An fawning interview of Marc Weldon and ensuing article by Matt Nippert.
Noted his comment about ‘wild claims made on left-wing blogs that the axing of Campbell Live was orchestrated by Beehive,’
An obsequious piece of writing.
she has made a living buying other peoples shows and putting nz in the name. our flag will probably be USA flag with nz in tiny letters somewhere. she will get a damehood within 12 months on the basis that her flag work is contribution to the community.
Very disappointing for Matt Nippert. No mention of the fact that a large number of the shows commissioned by TV3 are from Julie Christie’s old company Eyeworks. It was sold to Warner’s but I have yet to see any report that says Julie Christie no longer has any financial interest in that company.
The Auckland mayoralty is shaping up to be a vote splitting lolly scramble if silly old Lenny doesn’t call it a day and ease the way for Phil Goff-Off. Williamson won’t be impressed to hear former Telecom Boss lady Theresa Gattung is being mooted as a real right-wing contender. Of course it could be spin to make Judy’s buddy Maurice Williamson look more appealing. Plenty of voters will remember the dirty tactic’s employed by Gattung to hold a monopoly on telecommunications for Telesuckie.
“* On the need for regulation:
This is pretty much a manufactured grievance. You know that’s the case because the only people marching in the streets about it are our competitors, not customers.”
I marched off and never been back to Telecom/Spark thanks to Ms Gattung. Cunliffe done some good work unbundling the monopoly she held over the market.
Perhaps we should look on the bright side. Theresa set a new bar for honesty and transparency. Let’s have more of Theresa-style corporate truth telling
More MSM talk up articles on Amy Adams and domestic violence. Nacts & DV
What’s the NAct agenda here? Shoring up the female vote? Amy making a run for party leader? Covering other bad news with this campaign? Hiding a Nact party internal problem with DV?
Why isn’t the media asking the hard questions- but Minister your government has-
– removed the Bristol clauses in the DV legislation
– removed reporting of DV assaults from the police statistics
– failed to check if the police are using “police safety orders” (bad name if ever there was one) to minimise arrests and keep law n’ order stats down
-failed to fund legal aid in the family court
-failed to fund rape centres and refuges
-redone child support on flimsy or no evidence and taken money away from the children’s needs
-presided over the roastbusters
– did the malaysian diplomat deal
– not come clean about the why some NAct MP’s have left parliament
-uses WINZ to hound the parent looking after the kids
all of which covers up or ratifies the attitudes associated with the violence.
So Minister, Why are you suddenly broadcasting concern and suddenly think you need to do something? What are your real motives since past performance suggests your lot couldn’t care less.
Or is it that the cost they tout $14B, means Nact would like to remove all this from the public funding and make it how it used to be 66 years ago – something that went on behind closed doors without interference from others
well said…
removed funding of high school programmes for girls that resulted in higher self esteem and reporting of abuse…
womens refuge struggle for funding so relying on gaffe by hells pizza to survive
Thanks Tracey – I was sure I had missed plenty too. MSM just keeps running these articles without a single question – just like they were Amy’s publicity machine. The public deserves a lot more from the MSM.
Nor are comments ever opened so they can say this.
Personally I think they may be trying to move all this out of the public sphere of intervention so they don’t have to spend any state funds on it.
Cue a few underfunded providers who have whole families referred to them but no court or police action possible and ultimately no DPB type welfare – people have to stay in the relationships or starve on the street – more the NAct mindset.
Now imagine what that would look like if they included private debt. And no matter what they include in the visuals none of it is payable which means that the private banks will have an eternity of bludging off of everyone else unless we change the system.
Total money owed is roughly in the region of the world’s total GDP. In other words all money is created as debt and it can never be paid back. The banking cartel own the planet, I wish people would wake up.
Titirangi kauri tree owner kickstarts debate with environmental application.
Yep those incompetent council resources consent officers again, don’t notice the Kauri trees in the first place should be preserved, then grant the application, than back track and the owner verbally agrees to preserve them, only to change their mind and then go to remove the SEA status completely and not only on that property but others the developer owns.
Oh to be a developer in Auckland and buy cheap sites cos they are protected, put in consents to remove the protection led by 70 page proposal that fails to mention the mature Kauris and Rimu’s on the site, and then bobs your uncle the council will of course agree to clear the site, to put in double garaging and a 2 story residence cos too much hassle to build around the trees who they failed to notice in the first place or even understand why they should be preserved.
If anyone notices, agree to preserve them. buy time and then go back to environment court with hanky in hand and a dodgy deal with council who will sign anything to get one of their bad decisions through, crying what a victim they are.
I would like to see more penalty for those that manipulate the reports in the first place and more accountability to council for not noticing these very disturbing occurrences to by pass the district plan often ironically being spear headed by their own officers who seem to want to remove all protection from Auckland so that they have even less to do and more power in the process.
so Lenihan is basically arguing that if the protest hadn’t happened they would have removed the trees despite the SEA status and then because the site was cleared they could apply to have the SEA status removed. This puts him pretty high on the scale of evil developers IMO and he now has zero credibility or trustworthyness.
He also appears to have forgotten that the protest had nationwide support.
+1, it’s as if he’s learnt nothing over the whole debacle too. Maybe he just wants to show that he really is right, but to go through all of this again is either stupidity or pigheadedness.
You might like to read the actual submission #851 which was made in January 2014. Google “Unitary Plan Submissions”. This is a submission to the Unitary Plan – it is being heard by a panel of independent Commissioners. It has hit the news now because the hearings are in progress and this submitter has turnd up to speak to his submission.
It is not – repeat not, a Council officer initiative.
The council appoint the independent commissioners. They council read and review the reports and make a recommendation to the independent commissioners.
The independent commissioners are not independent at all, they are appointed by the council.
The indépendant commissioners practically always follow the recommendations of council.
The environment court practically always follows the submission of the council. The council when it goes to environment court, just appoint expensive lawyers to defend their bad decisions which are paid by the ratepayer.
The environment court seldom decline an application. As an applicant you are virtually guaranteed success as long as you can get the council to ‘support’ it.
Any applicant has an over 99% chance of success, all they have to do is get the council to support an application.
Therefore it puts the council officers in a huge position of power and open to abuse as there is no real independent checks and balances. Often it is hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of profit for some developer or industry – all in the hands of officers who probably earn $60k.
Can you imagine in a ‘real’ court that convicts 99% of people – it would be called a Kangaroo court.
And that folks is the Council and Environment court process.
So you are saying that developers bribe Council officers to get favourable reports? Seeing that most reasonable sized developments would have several officers – a Development Engineer, a Traffic Engineer, perhaps an Arborist and/or an Ecologist, plus the Planner who puts it all together and makes a recommendation, are you saying they are all bribed? Then there is the Senior Planner who reviews and possibly signs off the report for the Commissioner, or if it is for a hearing, then a more senior Manager reviews and clears the hearing report. They are all bribed too are they? Then the Commissioners – just one if it is a Duty Commissioner, or up to 4 including a Local Board member if it is a hearing. That is a lot of cash to be chucking around.
Do you actually have any proof of this – you know like “evidence”? I am sure Penny Bright would be intrested in evidence – she has been working away full time for the last 7 years to uncover corruption at Council and come up with zip.
This is a good opinion piece on TPPA especially for sending to those who don’t know much about the topic.
Ross Henderson: TPPA deserves a transparent discussion
“You could argue – the Government has argued – that no one’s seen the detail yet and this is all scare-mongering. But why can’t they give us a simple guarantee that they won’t sign up to a deal which increases the cost of healthcare and threatens our power as a nation to make our own laws?”
“But why can’t they give us a simple guarantee that they won’t sign up to a deal which increases the cost of healthcare and threatens our power as a nation to make our own laws?”
hmmm. For a start, I’m not willing to trust this govt on anything they say and do. But more importantly when did the debate shift to, it’s ok to sign if we get these concessions? Isn’t the whole point that it’s a secret agreement and we can’t know what concessions to ask for other than the ones that we know about because of leaks? Shouldn’t we be opposing secret trade agreements on principle?
Why can’t globalisation be done transparently anyway?
Why can’t globalisation be done transparently anyway?
Lack of any effective mechanisms to ensure democratic accountability at a global level is why.
For instance, why is it not the role of the UNDP to broker these trade deals? Why have they been shut out of the process? If you wanted true global trade, what organisation is better placed to regulate it?
While has long been fashionable to sneer at the UN, most of it’s shortcomings have been imposed on it by the dominant big powers determined to prevent it from ever impinging on their nation state sovereignty.
From this perspective it’s fairly plain that these deals like the TPP have much less to do with globalisation and open trade, and much more to do with entrenching corporate advantage.
Sorry, but you’ll never get support from me for a world government. Imagine Key’s lot in charge with legitimacy 🙁 Think global, act local*, we should be devolving. Globalisation is horse shit. My question was a bit rhetorical, designed to point to the Emperor’s new clothes. As you say, globalisation is all about making a few people rich, and is nothing to do with open trade. Transparency would severely impact on their ability to do business. What’s stunning is that so many people are still complacent about it.
*CC, PO and probably the GFCs all suggest we should be trading locally not globally.
That’s pretty much the same logic local warlords would have used against the rise of the nation state; and abandons the global stage to those actors big and powerful enough to act upon it. Big finance, big military and big data.
Imagine Key’s lot in charge with legitimacy
The one thing worse than bad government is no government. Unless you really are an anarchist who doesn’t believe in governance at all. In which case you may have been on the wrong forum all these years. 🙂
Almost all the most intractable challenges humanity faces are global in nature. Their solutions will be too. I personally think some form of global governance is inevitable; the real challenge will be the struggle over who controls it and in whose interests.
Nor is there any reason to argue that global governance means the demise of the devolved local forms either. No more than for instance, the existence of the nation state implies the end of all city council’s.
I don’t agree with that red – the solutions will come locally rather than globally because trying to enact a global solution (if one could even be invented) to each community just is not possible imo.
We are at/near the ‘top’ in terms of globalisation – all downhill from here imo – mainly due to the effects of running out of cheap energy and the extra energy being put into the system as climate warming continues.
I’m aware my view probably is out of synch with most lefties around here .. and by this I’m really not trying to disrespect why most people feel like this.
For so many of us we feel that the governments are bad enough … we can only dread how much more frustrating and difficult a global government might be. I’ve a lot of sympathy with that.
But I do believe that the world entered a permanent new phase when it entered the first round of globalisation, based on coal and steam engines, in the mid-1800’s. We are now close to the end of the second round, that has been based on oil and electronics; and all the upheaval that this ending may imply.
But regardless of how much cheap energy we’ve so profligately wasted – along the way we also gained a whole raft of knowledge, technologies and ways of looking world that will prove durable. Yes the hugely wasteful form of globalisation that is currently on it’s last legs will fail – but this does not preclude a new form arising in it’s place.
For instance, let me imagine a third round of globalisation driven by solar and bio-mimicry. Such a thing might be possible; and with it the still unsolved challenges of just and democratically global governance will still be a live issue.
The further the civilization develops, though, the less it questions the validity of the basic ideas themselves, and the urban environment is a critical factor in making this happen. By limiting, as far as possible, the experiences available to influential members of society to those that fit the established architecture of thought, urban living makes it much easier to confuse mental models with the universe those models claim to describe, and that confusion is essential if enough effort, enthusiasm, and passion are to be directed toward the process of elaborating those models to their furthest possible extent.
so for me the idea that the “whole raft of knowledge, technologies and ways of looking world that will prove more durable” fit with JMG’s description of civilization, in that that ideal described above is derived from the structure of the civilization itself (mental model) and thus supports the notion of that civilization – rather than it is an inherent truth.
Unless you really are an anarchist who doesn’t believe in governance at all.
It’s not that they don’t believe in governance but that they don’t believe in a separate entity called government. In an anarchist society it’s the people making collective decisions and rules. In other words, the people are the government. Otherwise known as democracy.
I personally think some form of global governance is inevitable; the real challenge will be the struggle over who controls it and in whose interests.
Again, that comes down to democracy and not dictatorial organisations that are subservient to the corporations.
What I truly see standing in the way of a globalised world are:
1. Culture: At the moment there is a global cultural clash
2. Equality: We need everyone to have the same living standard. Without that then there will be wars and other strife as people try to equalise or prevent that equalisation (IMO, a lot of what the Western world does these days is to actually to prevent that equalisation).
3. Massive population decline: We simply don’t have enough resources to keep everyone at the current Western Living standard.
Mostly I’d agree. Forgive me if I decline to address anarchism; it’s simply a topic I have no strong ideas about. But I would add to your latter three points:
1. We live in a globalised world, but it lacks the underpinning values and culture to let it flourish positively.
2. Absolutely – this is why inequality (and social injustice in all it forms) matters so much
You’ve more or less expressed exactly what I am saying. Yes we live in a globalised world, in which various supra-national powers wield unaccountable power. One might even describe them as a form of oligarchical government; fair enough.
But democratically accountable – they most certainly are not.
Our forms of government (local and national) are effectively bankrupt, and not just on ideas 😉 That is a serious issue for their continued control over people. If they can’t fund core services, then they will gradually disappear. The other problem they have is a loss of trust, and these power structures are getting more and more arrogant as time goes on. I think we’ll gradually see people investing their trust into local grassroots movements/groups that are outside the current system that keeps on making the same bureaucratic, out of touch mistakes. On a global level, as persistent depressions spread across the world, I think reduced trade between nations may mean countries become more insular like many countries were before globalisation.
I happily endorse exactly what you are saying about increased local grassroots movements.
The nation state is under siege from both above and below, from both the forces of globalisation AND those of an increasing desire for peoples to assert their cultural identity. The rise of the SNP is the example which springs immediately to my mind.
And for the most part I’d assert this is a good thing. Nation states have monopolised their position at the top of the political totem pole for too long. Relinquishing portions of their sovereignty, both to a federal global governance and to revitalised cultural/ grassroots movements, would quite likely address a fair slice of the ‘arrogance’ issue you describe.
If they can’t fund core services, then they will gradually disappear.
Government can’t fund services because the business sector has been attacking them, telling people that they’re paying too much in taxes, that taxes are theft, that the business sector can do it better/cheaper and people have been buying into that BS. This result in people complaining about the taxes and so governments cut taxes the end result is that our society no longer has the support structure to keep it going and it collapses.
You gotta wonder if John Roughan can even see the external edges of his keyboard with the size of his blinkers.
No need to link to it, just imagine an idyllic pasture festooned with iridescent flowers dancing in warm breezes as cherubs of wonderment float by gleefully distributing petals of joy.
[Never to dissipate] intoxication by the fumes of well rewarded hagiography perhaps ? With such skin in the game the role ceases to be that of journalist…….it’s forever the role of ‘spurnalist’ – reliably ready spurning of anything/one failing to endorse the subject of the well rewarded hagiography. Delivered with increasingly solemn old-world-vicar-like pomposity. Caricaturish really.
The Weekend Herald commentaries look to be well choreographed, there seems to be a fair level of coaching by Herald management. All too often the National Party fan club all pick the same topic to comment on. That might be coincidence once but not when it’s as frequent as the Herald commentaries.
It’s quite notable that with Roughan’s pieces the Herald often holds back the reader comments until days later, by then readers have moved on and don’t read the scorn heaped on him. That has to be deliberate.
Jimmy Kimmel: “Not all English people are like this jackal.”
Murdering rich bastard condemned around the world.
A rich, pampered, cocaine-sniffing, prostitute-chasing playboy and recreational hunter who rejoices in the nickname “The Big H” has been condemned around the world after it was revealed he had killed Afghani peasants and boasted about it.
Angry crowds waved signs saying “KILLER”, “ROT IN HELL”, “THE BUTCHER OF BUCKINGHAM” and “I AM AFGHANISTAN”, and shouted messages like “Extradite!” and “Shut him down!” They want the playboy to be sent back to Afghanistan to face charges.
To resounding applause, late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel declared: “Not all English people are like this jackal.”
Referring to the dentist who killed a lion (Cecil?) made me think about how they crop up in books.
In Catch 22 by Joseph Heller – The question of “Who promoted Major Major?” alludes to Joseph McCarthy’s questioning of the promotion of Major Peress, an army dentist who refused to sign loyalty oaths.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night – A white supremacist organization [whose leader, a dentist named Lionel Jones] discovers his existence [Campbell] and makes him a cause celebre, inviting him to speak to new recruits as a “true American patriot.”
(Howard W Campbell is a playwright who became a Nazi propagandist for the USA so he could secretly broadcast coded messages aiding the Allies. He is conspired against
by a white supremacist dentist when back in the USA, still denigrated as a Nazi sympathiser.)
I think the dentists of the USA became annoyed at the portrayal of their profession in an unflattering way and took some legal action. But I am not sure about this, it may have just been considered.
Yes it’s almost become a cliché – the dentist who is “broken” in some way that emerges as brutality or “deviancy”. Even the latest “The Hangover” films had the dentist as both domestically and socially “suspect” – you know, compared to mainstream Hollywood gender roles.
This Big_H bloke could be a Francis Macomber type on the inside: using and running from women, killing only from positions of superiority, a real coward despite his alleged military “derring-do”. I hope he didn’t track or shoot the Lion from a vehicle… Ernest would not be pleased. Wastrels, he called them. Unlike Fitzgerald, he didn’t much like the rich, at all. A good woman could sort Big_H out, if he had the guts to stick with her, and if none available, a Margot character would solve the problem, too.
@Morrisey
I am surprised that you are targeting Prince Harry. Why? Many of your links seem anti-royalist. He has enough snappers and slappers stalking him. I think that he deserves not to have stories scraped up as an excuse to build a phantom story.
National Party standard approach to a controversy.
1. Fire up John Key’s Dirty Politics Machine
2. Start lying.
3. Lie about lying and then immediately attack, never defend, never explain
4. blame the last Labour government
5. Try a sleaze distraction
6. Blame the public service
7. Never ever admit liability
8. Blame an opposition MP personally
9. Keep lying
10. Scramble like crazy behind the scenes to come up with some good news.
11. Rinse and repeat.
This Mark Todd (not the horsey one) is doing something special in NZ, along with his compatriot. This is a must listen for all who know we are needing changes in thinking and doing in housing and education and on. Good listening with Kim at Radionz. http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/201765712
10:05 Playing Favourites with Mark Todd
Mark Todd is the co-founder, with Ben Preston, of Auckland urban development company Ockham Residential, and the Ockham Foundation, an education-based registered charity. Ockham Residential is the new sponsor of the New Zealand Book Awards, to be produced by the Auckland Writers Festival from 2016.
Geez our journalists are lazy. Apparently it’s not our dairy thats the problem it’s the Canadians not wanting the TPPA because their diary industry would be flooded with shit US milk if the borders were opened. Groser ( pissed again most likely ) thinking he’s the great intellect and hard nosed negoitiator and the idoit scibblers hanging on every word.
Fuck me we’ve fallen a long way
Tourism is going to be our saviour when dairy goes down.
Here is a piece on Radionz about the Canary Islands off Spain that have 11 million tourists a year?? Anyway they find the locals are being pushed out of their own island by the burgeoning tourist infrastructure of resorts appealing to tourists alone.
The locals’ small businesses are going out of business.
The unemployment for youth right up to the 30s? is 56%. The business is not spreading out to the island because of the truly-vertical integration where the accommodation hotels are self-contained and capture all the spending.
There are so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot with tourism as your main business.
Those who do any thinking about NZ wider prosperity and business stability should take note and learn the lessons now. http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/201765598
That gave a good look at the issues Spanish tourism faces, in part due to an investment boom / bust like we had in 2000s in property here and in dairy the last few years. We’ve got the same conflicts in our tourist industry, but the scale is really different. The effects and responses are very different too.
We’re lucky in a way that we are so far away form the markets that create the Spanish problem, you can commute from Spain to London, people do, so they get millions of short stay visitors who just want to get plastered and then go home. We require a bit more commitment, and that tends to self select.
We also go through viscous cycles. Combine this with the distance thing and investment here isn’t as attractive as places closer to the big markets. So we’re not as likely to get the mega resort developments. But we need to manage these cycles more effectively. The recent 25% appreciation of our currency due to the dairy boom has been hell for tourism, we’re back in the game with the US market now but the Aussie market has a long way to go. We need to be around AUD 0.80 before we’re going anywhere there. The worst affected in our case have been some of our suppliers, carvers and artists who’ve been smacked around by businesses failing and have had to go and get other jobs to survive, they’ve gt to start again if they want to go back to their art.
The vertical integration does happen here, but there’s a strong move by industry leaders to higher value independent visitors in most markets. A lot of the understand that we will always be limited because of the distance and there’s no point selling a package for $1000 when you can sell a better one for $10,000 . There’s a market for group tours, but independent packages erode that once the market matures, like the Chinese and US have. The closest we have to the Canarys would be the cruise lines, they expect their slice of everything, and can be very unpleasant.
The industry needs clear political leadership to get through these cycles, the current minister is MIA, he seems to think Sky City is the total of the industry. But if he’s pushed he’ll take credit for all those who are getting somewhere (surviving) despite his governments policies. It’s an opportunity for the opposition to get traction where there could be a bit of a muddle.
@Graeme
That gives a really thorough summary to our problems as I have heard them.
That massive short-stay, go and get bombed then home, is a killer for places like Venice with environmental problems, sea level rise and infrastructure limitations. They need high spending visitors with true appreciation for their wonders.
In UK they have put down board walks at Lands End. We have protected Tane Mahuta similarly. Though it is interesting that if NZsare wanting to go and view on the tourist buses, seats will be booked up for months ahead. It could be that some of our attractions are already overrun by tourists even with the distance disadvantage.
The trick is getting the tourists to come to your town and spend at least a night there, and not just follow a well-trodden route. For instance, I have heard that Kerikeri, a pretty little place, is down on its uppers.
I think the Oz aren’t big spenders, and are short stayers. Though while we still own AirNZ, there is money to be made in transporting them and those NZs who cross to the Gold Coast. I think the Japanese and US are bigger spenders.
Detective Inspector Grant Wormald didn’t perjure himself because surveillance is completely different from intercepting communications….
Knock me over with a feather!
I remember in the early 80’s as a member of a national Public Questions Committee wondering whether the IPCA structure was the best way to go . I’m now more than convinced that it was not. This is such another extreme case of the Police covering their backsides with a supposedly “independent” inquiry . They have to go and a completely independent body set up instead. What we have now is just a joke – if it wasn’t so serious.
+100
At the same time how about a completely independent Prosecution Service that has no connection to Police. Preferably not even ex police as investigators.
It is time that Police do not decide when of if they will prosecute
I’m inclined to agree. Perhaps a system along the lines of the French or Scottish, or something similar. A separate legal body completely independent from the Pollice.
It is not a stretch to say many people who live in the cities of New Zealand, do not spare much of a thought for the volunteer based emergency services that populate the small towns and rural communities across our country. Not until they need them of course.
Like when they are visiting their rural investment property and dozing in the sun after (an often illegal) burn off that wasn’t quite as dead as the owner thought and the winds of the late afternoon decide to have some fun with the smouldering cuttings from their overgrown plot of future plans.
For many, thankfully, that is the one and only time they have anything to do with a volunteer Fire Service. But that service does much much more.
And New Zealand should really do more for them. But when?
After the embers have been dampened?
After the once grand forest is a dark shadow of itself and the hillside is nothing more than ashes?
After the steel and speed and flesh and ignorance have left little but twisted carnage that someone has to reach into and check for a pulse? After the wreckage has been towed away from the unfamiliar highway, that wasn’t designed to be driven in the same manner as some motorway being used on a pre-dawn munchie run? After the frightened family are huddled in the back of the ambulance, assured and safe as the impact of a moment’s indecision is cleared away? After the blood has been hosed off the road?
After the final tarpaulin is dragged off the storm battered roof, scrubbed down, dried off and carefully stored until the next alarm? After the broken limbs of busted trees are roped in the dark and dragged out from under bridges as the raging floodwaters rise and homes are threatened? Homes that might even belong to the volunteers themselves, who have left their families, as they do without question, night after night day after day. Heading out in the middle of deep winter storms when the cold steel rain annihilates any chance of comfort. In the height of summer when surf is calling and barbeque chatter not cackling pyres are all the exhausted men and women wanted to hear? Is it only after these events we should remind ourselves how desperately we need them?
These people are volunteers.
When that siren cries out across a calm evening, the rest of the community tenses for a moment before remembering its Tuesday night, so it’s just a call to training. But then they hear a second, third, a fourth alarm blasts across the town’s rooftops and they know there is no training tonight. Someone needs help. These volunteers do what is asked of them. They drop what they are doing and go.
They face dwindling resources and increasing call-outs. They get little thanks outside of the communities they live in and what do they ask for? – some simple respect and awareness that should be front of mind for anyone tasked with the vital job of alerting them to an alarm. Instead they have to publicly confront a company that has completely failed them. Some of those lives, those jobs, those homes, are too far away from the siren for it to be heard, so they need another way to be contacted. Pagers are the essential link between the disaster and the people you rely on to make things okay again.
Apparently, Spark want to remove this essential and singularly reliable means of alert to alarm that these selfless volunteers rely upon.
Spark is scrambling to cover their arses on this indefensible decision and are no doubt, behind the scenes, in full PR mode working out the best way to sell the fuck up to the public. They are probably counting on the fact that outside of a few donations here and there, most of New Zealand has little thought for volunteer emergency services.
What does the change really mean though? Why is it such a big deal? Pagers are so last century right! What’s with all the fuss? It is quite simple really, and once you think about it for five seconds you will know all too well why the real issue won’t be discussed in public by Spark.
Throughout rural New Zealand the mobile communications service is below par. That is an understatement of course. All across New Zealand, mobile technology in rural areas that fall outside of the State highway channels is happenchance some days, and pointless to even attempt on others. You might well have had some inconvenient loss of service whilst traveling to a friend’s farm, or when lazing at the beach on holiday, but unless you have lived it, day in day out, you cannot fully appreciate the sheer bloody uselessness of it.
Many of these volunteers live and work in the very regions where mobile coverage is sketchy at best. Spark’s decision to remove the paging technology has very real potential to cost lives. Any delay in receiving an alarm to an emergency event can cost a life. Look at it this way – if you ever venture outside of an urban centre, where the emergency services are staffed by employed members of the New Zealand Fire Service, you rely on volunteers to save lives.
If the volunteers cannot get reliable alarm alerts, that life that isn’t saved, might be yours. Do you have enough faith in the mobile services of rural New Zealand to trust your life to such a decision?
Perhaps you might like to tell Spark what you think about their complete failure to comprehend the implications of their short-sighted and undoubtedly economically driven decision.
I was under the impression that Spark (and Chorus) was created because Telecom was getting out of standard telecomms systems, and into internet TV/entertainment. Therefore telling Spark they are going wrong is pointless. They no listening no more.
Now if your volunteers would buy iphones and agree to doing a reality show like, MasterFireChief, BurnMyBush or MyVolliesRule, you might get better support.
except paging systems are notoriously unreliable they are only a one way system and the sender has no idea if the recipient has picked up the page let alone acted upon it.
We need a reliable cellular coverage that allows two way communication
Freedom – your point and prose are awesome – I’ve turned it into a poem of sorts
These people are volunteers.
For many, thankfully,
after the embers have dampened
the once grand forest is a dark shadow of itself
the hillside is nothing more than ashes.
after the steel and speed, flesh and ignorance
left little but twisted carnage that someone
has to reach into and check for a pulse.
after the wreckage has been towed
away from the unfamiliar highway, that wasn’t
designed to be driven the same manner as motorway.
after the frightened family, huddled in the ambulance back
assured and safe as the impact of a moment’s
indecision is cleared away, the blood hosed off the road.
is it only after these events we should remind ourselves
how desperately we need them, these people are volunteers,
these volunteers are people, these people are us.
@freedom
Well I think we should contact Spark. and complain.
That’s a terrific impassioned piece which is timely. The volunteer fire service does get taken for granted. The fire service management even did not use to look after their needs properly. And the government wants to load even more onto you.
So we get in touch with Spark. And listening to you, you make a better case for technological efficiency than the wealthy moaning that at one time they had to wait three months for a new phone connection at the time that privatisation was introduced.
Obviously it hasn’t worked for the country fire service. Perhaps we should change back to government services for the rural area.
What else should people be doing to help the volunteer fire services. Has their money been frozen. Is it all from government?
Well it is likely they feel neglected. They do in other countries. I wrote to the local NZ paper once saying that volunteer fire persons weren’t acknowledged enough for their good work. Then I found it on google having been uplifted and put in a USA firemens publication.
They are such a bargain as business can treat serious problem responses as an externality. And of course in neo lib economic theory there is no such thing as self sacrifice, community devotion. Everything that humans do is done for reward, so the fire person gets a feeling of satisfaction and standing in the community, even not getting paid might give a feeling of worth, so payment would spoil all that lovely spiritual elation.
Someone elsewhere in the blog is discussing that point. The way that modern economics extends its calculations over all life activities, not just those in business or trade as the old theories used to do.
Syrian military have reportedly brought down a “hostile” US surveillance drone flying in Syrian airspace, apparently without Damascus’s consent. A US official confirmed that the military “lost contact” with one of their UAVs over Latakia province.
“Syrian air defenses brought down a hostile US surveillance plane in northern Latakia,” the Syrian state news agency SANA initially on Tuesday, providing no further details. Syrian authorities have meanwhile begun an investigation to find out who owns the reconnaissance plane, reported Kuwait’s KUNA news agency.
The flying of military aircraft over another state without permission has been recognised for some time as an aggressive act of war and yet we never see this fact reported in the news when the US flies it’s planes over another state. They did it back in the Cold War and then got upset about their planes being shot down.
We’ve got it pretty good here. Don’t we? There is a certain image of New Zealand that we all like to believe in: We’re clean, green, laid-back, resourceful, fair and inventive. We’re the plucky little battlers at the end of world, quietly working hard in our little slice of paradise. All good. Sweet as. No worries.
But is this really true? If it used to be, is still true today? Will it stay true? Here at The Wireless, we took a dive into some statistics that show us where we’ve been and where we are now, and raise some big questions about where we’re headed next.
Ah, 2001. Helen Clark is Prime Minister and Jenny Shipley leads the National Party. The first Lord of the Rings film is released. Australia holds the Bledisloe Cup. Zed wins Album of the year. New Zealand’s largest company, Fonterra, is formed…
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
What is it with the mining industry? Its not enough for them to pillage the earth - they apparently can't even be bothered getting resource consent to do so: The proponent behind a major mine near the Clutha River had already been undertaking activity in the area without a ...
Photo # 1 I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to housing, as described here two years ago by copying and pasting from The ConversationWhat Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed land, ...
Buzz from the Beehive Reactions to news of the government’s readiness to make urgent changes to “the resource management system” through a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) suggest a balanced approach is being taken. The Taxpayers’ Union says the proposed changes don’t go far enough. Greenpeace says ...
I’m starting to wonder if Anna Burns-Francis might be the best political interviewer we’ve got. That might sound unlikely to you, it came as a bit of a surprise to me.Jack Tame can be excellent, but has some pretty average days. I like Rebecca Wright on Newshub, she asks good ...
Chris Trotter writes – Willie Jackson is said to be planning a “media summit” to discuss “the state of the media and how to protect Fourth Estate Journalism”. Not only does the Editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, think this is a good idea, but he has also ...
Graeme Edgeler writes – This morning [April 21], the Wellington High Court is hearing a judicial review brought by Hon. Karen Chhour, the Minister for Children, against a decision of the Waitangi Tribunal. This is unusual, judicial reviews are much more likely to brought against ministers, rather than ...
Both of Parliament’s watchdogs have now ripped into the Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMy pick of the six newsey things to know from Aotearoa’s political economy and beyond on the morning of Tuesday, April 23 are:The Lead: The Auditor General,John Ryan, has joined the ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Sarah SpengemanPeople wait to board an electric bus in Pune, India. (Image credit: courtesy of ITDP) Public transportation riders in Pune, India, love the city’s new electric buses so much they will actually skip an older diesel bus that ...
The infrastructure industry yesterday issued a “hurry up” message to the Government, telling it to get cracking on developing a pipeline of infrastructure projects.The hiatus around the change of Government has seen some major projects cancelled and others delayed, and there is uncertainty about what will happen with the new ...
Hi,Over the weekend I revisited a podcast I really adore, Dead Eyes. It’s about a guy who got fired from Band of Brothers over two decades ago because Tom Hanks said he had “dead eyes”.If you don’t recall — 2001’s Band of Brothers was part of the emerging trend of ...
Buzz from the Beehive The 180 or so recipients of letters from the Government telling them how to submit infrastructure projects for “fast track” consideration includes some whose project applications previously have been rejected by the courts. News media were quick to feature these in their reports after RMA Reform Minister Chris ...
It would not be a desirable way to start your holiday by breaking your back, your head, or your wrist, but on our first hour in Singapore I gave it a try.We were chatting, last week, before we started a meeting of Hazel’s Enviro Trust, about the things that can ...
Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure that the new Fast-Track Approvals Bill – currently being pushed through by the ...
Feel worried. Shane Jones and a couple of his Cabinet colleagues are about to be granted the power to override any and all objections to projects like dams, mines, roads etc even if: said projects will harm biodiversity, increase global warming and cause other environmental harms, and even if ...
Bryce Edwards writes- The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. ...
Michael Bassett writes – If you think there is a move afoot by the radical Maori fringe of New Zealand society to create a parallel system of government to the one that we elect at our triennial elections, you aren’t wrong. Over the last few days we have ...
Without a corresponding drop in interest rates, it’s doubtful any changes to the CCCFA will unleash a massive rush of home buyers. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: The six things that stood out to me in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Monday, April 22 included:The Government making a ...
Sunday was a lazy day. I started watching Jack Tame on Q&A, the interviews are usually good for something to write about. Saying the things that the politicians won’t, but are quite possibly thinking. Things that are true and need to be extracted from between the lines.As you might know ...
In our Weekly Roundup last week we covered news from Auckland Transport that the WX1 Western Express is going to get an upgrade next year with double decker electric buses. As part of the announcement, AT also said “Since we introduced the WX1 Western Express last November we have seen ...
TL;DR: The six key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 29 include:PM Christopher Luxon is scheduled to hold a post-Cabinet news conference at 4 pm today. Stats NZ releases its statutory report on Census 2023 tomorrow.Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivers a pre-Budget speech at ...
A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 14, 2024 thru Sat, April 20, 2024. Story of the week Our story of the week hinges on these words from the abstract of a fresh academic ...
The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. The Government says this will ...
This is a column to say thank you. So many of have been in touch since Mum died to say so many kind and thoughtful things. You’re wonderful, all of you. You’ve asked how we’re doing, how Dad’s doing. A little more realisation each day, of the irretrievable finality of ...
Identifying the engine type in your car is crucial for various reasons, including maintenance, repairs, and performance upgrades. Knowing the specific engine model allows you to access detailed technical information, locate compatible parts, and make informed decisions about modifications. This comprehensive guide will provide you with a step-by-step approach to ...
Introduction: The allure of racing is undeniable. The thrill of speed, the roar of engines, and the exhilaration of competition all contribute to the allure of this adrenaline-driven sport. For those who yearn to experience the pinnacle of racing, becoming a race car driver is the ultimate dream. However, the ...
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Your car battery is an essential component that provides power to start your engine, operate your electrical systems, and store energy. Over time, batteries can weaken and lose their ability to hold a charge, which can lead to starting problems, power failures, and other issues. Replacing your battery before it ...
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Mazda, a Japanese automotive manufacturer with a rich history of innovation and engineering excellence, has emerged as a formidable player in the global car market. Known for its reputation of producing high-quality, fuel-efficient, and driver-oriented vehicles, Mazda has consistently garnered praise from industry experts and consumers alike. In this article, ...
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Introduction Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) has revolutionized the field of translation by harnessing the power of technology to assist human translators in their work. This innovative approach combines specialized software with human expertise to improve the efficiency, accuracy, and consistency of translations. In this comprehensive article, we will delve into the ...
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“You talking about me?”The neoliberal denigration of the past was nowhere more unrelenting than in its depiction of the public service. The Post Office and the Railways were held up as being both irremediably inefficient and scandalously over-manned. Playwright Roger Hall’s “Glide Time” caricatures were presented as accurate depictions of ...
Roger Partridge writes – When the Coalition Government took office last October, it inherited a country on a precipice. With persistent inflation, decades of insipid productivity growth and crises in healthcare, education, housing and law and order, it is no exaggeration to suggest New Zealand’s first-world status was ...
Rob MacCulloch writes – In 2022, the Curriculum Centre at the Ministry of Education employed 308 staff, according to an Official Information Request. Earlier this week it was announced 202 of those staff were being cut. When you look up “The New Zealand Curriculum” on the Ministry of ...
Chris Bishop’s bill has stirred up a hornets nest of opposition. Photo: Lynn Grieveson for The KākāTL;DR: The six things that stood out to me in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate from the last day included:A crescendo of opposition to the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill is ...
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Hello! Here comes the Saturday edition of More Than A Feilding, catching you up on the past week’s editions.State of humanity, 20242024, it feels, keeps presenting us with ever more challenges, ever more dismay.Do you give up yet? It seems to ask.No? How about this? Or this?How about this?Full story Share ...
Determining the hardest sport in the world is a subjective matter, as the difficulty level can vary depending on individual abilities, physical attributes, and experience. However, based on various factors including physical demands, technical skills, mental fortitude, and overall accomplishment, here is an exploration of some of the most challenging ...
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Abstract: Soccer, the global phenomenon captivating millions worldwide, has a rich history that spans centuries. Its origins trace back to ancient civilizations, but the modern version we know and love emerged through a complex interplay of cultural influences and innovations. This article delves into the fascinating journey of soccer’s evolution, ...
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Jump-starting a car is a common task that can be performed even in adverse weather conditions like rain. However, safety precautions and proper techniques are crucial to avoid potential hazards. This comprehensive guide will provide detailed instructions on how to safely jump a car in the rain, ensuring both your ...
Graham Adams writes about the $55m media fund — When Patrick Gower was asked by Mike Hosking last week what he would say to the many Newstalk ZB callers who allege the Labour government bribed media with $55 million of taxpayers’ money via the Public Interest Journalism Fund — and ...
Note: this blog post has been put together over the course of the week I followed the happenings at the conference virtually. Should recordings of the Great Debates and possibly Union Symposia mentioned below, be released sometime after the conference ends, I'll include links to the ones I participated in. ...
The following was my submission made on the “Fast Track Approvals Bill”. This potential law will give three Ministers unchecked powers, un-paralled since the days of Robert Muldoon’s “Think Big” projects.The submission is written a bit tongue-in-cheek. But it’s irreverent because the FTAB is in itself not worthy of respect. ...
One Could Reduce Child Poverty At No Fiscal CostFollowing the Richardson/Shipley 1990 ‘redesign of the welfare state’ – which eliminated the universal Family Benefit and doubled the rate of child poverty – various income supplements for families have been added, the best known being ‘Working for Families’, introduced in 2005. ...
Buzz from the Beehive A few days ago, Point of Order suggested the media must be musing “on why Melissa is mute”. Our article reported that people working in the beleaguered media industry have cause to yearn for a minister as busy as Melissa Lee’s ministerial colleagues and we drew ...
1. What was The Curse of Jim Bolger?a. Winston Peters b. Soon after shaking his hand, world leaders would mysteriously lose office or shuffle off this mortal coilc. Could never shake off the Mother of All Budgetsd. Dandruff2. True or false? The Chairman of a Kiwi export business has asked the ...
Jack Vowles writes – New Zealand is said to be suffering from ‘serious populist discontent’. An IPSOS MORI survey has reported that we have an increasing preference for strong leaders, think that the economy is rigged toward the rich and powerful, and political elites are ignoring ‘hard-working people’. ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
A laundry list of additional costs for Tāmaki Makarau Auckland shows the Minister for the city is not delivering for the people who live there, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
The Green Party has today launched a step-by-step guide to help New Zealanders make their voice heard on the Government’s democracy dodging and anti-environment fast track legislation. ...
The National Government’s proposed changes to the Residential Tenancies Act will mean tenants can be turfed from their homes by landlords with little notice, Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. ...
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is calling on all parties to support a common-sense change that’s great for the planet and great for consumers after her member’s bill was drawn from the ballot today. ...
A significant milestone has been reached in the fight to strike an anti-Pasifika and unfair law from the country’s books after Teanau Tuiono’s members’ bill passed its first reading. ...
New Zealand has today missed the opportunity to uphold the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, says James Shaw after his member’s bill was voted down in its first reading. ...
Today’s advice from the Climate Change Commission paints a sobering reality of the challenge we face in combating climate change, especially in light of recent Government policy announcements. ...
Minister for Disability Issues Penny Simmonds appears to have delayed a report back to Cabinet on the progress New Zealand is making against international obligations for disabled New Zealanders. ...
The Government’s newly announced review of methane emissions reduction targets hints at its desire to delay Aotearoa New Zealand’s urgent transition to a climate safe future, the Green Party said. ...
The Government must commit to the Maitai School building project for students with high and complex needs, to ensure disabled students from the top of the South Island have somewhere to learn. ...
Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey and his Government colleagues have made a meal of their mental health commitments, showing how flimsy their efforts to champion the issue truly are, says Labour Mental Health spokesperson Ingrid Leary. ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed an important milestone in New Zealand’s hydrogen future, with the opening of the country’s first network of hydrogen refuelling stations in Wiri. “I want to congratulate the team at Hiringa Energy and its partners K one W one (K1W1), Mitsui & Co New Zealand ...
The coalition Government is delivering on its commitment to improve resource management laws and give greater certainty to consent applicants, with a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) expected to be introduced to Parliament next month. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has today outlined the first RMA Amendment ...
Overseas models for regulating the oil and gas sector, including their decommissioning regimes, are being carefully scrutinised as a potential template for New Zealand’s own sector, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. The Coalition Government is focused on rebuilding investor confidence in New Zealand’s energy sector as it looks to strengthen ...
Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell has today released the Report of the Government Inquiry into the response to the North Island Severe Weather Events. “The report shows that New Zealand’s emergency management system is not fit-for-purpose and there are some significant gaps we need to address,” Mr Mitchell ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is today travelling to Europe where he’ll update the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Government’s work to restore law and order. “Attending the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva provides us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while ...
Associate Agriculture Minister, Mark Patterson, formally reopened the world’s largest wool processing facility today in Awatoto, Napier, following a $50 million rebuild and refurbishment project. “The reopening of this facility will significantly lift the economic opportunities available to New Zealand’s wool sector, which already accounts for 20 per cent of ...
Hon Andrew Bayly, Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing At the Southland Otago Regional Engineering Collective (SOREC) Summit, 18 April, Dunedin Ngā mihi nui, Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Ko Whanganui aho Good Afternoon and thank you for inviting me to open your summit today. I am delighted ...
The Government is delivering on its commitment to bring back the Three Strikes legislation, Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee announced today. “Our Government is committed to restoring law and order and enforcing appropriate consequences on criminals. We are making it clear that repeat serious violent or sexual offending is not ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has today announced four new diplomatic appointments for New Zealand’s overseas missions. “Our diplomats have a vital role in maintaining and protecting New Zealand’s interests around the world,” Mr Peters says. “I am pleased to announce the appointment of these senior diplomats from the ...
New Zealand is contributing NZ$7 million to support communities affected by severe food insecurity and other urgent humanitarian needs in Ethiopia and Somalia, Foreign Minister Rt Hon Winston Peters announced today. “Over 21 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across Ethiopia, with a further 6.9 million people ...
Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith is congratulating Mataaho Collective for winning the Golden Lion for best participant in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. "Congratulations to the Mataaho Collective for winning one of the world's most prestigious art prizes at the Venice Biennale. “It is good ...
The Government is reforming financial services to improve access to home loans and other lending, and strengthen customer protections, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly and Housing Minister Chris Bishop announced today. “Our coalition Government is committed to rebuilding the economy and making life simpler by cutting red tape. We are ...
“China remains a strong commercial opportunity for Kiwi exporters as Chinese businesses and consumers continue to value our high-quality safe produce,” Trade and Agriculture Minister Todd McClay says. Mr McClay has returned to New Zealand following visits to Beijing, Harbin and Shanghai where he met ministers, governors and mayors and engaged in trade and agricultural events with the New ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has completed a successful trip to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, deepening relationships and capitalising on opportunities. Mr Luxon was accompanied by a business delegation and says the choice of countries represents the priority the New Zealand Government places on South East Asia, and our relationships in ...
New Zealand is demonstrating its commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions, and supporting clean energy transition in South East Asia, through a contribution of NZ$41 million (US$25 million) in climate finance to the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-led Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM). Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts announced ...
The Government is today releasing a list of organisations who received letters about the Fast-track applications process, says RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. “Recently Ministers and agencies have received a series of OIA requests for a list of organisations to whom I wrote with information on applying to have a ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Wellington Barrister David Jonathan Boldt as a Judge of the High Court, and the Honourable Justice Matthew Palmer as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Boldt graduated with an LLB from Victoria University of Wellington in 1990, and also holds ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford will lead the New Zealand delegation at the 2024 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) held in Singapore. The delegation includes representatives from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua and the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) Te Riu Roa. The summit is co-hosted ...
A stopbank upgrade project in Tairawhiti partly funded by the Government has increased flood resilience for around 7000ha of residential and horticultural land so far, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones today attended a dawn service in Gisborne to mark the end of the first stage of the ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters will represent the Government at Anzac Day commemorations on the Gallipoli Peninsula next week and engage with senior representatives of the Turkish government in Istanbul. “The Gallipoli campaign is a defining event in our history. It will be a privilege to share the occasion ...
Science, Innovation and Technology and Defence Minister Judith Collins will next week attend the OECD Science and Technology Ministerial conference in Paris and Anzac Day commemorations in Belgium. “Science, innovation and technology have a major role to play in rebuilding our economy and achieving better health, environmental and social outcomes ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon held a bilateral meeting today with the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Prime Minister was accompanied by MP Paulo Garcia, the first Filipino to be elected to a legislature outside the Philippines. During today’s meeting, Prime Minister Luxon and President Marcos Jr discussed opportunities to ...
The Government has announced that $20 million in funding will be made available to Westport to fund much needed flood protection around the town. This measure will significantly improve the resilience of the community, says Local Government Minister Simeon Brown. “The Westport community has already been allocated almost $3 million ...
The Government is proud to support the first ever Repco Supercars Championship event in Taupō as up to 70,000 motorsport fans attend the Taupō International Motorsport Park this weekend, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. “Anticipation for the ITM Taupō Super400 is huge, with tickets and accommodation selling out weeks ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced an increase to the Rates Rebate Scheme, putting money back into the pockets of low-income homeowners. “The coalition Government is committed to bringing down the cost of living for New Zealanders. That includes targeted support for those Kiwis who are doing things tough, such ...
The Coalition Government is investing in a project to boost survival rates of New Zealand mussels and grow the industry, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has announced. “This project seeks to increase the resilience of our mussels and significantly boost the sector’s productivity,” Mr Jones says. “The project - ...
Benefit figures released today underscore the importance of the Government’s plan to rebuild the economy and have 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “Benefit numbers are still significantly higher than when National was last in government, when there was about 70,000 fewer ...
The Government’s commitment to doubling New Zealand’s renewable energy capacity is backed by new data showing that clean energy has helped the country reach its lowest annual gross emissions since 1999, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. New Zealand’s latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory (1990-2022) published today, shows gross emissions fell ...
The Government is bringing the earthquake-prone building review forward, with work to start immediately, and extending the deadline for remediations by four years, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “Our Government is focused on rebuilding the economy. A key part of our plan is to cut red tape that ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his Thai counterpart, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, have today agreed that New Zealand and the Kingdom of Thailand will upgrade the bilateral relationship to a Strategic Partnership by 2026. “New Zealand and Thailand have a lot to offer each other. We have a strong mutual desire to build ...
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Transport Minister Simeon Brown have today announced the Coalition Government’s intention to extend port coastal permits for a further 20 years, providing port operators with certainty to continue their operations. “The introduction of the Resource Management Act in 1991 required ports to obtain coastal ...
Today’s announcement that inflation is down to 4 per cent is encouraging news for Kiwis, but there is more work to be done - underlining the importance of the Government’s plan to get the economy back on track, acting Finance Minister Chris Bishop says. “Inflation is now at 4 per ...
Refreshed health guidance released today will help parents and schools make informed decisions about whether their child needs to be in school, addressing one of the key issues affecting school attendance, says Associate Education Minister David Seymour. In recent years, consistently across all school terms, short-term illness or medical reasons ...
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones is streamlining high-level oceans management while maintaining a focus on supporting the sector’s role in the export-led recovery of the economy. “I am working to realise the untapped potential of our fishing and aquaculture sector. To achieve that we need to be smarter with ...
Associate Agriculture Minister Mark Patterson is speaking at the International Wool Textile Organisation Congress in Adelaide, promoting New Zealand wool, and outlining the coalition Government’s support for the revitalisation the sector. "New Zealand’s wool exports reached $400 million in the year to 30 June 2023, and the coalition Government ...
The Government is making legislative changes to make it easier for new early learning services to be established, and for existing services to operate, Associate Education Minister David Seymour says. The changes involve repealing the network approval provisions that apply when someone wants to establish a new early learning service, ...
Changes to the Resource Management Act will align consenting for coal mining to other forms of mining to reduce barriers that are holding back economic development, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. “The inconsistent treatment of coal mining compared with other extractive activities is burdensome red tape that fails to acknowledge ...
Trade, Agriculture and Forestry Minister Todd McClay has concluded productive discussions with ministerial counterparts in Beijing today, in support of the New Zealand-China trade and economic relationship. “My meeting with Commerce Minister Wang Wentao reaffirmed the complementary nature of the bilateral trade relationship, with our Free Trade Agreement at its ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon today paid tribute to Singapore’s outgoing Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Meeting in Singapore today immediately before Prime Minister Lee announced he was stepping down, Prime Minister Luxon warmly acknowledged his counterpart’s almost twenty years as leader, and the enduring legacy he has left for Singapore and South East ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon held a bilateral meeting today with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. While in Singapore as part of his visit to South East Asia this week, Prime Minister Luxon also met with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and will meet with Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong. During today’s meeting, Prime Minister Luxon ...
COMMENTARY:By Murray Horton New Zealand needs to get tough with Israel. It’s not as if we haven’t done so before. When NZ authorities busted a Mossad operation in Auckland 20 years ago, the government didn’t say: “Oh well, Israel has the right to defend itself.” No, it arrested, prosecuted, ...
NEWSMAKERS:By Vijay Narayan, news director of FijiVillage Blessed to be part of the University of Fiji (UniFiji) faculty to continue to teach and mentor those who want to join our noble profession, and to stand for truth and justice for the people of the country. I was privileged to ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University Three weeks from now, some of us will be presented with a mountain of budget papers, and just about all of us will get to hear about them on radio, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dan Lowry, Ice Sheet & Climate Modeller, GNS Science Hugh Chittock/Antarctica New Zealand, CC BY-SA As the climate warms and Antarctica’s glaciers and ice sheets melt, the resulting rise in sea level has the potential to displace hundreds of millions of ...
The government's plan to reintroduce a three strikes regime is being strongly opposed by lawyers, who argue there is no evidence it reduces crime or helps people rehabilitate. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Professor specialising in Internet law, Bond University Do Australian courts have the right to decide what foreign citizens, located overseas, view online on a foreign-owned platform? Anyone inclined to answer “yes” to this question should perhaps also ask ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Giovanni E Ferreira, NHMRC Emerging Leader Research Fellow, Institute of Musculoskeletal Health, University of Sydney Last week in a post on X, owner of the platform Elon Musk recommended people look into disc replacement if they’re experiencing severe neck or back pain. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hayward, Emeritus Professor of Public Policy, RMIT University anek.soowannaphoom/Shutterstock NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey caught the headlines yesterday, courtesy of a blistering speech condemning the latest GST carve-up. New South Wales, he claimed, would be A$11.9 billion worse off over the ...
While police are "broadly in favour", the government's proposed anti-gang laws are facing pushback from lawyers, rights groups and former gang members. ...
While police are "broadly in favour", the government's proposed anti-gang laws are facing pushback from lawyers, rights groups and former gang members. ...
By Miriam Zarriga in Port Moresby Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has arrived at Kokoda Station, Northern province, at the start of his state visit to Papua New Guinea. Both Albanese and Prime Minister James Marape will meet with the locals and the Northern Provincial government before they begin their ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wallace, Professor, School of Politics Economics & Society, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of Canberra Shutterstock An important principle was invoked by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week in defence of the government’s Future Made in Australia industry ...
By Patrick Decloitre, RNZ Pacific correspondent French Pacific desk Security forces reinforcements were sent from France ahead of two rival marches in the capital Nouméa today, at the same time and only two streets away one from the other. One march, called by Union Calédonienne party (a component of the ...
A poll last August found that just 16% of New Zealanders oppose bringing back the ‘Three Strikes’ law. The nationwide poll of 1,000 New Zealanders was commissioned by Family First NZ and carried out by Curia Market Research. ...
The solo show from Ana Scotney is both sprawling and intimate, and a must-see, writes Mad Chapman. In the opening moments of Scattergun: After the Death of Rūaumoko, writer and performer Ana Scotney lays out the groundwork, literally. Silently moving around the square stage, Scotney is not so much dancing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics, Monash University Who makes the words? Why are trees called trees and why are shoes called shoes and who makes the names? – Elliot, age 5, Eltham, Victoria Good question Elliot! Let’s start with ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne at amRawpixel.com/Shutterstock Roles of health professionals are still unfortunately often stuck in the past. That is, before the ...
COMMENTARY:By Malcolm Evans Last week’s leaked New York Times staff directive, as to what words can and cannot be used to describe the carnage Israel is raining on Palestinians, is proof positive, since those reports are published verbatim here in New Zealand, that our understanding of the conflict is ...
In the case of New Zealand, the results confirm that there is no popular support for the vicious austerity program being imposed by the National Party-led government, which is backed in all fundamental respects by the opposition Labour Party. ...
The ‘Vampire’ singer has never visited our part of the world, but that might all be about to change. We assess the evidence.Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour is pulling in massive crowds as it whips around the US and Europe, even helping to catapult regular supporting act Chappell Roan ...
Testing of drinking water in rural Canterbury over the weekend by Greenpeace revealed that several public town supplies were reaching levels of nitrate above 5 mg/L - the threshold which a growing body of scientific evidence has linked to increased ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rohan Fisher, Information Technology for Development Researcher, Charles Darwin University It may come as a surprise to hear 2023 was Australia’s biggest bushfire season in more than a decade. Fires burned across an area eight times as big as the 2019–20 Black ...
Responding to the Government’s announcement of changes to resource management laws, Taxpayers’ Union Executive Director, Jordan Williams, said: “These changes are a step in the right direction in terms of removing ideological and unworkable ...
More than two years after the Human Rights Council called for the establishment of a national human rights commission, such a body has yet to be formed. ...
Comment:An emergency management system with wide variations in performance, significant capability gaps, funding shortfalls and above all a setup that is not meeting the needs of New Zealanders at times of crisis. The Government’s inquiry into the response to Cyclone Gabrielle and other severe weather events in the North ...
Welcome to the whirring wonders of one brain trying to align its actions with its beliefs within a system it thinks is evil. My brain has been spiralling in a woke conundrum ever since I found out a bookshop I’ve never been to was shutting down. Good Books, a bookshop ...
We repeat our call for criminal justice policy to be based on evidence, something the three strikes regime neglects to recognise – with no evidence that it either reduces crime or assists with rehabilitation. ...
By Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor in Honiara With only four more seats in the 50-member Parliament yet to be officially declared, there is no outright winner in the Solomon Islands elections. As of Monday, the two largest blocs in the winner’s circle, independents and the incumbent Prime Minister Manasseh ...
Two/fiftyseven is a multi-purpose space hidden in the heart of Wellington that is paving a way for sustainable building and responsible landlording in Aotearoa and beyond.By 2060 the world is predicted to double its entire building stock, which equates to building an entire New York City every 34 days, ...
Popstars wasn’t just a reality television revolution, it was also a huge moment for Y2K fashion.It’s 25 years since girl group TrueBliss was formed on New Zealand national television, breaking new ground for both the reality television industry and the shiny clothing industry. With the first episode on NZ ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Pepping, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology, Griffith University Marvin / Shutterstock Are all single people insecure? When we think about people who have been single for a long time, we may assume it’s because single people have insecurities that make ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Geary, Lecturer in Quantitative Ecology & Biodiversity Conservation, The University of Melbourne Trismegist san, Shutterstock Landscapes that have escaped fire for decades or centuries tend to harbour vital structures for wildlife, such as tree hollows and large logs. But these ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Gladstone-Gallagher, Lecturer in Marine Science, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau Shutterstock/S Curtis Why are we crossing ecological boundaries that affect Earth’s fundamental life-supporting capacity? Is it because we don’t have enough information about how ecosystems respond to change? Or ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Crocker, PhD Student in Economics, Deakin University Here’s something for the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia to ponder as it meets next month to set interest rates. It has pushed up rates on 13 occasions since it began its ...
As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a charity director outlines how she’s saving for retirement and buying secondhand. Want to be part of The Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here.Gender: Female Age: 45 Ethnicity: Pākehā Role: Charity director, mum of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sophie Yates, Research Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University Many Australians with disability feel on the edge of a precipice right now. Recommendations from the disability royal commission and the NDIS review were released late last year. Now a ...
It’s been called a failed experiment and a judicial straightjacket but the government says the revised three strikes law will be a more workable regime, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here. Three ...
New Zealand’s Palestinian community and Palestinian Youth Aotearoa are voicing alarm and disappointment with the lack of factual rigour present during the Israeli Ambassador’s appearance as a guest on TVNZ’s Q+A With Jack Tame Sunday (21/04). ...
Both ACT leader David Seymour, who played a key role in drawing up the assisted dying law, and hospice leaders say it's time the legislation was changed. ...
Public submissions on proposed gang control laws are being heard today. Rising gang membership has been cited as rationale for a crackdown – but what do we actually know about how many people belong to gangs in New Zealand?What’s all this then?A rise in the number of gang ...
Climate activists are setting their sights on an unpopular target, and hoping to bring lots of the public with them. It’s hard to miss the Majestic Princess: the enormous cruise ship, docked at Auckland’s Prince’s Wharf, looms over the nearby buildings. The ship, which can fit nearly 6,000 people, ...
Opinion: Making sure developers, local and central government, and landowners are all on the same page makes sense The post A new kind of city deal appeared first on Newsroom. ...
Loading…(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){var ql=document.querySelectorAll('A[quiz],DIV[quiz],A[data-quiz],DIV[data-quiz]'); if(ql){if(ql.length){for(var k=0;k<ql.length;k++){ql[k].id='quiz-embed-'+k;ql[k].href="javascript:var i=document.getElementById('quiz-embed-"+k+"');try{qz.startQuiz(i)}catch(e){i.start=1;i.style.cursor='wait';i.style.opacity='0.5'};void(0);"}}};i['QP']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','https://take.quiz-maker.com/3012/CDN/quiz-embed-v1.js','qp'); Got a good quiz question?Send Newsroom your questions. The post Newsroom daily quiz, Tuesday 23 April appeared first on Newsroom. ...
The following korero between Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, author of the newly published memoir Hine Toa, one of the year’s most important books, and Dale Husband from e-tangata, was first published in October. It traverses her involvement with the activist group Ngā Tamatoa at Auckland University in the early 1970s, her ...
In the 16 years since it was bought by the government for $690 million, KiwiRail has had several overhauls and turnaround plans worth billions of dollars. Its ambitions as a successful, profitable operator of tourism, freight and ferries have often been derailed by disasters from earthquakes to cyclones, mine explosions ...
Black Ferns trailblazer Kendra Cocksedge was on the verge of tears when her young protégé, Hannah King, unassumingly broke the news. Three-time Rugby World Cup winner Cocksedge and Lincoln agriculture student King meet every few weeks over a hot chocolate, in an enduring mentorship that’s spanned years. “Before we even ...
Opinion: We’ve kicked the tyres on the perception NZ’s economy is in a parlous state compared to Australia. We take a quick tour of relative trends in GDP, housing markets, labour markets, trade, the fiscal situation, and the outlooks for inflation and interest rates. We find the cyclical positions of ...
By Russell Palmer, RNZ News digital political journalist New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters is putting off recognition of Palestine as a state, despite opposition Labour’s formal request that he make the move. Peters said diplomatic recognition of Palestine was a matter of “when not if”, but doing so now ...
The opposition has laid into the government's plan to reintroduce a "three strikes" regime, saying it's inequitable and there's very little evidence it works. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rob Nicholls, Senior research associate, University of Sydney Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has ordered social media platform “X” (formerly known as Twitter) to remove graphic videos of the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney last week from the site. The incident ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Turnbull, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Sydney John Turnbull, CC BY-NC-ND In past bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, the southern region has sometimes been spared worst of the bleaching. Not this time. This year’s intense underwater heat has ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Austin, Lecturer in Theatre, The University of Melbourne Darren Gill/Mackey, Darling & Collaborators The relationship between witchcraft and teenage girls has been the subject of many books, films and television shows. Over time, the traditional image of witch as crone ...
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards, Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards. Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Becky Freeman, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, University of Sydney Andres Siimon/Unsplash There are no silver bullets, magic tricks or secret hacks to solving complex public health problems. Taking on the global tobacco industry and reducing the devastating consequences of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam B. Watts, Research Associate in galaxy evolution, The University of Western Australia ESO/A. Watts et al., CC BY We breathe oxygen and nitrogen gas in our atmosphere every day, but did you know that these gases also float through space, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzanne Nielsen, Professor and Deputy Director, Monash Addiction Research Centre, Monash University Maxime Bhm/Unsplash A new group of drugs called nitazenes has been detected in Australia. They have been sold as heroin as well as other drugs like ketamine. Concerns ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Twomey, Professor emerita, University of Sydney Image from Bradlow + Bock campaign Can the job of being a federal member of parliament be shared by two or more persons? Two prospective candidates for the inner-Melbourne federal seat of Higgins, Lucy ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Rathus, Senior Lecturer in Law, Griffith University Shutterstock In October 2023, the federal parliament passed major changes to how children’s cases are decided under the Family Law Act, which kick in next month. Among other things, they repeal a ...
An fawning interview of Marc Weldon and ensuing article by Matt Nippert.
Noted his comment about ‘wild claims made on left-wing blogs that the axing of Campbell Live was orchestrated by Beehive,’
An obsequious piece of writing.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/matt-nippert/news/headlines.cfm?a_id=644
and julie christie is a genius… cdwm is an absolute flop… but it stays.
A few reality ‘hits’ can’t save this sinking ship. I love that they herald Christie as a visionary when really she’s just a muck-raker.
she has made a living buying other peoples shows and putting nz in the name. our flag will probably be USA flag with nz in tiny letters somewhere. she will get a damehood within 12 months on the basis that her flag work is contribution to the community.
Very disappointing for Matt Nippert. No mention of the fact that a large number of the shows commissioned by TV3 are from Julie Christie’s old company Eyeworks. It was sold to Warner’s but I have yet to see any report that says Julie Christie no longer has any financial interest in that company.
actual link
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/matt-nippert/news/article.cfm?a_id=644&objectid=11493726
The Auckland mayoralty is shaping up to be a vote splitting lolly scramble if silly old Lenny doesn’t call it a day and ease the way for Phil Goff-Off. Williamson won’t be impressed to hear former Telecom Boss lady Theresa Gattung is being mooted as a real right-wing contender. Of course it could be spin to make Judy’s buddy Maurice Williamson look more appealing. Plenty of voters will remember the dirty tactic’s employed by Gattung to hold a monopoly on telecommunications for Telesuckie.
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11493808
Theresa Telecom”not being straight up” with customers Gattung, charming.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10380894
Good link Joe 90 here is an extract;
“* On the need for regulation:
This is pretty much a manufactured grievance. You know that’s the case because the only people marching in the streets about it are our competitors, not customers.”
I marched off and never been back to Telecom/Spark thanks to Ms Gattung. Cunliffe done some good work unbundling the monopoly she held over the market.
Perhaps we should look on the bright side. Theresa set a new bar for honesty and transparency. Let’s have more of Theresa-style corporate truth telling
Boag must lie awake at night, distressed at the thought that the Auckland Council owns shares in ports and airports .
More MSM talk up articles on Amy Adams and domestic violence.
Nacts & DV
What’s the NAct agenda here? Shoring up the female vote? Amy making a run for party leader? Covering other bad news with this campaign? Hiding a Nact party internal problem with DV?
Why isn’t the media asking the hard questions- but Minister your government has-
– removed the Bristol clauses in the DV legislation
– removed reporting of DV assaults from the police statistics
– failed to check if the police are using “police safety orders” (bad name if ever there was one) to minimise arrests and keep law n’ order stats down
-failed to fund legal aid in the family court
-failed to fund rape centres and refuges
-redone child support on flimsy or no evidence and taken money away from the children’s needs
-presided over the roastbusters
– did the malaysian diplomat deal
– not come clean about the why some NAct MP’s have left parliament
-uses WINZ to hound the parent looking after the kids
all of which covers up or ratifies the attitudes associated with the violence.
So Minister, Why are you suddenly broadcasting concern and suddenly think you need to do something? What are your real motives since past performance suggests your lot couldn’t care less.
Or is it that the cost they tout $14B, means Nact would like to remove all this from the public funding and make it how it used to be 66 years ago – something that went on behind closed doors without interference from others
well said…
removed funding of high school programmes for girls that resulted in higher self esteem and reporting of abuse…
womens refuge struggle for funding so relying on gaffe by hells pizza to survive
Thanks Tracey – I was sure I had missed plenty too. MSM just keeps running these articles without a single question – just like they were Amy’s publicity machine. The public deserves a lot more from the MSM.
Nor are comments ever opened so they can say this.
So twits like Duncan Garner can write nice stuff about them without them actually doing anything:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/70930827/duncan-garner-gutsy-stuff-from-adams-to-hit-the-bullies-where-it-hurts
collins introduced measures to deal with bullies too. turns out she is a huge self interested bully. i hope this isnt a pattern
Personally I think they may be trying to move all this out of the public sphere of intervention so they don’t have to spend any state funds on it.
Cue a few underfunded providers who have whole families referred to them but no court or police action possible and ultimately no DPB type welfare – people have to stay in the relationships or starve on the street – more the NAct mindset.
You have overlooked two glaring onslaughts, RedBaron.
The attack on privacy and the move away from the presumption of innocence.
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/60-trillion-of-world-debt-in-one-visualization/
The debt by country, not including personal debt of citizens.
+1
Now imagine what that would look like if they included private debt. And no matter what they include in the visuals none of it is payable which means that the private banks will have an eternity of bludging off of everyone else unless we change the system.
Total money owed is roughly in the region of the world’s total GDP. In other words all money is created as debt and it can never be paid back. The banking cartel own the planet, I wish people would wake up.
Titirangi kauri tree owner kickstarts debate with environmental application.
Yep those incompetent council resources consent officers again, don’t notice the Kauri trees in the first place should be preserved, then grant the application, than back track and the owner verbally agrees to preserve them, only to change their mind and then go to remove the SEA status completely and not only on that property but others the developer owns.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/70902656/titirangi-kauri-tree-owner-kickstarts-debate-with-environmental-application
Oh to be a developer in Auckland and buy cheap sites cos they are protected, put in consents to remove the protection led by 70 page proposal that fails to mention the mature Kauris and Rimu’s on the site, and then bobs your uncle the council will of course agree to clear the site, to put in double garaging and a 2 story residence cos too much hassle to build around the trees who they failed to notice in the first place or even understand why they should be preserved.
If anyone notices, agree to preserve them. buy time and then go back to environment court with hanky in hand and a dodgy deal with council who will sign anything to get one of their bad decisions through, crying what a victim they are.
I would like to see more penalty for those that manipulate the reports in the first place and more accountability to council for not noticing these very disturbing occurrences to by pass the district plan often ironically being spear headed by their own officers who seem to want to remove all protection from Auckland so that they have even less to do and more power in the process.
so Lenihan is basically arguing that if the protest hadn’t happened they would have removed the trees despite the SEA status and then because the site was cleared they could apply to have the SEA status removed. This puts him pretty high on the scale of evil developers IMO and he now has zero credibility or trustworthyness.
He also appears to have forgotten that the protest had nationwide support.
+1, it’s as if he’s learnt nothing over the whole debacle too. Maybe he just wants to show that he really is right, but to go through all of this again is either stupidity or pigheadedness.
+ 1 he needs some learning and hopefully it will come soon
You might like to read the actual submission #851 which was made in January 2014. Google “Unitary Plan Submissions”. This is a submission to the Unitary Plan – it is being heard by a panel of independent Commissioners. It has hit the news now because the hearings are in progress and this submitter has turnd up to speak to his submission.
It is not – repeat not, a Council officer initiative.
The council appoint the independent commissioners. They council read and review the reports and make a recommendation to the independent commissioners.
The independent commissioners are not independent at all, they are appointed by the council.
The indépendant commissioners practically always follow the recommendations of council.
The environment court practically always follows the submission of the council. The council when it goes to environment court, just appoint expensive lawyers to defend their bad decisions which are paid by the ratepayer.
The environment court seldom decline an application. As an applicant you are virtually guaranteed success as long as you can get the council to ‘support’ it.
Any applicant has an over 99% chance of success, all they have to do is get the council to support an application.
Therefore it puts the council officers in a huge position of power and open to abuse as there is no real independent checks and balances. Often it is hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of profit for some developer or industry – all in the hands of officers who probably earn $60k.
Can you imagine in a ‘real’ court that convicts 99% of people – it would be called a Kangaroo court.
And that folks is the Council and Environment court process.
So you are saying that developers bribe Council officers to get favourable reports? Seeing that most reasonable sized developments would have several officers – a Development Engineer, a Traffic Engineer, perhaps an Arborist and/or an Ecologist, plus the Planner who puts it all together and makes a recommendation, are you saying they are all bribed? Then there is the Senior Planner who reviews and possibly signs off the report for the Commissioner, or if it is for a hearing, then a more senior Manager reviews and clears the hearing report. They are all bribed too are they? Then the Commissioners – just one if it is a Duty Commissioner, or up to 4 including a Local Board member if it is a hearing. That is a lot of cash to be chucking around.
Do you actually have any proof of this – you know like “evidence”? I am sure Penny Bright would be intrested in evidence – she has been working away full time for the last 7 years to uncover corruption at Council and come up with zip.
This is a good opinion piece on TPPA especially for sending to those who don’t know much about the topic.
Ross Henderson: TPPA deserves a transparent discussion
“You could argue – the Government has argued – that no one’s seen the detail yet and this is all scare-mongering. But why can’t they give us a simple guarantee that they won’t sign up to a deal which increases the cost of healthcare and threatens our power as a nation to make our own laws?”
http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/opinion/70882005/ross-henderson-tppa-deserves-a-transparent-discussion
Like Mr Mapp?
“But why can’t they give us a simple guarantee that they won’t sign up to a deal which increases the cost of healthcare and threatens our power as a nation to make our own laws?”
hmmm. For a start, I’m not willing to trust this govt on anything they say and do. But more importantly when did the debate shift to, it’s ok to sign if we get these concessions? Isn’t the whole point that it’s a secret agreement and we can’t know what concessions to ask for other than the ones that we know about because of leaks? Shouldn’t we be opposing secret trade agreements on principle?
Why can’t globalisation be done transparently anyway?
+1
“For a start, I’m not willing to trust this govt on anything they say and do.”
That’s a pretty good rule of thumb for anyone. Saves hours of explainings.
Why can’t globalisation be done transparently anyway?
Lack of any effective mechanisms to ensure democratic accountability at a global level is why.
For instance, why is it not the role of the UNDP to broker these trade deals? Why have they been shut out of the process? If you wanted true global trade, what organisation is better placed to regulate it?
While has long been fashionable to sneer at the UN, most of it’s shortcomings have been imposed on it by the dominant big powers determined to prevent it from ever impinging on their nation state sovereignty.
From this perspective it’s fairly plain that these deals like the TPP have much less to do with globalisation and open trade, and much more to do with entrenching corporate advantage.
Sorry, but you’ll never get support from me for a world government. Imagine Key’s lot in charge with legitimacy 🙁 Think global, act local*, we should be devolving. Globalisation is horse shit. My question was a bit rhetorical, designed to point to the Emperor’s new clothes. As you say, globalisation is all about making a few people rich, and is nothing to do with open trade. Transparency would severely impact on their ability to do business. What’s stunning is that so many people are still complacent about it.
*CC, PO and probably the GFCs all suggest we should be trading locally not globally.
That’s pretty much the same logic local warlords would have used against the rise of the nation state; and abandons the global stage to those actors big and powerful enough to act upon it. Big finance, big military and big data.
Imagine Key’s lot in charge with legitimacy
The one thing worse than bad government is no government. Unless you really are an anarchist who doesn’t believe in governance at all. In which case you may have been on the wrong forum all these years. 🙂
Almost all the most intractable challenges humanity faces are global in nature. Their solutions will be too. I personally think some form of global governance is inevitable; the real challenge will be the struggle over who controls it and in whose interests.
Nor is there any reason to argue that global governance means the demise of the devolved local forms either. No more than for instance, the existence of the nation state implies the end of all city council’s.
“… Their solutions will be too.”
I don’t agree with that red – the solutions will come locally rather than globally because trying to enact a global solution (if one could even be invented) to each community just is not possible imo.
We are at/near the ‘top’ in terms of globalisation – all downhill from here imo – mainly due to the effects of running out of cheap energy and the extra energy being put into the system as climate warming continues.
I’m aware my view probably is out of synch with most lefties around here .. and by this I’m really not trying to disrespect why most people feel like this.
For so many of us we feel that the governments are bad enough … we can only dread how much more frustrating and difficult a global government might be. I’ve a lot of sympathy with that.
But I do believe that the world entered a permanent new phase when it entered the first round of globalisation, based on coal and steam engines, in the mid-1800’s. We are now close to the end of the second round, that has been based on oil and electronics; and all the upheaval that this ending may imply.
But regardless of how much cheap energy we’ve so profligately wasted – along the way we also gained a whole raft of knowledge, technologies and ways of looking world that will prove durable. Yes the hugely wasteful form of globalisation that is currently on it’s last legs will fail – but this does not preclude a new form arising in it’s place.
For instance, let me imagine a third round of globalisation driven by solar and bio-mimicry. Such a thing might be possible; and with it the still unsolved challenges of just and democratically global governance will still be a live issue.
I’d offer JMG’s post
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.nz/2015/07/the-cimmerian-hypothesis-part-three-end.html
so for me the idea that the “whole raft of knowledge, technologies and ways of looking world that will prove more durable” fit with JMG’s description of civilization, in that that ideal described above is derived from the structure of the civilization itself (mental model) and thus supports the notion of that civilization – rather than it is an inherent truth.
Thanks – there is a lot of depth to this topic marty. I’d not pretend to be the font of all knowledge on it … at least not on this occasion. 🙂
ditto 🙂
It’s not that they don’t believe in governance but that they don’t believe in a separate entity called government. In an anarchist society it’s the people making collective decisions and rules. In other words, the people are the government. Otherwise known as democracy.
Again, that comes down to democracy and not dictatorial organisations that are subservient to the corporations.
What I truly see standing in the way of a globalised world are:
1. Culture: At the moment there is a global cultural clash
2. Equality: We need everyone to have the same living standard. Without that then there will be wars and other strife as people try to equalise or prevent that equalisation (IMO, a lot of what the Western world does these days is to actually to prevent that equalisation).
3. Massive population decline: We simply don’t have enough resources to keep everyone at the current Western Living standard.
Mostly I’d agree. Forgive me if I decline to address anarchism; it’s simply a topic I have no strong ideas about. But I would add to your latter three points:
1. We live in a globalised world, but it lacks the underpinning values and culture to let it flourish positively.
2. Absolutely – this is why inequality (and social injustice in all it forms) matters so much
3. Probably.
RedLogix
We have global government. It’s called multi-national corporations.
In case you missed it this week, former President Jimmy Carter says they own the entire US governance system through campaign bribes.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/30/politicians-admitting-obvious-fact-money-affects-vote/
@AmaKiwi
You’ve more or less expressed exactly what I am saying. Yes we live in a globalised world, in which various supra-national powers wield unaccountable power. One might even describe them as a form of oligarchical government; fair enough.
But democratically accountable – they most certainly are not.
Our forms of government (local and national) are effectively bankrupt, and not just on ideas 😉 That is a serious issue for their continued control over people. If they can’t fund core services, then they will gradually disappear. The other problem they have is a loss of trust, and these power structures are getting more and more arrogant as time goes on. I think we’ll gradually see people investing their trust into local grassroots movements/groups that are outside the current system that keeps on making the same bureaucratic, out of touch mistakes. On a global level, as persistent depressions spread across the world, I think reduced trade between nations may mean countries become more insular like many countries were before globalisation.
I happily endorse exactly what you are saying about increased local grassroots movements.
The nation state is under siege from both above and below, from both the forces of globalisation AND those of an increasing desire for peoples to assert their cultural identity. The rise of the SNP is the example which springs immediately to my mind.
And for the most part I’d assert this is a good thing. Nation states have monopolised their position at the top of the political totem pole for too long. Relinquishing portions of their sovereignty, both to a federal global governance and to revitalised cultural/ grassroots movements, would quite likely address a fair slice of the ‘arrogance’ issue you describe.
Government can’t fund services because the business sector has been attacking them, telling people that they’re paying too much in taxes, that taxes are theft, that the business sector can do it better/cheaper and people have been buying into that BS. This result in people complaining about the taxes and so governments cut taxes the end result is that our society no longer has the support structure to keep it going and it collapses.
+1
Shooting ourselves in the foot with demand destruction to serve the greed of a few 1 percenters
You gotta wonder if John Roughan can even see the external edges of his keyboard with the size of his blinkers.
No need to link to it, just imagine an idyllic pasture festooned with iridescent flowers dancing in warm breezes as cherubs of wonderment float by gleefully distributing petals of joy.
[Never to dissipate] intoxication by the fumes of well rewarded hagiography perhaps ? With such skin in the game the role ceases to be that of journalist…….it’s forever the role of ‘spurnalist’ – reliably ready spurning of anything/one failing to endorse the subject of the well rewarded hagiography. Delivered with increasingly solemn old-world-vicar-like pomposity. Caricaturish really.
Wasn’t that predictable…..
The Weekend Herald commentaries look to be well choreographed, there seems to be a fair level of coaching by Herald management. All too often the National Party fan club all pick the same topic to comment on. That might be coincidence once but not when it’s as frequent as the Herald commentaries.
It’s quite notable that with Roughan’s pieces the Herald often holds back the reader comments until days later, by then readers have moved on and don’t read the scorn heaped on him. That has to be deliberate.
Or they simply close down the debate.
‘
What! No unicorns?
I thought it was missing something 🙂
http://jorjajacksonridge.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/unicorn4.jpg
“What I say is what I say.”
Brutal new comedy series gets 24 million viewers.
Who said Americans don’t have a sense of irony?
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/07/opinions/opinion-gop-debate-roundup/
It’s too early to tell whether (some) farmers are in for another shock: El Nino – Explained as simply as possible.
http://www.weatherwatch.co.nz/content/el-nino-explained-simply-possible
Link wasn’t working, I just removed the apostrope at the end 😉
Ta
Jimmy Kimmel: “Not all English people are like this jackal.”
Murdering rich bastard condemned around the world.
A rich, pampered, cocaine-sniffing, prostitute-chasing playboy and recreational hunter who rejoices in the nickname “The Big H” has been condemned around the world after it was revealed he had killed Afghani peasants and boasted about it.
Angry crowds waved signs saying “KILLER”, “ROT IN HELL”, “THE BUTCHER OF BUCKINGHAM” and “I AM AFGHANISTAN”, and shouted messages like “Extradite!” and “Shut him down!” They want the playboy to be sent back to Afghanistan to face charges.
To resounding applause, late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel declared: “Not all English people are like this jackal.”
http://www.kare11.com/story/news/2015/07/29/protests-set-against-dentist-who-killed-beloved-lion/30821461/
http://www.3news.co.nz/world/report-of-prince-harrys-taliban-kill-mission-denied-2012122411#axzz3iAdyhxOy
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/4712507/Air-return-for-Big-H-the-killer.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/31/prince-harry-nicknamed-big-h-by-army-comrades.html
https://aotearoaawiderperspective.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/big-h-the-afghan-killer-aka-prince-harry-of-the-royal-house-of-saxe-coburg-and-gotha-aka-winsor-descendent-of-vlad-the-impaler-aka-as-dracul/
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/30/us/walter-palmer-whereabouts/index.html?iid=ob_article_organicsidebar_expansion&iref=obnetwork
Referring to the dentist who killed a lion (Cecil?) made me think about how they crop up in books.
In Catch 22 by Joseph Heller –
The question of “Who promoted Major Major?” alludes to Joseph McCarthy’s questioning of the promotion of Major Peress, an army dentist who refused to sign loyalty oaths.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night –
A white supremacist organization [whose leader, a dentist named Lionel Jones] discovers his existence [Campbell] and makes him a cause celebre, inviting him to speak to new recruits as a “true American patriot.”
(Howard W Campbell is a playwright who became a Nazi propagandist for the USA so he could secretly broadcast coded messages aiding the Allies. He is conspired against
by a white supremacist dentist when back in the USA, still denigrated as a Nazi sympathiser.)
I think the dentists of the USA became annoyed at the portrayal of their profession in an unflattering way and took some legal action. But I am not sure about this, it may have just been considered.
Yes it’s almost become a cliché – the dentist who is “broken” in some way that emerges as brutality or “deviancy”. Even the latest “The Hangover” films had the dentist as both domestically and socially “suspect” – you know, compared to mainstream Hollywood gender roles.
This Big_H bloke could be a Francis Macomber type on the inside: using and running from women, killing only from positions of superiority, a real coward despite his alleged military “derring-do”. I hope he didn’t track or shoot the Lion from a vehicle… Ernest would not be pleased. Wastrels, he called them. Unlike Fitzgerald, he didn’t much like the rich, at all. A good woman could sort Big_H out, if he had the guts to stick with her, and if none available, a Margot character would solve the problem, too.
@Morrisey
I am surprised that you are targeting Prince Harry. Why? Many of your links seem anti-royalist. He has enough snappers and slappers stalking him. I think that he deserves not to have stories scraped up as an excuse to build a phantom story.
On what basis does he ‘deserve’ it ?
The royals are fair game, as are the Key’s offspring
Why not take up boomerang throwing instead of horseshoes.
National Party standard approach to a controversy.
1. deny anything is wrong
2. blame the last Labour Government
3. blame anyone else
4. never accept responsibility
1. Fire up John Key’s Dirty Politics Machine
2. Start lying.
3. Lie about lying and then immediately attack, never defend, never explain
4. blame the last Labour government
5. Try a sleaze distraction
6. Blame the public service
7. Never ever admit liability
8. Blame an opposition MP personally
9. Keep lying
10. Scramble like crazy behind the scenes to come up with some good news.
11. Rinse and repeat.
12. Pretend to apologise when caught out but never actually apologise.
13. And then continue doing exactly what they were doing before.
Theresa Gattung running for Auckland mayoralty soon? On Radionz news just now.
This Mark Todd (not the horsey one) is doing something special in NZ, along with his compatriot. This is a must listen for all who know we are needing changes in thinking and doing in housing and education and on. Good listening with Kim at Radionz.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/201765712
10:05 Playing Favourites with Mark Todd
Mark Todd is the co-founder, with Ben Preston, of Auckland urban development company Ockham Residential, and the Ockham Foundation, an education-based registered charity. Ockham Residential is the new sponsor of the New Zealand Book Awards, to be produced by the Auckland Writers Festival from 2016.
Geez our journalists are lazy. Apparently it’s not our dairy thats the problem it’s the Canadians not wanting the TPPA because their diary industry would be flooded with shit US milk if the borders were opened. Groser ( pissed again most likely ) thinking he’s the great intellect and hard nosed negoitiator and the idoit scibblers hanging on every word.
Fuck me we’ve fallen a long way
Tourism is going to be our saviour when dairy goes down.
Here is a piece on Radionz about the Canary Islands off Spain that have 11 million tourists a year?? Anyway they find the locals are being pushed out of their own island by the burgeoning tourist infrastructure of resorts appealing to tourists alone.
The locals’ small businesses are going out of business.
The unemployment for youth right up to the 30s? is 56%. The business is not spreading out to the island because of the truly-vertical integration where the accommodation hotels are self-contained and capture all the spending.
There are so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot with tourism as your main business.
Those who do any thinking about NZ wider prosperity and business stability should take note and learn the lessons now.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/201765598
That gave a good look at the issues Spanish tourism faces, in part due to an investment boom / bust like we had in 2000s in property here and in dairy the last few years. We’ve got the same conflicts in our tourist industry, but the scale is really different. The effects and responses are very different too.
We’re lucky in a way that we are so far away form the markets that create the Spanish problem, you can commute from Spain to London, people do, so they get millions of short stay visitors who just want to get plastered and then go home. We require a bit more commitment, and that tends to self select.
We also go through viscous cycles. Combine this with the distance thing and investment here isn’t as attractive as places closer to the big markets. So we’re not as likely to get the mega resort developments. But we need to manage these cycles more effectively. The recent 25% appreciation of our currency due to the dairy boom has been hell for tourism, we’re back in the game with the US market now but the Aussie market has a long way to go. We need to be around AUD 0.80 before we’re going anywhere there. The worst affected in our case have been some of our suppliers, carvers and artists who’ve been smacked around by businesses failing and have had to go and get other jobs to survive, they’ve gt to start again if they want to go back to their art.
The vertical integration does happen here, but there’s a strong move by industry leaders to higher value independent visitors in most markets. A lot of the understand that we will always be limited because of the distance and there’s no point selling a package for $1000 when you can sell a better one for $10,000 . There’s a market for group tours, but independent packages erode that once the market matures, like the Chinese and US have. The closest we have to the Canarys would be the cruise lines, they expect their slice of everything, and can be very unpleasant.
The industry needs clear political leadership to get through these cycles, the current minister is MIA, he seems to think Sky City is the total of the industry. But if he’s pushed he’ll take credit for all those who are getting somewhere (surviving) despite his governments policies. It’s an opportunity for the opposition to get traction where there could be a bit of a muddle.
@Graeme
That gives a really thorough summary to our problems as I have heard them.
That massive short-stay, go and get bombed then home, is a killer for places like Venice with environmental problems, sea level rise and infrastructure limitations. They need high spending visitors with true appreciation for their wonders.
In UK they have put down board walks at Lands End. We have protected Tane Mahuta similarly. Though it is interesting that if NZsare wanting to go and view on the tourist buses, seats will be booked up for months ahead. It could be that some of our attractions are already overrun by tourists even with the distance disadvantage.
The trick is getting the tourists to come to your town and spend at least a night there, and not just follow a well-trodden route. For instance, I have heard that Kerikeri, a pretty little place, is down on its uppers.
I think the Oz aren’t big spenders, and are short stayers. Though while we still own AirNZ, there is money to be made in transporting them and those NZs who cross to the Gold Coast. I think the Japanese and US are bigger spenders.
From the “Believe it or Not” files – this incredible “decision” by one IPCA chairman Judge Sir David Carruthers:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11493239
In a nutshell:
Detective Inspector Grant Wormald didn’t perjure himself because surveillance is completely different from intercepting communications….
Knock me over with a feather!
I remember in the early 80’s as a member of a national Public Questions Committee wondering whether the IPCA structure was the best way to go . I’m now more than convinced that it was not. This is such another extreme case of the Police covering their backsides with a supposedly “independent” inquiry . They have to go and a completely independent body set up instead. What we have now is just a joke – if it wasn’t so serious.
+100
At the same time how about a completely independent Prosecution Service that has no connection to Police. Preferably not even ex police as investigators.
It is time that Police do not decide when of if they will prosecute
I’m inclined to agree. Perhaps a system along the lines of the French or Scottish, or something similar. A separate legal body completely independent from the Pollice.
Sounds like wormtongue to me.
Yes the lexical semantics involved in this decision is mind-numbing.
Obviously a box of JK Red is expected at yuletide.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/280817/fire-service-not-told-of-pager-shutdown
It is not a stretch to say many people who live in the cities of New Zealand, do not spare much of a thought for the volunteer based emergency services that populate the small towns and rural communities across our country. Not until they need them of course.
Like when they are visiting their rural investment property and dozing in the sun after (an often illegal) burn off that wasn’t quite as dead as the owner thought and the winds of the late afternoon decide to have some fun with the smouldering cuttings from their overgrown plot of future plans.
For many, thankfully, that is the one and only time they have anything to do with a volunteer Fire Service. But that service does much much more.
And New Zealand should really do more for them. But when?
After the embers have been dampened?
After the once grand forest is a dark shadow of itself and the hillside is nothing more than ashes?
After the steel and speed and flesh and ignorance have left little but twisted carnage that someone has to reach into and check for a pulse? After the wreckage has been towed away from the unfamiliar highway, that wasn’t designed to be driven in the same manner as some motorway being used on a pre-dawn munchie run? After the frightened family are huddled in the back of the ambulance, assured and safe as the impact of a moment’s indecision is cleared away? After the blood has been hosed off the road?
After the final tarpaulin is dragged off the storm battered roof, scrubbed down, dried off and carefully stored until the next alarm? After the broken limbs of busted trees are roped in the dark and dragged out from under bridges as the raging floodwaters rise and homes are threatened? Homes that might even belong to the volunteers themselves, who have left their families, as they do without question, night after night day after day. Heading out in the middle of deep winter storms when the cold steel rain annihilates any chance of comfort. In the height of summer when surf is calling and barbeque chatter not cackling pyres are all the exhausted men and women wanted to hear? Is it only after these events we should remind ourselves how desperately we need them?
These people are volunteers.
When that siren cries out across a calm evening, the rest of the community tenses for a moment before remembering its Tuesday night, so it’s just a call to training. But then they hear a second, third, a fourth alarm blasts across the town’s rooftops and they know there is no training tonight. Someone needs help. These volunteers do what is asked of them. They drop what they are doing and go.
They face dwindling resources and increasing call-outs. They get little thanks outside of the communities they live in and what do they ask for? – some simple respect and awareness that should be front of mind for anyone tasked with the vital job of alerting them to an alarm. Instead they have to publicly confront a company that has completely failed them. Some of those lives, those jobs, those homes, are too far away from the siren for it to be heard, so they need another way to be contacted. Pagers are the essential link between the disaster and the people you rely on to make things okay again.
Apparently, Spark want to remove this essential and singularly reliable means of alert to alarm that these selfless volunteers rely upon.
Spark is scrambling to cover their arses on this indefensible decision and are no doubt, behind the scenes, in full PR mode working out the best way to sell the fuck up to the public. They are probably counting on the fact that outside of a few donations here and there, most of New Zealand has little thought for volunteer emergency services.
What does the change really mean though? Why is it such a big deal? Pagers are so last century right! What’s with all the fuss? It is quite simple really, and once you think about it for five seconds you will know all too well why the real issue won’t be discussed in public by Spark.
Throughout rural New Zealand the mobile communications service is below par. That is an understatement of course. All across New Zealand, mobile technology in rural areas that fall outside of the State highway channels is happenchance some days, and pointless to even attempt on others. You might well have had some inconvenient loss of service whilst traveling to a friend’s farm, or when lazing at the beach on holiday, but unless you have lived it, day in day out, you cannot fully appreciate the sheer bloody uselessness of it.
Many of these volunteers live and work in the very regions where mobile coverage is sketchy at best. Spark’s decision to remove the paging technology has very real potential to cost lives. Any delay in receiving an alarm to an emergency event can cost a life. Look at it this way – if you ever venture outside of an urban centre, where the emergency services are staffed by employed members of the New Zealand Fire Service, you rely on volunteers to save lives.
If the volunteers cannot get reliable alarm alerts, that life that isn’t saved, might be yours. Do you have enough faith in the mobile services of rural New Zealand to trust your life to such a decision?
Perhaps you might like to tell Spark what you think about their complete failure to comprehend the implications of their short-sighted and undoubtedly economically driven decision.
http://www.spark.co.nz/contactus/
Sorry mate, but the market has spoken.
I was under the impression that Spark (and Chorus) was created because Telecom was getting out of standard telecomms systems, and into internet TV/entertainment. Therefore telling Spark they are going wrong is pointless. They no listening no more.
Now if your volunteers would buy iphones and agree to doing a reality show like, MasterFireChief, BurnMyBush or MyVolliesRule, you might get better support.
Very droll Charles …. 🙂
I hope so. These days, never can tell how close to reality droll might actually be.
Yeah. Being a professional satirist must be a daunting job these days …
except paging systems are notoriously unreliable they are only a one way system and the sender has no idea if the recipient has picked up the page let alone acted upon it.
We need a reliable cellular coverage that allows two way communication
except that until the cellular system has 100% coverage and 100% reliability the pager system is as good as it gets in many rural areas.
And that wee buzz is truly galvanising..,seldom unacknowledged.
Our rural and often volunteer emergency services deserve better.
Freedom – your point and prose are awesome – I’ve turned it into a poem of sorts
These people are volunteers.
For many, thankfully,
after the embers have dampened
the once grand forest is a dark shadow of itself
the hillside is nothing more than ashes.
after the steel and speed, flesh and ignorance
left little but twisted carnage that someone
has to reach into and check for a pulse.
after the wreckage has been towed
away from the unfamiliar highway, that wasn’t
designed to be driven the same manner as motorway.
after the frightened family, huddled in the ambulance back
assured and safe as the impact of a moment’s
indecision is cleared away, the blood hosed off the road.
is it only after these events we should remind ourselves
how desperately we need them, these people are volunteers,
these volunteers are people, these people are us.
Anyway kia kaha
whakawhetai i marty
if one positive act inspires another
i call that progress
@freedom
Well I think we should contact Spark. and complain.
That’s a terrific impassioned piece which is timely. The volunteer fire service does get taken for granted. The fire service management even did not use to look after their needs properly. And the government wants to load even more onto you.
So we get in touch with Spark. And listening to you, you make a better case for technological efficiency than the wealthy moaning that at one time they had to wait three months for a new phone connection at the time that privatisation was introduced.
Obviously it hasn’t worked for the country fire service. Perhaps we should change back to government services for the rural area.
What else should people be doing to help the volunteer fire services. Has their money been frozen. Is it all from government?
“What else should people be doing to help the volunteer fire services [?] ”
That, is a very good question
and one I have thought about a few times today
maybe we need to ask them, what they would like us to do?
Well it is likely they feel neglected. They do in other countries. I wrote to the local NZ paper once saying that volunteer fire persons weren’t acknowledged enough for their good work. Then I found it on google having been uplifted and put in a USA firemens publication.
They are such a bargain as business can treat serious problem responses as an externality. And of course in neo lib economic theory there is no such thing as self sacrifice, community devotion. Everything that humans do is done for reward, so the fire person gets a feeling of satisfaction and standing in the community, even not getting paid might give a feeling of worth, so payment would spoil all that lovely spiritual elation.
Someone elsewhere in the blog is discussing that point. The way that modern economics extends its calculations over all life activities, not just those in business or trade as the old theories used to do.
Syrian air defenses bring down US surveillance drone – reports
The flying of military aircraft over another state without permission has been recognised for some time as an aggressive act of war and yet we never see this fact reported in the news when the US flies it’s planes over another state. They did it back in the Cold War and then got upset about their planes being shot down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OhCAyIllnXY#t=0
Some other long term thinking, from 2001 to 2014 and 2030 (written in 2014)
Past, present, what-the-future?, some big questions for 2030 New Zealand…