It came to me overnight. No drugs, no alcohol, so it must have been the cheese.
The answer as to who NZF will choose for Government is both. No wait and keep reading. For one half of the term NZF goes with National, and then for the other half of the term he goes with Labour/Greens.
See my estimate is that the 7 year itch needs to be adjusted into NZ Government years (what will become known as the NZGY): One and a half NZGYs is equal to 7 human years.
And so with the honeymoon is over, and everybody is fighting over who is the favourite child, it’s separation time and you need to find a new significant other. Luckily in NZ this time we have a spare. Now there are not many electorates around the world who plan so well.
As to the sequencing, well that something that I hope will come to me after tonight’s bout of dreaming.
The “Peters Deal” has already been made. It requires that John Key, newly stripped of his titles, returns to Parliament to play the role of caddy to Winston, as the new PM strides about the Beehive dressed in plus-fours and spats, swinging a flanged niblick at politicians from all parties, foolish enough to venture onto the “Links” as Winston calls what were previously known as the Halls of Power. “It’s a simple and straightforward game”, quipped Peters at his first press conference as Prime Minister, clipping Key behind the ear for a momentary lapse of concentration and also for fun, “the aim being to belt these useless sods into the Joyce Hole with as many swings as I choose. Yes, my caddy “Jonny” was reluctant to take the role, but given what I’ve got on him, he had no choice, and certainly, I am enjoying the sound of his constant whining. The golf bag I have him carrying is loaded heavy with full bottles of wine from his own vineyard – rubbish I won’t be drinking, but then, neither will he!”. Prime Minister Peters said he’d be needing a course of Botox shortly, as the muscles in his face responsible for his trade mark grin are beginning to fibrillate from constant use.
Going at full power Robert G. Please hurry with the next episode. I feel like the eager USA residents waiting for the boat from UK for the next instalment of Charles Dickens’ Little Nell.
The Q&A panel suggested there should be set procedures for MMP party negotiations once all votes are counted. After all we should be better at it after 21 years of MMP one participant claimed. For example Russell Norman suggested that the party with the most votes lead initial negotiations rather than have a minority party manage “bids” from two large parties.
So what ideas can be generated here, in this forum, to improve the status quo?
What does that even mean? NZF policies are all going to be enacted by the new Parliament?
The problem with having journalists interview one another is that none of them are particularly intelligent or insightful. That’s why we end up with these trite fortune cookies instead.
Dont buy into that tail dog crap. The negotiations look fine its about giving the country the nearest policy match that we voted for. It is quite proper that the smaller parties should gain this influence thats why we have mmp
Exactly. We have MMP so that the majority of people have a say rather than being ruled by a minority as happened under FPP and which, seemingly, National and the journalists want us to return to.
The only reason Peters is a problem is because the media gives him additional power and then Peters plays them. If the MSM were reporting to inform the public instead of being circus promoters and entertainers then we’d have a process that served us better.
The problem is the media saying there is a problem.
I’ve seen and heard so much stuff about Peters “holding the country to ransom” and implying he is doing terrible things.
I thought he was doing what he has to do.
And I am fairly certain that whatever is being said behind closed doors isn’t out here. So how can he be judged on that? At this stage judging him on policies we say are terrible is rubbish. He fairly got to that position with those policies. Like National and Labour got to their positions with policies some say are crap, destructive and dumb.
IMO Peters (historically) has been a big part of creating this situation, so I’m not that sympathetic to him personally (I rate him as one of the main reasons why we have a bastard version of MMP rather than a representative one). The MSM is out of control. They’re all power mongers.
I’m not convinced there is anything significantly wrong with the conventions on how coalitions are formed though. I’m also not convinced that rules would force power mongers to behave better, or at least that this is the best way to get power mongers to behave better.
For many, including the panel, the tail wags the dog.
Funny how all these right-wingers who are supposedly so familiar with how negotiations work in the private sector are suddenly horrified that one party to the negotiations might choose to exercise whatever leverage it has and somebody needs to do something about it. Harden the fuck up, you pathetic whiners.
“Funny how all these right-wingers who are supposedly so familiar with how negotiations work…”
Since when was Russell Norman (who made the suggestion) a right-winger?
If Norman’s idea was followed this time, NZF would negotiate with National first and only talk to Lab+Greens if they couldn’t reach an arrangement with the Nats. They wouldn’t be able to weigh up different options and it seems to me that if they did move on to the “second choice’ negotiations they would have less leverage as that team would know the small party had used up its other option (while they would still have plenty of leverage in the first set of negotiations), so that would distort things somewhat.
Personally, I don’t see a big problem and I’d be fine with them taking more time. I think Peters has created a perception of being a bit of a demagogue and a rogue, but presumably he’s learnt from his previous coalition experiences and he seems keen to handle things differently from 20 years ago. If anything, I think he’s rushing it this time. I can see an agreement in principal being reached by Thursday, but not an actual coalition deal. Confidence and supply may well be on the cards.
I can see an agreement in principal being reached by Thursday, but not an actual coalition deal. Confidence and supply may well be on the cards.
If I was betting person that would be my choice. The fact he is adamant an agreement can be reached by Thursday suggests to me he has already made up his mind to go with C and S. The question is, will it be with National or Lab/Greens? No bets on that one.
Let elected representatives decide how they’ll represent their constituents in whichever way they choose. The “problem” with the status quo is impatience.
Who’s going to police Russel’s attempt to legitimise the “moral mandate”?
It would only need a simple signal from the Governor-General, within a timetable saying they had x days for the highest -polling party to propose a government, after which it goes to second place to have a go within x days.
Why should any party be given negotiating privileges not given to all the other parties? Governing is about managing a variety of competing demands. I think the first grouping to show they can come together for a majority, in a completely unstructured negotiating arena, is genuinely the best outcome for the country. Put any preconditions on that and the chances of a not-the-best outcome increase.
Yeah, I was surprised to see Russel Norman promoting the idea of privileging the party with the most votes. It would reward National for cannibalising its potential coalition partners and encourage Labour to do the same. Strictly a proposal for FPP enthusiasts, I would have thought.
In Negotiations with big countries like China or USA, tiny NZ manages to gain some advantages but the tail waggers would argue that NZ should jolly well sit down and do what those big countries dictate. Small players have no rights!
I heard the all white male panel wanting rules for how to talk to each other.
What a bizarre concept. It really is simple.
After the election parties approach each other and have a conversation. This is called “talking”. Then if they want to, they raise the level of the talking to negotiation. Negotiation is talking with a view to making an Agreement.
WHy is this so hard? I suspect part of the problem is having an all male, white panel for a start.
“After the election parties approach each other and have a conversation. This is called “talking”. Then if they want to, they raise the level of the talking to negotiation. Negotiation is talking with a view to making an Agreement.”
That’s pretty well it, like minded parties will have more in common and commit sooner to negotiations.
The J Key trained media is PATHETIC, has no idea about how to deal with the outcome of the election and has no info to pass on so just makes stuff up, surmises and in some cases tries to influence negotiations towards their beloved party.
For nine long years national have unfunded and under valued our schools and educators.
Schools have been struggling and asking for change for years, but national have not listened, rather they have done what ever they want to do and to hell with how our educators feel about it. NewsRoom have published an article today about it.
The value of education in any society is enormous, education lifts people out of poverty, reduces crime, educated people raise economies and save lives.
One of the greatest gifts we can give children is to help them feel valued and important, a way to do this is through education. But if we aren’t valuing our educators and schools, how is that making our children feel? If educators are underpaid and overworked and not even listened to, then the whole education system suffers.
Living in hope for change and support in our education sector, one thing is for sure all the opposition parties value education, educators and kids, that gives me hope.
In the meantime, if you are able, rock on down to your local school and get involved and volunteer. The rewards are enormous, and it helps to bring communities together and saves lives.
NZ1st, Labour and Greens all want change in our education system, so do voters, more voted for education changes than keeping the system as it is.
Three more sleeps, we need a win for the kids of NZ and those that educate them.
It will be an enormous task to make the changes to our education system which need to be made.
I fear the horse has bolted on having a society which sees learning and teaching as anything more than a paint-by-numbers consumer exercise. That means the focus is on peripheral consumer views of the issues to do with schooling, like teachers’ pay.
Valuing teachers and schools is critical but the vital changes need to be in the acceptance of the essential notions about learning and the paramountcy of those. Arriving at the point by saying that ‘teachers are important’ is putting the cart before the horse.
Totally agree with you Pete about it being an enourmous task. But the upside is, teachers will probably leap at the chance to be heard and involved, am sure there won’t be a lack of enthusiasm in brainstorming any changes 😀
Like Douglas and Richardson’s reforms it will take decades for anyone to reverse the damage the blind following of the business model has done to Tertiary and the blind desire to churn out little cogs in businesses wheels has done to Schooling. So many people wanting to impose their education system on generations that might as well live on a different planet by comparison.
Cinny @ 4. There is a good Education column, “Teachers fight to fix education system” by Teuila Fuatai on Newsroom.
““National standards, allowing charter schools in, removing incentives for 100 percent qualified teachers in Early Childhood Education, not adequately funding support staff, constantly cutting back on the operations grant – all these things all point in the same direction: that the system has an escalating crisis that needs to be fixed,” he says.”
Not a moral right to govern.
Jack Vowles
Professor Jack Vowles is in Victoria University of Wellington’s School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations.
‘A party ‘winning’ with a little over 44 percent of the votes cannot reasonably claim a moral right to govern: at best being the plurality winner designates being the first in the queue to seek that role. This advantages National. But stability and durability of a coalition or other government arrangement is enhanced by ideological proximity and congruence between the partners. This advantages the centre-left combination of Labour, New Zealand First and Green. A majority is 50 percent plus one. In 2017, as at every election since 1996, New Zealand has collectively continued to reject the option of having a single-party majority government.’
“Until now we’ve had the world gate-crash our party. But now it is time to make it work for us.
Let’s design our country to make it better for us. Bring in the people by all means but send them to where we need them. Let’s not give them what they need from us so easily.
People are lining up to come here because we are the last paradise on Earth.
Our small population is our winning card. Let’s not lose that.
Everything we do we must ask ourselves this question: Will this make our country better for those living in it now?”
Nice big swinging arm movements there.
The project that I am in has approximately 65% foreigners, and would not have been possible without them.
The suburb of another project I worked on was revived with fresh immigrant capital over a decade.
The town with my holiday home has been transformed for good with foreigners choosing to live and invest here.
Our immigration settings should always be up for debate, but it is not helpful for Duncan Garner to base the immigration debate on ethnicity.
I posted about this last night.
I agree with your summation. We need an intelligent discussion about immigration, identity and infrastructure.
Duncan Garner has written an article backing Winston on immigration after his experience shopping in Kmart.
It has provoked a lot of criticism and support on Stuff and twitter.
Bradbury also writes this article
‘Why we urgently need to investigate Chinese influence over National’
‘The shocking reality that the National Party is little more than a front for Chinese business interests demands far more attention than it gained…
New research paper lays bare China’s influence campaign in New Zealand
Concerns raised over political donations and directorships offered to former ministers and relatives
Chinese-owned New Zealand dairy farms said to possibly being used to test advanced missile technology’
The only good thing you can say about Garner is that he does his own shopping. George Bush Senior lost masses of votes when he was shown shopping (playing the common man) at a supermarket during the 1993 campaign and being amazed at how the product scanners worked….clearly it was the first time he had stepped inside such an establishment.
Mass immigration is a mixed bag; upside is growth, diversity, investment and cheap labour; downside … ask Maori. There are two narratives here and most people experience a mix of both.
True there is a real difference; European colonisation was largely the outcome of the massive disparity of industrialisation and technology in that era, and a with this a sense of entitled superiority which enabled them to project and impose on indigenous peoples around the globe. In many ways the British Empire was a peak version of the old patterns of history, wars, migrations and displacement being an ancient story; although the sheer geographic extent of it was unprecedented.
Colonisation in Aoteoroa came towards the end of that period, and followed a somewhat different pattern to say India or China. Here the vast majority of ordinary immigrants were escaping very poor prospects to build themselves a better life. They endured awful, dangerous journeys in the hope of a fresh start. While of course the elites plundered NZ and extracted as much wealth as they could in the usual fashion of Empires; over time something else happened … a whole new society dominated by sheer numbers of Europeans and their cultural habits arose to almost (but not completely) supplant what had existed before.
While for example the local peoples of Africa, India and China remained dominant, in the Americas and Australiasia they did not, with colonisation culminating in the physcial, economic and cultural displacement of indigenous peoples almost everywhere.
Colonisation is an essentially extractive process, a giant wealth pump that siphons resources back to the elites at the centre of empire. Immigration is the movement of peoples, usually to either escape active persecution, or to seek a better life elsewhere; this being an ancient feature of human life for probably millions of years.
Yet ultimately the end result can be very similar; in 1840 Maori were still by far the dominant population and few who signed the ToW could have imagined that within decades they’d be fighting wars to defend what remained of their land rights, or that by the turn of the century the Australian phrase “smoothing the pillow of a dying race” would enter the lexicon of their experience.
Already it impacts our elections, much of provincial NZ moved distinctly left, while Auckland now some 26% Asian/Indian, voted solidly for the status quo. Already on both sides of the Tasman there are real concerns around the CCCP’s projection of not so very soft power into our political systems.
That has to be Garner’s core question; where are we going? Because there really is no upper limit to the number of people from all over the world who would like to immigrate here. It’s not unrealistic to imagine a New Zealand in our lifetimes with a population exceeding 10 million; consisting of maybe 1m Maori/Polynesian, 3m Caucasian and another 6m from Asia.
Nothing inherently wrong with this; but I find it hard to imagine such a change will have zero political and social consequences.
The mindset of a colonists and an immigrants are almost the opposite of each other. One comes to squash existing peoples the other to join. Quite different. The average settler was extractive not just the colonising elites. i don’t buy the innocent running away from exploitation so ended up exploiting others line.
I understand the fear people have about asians taking over but they arent and won’t imo not while the euros are dominant.
The mindset of a colonists and an immigrants are almost the opposite of each other. One comes to squash existing peoples the other to join. Quite different.
[Citation needed]
I understand the fear people have about asians taking over but they arent and won’t imo not while the euros are dominant.
Fake news buddy – do you know what opinion means? You may cling to others analysis like a child to apron strings but I chose to create my own opinions from all that I read and learn. Perhaps that is the difference between man and machine – a basic fact.
One comes to squash existing peoples the other to join.
A good distinction; I’m sure that was the experience of Maori during the late 1800’s, but it’s harder to know if it was the intention of the hundreds of thousands of very poor Irish, Scottish, Welsh and others who made perilous journey in tiny ships to the most remote land on the face of the earth … to ‘squash the Maoris’.
I’ve read stories of families who’d hold a wake for those departing, because effectively they’d never be seen or likely heard from again.
Now I agree the elites certainly arrived with a different mindset; but they were always a tiny minority. The vast majority were very ordinary immigrants who where effectively just displaced peoples themselves and arrived with no more intent than to escape the colonisation they’d already lived through.
We have our stories too.
And yes the euros are numerically dominant over the whole of NZ at the moment, but barely so in Auckland. And within a few decades Maori/Polynesian/Euro might well be a minority.
Again if you asked all the Kaumatua who signed the ToW in 1840 did they want within 60 years for their mokopuna would to be reduced to a marginalised minority in their own land … I think most would have said no. And would that have made them all racists?
Yes it was a difficult journey to escape persecution and they came to a land denuded of indigenous people and culture. All they could do was take up the plough after putting the gun down, to make the land productive so that their family could thrive. Better than letting it waste and spoil. /semi sarc ☺
As you may recall, I have an ‘adopted’ Chinese son. He’s now an airline pilot in Xian City, flying 737’s four times a week on a triangular night route. He started as the orphaned son of rice farming peasants and has done well. It took time to get to know each other, but a shared interest in aviation and scary youtube videos gave us a lot in common. 🙂
He already had an anglicised first name and when he asked us a few months back for permission to use my surname as well … because he regarded us as his second family … I was remarkably moved.
Conversations with him could be unsettling though. Flying over the vast apparently empty expanses of Australia while he was training here, it seemed to him that it was very much underutilised. He was very clear that lots of Chinese could transform it all into much more productive uses rather than let it ‘waste and spoil’. /Not sarc at all.
Conversations with him could be unsettling though. Flying over the vast apparently empty expanses of Australia while he was training here, it seemed to him that it was very much underutilised. He was very clear that lots of Chinese could transform it all into much more productive uses rather than let it ‘waste and spoil’.
“The mindset of a colonists and an immigrants are almost the opposite of each other. One comes to squash existing peoples the other to join.”
True, but there is a third dynamic here. We have a neoliberal internal government that has an imperialist mindset and is in charge of immigration policy. So this isn’t simply about what immigrants want when they come here, it’s about who is choose who gets to come, how they come, and why.
“I understand the fear people have about asians taking over but they arent and won’t imo not while the euros are dominant.”
I don’t want to focus on Asians, for obvious reasons, but afaik if you increase a population fast enough from immigration then the culture of that society will change. The issue here is whether that matters, not that it’s not happening.
Where I live the immigration issues are from Europeans, Brits and Americans. And Aucklanders. /shrug. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some serious racism issues in NZ around Pākehā fears of Asians, but I think it’s a mistake to work on that being the *only problem here.
Yes of course you are correct. Same here. Part of the issue for me is pulling all the individual strands out – a big poster would be good. Immigration, foreign ownership, refugees, cultural solidification and openness, racism, names of things, infrastructure, city verses country, home ownership, wages, neoliberalism, and so on
There probably are some people who have a fear of Asian culture taking over the dominant English culture.
That’s not wholly unreasonable; after all is this not exactly what Maori have been saying for the past hundred years or more?
No culture is all good or all bad, they’re all a random mix of social habits that arose from the accidents of history and geography. Each has strong points, and each has less attractive aspects. Typically we like to be proud of what we’re good at, and have massive blind spots around the rest.
And when we look at an outsider culture we tend to be most irked by their blind spots and weaknesses, and much slower to appreciate what they do well.
Because most people are very change resistant the process of getting used to each other, building on our strengths and discarding our failings is a slow process that cannot be easily rushed.
Exactly … it’s not immigration that is the problem. We are ALL immigrants of one sort or another. But the nature and rate of that immigration can easily change a society in ways people are not ready for, nor desire.
Going back to the Maori experience; many of the very early European arrivals (prior to 1840 most actually arrived from America), integrated very tightly with the Maori iwi they encountered. From the Maori perspective this was not a problem at all; indeed many rather valued their ‘white Maori’ because it facilitated economic and political opportunities.
And it shouldn’t be forgotten that Maori and Europeans have intermarried at remarkably high rates; that while Maori and Europeans maintain quite distinct cultures at a personal level there is a huge amount of cross-over.
Now if hypothetically Europeans had arrived at a relatively low rate during the 1800’s, and most had continued to integrate into Maori society as the early pattern indicated … the entire question of ‘colonisation’ would never have occurred.
An imperfect example might be to point to the Samoan/German experience … while it clearly started out as colonisation, in the aftermath of WW1 the rate of immigration slowed dramatically, and the two populations then had time to successfully merge into a distinct culture of it’s own.
If your definition of ‘assimilation’ is based on your experience of euros demographically overwhelming maori, then absolutely. The idea that Maori should all become ‘well behaved brown skinned Euros’ is of course repugnant.
But over time distinct cultures that flourish side by side, DO influence each other, and intermarriage DOES generate whole new patterns. In the long run both cultures finish up the stronger for it, initially separate and ultimately as something new.
Actually, I don’t think it’s the fact of there being self checkouts that is KMart’s problem – it’s that there are not enough of them.
they do still have some person operated checkouts, and some staff overseeing the self checkouts.
the queues at St Lukes’ Kmart the last few times I’ve been there were horrendous. At first I thought it was because of a sale.
Basically, if they are selling that much stuff, to that many people, they need more checkouts – and that would require more money spent on checkouts, and more staff to over see them.
Basically, if they are selling that much stuff, to that many people, they need more checkouts – and that would require more money spent on checkouts, and more staff to over see them.
Bomber Bradbury’s analysis is excellent. and Bomber is spot on there-nicely observed.
Nah. Bomber’s being as much a useless donkey dick as Duncan Garner.
Here’s Bomber.
he’s (Garner) trying to articulate the frustration many Aucklander’s feel at the cramped infrastructure groaning under the weight of a surge in immigration numbers and the total inability of Government to show any leadership by properly funding the migration growth which they are promoting.
I’ll spell this one out.
There is crap infrastructure and there is immigration. The insidious and unspoken line (it’s common enough and embraced by NZ Labour among others) is that immigration is somehow responsible for the infra-structure being crap…and for it getting getting more crap.
But it’s not.
The infra-structure is crap because successive governments have neglected it. Infra-structure is crap because of bad management; a failure on the part of the politicians who presume to control and manage such things.
But hey. Let’s point the finger “over there” at past and present immigrants instead, some of who could have been offered very good jobs laying in and maintaining all that infrastructure that successive governments have paid fuck all attention to (beyond flogging bits to private concerns that could extract massive profits off the back of steady deterioration).
And as a footnote not an aside, you may or may not have noticed that proposed immigration settings are set along lines of class (ie, huge bias against low skilled or poor immigrants)…which kind of defeats the purpose (if such a purpose exists) of getting basic infra-structure up to scratch.
I agree that lack of planning for infrastructure is not the fault of immigrants. It’s also true that there are natural limits to growth, and there is a relationship between the number of people and what can support them in the physical world and whether that is problematic.
There is crap infrastructure and there is immigration. The insidious and unspoken line (it’s common enough and embraced by NZ Labour among others) is that immigration is somehow responsible for the infra-structure being crap…and for it getting getting more crap.
No it’s not.
The point is that the immigration hasn’t been planned for and the necessary infrastructure built. Then there’s the influence it has on wages – you know, the sub-par wages we have because there’s so many people being imported by businesses specifically to keep wages down.
In other words, the cost of the immigration hasn’t been covered.
Garner and Bradbury seem to skip past who creates the pressure on the infrastructure which is not the immigrants.
Remember the guy who came in on the Investment visa? Was going to build that hotel in Epsom? After 5-10 years has not? Now, how hard to have in place a law that says if you do not do what you promise you forfeit the money you had to bring in. It goes tot he Govt coffers and you get PR or Citizenship rescinded. That would be easy if there was political will. BUT it happens a bit.
Secondly, we have the kiwifruit industry brazenly not giving migrant workers contracts and paying under minimum wage (over 50%) of them. That is deliberate law breaking to take advantage of vulnerable people seeking a better life. It is also interrupting the blessed market the right loves SO much. IF there are not enough workers, wages should go up under market forces.
Instead they are deliberately driven down. Single people on benefits would DO seasonal jobs IF
1. The pay was better
2. They could get straight back on a benefit when the work finished
As long as it takes WINZ weeks or months to start paying someone coming off seasonal work it would be a foolish person who leaves it to take a short term job. When you add in the weeks or months to get back on support the real hourly rate of the seasonal work is well below $10 an hour.
“Our immigration settings should always be up for debate, but it is not helpful for Duncan Garner to base the immigration debate on ethnicity.”
Or to do so in a way that is pretty blatantly racist (I will grant him this, I don’t think he realised he was being racist. Time for him to learn though).
Individual advantages from immigration doesn’t mean that Duncan Garner’s points as displayed in Ad’s comment aren’t correct. They are valid points and need to be thought about and acted on.
The application of rational thinking should not be drowned by sentiment and past success. Now we need something different. You only have to look at the whole picture to see that.
A classic example of unfettered immigration, is the experience of the Fijian’s, in a democracy, where the immigrants end up out numbering the citizens, the migrants can set up their own political parties and win with a majority in democratic elections.
There are many other example as well through northern Africa.
Countries with relatively small populations are at serious risk from overpopulating their countries with migrants.
NZ has a very small population compared to China or India, for either or both of those 2 countries to lose 100 million, they wouldn’t even register on population numbers, but if they all arrived at NZ…….
Refugees should be the first choice of migrants to be allowed to enter NZ, a good example of this is the new Green’s member.
A leader of the Tūhoe people’s drive for self-determination, Tamati Kruger, will give the 2017 Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture on 31 October. (Tuesday)
Tue, October 31, 2017 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Location
OGHLecTh (102-G36)
Corner of Princes St & Waterloo Quadrant
The University of Auckland
The lecture, at the University of Auckland, will be a historic opportunity for Tūhoe to explain their philosophy of Mana Motuhake/Self-Determination to a national audience, and to report on how the approach is working out in practice since the iwi signed a settlement with the Crown in 2013.
The settlement transferred management of the Tūhoe homeland in the former Urewera National Park to a new entity Te Urewera, which Kruger chairs, run jointly by the Crown and Tūhoe.
It also agreed in principle that Tūhoe should run its own social services, including healthcare and education, for its own people.
So far Tūhoe has opened a health clinic at Taneatua and plans two more, it runs youth and counselling services, offers educational scholarships, and is becoming involved in wider educational and social services.
Tāmati Kruger was educated at Victoria University in Wellington, where he also tutored in te reo Māori and was involved in the early days if the Te Reo Māori Society in the 1970s.
He was the chief Tūhoe negotiator in the settlement process and also chairs the tribal body Tūhoe Te Uru Taumatua.
The lecture will be held at the University of Auckland and you can register here.
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October 2017
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A video of Lisa Marriot’s 2016 lecture, ‘Are we all equal in NZ?’, is here.
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Twitterfinger J. Putinpussy barfs up yet another obstacle to actually getting anything done. By picking a fight with someone he really needs onside, but has zero leverage over.
You mean he has no strategy! Simply reacts in a vengeful way… Based on all of the evidence of Trump’s first nine months in office, it’s impossible to conclude that he has any sort of comprehensive strategy or theory of the case. He acts (or reacts) and sees what happens. There’s no bigger plan that we’re not privy to. There’s really no plan at all.
Loved this Tweet from Corker in response: “”It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning,” “
Well that is certainly true! Executive orders is about all that has been achieved and even then may are subject to litigation. I can’t say the “beautiful, and wonderful” Tax plan has much hope of success either when the populous wake up to the realisation as to who are the ones going to benefit… and it certainly isn’t them!
The stacking of the EPA with Climate denialists is unfortunately having an effect, and the run down of funding in social services and eduction, and FEMA. The flow on will be increasing dissatisfaction and resentment to the administration and they will have a very difficult job at re-election in 2018 and almost no hope in 2020.
A recent poll has the Chump on only 24% approval rating and even 33% of Repugnents disapprove as well.
The big thing they’ve achieved is stacking the courts. McConnell refusing to confirm Obama appointments left a huge backlog of vacancies that they’ve been fairly quickly filling with Heritage Foundation recommendations.
President Caligula, and no one in GOP has the stones to hold him accountable.
President Trump told the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Seema Verma to deny a request from the Republican-controlled state of Iowa to fix their health-care marketplace, according to The Washington Post.
According to the Post, Iowa officials sought for months to get federal permission to fix health insurance markets in their state, but they were shut down by Trump administration officials.
Critics of the president say Trump’s unusual move is a part of the administration’s effort to undermine ObamaCare
We have unemployment in NZ and under-employment too in high numbers. Yet the employers can’t find retail workers with enough ability and bleat they need to bring people in from overseas because they have new ideas. This was the plaint of Massey Uni professional on RadioNZ – couldn’t find so here is Scoop on it.
“There is concern that New Zealand doesn’t have a strong enough talent pipeline. We definitely have skills gaps in buying, merchandising and digital, and this will only be exacerbated as retailers compete with the likes of Amazon,” he says.
“The skills and competencies required are becoming a lot more sophisticated – retailers need staff that understand how business models are changing if they are to successfully integrate their physical and digital platforms.”
This from Google:
Bachelor of Retail and Business Management … – Massey University http://www.massey.ac.nz/retail
The multi-billion dollar retail sector is New Zealand’s second-largest for employment, responsible for seamlessly and endlessly delivering goods and services to …
NZ Herald: New Zealand’s Latest News, Business, Sport, Weather … http://www.nzherald.co.nz/author/carmen-hall/
2 days ago – carmen.hall@nzme.co.nz. @ Bay_Times … Rotorua business leaders plan a national campaign to attract skilled workers. ROTORUA … NEW ZEALAND · Migrants struggling to find jobs. 12 Sep, 2017 10: …. Data shows retail spending on cards in Tauranga jumped 6.4% for year to June. ….. That was hard but I can’t imagine …
and this from USA
Companies can’t find workers to rebuild after Harvey and Irma | Don’t … http://www.sentinel-echo.com/…/companies-can-t-find-workers…/article_282d07a1-f5cc-5b...
4 days ago – More people were looking for jobs , particularly men. … Business owners say a lack of skilled workers who can pass a drug test has stalled their growth . Companies can’t find workers to rebuild after Harvey and Irma
By Danielle Paquette | The Washington Post Oct 4, 2017 Updated Oct 4, 2017
This from USA, where we seem to import ideas and policies from as we have adopted a drug testing regime which seems to be draconian and unnecessary for most employers.
Adani are virtually bankrupt and the entire thing is a scam to get money out of the Qlnd govt to prop up their failing investments elsewhere.
Tellingly none of the big banks will touch them, and the big automation player I know, who’d normally have people dedicated to winning a project of this scale aren’t bothering to waste time on it.
This week is the week we find out if the infamous Barnaby Joyce loses his job, and his deputy and a few others as well.
One decision has already been made for the One Nation party candidate Robertson, the Flat earth believer, the Supreme court found he was not eligible, ignorance is not a defense, grim times for the Turnbull Govt with only a majority of one and 20 consecutive negative polls for him, the latest one seeing him fall another 2 points
I’ve just finished filling out the 12 pages of Temporary Additional Support Re-Application paperwork, a joyful 3 monthly ritual in order to be able to pay the rent.
Anyone familiar with these forms will know about that threatening sounding Q.20 :
“You and your partner must take all necessary steps to increase income or reduce costs where possible. Please indicate where what steps you and/or your partner have taken to get other assistance, reduce costs or increase income.”
I was very tempted to write in “voted for Greens on their platform of raising benefit levels.” Would that constitute an attempt to increase income when one has no other ways of doing so?
Unfortunately I was too scared to- because even if the satire is over their heads, there is a very real fear these days that the slightest criticism against the system, and I’m implicating benefit rates here of course, will cross the desk of the wrong person ie one who could make things very difficult.
Looking forward to running the security gauntlet, and a long queue at the office, just to get the stamped receipt for said papers, then hope to god they don’t mess up again like last time. Multiply this scenario for 100s of 1000s of NZers…
Weka, you’re brave posting in forms. I did once, many moons ago and they were never seen again. Best practice these days is to hand deliver- if practically possible- physically hand them over and request a stamped signed receipt. They usually photocopy the front page and hand that back.
The annual DB confirmation paperwork can only be mailed back to somewhere in Auckland so no choice there and I’m terrified because there’s no way of knowing it arrived until a) your payments keep going in as usual or b) you get the letter saying it’s been stopped. And they wonder why the increasing rates of severe anxiety?
I used to hand deliver and get it date stamped until I got to ill to do so. So needs must. I take the view that if I post the forms and they get lost, it’s WINZ’s fault and it’s on them to sort it out. If my benefit was lapsing because of their fuck ups, then it’s time to get senior management and advocates or CLC lawyers involved. None of that is probably any less time consuming or stressful than what you are doing though 🙁
” You and your partner must take all necessary steps to increase income or reduce costs where possible. Please indicate where what steps you and/or your partner have taken to get other assistance, reduce costs or increase income.” ”
I think they cut and paste this for everything… Principals, DHBs, Tertiaries, Rape Prevention Orgs… just substitute partner
They also change the rules without feeling the need to inform their ‘clients’.
In order to receive the supported living payment (the old invalid benefit), I had to supply a medical certificate. The doctor needed to indicate how long the med cert was for, ie 2 years, five years or never. Three years ago my rheumatologist signed me off as never needing another one. However last year Winz requested a new one. When I phoned to ask why, I was told someone would call me back. subsequently I received a voicemail threatening to look into my part-time employment 3 years ago.
Apparently everyone on SLP now needs to provide a med cert every two years. Next year, at 64 yrs, I will have to provide another one. This has no useful purpose and is outright harassment.
All those who said waiting for the outcome of the special votes was a waste of time and made no difference were wrong.
Winston Peters said he wanted to wait until after the results of specials as they could change things significantly, Bill and the media disagreed, they said no significant change, however, Peters, after the release of the specials, announced that the outcome was SIGNIFICANT.
Maybe, to extrapolate, the significance indicates a more likely outcome for one side and not the other, my view is that L/G block is now in good contention, based on Peters putting so much emphasis on the SIGNIFICANCE of the specials.
Welcome to new Zealand – neo-liberal hellhole.
No wonder we have health issues in this country.
No doubt Katherine Rich pimps for these organisations.
‘Kiwi kids are exposed to 27 junk food advertisements a day, study finds.’
In a world-first study by Otago and Auckland universities, 168 children from across the Wellington region, aged between 11 and 13, wore cameras around their necks for four days, capturing what they saw every seven seconds.
In one case, a poster for Coca-Cola hung on a classroom wall. In others, marketing for sugary or energy drinks on the sides of dairies or on the ends of buses plagued their journey home.
“The consequence of that is obesity,” she said. “[Kids] are twice as likely to see junk food marketing as healthy marketing, it goes against that effort to help children maintain their weight.”
Ministry of Health statistics show 11 per cent of New Zealand children aged between 2 and 14 are obese, and a further 22 per cent are overweight.
Sugary drinks, fast food, confectionary and snack food advertisements were the most common found in the study. Product packaging was the dominant platform, followed by signs.
In an effort to reduce exposure, the researchers are calling on the incoming Government to impose a sugary drinks tax, regulate junk food marketing and impose rules that would see only healthy foods sold in schools.
They would also like to see a ban on junk food advertising in sports, such as Gatorade’s partnership with the All Blacks.’
Hidden cost of feeding grain to farm animals to hit $1.32tn a year
‘Our habit of feeding human foods, such as grain and soya, to farm animals will cost us $1.32tn (£1tn) a year by 2050 globally, according to environmental campaigners.
The hidden costs of the industrial farming system are vast, and urgently need to be brought into clear focus, Peter Stevenson of Compassion in World Farming told the Extinction and Livestock conference in London. “There’s a worrying disconnect between the retail price of food and the true cost of production. As a result, food produced at great environmental cost can appear to be cheaper than more sustainably produced alternatives.”
“Cheap food is something we pay for three times, once at the checkout, again in tax subsidies and again in the enormous clean up cost to our health and environment,” his colleague Philip Lymbery pointed out.
We are paying for soil erosion, water pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, and a multitude of other impacts which are passed on to the public by farmers and the sector, the conference heard. For example, our current rate of soil loss costs £400bn a year globally, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated that water pollution in six EU states alone costs €2bn-5bn a year; and according to the European Environment Agency the current rate of biodiversity loss is reducing global GDP by 3% every year.’…….
Every Single Piece Of Plastic Ever Made Still Exists.
……..’Because plastic lasts for so long, every single piece of plastic ever made still exists, and will continue existing for at least 500 years. To put that in context, if Leonardo da Vinci had drunk water from a plastic bottle when he was painting the Mona Lisa, that bottle would not have fully decomposed yet.
Every day, more and more plastic is produced, used and thrown away. In countries where disposable cups are made of plastic, for example, it may take only seconds for one to leave the package, be used, and end up in a trash can. So much plastic is being consumed that there is an area bigger than France of throw-away plastic swirling at all depths in the North Pacific Ocean. It has become so ubiquitous that birds are using it to build their nests.’……
Not quite true, some plastics are organically based and used in the agricultural industries, others are very susceptible to UV corrosion which do break down to their base products a bit like rusting steel.
Something that annoys me, is that everyone blames the plastic bottles for ending up in the water ways and sea, yet, the bottles themselves are not responsible, they didn’t leap out of someone’s hand and into the river, but the PEOPLE discarding them are, surly there is a degree of responsibility of humans to care for the environment by recycling and discarding in the proper manner, plastic water bottles are a very good method of hydration, they are also relatively safe and bacteria free, ideal in emergencies. Plastic bottle manufacturers recycle a very high percentage returned bottles.
If you look at some of the less developed countries, where waste disposal is non existent and the main means of disposal is to simply “biff it out the window”, there is no system for garbage collection, unfortunately the migrants from these countries when emigrating to more civilized countries don’t usually adapt to the changes and values and continue to litter as they always have, I’ve actually seen graphic evidence of this in some overseas cities in areas of particularly high migrant residents from these under developed countries.
The micro beads used in cosmetics are a real problem too, with some countries banning products containing micro beads.
NewsFlash
I remember a past Parliamenary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Williams, in 2002 praise the efforts of the Mayor of a Brazilian city for cleaning up the city and making it a people-friendly more attractive place.
Morgan Williams (ecologist) – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Williams_(ecologist)
John Morgan Williams (born 25 March 1943), known as Dr. J. Morgan Williams or Morgan Williams, is a New Zealand ecologist and agricultural scientist who served as the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment from 1997 to March 2007. … Greening the City: Bringing Biodiversity Back into the Urban
Environment”.
I think that they encouraged people to hand in rubbish from the streets and favellas for physical, practical reward, such as food, perhaps some eggs. It made a big difference. Also they had covered bus stops made in clear plastic so people were covered and crime was discouraged. That would be much appreciated.
Curitiba – Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment http://www.pce.parliament.nz/media/pdfs/CURTIBA.pdf
On the southern plateau of Brazil one city, Curitiba, has lifted itself out of tough … Brazilian Ambassador to New Zealand and his staff for assisting with visits and complimentary visas to Brazil. … mercial competition models, separation of poli- cies from ….. Morgan. Transport corridor. Section through transport corridor (IPPUC). http://www.pce.parliament.nz/media/pdfs/CURTIBA.pdf
I think anyone who comes to this blog would be interested in this report. I urge you to read it because it deals with many things that way heavily on this country now, and might be helpful to consider points for Auckland. Probably the Auckland activist group already have many similar policies but lack the breadth of mind in the elites to effect change for the lumpenproletariat.
Postmodernism has long been looked upon as an indecipherable ideology and a source of amusement. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, had a hoax article published in ‘Social Text’ an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. In ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Anew study in Nature Sustainability incorporates the damages that climate change does to healthy ecosystems into standard climate-economics models. The key finding in the study by Bernardo Bastien-Olvera and Frances Moore from the University of California at Davis: The models have been underestimating the ...
In a recent interview with RNZ (14th of January), NZ Council of Civil Liberties Chair Thomas Beagle, in response to Simon Bridges condemnation of the post-Trump Twitter purge of local far Right and other accounts, said the following: “Cos the thing about freedom of expression is that it’s not just ...
Let’s be clear: if Trump is not politically killed off once and for all, he will become a MAGA Dracula, rising from the dead to haunt US politics for years to come and giving inspiration to his wretched family of grifters and thousands of deplorables well into the next decade. ...
Since its demise as an imperial power, and especially its deindustrialisation under Thatcher, the UK's primary economic engine has been its role as a money laundry, using its network of overseas territories as tax havens to enable rich people around the world to steal from the societies they live in. ...
Last month OMV quit the Great South Basin and surrendered its offshore exploration permits outside of Taranaki. This month, Australian-owned Beach Energy has done the same: Beach Energy Resources New Zealand has decided to abandon all of its oil and gas exploration permits off the South Island coast, including ...
The new Northland case has been linked to the South African strain of Covid-19, one of a number of new, more contagious Covid variants. Here’s how they emerge and why. Let’s start with the basics. The genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for Covid-19 is a strand of RNA ...
MARVIN HUBBARD, US citizen by birth, New Zealand citizen by choice, Quaker and left-wing activist, has been broadcasting his show, "Community or Chaos", on Otago Access Radio for the best part of 30 years. On 24 November last year, I spoke with him about the outcome of the 2020 General ...
This is a guest blog post by Daniel Tamberg, Potsdam, co-founder and director of SCIARA GmbH. The non-profit organisation SCIARA is developing and operating a flexible software platform for scientific simulation games that allows thousands of players to explore, design and understand possible climate futures together. Decision-makers in politics, business, ...
Yesterday's Gone: Cold shivers are running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante. A change is gonna come. ONE COULD ...
Is it possible to live and let live in the post-Trump era? The online campaign to vilify Christopher Liddell, ex-White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant to Trump, makes for an interesting case study. Liddell is a New Zealander whose illustrious career in corporate America once earned him plaudits ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 17, 2021 through Sat, Jan 23, 2021Editor's Choice12 new books explore fresh approaches to act on climate changeAuthors explore scientific, economic, and political avenues for climate action ...
This discussion is from a Twitter thread by Martin Kulldorff on 20 December 2020. He is a Professor at Harvard Medical School specialising in disease surveillance methods, infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety. His Twitter handle is @MartinKulldorff #1 Public health is about all health outcomes, not just a single ...
The Treasury forecasts suggest the economy is doing better than expected after the Covid Shock. John Kenneth Galbraith was wont to say that economic forecasting was designed to make astrology look good. Unfair, but it raises the question of the purpose of economic forecasts. Certainly the public may treat them ...
Q: Will the COVID-19 vaccines prevent the transmission of the coronavirus and bring about community immunity (aka herd immunity)? A: Jury not in yet but vaccines do not have to be perfect to thwart the spread of infection. While vaccines induce protection against illness, they do not always stop actual ...
Joe Biden seems to be everything that Donald Trump was not – decent, straightforward, considerate of others, mindful of his responsibilities – but none of that means that he has an easy path ahead of him. The pandemic still rages, American standing in the world is grievously low, and the ...
Keana VirmaniFrom healthcare robots to data privacy, to sea level rise and Antarctica under the ice: in the four years since its establishment, the Aotearoa New Zealand Science Journalism Fund has supported over 30 projects.Rebecca Priestley, receiving the PM Science Communication Prize (Photo by Mark Tantrum) Associate Professor ...
Nothing more from me today - I'm off to Wellington, to participate in the city's annual roleplaying convention (which has also eaten my time for the whole week, limiting blogging despite there being interesting things happening). Normal bloggage will resume Tuesday. ...
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weaponscame into force today, making the development, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal in international law. Every nuclear-armed state is now a criminal regime. The corporations and scientists who design, build and maintain their illegal weapons are now ...
"Come The Revolution!" The key objective of Bernard Hickey’s revolutionary solution to the housing crisis is a 50 percent reduction in the price of the average family home. This will be achieved by the introduction of Capital Gains, Land, and Wealth taxes, and by the opening up of currently RMA-protected ...
by Daphna Whitmore Twitter and Facebook shutting down Trump’s accounts after his supporters stormed Capitol Hill is old news now but the debates continue over whether the actions against Trump are a good thing or not. Those in favour of banning Trump say Twitter and Facebook are private companies and ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Democrats now control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade, albeit with razor thin Congressional majorities. The last time, in the 111th Congress (2009-2011), House Democrats passed a carbon cap and trade bill, but it died ...
Session thirty-three was highly abbreviated, via having to move house in a short space of time. Oh well. The party decided to ignore the tree-monster and continue the attack on the Giant Troll. Tarsin – flying on a giant summoned bat – dumped some high-grade oil over the ...
Last night I stayed up till 3am just to see then-President Donald Trump leave the White House, get on a plane, and fly off to Florida, hopefully never to return. And when I woke up this morning, America was different. Not perfect, because it never was. Probably not even good, ...
Watching today’s inauguration of Joe Biden as the United States’ 46th president, there’s not a lot in common with the inauguration of Donald Trump just four destructive years ago. Where Trump warned of carnage, Biden dared to hope for unity and decency. But the one place they converge is that ...
Dan FalkBritons who switched on their TVs to “Good Morning Britain” on the morning of Sept. 15, 2020, were greeted by news not from our own troubled world, but from neighboring Venus. Piers Morgan, one of the hosts, was talking about a major science story that had surfaced the ...
Sara LutermanGrowing up autistic in a non-autistic world can be very isolating. We are often strange and out of sync with peers, despite our best efforts. Autistic adults have, until very recently, been largely absent from media and the public sphere. Finding role models is difficult. Finding useful advice ...
Doug JohnsonThe alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year. In 2015, for instance, around 75,000 people visited the Chicago Botanic Garden to see one of their corpse flowers bloom. More than ...
Getting to Browser Tab Zero so I can reboot the computer is awfully hard when the one open tab is a Table of Contents for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and every issue has more stuff I want to read. A few highlights: Gugler et al demonstrating ...
Timothy Ford, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Charles M. Schweik, University of Massachusetts AmherstTo mitigate health inequities and promote social justice, coronavirus vaccines need to get to underserved populations and hard-to-reach communities. There are few places in the U.S. that are unreachable by road, but other factors – many ...
Israel chose to pay a bit over the odds for the Pfizer vaccine to get earlier access. Here’s The Times of Israel from 16 November. American government will be charged $39 for each two-shot dose, and the European bloc even less, but Jerusalem said to agree to pay $56. Israel ...
Orla is a gender critical Marxist in Ireland. She gave a presentation on 15 January 2021 on the connection between postmodern/transgender identity politics and the current attacks on democratic and free speech rights. Orla has been active previously in the Irish Socialist Workers Party and the People Before Profit electoral ...
. . America: The Empire Strikes Back (at itself) Further to my comments in the first part of 2020: The History That Was, the following should be considered regarding the current state of the US. They most likely will be by future historians pondering the critical decades of ...
Nathaniel ScharpingIn March, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down major cities in the U.S., researchers were thinking about blood. In particular, they were worried about the U.S. blood supply — the millions of donations every year that help keep hospital patients alive when they need a transfusion. ...
Sarah L Caddy, University of CambridgeVaccines are a marvel of medicine. Few interventions can claim to have saved as many lives. But it may surprise you to know that not all vaccines provide the same level of protection. Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you ...
Back in 2016, the Portuguese government announced plans to stop burning coal by 2030. But progress has come much quicker, and they're now scheduled to close their last coal plant by the end of this year: The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 ...
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, ...
RNZ reports on continued arbitrariness on decisions at the border. British comedian Russell Howard is about to tour New Zealand and other acts allowed in through managed isolation this summer include drag queen RuPaul and musicians at Northern Bass in Mangawhai and the Bay Dreams festival. The vice-president of the ...
As families around the world mourn more than two million people dead from Covid-19, the Plan B academics and their PR industry collaborator continue to argue that the New Zealand government should stop focusing on our managed isolation and quarantine system and instead protect the elderly so that they can ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 10, 2021 through Sat, Jan 16, 2021Editor's ChoiceNASA says 2020 tied for hottest year on record — here’s what you can do to helpPhoto by Michael Held on Unsplash ...
Health authorities in Norway are reporting some concerns about deaths in frail elderly after receiving their COVID-19 vaccine. Is this causally related to the vaccine? Probably not but here are the things to consider. According to the news there have been 23 deaths in Norway shortly after vaccine administration and ...
Happy New Year! No, experts are not concerned that “…one of New Zealand’s COIVD-1( vaccines will fail to protect the country” Here is why. But first I wish to issue an expletive about this journalism (First in Australia and then in NZ). It exhibits utter failure to actually truly consult ...
All nations have shadows; some acknowledge them. For others they shape their image in uncomfortable ways.The staunch Labour supporter was in despair at what her Rogernomics Government was doing. But she finished ‘at least, we got rid of Muldoon’, a response which tells us that then, and today, one’s views ...
Grigori GuitchountsIn November, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, made an attention-grabbing announcement: More than 30 of its most prestigious journals, including the flagship Nature, will now allow authors to pay a fee of US$11,390 to make their papers freely available for anyone to read ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer Imagine a major climate change law passing the U.S. Congress unanimously? Don’t bother. It turns out that you don’t need to imagine it. Get this: The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed ...
“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie ...
TheOneRing.Net has got its paws on the official synopsis of the upcoming Amazon Tolkien TV series. It’s a development that brings to mind the line about Sauron deliberately releasing Gollum from the dungeons of Barad-dûr. Amazon knew exactly what they were doing here, in terms of drumming up publicity: ...
Since Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, US presidents have joined an informal club intended to provide support - and occasionally rivalry - between those few who have been ‘leaders of the free world’. Donald Trump, elected on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ and a constant mocker of his predecessors, ...
For over a decade commentators have noted the rise of a new brand of explicitly ideological politics throughout the world. By this they usually refer to the re-emergence of national populism and avowedly illiberal approaches to governance throughout the “advanced” democratic community, but they also extend the thought to the ...
The US House of Representatives has just impeached Donald Trump, giving him the dubious honour of being the only US President to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans voted for impeachement, making it the most bipartisan impeachment ever. The question now is whether the Senate will rise to the occasion, and ...
Kieren Mitchell; Alice Mouton, Université de Liège; Angela Perri, Durham University, and Laurent Frantz, Ludwig Maximilian University of MunichThanks to the hit television series Game of Thrones, the dire wolf has gained a near-mythical status. But it was a real animal that roamed the Americas for at least 250,000 ...
Tide of tidal data rises Having cast our own fate to include rising sea level, there's a degree of urgency in learning the history of mean sea level in any given spot, beyond idle curiosity. Sea level rise (SLR) isn't equal from one place to another and even at a particular ...
Well, some of those chickens sure came home bigly, didn’t they… and proceeded to shit all over the nice carpet in the Capitol. What we were seeing here are societal forces that have long had difficulty trying to reconcile people to the “idea” of America and the reality of ...
In the wake of Donald Trump's incitement of an assault on the US capitol, Twitter finally enforced its terms of service and suspended his account. They've since followed that up with action against prominent QAnon accounts and Trumpers, including in New Zealand. I'm not unhappy with this: Trump regularly violated ...
Peter S. Ross, University of British ColumbiaThe Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern ...
Susan St John makes the case for taxing a deemed rate of return on excessive real estate holdings (after a family home exemption), to redirect scarce housing resources to where they are needed most. Read the full article here ...
I’m less than convinced by arguments that platforms like Twitter should be subject to common carrier regulation preventing them from being able to decide who to keep on as clients of their free services, and who they would not like to serve. It’s much easier to create competition for the ...
The hypocritical actions of political leaders throughout the global Covid pandemic have damaged public faith in institutions and governance. Liam Hehir chronicles the way in which contemporary politicians have let down the public, and explains how real leadership means walking the talk. During the Blitz, when German bombs were ...
A growing public housing waiting list and continued increase of house prices must be urgently addressed by Government, Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson said today. ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Hon Nanaia Mahuta today announced three diplomatic appointments: Alana Hudson as Ambassador to Poland John Riley as Consul-General to Hong Kong Stephen Wong as Consul-General to Shanghai Poland “New Zealand’s relationship with Poland is built on enduring personal, economic and historical connections. Poland is also an important ...
Work begins today at Wainuiomata High School to ensure buildings and teaching spaces are fit for purpose, Education Minister Chris Hipkins says. The Minister joined principal Janette Melrose and board chair Lynda Koia to kick off demolition for the project, which is worth close to $40 million, as the site ...
A skilled and experienced group of people have been named as the newly established Oranga Tamariki Ministerial Advisory Board by Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis today. The Board will provide independent advice and assurance to the Minister for Children across three key areas of Oranga Tamariki: relationships with families, whānau, and ...
The green light for New Zealand’s first COVID-19 vaccine could be granted in just over a week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said today. “We’re making swift progress towards vaccinating New Zealanders against the virus, but we’re also absolutely committed to ensuring the vaccines are safe and effective,” Jacinda Ardern said. ...
The Minister for ACC is pleased to announce the appointment of three new members to join the Board of ACC on 1 February 2021. “All three bring diverse skills and experience to provide strong governance oversight to lead the direction of ACC” said Hon Carmel Sepuloni. Bella Takiari-Brame from Hamilton ...
The Government is investing $9 million to upgrade a significant community facility in Invercargill, creating economic stimulus and jobs, Infrastructure Minister Grant Robertson and Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene have announced. The grant for Waihōpai Rūnaka Inc to make improvements to Murihiku Marae comes from the $3 billion set ...
[Opening comments, welcome and thank you to Auckland University etc] It is a great pleasure to be here this afternoon to celebrate such an historic occasion - the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This is a moment many feared would never come, but ...
The Government is providing $3 million in one-off seed funding to help disabled people around New Zealand stay connected and access support in their communities, Minister for Disability Issues, Carmel Sepuloni announced today. The funding will allow disability service providers to develop digital and community-based solutions over the next two ...
Border workers in quarantine facilities will be offered voluntary daily COVID-19 saliva tests in addition to their regular weekly testing, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. This additional option will be rolled out at the Jet Park Quarantine facility in Auckland starting on Monday 25 January, and then to ...
The next steps in the Government’s ambitious firearms reform programme to include a three-month buy-back have been announced by Police Minister Poto Williams today. “The last buy-back and amnesty was unprecedented for New Zealand and was successful in collecting 60,297 firearms, modifying a further 5,630 firearms, and collecting 299,837 prohibited ...
Upscaling work already underway to restore two iconic ecosystems will deliver jobs and a lasting legacy, Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “The Jobs for Nature programme provides $1.25 billion over four years to offer employment opportunities for people whose livelihoods have been impacted by the COVID-19 recession. “Two new projects ...
The Government has released its Public Housing Plan 2021-2024 which outlines the intention of where 8,000 additional public and transitional housing places announced in Budget 2020, will go. “The Government is committed to continuing its public house build programme at pace and scale. The extra 8,000 homes – 6000 public ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has congratulated President Joe Biden on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States of America. “I look forward to building a close relationship with President Biden and working with him on issues that matter to both our countries,” Jacinda Ardern said. “New Zealand ...
A major investment to tackle wilding pines in Mt Richmond will create jobs and help protect the area’s unique ecosystems, Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor says. The Mt Richmond Forest Park has unique ecosystems developed on mineral-rich geology, including taonga plant species found nowhere else in the country. “These special plant ...
To further protect New Zealand from COVID-19, the Government is extending pre-departure testing to all passengers to New Zealand except from Australia, Antarctica and most Pacific Islands, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “The change will come into force for all flights arriving in New Zealand after 11:59pm (NZT) on Monday ...
Bay Conservation Cadets launched with first intake Supported with $3.5 million grant Part of $1.245b Jobs for Nature programme to accelerate recover from Covid Cadets will learn skills to protect and enhance environment Environment Minister David Parker today welcomed the first intake of cadets at the launch of the Bay ...
The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown have announced passengers from the Cook Islands can resume quarantine-free travel into New Zealand from 21 January, enabling access to essential services such as health. “Following confirmation of the Cook Islands’ COVID ...
Jobs for Nature funding is being made available to conservation groups and landowners to employ staff and contractors in a move aimed at boosting local biodiversity-focused projects, Conservation Minister Kiritapu Allan has announced. It is estimated some 400-plus jobs will be created with employment opportunities in ecology, restoration, trapping, ...
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Today’s deal between Meridian and Rio Tinto for the Tiwai smelter to remain open another four years provides time for a managed transition for Southland. “The deal provides welcome certainty to the Southland community by protecting jobs and incomes as the region plans for the future. The Government is committed ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has appointed Anna Curzon to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). The leader of each APEC economy appoints three private sector representatives to ABAC. ABAC provides advice to leaders annually on business priorities. “ABAC helps ensure that APEC’s work programme is informed by business community perspectives ...
The Government’s prudent fiscal management and strong policy programme in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic have been acknowledged by the credit rating agency Fitch. Fitch has today affirmed New Zealand’s local currency rating at AA+ with a stable outlook and foreign currency rating at AA with a positive ...
The Government is putting in place a suite of additional actions to protect New Zealand from COVID-19, including new emerging variants, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “Given the high rates of infection in many countries and evidence of the global spread of more transmissible variants, it’s clear that ...
$36 million of Government funding alongside councils and others for 19 projects Investment will clean up and protect waterways and create local jobs Boots on the ground expected in Q2 of 2021 Funding part of the Jobs for Nature policy package A package of 19 projects will help clean up ...
The commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Ruapekapeka represents an opportunity for all New Zealanders to reflect on the role these conflicts have had in creating our modern nation, says Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Kiri Allan. “The Battle at Te Ruapekapeka Pā, which took ...
After a raft of inquiries delving into and recommending what should be done about the politically beleaguered Orangi Tamaraki, along with the briefing papers we suppose he has been given, we imagined Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis would have no more need for expert advice. Wrong. He has ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Ho, Senior Lecturer and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University There’s a common assumption men take longer than women to poo. People say so on Twitter, in memes, and elsewhereonline. But is that right? What could explain it? And if ...
Just as sexuality is a spectrum, so too is asexuality. In Ace of Hearts, members of New Zealand’s asexual community talk about the challenges and misconceptions of identifying as ace.First published November 17, 2020.Ace of Hearts is part of Frame, a series of short documentaries produced by Wrestler for The Spinoff.“A ...
Sam Brooks wasn’t allowed to watch kids TV as a kid. Now, as a 30 year old man, he watches it for the first time.My mother’s approach to parenting was unorthodox. I wrote weekly book reports on top of my actual homework, I did maths equations in Roman numerals and ...
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk More leading Indonesian figures have made racial slurs against Natalius Pigai, former chair of the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) – and all West Papuans, says United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda. “Since the illegal Indonesian invasion in 1963, Indonesian ...
“The Government’s failure to even conduct a standard cost-benefit analysis for the most expensive infrastructure project in New Zealand’s history is mind-bogglingly arrogant,” says New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke. “A ...
The Ministry of Health is today drawing backlash from the local New Zealand vaping industry following its release of proposed regulations for the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act. Vaping Trade Association New Zealand (VTANZ) President, ...
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The appointment of an advisory board for Oranga Tamariki is welcome and should be a step toward a total transformation of the care and protection system to a by Māori, for Māori approach, Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft said today. Minister ...
Taking control of your financial wellbeing can have cascading positive impacts for your life and it can also be fun. With the help of the team at Kiwi Wealth, we’ve compiled some simple tricks for balancing your books in 2021. There’s something about the beginning of a new year, especially after ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kris Gledhill, Professor of Law, Auckland University of Technology As we know, getting into New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult. There are practicalities, such as high airfare and managed isolation costs. And there are legal requirements, including pre-flight testing, mandatory ...
New Zealand faces the risk of a generation being locked out of the housing market unless land is freed up and more houses built, National Party leader Judith Collins says. ...
On Sunday, Stuff published a months-long investigation by Alison Mau detailing allegations of harassment and exploitation within the local music industry.The piece, ‘Music industry professionals demand change after speaking out about its dark side’, includes allegations of inappropriate behaviour and abuse of power by male artists, international acts and executives; ...
“The Government is all at sea on timelines for Australia and New Zealand’s respective vaccine roll-outs, with the worst news coming from the mouth of Pfizer Australia CEO Anne Harris,” says ACT Leader David Seymour. “Yesterday, under increasing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Higgins, Senior Research Fellow, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised the US would demonstrate “global leadership on refugees”. Once elected, he pledged to vastly increase refugee resettlement in the US. If history is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Baumann, Casual Academic, School of Social Sciences & Psychology, Western Sydney University Among the many hard truths exposed by COVID-19 is the huge disparity between the world’s rich and poor. As economies went into freefall, the world’s billionaires increased their already ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jan Lanicek, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW On January 27 communities worldwide commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz — the largest complex of concentration camps and extermination centres during the Holocaust. This is the first year the International ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorinda Cramer, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Australian Catholic University The summer break is over, marking a return to the office. For some, this ends almost a year of working from home in lockdown. Some analysts are predicting it might also mark an enduring ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for January 27, keeping you up to date with the latest local and international news. Reach me on stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur members make The Spinoff happen! Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato New Zealand has a strong history of protecting and promoting human rights at home and internationally, and prides itself on being an outspoken critic and global leader in this area. So, when the most ...
Good morning and welcome to the Bulletin. In today’s edition: Collins outlines the plan forward for National, no spread of Covid spotted yet in Northland, and students return for climate protest.In front of a Rotary Club at the Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland, National leader Judith Collins yesterday set out her ...
*This articlefirst appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. The tourism industry isn't holding its breath for a trans-Tasman travel bubble being in place after Australia temporarily closed its borders to New Zealand. New Zealanders could be waiting even longer for a full trans-Tasman bubble, with the ...
We continue our week-long examination of New Zealand writer Roderick Finlayson with an essay by Anahera Gildea on cultural appropriation Every night at 7pm sharp, my Irish Catholic father and his eight siblings would have to kneel on the carpet of the living room, facing the freshly polished nudity of ...
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A Covid reset will force costly and inflexible cities to take a hard look at their planning systems, or people will vote with their feet. Broken urban planning systems make for misery even in the best of times. If land use and housing regulations prevent metropolitan areas from growing up or out as ...
When an Auckland school classroom went up in flames in December last year, exploding asbestos over neighbouring houses, five separate government agencies were involved. Yet stressed residents dealing with the aftermath on their homes say the response felt chaotic and uncoordinated; even local MPs who got involved couldn't get the information they wanted. Hundreds of thousands of ...
The pandemic has accelerated the trend of doing our banking online instead of in person. This rapid digital embrace has, in turn, sped up the closure of many smaller bank branches. But, as Mark Jennings writes, there are new branches springing up with a different look and purpose. Auckland’s Wynyard ...
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Telling a Rotary Club audience that housing is a serious problem and they should care deeply about it landed flat but took some daring from the National leader, writes Justin Giovannetti.Judith Collins’ level of control over the National Party is still a question best answered by a shrug.Elevated to her ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, University of Melbourne In this series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen. When I first heard that Rowan Atkinson was to put on Maigret’s velvet-collared overcoat, I wondered ...
Auckland writer Olivia Hayfield* explains how she resurrected 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe to star in her new novel, Sister to Sister. Olivia Hayfield is a pen name. Real name: Sue Copsey. When I’m planning my modern retellings of historical tales, I read widely on the characters and see who leaps out at ...
The Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine could be approved as early as next week, Marc Daalder reports Medsafe will be asked to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine against Covid-19 on February 2, the Government has announced. The Medicines Assessment Advisory Committee (MAAC) is an independent panel that provides advice on some medicine approvals in ...
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The Point of Order Trough Monitor was triggered today by the announcement of a $9 million handout for Southlanders – sorry, some Southlanders. The news came from the office of Grant Robertson who, as Minister of Finance, prefers to invest public money rather than give it away – especially when ...
Few people outside of her campaign team gave Chlöe Swarbrick any chance of winning in Auckland Central this year – but the Green Party MP was too busy to listen. Here’s how they turned the electorate green.First published November 12, 2020.Three Ticks Chlöe is part of Frame, a series of short ...
Interactions between parents and healthcare providers could have a big impact on the wellbeing of our children, according to new research. The way parents and healthcare providers interact has lasting implications for children’s health, new research has found – and that includes immunisation uptake.Released today, the report is based on research ...
The Opposition starts the political year calling for emergency, temporary legislation to free up house building National leader Judith Collins has set five priorities for her party over the next three years - but excluded climate change, education and Crown-Māori relations. Giving her first 'state of the nation' speech as party ...
One of the biggest challenges facing the Ardern government is in public health. New Zealand may have escaped the pressures heaped on other health systems by the Covid-19 pandemic but its health service has had its problems, not least those exposed in the first report from Heather Simpson and her ...
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Pacific Media Watch newsdesk Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the arbitrary and opaque experiments that Google is conducting with its search engine in Australia, with the consequence that many national news websites are no longer appearing in the search results seen by some users. The Australian, ABC, Australian Financial ...
Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta says councils can take stronger action against companies dumping contaminated waste water, even though they have identified loopholes in the law on fines. ...
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The latest fleeing driver statistics show the numbers of incidents sky-rocketing out of control through 2020 with Police deciding the only tactic is to give up on chasing altogether, says Sensible Sentencing Trust. “The inconvenient truth is ...
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The Youth of NZ will be standing up for climate action once again, on January 26th outside of Parliament for School Strike 4 Climate NZ’s 100 Days 4 Action campaign rally. “COVID-19 may have stopped us in our tracks in the past. However, I tend ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Parwinder Kaur, Associate Professor | Director, DNA Zoo Australia, University of Western Australia Koalas are unique in the animal kingdom, living on a eucalyptus diet that would kill other creatures and drinking so little their name comes from the Dharug word gula, ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Binoy Kampmark, Senior Lecturer in Global Studies, Social Science & Planning, RMIT University Since 2005, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has been one of the most stable and enduring of political forces, both in Europe and on the global stage. During her 16 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, University of Melbourne In this series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen. When I first heard that Rowan Atkinson was to put on Maigret’s velvet-collared overcoat, I wondered ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. Experts are calling for hotels with sub-par ventilation systems to no longer be used as managed isolation facilities as health officials investigate how a Northland woman became infected with Covid-19 while staying at the Pullman hotel, Rowan Quinn reports. ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for January 26, keeping you up to date with the latest local and international news. Reach me on stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur Members make The Spinoff happen! Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us ...
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With democracy what now separates the US from its adversaries, Wellington can bet on more continuity than change in Washington’s hardline view of China. ...
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It came to me overnight. No drugs, no alcohol, so it must have been the cheese.
The answer as to who NZF will choose for Government is both. No wait and keep reading. For one half of the term NZF goes with National, and then for the other half of the term he goes with Labour/Greens.
See my estimate is that the 7 year itch needs to be adjusted into NZ Government years (what will become known as the NZGY): One and a half NZGYs is equal to 7 human years.
And so with the honeymoon is over, and everybody is fighting over who is the favourite child, it’s separation time and you need to find a new significant other. Luckily in NZ this time we have a spare. Now there are not many electorates around the world who plan so well.
As to the sequencing, well that something that I hope will come to me after tonight’s bout of dreaming.
The “Peters Deal” has already been made. It requires that John Key, newly stripped of his titles, returns to Parliament to play the role of caddy to Winston, as the new PM strides about the Beehive dressed in plus-fours and spats, swinging a flanged niblick at politicians from all parties, foolish enough to venture onto the “Links” as Winston calls what were previously known as the Halls of Power. “It’s a simple and straightforward game”, quipped Peters at his first press conference as Prime Minister, clipping Key behind the ear for a momentary lapse of concentration and also for fun, “the aim being to belt these useless sods into the Joyce Hole with as many swings as I choose. Yes, my caddy “Jonny” was reluctant to take the role, but given what I’ve got on him, he had no choice, and certainly, I am enjoying the sound of his constant whining. The golf bag I have him carrying is loaded heavy with full bottles of wine from his own vineyard – rubbish I won’t be drinking, but then, neither will he!”. Prime Minister Peters said he’d be needing a course of Botox shortly, as the muscles in his face responsible for his trade mark grin are beginning to fibrillate from constant use.
Wot bout paula?
Of course there has to be a golf bag.
Robert. Robert. Will it be true? Is it credible? Hope so but what will Jacinda be doing in your dream? Surely not bagging it like Paula!
Well, she’d be really teed-off and as for the greens, it’d be rough going.
Going at full power Robert G. Please hurry with the next episode. I feel like the eager USA residents waiting for the boat from UK for the next instalment of Charles Dickens’ Little Nell.
Any handicap ratings listed in the clubhouse?–nick’s for example.
Post-Election Negotiations
The Q&A panel suggested there should be set procedures for MMP party negotiations once all votes are counted. After all we should be better at it after 21 years of MMP one participant claimed. For example Russell Norman suggested that the party with the most votes lead initial negotiations rather than have a minority party manage “bids” from two large parties.
So what ideas can be generated here, in this forum, to improve the status quo?
Why? What is the problem with how things are currently being done?
For many, including the panel, the tail wags the dog.
It’s a fukn spineless dog that can’t manage a tail.
“It’s a fukn spineless dog that can’t manage a tail.”
Expression of the day!
What does that even mean? NZF policies are all going to be enacted by the new Parliament?
The problem with having journalists interview one another is that none of them are particularly intelligent or insightful. That’s why we end up with these trite fortune cookies instead.
+111
And still none of them understand that at any time Labour or National can say no to NZF. Tail cannot wag a dog that holds its tail still.
Dont buy into that tail dog crap. The negotiations look fine its about giving the country the nearest policy match that we voted for. It is quite proper that the smaller parties should gain this influence thats why we have mmp
^^^this.
+ 100%
Exactly. We have MMP so that the majority of people have a say rather than being ruled by a minority as happened under FPP and which, seemingly, National and the journalists want us to return to.
AND that it needs to take some time.
In addition why do some people and the media think that in the past 2 weeks the parties were doing nothing?
The only reason Peters is a problem is because the media gives him additional power and then Peters plays them. If the MSM were reporting to inform the public instead of being circus promoters and entertainers then we’d have a process that served us better.
The problem is the media saying there is a problem.
I’ve seen and heard so much stuff about Peters “holding the country to ransom” and implying he is doing terrible things.
I thought he was doing what he has to do.
And I am fairly certain that whatever is being said behind closed doors isn’t out here. So how can he be judged on that? At this stage judging him on policies we say are terrible is rubbish. He fairly got to that position with those policies. Like National and Labour got to their positions with policies some say are crap, destructive and dumb.
IMO Peters (historically) has been a big part of creating this situation, so I’m not that sympathetic to him personally (I rate him as one of the main reasons why we have a bastard version of MMP rather than a representative one). The MSM is out of control. They’re all power mongers.
I’m not convinced there is anything significantly wrong with the conventions on how coalitions are formed though. I’m also not convinced that rules would force power mongers to behave better, or at least that this is the best way to get power mongers to behave better.
I didn’t see Q and A.
For many, including the panel, the tail wags the dog.
Funny how all these right-wingers who are supposedly so familiar with how negotiations work in the private sector are suddenly horrified that one party to the negotiations might choose to exercise whatever leverage it has and somebody needs to do something about it. Harden the fuck up, you pathetic whiners.
It would be funny if it weren’t important. They want rules about how to talk to other people…
“Funny how all these right-wingers who are supposedly so familiar with how negotiations work…”
Since when was Russell Norman (who made the suggestion) a right-winger?
If Norman’s idea was followed this time, NZF would negotiate with National first and only talk to Lab+Greens if they couldn’t reach an arrangement with the Nats. They wouldn’t be able to weigh up different options and it seems to me that if they did move on to the “second choice’ negotiations they would have less leverage as that team would know the small party had used up its other option (while they would still have plenty of leverage in the first set of negotiations), so that would distort things somewhat.
Personally, I don’t see a big problem and I’d be fine with them taking more time. I think Peters has created a perception of being a bit of a demagogue and a rogue, but presumably he’s learnt from his previous coalition experiences and he seems keen to handle things differently from 20 years ago. If anything, I think he’s rushing it this time. I can see an agreement in principal being reached by Thursday, but not an actual coalition deal. Confidence and supply may well be on the cards.
Since when was Russell Norman (who made the suggestion) a right-winger?
He’s a late jumper onto that particular bandwagon, which is otherwise stocked with right-wingers, and probably its least significant advocate.
I can see an agreement in principal being reached by Thursday, but not an actual coalition deal. Confidence and supply may well be on the cards.
If I was betting person that would be my choice. The fact he is adamant an agreement can be reached by Thursday suggests to me he has already made up his mind to go with C and S. The question is, will it be with National or Lab/Greens? No bets on that one.
Let elected representatives decide how they’ll represent their constituents in whichever way they choose. The “problem” with the status quo is impatience.
Who’s going to police Russel’s attempt to legitimise the “moral mandate”?
+100
Too many people with NO patience.
It would only need a simple signal from the Governor-General, within a timetable saying they had x days for the highest -polling party to propose a government, after which it goes to second place to have a go within x days.
Why should any party be given negotiating privileges not given to all the other parties? Governing is about managing a variety of competing demands. I think the first grouping to show they can come together for a majority, in a completely unstructured negotiating arena, is genuinely the best outcome for the country. Put any preconditions on that and the chances of a not-the-best outcome increase.
Yeah, I was surprised to see Russel Norman promoting the idea of privileging the party with the most votes. It would reward National for cannibalising its potential coalition partners and encourage Labour to do the same. Strictly a proposal for FPP enthusiasts, I would have thought.
Hell no. We’d never get a bloody government.
We need to let the parties negotiate first.
In Negotiations with big countries like China or USA, tiny NZ manages to gain some advantages but the tail waggers would argue that NZ should jolly well sit down and do what those big countries dictate. Small players have no rights!
Isn’t it the case, that we do..?
I heard the all white male panel wanting rules for how to talk to each other.
What a bizarre concept. It really is simple.
After the election parties approach each other and have a conversation. This is called “talking”. Then if they want to, they raise the level of the talking to negotiation. Negotiation is talking with a view to making an Agreement.
WHy is this so hard? I suspect part of the problem is having an all male, white panel for a start.
Tracey
“After the election parties approach each other and have a conversation. This is called “talking”. Then if they want to, they raise the level of the talking to negotiation. Negotiation is talking with a view to making an Agreement.”
That’s pretty well it, like minded parties will have more in common and commit sooner to negotiations.
The J Key trained media is PATHETIC, has no idea about how to deal with the outcome of the election and has no info to pass on so just makes stuff up, surmises and in some cases tries to influence negotiations towards their beloved party.
For nine long years national have unfunded and under valued our schools and educators.
Schools have been struggling and asking for change for years, but national have not listened, rather they have done what ever they want to do and to hell with how our educators feel about it. NewsRoom have published an article today about it.
The value of education in any society is enormous, education lifts people out of poverty, reduces crime, educated people raise economies and save lives.
One of the greatest gifts we can give children is to help them feel valued and important, a way to do this is through education. But if we aren’t valuing our educators and schools, how is that making our children feel? If educators are underpaid and overworked and not even listened to, then the whole education system suffers.
Living in hope for change and support in our education sector, one thing is for sure all the opposition parties value education, educators and kids, that gives me hope.
In the meantime, if you are able, rock on down to your local school and get involved and volunteer. The rewards are enormous, and it helps to bring communities together and saves lives.
NZ1st, Labour and Greens all want change in our education system, so do voters, more voted for education changes than keeping the system as it is.
Three more sleeps, we need a win for the kids of NZ and those that educate them.
It will be an enormous task to make the changes to our education system which need to be made.
I fear the horse has bolted on having a society which sees learning and teaching as anything more than a paint-by-numbers consumer exercise. That means the focus is on peripheral consumer views of the issues to do with schooling, like teachers’ pay.
Valuing teachers and schools is critical but the vital changes need to be in the acceptance of the essential notions about learning and the paramountcy of those. Arriving at the point by saying that ‘teachers are important’ is putting the cart before the horse.
Great to see your sentiments!
Totally agree with you Pete about it being an enourmous task. But the upside is, teachers will probably leap at the chance to be heard and involved, am sure there won’t be a lack of enthusiasm in brainstorming any changes 😀
Am finding out more about NZ1st MP’s and it turns out that five out of nine are teachers, this gives me hope for our education sector.
Like Douglas and Richardson’s reforms it will take decades for anyone to reverse the damage the blind following of the business model has done to Tertiary and the blind desire to churn out little cogs in businesses wheels has done to Schooling. So many people wanting to impose their education system on generations that might as well live on a different planet by comparison.
Cinny @ 4. There is a good Education column, “Teachers fight to fix education system” by Teuila Fuatai on Newsroom.
““National standards, allowing charter schools in, removing incentives for 100 percent qualified teachers in Early Childhood Education, not adequately funding support staff, constantly cutting back on the operations grant – all these things all point in the same direction: that the system has an escalating crisis that needs to be fixed,” he says.”
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2017/10/08/52023/teachers-negotiate-for-education-sector-survival
Thank you Ian 😀
Not a moral right to govern.
Jack Vowles
Professor Jack Vowles is in Victoria University of Wellington’s School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations.
‘A party ‘winning’ with a little over 44 percent of the votes cannot reasonably claim a moral right to govern: at best being the plurality winner designates being the first in the queue to seek that role. This advantages National. But stability and durability of a coalition or other government arrangement is enhanced by ideological proximity and congruence between the partners. This advantages the centre-left combination of Labour, New Zealand First and Green. A majority is 50 percent plus one. In 2017, as at every election since 1996, New Zealand has collectively continued to reject the option of having a single-party majority government.’
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2017/10/08/52205/not-a-moral-right-to-govern
Which is why we need a return to academics as experts, not former politicians and paid lobbyists
Stephanie Rodgers has had a go at this anti-immigration column by Duncan Garner.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/97625919/duncan-garner-dear-nz-how-do-we-want-to-look-in-20-years
He concludes:
“Until now we’ve had the world gate-crash our party. But now it is time to make it work for us.
Let’s design our country to make it better for us. Bring in the people by all means but send them to where we need them. Let’s not give them what they need from us so easily.
People are lining up to come here because we are the last paradise on Earth.
Our small population is our winning card. Let’s not lose that.
Everything we do we must ask ourselves this question: Will this make our country better for those living in it now?”
Nice big swinging arm movements there.
The project that I am in has approximately 65% foreigners, and would not have been possible without them.
The suburb of another project I worked on was revived with fresh immigrant capital over a decade.
The town with my holiday home has been transformed for good with foreigners choosing to live and invest here.
Our immigration settings should always be up for debate, but it is not helpful for Duncan Garner to base the immigration debate on ethnicity.
I posted about this last night.
I agree with your summation. We need an intelligent discussion about immigration, identity and infrastructure.
Duncan Garner has written an article backing Winston on immigration after his experience shopping in Kmart.
It has provoked a lot of criticism and support on Stuff and twitter.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/97625919/duncan-garner-dear-nz-how-do-we-want-to-look-in-20-years
https://twitter.com/DuncanGarnerNZ?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Bomber Bradbury’s analysis is excellent.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/10/08/why-duncan-garners-k-mart-checkout-metaphor-is-actually-delightfully-perfect/
Bradbury also writes this article
‘Why we urgently need to investigate Chinese influence over National’
‘The shocking reality that the National Party is little more than a front for Chinese business interests demands far more attention than it gained…
New research paper lays bare China’s influence campaign in New Zealand
Concerns raised over political donations and directorships offered to former ministers and relatives
Chinese-owned New Zealand dairy farms said to possibly being used to test advanced missile technology’
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2017/10/06/why-we-urgently-need-to-investigate-chinese-influence-over-national/
Bomber is spot on there-nicely observed.
The only good thing you can say about Garner is that he does his own shopping. George Bush Senior lost masses of votes when he was shown shopping (playing the common man) at a supermarket during the 1993 campaign and being amazed at how the product scanners worked….clearly it was the first time he had stepped inside such an establishment.
Mass immigration is a mixed bag; upside is growth, diversity, investment and cheap labour; downside … ask Maori. There are two narratives here and most people experience a mix of both.
Colonisation is a lot different to immigration. I wish we could keep the two subjects separate and I understand why allies are sought.
Colonisation is a lot different to immigration.
True there is a real difference; European colonisation was largely the outcome of the massive disparity of industrialisation and technology in that era, and a with this a sense of entitled superiority which enabled them to project and impose on indigenous peoples around the globe. In many ways the British Empire was a peak version of the old patterns of history, wars, migrations and displacement being an ancient story; although the sheer geographic extent of it was unprecedented.
Colonisation in Aoteoroa came towards the end of that period, and followed a somewhat different pattern to say India or China. Here the vast majority of ordinary immigrants were escaping very poor prospects to build themselves a better life. They endured awful, dangerous journeys in the hope of a fresh start. While of course the elites plundered NZ and extracted as much wealth as they could in the usual fashion of Empires; over time something else happened … a whole new society dominated by sheer numbers of Europeans and their cultural habits arose to almost (but not completely) supplant what had existed before.
While for example the local peoples of Africa, India and China remained dominant, in the Americas and Australiasia they did not, with colonisation culminating in the physcial, economic and cultural displacement of indigenous peoples almost everywhere.
Colonisation is an essentially extractive process, a giant wealth pump that siphons resources back to the elites at the centre of empire. Immigration is the movement of peoples, usually to either escape active persecution, or to seek a better life elsewhere; this being an ancient feature of human life for probably millions of years.
Yet ultimately the end result can be very similar; in 1840 Maori were still by far the dominant population and few who signed the ToW could have imagined that within decades they’d be fighting wars to defend what remained of their land rights, or that by the turn of the century the Australian phrase “smoothing the pillow of a dying race” would enter the lexicon of their experience.
Already it impacts our elections, much of provincial NZ moved distinctly left, while Auckland now some 26% Asian/Indian, voted solidly for the status quo. Already on both sides of the Tasman there are real concerns around the CCCP’s projection of not so very soft power into our political systems.
That has to be Garner’s core question; where are we going? Because there really is no upper limit to the number of people from all over the world who would like to immigrate here. It’s not unrealistic to imagine a New Zealand in our lifetimes with a population exceeding 10 million; consisting of maybe 1m Maori/Polynesian, 3m Caucasian and another 6m from Asia.
Nothing inherently wrong with this; but I find it hard to imagine such a change will have zero political and social consequences.
A couple of points
The mindset of a colonists and an immigrants are almost the opposite of each other. One comes to squash existing peoples the other to join. Quite different. The average settler was extractive not just the colonising elites. i don’t buy the innocent running away from exploitation so ended up exploiting others line.
I understand the fear people have about asians taking over but they arent and won’t imo not while the euros are dominant.
[Citation needed]
Except it seems that they are (see Bradbury’s Chinese Influence on National).
These are questions that need to be asked and get answered and not just dismissed by what you believe to be true.
It’s my opinion
https://theconversation.com/no-youre-not-entitled-to-your-opinion-9978
Yes I am.
Only if you can back it up and you can’t.
Not true as I have just proved.
You’ve never proved anything. You can’t back up your opinions even with sound logic never mind actual research.
Fake news buddy – do you know what opinion means? You may cling to others analysis like a child to apron strings but I chose to create my own opinions from all that I read and learn. Perhaps that is the difference between man and machine – a basic fact.
Then link to it. Backup what you say with facts, research and logic.
You’ve never, ever done that and almost everything you say comes across as you talking out your arse.
One comes to squash existing peoples the other to join.
A good distinction; I’m sure that was the experience of Maori during the late 1800’s, but it’s harder to know if it was the intention of the hundreds of thousands of very poor Irish, Scottish, Welsh and others who made perilous journey in tiny ships to the most remote land on the face of the earth … to ‘squash the Maoris’.
I’ve read stories of families who’d hold a wake for those departing, because effectively they’d never be seen or likely heard from again.
Now I agree the elites certainly arrived with a different mindset; but they were always a tiny minority. The vast majority were very ordinary immigrants who where effectively just displaced peoples themselves and arrived with no more intent than to escape the colonisation they’d already lived through.
We have our stories too.
And yes the euros are numerically dominant over the whole of NZ at the moment, but barely so in Auckland. And within a few decades Maori/Polynesian/Euro might well be a minority.
Again if you asked all the Kaumatua who signed the ToW in 1840 did they want within 60 years for their mokopuna would to be reduced to a marginalised minority in their own land … I think most would have said no. And would that have made them all racists?
Yes it was a difficult journey to escape persecution and they came to a land denuded of indigenous people and culture. All they could do was take up the plough after putting the gun down, to make the land productive so that their family could thrive. Better than letting it waste and spoil. /semi sarc ☺
As you may recall, I have an ‘adopted’ Chinese son. He’s now an airline pilot in Xian City, flying 737’s four times a week on a triangular night route. He started as the orphaned son of rice farming peasants and has done well. It took time to get to know each other, but a shared interest in aviation and scary youtube videos gave us a lot in common. 🙂
He already had an anglicised first name and when he asked us a few months back for permission to use my surname as well … because he regarded us as his second family … I was remarkably moved.
Conversations with him could be unsettling though. Flying over the vast apparently empty expanses of Australia while he was training here, it seemed to him that it was very much underutilised. He was very clear that lots of Chinese could transform it all into much more productive uses rather than let it ‘waste and spoil’. /Not sarc at all.
Interesting, good on you for that relationship.
So many people see the gap not the space. They miss infinity by only a little.
Sounds like John Key’s pronouncement that water flowing down the river and into the sea was wasted. It’s the same thinking that brought about the death of the Aral Sea.
“The mindset of a colonists and an immigrants are almost the opposite of each other. One comes to squash existing peoples the other to join.”
True, but there is a third dynamic here. We have a neoliberal internal government that has an imperialist mindset and is in charge of immigration policy. So this isn’t simply about what immigrants want when they come here, it’s about who is choose who gets to come, how they come, and why.
“I understand the fear people have about asians taking over but they arent and won’t imo not while the euros are dominant.”
I don’t want to focus on Asians, for obvious reasons, but afaik if you increase a population fast enough from immigration then the culture of that society will change. The issue here is whether that matters, not that it’s not happening.
I think it is all about the Asians actually and the fear of Asians that some euros have.
Where I live the immigration issues are from Europeans, Brits and Americans. And Aucklanders. /shrug. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t some serious racism issues in NZ around Pākehā fears of Asians, but I think it’s a mistake to work on that being the *only problem here.
Yes of course you are correct. Same here. Part of the issue for me is pulling all the individual strands out – a big poster would be good. Immigration, foreign ownership, refugees, cultural solidification and openness, racism, names of things, infrastructure, city verses country, home ownership, wages, neoliberalism, and so on
so many strands arggggg…
There probably are some people who have a fear of Asian culture taking over the dominant English culture.
Personally, I’m concerned with an excess of foreigners making the people already here even more poverty stricken. And that’s already happening.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/90260050/overseas-investment-office-approves-sharp-increase-in-foreign-land-ownership
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11883554
I’m also concerned with how many people NZ can sustainably support. We don’t know that at all and yet we’re letting in an unlimited number of people.
Valid concerns imo.
There probably are some people who have a fear of Asian culture taking over the dominant English culture.
That’s not wholly unreasonable; after all is this not exactly what Maori have been saying for the past hundred years or more?
No culture is all good or all bad, they’re all a random mix of social habits that arose from the accidents of history and geography. Each has strong points, and each has less attractive aspects. Typically we like to be proud of what we’re good at, and have massive blind spots around the rest.
And when we look at an outsider culture we tend to be most irked by their blind spots and weaknesses, and much slower to appreciate what they do well.
Because most people are very change resistant the process of getting used to each other, building on our strengths and discarding our failings is a slow process that cannot be easily rushed.
Exactly … it’s not immigration that is the problem. We are ALL immigrants of one sort or another. But the nature and rate of that immigration can easily change a society in ways people are not ready for, nor desire.
Going back to the Maori experience; many of the very early European arrivals (prior to 1840 most actually arrived from America), integrated very tightly with the Maori iwi they encountered. From the Maori perspective this was not a problem at all; indeed many rather valued their ‘white Maori’ because it facilitated economic and political opportunities.
And it shouldn’t be forgotten that Maori and Europeans have intermarried at remarkably high rates; that while Maori and Europeans maintain quite distinct cultures at a personal level there is a huge amount of cross-over.
Now if hypothetically Europeans had arrived at a relatively low rate during the 1800’s, and most had continued to integrate into Maori society as the early pattern indicated … the entire question of ‘colonisation’ would never have occurred.
An imperfect example might be to point to the Samoan/German experience … while it clearly started out as colonisation, in the aftermath of WW1 the rate of immigration slowed dramatically, and the two populations then had time to successfully merge into a distinct culture of it’s own.
There are wildly different Māori experiences that the ones you have heard of.
There is no blending into a distinct new culture – that is just another assimilation fantasy imo.
I’m not sure why you are driving down this road – i thought you had made your point way up the thread. As a peaceful gesture I am disengaging.
that is just another assimilation fantasy imo.
If your definition of ‘assimilation’ is based on your experience of euros demographically overwhelming maori, then absolutely. The idea that Maori should all become ‘well behaved brown skinned Euros’ is of course repugnant.
But over time distinct cultures that flourish side by side, DO influence each other, and intermarriage DOES generate whole new patterns. In the long run both cultures finish up the stronger for it, initially separate and ultimately as something new.
I quite liked Stan Grant’s take on this:
https://e-tangata.co.nz/news/we-must-remember-our-history-but-move-beyond-it
Actually, I don’t think it’s the fact of there being self checkouts that is KMart’s problem – it’s that there are not enough of them.
they do still have some person operated checkouts, and some staff overseeing the self checkouts.
the queues at St Lukes’ Kmart the last few times I’ve been there were horrendous. At first I thought it was because of a sale.
Basically, if they are selling that much stuff, to that many people, they need more checkouts – and that would require more money spent on checkouts, and more staff to over see them.
And now extend that to all of our infrastructure.
Bomber Bradbury’s analysis is excellent. and Bomber is spot on there-nicely observed.
Nah. Bomber’s being as much a useless donkey dick as Duncan Garner.
Here’s Bomber.
I’ll spell this one out.
There is crap infrastructure and there is immigration. The insidious and unspoken line (it’s common enough and embraced by NZ Labour among others) is that immigration is somehow responsible for the infra-structure being crap…and for it getting getting more crap.
But it’s not.
The infra-structure is crap because successive governments have neglected it. Infra-structure is crap because of bad management; a failure on the part of the politicians who presume to control and manage such things.
But hey. Let’s point the finger “over there” at past and present immigrants instead, some of who could have been offered very good jobs laying in and maintaining all that infrastructure that successive governments have paid fuck all attention to (beyond flogging bits to private concerns that could extract massive profits off the back of steady deterioration).
And as a footnote not an aside, you may or may not have noticed that proposed immigration settings are set along lines of class (ie, huge bias against low skilled or poor immigrants)…which kind of defeats the purpose (if such a purpose exists) of getting basic infra-structure up to scratch.
Not to mention that the arrangements in Kmart are not about infrastructure, but due to commercial decisions.
Kmart are currently treating paying customers in a pretty shoddy way. The queues around the store I’ve been to are crazy.
It’s privately owned infrastructure but it’s still infrastructure.
And there’s absolutely nothing that the customers can do about it.
I agree that lack of planning for infrastructure is not the fault of immigrants. It’s also true that there are natural limits to growth, and there is a relationship between the number of people and what can support them in the physical world and whether that is problematic.
No it’s not.
The point is that the immigration hasn’t been planned for and the necessary infrastructure built. Then there’s the influence it has on wages – you know, the sub-par wages we have because there’s so many people being imported by businesses specifically to keep wages down.
In other words, the cost of the immigration hasn’t been covered.
Garner and Bradbury seem to skip past who creates the pressure on the infrastructure which is not the immigrants.
Remember the guy who came in on the Investment visa? Was going to build that hotel in Epsom? After 5-10 years has not? Now, how hard to have in place a law that says if you do not do what you promise you forfeit the money you had to bring in. It goes tot he Govt coffers and you get PR or Citizenship rescinded. That would be easy if there was political will. BUT it happens a bit.
Secondly, we have the kiwifruit industry brazenly not giving migrant workers contracts and paying under minimum wage (over 50%) of them. That is deliberate law breaking to take advantage of vulnerable people seeking a better life. It is also interrupting the blessed market the right loves SO much. IF there are not enough workers, wages should go up under market forces.
Instead they are deliberately driven down. Single people on benefits would DO seasonal jobs IF
1. The pay was better
2. They could get straight back on a benefit when the work finished
As long as it takes WINZ weeks or months to start paying someone coming off seasonal work it would be a foolish person who leaves it to take a short term job. When you add in the weeks or months to get back on support the real hourly rate of the seasonal work is well below $10 an hour.
Hold on, Bill.
I haven’t heard Labour blame our insufficient infrastructure on immigration.
Labour’s argument is, due to our lacking infrastructure we need to take a breather on immigration, giving us time to play catch up.
“Our immigration settings should always be up for debate, but it is not helpful for Duncan Garner to base the immigration debate on ethnicity.”
Or to do so in a way that is pretty blatantly racist (I will grant him this, I don’t think he realised he was being racist. Time for him to learn though).
Good morning weka,
Did you get my message?
I have now 🙂 Just putting it up. Thanks!
Individual advantages from immigration doesn’t mean that Duncan Garner’s points as displayed in Ad’s comment aren’t correct. They are valid points and need to be thought about and acted on.
The application of rational thinking should not be drowned by sentiment and past success. Now we need something different. You only have to look at the whole picture to see that.
Billshit.
It would have been possible if we’d developed our people and economy rather than throwing it away via neo-liberalism.
Don’t need foreign money to utilise NZ’s resources. For that we need NZ money.
So? Auckland has been badly transformed because of all the foreigners choosing to live here.
He didn’t. He based it upon there being too bloody many and that we’re not planning for it.
A classic example of unfettered immigration, is the experience of the Fijian’s, in a democracy, where the immigrants end up out numbering the citizens, the migrants can set up their own political parties and win with a majority in democratic elections.
There are many other example as well through northern Africa.
Countries with relatively small populations are at serious risk from overpopulating their countries with migrants.
NZ has a very small population compared to China or India, for either or both of those 2 countries to lose 100 million, they wouldn’t even register on population numbers, but if they all arrived at NZ…….
Refugees should be the first choice of migrants to be allowed to enter NZ, a good example of this is the new Green’s member.
NZ is already in a situation where immigrants outnumber indigenous people by something like 5 to 1 or greater.
“The town with my holiday home has been transformed for good with foreigners choosing to live and invest here.”
I can’t believe I read that here at The Standard. How about you ask the locals whose town it is what they think.
Latest lecture from the Bruce Jesson Foundation. As with all it will be interesting – you lucky Aucklanders and even Hamiltonians, don’t miss it.
Register to hear Tūhoe leader Tāmati Kruger’s 2017 Bruce Jesson Lecture – At
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2017-bruce-jesson-lecture-tuhoe-and-self-determination-tickets-37052604337
A leader of the Tūhoe people’s drive for self-determination, Tamati Kruger, will give the 2017 Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture on 31 October. (Tuesday)
Tue, October 31, 2017 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Location
OGHLecTh (102-G36)
Corner of Princes St & Waterloo Quadrant
The University of Auckland
The lecture, at the University of Auckland, will be a historic opportunity for Tūhoe to explain their philosophy of Mana Motuhake/Self-Determination to a national audience, and to report on how the approach is working out in practice since the iwi signed a settlement with the Crown in 2013.
The settlement transferred management of the Tūhoe homeland in the former Urewera National Park to a new entity Te Urewera, which Kruger chairs, run jointly by the Crown and Tūhoe.
It also agreed in principle that Tūhoe should run its own social services, including healthcare and education, for its own people.
So far Tūhoe has opened a health clinic at Taneatua and plans two more, it runs youth and counselling services, offers educational scholarships, and is becoming involved in wider educational and social services.
Tāmati Kruger was educated at Victoria University in Wellington, where he also tutored in te reo Māori and was involved in the early days if the Te Reo Māori Society in the 1970s.
He was the chief Tūhoe negotiator in the settlement process and also chairs the tribal body Tūhoe Te Uru Taumatua.
The lecture will be held at the University of Auckland and you can register here.
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October 2017
FYI
2016 Lecture
A video of Lisa Marriot’s 2016 lecture, ‘Are we all equal in NZ?’, is here.
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c/- Politics & International Relations
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Thanks heaps for this
Good one
Twitterfinger J. Putinpussy barfs up yet another obstacle to actually getting anything done. By picking a fight with someone he really needs onside, but has zero leverage over.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/08/politics/donald-trump-bob-corker-tweets/index.html
Some analysis of what this means about his strategy.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/08/politics/trump-corker-attack/index.html
You mean he has no strategy! Simply reacts in a vengeful way…
Based on all of the evidence of Trump’s first nine months in office, it’s impossible to conclude that he has any sort of comprehensive strategy or theory of the case. He acts (or reacts) and sees what happens. There’s no bigger plan that we’re not privy to. There’s really no plan at all.
Loved this Tweet from Corker in response:
“”It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning,” “
It’s minor relief to be watching them spending their time taking potshots at each other rather than working as a team to implement their agenda.
Well that is certainly true! Executive orders is about all that has been achieved and even then may are subject to litigation. I can’t say the “beautiful, and wonderful” Tax plan has much hope of success either when the populous wake up to the realisation as to who are the ones going to benefit… and it certainly isn’t them!
The stacking of the EPA with Climate denialists is unfortunately having an effect, and the run down of funding in social services and eduction, and FEMA. The flow on will be increasing dissatisfaction and resentment to the administration and they will have a very difficult job at re-election in 2018 and almost no hope in 2020.
A recent poll has the Chump on only 24% approval rating and even 33% of Repugnents disapprove as well.
The big thing they’ve achieved is stacking the courts. McConnell refusing to confirm Obama appointments left a huge backlog of vacancies that they’ve been fairly quickly filling with Heritage Foundation recommendations.
President Caligula, and no one in GOP has the stones to hold him accountable.
President Trump told the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Seema Verma to deny a request from the Republican-controlled state of Iowa to fix their health-care marketplace, according to The Washington Post.
According to the Post, Iowa officials sought for months to get federal permission to fix health insurance markets in their state, but they were shut down by Trump administration officials.
Critics of the president say Trump’s unusual move is a part of the administration’s effort to undermine ObamaCare
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/354170-trump-told-hhs-to-deny-request-to-fix-iowa-obamacare-market-report
We have unemployment in NZ and under-employment too in high numbers. Yet the employers can’t find retail workers with enough ability and bleat they need to bring people in from overseas because they have new ideas. This was the plaint of Massey Uni professional on RadioNZ – couldn’t find so here is Scoop on it.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1710/S00197/massey-survey-shows-amazon-effect-spooks-local-retailers.htm
Professor Elms says the survey also showed continued concerns about skill shortages in the sector. The top two most frequently-mentioned human resource priorities in both 2016 and 2017 were staffing and training.
“There is concern that New Zealand doesn’t have a strong enough talent pipeline. We definitely have skills gaps in buying, merchandising and digital, and this will only be exacerbated as retailers compete with the likes of Amazon,” he says.
“The skills and competencies required are becoming a lot more sophisticated – retailers need staff that understand how business models are changing if they are to successfully integrate their physical and digital platforms.”
This from Google:
Bachelor of Retail and Business Management … – Massey University
http://www.massey.ac.nz/retail
The multi-billion dollar retail sector is New Zealand’s second-largest for employment, responsible for seamlessly and endlessly delivering goods and services to …
NZ Herald: New Zealand’s Latest News, Business, Sport, Weather …
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/author/carmen-hall/
2 days ago – carmen.hall@nzme.co.nz. @ Bay_Times … Rotorua business leaders plan a national campaign to attract skilled workers. ROTORUA … NEW ZEALAND · Migrants struggling to find jobs. 12 Sep, 2017 10: …. Data shows retail spending on cards in Tauranga jumped 6.4% for year to June. ….. That was hard but I can’t imagine …
From RadioNZ
In the latest bid to solve the construction industry’s critical labour shortage, a new campaign starts today with the aim of attracting up to 20,000 foreign workers. The website LookSee Build New Zealand has 20 companies signed up looking for new staff as the pressure mounts to meet a projected demand for almost 60,000 skilled workers in just five years.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/201861653/construction-industry-s-latest-push-to-recruit-overseas-workers
and this from USA
Companies can’t find workers to rebuild after Harvey and Irma | Don’t …
http://www.sentinel-echo.com/…/companies-can-t-find-workers…/article_282d07a1-f5cc-5b...
4 days ago – More people were looking for jobs , particularly men. … Business owners say a lack of skilled workers who can pass a drug test has stalled their growth .
Companies can’t find workers to rebuild after Harvey and Irma
By Danielle Paquette | The Washington Post Oct 4, 2017 Updated Oct 4, 2017
This from USA, where we seem to import ideas and policies from as we have adopted a drug testing regime which seems to be draconian and unnecessary for most employers.
I think they all need fresh ideas.
Worth a look, when you have time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GDLHtH4zhc
Adani are virtually bankrupt and the entire thing is a scam to get money out of the Qlnd govt to prop up their failing investments elsewhere.
Tellingly none of the big banks will touch them, and the big automation player I know, who’d normally have people dedicated to winning a project of this scale aren’t bothering to waste time on it.
Yeah, but Turnbull and co are happy to loan a Billion or two, backing the Mining Industry
RedLogix, NewsFlash
Yes and yes. You are both correct.
This can be found from 36:15 in the clip.
https://youtu.be/6GDLHtH4zhc?t=36m15s
This week is the week we find out if the infamous Barnaby Joyce loses his job, and his deputy and a few others as well.
One decision has already been made for the One Nation party candidate Robertson, the Flat earth believer, the Supreme court found he was not eligible, ignorance is not a defense, grim times for the Turnbull Govt with only a majority of one and 20 consecutive negative polls for him, the latest one seeing him fall another 2 points
Unless….
I’ve just finished filling out the 12 pages of Temporary Additional Support Re-Application paperwork, a joyful 3 monthly ritual in order to be able to pay the rent.
Anyone familiar with these forms will know about that threatening sounding Q.20 :
“You and your partner must take all necessary steps to increase income or reduce costs where possible. Please indicate where what steps you and/or your partner have taken to get other assistance, reduce costs or increase income.”
I was very tempted to write in “voted for Greens on their platform of raising benefit levels.” Would that constitute an attempt to increase income when one has no other ways of doing so?
Unfortunately I was too scared to- because even if the satire is over their heads, there is a very real fear these days that the slightest criticism against the system, and I’m implicating benefit rates here of course, will cross the desk of the wrong person ie one who could make things very difficult.
Looking forward to running the security gauntlet, and a long queue at the office, just to get the stamped receipt for said papers, then hope to god they don’t mess up again like last time. Multiply this scenario for 100s of 1000s of NZers…
Lol, I can understand the temptation (and agree with the need for caution).
Re the office visit, would be interesting if beneficiaries kept time records of what is involved in keeping a benefit.
I post my forms in, but make sure I always keep copies for myself.
Weka, you’re brave posting in forms. I did once, many moons ago and they were never seen again. Best practice these days is to hand deliver- if practically possible- physically hand them over and request a stamped signed receipt. They usually photocopy the front page and hand that back.
The annual DB confirmation paperwork can only be mailed back to somewhere in Auckland so no choice there and I’m terrified because there’s no way of knowing it arrived until a) your payments keep going in as usual or b) you get the letter saying it’s been stopped. And they wonder why the increasing rates of severe anxiety?
I used to hand deliver and get it date stamped until I got to ill to do so. So needs must. I take the view that if I post the forms and they get lost, it’s WINZ’s fault and it’s on them to sort it out. If my benefit was lapsing because of their fuck ups, then it’s time to get senior management and advocates or CLC lawyers involved. None of that is probably any less time consuming or stressful than what you are doing though 🙁
What’s DB?
Sorry, disability benefit
Sigh. I am so sorry you have to go through this.
On a slightly humourous note
” You and your partner must take all necessary steps to increase income or reduce costs where possible. Please indicate where what steps you and/or your partner have taken to get other assistance, reduce costs or increase income.” ”
I think they cut and paste this for everything… Principals, DHBs, Tertiaries, Rape Prevention Orgs… just substitute partner
Good point Tracey…anything to justify not giving money they do actually have to people and organisations that need it.
They also change the rules without feeling the need to inform their ‘clients’.
In order to receive the supported living payment (the old invalid benefit), I had to supply a medical certificate. The doctor needed to indicate how long the med cert was for, ie 2 years, five years or never. Three years ago my rheumatologist signed me off as never needing another one. However last year Winz requested a new one. When I phoned to ask why, I was told someone would call me back. subsequently I received a voicemail threatening to look into my part-time employment 3 years ago.
Apparently everyone on SLP now needs to provide a med cert every two years. Next year, at 64 yrs, I will have to provide another one. This has no useful purpose and is outright harassment.
All those who said waiting for the outcome of the special votes was a waste of time and made no difference were wrong.
Winston Peters said he wanted to wait until after the results of specials as they could change things significantly, Bill and the media disagreed, they said no significant change, however, Peters, after the release of the specials, announced that the outcome was SIGNIFICANT.
Maybe, to extrapolate, the significance indicates a more likely outcome for one side and not the other, my view is that L/G block is now in good contention, based on Peters putting so much emphasis on the SIGNIFICANCE of the specials.
Optimism? YES
Reality? we’ll still have to wait and see.
What says democracy, or the spreading there of….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TecCuUhLHk&ab_channel=YellowKingToyBoy
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11930194
Conrad selling off-the-plan Auckland apartments for NZ residency
This seems very strange to me.
Welcome to new Zealand – neo-liberal hellhole.
No wonder we have health issues in this country.
No doubt Katherine Rich pimps for these organisations.
‘Kiwi kids are exposed to 27 junk food advertisements a day, study finds.’
In a world-first study by Otago and Auckland universities, 168 children from across the Wellington region, aged between 11 and 13, wore cameras around their necks for four days, capturing what they saw every seven seconds.
In one case, a poster for Coca-Cola hung on a classroom wall. In others, marketing for sugary or energy drinks on the sides of dairies or on the ends of buses plagued their journey home.
“The consequence of that is obesity,” she said. “[Kids] are twice as likely to see junk food marketing as healthy marketing, it goes against that effort to help children maintain their weight.”
Ministry of Health statistics show 11 per cent of New Zealand children aged between 2 and 14 are obese, and a further 22 per cent are overweight.
Sugary drinks, fast food, confectionary and snack food advertisements were the most common found in the study. Product packaging was the dominant platform, followed by signs.
In an effort to reduce exposure, the researchers are calling on the incoming Government to impose a sugary drinks tax, regulate junk food marketing and impose rules that would see only healthy foods sold in schools.
They would also like to see a ban on junk food advertising in sports, such as Gatorade’s partnership with the All Blacks.’
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/well-good/teach-me/97677040/kiwi-kids-are-exposed-to-27-junk-food-advertisements-a-day-study-finds
Hidden cost of feeding grain to farm animals to hit $1.32tn a year
‘Our habit of feeding human foods, such as grain and soya, to farm animals will cost us $1.32tn (£1tn) a year by 2050 globally, according to environmental campaigners.
The hidden costs of the industrial farming system are vast, and urgently need to be brought into clear focus, Peter Stevenson of Compassion in World Farming told the Extinction and Livestock conference in London. “There’s a worrying disconnect between the retail price of food and the true cost of production. As a result, food produced at great environmental cost can appear to be cheaper than more sustainably produced alternatives.”
“Cheap food is something we pay for three times, once at the checkout, again in tax subsidies and again in the enormous clean up cost to our health and environment,” his colleague Philip Lymbery pointed out.
We are paying for soil erosion, water pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, and a multitude of other impacts which are passed on to the public by farmers and the sector, the conference heard. For example, our current rate of soil loss costs £400bn a year globally, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated that water pollution in six EU states alone costs €2bn-5bn a year; and according to the European Environment Agency the current rate of biodiversity loss is reducing global GDP by 3% every year.’…….
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/07/feeding-grain-to-farm-animals-wastes-more-than-1bn-a-year-data-shows
Rise of mega farms: how the US model of intensive farming is invading the world
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/18/rise-of-mega-farms-how-the-us-model-of-intensive-farming-is-invading-the-world
Every Single Piece Of Plastic Ever Made Still Exists.
……..’Because plastic lasts for so long, every single piece of plastic ever made still exists, and will continue existing for at least 500 years. To put that in context, if Leonardo da Vinci had drunk water from a plastic bottle when he was painting the Mona Lisa, that bottle would not have fully decomposed yet.
Every day, more and more plastic is produced, used and thrown away. In countries where disposable cups are made of plastic, for example, it may take only seconds for one to leave the package, be used, and end up in a trash can. So much plastic is being consumed that there is an area bigger than France of throw-away plastic swirling at all depths in the North Pacific Ocean. It has become so ubiquitous that birds are using it to build their nests.’……
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/every-single-piece-of-plastic-ever-made-still-exists_us_58d15c2ce4b07112b647322c?utm_campaign=Twitter&utm_source=Link&utm_medium=US
Not quite true, some plastics are organically based and used in the agricultural industries, others are very susceptible to UV corrosion which do break down to their base products a bit like rusting steel.
Something that annoys me, is that everyone blames the plastic bottles for ending up in the water ways and sea, yet, the bottles themselves are not responsible, they didn’t leap out of someone’s hand and into the river, but the PEOPLE discarding them are, surly there is a degree of responsibility of humans to care for the environment by recycling and discarding in the proper manner, plastic water bottles are a very good method of hydration, they are also relatively safe and bacteria free, ideal in emergencies. Plastic bottle manufacturers recycle a very high percentage returned bottles.
If you look at some of the less developed countries, where waste disposal is non existent and the main means of disposal is to simply “biff it out the window”, there is no system for garbage collection, unfortunately the migrants from these countries when emigrating to more civilized countries don’t usually adapt to the changes and values and continue to litter as they always have, I’ve actually seen graphic evidence of this in some overseas cities in areas of particularly high migrant residents from these under developed countries.
The micro beads used in cosmetics are a real problem too, with some countries banning products containing micro beads.
NewsFlash
I remember a past Parliamenary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Williams, in 2002 praise the efforts of the Mayor of a Brazilian city for cleaning up the city and making it a people-friendly more attractive place.
Morgan Williams (ecologist) – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Williams_(ecologist)
John Morgan Williams (born 25 March 1943), known as Dr. J. Morgan Williams or Morgan Williams, is a New Zealand ecologist and agricultural scientist who served as the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment from 1997 to March 2007. … Greening the City: Bringing Biodiversity Back into the Urban
Environment”.
I think that they encouraged people to hand in rubbish from the streets and favellas for physical, practical reward, such as food, perhaps some eggs. It made a big difference. Also they had covered bus stops made in clear plastic so people were covered and crime was discouraged. That would be much appreciated.
Curitiba – Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment
http://www.pce.parliament.nz/media/pdfs/CURTIBA.pdf
On the southern plateau of Brazil one city, Curitiba, has lifted itself out of tough … Brazilian Ambassador to New Zealand and his staff for assisting with visits and complimentary visas to Brazil. … mercial competition models, separation of poli- cies from ….. Morgan. Transport corridor. Section through transport corridor (IPPUC).
http://www.pce.parliament.nz/media/pdfs/CURTIBA.pdf
I think anyone who comes to this blog would be interested in this report. I urge you to read it because it deals with many things that way heavily on this country now, and might be helpful to consider points for Auckland. Probably the Auckland activist group already have many similar policies but lack the breadth of mind in the elites to effect change for the lumpenproletariat.
Just an observation: For an OK bank – certainly not amongst the worst, ASB’s Chief Jee Bung Wunder is a complete fucking irriot (going forward).
The greens have never been in power and don’t want to be
[TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]
Wow, Ian. You really sound like a person with deep understanding and penetrating analytical thought.
Blast those impotent Greens! They said they wanted to go into Government with Labour, but by the Powers of Ian, it seems they don’t !