We need immigrants to work here cause Kiwi’s are either too stoned, lazy or sitting on the other side of the road begging while immigrant workers rebuild Christchurch (total misquote but the essence of Hides Bull feces NBR).
I call Bull shit cause once again we have yet another immigrant being exploited by a Kiwi company that won’t employ Kiwi’s – not because of pot, not because of lack of work ethic but cause $$$$.
Judge Inglis said this sort of case was all too common in New Zealand.
“The position Mr Domingo has found himself in is not unique.
“It is clear that it has taken a degree of personal endurance to pursue matters to this point.
“Mr Domingo said that he had felt like ‘giving up’ in terms of seeking compliance with the authority’s awards. These are observations which the Employment Court frequently hears in cases such as this.”
Bill will be here shortly to label you and RNZ xenophobic in due course.
How on earth is anyone allowed to justify importing low skilled labour here, permanent or temporary? Allow the wages to rise to a level that is sustainable for kiwis , expensive kiwi cost of living but international third world wages being payed.
[Mischaracterisation riding the back of smear…or is that the other way around? No matter – it’s really, really stupid to attack the site’s authors. One week ban.] – Bill
What a dreadful place this government has lead us to when it comes to housing. New Zealand now has the most unaffordable housing across a range of measures. New Zealand, once admired for the housing of its citizens, has a government which has watched over a division in society on housing which may never be repaired.
Across five different measures, New Zealand has come out on top of three of the five measures for the most expensive global housing market.
New Zealand has had the highest rise in house prices, costs the most against the average person’s income and now has the biggest difference between house prices and renting prices.
The Economist puts this trend down to “a growing horde of rich foreigners” coming to New Zealand because they see it as a “safe haven”.
High time ownership ( or an equitable interest) in a property in NZ gave you compulsory tax residence-(offshore group) in NZ and you are taxed on your worldwide tax income & assets against which you may offset any taxes paid as a tax resident – (onshore group).
That should tax care of the super problem & a few others too.
What a dreadful place this government has lead us to when it comes to housing.
This government like it that way because it means a few rich people can become even bigger bludgers. If we had equality then people may actually become independent of rich people and then the rich wouldn’t be able to bludge off of everyone else.
I’ve just been over to Frank Macskasy’s page to read his immigration article.
Now I know that John key didn’t take responsibility for anything but there is a picture montage there of newspaper headlines and it’s like “wow” I found the visual impact pretty strong.
Don’t know who owns it or who did it but felt it would make an excellent poster etc and deserves widespread distribution. One picture a thousand words.
and BTW not sure if it can be fixed -but when I click on the usual spot on the feed I normally get Frank’s picture not the article. I’m sure Frank’s good lookin’ but?
For sale: the $5m slum Steve Braunias wanders through the grim …
m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11815645
18 months ago I approached the head tenant of where I pay $250.00 per week for a run down shithole that has a lose tap, poor drainage /guttering issues , and a shower that does not drain properly.
It also has faulty wiring that has pooled at some stage and shorted( blown ) the ceiling light socket.
Several other wall sockets are faulty.
As a result of this weather bomb we are having – I found water pouring in from the wall in the bathroom/toilet area at about half way up the wall.
This pooled into the open plan area where the carpet now is .
I would estimate 1-2 cm’s or more in depth.
The place is a potential electrical deathtrap with water back- pooling in the walls.
I also note as a past painter and decorator the dilapidated paint job and the amateur attempts to fill all the punch holes in the walls and doors.
Two weeks ago I suffered my first heart attack and received a stent in a heart artery. I am still breathless and sometimes exhausted as a result. And I am furious.
It is obvious that the landlord has bought this property as a part of a cheap investment portfolio and intends to pay as little as possible ( nothing ) toward either its livability or its maintenance. It obviously has had NO money spent on bringing it up to standard . It would be around early 1980’s vintage.
Reading the above article in the NZ Herald today has made me feel almost vigilante towards this National govt that has enabled this type of criminal element to get away with this sort of blatant racketeering.
I will approach the head tenant and if he doesn’t grow some balls ASAP I will go to the Tenancy Tribunal on Monday , and force the issue. Another recourse is social media.
A message to both Bill English and Andrew Little.
To Bill English, – I AM NOT SOME ANIMAL OR DOG TO BE TREATED LIKE SHIT.
To Andrew Little. I believe you and Jacinda Adern have it in your power to do something about this sort of state of affairs that has been legitimized by this National govt up and down this country to so many of their fellow countrymen and women.
Stop standing at the gateway umming and ahhing. Get bold and do something.
You have EVERY moral right to do so.
Do that ?… and the people will carry you through the next election and on into govt for the years to come . And you will have the peoples MANDATE to rectify this viscous govts avarice and self serving agenda.
Do nothing?
Then you amply deserve the wrath and the cursing of the voters for your timid inaction.
The place is a potential electrical deathtrap with water back- pooling in the walls.
No, from what you’re saying, it is a death trap – and that’s without the water. The water increases the probability of death.
Reading the above article in the NZ Herald today has made me feel almost vigilante towards this National govt that has enabled this type of criminal element to get away with this sort of blatant racketeering.
This type of stuff has been building up for some time. Decades in fact as the rentiers have realised that being immoral arseholes that endanger peoples lives has no consequences.
The problem with National is that they’ll keep it that way.
The article neglected to mention the army of cockroaches that scuttle round the floors and up the walls at night. Refrigerators (privately owned and kept in tenants’ rooms to keep food safe) are soon invaded by the cockroaches. The place is a hell hole but is better than nothing. A few fortunate tenants have managed to escape and move into HNZ flats. Auckland needs far more flats for single people on low incomes but HNZ do not seem interested in this group.
Yes, I’m aware of that. However, that was recently, this has been going on for 18 months apparently. Thus, there was ample opportunity to move out beforehand.
Moreover, why move into such a dive in the first place?
To make room for my son to complete a certificate and so he could use the room I had to vacate when I was staying at my sisters and brother in- laws after relocating to Auckland to get a security job.
That’s why.
And as for moving into the dive?
Do you have your head up your arse as well?
It may be one step better than sleeping in a fucking car but not much bud.
And why the fucking hell should I have to give you my bloody life story online in full public just to educate a moron like you anyway?
Both your previous comments came across as accusatory. Like WK shouldn’t have rented there in the first place, and should have moved out. Like I said, it’s not hard to imagine circumstances where that’s not easy, or even possible.
Your comments are bizarre actually given there is a well known housing crisis going on.
I’ve lived in millionaires homes when I was younger and I’ve lived a year up in the mountains in the middle of winter in a stone shack outside of Queenstown when I was goldmining in the rivers with a pump , floating dredge and wet- suit and another year in a mountain tent .
Been self employed and owned a half mil dollar property of my own – then lost it all during 2008.
And I reckon I’ve lived more of a life than half these far right wing wannabe pseudo intellectual neo liberal fanatics who comment on this blog site .
And when I saw that article in the NZ Herald this morning , in light of whats been happening to so many New Zealander family’s having to sleep in cars and the like over the past few years – I thought ”FUCK IT !!”… Im going to say something.
Because now this govt and their neo liberal perversions have just got personal.
I’m fortunate that I’ve only got me to worry about.
But at least when you live in the boon docks in a tent or an old abandoned stone shack its free. And you can accept a primitive lifestyle.
But to get shafted and ripped off each and every bloody week just for the privilege of living in a shitty run down dogbox so some blighted little parasitic scum bag can live in comfort and climb up on your shoulders galls me to the bone.
And the fact that pricks like this are being enabled to do so by this shitty, do nothing , hands off incumbent non govt should fill every decent and honest bastard full of rage.
Oh, so you just wanted to make sure that WK didn’t move into a dangerous shelter just so they could bitch about it? 🙄
Your second sentence perfectly describes the point that you still seem to have managed to miss: if the housing system means that some people can only afford to live in dwellings that are hazardous to their health or have no dwelling whatsoever, then that system is broken. And people are trapped living in hovels.
No, I was trying to establish what the actual facts in this case are.
I wasn’t putting their story under a microscope. I merely asked two simple questions.
The point of this was to establish if fiscal constraints was/is the problem preventing WK from moving out.
I’ve seen a number of people complain about the state of their rented dwellings and advocating for a rental warrant while failing to consider that improvements to their dwellings would most likely lead to rent increases, thus forcing/pricing them out. Hence it’s not really the solution.
I find it completely fucked up. I find your faux concern fucked up. I find it nuts that you think the take-home message is “don’t complain, because things might end up worse-off for you if you do”. I find it fucked up that you think people would be anything other than forced to live in circumstances that make them concerned for their lives and feel like they’re treated like animals. I think it’s fucked up that you need to know every fucking detail in order to avoid facing the obvious reasons as to why someone even moved into a place in the first place. I think it’s fucked up that you believe that just one more detail might suddenly make it all WK’s fault and a completely avoidable and solvable situation.
“Actual facts”??? Do you think WK was misleading you in some way? For fuck’s sake.
I wasn’t implying not to complain, I was highlighting why a rental warrant isn’t the best solution.
In WK’s case, being impacted by a rent increase as a result is a potential outcome, it’s not my take-home message for not complaining, it’s merely the reality which comes back to our broken system. And it’s not a system I support. So it’s not my rationale that’s fucked up.
Wk could have moved into the place for numerous reasons, location being one. I didn’t require to know every fucking detail as you put it. In fact WK told me far more than I needed to know, but failed to tell me what I wanted to know.
I’m not blaming WK for their current predicament, just trying to better understand it And no, I don’t think WK was misleading me, however my questions were not answered, therefore we can only speculate on why WK initially moved in, hasn’t moved out and has put up with it for so long.
Moreover, considering what he’s put out there, my questions were reasonable and to be expected.
“To Andrew Little. I believe you and Jacinda Adern have it in your power to do something about this sort of state of affairs that has been legitimized by this National govt up and down this country to so many of their fellow countrymen and women.”
If they are elected into power, they will then have the power to do something.
WILD KATIPO as it is in the bathroom, you have rights.
Phone around find the most expensive plumber you can find. THE MOST Expensive. Then find a sparky in the same camp. Explain to them the situation – the bill goes to the landlord. If you are in Auckland, some of these trades people are only to happy to help.
Book them in to turn up in 24 hours, then inform the landlord what you have done on the ground of health and safety. And that in 24 hours this will be happening. As you will not let the property be damaged on your watch. Only a idiot landlord will not act at this point.
All perfectly legal. And compliant to the residential tenancy act.
This particular landlord would not pay the bill. He has been aware of the conditions for years and makes no effort to improve them. Wants the rent on time though. In Auckland plumbers don’t start the job until they are guaranteed payment.
That why I said try some of the expensive places, and tell them what is going on. You will be quietly surprised. They will get paid, as per the act – via the disputes tribunal and putting debt collectors on them. The big expensive outfits are the only option left, because they know the law, and will get their money.
Small places can’t afford to not get payed. Or fight to get their money. Hence why they won’t do the job.
You don think the govt has a role in safety compliance for housing? Wow.
WK already said what they’re going to do, despite having been seriously ill, did you even read the comment? Got any social conscience or intelligence at all?
And just what can the tenancy tribunal actually do?
Can it charge his landlord with attempted murder?
Can it even fine him?
Can it force him to refurbish the place to a liveable standard?
Or is it like many of these government entities that have been set up over the decades that people are supposed to complain to but have no teeth to force anything?
“I didn’t see the Tenancy Tribuna bit in his post/rant it was all a bit jumbled and hard to read.”
Nice try, but I managed it on a phone while unwell. I think more likely you just rushed through on your way to trolling.
“The point though is unless you raise issues with the appropriate authorities nothing will ever change,.”
Quite. When you have mass problems across the country, the governing party is the appropriate authority. Basically what you are saying is that all responsibility lies with the tenant, irrespective of their ability to go to the Tenancy Tribunal. In which case landlords are free to be as fuckwitted as they like until they caught by a private citizen. Nice.
“And this has been going on for at least 18 months, why hasn’t he been to the tenancy tribunal already.”
Landlords are running a business and selling a service, what they sell should be up to scratch.
The problem is at the moment, there’s a shortage of rentals, a rental WOF would probably remove at least 10% of the rental stock from the market as well as push up already over inflated rental prices.
Once we get the housing situation under control then introduce a rental WOF at the moment I think it will cause more harm than good.
Mouldy walls are covered by weather tightness and ventilation.
Cracked floorBoards? how big is the crack? you just need to duck down to any building supply and get some caulk, fixed for under $10.00
What sort of heating do you expect the landlord to cover?
“Mouldy walls are covered by weather tightness and ventilation.”
I’ve seen rooms that have mould that would pass a weather tight and ventilation test. Are you saying that it should be a weather tightness, ventilation, and mould check? Seems odd, I would put addressing mould as a separate category, especially given it’s potentially such a health risk.
“Cracked floorBoards? how big is the crack?”
Big enough to cause damage to your foot from the rough edge. My point was that you had excluded general repairs, or otherwise dangerous shit.
“What sort of heating do you expect the landlord to cover?”
Fixed heating. So a wood burner or heat pump or other form of electric heating that goes with the house (may as well ban gas on upgrades because of CC).
I’ve seen rooms that have mould that would pass a weather tight and ventilation test. Are you saying that it should be a weather tightness, ventilation, and mould check? Seems odd, I would put addressing mould as a separate category, especially given it’s potentially such a health risk.
What’s causing the mould?
If the walls or roof is leaking no amount of ventilation is going to make a difference, you’re going to have mould issues.
Anything else can be fixed with decent ventilation or educating the tenants.
Fixed heating. So a wood burner or heat pump or another form of electric heating that goes with the house.
To heat a whole house (100-150 m2) with heat pumps you’re looking at 10-15k
The’s the problem if you start to get too overzealous you reach a point where the landlord says fuck it, kicks out the tenants, sells up and there’s one less rental.
Previous occupiers not opening the bathroom window. So the ventilation and weathertightness would pass, but there is existing mould. Mould prevention isn’t the same as mould removal.
“The’s the problem if you start to get too overzealous you reach a point where the landlord says fuck it, kicks out the tenants, sells up and there’s one less rental.”
It’s only a problem if you think the housing market is more important than people’s health and wellbeing. The government can buy houses, get them up to scratch and add them to their HNZ managed rentals.
However I suspect that your point is based on the need to defend landlord profits rather than whether lots of landlords will really get out of the business. If a someone can’t install fixed heating in a house for far less than $15,000 they’re probably not competent to be a landlord.
Maybe the ideal solution would be to get the crap that needs doing up out of the rental / investor market and either demolished or sold off cheaply to first home buyers as a do-up.
This is how a lot of us got our foot on the property ladder in past generations but openings are limited now.
However I suspect that your point is based on the need to defend landlord profits rather than whether lots of landlords will really get out of the business. If a someone can’t install fixed heating in a house for far less than $15,000 they’re probably not competent to be a landlord.
If you’re installing fixed heating to a WOF standard and want to use heat pumps it will cost you 10-15k.
The only other form of electric heating you could use is resistance heating which is just your bar heaters so all you really need to do is provide a power point.
You could install a wood burner for 5k but a lot of tenants don’t want the hassle of having to chop wood also you’ll need a shed to store the wood.
“Maybe the ideal solution would be to get the crap that needs doing up out of the rental / investor market and either demolished or sold off cheaply to first home buyers as a do-up.
This is how a lot of us got our foot on the property ladder in past generations but openings are limited now.”
I think so too. The whole “landlords can’t afford it and will sell” line, apart from basically saying that some people should live in hovels, also misses the opportunity to sort this out once and for all and that it can be sorted out.
Imagine if we applied the same principle to a car WOF 🙄 People can’t afford to get the repairs done in their cars so we let’s not do a WOF system.
He is a past painter and decorator living by himself with a heart condition, probably aggravated by the stress of getting nowhere with the head tenant.
He has earned and deserves respect for the life he gave to his trade and the restraint and patience he has shown.
My guess is he hasn’t been to the Tenancy Tribunal because he is stoical and has the dignity and expectation of good faith in others to try to fix it by a personal approach to the head tenant.
ATM… just feeling a little bit like my blood pressures going through my head. The head tenants been out overnight, I’ll approach him when he returns. If he contacts the landlord and action is taken to avoid bringing in the Tribunal , well and good. If not , I’ll push the issue. Starting Monday. I should be fine by myself and thank you.
I live by myself but family is not too far away , so I’m fortunate.
Always was a tradie outdoors type worker , pretty physically strong but this heart business has been a real confidence knocker… so just a bit sort of weepy atm… Id like to say thank you for the moral support from both Draco and weka and yourself. Ive spoken enough about housing here before but now Im REALLY feeling part of it.
Take care matey! Three weeks isn’t very long to recover. Stress if a funny thing, sometimes it’s easier to do something stressful than do nothing about another stressor, but can you also take some time with this?
I’m wondering if there are pathways through the Tribunal process that mean its expedited on the grounds of health or danger.
I dunno , but atm Im taking a back seat and just going to relax… that head pounding feeling isn’t pleasant… so Ill kick back for the rest of the day ,get some sleep then have another go.
@ Wild Katipo … been following your sad situation through this blog. Makes for pretty shocking reading, that circumstances such as yours being allowed to prevail in NZ in the first place to decent Kiwis!
More publicity needs to be drawn to issues such as yours, with some serious scrutiny being done on your living conditions, along with the obscene profits gained from scurrilous landlords, preying on good people such as yourself in need of accommodation! From what you have written, your plight seems pretty appalling to say the least, sub human in fact! You and others like you need advocates to act on your behalf.
I wish you all the best in getting some positive action here. Take very good care of yourself my friend and look after that good heart of yours.
Cheers
Mary
You can not stop paying the rent, you will be evicted.
As it is a breach of the Tenancy act, you give an automatic win in any tribunal hearing to a land lord. NO matter the circumstances which drove you to not pay rent.
You have to pay rent, to even the worst scum sucking leech. Tenants have no power, no matter how reality shows try to tell the lie otherwise.
Ok but that was not my actual experience as a student when landlord made non consented additions and prevented us getting quite enjoyment of flat. But if your the expert I will go with that
It you go to the Tenancy Tribunal, then there is a risk of getting a retaliatory eviction. Plain and simple. If a landlord wants to get rid of you, he will find a way. Despite what landlords moan about, it is actually quite easy to evict a tenant.
Professor James Renwick has been in Northland this week to help raise funds for a climate change sculpture in Kerikeri by the artist Chris Booth.
Professor Renwick said that was increasingly the trend as the climate changes.
“Looking further afield California is a classic example. They’ve had years of severe drought and hardly any snow on the mountains.
“And now, this winter that is just gone, they’ve been absolutely pounded … the dams are bursting and all the rest of it.
“And that’s exactly the picture, you get long periods of severe drought and then when it starts to rain it really hammers down.
Can’t be a great week to be living in NZ’s north – whether it be people living in the open, on streets, in garages, in cars, or with families sharing to small a living space.
She cuts through all the BS that the redevelopment is benefiting local HNZ tenants.
Niki represents a community of people who feel that they have been shunted around as if they are of little consequence. They have stayed defiant because they can see through the rhetoric that the redevelopment of their neighbourhood is about helping the locals and doing up old houses. In fact, the redevelopment is benefitting wealthy developers and property investors who get to dally around with a small bit of social housing on the side so they can justify their land grab.
The plan to redevelop Tāmaki does not have the support of the very people it is supposed to be helping….
…
The National government did not just let the housing crisis happen. Their policy settings have designed the shortage of affordable, state, and social housing. Through its tax policy, this government has encouraged the use of houses for business investment instead of for living in as homes. This has helped put both rents and mortgages out of reach for too many people, in a way this country has not seen before. This is the housing crisis.
This reminds me of another National Party hypocrisy. Bolger’s support for the idea of social capital as somehow linked to the preservation of strong market incentives ie. vote National and you will be enabled to get ahead at the expense of the community.
“For Bolger (1998), social capital does not draw on “old fashioned, discredited socialism” but rather his conviction of the “strength, goodness and commonsense of communities”. He speaks of a change of emphasis from economic capital to social capital: recent economic reforms will preserve strong market incentives, now, apparently, all we need to develop a new approach to social policy which will empower communities to deal with the many social problems facing them.”
There is nothing I can say here…its simply a link to a very interesting point of view about the effects and reality of imprisonment. Though also interesting from a legal point of view, yet to be fully played out in the courts.
Elon Musk sets the cat among the pigeons with an open offer to South Australia for grid scale batteries to cover intermittency problems with South Australia’s high proportion of wind and solar generation. That’s a real in-your-face challenge to the fossil-heads in Canberra.
This role is in a team of proactive and positive staff who enjoy leveraging current and emerging technologies for mission outcomes. The team is a growth area for GCSB with a roadmap of interesting and diverse technical projects for the right applicant to enjoy. The GCSB offers a competitive salary, health insurance and flexible working hours. If you are interested in putting your technical skills towards keeping New Zealand safe and prosperous in an innovative and unconventional technical domain, this is the role you are looking for.
We are looking for someone with experience in Linux systems administration at the RHCSA level or equivalent and one or more of the following areas is required:
Virtualisation administration at the VCP/RHCVA level or equivalent.
Infrastructure provisioning tools such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible.
Network administration at the CCNA level or equivalent.
ICT systems design.
ICT systems security experience.
Not my kind of thing. I prefer to write code rather than running systems.
The only reason that I run this system is because of a favor asked long long ago by some people on the original crew, and because I can treat it as a semi interesting hobby rather than real work. I have always detested it when I have wound up doing the IT department’s work rather than development.
I suspect that whoever they are after is just a flunky to run some of their infrastructure rather than something I’d ever find interesting.
The wonderful Testers who find my bugs for me before the customers do. They are some of my favorite people.
And for the record, and because I have been known to indulge in it on the odd occassion, there was no irony at all on those statements.
Being able to test integrated systems systematically and repeatably is a skill that so few people lack that it rates for me as a talent. I can (and often do) write unit-tests and functional tests pr perform bench testing all day and never find some of the integration flaws and outright bugs these people do.
When you’re putting dozens of hardware and software units together in an integrated system over a wireless system, being able to work on flaws long enough to describe a reproducible condition is freaking hard. Yet some people (unlike me) can do it. That means that I can find and kill the damn thing.
Very interesting Iprent As a mech engineer computer technology to me is really mind blowing. especially the advancement in the design and draughting area’s. From drawing boards and slide rules and modern day 3D drawing programmes.
I have always admired you guys because as an engineer mechanical problems are easy to find. If it rattles, it is too loose, if it gets too hot it’s too tight and if it squeaks it needs a little lubricant. Dead easy not like you guys especially some of the ones I have met who have built programmes so all the mechanical bits work in the right sequence. In your game when you turn the switch on and nothing happens. you always seem to know where to look. without getting zapped or causing major problems, with no indication or signs of the problem.
weka, and your list is why this limited form of democracy is a sick joke.
Bugger the democrats, seriously they put up a hard right conservative, and we are suppose to think that is better?
Seriously trump is bad, but to be frightened to vote conservative is just as evil. This was, and is the whole issue, why vote for the lesser evil, when all you get served is evil? Demand better.
Gosh, I really hope that one day I will feel sufficiently privileged and disconnected from other humans that when it comes to the moment of actually voting, I can opt out of the unpalatable task of choosing the least bad realistic option for the future while adopting a sneering morally superior tone about my cop-out.
Your approach fucks over everybody affected by the appointment of Scott Pruitt to the EPA – ie everyone on this planet.
Your approach fucks over all the people suffering from the increase in hate in the US over the last six months.
Your approach fucks over … the list is very long.
My approach was to support Bernie all the way to the point where he no longer had any chance of winning the nomination. Then I swallowed hard and changed my support to the next least bad realistic alternative. Here in New Zealand, the Greens are the party likely to get into government that is least bad from my perspective. So my approach is I’ll support them, even though I have serious problems with some of their positions.
Who are you going to fuck over in September because no party with a chance of getting into Parliament in New Zealand is pure and moral enough for you?
And will he expect them to thank him for his exemplary display of moral purity? Will they – and it’s always ‘they’ or ‘them’, always someone else – willingly sacrifice their welfare and lives because he tells them it’s for a higher cause?
There’s a point where moral purity becomes sanctimony, and that is the vice of hypocrisy that accommodates other people’s suffering as a mark of one’s supposed virtue.
I’ve friends directly affected by Trump’s actions and they can certainly tell the difference between Clinton and Trump. For at least one friend of mine in the States, it’s no delicate discussion about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whether its sinful to whistle on a Tuesday, it’s literally life and death for her with her health coverage disappearing and the spike in hate crimes against her community. She’s made it abundantly clear that she’d take great pleasure in making balloon animals with the intestines of people like Adam who refused to vote or wasted their vote on Stein because they wanted to strike a pose.
Yeah, I’ve just had my sister-in-law and niece visiting.
One of them works for a church in a Trump county. She’s got some really sad stories to tell, that have got a lot worse since November.
The other is a doctor whose last several positions were in Trump counties where there were severe opioid addiction problems. She’s currently doctoring in an impoverished area here in NZ, and has decided to lengthen her time here for several years beyond her original plans. Although the fact that she’s spending most of her time being a doctor instead of administering paperwork for insurance purposes has something to do with that.
Who is pure? I’ve never asked for purity, you seem obsessed by it rhinocrates, oddly enough. I’m asking for people to be moral, and act on it.
That aside did you miss that the Democrats lost everything, THEY LOST EVERYTHING! The house, the senate, and the presidency. So the Stein argument is a lie. Try watching somthing other MSNBC.
But sure live in lala land, where people who actually make moral choices are the enemy.
Yeah. Okay, that’s basically endorsing always putting others in charge. And those people that voters put in charge then determine what health policy or other social welfare policy will be brought forward, or not brought forward, or rolled back, or never discussed, based on their approach to and degree of accommodation towards capitalist markets.
Their rule is illegitimate – ie, they can’t justify it. And they always in representative democracies, in parliamentary systems, serve and never fundamentally question financial and business interests – interests that run on deliberate systems of trade and production and distribution that (in case you’ve missed it) have brought us screaming right on up to a cliff edge at a great rate of knots. (resources fucked, peoples’ lives fucked, the climate fucked, eco-systems fucked)
And yet still most advocate that we continue voting until the cows come home in some vain hope that there will one day be worthy leaders determined to do what is right. (There will an occasional exception that will serve to prove the rule, who will be swiftly stomped on and removed to the dead lands beyond the far fringes)
Not voting while seeking to develop parallel organsiational structures for society is entirely legitimate – and certainly more mature than just voting once every three, four or five years and going home ‘to the telly’ after the two minutes of participation as most people are apt to do.
And there are dozens of other legitimate routes of agency implied by those positions sketched out above.
But. How long now before we see the tired old mantra wheeled out? The one that claims that those who do not vote have no right to complain? Talk about defining politics and possibilities in the narrowest and most disempowering (not to mention downright dangerous) terms….
Allowing millions to be fucked over, often with fatal consequences, while knowing that it will happen as a consequence of your position is not a moral choice, it is a narcissistic one.
The people who suffer as a result will not thank you for sacrificing them.
That’s not living in lala land, la la land is a place where there are no consequences and hurt doesn’t matter. Living in reality means realising that there are more important things than keeping your hands lily white.
The opposition of voting versus joining a co-op is nonsensical – some of us can walk and chew gum at the same time.
It is also nonsensical to assume that if one ignores the state of the world as it is like a petulant child, it will magically go away and be replaced by exactly what you wish for. Power abhors a vacuum and if somehow representative democracy could be suddenly swept away, history has shown that what replaces it is usually much, much worse.
… and don’t presume to know what anybody does IRL away from a keyboard.
“… and don’t presume to know what anybody does IRL away from a keyboard.”
Ditto.
rhinocrates I’m not ignoring the world, as in the fact this was a hypothetical question, so I gave a answer to it.
You have point blankly refused to look at reality, the democrat’s have failed across the board. Why? They have failed, and you are ignoring it. It is becasue they are corrupt. That the whole so called establishment left in the USA have given up on working people, any chance you can see that?
Look I’ve got friends who will kill themselves when their health insurance runs out. That is reality, a harsh one. And you going to blame me, for a democratic party with no back bone, and no trust left with working people. You are going to have a go, becasue I say the system is broken. And say we should forget the ballot and fight for our rights. Well. It’s good to know where you stand.
Because here is the hypocrisy – If you buy into democracy, the right win, and they get to do what they want to do. People are going to suffer, that what happens in the system you are defending.
If you don’t get I’m fighting against evil, them you missing the point. and I can’t say too much more.
Adam, ‘fighting against evil’ is good, I don’t deny that you’re doing it, but you’ve become so obsessed with it as a Manichaean battle that you’ve ignored the collateral damage. If you are ‘good’, or label yourself as such, it does not necessarily follow that the consequences of what you do or fail to do are good.
I don’t give a toss about how virtuous you are. I care about the consequences of the kinds of actions or avoidance of action you promote. Right now I see people suffering because people who could have voted against Trump didn’t.
Trump’s win could have been prevented – a third of the electorate stayed at home, being too cool for school. There are direct consequences that were not part of the Democratic platform. Trump campaigned on anti-environmentalism, anti-semitism, islamophobia, homophobia, racism, misogyny and lo and behold, since his election, there has been a sharp rise in hate crimes that he inspired. These were not part of the Democratic Party campaign or policy.
Capitalism may be evil, but it is not the only evil in the world.
I agree that the Democratic party is corrupted, as are left parties worldwide that sold their souls to neoliberalism and called it the ‘centre’ (and don’t falsely assume that I’ve I’ve failed to see that – I’ve been very critical here about the state of the Labour Party). However, Sanders’ incursion at least showed that people aren’t chicken and changes were possible. In the aftermath they may get the kick up the arse that they need. One positive has been the spike in women now intending to run for office. Hopefully they will instigate change. Slowly, yes, but that’s life.
The left parties around the world are in a crisis of identity and integrity. In NZ at least we are able to cast protest votes for potential coalition partners or to at least get a voice in parliament. To hand a victory to the far right by saying they were always going to win is abdication and cowardice dressed up in sanctimony.
That is reality, a harsh one. And you going to blame me, for a democratic party with no back bone
With a disaster of this magnitude, there’s a lot of blame to go around and certainly plenty to spend on both. So what if you don’t get exactly what you want, completely and immediately? That’s no reason to throw your toys out of the cot; that’s a reason to work long and hard.
Two quotes from Voltaire: The perfect is the enemy of the good and The greatest crime is to do nothing because we can only do a little
My approach does not do any fornicating as you put it, it demands action. Not giving away sovereignty blindly to evil people.
You need to answer that question yourself, and you have, you are are willing to forsake morals for political power.
Yeah, not a choice I’m willing to make. Nor am I willing to stand aside, and let us keep falling into the abyss. Morality drives me to say, and act for the better world, not accept evil lithely.
Is it shocking to you that a stark evil is on display? Because you can help change that, and voting is only one part. I’d argue a very very small part, you can, and should do more. A lot more. Rather than get worked up by voting, which at the end of the day in a world dominated by corporations, is fast becoming the public illusion it always was. Try joining with others to improve your local community. Maybe sell your car, do some gardening, or join a Co-Op.
Nope. Voting people into positions of power whereby they could essentially ‘lord it over’ others fucked…well, much more than anything that’s just limited to Standing Rock.
Uh, Bill, there’s the minor matter of a thing called reality. Reality says we’re stuck with operating within the system we have now and for the foreseeable future.
Kidding ourselves that we can ignore or opt out of that simply cedes power to the nastier arseholes. Whereas engaging with reality at least gives us the chance to cede power to the not-quite-as-nasty arseholes that have at least a vague interest in our views and a chance of some overlap of vision for the future.
If that ugly reality of the system we have to work within ever changes, then we’ll have to make our decisions and take actions within that new framework. But it will still be in everyone’s interest to engage with it as it is, rather than pretending that opting out is a better choice.
Sheesh Andre, why don’t you just admit you are a conservative and give up.
Seriously if people thought and acted like you we would not have any democracy, we would not have a end to slavery, we would not have women participating, no rights, nothing, all we’d have is the right to bow our heads, and say “Yes MASSA”
Uh, Bill, there’s the minor matter of a thing called reality. Reality says …
Our current systems of governance persist precisely for as long as we lend them credence. And not a moment longer. They have no life of their own and there is no immutable reality or law of nature determining how we govern that means we have no option but acquiescence.
Actually, it might be better if there was. Thinking CC here and how we seem to imagine basic laws of physics can be ignored…
Anyway, where did anyone suggest we ignore or opt out of stuff related to governance?
I could vote. And I could simultaneously undermine some very basic assumptions and expectations attached to ‘from on high’ governance by dint of how I arrange my society with others. Or I could not vote.
Adam, slavery ended because people voted for a president that was against slavery, and was willing to go to war over it.
Women’s suffrage happened because people voted in legislators that supported it.
MMP happened because people voted for it.
The common factor in all these things? People voted for it, and won.
Yes, those votes were preceded by lots of hard work by activists that were subject to derision and worse in building the movement. And building the movement is essential. But voting for legislators sympathetic to the movement, or at least less hostile, is equally essential. At least until we move to a system that does away with the legislators.
Sorry about filling your replies tab, Bill. But as far as opting out of governance, in the case of an election like the recent US one, refusing to consider one of the two candidate with a chance of winning and instead going for an option with absolutely no chance, as adam apparently would have done had he been eligible, is effectively opting out.
One Two, all the history and evidence I’ve ever come across suggests that yes, slavery was a big part of what the US Civil War was about. But feel free to tell us what it was about in your alternative history. Probably best to start a fresh comment, though, rather than fill Bill’s replies tab.
Your approach fucks over everybody affected by the appointment of Scott Pruitt to the EPA – ie everyone on this planet.
Your approach fucks over all the people suffering from the increase in hate in the US over the last six months.
Your approach fucks over … the list is very long.
Fuck, yes. “I won’t vote for the lesser of two evils because I have morals” is why the USA is currently enjoying the dubious benefits of a descent into authoritarianism. If your morals involve assisting that process, it’s time to review your morals.
LOL, don’t ever stop Psycho Milt. Your muddled thinking is always good for a laugh.
[lprent: Translated loosely and almost sympathetically: I agree to disagree. ]
Does that mean you wouldn’t vote? Which in this case would be an affirmative for Tr*mp. I understand where you are coming from ethically, I’m just pointing out the pragmatics.
As we have had that choice for some time, and all it brings us is worse and worse people in politics. Pragmatics be damned, why support a steady slow crippling corruption?
So yeah I would not vote, and do what I normally do – get organised.
In our case New Zealand has great laws around Co-Operatives. Why are not people doing this more?
But to rely on the tired old political parties is beyond a sad joke. That is why I’m glad we have MMP, but even that has done far to little to improve the morality of our politicians, as this current government has put on display so often.
“But to rely on the tired old political parties is beyond a sad joke.”
Bill made similar commentary. Problem with that line is that it assumes that voting for the lesser evil (or in my case, the pragmatic choice), equates to relying on them.
Myself, I’ve been pretty up front that I think parliamentary politics is pretty much only good for holding the line while the real work gets done elsewhere. But I (and you) shouldn’t minimise it that much, because they still do some useful things, and that holding the line is the difference between super nasty and less nasty. You seem to believe we still have a choice for not nasty. In CC terms I think we are past that point. Which doesn’t mean we are without hope, but that whatever happens next it’s unlikely to be the revolution.
“In our case New Zealand has great laws around Co-Operatives. Why are not people doing this more?”
When people like yourself, Bill and me can’t work together, it’s probably not reasonable to expect others to who aren’t naturally interesting in that kind of co-operation.
Myself, I’ve been pretty up front that I think parliamentary politics is pretty much only good for holding the line
The status quo constraint,where real democratic contrarian debate is extinguished at all cost.
The illusion of democratic participation is well known,where the minority controls what is debated,where and when.
Galam (2004) for example showed in contrarian dynamics interesting properties arise.
“Applying our results to the European Union leads to the conclusion that it would be rather misleading to initiate large
public debates in most of the involved countries. Indeed, even starting from a huge initial majority of people in favor of the European Union, an open and free debate would lead to the creation of huge majority hostile to the European Union. This provides a strong ground to legitimize the on-going reluctance of most Europe an governments to hold referendum on associated issues.”
The full article is behind a paywall, but the abstract and your excerpt seem to suggest that “contrarian debate” is actually not democratic, as it changes the opinions of the populace rather than merely reporting them.
First point weka, I do work with Bill, mainly in picking his brain stuff. But as I’m a work locally type, and he is down the other end of the country, better to work the way we do.
As for working with you, I’d be happy to do that. I would not say I could not work with you.
What worries me, is so many here have got upset by a hypothetical question. Indeed a couple have gone into the realms of personal attack on a hypothetical not realising that we don’t actually live in the USA.
As I said and people have been deliberately obtuse about the NZ situation, and really don’t like being questioned on their morals.
I just don’t see the point in talking in circles with people who don’t want to listen to new ideas, or ideas which differ from theirs.
Amazon announced this week that it was launching Resistance Radio as a companion program for The Man in the High Castle, an alt-history drama loosely adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel. The pre-recorded radio program is basically a bunch of people talking about how the Third Reich is bad and does bad things. For some, they thought that applied to America’s current president (and/or they didn’t bother actually listening to it). In response, several irate opposers flocked to Amazon’s sponsored #ResistanceRadio hashtag to complain about the station’s “liberal agenda.”
Think about it, as one commenter puts it,
Trump supporter finds radio station talking about how terrible the Reich is, and how they should be opposed, and immediately starts defending the Nazi’s. What in the actual fuck?
Headlined AGAINST MERYL STREEP, the indictment declared, “Meryl Streep’s speechifying at the Golden Globes was the worst thing to happen since Trump’s election.” Hoo-kay.
3.9 Reserve Powers for NZ Council
3.9.1 NZ Council shall be authorised to suspend or cancel a leadership election in exceptional circumstances including, without limitation, the following:
• The death of a candidate;
• The calling of a General Election;
• Where NZ Council considers that the democratic integrity of the election process has been seriously undermined.
According to the Labour Party rules quoted above there does not need to be a leadership election when a general election has been called. This is understandable given that the process takes several weeks. Grant Robertson knows this. He has an opportunity to become leader by a simple majority vote in Caucus. If Labour keep polling badly and Chicken is behind Jacinda in preferred PM I’d predict he would make his move after June 23rd.That would be disastrous for Labour and given that Grant’s ambitions are insatiable he would put his own ambitions above those of Labour. You have been warned.
“Sponsored by Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina, the bill known as HR 1313 would allow for employers participating in “workplace wellness” programs to require their employees go through genetic testing, or risk taking a financial hit.”
Thanks to Private Eye for reminding us that post-truth politics existed in 1710. Back then, it was referred to as 'lying'. pic.twitter.com/KaAzDLAhyR— James Melville (@JamesMelville) March 10, 2017
Thanks to Private Eye for reminding us that post-truth politics existed in 1710. Back then, it was referred to as 'lying'. pic.twitter.com/KaAzDLAhyR
Looks like I might have to cut statcounter (one of our trackers) out of the site. It looks like they may be having some problems.
For a start, we’ve been getting some delays from statcounter over the last month not responding and slowing the page loads down. Something that is frigging irritating bearing in mind that only reason for having a visible tracker is to provide the Open Parachute ranking.
But I also just analyzed their tracking against the back end logs. That was because there was a major discrepancy between google analytics and their measurements. About 35k page views in February. It looks like google is right and statcounter close to 10% down.
I think that either a server dropped off or they started missing something like the mobiles.
But I’ve looked at what has been happening since, and there is still a significiant daily discrepancy between the three measures. Stat counter is down by several thousand page views per day.
There is always a variation on sessions because each tracking site uses different algorithms. Which is why sessions are pretty useless to measure on.
But the human page views have been generally conformant between trackers. There are variations on the page view counting, but that is mainly dependent on the timezone of measurement for a day and if the tracker is executed at the top of the page or at the end. Usually a variation of just a few hundred human page views over a week. Nothing visible anywhere on the statcounter site about a problem. In fact the site seems a bit dead. They have been happy to take our money each month.
That does kind of mean that there are getting to be a dearth of reliable trackers with a public face that something like Open Parachute can use. Sitemeter has completely screwed up several times in the past few years. There are a couple of others, but as each needs considerable testing before I can trust it on a high volume site. And I don’t have the time.
I’ll watch statcounter to the end of the month. If they continue to screw up then I’ll remove their drag on the site. Google analytics does a good job and is what I actually use for most analysis. I can take the money from statcounter and go and buy some services from them, or just look for a couple of paid plugins to enhance the site.
Several of us were having problems with statcounter slowing down page loading so we ended up installing a blocker suggested by BM (uBlock Origin). Dunno if that will cause a discrepancy between the different counters.
However it would have taken an awful lot of you to doing it to cause that level of discrepancy. It also doesn’t explain that whacking great pile of added page views on the 27th.
But yeah, statcounter has been a bit of a nuisance for speed lagging for a while now. Not as bad as sitemeter was before I got rid of it off the site years ago. I’d prefer to just use analytics which is very fast, non-intrusive and gives better stats as well. It is also pretty interesting watching it dodge blockers 🙂
However I decided a while ago that it was a good idea to leave a public track. It gives something for sites to aspire to 😈 What I should do is find out how to give some public access to the stats off that to Ken at Open Parachute. Analytics allows for specific logins to be able to access specific data. Maybe he’d leave off tormenting the flouridephobes for a while and code something to do that.
That report you linked to by AI has been well and truly debunked. They were quite literally making things up, but still, almost every major western outlet ran with uncritical “Oh My Gosh!” headlines for a day or two…mission accomplished.
New Zealand has its general election scheduled this October. This means the various parties are currently selecting their candidates, and as of yesterday, we now know the two major party candidates for the seat where I live (Taieri) – Ingrid Leary (Labour) and Stephen Jack (National). Leary’s ...
..By now, Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull (aka, Posie Parker) has come and gone. Her mission - to amplify a particularly pernicious form of transphobia (under the cloak of “women’s rights”) - an abject failure. As a marketing exercise to peddle her wares, it went well.A self-style "woman’s rights activist" Keen-Minshull/Parker has strident ...
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Hi,I go between excitement about AI — and absolute terror. I’m terrified it will take our jobs — and also kill us. Not kill us on purpose… more in a gray-goo kinda way.And as I wrote about over two years ago, I’m excited it might be the only thing to ...
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After yesterday's news that Stuart Nash deliberately and knowingly breached the OIA to cover up his corrupt disclosure of Cabinet information to his donors, the media now is focusing on the wider point: Nash's behaviour isn't isolated, but a symptom of the rot which has eaten away at transparency under ...
There was great disappointment following the just released poverty figures for the year ended to June 2022. Whatever your take, we are not facing up to the real child poverty problems.Some say the poverty figures show no significant change, some say there was a small improvement. Some say that the ...
Quiz1. Which is the most pleasing comment so far regarding this man’s indictment?a. He finally won a popular vote! b. “You can’t indicate me, I quit”c. Is this joy? It’s been so long since I’ve felt anything.2. “The boxset scandal that is Stuart Nash.”Who wrote this fine description? a. ...
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Big transport news today with the government beginning public engagement on options for the Waitemata Harbour Connections project. This project has had an incredibly long history, with previous versions somehow managing to be incredibly expensive, detrimental to most of the transport outcomes we are trying to achieve in Auckland, and ...
If ever there was an example of complacency about corruption and integrity in New Zealand politics it’s the fact that the Prime Minister’s Office knew back in 2021 that Cabinet Minister Stuart Nash was feeding privileged Cabinet information to business donors but did nothing about it. This is one of ...
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So, after interfering with the police, and then interfering with immigration decisions, Stuart Nash has finally been sacked: Stuart Nash has been sacked as a minister, after Stuff revealed he had emailed business figures, including donors, detailing private Cabinet discussions. Prime Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed the people Nash emailed ...
Nearly 25% of mortgages in Auckland are deemed at risk in a 1-in-100 year flood event. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: Once a year, every year, from now on, in our not-so-slow-cooking climate crisis, there will be a moment when the most important number in Aotearoa’s own personal, national ...
Item One: About a confected crisis Please bear with me for a moment, readers outside Auckland, I wish to sound the klaxon. Auckland, we have until 11pm today to have our say. About what? About this, as copied and pasted from Pippa Coom’s Facebook page:The "austerity" budget is built on ...
Buzz from the Beehive Yet again, the statement we were looking for could not be found on the Beehive website. Nor was it on the Scoop or Green Party websites. But – come to think of it – we are probably wasting our time by searching. Our quest is for the ...
The following is from a speech given by Arundhati Roy at the Swedish Academy on March 22, 2023, at a conference called Thought and Truth Under Pressure and reprinted from Literary Hub. I thank the Swedish Academy for inviting me to speak at this conference and for affording me the privilege ...
After almost two decades of racism, Australia is finally getting off its "stop the boats" bullshit. But don't worry, racists - Michael Wood has your back!The Government wants to increase the time it can detain without a warrant people seeking asylum en masse from four days to 28 ...
Last year, the Education and Workforce Committee recommended that the government legislate for pay transparency to prevent employers from secretly discriminating. This ought to be a bread and butter issue for Labour - discrimination sees women (and particularly Māori and Pasifika women) paid significantly less than men. But since then ...
Thomas Cranmer writes – ———— An unruly mob in Albert Park has catapulted New Zealand into the global headlines with ugly images that may become iconic in the debate about the dangers of transgenderism. ———— Bravo Kellie-Jay Keen. She did the job that needed to be done. For all the ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Global warming is melting the Arctic ice cap, and that’s having unforeseen effects on the world’s weather — even thousands of miles away from the North Pole. Some climate scientists have begun to link increasingly common heat waves in Europe to what is ...
Hot on the heels of the demotion of former police Minister Stuart Nash for breaching the Cabinet Manual, Radio New Zealand has revealed the close links between lobbyists and politicians- an area of New Zealand politics that is completely unregulated. The evidence in Guyon Espiner’s series Mate, Comrade, Brother, the ...
At the Auckland Transport board meeting today a series of papers really highlight the cost of sprawl. For the last few years, the Supporting Growth work has been looking at designing the strategic transport networks for future greenfield areas in the South, Northwest, North (around Dairy flat) and in Warkworth. ...
Hi,Today’s newsletter is something I’ve wanted to report for ages, but I have been waiting on a New Zealand judge to make a ruling. That ruling has been made — so here we go.Enjoy.A scene from Mister Organ.Two Police Officers Knock on My DoorOn November 4 last year, I was ...
Only three days after Nanaia Mahuta had dinner with China’s Foreign Minister, New Zealand’s intelligence chiefs were talking about state actors interfering in New Zealand politics and using ethnic communities here for espionage purposes. Neither GSCB Director (and new SIS director) Andrew Hampton nor acting SIS CEO Phil McKee ...
In what has been one of her most important diplomatic mission, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has opened the door for a visit to Beijing by Prime Minister Chris Hipkins later this year. Such a mission is regarded as vital with a new Prime Minister Li Qiang settling into office. ...
Saturday morning, we went to Albert Park.We were there to show support, to challenge words of demonisation.To repeat those words from Michèle A’Court:Making them sound “other” is a technique used by racists and homophobes to dehumanise whole groups of people who “aren’t like them”. If you dehumanise people, it is ...
Over a million New Zealanders will receive a little extra to help with the cost of living as a result of our 1 April changes. Around the world, inflation is causing costs to rise and we’re feeling it here at home. In tough times, we need to support those who ...
With benefit changes coming into effect tomorrow, the Green Party is calling on the Government to lift benefits to liveable levels to make sure everyone has what they need to thrive. ...
Following decades of work by the Green Party alongside the organics sector, people will finally be able to be confident that products labelled organic have met standards. ...
The Green Party supports immediate Government action to close the pay gap as called for in an open letter released today by the Human Rights Commission and 50 other organisations. ...
The Green Party is today welcoming the release of the Government’s waste strategy, but says it has a big gap without action on the container return scheme for beverage containers. ...
The Government’s decision to introduce ‘mass arrivals’ legislation goes against the values we all share of Aotearoa as a place where all people are treated fairly, the Green Party says. ...
MINISTER DAVIDSON MUST RESIGN AFTER 'VIOLENCE' COMMENTS Marama Davidson should stand down as ‘Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence’ for the clear and outrageous statement she made at the Posie Parker protest that ‘white straight men’ are the cause of violence. Her offensive, racist, and sexist remarks ...
In response to Newshub and Amelia Wade’s obvious and ham-fisted attempt at a typical and predicted political hit job. As any politically aware reporter would know, any Cabinet subcommittee has a duty and obligation as a part of any government to respond to any UN declaration, in this case ...
Good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today and in your busy lives turning up to this meeting. Forty five years ago, in Howick, often described as racist, and where few Maori lived because it had been a ‘Fencible’ settlement at the time of the Anglo-Maori ...
The Green Party has marked the National Party’s new education policy and given it a fail, especially for its failure to address the underlying drivers of school performance. ...
“This is it; 2023 will be the last opportunity New Zealand has to get a government that will confront the climate emergency with the urgency it demands,” says the Green Party’s co-leader and climate change spokesperson, James Shaw. ...
Political parties that want to negotiate with the Green Party must come to the table with much faster, bolder climate action, co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson emphasised in their State of the Planet speech today. ...
Political parties that want to negotiate with the Green Party after the election must come to the table with much faster, bolder climate action, co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson emphasised today. ...
You will never truly understand, from the pictures you’ve seen in the newspapers or on the six o-clock news, the sheer scale of the devastation wrought by Cyclone Gabrielle. ...
We’re boosting incomes and helping ease cost of living pressures on Kiwis through a range of bread and butter support measures that will see pensioners, students, families, and those on main benefits better off from the start of next month. ...
The error Labour Ministers made by stopping work on a beverage container return scheme will be reversed by the Greens at the earliest opportunity as part of the next Government. ...
“Cabinet needs to do better - and today has shown exactly why we need Green Ministers in cabinet, so we can prioritise action to cut climate pollution and support people to make ends meet,” says Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson. ...
Biggest increase in food prices for over three decades shows the need for an excess profit tax on corporations to help people put food on the table. ...
From today, 1.8 million flu vaccines are available to help protect New Zealanders from winter illness, Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall has announced. “Vaccination against flu is safe and will be a first line of defence against severe illness this winter,” Dr Verrall said. “We can all play a part ...
Associate Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage Willow-Jean Prime has congratulated Professor Rangi Mātāmua (Ngāi Tūhoe) who was last night named the prestigious Te Pou Whakarae o Aotearoa New Zealander of the Year. Professor Mātāmua, who is the government's Chief Adviser Mātauranga Matariki, was the winner of the New Zealander ...
The Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta has announced further sanctions on political and military figures from Russia and Belarus as part of the ongoing response to the war in Ukraine. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Alekseevna Lvova-Belova ...
A new public housing development planned for Whangārei will provide 95 warm and dry, modern homes for people in need, Housing Minister Megan Woods says. The Kauika Road development will replace a motel complex in the Avenues with 89 three-level walk up apartments, alongside six homes. “Whangārei has a rapidly ...
New Zealand welcomes the substantial conclusion of negotiations on the United Kingdom’s accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), Trade and Export Growth Minister Damien O’Connor announced today. “Continuing to grow our export returns is a priority for the Government and part of our plan to ...
Ngā Iwi o Taranaki and the Crown initial Taranaki Maunga collective redress deed Ngā Iwi o Taranaki and the Crown have today initialled the Taranaki Maunga Collective Redress Deed, named Te Ruruku Pūtakerongo, Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Andrew Little says. “I am pleased to be here for this ...
Minister for Pacific Peoples Barbara Edmonds has announced the 2023 Pacific Language week series, highlighting the need to revitalise and sustain languages for future generations. “Pacific languages are a cornerstone of our health, wellbeing and identity as Pacific peoples. When our languages are spoken, heard and celebrated, our communities thrive,” ...
880,000 pensioners to get a boost to Super, including 5000 veterans 52,000 students to see a bump in allowance or loan living costs Approximately 223,000 workers to receive a wage rise as a result of the minimum wage increasing to $22.70 8,000 community nurses to receive pay increase of up ...
Over 8000 community nurses will start receiving well-deserved pay rises of up to 15 percent over the next month as a Government initiative worth $200 million a year kicks in, says Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall. “The Government is committed to ensuring nurses are paid fairly and will receive ...
Tākiri mai ana te ata Ki runga o ngākau mārohirohi Kōrihi ana te manu kaupapa Ka ao, ka ao, ka awatea Tihei mauri ora Let the dawn break On the hearts and minds of those who stand resolute As the bird of action sings, it welcomes the dawn of a ...
The Government is introducing a scheme which will lift incomes for artists, support them beyond the current spike in cost of living and ensure they are properly recognised for their contribution to New Zealand’s economy and culture. “In line with New Zealand’s Free Trade Agreement with the UK, last ...
New Zealand is welcoming a decision by the United Nations General Assembly to ask the International Court of Justice to consider countries’ international legal obligations on climate change. The United Nations has voted unanimously to adopt a resolution led by Vanuatu to ask the ICJ for an advisory opinion on ...
More Police officers are being deployed to the frontline with the graduation of 59 new constables from the Royal New Zealand Police College today. “The graduation for recruit wing 364 was my first since becoming Police Minister last week,” Ginny Andersen said. “It was a real honour. I want to ...
Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta met with Vanuatu Foreign Minister Jotham Napat in Port Vila, today, signing a new Statement of Partnership — Aotearoa New Zealand’s first with Vanuatu. “The Mauri Statement of Partnership is a joint expression of the values, priorities and principles that will guide the Aotearoa New Zealand–Vanuatu relationship into ...
The Government has passed new legislation amending the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) levy regime, ensuring the best balance between a fair and cost effective funding model. The Fire and Emergency New Zealand (Levy) Amendment Bill makes changes to the existing law to: charge the levy on contracts of ...
The Government has passed the Organic Products and Production Bill through its third reading today in Parliament helping New Zealand’s organic sector to grow and lift export revenue. “The Organic Products and Production Bill will introduce robust and practical regulation to give businesses the certainty they need to continue to ...
The Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Bill, which will make it easier for New Zealanders to safely prove who they are digitally has passed its third and final reading today. “We know New Zealanders want control over their identity information and how it’s used by the companies and services they ...
The full Cyclone Gabrielle Recovery Taskforce has met formally for the first time as work continues to help the regions recover and rebuild from Cyclone Gabrielle. The Taskforce, which includes representatives from business, local government, iwi and unions, covers all regions affected by the January and February floods and cyclone. ...
Changes have been made to legislation to give subcontractors the confidence they will be paid the retention money they are owed should the head contractor’s business fail, Minister for Building and Construction Megan Woods announced today. “These changes passed in the Construction Contracts (Retention Money) Amendment Act safeguard subcontractors who ...
Transport Minister Michael Wood has unveiled five scenarios for one of the most significant city-shaping projects for Tāmaki Makaurau in coming decades, the additional Waitematā Harbour crossing. “Aucklanders and businesses have made it clear that the biggest barriers to the success of Auckland is persistent congestion and after years of ...
The Government has passed new legislation that ensures New Zealand’s civil aviation rules are fit for purpose in the 21st century, Associate Transport Minister Kiri Allan says. The Civil Aviation Bill repeals and replaces the Civil Aviation Act 1990 and the Airport Authorities Act 1966 with a single modern law ...
A Bill aimed at helping to reduce delays in the coronial jurisdiction passed its third reading today. The Coroners Amendment Bill, amongst other things, will establish new coronial positions, known as Associate Coroners, who will be able to perform most of the functions, powers, and duties of Coroners. The new ...
The Prime Minister has asked the Cabinet Secretary to conduct a review into communications between Stuart Nash and his donors. The review will take place over the next two months. The review will look at whether there have been any other breaches of cabinet collective responsibility or confidentiality, or whether ...
The new Recovery Visa to help bring in additional migrant workers to support cyclone and flooding recovery has attracted over 600 successful applicants within its first month. “The Government is moving quickly to support businesses bring in the workers needed to recover from Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods,” Michael ...
Bills to ensure non-teaching employees and contractors at schools, and unlicensed childcare services like mall crèches are vetted by police, and provide safeguards for school board appointments have passed their first reading today. The Education and Training Amendment Bill (No. 3) and the Regulatory Systems (Education) Amendment Bill have now ...
Wānanga will gain increased flexibility and autonomy that recognises the unique role they fill in the tertiary education sector, Associate Minister of Education Kelvin Davis has announced. The Education and Training Amendment Bill (No.3), that had its first reading today, proposes a new Wānanga enabling framework for the three current ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta will travel to Vanuatu today, announcing that Aotearoa New Zealand will provide further relief and recovery assistance there, following the recent destruction caused by Cyclones Judy and Kevin. While in Vanuatu, Minister Mahuta will meet with Vanuatu Acting Prime Minister Sato Kilman, Foreign Minister Jotham ...
The Government is backing Police and making communities safer with the roll-out of state-of-the-art tools and training to frontline staff, Police Minister Ginny Andersen said today. “Frontline staff face high-risk situations daily as they increasingly respond to sophisticated organised crime, gang-violence and the availability of illegal firearms,” Ginny Andersen said. ...
The Government has provided Police with more tools to crack down on gang offending with the passing of new legislation today which will further improve public safety, Justice Minister Kiri Allan says. The Criminal Activity Intervention Legislation Bill amends existing law to: create new targeted warrant and additional search powers ...
The Government today announced far-reaching changes to the way we make, use, recycle and dispose of waste, ushering in a new era for New Zealand’s waste system. The changes will ensure that where waste is recycled, for instance by households at the kerbside, it is less likely to be contaminated ...
New legislation passed by the Government today will make it harder for gangs and their leaders to benefit financially from crime that causes considerable harm in our communities, Minister of Justice Kiri Allan says. Since the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009 came into effect police have been highly successful in ...
This evening I have advised the Governor-General to dismiss Stuart Nash from all his ministerial portfolios. Late this afternoon I was made aware by a news outlet of an email Stuart Nash sent in March 2020 to two contacts regarding a commercial rent relief package that Cabinet had considered. In ...
Legislation to enable more build-to-rent developments has passed its third reading in Parliament, so this type of rental will be able to claim interest deductibility in perpetuity where it meets the requirements. Housing Minister Dr Megan Woods, says the changes will help unlock the potential of the build-to-rent sector and ...
A law passed by Parliament today exempts employers from paying fringe benefit tax on certain low emission commuting options they provide or subsidise for their staff. “Many employers already subsidise the commuting costs of their staff, for instance by providing car parks,” Environment Minister David Parker said. “This move supports ...
Today marks the 40th anniversary of Closer Economic Relations (CER), our gold standard free trade agreement between New Zealand and Australia. “CER was a world-leading agreement in 1983, is still world-renowned today and is emblematic of both our countries’ commitment to free trade. The WTO has called it the world’s ...
The Government is making procedural changes to the Immigration Act to ensure that 2013 amendments operate as Parliament intended. The Government is also introducing a new community management approach for asylum seekers. “While it’s unlikely we’ll experience a mass arrival due to our remote positioning, there is no doubt New ...
The Government welcomes progress on public sector pay adjustment (PSPA) agreements, and the release of the updated public service pay guidance by the Public Service Commission today, Minister for the Public Service Andrew Little says. “More than a dozen collective agreements are now settled in the public service, Crown Agents, ...
The Government has introduced the Severe Weather Emergency Recovery Legislation Bill to further support the recovery and rebuild from the recent severe weather events in the North Island. “We know from our experiences following the Canterbury and Kaikōura earthquakes that it will take some time before we completely understand the ...
Further assistance is now available to businesses impacted by Cyclone Gabrielle, with Customs able to offer payment plans and to remit late-payments, Customs Minister Meka Whaitiri has announced. “This is part of the Government’s ongoing commitment to assist economic recovery in the regions,” Meka Whaitiri said. “Cabinet has approved the ...
More than 41,000 sole parent families will be better off with a median gain of $20 a week Law change estimated to help lift up to 14,000 children out of poverty Child support payments will be passed on directly to people receiving a sole parent rate of main benefit, making ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne Morgan Hancock/AAP With 44% of enrolled voters counted in today’s Aston federal byelection, the ABC has Labor expected to win ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne Morgan Hancock/AAP With 44% of enrolled voters counted in today’s Aston federal byelection, the ABC has Labor expected to win ...
Analysis - When is a cabinet minister not a cabinet minister? The faulty logic of Stuart Nash has landed him and Labour in a heap of trouble but opened the door to serious reform of the Official Information Act, Tim Watkin writes. ...
Jubi News in Jayapura Indonesia’s Papua police chief Inspector-General Mathius D Fakhiri has called for action to ensure that “security disturbances” in the Puncak Jaya highlands do not widen in the face of escalating attacks by pro-independence militants. “For Puncak, we will take immediate action,” he said. According to General ...
What are you going to be watching this month? We round up everything coming to streaming services this month, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, Neon and TVNZ+. The biggies Party Down (all seasons on TVNZ+ from April 1) Thirteen years is a long time between drinks and ...
Ginny Andersen has landed a hot-potato portfolio and has been in Cabinet less than two months - the opposition will be eager to test her mettle this election year. ...
The executive producer of Modern Family has issued an incendiary claim about New Zealanders cheering and clapping in public. Hayden Donnell gets to the bottom of things.The sitcom Modern Family is remembered as a “warm-hearted story about the unbreakable bonds of family”; a tale of radically different people overcoming ...
As rain kept falling across January, February and into March, all band members cold do was sit at home cancelling festivals and posting sad Facebook messages to fans. The first post landed on January 3. As wild weather began hitting the country, campers around Northland packed up their tents ...
Because pro-social behaviour emerges so often after disaster, community empowerment should be central to disaster mitigation and recoveryOpinion: Cyclone Gabrielle caused major damage across the North Island. This unprecedented climate event created great uncertainty. People are wondering if, or when, they can return to their homes, the extent to ...
"We, women, loving you; you, men, finding new women to love": a Francophile love story in NZ Louis woke up and found out Marine was not lying next to him in bed. He checked his phone – 5:30am. The aurora shone a bright gold on the windows of the detached ...
Every weekday, The Detail makes sense of the big news stories. This week, we looked at how co-governance really works, Labour's record on climate action, what the new AUKUS nuclear submarine deal means for New Zealand, Posie Parker's visit to Auckland and the free speech debate, and the damage processed foods are ...
The radio workers were caught by the unexpected speed of the decline of NZ's consumer economy, since Christmas – and they won't be the last. Jonathan Milne reports. When broadcaster Tova O’Brien uttered the resounding words, "they’ve f***ed us", they resonated beyond the 1 percent audience share of a small talk radio operation ...
A New Zealand Battery Project centred on Lake Onslow in Central Otago is up against a cheaper North Island alternative Studies into whether a massive pumped-hydro scheme at Lake Onslow is New Zealand’s best bet for a secure energy future may have only four more months to run. While the ...
This is The Detail's Long Read - one in-depth story read by us every weekend. This week, it's Jungle Warfare, written by Ellen Rykers and published in New Zealand Geographic's March/April 2023 edition. You can find the full article, with photos by Adrian Malloch, here. Hundreds of pest plant species—many of them garden escapees—run rampant in ...
The Red, White & Brass star talks spectacle, honouring family sacrifices and his debut lead role over a Tongan lunch in Otāhuhu.Name a creative pursuit and 28-year-old Tongan New Zealander John-Paul Foliaki will give it a go. That is, if he hasn’t already. Foliaki plays the lead role, Maka, ...
To mark 100 years since the great short story writer’s death, books editor Claire Mabey marathonned her collected works – these are the top 20.Reader, I did it. I read all of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. Confession: I haven’t always been a fan. I have tedious memories of ...
In her first season as an ANZ Premiership captain, Ameliaranne Ekenasio was nervous about filling the shoes of the legendary Magic captains before her. But, as Merryn Anderson writes, the quiet leader has the full respect of the side who voted her in. When the Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic created history ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Ordway, Associate Professor Sport Management and Sport Integrity Lead, University of Canberra Lawyers for Australian 800-metre star Peter Bol say allegations the runner engaged in doping should be dropped after two independent labs found no evidence he used a banned substance. ...
Vanuatu’s Supreme Court has ruled in favour of Trading Post Ltd, the owner of the VanuatuDaily Post newspaper, BUZZ FM96 and other media outlets, in a case against the government’s refusal to renew the company’s former media director’s work permit. Dan McGarry, who served as a director of the ...
Balclutha-based farmer Stephen Jack has been selected by local party members as National’s candidate in Taieri for the 2023 General Election. “Taieri is my home and I’m incredibly excited to have the opportunity to campaign for a National Government ...
Analysis - The Stuart Nash scandal has the potential to damage Labour's election chances, Marama Davidson creates controversy and Auckland's second harbour crossing to be built earlier than expected. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare JM Burns, Assistant Professor and Non-executive Director, Bond University Shutterstock The story of the Aboriginal Community Benefit Fund, whose name and marketing misled thousands of customers into believing it was Indigenous owned and run, is a stark example of ...
It’s the biannual reminder to tamper with that pesky analogue clock you still have in your kitchen for some reason (or at the least your microwave/car stereo). This Sunday at 3am, we will all gain an hour of sleep as the clocks roll back ahead of winter. Get ready for ...
The chief ombudsman has elected to reopen his investigation into an email from former minister Stuart Nash to a pair of donors back in 2020. The email, which only came to light this week, quickly triggered Nash’s dismissal from cabinet. But in bad news for the prime minister Chris Hipkins, ...
Last week we celebrated The Bulletin’s fifth birthday with Spinoff members and staff at The Spinoff’s offices in Auckland. The Bulletin launched in March 2018 seeking to curate news and great journalism and email that to people for free each weekday morning. That hasn’t changed and it’s still going strong. ...
The biggest increase in the history of the minimum wage will have a huge impact for workers on low wages, says the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. From tomorrow, the minimum wage will rise to $22.70, up from $21.20. This increase will benefit ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By George Siemens, Co-Director, Professor, Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning, University of South Australia agsandrew/Shutterstock Recent public interest in tools like ChatGPT has raised an old question in the artificial intelligence community: is artificial general intelligence (in this case, ...
Auckland’s wet summer is delivering one final blow just in time for the weekend. The Synthony festival, due to be held on Saturday at Auckland Domain and featuring performances by Shapeshifter, Dave Dobbyn and Kimbra, has been postponed following predictions of heavy rainfall across the day. More than 20,000 people ...
We would like to see a temporary by-pass of the major slip on State Highway 25A built to alleviate the concerns of the residents of the Eastern Side of Coromandel. Cyclone Gabrielle inflicted substantial damage to roading on the Coromandel Peninsula. ...
Alex Casey watches Wellmania, the new Netflix comedy starring Instagram sensation Celeste Barber. The lowdownBased on the book by journalist Brigid Delaney, Netflix comedy Wellmania follows successful yet shambolic Australian food writer Liv Bealey (Celeste Barber) as she embarks on a quest to get well as quickly as possible. ...
The Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier says he has reopened his investigation into an Official Information Act complaint about a decision by former Minister Stuart Nash. "The original enquiry was discontinued in May last year in discussion with the ...
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation Tōpūtanga Tapuhi Kaitiaki o Aotearoa (NZNO) has welcomed this morning’s Government announcement to address pay disparities in the nursing and kaiāwhina workforces from 1 April. NZNO Chief Executive Paul ...
Don’t let broccoli’s virtuous goody two-shoes reputation put you off – these verdant and versatile florets make the perfect addition to tray bakes, salads, soups and more.I reckon broccoli’s “superfood” status has given it a bit of a bad reputation. Because it’s so healthy (and reasonably inoffensive), its nutrients ...
A poem from Michele Leggott’s forthcoming book Face to the Sky. escher x nendo I hear you Eddie Woo coming clear across the galleries of intercochlear space you have the measure of these galaxies earthmeasure you have the measure of their difference earthmisia you translate one world artemisia and here ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday, $26) The new, smaller format of Bonnie Garmus’ ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Blunden, Professor and Head of Paediatric Sleep Research, CQUniversity Australia ShutterstockWhat would happen to a person if they didn’t get the sleep they needed? Hedya, age 11, Australia This is a really good question Heyda, because it ...
Within hours of Duncan Garner telling listeners ‘It looks like the end of us’, the station’s website, social media and archives had been scrubbed from the internet.Right now across Auckland you can still see ads for Leo Molloy’s doomed mayoral campaign and electorate offices adorned with a smiling Jacinda ...
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has spoken more about the Stuart Nash email scandal at a media conference at the Manurewa RSA today, saying Nash has been "ultimately held accountable". ...
By Barbara Dreaver in Port Vila Vanuatu is in celebration mode after winning a significant battle on the world stage over climate change. In a United Nations resolution spearheaded by Vanuatu, the world’s top court will now advise on countries’ legal obligations to fight climate change. It also means the ...
By Jan Kohout, RNZ Pacific journalist New Caledonia’s Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) say they will tell the French Prime Minister of the Kanak people’s “sense of humiliation” over the last independence referendum. The pro-independence alliance is set to talk to the French state from April 7-15. The ...
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is visiting the Manurewa RSA meeting veterans who are among hundreds of thousands to receive higher payments from tomorrow. ...
This is an excerpt from The Spinoff’s pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up to have it delivered to your inbox every Friday here. If you want a middle-aged white man to play a disappointed-with-the-state-of-their-life middle-aged-white-man, you have two options: Jason Segel or Chris O’Dowd. Clearly, Segel was already busy ...
Over four million people have returned their Individual Forms for the 2023 Census, Stats NZ said today. “This is a great milestone. We didn’t hit this milestone until 30 April in the 2018 Census. I would like to thank everybody who has been counted ...
The government's recent announcement of five high carbon options for the next harbour crossing has disappointed those concerned about climate change. TRAC, a rail advocacy collective, opposes the short-sighted decision, citing the urgent need to reduce ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Guzyal Hill, Senior Lecturer, Charles Darwin University Shutterstock Sunday will mark the end of the Daylight Saving Time (DST) in eastern Australia, but there are many who would like to see it last longer or permanently. Twice a year, New ...
He Pou a Rangi Climate Change Commission has launched a call for evidence to support its work on Aotearoa New Zealand’s emissions reduction targets and emissions budgets. This call for evidence is an opportunity for anyone to share information, data and ...
As the move to digital commerce continues, fraudsters are counting on consumers to let their guard down and to supply personal information. And according to new research released today by global payments technology company Visa (NYSE: V), which ...
On the other side to Sir Ed is the scene of one of our greatest conservation triumphs. Allison Hess explains.Stuffed into your wallet or passed across the till, the New Zealand $5 note circulates largely unobserved. But if you were to take a closer look at the ubiquitous burnt ...
The Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) is asking for views on which overseas regulators it will draw on for some hazardous substance assessments and reassessments. The recognised international regulators must regulate hazardous substances in a similar ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Shortis, Lecturer, RMIT University Alex Brandon/AP Events often seem inevitable in hindsight. The indictment of former US President Donald Trump on criminal charges has been a possibility since the start of his presidency – arguably, since close to the ...
Te Hautū Kahurangi | Tertiary Education Union is ready to fight for every job at Te Pūkenga, as members digest a series of shocking statements from their Chief Executive on RNZ’s Nine To Noon programme today. Peter Winder stated, amongst other things, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology Media Whale Stock/Shutterstock What would you do to get more likes or shares on your favourite social media platform this April Fool’s Day? Would you blast an airhorn ...
New Zealand Politics Daily is a collation of the most prominent issues being discussed in New Zealand. It is edited by Dr Bryce Edwards of The Democracy Project. Today’s contentSTUART NASH, OIA Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Stuart Nash scandal boils down to cock-up vs ‘conspiracy’ (paywalled) Marc Daalder (Newsroom): The opaque transparency of the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tara McAllister, Research Fellow, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington Shutterstock/Guy Hasler As global environmental challenges grow, people and societies are increasingly looking to Indigenous knowledge for solutions. Indigenous knowledge is particularly appealing for addressing climate change because ...
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We need immigrants to work here cause Kiwi’s are either too stoned, lazy or sitting on the other side of the road begging while immigrant workers rebuild Christchurch (total misquote but the essence of Hides Bull feces NBR).
I call Bull shit cause once again we have yet another immigrant being exploited by a Kiwi company that won’t employ Kiwi’s – not because of pot, not because of lack of work ethic but cause $$$$.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/326339/food-company-fined-a-further-$11k-over-immigrant's-wages
Judge Inglis said this sort of case was all too common in New Zealand.
“The position Mr Domingo has found himself in is not unique.
“It is clear that it has taken a degree of personal endurance to pursue matters to this point.
“Mr Domingo said that he had felt like ‘giving up’ in terms of seeking compliance with the authority’s awards. These are observations which the Employment Court frequently hears in cases such as this.”
Our journey to the bottom continues
Bill will be here shortly to label you and RNZ xenophobic in due course.
How on earth is anyone allowed to justify importing low skilled labour here, permanent or temporary? Allow the wages to rise to a level that is sustainable for kiwis , expensive kiwi cost of living but international third world wages being payed.
[Mischaracterisation riding the back of smear…or is that the other way around? No matter – it’s really, really stupid to attack the site’s authors. One week ban.] – Bill
What a dreadful place this government has lead us to when it comes to housing. New Zealand now has the most unaffordable housing across a range of measures. New Zealand, once admired for the housing of its citizens, has a government which has watched over a division in society on housing which may never be repaired.
http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2017/03/new-zealand-housing-most-unaffordable-in-the-world-the-economist.html
High time ownership ( or an equitable interest) in a property in NZ gave you compulsory tax residence-(offshore group) in NZ and you are taxed on your worldwide tax income & assets against which you may offset any taxes paid as a tax resident – (onshore group).
That should tax care of the super problem & a few others too.
This government like it that way because it means a few rich people can become even bigger bludgers. If we had equality then people may actually become independent of rich people and then the rich wouldn’t be able to bludge off of everyone else.
Good thought’s – I think we should all do some serious bludging off the rich to get to the equality model.
I’ve just been over to Frank Macskasy’s page to read his immigration article.
Now I know that John key didn’t take responsibility for anything but there is a picture montage there of newspaper headlines and it’s like “wow” I found the visual impact pretty strong.
Don’t know who owns it or who did it but felt it would make an excellent poster etc and deserves widespread distribution. One picture a thousand words.
and BTW not sure if it can be fixed -but when I click on the usual spot on the feed I normally get Frank’s picture not the article. I’m sure Frank’s good lookin’ but?
Tenants pay $200-plus to share ‘slum’ with rats – Business – NZ Herald …
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11815660
For sale: the $5m slum Steve Braunias wanders through the grim …
m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11815645
18 months ago I approached the head tenant of where I pay $250.00 per week for a run down shithole that has a lose tap, poor drainage /guttering issues , and a shower that does not drain properly.
It also has faulty wiring that has pooled at some stage and shorted( blown ) the ceiling light socket.
Several other wall sockets are faulty.
As a result of this weather bomb we are having – I found water pouring in from the wall in the bathroom/toilet area at about half way up the wall.
This pooled into the open plan area where the carpet now is .
I would estimate 1-2 cm’s or more in depth.
The place is a potential electrical deathtrap with water back- pooling in the walls.
I also note as a past painter and decorator the dilapidated paint job and the amateur attempts to fill all the punch holes in the walls and doors.
Two weeks ago I suffered my first heart attack and received a stent in a heart artery. I am still breathless and sometimes exhausted as a result. And I am furious.
It is obvious that the landlord has bought this property as a part of a cheap investment portfolio and intends to pay as little as possible ( nothing ) toward either its livability or its maintenance. It obviously has had NO money spent on bringing it up to standard . It would be around early 1980’s vintage.
Reading the above article in the NZ Herald today has made me feel almost vigilante towards this National govt that has enabled this type of criminal element to get away with this sort of blatant racketeering.
I will approach the head tenant and if he doesn’t grow some balls ASAP I will go to the Tenancy Tribunal on Monday , and force the issue. Another recourse is social media.
A message to both Bill English and Andrew Little.
To Bill English, – I AM NOT SOME ANIMAL OR DOG TO BE TREATED LIKE SHIT.
To Andrew Little. I believe you and Jacinda Adern have it in your power to do something about this sort of state of affairs that has been legitimized by this National govt up and down this country to so many of their fellow countrymen and women.
Stop standing at the gateway umming and ahhing. Get bold and do something.
You have EVERY moral right to do so.
Do that ?… and the people will carry you through the next election and on into govt for the years to come . And you will have the peoples MANDATE to rectify this viscous govts avarice and self serving agenda.
Do nothing?
Then you amply deserve the wrath and the cursing of the voters for your timid inaction.
No, from what you’re saying, it is a death trap – and that’s without the water. The water increases the probability of death.
This type of stuff has been building up for some time. Decades in fact as the rentiers have realised that being immoral arseholes that endanger peoples lives has no consequences.
The problem with National is that they’ll keep it that way.
The article neglected to mention the army of cockroaches that scuttle round the floors and up the walls at night. Refrigerators (privately owned and kept in tenants’ rooms to keep food safe) are soon invaded by the cockroaches. The place is a hell hole but is better than nothing. A few fortunate tenants have managed to escape and move into HNZ flats. Auckland needs far more flats for single people on low incomes but HNZ do not seem interested in this group.
@ WILD KATIPO
Here’s a thought, if the place is such a dive, why not move out?
They’ve just had a heart attack, the stress and effort of moving house is probably not a good idea.
But even if they hadn’t, I can think of plenty of circumstances that make moving hard.
Yes, I’m aware of that. However, that was recently, this has been going on for 18 months apparently. Thus, there was ample opportunity to move out beforehand.
Moreover, why move into such a dive in the first place?
To make room for my son to complete a certificate and so he could use the room I had to vacate when I was staying at my sisters and brother in- laws after relocating to Auckland to get a security job.
That’s why.
And as for moving into the dive?
Do you have your head up your arse as well?
It may be one step better than sleeping in a fucking car but not much bud.
And why the fucking hell should I have to give you my bloody life story online in full public just to educate a moron like you anyway?
I have no need to hear your life story, thanks.
I was merely trying to ascertain why you initially moved into such a dive and why you haven’t moved out?
People generally move into dives because they are far cheaper to rent. And rents tend to reflect the standard and location of the property.
Both your previous comments came across as accusatory. Like WK shouldn’t have rented there in the first place, and should have moved out. Like I said, it’s not hard to imagine circumstances where that’s not easy, or even possible.
Your comments are bizarre actually given there is a well known housing crisis going on.
We can all speculate on their situation. I was merely trying to ascertain the facts in this case. Nothing bizarre or accusatory about it.
WK – Do you mind if I put your original comment up as a guest post tomorrow?
Go for your life.
I’ve lived in millionaires homes when I was younger and I’ve lived a year up in the mountains in the middle of winter in a stone shack outside of Queenstown when I was goldmining in the rivers with a pump , floating dredge and wet- suit and another year in a mountain tent .
Been self employed and owned a half mil dollar property of my own – then lost it all during 2008.
And I reckon I’ve lived more of a life than half these far right wing wannabe pseudo intellectual neo liberal fanatics who comment on this blog site .
And when I saw that article in the NZ Herald this morning , in light of whats been happening to so many New Zealander family’s having to sleep in cars and the like over the past few years – I thought ”FUCK IT !!”… Im going to say something.
Because now this govt and their neo liberal perversions have just got personal.
I’m fortunate that I’ve only got me to worry about.
But at least when you live in the boon docks in a tent or an old abandoned stone shack its free. And you can accept a primitive lifestyle.
But to get shafted and ripped off each and every bloody week just for the privilege of living in a shitty run down dogbox so some blighted little parasitic scum bag can live in comfort and climb up on your shoulders galls me to the bone.
And the fact that pricks like this are being enabled to do so by this shitty, do nothing , hands off incumbent non govt should fill every decent and honest bastard full of rage.
But then we’d all need bloody stents. 🙁
Hope your luck turns for the better soon.
Already got mine. Keeps me alive.
An individual’s ability to choose is proportionate to their net worth.
That’s a rule that applies to far too many things in society, and you obviously have no idea just how fundamental it is.
I understand that. I was merely trying to establish if this was a factor in this case.
If WK moved into this flat because of fiscal constraints, having it repaired may result in a rent increase. Which may force/price WK out.
Oh, so you just wanted to make sure that WK didn’t move into a dangerous shelter just so they could bitch about it? 🙄
Your second sentence perfectly describes the point that you still seem to have managed to miss: if the housing system means that some people can only afford to live in dwellings that are hazardous to their health or have no dwelling whatsoever, then that system is broken. And people are trapped living in hovels.
“Your second sentence perfectly describes the point that you still seem to have managed to miss”
Not at all. I agree the current system is failing some.
So you were merely trying to establish that the system was failing WK, as opposed to what?
What benefit do you or anyone get putting WK’s story under a microscope? What’s your point?
No, I was trying to establish what the actual facts in this case are.
I wasn’t putting their story under a microscope. I merely asked two simple questions.
The point of this was to establish if fiscal constraints was/is the problem preventing WK from moving out.
I’ve seen a number of people complain about the state of their rented dwellings and advocating for a rental warrant while failing to consider that improvements to their dwellings would most likely lead to rent increases, thus forcing/pricing them out. Hence it’s not really the solution.
What the actual facts are? As opposed to what you’ve already been told?
Your concern about possible future increases in rent is touching /sarc
“What the actual facts are? As opposed to what you’ve already been told?”
Yes, that’s correct. WK didn’t divulge why they didn’t just move out.
“Your concern about possible future increases in rent is touching /sarc”
You may find it funny and something to mock, but it’s a potential reality, thus a genuine concern.
No, I don’t find it funny.
I find it completely fucked up. I find your faux concern fucked up. I find it nuts that you think the take-home message is “don’t complain, because things might end up worse-off for you if you do”. I find it fucked up that you think people would be anything other than forced to live in circumstances that make them concerned for their lives and feel like they’re treated like animals. I think it’s fucked up that you need to know every fucking detail in order to avoid facing the obvious reasons as to why someone even moved into a place in the first place. I think it’s fucked up that you believe that just one more detail might suddenly make it all WK’s fault and a completely avoidable and solvable situation.
“Actual facts”??? Do you think WK was misleading you in some way? For fuck’s sake.
Certainly doesn’t seem likely. In fact it simply seems likely.
Once again, my concern is genuine.
Clearly you’ve misunderstood my comment above.
I wasn’t implying not to complain, I was highlighting why a rental warrant isn’t the best solution.
In WK’s case, being impacted by a rent increase as a result is a potential outcome, it’s not my take-home message for not complaining, it’s merely the reality which comes back to our broken system. And it’s not a system I support. So it’s not my rationale that’s fucked up.
Wk could have moved into the place for numerous reasons, location being one. I didn’t require to know every fucking detail as you put it. In fact WK told me far more than I needed to know, but failed to tell me what I wanted to know.
I’m not blaming WK for their current predicament, just trying to better understand it And no, I don’t think WK was misleading me, however my questions were not answered, therefore we can only speculate on why WK initially moved in, hasn’t moved out and has put up with it for so long.
Moreover, considering what he’s put out there, my questions were reasonable and to be expected.
List three reasons that someone would stay for a year and a half in a shit-hole that puts them in fear of their health. Other than money.
“To Andrew Little. I believe you and Jacinda Adern have it in your power to do something about this sort of state of affairs that has been legitimized by this National govt up and down this country to so many of their fellow countrymen and women.”
If they are elected into power, they will then have the power to do something.
What do you want Little to do about it?
WILD KATIPO as it is in the bathroom, you have rights.
Phone around find the most expensive plumber you can find. THE MOST Expensive. Then find a sparky in the same camp. Explain to them the situation – the bill goes to the landlord. If you are in Auckland, some of these trades people are only to happy to help.
Book them in to turn up in 24 hours, then inform the landlord what you have done on the ground of health and safety. And that in 24 hours this will be happening. As you will not let the property be damaged on your watch. Only a idiot landlord will not act at this point.
All perfectly legal. And compliant to the residential tenancy act.
This particular landlord would not pay the bill. He has been aware of the conditions for years and makes no effort to improve them. Wants the rent on time though. In Auckland plumbers don’t start the job until they are guaranteed payment.
That why I said try some of the expensive places, and tell them what is going on. You will be quietly surprised. They will get paid, as per the act – via the disputes tribunal and putting debt collectors on them. The big expensive outfits are the only option left, because they know the law, and will get their money.
Small places can’t afford to not get payed. Or fight to get their money. Hence why they won’t do the job.
Hey WK.
If you need an assist in whatever you want to do I’d be happy to provide some.
As you may have noticed, I really don’t like lazy dipshits, and deficient and grasping landlords are high in that list.
Besides, we bearers of the stent could do to help our new brethren.
Emailing is in the contact page. Happy to make time.
it sounds like your landlord is breaking all sorts of rules, Unless YOU get off your arse and complain, though, nothing will change,
It’s up to YOU , not Bill English or anyone else.
https://tenancy.govt.nz/maintenance-and-inspections/
You don think the govt has a role in safety compliance for housing? Wow.
WK already said what they’re going to do, despite having been seriously ill, did you even read the comment? Got any social conscience or intelligence at all?
I didn’t see the Tenancy Tribuna bit in his post/rant it was all a bit jumbled and hard to read.
The point though is unless you raise issues with the appropriate authorities nothing will ever change,.
And this has been going on for at least 18 months, why hasn’t he been to the tenancy tribunal already.
Your snide flamebait reveals your character.
And just what can the tenancy tribunal actually do?
Can it charge his landlord with attempted murder?
Can it even fine him?
Can it force him to refurbish the place to a liveable standard?
Or is it like many of these government entities that have been set up over the decades that people are supposed to complain to but have no teeth to force anything?
“I didn’t see the Tenancy Tribuna bit in his post/rant it was all a bit jumbled and hard to read.”
Nice try, but I managed it on a phone while unwell. I think more likely you just rushed through on your way to trolling.
“The point though is unless you raise issues with the appropriate authorities nothing will ever change,.”
Quite. When you have mass problems across the country, the governing party is the appropriate authority. Basically what you are saying is that all responsibility lies with the tenant, irrespective of their ability to go to the Tenancy Tribunal. In which case landlords are free to be as fuckwitted as they like until they caught by a private citizen. Nice.
“And this has been going on for at least 18 months, why hasn’t he been to the tenancy tribunal already.”
Have you ever been to the Tribunal BM?
I’m actually all for a rental WOF.
Landlords are running a business and selling a service, what they sell should be up to scratch.
The problem is at the moment, there’s a shortage of rentals, a rental WOF would probably remove at least 10% of the rental stock from the market as well as push up already over inflated rental prices.
Once we get the housing situation under control then introduce a rental WOF at the moment I think it will cause more harm than good.
Ok, so not actually the fault of the person who just had a heart attack.
“Once we get the housing situation under control”
Oh good, you’re voting on the left this year then. Because National have admitted they don’t know what to do.
+1
Any rental WOF needs to be well designed and implemented though
I wasn’t much impressed by the one previously proposed
You mean the one that was already trialled? What was wrong with it?
From memory, it went too far beyond health and safety issues.
A.
Such as?
WOF should cover
– Electrics
– Water quality.
– Insulation ceilings/floor
– Weather tightness
– Waste water/toilets
– Locks
– Extraction fans kitchen/Bathroom
– Smoke alarms.
– Stairs and railings if multistory
Maybe heating.
Everything else is excessive
maybe heating, lol. You don’t live in the SI do you.
Ok, so cracks in the floorboards, mouldy walls, that sort of thing are not to be covered because that would be excessive?
Mouldy walls are covered by weather tightness and ventilation.
Cracked floorBoards? how big is the crack? you just need to duck down to any building supply and get some caulk, fixed for under $10.00
What sort of heating do you expect the landlord to cover?
“Mouldy walls are covered by weather tightness and ventilation.”
I’ve seen rooms that have mould that would pass a weather tight and ventilation test. Are you saying that it should be a weather tightness, ventilation, and mould check? Seems odd, I would put addressing mould as a separate category, especially given it’s potentially such a health risk.
“Cracked floorBoards? how big is the crack?”
Big enough to cause damage to your foot from the rough edge. My point was that you had excluded general repairs, or otherwise dangerous shit.
“What sort of heating do you expect the landlord to cover?”
Fixed heating. So a wood burner or heat pump or other form of electric heating that goes with the house (may as well ban gas on upgrades because of CC).
I’ve seen rooms that have mould that would pass a weather tight and ventilation test. Are you saying that it should be a weather tightness, ventilation, and mould check? Seems odd, I would put addressing mould as a separate category, especially given it’s potentially such a health risk.
What’s causing the mould?
If the walls or roof is leaking no amount of ventilation is going to make a difference, you’re going to have mould issues.
Anything else can be fixed with decent ventilation or educating the tenants.
Fixed heating. So a wood burner or heat pump or another form of electric heating that goes with the house.
To heat a whole house (100-150 m2) with heat pumps you’re looking at 10-15k
The’s the problem if you start to get too overzealous you reach a point where the landlord says fuck it, kicks out the tenants, sells up and there’s one less rental.
Previous occupiers not opening the bathroom window. So the ventilation and weathertightness would pass, but there is existing mould. Mould prevention isn’t the same as mould removal.
“The’s the problem if you start to get too overzealous you reach a point where the landlord says fuck it, kicks out the tenants, sells up and there’s one less rental.”
It’s only a problem if you think the housing market is more important than people’s health and wellbeing. The government can buy houses, get them up to scratch and add them to their HNZ managed rentals.
However I suspect that your point is based on the need to defend landlord profits rather than whether lots of landlords will really get out of the business. If a someone can’t install fixed heating in a house for far less than $15,000 they’re probably not competent to be a landlord.
Maybe the ideal solution would be to get the crap that needs doing up out of the rental / investor market and either demolished or sold off cheaply to first home buyers as a do-up.
This is how a lot of us got our foot on the property ladder in past generations but openings are limited now.
However I suspect that your point is based on the need to defend landlord profits rather than whether lots of landlords will really get out of the business. If a someone can’t install fixed heating in a house for far less than $15,000 they’re probably not competent to be a landlord.
If you’re installing fixed heating to a WOF standard and want to use heat pumps it will cost you 10-15k.
The only other form of electric heating you could use is resistance heating which is just your bar heaters so all you really need to do is provide a power point.
You could install a wood burner for 5k but a lot of tenants don’t want the hassle of having to chop wood also you’ll need a shed to store the wood.
“If you’re installing fixed heating to a WOF standard and want to use heat pumps it will cost you 10-15k.”
What’s the standard?
“You could install a wood burner for 5k but a lot of tenants don’t want the hassle of having to chop wood also you’ll need a shed to store the wood”
Most firewood merchants cut wood to size now, no need for chopping. I’ve stored firewood under a tarp many times.
“Maybe the ideal solution would be to get the crap that needs doing up out of the rental / investor market and either demolished or sold off cheaply to first home buyers as a do-up.
This is how a lot of us got our foot on the property ladder in past generations but openings are limited now.”
I think so too. The whole “landlords can’t afford it and will sell” line, apart from basically saying that some people should live in hovels, also misses the opportunity to sort this out once and for all and that it can be sorted out.
Imagine if we applied the same principle to a car WOF 🙄 People can’t afford to get the repairs done in their cars so we let’s not do a WOF system.
Crook today Weka? Sympathies
He is a past painter and decorator living by himself with a heart condition, probably aggravated by the stress of getting nowhere with the head tenant.
He has earned and deserves respect for the life he gave to his trade and the restraint and patience he has shown.
My guess is he hasn’t been to the Tenancy Tribunal because he is stoical and has the dignity and expectation of good faith in others to try to fix it by a personal approach to the head tenant.
And once he goes to the Tenancy Tribunal he’ll be kicked out for some trumped up reason or other. Boarders don’t have many rights.
it sounds like your landlord is breaking all sorts of rules,
That’s right. He is.
And has been enabled by the same sort greedy governance that created the exploitative housing crisis in the first place.
Is there a WARRANT OF FITNESS for New Zealand housing ?
No.
Have I gotten ‘OFF MY BACKSIDE ‘ ?
Yes. I have mentioned this 18 months ago.
Is the accommodation dangerous?
Yes.
Should I have had to ‘ GET OFF MY BACKSIDE’ in the first place?
No.
If there were adequate laws and safety standards in place in this country governing rental accommodation – this should never have had to happen.
And do I have current health issues that might prevent me form ‘ GETTING OFF MY BACKSIDE’ and being Mr Fucking Action Man ?
Yes.
Especially if you regard a heart attack and hospitalization two weeks ago as a health issue.
So stick it up your arse BM , you odious bastard.
Im in no mood for ignorant pricks like you just currently.
+111
+1000 WK
BM takes the dickhead of the day award, and so early in the morning.
Katipo
Do you need help from someone on here in your approach to the Tenancy Tribunal?
A.
ATM… just feeling a little bit like my blood pressures going through my head. The head tenants been out overnight, I’ll approach him when he returns. If he contacts the landlord and action is taken to avoid bringing in the Tribunal , well and good. If not , I’ll push the issue. Starting Monday. I should be fine by myself and thank you.
I live by myself but family is not too far away , so I’m fortunate.
Always was a tradie outdoors type worker , pretty physically strong but this heart business has been a real confidence knocker… so just a bit sort of weepy atm… Id like to say thank you for the moral support from both Draco and weka and yourself. Ive spoken enough about housing here before but now Im REALLY feeling part of it.
So ironic L0L !
Cheers people
🙂
Take care matey! Three weeks isn’t very long to recover. Stress if a funny thing, sometimes it’s easier to do something stressful than do nothing about another stressor, but can you also take some time with this?
I’m wondering if there are pathways through the Tribunal process that mean its expedited on the grounds of health or danger.
I dunno , but atm Im taking a back seat and just going to relax… that head pounding feeling isn’t pleasant… so Ill kick back for the rest of the day ,get some sleep then have another go.
cheers.
Sorry to read this. Wishing you a good recovery.
@ Wild Katipo … been following your sad situation through this blog. Makes for pretty shocking reading, that circumstances such as yours being allowed to prevail in NZ in the first place to decent Kiwis!
More publicity needs to be drawn to issues such as yours, with some serious scrutiny being done on your living conditions, along with the obscene profits gained from scurrilous landlords, preying on good people such as yourself in need of accommodation! From what you have written, your plight seems pretty appalling to say the least, sub human in fact! You and others like you need advocates to act on your behalf.
I wish you all the best in getting some positive action here. Take very good care of yourself my friend and look after that good heart of yours.
Cheers
Mary
well said.
so very well said.
Sorry to hear your plight
If your not getting what your paying for stop paying your rent or partial pay , let him do all the work re getting you to tenancy tribunal
Red, stop offering advise that breaks the law.
You can not stop paying the rent, you will be evicted.
As it is a breach of the Tenancy act, you give an automatic win in any tribunal hearing to a land lord. NO matter the circumstances which drove you to not pay rent.
You have to pay rent, to even the worst scum sucking leech. Tenants have no power, no matter how reality shows try to tell the lie otherwise.
Ok but that was not my actual experience as a student when landlord made non consented additions and prevented us getting quite enjoyment of flat. But if your the expert I will go with that
How long ago were you a student? The law has changed. You can read the act and regulation if you like, but this is a better explanation.
https://tenancy.govt.nz/starting-a-tenancy/new-to-tenancy/key-rights-and-responsibilities/
It you go to the Tenancy Tribunal, then there is a risk of getting a retaliatory eviction. Plain and simple. If a landlord wants to get rid of you, he will find a way. Despite what landlords moan about, it is actually quite easy to evict a tenant.
On RNZ website: “Northern storm due in part to climate change – professor”
Can’t be a great week to be living in NZ’s north – whether it be people living in the open, on streets, in garages, in cars, or with families sharing to small a living space.
Marama Davidson on the privatisation of state housing in Glen Innes:
She cuts through all the BS that the redevelopment is benefiting local HNZ tenants.
This reminds me of another National Party hypocrisy. Bolger’s support for the idea of social capital as somehow linked to the preservation of strong market incentives ie. vote National and you will be enabled to get ahead at the expense of the community.
“For Bolger (1998), social capital does not draw on “old fashioned, discredited socialism” but rather his conviction of the “strength, goodness and commonsense of communities”. He speaks of a change of emphasis from economic capital to social capital: recent economic reforms will preserve strong market incentives, now, apparently, all we need to develop a new approach to social policy which will empower communities to deal with the many social problems facing them.”
http://www.amat.org.nz/Neoliberalism.pdf
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/90189659/witness-jailed-for-refusing-to-answer-questions-gets-new-insights-in-prison
There is nothing I can say here…its simply a link to a very interesting point of view about the effects and reality of imprisonment. Though also interesting from a legal point of view, yet to be fully played out in the courts.
Elon Musk sets the cat among the pigeons with an open offer to South Australia for grid scale batteries to cover intermittency problems with South Australia’s high proportion of wind and solar generation. That’s a real in-your-face challenge to the fossil-heads in Canberra.
https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/03/elon-musk-on-batteries-for-australia-installed-in-100-days-or-it-is-free/
I’m curious as to what the named IT tools are in this advert for a Linux admin person at NZ’s 5Eyes operation (applications close 31 March 2017):
What about it Lpent.
Could be interesting.
Not my kind of thing. I prefer to write code rather than running systems.
The only reason that I run this system is because of a favor asked long long ago by some people on the original crew, and because I can treat it as a semi interesting hobby rather than real work. I have always detested it when I have wound up doing the IT department’s work rather than development.
I suspect that whoever they are after is just a flunky to run some of their infrastructure rather than something I’d ever find interesting.
It is a generic role listing for an administrator/systems/network engineer
The tools listed are ‘out of the box’, and the level indicated for the role would be lower intermediate to intermediate
Face value
Indeed. I find it bad enough running a vSphere cluster for the testing crew. And at least I have skin in that. They’re often testing my code.
Thanks, Lynn and One Two.
They’re often testing my code.
You mean intermediate level admin people at your work? Not GCSB admin people?
Nope – definitely not. Nor the IT people.
The wonderful Testers who find my bugs for me before the customers do. They are some of my favorite people.
And for the record, and because I have been known to indulge in it on the odd occassion, there was no irony at all on those statements.
Being able to test integrated systems systematically and repeatably is a skill that so few people lack that it rates for me as a talent. I can (and often do) write unit-tests and functional tests pr perform bench testing all day and never find some of the integration flaws and outright bugs these people do.
When you’re putting dozens of hardware and software units together in an integrated system over a wireless system, being able to work on flaws long enough to describe a reproducible condition is freaking hard. Yet some people (unlike me) can do it. That means that I can find and kill the damn thing.
Very interesting Iprent As a mech engineer computer technology to me is really mind blowing. especially the advancement in the design and draughting area’s. From drawing boards and slide rules and modern day 3D drawing programmes.
I have always admired you guys because as an engineer mechanical problems are easy to find. If it rattles, it is too loose, if it gets too hot it’s too tight and if it squeaks it needs a little lubricant. Dead easy not like you guys especially some of the ones I have met who have built programmes so all the mechanical bits work in the right sequence. In your game when you turn the switch on and nothing happens. you always seem to know where to look. without getting zapped or causing major problems, with no indication or signs of the problem.
Amazon bestsellers list,led by Reasons To Vote For Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=sv_b_2
Someone should sell stamps and stamping pads with various words that people can print into the book themselves. Old school, but retro, very trendy.
Fascism
Tr*mp
President Bannon
weka, and your list is why this limited form of democracy is a sick joke.
Bugger the democrats, seriously they put up a hard right conservative, and we are suppose to think that is better?
Seriously trump is bad, but to be frightened to vote conservative is just as evil. This was, and is the whole issue, why vote for the lesser evil, when all you get served is evil? Demand better.
Of course.
If the election were to be held over, and you had a vote, and the choice was Tr*mp and co, or Clinton, who would you vote for?
I don’t vote for evil.
To vote for evil, is morally bankrupt.
h.r.c and trump are both evil, different faces of it, but both are equally lacking in a moral compass, and a innate sense of goodness.
It’s like asking someone if they want their leg cut off at the knee, or at the hip, it is just degrees of nasty.
Gosh, I really hope that one day I will feel sufficiently privileged and disconnected from other humans that when it comes to the moment of actually voting, I can opt out of the unpalatable task of choosing the least bad realistic option for the future while adopting a sneering morally superior tone about my cop-out.
You could try morals Andre. It’s not about sneering, it’s about demanding better.
I’d point out your approach got us to trump.
Your approach fucks over the Standing Rock tribe.
Your approach fucks over everybody affected by the appointment of Scott Pruitt to the EPA – ie everyone on this planet.
Your approach fucks over all the people suffering from the increase in hate in the US over the last six months.
Your approach fucks over … the list is very long.
My approach was to support Bernie all the way to the point where he no longer had any chance of winning the nomination. Then I swallowed hard and changed my support to the next least bad realistic alternative. Here in New Zealand, the Greens are the party likely to get into government that is least bad from my perspective. So my approach is I’ll support them, even though I have serious problems with some of their positions.
Who are you going to fuck over in September because no party with a chance of getting into Parliament in New Zealand is pure and moral enough for you?
And will he expect them to thank him for his exemplary display of moral purity? Will they – and it’s always ‘they’ or ‘them’, always someone else – willingly sacrifice their welfare and lives because he tells them it’s for a higher cause?
There’s a point where moral purity becomes sanctimony, and that is the vice of hypocrisy that accommodates other people’s suffering as a mark of one’s supposed virtue.
I’ve friends directly affected by Trump’s actions and they can certainly tell the difference between Clinton and Trump. For at least one friend of mine in the States, it’s no delicate discussion about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or whether its sinful to whistle on a Tuesday, it’s literally life and death for her with her health coverage disappearing and the spike in hate crimes against her community. She’s made it abundantly clear that she’d take great pleasure in making balloon animals with the intestines of people like Adam who refused to vote or wasted their vote on Stein because they wanted to strike a pose.
Yeah, I’ve just had my sister-in-law and niece visiting.
One of them works for a church in a Trump county. She’s got some really sad stories to tell, that have got a lot worse since November.
The other is a doctor whose last several positions were in Trump counties where there were severe opioid addiction problems. She’s currently doctoring in an impoverished area here in NZ, and has decided to lengthen her time here for several years beyond her original plans. Although the fact that she’s spending most of her time being a doctor instead of administering paperwork for insurance purposes has something to do with that.
Who is pure? I’ve never asked for purity, you seem obsessed by it rhinocrates, oddly enough. I’m asking for people to be moral, and act on it.
That aside did you miss that the Democrats lost everything, THEY LOST EVERYTHING! The house, the senate, and the presidency. So the Stein argument is a lie. Try watching somthing other MSNBC.
But sure live in lala land, where people who actually make moral choices are the enemy.
Yeah. Okay, that’s basically endorsing always putting others in charge. And those people that voters put in charge then determine what health policy or other social welfare policy will be brought forward, or not brought forward, or rolled back, or never discussed, based on their approach to and degree of accommodation towards capitalist markets.
Their rule is illegitimate – ie, they can’t justify it. And they always in representative democracies, in parliamentary systems, serve and never fundamentally question financial and business interests – interests that run on deliberate systems of trade and production and distribution that (in case you’ve missed it) have brought us screaming right on up to a cliff edge at a great rate of knots. (resources fucked, peoples’ lives fucked, the climate fucked, eco-systems fucked)
And yet still most advocate that we continue voting until the cows come home in some vain hope that there will one day be worthy leaders determined to do what is right. (There will an occasional exception that will serve to prove the rule, who will be swiftly stomped on and removed to the dead lands beyond the far fringes)
Not voting while seeking to develop parallel organsiational structures for society is entirely legitimate – and certainly more mature than just voting once every three, four or five years and going home ‘to the telly’ after the two minutes of participation as most people are apt to do.
And there are dozens of other legitimate routes of agency implied by those positions sketched out above.
But. How long now before we see the tired old mantra wheeled out? The one that claims that those who do not vote have no right to complain? Talk about defining politics and possibilities in the narrowest and most disempowering (not to mention downright dangerous) terms….
Allowing millions to be fucked over, often with fatal consequences, while knowing that it will happen as a consequence of your position is not a moral choice, it is a narcissistic one.
The people who suffer as a result will not thank you for sacrificing them.
That’s not living in lala land, la la land is a place where there are no consequences and hurt doesn’t matter. Living in reality means realising that there are more important things than keeping your hands lily white.
The opposition of voting versus joining a co-op is nonsensical – some of us can walk and chew gum at the same time.
It is also nonsensical to assume that if one ignores the state of the world as it is like a petulant child, it will magically go away and be replaced by exactly what you wish for. Power abhors a vacuum and if somehow representative democracy could be suddenly swept away, history has shown that what replaces it is usually much, much worse.
… and don’t presume to know what anybody does IRL away from a keyboard.
“… and don’t presume to know what anybody does IRL away from a keyboard.”
Ditto.
rhinocrates I’m not ignoring the world, as in the fact this was a hypothetical question, so I gave a answer to it.
You have point blankly refused to look at reality, the democrat’s have failed across the board. Why? They have failed, and you are ignoring it. It is becasue they are corrupt. That the whole so called establishment left in the USA have given up on working people, any chance you can see that?
Look I’ve got friends who will kill themselves when their health insurance runs out. That is reality, a harsh one. And you going to blame me, for a democratic party with no back bone, and no trust left with working people. You are going to have a go, becasue I say the system is broken. And say we should forget the ballot and fight for our rights. Well. It’s good to know where you stand.
Because here is the hypocrisy – If you buy into democracy, the right win, and they get to do what they want to do. People are going to suffer, that what happens in the system you are defending.
If you don’t get I’m fighting against evil, them you missing the point. and I can’t say too much more.
Adam, ‘fighting against evil’ is good, I don’t deny that you’re doing it, but you’ve become so obsessed with it as a Manichaean battle that you’ve ignored the collateral damage. If you are ‘good’, or label yourself as such, it does not necessarily follow that the consequences of what you do or fail to do are good.
I don’t give a toss about how virtuous you are. I care about the consequences of the kinds of actions or avoidance of action you promote. Right now I see people suffering because people who could have voted against Trump didn’t.
Trump’s win could have been prevented – a third of the electorate stayed at home, being too cool for school. There are direct consequences that were not part of the Democratic platform. Trump campaigned on anti-environmentalism, anti-semitism, islamophobia, homophobia, racism, misogyny and lo and behold, since his election, there has been a sharp rise in hate crimes that he inspired. These were not part of the Democratic Party campaign or policy.
Capitalism may be evil, but it is not the only evil in the world.
I agree that the Democratic party is corrupted, as are left parties worldwide that sold their souls to neoliberalism and called it the ‘centre’ (and don’t falsely assume that I’ve I’ve failed to see that – I’ve been very critical here about the state of the Labour Party). However, Sanders’ incursion at least showed that people aren’t chicken and changes were possible. In the aftermath they may get the kick up the arse that they need. One positive has been the spike in women now intending to run for office. Hopefully they will instigate change. Slowly, yes, but that’s life.
The left parties around the world are in a crisis of identity and integrity. In NZ at least we are able to cast protest votes for potential coalition partners or to at least get a voice in parliament. To hand a victory to the far right by saying they were always going to win is abdication and cowardice dressed up in sanctimony.
That is reality, a harsh one. And you going to blame me, for a democratic party with no back bone
With a disaster of this magnitude, there’s a lot of blame to go around and certainly plenty to spend on both. So what if you don’t get exactly what you want, completely and immediately? That’s no reason to throw your toys out of the cot; that’s a reason to work long and hard.
Two quotes from Voltaire: The perfect is the enemy of the good and The greatest crime is to do nothing because we can only do a little
My approach does not do any fornicating as you put it, it demands action. Not giving away sovereignty blindly to evil people.
You need to answer that question yourself, and you have, you are are willing to forsake morals for political power.
Yeah, not a choice I’m willing to make. Nor am I willing to stand aside, and let us keep falling into the abyss. Morality drives me to say, and act for the better world, not accept evil lithely.
Is it shocking to you that a stark evil is on display? Because you can help change that, and voting is only one part. I’d argue a very very small part, you can, and should do more. A lot more. Rather than get worked up by voting, which at the end of the day in a world dominated by corporations, is fast becoming the public illusion it always was. Try joining with others to improve your local community. Maybe sell your car, do some gardening, or join a Co-Op.
Your approach fucks over the Standing Rock tribe
Nope. Voting people into positions of power whereby they could essentially ‘lord it over’ others fucked…well, much more than anything that’s just limited to Standing Rock.
Uh, Bill, there’s the minor matter of a thing called reality. Reality says we’re stuck with operating within the system we have now and for the foreseeable future.
Kidding ourselves that we can ignore or opt out of that simply cedes power to the nastier arseholes. Whereas engaging with reality at least gives us the chance to cede power to the not-quite-as-nasty arseholes that have at least a vague interest in our views and a chance of some overlap of vision for the future.
If that ugly reality of the system we have to work within ever changes, then we’ll have to make our decisions and take actions within that new framework. But it will still be in everyone’s interest to engage with it as it is, rather than pretending that opting out is a better choice.
Sheesh Andre, why don’t you just admit you are a conservative and give up.
Seriously if people thought and acted like you we would not have any democracy, we would not have a end to slavery, we would not have women participating, no rights, nothing, all we’d have is the right to bow our heads, and say “Yes MASSA”
Uh, Bill, there’s the minor matter of a thing called reality. Reality says …
Our current systems of governance persist precisely for as long as we lend them credence. And not a moment longer. They have no life of their own and there is no immutable reality or law of nature determining how we govern that means we have no option but acquiescence.
Actually, it might be better if there was. Thinking CC here and how we seem to imagine basic laws of physics can be ignored…
Anyway, where did anyone suggest we ignore or opt out of stuff related to governance?
I could vote. And I could simultaneously undermine some very basic assumptions and expectations attached to ‘from on high’ governance by dint of how I arrange my society with others. Or I could not vote.
Adam, slavery ended because people voted for a president that was against slavery, and was willing to go to war over it.
Women’s suffrage happened because people voted in legislators that supported it.
MMP happened because people voted for it.
The common factor in all these things? People voted for it, and won.
Yes, those votes were preceded by lots of hard work by activists that were subject to derision and worse in building the movement. And building the movement is essential. But voting for legislators sympathetic to the movement, or at least less hostile, is equally essential. At least until we move to a system that does away with the legislators.
Sorry about filling your replies tab, Bill. But as far as opting out of governance, in the case of an election like the recent US one, refusing to consider one of the two candidate with a chance of winning and instead going for an option with absolutely no chance, as adam apparently would have done had he been eligible, is effectively opting out.
Do you believe the civil war was about slavery, Andre?
One Two, all the history and evidence I’ve ever come across suggests that yes, slavery was a big part of what the US Civil War was about. But feel free to tell us what it was about in your alternative history. Probably best to start a fresh comment, though, rather than fill Bill’s replies tab.
Wow Andre you just didn’t read what I said.
Just a couple of points.
One I did not say women suffrage, so where you dragged that from I’m not sure.
And two, how did we get the vote? Do you know, how did we win rights?
I think you need to stop assuming Andre, and start reading – just a suggestion.
Being wedded to belief systems leads to actions spawned, which paint individuals and groups into boxes…
Ego then ensures the box remain closed, and emotion takes over by lashing out at others with differing opinions
Non-judgment is beyond infinite sensations
Your approach fucks over the Standing Rock tribe.
Your approach fucks over everybody affected by the appointment of Scott Pruitt to the EPA – ie everyone on this planet.
Your approach fucks over all the people suffering from the increase in hate in the US over the last six months.
Your approach fucks over … the list is very long.
Fuck, yes. “I won’t vote for the lesser of two evils because I have morals” is why the USA is currently enjoying the dubious benefits of a descent into authoritarianism. If your morals involve assisting that process, it’s time to review your morals.
LOL, don’t ever stop Psycho Milt. Your muddled thinking is always good for a laugh.
[lprent: Translated loosely and almost sympathetically: I agree to disagree. ]
Does that mean you wouldn’t vote? Which in this case would be an affirmative for Tr*mp. I understand where you are coming from ethically, I’m just pointing out the pragmatics.
As we have had that choice for some time, and all it brings us is worse and worse people in politics. Pragmatics be damned, why support a steady slow crippling corruption?
So yeah I would not vote, and do what I normally do – get organised.
In our case New Zealand has great laws around Co-Operatives. Why are not people doing this more?
But to rely on the tired old political parties is beyond a sad joke. That is why I’m glad we have MMP, but even that has done far to little to improve the morality of our politicians, as this current government has put on display so often.
“But to rely on the tired old political parties is beyond a sad joke.”
Bill made similar commentary. Problem with that line is that it assumes that voting for the lesser evil (or in my case, the pragmatic choice), equates to relying on them.
Myself, I’ve been pretty up front that I think parliamentary politics is pretty much only good for holding the line while the real work gets done elsewhere. But I (and you) shouldn’t minimise it that much, because they still do some useful things, and that holding the line is the difference between super nasty and less nasty. You seem to believe we still have a choice for not nasty. In CC terms I think we are past that point. Which doesn’t mean we are without hope, but that whatever happens next it’s unlikely to be the revolution.
“In our case New Zealand has great laws around Co-Operatives. Why are not people doing this more?”
When people like yourself, Bill and me can’t work together, it’s probably not reasonable to expect others to who aren’t naturally interesting in that kind of co-operation.
Myself, I’ve been pretty up front that I think parliamentary politics is pretty much only good for holding the line
The status quo constraint,where real democratic contrarian debate is extinguished at all cost.
The illusion of democratic participation is well known,where the minority controls what is debated,where and when.
Galam (2004) for example showed in contrarian dynamics interesting properties arise.
“Applying our results to the European Union leads to the conclusion that it would be rather misleading to initiate large
public debates in most of the involved countries. Indeed, even starting from a huge initial majority of people in favor of the European Union, an open and free debate would lead to the creation of huge majority hostile to the European Union. This provides a strong ground to legitimize the on-going reluctance of most Europe an governments to hold referendum on associated issues.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437103009695
The full article is behind a paywall, but the abstract and your excerpt seem to suggest that “contrarian debate” is actually not democratic, as it changes the opinions of the populace rather than merely reporting them.
Sorry I linked to the companion paper rather then the one quoted from.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437104000330
http://home.iscte-iul.pt/~jmal/mcc/SergeGalam/Serge_Galam_Physica_A.pdf
Counter intuitive paradoxes prevail.
First point weka, I do work with Bill, mainly in picking his brain stuff. But as I’m a work locally type, and he is down the other end of the country, better to work the way we do.
As for working with you, I’d be happy to do that. I would not say I could not work with you.
What worries me, is so many here have got upset by a hypothetical question. Indeed a couple have gone into the realms of personal attack on a hypothetical not realising that we don’t actually live in the USA.
As I said and people have been deliberately obtuse about the NZ situation, and really don’t like being questioned on their morals.
I just don’t see the point in talking in circles with people who don’t want to listen to new ideas, or ideas which differ from theirs.
There’s ‘stupid’, ‘fucking idiot’ and then there’s ‘Trump supporter,’ which adds an extra slice of odiousness.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/trump-supporters-get-mad-because-they-think-the-man-in-1793159888?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
Amazon announced this week that it was launching Resistance Radio as a companion program for The Man in the High Castle, an alt-history drama loosely adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel. The pre-recorded radio program is basically a bunch of people talking about how the Third Reich is bad and does bad things. For some, they thought that applied to America’s current president (and/or they didn’t bother actually listening to it). In response, several irate opposers flocked to Amazon’s sponsored #ResistanceRadio hashtag to complain about the station’s “liberal agenda.”
Think about it, as one commenter puts it,
Trump supporter finds radio station talking about how terrible the Reich is, and how they should be opposed, and immediately starts defending the Nazi’s. What in the actual fuck?
FFS: If that wasn’t so pathetic, it’d be scary.
There there’s this brand of pathetic that enables Trump too:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/why-the-alt-left-is-a-problem
Headlined AGAINST MERYL STREEP, the indictment declared, “Meryl Streep’s speechifying at the Golden Globes was the worst thing to happen since Trump’s election.” Hoo-kay.
https://medium.com/@sammystyle77/the-nihilistic-purity-of-the-far-left-will-kill-us-all-54169b25e3a8#.nvt4434in
Has there been a pandemic of stupid self-absorption?
Hard on the heels of yesterday’s I don’t remember what I was doing inside that building…..
3.9 Reserve Powers for NZ Council
3.9.1 NZ Council shall be authorised to suspend or cancel a leadership election in exceptional circumstances including, without limitation, the following:
• The death of a candidate;
• The calling of a General Election;
• Where NZ Council considers that the democratic integrity of the election process has been seriously undermined.
According to the Labour Party rules quoted above there does not need to be a leadership election when a general election has been called. This is understandable given that the process takes several weeks. Grant Robertson knows this. He has an opportunity to become leader by a simple majority vote in Caucus. If Labour keep polling badly and Chicken is behind Jacinda in preferred PM I’d predict he would make his move after June 23rd.That would be disastrous for Labour and given that Grant’s ambitions are insatiable he would put his own ambitions above those of Labour. You have been warned.
Gattaca, here we come.
“Sponsored by Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina, the bill known as HR 1313 would allow for employers participating in “workplace wellness” programs to require their employees go through genetic testing, or risk taking a financial hit.”
http://www.salon.com/2017/03/10/house-committee-passes-bill-that-could-allow-employers-to-require-genetic-testing/
heh
Umm musing…
Looks like I might have to cut statcounter (one of our trackers) out of the site. It looks like they may be having some problems.
For a start, we’ve been getting some delays from statcounter over the last month not responding and slowing the page loads down. Something that is frigging irritating bearing in mind that only reason for having a visible tracker is to provide the Open Parachute ranking.
But I also just analyzed their tracking against the back end logs. That was because there was a major discrepancy between google analytics and their measurements. About 35k page views in February. It looks like google is right and statcounter close to 10% down.
And that was after statcounter dropped 43k page views into the count on Feb 27 – something that looks like a database scan and fix job.
They did something similar to The Daily Blog earlier in the month.
I think that either a server dropped off or they started missing something like the mobiles.
But I’ve looked at what has been happening since, and there is still a significiant daily discrepancy between the three measures. Stat counter is down by several thousand page views per day.
There is always a variation on sessions because each tracking site uses different algorithms. Which is why sessions are pretty useless to measure on.
But the human page views have been generally conformant between trackers. There are variations on the page view counting, but that is mainly dependent on the timezone of measurement for a day and if the tracker is executed at the top of the page or at the end. Usually a variation of just a few hundred human page views over a week. Nothing visible anywhere on the statcounter site about a problem. In fact the site seems a bit dead. They have been happy to take our money each month.
That does kind of mean that there are getting to be a dearth of reliable trackers with a public face that something like Open Parachute can use. Sitemeter has completely screwed up several times in the past few years. There are a couple of others, but as each needs considerable testing before I can trust it on a high volume site. And I don’t have the time.
I’ll watch statcounter to the end of the month. If they continue to screw up then I’ll remove their drag on the site. Google analytics does a good job and is what I actually use for most analysis. I can take the money from statcounter and go and buy some services from them, or just look for a couple of paid plugins to enhance the site.
Several of us were having problems with statcounter slowing down page loading so we ended up installing a blocker suggested by BM (uBlock Origin). Dunno if that will cause a discrepancy between the different counters.
It would 🙂
However it would have taken an awful lot of you to doing it to cause that level of discrepancy. It also doesn’t explain that whacking great pile of added page views on the 27th.
But yeah, statcounter has been a bit of a nuisance for speed lagging for a while now. Not as bad as sitemeter was before I got rid of it off the site years ago. I’d prefer to just use analytics which is very fast, non-intrusive and gives better stats as well. It is also pretty interesting watching it dodge blockers 🙂
However I decided a while ago that it was a good idea to leave a public track. It gives something for sites to aspire to 😈 What I should do is find out how to give some public access to the stats off that to Ken at Open Parachute. Analytics allows for specific logins to be able to access specific data. Maybe he’d leave off tormenting the flouridephobes for a while and code something to do that.
at the risk of interupting the adults while they are talking…i also started blocking stat counter too.
Okay… You are rapidly convincing me that I shouldn’t maintain statcounter.
It’s coming up to Saturday morning east coast USA time. Brace yourselves for another twitter eruption.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-tweets-saturday-jared-kushner-ivanka-shabbat-235902
Solved.
http://api.theweek.com/sites/default/files/twittercollar.jpg?resize=600×600
OMG. Mr Bradbury must have had a Damascus moment!
Suddenly it’s no longer boomers that are responsible for all our ills or for inter-generation warfare. It’s neoliberalism!
LOL.
Funny how the Kurds are just ignored, Turkey is loving our looking the other way.
https://washingtonhatti.com/2017/02/25/korukoy-a-kurdish-city-in-turkeys-seast-has-been-under-siege-for-14-days/
http://stockholmcf.org/hdps-baydemir-takes-military-blockade-in-korukoy-to-parliaments-agenda/
https://libcom.org/news/turkey-torture-murder-state-kurdish-village-koruk%C3%B6y-09032017
So not only are we accepting torture as normal, which it is not. It is morally bankrupt.
We seem to now accept without much question the labeling of ordinary citizens as terrorists, and terrorising them.
But not half as much as Bashar.
/
Who are these people ignoring Syria?
I’d say you just making stuff up.
Here the Trorygraph since the 28th of Feb, on Syria.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/syria/
Al Jazeera is pretty much the same in amount of content. Actually probably a bit more.
That report you linked to by AI has been well and truly debunked. They were quite literally making things up, but still, almost every major western outlet ran with uncritical “Oh My Gosh!” headlines for a day or two…mission accomplished.
…Turkey is loving our looking the other way.
There isn’t much the NZ Army could do anyway, but there is one great power still willing to help out: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/09/us-troops-arrival-syria-intensifies-struggle-for-influence.
TL;DW – the more polarised the electorate gets the greater the chance frog is boiled and the baby goes out with the bath water.