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.
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My top six things to note around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the week to July 27 were:1. The Minister for Ford Rangers strikes againTransport Minister Simeon Brown was again the busiest of the Cabinet ministers this week, announcing an ...
You got a fast carAnd I want a ticket to anywhereMaybe we make a dealMaybe together we can get somewhereAny place is betterYesterday’s newsletter, Trust In Me, on the report of abuse in state care, and by religious organisations, between 1950 and 2019, coupled with the hypocrisy of Christopher Luxon ...
New Zealand is again having to reconcile conflicting pressures from its military and its trade interests. Should we join Pillar Two of AUKUS and risk compromising our markets in China? For a century after New Zealand was founded in 1840, its external security arrangements and external economics arrangements were aligned. ...
The ‘50 Shades of Green’ farmers’ protest in 2019 was heavy on climate change denial, but five years on, scepticism and criticism about the idea that pine forests can save us is growing across the board. File photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: Here’s the top six news items of note in climate ...
This morning the sky was bright.The birds, in their usual joyous bliss. Nature doesn’t seem to feel the heat of what might angst humans.Their calls are clear and beautiful.Just some random thoughts:MāoriPaul Goldsmith has announced his government will roll back the judiciary’s rulings on Māori Customary Marine Title, which recognises ...
In 2003, the Court of Appeal delivered its decision in Ngati Apa v Attorney-General, ruling that Māori customary title over the foreshore and seabed had not been universally extinguished, and that the Māori Land Court could determine claims and confirm title if the facts supported it. This kicked off the ...
Earlier this week at Parliament, Labour leader Chris Hipkins was applauded for saying that the response to the final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care had to be “bigger than politics.” True, but the fine words, apologies and “we hear you” messages will soon ring ...
TL;DR: In news breaking this morning:The Ministry of Education is cutting $2 billion from its school building programme so the National-ACT-NZ First Coalition Government has enough money to deliver tax cuts; The Government has quietly lowered its child poverty reduction targets to make them easier to achieve;Te Whatu Ora-Health NZ’s ...
Kia ora. These are some stories that caught our eye this week – as always, feel free to share yours in the comments. Our header image this week (via Eke Panuku) shows the planned upgrade for the Karanga Plaza Tidal Swimming Steps. The week in Greater Auckland On ...
1. What's not to love about the way the Harris campaign is turning things around?a. Nothingb. Love all of itc. God what a reliefd. Not that it will be by any means easye. All of the above 2. Documents released by the Ministry of Health show Associate Health Minister Casey ...
Trust in me in all you doHave the faith I have in youLove will see us through, if only you trust in meWhy don't you, you trust me?In a week that saw the release of the 3,000 page Abuse in Care report Christopher Luxon was being asked about Boot Camps. ...
TL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers last night features co-hosts and talking about the Royal Commission Inquiry into Abuse in Carereport released this week, and with:The Kākā’s climate correspondent on a UN push to not recognise carbon offset markets and ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Friday, July 26, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Transport: Simeon Brown announced$802.9 million in funding for 18 new trains on the Wairarapa and Manawatū rail lines, which ...
The northern expressway extension from Warkworth to Whangarei is likely to require radical changes to legislation if it is going to be built within the foreseeable future. The Government’s powers to purchase land, the planning process and current restrictions on road tolling are all going to need to be changed ...
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFirst they came for the doctors But I was confused by the numbers and costs So I didn't speak up Then they came for our police and nurses And I didn't think we could afford those costs anyway So I ...
Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on UnsplashWe’re back again after our mid-winter break. We’re still with the ‘new’ day of the week (Thursday rather than Friday) when we have our ‘hoon’ webinar with paying subscribers to The Kākā for an hour at 5 pm.Jump on this link on YouTube Livestream ...
Notes: This is a free article. Abuse in Care themes are mentioned. Video is at the bottom.BackgroundYesterday’s report into Abuse in Care revealed that at least 1 in 3 of all who went through state and faith based care were abused - often horrifically. At least, because not all survivors ...
Luxon speaks in Parliament yesterday about the Abuse in Care report. Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty ImagesTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:PM Christopher Luxon said yesterday in tabling the Abuse in Carereport in Parliament he wanted to ‘do the ...
About a decade ago I worked with a bloke called Steve. He was the grizzled veteran coder, a few years older than me, who knew where the bodies were buried - code wise. Despite his best efforts to be approachable and friendly he could be kind of gruff, through to ...
Some of the recent announcements from the government have reminded us of posts we’ve written in the past. Here’s one from early 2020. There were plenty of reactions to the government’s infrastructure announcement a few weeks ago which saw them fund a bunch of big roading projects. One of ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:00 am on Thursday, July 25 are:News: Why Electric Kiwi is closing to new customers - and why it matters RNZ’s Susan EdmundsScoop: Government drops ...
Hi,I felt a small wet tongue snaking through one of the holes in my Crocs. It explored my big toe, darting down one side, then the other. “He’s looking for some toe cheese,” said the woman next to me, words that still haunt me to this day.Growing up in New ...
Yesterday I happily quoted the Prime Minister without fact-checking him and sure enough, it turns out his numbers were all to hell. It’s not four kg of Royal Commission report, it’s fourteen.My friend and one-time colleague-in-comms Hazel Phillips gently alerted me to my error almost as soon as I’d hit ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Thursday, July 25, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day were:The Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquirypublished its final report yesterday.PM Christopher Luxon and The Minister responsible for ...
The Official Information Act has always been a battle between requesters seeking information, and governments seeking to control it. Information is power, so Ministers and government agencies want to manage what is released and when, for their own convenience, and legality and democracy be damned. Their most recent tactic for ...
TL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:Transport and Energy Minister Simeon Brown is accelerating plans to spend at least $10 billion through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) to extend State Highway One as a four-lane ‘Expressway’ from Warkworth to Whangarei ...
I live my life (woo-ooh-ooh)With no control in my destinyYea-yeah, yea-yeah (woo-ooh-ooh)I can bleed when I want to bleedSo come on, come on (woo-ooh-ooh)You can bleed when you want to bleedYea-yeah, come on (woo-ooh-ooh)Everybody bleed when they want to bleedCome on and bleedGovernments face tough challenges. Selling unpopular decisions to ...
Please note:To skip directly to the- parliamentary footage in the video, scroll to 1:21 To skip to audio please click on the headphone iconon the left hand side of the screenThis video / audio section is under development. ...
Given the crackdown on wasteful government spending, it behooves me to point to a high profile example of spending by the Luxon government that looks like a big, fat waste of time and money. I’m talking about the deployment of NZDF personnel to support the US-led coalition in the Red ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:40 am on Wednesday, July 24 are:Deep Dive: Chipping away at the housing crisis, including my comments RNZ/Newsroom’s The DetailNews: Government softens on asset sales, ...
As I reported about the city centre, Auckland’s rail network is also going through a difficult and disruptive period which is rapidly approaching a culmination, this will result in a significant upgrade to the whole network. Hallelujah. Also like the city centre this is an upgrade predicated on the City ...
Today, a 4 kilogram report will be delivered to Parliament. We know this is what the report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State and Faith-based Care weighs, because our Prime Minister told us so.Some reporter had blindsided him by asking a question about something done by ...
TL;DR: As of 7:00 am on Wednesday, July 24, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Beehive:Transport Minister Simeon Brownannounced plans to use PPPs to fund, build and run a four-lane expressway between Auckland ...
NewstalkZB host Mike Hosking, who can usually be relied on to give Prime Minister Christopher Luxon an easy run, did not do so yesterday when he interviewed him about the HealthNZ deficit. Luxon is trying to use a deficit reported last year by HealthNZ as yet another example of the ...
Back in January a StatsNZ employee gave a speech at Rātana on behalf of tangata whenua in which he insulted and criticised the government. The speech clearly violated the principle of a neutral public service, and StatsNZ started an investigation. Part of that was getting an external consultant to examine ...
Renting for life: Shared ownership initiatives are unlikely to slow the slide in home ownership by much. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy today are:A Deloittereport for Westpac has projected Aotearoa’s home-ownership rate will ...
You're broken down and tiredOf living life on a merry go roundAnd you can't find the fighterBut I see it in you so we gonna walk it outAnd move mountainsWe gonna walk it outAnd move mountainsAnd I'll rise upI'll rise like the dayI'll rise upI'll rise unafraidI'll rise upAnd I'll ...
There’s been a change in Myers Park. Down the steps from St. Kevin’s Arcade, past the grassy slopes, the children’s playground, the benches and that goat statue, there has been a transformation. The underpass for Mayoral Drive has gone from a barren, grey, concrete tunnel, to a place that thrums ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Global society may have finally slammed on the brakes for climate-warming pollution released by human fossil fuel combustion. According to the Carbon Monitor Project, the total global climate pollution released between February and May 2024 declined slightly from the amount released during the same ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:00 am on Tuesday, July 23 are:Deep Dive: Penlink: where tolling rhetoric meets reality BusinessDesk-$$$’sOliver LewisScoop:Te Pūkenga plans for regional polytechs leak out ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Tuesday, July 23, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:Health: Shane Reti announcedthe Board of Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand was being replaced with Commissioner Lester Levy ...
Health NZ warned the Government at the end of March that it was running over Budget. But the reasons it gave were very different to those offered by the Prime Minister yesterday. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon blamed the “botched merger” of the 20 District Health Boards (DHBs) to create Health ...
Long ReadKey Summary: Although National increased the health budget by $1.4 billion in May, they used an old funding model to project health system costs, and never bothered to update their pre-election numbers. They were told during the Health Select Committees earlier in the year their budget amount was deficient, ...
As a momentous, historic weekend in US politics unfolded, analysts and commentators grasped for precedents and comparisons to help explain the significance and power of the choice Joe Biden had made. The 46th president had swept the Democratic party’s primaries but just over 100 days from the election had chosen ...
TL;DR: I’m casting around for new ideas and ways of thinking about Aotearoa’s political economy to find a few solutions to our cascading and self-reinforcing housing, poverty and climate crises.Associate Professor runs an online masters degree in the economics of sustainability at Torrens University in Australia and is organising ...
The Finance and Expenditure Committee has reported back on National's Local Government (Water Services Preliminary Arrangements) Bill. The bill sets up water for privatisation, and was introduced under urgency, then rammed through select committee with no time even for local councils to make a proper submission. Naturally, national's select committee ...
Some years ago, I bought a book at Dunedin’s Regent Booksale for $1.50. As one does. Vandrad the Viking (1898), by J. Storer Clouston, is an obscure book these days – I cannot find a proper online review – but soon it was sitting on my shelf, gathering dust alongside ...
History is not on the side of the centre-left, when Democratic presidents fall behind in the polls and choose not to run for re-election. On both previous occasions in the past 75 years (Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968) the Democrats proceeded to then lose the White House ...
This is a free articleCoverageThis morning, US President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the Presidential race. And that is genuinely newsworthy. Thanks for your service, President Biden, and all the best to you and yours.However, the media in New Zealand, particularly the 1News nightly bulletin, has been breathlessly covering ...
A homeless person’s camp beside a blocked-off slipped damage walkway in Freeman’s Bay: we are chasing our tail on our worsening and inter-related housing, poverty and climate crises. Photo: Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy ...
What has happened to it all?Crazy, some'd sayWhere is the life that I recognise?(Gone away)But I won't cry for yesterdayThere's an ordinary worldSomehow I have to findAnd as I try to make my wayTo the ordinary worldYesterday morning began as many others - what to write about today? I began ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 7:00 am on Monday, July 22 are:Today’s Must Read: Father and son live in a tent, and have done for four years, in a million ...
TL;DR: As of 7:00 am on Monday, July 22, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:US President Joe Biden announced via X this morning he would not stand for a second term.Multinational professional services firm ...
A listing of 32 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, July 14, 2024 thru Sat, July 20, 2024. Story of the week As reflected by preponderance of coverage, our Story of the Week is Project 2025. Until now traveling ...
This weekend, a friend pointed out someone who said they’d like to read my posts, but didn’t want to pay. And my first reaction was sympathy.I’ve already told folks that if they can’t comfortably subscribe, and would like to read, I’d be happy to offer free subscriptions. I don’t want ...
National: The Party of ‘Law and Order’ IntroductionThis weekend, the Government formally kicked off one of their flagship policy programs: a military style boot camp that New Zealand has experimented with over the past 50 years. Cartoon credit: Guy BodyIt’s very popular with the National Party’s Law and Orderimage, ...
Day one of the solo leg of my long journey home begins with my favourite sound: footfalls in an empty street. 5.00 am and it’s already light and already too warm, almost.If I can make the train that leaves Budapest later this hour I could be in Belgrade by nightfall; ...
Do you remember Y2K, the threat that hung over humanity in the closing days of the twentieth century? Horror scenarios of planes falling from the sky, electronic payments failing and ATMs refusing to dispense cash. As for your VCR following instructions and recording your favourite show - forget about it.All ...
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts being questioned by The Kākā’s Bernard Hickey.TL;DR: My top six things to note around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the week to July 20 were:1. A strategy that fails Zero Carbon Act & Paris targetsThe National-ACT-NZ First Coalition Government finally unveiled ...
Summary:As New Zealand loses at least 12 leaders in the public service space of health, climate, and pharmaceuticals, this month alone, directly in response to the Government’s policies and budget choices, what lies ahead may be darker than it appears. Tui examines some of those departures and draws a long ...
The Minister of Housing’s ambition is to reduce markedly the ratio of house prices to household incomes. If his strategy works it would transform the housing market, dramatically changing the prospects of housing as an investment.Leaving aside the Minister’s metaphor of ‘flooding the market’ I do not see how the ...
As previously noted, my historical fantasy piece, set in the fifth-century Mediterranean, was accepted for a Pirate Horror anthology, only for the anthology to later fall through. But in a good bit of news, it turned out that the story could indeed be re-marketed as sword and sorcery. As of ...
An employee of tobacco company Philip Morris International demonstrates a heated tobacco device. Photo: Getty ImagesTL;DR: The top six things I’ve noted around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy on Friday, July 19 are:At a time when the Coalition Government is cutting spending on health, infrastructure, education, housing ...
TL;DR: My pick of the top six links elsewhere around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day or so to 8:30 am on Friday, July 19 are:Scoop: NZ First Minister Casey Costello orders 50% cut to excise tax on heated tobacco products. The minister has ...
Kia ora, it’s time for another Friday roundup, in which we pull together some of the links and stories that caught our eye this week. Feel free to add more in the comments! Our header image this week shows a foggy day in Auckland town, captured by Patrick Reynolds. ...
TL;DR : Here’s the top six items climate news for Aotearoa this week, as selected by Bernard Hickey and The Kākā’s climate correspondent Cathrine Dyer. A discussion recorded yesterday is in the video above and the audio of that sent onto the podcast feed.The Government released its draft Emissions Reduction ...
Save some money, get rich and old, bring it back to Tobacco Road.Bring that dynamite and a crane, blow it up, start all over again.Roll up. Roll up. Or tailor made, if you prefer...Whether you’re selling ciggies, digging for gold, catching dolphins in your nets, or encouraging folks to flutter ...
Waiting In The Wings:For truly, if Trump is America’s un-assassinated Caesar, then J.D. Vance is America’s Octavian, the Republic’s youthful undertaker – and its first Emperor.DONALD TRUMP’S SELECTION of James D. Vance as his running-mate bodes ill for the American republic. A fervent supporter of Viktor Orban, the “illiberal” prime ...
TL;DR: As of 6:00 am on Friday, July 19, the top six announcements, speeches, reports and research around housing, climate and poverty in Aotearoa’s political economy in the last day are:The PSAannounced the Employment Relations Authority (ERA) had ruled in the PSA’s favour in its case against the Ministry ...
Te Rangi e tu nei (The sky above us) Te Papa e takoto nei (The land beneath us) Tatou katoa te hunga ora (To us all the living) Tena koutou katoa (Greetings) ...
A late change to charter school legislation will cheat educators out of fair pay and negotiating power proving charter schools are just a vehicle to make profit out of our education system. ...
In 2004 te iwi Māori rallied against the Crown’s attempt to confiscate our coastlines and moana with the Foreshore and Seabed Act. This led to the largest hīkoi of a generation and the birth of Te Pāti Māori. 20 years later, history is repeating itself. Today the government has announced ...
It has been five and a half years since the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care was established to investigate the abuse of children, young people, and vulnerable adults within state and faith-based institutions. Yesterday, the final report - Whanaketia through pain and trauma, from darkness to light ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to take action off the back of the International Court of Justice ruling on Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. ...
On Friday the International Court of Justice reaffirmed what Palestinian’s have been telling us for decades: that the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian lands by Israel is illegal and must end immediately. They also called for reparations for Palestinian’s who have lived under Israeli occupation since it began in 1967. ...
Labour calls on the Government to act after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territories is illegal. ...
The 53.7 percent rise in benefit sanctions over the last year is more proof of this Government’s disdain for our communities most in need of support. ...
Aotearoa could be a country where every child grows up feeling safe, loved and with a sense of belonging in their whānau and community. But for some of our children, this is far from reality. Instead, they are trapped in a maze of intergenerational harm that they can’t escape on ...
Te Pāti Māori are calling for David Seymour to resign as Associate Health Minister in response to his call for Pharmac to ignore the Treaty of Waitangi. “This announcement is just another example of the government’s anti-Tiriti, anti-Māori agenda.” Said Co-leader and spokesperson for health, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. “Seymour thinks it ...
The soaring price of renting is driving the rise of inflation in this country - with latest figures from Stats NZ showing rents are up 4.8 per cent on average while annual inflation is at 3.3 per cent. ...
National’s Emissions Reduction Plan will take New Zealand further from the economy we need to ensure the next generation has a stable climate and secure livelihoods. ...
Following consultation with named parties and thorough consideration of privacy interests, the Green Party is in a position to release the Executive Summary of the final report from the independent investigation into Darleen Tana. ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon should be asking serious questions of his Minister for Resources Shane Jones now it’s been revealed he misled the public about a dinner with mining companies that he didn’t declare and said wasn’t pre-arranged. ...
Te Pāti Māori have submitted to the Justice Select Committee against the Sentencing (Reinstating Three Strikes) Amendment Bill. The bill will further entrench racism in our justice system and fails to focus on rehabilitation. “Reinstating Three Strikes will empower a systematically racist system and exacerbate the overrepresentation of Māori in ...
The Transport and Infrastructure Committee is set to make a determination on the Residential Tenancies Amendment (RTA) Bill in the coming weeks. “This legislation will give landlords the power to kick our whānau out onto the street for no reason” said Housing spokesperson, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “Their solution to the housing ...
“National’s campaign was about tackling crime and the best they can do is a two-year long Ministerial Advisory Group,” Labour justice spokesperson Duncan Webb said. ...
“There are more examples of charter schools failing their students than there are success stories. The coalition Government is driving to dismantle our public school system and instead promote a privatised, competitive structure that puts profits before kids,” Jan Tinetti said. ...
“This government is choosing to deliberately mislead and withhold information, keeping our people in the dark about this government’s agenda and the future of our mokopuna,” said co-leader and spokesperson for Health, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. The call comes after the demand from the Chief Ombudsman that Associate Minister of Health, Casey ...
“Today’s climate announcement by Simon Watts makes clear the National Government is simply paying lip service to meeting its climate change targets,” Megan Woods said. ...
National is choosing to make life harder for workers by taking away the rights our communities have fought hard for. Here's how they’re taking workers backwards. ...
Australia, Canada and New Zealand today issued the following statement on the need for an urgent ceasefire in Gaza and the risk of expanded conflict between Hizballah and Israel. The situation in Gaza is catastrophic. The human suffering is unacceptable. It cannot continue. We remain unequivocal in our condemnation of ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today reminded all State and faith-based institutions of their legal obligation to preserve records relevant to the safety and wellbeing of those in its care. “The Abuse in Care Inquiry’s report has found cases where records of the most vulnerable people in State and faith‑based institutions were ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says the Government’s online safety website for children and young people has reached one million page views. “It is great to see so many young people and their families accessing the site Keep It Real Online to learn how to stay safe online, and manage ...
Tēnā tātou katoa, Ngā mihi te rangi, ngā mihi te whenua, ngā mihi ki a koutou, kia ora mai koutou. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and the invitation to speak at this 50th anniversary conference. I acknowledge all those who have gone before us and paved the ...
New Zealand’s payroll providers have successfully prepared to ensure 3.5 million individuals will, from Wednesday next week, be able to keep more of what they earn each pay, says Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Revenue Minister Simon Watts. “The Government's tax policy changes are legally effective from Wednesday. Delivering this tax ...
An experimental vineyard which will help futureproof the wine sector has been opened in Blenheim by Associate Regional Development Minister Mark Patterson. The covered vineyard, based at the New Zealand Wine Centre – Te Pokapū Wāina o Aotearoa, enables controlled environmental conditions. “The research that will be produced at the Experimental ...
The Coalition Government has confirmed the indicative regional breakdown of North Island Weather Event (NIWE) funding for state highway recovery projects funded through Budget 2024, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Regions in the North Island suffered extensive and devastating damage from Cyclone Gabrielle and the 2023 Auckland Anniversary Floods, and ...
Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi, will visit New Zealand next week, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced. “Indonesia is important to New Zealand’s security and economic interests and is our closest South East Asian neighbour,” says Mr Peters, who is currently in Laos to engage with South East Asian partners. ...
He aha te kai a te rangatira? He kōrero, he kōrero, he kōrero. The government has reaffirmed its commitment to supporting the aspirations of Ngāti Maniapoto, Minister for Māori Development Tama Potaka says. “My thanks to Te Nehenehenui Trust – Ngāti Maniapoto for bringing their important kōrero to a ministerial ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has thanked outgoing Chair of the Civil Aviation Authority, Janice Fredric, for her service to the board.“I have received Ms Fredric’s resignation from the role of Chair of the Civil Aviation Authority,” Mr Brown says.“On behalf of the Government, I want to thank Ms Fredric for ...
The Government is proposing legislation to overturn a Court of Appeal decision and amend the Marine and Coastal Area Act in order to restore Parliament’s test for Customary Marine Title, Treaty Negotiations Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “Section 58 required an applicant group to prove they have exclusively used and occupied ...
Regulation Minister David Seymour says that opposition parties have united in bad faith, opposing what they claim are ‘dangerous changes’ to the Early Childhood Education sector, despite no changes even being proposed yet. “Issues with affordability and availability of early childhood education, and the complexity of its regulation, has led ...
After receiving more than 740 submissions in the first 20 days, Regulation Minister David Seymour is asking the Ministry for Regulation to extend engagement on the early childhood education regulation review by an extra two weeks. “The level of interest has been very high, and from the conversations I’ve been ...
The Coalition Government is investing $802.9 million into the Wairarapa and Manawatū rail lines as part of a funding agreement with the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA), KiwiRail, and the Greater Wellington and Horizons Regional Councils to deliver more reliable services for commuters in the lower North Island, Transport Minister Simeon ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced his intention to appoint a Crown Manager to both Hawke’s Bay Regional and Wairoa District Councils to speed up the delivery of flood protection work in Wairoa."Recent severe weather events in Wairoa this year, combined with damage from Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 have ...
Mr Speaker, this is a day that many New Zealanders who were abused in State care never thought would come. It’s the day that this Parliament accepts, with deep sorrow and regret, the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. At the heart of this report are the ...
For the first time, the Government is formally acknowledging some children and young people at Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital experienced torture. The final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State and Faith-based Care “Whanaketia – through pain and trauma, from darkness to light,” was tabled in Parliament ...
The Government has acknowledged the nearly 2,400 courageous survivors who shared their experiences during the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State and Faith-Based Care. The final report from the largest and most complex public inquiry ever held in New Zealand, the Royal Commission Inquiry “Whanaketia – through ...
With a week to go before hard-working New Zealanders see personal income tax relief for the first time in fourteen years, 513,000 people have used the Budget tax calculator to see how much they will benefit, says Finance Minister Nicola Willis. “Tax relief is long overdue. From next Wednesday, personal income ...
Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden says a bill that has passed its first reading will improve parental leave settings and give non-biological parents more flexibility as primary carer for their child. The Regulatory Systems Amendment Bill (No3), passed its first reading this morning. “It includes a change ...
Two Bills designed to improve regulation and make it easier to do business have passed their first reading in Parliament, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. The Regulatory Systems (Economic Development) Amendment Bill and Regulatory Systems (Immigration and Workforce) Amendment Bill make key changes to legislation administered by the Ministry ...
New legislation paves the way for greater competition in sectors such as banking and electricity, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly says. “Competitive markets boost productivity, create employment opportunities and lift living standards. To support competition, we need good quality regulation but, unfortunately, a recent OECD report ranked New ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says lotteries for charitable purposes, such as those run by the Heart Foundation, Coastguard NZ, and local hospices, will soon be allowed to operate online permanently. “Under current laws, these fundraising lotteries are only allowed to operate online until October 2024, after which ...
The Coalition Government is accelerating work on the new four-lane expressway between Auckland and Whangārei as part of its Roads of National Significance programme, with an accelerated delivery model to deliver this project faster and more efficiently, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “For too long, the lack of resilient transport connections ...
Sir Don McKinnon will travel to Viet Nam this week as a Special Envoy of the Government, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced. “It is important that the Government give due recognition to the significant contributions that General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong made to New Zealand-Viet Nam relations,” Mr ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says newly appointed Commissioner, Grant Illingworth KC, will help deliver the report for the first phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons, due on 28 November 2024. “I am pleased to announce that Mr Illingworth will commence his appointment as ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters travels to Laos this week to participate in a series of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-led Ministerial meetings in Vientiane. “ASEAN plays an important role in supporting a peaceful, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific,” Mr Peters says. “This will be our third visit to ...
Construction of a new mental health facility at Te Nikau Grey Hospital in Greymouth is today one step closer, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey says. “This $27 million facility shows this Government is delivering on its promise to boost mental health care and improve front line services,” Mr Doocey says. ...
New Zealand is committing nearly $50 million to a package supporting sustainable Pacific fisheries development over the next four years, Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones announced today. “This support consisting of a range of initiatives demonstrates New Zealand’s commitment to assisting our Pacific partners ...
Associate Education Minister David Seymour says proposed changes to the Education and Training Amendment Bill will ensure charter schools have more flexibility to negotiate employment agreements and are equipped with the right teaching resources. “Cabinet has agreed to progress an amendment which means unions will not be able to initiate ...
In response to serious concerns around oversight, overspend and a significant deterioration in financial outlook, the Board of Health New Zealand will be replaced with a Commissioner, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti announced today. “The previous government’s botched health reforms have created significant financial challenges at Health NZ that, without ...
Minister for Space and Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins will travel to Adelaide tomorrow for space and science engagements, including speaking at the Australian Space Forum. While there she will also have meetings and visits with a focus on space, biotechnology and innovation. “New Zealand has a thriving space ...
Climate Change Minister Simon Watts will travel to China on Saturday to attend the Ministerial on Climate Action meeting held in Wuhan. “Attending the Ministerial on Climate Action is an opportunity to advocate for New Zealand climate priorities and engage with our key partners on climate action,” Mr Watts says. ...
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones is travelling to the Solomon Islands tomorrow for meetings with his counterparts from around the Pacific supporting collective management of the region’s fisheries. The 23rd Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Committee and the 5th Regional Fisheries Ministers’ Meeting in Honiara from 23 to 26 July ...
The Government today launched the Military Style Academy Pilot at Te Au rere a te Tonga Youth Justice residence in Palmerston North, an important part of the Government’s plan to crackdown on youth crime and getting youth offenders back on track, Minister for Children, Karen Chhour said today. “On the ...
The Government has welcomed news the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) has begun work to replace nine priority bridges across the country to ensure our state highway network remains resilient, reliable, and efficient for road users, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.“Increasing productivity and economic growth is a key priority for the ...
Acting Prime Minister David Seymour has been in contact throughout the evening with senior officials who have coordinated a whole of government response to the global IT outage and can provide an update. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet has designated the National Emergency Management Agency as the ...
New Zealand and Japan will continue to step up their shared engagement with the Pacific, Foreign Minister Winston Peters says. “New Zealand and Japan have a strong, shared interest in a free, open and stable Pacific Islands region,” Mr Peters says. “We are pleased to be finding more ways ...
New developments in the heart of North Island forestry country will reinvigorate their communities and boost economic development, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones visited Kaingaroa and Kawerau in Bay of Plenty today to open a landmark community centre in the former and a new connecting road in ...
President Adeang, fellow Ministers, honourable Diet Member Horii, Ambassadors, distinguished guests. Minasama, konnichiwa, and good afternoon, everyone. Distinguished guests, it’s a pleasure to be here with you today to talk about New Zealand’s foreign policy reset, the reasons for it, the values that underpin it, and how it ...
Christopher Luxon: hurdles The little man from National jumps hurdles in his sleep. He’s quite good at it in his dreams and even though the reality doesn’t quite match up you have to give him credit for getting up every morning and crashing into the very first hurdle of the ...
Comment: It was a good two hours into the conversation when Tyrone Marks raised the most basic of questions when I first spoke to him in 2017. “They didn’t explain the things they did to me. They never told me why. And they still haven’t. There’s no explanation for it. ...
Last summer when Matairangi burned, Ginny and Tom stood at the window of their lounge, watching kākā shoot skyward from the burning trees. From the distance, they looked to Ginny like pages torn from books and thrown into a bonfire. It was Tom, voice tight, who told her it was ...
Opinion: The Canadian short story writer Alice Munro – winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 – died in May at the age of 92. Her work was about “the damage people inflict on one another in the name of love”, Deborah Treisman wrote in the New Yorker. ...
This month marks two years since the most powerful telescope ever built sent its first pictures back to earth. From its lofty vantage point, beyond the moon in orbit around the sun, the James Webb Space Telescope was tuned to observe the first stars and galaxies being born soon after ...
Comment: After Climate Change Minister Simon Watts’ preview several weeks ago, I had some optimism about the Government’s emissions reduction plan. Now I’ve read the discussion document, that hope has been dashed. How can the Government propose a plan that wants to take New Zealand taxpayers’ hard-earned money, and spend ...
Madeleine Chapman rounds out Death Week on The Spinoff with a final recommendation. You can read all of our Death Week coverage here. Nothing forces you to reflect on your life and relationships quite like proximity to death. For those whose nearest and dearest have died, there are reasonably obvious ...
Whitney Greene takes us through her life in television, including the TV character she’d like to plan a funeral for and her cow lung catastrophe on The Traitors NZ. “If the phone rings, I have to answer it,” Whitney Greene from The Traitors NZ warns as we begin our My ...
Maddie Ballard reviews the debut essay collection of Pōneke writer Flora Feltham.In ‘The Raw Material’, the longest essay in Flora Feltham’s dazzling debut collection, the author heads out for a run after hours of weaving and sees the world turn to textile. “Pounding along the Parade, I saw the ...
Andy Christiansen, one half of the experimental rock-pop duo TRiPS, shares the tunes inspiring the band’s perfect weekend and new release. “Good speakers, good food, good music, no distractions”: that’s all you need to enjoy the psychedelic stylings of TRiPS, a new band formed by Fly My Pretties’ Barnaby Weir ...
Celebrating our quadrennial opportunity to become experts in a bunch of sports we never normally watch.The games of the XXXIII Olympiad are upon us. Paris will host this year’s showcase of sporting and athletic prowess, which means some late-night and early-morning viewing for us in Aotearoa.But what sports ...
The photograph is striking and beautiful, but also disturbing – a reminder that my love for John was often entangled in shame.The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.In the spring of 1980, in Dunedin, shortly before his death, someone took a photograph ...
Get to know Babushka, our latest Dog of the Month. This feature was offered as a reward during our What’s Eating Aotearoa PledgeMe campaign. Thank you to Babu’s humans, Jo and Isabel, for their support. Dog name: Babushka (Babu for short) Age: 2Breed: Border Collie X poodleIf rescued, ...
Pacific Media Watch A Lebanese photojournalist who was severely wounded during an Israeli air strike in south Lebanon carried the Olympic torch in Paris this week in honour of her peers who have been wounded and killed in the field — especially in Gaza and Lebanon. Christina Assi of Agence ...
The first report in a five-part web series focused on the 15th Triennial Conference of Pacific Women taking place in the Marshall Islands this week.SPECIAL REPORT:By Netani Rika in Majuro Women continue to fight for justice 70 years after the first nuclear tests by the United States caused ...
Christopher Luxon has joined with Australia and Canada's leaders in voicing support for US President Joe Biden's ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The 2022 election brought the “teal wave” into parliament. The next election will test whether teals, who occupy what were Liberal seats, and other independents can maintain their momentum. Joining us on the Podcast ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Musgrave, Senior lecturer in Pharmacology, University of Adelaide Pixavri/Shutterstock A major Federal Court class action has been dismissed this week after Justice Michael Lee ruled there was not enough evidence to prove the weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. Plaintiff Kelvin ...
In The Week in Politics: politicians have to decide what to do about child abuse, Health NZ is booked in for major surgery and Darleen Tana returns. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University Mainstream media are surprisingly muted at the prospect of the world’s most powerful nation being led for the first time by a woman – specifically a woman of colour, Vice President Kamala ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Bennett, PhD Student, Associate Research Fellow, Deakin University Last week, a drone delivery company called Wing (owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet) started operating in Melbourne. Some 250,000 residents in parts of the city’s eastern suburbs can now order food from ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Foo, Lecturer, Physiotherapy, Monash University pikselstock/Shutterstock In the next 40 years in Australia, it’s predicted the number of Australians aged 65 and over will more than double, while the number of people aged 85 and over will more than triple. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katrina Grant, Research Associate, Power Institute for Arts and Visual Culture, University of Sydney Jonas Åkerström’s 1790 work, Session of the Accademia dell’Arcadia on August 17 1788.Nationalmuseum/Cecilia Heisser Ever wondered whether you’d have a better chance at winning an Olympic gold ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Jones, Program Lead, Food Governance, George Institute for Global Health wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock On Thursday, Australian and New Zealand food ministers at state, federal and national levels met to thrash out what’s next for health star ratings on packaged foods. Now, after ...
The Abuse in Care report found many Pacific survivors lost their connections to their culture and language, resulting in trauma that has been carried from generation to generation. ...
In the regulatory review, ECC intends to suggest that ERO focus on curriculum delivery reviews rather than the Ministry, because it’s not efficient or effective to have two agencies with radically different approaches climbing over each other. ...
Te Rūnanga Nui o Ngā Kura Kaupapa Māori invites the current government to work in partnership with them to develop a pathway forward, including the development of a parallel pathway and meaningful policy and strategy for Kura Kaupapa Māori ...
If you haven’t started watching yet, Tara Ward begs you to reconsider. This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. In the world of New Zealand reality television, we have many gems in our crown. There’s the delicious second season of the Celebrity Treasure ...
A new poem by Fiona Kidman. The clothes of the dead I did not keep my mother’s furry red beret for long nor the stringy scarves that adorned the necks of my aunts, although I have kept tag ends of gold, the rings and trinkets they wore, the brooches no ...
The government’s announcement that it will re-open the foreshore and seabed controversy by changing the rules on recognising centuries-old Māori customary title for a third time goes against the rule of law and New Zealand values,” Mr Tipa says. ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $25) Roarrrr! Perkins’ brilliant, award-winning, Marian-Keyes anointed, darkly funny, long ...
The 2004 Act vested ownership of the foreshore and seabed in the Crown, extinguishing any Māori claims to ownership and causing widespread outrage and protests among Māori communities. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Antje Deckert, Associate Professor (Criminology), Auckland University of Technology Getty Images Despite the connection between institutional harm and gang membership made clear in this week’s mammoth royal commission abuse-in care report, the government seems unlikely to soften its “get tough on ...
From Lewis Clareburt in the swimming to the start of the rowing – the first seven days of Paris 2024 promise to be big for New Zealand. There are few events that bring the country together quite like an Olympic Games. Nothing quite matches the excitement of getting up in ...
Groundbreaking local science just showed up in the most surprising of places: the season finale of The Kardashians. In the season five finale of The Kardashians last night, several members of the family gathered together in one of their signature empty, cream-coloured rooms to hear test results that had been ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amin Saikal, Emeritus professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, Australian National University The Middle East is on the brink of a possibly devastating regional war, with hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah reaching an extremely dangerous level. Washington has engaged in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Elizabeth Eades, Rheumatologist, Monash University Lupus is an inflammatory autoimmune illness, where the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks itself. Lupus can affect virtually any part of the body, although it most commonly affects the skin, joints and kidneys. The symptoms ...
A law firm that specialises in working with survivors of abuse in State care is disappointed that the Government fails to recognise that its boot camps can be directly compared to previous boot camps from the 1990s and 2000s. ...
Dying is a natural part of life, like updating your Wof or seeing your hairdresser, but without the word-of-mouth recs that help guarantee a good service. What if we changed that? Dying Reviews received by The Spinoff have had the names of organisations redacted while Hospice NZ collects further data. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland Mike Lewinski/Flickr, CC BY On any clear night, if you gaze skywards long enough, chances are you’ll see a meteor streaking through the sky. Some nights, however, are better than others. At ...
Despite having no bars or other designated spaces for lesbians, Auckland boasts a small but mighty lesbian museum. So how did it get here? The past 18 months has brought increasing hostility towards the queer community across Aotearoa. Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s anti-trans rally in Tamaki Makaurau last March led to a ...
Poneke Antifascist Coalition has invited Wellingtonians to stand in solidarity with the Kanak people at 12pm today outside the French Embassy in Wellington. ...
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A night of karaoke and community in a pub that feels like a memory. You’d barely even notice it, unless you knew to look. Tucked away behind a liquor store on busy Constable Street is the capital’s last great pub. Newtown Sports Bar is an emblem of the pub culture ...
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Dying is inevitable and, so it seems, is it costing a lot, writes Stewart Sowman-Lund in today’s extract from The Bulletin. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.The cost of dying ...
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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.
😀