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.
As the world economy slides rapidly towards deep recession there are growing calls for a Universal Benefit coming from some leftists and rightists. Now Finance Minister Grant Robertson is saying it is on the table. This article by a French party Workers Struggle provides analysis of various forms of universal ...
This is the advice from the very top of the anti-fluoride movement – Paul Connett, director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN). Don’t worry about reading up on all the scientific information “You only have ...
. . April 4: Day 10 of living in lock-down… I wake up to a fine Saturday morning which normally would be like an early Christmas. But it’s Day 10 of Level 4 Lock Down. What will my fellow New Zealanders be doing on a day like this – staying ...
Some time during the night we went over the 850,000 views mark. We might have had our millionth view by the end of this year – certainly by early next year. Most of the people involved in Redline spent years and years producing various small left-wing papers and selling them ...
Comfortably, in the very first round, with an impressive 56% of the votes.I wonder, did members of the Shadow Cabinet start tweeting their resignations during Starmer's victory speech, or is that only a trick the right pull?It is odd how all the talk of how the next leader "needs to ...
One of the key voices in this extraordinary time in which we live is that of University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker. Philip Matthews did an an excellent job this weekend of capturing the way he became the man for this moment in a profile for The Press.But one ...
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed the nation today about the decline in daylight New Zealand has been experiencing over the previous few months. She said “As many of you will notice, our attempts to stem the dwindling of the daylight over the last few months have been completely ...
Redline received this article from the KOE a Marxist party in Greece Our friends in the KOE describe here the mounting crisis in Greece and tensions on the Turkish border. As desperate people flee from their homelands which have been ruined after decades of imperialist wars and interventions the people ...
As the first week of Level Four lockdown unfolded, mounting questions grew as to just what was (and was not) allowed under its “rules”. Partly these were driven by some apparently contradictory messagesfrom different authority figures and explanations carried in the media. Partly they reflected a somewhat sketchy legal basis ...
. . April 3: Day 9 of living in lock-down… Another late-start to my work day. Everything is temporarily upended as clients are shuffled around so we can minimise our “bubble” by reducing the number of people we help. One of my colleagues has been removed from his clients; his ...
In order to meet our 2050 carbon target and do our bit to avoid making the Earth uninhabitable, New Zealand needs to decarbonise our economy, replacing fossil fuels with electricity in the energy, industrial and transport sectors. The good news is that it will mean cheaper power for all of ...
For those folk who find my other Lock-Down Diary versions too “negative” or otherwise unpalatable… Here’s a photo of a pretty flower, . . Better? Tomorrow’s Sanitised Version: a cute animal video. . . . =fs= ...
. . April 2: Day eight of living in lock-down… Today, my work day starts late. Our rosters and clients have been dramatically changed, lessening (theoretically) the number of people in our work “bubble”. If just one of us catches covid19 the impact could be considerable as Grey Base Hospital ...
As Aotearoa enters week two of lockdown, it’s clear we’re all still working out what our “bubbles” look like and how to stay in them to stop the spread of Covid-19. New to the government’s Covid-19 website is some good guidance for people living in apartment blocks. Recent decades have ...
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Lenin Don’t we all know that feeling now.
Prospect Magazine alerted me to this particularly apt quote. It is a much more evocative quote than Hemingway’s “gradually then suddenly” which is also doing ...
Yesterday was the day the consequences of the lockdown suddenly got very real for many. Firms have been closing and laying people off since the outset of the quarantine but this has mostly been happening out of the public eye. The mass closure of a number of iconic New Zealand ...
Brian Williamson1, Prof Nick Wilson2 (1Economic consultant, UK; 2University of Otago Wellington)In this blog, we outline how a win-win social contract could be forged to address the major dimensions of response to the COVID-19 pandemic when using a mitigation strategy: the particular need to protect older people from high ...
Resuming Normal Service: The Republican Party's nominee for in 1920, Warren Harding, promised the American people: “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration”. If she wishes to remain our prime minister, then Jacinda Ardern will offer New Zealanders the same.HOW EDUCATED AMERICA snickered when the ...
No Free Society Without A Free And Functioning News Media: If we are to surrender our civil rights to the broader cause of defeating Covid-19, then foreign corporations must, likewise, surrender their right to inflict immense economic and cultural harm on New Zealanders simply because it improves their bottom line.I’M ...
by Daphna Whitmore A third of the world is under lockdown and a clear assessment of this measure to curb the spread of COVID-19 is urgently needed. With any high-stakes decisions it has to be asked what are we dealing with here? Are the measures warranted? Will they achieve their ...
I haven’t done a huge amount in the last few days. I’m reading The Poppy War and I’ve sort of poked at a couple of games – I started SOMA but I’m a wimp and I quit while in the first room after the brain scan. I might try it ...
The swan politicians may be gliding on the water, occasionally snapping at one another. Meanwhile, as the Covid19 crisis illustrates, the officials are desperately paddling below providing the real locomotion. One of the most fatuous recent grandstanding comments (of about a week ago), adding to the public’s anxieties, was ...
Much has been written about the importance of discretion in an emergency situation, and the concerns raised by the potential for it to be exercised arbitrarily. Given the quality of the discussion, there seemed little point in adding to it at any length. In particular, I point to the evidence ...
Today has felt surreal. I was all set to touch base online with my science communication students when a colleague shared the news that Bauer Media would be shutting down its publications immediately. The first link I saw implied it was Woman’s Weekly affected, and even that shocked me. But ...
Bogeymen, Real And Imagined: Is the number of psychopathic and sociopathic individuals in any given society truly as vanishingly small as we like to tell ourselves? Isn’t it more likely that the mass-shooters and serial-killers filling the headlines represent only the tip of a much, much larger iceberg of frightfulness? ...
Outgoing Police Commissioner Mike Bush appeared before the Epidemic Response Committee today, who asked him for the rules police are using to enforce the lockdown. He refused:Police Commissioner Mike Bush has admitted the advice given to Kiwis about what they're able to do during the lockdown hasn't been clear enough. ...
For those folk who find my other Lock-Down Diary versions too “negative” or otherwise unpalatable… Here’s a photo of my cat, . . Better? Tomorrow’s Sanitised Version: a pretty flower. . . . =fs= ...
. . April 1: Day seven of living in lock-down… This morning I had a brief chat with one of my neighbours, “D” (social distance between us, a good three or four metres). I learned he had resigned from his previous job and had been hired by another company – ...
Funnily enough, my thought as I start this post is whether it will be well written enough. Or should that be well enough written? Because so much of what I know about good writing came from my two stints at The Listener, which this morning was shut down due to ...
With normal democratic procedures in abeyance, there were two ways to go. First, it was open for the government to dissolve itself and invite the National Party to join a ministry of national salvation. That would have lessened the democratic deficit of the times by having a team of rivals without ...
Dr Kirsty Ross Children and young people can respond differently in times of distress. This also varies by age and developmental stage, with younger children having more magical and imaginative thinking, and older children having more awareness and knowledge of the issues our communities are facing (which brings up ...
Hungary has been a virtual dictatorship for a decade now, as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has gradually eroded its democracy. But now, its official, with the passage of an indefinite emergency law allowing rule by decree:Hungary’s parliament has passed a new set of coronavirus measures that includes jail terms for ...
While the economy is on pause under lockdown, the government is beginning to plan how to cope with the post-lockdown, post-tourism, post-export education world we will eventually find ourselves in. They're planning a lot of infrastructure spending as economic stimulus, and have asked for proposals which can start the moment ...
It's my distraction, setting up tiny scenes to photograph. I've got stuck on the Babushka dolls for now. Something about their bubble shape. Something about their never changing, smiling features, suggesting persistent equanimity. Can we get through everything that is being thrown at us and keep at least a tiny ...
. . March 31: Day six of living in lock-down… This time I managed to sleep a little longer and the alarm woke me at the pre-set time: 6.55am. Then remembered I was working a later shift and could’ve slept in. Oh well, there are things to do at home. ...
Image credit:Diamond Harbour School Blogs I notice a few regulars no longer allow public access to the site counters. This may happen accidentally when the blog format is altered. If your blog is unexpectedly missing or ...
Yesterday's Horizon poll showing support for a "Yes" vote in this year's cannabis referendum sliding into the majority for the first time in a year looked like good news for reformers – and it probably is. But the result warrants some scrutiny.The poll is the fifth in a series commissioned ...
For almost a week now, every one of us who isn’t an essential worker has been confined to their bubble. We are allowed to go shopping for groceries, to visit the doctor, and to get a bit of exercise if we stay local. The reason we are doing this is ...
The Covid-19 saga will no doubt produce many twists and turns for us before it is finally brought to an end. But one thing it has shown us – and what comfort it should bring us – is that our country’s government is in good hands. I am not thinking ...
In the absence of a vaccine or a cure for a deadly disease, staying home in your bubble is what you do, the concept is not new. To the best of my knowledge last time we did this in NZ was for polio, in the years before a vaccine came ...
The following statement was released on March 28 by the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 40 groups, based in the United States. In recent weeks, Cuba has deployed hundreds of medical providers to over a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, as well as to their neighbors in Latin ...
This has been a terrible summer for Hector’s dolphins. The first indication was very low numbers of dolphin sightings during late spring and early summer. The Otago University Marine Mammal Research Team has carried out routine dolphin surveys at Banks Peninsula for more than 30 years. In all that time, ...
On March 17, Finance Minister Grant Robertson was quick out of the blocks with an economic rescue package to help businesses through the inevitable recession resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Robertson had pulled together a scheme in short order that so far seems to have saved many jobs. In his ...
The purpose of the lockdown is to save lives, by reducing the spread of covid-19. We won't know if its really working for another week, but given the devastation that will result if it doesn't - 14,000 dead is the optimistic scenario - its definitely worth trying. But pausing the ...
. . March 30: Day five of living in lock-down… Woke up still in darkness. Alarm hadn’t gone off. Turn to radio clock; it’s a few minutes after 6am… I lie there in the dark, waiting to drift off to sleep… but it ain’t happening. Clock ticks over to 6.55 ...
The story of Les Gray, the public sector psychologist who told the truth about his use of cannabis and set off a storm, has a special place in the lore of cannabis reform in New Zealand.When Paul Shannon interviewed Gray for the 'Dope and Hope' issue of Planet magazine in ...
by Phil Duncan For Marxists, a key concern about social trends is their context – not just their causes, but why they happen when they do. Events and phenomena have causes, but they also are time or period-specific. While much of the left have capitulated recently to postmodernism, most notably ...
Since the lockdown began, we've all suddenly been reminded who the actually essential workers in our society are: not the people at the top who pay themselves the big bucks and rort the perks, but the people at the bottom they screw over and squeeze: cleaners, warehouse staff, truck drivers ...
Kia ora! As I've watched nearly all my remaining work vanish over the past couple of days, it has occured to me that one good way to keep me away from arguing with fools on Twitter all the time (in the knowledge that all we're really doing is processing our ...
Aotearoa New Zealand has committed to trying to extirpate the virus that causes COVID-19 from its shores. To do that, as a society we’ve moved to “Level 4”. That means adapting to unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedoms, particularly to our rights to move freely and associate with friends and ...
When the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency last week, she handed the police powers to enforce it. And almost immediately, we started hearing about heavy-handed, arbitrary "enforcement" by police who (at best) cared more about order than law, or (more likely) had no idea what the rules were ...
. . Lock Down: Day 4 – A photo essay with observations . March 29: Usual wake up routine as RNZ snaps on my radio-clock. Jim Mora’s voice slowly enters my conciousness; there’s talk of a second wave of covid19 taking hold in South Korea; the week in Parliament – ...
Yesterday, New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 related death on the West Coast. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the only fatality, with the virus now being found in every region of the country.However despite the significant danger, people are still unfortunately breaching lockdown rules.There’s really only one main very ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Review... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... ‘Misinformation kills’: The link between coronavirus conspiracies and climate denialGrist / Rob Kim / Stringer / CSA Images Scientific ...
The kids did surprisingly well today – meltdown count was about 3, and mostly fairly short ones. (And a fourth while I was writing.) Game-wise I had a go at Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark. It’s a fairly standard RPG with turn-based combat and what they call a “mature storyline” (it ...
by Don Franks Hi David, Nice hearing from you, I’m glad to hear you’re getting by okay in these grim times. You asked how’s it going for us back here in New Zealand. You would have heard that the whole country is locked down and with breaks for exercise and ...
. . Lock Down: Day 3 – A photo essay with observations . March 28: First day of the first weekend in Lock Down. It feels like it’s been weeks since only Level 3 was declared last Tuesday, only four days ago. Woke up this morning to RNZ; coffee; toast, ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Mar 22, 2020 through Sat, Mar 28, 2020Articles Linked to on FacebookSun, Mar 22, 2020In Just 10 Years, Warming Has Increased the Odds of Disasters by Chelsea Harvey, ...
I’m here in lockdown with my flatmate and her two girls (6 and 2) and it. is. a time. They’re usually really active so to start with the only boardgame in the house is the copy of Guess Who that the 6 year old got for her birthday. Flatmate commented ...
The CV-19 (COVID) pandemic has seen the imposition of a government ordered national quarantine and the promulgation of a series of measures designed to spread the burden of pain and soften the economic blow on the most strategically important and most vulnerable sectors of society. The national narrative is framed ...
. . Lock Down: Day 2 – A photo essay with observations . March 27 – Day 2 of our Strange New World. The Park and Ride near my suburb, usually filled with hundreds of vehicles, had just… four; . . Another drive into Wellington City on a highway nearly ...
Fortune's Children: Under extraordinary pressure, the leader of the Government and the leader of the Opposition will each show us what they are made of. Have they been blessed with intelligence, grace, wit, poise, toughness, empathy and humour – and in what measure? More importantly, to what extent have they ...
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to rent a property on the open market in New Zealand, which is one of the most expensive in the entire world, you’ll likely be keenly aware of just how arrogant and entitled landlords and their real estate agents can be.Unfortunately for ...
Society-wise, aside from the specific morbidity shall we say of the medically-oriented aspects of this COVID-19 crisis, what is unfolding before the world is in more than one way an instructive study of humanity and reactions to a high intensity, high stress environment in real time. Friends, we are at ...
Right now low waged and insecure workers are feeling the economic brunt of the looming #Covid19 Recession. In response legal advocate Toby Cooper* and hospitality and worker’s rights advocate Chloe Ann-King, are putting together a series of legal blogs about your employment rights:In this legal blog we outline some ...
by Equipo Jurídico Pueblos and Gearóid Ó Loingsigh (25/03/2020) An escape plan in question On the night of March 21st and the early morning of the 22nd, the forces of the Colombian state stormed into the Modelo prison in Bogotá, murdering 23 prisoners and injuring 83, in response to the ...
When the government banned semi-automatic weapons in response to a terrorist atrocity, gun-nuts were outraged. Mired in toxic American gun culture, they thought owning weapons whose sole purpose was killing people was some sort of "constitutional right", a necessity for "defending themselves" against the government. Now, the Court of Appeal ...
Just before midnight on Wednesday March 25, Aotearoa New Zealand entered a countrywide alert level four lockdown. For at least the next four weeks, everyone who isn’t an essential worker is confined to their bubble. We are doing this to stop the explosive growth in people contracting and dying from ...
. . Lock Down: Day 1 – A photo essay with observations . Day one of the Level 4 nationwide lock-down (or, DefCon 4 as I sometimes cheekily call it) started at 11.59PM on 25 March. For a moment, most of the nation held it’s collective breath. In that brief ...
Broad, Sunlit Uplands: How those words fired my young imagination! Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say: how those words fused, in my young mind, with the image printed on every packet of Fielder’s Cornflour. Always fascinated by history, especially modern history, I cannot hear Churchill’s wonderfully evocative words, even ...
. . 24 March 2020 9.46AM Number of covid19 cases in Aotearoa New Zealand: 102 . As of 11.59 on Thursday, most of New Zealand will go into “lock down”. People will be expected not to travel to work; not to socialise; and to stay home. I will not be ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections A respected research group, Project Drawdown, finds that deploying solutions consistent with meeting the Paris climate targets would cost tens of trillions of dollars globally. But crucially, those outlays would also yield long-term savings many times larger than the up-front costs. The new 2020 Drawdown ...
It will pass. What happens next? Not immediately, but longer term. There are many opinions, fewer certainties. Will it “change everything!” as many confidently, and contradictorily predict? In this post I look at how foresight can help bound some of the uncertainties so you can more objectively consider the future. ...
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our Government has striven to provide calm, clear and consistent communication, including daily press conference updates from the Prime Minister. ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters says getting New Zealanders back home and other travellers out of the country is "a nightmare for our embassies, consuls, and staff around the world".Speaking to NewstalkZB's Mike Hosking, the Foreign Minister said that he gave a clear message to people travelling overseas that they ...
The domestic travel ban has been lifted for stranded foreign tourists trying to get to international airports to fly home, after the Coalition Government announced a plan to help the tens of thousands of foreigners stranded here. Foreign Minister Rt. Hon. Winston Peters spoke with RNZ's Susie Ferguson said foreign ...
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters believes the country is rediscovering its resilience and self-reliance through its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.He says he is heartened that the mass majority of New Zealanders are following lockdown rules and that the government looking at the future, including paying to keep much ...
New Zealand can emulate the success of the US after the Great Depression by exploiting our own resources to turn the economy around quickly, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says. Mr. Peters told Magic Talk that New Zealand has an opportunity to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic a "superior, ...
All 45 New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) personnel are either on their way back to New Zealand, or already in the country, according to Defence Minister Ron Mark."Twenty-eight personnel arrived back in New Zealand last week and are in isolation at the Royal New Zealand Air Force base in ...
The COVID-19 situation in New Zealand is moving fast - and to avoid what we've seen overseas - the Government's response must be to move fast too. We're committed to keeping New Zealanders safe and well-informed every step of the way. ...
We know people are feeling anxious about COVID-19. While the situation is serious, New Zealand has a world-class health system and we’re well-prepared to keep New Zealanders safe. ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters is encouraging New Zealanders overseas to stay where they are amid the COVID-19 pandemic. "We are reaching a point where the best option for most New Zealanders offshore is to shelter in place, by preparing to safely stay where they are.” "This includes following the instructions ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs Foreign Minister Winston Peters is encouraging the tens of thousands of New Zealanders travelling overseas to consider sheltering in place, in light of COVID-19. “Since 18 March, we have been warning New Zealanders offshore that the window for flying ...
Ground-breaking law has passed that will decriminalise abortion and ensure women and pregnant people seeking abortions have compassionate healthcare. ...
The Green Party says that the measures announced by the Government today will help families and businesses to prioritise our collective health and wellbeing in the response to COVID-19. ...
As New Zealanders brace for a global downturn due to Covid-19, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says his Coalition Government’s rescue package "more significant" than any other he's seen around the world. The Coalition is to reveal a multi-billion-dollar stimulus plan on Tuesday afternoon designed to cushion the economic blow ...
The Government will be introducing legislation to make changes to the Companies Act to help companies facing insolvency due to COVID-19 to remain viable and keep New Zealanders in jobs. The temporary changes include: Giving directors of companies facing significant liquidity problems because of COVID-19 a ‘safe harbour’ from insolvency ...
The Government’s plan to cushion the blow of COVID-19 by supporting incomes, jobs and businesses, and position the economy to recover has been backed by another international report. International credit rating agency Moody’s today reaffirmed its highest Aaa credit rating on New Zealand, saying the economy is expected to remain ...
National sports organisations have been given certainty of funding to ensure they can remain viable through the COVID-19 pandemic, Sport and Recreation Minister Grant Robertson announced today. “The global spread of COVID-19 has had a significant impact on sport and recreation in New Zealand, including the cancellation or postponement of ...
Changes have been made to allow butchers to process pork, only for supply to supermarkets or other processors or retailers that are open, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor has announced. “We carefully weighed the risk of allowing butchers to open their shops for retail customers, but the risk of spreading COVID-19 ...
Essential workers who take leave from work to comply with public health guidance are being supported with a leave scheme to ensure they will continue to receive income, say the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety Iain Lees-Galloway and Minister for Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni. A number of essential businesses ...
A Government WhatsApp channel has been launched to help make information more easily accessible and shareable in the fight against COVID-19. Govt.NZ, which is free to use on any mobile device, will carry information and news for the public, businesses, healthcare providers, not for profits and local government. It can ...
The Government has announced a plan to enable the safe, orderly exit of tens of thousands of stranded foreign nationals from New Zealand during the current COVID-19 Alert Level 4 restrictions, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Winston Peters has said. “When we moved into lockdown a week ago, the ...
Health Minister Dr David Clark says the Government is delivering on its commitment to support general practice doctors and nurses, and pharmacies on the front-line of our fight against COVID-19. "For us to overcome COVID-19, we need community health services such as general practice and community pharmacy to step up ...
Justice Susan Thomas has been appointed Chief High Court Judge, Attorney-General David Parker announced today. She replaces Justice Geoffrey Venning who has resigned from the position. David Parker paid tribute to Justice Venning, who he said had stewarded the High Court very capably over the last five years. “On behalf ...
Businesses can start applying to their banks for loans under the Business Finance Guarantee Scheme set up to support the New Zealand economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re moving quickly to protect New Zealand businesses, jobs and the economy during this unprecedented global economic shock,” Finance Minister Grant Robertson said. ...
Work is underway looking at measures to speed up consents for development and infrastructure projects during the recovery from COVID 19, to provide jobs and stimulate our economy. Environment Minister David Parker said the COVID-19 pandemic is a serious global crisis that will have a wide ranging and lasting impact ...
Advance payments will be made to transport construction industry contractors to retain the workforce and ensure it is ready to quickly gear up to build projects which will be vital to New Zealand’s COVID-19 economic recovery, Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced today. He said keeping the workforce required to build ...
The Government has tasked a group of industry leaders to seek out infrastructure projects that are ready to start as soon as the construction industry returns to normal to reduce the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Economic Development Minister Phil Twyford and Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones say. The Infrastructure ...
Work to scale up the health system in preparation for COVID-19 was today outlined by Health Minister David Clark, as he reported back to the new Epidemic Response Committee. “We are well placed to contain the spread of COVID-19. We have taken early and decisive action at our borders, and ...
The Government is refining its COVID-19 essential business guidance to include the distribution of news publications for communities which are hard to reach. The Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media, Kris Faafoi, said the move was in recognition of the importance for New Zealanders who might be harder to ...
The Government is ensuring supermarkets can open on Easter Sunday so we can buy groceries, but stay closed on Good Friday allowing workers to take a break. This provides a balanced approach and ensures we avoid large queues that two days closure may cause. “Supermarkets will be able to open ...
Following the successful conclusion of the Building Partner Capacity (BPC) mission at Taji, New Zealand defence personnel are returning to New Zealand from Iraq, in accordance with the Cabinet decision made in June 2019, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Ron Mark announced today. “New Zealand is very ...
The State of National Emergency to help stop the spread of COVID-19 has been extended for a further seven days, Minister of Civil Defence Peeni Henare said. The initial declaration on March 25 lasted seven days and can be extended as many times as necessary. “Since we went into isolation ...
New Zealand’s ability to go hard and go early in the fight against COVID-19 has been underpinned by strong Government finances and the growing economy heading into this global pandemic, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. The Treasury today released the Crown financial statements for the eight months to the end ...
Health Minister Dr David Clark says 36 new intensive care beds at Christchurch Hospital’s new Hagley building are being fast tracked so they are available for treatment of COVID-19 patients. The Ministry of Health is working with contractor CPB and Canterbury DHB to enable access to the hospital’s ICU, ...
The Government has fast-tracked up to $1 million to help Air New Zealand move urgent freight to and from New Zealand, with the first flight to Shanghai leaving tonight, Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced today. Phil Twyford says it’s crucial that trade in vital goods such as medical supplies and ...
New Zealand will temporarily remove tariffs on all medical and hygiene imports needed for the COVID-19 response. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker and Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi said today that the New Zealand Customs Service will apply tariff concessions to all diagnostic reagents and testing ...
Minister of Finance Grant Robertson has clarified that the changes to the wage subsidy scheme announced yesterday mean that employers should be passing on the full subsidy to workers, except in the case where the person’s normal income is less than the level of the subsidy. “We still want employers ...
Medical face masks from the national reserve supply are now being distributed to District Health Boards, while at the same time local production is being ramped up. Yesterday more than 640,000 masks were sent to DHBS – that is an immediate two week supply, with more to follow in coming ...
The Government has made modifications to the wage subsidy scheme to ensure people don’t lose their jobs during the national lockdown. These changes will soften the impact of COVID-19 on workers, families and businesses, and position them to exit the lockdown and look to recovery, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. ...
Farmers whose herds were culled in response to the outbreak of Mycoplasma bovis will be able to minimise the tax treatment of their income in some circumstances. Revenue Minister Stuart Nash says Cabinet has agreed to change the law. It means farmers may be eligible to spread their income over ...
A $27 million dollar package, effective immediately, is being provided to social sector services and community groups to ensure they can continue to provide essential support to communities as we stay at home as a nation to stop the spread of COVID-19, Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni announced. “At ...
“The guilty plea today will provide some relief to the many people whose lives were shattered by what happened on March 15,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. “These guilty pleas and conviction bring accountability for what happened and also save the families who lost loved ones, those who were injured, ...
The Prime Minister is holding daily press conferences to update New Zealanders on the Government's response to COVID-19. Links to videos and transcripts of these updates below. These transcripts also include All of Government press conferences led by Director Ministry of Health's Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. 25 March: Live update from the Prime ...
Frontline Police numbers have broken through the 10,000 mark for the first time in history as officers step forward to keep the community safe during the COVID19 lockdown. “Two Police graduations in Auckland and Wellington in the past week have been conducted in unprecedented circumstances,” Police Minister Stuart Nash said. ...
Urgent legislation has been passed to support the package of economic and social measures needed to recover from the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. “The COVID-19 Response (Taxation and Social Assistance Urgent Measures) Bill will cushion New Zealanders from the worst economic impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak,” said Revenue Minister ...
From tomorrow, Government support for farmers and growers affected by drought will be expanded and extended across the country, with access to Rural Assistance Payments (RAPS) available throughout the North Island, parts of the South Island and the Chatham Islands, Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni announced. “These challenging conditions have ...
Parliament has passed amendments to legislation that give the Secretary of Education stronger powers to act in the fight to limit the spread of COVID-19, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “They are part of a suite of changes passed under the COVID-19 Response (Urgent Management Measures) Legislation Bill,” Chris ...
Canada, Australia, Chile, Brunei and Myanmar have joined forces with New Zealand and Singapore by committing to keep supply chains open and remove any existing trade restrictive measures on essential goods, especially medical supplies, in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker today welcomed ...
Immediate freeze on rent increases Tenancies will not be terminated during the lock-down period, unless the parties agree, or in limited circumstances Tenants who had previously given notice can stay in their if they need to stay in the tenancy during the lock-down period Tenants will still be able to ...
As New Zealand unites to lock-down in the fight against COVID-19, the Finance Minister is urging all businesses and workers to stay connected over the next four weeks. “We understand the extreme pressure many businesses are under right now. I know most business owners think of their workers as family ...
A State of National Emergency has been declared across the country as the Government pulls out all the stops to curtail the spread of COVID-19. “Today we put in place our country’s second ever State of National Emergency as we fight a global pandemic, save New Zealanders’ lives and prevent ...
Mr Speaker I wish to make a Ministerial Statement under Standing Order 347 in relation to the recent declaration of a State of National Emergency. Having considered the advice of the Director Civil Defence Emergency Management, the Minister of Civil Defence declared a State of National Emergency for the whole of ...
People needing to travel on domestic flights, trains and Cook Strait ferries to get home before the country moves into level 4 lock-down tomorrow night will be able to continue using the passenger services until midnight on Friday, Transport Minister Phil Twyford said today. Domestic passenger services, particularly ferries, have ...
The Government, retail banks and the Reserve Bank are today announcing a major financial support package for home owners and businesses affected by the economic impacts of COVID-19. The package will include a six month principal and interest payment holiday for mortgage holders and SME customers whose incomes have been ...
By Jane Patterson, political editor of RNZ News Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says it’s too early to claim success against the spread of Covid-19 but 11 days into lockdown, New Zealand has made a good start. At today’s media briefing, Ardern was reluctant to draw too many conclusions from ...
By Stefan Armbruster of SBS News in Brisbane Refugees and asylum seekers in Brisbane have begun daily protests urging for their release after doctors and human rights lawyers flagged fears that a repurposed hotel could become a coronavirus infection hotspot. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the UN Human ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says it's too early to claim success against the spread of Covid-19 but 11 days into lockdown, New Zealand has made a good start. ...
Sam Brooks, a lifelong Studio Ghibli fan, presents a guide to the Japanese studio’s animated films, including which ones to show your kids when.Just heard ‘Let It Go’ for the billionth time? Sick of those class-traitor dogs that make up the cast of Paw Patrol? Look no further than the ...
Alan Simmons co-leader of the NZ Outdoors Party says tensions are at breaking point around New Zealand. “I cannot keep up with the calls and messages from New Zealanders who are extremely stressed, distressed and frustrated by dramatic changes imposed ...
Welcome back to Papercuts, our monthly books podcast hosted by Louisa Kasza, Jenna Todd and Kiran Dass.Well, we’ve all said we wish we had more time to read and now we’ve got what we wished for. Jenna, Kiran and Louisa delve into some book news (that’s not too heavy for ...
The prime minister says she expects the health minister to continue doing his job, including media interviews, after he broke the lockdown rules last week to go mountain biking. ...
There have been calls for major institutions like Auckland Art Gallery to do better in identifying queer or queer-associated artists. New Auckland Art Gallery director Kirsten Paisley believes it’s ‘a conversation that needs to happen’. Writer Samuel Te Kani digs into the complications below the surface of the erasures of ...
Ardern says the role of planning for moving out of lockdown is not the Government's alone Businesses should plan how they will operate in an environment where intensive contact tracing would be needed post-lockdown, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said today. The Government was working on additional guidance for the move to Level 3 ...
Netflix’s four-part series Unorthodox traces a woman’s escape from a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. Emily Writes considers the lessons we can all learn from her journey. There was a moment watching Netflix’s miniseries Unorthodox when I felt like I was actually in Berlin, where much of the show is ...
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening.The following charts are based on numbers shared at the daily press conference. These may vary from the full day's numbers released in the Ministry of Health's spreadsheet of ...
By RNZ Pacific The number of people with Covid-19 in the Pacific continues to climb with French Polynesia hitting 40 cases, Guam now over 90 and the US state of Hawai’i suffering its third coronavirus death. In the past day, another person tested positive for Covid-19 in French Polynesia. ...
We needed a reasonable period of time to allow the recent surging wave of highly geared first home buyers to get financially comfortable. We didn’t get it, writes David Hargreaves of interest.co.nz.You know, I was really beginning to think (as well as hope) that we might just get away with it.By ‘it’ ...
Being stuck inside all day might be wearing you and your kids down, but there’s never been a better time to encourage them to pick up their musical instrument and get stuck into writing songs. Mike Chunn from Play It Strange explains how. Mums and dads and households with teenage children. ...
Siouxsie Wiles on the vitriolic correspondence she’s received since the Covid-19 outbreak struck, and the realities of communicating evidence.I recently received an email and text from someone telling me they are planning to email my boss, the University of Auckland vice chancellor. They are going to ask for me to ...
In our new series The Lockdown Letters, five of New Zealand’s best writers chronicle the days of Covid-19 alert level four. Today, Fiona Farrell.There’s a sign sticky-taped to the bakery window. Closed Until Further Notice. Stay Safe NZ and Be Kind. We will get through this!We all know where the words ...
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level four. The country is shut down, apart from essential services. For updated official government advice, see here.The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this work, join The ...
Former editor of the Woman's Weekly, Nicky Pellegrino, bids farewell to the magazine that brought information and fun to generations of New Zealand women. All those stories. Gone. Stories about our politics, our health, our education, our aspirations. Stories about the houses we lived in and the gardens we grew, ...
As small businesses fight for their survival in the Covid-19 lockdown, it seems one of the country’s biggest retail landlords is not keen to share the pain. On the one side, you have Jonathan*. Jonathan runs a small business out of South Auckland’s Sylvia Park - New Zealand’s biggest mall. ...
With no Covid-19 cases and its economy desperate to restart, the Chathams is keen to go fishing again, writes Jim Kayes.It shouldn’t really be a surprise. They are, after all, ahead of New Zealand by 45 minutes.And though they are part of Wellington’s Rongotai electorate, the fiercely ...
Covid-19 is a real threat to older people, but these Central Otago seniors are embracing technology, experiencing no FOMO, and finding new ways to connect and share, finds Jill Herron When the full lockdown began on March 25 it meant the end of going for a swim, spa or to ...
On Friday night, the government quietly laid down some lockdown rules via a legal order under the Health Act. Law professor Andrew Geddis explains what it means for all of us (including David Clark). As the first week of level four lockdown unfolded, mounting questions grew as to just what was ...
The health and wellbeing of people working and being held inside our prisons needs to be a priority, writes JustSpeak director Tania Sawicki Mead. Kelvin Davis’s interview on The Hui last weekend made it clear that precautions taken by Corrections to stop the spread of Covid-19 will create an unprecedented restriction ...
Like countless New Zealanders stranded overseas, Wellingtonian Rosie O’Hagan will be braving authorities, airlines, airports and uncertainty to make it back from the other side of the world, writes Jim Kayes.Rosie O’Hagan hadn’t stepped outside for three weeks.When she finally did – around midnight on Friday ...
PACIFIC PANDEMIC DIARY:By David Robie A rather beautiful Guåhan legend is rather poignant in these stressed pandemic times. It is one about survival and cooperation. In ancient times, goes the story, a giant fish was eating great chunks out of this western Pacific island. The men used muscle ...
Simon Wren-Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford, raises good questions about Britain’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Some of them seem germane to this country’s response. Wren-Lewis posted his critique on his Mainly Macro blog under the heading Following the Science or a ...
Alex Casey speaks to a dream expert about why so many people are suddenly remembering their vivid and often horrible dreams. As the days begin to blur together and the only thing we get between sleeps is unimaginably horrible news and an embarrassing tootle around the block, it’s no surprise ...
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening.The following charts are based on numbers shared at the daily press conference. These may vary from the full day's numbers released in the Ministry of Health's spreadsheet of ...
Medical centres across the country are condensing services, moving online, and ushering in pandemic plans. Josie Adams assesses what it’s like to access and provide essential medical care under alert level four.On Monday, Sandra Russell woke up before dawn and drove to Milford to get her blood tested. She has ...
In our new series The Lockdown Letters, some of New Zealand’s best writers tell us what they’ve been up to in the days of Covid-19 alert level four. Today, writer and doctor Glenn Colquhoun, with the second of his Letters to Hone Tūwhare and his Travelling Band of Constant Companions. ...
ANALYSIS:By Haiqing Yu of RMIT University and Michael Keane of Curtin University China has gradually emerged out of its shadow of despair as the epicentre where the coronavirus pandemic started. Now, there is face saving required – as well as agenda-setting in the global power play. China played ...
Tech giant Google has released a giant global data set which shows how different countries are locking down, and which NZ regions are most compliant with its lockdown.A giant set of reports released by Google, created using its anonymised cellphone location data reveals the scale of human behaviour change the ...
Comedian Penny Ashton writes on the necessity of the arts, especially during lockdown.On March 22, everyone’s favourite fiscal bloodhounds, the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, sent out a tweet in response to Creative New Zealand’s announcement that it will dedicate an emergency response package to helping New Zealand’s artists, in the ...
Wellington writer Philippa Swan’s new novel TheNight of All Souls is an homage to Pulitzer-winning and all-round fabulous American writer Edith Wharton. Wharton died in 1937 but, Swan writes, she’s very much of the moment. Nobody does social distancing like Wharton did. While Wharton was still comparatively young, she created the ...
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level four. The country is shut down, apart from essential services. For updated official government advice, see here.The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this work, join The ...
Normally heaving year-round, Queenstown has ground to an eerie halt as Covid-19 cases rise and tourism income plummets, reports Paul Taylor. On a hill behind Queenstown's coronavirus Covid-19 community testing centre, the resort's iconic Skyline gondola sits motionless. More than 17 million people are estimated to have ridden the gondola ...
Are we drinking more in the lockdown? Hard to know, writes David Slack, but we’re certainly having to get creative about it. Almost every phone call I’ve answered this week has begun the same way: “You still off the drink, then?” Fair question. What a time to be not drinking. ...
Kiwi clinical psychologist Desiree Dickerson is stuck with her family in Spain and has written a guide in Nature: "Seven tips to manage your mental health and well-being during the Covid-19 outbreak." It’s Day 17 of the Covid-19 lockdown in Spain. In a small village on the Mediterranean coast, about ...
"Will our ills be cured? Will our feet carry us? For how long?": a short story set in Henderson by West Auckland writer Serie Barford.I learned to drive a tractor when I was a kid feeding out hay with my cousins on a dairy farm down the line. I ...
Without active testing in the community our Covid-19 picture isn’t complete, an epidemiologist says. David Williams reports. There are worse places to be self-isolating than Whakatāne, in the Bay of Plenty, says Bridget Robson, who lives on a two-acre block and keeps chickens. “We live in a beautiful part of ...
How do you hold a funeral service with the country in lockdown? Where there’s a will – and a tech-savvy uncle – there’s a way, Erin Kavanagh-Hall discovered.I was floating somewhere in the Cook Strait when I heard my grandfather’s funeral had been cancelled.I should elaborate. It was a Monday, ...
‘Stay in your bubble’ didn’t exist 100 years ago, but our ancestors would want us to know how essential it is to do so, says Jai Breitnauer.It was a warm but slightly grey January day in 2019 when I pulled the car over to the side of SH1, just south ...
David Clark’s misadventure in mountain biking was a stupid, but ultimately forgivable offence. The bigger problem is the continued uncertainty around what is and isn’t appropriate activity in lockdown, as Sam Sachdeva writes. Given the pressure he and his Cabinet colleagues are under, it is little surprise Health Minister David ...
Assessing the economic impact of Covid-19 requires a new approach to a problem economists have not encountered in modern times, writes Dr Kirdan Lees Covid-19 has presented quite a problem for economists. Containment policies that seek to flatten the Covid-19 curve or eliminate the virus, restrict economic activity. All governments ...
Every day at 1pm New Zealand’s Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield announces precise figures on the number of confirmed and probable cases of Covid-19 in the country. He is working on the best information available, and during this week the level of community transmission was put at around ...
Most of New Zealand's MPs are in lockdown just like the rest of us, confined to their neighbourhoods and stuck in their bubbles. Checkpoint called a few to ask them what they're doing. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Deery, Lecturer in Early Childhood Education, University of Melbourne “Stupid coronavirus!” I heard my six-year-old mumble while talking in her sleep. Earlier that day her swimming and basketball lessons were cancelled, a birthday party postponed, and she had to race with ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Tuffley, Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University “Zoombombing” in case you haven’t heard, is the unsavoury practice of posting distressing comments, pictures or videos after gatecrashing virtual meetings hosted by the videoconferencing app Zoom. With hundreds of millions ...
Analysis - A leading epidemiologist says health authorities 'really have no idea' of the extent of community spread, Parliament's Epidemic Response Committee gets its teeth into what's going on during the lockdown and the horrendous economic imp ...
The fifth in our new series of charts, graphics and data visualisations by Chris McDowall, covering the Covid-19 epidemic within New Zealand. We’ll publish the latest set each day on The Spinoff.This work is entirely funded by the generosity of The Spinoff MembersInformation about confirmed and probable cases of Covid-19 ...
The Finance Minister says struggling companies will be able to put some debt into hibernation, under new legislation unveiled today. Watch the latest government update here. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Lund, Commissioning Editor, The Conversation Editor’s note: The following is current as at April 3, 2020. Things are changing quickly so best to keep an eye on the latest information from WA Health, as well as the federal government.This article ...
During the challenges associated with lockdown, the Māori Party are congratulating Ngāti Ruanui and South Taranaki on the decision of the Court of Appeal, announced today, to stop Trans-Tasman Resources plans for risky seabed mining off the South ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling What does the COVID-19 pandemic sound like? For this episode, Dallas Rogers – a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney – asked academic colleagues from all over ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sven Gallasch, Lecturer in Law, Swinburne University of Technology “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion,” wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), “but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the ...
Environment Minister David Parker has directed officials to find ways to fast-track consents for infrastructure and development projects. He says his goal is to help create a pipeline of projects so that some can start immediately once Covid-19 restrictions are lifted “so people can get back into work as fast ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin Spain and Switzerland top cases, countries converging. Chart by Keith Rankin.Spain and Switzerland top cases, countries converging. Chart by Keith Rankin.Of the larger European countries, Italy is now in third place for known cases per person in the population. Spain has overtaken Switzerland for ...
Contact tracing is a crucial part of the Covid-19 puzzle and technology might prove essential to scaling up New Zealand's tracing capacity, Marc Daalder reports With the lockdown reducing physical contact between members of the public and testing ramping up, the only missing piece of the Covid-19 puzzle is contact tracing. ...
Insolvency laws will be temporarily changed to allow troubled companies to trade while technically insolvent Finance Minister Grant Robertson has announced changes to the Companies Act to allow companies to put their debts into "hibernation". Robertson said companies facing liquidity problems would have "safe harbour" from their normal insolvency duties ...
Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Ruanui and Te Kaahui o Rauru are celebrating the decision of the Court of Appeal, announced today, to stop Trans-Tasman Resources plans for risky seabed mining off the South Taranaki Bight. The Court of Appeal found that there ...
Bernard Hickey talks to Kiwibank Chief Economist Jarrod Kerr about a massive spike in US jobless claims, and they talk about an inspiring Kiwi app to fight Covid-19 globally. Guest, Pie Funds chief executive Mike Taylor also joins them to talk about the massive market swings and hopes for recovery. Bernard zooms out ...
Political commentators from the left and right sides of the political divide are questioning the powers being exercised by police during the nation-wide “lockdown”. The Asian Invasion 2019 blog draws attention to the warning sounded by former UK Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption when he challenged Covid-19 actions by British ...
Pacific Media Watch The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) has strongly condemned the shoot-to-kill order by President Rodrigo Duterte this week as a ‘dangerous’ opening to target and kill anyone in a public space. “We are raising the alarm in the international community on President ...
The Reserve Bank looks set to start buying council bonds as well as Government bonds to unfreeze financial markets and allow councils to defer rates and jointly invest in infrastructure with the central Government, Dileepa Fonseka reports In what would be another unprecedented move to calm financial markets and help ...
Four PhD students engaged a clinical psychologist to help them navigate an uncertain time in their studies. They share their findings here.As four PhD students from Massey University’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research we, like many others, can’t stop reading and talking about the unfolding events that have gripped our ...
The SpinoffBy Ashleigh Rushton, Lisa McLaren, Marion Tan & Sara Harrison
Covid-19 testing of the wider population is on the cards as World Health Organisation research shows people are most contagious within their first few days of being infected Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield says Covid-19 carriers are highly infectious when they show few signs of carrying the virus. People were ...
Z Energy is the latest company to cut its dividend payout and start talking to its banks about strengthening its finances. Chief executive Mike Bennetts said the company, the largest fuel retailer in the country, had been battered by a range of issues over the past 18 months, and was ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Kang, Associate professor, University of Technology Sydney Young people in Australia are among the fastest-growing group to contract COVID19. According to the Department of Health, there are now more cases in Australia among people aged 20 – 29 years than any ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cassandra Pattinson, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland Getting a good night’s sleep can be difficult at the best of times. But it can be even harder when you’re anxious or have something on your mind – a global pandemic, for example. ...
Journalist and Great Barrier Island resident Lindsay Wright reflects on outer gulf pandemic preparedness. Hardy locals can tough it out but Auckland bach owners and boaties should keep their distance. Aotea Great Barrier, the easternmost island in the Hauraki Gulf, are undergoing a Covid-19-inspired population flood. Great Barrier has scenery that makes ...
The Pharmaceutical Society of New Zealand is delighted that the government has moved quickly to provide an initial financial support package for pharmacy. The $15 million package was paid this week to pharmacy contract holders. Pharmaceutical Society president ...
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening.The following charts are based on numbers shared at the daily press conference and are "as of 9am" of the day. There were 71 new cases of Covid-19 in ...
A new poem by Wellington poet and bookseller Ash Davida Jane. washed up! it gets tiring pushing the fire alarm every nightbut things keep catching on fireor sometimes ...
Open mike 06/08/2011 
As the world economy slides rapidly towards deep recession there are growing calls for a Universal Benefit coming from some leftists and rightists. Now Finance Minister Grant Robertson is saying it is on the table. This article by a French party Workers Struggle provides analysis of various forms of universal ...5 hours ago
This is the advice from the very top of the anti-fluoride movement – Paul Connett, director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN). Don’t worry about reading up on all the scientific information “You only have ... 7 hours ago
. . April 4: Day 10 of living in lock-down… I wake up to a fine Saturday morning which normally would be like an early Christmas. But it’s Day 10 of Level 4 Lock Down. What will my fellow New Zealanders be doing on a day like this – staying ...11 hours ago
Comfortably, in the very first round, with an impressive 56% of the votes.I wonder, did members of the Shadow Cabinet start tweeting their resignations during Starmer's victory speech, or is that only a trick the right pull?It is odd how all the talk of how the next leader "needs to ...12 hours ago
One of the key voices in this extraordinary time in which we live is that of University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker. Philip Matthews did an an excellent job this weekend of capturing the way he became the man for this moment in a profile for The Press.But one ...12 hours ago
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed the nation today about the decline in daylight New Zealand has been experiencing over the previous few months. She said “As many of you will notice, our attempts to stem the dwindling of the daylight over the last few months have been completely ...1 day ago
As the first week of Level Four lockdown unfolded, mounting questions grew as to just what was (and was not) allowed under its “rules”. Partly these were driven by some apparently contradictory messages from different authority figures and explanations carried in the media. Partly they reflected a somewhat sketchy legal basis ...1 day ago
We must root out the traitors among us! ...2 days ago
In order to meet our 2050 carbon target and do our bit to avoid making the Earth uninhabitable, New Zealand needs to decarbonise our economy, replacing fossil fuels with electricity in the energy, industrial and transport sectors. The good news is that it will mean cheaper power for all of ...2 days ago
As Aotearoa enters week two of lockdown, it’s clear we’re all still working out what our “bubbles” look like and how to stay in them to stop the spread of Covid-19. New to the government’s Covid-19 website is some good guidance for people living in apartment blocks. Recent decades have ...3 days ago
Resuming Normal Service: The Republican Party's nominee for in 1920, Warren Harding, promised the American people: “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration”. If she wishes to remain our prime minister, then Jacinda Ardern will offer New Zealanders the same.HOW EDUCATED AMERICA snickered when the ...3 days ago
I haven’t done a huge amount in the last few days. I’m reading The Poppy War and I’ve sort of poked at a couple of games – I started SOMA but I’m a wimp and I quit while in the first room after the brain scan. I might try it ...3 days ago
46 Articles Physical science of global warming & effects Global response of evapotranspiration ratio to climate conditions and watershed characteristics in a changing environment Greenhouse effect: the relative contributions of emission height and total absorption Observations & observational methods of global warming & effects Climate change induced a ...4 days ago
Image credit: Diamond Harbour School Blogs I notice a few regulars no longer allow public access to the site counters. This may happen accidentally when the blog format is altered. If your blog is unexpectedly missing or ... 5 days ago
The Covid-19 saga will no doubt produce many twists and turns for us before it is finally brought to an end. But one thing it has shown us – and what comfort it should bring us – is that our country’s government is in good hands. I am not thinking ...5 days ago
The following statement was released on March 28 by the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 40 groups, based in the United States. In recent weeks, Cuba has deployed hundreds of medical providers to over a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, as well as to their neighbors in Latin ...5 days ago
Yesterday, New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 related death on the West Coast. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the only fatality, with the virus now being found in every region of the country.However despite the significant danger, people are still unfortunately breaching lockdown rules.There’s really only one main very ...6 days ago
The CV-19 (COVID) pandemic has seen the imposition of a government ordered national quarantine and the promulgation of a series of measures designed to spread the burden of pain and soften the economic blow on the most strategically important and most vulnerable sectors of society. The national narrative is framed ...1 week ago
Society-wise, aside from the specific morbidity shall we say of the medically-oriented aspects of this COVID-19 crisis, what is unfolding before the world is in more than one way an instructive study of humanity and reactions to a high intensity, high stress environment in real time. Friends, we are at ...1 week ago
Right now low waged and insecure workers are feeling the economic brunt of the looming #Covid19 Recession. In response legal advocate Toby Cooper* and hospitality and worker’s rights advocate Chloe Ann-King, are putting together a series of legal blogs about your employment rights: In this legal blog we outline some ...1 week ago
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our Government has striven to provide calm, clear and consistent communication, including daily press conference updates from the Prime Minister. ...5 hours ago
Foreign Minister Winston Peters says getting New Zealanders back home and other travellers out of the country is "a nightmare for our embassies, consuls, and staff around the world". Speaking to NewstalkZB's Mike Hosking, the Foreign Minister said that he gave a clear message to people travelling overseas that they ...2 days ago
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The scale of what we face right now is unlike anything we have ever seen before. Overcoming it is our common purpose. ...2 weeks ago
The Government will be introducing legislation to make changes to the Companies Act to help companies facing insolvency due to COVID-19 to remain viable and keep New Zealanders in jobs. The temporary changes include: Giving directors of companies facing significant liquidity problems because of COVID-19 a ‘safe harbour’ from insolvency ...2 days ago
By Jane Patterson, political editor of RNZ News Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says it’s too early to claim success against the spread of Covid-19 but 11 days into lockdown, New Zealand has made a good start. At today’s media briefing, Ardern was reluctant to draw too many conclusions from ...2 hours ago
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says it's too early to claim success against the spread of Covid-19 but 11 days into lockdown, New Zealand has made a good start. ...5 hours ago
Sam Brooks, a lifelong Studio Ghibli fan, presents a guide to the Japanese studio’s animated films, including which ones to show your kids when.Just heard ‘Let It Go’ for the billionth time? Sick of those class-traitor dogs that make up the cast of Paw Patrol? Look no further than the ...6 hours ago
Alan Simmons co-leader of the NZ Outdoors Party says tensions are at breaking point around New Zealand. “I cannot keep up with the calls and messages from New Zealanders who are extremely stressed, distressed and frustrated by dramatic changes imposed ...6 hours ago
Ardern says the role of planning for moving out of lockdown is not the Government's alone Businesses should plan how they will operate in an environment where intensive contact tracing would be needed post-lockdown, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said today. The Government was working on additional guidance for the move to Level 3 ...8 hours ago
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening. The following charts are based on numbers shared at the daily press conference. These may vary from the full day's numbers released in the Ministry of Health's spreadsheet of ...9 hours ago
Former editor of the Woman's Weekly, Nicky Pellegrino, bids farewell to the magazine that brought information and fun to generations of New Zealand women. All those stories. Gone. Stories about our politics, our health, our education, our aspirations. Stories about the houses we lived in and the gardens we grew, ...17 hours ago
As small businesses fight for their survival in the Covid-19 lockdown, it seems one of the country’s biggest retail landlords is not keen to share the pain. On the one side, you have Jonathan*. Jonathan runs a small business out of South Auckland’s Sylvia Park - New Zealand’s biggest mall. ...17 hours ago
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Not good enough the ‘incentives’ to work, high inflation and no net tax cuts have had a predictable outcome, it seems.
Personally I think it should be a scandal that someone in paid work should still have to go to WINZ for anything.
This article highlights the real costs that a crippling New Zealanders — rent and power bills. No point in having GST off fruit and veges or price controlled milks if you cannot afford the power to cook them with.
The sell down of our power companies, plus the changes to state housing, will only make things worse.
I wept when I read this. No surprise that we should come to this after 42years of neo liberal ideology (counting the years I spent under Thatcher when it was simply known as Thatcherism.) It was evil and cruel then, and changed a hard -fought -for better nation for the worse, and it is still doing its evil work in New Zealand in 2011.
Unfortunately it is aided in these times by John Key giving greed and avarice an acceptable ‘smiley’ face and a ‘positive’ spin.
How his followers love him as he spins his lies making it hunky dory and ‘respectable’ to be as selfish, thoughtless,ruthless and greedy as him. He makes them as fit for hell as himself and his party. Good job Key doesn’t believe in an afterlife , or maybe it isn’t, he might behave better towards his country and fellow citizen if he believed something nasty awaited him for his (and nacts) appalling actions and deceptions.
Apologies for the apparent emotion, but this story was too much, and I know there are hundreds more out there. Oh dear.
NO apology needed. I felt exactly the same when I read this. It was made worse by the reporter’s sly suggestion that some of the blame for this should have been placed on this poor woman “they began using tealight candles despite knowing it was dangerous”. In situations such as this sometimes risks have to be taken – through no fault of their own. No wonder many people just give up – worn out and beaten down by circumstance and callousness.
I wonder how many people know that WINZ have to see you for a food grant on the day you turn up. Sure, you might have to wait a bit, but they can’t send you away with an appointment time (though they will try to).
So, best to pay a portion of the necessary bill and apply for a food grant instead.
Meanwhile. I’m guessing she wouldn’t have had house and content insurance. And it won’t be the first time a landlord has ‘whacked’ a tennant for the replacement value of a house following a fire.
I didn’t know that! It’s useful information.. Meanwhile, that poor woman! How terrible for her… 🙁
“No wonder many people just give up – worn out and beaten down by circumstance and callousness.”
Exactly Rosy. I so admire this woman that she is still trying, but I can only imagine her exhaustion. How dare others on this planet ignore such suffering, including the thoughtless reporter and the insensitive and ghoulish WINZ.
Reading the article it sounds as if her last month’s power bill was $730 and the current one was $900. That is such a hefty sum to find.
Waikato can be cold and damp but perhaps there needs to be workshops for beneficiaries about using power affordably. It is so easy to turn on the heater, have long hot showers, but those two things mount up to a huge bill if not controlled. I wonder if they have a heat pump. Those things should have a meter box in them so they either stop or you turn down the thermostat to avoid being billed for unnecessary heating if they are going all the time.
How can she do all these things and remain sane? She should be able to draw a benefit for her maternal and family care while she studies for her qualifications.
Having a power bill that high is usually down to having a faulty hot water cylinder.
“perhaps there needs to be workshops for beneficiaries”
Except that she works two jobs and is in training, as well as caring for family. Where would she find the time? Perhaps her children should attend?
I agree with Millsy – this is a scandal. People shouldn’t have to make such choices in a rich country – and NZ is a rich country. Added to that she is in group that will be damned by others whatever she does (take your pick – Maori, solo mother, or the area she lives). I can’t imagine how hard it is for her to keep going.
Unfortunately Their reception at WINZ is the usual now a days, their staff have been gutted to bugger all they are over worked, underpaid, stressed to the max, and then they have US the beneficiary already stressed out due to circumstances beyond our control and this is the out come, or as I saw one day in a winz office a particularly rude and unhelpful staff member was ‘punched out’ . And I noticed here in Levin that one or two of the more ‘unhelpful’ staff members has disappeared and upon querying as to whether or not he’s been given the boot found out that he has been sent to CHCH. Now if all winz offices have done the same and sent the ‘worst’ of their staff to sort out CHCH I really do pity them. Puddin Bennett and co have got a lot to answer for.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10742995
Such an effective article against fracking, I had to check I really was reading the Herald.
Interesting that she challenges the astroturfers, and asks that commenters front-up with their real identities.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10743290
AN interesting timeline between request from Cameron Slater and the SIS meeting with Goff. The day after the supposed meeting with Goff and Slater is requesting the exact documents.
Suspicions of a setup anyone?
No set-up just a huge goof by Mr Goff.
An excellent article in todays Herald .Well worth reading. Sorry, don’t know how to direct link.
It shouldn’t be just the rich getting rich getting richer
By Brian Gaynor
5:30 AM Saturday Aug 6, 2011
He summarises with
‘A large number of government policies, including capital gains taxes, death duties, income tax, superannuation policies and government income transfers, play big roles as far as wealth and income inequality are concerned.’
If the National Business Review’s Rich List figures are accurate then there has been a dramatic concentration of wealth at the top end since the 1980s.
The increase in income inequality has been checked in recent years only through the introduction of Working for Families and lower investment returns for the wealthy.
There seem to be inconsistencies regarding the latter point as the National Business Review reports that its Rich List group is doing very well, yet the ministry argues that income inequality is contracting because the wealthy are experiencing low investment returns.
The most appropriate way to solve the wealth and income inequality problem is to find ways to raise the wealth and income of all New Zealanders.
This should be one of the main issues for debate in the upcoming general election campaign’.
Actually this is it
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10743233
I’ve learnt something new!
“The increase in income inequality has been checked in recent years only through the introduction of Working for Families and lower investment returns for the wealthy.” And now the screams of the ‘wealthy’ saying that WFF should be stopped. And all regulation to them getting richer, should be removed. And if this bunch of thieves get back into power just watch them do just what the rich want.
How about that capitalism eh! Is it working for you?
Reading Armstrong in granny you’d think the sky had fallen simply because labour was doing it’s job opposing rabid roy’s bill…….blatant one eyed reporting. This guys meant to be an experienced political reporter, what a fn joke.
I think Armstrong makes fair comments that are fairly plain outside devout the Labour circle. Labour have blocked all private members bills this year, that’s a terrible way to abuse democracy, in this case the only (outside) chance non government MPs have of getting anything through parliament.
And not only Labour.
Selfish, desperate and petty party politics shits on our democracy.
Reading Armstrong’s column one would wonder if he has ever seen Parliament before, let alone being one of the Herald’s senior political journalists who has made a career out of watching it.
It is a petty, stupid farce on the best of days. And that applies to all parties, usually excepting the Greens and the Maori Party.
John does a nice line in outraged on this one, getting his knickers in a real knot over something that is no more and no less abuse of Parliament than National’s overuse of urgency or Gerry Brownlee’s flat refusal to even stand up and answer a question during Question Time.
Perhaps John just found himself with nothing to write about this week, given that Audrey Young was writing the piece about Goff and the SIS.
oh Pete SS George, you really do try and spin. But what about the bloody NACTS abusing the parliamentary process through the use of urgency, to ram their bullshit policies through without debate??? Oh or is that ok?
When John Armstrong starts describing Labour’s antics as pitiful, pathetic, embarrassing and disgraceful, deemeaning itself and the institution of parliament, you know the sky really is falling.
What a sea-change for a once respectable political party!
No mention of the NACTs constant abuse of process and urgency to stuff NZ as far as possible, in case they lose the election and cannot get their, so called, mandate for burglery.
Seem to remember Nat’s fillibusters on occasions.
If Labour are doing their job they should not allow any more NACT policy to get through until after the election.
Mind you, if politicians were really representing us, they would be legislating for democracy.
The problem that Armstrong misses is that this is a private member’s bill in name only. It is in fact a government bill. They have just allowed a minor partner to run it so that they won’t lose any popularity of it. If it was a private members bill it would be a conscience vote and not a whipped vote.
Armstrong’s reporting is the disgrace here.
@KJT,
you avoid the whole thrust of Armstrong’s article – it’s not about the filibustering process. It’s about the shameful behaviour of Labour’s MPs after they got caught out.
Eric Roy’s authority as the Chairman of the Committee of the House was constantly being questioned and challenged.
Labour made repeated demands that Speaker Lockwood Smith be recalled to the chamber to rule on decisions made by Roy.
For the best part of an hour, Labour MPs raised timewasting points of order and forced a series of pointless votes to try to stop debate.
Trevor Mallard was ordered to leave the chamber but did not…
As Armstrong said: A clear line can be drawn between trying to delay a measure’s progress through Parliament by filibuster and trying to find and exploit gaps, loopholes and apparent anomalies in Parliament’s rules to subvert the will of the majority. Labour crossed that line.
Labour is, finally, doing their job. Trying to stop a bill that overrides the democratic decision of the students involved. People Labour represent.
National is not doing their job, which is to work in the best interests of the people they represent.
All, the nit picking and crap ignores the real story.
We are being betrayed by NACT. Who are heading us in the same direction as the USA.
John Roughan in Herald
Would Key Expose Israeli spies?
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10743239
Worth a read.
Last Para
I’d like to visit Arab countries one day. I’d like to trust this Government to protect the integrity of my passport. But I don’t.
Yes, a thoughtful and worthy analysis of the situation.
On the open mike post of the 3th of August I started a thread about the new video of the Architects and Engineers for 911 truth.
Two questions were posted and I promised to respond so here it is:
If they wanted to attack Iraq then why didn’t they do so instead of planning this highly risky (in case of being found out) attack?
The issue of course is much more complex then that. First of all they did not want to attack just Iraq but to have an enemy they could call upon whenever the reached the next stage of gaining dominance in another one of the most oil rich areas on the planet the Caspian basin and the south Mediterranean countries. One book that is very enlightening is the “Grand Chess board” written by Zbignew Brezinski and I greatly advise those of you interested and inclined to read rather than watch to go out get the book and read it.
For those of you who like to watch videos here is the link to a presentation of Michael Ruppert.
Michael Ruppert is an ex Los Angeles cop who broke the CIA drug dealing scandal and who presents the case for 911 and what motivated the perpetrators to plan and execute 911. THis presentation is a couple of years old and at the time Michael still adhered to the LIHOP (Let it happen on purpose) scenario but he has since deserted that for the MIHOP (Make it happen on purpose) scenario.
The presentation is a whopping 2.5 hours but he is a very entertaining intelligent raconteur and the connections he makes with the finance world, their drug dealing and robber baron empire building methods are very well supported with evidence and very compelling as presents the evidence as he would do to a prosecutor to make his case in a crime.
It pays to remember that John Key at the years leading up to 911 was at the peak of his game and that Merrill Lynch was too. They were involved in most of the financial scandals he mentions in the years leading up to 911 and while that does not mean that John Key was necessarily involved in these scandals he did earn his name of the “Smiling Assassin” when he fired many of his colleagues in the aftermath of the collapse of one of the biggest hedge funds LTCM in which Merrill Lynch lost billions of dollars. So to think that John Key was an innocent dolphin swimming with sharks is naive to say the least.
The other issue was the free fall speed of WTC 7 and I found two videos back of two scientists David Chandler and prof. Jones who confronted NIST in the peer to peer review stage of the WTC 7 investigation which took 7 years to complete and they forced NIST to admit that during 2.5 sec (or thereabouts) the building did indeed come down in freefall speed which begs the question. How did the material of at least 8 floors disappear into nothing to allow for the building to come down in freefall speed.
There is only one answer to that question. Explosives were used to bring it down!!
Do you really think the US government and intelligence services have the competence and ability to organise such a complex conspiracy. And keep it secret.
The engineering behind what happened and how the twin towers collapsed is easily understood.
It was due to a plane hitting them.
We were talking about WTC 7, the third building that collapsed on that day but for your information steel framed buildings do not collapse due to a carbon fire. Not even with planes hitting them.
Conspiracy theorists like to say “no other steel framed building has ever fallen down from a fire, some of which have raged for much longer than the twin towers did”.
How many other steel framed buildings, of that height, have had two planes flown into them deliberately?
Rare earth man,
Only two but the third building is what we are talking about. And about the theorist part: Buildings do not collapse breaking all three laws of motion. Impossible. So what we want is a new investigation. Has nothing to do with theory.
Engineers cannot be 100% certain exactly what was going on inside the building at the time.
To more easily express it in terms of alternate universes, maybe there was only a 1 in 1,000,000 combination of factors that lead to the building collapsing in the way it did. We happen to be in that universe. In all of the other universes where it didn’t collapse, or collapsed in a different fashion, there is no conspiracy theory. But we happen to live in this one.
Just because something is very very unlikely to happen, when it does happen that doesn’t mean there must have been some other factor that caused it.
LOL,
That is idiotic L. even by your standards. You are willing to accept a 1,000,000 factors just so long as they are different from the one obvious one: 19 Arabs had no access to WTC 7 and the only building to collapse in a controlled demolition fashion did so because a 1,000,000 factors other the OCT “conspired” to do so!!!
Here are 1500 Engineers and Architects who have an issue with that!
Oh, and by the way Fukushima is still killing and we are still importing foodstuffs from Japan!!! I hope like hell it isn’t beef.
Once again, you’re simply saying that the collapse of the building was so unlikely for the given reasons, that it must have been something else that caused it.
Unlikely things happen all the time, like people winning lotto (or no one winning lotto for 16 weeks in a row so the jackpot gets to 30m), or hurricanes being set on a bullseye path towards New Orleans.
About 1 guy winning 35 or more lotteries in one minute at the same time happened on that day. L, you fuckwit.
I’m going to have a Siesta so count me out for the rest of the afternoon. Jeez.
I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.
As I understand the NIST explanation the support for the building was compromised in the bottom half of the building. That is, there was no support holding the building up.
It is natural that it would free fall while there is nothing holding it up.
It falls in three phases. A slower initial phase as the support disappears, a free fall phase as that which is not supported falls, and a final slow phase as that which is falling starts to meet resistance from all the rubble.
On the motivations, you still haven’t adressed my point. If they were after a casus belli, then the AQ attacks provided it, and indeed, they went on to use the attacks in a clumsy fashion. Getting involved themselves in the way truthers allege would only add little at great risk.
The question is not ‘did neocons or whomever want an event that they could use to justify things they wanted to do’. The question is ‘why would they need to rig 3 buildings to blow up when AQ had already hijacked commercial airliners and flown them into buildings.’
As I said before, why launch the most risky and audacious false flag op in history, when a genuine flag is being waved in the form of the most audacious terror attack in history?
I’m not seeing what extra value was gained for the enormous risk to have been worth it. And I’m not seeing the ground work laid.
By that I mean that the propaganda efforts, both before and after the attack were clumsy. After the attack the propaganda worked long enough to get the job done, but if they were really in on it, it wouldn’t have been so clumsy. They would have already laid the groundwork so that people automatically thought ‘saddam’ when people heard ‘AQ’. As it turned out they had to go and try and create those links and work them into their previous narrative based on WMDs. They pulled it off, but it wasn’t as smooth as one would expect of people that had known what was going to happen.
PB,
I can see from the time it took you you basically responded based on your believes and you are entitled to them.
I just spend 2.5 hours watching the doco again and I suggest you do the same. Added to that I spend another hour watching both Chandler and Jones in their response to the NIST report and what they think about the “phase” hypothesis.
You on the other hand think that buildings of 47 floors collapsing into a pile of dust as the result of office fires within 5.7 seconds is reasonable which begs the question; do you still dare to go into steel framed high rises now that you know that simple office fires can bring them down into a pile of dust within 5.7 seconds?
So for now let’s agree to disagree and if and only if you are prepared like me to seriously study links I give you like I study yours I think I’m going to stop responding to you because it seems like a huge waste of time to me
It wasn’t a ‘simple office fire’. 25% of the structure over several floors had been scooped out by debris from WTC1. The fire burned, uncontrolled, for several hours.
As did the fire in this Madrid, Much hotter and much longer but no collapse of the steel frame. The WTC 7 walls did not even disappear and the damage to adjacent buildings was much more extensive but they did not collapse into a pile of dust in 5.7 seconds
Yes yes, Madrid is always dragged out.
What truthers don’t mention is that the Madrid building, or at least the section of it that didn’t collapse, was steel reinforced concrete. So not the same at all.
The top section, which didn’t have the concrete, did collapse.
plenty of related detail here:
http://www.debunking911.com/firsttime.htm
All three fucking buildings were twice reinforced with fucking steel. The twin towers both on the inside and the outside and WTC throughout the whole fucking building. You fuckwit.
Is fucking steel fucking concrete fucking fuckity fuckishy fuck fuck fuck?
You compare steel buildings to steel reinforced concrete buildings, and suggest they should act the same. Not my problem.
Please come up with any other instance of a steel framed building collapse due to fire.
We have been using steel framed buildings for more than half a century, and they have suffered many fires.
You should be able to point to some other building collapses due to fire, right?
travellerev is correct IMO. There is nothing to suggest that a steel framed building is more likely to collapse due to fire vs a building based on steel reinforced concrete. Or vice versa.
Its as irrelevant as saying that one had a sign hanging outside and the other didn’t, and that makes all the difference.
The McCormick Center in Chicago.
Sight and Sound Theater in Pennsylvania.
Steel framed buildings, caught fire, collapsed.
The Madrid building was steel framed. The bottom half was steel reinforced concrete. Top half collapsed, bottom half didn’t.
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/mccormick.html
Please be aware the McCormick building collapse was a roof collapse. You can also see in photos on the net that large parts of the roof structure framework collapsed but remained intact.
That is, the steel structures were not disintegrated by the fire
Re: the Madrid fire, I can see references to parts of the building having come down, but that most of the structure stayed upright (not just the bottom half) and had to be deliberately demolished at the cost of millions of euros.
But it remains, fires being hot enough to make the steel unable to bear the weight. That point is demonstrated.
Add to the fact that a skyscraper is one hell of a lot heavier than a roof…
Got seven in 10 seconds on Jstor..
Engineering. Steel framed buildings fire resistance.
Of course a reinforced concrete building is less likely to collapse due to fire than a steel frame. Concrete does not weaken in the same heat range and insulates the steel reinforcing from heat.
http://www.imoa.info/moly_uses/moly_grade_stainless_steels/architecture/fire_resistance.php
“Under continuous loading, carbon steel is usually limited to a maximum temperature of 700F (370C). (3, 4) By the time steel reaches 930F (500C), it has lost about 30% of its tensile strength. Unprotected weathering steel loses about half of its tensile strength above 1000F (539C)”.
Average temperature in a house fire, WITHOUT JET FUEL ACCELERANT, 593 C (1100 degrees F) for 27 minutes. (Victoria University Engineering Dept. Fire resistance studies).
Saying that planes could not have bought the world trade centre down is nonsense.
Engineers who studied the construction afterwards concluded that, even though a plane crashing into the building was one of the design criteria, the buildings, as built, would not have been able to withstand a crash at the actual speed and size that occurred.
Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story though.
I also read a thing from about 2004 or so, linked from here, I think it was a popular mechanics website.
The article said that in W7 there was a fuel pump leading to the basement high up into the upper stories and that this likely continued to pump fuel into the fire for 5-6 hours after the debris first struck it.
I have no idea if that’s the case or not, but if it is, then it really wasn’t a “simple office fire”.
NIST itself stated the fuel had no impact on the collapse and popular mechanics is the most shamed and debunked magazine for 911.
“popular mechanics is the most shamed and debunked magazine for 911.”
You mean the magazine that conspiracy theorists heap the most derision on.
That could be because it was Benjamin Chertoff nephew of the Chertoff of NSA and x-ray airport machine infamy wrote the bloody articles. And he wrote a bunch of unsupported crap easily debunked.
liquid fuels cannot burn hot enough in air to destroy steel structured frameworks.
Sure, a puddle of fuel in an open space may not get hot enough.
But in an enclosed space it’s possible the heat could have been amplified. Probably still not enough to melt steel, but I can imagine it could weaken it more than would be expected from flame in a pure pool.
I’m not claiming to be an expert or know more than the experts, but no one knows for 100% sure exactly what conditions inside the building were like during the whole drama.
Enclosed spaces have extraordinarily limited air supply – fires would have largely gone out. In the footage of the building you can see that the fires suffer from a lack of oxygen – they are not ‘bright’ or ‘raging’ or ‘inferno’-like. They are taking their sweet time, struggling along for air for a lot of it.
Blast furnaces are enclosed spaces that have air fed in at the bottom.
The heat in a blast furnace is much hotter than you can get from just a pile of burning material, and yet it still gets enough air to continue burning. In fact the act of combustion in a blast furnace helps to draw more air into the chamber.
yes, blast furnaces are often pressure fed with pure oxygen to smelt iron etc.
That does not happen in a skyscraper fire. Fire proof doors and walls prevent just that effect.
Try burning a newspaper inside a closed oven and see how well it goes.
Bringing up blast furnaces is simply to illustrate that the physical environment in which a fire is burning can greatly increase heat while not depriving it of oxygen.
Clearly an office building is not akin to a modern industrial blast furnace that uses pure oxygen force-fed into the fire. But the concept of a blast furnace has existed for several thousand years.
But Lanth, those kinds of environments typically have to be designed to feed oxygen to a fire.
Buildings are deliberately designed to do just the opposite: to impede feeding a fire.
If a physical structure resembling a blast furnace exists, it doesn’t matter whether it was deliberately constructed by a man, or created by pure random chance of structural debris falling down in the right configuration.
Note I’m not suggesting it was a blast furnace, I’m just giving you an example of a physical structure that results in hotter than normal temperatures while also not exhausting it’s oxygen supply.
“Buildings are deliberately designed to do just the opposite: to impede feeding a fire.”
Buildings are also designed not to have huge chunks missing out of them due to planes crashing into them, too.
The Twin Towers were built and designed to withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707.
(But not WTC 7 of course).
meh. When I think of a fire in a skyscraper, I can’t but notice liftshafts and emergency stairwells. Assuming all the doors are shut, cool, but if they were breached by debris or opened by people evacuating, there’s a pretty strong air feed.
Shoot – when I worked venue security and there were 2k people in an unventilated auditorium, we’d open the lower and upper level doors to cool the place down and the windspeed got very noticable.
Yes they can and have.
Deepwater horizon for one!
Steel loses stiffness at well below melting point anyway.
Which is why wooden framed buildings can often hold up longer in a fire, than a similar steel structure.
True 🙂
So where are the cases of steel framed skyscraper collapses? 😈
Don’t forget with Deepwater that you had the small effect of massive oceanic tidal forces pushing the thing over, along with several large explosions, explosives onsite, and not just a simple fire 🙂
KJT,
ROFL
In that case, large areas of the top half of the building should have stayed largely structurally intact in big recognisable ‘blocks’ and floors as we saw with the CTV building collapse.
It didn’t. The building was pulverised into fine dust and small debris. How did that happen to the top half of the building from a structural failure in the bottom half of the building?
Potential whys, off the top of my head in 20s: higher death toll, more psychological impact, deeper and longer lasting political reverberations, additional leverage with international allies, destruction of event evidence, destruction of other materials on sites, replacement insurance pay out,…
Looks like aklanders might have themselves a waterfront.
http://eyeonauckland.com/2011/08/karanga-plaza/
Looks nice.
Wow. Having grown up in Auckland I’m quite shocked to see something good happen there.
Iceland Revolution Project – Interview with Birgitta Jónsdóttir
I’ve decided that labour have been defeated using a rope a dope tactic,
The Govt have let them flail away fillibusting all year to prevent the vsm in the knowledge that that they could use procedure to allow the vsm to pass before the end of the cycle, (which is what we saw the other day)
All this has prevented more important and perhaps popular labour members bills from been drawn from the ballott which I suspect was the end game,
I’d have to say labour have been out manouvered on this one, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
It’s hard to know if National and Act deliberately played this out or eventually got fed up and decided to deal with it.
In any case it certainly looks like Labour out maneuvered themselves and also out maneuvered sensible democratic process.
iPredict can perhaps lend a little insight here.
When the contract for VSM passing before the election was first launched, it was up around 60%. It stayed around 40% for quite a long time, all while Labour was successfully filibustering it.
On Wednesday morning the stock spiked up from 20% to 40%, before eventually spiking around 95% prior to 2pm when parliament actually sat.
Clearly there was insider trading on this past Wednesday. Those same insiders may have been pumping the stock back as early as when it was first launched.
I guess the iPredict admin could probably investigate this – if the accounts involved in the recent insider trading were also the accounts that held up the price when the contract first announced, it would point towards this being the plan all along. Of course you can also just say that when they first bought up the stocks there were just hopeful of the outcome or expecting the filibuster to fail and didn’t specifically know that it would be broken in the way that it was.
iPredict is not a fair and transparent market. Sorta like the NYSE.
Isn’t it just amusing when the supposed party of free speech whines about someone exercising it?
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/head-student-body-urged-resign-after-abuse-4340774
He should’ve told him to “get raped”, they’re ok with that.
ACT, failing at classical liberalism since 1994.
“Whining” is also a part of free speech.
Being President of an association carries responsibilities. Acting (and posting) in a manner that reflects badly on the organisation can have consequences.
Except of course the little fact that ACT pretty much treated Alistair Thompson’s comments entirely differently, despite his position /smug
And you’ve entirely missed the point too, but that’s completely unsurprising given your extensive prior history of moronic posts.
Well, if you’re right, Pete, then there’ll be an election in a couple of months anyway.
w00t:
http://tvnz.co.nz/technology-news/nasa-finds-fresh-proof-water-mars-4340213
Not that I think such environments would be conducive to anything but extremophiles, on top of the little problem of “energy sources” required to keep cellular metabolism kicking over. This does however make terraforming possibly more viable 😛
The Solar Wind at Mars
To successfully terraform Mars you’d need to get a magnetosphere there and that’s looking problematical at best. My own guess is that you’d need to get Mars’ mass up to Earth standard or better.
Or you’d just keep replenishing the atmosphere with dirty snowballs as the rate of loss is so slow that it takes geological time frames to strip the atmosphere. Though the real problem is actually the lack of plate tectonics which in geological time frames stuffs up the carbon cycle slightly 😛
Along with genetically tweaking everything to put up with slightly higher background levels of radiation.
Of course the more current problems make it all a bit of a pipe dream at present…
I’m pretty sure this is what cell phones are for.
Dude, the wavelengths for cellphone radio only interact very, very, very weakly with biological tissue. The sort I’m taking about is standard cosmic background xray and gamma (and beta) radiation kicked out from the sun’s nuclear fusion processes + extrasolar sources that the earth’s magnetosphere shields us partly from. Combined with a nice thick atmosphere of course.
With a bit of tweaking to up-regulate DNA repair or splicing in relevant enzymes from radiation tolerant organisms, it would lead to plants (or rather algae) capable of surviving on Mars after initial terraforming steps, such as thickening the atmosphere.
There have been some really good doco’s on sky, one I watched was about storms on earth and other planets A force 5 huricane is just a gentle breeze on Jupiter where they have a storm thats been raging for hundreds of years. Or the nice Methane rain on a moon or two
Nats did not have a mandate to raise GST, or change kiwisaver, predicated on raising savings!
What! People with savings had value wiped out by GST rise and changes to kiwisaver make it less advantageous!
yet the mainstream media love lying to us, or letting National talking heads lie to our face.
Request Ignored by SIS
There’s been a lot written about the possibility that Israeli spies gained false New Zealand passports and whether Phil Goff was briefed on the situation by the head of the SIS, Warren Tucker…
There are only two dots to join here – the cetacean and Joky Hen.
According to TVNZ news Goff’s explanation appears to be correct.
http://tvnz.co.nz/politics-news/sis-boss-admits-no-record-goff-receiving-spy-briefing-4340822
Of course, all the RWNJ’s who have opined on The Standard over the last couple of days have suddenly gone silent.
@jackal 2.25pm
I agree with everything in your link,”Request Ignored by SIS” including the word ‘besmirch’ which I was using earlier in relation to this unsavoury situation. ‘Besmirching Phil Goff’ is just what the Nats under john key are trying to do via that misguided being Cameron Slater.
They used this tactic to bring down Winston Peters in 2008 and through him tried to get to Helen Clark. john key was aided and abetted in this by rodney hide and the msm,not to mention simon power later.
I know this because I recorded every TV news report/interview/newspaper clipping/utterance/ etc. that I could for 18 months so that I had proof of the manipulation that I could see unfolding before me.(I knew nothing of Winston P. at the time just noticed Guyon Espiner and Barry Soper doing an untruthful hit job when Peters was speaking with John McCain and followed it from there.)
Here we go again , I thought, as I watched this SIS story unfold and then read Andrea Vance, subtly tilting the story towards besmirching Goff and whitewashing her beloved key on Stuff today
However I have to say that key has not got hide (the arch besmircher) with him this time so I think he has had to use slater which might not be so successful. (Act are really good at defaming others in order to get into power. In fact in order to get into power I think they will stop at very little- quite ruthless.No wonder the trickle down effect from such people creates such a horrible horrible world to live in.)
I really hope the truth comes out and that key,his party and all who sail in her are shown up for who and what they really are- selfish, manipulating, power hungry, robbers of reputation and integrity (having none themselves) and worthless robber barrenz (cretainly not a government of any merit) of New Zealand.
PS also agree with logie97-“there are only two dots to join here …..”
I completely agree with your summation there seeker. It’s exactly the same tactics, which must have a compliant media that does not dig any deeper than a scratch on the surface. I’m optomistic this time re Phil Goff that there’s a stronger alternative media presence, the public is becoming more aware of such propaganda and that the perpetrators have overreached themselves. It would be good to see some documentation re the Peter’s besmirch, there’s at least a documentary to be made there. The part Owen Glenn played needs special attention.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/siege-of-gaza-has-become-a-moral-blockade-of-israel-1.371516
“Imagine Living Without Any Protection”
Siege of Gaza has become a moral blockade of Israel
by YITZHAK LAOR Haaretz, July 5, 2011
Israel is indeed connected to the centers of power in the world. The predictions of a tsunami at present seem to be exaggerated, but nevertheless, before the victory ball, it is worth remembering – the Israeli occupation is the longest military occupation of modern times. The subjects of the occupation in its two forms – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – live under a brutal regime that few other occupations allowed themselves, without any law – the blockade and the morbidity rate among children, the roadblocks and the arbitrariness of the soldiers, breaking in to people’s homes (imagine your children being awakened at night by the shouting of armed men, breaking down doors and blinding them with flashlights; imagine living without any protection ), the prolonged occupation, a disaster for us and for the Palestinians – because Israel enjoys the support of the West.
The settlements have turned the occupation into something insolvable, at least in the next few decades, so that the occupation will not merely raise another generation of Israeli troopers, egged on by the rabbis of the rabble, but also a third and fourth generation of Palestinians without another kind of life.
The fact that the Gaza Strip has become an international symbol of cruelty is yet further proof of the stupidity of our leaders. Operation Cast Lead and the blockade of Gaza – both of them with broad national consensus – have turned Gaza into a symbol that no longer needs coordination on the part of the Palestinians. Israeli democracy appears as it actually is: In the name of the majority (six million Jews ) it is permitted to do to the minority (five million, in Israel and the territories ) almost anything.
The national minority in Israel has the right to vote but it does not have television of its own ; it has health insurance but also heavy unemployment and infant mortality rates that are much higher than among the Jews (8.3 compared with 3.7 for every 1000 births ). Tel Aviv, which sells itself to the world as a liberal city, is the only metropolis in the West that does not have a Muslim population. Its “coolness” is racist – the 20 percent minority does not appear at all in the life of the city. And it is advisable for propagandists not to point to Jaffa as proof of diversity – Jaffa with its yuppie immigration is a perfect example of apartheid carried out by “secular” and “liberal” Tel Aviv.
Official propaganda, too, will not help. The more pressure Israel brings to bear on centers in the West – countries and media giants – the more the wave against it grows, because the hatred of the occupation and of Israeli racism springs from the knowledge that what Israel does is funded by the West, gets assistance from the West, and from connections with the focuses of power – as a living memorial to colonialism. There is nothing better than the way in which the Greeks thwarted the Gaza aid flotilla’s departure to reinforce this. It was not just Greece that thwarted it.
The coalitions that are being organized against Israel in the West include members of the left. There are also many others and not all of them are humanistic. They are not always Jew-lovers. These coalitions will continue to grow as long as the western political community presents itself as “helpless” in the face of Israeli obduracy. Of course it is not helpless, and when it has actual interests, it is capable of behaving in typically western barbaric fashion, as it is doing now in Libya and in Iraq.
The loathing of Israel fits in with the growing anti-establishment wrath, within the context of politics where there is no difference between the parties. The protests in Greece are an example of lack of faith of this kind, which does not spring from the Israeli occupation but from the powerlessness of the masses to influence what is taking place in their countries – economics and war.
Israel is merely one subject out of several that the political – or the apolitical – complaining is busy with. Very few people join flotillas, but many more participate in sending them and even more internalize their oppression. The complaining and mumbling is part of a burgeoning anti-establishment consensus. The record of what is always known as “the hypocritical politicians” has been joined by the hypocritical attitude toward Israeli cruelty.
It is not surprising therefore that the blockade of Gaza is getting tighter in the form of a moral blockade of Israel. Slowly but surely, in a world filled with injustice and war crimes and racism toward minorities and migrants, Israel has learned, during decades of stupidity, how to become the symbol of injustice and these crimes. We are no longer the embodiment of progress, as we were trumpeted as being for a long time, but the exact opposite. And this is truly just the beginning.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/siege-of-gaza-has-become-a-moral-blockade-of-israel-1.371516
How do they print this in Israel and get away with it???
How do they print this in Israel and get away with it???
The same way that diligent and honest reporters like Seymour Hersh survive in the United States, and the likes of Gordon Campbell and Jon Stephenson survive in New Zealand—because the government simply ignores them as far as possible. No need to worry about intelligent and informed critics when you have a guaranteed faithful government mouthpiece like the Jerusalem Post—or the New York Post or the New Zealand Herald to support you no matter what crimes you commit, or what stupid and offensive statements you make after a massacre in Norway.
By the way, Haaretz is where you can read many other great Israeli writers, such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.
I/S tweets:
The Trident programme was excluded from the UK defence review while conventional forces were reduced and public austerity measures were implemented. Priorities like this do my head in.
Hiroshima Day, an apt time to question Trident
I remembered Hiroshima Day yesterday, how many others did? (I know you did Rosy)…
It still matters!
Given that we are lumbered with the “dirge” that is now our national song, it is interesting that the two most important words in the first verse are “the” and “of”.
Have a listen next time and it won’t matter if it is a highly trained opera singer or a wailing two bit celebrity they will emphasise those two words. Seems we will have to get the Minister of Education to order that the song be taught correctly at primary school. It’s going to be a long process.
… at thy feet,
in THE bonds OF love we meet.
😀