8 June 2011
PRESS RELEASE: Penny Bright ‘Anti-corruption campaigner’:
“Is the Solicitor-General maliciously abusing his position, as the second-highest ‘lawyer in the land’ by persecuting/ prosecuting Vince Siemer (AGAIN) for ‘contempt of Court’? ”
Vince Siemer – is facing jail for contempt of court (AGAIN!), through proceedings initiated (AGAIN) by the Solicitor -General for telling the public J Winkelman’s decision that the people arrested in the state terror raids of 15th October 2007 were not only denied a jury trial, but that the public were being denied the right to know that information.
(There will be a protest outside the Wellington High Court
2 Molesworth St (opposite Parliament)
Thursday 9 June 2011 from 9 – 10am, then for those who are able – quiet support inside the court room.
Well-known human rights lawyer Tony Ellis will be defending Vince Siemer).
In my considered opinion, Vince Siemer is NZ’s leading ‘Public Watchdog’ / ‘Whistleblower’ on the lack of transparency and accountability and ‘conflicts of interest’ in the NZ Judiciary. http://www.kiwisfirst.co.nz )
Why is the Solicitor-General David Collins QC himself not facing an investigation for ‘contempt of the House’ – given his role – in my considered opinion, of helping to ‘mislead’ the former Justice and Electoral Select Committee, which resulted in the matters raised in Petition 2005/142 being declared ‘subjudice’, at a time they clearly were NOT?
(Petition 2005/142 presented to the House by Mr Hide MP on 24 July 2007 “requesting that Parliament conduct an inquiry into the comittal for imprisonment of Mr Vincent Ross Siemer for contempt of court”)
Was the former Justice and Electoral Select Committee ‘misled’ – not only by the Solicitor-General David Collins QC (‘the highest acting law officer in the land’); but also by the former Clerk of the House David McGee QC (now an Ombudsman) ; and the former Acting Deputy Solicitor-General (Public Law) Grant Liddell (who later became the CEO of the NZ Serious Fraud Office (SFO)?
Read the following information for yourself – and you be the judge…….”
So now many of the ordinary mums and dads are being subtly cast again as “pariahs” of the state – you know, the ones who belong to unions or are public service employees. Now, let’s list a few other average mums and dads who, with the stroke of their pens, have shunted inordinate amounts of the New Zealand cake offshore – family names like Myers, Douglas, Fay, Aldgate-Whitechapel, Hart, Richwhite, … makes you wonder who the real Kiwis are doesn’t it?
Oh, its far worse, the typically civilisation killer is here. Where the language of debate, if its allowed to happen (in the public eye), is restricted to the needs of the exploiters continued exploitation. Where the only justified work lifestyle has to be in some industry that exploits its workers and its environment, and where if you do have standards to meet the taxpayer not the polluter has to pay. Imagine the markets as a massive bragging competition, we’re made this much money using up this much soil, putting this much high density ore into refuse dumps globally, so we can produce some high end product for the few who braggers who brag the best.
Its not surprising Key is loved by one and all, he is a hero of the brag to make money brigade, what your kids should grow up to be like.
What’s the story with Fiji at the RWC? Articles I’ve read seem confusing as to who can and can’t come and I got the impression the IRB seemed to be thinking it could let in who it liked……ignoring any bans we may have.
So it’s another case of us surrendering sovereignty to some external transnational body? – again!
Thanks Murray! You bring the KY and we will assume the position – again!
What is it with Key and planking? He is now busily trying to reform labour laws to make protection for workers a joke and describes this as a “campaign plank” …
Closing down debate quickly on National Radio—again
Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan, Thursday June 9, 2011
In a discussion about deep sea oil and gas exploration off New Zealand’s coasts, Simon Boxer of Greenpeace mentioned that both the Brazilian government and Petrobras were angry with the New Zealand government for making public announcements about oil-prospecting deals, without having consulted local people.
Incredibly, Kathryn Ryan sternly warned him away: “Well, we had the Associate Minister disputing that the other day. I don’t want that dragged up again. Let’s move on.”
A couple of weeks ago, an equally nervous Jim Mora stopped Richard Langstone and Bomber Bradbury from going after Professor Stephen Hoadley, who had made a couple of preposterous statements asserting the “legality” of the American carpet-bombing of Indo-China, and claiming that it conformed with the Geneva Conventions. Like Ryan, Mora insisted that there was no time to go “off topic” like that. (“The Panel”, May 27, 2011)
These are by no means isolated instances.
It’s clear that, in addition to the highly partisan, unapologetically pro-National-government New Zealand Herald and NewstalkZB, we have a public radio station that is afraid of incurring government wrath by letting critics have a say.
That’s a worry for democracy, as well as a blow for the prospects of interesting or stimulating discussions on the radio.
Morrissey – Be fair, the interviewers must offer their audience a broad view of their subject, and only Mary Wilson, of those I listen to, hammers one aspect into the ground. She doesn’t give up. Sometimes it even seems pointless and I turn the radio off. Interviewers can’t get into the argy-bargy that goes on here sometimes with endless assertions being countered continuously with a lot of rancour and little illumination or new facets being revealed, and other relevant info getting sidelined.
…only Mary Wilson…hammers one aspect into the ground. She doesn’t give up.
Eva Radich is another determined interviewer. When Tony Blair had the hide to make a state visit here some years ago, she went after him about the illegality of the Iraq invasion and his bogus “45 minute” claim. She would not let him evade her questions or divert the focus of the interview. In the end, of course, he just resorted to his usual insulting menu of vague platitudes. But she had discomfited that creep, in a way he rarely faced back in the U.K. And what a great contrast between her interview with Blair and the hesitant treatment he got a day later by an overwhelmed John Campbell, who obviously detested Blair but lacked the fortitude to insist he respond seriously to his questions.
Last year Kim Hill subjected ex-Australian prime minister John Howard to a thirty-five minute interrogation. The Great Man was clearly unsettled by her persistence, something he rarely if ever encountered back in Australia. But one person was even more upset by the interview than Howard was—the Wairarapa oenophile Karl Du Fresne was incensed by Kim’s lack of forelock-tugging, and slammed her “lack of balance” in a dyspeptic column in the Australian Spectator… http://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2010/11/howard-deserved-more-balanced-treatment.html
Sometimes it even seems pointless and I turn the radio off.
I think it’s a pity more interviewers haven’t got the courage, or are insufficiently prepared, to seriously hold politicians to account. When TV and radio stations assign people like John Campbell, Kathryn Ryan, Mike Hosking, and (God save us) Paul Holmes to interview powerful and intimidating politicians, it’s a missed opportunity.
I generally reckon that when the press isn’t being combative they are missing the point of their freedom.
I like seeing all pollies getting their feet held to the fire, particularly when they are ones that I have voted for or are thinking of voting for. Fucking nail them.
I don’t care if a journo ‘gets it wrong’, or asks ‘stupid questions’ or is ‘rude’. That’s ‘doing their job’ as far as I see it.
One of the US founders said (paraphrase) that given the choice between a free press and free elections, he’d take the former every time. And this was in a time when the press was vicious. His point was that a combative and free press lets the public know things by forcing pollies to confront things. Without that knowledge, elections are useless. With that knowledge, even absent elections, remedies are available.
The public is capable of deciding if a journo has been an arsehole, and an arsehole journo at the end of the day, is just a twatcock asking questions and printing the answers. Those answers will always be of some value.
Some detail about the Ecoli outbreak. This has been ruinous for Spain and the wash has spread over all the EU. A British bacteriologist (I think) said that in fact it was a North German problem. All the people sickening outside Germany had contact from there. The researchers have concentrated on salad vegetables because most of those affected are women and probably health conscious, but what about bottled water, or natural beauty preparations? (Light bulb – they need to call House.)
With all the sophisticated, easily accessed labs they have in Germany and Europe, they have not been able to source this thing. Imagine our country affected by a blow to its agriculture like this. It does not even have to be true, just suspected. We have closed down so much of our manufacturing and employment-rich businesses separate from the farming economy. We would be back to slave camps, that’s what they called the work camps during the Depression. And glad to get something no doubt.
From google listings – 1 The EHEC strain may cause hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which is characterised by acute kidney failure and can lead to seizures, strokes and coma.
Reinhard Burger, head of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute which monitors epidemics, said the country usually saw between 50 and 60 cases of HUS annually, whereas it had recorded about 80 during the current outbreak.
Earlier –
2 Ten people have been hospitalized in Frankfurt with another 50 experiencing mild symptoms. In Hamburg, another forty patients are being treated for EHEC as well. Other cases have been confirmed in the Northern part of Germany including Rostock, Lower Saxony, Bremen and Schleswig Holstein. There are up to 600 suspected cases across Germany.
3 The latest cases in the U.K. involve three people with bloody diarrhea and one person who has developed the potentially fatal form of the condition known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).
Three of the four new cases are in U.K. residents who have recently returned from Germany, and the other involves a person from Germany who is on vacation in England.
Recent news 8/6 http://news.uk.msn.com/world/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=158154499
4 Another person has died in Germany from the infection, raising the toll to 24 in Germany, plus one in Sweden.
The number of reported cases is up by more than 300 over the previous day to 2,648, including nearly 700 suffering from a serious complication that can cause kidney failure.
Interesting, the photo accompanying the above article showed a laboratory worker? not wearing gloves with an opened bean sprout packet which the caption said was to be tested. Surely a file photo. I wouldn’t want to put my flesh anywhere near something as possibly infective as that.
“Imagine our country affected by a blow to its agriculture like this. It does not even have to be true, just suspected.”
This is why the American beef industry does their own management of testing for mad cow disease, and deliberately do a very poor job of it while covering up any actual infections detected (any cows ‘suspected’ of having it are killed and incinerated before samples can be taken for proper testing). That way they can be sure that if there is actually a problem with mad cow disease, it would have to be quite widespread before the public became aware of it.
In milk we trust.
Solely, absolutely and forever and ever.
Kiss goodbye to rail and engineering technology (Kevin Welsh @ 1:44pm).
May the sacredness of our milk always prevail over all disasters – national or National.
And may our milk be always completely free from health scares.
If you’re not keen about being a milk slave, erm, farmer or dairy maid, please take the next one-way flight out of Milkland.
I don’t know if I would trust all milk, there was something on TV news last night about modified cows producing “human ” milk. Curdled thoughts on that.
lanthanide – Gosh! The usa beef lobby is powerful – remember them suing Oprah for saying she wouldn’t eat hamburger or similar. I think that was at the mad cow disease outbreak. Also I remember a couple of journalists being harrassed by the usa dairy lobby who managed to get control of the wording of legislation about quality of milk so they could ensure that people remained unaware of possible problems. The ‘What you don’t know, won’t hurt you’ approach. This was another scare, back a decade or two.
You can imagine how tough the usa lobby is when you hear Federated Farmers leaders like Don Nicholson talking about farmers’ interests.
according to some very smart people, including the Koch Institute mentioned above, Mother Nature simply does not work in the manner the Bankers would like us to believe. No naturally occuring process can achieve this level of resistance complexity and then magically appear simulaneously in multiple links on the food chain. It does not happen, not without a concerted level of assistance.
The very complex questions, often have very simple answers.
What a load of BS. Bacteria such as E. coli typically acquire multidrug resistance via horizontal gene transfer from other bacteria, and not via multiple rounds of selection. And bacterial contamination is easy spread given the right conditions (and of course that all the cases are linked to a single country anyway). Mother nature is not benevolent.
And the theory of how the strain was ‘engineered’ is just as dumb. If I was going to engineer a deadly strain of bacteria, it wouldn’t be via that method.
This is shocking. But this Government prefers to purchase Chinese workers and have our own as unemployed on the street and on the dole because it is more “efficient”.
I dont think we should be suprised about this one. And we shouldnt blame the current administration.
This has been happening for about the past 25 years or so, with NZR, TranzRail and then Toll running down the railway workshops, that provided NZ with a lot of skill, expertise and engineering infrastructure for the past century or so. Eastown, Otahuhu, Addington (now replaced by a shopping mall), all gone, and Hutt, along with Hillside, running at a fraction of its orginal capacity.
If you want to blame anyone for this, blame Richard Prebble. He was the one who stripped NZR to the bone for it to be flogged off.
Yep and, unfortunately, neither of the two main parties are willing to change the direction just yet. One because of the ideology – they actually want NZ to go the wrong way because it directly benefits them and they don’t care what it does to everyone else. The other doesn’t seem to want to admit that it got it wrong three decades ago and some of them even want to continue going the wrong way as well.
Choice: A) Wrong way or b) Wrong way with conditions.
Not really all that appertising and none of the minor parties are talking about the necessary changes needed to make us sustainable/more egalatarian either. They’re sayijg that’s what they want but not how to go about doing it.
Some thoughts on religion, the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good ideas and ideals from religion can get dereailed after the ambitious and the fanatical and the dogmatic pedants and the supernaturally moral (in theory) get their hold on it and find a hopefully, comfortable position within it and a hopefully decent income and elevated position in society. It’s true that men have dominated in the past, but in the Catholic church some of the nuns have been remarkably bold in setting up an Order in a new place. And Anglican nuns as well I think. The belief of a woman in the goodness of Christ and his life as a shining example to follow led her into an adventurous and strenuous life. Read about Gladys Aylward in The Small Woman by Alan Burgess. Often comes up on Trademe. Religion has been a comfort, a scourge, a challenge. Here is a link I’ve got – can’t remember exactly what’s on it. http://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/a/aylward-gladys.php
And if you are a leftie then you will have heard of The Tolpuddle Martyrs – basically one family of godly men who started the farm union movement in southern England, got punished by being sent as convicts to Australia, and by popular acclaim of British crowds who supported them, were pardoned and allowed back to England. It was their Methodism that kept them sane in their souls, and gave them strength to endure the very nasty privations they bore.
For the rest of us, it is sometimes just comfortable to front up and gabble the responses, kneel and rise if that’s how they do it in Rome, sing a few good songs, and hopefully be better people for a while. There are worse things than meeting with others who have shared beliefs in trying to be kind and think of others before ourselves sometimes. But as M says in the blog for Key’s Destiny it doesn’t last beyond Sunday morning for some people.
Nice one prism and I don’t down people for having faith having being raised a Catholic but I don’t like it where religion is misused to keep people down, for example Joseph Ratzinger aka God’s policeman describing homosexuals as backyard mongrels.
As a teenager it began to chafe the way I saw women very much in the background with their worth seeming to be in motherhood or the religious life instead of the human flawed beings like their male counterparts.
I’m lapsed for many years now but take with me the social justice aspect of my upbringing and try to effect change where I can or speak out in defence of those under nasty yokes and I think many other lapsers do too.
Don’t have a problem with people being churchgoers or talking about their faith as I have friends from all over the spectrum from hardened atheists to the most ardent believers and when faith or religion is put to use for the good like say the sisters of the Home of Compassion I’m their most vehement supporter.
My old Grandmother – a life-long Athiest and left-wing Labour Party activist – always said Lapsed Catholics made the best, most passionate, most committed Lefties.
Agreed swordfish. My grandmother had a picture of Jesus Christ the sacred heart on one side of her mantlepiece and Micky Savage on the other. Both pictures were about the same size and of an identical height!
May i suggest that lapsed Catholics make good lefties because the good hearts of these people were still beating after realising the Church was one big lie and they really really wanted to believe that there is a way for Humans to help each other live a better life without the endless deference to greed and brutality
Nice one prism and I don’t down people for having faith having being raised a Catholic but I don’t like it where religion is misused to keep people down, for example Joseph Ratzinger aka God’s policeman describing homosexuals as backyard mongrels.
I have come to believe that I had a huge advantage by being raised by parents who were atheist and agnostic/apathetic.. (although afaik they didn’t stay that way.) I didn’t learn anything about God/religion/church until I was 19. I started as a fundamentalist, and have become an Anglo-Catholic.
I’ve heard that Benedict said that, but I’d like ‘chapter and verse’, simply because from what I know of him (which was nothing, until recently my dear beloved Italian teacher, sent me his latest book as a Christmas present) it does not sound like the sort of thing he would say! When I am not here, I spend far too long on ATS, talking about politics which is fine, and ‘debating’ with atheists, which is not – because said atheists are much more into personal abuse than all but a few here (you know who you are! 😀 ) It just makes me completely exhausted to see all the same old techniques – the old assertiveness training ‘broken record’ is a favourite…. Sadly, so is citing the most rage-inducing quotes, without sources, and then when the sources are tracked down, turns out to have been something interpreted very creatively! Having the same problem convincing Americans that Admadinejad never said he wanted to nuke Israel, not even ‘wipe it off the map’ – I can’t understand why lefties are quite happy to use right wing techniques such as mis-quoting, etc against we religious… 🙁
Yesterday, the Green Party co-leader Dr Russel Norman asked the Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key a number of pertinent questions concerning Ministers receiving “corporate hospitality.” As usual John Key was evasive and did not answer appropriately continuing to obfuscate and deliberately withhold relevant information. The current Speaker of the House Lockwood Smith then protected John Key by implementing procedural trivialities in an appalling display of arrogance that perverted Parliamentary justice from being served.
Easy street, insulated by their wealth, are up in arms over loss of free weather reports for pilots.
Unlike boaties, rock anglers, etc, anyone, who can jump off anywhere to get on the ocean, not just anyone can jump in a plane, or hellicopter.
What exactly were they thinking when they thought cuts would be on the poor singularly?
What did they understand to mean back office cuts and privatization?
Of course it would mean less generosity towards their luxuries hobbies.
What comes around goes around, we can be generous, grow the economy by providing incentives in real growth rather than exporting people, profits and future opportunities.
Capital farming is an attack on capitalism, since it rewards those with massive wealth to keep it and shut out new hard working citizens entering their industry, or the home ownership club.
Oh, and when did free market come to mean free for all? Markets aren’t fair, uniform, unless well regulated by government and society. When the cultural norms break down in punishing criminals, and short cut takers, then government needs to step up its game rather than rush to join up with the government hands off driving.
Economic outlook is uncertain, but what is certain is energy will cost more, transport cost will rise.
That reminds me… I’ve been meaning to tell everyone that DF has reinstalled his LSO cookie.
The best way to combat it is to install Better Privacy and restart your browser each time you visit Kiwibog. Whaleoil has also recently implemented the technology on his site.
You can learn a little bit more about the DF LSO in this Jackal blog post.
I read this extract from Hansard (dated 7-6-11) on Red Alert a few minutes ago.It was posted by Trevor M.under “Late Play Annie to the Leader of the National Party.” It was about the contract given to Parents Inc not being put out for tender.
“Hon Annette King: What evidence and scientific advice did he seek before agreeing to allocate $2.4 million to Parents Inc. for a parenting programme that even the Minister for Social Development and Employment said she had neither sought nor received advice on, or was she carrying out his promise that he made before the election that he would make sure that Parents Inc. got money?
Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Members will accept that, as Prime Minister, I am not responsible for the allocation of that contract; that actually goes through the Ministry of Social Development. But I would say I have seen that Toolbox; I have seen the programme. In my opinion it is a very, very successful programme that is helping New Zealand parents, and we do need to help parents in New Zealand.”
Is there not something very wrong about this? John Key did not deny that he had made a promise before the election! More arbitrary government from Mr.’if i ruled the world,forget democratic procedures’ K.ey? Is this not similar to PEDA and Bill English the budget before last, or perhaps worse as it was promised bfore the election?
In Britain, arbitrary government under Charles 1,caused a civil war and Charles, thinking he had “divine right” as king to make decisions off the top off his head, lost said head to the executioner(1649). At least in the case of Charles he was leader and king, but Mr. Key apparently made a promise before he became leader! How many other promises did he make and why? And he often makes decicisions of his head.
According to Speake’s rules, if there is more than one question asked in Question Time, the minister or PM addressed only needs to answer one. So the fact that Key didn’t answer the question on promises, doesn’t mean he DID make a promise. He just chose to answer the first question.
But if the answer was in the negative then Mr Key would have said so, and thus closed off the issue. To avoid answering does increase the possibility that Key made a promise that was outside the tendering rules. Unlawful? But Key can do that because who can stop him. And the MSM are not going to question the ethics of it are they?
I’ve noticed a lot of epic spelling mistakes on Stuff lately. They’re probably employing some minimum wage slave who’s in constant fear of being fired before 90 days is up. It would be their style.
A Fairfax exec told me a couple of years ago that the occasional payoff to an accidentally libelled member of the public was still going to be cheaper than employing subbies. He wasn’t sure that they had an obligation to always be accurate anyway, but he did reckon they were obliged to correct their mistakes, but only if they were pointed out to them.
So, are these people objective judges of individual’s right to regain some freedom or just rightwing ringins this government has put in place to control people?
What’s significant here is that the overall confidence rating hasn’t changed, but party vote preferences have. So that “disconnect” (i.e. people not happy but supporting status quo) has been reduced. Good.
I wouldn’t read much into the minor party results – Morgan has always been funny on those. But overall, it’s encouraging for those (like me!) who had started to give up on under-performing Labour.
Yep, that’s a good result for the left. A nominal 7 point gap between Team Key and the opposition, the smallest it’s been since the start of the year. Factor in the likely electoral neutering of ACT and the maori party and it’s getting down to a seat or three. Continuous job losses, a moribund economy and no fucken idea what to do about either are starting to kill Key’s chances in November. And did I mention Kiwisaver and asset sales?
Interesting that Tariana Turia was all over the news today bigging up Darren Hughes. A olive branch of sorts to Labour?
It gets even better – “the Budget” is an organism separate and independent from the Government as Acting (good actor?) Economic Decimation, erm, Development Minister David Carter told the commerce select committee today he was not aware that any analysis had been done …
“Bear in mind the Government hasn’t said it will create the 170,000 new jobs – the Budget said there will be 170,000 jobs,” he said.
The Budget said. The Government hasn’t said. The Budget said. The Government hasn’t said.
Oh yes yes yes, we understand.
At the risk of saying something unpopular for me, this was a bit of a WTF moment
The heritage advisor for Auckland’s main iwi hadn’t heard of an inner-city taniwha before yesterday, but he says the point about consultation over the CBD Rail Link project is valid.
I am sorry but the last time I remember hearing about a Taniwha was a few years ago, and it caused all sorts of problems. But this one, is one, that few people seem to have heard of.
But it’s very handy for Steven Joyce, who we all know is so in favour of the Britomart rail link, NOT
I imagine the right’s silence over this issue would be quite deafening, simply because that the ‘taniwha’ lies in the path of a railway line, not a road.
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. . March 30: Day five of living in lock-down… Woke up still in darkness. Alarm hadn’t gone off. Turn to radio clock; it’s a few minutes after 6am… I lie there in the dark, waiting to drift off to sleep… but it ain’t happening. Clock ticks over to 6.55 ...
The story of Les Gray, the public sector psychologist who told the truth about his use of cannabis and set off a storm, has a special place in the lore of cannabis reform in New Zealand.When Paul Shannon interviewed Gray for the 'Dope and Hope' issue of Planet magazine in ...
by Phil Duncan For Marxists, a key concern about social trends is their context – not just their causes, but why they happen when they do. Events and phenomena have causes, but they also are time or period-specific. While much of the left have capitulated recently to postmodernism, most notably ...
Since the lockdown began, we've all suddenly been reminded who the actually essential workers in our society are: not the people at the top who pay themselves the big bucks and rort the perks, but the people at the bottom they screw over and squeeze: cleaners, warehouse staff, truck drivers ...
Kia ora! As I've watched nearly all my remaining work vanish over the past couple of days, it has occured to me that one good way to keep me away from arguing with fools on Twitter all the time (in the knowledge that all we're really doing is processing our ...
Aotearoa New Zealand has committed to trying to extirpate the virus that causes COVID-19 from its shores. To do that, as a society we’ve moved to “Level 4”. That means adapting to unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedoms, particularly to our rights to move freely and associate with friends and ...
When the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency last week, she handed the police powers to enforce it. And almost immediately, we started hearing about heavy-handed, arbitrary "enforcement" by police who (at best) cared more about order than law, or (more likely) had no idea what the rules were ...
. . Lock Down: Day 4 – A photo essay with observations . March 29: Usual wake up routine as RNZ snaps on my radio-clock. Jim Mora’s voice slowly enters my conciousness; there’s talk of a second wave of covid19 taking hold in South Korea; the week in Parliament – ...
Yesterday, New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 related death on the West Coast. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the only fatality, with the virus now being found in every region of the country.However despite the significant danger, people are still unfortunately breaching lockdown rules.There’s really only one main very ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Review... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... ‘Misinformation kills’: The link between coronavirus conspiracies and climate denialGrist / Rob Kim / Stringer / CSA Images Scientific ...
The kids did surprisingly well today – meltdown count was about 3, and mostly fairly short ones. (And a fourth while I was writing.) Game-wise I had a go at Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark. It’s a fairly standard RPG with turn-based combat and what they call a “mature storyline” (it ...
by Don Franks Hi David, Nice hearing from you, I’m glad to hear you’re getting by okay in these grim times. You asked how’s it going for us back here in New Zealand. You would have heard that the whole country is locked down and with breaks for exercise and ...
. . Lock Down: Day 3 – A photo essay with observations . March 28: First day of the first weekend in Lock Down. It feels like it’s been weeks since only Level 3 was declared last Tuesday, only four days ago. Woke up this morning to RNZ; coffee; toast, ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Mar 22, 2020 through Sat, Mar 28, 2020Articles Linked to on FacebookSun, Mar 22, 2020In Just 10 Years, Warming Has Increased the Odds of Disasters by Chelsea Harvey, ...
I’m here in lockdown with my flatmate and her two girls (6 and 2) and it. is. a time. They’re usually really active so to start with the only boardgame in the house is the copy of Guess Who that the 6 year old got for her birthday. Flatmate commented ...
The CV-19 (COVID) pandemic has seen the imposition of a government ordered national quarantine and the promulgation of a series of measures designed to spread the burden of pain and soften the economic blow on the most strategically important and most vulnerable sectors of society. The national narrative is framed ...
. . Lock Down: Day 2 – A photo essay with observations . March 27 – Day 2 of our Strange New World. The Park and Ride near my suburb, usually filled with hundreds of vehicles, had just… four; . . Another drive into Wellington City on a highway nearly ...
Fortune's Children: Under extraordinary pressure, the leader of the Government and the leader of the Opposition will each show us what they are made of. Have they been blessed with intelligence, grace, wit, poise, toughness, empathy and humour – and in what measure? More importantly, to what extent have they ...
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to rent a property on the open market in New Zealand, which is one of the most expensive in the entire world, you’ll likely be keenly aware of just how arrogant and entitled landlords and their real estate agents can be.Unfortunately for ...
Society-wise, aside from the specific morbidity shall we say of the medically-oriented aspects of this COVID-19 crisis, what is unfolding before the world is in more than one way an instructive study of humanity and reactions to a high intensity, high stress environment in real time. Friends, we are at ...
Right now low waged and insecure workers are feeling the economic brunt of the looming #Covid19 Recession. In response legal advocate Toby Cooper* and hospitality and worker’s rights advocate Chloe Ann-King, are putting together a series of legal blogs about your employment rights:In this legal blog we outline some ...
by Equipo Jurídico Pueblos and Gearóid Ó Loingsigh (25/03/2020) An escape plan in question On the night of March 21st and the early morning of the 22nd, the forces of the Colombian state stormed into the Modelo prison in Bogotá, murdering 23 prisoners and injuring 83, in response to the ...
When the government banned semi-automatic weapons in response to a terrorist atrocity, gun-nuts were outraged. Mired in toxic American gun culture, they thought owning weapons whose sole purpose was killing people was some sort of "constitutional right", a necessity for "defending themselves" against the government. Now, the Court of Appeal ...
Just before midnight on Wednesday March 25, Aotearoa New Zealand entered a countrywide alert level four lockdown. For at least the next four weeks, everyone who isn’t an essential worker is confined to their bubble. We are doing this to stop the explosive growth in people contracting and dying from ...
. . Lock Down: Day 1 – A photo essay with observations . Day one of the Level 4 nationwide lock-down (or, DefCon 4 as I sometimes cheekily call it) started at 11.59PM on 25 March. For a moment, most of the nation held it’s collective breath. In that brief ...
Broad, Sunlit Uplands: How those words fired my young imagination! Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say: how those words fused, in my young mind, with the image printed on every packet of Fielder’s Cornflour. Always fascinated by history, especially modern history, I cannot hear Churchill’s wonderfully evocative words, even ...
. . 24 March 2020 9.46AM Number of covid19 cases in Aotearoa New Zealand: 102 . As of 11.59 on Thursday, most of New Zealand will go into “lock down”. People will be expected not to travel to work; not to socialise; and to stay home. I will not be ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections A respected research group, Project Drawdown, finds that deploying solutions consistent with meeting the Paris climate targets would cost tens of trillions of dollars globally. But crucially, those outlays would also yield long-term savings many times larger than the up-front costs. The new 2020 Drawdown ...
It will pass. What happens next? Not immediately, but longer term. There are many opinions, fewer certainties. Will it “change everything!” as many confidently, and contradictorily predict? In this post I look at how foresight can help bound some of the uncertainties so you can more objectively consider the future. ...
We’ve been meaning t write something on Cuba and the coronavirus but have just discovered a very good article on the subject in the US left publication Jacobin. The article looks at how Cuba, a poor country but one where capitalism has been done away with, is leading the way ...
In 2018, El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey - two British citizens who had purportedly been stripped of their citizenship by the British government - were captured while fighting for Isis in Syria. The British government then conspired to hand them over to the US, and agreed to provide evidence ...
Transformers: The disaster of the Great Depression was transformed into a new and fairer society by the democratic socialism of the First Labour Government. The disaster of the Covid-19 Pandemic offers a similar transformative possibility to the Labour-NZ First-Green Government. Seize the time, Jacinda! You will never have a better ...
Tamper with The System? Well, we already are. But there's a difference between accidentally trickling sand into a precision gearbox versus formulating a plan to alter it on the fly with improvements in mind. One action is more or less innocently unscrupulous, the other amenable to earning an easy ...
Associate Prof George Thomson, Louise Delany, Prof Nick WilsonWhile it is possible that New Zealand can use intense public health controls to eradicate COVID-19 from the country – we must also plan for other scenarios where thousands of New Zealanders are sick – including many urgently hospitalised.1 Better resilience ...
Kia ora my name is Chloe Ann-King* and I am the founder of Raise the Bar, a campaign and non-profit that gives free legal aid, advocacy and tautoko to hospitality workers in Aotearoa. Right now all over our country hospo workers are being fired at will, having shifts cut or being ...
We're about to do something unprecedented as a nation. We hope that by taking this extraordinary action before a single life in New Zealand has been lost to the deadly novel virus we will save tens of thousands of lives. Our lives. We'll do it together, in households, in isolation ...
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”So writes the author of Ecclesiastes, a book in the Old Testament that’s counted as a ‘wisdom’ book and written as if by an unnamed king of Jerusalem. But who would have thought there would be a time ...
I was surprised when the prime minister described the Economic Response to Covid-19 package as the ‘largest peacetime government spend in New Zealand's history’. Reflecting – checking through history – I realised that the term ‘spend’ was crucial and the package had no income tax cuts. Even so, it has ...
Years ago the Argentine sociologist Carlos Weisman wrote a book titled “Living within our Means.” It was a critique of Argentine society that focused on the paradoxical question of why, in a land of plenty, there was so much economic instability, inequality, corruption and political turmoil. His conclusion was basically ...
Parliament will be leading by example and adjourning tomorrow after a special sitting to consider an epidemic notice and state of emergency. Day-to-day oversight of the government will be delegated to a select committee. But that's not the only overight mechanism. The OIA will still be law, and (so far) ...
Michael Baker, University of OtagoOverjoyed. That’s not a word epidemiologists normally use, but that’s how I felt after hearing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s announcement about New Zealand’s COVID-19 shutdown of everything except essential services for at least four weeks from midnight on Wednesday. More than anything, I just ...
How much homelessness is caused by house hoarding? We're about to find out. The pandemic has destroyed tourism, which means that house hoarders who put their hoarded properties up as short-term tourist rentals are now offering them on the ordinary rental market:Property investors are pulling properties from Airbnb to offer ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bruce Lieberman It seems like such a simple, straightforward, empowering idea: plant trees – a lot of trees – all over the world, and watch the planet’s temperature fall. Who doesn’t love a tree or two, even far more – the right ...
According to Newshub, Simon Bridges is open to joining a “grand coalition” with Labour as we hunker down to go into a month long lockdown. The idea is sound. Before now, the role of the opposition was to scrutinise and oppose. In the context of what almost amounts to a ...
Kia ora my name is Chloe Ann-King* and I am the founder of Raise the Bar, a campaign and non-profit that gives free legal aid, advocacy and tautoko to hospitality workers in Aotearoa. Right now all over our country hospo workers are being fired at will, having shifts cut or ...
We need to be lifting our game against COVID-19. You and I need to help those working to prevent the spread of COVID-19 while they’re trying to lift the testing and treatment efforts. We don’t want to be playing this game running backwards. Best to play it solidly forward, from ...
Prof Tony Blakely, Prof Michael Baker, and Prof Nick WilsonThe NZ Government must do more to clearly articulate its COVID-19 strategy: eradication or ‘flattening the curve’ mitigation. But to do so means understanding the maths and ethics of both these strategies. In this blog, we adapt our work for ...
New Zealand can emulate the success of the US after the Great Depression by exploiting our own resources to turn the economy around quickly, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says. Mr. Peters told Magic Talk that New Zealand has an opportunity to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic a "superior, ...
All 45 New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) personnel are either on their way back to New Zealand, or already in the country, according to Defence Minister Ron Mark."Twenty-eight personnel arrived back in New Zealand last week and are in isolation at the Royal New Zealand Air Force base in ...
The COVID-19 situation in New Zealand is moving fast - and to avoid what we've seen overseas - the Government's response must be to move fast too. We're committed to keeping New Zealanders safe and well-informed every step of the way. ...
We know people are feeling anxious about COVID-19. While the situation is serious, New Zealand has a world-class health system and we’re well-prepared to keep New Zealanders safe. ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters is encouraging New Zealanders overseas to stay where they are amid the COVID-19 pandemic. "We are reaching a point where the best option for most New Zealanders offshore is to shelter in place, by preparing to safely stay where they are.” "This includes following the instructions ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs Foreign Minister Winston Peters is encouraging the tens of thousands of New Zealanders travelling overseas to consider sheltering in place, in light of COVID-19. “Since 18 March, we have been warning New Zealanders offshore that the window for flying ...
Ground-breaking law has passed that will decriminalise abortion and ensure women and pregnant people seeking abortions have compassionate healthcare. ...
The Green Party says that the measures announced by the Government today will help families and businesses to prioritise our collective health and wellbeing in the response to COVID-19. ...
As New Zealanders brace for a global downturn due to Covid-19, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says his Coalition Government’s rescue package "more significant" than any other he's seen around the world. The Coalition is to reveal a multi-billion-dollar stimulus plan on Tuesday afternoon designed to cushion the economic blow ...
Changes have been made to allow butchers to process pork, only for supply to supermarkets or other processors or retailers that are open, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor has announced. “We carefully weighed the risk of allowing butchers to open their shops for retail customers, but the risk of spreading COVID-19 ...
Essential workers who take leave from work to comply with public health guidance are being supported with a leave scheme to ensure they will continue to receive income, say the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety Iain Lees-Galloway and Minister for Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni. A number of essential businesses ...
A Government WhatsApp channel has been launched to help make information more easily accessible and shareable in the fight against COVID-19. Govt.NZ, which is free to use on any mobile device, will carry information and news for the public, businesses, healthcare providers, not for profits and local government. It can ...
The Government has announced a plan to enable the safe, orderly exit of tens of thousands of stranded foreign nationals from New Zealand during the current COVID-19 Alert Level 4 restrictions, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Winston Peters has said. “When we moved into lockdown a week ago, the ...
Health Minister Dr David Clark says the Government is delivering on its commitment to support general practice doctors and nurses, and pharmacies on the front-line of our fight against COVID-19. "For us to overcome COVID-19, we need community health services such as general practice and community pharmacy to step up ...
Justice Susan Thomas has been appointed Chief High Court Judge, Attorney-General David Parker announced today. She replaces Justice Geoffrey Venning who has resigned from the position. David Parker paid tribute to Justice Venning, who he said had stewarded the High Court very capably over the last five years. “On behalf ...
Businesses can start applying to their banks for loans under the Business Finance Guarantee Scheme set up to support the New Zealand economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re moving quickly to protect New Zealand businesses, jobs and the economy during this unprecedented global economic shock,” Finance Minister Grant Robertson said. ...
Work is underway looking at measures to speed up consents for development and infrastructure projects during the recovery from COVID 19, to provide jobs and stimulate our economy. Environment Minister David Parker said the COVID-19 pandemic is a serious global crisis that will have a wide ranging and lasting impact ...
Advance payments will be made to transport construction industry contractors to retain the workforce and ensure it is ready to quickly gear up to build projects which will be vital to New Zealand’s COVID-19 economic recovery, Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced today. He said keeping the workforce required to build ...
The Government has tasked a group of industry leaders to seek out infrastructure projects that are ready to start as soon as the construction industry returns to normal to reduce the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Economic Development Minister Phil Twyford and Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones say. The Infrastructure ...
Work to scale up the health system in preparation for COVID-19 was today outlined by Health Minister David Clark, as he reported back to the new Epidemic Response Committee. “We are well placed to contain the spread of COVID-19. We have taken early and decisive action at our borders, and ...
The Government is refining its COVID-19 essential business guidance to include the distribution of news publications for communities which are hard to reach. The Minister of Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media, Kris Faafoi, said the move was in recognition of the importance for New Zealanders who might be harder to ...
The Government is ensuring supermarkets can open on Easter Sunday so we can buy groceries, but stay closed on Good Friday allowing workers to take a break. This provides a balanced approach and ensures we avoid large queues that two days closure may cause. “Supermarkets will be able to open ...
Following the successful conclusion of the Building Partner Capacity (BPC) mission at Taji, New Zealand defence personnel are returning to New Zealand from Iraq, in accordance with the Cabinet decision made in June 2019, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Ron Mark announced today. “New Zealand is very ...
The State of National Emergency to help stop the spread of COVID-19 has been extended for a further seven days, Minister of Civil Defence Peeni Henare said. The initial declaration on March 25 lasted seven days and can be extended as many times as necessary. “Since we went into isolation ...
New Zealand’s ability to go hard and go early in the fight against COVID-19 has been underpinned by strong Government finances and the growing economy heading into this global pandemic, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. The Treasury today released the Crown financial statements for the eight months to the end ...
Health Minister Dr David Clark says 36 new intensive care beds at Christchurch Hospital’s new Hagley building are being fast tracked so they are available for treatment of COVID-19 patients. The Ministry of Health is working with contractor CPB and Canterbury DHB to enable access to the hospital’s ICU, ...
The Government has fast-tracked up to $1 million to help Air New Zealand move urgent freight to and from New Zealand, with the first flight to Shanghai leaving tonight, Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced today. Phil Twyford says it’s crucial that trade in vital goods such as medical supplies and ...
New Zealand will temporarily remove tariffs on all medical and hygiene imports needed for the COVID-19 response. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker and Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi said today that the New Zealand Customs Service will apply tariff concessions to all diagnostic reagents and testing ...
Minister of Finance Grant Robertson has clarified that the changes to the wage subsidy scheme announced yesterday mean that employers should be passing on the full subsidy to workers, except in the case where the person’s normal income is less than the level of the subsidy. “We still want employers ...
Medical face masks from the national reserve supply are now being distributed to District Health Boards, while at the same time local production is being ramped up. Yesterday more than 640,000 masks were sent to DHBS – that is an immediate two week supply, with more to follow in coming ...
The Government has made modifications to the wage subsidy scheme to ensure people don’t lose their jobs during the national lockdown. These changes will soften the impact of COVID-19 on workers, families and businesses, and position them to exit the lockdown and look to recovery, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. ...
Farmers whose herds were culled in response to the outbreak of Mycoplasma bovis will be able to minimise the tax treatment of their income in some circumstances. Revenue Minister Stuart Nash says Cabinet has agreed to change the law. It means farmers may be eligible to spread their income over ...
A $27 million dollar package, effective immediately, is being provided to social sector services and community groups to ensure they can continue to provide essential support to communities as we stay at home as a nation to stop the spread of COVID-19, Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni announced. “At ...
“The guilty plea today will provide some relief to the many people whose lives were shattered by what happened on March 15,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. “These guilty pleas and conviction bring accountability for what happened and also save the families who lost loved ones, those who were injured, ...
The Prime Minister is holding daily press conferences to update New Zealanders on the Government's response to COVID-19. Links to videos and transcripts of these updates below. These transcripts also include All of Government press conferences led by Director Ministry of Health's Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. 25 March: Live update from the Prime ...
Frontline Police numbers have broken through the 10,000 mark for the first time in history as officers step forward to keep the community safe during the COVID19 lockdown. “Two Police graduations in Auckland and Wellington in the past week have been conducted in unprecedented circumstances,” Police Minister Stuart Nash said. ...
Urgent legislation has been passed to support the package of economic and social measures needed to recover from the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. “The COVID-19 Response (Taxation and Social Assistance Urgent Measures) Bill will cushion New Zealanders from the worst economic impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak,” said Revenue Minister ...
From tomorrow, Government support for farmers and growers affected by drought will be expanded and extended across the country, with access to Rural Assistance Payments (RAPS) available throughout the North Island, parts of the South Island and the Chatham Islands, Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni announced. “These challenging conditions have ...
Parliament has passed amendments to legislation that give the Secretary of Education stronger powers to act in the fight to limit the spread of COVID-19, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “They are part of a suite of changes passed under the COVID-19 Response (Urgent Management Measures) Legislation Bill,” Chris ...
Canada, Australia, Chile, Brunei and Myanmar have joined forces with New Zealand and Singapore by committing to keep supply chains open and remove any existing trade restrictive measures on essential goods, especially medical supplies, in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker today welcomed ...
Immediate freeze on rent increases Tenancies will not be terminated during the lock-down period, unless the parties agree, or in limited circumstances Tenants who had previously given notice can stay in their if they need to stay in the tenancy during the lock-down period Tenants will still be able to ...
As New Zealand unites to lock-down in the fight against COVID-19, the Finance Minister is urging all businesses and workers to stay connected over the next four weeks. “We understand the extreme pressure many businesses are under right now. I know most business owners think of their workers as family ...
A State of National Emergency has been declared across the country as the Government pulls out all the stops to curtail the spread of COVID-19. “Today we put in place our country’s second ever State of National Emergency as we fight a global pandemic, save New Zealanders’ lives and prevent ...
Mr Speaker I wish to make a Ministerial Statement under Standing Order 347 in relation to the recent declaration of a State of National Emergency. Having considered the advice of the Director Civil Defence Emergency Management, the Minister of Civil Defence declared a State of National Emergency for the whole of ...
People needing to travel on domestic flights, trains and Cook Strait ferries to get home before the country moves into level 4 lock-down tomorrow night will be able to continue using the passenger services until midnight on Friday, Transport Minister Phil Twyford said today. Domestic passenger services, particularly ferries, have ...
The Government, retail banks and the Reserve Bank are today announcing a major financial support package for home owners and businesses affected by the economic impacts of COVID-19. The package will include a six month principal and interest payment holiday for mortgage holders and SME customers whose incomes have been ...
Minister of Transport Phil Twyford has today announced details of the Government’s support package to keep key air freight moving and ensure New Zealanders retain access to essential goods during the four-week level 4 lockdown. “The Government is working with airlines and air freight operators to ensure New Zealand’s key ...
New Zealand moved up to COVID-19 Alert Level 3 – Restrict New Zealand to move up to COVID-19 Alert Level 4 – Eliminate, in 48 hours Two-staged approach to give people and businesses time to prepare Level 3, from tomorrow Non-essential businesses must close All events and gatherings must be ...
Good afternoon The Cabinet met this morning to discuss our next actions in the fight against COVID-19. Like the rest of the world, we are facing the potential for devastating impacts from this virus. But, through decisive action, and through working together, do we have a small window to get ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra As the COVID-19 transforms our individual lives, we are learning a few new things about ourselves as a society. We’ve known Australians suspect authority and, like other Western countries, have come to trust government less ...
About those handles and rails and communal areas …The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 crisis is only possible because of the support of members. If you can, please consider joining Spinoff Members here.As Aotearoa enters week two of lockdown, it’s clear we’re all still working out what our “bubbles” look ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie Quinn, Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow, School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is changing how we live. With a rapid increase in cases, we are now isolating in our homes to “flatten the curve”. However, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra In this special hour long podcast presented by Mark Evans, professor of governance and director of Democracy 2025, the panel discusses Australian democracy with Emeritus Professor Ian Chubb and Michelle Grattan. The panel dissects the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The government will provide free child care in a move aimed at ensuring parents, especially in essential services, are able to keep working. More than 945,000 families with 1.3 million children will benefit. The new ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jen Jackson, Education Policy Lead, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced free childcare for more than one million families, with a funding boost that aims to keep more than 13,000 childcare services across Australia open. In doing so, ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin What is Money?Keith Rankin.Money is a mystery. To most of us we receive it, we spend it, we save it, we borrow it. And if we don’t have enough, we are in trouble. Many of us think of money as if it is tangible, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hassan Vally, Associate Professor, La Trobe University To control the spread of COVID-19 we need to identify as many people with the virus as possible. If we know who has it, we can isolate them so they can’t infect others and quarantine ...
By RNZ News New Zealand has had its biggest increase in one day as the Health Ministry confirms 89 new cases of Covid-19, bringing the total number of cases to 797. Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said today 92 people had now recovered from the coronavirus. Thirteen people ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bhiamie Williamson, Research Associate & PhD Candidate, Australian National University The catastrophic bushfire season is officially over, but governments, agencies and communities have failed to recognise the specific and disproportionate impact the fires have had on Aboriginal peoples. Addressing this in bushfire ...
PACIFIC UPDATE:By Barbara Dreaver of TVNZ There are now 147 positive cases across seven countries in the Pacific region and four deaths. In Guam, cases continue to grow, with the count now at 77, five of them health workers. The island nation is facing its own crisis on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Jin Kang, Lecturer, Edith Cowan University With #StayAtHome and social distancing now becoming a way of life, an increasing number of people are relying on the internet for work, education and entertainment. This has placed greater demand on our network infrastructure, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natalie Klein, Professor, UNSW The spectre of large ships with people desperate to come ashore is not a new sight in Australia. In 2001, the MV Tampa infamously sought to enter Australian waters off Christmas Island to discharge more than 400 asylum ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Holden, Senior Lecturer in Dental Ethics, Law and Professionalism, University of Sydney The coronavirus pandemic is changing the way we access health care, and dental care is no exception. Dentists are no longer allowed to provide a raft of care, such ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Kirstin Mead from the Regional Business Partners’ Network.Business owners around the country will ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Roberts, Associate professor (Curriculum Inquiry / Rural Education), University of Canberra Schools have been progressively moving classes online due to the COVID-19 pandemic and there is uncertainty over what the next months may bring. This has thrown many year 12 students’ ...
The fourth in our new series of charts, graphics and data visualisations by Chris McDowall, covering the Covid-19 epidemic within New Zealand. We’ll publish the latest set each day on The Spinoff.This work is entirely funded by the generosity of The Spinoff MembersInformation about confirmed and probable cases of Covid-19 ...
Employers in essential services and foreigners trying to leave New Zealand were the targets of Government announcements on Thursday afternoon Essential services who employ workers who can't go to work due to Covid-19 will be able to access the Government's funds to pay them. The scheme would allow employers in "essential services" ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Stephens, ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland Australia’s coronavirus public health messaging has been criticisedasconfusing during a time when health guidelines and regulations are changing rapidly, and educating the public about health ...
The longer we wait to restore broader economic activity, the greater the long-term loss of economic capability. We need to start thinking about 'virus-proof' workplaces and practices, says Rod Oram So far our physical economy is holding up remarkably well considering the stunning shocks we and the virus are hurling ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chelsea Bond, Senior Research Fellow, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland Among the latest coronavirus advice from the prime minister was an age-based self-isolation strategy designed to protect those considered most vulnerable in the global health crisis. The directive was ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Donna Maree Cooper, Senior Lecturer QUT Law Faculty, Queensland University of Technology Separated parents are facing a range of new challenges in the wake of COVID-19. To contain the spread, the government has directed people to stay at home except when carrying ...
Today came the shocking news that Bauer Media is closing its New Zealand operation, with the loss of scores of jobs. Bauer was the publisher of most of NZ’s magazines, among them Metro, Woman’s Day, North & South, Next, Home, the Listener, Kia Ora and the NZ Women’s Weekly. Here ...
The Government’s call for infrastructure projects that are ‘ready to go’ is welcome news for Wellington, given the stalled progress to date of ‘Let’s Get Wellington Moving’, says the Wellington Chamber of Commerce. "The whole ‘Let’s ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mehmet Ozalp, Associate Professor in Islamic Studies, Director of The Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and Executive Member of Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University As the world faces the greatest disruption of our lifetimes, Muslims throughout the world are ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Martin, Associate Professor, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne The viral spread of mis- and disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, just like the viral spread of the disease itself, has led to unprecedented media coverage. This has included ...
Tens of thousands of visitors to New Zealand will be relieved that they now have some chance of returning home before the lockdown ends, Tourism Industry Aotearoa says. “We welcome today’s announcement by Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland As the Covid-19 pandemic spreads around the world, wartime metaphors abound. And, with what amounts to a war economy now in place, attention has inevitably turned to post-war reconstruction. It is self-evident ...
Pre-clinical trials will assess how effective and safe the potential vaccines are using an animal model before human testing. Mirjam Guesgen reports.The Australian national science agency, CSIRO, has begun testing two potential vaccines for Covid-19, with results due by June, 2020.These pre-clinical trials will assess how effective and safe the ...
Watch our live Q&A session with Dr Ayesha Verrall, a senior lecturer at Otago University who specialises in infectious diseases. Ayesha Verrall is an infectious diseases physician and senior lecturer at Otago University's Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine (Wellington). Dr Verrall has been monitoring the spread and impact of Covid-19 closely and ...
Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier says all New Zealanders have the right to be treated fairly during the COVID-19 emergency including those under lock and key. "My role as an independent watchdog will continue during the lockdown period and beyond," ...
Amalgamated Workers Union New Zealand (AWUNZ) has described a take it or leave it offer from Fletcher Building Management to staff as disgraceful. AWUNZ National Secretary Maurice Davis said the union was more than disappointed with the scheme Fletcher ...
As the Covid-19 hits NZ hard, and the country may have to be held in lockdown longer than originally intended, the issue whether the general election on September 19 should be postponed looms larger. It has already been canvassed in some media, but the PM, Jacinda Ardern, last week insisted ...
One way to pass time, which we suddenly have a lot of, is gardening. But where can you get seeds? And what do you plant in autumn? Josie Adams finds out.While it seems many New Zealanders are exercising a newfound love of jogging, some of us are more sedentary. For ...
Essential moves have been made to manage the impact of COVID-19 in New Zealand. This means significant changes to how society is operating. These unprecedented measures limit liberties and physical freedoms in order to protect the right to health and ...
The Council of Trade Unions is calling on Fletchers Building Limited to do the right thing and reverse their decision to cut the pay for their employees by up to 70%. "We are calling on one of New Zealand's biggest companies to do the right thing ...
Bernard Hickey talks to Kiwibank Chief Economist Jarrod Kerr about his forecast GDP could fall as much as 17 percent this year, and why the Reserve Bank should buy council bonds as well as Government bonds. Newsroom Pro Managing Editor Bernard Hickey and Kiwibank Chief Economist Jarrod Kerr talk ...
Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt, is calling on the Government to respect the rights of people it is holding for detention purposes in its response to COVID-19. People detained by the authorities have a heightened risk of infection due to living ...
Her mother’s job was a source of shame for Yawynne Yem growing up. Now checkout operators are essential workers as we hunker down against Covid-19. Any time I had to reveal my mum’s job to someone, hastened justifications would also fall out of my mouth, reeking of shame. “We’re a first-generation ...
Responding to the closure of Bauer Media, Free Speech Coalition spokesperson David Farrar says: "The loss of the New Zealand Listener, North & South Magazine, and more is a sickening blow to the diversity of our media environment." "The ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Macquarie University In the current health crisis, we might ask what needs to be cured more urgently: the virus itself or people’s poor sense of moderation. We have seen shocking ...
Lockdowns around the globe - and the correlating sink in economic productivity - have sparked a bad faith backlash founded on old numbers, bunk science and outright distortions of fact, Marc Daalder argues No one was more surprised to see that Neil Ferguson, the author of a groundbreaking paper on ...
Elimination of Covid-19 doesn't mean getting rid of it everywhere in New Zealand, the Director-General of Health says Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield has hinted that different regions might end up on different alert levels when lockdown ends. Bloomfield said the lockdown goal of "elimination" didn't mean getting rid of it everywhere. ...
Sam Brooks shares central Auckland’s best-kept drinking secret, the bowling alley bastion that has become his ‘third place’.One of the first pieces I wrote for The Spinoff was a review of Metrolanes, the bowling alley bar that had quickly found a place in my heart. It is, in my mind, ...
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening. There were 89 new cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand today, up from the previous day's 61 new cases. The increase from 61 to 89 is a 46 percent ...
Based on the experience of Kiwibuild, wiseacres chortle at the prospect of another Ministry of Works to design and build New Zealand infrastructure from highways and motorways to airports, power stations and railways. The prospect was raised in a Newsroom report which said: Ministers are rushing to prevent the country’s ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Martin, Associate Professor, University of Melbourne The viral spread of mis- and disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, just like the viral spread of the disease itself, has led to unprecedented media coverage. This has included a welcome return to prioritising expert ...
Join Leonie Hayden as she works through the first four weeks of Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy.Rāpare/ThursdayWe’re back to practising our long and short vowels, this time comparing words that are spelled the same except for the presence of a macron.Practise, practise, practise, Scotty tells us in this lesson. I ...
WHAT: An online delivery event for two petitions with a combined 95,000 signatures. The petitions call for a number of changes including for the New Zealand Government to suspend rent and mortgage payments, and to buy unoccupied homes for the homeless. ...
The outgoing Police Commissioner has admitted police have failed to carry out the level of checks on recent arrivals to NZ, supposed to be in strict self-isolation. ...
The flippant way Mike Bush responded to the epidemic response committee this morning highlights how vital it is police are held to account during the national emergency, writes Cat MacLennan Outgoing Police Commissioner Mike Bush did himself no favours with his attitude when he appeared before Parliament’s Epidemic Response Committee this ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Livingstone, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University Pubs, clubs and casinos have all been closed as part of the response to COVID-19. That means Australia’s 194,000 poker machines are now shut down. These venues, and their ...
Former editor Finlay Macdonald marks the sudden death of a title that was once part of the lifeblood of the country. Listener editors, like most magazine and newspaper editors these days, get used to living with declining circulation numbers. Ever since the Internet came along, it’s been a long, dismal ...
With the nation in lockdown and schools closed, many parents will be looking for ways to keep educating their children. Amee Parker is in her final year of a PhD looking at homeschooling, and she has some advice.As a nation we are now forced, out of necessity, to stay in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Breunig, Professor of Economics and Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University How would you feel if you were having a Zoom meeting with your accountant and they asked “how would you like to ...
Pacific Media Watch Police in Papua New Guinea have arrested nine alleged illegal border crossers and quarantined them in Vanimo, reports RNZ Pacific. The arrests came as East Sepik Governor Allan Bird called for “shoot to kill’ orders for illegal border crossers and a military control of areas along ...
Police have assumed extraordinary powers during the lockdown period - but with that has come questions from the public and politicians about how they are exercising those powers. Police have come under pressure to release legal advice and guidance on how they are using the emergency powers granted to them ...
In our new series The Lockdown Letters, some of New Zealand’s best writers tell us what they’ve been up to in the days of Covid-19 alert level four. Today, political commentator and essayist Morgan Godfery.IS IT DAY EIGHT?In the absence of a capitalist routine, one day bleeds into the other.In the ...
By RNZ News The publisher of some of New Zealand’s best known magazines has folded amid the economic fallout from the national coronavirus pandemic lockdown. Bauer Media, which publishes The Listener, Woman’s Day, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, Metro, North and South and Next, says it is no longer viable ...
Sue Grey, Co-leader Of Nz Outdoors Party Supports A Ban On Rates Increases And Challenges All Politicians And Candidates To Support This The NZ Outdoors Party co-leader Sue Grey supports the call for councils to operate without rates increases at least for ...
The NZ Outdoors Party co-leader Sue Grey supports the call for councils to operate without rates increases at least for the coming financial year, and challenges all politician and candidates to unite behind this. “Our Council’s spending and increase ...
The publisher of some of the country's best known magazines has folded. Bauer Media, which has The Listener, Woman's Day, New Zealand Woman's Weekly, North and South and Next, says it's no longer viable and it's shut its doors today. Chief executive Brendon Hill said the Covid-19 lockdown had stopped magazine production and ...
Police acknowledge the findings of a report by the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) into an incident where an officer used excessive force following an arrest in Auckland City in 2018. On 24th August, 2018, the Police officer was called to ...
Pacific Media Watch Launched by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), “Tracker 19” is a tool made for an unprecedented global crisis. So named in reference not only to Covid-19 but also article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this project aims to evaluate the pandemic’s impacts on global ...
A recurring theme in contemporary literature is of the plague that appears suddenly from nowhere and takes hold of the world, destroying or severely damaging life in the process. In 2003 acclaimed author Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake was ...
The Covid-19 crisis in media has claimed NZ’s biggest magazine publisher, Bauer Media.Bauer Media NZ is closing its doors permanently and with immediate effect due to the severe economic impact of Covid-19, staff have just been told via a Zoom meeting.CEO Brendon Hill was emotional as he informed staff of ...
NZ Gov't must lower road freight use because truck drivers will widely carry Covid 19 virus to our communities through open assess community transmission, and using rail less staff are used to move the same freight by comparison. Facts; Our Government ...
The government needs to step up and pay the next rates instalment to councils on behalf of property owners and businesses as part of its economic support package. People are facing unprecedented financial stress directly due to the measures implemented ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s contentEnforcing the lockdown, civil liberties Peter Dunne (Newsroom): Democracy on hold Heather Roy (Democracy Project): The Long Road Back to Full ...
More than 40 million masks are on the way to help protect frontline health workers after weeks of confusion and fear about the supply of Covid-19 equipment. ...
Open mike 09/06/2011 
by Daphna Whitmore A third of the world is under lockdown and a clear assessment of this measure to curb the spread of COVID-19 is urgently needed. With any high-stakes decisions it has to be asked what are we dealing with here? Are the measures warranted? Will they achieve their ...2 hours ago
I haven’t done a huge amount in the last few days. I’m reading The Poppy War and I’ve sort of poked at a couple of games – I started SOMA but I’m a wimp and I quit while in the first room after the brain scan. I might try it ...6 hours ago
The swan politicians may be gliding on the water, occasionally snapping at one another. Meanwhile, as the Covid19 crisis illustrates, the officials are desperately paddling below providing the real locomotion. One of the most fatuous recent grandstanding comments (of about a week ago), adding to the public’s anxieties, was ...8 hours ago
Much has been written about the importance of discretion in an emergency situation, and the concerns raised by the potential for it to be exercised arbitrarily. Given the quality of the discussion, there seemed little point in adding to it at any length. In particular, I point to the evidence ...8 hours ago
Today has felt surreal. I was all set to touch base online with my science communication students when a colleague shared the news that Bauer Media would be shutting down its publications immediately. The first link I saw implied it was Woman’s Weekly affected, and even that shocked me. But ...9 hours ago
Bogeymen, Real And Imagined: Is the number of psychopathic and sociopathic individuals in any given society truly as vanishingly small as we like to tell ourselves? Isn’t it more likely that the mass-shooters and serial-killers filling the headlines represent only the tip of a much, much larger iceberg of frightfulness? ...13 hours ago
Outgoing Police Commissioner Mike Bush appeared before the Epidemic Response Committee today, who asked him for the rules police are using to enforce the lockdown. He refused:Police Commissioner Mike Bush has admitted the advice given to Kiwis about what they're able to do during the lockdown hasn't been clear enough. ...14 hours ago
For those folk who find my other Lock-Down Diary versions too “negative” or otherwise unpalatable… Here’s a photo of my cat, . . Better? Tomorrow’s Sanitised Version: a pretty flower. . . . =fs= ...15 hours ago
46 Articles Physical science of global warming & effects Global response of evapotranspiration ratio to climate conditions and watershed characteristics in a changing environment Greenhouse effect: the relative contributions of emission height and total absorption Observations & observational methods of global warming & effects Climate change induced a ...1 day ago
Image credit: Diamond Harbour School Blogs I notice a few regulars no longer allow public access to the site counters. This may happen accidentally when the blog format is altered. If your blog is unexpectedly missing or ... 2 days ago
The Covid-19 saga will no doubt produce many twists and turns for us before it is finally brought to an end. But one thing it has shown us – and what comfort it should bring us – is that our country’s government is in good hands. I am not thinking ...2 days ago
The following statement was released on March 28 by the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 40 groups, based in the United States. In recent weeks, Cuba has deployed hundreds of medical providers to over a dozen countries in Europe, Asia, as well as to their neighbors in Latin ...2 days ago
Yesterday, New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 related death on the West Coast. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the only fatality, with the virus now being found in every region of the country.However despite the significant danger, people are still unfortunately breaching lockdown rules.There’s really only one main very ...4 days ago
The CV-19 (COVID) pandemic has seen the imposition of a government ordered national quarantine and the promulgation of a series of measures designed to spread the burden of pain and soften the economic blow on the most strategically important and most vulnerable sectors of society. The national narrative is framed ...5 days ago
Society-wise, aside from the specific morbidity shall we say of the medically-oriented aspects of this COVID-19 crisis, what is unfolding before the world is in more than one way an instructive study of humanity and reactions to a high intensity, high stress environment in real time. Friends, we are at ...6 days ago
Right now low waged and insecure workers are feeling the economic brunt of the looming #Covid19 Recession. In response legal advocate Toby Cooper* and hospitality and worker’s rights advocate Chloe Ann-King, are putting together a series of legal blogs about your employment rights: In this legal blog we outline some ...6 days ago
Kia ora my name is Chloe Ann-King* and I am the founder of Raise the Bar, a campaign and non-profit that gives free legal aid, advocacy and tautoko to hospitality workers in Aotearoa. Right now all over our country hospo workers are being fired at will, having shifts cut or being ...1 week ago
According to Newshub, Simon Bridges is open to joining a “grand coalition” with Labour as we hunker down to go into a month long lockdown. The idea is sound. Before now, the role of the opposition was to scrutinise and oppose. In the context of what almost amounts to a ...1 week ago
Kia ora my name is Chloe Ann-King* and I am the founder of Raise the Bar, a campaign and non-profit that gives free legal aid, advocacy and tautoko to hospitality workers in Aotearoa. Right now all over our country hospo workers are being fired at will, having shifts cut or ...1 week ago
New Zealand can emulate the success of the US after the Great Depression by exploiting our own resources to turn the economy around quickly, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says. Mr. Peters told Magic Talk that New Zealand has an opportunity to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic a "superior, ...2 days ago
The COVID-19 situation in New Zealand is moving fast - and to avoid what we've seen overseas - the Government's response must be to move fast too. We're committed to keeping New Zealanders safe and well-informed every step of the way. ...6 days ago
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The scale of what we face right now is unlike anything we have ever seen before. Overcoming it is our common purpose. ...1 week ago
Changes have been made to allow butchers to process pork, only for supply to supermarkets or other processors or retailers that are open, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor has announced. “We carefully weighed the risk of allowing butchers to open their shops for retail customers, but the risk of spreading COVID-19 ...9 hours ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra As the COVID-19 transforms our individual lives, we are learning a few new things about ourselves as a society. We’ve known Australians suspect authority and, like other Western countries, have come to trust government less ...2 hours ago
About those handles and rails and communal areas …The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 crisis is only possible because of the support of members. If you can, please consider joining Spinoff Members here.As Aotearoa enters week two of lockdown, it’s clear we’re all still working out what our “bubbles” look ...3 hours ago
Employers in essential services and foreigners trying to leave New Zealand were the targets of Government announcements on Thursday afternoon Essential services who employ workers who can't go to work due to Covid-19 will be able to access the Government's funds to pay them. The scheme would allow employers in "essential services" ...9 hours ago
The longer we wait to restore broader economic activity, the greater the long-term loss of economic capability. We need to start thinking about 'virus-proof' workplaces and practices, says Rod Oram So far our physical economy is holding up remarkably well considering the stunning shocks we and the virus are hurling ...9 hours ago
The Government’s call for infrastructure projects that are ‘ready to go’ is welcome news for Wellington, given the stalled progress to date of ‘Let’s Get Wellington Moving’, says the Wellington Chamber of Commerce. "The whole ‘Let’s ...10 hours ago
The government will allow foreign nationals to travel domestically to get to international airports so that they can fly home. ...11 hours ago
Watch our live Q&A session with Dr Ayesha Verrall, a senior lecturer at Otago University who specialises in infectious diseases. Ayesha Verrall is an infectious diseases physician and senior lecturer at Otago University's Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine (Wellington). Dr Verrall has been monitoring the spread and impact of Covid-19 closely and ...11 hours ago
As the Covid-19 hits NZ hard, and the country may have to be held in lockdown longer than originally intended, the issue whether the general election on September 19 should be postponed looms larger. It has already been canvassed in some media, but the PM, Jacinda Ardern, last week insisted ...11 hours ago
Bernard Hickey talks to Kiwibank Chief Economist Jarrod Kerr about his forecast GDP could fall as much as 17 percent this year, and why the Reserve Bank should buy council bonds as well as Government bonds. Newsroom Pro Managing Editor Bernard Hickey and Kiwibank Chief Economist Jarrod Kerr talk ...11 hours ago
Lockdowns around the globe - and the correlating sink in economic productivity - have sparked a bad faith backlash founded on old numbers, bunk science and outright distortions of fact, Marc Daalder argues No one was more surprised to see that Neil Ferguson, the author of a groundbreaking paper on ...12 hours ago
Elimination of Covid-19 doesn't mean getting rid of it everywhere in New Zealand, the Director-General of Health says Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield has hinted that different regions might end up on different alert levels when lockdown ends. Bloomfield said the lockdown goal of "elimination" didn't mean getting rid of it everywhere. ...12 hours ago
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening. There were 89 new cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand today, up from the previous day's 61 new cases. The increase from 61 to 89 is a 46 percent ...12 hours ago
Based on the experience of Kiwibuild, wiseacres chortle at the prospect of another Ministry of Works to design and build New Zealand infrastructure from highways and motorways to airports, power stations and railways. The prospect was raised in a Newsroom report which said: Ministers are rushing to prevent the country’s ...13 hours ago
The flippant way Mike Bush responded to the epidemic response committee this morning highlights how vital it is police are held to account during the national emergency, writes Cat MacLennan Outgoing Police Commissioner Mike Bush did himself no favours with his attitude when he appeared before Parliament’s Epidemic Response Committee this ...13 hours ago
Former editor Finlay Macdonald marks the sudden death of a title that was once part of the lifeblood of the country. Listener editors, like most magazine and newspaper editors these days, get used to living with declining circulation numbers. Ever since the Internet came along, it’s been a long, dismal ...14 hours ago
Air New Zealand is slashing its domestic operations by 95 percent in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak. ...14 hours ago
Police have assumed extraordinary powers during the lockdown period - but with that has come questions from the public and politicians about how they are exercising those powers. Police have come under pressure to release legal advice and guidance on how they are using the emergency powers granted to them ...15 hours ago
The publisher of some of the country's best known magazines has folded. Bauer Media, which has The Listener, Woman's Day, New Zealand Woman's Weekly, North and South and Next, says it's no longer viable and it's shut its doors today. Chief executive Brendon Hill said the Covid-19 lockdown had stopped magazine production and ...16 hours ago
More than 40 million masks are on the way to help protect frontline health workers after weeks of confusion and fear about the supply of Covid-19 equipment. ...18 hours ago
8 June 2011
PRESS RELEASE: Penny Bright ‘Anti-corruption campaigner’:
“Is the Solicitor-General maliciously abusing his position, as the second-highest ‘lawyer in the land’ by persecuting/ prosecuting Vince Siemer (AGAIN) for ‘contempt of Court’? ”
Vince Siemer – is facing jail for contempt of court (AGAIN!), through proceedings initiated (AGAIN) by the Solicitor -General for telling the public J Winkelman’s decision that the people arrested in the state terror raids of 15th October 2007 were not only denied a jury trial, but that the public were being denied the right to know that information.
(There will be a protest outside the Wellington High Court
2 Molesworth St (opposite Parliament)
Thursday 9 June 2011 from 9 – 10am, then for those who are able – quiet support inside the court room.
Well-known human rights lawyer Tony Ellis will be defending Vince Siemer).
In my considered opinion, Vince Siemer is NZ’s leading ‘Public Watchdog’ / ‘Whistleblower’ on the lack of transparency and accountability and ‘conflicts of interest’ in the NZ Judiciary.
http://www.kiwisfirst.co.nz )
Why is the Solicitor-General David Collins QC himself not facing an investigation for ‘contempt of the House’ – given his role – in my considered opinion, of helping to ‘mislead’ the former Justice and Electoral Select Committee, which resulted in the matters raised in Petition 2005/142 being declared ‘subjudice’, at a time they clearly were NOT?
(Petition 2005/142 presented to the House by Mr Hide MP on 24 July 2007 “requesting that Parliament conduct an inquiry into the comittal for imprisonment of Mr Vincent Ross Siemer for contempt of court”)
Was the former Justice and Electoral Select Committee ‘misled’ – not only by the Solicitor-General David Collins QC (‘the highest acting law officer in the land’); but also by the former Clerk of the House David McGee QC (now an Ombudsman) ; and the former Acting Deputy Solicitor-General (Public Law) Grant Liddell (who later became the CEO of the NZ Serious Fraud Office (SFO)?
Read the following information for yourself – and you be the judge…….”
(Full post on http://waterpressure.wordpress.com )
Penny Bright
So now many of the ordinary mums and dads are being subtly cast again as “pariahs” of the state – you know, the ones who belong to unions or are public service employees. Now, let’s list a few other average mums and dads who, with the stroke of their pens, have shunted inordinate amounts of the New Zealand cake offshore – family names like Myers, Douglas, Fay, Aldgate-Whitechapel, Hart, Richwhite, … makes you wonder who the real Kiwis are doesn’t it?
Oh, its far worse, the typically civilisation killer is here. Where the language of debate, if its allowed to happen (in the public eye), is restricted to the needs of the exploiters continued exploitation. Where the only justified work lifestyle has to be in some industry that exploits its workers and its environment, and where if you do have standards to meet the taxpayer not the polluter has to pay. Imagine the markets as a massive bragging competition, we’re made this much money using up this much soil, putting this much high density ore into refuse dumps globally, so we can produce some high end product for the few who braggers who brag the best.
Its not surprising Key is loved by one and all, he is a hero of the brag to make money brigade, what your kids should grow up to be like.
What’s the story with Fiji at the RWC? Articles I’ve read seem confusing as to who can and can’t come and I got the impression the IRB seemed to be thinking it could let in who it liked……ignoring any bans we may have.
That’s probably because McCully has promised the IRB that any such existing bans will not be enforced for the purposes of the RWC.
So it’s another case of us surrendering sovereignty to some external transnational body? – again!
Thanks Murray! You bring the KY and we will assume the position – again!
Glenn Greenwald finds a(nother) classic example of one his favorite bugbears; ridiculously inappropriate use of anonymous sourcing.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/06/02/hersh/index.html
Shorter: Dear journo’s, when officials are feeding you the official line, they don’t need anonymity, and shouldn’t get it.
What is it with Key and planking? He is now busily trying to reform labour laws to make protection for workers a joke and describes this as a “campaign plank” …
Plonker.
Probably think he’s “cool”
Interesting flick – it’s long though at nearly three hours
Haha they said “a NZ study done in a town called Doo-Ned-In”
Hmmmm…
So, some indications show that the US went into recession in 2006 and still hasn’t come out. That’s gotta hurt.
Closing down debate quickly on National Radio—again
Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan, Thursday June 9, 2011
In a discussion about deep sea oil and gas exploration off New Zealand’s coasts, Simon Boxer of Greenpeace mentioned that both the Brazilian government and Petrobras were angry with the New Zealand government for making public announcements about oil-prospecting deals, without having consulted local people.
Incredibly, Kathryn Ryan sternly warned him away: “Well, we had the Associate Minister disputing that the other day. I don’t want that dragged up again. Let’s move on.”
A couple of weeks ago, an equally nervous Jim Mora stopped Richard Langstone and Bomber Bradbury from going after Professor Stephen Hoadley, who had made a couple of preposterous statements asserting the “legality” of the American carpet-bombing of Indo-China, and claiming that it conformed with the Geneva Conventions. Like Ryan, Mora insisted that there was no time to go “off topic” like that. (“The Panel”, May 27, 2011)
These are by no means isolated instances.
It’s clear that, in addition to the highly partisan, unapologetically pro-National-government New Zealand Herald and NewstalkZB, we have a public radio station that is afraid of incurring government wrath by letting critics have a say.
That’s a worry for democracy, as well as a blow for the prospects of interesting or stimulating discussions on the radio.
Morrissey – Be fair, the interviewers must offer their audience a broad view of their subject, and only Mary Wilson, of those I listen to, hammers one aspect into the ground. She doesn’t give up. Sometimes it even seems pointless and I turn the radio off. Interviewers can’t get into the argy-bargy that goes on here sometimes with endless assertions being countered continuously with a lot of rancour and little illumination or new facets being revealed, and other relevant info getting sidelined.
…only Mary Wilson…hammers one aspect into the ground. She doesn’t give up.
Eva Radich is another determined interviewer. When Tony Blair had the hide to make a state visit here some years ago, she went after him about the illegality of the Iraq invasion and his bogus “45 minute” claim. She would not let him evade her questions or divert the focus of the interview. In the end, of course, he just resorted to his usual insulting menu of vague platitudes. But she had discomfited that creep, in a way he rarely faced back in the U.K. And what a great contrast between her interview with Blair and the hesitant treatment he got a day later by an overwhelmed John Campbell, who obviously detested Blair but lacked the fortitude to insist he respond seriously to his questions.
Last year Kim Hill subjected ex-Australian prime minister John Howard to a thirty-five minute interrogation. The Great Man was clearly unsettled by her persistence, something he rarely if ever encountered back in Australia. But one person was even more upset by the interview than Howard was—the Wairarapa oenophile Karl Du Fresne was incensed by Kim’s lack of forelock-tugging, and slammed her “lack of balance” in a dyspeptic column in the Australian Spectator…
http://karldufresne.blogspot.com/2010/11/howard-deserved-more-balanced-treatment.html
Sometimes it even seems pointless and I turn the radio off.
I think it’s a pity more interviewers haven’t got the courage, or are insufficiently prepared, to seriously hold politicians to account. When TV and radio stations assign people like John Campbell, Kathryn Ryan, Mike Hosking, and (God save us) Paul Holmes to interview powerful and intimidating politicians, it’s a missed opportunity.
I generally reckon that when the press isn’t being combative they are missing the point of their freedom.
I like seeing all pollies getting their feet held to the fire, particularly when they are ones that I have voted for or are thinking of voting for. Fucking nail them.
I don’t care if a journo ‘gets it wrong’, or asks ‘stupid questions’ or is ‘rude’. That’s ‘doing their job’ as far as I see it.
One of the US founders said (paraphrase) that given the choice between a free press and free elections, he’d take the former every time. And this was in a time when the press was vicious. His point was that a combative and free press lets the public know things by forcing pollies to confront things. Without that knowledge, elections are useless. With that knowledge, even absent elections, remedies are available.
The public is capable of deciding if a journo has been an arsehole, and an arsehole journo at the end of the day, is just a twatcock asking questions and printing the answers. Those answers will always be of some value.
I note that Ryan is often like that, ruthlessly cutting people off… either for time reasons, or for reasons of what seems to be clearly censorship…
Some detail about the Ecoli outbreak. This has been ruinous for Spain and the wash has spread over all the EU. A British bacteriologist (I think) said that in fact it was a North German problem. All the people sickening outside Germany had contact from there. The researchers have concentrated on salad vegetables because most of those affected are women and probably health conscious, but what about bottled water, or natural beauty preparations? (Light bulb – they need to call House.)
With all the sophisticated, easily accessed labs they have in Germany and Europe, they have not been able to source this thing. Imagine our country affected by a blow to its agriculture like this. It does not even have to be true, just suspected. We have closed down so much of our manufacturing and employment-rich businesses separate from the farming economy. We would be back to slave camps, that’s what they called the work camps during the Depression. And glad to get something no doubt.
From google listings –
1 The EHEC strain may cause hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which is characterised by acute kidney failure and can lead to seizures, strokes and coma.
Reinhard Burger, head of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute which monitors epidemics, said the country usually saw between 50 and 60 cases of HUS annually, whereas it had recorded about 80 during the current outbreak.
Earlier –
2 Ten people have been hospitalized in Frankfurt with another 50 experiencing mild symptoms. In Hamburg, another forty patients are being treated for EHEC as well. Other cases have been confirmed in the Northern part of Germany including Rostock, Lower Saxony, Bremen and Schleswig Holstein. There are up to 600 suspected cases across Germany.
3 The latest cases in the U.K. involve three people with bloody diarrhea and one person who has developed the potentially fatal form of the condition known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS).
Three of the four new cases are in U.K. residents who have recently returned from Germany, and the other involves a person from Germany who is on vacation in England.
Recent news 8/6 http://news.uk.msn.com/world/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=158154499
4 Another person has died in Germany from the infection, raising the toll to 24 in Germany, plus one in Sweden.
The number of reported cases is up by more than 300 over the previous day to 2,648, including nearly 700 suffering from a serious complication that can cause kidney failure.
Interesting, the photo accompanying the above article showed a laboratory worker? not wearing gloves with an opened bean sprout packet which the caption said was to be tested. Surely a file photo. I wouldn’t want to put my flesh anywhere near something as possibly infective as that.
“Imagine our country affected by a blow to its agriculture like this. It does not even have to be true, just suspected.”
This is why the American beef industry does their own management of testing for mad cow disease, and deliberately do a very poor job of it while covering up any actual infections detected (any cows ‘suspected’ of having it are killed and incinerated before samples can be taken for proper testing). That way they can be sure that if there is actually a problem with mad cow disease, it would have to be quite widespread before the public became aware of it.
In milk we trust.
Solely, absolutely and forever and ever.
Kiss goodbye to rail and engineering technology (Kevin Welsh @ 1:44pm).
May the sacredness of our milk always prevail over all disasters – national or National.
And may our milk be always completely free from health scares.
If you’re not keen about being a milk slave, erm, farmer or dairy maid, please take the next one-way flight out of Milkland.
In milk we trust.
I don’t know if I would trust all milk, there was something on TV news last night about modified cows producing “human ” milk. Curdled thoughts on that.
Hey PeteG, maybe National can now find a productive use for all those DPB mums eh?
Careful, Colonial Viper; I don’t think the NActs understand satire. At least I hope it was satire…
😛
lanthanide – Gosh! The usa beef lobby is powerful – remember them suing Oprah for saying she wouldn’t eat hamburger or similar. I think that was at the mad cow disease outbreak. Also I remember a couple of journalists being harrassed by the usa dairy lobby who managed to get control of the wording of legislation about quality of milk so they could ensure that people remained unaware of possible problems. The ‘What you don’t know, won’t hurt you’ approach. This was another scare, back a decade or two.
You can imagine how tough the usa lobby is when you hear Federated Farmers leaders like Don Nicholson talking about farmers’ interests.
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/693/134/Forensic_Evidence_Emerges_that_European_E.Coli_Superbug_was_Bioengineered_to_Produce_Human_Fatalities.html
according to some very smart people, including the Koch Institute mentioned above, Mother Nature simply does not work in the manner the Bankers would like us to believe. No naturally occuring process can achieve this level of resistance complexity and then magically appear simulaneously in multiple links on the food chain. It does not happen, not without a concerted level of assistance.
The very complex questions, often have very simple answers.
What a load of BS. Bacteria such as E. coli typically acquire multidrug resistance via horizontal gene transfer from other bacteria, and not via multiple rounds of selection. And bacterial contamination is easy spread given the right conditions (and of course that all the cases are linked to a single country anyway). Mother nature is not benevolent.
And the theory of how the strain was ‘engineered’ is just as dumb. If I was going to engineer a deadly strain of bacteria, it wouldn’t be via that method.
Just another kick in the guts for what is left of New Zealand’s heavy engineering industry.
This is shocking. But this Government prefers to purchase Chinese workers and have our own as unemployed on the street and on the dole because it is more “efficient”.
Loyalty to a company never amounts to anything. The directors/owners ask for it all the time but never extend it themselves.
And yes, this act is just another way that NAct are undermining our economy.
I dont think we should be suprised about this one. And we shouldnt blame the current administration.
This has been happening for about the past 25 years or so, with NZR, TranzRail and then Toll running down the railway workshops, that provided NZ with a lot of skill, expertise and engineering infrastructure for the past century or so. Eastown, Otahuhu, Addington (now replaced by a shopping mall), all gone, and Hutt, along with Hillside, running at a fraction of its orginal capacity.
If you want to blame anyone for this, blame Richard Prebble. He was the one who stripped NZR to the bone for it to be flogged off.
NZ has been going down the wrong road for a very long time.
Yep and, unfortunately, neither of the two main parties are willing to change the direction just yet. One because of the ideology – they actually want NZ to go the wrong way because it directly benefits them and they don’t care what it does to everyone else. The other doesn’t seem to want to admit that it got it wrong three decades ago and some of them even want to continue going the wrong way as well.
Choice: A) Wrong way or b) Wrong way with conditions.
Not really all that appertising and none of the minor parties are talking about the necessary changes needed to make us sustainable/more egalatarian either. They’re sayijg that’s what they want but not how to go about doing it.
Some thoughts on religion, the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good ideas and ideals from religion can get dereailed after the ambitious and the fanatical and the dogmatic pedants and the supernaturally moral (in theory) get their hold on it and find a hopefully, comfortable position within it and a hopefully decent income and elevated position in society. It’s true that men have dominated in the past, but in the Catholic church some of the nuns have been remarkably bold in setting up an Order in a new place. And Anglican nuns as well I think. The belief of a woman in the goodness of Christ and his life as a shining example to follow led her into an adventurous and strenuous life. Read about Gladys Aylward in The Small Woman by Alan Burgess. Often comes up on Trademe. Religion has been a comfort, a scourge, a challenge. Here is a link I’ve got – can’t remember exactly what’s on it. http://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/a/aylward-gladys.php
And if you are a leftie then you will have heard of The Tolpuddle Martyrs – basically one family of godly men who started the farm union movement in southern England, got punished by being sent as convicts to Australia, and by popular acclaim of British crowds who supported them, were pardoned and allowed back to England. It was their Methodism that kept them sane in their souls, and gave them strength to endure the very nasty privations they bore.
For the rest of us, it is sometimes just comfortable to front up and gabble the responses, kneel and rise if that’s how they do it in Rome, sing a few good songs, and hopefully be better people for a while. There are worse things than meeting with others who have shared beliefs in trying to be kind and think of others before ourselves sometimes. But as M says in the blog for Key’s Destiny it doesn’t last beyond Sunday morning for some people.
Nice one prism and I don’t down people for having faith having being raised a Catholic but I don’t like it where religion is misused to keep people down, for example Joseph Ratzinger aka God’s policeman describing homosexuals as backyard mongrels.
As a teenager it began to chafe the way I saw women very much in the background with their worth seeming to be in motherhood or the religious life instead of the human flawed beings like their male counterparts.
I’m lapsed for many years now but take with me the social justice aspect of my upbringing and try to effect change where I can or speak out in defence of those under nasty yokes and I think many other lapsers do too.
Don’t have a problem with people being churchgoers or talking about their faith as I have friends from all over the spectrum from hardened atheists to the most ardent believers and when faith or religion is put to use for the good like say the sisters of the Home of Compassion I’m their most vehement supporter.
My old Grandmother – a life-long Athiest and left-wing Labour Party activist – always said Lapsed Catholics made the best, most passionate, most committed Lefties.
Agreed swordfish. My grandmother had a picture of Jesus Christ the sacred heart on one side of her mantlepiece and Micky Savage on the other. Both pictures were about the same size and of an identical height!
May i suggest that lapsed Catholics make good lefties because the good hearts of these people were still beating after realising the Church was one big lie and they really really wanted to believe that there is a way for Humans to help each other live a better life without the endless deference to greed and brutality
I have come to believe that I had a huge advantage by being raised by parents who were atheist and agnostic/apathetic.. (although afaik they didn’t stay that way.) I didn’t learn anything about God/religion/church until I was 19. I started as a fundamentalist, and have become an Anglo-Catholic.
I’ve heard that Benedict said that, but I’d like ‘chapter and verse’, simply because from what I know of him (which was nothing, until recently my dear beloved Italian teacher, sent me his latest book as a Christmas present) it does not sound like the sort of thing he would say! When I am not here, I spend far too long on ATS, talking about politics which is fine, and ‘debating’ with atheists, which is not – because said atheists are much more into personal abuse than all but a few here (you know who you are! 😀 ) It just makes me completely exhausted to see all the same old techniques – the old assertiveness training ‘broken record’ is a favourite…. Sadly, so is citing the most rage-inducing quotes, without sources, and then when the sources are tracked down, turns out to have been something interpreted very creatively! Having the same problem convincing Americans that Admadinejad never said he wanted to nuke Israel, not even ‘wipe it off the map’ – I can’t understand why lefties are quite happy to use right wing techniques such as mis-quoting, etc against we religious… 🙁
More Questions Than Answers
Yesterday, the Green Party co-leader Dr Russel Norman asked the Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key a number of pertinent questions concerning Ministers receiving “corporate hospitality.” As usual John Key was evasive and did not answer appropriately continuing to obfuscate and deliberately withhold relevant information. The current Speaker of the House Lockwood Smith then protected John Key by implementing procedural trivialities in an appalling display of arrogance that perverted Parliamentary justice from being served.
Easy street, insulated by their wealth, are up in arms over loss of free weather reports for pilots.
Unlike boaties, rock anglers, etc, anyone, who can jump off anywhere to get on the ocean, not just anyone can jump in a plane, or hellicopter.
What exactly were they thinking when they thought cuts would be on the poor singularly?
What did they understand to mean back office cuts and privatization?
Of course it would mean less generosity towards their luxuries hobbies.
What comes around goes around, we can be generous, grow the economy by providing incentives in real growth rather than exporting people, profits and future opportunities.
Capital farming is an attack on capitalism, since it rewards those with massive wealth to keep it and shut out new hard working citizens entering their industry, or the home ownership club.
Oh, and when did free market come to mean free for all? Markets aren’t fair, uniform, unless well regulated by government and society. When the cultural norms break down in punishing criminals, and short cut takers, then government needs to step up its game rather than rush to join up with the government hands off driving.
Economic outlook is uncertain, but what is certain is energy will cost more, transport cost will rise.
Ugh I just found WhaleOil. I need to go and scrub myself now. I feel dirty.
I recommend paumice and hospital strength disinfectant.
And beer and whisky. Then go and deliver 500 pamphlets and erect 10 billboards and you will feel better …
That reminds me… I’ve been meaning to tell everyone that DF has reinstalled his LSO cookie.
The best way to combat it is to install Better Privacy and restart your browser each time you visit Kiwibog. Whaleoil has also recently implemented the technology on his site.
You can learn a little bit more about the DF LSO in this Jackal blog post.
ugh, feel your pain, I did the same a couple of days ago. Still de-Oiling.
I read this extract from Hansard (dated 7-6-11) on Red Alert a few minutes ago.It was posted by Trevor M.under “Late Play Annie to the Leader of the National Party.” It was about the contract given to Parents Inc not being put out for tender.
“Hon Annette King: What evidence and scientific advice did he seek before agreeing to allocate $2.4 million to Parents Inc. for a parenting programme that even the Minister for Social Development and Employment said she had neither sought nor received advice on, or was she carrying out his promise that he made before the election that he would make sure that Parents Inc. got money?
Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Members will accept that, as Prime Minister, I am not responsible for the allocation of that contract; that actually goes through the Ministry of Social Development. But I would say I have seen that Toolbox; I have seen the programme. In my opinion it is a very, very successful programme that is helping New Zealand parents, and we do need to help parents in New Zealand.”
Is there not something very wrong about this? John Key did not deny that he had made a promise before the election! More arbitrary government from Mr.’if i ruled the world,forget democratic procedures’ K.ey? Is this not similar to PEDA and Bill English the budget before last, or perhaps worse as it was promised bfore the election?
In Britain, arbitrary government under Charles 1,caused a civil war and Charles, thinking he had “divine right” as king to make decisions off the top off his head, lost said head to the executioner(1649). At least in the case of Charles he was leader and king, but Mr. Key apparently made a promise before he became leader! How many other promises did he make and why? And he often makes decicisions of his head.
According to Speake’s rules, if there is more than one question asked in Question Time, the minister or PM addressed only needs to answer one. So the fact that Key didn’t answer the question on promises, doesn’t mean he DID make a promise. He just chose to answer the first question.
But if the answer was in the negative then Mr Key would have said so, and thus closed off the issue. To avoid answering does increase the possibility that Key made a promise that was outside the tendering rules. Unlawful? But Key can do that because who can stop him. And the MSM are not going to question the ethics of it are they?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/5120337/Reserve-Bank-keeps-official-cash-rate-steady
We don’t need no stinkin sub-editors.
Isn’t it all done out of Aussie now? Or not done as the case may be…
Still there as I write this btw…
I’ve noticed a lot of epic spelling mistakes on Stuff lately. They’re probably employing some minimum wage slave who’s in constant fear of being fired before 90 days is up. It would be their style.
That’s the efficiency gain of privatisation the NACTs want to bring to the public sector, I guess…
A Fairfax exec told me a couple of years ago that the occasional payoff to an accidentally libelled member of the public was still going to be cheaper than employing subbies. He wasn’t sure that they had an obligation to always be accurate anyway, but he did reckon they were obliged to correct their mistakes, but only if they were pointed out to them.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1106/S00142/new-parole-board-appointments-announced.htm
So, are these people objective judges of individual’s right to regain some freedom or just rightwing ringins this government has put in place to control people?
An excellent question Jum.
For the first time in a while, the latest Morgan poll shows a major shift – to the opposition:
http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2011/4675/
What’s significant here is that the overall confidence rating hasn’t changed, but party vote preferences have. So that “disconnect” (i.e. people not happy but supporting status quo) has been reduced. Good.
I wouldn’t read much into the minor party results – Morgan has always been funny on those. But overall, it’s encouraging for those (like me!) who had started to give up on under-performing Labour.
I’m still gonna vote Green though.
heh. That would be an interesting parliament. Act potentially out, Mana in.
Yep, that’s a good result for the left. A nominal 7 point gap between Team Key and the opposition, the smallest it’s been since the start of the year. Factor in the likely electoral neutering of ACT and the maori party and it’s getting down to a seat or three. Continuous job losses, a moribund economy and no fucken idea what to do about either are starting to kill Key’s chances in November. And did I mention Kiwisaver and asset sales?
Interesting that Tariana Turia was all over the news today bigging up Darren Hughes. A olive branch of sorts to Labour?
9.5% undecided. Up 2%. That may be a good sign for the Opposition too as maybe a few are not so sure about the Nacts.
Newsflash
~ ~ In Search of 170,000 jobs ~ ~
Fantastic! John Key’s Government has overexceeded his aspirational bullshit and is now taking up residence in political fantasy islands:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/5123165/Ministry-unsure-about-Budgets-job-promise
It gets even better – “the Budget” is an organism separate and independent from the Government as Acting (good actor?) Economic Decimation, erm, Development Minister David Carter told the commerce select committee today he was not aware that any analysis had been done …
“Bear in mind the Government hasn’t said it will create the 170,000 new jobs – the Budget said there will be 170,000 jobs,” he said.
The Budget said. The Government hasn’t said. The Budget said. The Government hasn’t said.
Oh yes yes yes, we understand.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/5123165/Ministry-unsure-about-Budgets-job-promise
Time to blame the peasants and boy sells kidney to buy iPad – gotta love Max Keiser:
At the risk of saying something unpopular for me, this was a bit of a WTF moment
The heritage advisor for Auckland’s main iwi hadn’t heard of an inner-city taniwha before yesterday, but he says the point about consultation over the CBD Rail Link project is valid.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10731219
I am sorry but the last time I remember hearing about a Taniwha was a few years ago, and it caused all sorts of problems. But this one, is one, that few people seem to have heard of.
But it’s very handy for Steven Joyce, who we all know is so in favour of the Britomart rail link, NOT
http://www.imperatorfish.com/2011/06/guest-post-from-horotiu-taniwha.html
I imagine the right’s silence over this issue would be quite deafening, simply because that the ‘taniwha’ lies in the path of a railway line, not a road.