According to Pete George, this does not constitute a crisis for our democracy.
Bryce Edwards sees it differently.
Nearly 64% of the electorate did NOT vote.
18% of the electorate voted for Bidois.
“But what about the fact that there was a low voter turnout. According to the Electoral Commission, voter turnout is estimated to be 43.7%. This figure is based on the numbers that have voted, as a percentage of those enrolled. However, the Electoral Commission and Statistics New Zealand previously estimated that in Northcote there is an eligible voter population of 54,790 (of which about nine per cent are not enrolled). So, when you take that into account, the 19,900 who voted, make up an even smaller “real” voter turnout – which is well under 40%.
It also means that the vote for each candidate as a proportion of all eligible voters in Northcote is somewhat smaller than it might initially appear, since about 35,000 eligible voters choose not to vote – which somewhat overshadows the 10,147 who voted for the winning candidate.”
Compulsory voting is the solution. Oz have done it for decades and there’s engagement across the demographics as a result.
National rejected that along with pretty much every other suggested reform, my how surprising. Keeps the bastards honest, where that’s practical for some parties, when they know the disaffected are forced to vote.
Like road rules they serve a greater good even if they’re not popular.
This was a by-election at the start of the term of a new government for a seat previously held by the opposition. Of course turnout will be low. There was nothing really at stake. Jumping up and down and trying to call this the death of democracy in NZ is ridiculous.
Does it Draco? This from a stuff article after their 2016 Federal Election:
“A long winter federal election campaign in Australia that clashed with school holidays has resulted in the biggest voter no-show in the country since compulsory voting began in 1925.
More than 1.4 million Australians last month failed to cast a vote for the House of Representatives in what ultimately became a cliff-hanger election. The figure represents more than 9 per cent of 15.7 million eligible voters.
The turnout is the worst since 1922, when voting was optional and just 59 per cent of eligible people cast a lower house vote.”
It’s a political hot potato. As you say, it’s those doing it toughest that are least inclined to vote. Fining those that struggle to keep food up to mouths is popularity suicide. If zero punitive measures against non voters, there’s no point introducing the fresh law.
Yeah ok, I’ve gone and done some more reading on it. I’m not as partisan as I was. I lived in Oz for a long period, it is no hardship to vote. Chasing up non voters appears to be a token effort, 12 people in Darwin taken to court after the last election.
I dread the influx in….”I voted for that chappie with the straight teeth, whatisname? I once saw him in a Crusaders jersey” vox pops.
Chasing up non voters appears to be a token effort, 12 people in Darwin taken to court after the last election.
I suspect that it actually isn’t. Most would be given a warning and to vote next time or else. Many would be given the voting slip and told here and now or else.
You probably just don’t hear about it which is unfortunate.
If you’re not on the electoral roll how do they know who to chase up?
Just because you’re not on the electoral roll doesn’t mean that you can’t be traced. Got a bank account? Pay your taxes? Drive a car?
Yeah, I’m one of the few people who have no difficulty with the government doing data matching to catch criminals. Especially when those criminals are fucking over our democracy.
But also, in order to enrol you have to sign a form. No person can legally be forced to sign any form they don’t wish to sign.
It is a legal requirement to be enrolled. You must sign that form whether you like it or not.
According to Pete George, this does not constitute a crisis for our democracy.
Bryce Edwards sees it differently.
How exactly does Bryce Edwards see it differently, Ed? His piece is actually very noncommittal and empty of firm opinion on the matter at hand.
I think your comment has put a few here on the wrong foot …
You could have made the argument as to why you think the numbers reflect badly on the current state of our representative democracy but you didn’t. Why not?
I am struggling to work out what Andrew Little was thinking in putting about his agenda to dump the three strikes legislation without first getting his political ducks in a row. Is he a political idiot?
Little floats idea, gives Winston the opportunity to make his mark, both postpone the issue for a while and a satisfactory result flies through the House; everybody wins. Meanwhile, the Right enjoy a temporary lift, to no eventual gain. The Coalition Government works, and is seen to be working, as it should.
8.3 and in any case, is your “dogs” reference to the poor autistic man, savaged yesterday by rottweilers near Winton? That’s harsh for this time of the morning, Ruby. For any time really.
That seems an excessively generous interpretation to me.
Occam’s says more like Little, who was a politically inept leader, simple fucked up the politics.
I agree the politics are nowhere near as bad as our aggressively authoritarian political media seem to think, but the Likes of Audrey Young seem very under employed most of the time. Not a lot of substance happens in our politics, so they are reduced to making mountains out of molehills and reporting two flies climbing a wall with breathless urgency.
I just wonder why they don’t occupy their copious spare time writing in depth backgrounders.
“politically inept leader”, even if true, doesn’t translate to inept politician. I suggest that in fact, Little is a good and efficient politician, especially when out of the “leader” spotlight. In this instance we can only speculate, but my view is that he’s not so “inept” as to be unaware of what Winston’s position would invariably have been, and in fact played the game to the satisfaction of all-but-you (and some other posters 🙂
Now this is clearly overblown but Politics is as much about perception than reality and if the perception is a Government that is unstable soon enough it will be.
Headlines, schmedlines – they’re froth, Gosman, eye-catching dross, the don’t mean anything; that you’re enchanted by them is… a shame. Nevermind, there are others who can see past the headlines .
Your believing that illusions are real is … cute. Serious political commenters though, don’t fall for illusions. The Government won’t become “unstable” simply because National declares that to be the case; your confidence in that sort of fickleness marks you as … fickle.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) serious political commentators don’t generally dictate the popularity of political parties. If the perception gains traction that a governing coalition is unstable then people will think is is likely to fall and stop supporting it. Yes this is unfair to a degree but it is political reality.
Three years of parties disagreeing in public (but respectfully) without the government being brought down will show those headlines as stupid.
The media need crises to sell copy. I can understand why the populace might not be used to a government of adults, but they’ll learn what should be the norm rater than the exception.
I was thinking about that possibility except it has had a negative impact on the Government generally. It looks like the political management skills of Little and by extension the PM are flawed. Just listen to the attack by Guyon Espiner on Morning report this morning.
Guyon’s attack was, by accounts I’ve read, a failed one. Little would have been attacked even more vigorously, had his proposal gone ahead un-modified, as you know – Farrar et al would have been shrieking heedlessly; as it is, they’re crowing prematurely. What the media does is of little consequence, pun intended, and a smart operator will play them. Little’s a clever guy and Winston’s not too shabby either.
Little clever? Nah, he’s either stupid or arrogant. Clearly he didn’t have NZF on board with the three strikes policy, and Peters has rescued his plummeting polling at the expense of the hapless Mr Little.
Little should never had floated this idea as essentially a done deal. He could have made out that he was very keen to review the law including and then allowed Winston credit for nixing it.
The whole thing has been a shambles.
Luckily Winston’s going after MSD and Bennett et al plus the shenanigans in Singapore will quickly push it off the news cycle (for now).
But the ongoing government messiness and poor comms etc can only be explained away by Ardern for so long before it starts to become a major liability.
“the ongoing government messiness” is a message constructed and broadcast by the Right. There’s a grain of truth in it, as there would be for any and every “new” coalition Government, but the blue magnifying glass is being held over that small issue as part of National’s programme of denigrating the Government.
I admire your rather generous assessment of the situation Robert and I’d like to be able to agree with you but I can’t.
Three Strikes and law and order issues generally are just too sensitive electorally to be allowed to play out like this has. Apparently there was almost outright panic in Little’s office a week or so ago when the OIA on 3 strikes was released to media and they realised how it was going to go.
Oh well, I can’t argue with “apparently”…
Mind you, to say that “Three Strikes and law and order issues generally are just too sensitive electorally” shows me that any approach would bring problems, so this way, the usual attack lines are blurred and criticism blunted; in fact, the “usual suspects” are crowing with delight; that’s a pretty clever strategy if in fact, Little and Peters colluded. I’d do it the way they have; play some feints and switches and slip the soul through while confusion reigns.
That’s the thing though, apart from the lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the -key crowd pleasers any sensible measures on crime and justice are always problematic to put in front of the electorate.
It’s hard to see how giving the Opposition and their pals in the media an even bigger stick with which to beat the government on this is going to blur attack lines and blunt criticism?
Hard to see? Not for me 🙂
Will the Government get a progressive package of law & order reforms through in the near future? Yes, I believe they will. Will there be less noise around it, due to the “moderating” effect of Winston’s recent action? Yes, I believe there will. Clever play? Yes, I still believe so. I don’t take much note of the wailing and gnashing of Righty teeth around this issue.
What is missing throughout this debate, especially in the MSM, is the fact the 3 Strikes is a stupid politically motivated law, a blunt instrument that doesn’t work.
The MSM, if it was being even-handed, should be making the point that Labour and the Greens are right to try to get it repealed rather than treating this as an issue they hope will destroy the coalition.
Well done Andrew Little for sticking to his guns on Morning Report this morning.
An even-handed MSM would do itself out of a job, consequently, it always tips the table one way or the other, to maintain tension. We readers love tension; makes us feel alive!
Recent history would indicate our MSM are incapable of/disinterested in exploring the effects of policy as opposed to ‘political drama’…..and yet ‘we’ persist in our support.
““the ongoing government messiness” is a message constructed and broadcast by the Right.”
No, the messiness is surely and simply the result of inexperience combined with incompetence mixed with hubris. From the coalition agreement that gifted a billion dollars to a NZF slush fund, to the election of the Speaker (Labour’s screw up and then cover up), to the disgraceful decision making around oil and gas exploration, through to the incompetence of MIA Ministers such as Curran, Jackson, Davis, Twyford et al, this is a shambolic government mislead by a PM whose previous claim to fame had been working in a fish and chip shop. You were warned.
No, the messiness is natural and unavoidable. It’s the reporting that’s unnatural; the endless whine that you are part of, babayaga, that’s the twitter. Plus, You Have Been Warned!!!
Bomber’s on the money here.
“By publicly dumping a law that was only rhetoric and theatre in the first place (it’s only impacted 20 prisoners) Labour…
gives NZ First oxygen at a time when Labour desperately requires their coalition partners to survive
blunts National’s law and order attack which they will be playing all year with new tough on crime members bills.
Allows the perception to the petty consumers of bitterness that Labour have had to back down on prison reform when the actual process will continue. Liberal twitter and NGOs on twitter will lambast Little and scream at the injustice which will convince the petty consumers of bitterness in muddle Nu Zilind that Labour must have changed their position to outrage the Twitterratti in such a way.
Little loses the battle so he can win the war.”
If thats true its a bit short sighted because from now until the next election National can point to Labour being soft on crime so a vote for NZFirst is a vote for being soft on crime whereas a vote for National is a vote for three strikes
I’m sure he’s like most politicians, a decent, well meaning, reasonably intelligent person.
However your question: “Is he a political idiot?” is an easy question to answer. He’s failed twice to win an electorate seat and was driving Labour to oblivion before he did the smartest thing he’s ever likely to do, politically, and resign so yes, politically speaking, he is an idiot
However he is rocking a decent beard so thats something in his favour
You call that a beard?
It is just like Mallard’s.
All it is is that the hair from the top of his head has slipped down his face.
The only halfway decent beard any recent MP has had is the one Gareth Hughes showed off.
That added about 10 years to his age and made him look old enough to vote.
Even then he couldn’t compare to some of the early PMs like Seddon, Vogel, Stafford or Weld.
Best I can manage is councillor, Southland Regional Council, 2010 – 2018. I wonder if I’m on my own in being a bearded councillor in NZ? I certainly don’t meet many others.
They do, yes; well, mostly. I was told by my wife’s maiden aunt, way back, that she could “never make love to a man with a beard”. I guessed she meant something more arcane than it seemed by that, but still, I was taken aback. Didn’t stop me though!
“Didn’t stop me though”
How could I let that slip through???
I’m a “share the love” kinda guy. Truth to tell, Maiden Aunt’s comments didn’t deter me from wooing her niece (much more seemly, aye, though not quite the story it was shaping up to be 🙂
Crikey! Is Guyon looking for a bonus? His interview smacks of desperation. Fortunately Jacinda was able to make him sound just that. DESPARATE. She treated him like the bad mannered child that he is and he achieved absolutely nothing with his hectoring,bullying attitude. Maybe he should try a measured professional approach and he might get taken seriously. An excellent, sensible calm and clear attitude from Jacinda with her replies was wonderful to hear. At least one adult in the conversation! Guyon is past his used by date.
Was Guyon ever that “persistent” with Key?
Don’t remember him being so. Guyon was grateful that Key would allow a very sparse minute just before the 8 o’clock news and treated him gently in case he didn’t turn up at all.
Of course he was as persistent with Key and English. You just can’t remember because you obviously thought that any persistent questioning of Key/English was justified as a result of your political bias.
Totally agree. Guyon Espinor is a hectoring bore. I am tired of his style of interviewing. He’s more suited to Fox News.
And as for John Key – for years he refused to be interviewed on Morning Report.
If President Trump gets a good poll bump from the results of this North Korean summit he will be sending a strong signal to Romney and the traditional conservative Republican wing that there is only one Republican nomination for the next Presidential contest – and it’s him.
If the Dems don’t get their house sorted in pretty quick order instead of folding and undercutting each other like they did in the banking reforms, then they will be very hard pressed to beat Trump.
The rest might be a bit too far into the future, but Trump’s massive strength of perpetual chaos, drama, and through that total name-domination in the media is sustaining a very strong base to build from.
@ffloyd….agreed. I loved both Little and Jacinda taking it to Espiner this morning on Morning Report-well worth a listen to anyone who hasn’t heard it.
Both showed themselves to be smart and on top of the issue. I’m still reveling in this government after 9 years of hell.
Our future trade focus should be Asia and we should be part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, hanging off the USA’s coat tails is not going to do us any good in the future, the future trade growth region is Asia.
It’s better to trade with countries that make different stuff. Korea makes real steel and computers, and does not compete with our ag goods. The US, with its weird corn subsidies and mad cow disease doesn’t want our stuff.
Korea makes real steel and computers, and does not compete with our ag goods.
We make steel. Around 1.5 million tonnes of it per year. We export around 1 million tonnes of it. And that doesn’t even take into account all the raw iron sand that we export.
The problem with that scenario is that we will, quite rapidly, run out of iron deposits.
Our focus on farming is depleting our soils as well poisoning our waterways. So, that’s not sustainable either.
Electronics tend to made out of silicon and doping with semi-conductors. We have significant deposits of both of those as well. So, we could easily make our own electronics from our own resources. Just need to develop those deposits and build the factories. Do that and buying our own would be cheaper than importing due to distance and transport costs.
The US, with its weird corn subsidies and mad cow disease doesn’t want our stuff.
Our main agricultural export ATM seems to be dairy. The US is massively over-producing dairy to the point where their farmers are losing money on sale of it. In other words, even if we had an FTA with the US, we wouldn’t be able to export there simply because they can provide it themselves cheaper. And once they get that over-production sorted it’ll still be cheaper to buy US produced milk in the US than to buy NZ milk in the US.
An export led economy is doomed due to the very real physical limitations of available resources.
An economy that uses it’s own resources and recycles them is actually sustainable due to the resources always being available.
In other words, reality makes trade unsustainable.
God. Who gave Armstrong the kiss of life. ANOTHER opinion piece on his intimate knowledge of Jacindas state of mind, this time on Andrew Littles 3strike postponement. Definitely on a Labour sabotage mission.
Is Armstrong working as a psychologist now, just wait till after the baby is born and the post natal depresssion kicks in, Guyon, Richardson, Garner and Armstrong will have a fieldday ?
Armstrong is a devious National Party shill (as opposed to a journalist).
He lost all credibility as a commentator when he demanded Cunliffe’s resignation over a meaningless 10 year old letter. He later admitted he was wrong to do this, but of course he knew that at the time.
Justice! Fair play! Good for Nicky and for future police action. Though it still doesn’t explain why the police were so active for Slater.
“Investigative journalist Nicky Hager has accepted a police apology and payment of “substantial damages” following the unlawful search of his home during the investigation into the hacking that led to the Dirty Politics book.”
Just listening to K Ryan talking to someone? regarding the meeting between dumb and dumber. He says it is just a publicity exercise and won’t achieve anything. Does this mean it will be all about ‘summit and nowt?
“Ms Berryman is commencing immediately with the initial focus of her investigation on the Young Labour camp in February. The review is expected to take between two and three months,” said Nigel Haworth, Labour Party President.
Why should expect to hear anything? t has nothing to do with you. It was a purely internal matter for the Labour Party.
However I will tell you the gist of the enquiry.
Nothing happened.
The stories about it were all fabrications by lying members of neo-Nazi organisations like the National Party.
There were no members of the Party at the affair.
The people who were there all went to bed early and no one saw or heard anything.
The only problems were caused by fifth columnists from the National Party and other Fascist organisations.
But nothing happened.
Nothing further will be said.
It is time to move on.
But nothing happened.
There. I think you would agree that is a pretty fair summary of the matter.
Hopefully the IRD will do an audit on John Key’s affairs and determine whether he paid tax on the NZRail shares which he failed to disclose to the NZ Public, as he may have bought those shares with the intention of selling them (ie speculation) as he was definitely not a long term investor in NZRail, similar to one of the other major shareholders Fay Richwhite ?
I’d like to think that those in power should have automatic audits to make sure they are not profiting from their power. In particular due to the rise of the super rich to being in politics, aka financial trader makes PM aka KEY, the property developer/reality TV star make President aka Trump, the lawyer who makes his own laws aka Rodrigo Duterte…
But the trouble is that interviews aren’t as useful as employers think. Indeed, organizations can still make great (and arguably better) hiring decisions without them. What would happen if we all agreed to scrap job interviews tomorrow, and focused instead on other indicators of career potential? Unthinkable as it may sound, there are at least three important data points that suggest replacing interviews with other, more predictive measures is the way to go.
Most of the attributes interviewers try to evaluate by gut feel–a candidate’s competencies, skills, personality, values, “culture fit,” and so on–are more rigorously inferred from other data like resumes, simulations, tests, and past performance ratings. Interviews certainly create opportunities for candidates to make claims about these qualities, but as I argue in my latest book, there’s little reason to believe them. Indeed, there’s not much overlap between the talents people say they have and the ones they actually possess. (Plus, interviewers often use the idea of “good culture fit” to justify hiring people from their own in-groups.)
In fact, so-called “dark side” personality traits, such as narcissism and psychopathy, are found among people with otherwise strong social skills, at least in short-term interactions, which makes them perform rather well on interviews. In that sense, interviews are just like a first date: Just because someone charms you the first time you meet them doesn’t mean you should marry them. The regrettable fact is that there are parasitic people in just about every organization–those who climb the ladder while sucking up resources and taking credit for others’ work, all at the expense of strong performers who go unrecognized and stagnate in their careers. De-emphasizing job interviews–or ditching them completely–might help alleviate this this problem.
I’m sure that there are many managers and business owners who think that they’re great at interviews and yet are probably the most biased and make the worst mistakes because of that bias while they hire people just like them.
You have to wonder how a $6000 fine is going to deter employers after a 3.5 year breach of employing an illegal worker and not paying taxes and of course this is a person who is sponsoring in migrant workers too, for a liquor store.
If you calculate how much is being lost in each case, 3.5 years of someone else not getting a job, the police costs to prosecute, the deportation costs and the justice system and then the guy just gets a fine of $6000 and the loss of business to other stores who employ legal workers paying taxes! Crime sure does pay in this country!
Weird that you can’t get somebody who needs a job locally to work at his store and how the government keeps bringing in low wage workers at the drop of a hat and the government doesn’t understand why poverty is increasing.
Apparently over 60% of people who end up in prison are unemployed… maybe have a think about, rather than building more prisons and having 3 strikes laws and work for dole schemes – actually employ our own citizens in real jobs at 40 hours a week so that they don’t need to turn to crime!
There is no longer an equal playing field in this country both for businesses and workers because there has become a culture of paying for for a fake job to get residency, underpaying for a job or having illegal workers paying no taxes taking jobs.
Even the sex workers are fed up with the illegal workers coming in on student and tourist visas!
You can’t run a country with less and less people paying taxes and ignoring the problem of fake jobs and illegal workers!
Start with the criminal employers who are not paying taxes, probably collecting many benefits like AS and WFF and creating these Ponzi schemes buying up more small and medium businesses and perpetuating the growing problems for other legitimate businesses and workers.
They can’t read well enough, for example, to be able to get a driver’s licence because they can’t do the written tests.
They can’t get a job in today’s society because they can’t read.
When I was young I used to spend the University Summer break working in Wool Stores. You could get a job like that even if you could barely read or write. Being able to pick out the right numbers on the stencil when marking the weight was pretty much all you needed to be able to do.
Those sort of jobs simply don’t exist any more, but there are still people who can’t read well enough to do anything else. That is what is the best thing we can do to get people into jobs and out of prison.
I’m not saying that that is the only reason why this firm doesn’t hire locals. There are always ratbags who will hire immigrants at illegally low wages. It is however indicative of why there are people who can’t get jobs and just drift from one jail sentence to another.
My personal opinion is that the schools should make their absolute priority getting people up to a minimum level of literacy and numeracy before they worry about anything else at all. Cultural topics can wait. If you can’t read you can’t learn anything else anyway.
Agree literacy in prisons is a problem aka anyone illiterate should all be doing the primary school syllabus while in prison. I’m not talking about dinky little online courses, I think there should be full on schools in prisons for the inmates with one teacher per 20 inmates for example.
However once they get out of prison they should have an opportunity to get a job or even better not go to prison because they got a job when they left school/tertiary in the first place…
But my link was about an illegal worker working in a liquor store, I don’t think you need high literacy for that, in fact they seem to use symbols now on tills for products and the tills do all the calculations for the cash customers. So I think that illegal workers are a bad idea, we are just getting worse and worse in NZ, encouraging poor work practises with pathetic sentences and encouraging more of the same.
To give an example the guy who poached some Paua got 12 months in prison, his dive gear confiscated and not allowed to fish for 3 years. Someone who sent a hoax note to Fonterra got 8 years in prison. Grow a bit of cannabis and you could lose your house!
But poor working practises from employers, if they even get caught, actually seem to have a fine below what they made by their illegal actions!
The law should be banning employers caught hiring illegal workers from owning/managing a business for 3 years, let alone allow them to bring more people in as well as a fine of $100,000. They should also have IRD doing full audits to see if any suspicious payments are being made (aka bribes for jobs) and check if they are compliant in other tax matters.
The point is, people need to be doing something if they are unemployed and getting $150 p/w on the dole aint a good prospect and even worse ‘work for the dole at $150’, and a $600 p/w job in a liquor store, although not great, is better than nothing!
So if we are getting employers owning multiple businesses who have people paying for the job, working illegally or getting $2p/h (and there are many cases occurring of that), then it’s cutting someone else’s prospects down to get that job or someone else operating a business that operates within NZ law.
I’m sorry to have derailed your comments with my pet hobby horse.
I got distracted by the comment about prisoners having been unemployed.
Having people who are literate isn’t going to help very much with employers like the one in the case you quote of course. They employ people who will work for very little because otherwise they get deported.
The only real way to deal with such employers is to belt them with truly massive fines. Fines so high that it simply isn’t worth them offending. Then pay at least some of the money out to the people who were employed illegally or on less than the minimum wage. Treat their wealth as being like the money seized from the gangs. It is proceeds of a crime and should be forfeited.
On a different subject I would allow the employment of people who simply cannot produce enough to justify them having to be paid the minimum wage. There used to be sheltered workshops for such people. Sure they were paid very little. It did however give them something they could do. Make their living costs up with a benefit from the state.
alwyn, I would put it to you that the minimum wage is now so low that it is the equivalent of a sheltered workshop wage.
How desperate would you have to be to do hard, physically hurtful labour like picking Kiwifruit for possibly less than $15 an hour? (They jiggle it by paying by the basket, I believe.)
Be honest.
Well, to be honest your first statement is simply wrong.
If you compare the minimum wage to the median wage for a full time worker New Zealand has a very high ratio when compared to similar countries. In 2016, according to the OECD the ratios for a few selected countries was
New Zealand 0.61
Australia 0.54
Germany 0.47
France 0.61
USA 0.35
Canada 0.46
UK 0.41
The numbers for lots of other countries are here. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=MIN2AVE
I would fail to see how that can be described as “low”.
It is also much greater than would have been a typical wage in a sheltered workshop. They were, until the were forced out of existence by the Clark Government something like a couple of dollars/hour.
The workers didn’t live of that of course. They, or their families got benefits. It gave the people involved something to do each day and gave some meaning to their life.
Would I like to do something like Kiwifruit picking? At my age and physical condition of course not. When I was younger I quite happily spent about 3 months each year labouring and enjoyed it. It is amazing how much muscle you can put on in a few months when away from the student life.
I can’t really discuss the topic with you unless you see that your beliefs about minimum wages in this country are simply wrong, can I?
How can 50% of prisoners be illiterate surely they went to school until they were 15 years old, I thought we had a good education system or have we had teachers just f’ing around ? Sounds like B/S to me ?
@Tamati Tautuhi, sadly I think it is true, I have heard similar, sadly the result of Rogernomics and our ‘new’ educational systems like Tomorrow’s Schools where schools are run more like businesses. Personally I’d like to see our school principals have a more education focus, nowadays they are more like administration managers working our asset depreciation and infrastructure maintenance budgets… because in the old days the ministry took care of all that but now it’s up to the individual schools the burden often falling on principals… which has encouraged a certain type of principal more on the economic side than the educational side..
Of course in the business world, you have a CEO, CIO, CFO and CTO… but school principals are expected to do all that in one role, plus be the educational leaders..and of course the health and safety side.
Quite frankly it’s lucky we even get the results we do get with the weird ideas that have come about. The casualties are the kids who are failing 30% and the syllabus not getting every kid through.
It’s also not just for people who are going the criminal route that these jobs are useful for, I know people with intellectual disabilities who are all working in places like Supermarkets, or people who work in hospitality because they have other issues. The people I know are good workers who have been working for nearly a decade in that type of job. But they are being replaced and forced out of the work force by a growing issue of imported low wage workers, who as well as taking out jobs need more hospitals/schools/roads/houses.
So not only are people at the bottom facing job pressure, they also now have more competition for getting a house to rent and the rest of the country are subsidising these employers who are increasing at an alarming pace around the country. It used to just be Auckland, no more it’s spreading everywhere.
Likewise the quality of tourist experience. Stayed at a formally upmarket hotel taken over by an overseas firm who are buying up hotels around the country. If hardly any staff members, stinky minibar, dirty bathroom, un maintained rooms with bits falling off door, and rat bait packages under the bed in a resort that used to be luxury stay, sound like a good tourist experience, welcome to the ‘new’ New Zealand experience…
@Tamati. I can’t confirm the numbers but I am certainly willing to believe Mike’s comments. Did you read the article at that link?
I once tutored someone in one of our Prisons. That was about 40 years ago. He was, I think, in for selling drugs and he was doing part-time University courses at Massey. Definitely an odd one out. He said that many inmates couldn’t read and he would read their letters to them.
There have always been people like that. It isn’t a new thing or something that Tomorrow’s Schools caused. It just didn’t matter so much when there were lots of manual labour jobs available. When I was at High School we had a lot (around 20%) who arrived at the school for the third form at age 13 who really could not read or write. There were a couple of teachers who spent nearly all their time teaching them to read. You see without that skill they couldn’t learn anything else. Once they had, if ever, achieved that skill they could learn other things.
That was about 60 years ago. At least, as I suggested, in those days you could find work with very low skills. Now you can’t. In fact you may not even be able to get to work if you can’t drive.
If you don’t get the hang of reading early on at school I have been told you will withdraw from learning. You know you aren’t as good as other kids but you don’t want to admit it or to show up as being behind. So you say nothing. Then you stop attending school and things just never improve.
And no, it isn’t just “teachers f”ing off” as you put it. Kids missing school because they can’t keep up can’t be helped if they aren’t there.
On the other hand I think there are far too many things in the curriculum that could be ignored as long as this skill isn’t there. It might be a good thing to learn about all sorts of topics but they should be left until the three R’s are at some minimal level.
Good comment, alwyn (just for a change..)
Some time ago during my time as a teacher of languages I remember a very interesting lecture/article by some linguistic guru who claimed by some research or stats or who-knows-what that even in the best utopian country with the finest possible education system, a minimum of 8% (it could have been 1 in 8) in any population will inevitably remain functionally illiterate.
It is just the way humans are born.
So while some prisoners may be capable of becoming literate, it may well be that many will remain the way they are despite our efforts.
To my mind we need to reinstitute well-paid jobs for such people.
My surprising choice for an example of such nature is – rubbish collection!
In the good old days: a gang of 5 or so people with one truck. One drives; one or two stand up on rear, catch the bins lifted or thrown upwards to them, empty the bin into the truck, then toss the empty bin back down to the several runners, who place it back on the footpath upside-down. (A popular member of the old Waikato Rugby team used to do that job because it helped him keep fit for rugby.)
A radio would be blaring pop music on the back of the truck, the guys would be calling out to one another (including to driver) to maintain coordinated effort.
My toddler daughter would hear the parade coming, rush to the front window: the guys on the back of the truck used to look out for this, and would wave and grin, causing little toddler to wave back energetically. They seemed to love waving to little kids. They were cheerful enough to smile!
Lamentably, there is no such thing any more. Automated trucks, max of two people; no music; one might get fit by stepping on and off running board to toss bags (PLASTIC!!) of rubbish into the rear… The worst I saw was in Auckland where one sad-looking guy drove the truck that had mechanised arms to pick up wheely-bins and replace them (emptied out) back on the footpath. He looked bloody miserable. Probably paid far less than those earlier guys.
This disaster must apply to many other jobs as well. Fewer people less happy, being paid less money. I would not have minded working with those guys back when I was young. I would hate to work in modern rubbish collection.
This is how the Market leads us to bad places: mechanisation that is not well-guided is the enemy of human society. (The Luddites were right!)
The economy makes a good servant to society, but a very poor master.
And we have RWNJs still stupid enough to want the economy and the market to rule….
So weird though that although those jobs are apparently going, NZ seems to have so many ‘unskilled’ jobs on it’s ‘skilled’ migrant list… our productivity has been stagnant for years and our migrants are even lower qualified and less skilled than 5 years ago and so many lobby groups jumping up and down about how there are so many shortages of labour because apparently Kiwis are not suitable anymore. What a strategy for the future, sarc.
Posted an article a few days ago where an offshore hotel being built wanted 100’s of workers bought into Auckland on $20 p/h as decorators.
$20 p/h was the rate for a painter/decorater about 28 years ago!!! There are plenty of painter/decorators in Northland, but do you really think it is worth someone’s while to come to Auckland for a pay rate that comes from circa 1990 and is impossible to live on once you have a family ????
How the fuck can local construction survive when you are getting this under cutting?
Careful, dear alwyn – you have almost agreed with me.
What is the way ahead? They say that further automation is going to cut even more jobs. Would a sensible society not be concerned to see that its members were usefully and reasonably happily occupied, and use automation only as required to meet those needs, and improve the economy without social damage??
Instead we have a greedy group who use automation to maximise their profits, without caring that they create one hell-hole of a society.
A recipe for massive disaster.
Your thoughts? (As The Chairman was so fond of demanding..)
Even better he is a “Polynesian Jew” playing Adolf Hitler, the imaginary friend of a young German lad whose mum is active in the Resistance (and Scarlett Johansson to boot!).
Simon No Bridges says Winston should concentrate on governing the country rather than taking out vendettas against Senior Government Officials and MP’s.
What the clown needs to realize is it is a separate issue to NZF, the Coalition or the governing of the country. These people deliberately released Winston’s personal information into the public arena, to smear him and influence the outcome of the 2017 General Election. Dirty Politics Paper 102
If people are not brought to account by the judicial system these things will keep happening.
We had blatant fraud and corruption with the collapse of the BNZ which was covered up by the NZ Government and the NZ Judiciary in the Winebox Enquiry. Hence we have systemic failures of companies here in NZ ever since then, as “white collar crime” is considered a legitimate business activity here in NZ. However stealing pinky bars from the local petrol station will get you locked up for a good length of time.
It sends a message to the crooks “if you are going to commit fraud here in NZ do it for a reasonable sum of money ? ” Doug Graham would be a classic case and example.
The Standard used to be, Worthwhile. But now that it is infested with Trolls it is so dull and childlike. It iooks and acts like a toddler with a dirty bottom.
Observer; The Standard is still worthwhile and then some. Those folk you “name” are our “creative tension providers” – without them, we are soft. Harden up, enjoy the creative stress!
You just have to scroll, or scribe past them, throw them the odd lure or live bait when you want a bit of entertainment, as it doesn’t take them long to come up the berley trail, just don’t feed them too much as they can chew up a lot of precious time and bait.
Report: We had good early activity by two trolls Gossie was up early and I am not sure who the other one was, today we have had good troll activity throughout the day, and it is highly likely we will get the Pick 6 today b4 12.00am, yesterday we didn’t get the last leg b4 12.00am but we got 5 legs in. So far today we have had activity from, Gossie, Mullet Head, James, Puckish Rogue & Baby Gaga. I will post the results later once we have analysed all the days trolling activity across T/S.
As I have suggested they should set up there own Blog Site and go all out, I guess they are over here undercover from Kiwi Blog & Whale Oil websites to keep themselves entertained ?
And how do we classify contributors? Who could decide whether a certain genuinely concerned Leftie (who often makes comments that look so) is in fact not what he seems?
Watched Question Time today. Bridges all geared up to smash Andrew Little but crashed out having to face Winston “On behalf Of the PM.”
Winston was at his best. Succinct. Amusing. And made Simon look like a very very silly little boy. Winston will be great as Acting PM.
Apologize to the ambulance service people it’s not like Eco Maori rings a ambulance every day. I was informed that the service is busy and the time was 40 min. The last time I had a ambulance rang was a hcoptter I did not wait I got my son to take me to hospital.
Ka kite ano
The ultra-rich have done very, very well out of the pandemic. Globally, the wealth of the ten richest people rose by US$540 billion last year, enough money to pay for the pandemic in its entirity. And in New Zealand, local billionaire Graeme Hart saw his wealth increase by almost NZ$3.5 ...
Postmodernism has long been looked upon as an indecipherable ideology and a source of amusement. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, had a hoax article published in ‘Social Text’ an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. In ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Anew study in Nature Sustainability incorporates the damages that climate change does to healthy ecosystems into standard climate-economics models. The key finding in the study by Bernardo Bastien-Olvera and Frances Moore from the University of California at Davis: The models have been underestimating the ...
In a recent interview with RNZ (14th of January), NZ Council of Civil Liberties Chair Thomas Beagle, in response to Simon Bridges condemnation of the post-Trump Twitter purge of local far Right and other accounts, said the following: “Cos the thing about freedom of expression is that it’s not just ...
Let’s be clear: if Trump is not politically killed off once and for all, he will become a MAGA Dracula, rising from the dead to haunt US politics for years to come and giving inspiration to his wretched family of grifters and thousands of deplorables well into the next decade. ...
Since its demise as an imperial power, and especially its deindustrialisation under Thatcher, the UK's primary economic engine has been its role as a money laundry, using its network of overseas territories as tax havens to enable rich people around the world to steal from the societies they live in. ...
Last month OMV quit the Great South Basin and surrendered its offshore exploration permits outside of Taranaki. This month, Australian-owned Beach Energy has done the same: Beach Energy Resources New Zealand has decided to abandon all of its oil and gas exploration permits off the South Island coast, including ...
The new Northland case has been linked to the South African strain of Covid-19, one of a number of new, more contagious Covid variants. Here’s how they emerge and why. Let’s start with the basics. The genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for Covid-19 is a strand of RNA ...
MARVIN HUBBARD, US citizen by birth, New Zealand citizen by choice, Quaker and left-wing activist, has been broadcasting his show, "Community or Chaos", on Otago Access Radio for the best part of 30 years. On 24 November last year, I spoke with him about the outcome of the 2020 General ...
This is a guest blog post by Daniel Tamberg, Potsdam, co-founder and director of SCIARA GmbH. The non-profit organisation SCIARA is developing and operating a flexible software platform for scientific simulation games that allows thousands of players to explore, design and understand possible climate futures together. Decision-makers in politics, business, ...
Yesterday's Gone: Cold shivers are running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante. A change is gonna come. ONE COULD ...
Is it possible to live and let live in the post-Trump era? The online campaign to vilify Christopher Liddell, ex-White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Assistant to Trump, makes for an interesting case study. Liddell is a New Zealander whose illustrious career in corporate America once earned him plaudits ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 17, 2021 through Sat, Jan 23, 2021Editor's Choice12 new books explore fresh approaches to act on climate changeAuthors explore scientific, economic, and political avenues for climate action ...
This discussion is from a Twitter thread by Martin Kulldorff on 20 December 2020. He is a Professor at Harvard Medical School specialising in disease surveillance methods, infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety. His Twitter handle is @MartinKulldorff #1 Public health is about all health outcomes, not just a single ...
The Treasury forecasts suggest the economy is doing better than expected after the Covid Shock. John Kenneth Galbraith was wont to say that economic forecasting was designed to make astrology look good. Unfair, but it raises the question of the purpose of economic forecasts. Certainly the public may treat them ...
Q: Will the COVID-19 vaccines prevent the transmission of the coronavirus and bring about community immunity (aka herd immunity)? A: Jury not in yet but vaccines do not have to be perfect to thwart the spread of infection. While vaccines induce protection against illness, they do not always stop actual ...
Joe Biden seems to be everything that Donald Trump was not – decent, straightforward, considerate of others, mindful of his responsibilities – but none of that means that he has an easy path ahead of him. The pandemic still rages, American standing in the world is grievously low, and the ...
Keana VirmaniFrom healthcare robots to data privacy, to sea level rise and Antarctica under the ice: in the four years since its establishment, the Aotearoa New Zealand Science Journalism Fund has supported over 30 projects.Rebecca Priestley, receiving the PM Science Communication Prize (Photo by Mark Tantrum) Associate Professor ...
Nothing more from me today - I'm off to Wellington, to participate in the city's annual roleplaying convention (which has also eaten my time for the whole week, limiting blogging despite there being interesting things happening). Normal bloggage will resume Tuesday. ...
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weaponscame into force today, making the development, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal in international law. Every nuclear-armed state is now a criminal regime. The corporations and scientists who design, build and maintain their illegal weapons are now ...
"Come The Revolution!" The key objective of Bernard Hickey’s revolutionary solution to the housing crisis is a 50 percent reduction in the price of the average family home. This will be achieved by the introduction of Capital Gains, Land, and Wealth taxes, and by the opening up of currently RMA-protected ...
by Daphna Whitmore Twitter and Facebook shutting down Trump’s accounts after his supporters stormed Capitol Hill is old news now but the debates continue over whether the actions against Trump are a good thing or not. Those in favour of banning Trump say Twitter and Facebook are private companies and ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Democrats now control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade, albeit with razor thin Congressional majorities. The last time, in the 111th Congress (2009-2011), House Democrats passed a carbon cap and trade bill, but it died ...
Session thirty-three was highly abbreviated, via having to move house in a short space of time. Oh well. The party decided to ignore the tree-monster and continue the attack on the Giant Troll. Tarsin – flying on a giant summoned bat – dumped some high-grade oil over the ...
Last night I stayed up till 3am just to see then-President Donald Trump leave the White House, get on a plane, and fly off to Florida, hopefully never to return. And when I woke up this morning, America was different. Not perfect, because it never was. Probably not even good, ...
Watching today’s inauguration of Joe Biden as the United States’ 46th president, there’s not a lot in common with the inauguration of Donald Trump just four destructive years ago. Where Trump warned of carnage, Biden dared to hope for unity and decency. But the one place they converge is that ...
Dan FalkBritons who switched on their TVs to “Good Morning Britain” on the morning of Sept. 15, 2020, were greeted by news not from our own troubled world, but from neighboring Venus. Piers Morgan, one of the hosts, was talking about a major science story that had surfaced the ...
Sara LutermanGrowing up autistic in a non-autistic world can be very isolating. We are often strange and out of sync with peers, despite our best efforts. Autistic adults have, until very recently, been largely absent from media and the public sphere. Finding role models is difficult. Finding useful advice ...
Doug JohnsonThe alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year. In 2015, for instance, around 75,000 people visited the Chicago Botanic Garden to see one of their corpse flowers bloom. More than ...
Getting to Browser Tab Zero so I can reboot the computer is awfully hard when the one open tab is a Table of Contents for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and every issue has more stuff I want to read. A few highlights: Gugler et al demonstrating ...
Timothy Ford, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Charles M. Schweik, University of Massachusetts AmherstTo mitigate health inequities and promote social justice, coronavirus vaccines need to get to underserved populations and hard-to-reach communities. There are few places in the U.S. that are unreachable by road, but other factors – many ...
Israel chose to pay a bit over the odds for the Pfizer vaccine to get earlier access. Here’s The Times of Israel from 16 November. American government will be charged $39 for each two-shot dose, and the European bloc even less, but Jerusalem said to agree to pay $56. Israel ...
Orla is a gender critical Marxist in Ireland. She gave a presentation on 15 January 2021 on the connection between postmodern/transgender identity politics and the current attacks on democratic and free speech rights. Orla has been active previously in the Irish Socialist Workers Party and the People Before Profit electoral ...
. . America: The Empire Strikes Back (at itself) Further to my comments in the first part of 2020: The History That Was, the following should be considered regarding the current state of the US. They most likely will be by future historians pondering the critical decades of ...
Nathaniel ScharpingIn March, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down major cities in the U.S., researchers were thinking about blood. In particular, they were worried about the U.S. blood supply — the millions of donations every year that help keep hospital patients alive when they need a transfusion. ...
Sarah L Caddy, University of CambridgeVaccines are a marvel of medicine. Few interventions can claim to have saved as many lives. But it may surprise you to know that not all vaccines provide the same level of protection. Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you ...
Back in 2016, the Portuguese government announced plans to stop burning coal by 2030. But progress has come much quicker, and they're now scheduled to close their last coal plant by the end of this year: The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 ...
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, ...
RNZ reports on continued arbitrariness on decisions at the border. British comedian Russell Howard is about to tour New Zealand and other acts allowed in through managed isolation this summer include drag queen RuPaul and musicians at Northern Bass in Mangawhai and the Bay Dreams festival. The vice-president of the ...
As families around the world mourn more than two million people dead from Covid-19, the Plan B academics and their PR industry collaborator continue to argue that the New Zealand government should stop focusing on our managed isolation and quarantine system and instead protect the elderly so that they can ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 10, 2021 through Sat, Jan 16, 2021Editor's ChoiceNASA says 2020 tied for hottest year on record — here’s what you can do to helpPhoto by Michael Held on Unsplash ...
Health authorities in Norway are reporting some concerns about deaths in frail elderly after receiving their COVID-19 vaccine. Is this causally related to the vaccine? Probably not but here are the things to consider. According to the news there have been 23 deaths in Norway shortly after vaccine administration and ...
Happy New Year! No, experts are not concerned that “…one of New Zealand’s COIVD-1( vaccines will fail to protect the country” Here is why. But first I wish to issue an expletive about this journalism (First in Australia and then in NZ). It exhibits utter failure to actually truly consult ...
All nations have shadows; some acknowledge them. For others they shape their image in uncomfortable ways.The staunch Labour supporter was in despair at what her Rogernomics Government was doing. But she finished ‘at least, we got rid of Muldoon’, a response which tells us that then, and today, one’s views ...
Grigori GuitchountsIn November, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, made an attention-grabbing announcement: More than 30 of its most prestigious journals, including the flagship Nature, will now allow authors to pay a fee of US$11,390 to make their papers freely available for anyone to read ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer Imagine a major climate change law passing the U.S. Congress unanimously? Don’t bother. It turns out that you don’t need to imagine it. Get this: The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed ...
“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie ...
TheOneRing.Net has got its paws on the official synopsis of the upcoming Amazon Tolkien TV series. It’s a development that brings to mind the line about Sauron deliberately releasing Gollum from the dungeons of Barad-dûr. Amazon knew exactly what they were doing here, in terms of drumming up publicity: ...
Since Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, US presidents have joined an informal club intended to provide support - and occasionally rivalry - between those few who have been ‘leaders of the free world’. Donald Trump, elected on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ and a constant mocker of his predecessors, ...
For over a decade commentators have noted the rise of a new brand of explicitly ideological politics throughout the world. By this they usually refer to the re-emergence of national populism and avowedly illiberal approaches to governance throughout the “advanced” democratic community, but they also extend the thought to the ...
The US House of Representatives has just impeached Donald Trump, giving him the dubious honour of being the only US President to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans voted for impeachement, making it the most bipartisan impeachment ever. The question now is whether the Senate will rise to the occasion, and ...
Kieren Mitchell; Alice Mouton, Université de Liège; Angela Perri, Durham University, and Laurent Frantz, Ludwig Maximilian University of MunichThanks to the hit television series Game of Thrones, the dire wolf has gained a near-mythical status. But it was a real animal that roamed the Americas for at least 250,000 ...
Tide of tidal data rises Having cast our own fate to include rising sea level, there's a degree of urgency in learning the history of mean sea level in any given spot, beyond idle curiosity. Sea level rise (SLR) isn't equal from one place to another and even at a particular ...
Well, some of those chickens sure came home bigly, didn’t they… and proceeded to shit all over the nice carpet in the Capitol. What we were seeing here are societal forces that have long had difficulty trying to reconcile people to the “idea” of America and the reality of ...
In the wake of Donald Trump's incitement of an assault on the US capitol, Twitter finally enforced its terms of service and suspended his account. They've since followed that up with action against prominent QAnon accounts and Trumpers, including in New Zealand. I'm not unhappy with this: Trump regularly violated ...
Peter S. Ross, University of British ColumbiaThe Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern ...
Susan St John makes the case for taxing a deemed rate of return on excessive real estate holdings (after a family home exemption), to redirect scarce housing resources to where they are needed most. Read the full article here ...
I’m less than convinced by arguments that platforms like Twitter should be subject to common carrier regulation preventing them from being able to decide who to keep on as clients of their free services, and who they would not like to serve. It’s much easier to create competition for the ...
A growing public housing waiting list and continued increase of house prices must be urgently addressed by Government, Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson said today. ...
A Waitomo-based Jobs for Nature project will keep up to ten people employed in the village as the tourism sector recovers post Covid-19 Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “This $500,000 project will save ten local jobs by deploying workers from Discover Waitomo into nature-based jobs. They will be undertaking local ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Hon Nanaia Mahuta today announced three diplomatic appointments: Alana Hudson as Ambassador to Poland John Riley as Consul-General to Hong Kong Stephen Wong as Consul-General to Shanghai Poland “New Zealand’s relationship with Poland is built on enduring personal, economic and historical connections. Poland is also an important ...
Work begins today at Wainuiomata High School to ensure buildings and teaching spaces are fit for purpose, Education Minister Chris Hipkins says. The Minister joined principal Janette Melrose and board chair Lynda Koia to kick off demolition for the project, which is worth close to $40 million, as the site ...
A skilled and experienced group of people have been named as the newly established Oranga Tamariki Ministerial Advisory Board by Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis today. The Board will provide independent advice and assurance to the Minister for Children across three key areas of Oranga Tamariki: relationships with families, whānau, and ...
The green light for New Zealand’s first COVID-19 vaccine could be granted in just over a week, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said today. “We’re making swift progress towards vaccinating New Zealanders against the virus, but we’re also absolutely committed to ensuring the vaccines are safe and effective,” Jacinda Ardern said. ...
The Minister for ACC is pleased to announce the appointment of three new members to join the Board of ACC on 1 February 2021. “All three bring diverse skills and experience to provide strong governance oversight to lead the direction of ACC” said Hon Carmel Sepuloni. Bella Takiari-Brame from Hamilton ...
The Government is investing $9 million to upgrade a significant community facility in Invercargill, creating economic stimulus and jobs, Infrastructure Minister Grant Robertson and Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene have announced. The grant for Waihōpai Rūnaka Inc to make improvements to Murihiku Marae comes from the $3 billion set ...
[Opening comments, welcome and thank you to Auckland University etc] It is a great pleasure to be here this afternoon to celebrate such an historic occasion - the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This is a moment many feared would never come, but ...
The Government is providing $3 million in one-off seed funding to help disabled people around New Zealand stay connected and access support in their communities, Minister for Disability Issues, Carmel Sepuloni announced today. The funding will allow disability service providers to develop digital and community-based solutions over the next two ...
Border workers in quarantine facilities will be offered voluntary daily COVID-19 saliva tests in addition to their regular weekly testing, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. This additional option will be rolled out at the Jet Park Quarantine facility in Auckland starting on Monday 25 January, and then to ...
The next steps in the Government’s ambitious firearms reform programme to include a three-month buy-back have been announced by Police Minister Poto Williams today. “The last buy-back and amnesty was unprecedented for New Zealand and was successful in collecting 60,297 firearms, modifying a further 5,630 firearms, and collecting 299,837 prohibited ...
Upscaling work already underway to restore two iconic ecosystems will deliver jobs and a lasting legacy, Conservation Minister Kiri Allan says. “The Jobs for Nature programme provides $1.25 billion over four years to offer employment opportunities for people whose livelihoods have been impacted by the COVID-19 recession. “Two new projects ...
The Government has released its Public Housing Plan 2021-2024 which outlines the intention of where 8,000 additional public and transitional housing places announced in Budget 2020, will go. “The Government is committed to continuing its public house build programme at pace and scale. The extra 8,000 homes – 6000 public ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has congratulated President Joe Biden on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States of America. “I look forward to building a close relationship with President Biden and working with him on issues that matter to both our countries,” Jacinda Ardern said. “New Zealand ...
A major investment to tackle wilding pines in Mt Richmond will create jobs and help protect the area’s unique ecosystems, Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor says. The Mt Richmond Forest Park has unique ecosystems developed on mineral-rich geology, including taonga plant species found nowhere else in the country. “These special plant ...
To further protect New Zealand from COVID-19, the Government is extending pre-departure testing to all passengers to New Zealand except from Australia, Antarctica and most Pacific Islands, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “The change will come into force for all flights arriving in New Zealand after 11:59pm (NZT) on Monday ...
Bay Conservation Cadets launched with first intake Supported with $3.5 million grant Part of $1.245b Jobs for Nature programme to accelerate recover from Covid Cadets will learn skills to protect and enhance environment Environment Minister David Parker today welcomed the first intake of cadets at the launch of the Bay ...
The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown have announced passengers from the Cook Islands can resume quarantine-free travel into New Zealand from 21 January, enabling access to essential services such as health. “Following confirmation of the Cook Islands’ COVID ...
Jobs for Nature funding is being made available to conservation groups and landowners to employ staff and contractors in a move aimed at boosting local biodiversity-focused projects, Conservation Minister Kiritapu Allan has announced. It is estimated some 400-plus jobs will be created with employment opportunities in ecology, restoration, trapping, ...
The Government has approved an exception class for 1000 international tertiary students, degree level and above, who began their study in New Zealand but were caught offshore when border restrictions began. The exception will allow students to return to New Zealand in stages from April 2021. “Our top priority continues ...
Today’s deal between Meridian and Rio Tinto for the Tiwai smelter to remain open another four years provides time for a managed transition for Southland. “The deal provides welcome certainty to the Southland community by protecting jobs and incomes as the region plans for the future. The Government is committed ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has appointed Anna Curzon to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). The leader of each APEC economy appoints three private sector representatives to ABAC. ABAC provides advice to leaders annually on business priorities. “ABAC helps ensure that APEC’s work programme is informed by business community perspectives ...
The Government’s prudent fiscal management and strong policy programme in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic have been acknowledged by the credit rating agency Fitch. Fitch has today affirmed New Zealand’s local currency rating at AA+ with a stable outlook and foreign currency rating at AA with a positive ...
The Government is putting in place a suite of additional actions to protect New Zealand from COVID-19, including new emerging variants, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “Given the high rates of infection in many countries and evidence of the global spread of more transmissible variants, it’s clear that ...
$36 million of Government funding alongside councils and others for 19 projects Investment will clean up and protect waterways and create local jobs Boots on the ground expected in Q2 of 2021 Funding part of the Jobs for Nature policy package A package of 19 projects will help clean up ...
The commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Ruapekapeka represents an opportunity for all New Zealanders to reflect on the role these conflicts have had in creating our modern nation, says Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Kiri Allan. “The Battle at Te Ruapekapeka Pā, which took ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Russell Dean Christopher Bicknell, Post-doctoral researcher in Palaeobiology , University of New England Shell-crushing predation was already in full swing half a billion years ago, as our new research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B reveals. A hyena devouring ...
Vodafone has suspended advertising on the radio station amid calls for talkback host John Banks to be taken off air after yet another racist outburst. Alex Braae reports. In an alarming segment of talkback radio, former Auckland mayor John Banks endorsed the views of a caller who described Māori as a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Welch, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland When a COVID-19 case was found in Northland last Sunday, Aotearoa’s second-longest period with no detected community case came to an end. ESR scientists worked late into Sunday night to obtain a whole genome sequence ...
He has the perfect moustache, an exceptional mullet, and he uses terms like ‘face hole’ on national TV. Who or what is Dr Joel Rindelaub?I was drawn in by the moustache, but it was the mullet that really kept me there. Watching TVNZ’s Breakfast yesterday morning I was fixated. Often, ...
We’ll never be royals with nearly a quarter of declined baby names featuring “Royal” in some form or another. Te Tari Taiwhenua Department of Internal Affairs has released the list of names declined in 2020 by the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and ...
After a raft of inquiries delving into and recommending what should be done about the politically beleaguered Orangi Tamaraki, along with the briefing papers we suppose he has been given, we imagined Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis would have no more need for expert advice. Wrong. He has ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Ho, Senior Lecturer and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University There’s a common assumption men take longer than women to poo. People say so on Twitter, in memes, and elsewhereonline. But is that right? What could explain it? And if ...
Just as sexuality is a spectrum, so too is asexuality. In Ace of Hearts, members of New Zealand’s asexual community talk about the challenges and misconceptions of identifying as ace.First published November 17, 2020.Ace of Hearts is part of Frame, a series of short documentaries produced by Wrestler for The Spinoff.“A ...
Sam Brooks wasn’t allowed to watch kids TV as a kid. Now, as a 30 year old man, he watches it for the first time.My mother’s approach to parenting was unorthodox. I wrote weekly book reports on top of my actual homework, I did maths equations in Roman numerals and ...
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk More leading Indonesian figures have made racial slurs against Natalius Pigai, former chair of the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) – and all West Papuans, says United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda. “Since the illegal Indonesian invasion in 1963, Indonesian ...
“The Government’s failure to even conduct a standard cost-benefit analysis for the most expensive infrastructure project in New Zealand’s history is mind-bogglingly arrogant,” says New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke. “A ...
The Ministry of Health is today drawing backlash from the local New Zealand vaping industry following its release of proposed regulations for the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act. Vaping Trade Association New Zealand (VTANZ) President, ...
Sophie Gilmour and Simon Day are joined by special guest Hugo Baird, co-owner of Grey Lynn’s Honey Bones and Lilian, to talk about opening new pub Hotel Ponsonby.Auckland is a city of many bars but few really good pubs – the kind of places you’d be just as comfortable going ...
The appointment of an advisory board for Oranga Tamariki is welcome and should be a step toward a total transformation of the care and protection system to a by Māori, for Māori approach, Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft said today. Minister ...
Taking control of your financial wellbeing can have cascading positive impacts for your life and it can also be fun. With the help of the team at Kiwi Wealth, we’ve compiled some simple tricks for balancing your books in 2021. There’s something about the beginning of a new year, especially after ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kris Gledhill, Professor of Law, Auckland University of Technology As we know, getting into New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult. There are practicalities, such as high airfare and managed isolation costs. And there are legal requirements, including pre-flight testing, mandatory ...
New Zealand faces the risk of a generation being locked out of the housing market unless land is freed up and more houses built, National Party leader Judith Collins says. ...
On Sunday, Stuff published a months-long investigation by Alison Mau detailing allegations of harassment and exploitation within the local music industry.The piece, ‘Music industry professionals demand change after speaking out about its dark side’, includes allegations of inappropriate behaviour and abuse of power by male artists, international acts and executives; ...
“The Government is all at sea on timelines for Australia and New Zealand’s respective vaccine roll-outs, with the worst news coming from the mouth of Pfizer Australia CEO Anne Harris,” says ACT Leader David Seymour. “Yesterday, under increasing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Higgins, Senior Research Fellow, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised the US would demonstrate “global leadership on refugees”. Once elected, he pledged to vastly increase refugee resettlement in the US. If history is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Baumann, Casual Academic, School of Social Sciences & Psychology, Western Sydney University Among the many hard truths exposed by COVID-19 is the huge disparity between the world’s rich and poor. As economies went into freefall, the world’s billionaires increased their already ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jan Lanicek, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW On January 27 communities worldwide commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz — the largest complex of concentration camps and extermination centres during the Holocaust. This is the first year the International ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorinda Cramer, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Australian Catholic University The summer break is over, marking a return to the office. For some, this ends almost a year of working from home in lockdown. Some analysts are predicting it might also mark an enduring ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for January 27, keeping you up to date with the latest local and international news. Reach me on stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur members make The Spinoff happen! Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato New Zealand has a strong history of protecting and promoting human rights at home and internationally, and prides itself on being an outspoken critic and global leader in this area. So, when the most ...
Good morning and welcome to the Bulletin. In today’s edition: Collins outlines the plan forward for National, no spread of Covid spotted yet in Northland, and students return for climate protest.In front of a Rotary Club at the Ellerslie Racecourse in Auckland, National leader Judith Collins yesterday set out her ...
*This articlefirst appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. The tourism industry isn't holding its breath for a trans-Tasman travel bubble being in place after Australia temporarily closed its borders to New Zealand. New Zealanders could be waiting even longer for a full trans-Tasman bubble, with the ...
We continue our week-long examination of New Zealand writer Roderick Finlayson with an essay by Anahera Gildea on cultural appropriation Every night at 7pm sharp, my Irish Catholic father and his eight siblings would have to kneel on the carpet of the living room, facing the freshly polished nudity of ...
Children's Minister Kelvin Davis will have independent eyes and ears across Oranga Tamariki over the next five months as the Government tries to change the work and practices of the ministry. The Government has created a Māori-led watchdog to oversee how the children's ministry, Oranga Tamariki, deals with parents and ...
A Covid reset will force costly and inflexible cities to take a hard look at their planning systems, or people will vote with their feet. Broken urban planning systems make for misery even in the best of times. If land use and housing regulations prevent metropolitan areas from growing up or out as ...
Corrina Gage has represented New Zealand in a trio of water sports. But it's her love for waka ama - and the opportunities it gives paddlers from 5 to 85 - that keeps her racing and coaching around the world. Lake Karāpiro is quiet and still now. But last week, it was all noise ...
When an Auckland school classroom went up in flames in December last year, exploding asbestos over neighbouring houses, five separate government agencies were involved. Yet stressed residents dealing with the aftermath on their homes say the response felt chaotic and uncoordinated; even local MPs who got involved couldn't get the information they wanted. Hundreds of thousands of ...
The pandemic has accelerated the trend of doing our banking online instead of in person. This rapid digital embrace has, in turn, sped up the closure of many smaller bank branches. But, as Mark Jennings writes, there are new branches springing up with a different look and purpose. Auckland’s Wynyard ...
Telling a Rotary Club audience that housing is a serious problem and they should care deeply about it landed flat but took some daring from the National leader, writes Justin Giovannetti.Judith Collins’ level of control over the National Party is still a question best answered by a shrug.Elevated to her ...
A gang turf war gripped the South Auckland suburb in late 2020, forcing schools to lock down and armed police to patrol the streets. Community leaders are now warning the cycle of violent retribution could continue in 2021, unless radical interventions are made.The violent altercations that loomed large in Ōtara ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, University of Melbourne In this series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen. When I first heard that Rowan Atkinson was to put on Maigret’s velvet-collared overcoat, I wondered ...
Auckland writer Olivia Hayfield* explains how she resurrected 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe to star in her new novel, Sister to Sister. Olivia Hayfield is a pen name. Real name: Sue Copsey. When I’m planning my modern retellings of historical tales, I read widely on the characters and see who leaps out at ...
The Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine could be approved as early as next week, Marc Daalder reports Medsafe will be asked to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine against Covid-19 on February 2, the Government has announced. The Medicines Assessment Advisory Committee (MAAC) is an independent panel that provides advice on some medicine approvals in ...
COMMENT:By Bryan Kramer, PNG’s Minister of Police who has defended Commissioner Manning’s appointment today in The National My last article, announcing that I intend to make a submission to the National Executive Council (NEC) to amend the Public Service regulation to no longer require the Commissioner of Police to ...
The Point of Order Trough Monitor was triggered today by the announcement of a $9 million handout for Southlanders – sorry, some Southlanders. The news came from the office of Grant Robertson who, as Minister of Finance, prefers to invest public money rather than give it away – especially when ...
Few people outside of her campaign team gave Chlöe Swarbrick any chance of winning in Auckland Central this year – but the Green Party MP was too busy to listen. Here’s how they turned the electorate green.First published November 12, 2020.Three Ticks Chlöe is part of Frame, a series of short ...
Interactions between parents and healthcare providers could have a big impact on the wellbeing of our children, according to new research. The way parents and healthcare providers interact has lasting implications for children’s health, new research has found – and that includes immunisation uptake.Released today, the report is based on research ...
The Opposition starts the political year calling for emergency, temporary legislation to free up house building National leader Judith Collins has set five priorities for her party over the next three years - but excluded climate change, education and Crown-Māori relations. Giving her first 'state of the nation' speech as party ...
One of the biggest challenges facing the Ardern government is in public health. New Zealand may have escaped the pressures heaped on other health systems by the Covid-19 pandemic but its health service has had its problems, not least those exposed in the first report from Heather Simpson and her ...
New Zealand’s Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins has revealed that 14 close contacts of the Northland community case have returned negative test results. Yesterday he announced two close contacts – her husband and hair dresser – were negative. In his tweet, Hipkins described the news as “encouraging”. However, New ...
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the arbitrary and opaque experiments that Google is conducting with its search engine in Australia, with the consequence that many national news websites are no longer appearing in the search results seen by some users. The Australian, ABC, Australian Financial ...
Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta says councils can take stronger action against companies dumping contaminated waste water, even though they have identified loopholes in the law on fines. ...
Drag Race Down Under, part of the popular RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise, is filming in New Zealand. In their own words, local drag talent share what drag means to them and how it might be impacted by the show.RuPaul’s Drag Race is, quite simply, a television phenomenon. Love it or ...
For a long time, weighted blankets were considered a specialist device. Now they’re popular with even the most normal sleepers.Growing up, Temple Grandin spent time on her aunt’s cattle ranch in America, watching cow after stressed cow enter a squeeze chute and come out calm as the dead sea. She ...
Increased provisional tax thresholds, immediate low-value asset write offs and allowing the deferral of tax payments and use of money interest (UOMI) write offs were the most popular tax measures introduced by the Government to help businesses survive ...
The latest fleeing driver statistics show the numbers of incidents sky-rocketing out of control through 2020 with Police deciding the only tactic is to give up on chasing altogether, says Sensible Sentencing Trust. “The inconvenient truth is ...
With new revelations of the appalling racism behind Israel’s refusal to provide Covid-19 vaccines to 4.5 million Palestinians under its occupation and control, PSNA has renewed our call for the government to speak out alongside the United Nations ...
The Youth of NZ will be standing up for climate action once again, on January 26th outside of Parliament for School Strike 4 Climate NZ’s 100 Days 4 Action campaign rally. “COVID-19 may have stopped us in our tracks in the past. However, I tend ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Parwinder Kaur, Associate Professor | Director, DNA Zoo Australia, University of Western Australia Koalas are unique in the animal kingdom, living on a eucalyptus diet that would kill other creatures and drinking so little their name comes from the Dharug word gula, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By S. Anna Florin, Research fellow, University of Wollongong Archaeological research provides a long-term perspective on how humans survived various environmental conditions over tens of thousands of years. In a paper published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we’ve tracked rainfall in northern ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Binoy Kampmark, Senior Lecturer in Global Studies, Social Science & Planning, RMIT University Since 2005, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has been one of the most stable and enduring of political forces, both in Europe and on the global stage. During her 16 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Véronique Duché, A.R. Chisholm Professor of French, University of Melbourne In this series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on the page and on screen. When I first heard that Rowan Atkinson was to put on Maigret’s velvet-collared overcoat, I wondered ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. Experts are calling for hotels with sub-par ventilation systems to no longer be used as managed isolation facilities as health officials investigate how a Northland woman became infected with Covid-19 while staying at the Pullman hotel, Rowan Quinn reports. ...
Welcome to The Spinoff’s live updates for January 26, keeping you up to date with the latest local and international news. Reach me on stewart@thespinoff.co.nzOur Members make The Spinoff happen! Every dollar contributed directly funds our editorial team – click here to learn more about how you can support us ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Questions to be answered about case in the community, major companies flagrantly breaching wastewater consents, and Tenancy Tribunal decisions harming abuse survivors.As of this morning, we’re still waiting on some crucial information about the situation in Northland, after a person travelled ...
With democracy what now separates the US from its adversaries, Wellington can bet on more continuity than change in Washington’s hardline view of China. ...
Trump and Kim will meet accompanied only by interpreters.
On the agenda: real estate and money laundering opportunities, bribe management, meth and human trafficking arrangements, contract killing.
According to Pete George, this does not constitute a crisis for our democracy.
Bryce Edwards sees it differently.
Nearly 64% of the electorate did NOT vote.
18% of the electorate voted for Bidois.
“But what about the fact that there was a low voter turnout. According to the Electoral Commission, voter turnout is estimated to be 43.7%. This figure is based on the numbers that have voted, as a percentage of those enrolled. However, the Electoral Commission and Statistics New Zealand previously estimated that in Northcote there is an eligible voter population of 54,790 (of which about nine per cent are not enrolled). So, when you take that into account, the 19,900 who voted, make up an even smaller “real” voter turnout – which is well under 40%.
It also means that the vote for each candidate as a proportion of all eligible voters in Northcote is somewhat smaller than it might initially appear, since about 35,000 eligible voters choose not to vote – which somewhat overshadows the 10,147 who voted for the winning candidate.”
http://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2018/06/northcote-voter-turnout-lower-than.html
Compulsory voting is the solution. Oz have done it for decades and there’s engagement across the demographics as a result.
National rejected that along with pretty much every other suggested reform, my how surprising. Keeps the bastards honest, where that’s practical for some parties, when they know the disaffected are forced to vote.
Like road rules they serve a greater good even if they’re not popular.
Stv returns mayors in places like wellington with as little as 22% of the actual vote and as little as 11% of the enrolled vote.
No one screamed constitutional crises when the dippiest dipper ever, Celia wade brown, was voted in
Farrar and his cronies certainly did. But then, they’re constantly screaming.
I ignore broken records like Farrar. Our views align in some areas but his messaging is wrong
Some of your views align with “broken record” Farrar?
Which ones?
What a lot of silly nonsense.
Think of it as like an opinion poll, but instead of say 300 giving their view, its 19,000
In other words , THE RESULT WOULD BE EXACTLY THE SAME AS THOUGH EVERYONE VOTED.
The idea that 19,000 vote and we dont know what ALL the actual voters think is seriously nutty thinking
Bryce Edwards needs a good telling off
Probably not actually. The people who vote tend to be more right-wing and rich compared to those who don’t.
This was a by-election at the start of the term of a new government for a seat previously held by the opposition. Of course turnout will be low. There was nothing really at stake. Jumping up and down and trying to call this the death of democracy in NZ is ridiculous.
As I say, we need compulsory voting. Voluntary voting simply isn’t working.
Australia shows that compulsory voting works far better.
Does it Draco? This from a stuff article after their 2016 Federal Election:
“A long winter federal election campaign in Australia that clashed with school holidays has resulted in the biggest voter no-show in the country since compulsory voting began in 1925.
More than 1.4 million Australians last month failed to cast a vote for the House of Representatives in what ultimately became a cliff-hanger election. The figure represents more than 9 per cent of 15.7 million eligible voters.
The turnout is the worst since 1922, when voting was optional and just 59 per cent of eligible people cast a lower house vote.”
It’s a political hot potato. As you say, it’s those doing it toughest that are least inclined to vote. Fining those that struggle to keep food up to mouths is popularity suicide. If zero punitive measures against non voters, there’s no point introducing the fresh law.
Yes it does.
9% compared to more than 50%.
Or even in general elections where we’re seeing less than 80% turnout.
You also seem to have missed this line in the bit you quoted:
Seems that Australians are actually quite happy with compulsory voting.
And yet our governments keep doing it to beneficiaries.
All it takes is good advertising before each election and the number fined will be minimal.
Yeah ok, I’ve gone and done some more reading on it. I’m not as partisan as I was. I lived in Oz for a long period, it is no hardship to vote. Chasing up non voters appears to be a token effort, 12 people in Darwin taken to court after the last election.
I dread the influx in….”I voted for that chappie with the straight teeth, whatisname? I once saw him in a Crusaders jersey” vox pops.
I suspect that it actually isn’t. Most would be given a warning and to vote next time or else. Many would be given the voting slip and told here and now or else.
You probably just don’t hear about it which is unfortunate.
If you’re not on the electoral roll how do they know who to chase up?
But also, in order to enrol you have to sign a form. No person can legally be forced to sign any form they don’t wish to sign.
Just because you’re not on the electoral roll doesn’t mean that you can’t be traced. Got a bank account? Pay your taxes? Drive a car?
Yeah, I’m one of the few people who have no difficulty with the government doing data matching to catch criminals. Especially when those criminals are fucking over our democracy.
It is a legal requirement to be enrolled. You must sign that form whether you like it or not.
How exactly does Bryce Edwards see it differently, Ed? His piece is actually very noncommittal and empty of firm opinion on the matter at hand.
I think your comment has put a few here on the wrong foot …
You could have made the argument as to why you think the numbers reflect badly on the current state of our representative democracy but you didn’t. Why not?
Nanny state?
More like angry drunken big bully Brother State.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/359376/woman-has-benefit-wrongly-suspended-for-second-time
I am struggling to work out what Andrew Little was thinking in putting about his agenda to dump the three strikes legislation without first getting his political ducks in a row. Is he a political idiot?
Little floats idea, gives Winston the opportunity to make his mark, both postpone the issue for a while and a satisfactory result flies through the House; everybody wins. Meanwhile, the Right enjoy a temporary lift, to no eventual gain. The Coalition Government works, and is seen to be working, as it should.
Spin Spin Spin RG, just like a Council does when it imposes 8% rates increases. Your man was fed to the dogs, not unexpected.
8.3 and in any case, is your “dogs” reference to the poor autistic man, savaged yesterday by rottweilers near Winton? That’s harsh for this time of the morning, Ruby. For any time really.
That seems an excessively generous interpretation to me.
Occam’s says more like Little, who was a politically inept leader, simple fucked up the politics.
I agree the politics are nowhere near as bad as our aggressively authoritarian political media seem to think, but the Likes of Audrey Young seem very under employed most of the time. Not a lot of substance happens in our politics, so they are reduced to making mountains out of molehills and reporting two flies climbing a wall with breathless urgency.
I just wonder why they don’t occupy their copious spare time writing in depth backgrounders.
“politically inept leader”, even if true, doesn’t translate to inept politician. I suggest that in fact, Little is a good and efficient politician, especially when out of the “leader” spotlight. In this instance we can only speculate, but my view is that he’s not so “inept” as to be unaware of what Winston’s position would invariably have been, and in fact played the game to the satisfaction of all-but-you (and some other posters 🙂
Except his actions are generating headlines like this:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/12/new-zealand-coalition-under-strain-as-jacinda-ardern-prepares-for-maternity-leave
Now this is clearly overblown but Politics is as much about perception than reality and if the perception is a Government that is unstable soon enough it will be.
Headlines, schmedlines – they’re froth, Gosman, eye-catching dross, the don’t mean anything; that you’re enchanted by them is… a shame. Nevermind, there are others who can see past the headlines .
Your believing that illusions are real is … cute. Serious political commenters though, don’t fall for illusions. The Government won’t become “unstable” simply because National declares that to be the case; your confidence in that sort of fickleness marks you as … fickle.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) serious political commentators don’t generally dictate the popularity of political parties. If the perception gains traction that a governing coalition is unstable then people will think is is likely to fall and stop supporting it. Yes this is unfair to a degree but it is political reality.
So?
Three years of parties disagreeing in public (but respectfully) without the government being brought down will show those headlines as stupid.
The media need crises to sell copy. I can understand why the populace might not be used to a government of adults, but they’ll learn what should be the norm rater than the exception.
I was thinking about that possibility except it has had a negative impact on the Government generally. It looks like the political management skills of Little and by extension the PM are flawed. Just listen to the attack by Guyon Espiner on Morning report this morning.
Guyon’s attack was, by accounts I’ve read, a failed one. Little would have been attacked even more vigorously, had his proposal gone ahead un-modified, as you know – Farrar et al would have been shrieking heedlessly; as it is, they’re crowing prematurely. What the media does is of little consequence, pun intended, and a smart operator will play them. Little’s a clever guy and Winston’s not too shabby either.
Little clever? Nah, he’s either stupid or arrogant. Clearly he didn’t have NZF on board with the three strikes policy, and Peters has rescued his plummeting polling at the expense of the hapless Mr Little.
Yours is a simplistic world view, Baba Yaga. Sophisticated ideas must make you feel dizzy, yes?
The proposed repeal of the 3 strikes law was not sophisticated. It was stupid.
No it wasn’t; you’re like a cuckoo clock, babayaga; same phrase, over and over cuckoo, cuckoo!
Is Baby Gaga trolling again today or is he being sensible today, Gossie and Mullet Head are going stupid again ?
Little should never had floated this idea as essentially a done deal. He could have made out that he was very keen to review the law including and then allowed Winston credit for nixing it.
The whole thing has been a shambles.
Luckily Winston’s going after MSD and Bennett et al plus the shenanigans in Singapore will quickly push it off the news cycle (for now).
But the ongoing government messiness and poor comms etc can only be explained away by Ardern for so long before it starts to become a major liability.
“the ongoing government messiness” is a message constructed and broadcast by the Right. There’s a grain of truth in it, as there would be for any and every “new” coalition Government, but the blue magnifying glass is being held over that small issue as part of National’s programme of denigrating the Government.
I admire your rather generous assessment of the situation Robert and I’d like to be able to agree with you but I can’t.
Three Strikes and law and order issues generally are just too sensitive electorally to be allowed to play out like this has. Apparently there was almost outright panic in Little’s office a week or so ago when the OIA on 3 strikes was released to media and they realised how it was going to go.
Oh well, I can’t argue with “apparently”…
Mind you, to say that “Three Strikes and law and order issues generally are just too sensitive electorally” shows me that any approach would bring problems, so this way, the usual attack lines are blurred and criticism blunted; in fact, the “usual suspects” are crowing with delight; that’s a pretty clever strategy if in fact, Little and Peters colluded. I’d do it the way they have; play some feints and switches and slip the soul through while confusion reigns.
That’s the thing though, apart from the lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the -key crowd pleasers any sensible measures on crime and justice are always problematic to put in front of the electorate.
It’s hard to see how giving the Opposition and their pals in the media an even bigger stick with which to beat the government on this is going to blur attack lines and blunt criticism?
Hard to see? Not for me 🙂
Will the Government get a progressive package of law & order reforms through in the near future? Yes, I believe they will. Will there be less noise around it, due to the “moderating” effect of Winston’s recent action? Yes, I believe there will. Clever play? Yes, I still believe so. I don’t take much note of the wailing and gnashing of Righty teeth around this issue.
Well I hope you’re right Robert. Otherwise the future is a correctional facility on every bloody street corner.
I hope I am also, ScottGN. I think Andrew Little’s bright and will serve us well.
What is missing throughout this debate, especially in the MSM, is the fact the 3 Strikes is a stupid politically motivated law, a blunt instrument that doesn’t work.
The MSM, if it was being even-handed, should be making the point that Labour and the Greens are right to try to get it repealed rather than treating this as an issue they hope will destroy the coalition.
Well done Andrew Little for sticking to his guns on Morning Report this morning.
An even-handed MSM would do itself out of a job, consequently, it always tips the table one way or the other, to maintain tension. We readers love tension; makes us feel alive!
I guess we have to accept the msm controls the government and the electorate.
What are we going to do about?
Recent history would indicate our MSM are incapable of/disinterested in exploring the effects of policy as opposed to ‘political drama’…..and yet ‘we’ persist in our support.
Their version of ‘reality TV’?
““the ongoing government messiness” is a message constructed and broadcast by the Right.”
No, the messiness is surely and simply the result of inexperience combined with incompetence mixed with hubris. From the coalition agreement that gifted a billion dollars to a NZF slush fund, to the election of the Speaker (Labour’s screw up and then cover up), to the disgraceful decision making around oil and gas exploration, through to the incompetence of MIA Ministers such as Curran, Jackson, Davis, Twyford et al, this is a shambolic government mislead by a PM whose previous claim to fame had been working in a fish and chip shop. You were warned.
No, the messiness is natural and unavoidable. It’s the reporting that’s unnatural; the endless whine that you are part of, babayaga, that’s the twitter. Plus, You Have Been Warned!!!
Bomber’s on the money here.
“By publicly dumping a law that was only rhetoric and theatre in the first place (it’s only impacted 20 prisoners) Labour…
gives NZ First oxygen at a time when Labour desperately requires their coalition partners to survive
blunts National’s law and order attack which they will be playing all year with new tough on crime members bills.
Allows the perception to the petty consumers of bitterness that Labour have had to back down on prison reform when the actual process will continue. Liberal twitter and NGOs on twitter will lambast Little and scream at the injustice which will convince the petty consumers of bitterness in muddle Nu Zilind that Labour must have changed their position to outrage the Twitterratti in such a way.
Little loses the battle so he can win the war.”
If thats true its a bit short sighted because from now until the next election National can point to Labour being soft on crime so a vote for NZFirst is a vote for being soft on crime whereas a vote for National is a vote for three strikes
I’m sure he’s like most politicians, a decent, well meaning, reasonably intelligent person.
However your question: “Is he a political idiot?” is an easy question to answer. He’s failed twice to win an electorate seat and was driving Labour to oblivion before he did the smartest thing he’s ever likely to do, politically, and resign so yes, politically speaking, he is an idiot
However he is rocking a decent beard so thats something in his favour
You call that a beard?
It is just like Mallard’s.
All it is is that the hair from the top of his head has slipped down his face.
The only halfway decent beard any recent MP has had is the one Gareth Hughes showed off.
That added about 10 years to his age and made him look old enough to vote.
Even then he couldn’t compare to some of the early PMs like Seddon, Vogel, Stafford or Weld.
You call that a beard?
https://robertwoodlander.blogspot.com/2018/05/coming-clean.html
I am impressed. You could have been PM, or was it Premier, in 1860’s New Zealand.
Best I can manage is councillor, Southland Regional Council, 2010 – 2018. I wonder if I’m on my own in being a bearded councillor in NZ? I certainly don’t meet many others.
That’s a beard that commands respect!
I thank you, but respectfully suggest you talk with my wife who holds a slightly different view 🙂
Secretly all women like men with beards and I read it in Oblivious Male Monthly so it must be true
They do, yes; well, mostly. I was told by my wife’s maiden aunt, way back, that she could “never make love to a man with a beard”. I guessed she meant something more arcane than it seemed by that, but still, I was taken aback. Didn’t stop me though!
You made love to your wife’s maiden aunt? That’s a pretty ballsy move I gotta say. 🙂
“Didn’t stop me though”
How could I let that slip through???
I’m a “share the love” kinda guy. Truth to tell, Maiden Aunt’s comments didn’t deter me from wooing her niece (much more seemly, aye, though not quite the story it was shaping up to be 🙂
Kym Koloni NZF stood as an Independent Candidate and got 95 votes, not looking good for NZF down the track ?
Not looking good for Kym.
NZF might have to start looking for a new candidate for Northcote if they are going to contest the seat in the 2020 Election ?
Crikey! Is Guyon looking for a bonus? His interview smacks of desperation. Fortunately Jacinda was able to make him sound just that. DESPARATE. She treated him like the bad mannered child that he is and he achieved absolutely nothing with his hectoring,bullying attitude. Maybe he should try a measured professional approach and he might get taken seriously. An excellent, sensible calm and clear attitude from Jacinda with her replies was wonderful to hear. At least one adult in the conversation! Guyon is past his used by date.
+1
Agree +100% the guy is a joke.
Was Guyon ever that “persistent” with Key?
Don’t remember him being so. Guyon was grateful that Key would allow a very sparse minute just before the 8 o’clock news and treated him gently in case he didn’t turn up at all.
Of course he was as persistent with Key and English. You just can’t remember because you obviously thought that any persistent questioning of Key/English was justified as a result of your political bias.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/75031554/Theres-a-place-for-hard-nosed-interviews-but-not-aggression
Crikey iannie, you forgot the previslabagummnt, previslabagummnt, previslabagummnt, previslabagummnt, previslabagummnt, exchange already?
Totally agree. Guyon Espinor is a hectoring bore. I am tired of his style of interviewing. He’s more suited to Fox News.
And as for John Key – for years he refused to be interviewed on Morning Report.
Did you not follow the link I provided?
“Guyon Espinor is a hectoring bore. ”
QFT
If President Trump gets a good poll bump from the results of this North Korean summit he will be sending a strong signal to Romney and the traditional conservative Republican wing that there is only one Republican nomination for the next Presidential contest – and it’s him.
If the Dems don’t get their house sorted in pretty quick order instead of folding and undercutting each other like they did in the banking reforms, then they will be very hard pressed to beat Trump.
The rest might be a bit too far into the future, but Trump’s massive strength of perpetual chaos, drama, and through that total name-domination in the media is sustaining a very strong base to build from.
Yahoo! Go Andrew Little. Guyon needs to give up. He’s looking like an amateur. Three strikes AND OUT! He should stick to reporting on weather.
@ffloyd….agreed. I loved both Little and Jacinda taking it to Espiner this morning on Morning Report-well worth a listen to anyone who hasn’t heard it.
Both showed themselves to be smart and on top of the issue. I’m still reveling in this government after 9 years of hell.
Sniggering Gyno did seem a little taken aback when Andy bit back.
Why? What was the issue with the way he approached the topic this morning?
Our future trade focus should be Asia and we should be part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, hanging off the USA’s coat tails is not going to do us any good in the future, the future trade growth region is Asia.
Forget about the USA let them do their own thing.
Our future trade focus should be on minimising trade. That’s hard though and does require developing our economy and our society.
It’s better to trade with countries that make different stuff. Korea makes real steel and computers, and does not compete with our ag goods. The US, with its weird corn subsidies and mad cow disease doesn’t want our stuff.
Except that that’s a load of bollocks.
Dubious Assumptions on Comparative Advantage
Loss from Trade
We make steel. Around 1.5 million tonnes of it per year. We export around 1 million tonnes of it. And that doesn’t even take into account all the raw iron sand that we export.
The problem with that scenario is that we will, quite rapidly, run out of iron deposits.
Our focus on farming is depleting our soils as well poisoning our waterways. So, that’s not sustainable either.
Electronics tend to made out of silicon and doping with semi-conductors. We have significant deposits of both of those as well. So, we could easily make our own electronics from our own resources. Just need to develop those deposits and build the factories. Do that and buying our own would be cheaper than importing due to distance and transport costs.
Our main agricultural export ATM seems to be dairy. The US is massively over-producing dairy to the point where their farmers are losing money on sale of it. In other words, even if we had an FTA with the US, we wouldn’t be able to export there simply because they can provide it themselves cheaper. And once they get that over-production sorted it’ll still be cheaper to buy US produced milk in the US than to buy NZ milk in the US.
An export led economy is doomed due to the very real physical limitations of available resources.
An economy that uses it’s own resources and recycles them is actually sustainable due to the resources always being available.
In other words, reality makes trade unsustainable.
God. Who gave Armstrong the kiss of life. ANOTHER opinion piece on his intimate knowledge of Jacindas state of mind, this time on Andrew Littles 3strike postponement. Definitely on a Labour sabotage mission.
Is Armstrong working as a psychologist now, just wait till after the baby is born and the post natal depresssion kicks in, Guyon, Richardson, Garner and Armstrong will have a fieldday ?
Armstrong is a devious National Party shill (as opposed to a journalist).
He lost all credibility as a commentator when he demanded Cunliffe’s resignation over a meaningless 10 year old letter. He later admitted he was wrong to do this, but of course he knew that at the time.
Pretty sure you think that about much of the media given your comments in the past.
Yes, Armstrong, Cunliffe, the old, meaningless letter – nadir.
Has the old fossil Armstrong crawled out of his grave ?
Fossils can crawl?
Yikes!
There’s some HUGE fossils out there.
And some of them in graves, I read!
Justice! Fair play! Good for Nicky and for future police action. Though it still doesn’t explain why the police were so active for Slater.
“Investigative journalist Nicky Hager has accepted a police apology and payment of “substantial damages” following the unlawful search of his home during the investigation into the hacking that led to the Dirty Politics book.”
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12068928
Nicky Hagar getting a big pay out from the NZ Police +100%
Some very strange behaviour by the NZ Police under the previous National Government ?
Just listening to K Ryan talking to someone? regarding the meeting between dumb and dumber. He says it is just a publicity exercise and won’t achieve anything. Does this mean it will be all about ‘summit and nowt?
Nah its all about someone and newit ?
So about time we heard something about this:
https://www.labour.org.nz/maria_berryman_review
“Ms Berryman is commencing immediately with the initial focus of her investigation on the Young Labour camp in February. The review is expected to take between two and three months,” said Nigel Haworth, Labour Party President.
Why should expect to hear anything? t has nothing to do with you. It was a purely internal matter for the Labour Party.
However I will tell you the gist of the enquiry.
Nothing happened.
The stories about it were all fabrications by lying members of neo-Nazi organisations like the National Party.
There were no members of the Party at the affair.
The people who were there all went to bed early and no one saw or heard anything.
The only problems were caused by fifth columnists from the National Party and other Fascist organisations.
But nothing happened.
Nothing further will be said.
It is time to move on.
But nothing happened.
There. I think you would agree that is a pretty fair summary of the matter.
Being that the media seem to have forgotten about it as well its hard to see how the left think theres a bias against them
Also: Pony Tail
Orangutan fights off a bulldozer to protect its home
Once again a darling of many a hard core lefty has turned in to an authoritarian douchebag and is messing his country up.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/11/nicaragua-university-protest-daniel-ortega-occupation
Hopefully the IRD will do an audit on John Key’s affairs and determine whether he paid tax on the NZRail shares which he failed to disclose to the NZ Public, as he may have bought those shares with the intention of selling them (ie speculation) as he was definitely not a long term investor in NZRail, similar to one of the other major shareholders Fay Richwhite ?
You do come up with interesting conspiracy theories there. Interesting or wacky. Take your pick.
I’d like to think that those in power should have automatic audits to make sure they are not profiting from their power. In particular due to the rise of the super rich to being in politics, aka financial trader makes PM aka KEY, the property developer/reality TV star make President aka Trump, the lawyer who makes his own laws aka Rodrigo Duterte…
What if we killed the job interview?
I’m sure that there are many managers and business owners who think that they’re great at interviews and yet are probably the most biased and make the worst mistakes because of that bias while they hire people just like them.
You have to wonder how a $6000 fine is going to deter employers after a 3.5 year breach of employing an illegal worker and not paying taxes and of course this is a person who is sponsoring in migrant workers too, for a liquor store.
If you calculate how much is being lost in each case, 3.5 years of someone else not getting a job, the police costs to prosecute, the deportation costs and the justice system and then the guy just gets a fine of $6000 and the loss of business to other stores who employ legal workers paying taxes! Crime sure does pay in this country!
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12069066
Weird that you can’t get somebody who needs a job locally to work at his store and how the government keeps bringing in low wage workers at the drop of a hat and the government doesn’t understand why poverty is increasing.
Apparently over 60% of people who end up in prison are unemployed… maybe have a think about, rather than building more prisons and having 3 strikes laws and work for dole schemes – actually employ our own citizens in real jobs at 40 hours a week so that they don’t need to turn to crime!
There is no longer an equal playing field in this country both for businesses and workers because there has become a culture of paying for for a fake job to get residency, underpaying for a job or having illegal workers paying no taxes taking jobs.
Even the sex workers are fed up with the illegal workers coming in on student and tourist visas!
You can’t run a country with less and less people paying taxes and ignoring the problem of fake jobs and illegal workers!
Start with the criminal employers who are not paying taxes, probably collecting many benefits like AS and WFF and creating these Ponzi schemes buying up more small and medium businesses and perpetuating the growing problems for other legitimate businesses and workers.
If Mike Williams’ numbers are correct, and he is CEO of the Howard League, much of the real problem is that more than 50% of prisoners are functionally illiterate. That is the number he gives in this link although I have seen other estimates of it being as high as 70%.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/80836726/mike-williams-and-the-howard-league-gives-prisoners-a-second-chance
They can’t read well enough, for example, to be able to get a driver’s licence because they can’t do the written tests.
They can’t get a job in today’s society because they can’t read.
When I was young I used to spend the University Summer break working in Wool Stores. You could get a job like that even if you could barely read or write. Being able to pick out the right numbers on the stencil when marking the weight was pretty much all you needed to be able to do.
Those sort of jobs simply don’t exist any more, but there are still people who can’t read well enough to do anything else. That is what is the best thing we can do to get people into jobs and out of prison.
I’m not saying that that is the only reason why this firm doesn’t hire locals. There are always ratbags who will hire immigrants at illegally low wages. It is however indicative of why there are people who can’t get jobs and just drift from one jail sentence to another.
My personal opinion is that the schools should make their absolute priority getting people up to a minimum level of literacy and numeracy before they worry about anything else at all. Cultural topics can wait. If you can’t read you can’t learn anything else anyway.
Agree literacy in prisons is a problem aka anyone illiterate should all be doing the primary school syllabus while in prison. I’m not talking about dinky little online courses, I think there should be full on schools in prisons for the inmates with one teacher per 20 inmates for example.
However once they get out of prison they should have an opportunity to get a job or even better not go to prison because they got a job when they left school/tertiary in the first place…
But my link was about an illegal worker working in a liquor store, I don’t think you need high literacy for that, in fact they seem to use symbols now on tills for products and the tills do all the calculations for the cash customers. So I think that illegal workers are a bad idea, we are just getting worse and worse in NZ, encouraging poor work practises with pathetic sentences and encouraging more of the same.
To give an example the guy who poached some Paua got 12 months in prison, his dive gear confiscated and not allowed to fish for 3 years. Someone who sent a hoax note to Fonterra got 8 years in prison. Grow a bit of cannabis and you could lose your house!
But poor working practises from employers, if they even get caught, actually seem to have a fine below what they made by their illegal actions!
The law should be banning employers caught hiring illegal workers from owning/managing a business for 3 years, let alone allow them to bring more people in as well as a fine of $100,000. They should also have IRD doing full audits to see if any suspicious payments are being made (aka bribes for jobs) and check if they are compliant in other tax matters.
The point is, people need to be doing something if they are unemployed and getting $150 p/w on the dole aint a good prospect and even worse ‘work for the dole at $150’, and a $600 p/w job in a liquor store, although not great, is better than nothing!
So if we are getting employers owning multiple businesses who have people paying for the job, working illegally or getting $2p/h (and there are many cases occurring of that), then it’s cutting someone else’s prospects down to get that job or someone else operating a business that operates within NZ law.
I’m sorry to have derailed your comments with my pet hobby horse.
I got distracted by the comment about prisoners having been unemployed.
Having people who are literate isn’t going to help very much with employers like the one in the case you quote of course. They employ people who will work for very little because otherwise they get deported.
The only real way to deal with such employers is to belt them with truly massive fines. Fines so high that it simply isn’t worth them offending. Then pay at least some of the money out to the people who were employed illegally or on less than the minimum wage. Treat their wealth as being like the money seized from the gangs. It is proceeds of a crime and should be forfeited.
On a different subject I would allow the employment of people who simply cannot produce enough to justify them having to be paid the minimum wage. There used to be sheltered workshops for such people. Sure they were paid very little. It did however give them something they could do. Make their living costs up with a benefit from the state.
alwyn, I would put it to you that the minimum wage is now so low that it is the equivalent of a sheltered workshop wage.
How desperate would you have to be to do hard, physically hurtful labour like picking Kiwifruit for possibly less than $15 an hour? (They jiggle it by paying by the basket, I believe.)
Be honest.
Well, to be honest your first statement is simply wrong.
If you compare the minimum wage to the median wage for a full time worker New Zealand has a very high ratio when compared to similar countries. In 2016, according to the OECD the ratios for a few selected countries was
New Zealand 0.61
Australia 0.54
Germany 0.47
France 0.61
USA 0.35
Canada 0.46
UK 0.41
The numbers for lots of other countries are here.
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=MIN2AVE
I would fail to see how that can be described as “low”.
It is also much greater than would have been a typical wage in a sheltered workshop. They were, until the were forced out of existence by the Clark Government something like a couple of dollars/hour.
The workers didn’t live of that of course. They, or their families got benefits. It gave the people involved something to do each day and gave some meaning to their life.
Would I like to do something like Kiwifruit picking? At my age and physical condition of course not. When I was younger I quite happily spent about 3 months each year labouring and enjoyed it. It is amazing how much muscle you can put on in a few months when away from the student life.
I can’t really discuss the topic with you unless you see that your beliefs about minimum wages in this country are simply wrong, can I?
How can 50% of prisoners be illiterate surely they went to school until they were 15 years old, I thought we had a good education system or have we had teachers just f’ing around ? Sounds like B/S to me ?
@Tamati Tautuhi, sadly I think it is true, I have heard similar, sadly the result of Rogernomics and our ‘new’ educational systems like Tomorrow’s Schools where schools are run more like businesses. Personally I’d like to see our school principals have a more education focus, nowadays they are more like administration managers working our asset depreciation and infrastructure maintenance budgets… because in the old days the ministry took care of all that but now it’s up to the individual schools the burden often falling on principals… which has encouraged a certain type of principal more on the economic side than the educational side..
Of course in the business world, you have a CEO, CIO, CFO and CTO… but school principals are expected to do all that in one role, plus be the educational leaders..and of course the health and safety side.
Quite frankly it’s lucky we even get the results we do get with the weird ideas that have come about. The casualties are the kids who are failing 30% and the syllabus not getting every kid through.
It’s also not just for people who are going the criminal route that these jobs are useful for, I know people with intellectual disabilities who are all working in places like Supermarkets, or people who work in hospitality because they have other issues. The people I know are good workers who have been working for nearly a decade in that type of job. But they are being replaced and forced out of the work force by a growing issue of imported low wage workers, who as well as taking out jobs need more hospitals/schools/roads/houses.
So not only are people at the bottom facing job pressure, they also now have more competition for getting a house to rent and the rest of the country are subsidising these employers who are increasing at an alarming pace around the country. It used to just be Auckland, no more it’s spreading everywhere.
Likewise the quality of tourist experience. Stayed at a formally upmarket hotel taken over by an overseas firm who are buying up hotels around the country. If hardly any staff members, stinky minibar, dirty bathroom, un maintained rooms with bits falling off door, and rat bait packages under the bed in a resort that used to be luxury stay, sound like a good tourist experience, welcome to the ‘new’ New Zealand experience…
@Tamati. I can’t confirm the numbers but I am certainly willing to believe Mike’s comments. Did you read the article at that link?
I once tutored someone in one of our Prisons. That was about 40 years ago. He was, I think, in for selling drugs and he was doing part-time University courses at Massey. Definitely an odd one out. He said that many inmates couldn’t read and he would read their letters to them.
There have always been people like that. It isn’t a new thing or something that Tomorrow’s Schools caused. It just didn’t matter so much when there were lots of manual labour jobs available. When I was at High School we had a lot (around 20%) who arrived at the school for the third form at age 13 who really could not read or write. There were a couple of teachers who spent nearly all their time teaching them to read. You see without that skill they couldn’t learn anything else. Once they had, if ever, achieved that skill they could learn other things.
That was about 60 years ago. At least, as I suggested, in those days you could find work with very low skills. Now you can’t. In fact you may not even be able to get to work if you can’t drive.
If you don’t get the hang of reading early on at school I have been told you will withdraw from learning. You know you aren’t as good as other kids but you don’t want to admit it or to show up as being behind. So you say nothing. Then you stop attending school and things just never improve.
And no, it isn’t just “teachers f”ing off” as you put it. Kids missing school because they can’t keep up can’t be helped if they aren’t there.
On the other hand I think there are far too many things in the curriculum that could be ignored as long as this skill isn’t there. It might be a good thing to learn about all sorts of topics but they should be left until the three R’s are at some minimal level.
Good comment, alwyn (just for a change..)
Some time ago during my time as a teacher of languages I remember a very interesting lecture/article by some linguistic guru who claimed by some research or stats or who-knows-what that even in the best utopian country with the finest possible education system, a minimum of 8% (it could have been 1 in 8) in any population will inevitably remain functionally illiterate.
It is just the way humans are born.
So while some prisoners may be capable of becoming literate, it may well be that many will remain the way they are despite our efforts.
To my mind we need to reinstitute well-paid jobs for such people.
My surprising choice for an example of such nature is – rubbish collection!
In the good old days: a gang of 5 or so people with one truck. One drives; one or two stand up on rear, catch the bins lifted or thrown upwards to them, empty the bin into the truck, then toss the empty bin back down to the several runners, who place it back on the footpath upside-down. (A popular member of the old Waikato Rugby team used to do that job because it helped him keep fit for rugby.)
A radio would be blaring pop music on the back of the truck, the guys would be calling out to one another (including to driver) to maintain coordinated effort.
My toddler daughter would hear the parade coming, rush to the front window: the guys on the back of the truck used to look out for this, and would wave and grin, causing little toddler to wave back energetically. They seemed to love waving to little kids. They were cheerful enough to smile!
Lamentably, there is no such thing any more. Automated trucks, max of two people; no music; one might get fit by stepping on and off running board to toss bags (PLASTIC!!) of rubbish into the rear… The worst I saw was in Auckland where one sad-looking guy drove the truck that had mechanised arms to pick up wheely-bins and replace them (emptied out) back on the footpath. He looked bloody miserable. Probably paid far less than those earlier guys.
This disaster must apply to many other jobs as well. Fewer people less happy, being paid less money. I would not have minded working with those guys back when I was young. I would hate to work in modern rubbish collection.
This is how the Market leads us to bad places: mechanisation that is not well-guided is the enemy of human society. (The Luddites were right!)
The economy makes a good servant to society, but a very poor master.
And we have RWNJs still stupid enough to want the economy and the market to rule….
“A popular member of the old Waikato Rugby team used to do that job because it helped him keep fit for rugby”
He wasn’t the only one. Jerry Collins did the same thing in Porirua, even when he was a very well paid All Black. In the off season I believe but still.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/rugby/all-blacks/69363078/no-passengers-jerry-collins-earned-his-stripes-as-a-wellington-garbo
So weird though that although those jobs are apparently going, NZ seems to have so many ‘unskilled’ jobs on it’s ‘skilled’ migrant list… our productivity has been stagnant for years and our migrants are even lower qualified and less skilled than 5 years ago and so many lobby groups jumping up and down about how there are so many shortages of labour because apparently Kiwis are not suitable anymore. What a strategy for the future, sarc.
Posted an article a few days ago where an offshore hotel being built wanted 100’s of workers bought into Auckland on $20 p/h as decorators.
$20 p/h was the rate for a painter/decorater about 28 years ago!!! There are plenty of painter/decorators in Northland, but do you really think it is worth someone’s while to come to Auckland for a pay rate that comes from circa 1990 and is impossible to live on once you have a family ????
How the fuck can local construction survive when you are getting this under cutting?
Careful, dear alwyn – you have almost agreed with me.
What is the way ahead? They say that further automation is going to cut even more jobs. Would a sensible society not be concerned to see that its members were usefully and reasonably happily occupied, and use automation only as required to meet those needs, and improve the economy without social damage??
Instead we have a greedy group who use automation to maximise their profits, without caring that they create one hell-hole of a society.
A recipe for massive disaster.
Your thoughts? (As The Chairman was so fond of demanding..)
Prepare for much gnashing of teeth, keening and wailing from the left:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/104640010/live-donald-trump-and-kim-jong-un-meet-for-the-better-or-worse-of-the-world
That’s the chewing of popcorn, not the gnashing of teeth puckers.
Taika Waititi’s new film about to be released Jojo Rabbit where he is acting as Adolph Hitler, it should be entertaining.
Even better he is a “Polynesian Jew” playing Adolf Hitler, the imaginary friend of a young German lad whose mum is active in the Resistance (and Scarlett Johansson to boot!).
Never realised he was a Polynesian Jew ?
Were did you get that info from is it his mothers or fathers side ?
Should be a good watch.
http://www.indiewire.com/2018/06/jojo-rabbit-taika-waititi-adolf-hitler-photo-1201973380/
He says it in in the second Tweet. Possibly just Taika-speak though…
Must be on the mothers side of the family, interesting that will confuse the critics, mind you he likes to maximize the entertainment and confusion.
Taika Waititi is an amazing film director.
Amen to that.
Thorough verbal referencing conducted after interviewing is the key to making good hiring decisions, and psychometric testing can help too
Simon No Bridges says Winston should concentrate on governing the country rather than taking out vendettas against Senior Government Officials and MP’s.
What the clown needs to realize is it is a separate issue to NZF, the Coalition or the governing of the country. These people deliberately released Winston’s personal information into the public arena, to smear him and influence the outcome of the 2017 General Election. Dirty Politics Paper 102
If people are not brought to account by the judicial system these things will keep happening.
We had blatant fraud and corruption with the collapse of the BNZ which was covered up by the NZ Government and the NZ Judiciary in the Winebox Enquiry. Hence we have systemic failures of companies here in NZ ever since then, as “white collar crime” is considered a legitimate business activity here in NZ. However stealing pinky bars from the local petrol station will get you locked up for a good length of time.
It sends a message to the crooks “if you are going to commit fraud here in NZ do it for a reasonable sum of money ? ” Doug Graham would be a classic case and example.
I’m sure Slick Britches will have been careful to leave no traces of any advice to Pullya.
To Whom it May Concern
The Standard used to be, Worthwhile. But now that it is infested with Trolls it is so dull and childlike. It iooks and acts like a toddler with a dirty bottom.
Gosman, James, baba yaga. Graffiti Inc.
Observer; The Standard is still worthwhile and then some. Those folk you “name” are our “creative tension providers” – without them, we are soft. Harden up, enjoy the creative stress!
You just have to scroll, or scribe past them, throw them the odd lure or live bait when you want a bit of entertainment, as it doesn’t take them long to come up the berley trail, just don’t feed them too much as they can chew up a lot of precious time and bait.
Berley = chum – I like your style, Tamati.
12/06/16 The Standard Pick Six Troll Competition
Report: We had good early activity by two trolls Gossie was up early and I am not sure who the other one was, today we have had good troll activity throughout the day, and it is highly likely we will get the Pick 6 today b4 12.00am, yesterday we didn’t get the last leg b4 12.00am but we got 5 legs in. So far today we have had activity from, Gossie, Mullet Head, James, Puckish Rogue & Baby Gaga. I will post the results later once we have analysed all the days trolling activity across T/S.
As I have suggested they should set up there own Blog Site and go all out, I guess they are over here undercover from Kiwi Blog & Whale Oil websites to keep themselves entertained ?
“Baby Gaga” is good. What can you do with “James”?
Janus? A Roman god, after all.
*Cough cough* Feeling a bit left out here, wheres the love?
Has Baby Gaga and James both been trolling today or just James ?
And how do we classify contributors? Who could decide whether a certain genuinely concerned Leftie (who often makes comments that look so) is in fact not what he seems?
No James. A James-free day. James has not darkened our door. James has been absent (for years 🙂
James? You mean James ‘The Mad Butcher’ James?
Ha!
* Grunts: Eat! MEAT!
Watched Question Time today. Bridges all geared up to smash Andrew Little but crashed out having to face Winston “On behalf Of the PM.”
Winston was at his best. Succinct. Amusing. And made Simon look like a very very silly little boy. Winston will be great as Acting PM.
Q1 https://www.parliament.nz/en/watch-parliament/ondemand?itemId=200714
PS Has Simon sorted out his hair stylist?
Lovely. Paula Bennett looks scorched .
He will have to put a lot more brylecream on if he is going to be slippery enough to out smart Winston.
By the looks of it, Paula and Simon share the same hair stylist. That style suits them well; it makes Paula look older and Simon look younger.
Little bit of synergy there between the two of them lol.
both just as slimy.
I think “slick” is the word you were looking for 😉
You know the country is in trouble when a dentist launches a petition to stop DIY dentistry
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018648930/petition-launched-as-diy-dentistry-grows
Winston, cat; what’s his name, (Opposition leader) mouse. Bennett took a slamming from Mallard. All’s well in the world.
Winston is having the.time.of.his.life.
Poor National. Stuffed!
Apologize to the ambulance service people it’s not like Eco Maori rings a ambulance every day. I was informed that the service is busy and the time was 40 min. The last time I had a ambulance rang was a hcoptter I did not wait I got my son to take me to hospital.
Ka kite ano