writing a commentary for RNZ News today, Nicky Hager, author of Secret Power, a 1996 ...
While Nicola Willis wouldn’t give any details on its size, she said a package of tax cuts is definitely still coming in this year’s budget, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here. ...
The Taxpayers’ Union is welcoming the investigation into the Department of Internal Affairs after it was revealed that the Department’s Chief Executive personally reached out to expedite a DJs passport application. Taxpayers’ Union Campaigns ...
Finance minister Nicola Willis delivers her first budget statement, and unwittingly helps Joel MacManus save his relationship. Nicola Willis strode into the Beehive Theatrette. Around me, on the green foldout seats, were the country’s top business and political journalists. They were all here to see her announce the Budget Policy ...
Twenty years ago today, Māori Television launched after much controversy. Jamie Tahana looks back on its survival and impact across two decades. Chad Chambers stepped onto the stage, the brim of his cap casting a shadow across his face. His smile beamed as bright as his white freezing works gumboots, ...
Tauranga, Rotorua, Wellsford, Onehunga, Westhaven marina – Gavin Strawhan walks the meanish streets of New Zealand in his entertaining debut novel The Call, almost sure to roar into the number 1 position on the Nielsen bestseller chart, its front cover bearing a rave from somebody: “A really good and genuinely ...
On a Thursday in February, at Wellington’s Conservation House, the Conservation Authority, a statutory body advising the eponymous department and minister, Tama Potaka, opened its 195th meeting. Under consideration that afternoon was an agenda item written by Tim Bamford, chief advisor in the Department of Conservation’s biodiversity, heritage and visitors ...
Rolf Harris only musician to agree to play at Trump inauguration
It is believed that the star will be performing a set packed with favourites, including Two Little Boys, Tie me Kangaroo Down Sport, and I’m Jake the Peg (Grab them by the Pussy).
And Bill Cosby is the Master of Ceremonies, I believe.
—Mike “Contra” Hosking, 2013, after playing one of Cosby’s stand-up routines ranting about the misbehaviour of black youth.
Podesta-Pizza Gate.
Look it up peeps, including his love of dodgy artwork.
Wow, you actually believe that pizza gate nonsense?
I think it’s somewhat suspicious yes, and definitely I do think the Podesta’s have bad taste in dodgy artwork.
Wow.
And here’s something else: he seems to associate with a whole bunch of people who seem intent on emailing each other in very odd phrases (what on earth is a ‘pizza related map’ and why would such a ‘map’ be drawn on a ‘hankerchief’???).
Must be Washington DC speak. Or something.
Again. Wow.
Podesta is scum
The exact wikileaks link. Do you want your pizza related map hankerchief?
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/32795
NewstalkZB’s dismal Mike “Contra” Hosking, punked on air
Actually, it’s his English equivalent…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbneAdXnW9c
Donald Trump, greatest American president since Reagan, tells Toyota to build plant in US or pay!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/817071792711942145
Now, if only he’d pay the workers in his crummy casinos a decent wage.
Don’t bother trying to please the left wing, it’s not worth it.
By the way, Mexico is complaining that Trump policies have now cost them 3600 well paid manufacturing jobs which were going to move out of the USA to Mexico.
James Clapper is arguably the most notorious liar in the world;
So why is RNZ National treating him as a serious and credible source?
Summer Report, RNZ National, Friday 6 January 2017, 8:25 a.m.
I’m sure I was not the only person to listen with interest when perky Summer Report host Anusha Bradley read out from her script that a “leading security analyst” is “more certain than ever” that Russian hackers were working for Donald Trump. It was not until at least thirty seconds into her spiel that Bradley revealed who this “leading security analyst” was: James Clapper, the utterly discredited Director of National Intelligence.
In case you’ve forgotten, James Clapper is the man who lied under oath to Congress, and denied that the NSA was illegally collecting data on American citizens. It was seeing Clapper lying to Congress that prompted Edward Snowden to blow the whistle on the whole of the massive, illegal, unconstitutional NSA spying regime. “Sort of the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. … Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back.” [1]
None of this seemed to matter to Anusha Bradley, or to “our U.S. correspondent Kevin McAleese”, who chuntered on for a minute or so, recycling Clapper’s anti-Russian rhetoric as if he were a credible source. We are accustomed to RNZ National presenters being naïve (Jesse Mulligan, Bryan Crump), ill-informed (Jesse Mulligan), even nasty (Jim Mora, Noelle McCarthy). But this morning’s performance by Anusha Bradley and her “U.S. correspondent” was as bad, as foolish, and as flagrantly dishonest as anything I have ever heard on any radio station, anywhere.
[1] http://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/snowden277_page-2.html
@Morrissey +1
@Morrissey +2
Have a read of this, from people who actually understand the technology of hacking.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/did-russia-tamper-with-the-2016-election-bitter-debate-likely-to-rage-on/
Nice work Mr. M
Not sure that I can ever remember chuntering but it seems fairly clear that the Russians did influence the outcome of the American election as did James Comey.
Okay the cybertrail hasn’t been published yet but I suspect it will be soon.
Hillary is still a criminal
Not sure that I can ever remember chuntering…
Good spotting, Scott! I used the word carelessly and imprecisely. I should have just written: “Kevin McAleese said….” His lazy and shoddy journalism is what damns him: he doesn’t need any help from me.
… but it seems fairly clear that the Russians did influence the outcome of the American election as did James Comey.
There is no evidence of Russian influence.
Okay the cybertrail hasn’t been published yet but I suspect it will be soon.
Well, we at least have the word of the world’s most discredited liar to boost our confidence.
This “Indivisible” guide is very much written for an American audience, but a bit of word substitution and tweaking and it is a fantastic slacktivist/occasional activist/activisit guide for NZ as well. I love the inclusion, for example, of suggested call dialogues. The left here needs to publish them so people who might not go on a protest know who to call, and how to manage the conversation!
https://www.indivisibleguide.com/
Apparently it is going down a treat amongst Democrats in the USA, who are finally waking up to the fact that they now have oppositional, parliamentary style politics and they’ve allowed the equivalent of the right wing of the ACT party win power in state after state for the GOP.
But all the poaching of Tea Party organising model will only work if the primary agency for the left is left wing and progressive in the first place, which brings us to the tactic which the representative wing of a political party fears the most: The purge. Nothing gets the attention of a fat cat political careerist like seeing their colleagues getting dumped one by one… Thinking specifically of New Zealand, Up to now, everyone has played nice in New Zealand on this – or rather, they’ve been bullied, browbeaten and purged by MPs whose vigilance in stamping out dissent in the local party sheeple is why Labour is now a hollow shell of a political party – an elite cadre party of like minded careerist technocrats is far, far easier to control than one full of opinionated people who refuse to be bullied. In terms of the purge, in nowadays seems you need an external but affiliated organisation (Momentum or the Tea Party, may God forgive my soul for mentioning them together in the same sentence) to smash the layers of institutional defenses establishment political parties have built to protect their careerist and managerialist cadres.
Some MPs are already reasonably leftist, or pragmatic enough, to be dragged to the left. But many are simply to committed to neo-liberal ideology and/or beneficiaries from their close ties to the neo-liberal establishment to be saved. For them, forced retirement or de-selection challenges should beckon. A time traveller from the 1935 Labour party would be confused to discover the current labour party has no plan to radically reform Labour relations, fully fund “free” education, openly and fulsomely oppose free trade agreements that damage local wages and conditions or support proper progressive taxation of the rich – and will only reluctantly and listlessly pick elements of those things when threatened with open revolt.
The left’s chosen vehicle must grow an ideological backbone if it wants to be able to co-opt the organising tools of their opposition. Any who refuse to do so should be kicked into touch.
For the benefit of the more simple-minded among us, would someone please write a comprehensive list of Labour mps and where they stand on this spectrum. If you are living outside the beltway the information available is patchy to say the least and sources unreliable. We rely on a msm which, as we are clearly aware, is no better than it ought to be and if you read the likes of Chris Trotter you could be forgiven for tearing your hair out and running screaming into the bushes with the total confusion of it !
I personally am only beginning to sneak back to Labour after leaving them as a result of the foreshore and seabed fiasco.
+ lots 🙂
What would be great, assuming that Labour wishes to be seen as philosophically and ideologically in opposition to National, is to have Labour candidates come on here and answer questions from those of us who are quite desperate for change but have lost trust in all of those who aspire to lead.
In the 2014 campaign, Labour candidates were all instructed to describe Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics as “a distraction.”
That is how serious and well organized Labour is.
@Morrissey – hopefully Labour learnt from that, the strategy’s effectiveness or lack of, showed in their election results.
Helping your opponent in their denial is not a winning strategy.
If Labour didn’t know what to do, they should stay out of it and deflect it back to the real protagonists Natz vs Hager. By minimising it and calling it a ‘distraction’ helped the Natz and angered the Labour supporters who are sick of the establishment denials on these issues.
“That is how serious and well organized Labour is.”
“That is how serious and well organized Labour was.”
FIFY. Different leader, Goff and Shearer gone etc. Times are a changing, best we support that change in the right direction.
What waypoints tell you that Labour has undergone a “change in the right direction”?
In my view, nothing has changed in the perpetuation of the same careerist ‘hanging on for dear life because I can’t get $150K pa in any other job’ Labour attitude and culture from those days.
Have you heard anything from Labour about the UBI lately? How about anything around a commitment to keep national super? Or any remarks that basic benefits need to be increased?
You appear to want National to have a fourth term, so there really is no point in discussing this with you CV. Plus the whole poisoning not just the well, but the ground around it thing, ffs.
So Labour hasn’t said anything about NZ Super, benefit levels or a UBI lately then, eh? Interesting. They still have 6-7 months before the election so I guess they better start.
I’ve already said elsewhere that it’s 2:1 for a National win next (whoops THIS) year, which will increase further for National if they play the shell game that I am expecting.
At this stage I am picking the extreme upper limit party vote for LAB+GR at 43% to 44%.
Like I said, no point in talking with you while you’ve got your shit-tinted glasses on. You can frame it as a prediction, but everything I have seen from you in the past year suggests that you also want Labour to lose. Your political actions support this. You are abusing your power and I’m not playing that game any more.
Well said Weka.
RT’s megaphone is toxic.
“Shit tinted glasses” are probably preferable to having your head buried in the sand. CV is right – we still need Labour to get a voice and say something instead of just barking at passing cars. We need a confident and worthy opposition….. the clock is ticking.
Yeah but that wasn’t what I was referring to about CV at all. I’m happy to clarify if it’s not clear, but I really think you are misleading about what I was saying and doing.
Are you saying that I have my head buried in the sand? Care to provide some evidence of that?
Weka you seem happy to accuse me of all kinds of nonsense (eg https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-06012017/#comment-1283313) without evidence but people better not accuse you of anything without evidence, because different standard.
Thanks for taking off the red tinted glasses and for putting putting on corrective, prescription (not prediction) glasses, Colonial Viper. Real Labour supporters must want to face reality and make themselves see clearly in order to hold caucus members, particularly the careerists and old driftwood, to account.
Unlike CV, I’ve never voted Labour, and only voted to the left of Labour. I’m not a Labour supporter, and neither are many in this thread.
The inability to engage with ideas in real terms is pretty tedious and a big part of the problem here. Of course Labour need to be held accountable. That’s nothing to do with what I was saying about CV though.
I’m quite happy to engage with ideas “in real terms”. Eg. I commented on your post the other day about how consumerism was a battle of the 1970s which had long since been lost and the left had no new ideas about it since then.
But you didn’t want to engage with that idea in real terms and shifted my comment off your post.
CV you know how the party works. Policies are released incrementally and the party policy platform contains the general principles. Can you decist from misrepresenting the position all the time. People will suspect you are getting your lines from Hooton.
From a non-partisan point of view.
A few months is insufficient to communicate and gain understanding from the electorate on any significant or complex policy.
It is barely enough time to ensure that voters are fully familiar with the headline policy items.
This has been proven over and over again.
You may argue that this is simply the way that the party “works.” That may be so, but it certainly doesn’t work for the public.
+1 Weka – Times are a changing, best we support that change in the right direction.
I was referring to the Party’s performance of late. Sorry weka, I was in no way referring to you re head in the sand. Perhaps I should have used “one”.
Thanks for clarifying garibaldi. There’s hardly anyone here who is happy with Labour’s performance. That’s a different thing than wanting them to lose. So I will in fact take a Labour voter with their head in the sand over the ethically bankrupt politics that CV now pushes with his shit-stained glasses on. And to be clear, I’m not talking in any way at all about not criticising Labour.
Fortunately those aren’t the only choices and there is more to be gained from working constructively (including critiques) than poisoning the well.
As for Labour, I’ve long held the view that they are who they are and it’s better strategy to support them in small incremental shifts so that we get enough reprieve that the real change can be done elsewhere. If Labour fails now, that gives National another term, and that IMO is catastrophic for NZ.
I’ve put this challenge out to CV in the past, and he’s never responded meaningfully, but even if one were to think that a 4th National term might galvanise a true shift in NZ politics for something else good to arise, I’ve yet to see any evidence presented for how that might happen. Much more likely that we would have photo-fascism entrenched even further in NZ as well as more of our ability to effect change stripped from us.
Yes, many of us want a truly left wing party in NZ. We don’t have one. It’s not possible for Labour to be what we want them to be (if you disagree please explain how that could happen).
Time to get on with the work of making what we can with that.
I’ll tell you what I don’t like about Labour. They claim they are a broad church but from the evidence I have seen in the past few years, they lean to the centre right (eg Stuart Nash) and reject the left (eg Hone Harawira). The image of Chris Hipkins visciously attacking David C during the great non-event coup is also etched in my brain.
When youer trying to take votes off National, of course you end up on the right.
Labour isn’t a “broad church” – it can’t even get one in four NZers to vote for it.
“I’ll tell you what I don’t like about Labour. They claim they are a broad church but from the evidence I have seen in the past few years, they lean to the centre right (eg Stuart Nash) and reject the left (eg Hone Harawira). The image of Chris Hipkins visciously attacking David C during the great non-event coup is also etched in my brain.”
sure, and there’s plenty of things I don’t like about them too. Nevertheless, they are the only way we are going to have a centre-left govt by the end of the year, so what’s the strategy now?
Why would there be “any evidence” today for something which might hypothetically happen some time years in the future?
What was the evidence 12 months ago that Trump would be President of the USA today?
Did that lack of evidence back then preclude Trump becoming President?
I didn’t have any evidence when I picked a clear and significant Trump victory; I just read the political tea leaves.
Well said weka. If we want to see a Government that isn’t a National one this year then we need to see Labour maximise its vote. Some lefties might not be a fan of Labour, but Labour are still going to make up at least 50% of a leftist block in Government. If you’re a Green or NZF voter you need them to do well, your chances rely on their success.
The last few weeks of the year I felt were good ones for Andrew Little. He looked more confident and fired up infront of camera and that’s good for everyone. I’m fine with them not chasing the UBI or anything else that might scare the horses for now… Just keep getting the hits in on our woeful housing situation and that’s half the job done.
Thanks, I don’t see a lot of MSM, so often don’t have a good sense of what Little is doing unless I go look.
(I would add that if people want a centre left govt then they shouldn’t vote NZF. Peters might choose National, or he might choose Labour in which case he will hold Labour to the right. Either way it’s not going to shift us left and it could be downright disastrous).
” If Labour fails now, that gives National another term, and that IMO is catastrophic for NZ.”
Yes I totally agree which is why I made the initial request
What did you think about the idea of crowdsourcing the list/post?
edit, sorry, just seen your reply below.
In the 2014 campaign, Labour candidates were all instructed to describe Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics as “a distraction.”
DUH ! And they still cant figure out why they lost! Thats just about the most counterproductive thing they coukd have done, short of dumping on dotcom
The guide is great because what is says is if you don’t like a GOVERNMENT policy, you don’t go and occupy a National party MPs office. You go and occupy the office of a LABOUR MP who won’t come out and oppose it when you ask him or her. So you don’t need to know a “spectrum” – you just ask your local MP for an unequivocal position on an issue, and if they won’t give you one you go and sit in their office or get you and 1000 people to keep ringing them until they turn up and explain why. The pressure is on YOUR SIDE to grow some balls, and take the fight to the right.
That is brilliant Sanctuary.
I would add that it needs some strategy, or at least some degree of thoughtfulness. Going into an election year, the focus needs to be on policy and direct action against those MPs (and presumably LECs) who aren’t moving left, and avoiding Labour bashing for the sake of it. I’d say it needs to happen now, rather than closer to the election.
I’d like to know what the selection process is, and a timeline on that.
And I’d love to see people on The Standard organising around this. Time we stopped arguing about shit and did something.
It will be great if many of us can visit the local Labour MP offices & blog updates about how often they are not around. I know my mates and I can name half a dozen who are hardly around (may I list them here?) and we can compare notes or a real-time record
Do you mean keeping a log of which electorate MPs spend the least time in their electorates? To what purpose?
( It will be great if many of us can visit the local Labour MP offices )
I recently moved to Pukekohe in south Auckland and thought I would go along to a local branch meeting it’s been a while. I went onto Labour’s web site and I cannot even find if they have one.
“The pressure is on YOUR SIDE to grow some balls, and take the fight to the right.”
I wonder if Labour hopeful (again) Laila Harre took the opportunity to tell her mate Nikki Kaye just how bloody lucky she was that her cancer diagnosis didn’t cost her her job.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11777745
Perhaps Laila took the opportunity to remind Nikki of the many people who where not so fortunate, whose employers threw them to the wolves and who got literally the bum’s rush when they were forced to apply to WINZ for support.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/72993797/Cancer-Society-attacks-ludicrous-benefit-requirements-for-cancer-patients
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/80593373/cancer-sufferer-pleas-for-benefit-break
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/286914/jobseeker-benefit-for-cancer-patients-'ludicrous‘
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11564991
http://www.nzdoctor.co.nz/news/2015/october-2015/14/minister-steps-in-to-deal-with-cancer-patients%E2%80%99-work-and-income-headache.aspx
Hearing about Nikki Kaye’s “beautiful cancer lesson” makes me want to puke.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11772239
On this site most of the commenters, who choose to shred Labour’s MPs on a regular basis for being so-called neo-liberals, are not even members of the party and I suspect have never been members. However, they seem to be of the view they know more about Labour’s MPs than those of us who are members and have been for many years.
I drifted away from Labour around 1983/4 because I was sick of the [then] in-fighting. I didn’t understand the nuts and bolts of it at the time, but in retrospect can appreciate it was the Douglas clan (not always Douglas himself but his hangers-on in the Party) who were behind most of the problems. I rejoined 15 years ago after Helen Clark came to power.
Since the departure of the Douglas crew and their member acolytes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Labour has been slowly returning to its roots (albeit in a modernised version) and that can be evidenced in the types of policies I know they are planning to put forward this election year. For some people it has been too slow, but to reinvent a political party is not an easy task and it takes time to get everyone back on board again. In this respect, Andrew Little is doing a magnificent job and I am no longer as pessimistic as I was about Labour’s election chances… as I was a year or two ago.
I know there are one or two ‘light to moderate’ neo-liberals still in caucus but they are bowing out at the end of this term. Others – like for example Annette King – have well and truly re-embraced their former Labour values. Indeed I’m sure they never lost them… just put them in a cupboard for safe keeping until the time was right to bring them out again.
Perhaps those of us on the inside can appreciate the extent of the advances that have been made in recent years, but others have yet to catch up. I know CV will disagree but he appears to have had some major run-ins with the Party (I don’t know the details, just what he has revealed here) which are negatively impacting on his judgement. I’m hoping one day he will feel able to re-connect.
“On this site most of the commenters, who choose to shred Labour’s MPs on a regular basis for being so-called neo-liberals, are not even members of the party and I suspect have never been members.”
Guilty as charged, but in my defense I have tried to find enough in Labour and/or the Greens policy to give me reason to sign up.
Both have to do better.
(Oh, and I should maybe re email Annette King about a particular issue (that is within the scope of her responsibilities) and see if her re connection with true Labour roots has progressed far enough for her to challenge the Nats over their lies and deception.)
But maybe not. I did make an approach to Ruth Dyson about the same issue in person, in her office, and oh my goodness gracious me….
We left her office stunned, and shaking our heads that she would say what she did…and realised that as far as our particular issue…Labour was a predominant player in fucking things up.
And if they’ll do that for people with disabilities….
Ruth Dyson is one of those bowing out – I think.
Fair enough comments Rosemary McDonald. Certainly Labour needs to to do better when it comes to policy presentation. They need to be short, sharp and easy to understand for the majority of voters. The long versions can be set aside for us political tragics who like to wallow in the complexities of policy or who have a vested interest (like yourself) in specific policy planks. 🙂
Btw, I wasn’t impressed with Ruth Dyson as a minister in the Clark government. I didn’t know much about her but some of her media responses left a lot to be desired. She was rarely definitive and liked to talk about “looking at options” but never said what those options were. Someone else who is very good like that is Nick Smith.
She did a lot of good for disability issues.
As I said, I didn’t know her but her public performances re-interviews and the like… were not impressive and lacked substance.
“…political tragics..”
🙂 lol, in fact!
The wallowing thing…yes, I am focused on non -ACC disability issues and especially the family carer issue. This particular subject I know inside out…including the history under Labour.
Labour could have sorted this. Should have sorted this. Didn’t…but worse…allowed for a system where those who were willing to take a punt at being caught out could circumvent the non- payment of family carers policy.
Ruth Dyson knew this was happening when we spoke with her in early 2013…”It was only a policy not the law”. When this government made the policy that had been determined to be discriminatory actual law…well…I wonder to this day if Ruth Dyson knew that this was going to happen…and the outrage from Labour in the House that day in May 2013 was just pantomime.
Almost as if this suspicion of mine had been broadcast…a commentor on another site told of how exactly that solution (of making the Policy law) was being touted by the Ministry of Health and Crown Law back before the Family Carers case went to the Human Rights Tribunal in 2008…under Labour.
You know, from my point of view…policies and manifestos and candidate bios are all very nice and good…but being honest, truthful, showing a very high level of integrity, is even better.
I know Labour failed this test over the family carers case….in how many other areas of government responsibility did they also neglect to be honest and transparent?
Labour is history in terms of political, popular and ideological relevance. They are no longer needed, but are instead taking up space on the political spectrum which could be better used.
That’s a bold statement CV. If Anne is correct then maybe, just maybe, Labour might reconnect with people.
The clock is ticking.
Nope – if the Little/King leadership team had the ability to “reconnect with people” they wouldn’t have left it until 7 months before the election to demonstrate it.
Yes CV i agree Labour is finished as a political force , those who continue to support them guarentee national party victory
Last year I kept hearing: the affable John Key is the only real asset this National Government has which is keeping them afloat. Without his popularity, National would be gone!
Now that John Key is history and the monotonous expressionless English is in charge, this election should be a walkover for Labour. Shouldn’t it?
Unless of course, you and me are correct in our analysis (which we are).
“Yes CV i agree Labour is finished as a political force , those who continue to support them guarentee national party victory”
I’m genuinely curious as to how you see that working. If Labour are finished and we shouldn’t vote for them or support them in any way, then what else can happen apart from National getting a 4th term? Can you please explain your thinking? e.g. do you think a new left wing party will arise this year and win the election? Or do you think that the Greens will get enough votes to win the election and govern on their own?
” … write a comprehensive list of Labour mps and where they stand on…”
I smiled at that bit, picturing a serious interview with John Key, him answering the question about what his MPs believe. “I believe they believe what I tell them to believe. And believe me they do if they want to believe they have any future chances.”
“For the benefit of the more simple-minded among us, would someone please write a comprehensive list of Labour mps and where they stand on this spectrum.”
I’d be happy to collate and put up a post on that if people here want to make the list. It would need to be evidence based, and we could do it in the sense of a lay-persons guide to the Labour Party. For those of us that don’t know Labour well, there is plenty in the public domain, both words/actions from MPs themselves, as well as analysis in the media (blogosphere, social and mainstream). We could pick say five MPs to focus on at a time and go out and do the research, bring it back to comments, get feedback and then it can go into a post.
I think having an outline of how Labour works internally, including the selection process, would be important too.
That sounds like a great idea – thank you Weka. Like you, I fail to see what the alternative is if Labour can’t make it as the dominant, or at least equal party in power. I’m reading all this hand wringing, but as you suggest, too much of that and we’ll wind up with a 4th term for the Natz
JanM, Rosemary McD et al – Chris Trotter is not a friend of Labour – he’s harbouring some sort of snitch from way back which keeps him blindfolded as to what Labour is actually doing.
When you ask where Labour MPs stand on “this spectrum” – what do you mean? A simple left – right answer, or a bit more detail …… and for that maybe you could look at Labour’s policy platform – formulated after the last election debacle among much debate and argument between Party members and remnants of the neo-lib rightwing bloc . It can be found here
https://www.google.co.nz/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=nzlp%20policy%20platform
This is what Labour policy for the 2017 election will be based on.
I’m not so sure it’s an ideological problem, seems more to be lack of talent.
Take the frequent talk about ‘moving more to the centre’ as an example. The general argument is that Labour needs more votes from the centre ergo they need to move politically and ideologically further to the right to capture those votes.
The corollary to that argument is moving to the right will lose votes from the left, the consequent strategy being to pass those votes to the Greens and get them back through a Labour/Green coalition..
That argument is predicated on the rationale that you can’t please both at the same time; you either go for the centre or you go for the left. It seems more a pragmatic approach than an ideological one.
My thinking is meh, this is New Zealand where a good 75% of the population would be considered ‘left’ in pretty much any other country. Just how hard is to to create a policy platform that would satisfy both the left and enough of the middle to capture 50% of the votes? … to my mind it should be a doddle for anyone with a bit of talent.
“I’m not so sure it’s an ideological problem, seems more to be lack of talent.”
Inclined to agree….compounded by special/personal interests.The Future of Work Commission is a glaring example…2 years work to produce what? if labour (or anyone else for that matter) could produce a comprehensive and clear policy prescription for a transitioning society they would be home and hosed (IMO)
Monbiot has made the same point about the left in general worldwide……its called leadership.
A team of MBA students working on a one semester assignment would have done better work on the topic than that caucus. It was laughable.
A noticeable portion of the stuff that Labour put out was googled, cut and pasted.
The future of work commision simply highlights how automation would exacerbate challenges around inequality & low productivity that New Zealand already faces. Its anti bureaucratic in nature, but not by nature?
Neoliberalism conditions you to believe that value is in paper work. It’s starts on the level of a guy checking to see if you use the rooms in your house properly. Moving up the neoliberal pyramid you have police who spend most of there time filling out paper work but the message is the same, value is in paper work. Then you’ve got managers who’s function seems to revolve around if some one gets payed to much. Derivatives traders which is a really fancy form of paper is at the top of the neoliberal pyramid because they earn the most.
To reevaluate what it means to work means finding away to destroy this mountain of paper work we’ve created that adds no value to the real economy.
That’s seditious talk, watch I don’t audit you to ISO requirements
I suspect that hasn’t happened because bots aren’t a good excuse for saying I never received that advice.
Yeah. I’ve tried to avoid even commenting on that Future of Work because every time I see it mentioned I get the recurring image of Nero and his fiddle.
I don’t wish to belittle their work but I can’t see the point of it, they’re not in power they just look to be indulging themselves there.
“Take the frequent talk about ‘moving more to the centre’……” That is media opinion, DH – and is not what Labour is actually talking about.
As Andrew Little has said a couple of times – in his connections with NZers as he goes around the country – everyone he meets considers themselves “middle NZ” (except for the 1%) – so he’s talking to people who are having difficulty getting a home, who have been made redundant, farmers, business people, others who are in work, people who have been ill, etc etc – all of them considering themselves “middle NZ”
I think it is what they’re talking about Jenny, why else would they want a MoU with the Greens.
Labour is a true left wing party! Promise! Labour will show their true left wing values after we give them power! Why do people not believe this!!! Wreckers and haters!!!!!
I would have thought it’s because they understand they can’t govern alone and have seen how trying to act as a FPP party in an MMP environment has failed them.
….if you read the likes of Chris Trotter….
There’s your problem, right there.
https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-19072013/#comment-664870
Well, that all went well then!!! 🙁
Well, I tried to give a bit of background for you JanM but perhaps you already knew it. You’ve got to say Labour is a far better party now than it was seven years ago. Cohesive with good policy coming up and believe me… some outstanding candidates on offer this election starting with the highly talented Michael Wood. Compare them to the types on offer from the National Party and they outflank them in every respect.
Anne , do you know how much “deadwood” Labour is going to shed? Seems to me they need to fair bit of it, just like National has done already. Too many right wingers still in the Labour caucus.
Bearing in mind Labour’s numbers were decimated in 2011 and 2014 so there aren’t as many to be culled as in the National Party:
Clayton Cosgrove, Ruth Dyson, Damien O’Conner (not sure about him but think so) Su’a William Sio and I think one of the Maori electorate MPs might be going . David Shearer has already gone. I’m picking there might be one or two others who have yet to declare they’e going. All in all it looks like at least 8 MPs will be gone by the next election. That opens up a good chance some very bright and talented younger aspirants will enter the caucus. To name two of them Deborah Russell and Claire Szabo. There are others.
Deborah Russell. Another career minded academic technocrat for Labour’s ranks.
Funnily enough, Labour doesn’t attract many bombastic right-wing populist demagogues, so it’s no surprise you’re dismissive of its candidates.
Labour doesn’t attract many, full stop.
Nick Leggat and Phil Quin?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-M_yhz-KlZ3Q/TnYoD5xeHXI/AAAAAAAACmM/gH8uLe42BPI/s1600/P1070759.JPG
Stuart Nash?
Thank you Anne, that’s more leaving than I expected.
“You’ve got to say Labour is a far better party now than it was seven years ago.”
Yes they are ….but still frustratingly undetermined.
Thanks Anne – it all helps
ISIS Pledge to Kill Thousands of Americans by opening Gun Stores across the Mid – West
It is intended the new retail chain will be called ‘All-American Patriot’, and will have an extensive section devoted to easily concealed high calibre weapons with extended magazines.
Oh Wait! The NRA are already doing this!
Over 20M new firearms were sold last year in the USA. A new record. Under Barack Hussein Obama.
Lionel explains how to maximally prosecute the case of 4 black youth in Chicago who kidnapped, tied up, abused, tortured a mentally handicapped white Trump supporter
While yelling invective like “fuck Trump” and “fuck white people.” The alleged perpetrators live streamed their activities. The video is still available on the internet.
He discusses if this is a “hate crime.” Also what if the alleged perpetrators have priors, and what would need to be done to maximise their sentencing.
Also imagine the inverse situation: 4 white youth who kidnapped, tied up, abused, tortured a mentally handicapped black Obama supporter.
While yelling invective like “fuck Obama” and “fuck black people.
And live streaming it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65rMZqSBuoU
Very fucked up (and I strongly suspect) drug induced bullshit.
A ‘hate crime’? I have doubts.
Politically motivated? No.
Kick their collective arses from here to now, but as for pretending this sort of evil nonsense is hugely unusual and then blowing it upout of context to be something it’s not in order to score some point or other? Nah.
If it were four young white men who had done exactly the same to a young black intellectually disabled Obama supporter while shouting “fuck blacks” and “fuck Obama” there would be much clearer hate and political motivations, no?
I would even expect President Obama to address the incident in front of the White House press corp. If it had been carried out by white men.
Anyhow, Cook County prosecutors have now filed charges of aggravated kidnap, hate crime, aggravated unlawful restraint and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
All things being equal, I think I’d view it the same and still ‘call out’ any media seeking to surround it with a convenient context.
That’s awful, and you’re a shithead propagandist trying to score points off it.
How can it be propaganda if all the events relayed are factually true? Trump supporters are being targeted and attacked: both physically and verbally.
🙄
I’m not interested how you justify it to yourself, shithead.
But when people report things trump actually said and did, factually true things, it’s all just a smear.
CV – you are the most intellectually dishonest person I have heard in recent memory.
+1. It’s about the propaganda now. Post-truth. It’s easy to see why he likes Trump so much.
I’m not sure it’s intellectually dishonest if he actually thinks that way. But he is certainly the nastiest sack of shit I’ve had the misfortune to interact with in the recent past.
All hating and wrecking, trying to be a saboteur. Not a single useful considered criticism, not even a valid challenge to viewpoints we get from the likes of BM, Puckish, et al. Just nasty slogans hating on Labour, Greens, Democrats. All the while spreading hate propaganda and fake news all over the site, while trying to get opinion and facts he doesn’t like labelled fake news and trying to trash the idea that there really are objective facts.
Poor old Andre, your flimsy vitriol and othering can’t protect the irrelevance of the establishment pseudo-left (aka free market centre) any more.
In other news: Trump threatens Toyota to build its new plant in the USA, or else face a massive border tax
Trump is the gutsiest pro-working class President in a generation.
(Warning: “fake news” site Zero Hedge:)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-05/trump-threatens-toyota-build-new-plant-us-or-pay-big-border-tax
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t see a guy who devotes such ingenuity and diligence to stiffing his employees and contractors as “pro-working class.” Try looking at his actions, rather than his tweets and blowhard speeches.
That bullshit could just have easily revolved around some football team or a religious belief. The rhetoric just served as a vehicle for the abuse and isn’t in and of itself very important.
Your other point about Trump supporters being physically attacked, if true, hasn’t got sweet fuck all to do with this wee group of shit heads being shit.
the new face of white supremacy.
?
So no, I won’t be writing angry tweets about what these folk did in Chicago. They are already in jail. They will be punished, I am sure, to the fullest extent of the law, but I’ve written about case after case after case of drug offenses and incidents of sexual assault and even murders committed by white folk where the system gave them a helping hand. The Stanford swimmer, Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping a woman, but spent a summer in jail for it instead of the 10 to 20 years he deserved, comes to mind.
Black folk and white folk both use and sell drugs at almost identical rates, with the rates for whites actually being slightly higher in both categories, but African-Americans are sent to prison at four to 10 times the rates of whites for various drug offenses.
Black folk are held super-responsible for every mistake and criminal offense made. We rarely have to march for justice in our communities. American prisons are full of black folk who are being held responsible for every mistake they’ve ever made.
Now I actually see thousands of other whites saying I caused this assault. Of course I reject that foolishness altogether. What’s most disturbing is that I hardly see many whites who are particularly angry about the crime speaking sympathetically about the victim. They are mainly using it to advance their racist agenda and demonize random black folk who had nothing to do with such a thing. Furthermore, I have routinely seen tens of thousands of African-Americans standing up and fighting and protesting for white victims of police brutality and toxic masculinity. The Alt-Right Movement does not care about violence in this country. Thousands of whites murder people every year, but you’d be hard pressed to find a protest or march headed by their movement on white on white crime.
As I type, the top trending topic in the country is now #BLMKidnapping. BLM stands for Black Lives Matter. The people in the video never even suggested such a thing. The Black Lives Matter Movement has never advocated such a thing. I have never advocated such a thing.
Shaun King, Civil Rights and BLM activist.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-don-chicago-white-assault-case-blm-movement-article-1.2935825
whole thing is worth a read.
You’re pointing to this “White people are the new victims of racism” stuff that’s behind CV’s post?
Pretty much. Not that that is itself new, but there is something additional going on now where people feel emboldened in promoting ideas that are at the least aligned with white supremacist views e.g. that all racism is equal, that racism is simply how one person treats another, that structural racism isn’t a real thing. I see this happening more in the US, but CV’s comment seemed a fairly classic example of it and I’m guessing we will see more of it in NZ. I noted the other day that Bradbury’s recent post where he is complaining about not being allowed to speak because he is a white man is another example. Different, but maybe part of the same shift happening in the culture. Traditionally we would expect both CV and Bradbury’s comments to come from the right or conservatives or small parts of the left, but now we have these voices becoming larger within left wing spaces.
Bradbury’s recent post where he is complaining about not being allowed to speak because he is a white man
Curiously, Bradbury has said a lot about the Sir Mad B story in the last few days – a flurry of posts, while saying the MSM have more important stories/issues they should be focusing on.
lol, true. It was the Klu Klux Klambs post I was thinking of.
heh. ku klux klambs.
First smile of the day 🙂
(the last few weeks have been a bit shit, with different family members in hospital and a pet death. Fucking circle of life…)
sorry to hear that McFlock.
cheers
no worries, c’est la vie. Looking forward to getting busy again though
CV’s is Slater level posting. The steady decline continues.
You’ll thank us latter when every ones making money
…….. and totally destroying the environment in the rush to “get ahead”.
Arthur Edington once said If your theory clashes with the second law of thermal dynamics I can give you no hope, there is nothing for it but to collapse in the deepest humiliation.
Even environmentalists haven’t discovered a theory of production that fits with in the laws of thermal dynamics.
By definition, anything that comes from several points across the globe has a huge carbon footprint.
Civilisation is a heat engine – Guy McPherson
Pedantic observation – it’s ‘thermodynamics’ (does sound a bit like thermal dynamics); no criticism intended.
Drowsy M. Kram is correct. It’s thermodynamics, not thermal dynamics.
We can get a rich function that relates to labour/capital/energy inputs (that hasn’t happened yet). Once you’ve got energy related to parts of production, it talks to a relationship between the 2nd law of thermodynamics and so on, then it will be possible to make links to entropy/wast/ecology issues which economics has failed to do.
It keeps getting odd. From the ‘Jesus was white’ brigade Megan Kelly, now main stream…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwsq__gQPXw
Megyn Kelly is awesome.
What are doing watching Fox News heh
I talked to an overseas employment expert/philosopher recently and he was full of praise for Grant Robertson’s Future of Work project. He said it was world leading in scope and vision. I expect we will hear more about aspects of it this year (but hopefully in a form that is clear, succinct and easy to understand).
Yes@Ethica….clear, succinct and easy to understand….because its definitely not a vote winner in its current form.
You gotta be kidding. A mish mash of a report clearly put together by different authors, few cohesive themes, with some chapters far better prepared than others which appeared simply slapdash thrown together.
Regardless of FoWP’s substance and grunt, or lack of, it is very important for Robertson & Labour to talk it up !!
@JoyFL ….do you really think so ?……I dont, not in election year.
I would prefer they kept to simple policies i..e. Kiwi Build ….and placed Future of Work as a behind the scenes driver.
Good piece here on the Israeli motive of keeping occupied territories just that, occupied. They do this to deny 3 Million Palestinians a vote.
Amazing that Jews in settlements are allowed to vote but Palestinians are not. And Israeli supporters like to say Israel is the only democracy in the region…
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11777761
Take note RWers who regularly want to deny the poor their piece of the pay pie:
“The CEO of a popular fast food chain said this week that he was “stunned” to see profits soar each time California passed minimum wage increases.
In an interview with KQED on Tuesday, Wetzel’s Pretzels CEO Bill Phelps admitted that his investors were worried about how a 2014 wage hike would impact the business. “Like most business people I was concerned about it,” Phelps said.
For years, opponents of minimum wage increases have argued that wage hikes mean fewer jobs because businesses have to raise prices and cut hours to cover the additional expenses. But Phelps said that his sales skyrocketed after a California law forced businesses to raise wages in 2014.
“I was shocked,” Phelps recalled. “I was stunned by the business.”
The same thing happened earlier this year when California raised the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour, Phelps said.”
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/03/minimum-wage-goes-up-and-so-does-business-thats-what-this-fast-food-ceo-says-happened/
But we have been told this many times of course… just some will not listen.
Oh dear. It seems that Trump found a way to hide how much he really owes in his FEC statement.
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-said-he-had-315-million-in-debt-he-left-out-1-5-billion-73577d392896#.vd4vq9r78
Sounds like ordinary business working capital mixed in with long term mortgages on large properties. Nothing remarkable.
The Chump will really drain that swamp, eh.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11777900
Trump has made it clear that people who work at a senior level in his Administration will not be able move on and then lobby for corporations (5 year ban) and foreign countries (life time ban).
Gutsier than Obama ever did.
Paying attention to the types of people he is appointing seems a way more useful predictor of future events than anything the guy said to get elected.
He’s appointing the people he needs to get his agenda done.
Sure and he prolly won’t change his mind about that.
A good piece that illustrates the difference between shoddy journalism and fake news. A distinction that even Glenn Greenwald can’t seem to get his head around, to his discredit.
https://thinkprogress.org/wapo-false-report-is-not-fake-news-30b5c9c89368#.bffxds61k
N.B. Glenn Greenwald is one of the top dozen journalists anywhere in the world today. “Lauren C Wiliams” is not.
You know more than Glenn Greenwald, do you?
It’s funny, but going by the calibre of your posts on this forum over the last month or so, I wouldn’t have credited you with the necessaries.
Another Pumpkin Pinochet promise goes west.
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has signaled to congressional Republican leaders that his preference is to fund the border wall through the appropriations process as soon as April, according to House Republican officials.</i?
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/05/politics/border-wall-house-republicans-donald-trump-taxpayers/index.html
He’s already taken back 3,600 good paying jobs from Mexico and got billions in new investment for the USA which was going to go to Mexico.
So yes, Mexico is definitely going to pay for the wall. From a certain point of view.
And promised to cancel tens of thousands of jobs across the continental US, alongside the F35.
I’m sure you’ll somehow blame Obama for September’s US unemployment rate.
if the F-35 is cancelled Boeing will get to build more F-18 Super Hornets.
Also, no one outside DC believes those false unemployment statistics. And certainly not in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.
Obama is irrelevant. Putin demonstrated that masterfully.
“masterfully”.
🙄
Hebron shooter Elor Azaria is indeed the norm
Over the past year and a half, dozens of Palestinian men, women and children have been killed, even though they could have been overpowered while they were still alive. The difference between them and Azaria is that he was videotaped.
by AMIRA HASS, Haaretz, Jan. 5, 2017
There’s one thing on which Palestinians agree with Elor Azaria and his supporters: that he wasn’t the only one, he just had the bad luck to be videotaped without his knowledge. Palestinians agree with Azaria and his supporters that he was complying with the norm and did exactly what other soldiers do – namely, shoot with intent to kill even when nobody’s life is in danger.
Palestinians agree with Azaria that the system discriminated against him. It’s just that they believe dozens of other soldiers and policemen should also have stood trial.
Like Azaria himself, Palestinians are wondering why he stood trial while the soldiers who killed Hadeel al-Hashlamoun of Hebron were never even investigated by the Military Police. She, too, was lying on the ground, after soldiers shot her from a distance at a checkpoint because she held a knife (which no soldier was even scratched by). And then, while she was lying there, they continued shooting her in the upper body. (This was on September 22, 2015, and Hebron residents attribute the subsequent outbreak of lone-wolf attacks to this incident.)
On June 11, 2010, Maxim Vinogradov, a Border Policeman, “confirmed the kill” of Ziad Jilani, who was already lying on the ground, shot and wounded, after having run over other policemen with his car in Jerusalem’s Wadi Joz neighborhood. The prosecution decided against indicting Vinogradov, accepting his ridiculous claim that he feared Jilani had a bomb. He was in the heart of a Palestinian neighborhood – why would he blow himself up there?
Fadi Alloun of Isawiyah was also lying on the ground, after having stabbed an Israel in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood on October 4, 2015. An anonymous policeman shot him to death after passersby encouraged him to do so. In this case, there was video footage from a cell phone, but it wasn’t enough for any steps to be taken against the killer.
Sara Hajuj of Bani Naim pulled a knife on Border Policemen inside the security-inspection room of a Hebron checkpoint on July 1, 2016. They sprayed her in the face with pepper spray and fled the room. Then one of them shot her, while she was alone in the room and didn’t endanger anyone.
On June 2, 2016, Ansar Hirsheh crossed the checkpoint at Anabta, where pedestrian traffic is forbidden, on foot. She had a knife in her belongings, but she didn’t endanger anyone. And there was no reason why the four armed, trained soldiers who surrounded her couldn’t have overpowered her without killing her.
Over the past year and a half, dozens of Palestinian men, women and children have been killed, even though according to both eyewitnesses and common sense, they could have been overpowered while they were still alive. Some, it later turned out, hadn’t even attempted to commit an attack. Dozens of soldiers, Border Policemen and checkpoint guards are walking free among us after having killed Palestinians who posed no danger to their lives. The defense establishment portrayed them as having acted properly.
The boundary between self-defense and nationalist vengeance has been completely blurred. This is the atmosphere in which Azaria operated.
Therefore, the message sent by the military court judges stands out for its rarity: Elor Azaria violated the rules of engagement, so he was convicted. But the message the Israeli defense establishment sends to its soldiers and policemen is equally loud and clear: “Take care that you aren’t videotaped when you do the deed. We know how to downplay the value of photographs taken by Palestinian security cameras and bury the testimony of Palestinian eyewitnesses. But we still haven’t found the solution to close-up, professional video footage.”
http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium-1.763074
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/world/321890/huge-iceberg-poised-to-break-off-antarctica
Larsen C starting to join its mates
but none of this is supposed to happen for decades more!!!
I don’t mean to brag – but…
I just put a jig-saw puzzle together in 1 day
And on the box it said 2 – 4 years!
😀
I love jigsaw puzzles!
brilliant!!!