Not good enough the ‘incentives’ to work, high inflation and no net tax cuts have had a predictable outcome, it seems.
Susie Harris-Wright and her five children spent a week living in darkness before a candle-sparked fire destroyed their rented home.
Her 10-year-old son, who would later save her life, went three days without a shower before Tuesday night’s blaze after she was unable to stretch the budget far enough to pay the power bill.
The Hamilton mum, who also cares for her 24-year-old nephew, works two part-time jobs – as a Red Badge security guard and a Novotel room maid – while studying to become an emergency medical technician.
The family spent that week scrambling: visiting friends, sneaking a shower and eating where and whenever they could. In the days before the fire, takeaways were the food of choice…. Ms Harris-Wright had visited the Dinsdale Winz branch office several times, trying to bring forward her appointment, which had been scheduled for Wednesday morning.
Personally I think it should be a scandal that someone in paid work should still have to go to WINZ for anything.
This article highlights the real costs that a crippling New Zealanders — rent and power bills. No point in having GST off fruit and veges or price controlled milks if you cannot afford the power to cook them with.
The sell down of our power companies, plus the changes to state housing, will only make things worse.
I wept when I read this. No surprise that we should come to this after 42years of neo liberal ideology (counting the years I spent under Thatcher when it was simply known as Thatcherism.) It was evil and cruel then, and changed a hard -fought -for better nation for the worse, and it is still doing its evil work in New Zealand in 2011.
Unfortunately it is aided in these times by John Key giving greed and avarice an acceptable ‘smiley’ face and a ‘positive’ spin.
How his followers love him as he spins his lies making it hunky dory and ‘respectable’ to be as selfish, thoughtless,ruthless and greedy as him. He makes them as fit for hell as himself and his party. Good job Key doesn’t believe in an afterlife , or maybe it isn’t, he might behave better towards his country and fellow citizen if he believed something nasty awaited him for his (and nacts) appalling actions and deceptions.
Apologies for the apparent emotion, but this story was too much, and I know there are hundreds more out there. Oh dear.
NO apology needed. I felt exactly the same when I read this. It was made worse by the reporter’s sly suggestion that some of the blame for this should have been placed on this poor woman “they began using tealight candles despite knowing it was dangerous”. In situations such as this sometimes risks have to be taken – through no fault of their own. No wonder many people just give up – worn out and beaten down by circumstance and callousness.
I wonder how many people know that WINZ have to see you for a food grant on the day you turn up. Sure, you might have to wait a bit, but they can’t send you away with an appointment time (though they will try to).
So, best to pay a portion of the necessary bill and apply for a food grant instead.
Meanwhile. I’m guessing she wouldn’t have had house and content insurance. And it won’t be the first time a landlord has ‘whacked’ a tennant for the replacement value of a house following a fire.
“No wonder many people just give up – worn out and beaten down by circumstance and callousness.”
Exactly Rosy. I so admire this woman that she is still trying, but I can only imagine her exhaustion. How dare others on this planet ignore such suffering, including the thoughtless reporter and the insensitive and ghoulish WINZ.
Reading the article it sounds as if her last month’s power bill was $730 and the current one was $900. That is such a hefty sum to find.
Waikato can be cold and damp but perhaps there needs to be workshops for beneficiaries about using power affordably. It is so easy to turn on the heater, have long hot showers, but those two things mount up to a huge bill if not controlled. I wonder if they have a heat pump. Those things should have a meter box in them so they either stop or you turn down the thermostat to avoid being billed for unnecessary heating if they are going all the time.
How can she do all these things and remain sane? She should be able to draw a benefit for her maternal and family care while she studies for her qualifications.
“perhaps there needs to be workshops for beneficiaries”
Except that she works two jobs and is in training, as well as caring for family. Where would she find the time? Perhaps her children should attend?
I agree with Millsy – this is a scandal. People shouldn’t have to make such choices in a rich country – and NZ is a rich country. Added to that she is in group that will be damned by others whatever she does (take your pick – Maori, solo mother, or the area she lives). I can’t imagine how hard it is for her to keep going.
Unfortunately Their reception at WINZ is the usual now a days, their staff have been gutted to bugger all they are over worked, underpaid, stressed to the max, and then they have US the beneficiary already stressed out due to circumstances beyond our control and this is the out come, or as I saw one day in a winz office a particularly rude and unhelpful staff member was ‘punched out’ . And I noticed here in Levin that one or two of the more ‘unhelpful’ staff members has disappeared and upon querying as to whether or not he’s been given the boot found out that he has been sent to CHCH. Now if all winz offices have done the same and sent the ‘worst’ of their staff to sort out CHCH I really do pity them. Puddin Bennett and co have got a lot to answer for.
Such an effective article against fracking, I had to check I really was reading the Herald.
Interesting that she challenges the astroturfers, and asks that commenters front-up with their real identities.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10743290
AN interesting timeline between request from Cameron Slater and the SIS meeting with Goff. The day after the supposed meeting with Goff and Slater is requesting the exact documents.
Suspicions of a setup anyone?
An excellent article in todays Herald .Well worth reading. Sorry, don’t know how to direct link.
It shouldn’t be just the rich getting rich getting richer
By Brian Gaynor
5:30 AM Saturday Aug 6, 2011
He summarises with
‘A large number of government policies, including capital gains taxes, death duties, income tax, superannuation policies and government income transfers, play big roles as far as wealth and income inequality are concerned.’
If the National Business Review’s Rich List figures are accurate then there has been a dramatic concentration of wealth at the top end since the 1980s.
The increase in income inequality has been checked in recent years only through the introduction of Working for Families and lower investment returns for the wealthy.
There seem to be inconsistencies regarding the latter point as the National Business Review reports that its Rich List group is doing very well, yet the ministry argues that income inequality is contracting because the wealthy are experiencing low investment returns.
The most appropriate way to solve the wealth and income inequality problem is to find ways to raise the wealth and income of all New Zealanders.
This should be one of the main issues for debate in the upcoming general election campaign’.
“The increase in income inequality has been checked in recent years only through the introduction of Working for Families and lower investment returns for the wealthy.” And now the screams of the ‘wealthy’ saying that WFF should be stopped. And all regulation to them getting richer, should be removed. And if this bunch of thieves get back into power just watch them do just what the rich want.
Reading Armstrong in granny you’d think the sky had fallen simply because labour was doing it’s job opposing rabid roy’s bill…….blatant one eyed reporting. This guys meant to be an experienced political reporter, what a fn joke.
I think Armstrong makes fair comments that are fairly plain outside devout the Labour circle. Labour have blocked all private members bills this year, that’s a terrible way to abuse democracy, in this case the only (outside) chance non government MPs have of getting anything through parliament.
Anyone doing so would have witnessed a spectacle which would immediately have brought several words to mind – words such as pitiful, pathetic, embarrassing and disgraceful.
It is a further black mark on Labour that not only has an innocent third party been caught in the crossfire, but the presence of the Royal Society’s measure on the order paper has been exploited for purely political motives.
And not only Labour.
The Greens should likewise hold their heads in shame over being party to Labour’s shoddy behaviour. They put much stock in parliamentary probity.
Selfish, desperate and petty party politics shits on our democracy.
Reading Armstrong’s column one would wonder if he has ever seen Parliament before, let alone being one of the Herald’s senior political journalists who has made a career out of watching it.
It is a petty, stupid farce on the best of days. And that applies to all parties, usually excepting the Greens and the Maori Party.
John does a nice line in outraged on this one, getting his knickers in a real knot over something that is no more and no less abuse of Parliament than National’s overuse of urgency or Gerry Brownlee’s flat refusal to even stand up and answer a question during Question Time.
Perhaps John just found himself with nothing to write about this week, given that Audrey Young was writing the piece about Goff and the SIS.
oh Pete SS George, you really do try and spin. But what about the bloody NACTS abusing the parliamentary process through the use of urgency, to ram their bullshit policies through without debate??? Oh or is that ok?
When John Armstrong starts describing Labour’s antics as pitiful, pathetic, embarrassing and disgraceful, deemeaning itself and the institution of parliament, you know the sky really is falling.
What a sea-change for a once respectable political party!
No mention of the NACTs constant abuse of process and urgency to stuff NZ as far as possible, in case they lose the election and cannot get their, so called, mandate for burglery.
Seem to remember Nat’s fillibusters on occasions.
If Labour are doing their job they should not allow any more NACT policy to get through until after the election.
Mind you, if politicians were really representing us, they would be legislating for democracy.
The problem that Armstrong misses is that this is a private member’s bill in name only. It is in fact a government bill. They have just allowed a minor partner to run it so that they won’t lose any popularity of it. If it was a private members bill it would be a conscience vote and not a whipped vote.
you avoid the whole thrust of Armstrong’s article – it’s not about the filibustering process. It’s about the shameful behaviour of Labour’s MPs after they got caught out.
Eric Roy’s authority as the Chairman of the Committee of the House was constantly being questioned and challenged.
Labour made repeated demands that Speaker Lockwood Smith be recalled to the chamber to rule on decisions made by Roy.
For the best part of an hour, Labour MPs raised timewasting points of order and forced a series of pointless votes to try to stop debate.
Trevor Mallard was ordered to leave the chamber but did not…
As Armstrong said: A clear line can be drawn between trying to delay a measure’s progress through Parliament by filibuster and trying to find and exploit gaps, loopholes and apparent anomalies in Parliament’s rules to subvert the will of the majority. Labour crossed that line.
Worth a read.
Last Para
I’d like to visit Arab countries one day. I’d like to trust this Government to protect the integrity of my passport. But I don’t.
On the open mike post of the 3th of August I started a thread about the new video of the Architects and Engineers for 911 truth.
Two questions were posted and I promised to respond so here it is:
If they wanted to attack Iraq then why didn’t they do so instead of planning this highly risky (in case of being found out) attack?
The issue of course is much more complex then that. First of all they did not want to attack just Iraq but to have an enemy they could call upon whenever the reached the next stage of gaining dominance in another one of the most oil rich areas on the planet the Caspian basin and the south Mediterranean countries. One book that is very enlightening is the “Grand Chess board” written by Zbignew Brezinski and I greatly advise those of you interested and inclined to read rather than watch to go out get the book and read it.
For those of you who like to watch videos here is the link to a presentation of Michael Ruppert.
Michael Ruppert is an ex Los Angeles cop who broke the CIA drug dealing scandal and who presents the case for 911 and what motivated the perpetrators to plan and execute 911. THis presentation is a couple of years old and at the time Michael still adhered to the LIHOP (Let it happen on purpose) scenario but he has since deserted that for the MIHOP (Make it happen on purpose) scenario.
The presentation is a whopping 2.5 hours but he is a very entertaining intelligent raconteur and the connections he makes with the finance world, their drug dealing and robber baron empire building methods are very well supported with evidence and very compelling as presents the evidence as he would do to a prosecutor to make his case in a crime.
It pays to remember that John Key at the years leading up to 911 was at the peak of his game and that Merrill Lynch was too. They were involved in most of the financial scandals he mentions in the years leading up to 911 and while that does not mean that John Key was necessarily involved in these scandals he did earn his name of the “Smiling Assassin” when he fired many of his colleagues in the aftermath of the collapse of one of the biggest hedge funds LTCM in which Merrill Lynch lost billions of dollars. So to think that John Key was an innocent dolphin swimming with sharks is naive to say the least.
The other issue was the free fall speed of WTC 7 and I found two videos back of two scientists David Chandler and prof. Jones who confronted NIST in the peer to peer review stage of the WTC 7 investigation which took 7 years to complete and they forced NIST to admit that during 2.5 sec (or thereabouts) the building did indeed come down in freefall speed which begs the question. How did the material of at least 8 floors disappear into nothing to allow for the building to come down in freefall speed.
There is only one answer to that question. Explosives were used to bring it down!!
Do you really think the US government and intelligence services have the competence and ability to organise such a complex conspiracy. And keep it secret.
The engineering behind what happened and how the twin towers collapsed is easily understood.
We were talking about WTC 7, the third building that collapsed on that day but for your information steel framed buildings do not collapse due to a carbon fire. Not even with planes hitting them.
Conspiracy theorists like to say “no other steel framed building has ever fallen down from a fire, some of which have raged for much longer than the twin towers did”.
How many other steel framed buildings, of that height, have had two planes flown into them deliberately?
Only two but the third building is what we are talking about. And about the theorist part: Buildings do not collapse breaking all three laws of motion. Impossible. So what we want is a new investigation. Has nothing to do with theory.
Engineers cannot be 100% certain exactly what was going on inside the building at the time.
To more easily express it in terms of alternate universes, maybe there was only a 1 in 1,000,000 combination of factors that lead to the building collapsing in the way it did. We happen to be in that universe. In all of the other universes where it didn’t collapse, or collapsed in a different fashion, there is no conspiracy theory. But we happen to live in this one.
Just because something is very very unlikely to happen, when it does happen that doesn’t mean there must have been some other factor that caused it.
LOL,
That is idiotic L. even by your standards. You are willing to accept a 1,000,000 factors just so long as they are different from the one obvious one: 19 Arabs had no access to WTC 7 and the only building to collapse in a controlled demolition fashion did so because a 1,000,000 factors other the OCT “conspired” to do so!!!
Here are 1500 Engineers and Architects who have an issue with that!
Oh, and by the way Fukushima is still killing and we are still importing foodstuffs from Japan!!! I hope like hell it isn’t beef.
Once again, you’re simply saying that the collapse of the building was so unlikely for the given reasons, that it must have been something else that caused it.
Unlikely things happen all the time, like people winning lotto (or no one winning lotto for 16 weeks in a row so the jackpot gets to 30m), or hurricanes being set on a bullseye path towards New Orleans.
As I understand the NIST explanation the support for the building was compromised in the bottom half of the building. That is, there was no support holding the building up.
It is natural that it would free fall while there is nothing holding it up.
It falls in three phases. A slower initial phase as the support disappears, a free fall phase as that which is not supported falls, and a final slow phase as that which is falling starts to meet resistance from all the rubble.
On the motivations, you still haven’t adressed my point. If they were after a casus belli, then the AQ attacks provided it, and indeed, they went on to use the attacks in a clumsy fashion. Getting involved themselves in the way truthers allege would only add little at great risk.
The question is not ‘did neocons or whomever want an event that they could use to justify things they wanted to do’. The question is ‘why would they need to rig 3 buildings to blow up when AQ had already hijacked commercial airliners and flown them into buildings.’
As I said before, why launch the most risky and audacious false flag op in history, when a genuine flag is being waved in the form of the most audacious terror attack in history?
I’m not seeing what extra value was gained for the enormous risk to have been worth it. And I’m not seeing the ground work laid.
By that I mean that the propaganda efforts, both before and after the attack were clumsy. After the attack the propaganda worked long enough to get the job done, but if they were really in on it, it wouldn’t have been so clumsy. They would have already laid the groundwork so that people automatically thought ‘saddam’ when people heard ‘AQ’. As it turned out they had to go and try and create those links and work them into their previous narrative based on WMDs. They pulled it off, but it wasn’t as smooth as one would expect of people that had known what was going to happen.
PB,
I can see from the time it took you you basically responded based on your believes and you are entitled to them.
I just spend 2.5 hours watching the doco again and I suggest you do the same. Added to that I spend another hour watching both Chandler and Jones in their response to the NIST report and what they think about the “phase” hypothesis.
You on the other hand think that buildings of 47 floors collapsing into a pile of dust as the result of office fires within 5.7 seconds is reasonable which begs the question; do you still dare to go into steel framed high rises now that you know that simple office fires can bring them down into a pile of dust within 5.7 seconds?
So for now let’s agree to disagree and if and only if you are prepared like me to seriously study links I give you like I study yours I think I’m going to stop responding to you because it seems like a huge waste of time to me
It wasn’t a ‘simple office fire’. 25% of the structure over several floors had been scooped out by debris from WTC1. The fire burned, uncontrolled, for several hours.
As did the fire in this Madrid, Much hotter and much longer but no collapse of the steel frame. The WTC 7 walls did not even disappear and the damage to adjacent buildings was much more extensive but they did not collapse into a pile of dust in 5.7 seconds
What truthers don’t mention is that the Madrid building, or at least the section of it that didn’t collapse, was steel reinforced concrete. So not the same at all.
The top section, which didn’t have the concrete, did collapse.
All three fucking buildings were twice reinforced with fucking steel. The twin towers both on the inside and the outside and WTC throughout the whole fucking building. You fuckwit.
Please come up with any other instance of a steel framed building collapse due to fire.
We have been using steel framed buildings for more than half a century, and they have suffered many fires.
You should be able to point to some other building collapses due to fire, right?
travellerev is correct IMO. There is nothing to suggest that a steel framed building is more likely to collapse due to fire vs a building based on steel reinforced concrete. Or vice versa.
Its as irrelevant as saying that one had a sign hanging outside and the other didn’t, and that makes all the difference.
Please be aware the McCormick building collapse was a roof collapse. You can also see in photos on the net that large parts of the roof structure framework collapsed but remained intact.
That is, the steel structures were not disintegrated by the fire
Re: the Madrid fire, I can see references to parts of the building having come down, but that most of the structure stayed upright (not just the bottom half) and had to be deliberately demolished at the cost of millions of euros.
Engineering. Steel framed buildings fire resistance.
Of course a reinforced concrete building is less likely to collapse due to fire than a steel frame. Concrete does not weaken in the same heat range and insulates the steel reinforcing from heat.
“Under continuous loading, carbon steel is usually limited to a maximum temperature of 700F (370C). (3, 4) By the time steel reaches 930F (500C), it has lost about 30% of its tensile strength. Unprotected weathering steel loses about half of its tensile strength above 1000F (539C)”.
Average temperature in a house fire, WITHOUT JET FUEL ACCELERANT, 593 C (1100 degrees F) for 27 minutes. (Victoria University Engineering Dept. Fire resistance studies).
Saying that planes could not have bought the world trade centre down is nonsense.
Engineers who studied the construction afterwards concluded that, even though a plane crashing into the building was one of the design criteria, the buildings, as built, would not have been able to withstand a crash at the actual speed and size that occurred.
Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story though.
I also read a thing from about 2004 or so, linked from here, I think it was a popular mechanics website.
The article said that in W7 there was a fuel pump leading to the basement high up into the upper stories and that this likely continued to pump fuel into the fire for 5-6 hours after the debris first struck it.
I have no idea if that’s the case or not, but if it is, then it really wasn’t a “simple office fire”.
That could be because it was Benjamin Chertoff nephew of the Chertoff of NSA and x-ray airport machine infamy wrote the bloody articles. And he wrote a bunch of unsupported crap easily debunked.
Sure, a puddle of fuel in an open space may not get hot enough.
But in an enclosed space it’s possible the heat could have been amplified. Probably still not enough to melt steel, but I can imagine it could weaken it more than would be expected from flame in a pure pool.
I’m not claiming to be an expert or know more than the experts, but no one knows for 100% sure exactly what conditions inside the building were like during the whole drama.
Enclosed spaces have extraordinarily limited air supply – fires would have largely gone out. In the footage of the building you can see that the fires suffer from a lack of oxygen – they are not ‘bright’ or ‘raging’ or ‘inferno’-like. They are taking their sweet time, struggling along for air for a lot of it.
Blast furnaces are enclosed spaces that have air fed in at the bottom.
The heat in a blast furnace is much hotter than you can get from just a pile of burning material, and yet it still gets enough air to continue burning. In fact the act of combustion in a blast furnace helps to draw more air into the chamber.
Bringing up blast furnaces is simply to illustrate that the physical environment in which a fire is burning can greatly increase heat while not depriving it of oxygen.
Clearly an office building is not akin to a modern industrial blast furnace that uses pure oxygen force-fed into the fire. But the concept of a blast furnace has existed for several thousand years.
If a physical structure resembling a blast furnace exists, it doesn’t matter whether it was deliberately constructed by a man, or created by pure random chance of structural debris falling down in the right configuration.
Note I’m not suggesting it was a blast furnace, I’m just giving you an example of a physical structure that results in hotter than normal temperatures while also not exhausting it’s oxygen supply.
“Buildings are deliberately designed to do just the opposite: to impede feeding a fire.”
Buildings are also designed not to have huge chunks missing out of them due to planes crashing into them, too.
meh. When I think of a fire in a skyscraper, I can’t but notice liftshafts and emergency stairwells. Assuming all the doors are shut, cool, but if they were breached by debris or opened by people evacuating, there’s a pretty strong air feed.
Shoot – when I worked venue security and there were 2k people in an unventilated auditorium, we’d open the lower and upper level doors to cool the place down and the windspeed got very noticable.
So where are the cases of steel framed skyscraper collapses? 😈
Don’t forget with Deepwater that you had the small effect of massive oceanic tidal forces pushing the thing over, along with several large explosions, explosives onsite, and not just a simple fire 🙂
As I understand the NIST explanation the support for the building was compromised in the bottom half of the building. That is, there was no support holding the building up.
In that case, large areas of the top half of the building should have stayed largely structurally intact in big recognisable ‘blocks’ and floors as we saw with the CTV building collapse.
It didn’t. The building was pulverised into fine dust and small debris. How did that happen to the top half of the building from a structural failure in the bottom half of the building?
The question is ‘why would they need to rig 3 buildings to blow up when AQ had already hijacked commercial airliners and flown them into buildings.’
As I said before, why launch the most risky and audacious false flag op in history, when a genuine flag is being waved in the form of the most audacious terror attack in history?
Potential whys, off the top of my head in 20s: higher death toll, more psychological impact, deeper and longer lasting political reverberations, additional leverage with international allies, destruction of event evidence, destruction of other materials on sites, replacement insurance pay out,…
I’ve decided that labour have been defeated using a rope a dope tactic,
The Govt have let them flail away fillibusting all year to prevent the vsm in the knowledge that that they could use procedure to allow the vsm to pass before the end of the cycle, (which is what we saw the other day)
All this has prevented more important and perhaps popular labour members bills from been drawn from the ballott which I suspect was the end game,
I’d have to say labour have been out manouvered on this one, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
When the contract for VSM passing before the election was first launched, it was up around 60%. It stayed around 40% for quite a long time, all while Labour was successfully filibustering it.
On Wednesday morning the stock spiked up from 20% to 40%, before eventually spiking around 95% prior to 2pm when parliament actually sat.
Clearly there was insider trading on this past Wednesday. Those same insiders may have been pumping the stock back as early as when it was first launched.
I guess the iPredict admin could probably investigate this – if the accounts involved in the recent insider trading were also the accounts that held up the price when the contract first announced, it would point towards this being the plan all along. Of course you can also just say that when they first bought up the stocks there were just hopeful of the outcome or expecting the filibuster to fail and didn’t specifically know that it would be broken in the way that it was.
Being President of an association carries responsibilities. Acting (and posting) in a manner that reflects badly on the organisation can have consequences.
Not that I think such environments would be conducive to anything but extremophiles, on top of the little problem of “energy sources” required to keep cellular metabolism kicking over. This does however make terraforming possibly more viable 😛
New evidence from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft supports a long-held suspicion that much of the Red Planet’s atmosphere was simply blown away — by the solar wind.
To successfully terraform Mars you’d need to get a magnetosphere there and that’s looking problematical at best. My own guess is that you’d need to get Mars’ mass up to Earth standard or better.
Or you’d just keep replenishing the atmosphere with dirty snowballs as the rate of loss is so slow that it takes geological time frames to strip the atmosphere. Though the real problem is actually the lack of plate tectonics which in geological time frames stuffs up the carbon cycle slightly 😛
Along with genetically tweaking everything to put up with slightly higher background levels of radiation.
Of course the more current problems make it all a bit of a pipe dream at present…
Dude, the wavelengths for cellphone radio only interact very, very, very weakly with biological tissue. The sort I’m taking about is standard cosmic background xray and gamma (and beta) radiation kicked out from the sun’s nuclear fusion processes + extrasolar sources that the earth’s magnetosphere shields us partly from. Combined with a nice thick atmosphere of course.
With a bit of tweaking to up-regulate DNA repair or splicing in relevant enzymes from radiation tolerant organisms, it would lead to plants (or rather algae) capable of surviving on Mars after initial terraforming steps, such as thickening the atmosphere.
There have been some really good doco’s on sky, one I watched was about storms on earth and other planets A force 5 huricane is just a gentle breeze on Jupiter where they have a storm thats been raging for hundreds of years. Or the nice Methane rain on a moon or two
There’s been a lot written about the possibility that Israeli spies gained false New Zealand passports and whether Phil Goff was briefed on the situation by the head of the SIS, Warren Tucker…
@jackal 2.25pm
I agree with everything in your link,”Request Ignored by SIS” including the word ‘besmirch’ which I was using earlier in relation to this unsavoury situation. ‘Besmirching Phil Goff’ is just what the Nats under john key are trying to do via that misguided being Cameron Slater.
They used this tactic to bring down Winston Peters in 2008 and through him tried to get to Helen Clark. john key was aided and abetted in this by rodney hide and the msm,not to mention simon power later.
I know this because I recorded every TV news report/interview/newspaper clipping/utterance/ etc. that I could for 18 months so that I had proof of the manipulation that I could see unfolding before me.(I knew nothing of Winston P. at the time just noticed Guyon Espiner and Barry Soper doing an untruthful hit job when Peters was speaking with John McCain and followed it from there.)
Here we go again , I thought, as I watched this SIS story unfold and then read Andrea Vance, subtly tilting the story towards besmirching Goff and whitewashing her beloved key on Stuff today
However I have to say that key has not got hide (the arch besmircher) with him this time so I think he has had to use slater which might not be so successful. (Act are really good at defaming others in order to get into power. In fact in order to get into power I think they will stop at very little- quite ruthless.No wonder the trickle down effect from such people creates such a horrible horrible world to live in.)
I really hope the truth comes out and that key,his party and all who sail in her are shown up for who and what they really are- selfish, manipulating, power hungry, robbers of reputation and integrity (having none themselves) and worthless robber barrenz (cretainly not a government of any merit) of New Zealand.
PS also agree with logie97-“there are only two dots to join here …..”
I completely agree with your summation there seeker. It’s exactly the same tactics, which must have a compliant media that does not dig any deeper than a scratch on the surface. I’m optomistic this time re Phil Goff that there’s a stronger alternative media presence, the public is becoming more aware of such propaganda and that the perpetrators have overreached themselves. It would be good to see some documentation re the Peter’s besmirch, there’s at least a documentary to be made there. The part Owen Glenn played needs special attention.
Siege of Gaza has become a moral blockade of Israel
by YITZHAK LAOR Haaretz, July 5, 2011
Israel is indeed connected to the centers of power in the world. The predictions of a tsunami at present seem to be exaggerated, but nevertheless, before the victory ball, it is worth remembering – the Israeli occupation is the longest military occupation of modern times. The subjects of the occupation in its two forms – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – live under a brutal regime that few other occupations allowed themselves, without any law – the blockade and the morbidity rate among children, the roadblocks and the arbitrariness of the soldiers, breaking in to people’s homes (imagine your children being awakened at night by the shouting of armed men, breaking down doors and blinding them with flashlights; imagine living without any protection ), the prolonged occupation, a disaster for us and for the Palestinians – because Israel enjoys the support of the West.
The settlements have turned the occupation into something insolvable, at least in the next few decades, so that the occupation will not merely raise another generation of Israeli troopers, egged on by the rabbis of the rabble, but also a third and fourth generation of Palestinians without another kind of life.
The fact that the Gaza Strip has become an international symbol of cruelty is yet further proof of the stupidity of our leaders. Operation Cast Lead and the blockade of Gaza – both of them with broad national consensus – have turned Gaza into a symbol that no longer needs coordination on the part of the Palestinians. Israeli democracy appears as it actually is: In the name of the majority (six million Jews ) it is permitted to do to the minority (five million, in Israel and the territories ) almost anything.
The national minority in Israel has the right to vote but it does not have television of its own ; it has health insurance but also heavy unemployment and infant mortality rates that are much higher than among the Jews (8.3 compared with 3.7 for every 1000 births ). Tel Aviv, which sells itself to the world as a liberal city, is the only metropolis in the West that does not have a Muslim population. Its “coolness” is racist – the 20 percent minority does not appear at all in the life of the city. And it is advisable for propagandists not to point to Jaffa as proof of diversity – Jaffa with its yuppie immigration is a perfect example of apartheid carried out by “secular” and “liberal” Tel Aviv.
Official propaganda, too, will not help. The more pressure Israel brings to bear on centers in the West – countries and media giants – the more the wave against it grows, because the hatred of the occupation and of Israeli racism springs from the knowledge that what Israel does is funded by the West, gets assistance from the West, and from connections with the focuses of power – as a living memorial to colonialism. There is nothing better than the way in which the Greeks thwarted the Gaza aid flotilla’s departure to reinforce this. It was not just Greece that thwarted it.
The coalitions that are being organized against Israel in the West include members of the left. There are also many others and not all of them are humanistic. They are not always Jew-lovers. These coalitions will continue to grow as long as the western political community presents itself as “helpless” in the face of Israeli obduracy. Of course it is not helpless, and when it has actual interests, it is capable of behaving in typically western barbaric fashion, as it is doing now in Libya and in Iraq.
The loathing of Israel fits in with the growing anti-establishment wrath, within the context of politics where there is no difference between the parties. The protests in Greece are an example of lack of faith of this kind, which does not spring from the Israeli occupation but from the powerlessness of the masses to influence what is taking place in their countries – economics and war.
Israel is merely one subject out of several that the political – or the apolitical – complaining is busy with. Very few people join flotillas, but many more participate in sending them and even more internalize their oppression. The complaining and mumbling is part of a burgeoning anti-establishment consensus. The record of what is always known as “the hypocritical politicians” has been joined by the hypocritical attitude toward Israeli cruelty.
It is not surprising therefore that the blockade of Gaza is getting tighter in the form of a moral blockade of Israel. Slowly but surely, in a world filled with injustice and war crimes and racism toward minorities and migrants, Israel has learned, during decades of stupidity, how to become the symbol of injustice and these crimes. We are no longer the embodiment of progress, as we were trumpeted as being for a long time, but the exact opposite. And this is truly just the beginning.
How do they print this in Israel and get away with it???
The same way that diligent and honest reporters like Seymour Hersh survive in the United States, and the likes of Gordon Campbell and Jon Stephenson survive in New Zealand—because the government simply ignores them as far as possible. No need to worry about intelligent and informed critics when you have a guaranteed faithful government mouthpiece like the Jerusalem Post—or the New York Post or the New Zealand Herald to support you no matter what crimes you commit, or what stupid and offensive statements you make after a massacre in Norway.
By the way, Haaretz is where you can read many other great Israeli writers, such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.
The Trident programme was excluded from the UK defence review while conventional forces were reduced and public austerity measures were implemented. Priorities like this do my head in.
But with today the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, that other image of destruction from Japan leaves many questioning why on Earth we would countenance building a new nuclear weapons capable of causing death and destruction thousands of times worse than the havoc wreaked by a natural disasters and the fall-out from Fukushima.
Given that we are lumbered with the “dirge” that is now our national song, it is interesting that the two most important words in the first verse are “the” and “of”.
Have a listen next time and it won’t matter if it is a highly trained opera singer or a wailing two bit celebrity they will emphasise those two words. Seems we will have to get the Minister of Education to order that the song be taught correctly at primary school. It’s going to be a long process.
In 1987, as a British Labour MP, I was elected to the Shadow Cabinet by my colleagues and was asked by the party leader to direct Labour’s campaign in the general election of that year. The election was to take place at the height of Mrs Thatcher’s dominance and we ...
National MP Nicola WillisHousing, which I would argue is a fundamental human right, has long been a problem in New Zealand. Not only do we have some of the most overpriced houses in the entire world, much of the housing stock is substandard and therefore affects not just people’s health ...
If the government has not lined up behind a "Yes" vote in this year's cannabis referendum the way some reformers would have liked, one entirely laudable thing it did do was commission some science around the public's choice.That science landed today, in the form of the report from an expert ...
Associate Professor Sara WaltonAt the heart of the discussion on opening up our borders is the dichotomy of health and the economy – both of which are actually intertwined, like many things with our economy, as this epidemic has shown.If we think about our country as a system, ...
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Josh Gabbatiss This year will see the largest ever drop globally in both investment and consumer spending on energy as the coronavirus pandemic hits every major sector, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The crisis is accelerating the shutdown of older fossil-fuelled ...
A short opinion piece – Friday 26th June 2020 Whilst our Government has treated many financial victims of the current Covid-19 virus with appropriate generosity, the same cannot be said for those of the two earlier “epidemics” in NZ. The “Covid-84” virus (also called “Rogernomics”) spread systemic greed, with the ...
Everyone deserves a a decent life. We know this is possible with a fairer approach to income support and tax Read the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Poverty Action Plan here ...
After a long break, the government is back inserting secrecy clauses in legislation. This time its the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill (No 3), which in its clause allowing Ministers to exempt purchasers of farm land from the usual rules also allows them to exempt an exemption from the publication requirement: ...
Over the past two years the government has repeatedly delayed a scheme to put cameras on boats to monitor Mew Zealand's pervasively criminal fishing industry. But it turns out that the industry actually wants cameras: Three of the country's biggest seafood companies have broken ranks with the rest of the ...
Louise Delany (public health lawyer)Health and emergency laws have played a critical role in this country’s successful elimination of community transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic. This blog details key aspects of the legislation and comments on issues around testing, payments by incoming travellers for quarantine costs, and mask use. ...
I like Andrew Curry’s succinct and insightful futures blog The Next Wave. His most recent post is about social change. In particular, the decadal-long periods usually required for changes in values. He highlights a 2016 paper by Inglehart and Norris, who examined whether economic insecurity or a “cultural backlash” ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... Story of the Week... Stop making sense: why it's time to get emotional about climate changeThe science has been settled to the highest degree, so now ...
MONDAY JULY 6Washington (History, Sky 073, 7.30pm). The brilliant Doris Kearns Goodwin is the executive producer of this six-part series about America's first president. It combines interviews with live action and is narrated by Jeff Daniels. It's engaging, said Salon.TUESDAY JULY 7The ABC Murders (Prime, 8.30pm). Sarah Phelps has done incredible things with ...
I think we can all agree that the mainstream media in New Zealand has a very different set of rules for the right wing compared to the left. While Labour and Green Party politicians don’t seem to be able to fart without it becoming a sackable offence, National and Act ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, June 28 through Sat, July 4, 2020Editor's Choice'2040': A funny, entertaining, upbeat climate documentaryA timely Australian documentary takes a 'solutions' approach, with the filmmaker inspired by visions of ...
Racist National MP Hamish WalkerEven before Todd Muller's coup ousted Simon Bridges by a single vote, it was patently obvious that the National Party promotes and stands for white privilege. In fact they’ve always worked to ensure the discriminatory status quo in New Zealand doesn’t change.So it’s no surprise that ...
Dave HeatleyZero community transmission. Just a handful of active cases, all in quarantine. New Zealand is in an attractive situation, at least compared to much of the world. The situation could be robust and enduring – or it might be fragile, just one border incursion away from a “second ...
Is the consequence of the Simpson Report proposals for restructuring the health system poorer accountability to people? When in doubt, centralise‘ has been a persistent theme in New Zealand public policy throughout our history. The current government is no exception. Here are some examples. - The regional polytechs have been ...
I wrote earlier in the week about the Scientology front organisations Drug Free World and Drug Free Ambassadors and their quite prominent role in anti-cannabis reform "coalition" assembled by Family First and a newloca branch of the American prohibitionist organisation SAM.It turns out Family First aren't the only ones helping ...
Nik GreenMuch of the public debate about the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has focused on the extent to which government regulations have restricted personal and business activity.Oxford University Blavatnik School of Government Here in New Zealand, the question of when to change Alert Levels dominated the ...
Raising The Bar: Would that the Prime Minister and her colleagues would listen as intently to what the people – as opposed to the power elites – are saying as the Greens. Were they so disposed, the popular clamour for a transformational post-Covid reset would be loud in their ears. ...
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nzDo you think the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown will slow or ...
A bit like a letter home. I have now been full-time at the University of Melbourne since 2019. Before that, I was 20 years at the University of Otago, Wellington. Indeed, I set up this very Public Health Expert Blog with Nick Wilson ten years ago. Now I am your ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections House Democrats have released a comprehensive report showing how – if they control the White House and both the Senate and the House of Representatives – they might move forward on climate change. Their “Climate Crisis Action Plan,” released June 30 by the ...
Not Ready: Todd Muller’s lack-lustre and self-contradictory performances offer conclusive proof that a political leader cannot be managed into competence. National’s new boss has Janet Wilson handling his media and Matthew Hooton writing his speeches. Both are highly professional political and public relations specialists, and Muller is lucky to have ...
Unfortunately, due to a medical emergency, I have landed in hospital so am not able to do a current update on the NZ blog statistics. Let’s hope I can get back to this in good time. ...
It started as a family story, about a step-father who went out one night to break into an embassy in Wadestown, Wellington. John Daniell wanted to understand what his family had been part of when his mother and then step-father work for New Zealand’s Security Intelligence. He wanted to know ...
The Greens have shaken up the election campaign with the announcement of their radical poverty and action plan to reform welfare provision and introduce a new wealth tax for millionaires. It’s a big-thinking, controversial policy and has generated a lot of disagreement over how radical it is, whether it could ...
My house is currently supplied electricity by Meridian. As soon as I can change I will because Meridian spilled water to hike electricity prices. They got consumers to spend an extra $80 million on power unnecessarily. Clever them. The Electricity Authority has called their behaviour an “undesirable trading situation”, or ...
When Jacinda Ardern unexpectedly became the Labour Party leader shortly before the 2017 general election, she promised to lead a government of transformation. After nearly three years occupying the Treasury benches, health professionals working in public hospitals have been keenly waiting for transformational progress, including in the capacity and quality ...
Last night, One News ran a follow-up story to its Colmar Brunton poll results on the cannabis referendum, headed here as Government accuses big American anti-cannabis group of interfering in NZ politics.In truth it wasn't just the government: Justice minister Andrew Little, National's Shane Reti and the Greens' Chloe Swarbrick ...
When the government refused to put cameras on fishing boats to ensure fishers obeyed the law, Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash claimed that coalition partner NZ First (which has received large donations from the fishing industry) was not responsible for the decision. He has repeated that claim repeatedly since then. But ...
Heroic Evasions: Labour needs to be unequivocal in its communications with the electorate. Either it has a plan to prevent their fellow New Zealanders from falling off the economic cliff, or it doesn’t. Either it has a fiscal policy equal to the task of funding that plan, or it hasn’t. ...
Prof John Potter*Elimination has been an effective strategy for New Zealand in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic virus (SARS-CoV-2). Most other countries have not pursued this goal and are ignoring the opportunity even now. SARS-CoV-2 is not manageable by the influenza playbook; its longer incubation period makes tracing ...
This is a re-post from Weather Underground by Bob HensonAbove: This rainbow appears unusually low in the sky because it has formed early in the afternoon, rather than toward sunset. For a rainbow to form, water droplets must be present in the air in front of an observer ...
On Monday, Todd Muller gave an important speech to the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, He spoke firmly about his belief in the need for foreign investment, for the public sector to partner with the private sector rather than boss it around and, crucially, demanded the government deliver a clear strategy ...
Todd Muller's first act on become party leader was to appoint an all-white front bench. This understandably raised eyebrows, so he is now apparently reconsidering caucus and list rankings. Which is obviously necessary, but there's still the underlying problem: National doesn't have a lot of Māori MP's. And the reason ...
Meridian energy has been caught manipulating the electricity market for fun and profit: Meridian Energy pushed up power prices by unnecessary spilling water from its south dams in December that could have been used for generation, the Electricity Authority has ruled in a preliminary decision. The authority said the ...
When the Christchurch murderer pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder and a number of other violent assault charges a few months ago, he effectively closed the door on what the public will know about the lead up to and commission of the event. His plea means that no evidence ...
Daphna Whitmore The Philippines is enduring one of the longest lockdowns in the world. For President Duterte the lockdown provides an opportunity to garner more powers and to push through a brazen assault on human rights. A new law called the Anti-Terror Bill has been passed under urgency and it ...
Hearing the Prime Minister castigate the Warehouse for laying off 1,000 workers after receiving $52 million in wage subsidies reminds me of the fabled frog who agreed to carry a scorpion across a river. The scorpion stings the frog halfway across, dooming both to drown. The frog cries “Why on ...
Prof Nick Wilson, Dr Amanda Kvalsvig, Prof Michael BakerCompared with other OECD countries NZ is a stand-out success story by ending community transmission of COVID-19. While there have been some well-publicised recent deficiencies (eg, quarantine organisation), there has still been no evidence of community transmission for many weeks. Nevertheless, ...
It’s June 30th, marked as Asteroid Day by many people of an astronomical bent around the globe. On this date in 1908, early in the morning in a remote part of central Siberia, the sky fell in. Well, not literally. What happened is a substantially-sized lump of cosmic detritus ...
There really is not much about Paula Bennett concerning her career trajectory, the policies she promoted, and most importantly, the socio-economic effect this had upon New Zealand (and particularly the most vulnerable in this, our oft-cited “egalitarian” society of this country) that can be said now that hasn’t already been ...
Don Franks Poverty, inequality – really – aren’t politicians paid to sort that stuff ? Why can’t they just get it together and come up with something fair and sensible? A cold rainy 2020 morning, a headline showed promise. “Green Party’s $8b plan would guarantee an income of $325 a ...
A guest repost by Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) staff attorney Augusta Wilson. Fundraising is not the objective of this article but readers may wish to know that CSLDF is currently conducting a summer fundraiser to support defense of research scientists and research integrity from anti-science interference by politicians and industrial interests. The COVID-19 pandemic ...
Helloy… My name is Todd Muller and I am the leader of the National Party of New Zealand. Many people come up to me on the street and ask me who I am. I’m often walking through Tauranga, or in a mall in suburban Auckland, or maybe even a farmers’ ...
The US state of Mississippi has finally voted to remove the Confederate emblem from its state flag. Good. Its appalling that it was put there in the first place, but even more appalling that it took so long to remove it. Its basicly as if a German Länder still had ...
No one could have predicted when David Seymour’s End of Life Choice Bill was passed by Parliament last November that the referendum required to bring the legislation into force would be held against the backdrop of a deadly global pandemic. Since then, the mounting tally of casualties around the world ...
Paul GoldsmithYou can often tell just how effective a progressive policy proposal will be by how much the right wing criticise it. The more socially beneficial, the more vitriolic and unhinged they seem to become.That was the case when the Green Party announced their Poverty Action Plan yesterday. The response ...
Back at the beginning of April, when we had much else on our minds, I wrote this post urging some caution in interpreting the results of the latest Horizon poll, conducted in February, on voting intentions in this year's cannabis referendum, which was paid for by Helius Therapeutics.I wrote that ...
Over the weekend the Greens made their first election policy announcement, and promised transformational change: a more progressive tax system, with new rates applying to incomes of $100,000 and $150,000; a new wealth tax on net wealth over $1 million; and a guaranteed minimum income to eliminate poverty. Its bold, ...
Story of the Week... El Niño/La Niña Update... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... Story of the Week... Global Warming Is Melting Our Sense of Time Satellite image of smoke from active fires burning near the ...
. . Plague town? There are two things right now in Aotearoa New Zealand that are guaranteed to piss people off. Firstly, it’s National playing silly-bugger politics with the covid-19 pandemic. This cost Simon Bridges his job as National’s Leader. Lately, Michael Woodhouse has been playing fast and loose with ...
Tertiary fees in New Zealand versus Australia: Fees Are Important, but not as Important as Financing In Australia, the Education Minister Dan Tehan has proposed an overhaul of the existing higher education funding system to offer 39,000 additional study places by 2023 and 100,000 by 2030. The proposal has been ...
The latest opinion poll forecasts a landslide win by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party, but when taken alongside other polling, it illustrates New Zealand politics remains volatile and the contest is still very open. According to the Colmar Brunton poll published by TVNZ last night, Labour would easily romp back ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, June 21 through Sat, June 27, 2020Editor's ChoiceFacebook creates fact-checking exemption for climate deniers Facebook is "aiding and abetting the spread of climate misinformation,” said Robert Brulle, an ...
The images and reports delivered to us by the world’s media leave us in no doubt that the rest of the world is still in the grip of a coronavirus pandemic that shows no signs of slackening, but is actually uncontrolled and picking up pace in many countries; and even ...
Minister of Health - David ClarkIf you follow politics at all in New Zealand, David Clark is likely a name you’re a bit familiar with. The current Minister of Health is perhaps the most disliked Member of Parliament at the moment, which amongst very stiff competition is really saying something. ...
SUNDAY JUNE 28Beat the Chasers (TVNZ 1, 8.30pm). Judging by the tweets, which is probably a bad idea, over lockdown, all of New Zealand found itself in front of The Chase every night at 5pm. It is a brilliant fomat: hardly anyone wins any money ...
SATURDAY JUNE 27Banksy and the Rise of Outlaw Art (Sky Arts, Sky 017, 8.00pm). There was graffiti before Banksy, but perhaps his pungent political messages hit home a bit harder. Anyways, a doco about his influence on street art featuring a bunch of cool people.SUNDAY JUNE 28Beat the Chasers (TVNZ 1, ...
We have been assailed by Fox News-style headlines, lurid stories of “a breach!”. An almost nuclear level disaster on the horizon scream, “Fiasco!” here, “Hero to Zero!” there… Oh quick, panic everyone!This has fueled an unbelievably stupid environment of panic among some, and spurred useless, counterproductive political ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters A massive dust storm formed over the Sahara Desert last week and invaded the Caribbean over the June 20-21 weekend, bringing dangerous levels of air pollution and low visibility to the islands. The dust is accompanied by a large amount ...
Will the Covid Crisis lead to a dramatic redirection for New Zealand and the World? A hinge in history occurs where the past and present are connected but they point in different directions. Big hinges are rare but crucial in the development of humankind. Not in Narrow Seas identifies six. ...
Mark Patterson MP, Spokesperson for Primary Industry New Zealand First is supporting calls by hunters and the New Zealand Tahr Foundation (NZTF) to halt a large scale cull of Himalayan Tahr by the Department of Conservation in National Parks. The calls are supported by a 40,000 strong petition and the ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First New Zealand First leader Winston Peters today scoffed at suggestions that a team of six political operatives have been dispatched to New Zealand to assist his campaign. ‘As President Ronald Reagan once said, ‘there they go again.’ ‘The clickbait journos can’t ...
New Zealand First is pleased to announce Jenny Marcroft as the party’s election 2020 candidate for the Auckland Central electorate. Jenny spent years working in Auckland Central, having spent a vast proportion of her broadcasting career there. She says she, "knows the place and knows the people." Ms Marcroft says ...
New Zealanders deserve healthy rivers and lakes that are safe to swim in - but they have been getting worse for decades. That's why, with our latest announcement, we're investing in projects that will help clean up our rivers and lakes and restore them to health, within a generation. ...
This week we moved into the second half of 2020 - and our Government delivered another week of big changes and major progress for New Zealanders. Read below for a wrap of the key things moments from the week - from extending paid parental leave, to making major investments in ...
The Green Party has opposed the COVID-19 Recovery Fast-track Consenting Bill which shortcuts normal consenting processes under the Resource Management Act (RMA), reduces public participation and narrows environmental considerations. ...
Hon Shane Jones, Minister of Regional Economic Development A regional freight hub for the lower North Island will be built just northeast of Palmerston North, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones has announced. The Government is investing $40 million through the Provincial Growth Fund to designate and buy land and design ...
Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson is calling for the introduction of a Guaranteed Minimum Income to lift hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty and prevent more families entering into further debt with the Ministry of Social Development. ...
There has been renewed focus on New Zealand First acting as a handbrake on the Government after our decision to not support Auckland light rail. We are a handbrake for bad ideas, that istrue, but our track record since 2017 has seen New Zealand First constructively also serve as an ...
Mark Patterson MP, New Zealand First List MP New Zealand First’s Fair Residency for Superannuation Bill passed its First Reading in Parliament today. The Bill makes a significant change to NZ Super by raising the minimum residency requirement from 10 to 20 years, after age 20. “Currently, a migrant of ...
Darroch Ball MP, Spokesperson for Law and Order A New Zealand First member’s bill in the name of Darroch Ball introducing a six-month minimum prison sentence for assaults on first responders has passed its second reading in Parliament. The new offence of "injuring a first responder or corrections officer with ...
Fletcher Tabuteau MP, Deputy Leader of New Zealand First New Zealand First welcomes the launch of the new Criminal Cases Review Commission, gifted with the name from Waikato-Tainui - Te Kāhui Tātari Ture, announced in Hamilton today by Justice Minister Andrew Little. “New Zealand First has long believed in and ...
The Green Party is celebrating over $800m in new funding for green projects, which will get people into jobs while solving New Zealand’s long-term challenges. ...
Mark Patterson MP, Spokesperson for Primary Industries New Zealand First is appalled that Meridian seems to have been unnecessarily spilling water from its dams to drive up its profits."While New Zealanders have been coming together in some of our darkest hours, we don’t expect power gentailers to waste water and ...
We wrapped up the first half of 2020 with a busy month, taking additional steps to support New Zealanders as we continue with our economic recovery. We rolled out targeted packages to support key industries like tourism and construction, helped create jobs in the environmental and agriculture sectors, and set ...
Hon Shane Jones, Minister for Infrastructure Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones has welcomed the appointment of Maurice Davis and his deep infrastructure and construction experience to the board of the Infrastructure Commission. Mr Davis (Ngāti Maniapoto), is the seventh and final appointment to the board led by former Reserve Bank Governor ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First New Zealand’s click bait journalism is taking a turn for the worse, with yet another example of sensationalist, wilful-misrepresentation of the facts. “New Zealand First has worked constructively with its Coalition partner on hundreds of pieces of legislation and policy, and ...
The Green Party is today unveiling its Poverty Action Plan, which includes a Guaranteed Minimum Income to ensure people have enough to live with dignity. ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister Fletcher Tabuteau MP, Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development The Rotorua Museum redevelopment and Whakarewarewa and Tokorangi Forest projects will be accelerated thanks to a $2.09 million Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) boost, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher ...
This week, we rolled out the next steps of our recovery plan, with new infrastructure investment, extra support for tourism operators, and a new programme to get Kiwis into agriculture careers. The global economic consequences of COVID-19 will continue to be a challenge, but we have a detailed plan to ...
Jenny Marcroft MP, Spokesperson for Health New Zealand First welcomes the passage of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission Bill through its final reading in Parliament today fulfilling a coalition agreement commitment. “This is an important step in saving the lives of New Zealanders and delivers a key coalition commitment ...
Whakatāne has been given a $2.5 million boost to speed up previously funded projects and create more than 450 jobs in the next decade. Of those, the equivalent of 160 full-time jobs could be delivered in the next six weeks. Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters is in town to make ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister Fletcher Tabuteau MP, Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) is investing $2.5 million to accelerate three infrastructure projects in Whakatāne, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau announced today. “This package is about ...
Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones is throwing his weight behind a bid by the Auckland Council to fast-track the more than doubling of the city's water allowance from the Waikato River. And he's coming out strongly against anyone who plans on getting in the way of this campaign. "It is my ...
The Green Party is thrilled to see changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that mean consents for large projects can be declined if they will have significant climate change implications that are inconsistent with the Zero Carbon Act and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Paris Agreement obligations. ...
Hon Ron Mark, Minister of Defence The Royal New Zealand Navy’s new ship, Aotearoa, set sail for New Zealand on 10 June from the Republic of Korea, and is due to arrive in Auckland tomorrow, announced Minister of Defence Ron Mark. “Aotearoa is the Royal New Zealand Navy’s new fleet ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Racing Racing Minister Winston Peters has today welcomed the Racing Industry Bill passing its third reading, creating the legislative framework for revitalising the racing industry while limiting the need for future government intervention. “For too long our domestic racing industry has ...
The Green Party has today put forward an amendment to the Electoral (Registration of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill to ensure all people in prisons can vote in general elections. ...
The Green Party welcomes the decision to not proceed with Public Public Investment (PPI) delivery of Auckland’s light rail project and to instead run the process through the public service. ...
Hon Ron Mark, New Zealand First List MP based in the Wairarapa New Zealand First List MP Hon Ron Mark welcomes the announcement of Provincial Growth Funding investment of $1.4 million to help secure the Wairarapa’s water supply. The funding boost will allow the Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC), and ...
New Zealand First list MP Mark Patterson has been selected to represent the party in the newly formed Taieri electorate at the upcoming election. Mr Patterson, his wife Jude and two daughters farm sheep and beef at Lawrence and Waitahuna. He previously stood in the Clutha-Southland electorate however boundary changes ...
Hon Shane Jones, Associate Minister for State Owned Enterprises A new ‘super depot’ to be built for NZ Post in Wellington will create around 350 jobs during construction, Associate Minister for State Owned Enterprises Shane Jones says. Shane Jones today attended a ground-breaking and blessing ceremony for the parcel-processing depot ...
Our strong economic management prior to COVID-19 - with surpluses, low debt and near-record-low unemployment - put us in a good position to weather the impact of the virus and start to rebuild our economy much earlier than many other countries.Now we're putting our plan to recover and rebuild ...
Darroch Ball MP, New Zealand First Spokesperson for Law and Order Recently released Police fleeing driver statistics have shown yet another increase in incidents with another record-high in the latest quarter. “This new quarterly record-high is the latest in a string of record-high numbers since 2014. The data shows incidents ...
New Zealand First MP Fletcher Tabuteau is pleased to be confirmed today as the party’s candidate for the Rotorua electorate. Speaking at the Rotorua AGM for New Zealand First, Mr Tabuteau said this is an election that is incredibly important for the people of Rotorua. “The founding principles of New ...
The Human Rights Commission’s PRISM report on the issues impacting people based on their sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) provides an excellent programme of work for future governments to follow, say the Greens. ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said the trans-Tasman bubble had not been jeopardised after aborder botch-upresulted in New Zealand having two active cases of COVID-19. On Friday, Mr Peters told RNZ's Morning Report he had heard from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison that borders for trans-Tasman travel would open by ...
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters said today he was pleased the army was now running the quarantine and isolation process - up until now it has been the Ministry of Health. Peters told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking that the army knew how to introduce and follow protocols and instil discipline. ...
The Government is making immediate short-term changes to visa settings to support temporary migrants already onshore in New Zealand and their employers, while also ensuring New Zealanders needing work are prioritised, Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. We are: Extending temporary work visas due to expire by the end of 2020 ...
Professor Peter Skelton CNZM has been appointed as Chief Freshwater Commissioner and Alternate Environment Court Judge Craig James Thompson as Deputy Chief Freshwater Commissioner for the newly established Freshwater Planning Process (FPP). Environment Minister David Parker today also announced the appointment of Chief Environment Court Judge Laurie Newhook as the ...
Auckland Queen’s Counsel Neil Campbell has been appointed a Judge of the High Court, Attorney‑General David Parker announced today. Justice Campbell graduated with a BCom and LLB (Hons) from the University of Auckland in 1992. He spent two years with Bell Gully Buddle Weir in Auckland before travelling to the United ...
The Associate Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration, Poto Williams, is seeking feedback on a proposal to better enable the development and operation of commercial film and video facilities in Christchurch. The Proposal, developed by Regenerate Christchurch in response to a request from Christchurch City Council, asks that powers under section ...
The Government has launched a bold plan to boost primary sector export earnings by $44 billion over the next decade, while protecting the environment and growing jobs. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern today released Fit for a Better World – Accelerating our Economic Potential, a 10-year roadmap to unlock greater value ...
A new approach to prevent family harm that encourages greater collaboration across government and community groups is being celebrated at the opening of a new facility in Auckland. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern today opened the Multi-Disciplinary Family Harm Prevention Hub Te Taanga Manawa in Lambie Road in Manukau. The facility ...
The Government has released a major new report on the options for relocating the Port of Auckland’s freight operations while deferring any decision on the issue. “That decision needs to be informed by policy analysis that is still to be completed. As a result it will be up to a ...
The history of Rāpaki is being restored through the inclusion of te reo in thirteen official place names on Te Pātaka-o-Rākaihautū / Banks Peninsula and around Lyttelton Harbour/Whakaraupō, the Minister for Land Information, Eugenie Sage, announced today. “I am pleased to approve the proposals from Te Hapū o Ngāti ...
Bookings for seats on Air New Zealand flights into New Zealand will be managed in the short term to ensure the Government is able to safely place New Zealanders arriving home into a managed isolation or quarantine facility, says Housing Minister Megan Woods. “Last week Air Commodore Darryn Webb and I ...
Grant Robertson has today announced the first major release of funding from the $265 million Sport Recovery Package announced at Budget 2020. “Today we’re setting out how $80 million will be invested, with $54 million of that over the 2020/2021 financial year for organisations from community level through to elite ...
The Government is maintaining current levy rates for the next 2 years, as part of a set of changes to help ease the financial pressures of COVID-19 providing certainty for businesses and New Zealanders, ACC Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. “New Zealanders and businesses are facing unprecedented financial pressures as a ...
Small businesses are getting greater certainty about access to finance with an extension to the interest-free cashflow loan scheme to the end of the year. The Small Business Cashflow Loan Scheme has already been extended once, to 24 July. Revenue and Small Business Minister Stuart Nash says it will be ...
A package of 23 projects across the country will clean up waterways and deliver over 2000 jobs Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Environment Minister David Parker announced today. The $162 million dollar package will see 22 water clean-up projects put forward by local councils receiving $62 million and the Kaipara ...
Tena koutou katoa Nga tangata whenua o tenei rohe o Pōneke, tena koutou Nau mai, haere mai ki te hui a tau mo te roopu reipa Ko tatou! Ko to tatou mana! Ko to tatou kaupapa kei te kokiri whakamua Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa Welcome. I ...
The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) is investing $1.5 million to ensure QE Health in Rotorua can proceed with its world class health service and save 75 existing jobs, Under Secretary for Regional Economic Development, Fletcher Tabuteau announced today. The PGF funding announced today is in addition to the $8 million ...
A new programme, which sets a firm course for the Building and Construction sector to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, has been announced by the Minister for Building and Construction Jenny Salesa. “A significant amount of New Zealand’s carbon emissions come from the building and construction sector. If we’re serious ...
The Provincial Growth Fund is investing more than $7.5 million in Northland ventures to combat the economic impact of the COVID-19 virus, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones have announced. The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) investment is going to the Northern Adventure Experience and ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Education Minister Chris Hipkins today announced significant funding for Auckland’s Northcote College as part of the first wave of a new nationwide school redevelopment programme to upgrade schools over the next 10 years. The $48.5 million project brings the total investment in Northcote College to ...
The Government has opened an urgent response fund to support schools and early learning services to get children and young people back on track after the Covid-19 lockdown. “While we are seeing improvements in attendance under Alert Level 1 Ministry of Education data shows that attendance rates in our schools ...
The law to boost the economic recovery from the impact of COVID-19 by speeding up resource consenting on selected projects has passed its second and third readings in the House today. “Accelerating nationwide projects and activities by government, iwi and the private sector will help deliver faster economic recovery and ...
Five port-related projects in Whanganui will receive a $26.75 million Provincial Growth Fund investment to support local economic recovery and create new opportunities for growth, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today. “This is a significant investment that will support the redevelopment of the Whanganui Port, a project governed ...
Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery will receive an investment of up to $12 million administered by the Provincial Growth Fund to support its redevelopment, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today. The project is included in a $3 billion infrastructure pipeline announced by Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Shane Jones yesterday. ...
The Provincial Growth Fund is investing nearly $2.5 million into three Te Ara Mahi programmes to support Manawatū-Whanganui jobseekers and employees to quickly train and upskill, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today. “Up to 154 local people will be supported into employment within the first year by these ...
This morning I have formally tendered my resignation as Minister of Health, which was accepted by the Prime Minister. Serving as Minister of Health has been an absolute privilege – particularly through these extraordinary last few months. It’s no secret that Health is a challenging portfolio. I have given ...
Scholarships for 57 early-career agricultural emissions scientists from 20 developing countries is another example of New Zealand’s international leadership in primary sector sustainability, says Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor. Mr O’Connor, announcing the scholarships today, says hundreds of applications were received for this fourth round of the CLIFF-GRADS programme (Climate, Food ...
A project to help rejuvenate the Horowhenua town of Foxton will receive a Provincial Growth Fund investment of $3.86 million, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today. “This funding for the Foxton Regeneration project will be used to make the well-known holiday town even more attractive for visitors and ...
Moa bones and other sub-fossil remains of extinct species are set to have improved protection with proposals to prevent the trade in extinct species announced the Minister of Conservation Eugenie Sage today. “We have lost too many of our native species, but these lost species, such as moa, remain an ...
The Government’s free and healthy school lunches programme moves south for the first time creating jobs for around 30 people in Otago and Southland. “Eighteen schools with 3000 students are joining the programme – 11 have already begun serving lunches, and seven are preparing to start during Term 3. This is ...
Thousands of Kiwi jobs and investment in New Zealand productions will be protected through a screen sector support package announced today by Associate Minister for Arts Culture and Heritage Carmel Sepuloni, Minister for Economic Development Phil Twyford and Minister for Broadcasting Kris Faafoi. The package also includes investment in broadcasting ...
The Government has established a new $10 million fund for the domestic events sector to help save jobs and protect incomes as it recovers from the impacts of COVID-19, Minister of Economic Development Phil Twyford announced today. This funding from Budget 2020 follows talks with the event sector designed to ...
The Government has taken another step in its commitment to making sure New Zealanders get a fairer deal at the petrol pump with the introduction of legislation to improve competition in the retail fuel market, says Energy and Resources Minister Megan Woods. “The fuel market study that this Government ordered ...
New Zealand has joined a global initiative that aims to enable all countries to access a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters announced today. The COVAX Facility was recently launched by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The Alliance includes the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank ...
From today new legislation takes effect to both restore the right to legal representation at the start of a Care of Children (CoCA) dispute in the Family Court, and allow parties to those proceedings to access legal aid where eligible. During a visit to the Family Court in Auckland today, ...
Home-based early childhood education (ECE) subsidised by the government will transition to a fully qualified workforce by 2025 to ensure better and more consistent quality, Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced today. “Quality early learning helps provide children with a strong foundation for their future,” Chris Hipkins said. From 1 January ...
The new Criminal Cases Review Commission | Te Kāhui Tātari Ture (CCRC) has started work and can now independently investigate claimed miscarriages of justice. “Even though we have appeal rights and safeguards against unsafe convictions, from time to time our justice system does get things wrong. The design of the ...
E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā karangatanga maha, tēnā koutou Ki a koutou Te Āti Awa, Taranaki Whānui, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, ngā mana whenua o te rohe nei, tēnā koutou Ko Te Whare Wānanga o Aotearoa ki ngā take o te Ao (NZIIA), Ko te Rōpū Tohu Tono ...
The Government’s increase to paid parental leave kicks in today with another 4 weeks taking New Zealand up to a full 6 months (26 weeks, up from 22 weeks) leave for new parents, and the maximum weekly payment will increase by $20pw, Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. ...
A new package of infrastructure investments will help kick-start the post-COVID rebuild by creating more than 20,000 jobs and unlocking more than $5 billion of projects up and down New Zealand. Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones today outlined how the $3 billion infrastructure fund in the ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters today expressed the New Zealand Government’s deep disappointment at the passage by China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee of a national security law for Hong Kong. “New Zealand has consistently emphasised its serious concern about the imposition of this legislation on Hong Kong without inclusive ...
More jobs and more family time with newborns are the centrepiece of a suite of Government initiatives coming into effect today. July 1 is a milestone day for the Government as a host of key policies take effect, demonstrating the critical areas where progress has been made. “The Coalition Government ...
A flood of Kiwis returning home from Australia has overwhelmed quarantine capacity. Bernard Hickey reports the Government is looking at bringing in cruise ships to expand supply and a quarantine booking system to further restrict demand. Meanwhile, there is now no space for new guest workers, tourists or students for the foreseeable future. ...
The National Party leader says he has written to the party's board asking them to remove MP Hamish Walker from the party after it was revealed he leaked private health information to media. ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Scandal for MP after leaking confidential Covid data, new bookings for return to country put on hold, and Islamic Women’s Council release evidence of being ignored.We now know exactly how the leak of private information of all active Covid-19 patients happened. National ...
Opinion: While the investigation into the security of patient data may still find the Government wanting, a rookie National MP’s spectacular own goal has put the opposition in the firing line, writes Laura Walters Political gameplay 101: If you're trying to highlight that another political party shouldn't be trusted with ...
A new survey supports fundamental changes to the country's criminal justice system, but a parallel study shows many still believe in a punitive system, Laura Walters reports A new survey suggests strong support amongst Kiwis for fundamental changes in the resourcing and funding of the criminal justice system, as well as a ...
The Covid-19 lockdown has only confirmed how vital New Zealand’s early childhood sector is to the future of this country. Now is the time to bed in a systemic policy infrastructure to support resilient children, write three experts. The Early Learning Action Plan (ELAP), released in December 2019, was barely ...
Picked as a star by one of the great women golfers of all time, Wellington teenager Darae Chung is preparing herself mentally and physically to play overseas again. When 16-year-old Darae Chung travels around the country – and eventually around the globe again – playing golf, she will have the ...
He has been in the job less than a week, but new Health Minister Chris Hipkins is already making his presence felt on some critical Covid-19 issues, Sam Sachdeva writes When it was revealed Chris Hipkins would replace David Clark as Health Minister, some observers wondered whether the role may stretch him ...
Matteo Di Maio takes a look at New Zealand’s most expensive rare books. Anah Dunsheath from Rare Books in Auckland knows how you ought to take an old book off the shelf, and how you ought not to. Novices will just pull the book out by the top of its ...
The incoming government needs to wake up and have a critical look at the child protection monster that is Oranga Tamariki, writes Dr Ian Hyslop There is always risk of a chronic disconnect between the policy and operational arms of public service organisations. This risk is particularly acute in excessively ...
The genetic secrets of New Zealand’s predatory 'lion' have been revealed with the mapping of the stoat genome, and there's hope better, kinder ways of getting rid of the introduced killing machines might be found A stoat’s spleen, liquid nitrogen, supercomputers, and 18 months of international effort has led to the mapping ...
Auckland 'move the port' studies have averaged out to at least two per year over the last decade with almost every one of them throwing out a different option or result. ...
The Covid-19 pandemic made us see the value of a life. Now the Team of Five Million needs to take that lesson and open its eyes to the value of the lives of Maori, Pasifika and People of Colour, writes Karamia Muller. This year, 2020, is asking everyone: What is ...
Power Play - Todd Muller is dreaming if he thinks saying no comment will wash after his MP leaked the private details of Covid-19 patients to the media. ...
The leak, we discovered last night, was the work of a first-term MP and a veteran National Party operator. What does it mean for the pair, and for the party, asks Ben Thomas.The latest whodunit in New Zealand politics was solved last night in a flurry of releases, as National’s ...
The Government wants to accelerate improvements to production and sustainability on the land to almost double export earnings in a decade. But big change will be needed, Tim Murphy reports. ...
Methamphetamine - or P - is now here to stay. But addicts of the destructive drug are so ashamed, they will wait up to 10 years to get help. In 2001, William Bell murdered three people in a meth-fuelled rampage at the Mt Wellington RSA in Auckland. He was ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary-Louise McLaws, Professor of Epidemiology Healthcare Infection and Infectious Diseases Control, UNSW From midnight Wednesday, all of Metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire will return to Stage 3 lockdown for six weeks. There are only four reasons for residents to leave their homes: ...
After the Spinoff recounted Leave.EU heads telling Britain’s Daily Telegraph they had ‘dispatched’ a team to Auckland to work with NZ First, the party leader issued a deeply curious statement.The day began with news that the “bad boys of Brexit” were back and they were coming to New Zealand.The Daily ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Vaz, Senior Lecturer, Department of Banking and Finance, Monash University The reimposition of stage 3 restrictions on metropolitan Melbourne is, as Victorian premier Daniel Andrews says, a matter of life or death. That’s also true for small businesses. A further six ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW After early success in suppressing COVID-19, we are facing a resurgence in Victoria, which is threatening disease control for the whole country. Outbreaks in northwestern ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin, 6 July 2020 Three Citizenships The concept of ‘citizenship’ has both general and specific meanings. Keith Rankin. The most specific and familiar I call passport citizenship. A passport citizen of a country is a person holding a passport for that country, or with unambiguous entitlement to ...
Minister of Health and State Services Chris Hipkins says he is disappointed the leak of Covid-19 patient details involved politicians, but he does not want to prejudice the investigation. ...
New Zealand First MP Shane Jones is rejecting accusations he influenced the outcome of a report saying Ports of Auckland should shift to Northland. ...
Wellington’s newspaper, The Dominion-Post, gave it to its readers straight: “I’m no saviour”—Ardern rejects saintly status”. But would the crowd of 500 attending Labour’s Congress have believed it? They had stamped and cheered when, in opening the event, Peter Samuel Jackson (no, not the film director) had said: “We have ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The Victorian government will lock down all metropolitan Melbourne for six weeks from Wednesday night, as a new wave of the coronavirus takes hold in the city. The lockdown will also cover the Mitchell Shire, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hassan Vally, Associate Professor, La Trobe University As the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, one question that keeps coming up is whether COVID-19 can be transmitted through the air. In fact, 239 scientists in 32 countries have written an ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The Victorian government will lock down all metropolitan Melbourne for six weeks from Wednesday night, as a new wave of the coronavirus takes hold in the city. The lockdown will also cover the Mitchell Shire, ...
Transport Minister and senior Labour MP Phil Twyford has joined forces with his former colleague and now Auckland Mayor Phil Goff against New Zealand First and the party's push to move the port north. ...
The admissions by Walker and veteran spin doctor Michelle Boag follow the government’s announcement yesterday of a sweeping inquiry to find the source of the leak.National MP Hamish Walker has disclosed that he engineered a privacy breach over the weekend when he purposefully released the personal details of Covid-19 patients ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Russo, Associate Professor, Director Cabrini Monash University Department of Nursing Research, Monash University Metropolitan Melbourne and the shire of Mitchell will returned to Stage 3 stay-at-home restrictions as of midnight Wednesday, Premier Daniel Andrews has announced, after 191 new cases were ...
A National MP has outed himself as the source of media reports about a confidential Covid-19 patient data breach National's Clutha-Southland MP Hamish Walker has confessed to sharing the private information of Covid-19 patients with media, after the Government launched a high-powered inquiry to determine the source of the data breach. ...
"I have spoken to National Party Leader Todd Muller and informed him that I passed to members of the media, by email, information containing Covid-19 patient details that was given to me by a source." ...
I have spoken to National Party Leader Todd Muller and informed him that I passed to members of the media, by email, information containing Covid-19 patient details that was given to me by a source. I did this to expose the Government’s shortcomings ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeff Borland, Professor of Economics, University of Melbourne When a recession hits, no group of workers is immune. But some are harder hit than others. The latest labour market figures are giving us a good idea of who is being hardest hit ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Felicity Wilcox, Lecturer in Music and Sound Design, University of Technology Sydney Prolific composer Ennio Morricone has died in Rome at the age of 91. From his origins in Italian radio, Morricone became renowned internationally as a groundbreaking film composer. Composing over ...
One of the "bad boys of Brexit" who believes in political campaigns that are blunt and edgy has been hired to help with NZ First's election campaign, a UK newspaper is reporting. ...
Auckland Ratepayers’ Alliance spokesperson Jo Holmes says: “Auckland Council has released a statement to media boasting that, based on submissions to the Emergency Budget, a majority of Aucklanders support its rates increase. What the Council fails ...
The Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand said it repeatedly warned the government an attack like that on March 15 last year was possible. Today, it released the evidence.Within days of the March 15 mosque attacks, while the names of the dead were still being recorded, Anjum Rahman of the ...
In the 90s, the so-called information superhighway was more of a dirt road. Now it’s a multi-lane motorway. Vodafone NZ’s Sharina Nisha explains the technology that makes it all possible.They used to call it the information superhighway. Back in the heady days of the 1990s, the term was used to ...
Air New Zealand are temporarily suspending new international bookings to New Zealand to ensure that all arrivals can be accommodated in a managed isolation or quarantine facility. But as more countries open their borders to foreigners, including Kiwis, ...
Greenpeace says the newly released Government plan for the Primary Sector is a missed opportunity to build back better. The plan Fit for a Better World - Accelerating our Economic Potential , was released by Jacinda Ardern on Tuesday. It aims to map ...
Organisations representing a cross section of New Zealand industries are alarmed that no decision has been made on the fate of thousands of temporary workers with visas about to expire. ...
After three decades in existence, Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust has launched its own gallery on Auckland’s Karangahape Road.The first thing that hits you entering Tautai Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Moana Legacy, is the range of works on show. On one huge wall is a mural of black humanoid crocodiles on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue McIntyre, Honorary Professor, Australian National University Last week we learned woody vegetation in New South Wales is being cleared at more than double the rate of the previous decade – and agriculture was responsible for more than half the destruction. Farming ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chongyi Feng, Associate Professor in China Studies, University of Technology Sydney Chinese law professor Xu Zhangrun, who completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne, has become the latest high-profile critic of President Xi Jinping to be silenced for his views. It’s ...
If you’ve ever wondered what influencers have to offer to the world, look no further than Simone Anderson’s new recipe book So Delish!, which will revolutionise the way you put things on plates and in freezers.You know what I’m tired of? Professional cooks publishing cookbooks. Boring. If I ever fancy ...
The Electoral Commission has confirmed that the 'Aroha' posters of Jacinda Ardern, promoted by artists Weston Frizzell and advertiser Phantom Billstickers, does indeed constitute a party advertisement for the Labour Party. This judgment comes after ...
The Primary Land Users Group (PLUG) representing a cross-section of forestry, dairy, horticulture and dry-stock land-users has called out the Green Party, asking how they can reconcile their desire for legal cannabis with the negative environmental ...
Latest from the Beehive Readers are increasingly being introduced to Te Reo by a government which eschews prosaic names that simply and functionally reflect an agency’ purpose – such as Ministry of Forestry. Consistent with the discarding of plain English, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has opened a Multi-Disciplinary Family Harm ...
Mau Whenua statement on Nicky Hager Investigative Report - The long, sorry saga of Shelly Bay – Published Saturday 4th of July 2020 Hirini Jenkins-Mepham Chair of the Mau Whenua group opposing Port Nicholson Block Trustees land sales said “Nicky ...
Forest & Bird welcomes a new sustainable vision for the primary sector, but says it needs to be backed up with strong rules, meaningful support, and a change of attitude from industry laggards. The Government has released a report outlining ...
Rather than MPs rushing to regulate vaping in the last few days of this Parliamentary term, the bill’s many complexities should be debated after the General Election, says Nancy Loucas, co-director of Aotearoa Vapers Community Advocacy (AVCA). Parliament ...
The Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand will share parts 1 and 2 of the submission we presented to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch Mosque Attacks. The aim is to ensure New Zealand is fully informed about the efforts IWCNZ took prior ...
Irrigation New Zealand is greatly encouraged by the fact that the Government has today recognised the “transformational opportunity” water storage provides for New Zealand as part of our post-Covid economic recovery. Water storage was acknowledged ...
The Taxpayers’ Union cannot believe that New Zealand First is importing foreign political consultants, presumably because no New Zealanders are suitable, or perhaps willing, for NZ First campaign roles. Union spokesperson Jordan Williams says: “Winston ...
Retailers upset by the Government’s blinkered restrictions on vaping products say they feel shut out and ignored given the outcome of the select committee process. New Zealand Association of Convenience Stores (NZACS) Executive Director, Dave Hooker, ...
The MakeItLegal campaign has today welcomed the website on cannabis legalisation from the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor. “It is essential that people have reliable and factual information to help them decide how to vote in the cannabis ...
Responding to National MP Nicola Willis’s statement that National was wrong to sell so much state housing, New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says: “What a weak capitulation to left-wing ideology.” “Selling a state house ...
The Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand are sharing parts 1 and 2 of the submission we presented to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Christchurch Mosque Attacks. The aim is to ensure New Zealand is fully informed about the efforts IWCNZ took prior ...
An interesting tale of international diplomacy has emerged over NZ’s decision to turn next year’s round of APEC meetings – including the leaders’ summit – into a virtual event. NZ had to fight off a determined bid by the 2020 host, Malaysia, which hoped it could have its hosting rights ...
Members of New Zealand’s Indian community rallied in Auckland on Sunday to raise awareness about threats to their homeland’s democracy from the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism. As the world’s second-most populous nation grapples with a burgeoning pandemic and deepening political and social division, about 25 protesters gathered in Auckland’s Aotea ...
CEAC applauds professor Mike Joy as NZ’s leading environmental ecologists tireless efforts to enlighten ‘successive Governments’ over the pollution of our waterways and promoting best practice paths of cleaning up of our waterways over successive ...
Almost 170 years ago, Māori political processes were interrupted and displaced by a new, enforced electoral system. Researcher Jo Waitoa dispels the myth that voter turnout and political participation are the same thing. Read more of the The Spinoff’s Election 2020 coverage here.Māori political participation has a long and enduring tradition ...
After previously stonewalling inquiries on the matter, Leave.EU ‘bad boy’ Arron Banks has told a UK newspaper he is sending a team to New Zealand to work on Winston Peters’ NZ First campaign. Justin Giovannetti reports. New Zealand First has hired a crew of political operators from one of the most ...
Open mike 06/08/2011 
In 1987, as a British Labour MP, I was elected to the Shadow Cabinet by my colleagues and was asked by the party leader to direct Labour’s campaign in the general election of that year. The election was to take place at the height of Mrs Thatcher’s dominance and we ...16 hours ago
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If the government has not lined up behind a "Yes" vote in this year's cannabis referendum the way some reformers would have liked, one entirely laudable thing it did do was commission some science around the public's choice.That science landed today, in the form of the report from an expert ...17 hours ago
Almost two years ago, the government announced that it might take a look at OIA reform. After an attempt to do it in secret, they finally asked for public submissions, then summarised them for the Minister, who... sat on them for nine months. But today, after an almost two year ...19 hours ago
Associate Professor Sara Walton At the heart of the discussion on opening up our borders is the dichotomy of health and the economy – both of which are actually intertwined, like many things with our economy, as this epidemic has shown. If we think about our country as a system, ...22 hours ago
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Josh Gabbatiss This year will see the largest ever drop globally in both investment and consumer spending on energy as the coronavirus pandemic hits every major sector, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The crisis is accelerating the shutdown of older fossil-fuelled ...1 day ago
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Today’s content Labour Party Thomas Manch (Stuff): It might be ‘team’ Labour, but there’s little doubt about who’s the skipper, and ‘saviour’ Audrey Young (Herald): No ordinary Labour speech by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (paywalled) Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): Ardern asks NZ to move her towards a second term Richard Harman (Politik): Labour’s red glow Justin ...2 days ago
Is the consequence of the Simpson Report proposals for restructuring the health system poorer accountability to people? When in doubt, centralise‘ has been a persistent theme in New Zealand public policy throughout our history. The current government is no exception. Here are some examples. - The regional polytechs have been ...5 days ago
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Unfortunately, due to a medical emergency, I have landed in hospital so am not able to do a current update on the NZ blog statistics. Let’s hope I can get back to this in good time. ...6 days ago
When the Christchurch murderer pleaded guilty to 51 counts of murder and a number of other violent assault charges a few months ago, he effectively closed the door on what the public will know about the lead up to and commission of the event. His plea means that no evidence ...1 week ago
Daphna Whitmore The Philippines is enduring one of the longest lockdowns in the world. For President Duterte the lockdown provides an opportunity to garner more powers and to push through a brazen assault on human rights. A new law called the Anti-Terror Bill has been passed under urgency and it ...1 week ago
There really is not much about Paula Bennett concerning her career trajectory, the policies she promoted, and most importantly, the socio-economic effect this had upon New Zealand (and particularly the most vulnerable in this, our oft-cited “egalitarian” society of this country) that can be said now that hasn’t already been ...1 week ago
Helloy… My name is Todd Muller and I am the leader of the National Party of New Zealand. Many people come up to me on the street and ask me who I am. I’m often walking through Tauranga, or in a mall in suburban Auckland, or maybe even a farmers’ ...1 week ago
. . Plague town? There are two things right now in Aotearoa New Zealand that are guaranteed to piss people off. Firstly, it’s National playing silly-bugger politics with the covid-19 pandemic. This cost Simon Bridges his job as National’s Leader. Lately, Michael Woodhouse has been playing fast and loose with ...1 week ago
Tertiary fees in New Zealand versus Australia: Fees Are Important, but not as Important as Financing In Australia, the Education Minister Dan Tehan has proposed an overhaul of the existing higher education funding system to offer 39,000 additional study places by 2023 and 100,000 by 2030. The proposal has been ...1 week ago
We have been assailed by Fox News-style headlines, lurid stories of “a breach!”. An almost nuclear level disaster on the horizon scream, “Fiasco!” here, “Hero to Zero!” there… Oh quick, panic everyone! This has fueled an unbelievably stupid environment of panic among some, and spurred useless, counterproductive political ...2 weeks ago
Mark Patterson MP, Spokesperson for Primary Industry New Zealand First is supporting calls by hunters and the New Zealand Tahr Foundation (NZTF) to halt a large scale cull of Himalayan Tahr by the Department of Conservation in National Parks. The calls are supported by a 40,000 strong petition and the ...15 hours ago
New Zealanders deserve healthy rivers and lakes that are safe to swim in - but they have been getting worse for decades. That's why, with our latest announcement, we're investing in projects that will help clean up our rivers and lakes and restore them to health, within a generation. ...3 days ago
The Green Party has opposed the COVID-19 Recovery Fast-track Consenting Bill which shortcuts normal consenting processes under the Resource Management Act (RMA), reduces public participation and narrows environmental considerations. ...5 days ago
The Government is making immediate short-term changes to visa settings to support temporary migrants already onshore in New Zealand and their employers, while also ensuring New Zealanders needing work are prioritised, Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. We are: Extending temporary work visas due to expire by the end of 2020 ...13 hours ago
A flood of Kiwis returning home from Australia has overwhelmed quarantine capacity. Bernard Hickey reports the Government is looking at bringing in cruise ships to expand supply and a quarantine booking system to further restrict demand. Meanwhile, there is now no space for new guest workers, tourists or students for the foreseeable future. ...8 mins ago
The National Party leader says he has written to the party's board asking them to remove MP Hamish Walker from the party after it was revealed he leaked private health information to media. ...15 mins ago
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Scandal for MP after leaking confidential Covid data, new bookings for return to country put on hold, and Islamic Women’s Council release evidence of being ignored.We now know exactly how the leak of private information of all active Covid-19 patients happened. National ...38 mins ago
Opinion: While the investigation into the security of patient data may still find the Government wanting, a rookie National MP’s spectacular own goal has put the opposition in the firing line, writes Laura Walters Political gameplay 101: If you're trying to highlight that another political party shouldn't be trusted with ...1 hour ago
A new survey supports fundamental changes to the country's criminal justice system, but a parallel study shows many still believe in a punitive system, Laura Walters reports A new survey suggests strong support amongst Kiwis for fundamental changes in the resourcing and funding of the criminal justice system, as well as a ...1 hour ago
The Covid-19 lockdown has only confirmed how vital New Zealand’s early childhood sector is to the future of this country. Now is the time to bed in a systemic policy infrastructure to support resilient children, write three experts. The Early Learning Action Plan (ELAP), released in December 2019, was barely ...2 hours ago
Picked as a star by one of the great women golfers of all time, Wellington teenager Darae Chung is preparing herself mentally and physically to play overseas again. When 16-year-old Darae Chung travels around the country – and eventually around the globe again – playing golf, she will have the ...2 hours ago
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Not good enough the ‘incentives’ to work, high inflation and no net tax cuts have had a predictable outcome, it seems.
Personally I think it should be a scandal that someone in paid work should still have to go to WINZ for anything.
This article highlights the real costs that a crippling New Zealanders — rent and power bills. No point in having GST off fruit and veges or price controlled milks if you cannot afford the power to cook them with.
The sell down of our power companies, plus the changes to state housing, will only make things worse.
I wept when I read this. No surprise that we should come to this after 42years of neo liberal ideology (counting the years I spent under Thatcher when it was simply known as Thatcherism.) It was evil and cruel then, and changed a hard -fought -for better nation for the worse, and it is still doing its evil work in New Zealand in 2011.
Unfortunately it is aided in these times by John Key giving greed and avarice an acceptable ‘smiley’ face and a ‘positive’ spin.
How his followers love him as he spins his lies making it hunky dory and ‘respectable’ to be as selfish, thoughtless,ruthless and greedy as him. He makes them as fit for hell as himself and his party. Good job Key doesn’t believe in an afterlife , or maybe it isn’t, he might behave better towards his country and fellow citizen if he believed something nasty awaited him for his (and nacts) appalling actions and deceptions.
Apologies for the apparent emotion, but this story was too much, and I know there are hundreds more out there. Oh dear.
NO apology needed. I felt exactly the same when I read this. It was made worse by the reporter’s sly suggestion that some of the blame for this should have been placed on this poor woman “they began using tealight candles despite knowing it was dangerous”. In situations such as this sometimes risks have to be taken – through no fault of their own. No wonder many people just give up – worn out and beaten down by circumstance and callousness.
I wonder how many people know that WINZ have to see you for a food grant on the day you turn up. Sure, you might have to wait a bit, but they can’t send you away with an appointment time (though they will try to).
So, best to pay a portion of the necessary bill and apply for a food grant instead.
Meanwhile. I’m guessing she wouldn’t have had house and content insurance. And it won’t be the first time a landlord has ‘whacked’ a tennant for the replacement value of a house following a fire.
I didn’t know that! It’s useful information.. Meanwhile, that poor woman! How terrible for her… 🙁
“No wonder many people just give up – worn out and beaten down by circumstance and callousness.”
Exactly Rosy. I so admire this woman that she is still trying, but I can only imagine her exhaustion. How dare others on this planet ignore such suffering, including the thoughtless reporter and the insensitive and ghoulish WINZ.
Reading the article it sounds as if her last month’s power bill was $730 and the current one was $900. That is such a hefty sum to find.
Waikato can be cold and damp but perhaps there needs to be workshops for beneficiaries about using power affordably. It is so easy to turn on the heater, have long hot showers, but those two things mount up to a huge bill if not controlled. I wonder if they have a heat pump. Those things should have a meter box in them so they either stop or you turn down the thermostat to avoid being billed for unnecessary heating if they are going all the time.
How can she do all these things and remain sane? She should be able to draw a benefit for her maternal and family care while she studies for her qualifications.
Having a power bill that high is usually down to having a faulty hot water cylinder.
“perhaps there needs to be workshops for beneficiaries”
Except that she works two jobs and is in training, as well as caring for family. Where would she find the time? Perhaps her children should attend?
I agree with Millsy – this is a scandal. People shouldn’t have to make such choices in a rich country – and NZ is a rich country. Added to that she is in group that will be damned by others whatever she does (take your pick – Maori, solo mother, or the area she lives). I can’t imagine how hard it is for her to keep going.
Unfortunately Their reception at WINZ is the usual now a days, their staff have been gutted to bugger all they are over worked, underpaid, stressed to the max, and then they have US the beneficiary already stressed out due to circumstances beyond our control and this is the out come, or as I saw one day in a winz office a particularly rude and unhelpful staff member was ‘punched out’ . And I noticed here in Levin that one or two of the more ‘unhelpful’ staff members has disappeared and upon querying as to whether or not he’s been given the boot found out that he has been sent to CHCH. Now if all winz offices have done the same and sent the ‘worst’ of their staff to sort out CHCH I really do pity them. Puddin Bennett and co have got a lot to answer for.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10742995
Such an effective article against fracking, I had to check I really was reading the Herald.
Interesting that she challenges the astroturfers, and asks that commenters front-up with their real identities.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10743290
AN interesting timeline between request from Cameron Slater and the SIS meeting with Goff. The day after the supposed meeting with Goff and Slater is requesting the exact documents.
Suspicions of a setup anyone?
No set-up just a huge goof by Mr Goff.
An excellent article in todays Herald .Well worth reading. Sorry, don’t know how to direct link.
It shouldn’t be just the rich getting rich getting richer
By Brian Gaynor
5:30 AM Saturday Aug 6, 2011
He summarises with
‘A large number of government policies, including capital gains taxes, death duties, income tax, superannuation policies and government income transfers, play big roles as far as wealth and income inequality are concerned.’
If the National Business Review’s Rich List figures are accurate then there has been a dramatic concentration of wealth at the top end since the 1980s.
The increase in income inequality has been checked in recent years only through the introduction of Working for Families and lower investment returns for the wealthy.
There seem to be inconsistencies regarding the latter point as the National Business Review reports that its Rich List group is doing very well, yet the ministry argues that income inequality is contracting because the wealthy are experiencing low investment returns.
The most appropriate way to solve the wealth and income inequality problem is to find ways to raise the wealth and income of all New Zealanders.
This should be one of the main issues for debate in the upcoming general election campaign’.
Actually this is it
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10743233
I’ve learnt something new!
“The increase in income inequality has been checked in recent years only through the introduction of Working for Families and lower investment returns for the wealthy.” And now the screams of the ‘wealthy’ saying that WFF should be stopped. And all regulation to them getting richer, should be removed. And if this bunch of thieves get back into power just watch them do just what the rich want.
How about that capitalism eh! Is it working for you?
Reading Armstrong in granny you’d think the sky had fallen simply because labour was doing it’s job opposing rabid roy’s bill…….blatant one eyed reporting. This guys meant to be an experienced political reporter, what a fn joke.
I think Armstrong makes fair comments that are fairly plain outside devout the Labour circle. Labour have blocked all private members bills this year, that’s a terrible way to abuse democracy, in this case the only (outside) chance non government MPs have of getting anything through parliament.
And not only Labour.
Selfish, desperate and petty party politics shits on our democracy.
Reading Armstrong’s column one would wonder if he has ever seen Parliament before, let alone being one of the Herald’s senior political journalists who has made a career out of watching it.
It is a petty, stupid farce on the best of days. And that applies to all parties, usually excepting the Greens and the Maori Party.
John does a nice line in outraged on this one, getting his knickers in a real knot over something that is no more and no less abuse of Parliament than National’s overuse of urgency or Gerry Brownlee’s flat refusal to even stand up and answer a question during Question Time.
Perhaps John just found himself with nothing to write about this week, given that Audrey Young was writing the piece about Goff and the SIS.
oh Pete SS George, you really do try and spin. But what about the bloody NACTS abusing the parliamentary process through the use of urgency, to ram their bullshit policies through without debate??? Oh or is that ok?
When John Armstrong starts describing Labour’s antics as pitiful, pathetic, embarrassing and disgraceful, deemeaning itself and the institution of parliament, you know the sky really is falling.
What a sea-change for a once respectable political party!
No mention of the NACTs constant abuse of process and urgency to stuff NZ as far as possible, in case they lose the election and cannot get their, so called, mandate for burglery.
Seem to remember Nat’s fillibusters on occasions.
If Labour are doing their job they should not allow any more NACT policy to get through until after the election.
Mind you, if politicians were really representing us, they would be legislating for democracy.
The problem that Armstrong misses is that this is a private member’s bill in name only. It is in fact a government bill. They have just allowed a minor partner to run it so that they won’t lose any popularity of it. If it was a private members bill it would be a conscience vote and not a whipped vote.
Armstrong’s reporting is the disgrace here.
@KJT,
you avoid the whole thrust of Armstrong’s article – it’s not about the filibustering process. It’s about the shameful behaviour of Labour’s MPs after they got caught out.
Eric Roy’s authority as the Chairman of the Committee of the House was constantly being questioned and challenged.
Labour made repeated demands that Speaker Lockwood Smith be recalled to the chamber to rule on decisions made by Roy.
For the best part of an hour, Labour MPs raised timewasting points of order and forced a series of pointless votes to try to stop debate.
Trevor Mallard was ordered to leave the chamber but did not…
As Armstrong said: A clear line can be drawn between trying to delay a measure’s progress through Parliament by filibuster and trying to find and exploit gaps, loopholes and apparent anomalies in Parliament’s rules to subvert the will of the majority. Labour crossed that line.
Labour is, finally, doing their job. Trying to stop a bill that overrides the democratic decision of the students involved. People Labour represent.
National is not doing their job, which is to work in the best interests of the people they represent.
All, the nit picking and crap ignores the real story.
We are being betrayed by NACT. Who are heading us in the same direction as the USA.
John Roughan in Herald
Would Key Expose Israeli spies?
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10743239
Worth a read.
Last Para
I’d like to visit Arab countries one day. I’d like to trust this Government to protect the integrity of my passport. But I don’t.
Yes, a thoughtful and worthy analysis of the situation.
On the open mike post of the 3th of August I started a thread about the new video of the Architects and Engineers for 911 truth.
Two questions were posted and I promised to respond so here it is:
If they wanted to attack Iraq then why didn’t they do so instead of planning this highly risky (in case of being found out) attack?
The issue of course is much more complex then that. First of all they did not want to attack just Iraq but to have an enemy they could call upon whenever the reached the next stage of gaining dominance in another one of the most oil rich areas on the planet the Caspian basin and the south Mediterranean countries. One book that is very enlightening is the “Grand Chess board” written by Zbignew Brezinski and I greatly advise those of you interested and inclined to read rather than watch to go out get the book and read it.
For those of you who like to watch videos here is the link to a presentation of Michael Ruppert.
Michael Ruppert is an ex Los Angeles cop who broke the CIA drug dealing scandal and who presents the case for 911 and what motivated the perpetrators to plan and execute 911. THis presentation is a couple of years old and at the time Michael still adhered to the LIHOP (Let it happen on purpose) scenario but he has since deserted that for the MIHOP (Make it happen on purpose) scenario.
The presentation is a whopping 2.5 hours but he is a very entertaining intelligent raconteur and the connections he makes with the finance world, their drug dealing and robber baron empire building methods are very well supported with evidence and very compelling as presents the evidence as he would do to a prosecutor to make his case in a crime.
It pays to remember that John Key at the years leading up to 911 was at the peak of his game and that Merrill Lynch was too. They were involved in most of the financial scandals he mentions in the years leading up to 911 and while that does not mean that John Key was necessarily involved in these scandals he did earn his name of the “Smiling Assassin” when he fired many of his colleagues in the aftermath of the collapse of one of the biggest hedge funds LTCM in which Merrill Lynch lost billions of dollars. So to think that John Key was an innocent dolphin swimming with sharks is naive to say the least.
The other issue was the free fall speed of WTC 7 and I found two videos back of two scientists David Chandler and prof. Jones who confronted NIST in the peer to peer review stage of the WTC 7 investigation which took 7 years to complete and they forced NIST to admit that during 2.5 sec (or thereabouts) the building did indeed come down in freefall speed which begs the question. How did the material of at least 8 floors disappear into nothing to allow for the building to come down in freefall speed.
There is only one answer to that question. Explosives were used to bring it down!!
Do you really think the US government and intelligence services have the competence and ability to organise such a complex conspiracy. And keep it secret.
The engineering behind what happened and how the twin towers collapsed is easily understood.
It was due to a plane hitting them.
We were talking about WTC 7, the third building that collapsed on that day but for your information steel framed buildings do not collapse due to a carbon fire. Not even with planes hitting them.
Conspiracy theorists like to say “no other steel framed building has ever fallen down from a fire, some of which have raged for much longer than the twin towers did”.
How many other steel framed buildings, of that height, have had two planes flown into them deliberately?
Rare earth man,
Only two but the third building is what we are talking about. And about the theorist part: Buildings do not collapse breaking all three laws of motion. Impossible. So what we want is a new investigation. Has nothing to do with theory.
Engineers cannot be 100% certain exactly what was going on inside the building at the time.
To more easily express it in terms of alternate universes, maybe there was only a 1 in 1,000,000 combination of factors that lead to the building collapsing in the way it did. We happen to be in that universe. In all of the other universes where it didn’t collapse, or collapsed in a different fashion, there is no conspiracy theory. But we happen to live in this one.
Just because something is very very unlikely to happen, when it does happen that doesn’t mean there must have been some other factor that caused it.
LOL,
That is idiotic L. even by your standards. You are willing to accept a 1,000,000 factors just so long as they are different from the one obvious one: 19 Arabs had no access to WTC 7 and the only building to collapse in a controlled demolition fashion did so because a 1,000,000 factors other the OCT “conspired” to do so!!!
Here are 1500 Engineers and Architects who have an issue with that!
Oh, and by the way Fukushima is still killing and we are still importing foodstuffs from Japan!!! I hope like hell it isn’t beef.
Once again, you’re simply saying that the collapse of the building was so unlikely for the given reasons, that it must have been something else that caused it.
Unlikely things happen all the time, like people winning lotto (or no one winning lotto for 16 weeks in a row so the jackpot gets to 30m), or hurricanes being set on a bullseye path towards New Orleans.
About 1 guy winning 35 or more lotteries in one minute at the same time happened on that day. L, you fuckwit.
I’m going to have a Siesta so count me out for the rest of the afternoon. Jeez.
I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.
As I understand the NIST explanation the support for the building was compromised in the bottom half of the building. That is, there was no support holding the building up.
It is natural that it would free fall while there is nothing holding it up.
It falls in three phases. A slower initial phase as the support disappears, a free fall phase as that which is not supported falls, and a final slow phase as that which is falling starts to meet resistance from all the rubble.
On the motivations, you still haven’t adressed my point. If they were after a casus belli, then the AQ attacks provided it, and indeed, they went on to use the attacks in a clumsy fashion. Getting involved themselves in the way truthers allege would only add little at great risk.
The question is not ‘did neocons or whomever want an event that they could use to justify things they wanted to do’. The question is ‘why would they need to rig 3 buildings to blow up when AQ had already hijacked commercial airliners and flown them into buildings.’
As I said before, why launch the most risky and audacious false flag op in history, when a genuine flag is being waved in the form of the most audacious terror attack in history?
I’m not seeing what extra value was gained for the enormous risk to have been worth it. And I’m not seeing the ground work laid.
By that I mean that the propaganda efforts, both before and after the attack were clumsy. After the attack the propaganda worked long enough to get the job done, but if they were really in on it, it wouldn’t have been so clumsy. They would have already laid the groundwork so that people automatically thought ‘saddam’ when people heard ‘AQ’. As it turned out they had to go and try and create those links and work them into their previous narrative based on WMDs. They pulled it off, but it wasn’t as smooth as one would expect of people that had known what was going to happen.
PB,
I can see from the time it took you you basically responded based on your believes and you are entitled to them.
I just spend 2.5 hours watching the doco again and I suggest you do the same. Added to that I spend another hour watching both Chandler and Jones in their response to the NIST report and what they think about the “phase” hypothesis.
You on the other hand think that buildings of 47 floors collapsing into a pile of dust as the result of office fires within 5.7 seconds is reasonable which begs the question; do you still dare to go into steel framed high rises now that you know that simple office fires can bring them down into a pile of dust within 5.7 seconds?
So for now let’s agree to disagree and if and only if you are prepared like me to seriously study links I give you like I study yours I think I’m going to stop responding to you because it seems like a huge waste of time to me
It wasn’t a ‘simple office fire’. 25% of the structure over several floors had been scooped out by debris from WTC1. The fire burned, uncontrolled, for several hours.
As did the fire in this Madrid, Much hotter and much longer but no collapse of the steel frame. The WTC 7 walls did not even disappear and the damage to adjacent buildings was much more extensive but they did not collapse into a pile of dust in 5.7 seconds
Yes yes, Madrid is always dragged out.
What truthers don’t mention is that the Madrid building, or at least the section of it that didn’t collapse, was steel reinforced concrete. So not the same at all.
The top section, which didn’t have the concrete, did collapse.
plenty of related detail here:
http://www.debunking911.com/firsttime.htm
All three fucking buildings were twice reinforced with fucking steel. The twin towers both on the inside and the outside and WTC throughout the whole fucking building. You fuckwit.
Is fucking steel fucking concrete fucking fuckity fuckishy fuck fuck fuck?
You compare steel buildings to steel reinforced concrete buildings, and suggest they should act the same. Not my problem.
Please come up with any other instance of a steel framed building collapse due to fire.
We have been using steel framed buildings for more than half a century, and they have suffered many fires.
You should be able to point to some other building collapses due to fire, right?
travellerev is correct IMO. There is nothing to suggest that a steel framed building is more likely to collapse due to fire vs a building based on steel reinforced concrete. Or vice versa.
Its as irrelevant as saying that one had a sign hanging outside and the other didn’t, and that makes all the difference.
The McCormick Center in Chicago.
Sight and Sound Theater in Pennsylvania.
Steel framed buildings, caught fire, collapsed.
The Madrid building was steel framed. The bottom half was steel reinforced concrete. Top half collapsed, bottom half didn’t.
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/mccormick.html
Please be aware the McCormick building collapse was a roof collapse. You can also see in photos on the net that large parts of the roof structure framework collapsed but remained intact.
That is, the steel structures were not disintegrated by the fire
Re: the Madrid fire, I can see references to parts of the building having come down, but that most of the structure stayed upright (not just the bottom half) and had to be deliberately demolished at the cost of millions of euros.
But it remains, fires being hot enough to make the steel unable to bear the weight. That point is demonstrated.
Add to the fact that a skyscraper is one hell of a lot heavier than a roof…
Got seven in 10 seconds on Jstor..
Engineering. Steel framed buildings fire resistance.
Of course a reinforced concrete building is less likely to collapse due to fire than a steel frame. Concrete does not weaken in the same heat range and insulates the steel reinforcing from heat.
http://www.imoa.info/moly_uses/moly_grade_stainless_steels/architecture/fire_resistance.php
“Under continuous loading, carbon steel is usually limited to a maximum temperature of 700F (370C). (3, 4) By the time steel reaches 930F (500C), it has lost about 30% of its tensile strength. Unprotected weathering steel loses about half of its tensile strength above 1000F (539C)”.
Average temperature in a house fire, WITHOUT JET FUEL ACCELERANT, 593 C (1100 degrees F) for 27 minutes. (Victoria University Engineering Dept. Fire resistance studies).
Saying that planes could not have bought the world trade centre down is nonsense.
Engineers who studied the construction afterwards concluded that, even though a plane crashing into the building was one of the design criteria, the buildings, as built, would not have been able to withstand a crash at the actual speed and size that occurred.
Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story though.
I also read a thing from about 2004 or so, linked from here, I think it was a popular mechanics website.
The article said that in W7 there was a fuel pump leading to the basement high up into the upper stories and that this likely continued to pump fuel into the fire for 5-6 hours after the debris first struck it.
I have no idea if that’s the case or not, but if it is, then it really wasn’t a “simple office fire”.
NIST itself stated the fuel had no impact on the collapse and popular mechanics is the most shamed and debunked magazine for 911.
“popular mechanics is the most shamed and debunked magazine for 911.”
You mean the magazine that conspiracy theorists heap the most derision on.
That could be because it was Benjamin Chertoff nephew of the Chertoff of NSA and x-ray airport machine infamy wrote the bloody articles. And he wrote a bunch of unsupported crap easily debunked.
liquid fuels cannot burn hot enough in air to destroy steel structured frameworks.
Sure, a puddle of fuel in an open space may not get hot enough.
But in an enclosed space it’s possible the heat could have been amplified. Probably still not enough to melt steel, but I can imagine it could weaken it more than would be expected from flame in a pure pool.
I’m not claiming to be an expert or know more than the experts, but no one knows for 100% sure exactly what conditions inside the building were like during the whole drama.
Enclosed spaces have extraordinarily limited air supply – fires would have largely gone out. In the footage of the building you can see that the fires suffer from a lack of oxygen – they are not ‘bright’ or ‘raging’ or ‘inferno’-like. They are taking their sweet time, struggling along for air for a lot of it.
Blast furnaces are enclosed spaces that have air fed in at the bottom.
The heat in a blast furnace is much hotter than you can get from just a pile of burning material, and yet it still gets enough air to continue burning. In fact the act of combustion in a blast furnace helps to draw more air into the chamber.
yes, blast furnaces are often pressure fed with pure oxygen to smelt iron etc.
That does not happen in a skyscraper fire. Fire proof doors and walls prevent just that effect.
Try burning a newspaper inside a closed oven and see how well it goes.
Bringing up blast furnaces is simply to illustrate that the physical environment in which a fire is burning can greatly increase heat while not depriving it of oxygen.
Clearly an office building is not akin to a modern industrial blast furnace that uses pure oxygen force-fed into the fire. But the concept of a blast furnace has existed for several thousand years.
But Lanth, those kinds of environments typically have to be designed to feed oxygen to a fire.
Buildings are deliberately designed to do just the opposite: to impede feeding a fire.
If a physical structure resembling a blast furnace exists, it doesn’t matter whether it was deliberately constructed by a man, or created by pure random chance of structural debris falling down in the right configuration.
Note I’m not suggesting it was a blast furnace, I’m just giving you an example of a physical structure that results in hotter than normal temperatures while also not exhausting it’s oxygen supply.
“Buildings are deliberately designed to do just the opposite: to impede feeding a fire.”
Buildings are also designed not to have huge chunks missing out of them due to planes crashing into them, too.
The Twin Towers were built and designed to withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707.
(But not WTC 7 of course).
meh. When I think of a fire in a skyscraper, I can’t but notice liftshafts and emergency stairwells. Assuming all the doors are shut, cool, but if they were breached by debris or opened by people evacuating, there’s a pretty strong air feed.
Shoot – when I worked venue security and there were 2k people in an unventilated auditorium, we’d open the lower and upper level doors to cool the place down and the windspeed got very noticable.
Yes they can and have.
Deepwater horizon for one!
Steel loses stiffness at well below melting point anyway.
Which is why wooden framed buildings can often hold up longer in a fire, than a similar steel structure.
True 🙂
So where are the cases of steel framed skyscraper collapses? 😈
Don’t forget with Deepwater that you had the small effect of massive oceanic tidal forces pushing the thing over, along with several large explosions, explosives onsite, and not just a simple fire 🙂
KJT,
ROFL
In that case, large areas of the top half of the building should have stayed largely structurally intact in big recognisable ‘blocks’ and floors as we saw with the CTV building collapse.
It didn’t. The building was pulverised into fine dust and small debris. How did that happen to the top half of the building from a structural failure in the bottom half of the building?
Potential whys, off the top of my head in 20s: higher death toll, more psychological impact, deeper and longer lasting political reverberations, additional leverage with international allies, destruction of event evidence, destruction of other materials on sites, replacement insurance pay out,…
Looks like aklanders might have themselves a waterfront.
http://eyeonauckland.com/2011/08/karanga-plaza/
Looks nice.
Wow. Having grown up in Auckland I’m quite shocked to see something good happen there.
Iceland Revolution Project – Interview with Birgitta Jónsdóttir
I’ve decided that labour have been defeated using a rope a dope tactic,
The Govt have let them flail away fillibusting all year to prevent the vsm in the knowledge that that they could use procedure to allow the vsm to pass before the end of the cycle, (which is what we saw the other day)
All this has prevented more important and perhaps popular labour members bills from been drawn from the ballott which I suspect was the end game,
I’d have to say labour have been out manouvered on this one, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
It’s hard to know if National and Act deliberately played this out or eventually got fed up and decided to deal with it.
In any case it certainly looks like Labour out maneuvered themselves and also out maneuvered sensible democratic process.
iPredict can perhaps lend a little insight here.
When the contract for VSM passing before the election was first launched, it was up around 60%. It stayed around 40% for quite a long time, all while Labour was successfully filibustering it.
On Wednesday morning the stock spiked up from 20% to 40%, before eventually spiking around 95% prior to 2pm when parliament actually sat.
Clearly there was insider trading on this past Wednesday. Those same insiders may have been pumping the stock back as early as when it was first launched.
I guess the iPredict admin could probably investigate this – if the accounts involved in the recent insider trading were also the accounts that held up the price when the contract first announced, it would point towards this being the plan all along. Of course you can also just say that when they first bought up the stocks there were just hopeful of the outcome or expecting the filibuster to fail and didn’t specifically know that it would be broken in the way that it was.
iPredict is not a fair and transparent market. Sorta like the NYSE.
Isn’t it just amusing when the supposed party of free speech whines about someone exercising it?
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/head-student-body-urged-resign-after-abuse-4340774
He should’ve told him to “get raped”, they’re ok with that.
ACT, failing at classical liberalism since 1994.
“Whining” is also a part of free speech.
Being President of an association carries responsibilities. Acting (and posting) in a manner that reflects badly on the organisation can have consequences.
Except of course the little fact that ACT pretty much treated Alistair Thompson’s comments entirely differently, despite his position /smug
And you’ve entirely missed the point too, but that’s completely unsurprising given your extensive prior history of moronic posts.
Well, if you’re right, Pete, then there’ll be an election in a couple of months anyway.
w00t:
http://tvnz.co.nz/technology-news/nasa-finds-fresh-proof-water-mars-4340213
Not that I think such environments would be conducive to anything but extremophiles, on top of the little problem of “energy sources” required to keep cellular metabolism kicking over. This does however make terraforming possibly more viable 😛
The Solar Wind at Mars
To successfully terraform Mars you’d need to get a magnetosphere there and that’s looking problematical at best. My own guess is that you’d need to get Mars’ mass up to Earth standard or better.
Or you’d just keep replenishing the atmosphere with dirty snowballs as the rate of loss is so slow that it takes geological time frames to strip the atmosphere. Though the real problem is actually the lack of plate tectonics which in geological time frames stuffs up the carbon cycle slightly 😛
Along with genetically tweaking everything to put up with slightly higher background levels of radiation.
Of course the more current problems make it all a bit of a pipe dream at present…
I’m pretty sure this is what cell phones are for.
Dude, the wavelengths for cellphone radio only interact very, very, very weakly with biological tissue. The sort I’m taking about is standard cosmic background xray and gamma (and beta) radiation kicked out from the sun’s nuclear fusion processes + extrasolar sources that the earth’s magnetosphere shields us partly from. Combined with a nice thick atmosphere of course.
With a bit of tweaking to up-regulate DNA repair or splicing in relevant enzymes from radiation tolerant organisms, it would lead to plants (or rather algae) capable of surviving on Mars after initial terraforming steps, such as thickening the atmosphere.
There have been some really good doco’s on sky, one I watched was about storms on earth and other planets A force 5 huricane is just a gentle breeze on Jupiter where they have a storm thats been raging for hundreds of years. Or the nice Methane rain on a moon or two
Nats did not have a mandate to raise GST, or change kiwisaver, predicated on raising savings!
What! People with savings had value wiped out by GST rise and changes to kiwisaver make it less advantageous!
yet the mainstream media love lying to us, or letting National talking heads lie to our face.
Request Ignored by SIS
There’s been a lot written about the possibility that Israeli spies gained false New Zealand passports and whether Phil Goff was briefed on the situation by the head of the SIS, Warren Tucker…
There are only two dots to join here – the cetacean and Joky Hen.
According to TVNZ news Goff’s explanation appears to be correct.
http://tvnz.co.nz/politics-news/sis-boss-admits-no-record-goff-receiving-spy-briefing-4340822
Of course, all the RWNJ’s who have opined on The Standard over the last couple of days have suddenly gone silent.
@jackal 2.25pm
I agree with everything in your link,”Request Ignored by SIS” including the word ‘besmirch’ which I was using earlier in relation to this unsavoury situation. ‘Besmirching Phil Goff’ is just what the Nats under john key are trying to do via that misguided being Cameron Slater.
They used this tactic to bring down Winston Peters in 2008 and through him tried to get to Helen Clark. john key was aided and abetted in this by rodney hide and the msm,not to mention simon power later.
I know this because I recorded every TV news report/interview/newspaper clipping/utterance/ etc. that I could for 18 months so that I had proof of the manipulation that I could see unfolding before me.(I knew nothing of Winston P. at the time just noticed Guyon Espiner and Barry Soper doing an untruthful hit job when Peters was speaking with John McCain and followed it from there.)
Here we go again , I thought, as I watched this SIS story unfold and then read Andrea Vance, subtly tilting the story towards besmirching Goff and whitewashing her beloved key on Stuff today
However I have to say that key has not got hide (the arch besmircher) with him this time so I think he has had to use slater which might not be so successful. (Act are really good at defaming others in order to get into power. In fact in order to get into power I think they will stop at very little- quite ruthless.No wonder the trickle down effect from such people creates such a horrible horrible world to live in.)
I really hope the truth comes out and that key,his party and all who sail in her are shown up for who and what they really are- selfish, manipulating, power hungry, robbers of reputation and integrity (having none themselves) and worthless robber barrenz (cretainly not a government of any merit) of New Zealand.
PS also agree with logie97-“there are only two dots to join here …..”
I completely agree with your summation there seeker. It’s exactly the same tactics, which must have a compliant media that does not dig any deeper than a scratch on the surface. I’m optomistic this time re Phil Goff that there’s a stronger alternative media presence, the public is becoming more aware of such propaganda and that the perpetrators have overreached themselves. It would be good to see some documentation re the Peter’s besmirch, there’s at least a documentary to be made there. The part Owen Glenn played needs special attention.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/siege-of-gaza-has-become-a-moral-blockade-of-israel-1.371516
“Imagine Living Without Any Protection”
Siege of Gaza has become a moral blockade of Israel
by YITZHAK LAOR Haaretz, July 5, 2011
Israel is indeed connected to the centers of power in the world. The predictions of a tsunami at present seem to be exaggerated, but nevertheless, before the victory ball, it is worth remembering – the Israeli occupation is the longest military occupation of modern times. The subjects of the occupation in its two forms – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – live under a brutal regime that few other occupations allowed themselves, without any law – the blockade and the morbidity rate among children, the roadblocks and the arbitrariness of the soldiers, breaking in to people’s homes (imagine your children being awakened at night by the shouting of armed men, breaking down doors and blinding them with flashlights; imagine living without any protection ), the prolonged occupation, a disaster for us and for the Palestinians – because Israel enjoys the support of the West.
The settlements have turned the occupation into something insolvable, at least in the next few decades, so that the occupation will not merely raise another generation of Israeli troopers, egged on by the rabbis of the rabble, but also a third and fourth generation of Palestinians without another kind of life.
The fact that the Gaza Strip has become an international symbol of cruelty is yet further proof of the stupidity of our leaders. Operation Cast Lead and the blockade of Gaza – both of them with broad national consensus – have turned Gaza into a symbol that no longer needs coordination on the part of the Palestinians. Israeli democracy appears as it actually is: In the name of the majority (six million Jews ) it is permitted to do to the minority (five million, in Israel and the territories ) almost anything.
The national minority in Israel has the right to vote but it does not have television of its own ; it has health insurance but also heavy unemployment and infant mortality rates that are much higher than among the Jews (8.3 compared with 3.7 for every 1000 births ). Tel Aviv, which sells itself to the world as a liberal city, is the only metropolis in the West that does not have a Muslim population. Its “coolness” is racist – the 20 percent minority does not appear at all in the life of the city. And it is advisable for propagandists not to point to Jaffa as proof of diversity – Jaffa with its yuppie immigration is a perfect example of apartheid carried out by “secular” and “liberal” Tel Aviv.
Official propaganda, too, will not help. The more pressure Israel brings to bear on centers in the West – countries and media giants – the more the wave against it grows, because the hatred of the occupation and of Israeli racism springs from the knowledge that what Israel does is funded by the West, gets assistance from the West, and from connections with the focuses of power – as a living memorial to colonialism. There is nothing better than the way in which the Greeks thwarted the Gaza aid flotilla’s departure to reinforce this. It was not just Greece that thwarted it.
The coalitions that are being organized against Israel in the West include members of the left. There are also many others and not all of them are humanistic. They are not always Jew-lovers. These coalitions will continue to grow as long as the western political community presents itself as “helpless” in the face of Israeli obduracy. Of course it is not helpless, and when it has actual interests, it is capable of behaving in typically western barbaric fashion, as it is doing now in Libya and in Iraq.
The loathing of Israel fits in with the growing anti-establishment wrath, within the context of politics where there is no difference between the parties. The protests in Greece are an example of lack of faith of this kind, which does not spring from the Israeli occupation but from the powerlessness of the masses to influence what is taking place in their countries – economics and war.
Israel is merely one subject out of several that the political – or the apolitical – complaining is busy with. Very few people join flotillas, but many more participate in sending them and even more internalize their oppression. The complaining and mumbling is part of a burgeoning anti-establishment consensus. The record of what is always known as “the hypocritical politicians” has been joined by the hypocritical attitude toward Israeli cruelty.
It is not surprising therefore that the blockade of Gaza is getting tighter in the form of a moral blockade of Israel. Slowly but surely, in a world filled with injustice and war crimes and racism toward minorities and migrants, Israel has learned, during decades of stupidity, how to become the symbol of injustice and these crimes. We are no longer the embodiment of progress, as we were trumpeted as being for a long time, but the exact opposite. And this is truly just the beginning.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/siege-of-gaza-has-become-a-moral-blockade-of-israel-1.371516
How do they print this in Israel and get away with it???
How do they print this in Israel and get away with it???
The same way that diligent and honest reporters like Seymour Hersh survive in the United States, and the likes of Gordon Campbell and Jon Stephenson survive in New Zealand—because the government simply ignores them as far as possible. No need to worry about intelligent and informed critics when you have a guaranteed faithful government mouthpiece like the Jerusalem Post—or the New York Post or the New Zealand Herald to support you no matter what crimes you commit, or what stupid and offensive statements you make after a massacre in Norway.
By the way, Haaretz is where you can read many other great Israeli writers, such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.
I/S tweets:
The Trident programme was excluded from the UK defence review while conventional forces were reduced and public austerity measures were implemented. Priorities like this do my head in.
Hiroshima Day, an apt time to question Trident
I remembered Hiroshima Day yesterday, how many others did? (I know you did Rosy)…
It still matters!
Given that we are lumbered with the “dirge” that is now our national song, it is interesting that the two most important words in the first verse are “the” and “of”.
Have a listen next time and it won’t matter if it is a highly trained opera singer or a wailing two bit celebrity they will emphasise those two words. Seems we will have to get the Minister of Education to order that the song be taught correctly at primary school. It’s going to be a long process.
… at thy feet,
in THE bonds OF love we meet.
😀