Looks like the weather just re-set the government.
If you go through the big budget lines there will have to be some change:
– transport both road and rail reallocated to maintenance and rebuilds. Less spent on public transport subsidies with even fewer using them. Some projects like IREX (the ferry port rebuilds) saved due to the accelerating need to replace the failing ferries.
– MSD and Housing as both agencies reallocate for emergency accommodation, broken houses, shunted families
– Transpower rebuilds for greater resilience with faster and larger storms returning
– A decrease in expenditure in the South Island and an increase in the North Island north of Hastings.
The policy response to the stalled integration of stormwater, water and wastewater across the top of the North Island: that question of 3 Waters just got sharper.
We can already see the great sucking noise from the Auckland Council proposed budget, as major projects are stopped, and service cuts likely. Expect similar from Thames-Coromandel, Far North, Whangarei Council, Tauranga City, and many others. Mostly they will just be fixing roads and all the pet projects just die.
Since today is the re-opening of the Parliamentary year, a smart Prime Minister would start with further policy re-sets including strong signals on what shifts to expect from Budget 2023. Our very own Frank Underwood will do that over the next 48 hours.
I'm sure the Green Party are ready to table their 'transition budget' at just the same time as Robertson does.
The Greens will also then be able to signal what they would reallocate starting this week as Parliament re-starts.
[I don’t have anything to do with Green Party policy or their functions in parliament. Authors here write for themselves not parties, unless stated. It’s election year, please stop talking to and about me as if I represent the Greens or am an active member, I’m not. – weka]
Some will still chase The Good Life (can't blame 'em) as it recedes from sight in the rearview mirror, but the past is a different country – we don't live there anymore.
Oh, the good life,
Full of fun seems to be the ideal.
Mm, the good life,
Let’s you hide all the sadness you feel.
Please remember, I still want you.
And in case you wonder why,
Well just wake up to the good life.
Oh, talkin’ ’bout the good life.
Just the good life,
For you and me.
(The good life).
For you and me.
(The good life).
For you and me.
Public transport needs roads to operate on. Given the massive roading infrastructure damage across the country (just look at the Coromandel), I think that there's going to be huge investment in roads, and little left over in the way of subsidies for PT.
The rapid shut down of the train network (both in Auckland, and across the country) demonstrated again the weakness of trains in times of emergency – just one landslip over a rail line shuts down the whole system. Whereas with roads, you have a realistic possibility of being able to divert around the area.
Trains are good for getting lots of people efficiently in and out of a CBD, and as an alternative for long-distance freight hauling. But they are nothing like as flexible as a roading network, for all of the myriad of different things people use it for.
I didn't say don't fix roads, I said stop fixing things as if we are going back to normal. Please reread my comment so you know what I was talking about, because you are arguing a response to something I didn't say.
Public transport needs roads to operate on. Given the massive roading infrastructure damage across the country (just look at the Coromandel), I think that there's going to be huge investment in roads, and little left over in the way of subsidies for PT.
This is not transition thinking. Design at this point should be building infrastructure that transitions us to post carbon. So build roads and PT at the same time, with integrated design.
I agree about rail and roads. What we need is to design around resilience, but also mitigation. Resilience means you don't put all your eggs in one (or even two) baskets. Mitigation means drop GHG dependency as soon as possible.
If we believe the crisis is here, now, very serious and needs immediate response, then it makes no sense at all to try and restore to BAU. We should be looking at each infrastructure failure, assessing what function it serves, how it's going to work over the next few decades (or appropriate time frame), and look at how those needs can be met in the best way.
My question for the rebuild as was people, is whether you can see the time when we can't keep up with repairs. The time when the events happen so frequently that we don't have the labour, materials, or money to keep repairing. We can wait until we're in that situation and then we're fucked, or we can start doing sustainable and resilient design now.
And above all else we absolutely have to transition off FF, or there is no future.
"So build roads and PT at the same time, with integrated design. "
Given the insane amount of money it's going to cost to repair major roading infrastructure, where do you think the money is going to come from, to provide PT subsidies as well?
Your transition plan seems to pre-suppose that we're all going to retreat to some form of local small town – cut off from the rest of the world. This isn't a vision which is widely shared – or realistic for the majority of NZ (nor for those small towns, once they run out of the essential supplies to keep themselves running, which are imported – either from NZ, but more likely from overseas)
Looking at the Coromandel for example – examining the widespread and repeated roading failures, flooding (both stormwater and tide related), and landslides. What kind of 'resilient design' do you envisage? Or, would your solution be managed retreat for the whole area? Because, repairing roads to enable PT (buses – because rail isn’t viable), is going to cost just as much and be just as long-term unsustainable.
That's the scale of the financial hole we have dug ourselves into. We have to repair broken infrastructure right now to prevent immediate social and economic collapse – while simultaneously having to design, plan and build something else that won't get demolished again every few years.
It's the sort of hole you end up in when CC deniers are allowed to wield substantial economic and political power for 25 years. The level of taxation needed to get out of this hole is so high that it would cause a revolt. The system cannot heal itself – we're in the sh*t.
Looking at the Coromandel for example – examining the widespread and repeated roading failures, flooding (both stormwater and tide related), and landslides. What kind of 'resilient design' do you envisage? Or, would your solution be managed retreat for the whole area? Because, repairing roads to enable PT (buses – because rail isn’t viable), is going to cost just as much and be just as long-term unsustainable.
Everything would have to be looked at on a case by case basis. For example, it may well be that the Coromandel would have to treated as if it was an island, and connected by a ferry service.
So no interior roads at all? Because it would seem as though you'd need a heck of a lot of ferry infrastructure. Just looking at the map, and doing a back of the envelope calculation, you'd be looking at around 40 or so ferry stops to service the existing communities. And, the interior ones would have no service at all.
I'm assuming that this would be a state-run service (as the SH network is), since there's a high risk that commercial operators would cut it, if the usage numbers didn't stack up. [e.g. The existing Coromandel ferry from Auckland has just been cut by Fullers. And they've made no reversal of this decision, despite the SH failures, which are going to take years to repair.]
Infrastructure is interconnected – you can't look at it on a 'case-by-case' basis – roading infrastructure to Hahei – has an impact on access to Whitianga – and both are impacted by a decision about SH25 north of Waihi. [Although, perhaps you mean that you could look at Coromandel in isolation to proposed infrastructure solutions for the West Cost of the SI?]
I can see this ferry supply solution being workable for people with holiday homes, and summer-season tourists – but not being a great solution for year-round inhabitants.
Do you see this (reducing services) as one way of enforcing managed retreat?
So no interior roads at all? Because it would seem as though you'd need a heck of a lot of ferry infrastructure.
Access would still be available to East Coromandel via Waihi, though it would be a rather roundabout route for Aucklanders. Still, my suggestion was just an example of the sort of thinking we should be engaging in
After a relatively benign (for some) 70 years, during which the human popn of spaceship Earth tripled and civilisation reached peak convenience (for some), we live now in pressure cooker-times with many facing a less certain future.
Sure, building back better to preserve the status quo a little longer (a decade or two should do it!) is attractive (if expensive) – just don't imagine that 'better' roads will necessarily prevent worse (conceivably much worse) inconvenience in future. Try not to sweat small stuff/inconveniences now – we're survivors.
Once there's a wider acceptance of the fact that increasingly resource-hungry 'peak convenience' is behind us, we can begin to allocate more resources to mitigating a slide into 'peak inconvenience' (coming soon to a place near you) – boosting resilience, working with Nature – we're all in this together, passengers for a brief time on spaceship Earth.
I talked about how the word Transition was very precious to me, and that it means that we need, in everything we do, to act as if this is a climate and ecological emergency.
…
Dictionary.com define Transition as “movement, passage, or change from one position, state, stage, subject, concept, etc., to another; change”. George Monbiot beautifully dismisses those who suggest that burning fossil fuels can be part of a transition by saying that it’s transition “in the sense that chocolate fudge cake is a transition to a low calorie diet”.
…
Writing in ‘The Transition Companion’ in 2011, I said “the starting point for Transition is that the future with less oil, and producing less carbon emissions, could be preferable to today. Its aim is to act as a catalyst, a pulse, an invitation; to galvanise the shift towards a more localised and resilient community”. It expresses itself in many different ways, as an inner process, as people leading by example, as an approach rooted in place and circumstance, as a cultural shift, as an economic process, a storyteller, a tool for turning problems into solutions. That’s what Transition is. And the moral of this story is to never let anyone tell you otherwise.
"Once there's a wider acceptance of the fact that increasingly resource-hungry 'peak convenience' is behind us, we can begin to allocate more resources to mitigating a slide into 'peak inconvenience' "
And there's the nub of the issue. I don't think that we (as in either NZ or the rest of the world) are anywhere near acceptance that 'peak convenience' is behind us.
Some will never accept that 'peak convenience' is in the rearview mirror, and would drive off a climate change cliff just to show how right they are.
(Re-)Education it the key – works best on those who want to learn.
Of course. However, I don't think that we're anywhere near a majority (or even a significant (in numerical terms) minority) believing that 'peak convenience' is over.
Especially when they see peak luxury consumption going on all around them…..
There's belief, and then there's reality – this particular mismatch will continue until reality bites – may take several bites for some, and a few are so well 'insulated' that they'll take their belief to the grave.
For most, however, reality (CC, pandemics, regional conflicts) can be a harsh teacher – how best to spare ourselves from ‘the strap’?
The stats show that the worlds birthrate is falling significantly. This would lessen the pressure on BA U, -as long as the trend does not deepen to vanish as zero.
I am not sure if anyone has absorbed the scale of the insurance event(s) that have occurred in Auckland in past three weeks or so. Everywhere in Auckland there are still piles of dumped carpet and water damaged detritus on the side of the road. In just my work team of ten two were badly affected by the floods, one had a tree land on his house last night (minor damage, but insurance will be involved) and talking to another team leader yesterday she told me two of her team had lost a roof and been badly flooded respectively.
Multiply that anecdotal impact across the city and the insurance claims are going to be huge. It isn't "just" poor areas affected either now – soon you'll hear ad nauseum across the MSM the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the middle class when they are told their house/holiday home is now uninsurable.
It's lower direct impact than Christchurch earthquakes, but it's spread across about 50% of New Zealand's population, about 60% of its rail network, about 70% of its public transport network, and about 60% of its GDP production and of its consumption.
Included in that is what would have been peak dairy production across the northern half of the North Island which is the dominant portion of our export income.
Not only does the imapct require a major Budget reallocation, it also requires a budget reallocation by about a million households and 2.5 million New Zealanders. So yeah it's a biggie.
Speaking of Christchurch, do you know what sort of rebuild has been undertaken in that city?
Has the design incorporated 21st century thinking to allow for climate change, energy efficient buildings and other innovations or did they just try to recreate what was already there?
I was thinking about that film! People did their best, and some very cool things happened. National fucked a lot of things up, and the default position of working without regard for cradle to grave.
Mostly people were given money to repair or rebuild. For rebuilds, they were usually built to whatever standards the money could afford while still being legally compliant to relevant building codes at the time.
Some of the larger projects were more forward-thinking, but most of the rebuild was individual housing.
Living as I do close to a clifftop row of top of the range mansions that are sitting on land precariously close to falling into the sea, I am having some difficulty dredging up the compassion and sympathy normally expected for people in such situations. Will purchase earplugs to block out the noise coming from the affected area.
In Auckland, not so much the middle class – but the seriously wealthy inhabitants of highly renovated hilltop mansions, built as close as they could get to crumbling cliff edges.
The Council knows that these people are highly litigious – and regularly take the Council to court to get 'permission' to build what they want where they want it. And are notorious for cutting down, killing off and otherwise damaging any trees which impinge on their prized views.
One has already been in the papers threatening to sue the Council in a class action because of the stormwater damage to his property.
We need to set statutory set backs from cliff edges – and require owners to remove all decks, swimming pools and other associated infrastructure from within this area. For some, those with severe landslips, this will also include the house.
At the other end of the spectrum – why is KO building new housing subdivisions in a flood plain?
Yes, I consented a bunch of stuff for the sites on the Torbay cliffs. This included something called "cliff nailing" which is what you try when you have removed all the trees to improve the view and the sandstone/mudstone of the cliffs starts to crumble. It involves various sorts of mesh "nailed" to the cliff face with long wires and vegetation being encouraged to grow on it.
Someone was making a shedload of dosh from it and I have no idea if it actually worked.
I don't think there are any easy answers here, but I'm tending towards the idea that if the government ends up bailing people out, it should be for a replacement average house, not replacement value for the property lost. We've known about climate change for half a century.
EQC would (I think) cover the land value, for red-stickered properties. IIRC, Christchurch showed that the actual cash-in-hand value of this, was a lot less than people were expecting.
I'd like to add that this should be depreciated if the Council can show you contributed to the damage (removing vegetation on cliff edges, building additional structures, etc.). But suspect the litigation won't be worth the effort.
House value should be covered by insurance – and if you're under-insured as a multi-millionaire home-owner, then you've chosen to cover this yourself. [I'm not crying for you]
Older homes (inhabited by long-term residents) tend to be very well set back from the edges of the cliffs – and not inflated on steriods, the way the new mansions are. So set-back rules would be unlikely to affect them.
Probably made things worse. Nailing would fracture the cliffs, and shallow-rooted vegetation (rather than deep rooted trees) doesn't stabilize sandstone (though it's great for sand dunes)
The only positive effect would have been to reduce the likelihood of random frequent rock-falls on passers-by.
The use of soil-nails to enhance the stability of a slope has long been established, but is typically constrained by site geometry to primarily provide support perpendicular to the slope. Therefore, it must be communicated to the client that soil nailed remediation of slope failures are not intended to prevent global cliff failure or lateral regression adjacent to the soil nailed section.
I did see the image of the Orua Bay slip and ponder (without any conclusion) whether the combination of the vegetation clearance, the redirection of water for the property above and the clay/sand composition contributed to the failure at that site.
Interesting image anyway, as it shows the whole bank failure and not just the house.
A couple of friends in Clarks Beach lost some of their seaward property in the last storm.
Bugger, I thought I’d resized. Can a moderator with superior tech skills please adjust?
on some devices the sizing adjustment in the Comment editor looks like it's worked but it doesn't. Instead, make the comment, then click on edit and add the following just before the />
Incredibly photo. Would love to see what the land above that looks like. Seem to remember there were slips like this in the Nelson floods, lots of bare hillsides.
agree with you. the weather and climate change will be the economic and political driver this year . conservatives crave stability, so expecting them to jump out of the warm arms of the state , into the market knows best,sod you, uncertainty of corporate chris and caculating nicola is a big ask. many councils will be knocking on the three waters door, caps in hand. many of the road washouts are water pipe failures, so the majority of roading costs get sheeted back to drainage, sewage etc. empty phrases like "giving local democracy back" wont cover the shortfall.
What Jacinda and now Chippy have had to deal with! Rolling disasters.
I'm just trying to imagine how DeLuxon would approach them if he was PM.
Perhaps he would shock and impress us all with his decisive, well-communicated and compassionate action… or perhaps it would be dithering, grandstanding, gross mismanagement of funds into the hands of incompetent 'contractors', opportunistic support packages for big business, and chaotic misery for the rest of us.
Just saw a news site where Luxon magnanimously allows that the emergency response is as he would have done it. I've seen a lot of this from Luxon recently, treating emergencies as political hustings, taking up airtime uselessly without putting in the hard graft. Of course, the media bothering to post his political maunderings are also keen on promoting his pr spin. On the other hand, he still manages to project an air of self-satisfied twat, even in such fluff pieces.
British design guru Kevin McCloud has called for local democracy to be fully restored in Christchurch so the city can become "one of the most sustainable places" on Earth.
But he has already been dismissed as a "tourist" by Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee.
The Grand Designs presenter, who studied the history of art and architecture at Cambridge University, said a great city could only be built "ground up, not top down".
McCloud is interested in the rebuild after visiting Christchurch and is judging a design competition for new housing in the city.
"Christchurch's ambition as a city has been to make it one of the most sustainable places on the planet. You can't do that with national government intervention. You do it with local communities – ground up, not top down," he said.
"The role of central government is absolutely fundamental, but their presence should not undermine the right of people to determine their own future, which is what democracy is."
When asked about McCloud's suggestions, Brownlee said: "I have no response to Mr McCloud's ideas. We get lots of tourists and lots of tourists have lots of ideas and I don't respond to them either."
My home town of Napier has had a bit of a bash, lots of power outages, the road to Hastings is out (At last! The true foe is cut off!) SH2 is out in Eskdale (I can't recall the Esk river – more a gentle stream these days – flooding since I was a nipper many moons ago), I hear the Gentle Annie is closed, the Wairoa road is closed, and the Desert road is out so there is no way into the city at the moment from anywhere.
Dawn may reveal something approaching Bola levels of destruction on the East Coast. Let's hope not!
Ohhh just heard the Puketapu bridge has fallen down… Like a lot of NZ, barely controlled lifestyle development has occurred in the Puketapu valley without infrastructure upgrades, so hundreds and hundreds of people rely on what is basically a 1950s concrete structure designed for rural traffic and now they are cut off.
Goodness me, according to a chap on NatRad just now the Ngaruroro has breached it's banks in Hawkes Bay – that river has some enormous stop banks – if he means they are breached then that is something amazing. The flooding will be gigantic.
Sounds grim in Hawkes Bay. I cannot recall the Ngararoro and Tutaekuri breaching their flood defenses in fifty years, and the normally gentle Esk river has become a raging torrent by all accounts.
Taradale south of Anderson Park, Jervoistown and Meeanee all evacuating immediately. Huge if it really is that scale of disaster.
reports of people having to swim out of bedroom windows. Sounds like the area got more rain than expected or the stop banks weren't being monitored for breaching.
The Brookfields bridge over the Tutaekuri was built in WW2 and has withstood everything over the last 80 years. It has been destroyed – the picture I saw on my phone looks like the southern stop banks have simply been over-topped.
maybe a combination of both. I don't know how rivers and stop banks get monitored in situations like that especially at night.
The 100 year flood in Invercargill in the late 80s was a stop bank breach from memory. Maybe a log jam at a bridge, then a lot of water being released when that cleared.
On the east coast of the Peninsula they have suffered like everywhere else, but here in Thames we have been relatively sheltered from the strong easterlies by the Coromandel Ranges. The roads have suffered from more slipping caused by the heavy rain. A house at Thorndon Bay has been inundated by a slip – again. It was already red stickered so no one hurt. The Road out of town was closed for a while as the Kauranga River overflowed its stop banks on High Tide. The resulting flood always flows onto the rugby field, but when the rest of the water subsides, as the tide goes out, the ruby field has remained inundated. The Swamp Foxes will feel well at home on their next game.
"So: at what point was there consensus that there was no such thing as same-sex attraction, and how did it come to be that all terms such as homosexuality, bisexuality, gay or lesbian were rewritten to accommodate members of the opposite sex?
As I pointed out, you could end up with a group of trans-identified gay men, creating a lesbian association with no women members (and vice versa).
The vast amount of additional scaffolding required to support the initial lie, shows how significant the impact of ignoring the reality of immutable biological sex is.
And your identifying sexuality with a persons birth sex and that of their partner leads you to regard GB as being a homosexual male when with male partners.
And I doubt that when Elliot Page marries again they will be invited to and or attend a lesbian event. Despite your definition of such as a lesbian relationship.
Definitions, safeguarding and single-sex boundaries are not about accommodating specific individuals.
(As I mentioned, I'm not interested in other people's sex lives in the way you seem to be. It's also not relevant to this discussion).
I AM interested in definition dismantling being used as a trojan horse to avoid open, public discussion. Including how those distortions impact on the ability to clearly define a specific group, especially when advocating politically, organising, collecting data and statistics, clear medical treatment and messaging, and safeguarding provisions for that group.
If trans identifying men had a distinct term of their own: Eg. Femme-men – all those advantages would apply to them as well.
Also, instead of appropriating (and thus obliterating the meaning of) the terms for sexual-orientation, create distinct terms to accommodate your new application: homogender orientation, etc.
You've failed to give any reasons at all for the need to redefine words instead of create distinct terms, where I have provided significant reasons why it should be avoided.
If you can tear yourself away from other people's private lives – have another crack at it.
You've failed to give any reasons at all for the need to redefine words instead of create distinct terms, where I have provided significant reasons why it should be avoided.
If you can tear yourself away from other people's private lives – have another crack at it.
Not good at focusing on the relevant, I see. Despite being given repeat opportunities.
Well, let's take another route – and have a look at the result of the confusion you are so wedded to – this time for gay men:
I'm curious now how much of that aggression in TM is driven by socialisation and how much by artificial levels of testosterone (and perhaps altered levels of other hormones).
You can repeat that line all you like, but the fact is neither homosexual males nor lesbian females will invite, nor expect, GB and all others of the like or EP and all others of the like to join their groups and claim their identity.
I can't quite understand what you are saying. You appear to be saying that lesbians and gays will be able to retain their single sex spaces. And that trans people won't attempt to take their language. Both those things have already happened. Why are you not paying attention?
Not all trans people obviously. But pretty much everyone here is arguing about the ideology that is regressively subsuming single sex space, language and orientation.
Maybe because there are two distinct issues in play as
1. per Molly regarding a transgender woman and man and a transgender man and a woman as being in same sex relationships (when they would not)
2. your concern about places for same sex couples having to include those whom the hosts would not want as their guests.
Which is even more important where there is self ID (as psychopaths and sociopaths can use it to victimise others).
A wise government when forming the rules around gender ID would have allowed the ID only via a screened process (as was done – an evaluation of their circumstance and motive and a test of living as they intended first etc). And otherwise established rules whereby refuges and other places/groups (such as homosexual and lesbian ones or sports) decided their arrangements (as to safety etc).
"1. per Molly regarding a transgender woman and man and a transgender man and a woman as being in same sex relationships (when they would not)"
They ARE in same SEX relationships.
You could more accurately use distinct terms for their relationships in regards to gender identity.
SEXUAL orientation is a protected characteristic in many countries – redefining the word makes it very difficult to ascertain if discriminatory practices have taken place due to this characteristic.
There is no need to conflate SEXUAL-orientation, with an orientation based on gender identity. Distinct terms can be created that allow those relationships to also be protected from discrimination.
2. your concern about places for same sex couples having to include those whom the hosts would not want as their guests.
Your given example is quite frankly, bizarre:
"And I doubt that when Elliot Page marries again they will be invited to and or attend a lesbian event"
I also doubt this imaginary speculative scenario. Most people – when marrying – send out invitations to a wedding.
weka's examples of impacts are to do with support organisations, political advocacy and social events based around shared lesbian experiences and needs, not a private event celebrating a personal relationship.
"A wise government when forming the rules around gender ID would have allowed the ID only via a screened process (as was done – an evaluation of their circumstance and motive and a test of living as they intended first etc). "
A government with adults who possess critical thinking, could have foreseen the future impacts of creating a legal fiction of sex, and found another solution for this situation. Self-ID, compounds this failing.
There is nothing at all wrong with being a transsexual man or woman. However, all the empathy, goodwill, surgery, medication or official documents in the world do not change the material reality of sex.
(Official documents either record the truth or they begin to lose all authority, accuracy and relevance. We are seeing the negative impacts of this when we look at statistics, or see how people are left out of targeting medical messaging, or how media reports people inaccurately in news stories.)
The "line" you referred to is a repeat of an invitation to explain your position, and you keep ignoring it to refer to individuals in a particularly voyeuristic manner.
The creation of a word to refer to same gender identity orientation would be both accurate and distinct. The attempt to conflate SEXUAL orientation with gender identity, is as problematic as doing the same with SEX itself. That is why you find it incomprehensible that people continue to use the clear definitions of words. You have committed to do otherwise.
How Georgina Beyer and Elliot Page refer to themselves or others is not a universal arbitration system.
(If Elliot Page said they were a Teletubby and in a bouncy stomach relationship with a Care Bear – they would still be a woman who identifies as a Teletubby – in a relationship with a woman.)
You seem to think there is something intrinsically wrong with being a transsexual homosexual male, or a woman who identifies as a man in a lesbian relationship with another woman.
It will be a same 'sex' relationship if Elliot Page again partners with a women – female human – lesbians are women in relationships with women were both women were born with the female sex of the human species. It will also be a opposite gender relationship as per Gender Ideology. Both is possible at the same time.
it does. Which is why in Tasmania lesbians have been told that holding lesbian only events (that exclude males who self ID as lesbian) is breaching human rights.
It's also why lesbians get banned from lesbian dating apps for saying female only.
Sexual orientation is different than gender identity. People who self ID gender need to coin their own terms for the sexual orientation if they don't want to be referred to by the concepts nearly everyone else is using.
The issue was a claim that it would erase same sex attraction – it was proscribed in society for a long time and never did such a thing. Nor will gender identity becoming a thing do it either.
ok, so lesbians going back in the closet doesn't literally erase same sex attraction, but it functionally does. You're arguing something pretty abstract in the fact of people's suffering.
Lesbian is a word that has a meaning, and it will never include males. Gay males will never include females. And super straight heterosexuals will also stick to the tried and true as in opposite sex.
And yet, I could respond by saying EP the transgender man will not end up with a person who calls herself a lesbian and GB the transgender woman has not been dating homosexual men.
"And yet, I could respond by saying EP the transgender man will not end up with a person who calls herself a lesbian and GB the transgender woman has not been dating homosexual men."
Individuals can refer to themselves in any way – and it is either accurate – or inaccurate.
Your focus on the self-regard of individuals is not a conclusive argument for redefining sexual-orientation.
You don't seem to understand the difference between sexual attraction and same gender attraction.
Sexual attraction comes with requirments not preferences.
Women who are lesbians will not have sex with women who have penises. Their requirement is vagina. No vagina, and by that i don't mean a flayed penis but an actual natural vagina, no sexing, no romancing, no nothing. As lesbians are sexually attracted to natural vagina, boobies, and of course the smell of women and the being of women is what is required for them to be sexually attracted to a person.
Men who are homosexual will not have sex with a man who has a vagina. No dick, and again this is a natural dick we are talking here about, fake arm or leg rolls even fitted with a device that would get that roll to stand up will not do it. It is the natural dick, with its ability to ejaculate, the smell and feel of male that they are sexually attracted too.
Super straight heterosexual woman will not have sex with a male that comes with fake tits and penis and an identity as 'woman' as their sexual attraction is based on male genitalia attached to a male who presents and is happy as a male.
Ditto for super straight heterosexual males that won't have sex with a male who has an inverted penis and fake tits.
The bisexuals are maybe a bit different as they can feel a sexual attraction to both sexes.
The other 'spicy' so called straights that would fuck anything under moon so as long as they get to fuck they can spend eons on their preferences, it won't matter a bit to those of us who fuck on the grounds of sexual attraction.
So good old E. Page is a lesbian, a female, who presents male. You might want to pretend that they are in a heterosexual relationship, but you could not get E.Page to ever fuck a male, as they are strictly sexually attracted to females, and if their future partner were to identify as a Transman, no they would not be in a homosexual relationship either.
In the same sense i would not fuck someone or be in a relationship that would present female even with a penis. My requirement for sex and love is a male. Entire, unadulterated male.
Sadly there will be some sort of reckoning for those that were harmed by this insidious ideology, the young castrated males with their inverted penises, the young de-sexed women with their flat chests and vaginal atrophy, and that is that normal people will not want to have sex with them, and will not want to pretend to be in this or that made up same sex or heterosexual relationship.
And while it is an issue for lesbians, it also is an issue for homosexual men who do not consider people who present as man with vaginas as male or even just as fuckable.
Given the impact of slash on the flooding everywhere – here's a thought for Stuart Nash. Once the logging companies have done their felling and trimming, ban them from moving the logs off site until the cleanup has been checked and signed off by a forestry inspector.
A national state of emergency. Are we witnessing an inexorable morphing back to the future, the reintroduction of a 21st century model MoW couldn't be more valuable in these days of unprecedented earthly events. The thought of someone not just being in charge but responsible (you know, where the buck ultimately stops) gives a warm fuzzy feeling, doesn't it…….
Huge fan of MOW. Compare their sturdy projects with extortionate public-private road projects, with little redress to overseas behomeths for poor design and build; and DHB shoddy hospital builds. The main structural differences are that public accountability remains within government, and that the $$$ stay majorly in the country.
I'd say that the forestry 'slash' issue is one that could be dealt with tomorrow with a combination of central and local government legislation/regulation.
A simple requirement for all forestry harvesting to remove and deal with slash (might be chipping, or composting, or bio-char – or any of a series of agreed-by-local-government solutions) – before logs are allowed to be removed from the site for sale.
With very hefty financial penalties (including liability for downstream consequences) for any slash washed off.
Not really worried if it makes forestry more expensive – ATM, they're transferring their environmental cleanup cost to the tax/rate-payer.
That would deal with any newly harvested slash. Then existing companies should be required to clean up (either themselves or contracting others to do so), the downstream waterways to remove any washed down slash – and handle as above. This requirement would be tied to the land (so selling off the land or the forest, transfers the clean-up requirement – not letting companies opt out).
Apart from the forestry owners/management companies. I'd think this would be highly popular with just about everyone else.
What happens is the main contractor gets the cutting rights on a site and works away till most trees are harvested. Then they move onto another site thats pre scheduled and the remnants and trees that werent removed are sub contracted to a smaller harvester who tries to make as much money in the short time before they too pack up and leave.
Guess what is left that no one wants . The forest owner says its not my problem
Some time ago there was mention of shipping forest residues to India for use in Funeral Pyres as there is a major wood shortage there for that use. I recollect that containers full of one pyre bundles was being investigated pre-Covid.
It's not so much the logging companies but the forest owners that need to be targeted.
I'd suggest we need a levy on every tree planted and harvested to fund clean up operations and we need to have a good look at the regulations around harvesting.
Pretty clear that slash is heavily contributing to infrastructure failure.
Also these will be the youngest and most (economically) productive workers.
Further hollowing out the Russian economy, and skewing the demographics even further towards a rapidly ageing population.
ha ha whats "mindboggling " is the bullshit spouted by publications like the WP after all whats 500k of a pop of 143mil ?? .Russia prob gained ten times that figure from people emigrating from the donbass regions .Besides its likely a good number of those that left will return once the economy has stabilised properly and they,ve had their full of big macs coca cola and the madness's of the woke west .!!!
russia is desperate for more people. putin has long put effort into increasing the birth rate. still not increasing, but decreasing even faster.really the only population demographic that is increasing, is the amount of africans fleeing there own situations.
Russia has the most Ukrainian refugees of any other country
A scant third of refugees fleeing the country they're trying to destroy. That's fucking big of them. But hey, Ukrainians fleeing Russian barbarism should be grateful that they're not Syrians fleeing Russian barbarism.
In a book I was reading recently, Colossus – the Rise and Fall of the American Empire, the historian, Lyall Ferguson, points that while empires, of one sort or another, have existed since the beginning of recorded history, nationalism is something new, having started during the nineteenth century in opposition to empire, and which may not last too much longer. In other words empires may be here to stay.
It's a complex subject – but Russia, already in the throws of a demographic crisis, does not have surplus healthy male population to thrust into the mincer at Bakhmut. But then, as those of us who have survived Rogergnomics know, governments rarely act in the public interest.
The empire as commonwealth is a promising model, but the outlying members are wont to regret joining, or forcible assimilation. Certainly a decaying state as unenlightened and frankly backward as that responsible for invading Ukraine will have no queue of aspiring members.
TLDR: The Government has just declared a National State of Emergency in response to Cyclone Gabrielle, which is only the third-ever such declaration behind the Canterbury Earthquake on February 23, 2011 and the Covid Pandemic on March 25, 2020.
Woolly, her interviewee certainly couldn't have safely rebutted her position. Since 2014, it has been illegal in Russia to question the official view that Russia's role in WW2 began in 1941, and not at the brutal partitioning of Poland in 1939. He would have attracted large fines or up to 5 years in prison. Kinda suspiciously, a law seeks to revise history, in the best Stalinist tradition.
Rawira Waititi posted on his MP Facebook page today to commemorate the 14th of February except instead of the traditional romantic side of Valentines day he is celebrating the death of Captain Cook.
Recently Waititi was caught out on national TV not being able to articulate exactly what racist rhetoric the ACT party and David Seymour were supposedly guilty of. It is clear from his comments that it is he who is guilty of such rhetoric.
He is quite clearly gleeful over the fact Captain Cook was killed and eaten and states explicitly that colonisation was an infection on the Pacific (which suggests that by extension the people who now live here as a result must be part of that infection).
Rawiri can speak for himself (the Cook reference is gratuitous) but the statement "that colonisation was an infection on the Pacific" is simply historical fact. Europeans may not have intended to bring deadly diseases with them to the Pacific, Americas, etc, but they surely did. The natives had no immunity and so the result was a catastrophe.
It's surprising that you don't know that. Please read up a little.
Colonisation was not an infection. Indeed it is essentially what Iwi leaders signed up to in 1840 when they signed the Treaty of Waitangi. The English translation of the Maori version of the preamble states the following:
"…agree to the Queen's Government being established over all parts of this land and (adjoining) islands4 and also because there are many of her subjects already living on this land and others yet to come."
That is a explicit acknowledgement that NZ would be colonised as it talks about many British subjects in NZ and that more would follow. Maori can not claim they were unaware that colonisation was not the outcome.
No. Colonisation was the infection according to Rawiri Waititi not that colonisation brought infections. Colonisation didn't even bring infections. Interaction with the outside World did that. It would have happened regardless of any moves to colonise NZ.
"Colonisation didn't even bring infections. Interaction with the outside World did that. It would have happened regardless of any moves to colonise NZ."
In fact infectious diseases existed amongst Maori before Europeans arrived in NZ, including pneumonia and tetanus. According to Teara:
Maori face genuine inequalities around health outcomes, but the solutions lie in solutions targeted at need across the entire population, not rewriting history and racist dog whistling by the likes of Waititi.
His comments include a tweet (which he later denied) that describes Pakeha as an 'archaic species'.
He singles out for celebration the violent death of a renowned European explorer, while failing to mention the genocide of the Moriori committed by Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama.
There's a reason why we ask for people to provide evidence of claims of fact. People need to fact check, but also context matters a great deal for nuance and understanding.
You are making the argument that RW is racist, but we can't see if you are right because you have made assertions without evidence.
For instance, when I looked up the 'archaic species', this is what I found from 2021.
I'm ok with accepting that at face value and that someone running his twitter account misrepresented his position. But even if that's not true, he still corrected it/himself and made a point of clarifying his position. I read that as the old Pākeha system that dominates is being replaced by a partnership between Iwi and the Crown representing non-Māori.
Can you now please provide the evidence for your other two examples?
Not quite. I'm making the same claim about RW he made about DS, that his rhetoric is racist.
1. On the tweet, I made the comment that he later denied having made it. Whether or not we believe him or accept his explanation is a matter of opinion.
3. The Captain Cook comment is on RW's FB page. I'm not sure how to link, so I'll cut and paste:
"This day 14 February 1779 our Kanaka Maoli whanaunga killed Captain James Cook with his own knife, after his attempt to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, an Ali’i nui (Arikinui) of Hawaii. They cooked him and then ate him. Cook opened the door for the British coloniser to infect Te Moana Nui a Kiwa.
Valentines Day is a distraction to the true importance of today for all of our peoples of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. Not today coloniser! Today we celebrate and stand in solidarity with our Kanaka Maoli of Hawaii "
To link to a specific FB post, click on the date/time stamp of the post. This will reset the URLin the address bar and you can then copy and paste that. We require the link to the post rather than someone’s FB page, because the post can disappear down a feed over a day or so.
Colonisation didn't even bring infections. Interaction with the outside World did that. It would have happened regardless of any moves to colonise NZ.
It's like you learned nothing from the pandemic. If colonisation hadn't happened, Māori would have retained their landbase and resources and been able to adapt to emerging diseases. They could have quarantined and controlled immigration. Instead they were pushed into poverty and overwhelmed by the numbers of immigrants arriving.
Very large increases in the European population during this period meant Māori across the country were continuously exposed to new diseases
“The Captain Cook comment……. I'm not sure how to link, so I'll cut and paste:
"This day 14 February 1779 our Kanaka Maoli whanaunga killed Captain James Cook with his own knife, after his attempt to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, an Ali’i nui (Arikinui) of Hawaii. They cooked him and then ate him. Cook opened the door for the British coloniser to infect Te Moana Nui a Kiwa.
Valentines Day is a distraction to the true importance of today for all of our peoples of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. Not today coloniser! Today we celebrate and stand in solidarity with our Kanaka Maoli of Hawaii”
I am unsure why this is called either racist or racist rhetoric. It is pretty plain and clear writing. He uses a figure of speech 'infect' but that is the extent of it.
Because the subject matter is not to one's taste does not mean the writing has something wrong with it! He is urging people to remember on Valentines Day that 'lovey dovey' did not have a totally good influence on ancestors. He also makes the extended metaphor 'infect' work about the madness/infection that swept across European seagoing nations to colonise.
"Not today coloniser! Today we celebrate and stand in solidarity with our Kanaka Maoli of Hawaii”"
Celebrate what?
"This day 14 February 1779 our Kanaka Maoli whanaunga killed Captain James Cook with his own knife, after his attempt to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, an Ali’i nui (Arikinui) of Hawaii. They cooked him and then ate him. "
"Cook opened the door for the British coloniser to infect Te Moana Nui a Kiwa."
Rawiri is using 'infection' and 'colonisation' together as a figure of speech. I think an extended metaphor? simile?
He is linking the rampant race to discover by many European nations to an infection. He is saying that because it was so prevalent you could, as a figure of speech, call it an infection.
No doubt this colonisation did bring infections of many different kinds not resident in NZ.
RW is speaking English. It grieves me so much that many cannot understand this. There is truly a case for plain English where it counts. But please sometimes we should be grateful for a bit more from our language. This is where those who are fluent and those who are not differ.
I have been astounded recently:
Michael Woods Churchillian speech about the Parliamentary protest was fiendishly, and I suspect deliberately, misinterpreted by some, others just did not understand it. Not plain enough
The examples of print media articles from known satirists having to be labelled 'satire' I suppose in case people misunderstood them..
I was 'had on' on TS when I mentioned my experience that the common age that Govt press releases was pitched at was 9-11years.
Not all the pacific islands were colonised , Tonga merely became a 'protectorate' and today has the same form of government as when the British and others arrived
…and today [Tonga] has the same form of government as when the British and others arrived
Maybe a similar form – in 2008, and particularly in 2010, there were significant changes, at least according to my Tongan stepfather.
Tonga's king to cede key powers [29 July 2008]
"The Sovereign of the only Polynesian kingdom… is voluntarily surrendering his powers to meet the democratic aspirations of many of his people," he [Hon Fielakepa] said.
2010 Tongan general election [Wikipedia]
For the first time, a majority of the seats (17 out of 26) in the Tongan parliament were elected by universal suffrage, with the remaining nine seats being reserved for members of Tonga's nobility. This marked a major progression away from the 165-year rule of the monarchy towards a fully representative democracy. The Taimi Media Network described it as "Tonga’s first democratically elected Parliament".
To keep its form of self government and institutions from 1900 ( when came part of the British Empire) to 2008 isnt too bad, when its neighbours literally became colonies
An absolute monarchy until more recently was what the nobility wanted.
An English language version was also circulated during that time which is believed to have been written from memory of the original English-language draft, which has since been lost. It was sent out in late March and presented at hui in two locations where it is possible that up to 39 Rangatira signed it. In effect, these Rangatira would have been assenting to the content of the document in te reo Māori, as news of it would have travelled from the Waitangi signing and the discussion would have been about the content and intent of the reo Māori text since there were few who spoke or read fluent formal English in 1840. In addition, that which was verbally agreed was of the essence in the oral tradition of Māori
But we need to go back even further to understand how Te Tiriti came to be in the first place. The concept of a covenant between Maori and the Crown was conceived by Lord Glenelg (Secretary for the Colonies) and Sir James Stephen, (Permanent Undersecretary), who were committed to seeing Maori interests protected in the colonisation of New Zealand. In fact they initially opposed colonisation, and wanted to see an independent Maori nation. However, they eventually realised colonisation was a tide they could not hold back. Instead, they opted to try to establish British law as a restraint on land-grabbing colonists. Their influence resulted in Hobson being dispatched with instructions to seek Crown sovereignty on the basis of the ''free and intelligent consent'' of Maori and to ensure their land and political rights were protected.
Hobson wouldn't have gotten past first base on his own, and Te Tiriti was really the product of the Rev Henry Williams and the 40 Rangatira who were at Waitangi on the 6th Feb. With his son, Williams translated the English draft into Maori. He then played a leading role in explaining the Treaty to the gathered chiefs and as an interpreter at the proceedings. There were then negotiations, and a second version was finally agreed which was the version finally signed by the 400 Rangatira around the country. It is this version of Te Tiriti to which Maori assented.
Williams and his son Edward worked on the document and further changes in its meaning were made during its translation into te reo Māori, due in part to feedback from Rangatira that they would never cede their mana (power, prestige and authority) to the the Queen; the word kawanatanga (a transliteration of the word ‘governor’, an authority delegated by the British Crown such as that exercised by the Governors of New South Wales and Norfolk Island), was substituted. The final reo Māori version is what is known to Ngāpuhi as Te Tiriti Tuarua (the second version of the Treaty written in te reo) and it was this document that was presented to northern Māori at Waitangi and signed on 6th February by about 40 Rangatira and Captain Hobson on behalf of the Queen.
What happened in the years that followed is another story. Despite efforts by Rev Williams, and other missionaries like Octavius Hadfield and Thomas Grace, settler pressure for land prevailed.
The Treaty was dishonoured, injustice and war followed.
The Contra proferentem is an arcane bit of law that applies to commercial contracts and not to ones involving matters of sovereignty. There is an actual international convention on international treaties that deals with this. You should take the time to read it especially Article's 33.
No, Cook's crew were an actual infectious agent, introducing TB and sexual diseases on the trip previous to the one where he was killed. The Hawai'ians called them out on it when Cook returned. Here is a Hawai'ian version of Cook's crew's infectiousness and his death.
I went to Waititi's post and I didn't get the same interpretation that you did from his text. You seem a little primed to see racism, where there is anti-colonialism, which is a perfectly valid political view.
BHN do a really cool dissection of why Seymour's rhetoric is racist, between 50 -55 min of this episode.
please link to the actual post rather than someone's FB page. If you click on the date/time stamp of the post, the URL loads in the address bar and you can copy and paste that (remove everything from the ? onwards if it's a long link) Thanks.
Cook was not the first European to visit Tahiti, so the slander that he brought syphilis there is just that.
Mind, the Europeans blamed the New World for syphilis for centuries. Brief History of Syphilis – PMC (nih.gov) Archeology has since found evidence of syphilis in Greek and Roman port cities.
Plays well as a dog-whistle to the voters he means to mislead I guess.
Bryce's roundups are often wide of the mark, but in this case the collection of RW commentators (Hooton, Grant etc) have summed up Luxon's problem well enough. He's a phoney and unlike Key, not a good enough actor to play the role of regular bloke:
key could fake sincerity. luxo cant even do that. when the nats media cheerleaders are asking questions, you know there is trouble . dare they bring in willis, when misogynism is a basic nact foundation? collins was only accepted, because she acted like a male(crusher, playing with guns,etc) once she started pretending to be human, her appeal lessened to the shoutback radio set.
People who had the income to service a 90% + mortgage in an overheated market. and the bank wouldn't have given them the mortgage unless they could still service it when the market went sour. So they would have been pulling in a good wicket.
If they loose their job, well it might be a bit tough and the bank could sell them up, but banks are reluctant to bring about a mortgagee sale if they are going to loose money, more likely to support the borrower though it. That can be a character building experience for the borrower, and they won't be so keen on the big mortgage again.
Negative equity is only an issue if you have to sell, and history shows it only a temporary situation. The market stabilises / recovers and the borrower pays down the loan and things come right, or eventually the borrower can sell and try again.
The "Have to sell" thing is usually real estate speak for the vendor has other things on, like moving somewhere else, or the three Ds. Rarely is it the bank, or if it is, it's related to something other than the house. It's rare that a bank will go to a mortgagee sale on a first home buyer with just a loan on the house, they'll try very hard to make it work provided the borrower does their part to the best of their abilities. But with banks, fuck about and you'll find out…
The people who get fucked over with negative equity are people who have maxed the mortgage to build up a business and it doesn't go as well as they hoped. Run out of equity, and the ability to borrow more, in that situation and it can get tricky.
I was thinking 'have to sell' being people who get transferred in a job, or need to live in another city to look after an elderly parent. Or as Craig suggests, marriage separation.
Of those, not all will be 'have to' eg the house can be rented out. But then it’s an issue if the rent doesn’t cover the mortgage.
The business one makes sense. All of them are really about people taking on big mortgages at a time when that was a risk.
Also the bright line test swings into action if the house is rented out. Which matters, especially with divorce, when the 'plan' is for the equity (if any) or liabilities to be equally shared between the two individuals. Bright line, means that the equity won't be fully available for 10 years after purchase.
Certainly where divorce involves children, both parents (usually) want a house which is large enough for the kids – to facilitate shared care. [An unsung reason for the housing shortage – divorce rates, resulting in double the house space required for a single family]. And, if you're leveraged to the max on a double income to afford the house, you're not going to be able to afford an additional mortgage (or rent, for that matter).
half the country is used to not getting everything they want, or even most of what they want. What I'm getting at here is that the drop in market value may cause problems for people, but some of those problems are normal level not catastrophic. We need to be living within our means. A couple with three kids that divorces and wants two four bedroom houses but has an upside down mortgage, this family has some choices and it's not the end of the world if they have to make changes to the way they live and the priorities they have.
the sleep out/caravan for the spouse (continuing to pay the mortgage)
renting a one bed room place/apartment and taking turns there while the children stay in the home (continuing to pay mortgage/rent)
Work and Income could make it easier for relationships for those on sole parent benefits (allow the DPB person to receive a payment without partner income test for up to 3 years – the term which determines relationship status, with a work test for the payment once the youngest is over 3 or 5).
In the US, Freddie Mac and Minnie Mae mortgage financing crash, I read somewhere that banks extending loans were forced to suck up 20% of the equity loss. I agree with the lenders taking some of the hit, where mortgagee sales occur due to this large market swing.
In the US the mortgagee can simply leave the keys in the letterbox for the Bank and walk away with no further obligation but here in NZ the borrower is still "on the hook" for the remaining debt unless full bankruptcy proceedings are done.
for some that will be true. For others, take in a border. I'm not saying no-one is badly affected, I'm saying that some of the people have more choices.
Seriously negative equity would be small numbers, more common would just be to have not much or nothing left after the sale and both have to rent which obviously isn't ideal long term but totally agree that it's no more or less problematic than any other time (happens every day even in high markets).
With negative equity, that would include paying back the remainder of the mortgage, so cobbling together 2 lots of bonds might be difficult for lower-income families. That's still not particularly catastrophic unless there were other joint debts to resolve as well and someone ends up in bankruptcy over it (I know there are other options like No Asset Procedures, but not everyone will qualify for those). Obviously that's a more likely outcome if either spouse is unemployed or in a low-income job.
Amicable separations (or at least ones who listen to their lawyers) will find a way like one stays under some agreement around equity and payments to sort it out later, or just carry on living in the same house as flatmates in the short term e.g. separate bedrooms, rent a sleepout/caravan, insulate the garage etc. Renting it out might work but yields aren't that good currently, so no guarantee that will cover even interest-only payments – still worth having in the mix of options on the spreadsheets though. Not all separations are amicable however.
sorry, I dropped your duplicate comment in Trash, looks like you trashed the other one at the same time. Best I can do is copy and paste one of them back here. One is longer than the other, which one do you want?
Think the reply was the end of the longer one anyway when I was wondering what had happened….post longer version and I'll edit if necessary, or add in reply.
A first home buyer mid 2021 pays median price for a property ($825,000) with a 20% deposit and are carrying a $660,000 mortgage for 30 years on the most common term of 2 years fixed at 2.53%….weekly cost to service is $604 p/w.
Fast forward to mid this year and that fixed term is due to expire and the current best rate is around 6.5%…weekly cost $960 p/w.
Meanwhile rates and insurance have increased.(not to mention other cost increases)
Banks will overlook negative equity so long as the mortgage (and insurance) are being maintained but when they see the mortgagor start to struggle to meet those payments they will advise sale, before arrears accumulate…. this is not a 'mortgagee sale' but is much more common than realised and when the mortgagee 'recommends' sale you have little choice.
And in a falling market where sales are slow and credit tight there is a good chance you will be exiting with no equity….good bye your $160,000 deposit, of which a significant proportion was probably drawn down from your Kiwisaver…what chance you will manage to accumulate another deposit and re enter the market anytime soon even if interest rates revert to historical lows?
Found this article on Jacobin.com and would be of interest to quite of few here especially those of the Pro 🇷🇺 Supporters.
Jacobin is a very left wing & was a little surprised to see this article, it's well written & research. So it's worth reading than some of the other garbage out there.
Hmmm, I know there have been some caching issues lately and I thought they had been fixed. I went on another browser on this same PC and did not log in and indeed the TS website seems stuck at some time in the early morning of 15 Feb. The last posted comment I can actually read is https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-14-02-2023/#comment-1935330 @ 2023/02/15 at 4:47 am. The next and last comment in the Comment feed (https://thestandard.org.nz/is-it-too-early-to-talk-about-climate-change/#comment-1935331) @ 2023/02/15 at 6:25 am I can actually not read when I click on it; it is not there. I checked on a third browser (same PC) without logging in and it is the same issue.
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Last Sunday, we looked out across the seas to, of all places, the USA for inspiration and hope. We're going back again today to visit Joe Biden.But first, an octopus. Arguably this creature with more neurons in its arms than head qualifies as this planet’s first intelligent being.Arguably it also qualifies ...
When I left academia in 2011 I was forced to stop two book projects that were in the works. Without institutional support and resourcing it is impossible to conduct in-depth academic research that requires field research in foreign countries and … Continue reading → ...
Buzz from the Beehive Defence Minister Andrew Little, addressing big-wigs from around the world in Singapore, was oh-so-diplomatically disinclined to identify some countries as goodies or baddies in his government’s defence thinking. In his Speech To The IISS Shangri-La Dialogue 2023, he did say New Zealand’s most recent defence assessment ...
This week’s hoon included Wellington City Councillor Tamatha Paulon the politics ofLets Get Wellington Movingand the great battle for the Thorndon Quay cycle way. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTLDR: The week’s news in Aotearoa’s political economy I covered via The Kākā for subscribers included:The Labour Government’s ...
Morning all,I’ve been taking a look at some of the new features Substack have released and I’m keen to find out how you access newsletters. Some of the features are only available on certain platforms.Whether you use a mobile device like a phone or tablet, or a PC or laptop. ...
Hello! This is the Saturday edition of More Than A Feilding, catching you up on the week.Here’s what you may have missed.Last Sunday’s column had a genuinely inspiring story about political leaders getting huge things done in the face of culture wars and conservative resistance. Readers told me this should ...
Steven Levitt, famous for his Freakanomics, shows that being an economist is not just mouthing supply and demand.Anyone can call themselves an ‘economist’. Many do, despite having no qualifications in economics and hardly any formal training; they often make elementary errors. That is the result of a conscious decision of ...
Over the years, we've published several calls for help with translations but most of them were rather generalized in nature like last year's blog post published in February 2022. This time around, we are asking for help with a quite specific task, namely to update existing translations for the rebuttals included ...
1. By what name is this work of art known?a. The Drowning Dog, Francisco Goyab.The Temptation of St Anthony, Hieronymus Boschc.Saturn Devouring His Son Peter, Paul Rubensd.Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown Waves To A Stuff Journalist Through A Window, Stuff Photographer Ricky Wilson2. Who was in the news ...
An effective campaign against the RMA reforms will be a nightmare for Hipkins.Graham Adams writes – After a Budget that failed to excite voters and a lacklustre party conference where his senior colleagues faintly praised him for his proletarian taste in food, the very last thing Chris Hipkins ...
Buzz from the BeehiveEducation Minister Jan Tinetti brings news of a book of rules for school board members at the same time as her own grasp of Parliament’s rule book has been brought into question. Tinetti has announced a compulsory code of conduct to “ensure school board members are ...
Photo by Branden Tate on UnsplashIt’s that time of the week for an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session for paying subscribers about the week that was for an hour from midday (my apologies for the late start today), including:the Government’s vague promise of sharing the costs of cyclone rebuilding and buy-backs ...
Last night was a big night for our most celebrated radio presenter.Mike Hosking was named the Sir Paul Holmes Broadcaster of the Year - for the third straight year - as well as Best Talk Presenter (breakfast/drive) at the New Zealand Radio awards. Do you feel proud Aotearoa?In the presenter category ...
Speak of the devil. The Australian website Crikey has just launched an investigative series about the notorious lobbying firm Crosby Textor, or C/T as it now prefers to be called. It transpires that two clients of C/T’s American subsidiary will benefit greatly from the AUKUS defence pact between the US, ...
Aotearoa’s failure to deal with the escalating pace of human-induced climate change was starkly on display yesterday. Lynn Grieveson/Getty ImagesTL;DR: Our planet is now warming and generating extreme climate events faster than our politicians, voters and institutions can agree to reduce the costs and share the burden of those events ...
It’s Friday and we’ve got a long weekend ahead of us. Here’s our latest roundup of stories that caught our eye this week. The Week in Greater Auckland On Monday Matt reviewed National’s new housing policy. On Tuesday Matt looked at some of the highlights from Auckland Transport’s ...
The facts are bald and simple; India is now the most populous country in the world and the fifth largest economy and is on track to becoming the fourth. Despite that, New Zealand’s relationship with India could best be described as in its infancy, even though New Zealand has ...
Open access notables Multiple studies indicate changes in the properties of Antarctic bottom water (AABW) over the past half century. These changes involve density and hence will affect both local and distant circulation of the oceans, not least overturning effects that are vital for marine biology but also climate and ...
Completed reads for May: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift Journey to the Centre of the Earth, by Jules Verne Round the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne The Secret of the Island, by Jules Verne From the Earth ...
Ben Roberts-Smith is apparently "Australia’s most decorated living soldier", having won a Victoria Cross for killing people in Afghanistan. But today, after a stupendous self-own defamation case, he's also been proven to be a war criminal who committed multiple murders: Ben Roberts-Smith VC, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, has ...
Hey Uncle Dave, My house got wrecked in the summer floods. Do you know if the government’s got any plans to help me, or are they too busy making bilingual road signs?Noah InsuranceYou picked a good day to ask, Noah, the Govt has just announced there’ll be an offer of ...
The government has looked at imposing a tax on nitrogen fertiliser, used heavily in NZ agriculture, but yesterday Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor conceded he had not convinced farming leaders to go ahead with it. ACT”s Mark Cameron claimed credit in Parliament for “killing” the plan. Both Federated ...
Are women the new Māori?Since Christopher Luxon has been leader National have shown they’re prepared to throw Māori under a bus. Be it not wanting them to have a seat at the table on water management, referring to the Treaty as a “little experiment”, or the monocultural candidate selection polices ...
Are women the new Māori?Since Christopher Luxon has been leader National have shown they’re prepared to throw Māori under a bus. Be it not wanting them to have a seat at the table on water management, referring to the Treaty as a “little experiment”, or the monocultural candidate selection polices ...
Buzz from the Beehive An email from Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta had yet to be posted on the government’s official website, when Point of Order made its morning check on our ministers and what they are (officially) up to. She was providing us with an account – a ...
Multiple reviews are examining options to address a $25M to $40M funding hole in its operating budget and a reported $300M, 70,000 hour maintenance backlog for huts, tracks and visitor assets.Thomas Cranmer writes – Following Friday’s revelation that Budget 2023has left the Department of Conservation ...
Property values fell a further 0.7% in May from April across Aotearoa, but Core Logic sees evidence in the data “the current downturn is winding up.” Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: There are fresh signs this morning the housing market-with-bits-tacked-on economy is brightening up going into winter, and just ...
This is a cross post by Malcom McCracken at Better things are possible. It was from between when National signalled their change in housing policy but before they announced it but highlights why the Medium Density Residential Standards are important. Yesterday, the leader of the National Party, Christopher Luxon, ...
Do the global climate models (GCMs) we use for describing future climate change really capture the change and variations in the region that we want to study? There are widely used tools for evaluating global climate models, such as the ESMValTool, but they don’t provide the answers that I ...
This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). The world is getting hotter and the headlines are scary. So does climate change mean the world is about to pass ...
Politik (paywalled) reports that He waka eke noa, the farmers' scam to have the rest of us subsidise their emissions forever, so they can keep on destroying the planet, is dead: Reality appears to be about to shatter Jacinda Ardern's dream that New Zealand could lead the world in ...
Buzz from the Beehive Two ministerial press statements today draw attention to the Government’s incorporation of mātauranga Māori in its science policies and programmes. One of these announced the launch of the national space policy, which will oblige our space boffins to bring indigenous knowledge into their considerations. The ...
The Stations of the Cross, as all of us know from our devout and Godly ways, is a series of fourteen stations that depict the final hours in the story of Christ our Lord - appearing before Pilate, shouldering the wooden cross, whistling the Monty Python tune, so on and ...
The Stations of the Cross, as all of us know from our devout and Godly ways, is a series of fourteen stations that depict the final hours in the story of Christ our Lord - appearing before Pilate, shouldering the wooden cross, whistling the Monty Python tune, so on and ...
The Herald reports on a trivial but telling incident from Parliament: Labour Cabinet Minister Kiri Allan read the wrong speech at the third reading of a freedom camping bill in Parliament last night. She re-read almost word for word a speech given at the Self-contained Motor Vehicles Legislation bill’s ...
Barrie Saunders writes – Very well-intentioned politicians, judges and others have taken New Zealand down into a Treaty rabbit hole, from which few know how to exit without creating more social divisions. The modern interpretations of the Maori version of Treaty have set aside a common understanding of ...
It’s like deja-vu all over again. House prices are primed to surge 10-20% soon after any clear National-ACT win on October 14. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: There are increasing signs in economists’ forecasts, auction clearance rates, migration rates, divergent tax policies and house building rates that a clear ...
I did something yesterday that I hadn’t done in ages. Watch Oral Questions in parliament. I’m not sure what happened in all the episodes I missed, but nothing much seemed to have changed.For those unfamiliar, Question Time takes place in parliament at 2pm each Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of the ...
Slow Learner: Effective leaders develop a political “muscle memory” of their own. The National Party should get one.SPEAKING IN PUBLIC tops most people’s list of fearful situations. There are some careers, however, for which public fluency is a non-negotiable pre-requisite. There’s little point in pursuing an acting career, for example, ...
Reality appears to be about to shatter Jacinda Ardern’s dream that New Zealand could lead the world in showing how to deal with farm emissions. The Government is facing a breakdown in negotiations over its much-vaunted He Waka Eke Noa deal with farmers to price greenhouse gas emissions and ...
Hi,Webworm won a Voyager media award over the weekend for “Best Team Investigation”! This would not have been possible without readers. Without you. Thank you.Also, there’s a new Flightless Bird out today, where I look at drug rehab clinics in Florida. I talk to three former addicts, and their stories ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
Buzz from the Beehive The Government is coy about some aspects of its relationship with China – and with the United States. Earlier this month, the PM spent a hectic 23 hours in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, where he responded to the superpower security deal just ...
What do Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and your daily newspaper all have in common? They all tell tales of imaginary worlds.In Game of Thrones the honourable Stark family find themselves in deadly conflict with the ruthless House of Lannister.In the NZ Herald the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins finds himself ...
What do Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and your daily newspaper all have in common? They all tell tales of imaginary worlds.In Game of Thrones the honourable Stark family find themselves in deadly conflict with the ruthless House of Lannister.In the NZ Herald the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins finds himself ...
The Green Party are today launching a campaign asking for people to submit their stories of subpar, substandard and downright awful experiences of renting in Aotearoa. ...
The Green Party is welcoming the draft report of the Independent Electoral Review and challenging all political parties to commit to implementing its final recommendations after the 2023 general election. ...
Today, Te Pāti Māori announce Takuta Ferris will contest the Te Tai Tonga seat at this year’s General Election. “Takura ran for the Te Tai Tonga seat for Te Pāti Māori in 2020. It takes tremendous courage and commitment to put your hand up for another round in the ring ...
Focussed immigration has always been essential to our future, but New Zealanders need to be aware of the immediate dire situation our government is putting us in with a predicted record of one hundred thousand new immigrants moving to New Zealand in this year alone. That means we will have ...
Today, President of Te Pāti Māori, John Tamihere has confirmed that Heather Te-Au Skipworth will stand for Te Pāti Māori in the Tukituki electorate this election. ...
During New Zealand First coalition negotiations our policy was to train and resource 1800 new frontline police. We secured this coalition policy win to ensure our streets had a police force that could tackle crime - after years of neglect. Remember those previous nine years of neglect saw a ‘tag ...
Katie Kenny from Stuff published an article today with a lazy attempt at so-called ‘fact checking’ my recent comments on the World Health Organisation’s concerning new regulations being developed. What is most surprising is that throughout this entire ‘fact checking’ process, Kenny never once rang me asking for my side ...
The National Party has released another confused and rushed policy that will only further worsen the inequality that is driven by unaffordable housing. ...
Welcome to sunny and calm Wellington, which I know those of you who are visiting would of course expect to be the case. It’s been a busy week since we put forward the 2023 Budget. Labour MPs have been out across the motu giving the good oil on the Budget. ...
Kia orana, Talofa lava, Mālo e lelei, Taloha ni, Fakaalofa lahi atu, Noa’ia e mauri, Ni sa bula vinaka, Kia ora, Tena Koutou Katoa. Labour Party President Jill Day, Prime Minister Hipkins, Party faithful, delegates and comrades, whānau and friends, it’s a privilege to be here today. I begin my ...
One of my kaumātua up North stood before the Waitangi Tribunal and said: ‘He aha kē ahau, te tangata kore hara i mua i te Atua, e tu nei kia whakawaatia e koe, te tangata tāhae, te tangata hara, te tangata kore tikanga?Ko koe kē te tika, kia tū ...
New Zealanders will be highly concerned that the World Health Organisation proposes to effectively take control of independent decision making away from sovereign countries and place control with the Director General. W.H.O International Health Regulations on future outbreaks of disease aim to give the Director General extraordinary and wide-sweeping powers. ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to take responsibility for reducing inflation by taxing wealth instead of leaving RBNZ to continue hiking the Official Cash Rate. ...
The Green Party has released its list of candidates for the 2023 election. With a mix of familiar faces, fresh new talent, and strong tangata whenua voices, this exceptional group of candidates are ready to set the direction of the next Government. ...
Thank you for your invitation to be here, after yesterday's budget, and for the opportunity to talk with you. In the economic and social turmoil following the arrival of COVID 19 in New Zealand many concerns emerged. How would we keep our economy going and maintain our exports which are ...
At the heart of Budget 2023 is a cost of living package, designed to ease the pressure on New Zealanders in the face of global inflation and the challenges of rebuilding from extreme weather events. It provides practical cost of living relief across some of the core expenses facing Kiwis ...
A long standing Green Party policy has been extended yet again in this year’s Budget. This will deliver warmer homes for thousands of people, lower power bills, and cut climate pollution. ...
The Green Party is fully on board with free bus and train travel for under 12s and half price travel for under 25s - next stop, free travel for all under 18s, students, and apprentices. ...
Representation for women on public sector boards and committees is the highest it’s ever been with wāhine now making up 53.1 percent of public board and committee members,” Minister for Women Jan Tinetti said. Manatū Wāhine Ministry for Women’s 2022 stocktake of public sector boards and committees shows for the ...
A new law enabling sole parents on a benefit to receive child support payments for their tamariki was passed in Parliament today. “This change is estimated to lift as many as 14,000 children out of poverty and give families a median of $20 extra a week,” said Social Development and ...
Crack down on disposable vapes No new vape shops near schools or marae Restricted descriptions for product flavours The Government is taking action to reduce the number of young people taking up vaping, Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall has announced. “Too many young people are vaping, which is why we’re ...
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka will visit New Zealand this week, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced today. “Prime Minister Rabuka officially visited New Zealand in 1998, over 25 years ago, and we look forward to welcoming him here once again,” Chris Hipkins said. “New Zealand and Fiji have a long ...
The King’s Birthday and Coronation Honours List 2023 includes sporting stars and administrators who reflect the best of New Zealand’s sporting community. Sir Wayne Smith has been knighted for services to rugby. Sir Wayne was Assistant Coach of the All Blacks at the 2011 and 2015 Rugby World Cups and ...
Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa taki tini ‘My success is not mine alone, but that of the people” The King’s Birthday and Coronation Honours list 2023 celebrates Māori from all walks of life, reflecting the achievements of those who have made a significant contribution to ...
The strength and diversity of service in New Zealand is a standout feature of today’s King’s Birthday and Coronation Honours list, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said. “Each of today’s 182 recipients has contributed individually to our country. Viewed collectively, their efforts reflect an overwhelming commitment to service.” Chris Hipkins said. ...
The Defence Ministers of New Zealand and Japan have signed a statement of intent for closer defence cooperation between the two Pacific regional partners. Andrew Little and H. E. Yasukazu Hamada met to sign the ‘Statement of Intent on Defence Cooperation in Maritime Security, Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief and ...
New Zealand’s most recent defence assessment identified climate change and geostrategic competition as the two greatest security challenges to our place in the South Pacific. To the first issue, partners engaging and re-engaging with Pacific Island Countries are finding that climate change is a security and existential threat in our ...
The government is continuing to support rangatahi in providing more funding into Maori Trades training and new He Poutama Rangatahi programmes across Aotearoa. “We’re backing 30 new by Māori for Māori Kaupapa employment and training programmes, which will help iwi into sustainable employment or progress within their chosen careers” says ...
Murihiku Marae was officially reopened today, setting a gold standard in sustainable building practices as well as social outcomes for the people of Waihōpai Invercargill, Regional Development Minister Kiri Allan says. “The marae has been a central hub for this community since the 1980’s. With the support of $9.65 million ...
The first major public housing development in Whangārei for decades has reached completion, with 37 new homes opened in the suburb of Maunu today. The project on Tapatahi Crescent and Puriri Park Road, consists of 15 one-bedroom, 4 two-bedroom, 7 three-bedroom, 8 four-bedroom and 3 five-bedroom homes, as well as ...
Trade and Export Growth Minister Damen O’Connor will depart tomorrow for London to represent New Zealand at the Commonwealth Trade Ministers’ Meeting and then to Paris to vice-chair the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting. “My travel to the United Kingdom is well-timed, with the United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement (UK FTA) ...
The Fuel Industry (Improving Fuel Resilience) Amendment Bill would: boost New Zealand’s fuel supply resilience and economic security enable the minimum stockholding obligation regulations to be adapted as the energy and transport environment evolves. “Last November, I announced a six-point plan to improve the resiliency of our fuel supply from ...
The Government is making sure those on low incomes will no longer have to wait five weeks to get the minimum weekly rate of ACC, and improving the data collected to make the system fairer, Minister for ACC Peeni Henare said today. The Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) ...
A compulsory code of conduct will ensure school board members are crystal clear on their responsibilities and expected standard of behaviour, Minister of Education Jan Tinetti said. It’s the first time a compulsory code of conduct has been published for state and state-integrated school boards and comes into effect on ...
Tena koutou katoa and thank you, Mayor Nadine Taylor, for your welcome to Marlborough. Thanks also Doug Saunders-Loder and all of you for inviting me to your annual conference. As you might know, I’m quite new to this job – and I’m particularly pleased that the first organisation I’m giving a ...
The Government will enter into a funding arrangement with councils in cyclone and flood affected regions to support them to offer a voluntary buyout for owners of Category 3 designated residential properties. It will also co-fund work needed to protect Category 2 designated properties. “From the beginning of this process ...
The Government has announced changes to strengthen requirements in venues with pokie (gambling) machines will come into effect from 15 June. “Pokies are one of the most harmful forms of gambling. They can have a detrimental impact on individuals, their friends, whānau and communities,” Internal Affairs Minister Barbara Edmonds said. ...
The total Police workforce is now the largest it has ever been. Police constabulary stands at 10,700 officers – an increase of 21% since 2017 Māori officers have increased 40%, Pasifika 83%, Asian 157%, Women 61% Every district has got more Police under this Government The Government has delivered on ...
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hon Nanaia Mahuta met with Korea President Yoon, as well as Pacific Islands Forum Secretary General Henry Puna, during her recent visit to Korea. “It was an honour to represent Aotearoa New Zealand at the first Korea – Pacific Leaders’ Summit. We discussed Pacific ambitions under the ...
The Government’s Research and Development Tax Incentive has supported more than $2 billion of New Zealand business innovation – an increase of around $1 billion in less than nine months. "Research and innovation are essential in helping us meet the biggest challenges and seize opportunities facing New Zealand. It’s fantastic ...
The next ‘giant leap’ in New Zealand’s space journey has been taken today with the launch of the National Space Policy, Economic Development Minister Barbara Edmonds announced. “Our space sector is growing rapidly. Each year New Zealand is becoming a more and more attractive place for launches, manufacturing space-related technology ...
A new Year 7-13 designated character wharekura will be built in Pāpāmoa, Associate Minister of Education Kelvin Davis has announced. The wharekura will focus on science, mathematics and creative technologies while connecting ākonga to the whakapapa of the area. The decision follows an application by the Ngā Pōtiki ā Tamapahore ...
Protecting the environment by establishing a stronger, more consistent system for freedom camping Supporting councils to better manage freedom camping in their region and reduce the financial and social impacts on communities Ensuring that self-contained vehicle owners have time to prepare for the new system The Self-Contained Motor Vehicle ...
A new law passed last night could see up to 25 percent of Family Court judges’ workload freed up in order to reduce delays, Minister of Justice Kiri Allan said. The Family Court (Family Court Associates) Legislation Bill will establish a new role known as the Family Court Associate. The ...
New Zealand businesses will begin reaping the rewards of our gold-standard free trade agreement with the United Kingdom (UK FTA) from today. “The New Zealand UK FTA enters into force from today, and is one of the seven new or upgraded Free Trade Agreements negotiated by Labour to date,” Prime ...
The Government will reform outdated surrogacy laws to improve the experiences of children, surrogates, and the growing number of families formed through surrogacy, by adopting Labour MP Tāmati Coffey’s Member’s Bill as a Government Bill, Minister Kiri Allan has announced. “Surrogacy has become an established method of forming a family ...
Defence Minister Andrew Little departs for Singapore tomorrow to attend the 20th annual Shangri-La Dialogue for Defence Ministers from the Indo-Pacific region. “Shangri-La brings together many countries to speak frankly and express views about defence issues that could affect us all,” Andrew Little said. “New Zealand is a long-standing participant ...
Research, Science and Innovation Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall and the Chinese Minister of Science and Technology Wang Zhigang met in Wellington today and affirmed the two countries’ long-standing science relationship. Minister Wang was in New Zealand for the 6th New Zealand-China Joint Commission Meeting on Science and Technology Cooperation. Following ...
5 percent uplift clearer and simpler to navigate Domestic productions can access more funding sources 20 percent rebate confirmed for post-production, digital and visual effects Qualifying expenditure for post-production, digital and visual effects rebate dropped to $250,000 to encourage more smaller productions The Government is making it easier for the ...
Deputy Prime Minister and Associate Minister of Foreign Affairs (Pacific Region) Carmel Sepuloni will represent New Zealand at Samoa’s 61st Anniversary of Independence commemorations in Apia. “Aotearoa New Zealand is pleased to share in this significant occasion, alongside other invited Pacific leaders, and congratulates Samoa on the milestone of 61 ...
The Government is continuing to support retailers with additional funding for the highly popular Fog Cannon Subsidy Scheme, Police and Small Business Minister Ginny Andersen announced today. “The Government is committed to improving retailers’ safety,” Ginny Andersen said. “I’ve seen first-hand the difference fog cannons are making. Not only do ...
The Government has received the first independent review of the Intelligence and Security Act 2017, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says. The review, considered by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, was presented to the House of Representatives today. “Ensuring the safety and security of New Zealanders is of the utmost ...
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has expressed condolences on behalf of New Zealand to the Kingdom of Tonga following the death of Her Royal Highness Princess Mele Siu’ilikutapu Kalaniuvalu Fotofili. “New Zealand sends it’s heartfelt condolences to the people of Tonga, and to His Majesty King Tupou VI at this time ...
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has expressed condolences on behalf of New Zealand to the Kingdom of Tonga following the death of Her Royal Highness Princess Mele Siu’ilikutapu Kalaniuvalu Fotofili. “New Zealand sends it’s heartfelt condolences to the people of Tonga, and to His Majesty King Tupou VI at this time ...
Defence Minister Andrew Little and Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta have today announced the extension of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) deployment to Solomon Islands, as part of the regionally-led Solomon Islands International Assistance Force (SIAF). “Aotearoa New Zealand has a long history of working alongside the Royal Solomon ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta will travel to the Republic of Korea today to attend the Korea–Pacific Leaders’ Summit in Seoul and Busan. “Korea is an important partner for Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific region. I am eager for the opportunity to meet and discuss issues that matter to our ...
Trade and Export Growth Minister Damien O’Connor joined ministerial representatives at a meeting in Detroit, USA today to announce substantial conclusion of negotiations of a new regional supply chains agreement among 14 Indo-Pacific countries. The Supply Chains agreement is one of four pillars being negotiated within the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework ...
Our most spoken Pacific language is taking centre stage this week with Vaiaso o le Gagana Samoa – Samoa Language Week kicking off around the country. “Understanding and using the Samoan language across our nation is vital to its survival,” Barbara Edmonds said. “The Samoan population in New Zealand are ...
The prime minister has faced further questions on Michael Wood’s failure to properly disclose his Auckland Airport shares, saying the transport minister himself “didn’t really have an adequate explanation” for the oversight. Speaking at this afternoon’s post-cabinet press conference, Chris Hipkins said he trusted that Wood, who was earlier today ...
Asia Pacific Report The self-styled provisional government of the United Liberation Movement of West Papua“with the people” of the Melanesian region have declared political support for full West Papuan membership of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG). In a statement issued in the Vanuatu capital of Port Vila after a meeting ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ozan Isler, Research Fellow, School of Economics, The University of Queensland Bao Truong / Unsplash Many of our economic and even social interactions are competitive. We use markets to find jobs, but also dates. What does this mean for our ...
The government has announced new vaping restrictions aimed at reducing the number of young people who take up the habit, with a crackdown on cheap disposable vapes, bans on new vape shops near schools and rules around how vaping products can be named. “From August this year, all vaping devices ...
The government has announced new vaping restrictions aimed at reducing the number of young people who take up the habit, with a crackdown on cheap disposable vapes, bans on new vape shops near schools and rules around how vaping products can be named. “From August this year, all vaping devices ...
The traditional and contemporary intertwine at the first Pacific Dance Festival in three years.After a pandemic-induced absence of three years, Pacific Dance New Zealand’s annual Pacific Dance Festival has returned to Auckland. Opening the three week-long festival last week was Manu Malo by Aloali’i Tapu, with the highly anticipated ...
The traditional and contemporary intertwine at the first Pacific Dance Festival in three years.After a pandemic-induced absence of three years, Pacific Dance New Zealand’s annual Pacific Dance Festival has returned to Auckland. Opening the three week-long festival last week was Manu Malo by Aloali’i Tapu, with the highly anticipated ...
“A very special day for Ngati Porou”, was the reaction of Rei Kohere, Deputy Chairman of Te Runanganui o Ngati Porou, on the announcement of the Knighthood bestowed on Selwyn Tanetoa Parata in this year’s King’s Birthday honours. “The KCNZM, ...
A visit by officials from the Thai Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) is being welcomed as an opportunity to strengthen a key bilateral relationship and support ongoing work to combat the illicit transnational narcotics trade in the Asia-Pacific ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kali Marnane, Honorary Associate Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design, The University of Queensland Kali Marnane (2023), Author provided I’m in Ahmedabad, India, standing where families once built their homes under the shade of large trees. Today, those houses are ...
How a few basic rules can help get the balance right. Anyone trying to follow the latest political debate over housing, urban intensification and development can be forgiven for feeling confused. The National Party’s newly announced housing policy would allow local councils to opt out of the Medium ...
How a few basic rules can help get the balance right. Anyone trying to follow the latest political debate over housing, urban intensification and development can be forgiven for feeling confused. The National Party’s newly announced housing policy would allow local councils to opt out of the Medium ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Petraglia, Director, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University Wikimedia, CC BY-SA On September 13 2013, speleologists Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker descended deep into South Africa’s Rising Star cave system and discovered the first evidence of an ...
A key reason for standing down Michael Wood as transport minister was the fact he had told the Cabinet Office his shares in Auckland Airport would be sold, but then they weren’t, Chris Hipkins has said. On his way to question time in parliament this afternoon, soon after he announced ...
A key reason for standing down Michael Wood as transport minister was the fact he had told the Cabinet Office his shares in Auckland Airport would be sold, but then they weren’t, Chris Hipkins has said. On his way to question time in parliament this afternoon, soon after he announced ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By M. Reza Hosseini, Senior Lecturer in Construction, Deputy Director, Mediated Intelligence in Design (MInD) Research Lab, Deakin University Shutterstock Architecture, engineering and construction employ 1.2 million people in Australia and account for 9% of GDP. But our biggest services sector ...
SAFE has been notified today that the resource consent application to build four composting barns/feedlots in Kaituna Valley has been withdrawn. The feedlots would have confined 2,200 cows permanently indoors. The controversial proposal faced substantial ...
New Zealand still has much more to do to support poorer countries adapt and respond to the climate crisis. Oxfam Aotearoa’s Climate Justice Lead Nick Henry said: “Oxfam’s report reveals that as governments around the world begin negotiations of a new global ...
Step aside perfect-looking food content, there’s a new chef in town. Charlotte Muru-Lanning meets fudgeywudgeychef, the Auckland TikTok creator bringing an eccentric edge to cooking videos. This is an excerpt from our weekly food newsletter, The Boil Up. Whenever social media purports to shed its softly-lit, idealised vision of what food, ...
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Looks like the weather just re-set the government.
If you go through the big budget lines there will have to be some change:
– transport both road and rail reallocated to maintenance and rebuilds. Less spent on public transport subsidies with even fewer using them. Some projects like IREX (the ferry port rebuilds) saved due to the accelerating need to replace the failing ferries.
– MSD and Housing as both agencies reallocate for emergency accommodation, broken houses, shunted families
– Transpower rebuilds for greater resilience with faster and larger storms returning
– A decrease in expenditure in the South Island and an increase in the North Island north of Hastings.
The policy response to the stalled integration of stormwater, water and wastewater across the top of the North Island: that question of 3 Waters just got sharper.
We can already see the great sucking noise from the Auckland Council proposed budget, as major projects are stopped, and service cuts likely. Expect similar from Thames-Coromandel, Far North, Whangarei Council, Tauranga City, and many others. Mostly they will just be fixing roads and all the pet projects just die.
Since today is the re-opening of the Parliamentary year, a smart Prime Minister would start with further policy re-sets including strong signals on what shifts to expect from Budget 2023. Our very own Frank Underwood will do that over the next 48 hours.
–
Now is the time to do a transition budget, not pretend climate change isn’t happening by putting funds into BAU roading instead of public transport.
How long can we keep rebuilding infrastructure before we can’t keep up? Ak should be a massive wake up call.
Go right ahead.
I'm sure the Green Party are ready to table their 'transition budget' at just the same time as Robertson does.
The Greens will also then be able to signal what they would reallocate starting this week as Parliament re-starts.
[I don’t have anything to do with Green Party policy or their functions in parliament. Authors here write for themselves not parties, unless stated. It’s election year, please stop talking to and about me as if I represent the Greens or am an active member, I’m not. – weka]
.https://thestandard.org.nz/policy/
.https://thestandard.org.nz/about/#who_are_you
mod note.
Some will still chase The Good Life (can't blame 'em) as it recedes from sight in the rearview mirror, but the past is a different country – we don't live there anymore.
https://twitter.com/NiwaWeather/status/1620977861552373760/photo/1
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/a-plan-for-preserving-civilization
Public transport needs roads to operate on. Given the massive roading infrastructure damage across the country (just look at the Coromandel), I think that there's going to be huge investment in roads, and little left over in the way of subsidies for PT.
The rapid shut down of the train network (both in Auckland, and across the country) demonstrated again the weakness of trains in times of emergency – just one landslip over a rail line shuts down the whole system. Whereas with roads, you have a realistic possibility of being able to divert around the area.
Trains are good for getting lots of people efficiently in and out of a CBD, and as an alternative for long-distance freight hauling. But they are nothing like as flexible as a roading network, for all of the myriad of different things people use it for.
I didn't say don't fix roads, I said stop fixing things as if we are going back to normal. Please reread my comment so you know what I was talking about, because you are arguing a response to something I didn't say.
This is not transition thinking. Design at this point should be building infrastructure that transitions us to post carbon. So build roads and PT at the same time, with integrated design.
I agree about rail and roads. What we need is to design around resilience, but also mitigation. Resilience means you don't put all your eggs in one (or even two) baskets. Mitigation means drop GHG dependency as soon as possible.
If we believe the crisis is here, now, very serious and needs immediate response, then it makes no sense at all to try and restore to BAU. We should be looking at each infrastructure failure, assessing what function it serves, how it's going to work over the next few decades (or appropriate time frame), and look at how those needs can be met in the best way.
My question for the rebuild as was people, is whether you can see the time when we can't keep up with repairs. The time when the events happen so frequently that we don't have the labour, materials, or money to keep repairing. We can wait until we're in that situation and then we're fucked, or we can start doing sustainable and resilient design now.
And above all else we absolutely have to transition off FF, or there is no future.
"So build roads and PT at the same time, with integrated design. "
Given the insane amount of money it's going to cost to repair major roading infrastructure, where do you think the money is going to come from, to provide PT subsidies as well?
Your transition plan seems to pre-suppose that we're all going to retreat to some form of local small town – cut off from the rest of the world. This isn't a vision which is widely shared – or realistic for the majority of NZ (nor for those small towns, once they run out of the essential supplies to keep themselves running, which are imported – either from NZ, but more likely from overseas)
Looking at the Coromandel for example – examining the widespread and repeated roading failures, flooding (both stormwater and tide related), and landslides. What kind of 'resilient design' do you envisage? Or, would your solution be managed retreat for the whole area? Because, repairing roads to enable PT (buses – because rail isn’t viable), is going to cost just as much and be just as long-term unsustainable.
That's the scale of the financial hole we have dug ourselves into. We have to repair broken infrastructure right now to prevent immediate social and economic collapse – while simultaneously having to design, plan and build something else that won't get demolished again every few years.
It's the sort of hole you end up in when CC deniers are allowed to wield substantial economic and political power for 25 years. The level of taxation needed to get out of this hole is so high that it would cause a revolt. The system cannot heal itself – we're in the sh*t.
Money is not a problem as long as we are using our own currency.
Looking at the Coromandel for example – examining the widespread and repeated roading failures, flooding (both stormwater and tide related), and landslides. What kind of 'resilient design' do you envisage? Or, would your solution be managed retreat for the whole area? Because, repairing roads to enable PT (buses – because rail isn’t viable), is going to cost just as much and be just as long-term unsustainable.
Everything would have to be looked at on a case by case basis. For example, it may well be that the Coromandel would have to treated as if it was an island, and connected by a ferry service.
So no interior roads at all? Because it would seem as though you'd need a heck of a lot of ferry infrastructure. Just looking at the map, and doing a back of the envelope calculation, you'd be looking at around 40 or so ferry stops to service the existing communities. And, the interior ones would have no service at all.
I'm assuming that this would be a state-run service (as the SH network is), since there's a high risk that commercial operators would cut it, if the usage numbers didn't stack up. [e.g. The existing Coromandel ferry from Auckland has just been cut by Fullers. And they've made no reversal of this decision, despite the SH failures, which are going to take years to repair.]
Infrastructure is interconnected – you can't look at it on a 'case-by-case' basis – roading infrastructure to Hahei – has an impact on access to Whitianga – and both are impacted by a decision about SH25 north of Waihi. [Although, perhaps you mean that you could look at Coromandel in isolation to proposed infrastructure solutions for the West Cost of the SI?]
I can see this ferry supply solution being workable for people with holiday homes, and summer-season tourists – but not being a great solution for year-round inhabitants.
Do you see this (reducing services) as one way of enforcing managed retreat?
So no interior roads at all? Because it would seem as though you'd need a heck of a lot of ferry infrastructure.
Access would still be available to East Coromandel via Waihi, though it would be a rather roundabout route for Aucklanders. Still, my suggestion was just an example of the sort of thinking we should be engaging in
I cottoned on to BAU ("Business as Usual"?) but not FF – "Friendly Fire"?
fossil fuels. But yeah, friendly fire works too.
Here's what I said,
The BAU roading vs PT was Ad's framing. I was saying that instead of that self defeating binary, we can do transition responses.
And, a practical example of a transition response would be?
I'm writing a post about it 👍
https://www.oecd.org/climate-change/net-zero-resilience/
https://www.thefuturescentre.org/three-ingredients-for-the-transition-toward-a-more-resilient-net-zero-food-system/
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-02-10/manifesto-for-an-ecosocial-energy-transition-from-the-people-of-the-south/
After a relatively benign (for some) 70 years, during which the human popn of spaceship Earth tripled and civilisation reached peak convenience (for some), we live now in pressure cooker-times with many facing a less certain future.
Sure, building back better to preserve the status quo a little longer (a decade or two should do it!) is attractive (if expensive) – just don't imagine that 'better' roads will necessarily prevent worse (conceivably much worse) inconvenience in future. Try not to sweat small stuff/inconveniences now – we're survivors.
Once there's a wider acceptance of the fact that increasingly resource-hungry 'peak convenience' is behind us, we can begin to allocate more resources to mitigating a slide into 'peak inconvenience' (coming soon to a place near you) – boosting resilience, working with Nature – we're all in this together, passengers for a brief time on spaceship Earth.
very good, thanks for quoting Hopkins.
And there's the nub of the issue. I don't think that we (as in either NZ or the rest of the world) are anywhere near acceptance that 'peak convenience' is behind us.
Some will never accept that 'peak convenience' is in the rearview mirror, and would drive off a climate change cliff just to show how right they are.
(Re-)Education it the key – works best on those who want to learn.
Of course. However, I don't think that we're anywhere near a majority (or even a significant (in numerical terms) minority) believing that 'peak convenience' is over.
Especially when they see peak luxury consumption going on all around them…..
the more people say 'people won't change' instead of 'it's time to change', the less inclined people will be to change.
There's belief, and then there's reality – this particular mismatch will continue until reality bites – may take several bites for some, and a few are so well 'insulated' that they'll take their belief to the grave.
For most, however, reality (CC, pandemics, regional conflicts) can be a harsh teacher – how best to spare ourselves from ‘the strap’?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/eyewitness/audio/2018660217/the-strap-corporal-punishment-at-school-in-new-zealand
The stats show that the worlds birthrate is falling significantly. This would lessen the pressure on BA U, -as long as the trend does not deepen to vanish as zero.
I am not sure if anyone has absorbed the scale of the insurance event(s) that have occurred in Auckland in past three weeks or so. Everywhere in Auckland there are still piles of dumped carpet and water damaged detritus on the side of the road. In just my work team of ten two were badly affected by the floods, one had a tree land on his house last night (minor damage, but insurance will be involved) and talking to another team leader yesterday she told me two of her team had lost a roof and been badly flooded respectively.
Multiply that anecdotal impact across the city and the insurance claims are going to be huge. It isn't "just" poor areas affected either now – soon you'll hear ad nauseum across the MSM the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the middle class when they are told their house/holiday home is now uninsurable.
It's lower direct impact than Christchurch earthquakes, but it's spread across about 50% of New Zealand's population, about 60% of its rail network, about 70% of its public transport network, and about 60% of its GDP production and of its consumption.
Included in that is what would have been peak dairy production across the northern half of the North Island which is the dominant portion of our export income.
Not only does the imapct require a major Budget reallocation, it also requires a budget reallocation by about a million households and 2.5 million New Zealanders. So yeah it's a biggie.
Speaking of Christchurch, do you know what sort of rebuild has been undertaken in that city?
Has the design incorporated 21st century thinking to allow for climate change, energy efficient buildings and other innovations or did they just try to recreate what was already there?
I know that they threw large amounts of native timber in the landfill. It was one of the worst examples of how badly we think about sustainability.
There were some good projects showing an alternative approach too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DunDLvVQf3Y&t=1s&ab_channel=Rekindle
https://wholehousereuse.co.nz/
I was thinking about that film! People did their best, and some very cool things happened. National fucked a lot of things up, and the default position of working without regard for cradle to grave.
Mostly people were given money to repair or rebuild. For rebuilds, they were usually built to whatever standards the money could afford while still being legally compliant to relevant building codes at the time.
Some of the larger projects were more forward-thinking, but most of the rebuild was individual housing.
Living as I do close to a clifftop row of top of the range mansions that are sitting on land precariously close to falling into the sea, I am having some difficulty dredging up the compassion and sympathy normally expected for people in such situations. Will purchase earplugs to block out the noise coming from the affected area.
Having said the above here is the other side of the coin. A heart breaking story:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018877681
In Auckland, not so much the middle class – but the seriously wealthy inhabitants of highly renovated hilltop mansions, built as close as they could get to crumbling cliff edges.
The Council knows that these people are highly litigious – and regularly take the Council to court to get 'permission' to build what they want where they want it. And are notorious for cutting down, killing off and otherwise damaging any trees which impinge on their prized views.
One has already been in the papers threatening to sue the Council in a class action because of the stormwater damage to his property.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-floods-giant-pohutukawa-trees-hanging-over-motorway-in-st-marys-bay-a-danger-to-the-public-says-resident/3BD453WUMRH5XH73UUBQ6XVOCY/
We need to set statutory set backs from cliff edges – and require owners to remove all decks, swimming pools and other associated infrastructure from within this area. For some, those with severe landslips, this will also include the house.
At the other end of the spectrum – why is KO building new housing subdivisions in a flood plain?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/131196837/for-sale-new-warm-and-dry-homes-the-catch-theyre-in-a-flood-plain-and-the-flood-is-coming-sooner-than-you-think
Super low-lying areas are always going to be at risk of flooding (regardless of whatever flood mitigation measures you put in place).
Yes, I consented a bunch of stuff for the sites on the Torbay cliffs. This included something called "cliff nailing" which is what you try when you have removed all the trees to improve the view and the sandstone/mudstone of the cliffs starts to crumble. It involves various sorts of mesh "nailed" to the cliff face with long wires and vegetation being encouraged to grow on it.
Someone was making a shedload of dosh from it and I have no idea if it actually worked.
I don't think there are any easy answers here, but I'm tending towards the idea that if the government ends up bailing people out, it should be for a replacement average house, not replacement value for the property lost. We've known about climate change for half a century.
EQC would (I think) cover the land value, for red-stickered properties. IIRC, Christchurch showed that the actual cash-in-hand value of this, was a lot less than people were expecting.
I'd like to add that this should be depreciated if the Council can show you contributed to the damage (removing vegetation on cliff edges, building additional structures, etc.). But suspect the litigation won't be worth the effort.
House value should be covered by insurance – and if you're under-insured as a multi-millionaire home-owner, then you've chosen to cover this yourself. [I'm not crying for you]
Older homes (inhabited by long-term residents) tend to be very well set back from the edges of the cliffs – and not inflated on steriods, the way the new mansions are. So set-back rules would be unlikely to affect them.
Probably made things worse. Nailing would fracture the cliffs, and shallow-rooted vegetation (rather than deep rooted trees) doesn't stabilize sandstone (though it's great for sand dunes)
The only positive effect would have been to reduce the likelihood of random frequent rock-falls on passers-by.
A brief paper on the topic:
https://www.earthstability.co.nz/content/docs/Failure-of-cliff-top-Waitemata-Group-Residual-Soils.pdf
I did see the image of the Orua Bay slip and ponder (without any conclusion) whether the combination of the vegetation clearance, the redirection of water for the property above and the clay/sand composition contributed to the failure at that site.
Interesting image anyway, as it shows the whole bank failure and not just the house.
A couple of friends in Clarks Beach lost some of their seaward property in the last storm.
Bugger, I thought I’d resized. Can a moderator with superior tech skills please adjust?
on some devices the sizing adjustment in the Comment editor looks like it's worked but it doesn't. Instead, make the comment, then click on edit and add the following just before the />
width=100%
Thanks, weka.
Incredibly photo. Would love to see what the land above that looks like. Seem to remember there were slips like this in the Nelson floods, lots of bare hillsides.
agree with you. the weather and climate change will be the economic and political driver this year . conservatives crave stability, so expecting them to jump out of the warm arms of the state , into the market knows best,sod you, uncertainty of corporate chris and caculating nicola is a big ask. many councils will be knocking on the three waters door, caps in hand. many of the road washouts are water pipe failures, so the majority of roading costs get sheeted back to drainage, sewage etc. empty phrases like "giving local democracy back" wont cover the shortfall.
What Jacinda and now Chippy have had to deal with! Rolling disasters.
I'm just trying to imagine how DeLuxon would approach them if he was PM.
Perhaps he would shock and impress us all with his decisive, well-communicated and compassionate action… or perhaps it would be dithering, grandstanding, gross mismanagement of funds into the hands of incompetent 'contractors', opportunistic support packages for big business, and chaotic misery for the rest of us.
Luxon would be down the yacht club
Just saw a news site where Luxon magnanimously allows that the emergency response is as he would have done it. I've seen a lot of this from Luxon recently, treating emergencies as political hustings, taking up airtime uselessly without putting in the hard graft. Of course, the media bothering to post his political maunderings are also keen on promoting his pr spin. On the other hand, he still manages to project an air of self-satisfied twat, even in such fluff pieces.
Chch quakes gave a good indication of how National would handle things. Not sure about Luxon, he seems like just another in a long line.
Like chch they'd appoint a brownlee or similar to keep a lid on it and ensure the 'right' areas get looked after.
They treat disasters as golden opportunities for their backers.
Do a good job in the immediate aftermath and then tighten the screws on the longer term rebuild budget.
National knew best:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/7896437/Brownlee-dismisses-McCloud
My home town of Napier has had a bit of a bash, lots of power outages, the road to Hastings is out (At last! The true foe is cut off!) SH2 is out in Eskdale (I can't recall the Esk river – more a gentle stream these days – flooding since I was a nipper many moons ago), I hear the Gentle Annie is closed, the Wairoa road is closed, and the Desert road is out so there is no way into the city at the moment from anywhere.
Dawn may reveal something approaching Bola levels of destruction on the East Coast. Let's hope not!
Ohhh just heard the Puketapu bridge has fallen down… Like a lot of NZ, barely controlled lifestyle development has occurred in the Puketapu valley without infrastructure upgrades, so hundreds and hundreds of people rely on what is basically a 1950s concrete structure designed for rural traffic and now they are cut off.
Goodness me, according to a chap on NatRad just now the Ngaruroro has breached it's banks in Hawkes Bay – that river has some enormous stop banks – if he means they are breached then that is something amazing. The flooding will be gigantic.
Sounds grim in Hawkes Bay. I cannot recall the Ngararoro and Tutaekuri breaching their flood defenses in fifty years, and the normally gentle Esk river has become a raging torrent by all accounts.
Taradale south of Anderson Park, Jervoistown and Meeanee all evacuating immediately. Huge if it really is that scale of disaster.
reports of people having to swim out of bedroom windows. Sounds like the area got more rain than expected or the stop banks weren't being monitored for breaching.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/weather-news/131220076/absolutely-traumatised-woman-forced-to-swim-out-bedroom-window-in-floodwater
The Brookfields bridge over the Tutaekuri was built in WW2 and has withstood everything over the last 80 years. It has been destroyed – the picture I saw on my phone looks like the southern stop banks have simply been over-topped.
maybe a combination of both. I don't know how rivers and stop banks get monitored in situations like that especially at night.
The 100 year flood in Invercargill in the late 80s was a stop bank breach from memory. Maybe a log jam at a bridge, then a lot of water being released when that cleared.
Probably like my burg, an automated regional council dashboard monitored by contracted security.
https://www.horizons.govt.nz/managing-natural-resources/water/river-heights-and-rainfall-backup
that's fancy! ORC's is very basic.
Almost as flash as Hawkes Bay's.
https://www.hbrc.govt.nz/environment/river-levels/
❤️🌹
😁
not sure what this was a reply to, but how are things up your way Macro?
Not a reply Weka. Valentines Day so wishing love and joy to all in the TS community.
nice one 💚
How are things here?
On the east coast of the Peninsula they have suffered like everywhere else, but here in Thames we have been relatively sheltered from the strong easterlies by the Coromandel Ranges. The roads have suffered from more slipping caused by the heavy rain. A house at Thorndon Bay has been inundated by a slip – again. It was already red stickered so no one hurt. The Road out of town was closed for a while as the Kauranga River overflowed its stop banks on High Tide. The resulting flood always flows onto the rugby field, but when the rest of the water subsides, as the tide goes out, the ruby field has remained inundated. The Swamp Foxes will feel well at home on their next game.
I was wondering what happened to the houses that were on the edge of slips after the storm 2 weeks ago. Fingers cross things get to dry out a bit now.
"So: at what point was there consensus that there was no such thing as same-sex attraction, and how did it come to be that all terms such as homosexuality, bisexuality, gay or lesbian were rewritten to accommodate members of the opposite sex?
https://voidifremoved.substack.com/p/the-quiet-erasure-of-same-sex-attraction?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
As in this conversation with the apparently perpetually confused SPC the redefinition of sexual orientation is strangely homophobic, heterosexual phobic and bisexual phobic in one fell swoop.
As I pointed out, you could end up with a group of trans-identified gay men, creating a lesbian association with no women members (and vice versa).
The vast amount of additional scaffolding required to support the initial lie, shows how significant the impact of ignoring the reality of immutable biological sex is.
… AND the scaffolding is wonky and not able to take any pressure without collapse…
And your identifying sexuality with a persons birth sex and that of their partner leads you to regard GB as being a homosexual male when with male partners.
And I doubt that when Elliot Page marries again they will be invited to and or attend a lesbian event. Despite your definition of such as a lesbian relationship.
Definitions, safeguarding and single-sex boundaries are not about accommodating specific individuals.
(As I mentioned, I'm not interested in other people's sex lives in the way you seem to be. It's also not relevant to this discussion).
I AM interested in definition dismantling being used as a trojan horse to avoid open, public discussion. Including how those distortions impact on the ability to clearly define a specific group, especially when advocating politically, organising, collecting data and statistics, clear medical treatment and messaging, and safeguarding provisions for that group.
If trans identifying men had a distinct term of their own: Eg. Femme-men – all those advantages would apply to them as well.
Also, instead of appropriating (and thus obliterating the meaning of) the terms for sexual-orientation, create distinct terms to accommodate your new application: homogender orientation, etc.
You've failed to give any reasons at all for the need to redefine words instead of create distinct terms, where I have provided significant reasons why it should be avoided.
If you can tear yourself away from other people's private lives – have another crack at it.
Take your own advice and stop trying to claim that people such as GB are homosexual men or EP lesbian women, when they do not do so.
Not good at focusing on the relevant, I see. Despite being given repeat opportunities.
Well, let's take another route – and have a look at the result of the confusion you are so wedded to – this time for gay men:
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNE2Lbv6zhrjB4Fb2q7H_PQZxjz59gYQ68-ZQIruUN0zV3rqsokv2sYa8A2M3OS1w?key=WldZRUhlQTRQSDFsMWxOR0gyTzdNaWZ0cVFLQkdB
I'm curious now how much of that aggression in TM is driven by socialisation and how much by artificial levels of testosterone (and perhaps altered levels of other hormones).
Me too. AFAIK women who take testosterone can exhibit higher levels of aggression.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29770113/
There's a noted teenage girl obsession with gay porn and relationships on Tumblr and fanfiction, related by Helena Lacroix.
This encouragement of girls/women to target gay men as intimate partners is disrespectful, homophobic and setting people up for failure and rejection.
If you wanted to cause distress and depression, this seems like a good way to do so.
it's the worst of the dominant culture at work here.
You can repeat that line all you like, but the fact is neither homosexual males nor lesbian females will invite, nor expect, GB and all others of the like or EP and all others of the like to join their groups and claim their identity.
I can't quite understand what you are saying. You appear to be saying that lesbians and gays will be able to retain their single sex spaces. And that trans people won't attempt to take their language. Both those things have already happened. Why are you not paying attention?
Not all trans people obviously. But pretty much everyone here is arguing about the ideology that is regressively subsuming single sex space, language and orientation.
Maybe because there are two distinct issues in play as
1. per Molly regarding a transgender woman and man and a transgender man and a woman as being in same sex relationships (when they would not)
2. your concern about places for same sex couples having to include those whom the hosts would not want as their guests.
Which is even more important where there is self ID (as psychopaths and sociopaths can use it to victimise others).
A wise government when forming the rules around gender ID would have allowed the ID only via a screened process (as was done – an evaluation of their circumstance and motive and a test of living as they intended first etc). And otherwise established rules whereby refuges and other places/groups (such as homosexual and lesbian ones or sports) decided their arrangements (as to safety etc).
They ARE in same SEX relationships.
You could more accurately use distinct terms for their relationships in regards to gender identity.
SEXUAL orientation is a protected characteristic in many countries – redefining the word makes it very difficult to ascertain if discriminatory practices have taken place due to this characteristic.
There is no need to conflate SEXUAL-orientation, with an orientation based on gender identity. Distinct terms can be created that allow those relationships to also be protected from discrimination.
Your given example is quite frankly, bizarre:
"And I doubt that when Elliot Page marries again they will be invited to and or attend a lesbian event"
I also doubt this imaginary speculative scenario. Most people – when marrying – send out invitations to a wedding.
weka's examples of impacts are to do with support organisations, political advocacy and social events based around shared lesbian experiences and needs, not a private event celebrating a personal relationship.
A government with adults who possess critical thinking, could have foreseen the future impacts of creating a legal fiction of sex, and found another solution for this situation. Self-ID, compounds this failing.
There is nothing at all wrong with being a transsexual man or woman. However, all the empathy, goodwill, surgery, medication or official documents in the world do not change the material reality of sex.
(Official documents either record the truth or they begin to lose all authority, accuracy and relevance. We are seeing the negative impacts of this when we look at statistics, or see how people are left out of targeting medical messaging, or how media reports people inaccurately in news stories.)
The "line" you referred to is a repeat of an invitation to explain your position, and you keep ignoring it to refer to individuals in a particularly voyeuristic manner.
The creation of a word to refer to same gender identity orientation would be both accurate and distinct. The attempt to conflate SEXUAL orientation with gender identity, is as problematic as doing the same with SEX itself. That is why you find it incomprehensible that people continue to use the clear definitions of words. You have committed to do otherwise.
How Georgina Beyer and Elliot Page refer to themselves or others is not a universal arbitration system.
(If Elliot Page said they were a Teletubby and in a bouncy stomach relationship with a Care Bear – they would still be a woman who identifies as a Teletubby – in a relationship with a woman.)
You seem to think there is something intrinsically wrong with being a transsexual homosexual male, or a woman who identifies as a man in a lesbian relationship with another woman.
There is not.
It will be a same 'sex' relationship if Elliot Page again partners with a women – female human – lesbians are women in relationships with women were both women were born with the female sex of the human species. It will also be a opposite gender relationship as per Gender Ideology. Both is possible at the same time.
A definition saying same sex or gender attraction instead of just same sex attraction in no way erases same sex attraction.
it does. Which is why in Tasmania lesbians have been told that holding lesbian only events (that exclude males who self ID as lesbian) is breaching human rights.
It's also why lesbians get banned from lesbian dating apps for saying female only.
Sexual orientation is different than gender identity. People who self ID gender need to coin their own terms for the sexual orientation if they don't want to be referred to by the concepts nearly everyone else is using.
The issue was a claim that it would erase same sex attraction – it was proscribed in society for a long time and never did such a thing. Nor will gender identity becoming a thing do it either.
ok, so lesbians going back in the closet doesn't literally erase same sex attraction, but it functionally does. You're arguing something pretty abstract in the fact of people's suffering.
Given women are allowed to marry each other and date openly that's a stretch.
Yeah sure, self ID sucks and is causing problems, but argue the case reasonably.
Ok, so you really have no idea what is going on. Let me list some things off the top of my head.
1. Lesbians in Australia are banned from holding events without letting males attend.
2. Lesbians get banned from lesbian dating apps for stating female-only in their profiles.
3. Lesbians get told they are transphobic for not wanting to have sex with males (TW, NB males). Sometimes they get ostracised for this.
Because of the above, lesbians are meeting in secret. Stop and think about that. Lesbians have to meet in secret.
Then there is this. I guess the rapist was a lesbian /massive eye roll.
https://twitter.com/Square___Claire/status/1625676029439234049
I guess the earthquake was a groundswell warning …
What does this mean? Is this really the best response you can personally provide to the clear issues raised?
Lesbian is a word that has a meaning, and it will never include males. Gay males will never include females. And super straight heterosexuals will also stick to the tried and true as in opposite sex.
Sex and gender identity are not the same thing.
That's better put than some others do.
And yet, I could respond by saying EP will not end up with a person who calls herself a lesbian and GB has not been dating homosexual men.
The second paragraph would be better put as
And yet, I could respond by saying EP the transgender man will not end up with a person who calls herself a lesbian and GB the transgender woman has not been dating homosexual men.
"And yet, I could respond by saying EP the transgender man will not end up with a person who calls herself a lesbian and GB the transgender woman has not been dating homosexual men."
Individuals can refer to themselves in any way – and it is either accurate – or inaccurate.
Your focus on the self-regard of individuals is not a conclusive argument for redefining sexual-orientation.
You don't seem to understand the difference between sexual attraction and same gender attraction.
Sexual attraction comes with requirments not preferences.
Women who are lesbians will not have sex with women who have penises. Their requirement is vagina. No vagina, and by that i don't mean a flayed penis but an actual natural vagina, no sexing, no romancing, no nothing. As lesbians are sexually attracted to natural vagina, boobies, and of course the smell of women and the being of women is what is required for them to be sexually attracted to a person.
Men who are homosexual will not have sex with a man who has a vagina. No dick, and again this is a natural dick we are talking here about, fake arm or leg rolls even fitted with a device that would get that roll to stand up will not do it. It is the natural dick, with its ability to ejaculate, the smell and feel of male that they are sexually attracted too.
Super straight heterosexual woman will not have sex with a male that comes with fake tits and penis and an identity as 'woman' as their sexual attraction is based on male genitalia attached to a male who presents and is happy as a male.
Ditto for super straight heterosexual males that won't have sex with a male who has an inverted penis and fake tits.
The bisexuals are maybe a bit different as they can feel a sexual attraction to both sexes.
The other 'spicy' so called straights that would fuck anything under moon so as long as they get to fuck they can spend eons on their preferences, it won't matter a bit to those of us who fuck on the grounds of sexual attraction.
So good old E. Page is a lesbian, a female, who presents male. You might want to pretend that they are in a heterosexual relationship, but you could not get E.Page to ever fuck a male, as they are strictly sexually attracted to females, and if their future partner were to identify as a Transman, no they would not be in a homosexual relationship either.
In the same sense i would not fuck someone or be in a relationship that would present female even with a penis. My requirement for sex and love is a male. Entire, unadulterated male.
Sadly there will be some sort of reckoning for those that were harmed by this insidious ideology, the young castrated males with their inverted penises, the young de-sexed women with their flat chests and vaginal atrophy, and that is that normal people will not want to have sex with them, and will not want to pretend to be in this or that made up same sex or heterosexual relationship.
And while it is an issue for lesbians, it also is an issue for homosexual men who do not consider people who present as man with vaginas as male or even just as fuckable.
Given the impact of slash on the flooding everywhere – here's a thought for Stuart Nash. Once the logging companies have done their felling and trimming, ban them from moving the logs off site until the cleanup has been checked and signed off by a forestry inspector.
A national state of emergency. Are we witnessing an inexorable morphing back to the future, the reintroduction of a 21st century model MoW couldn't be more valuable in these days of unprecedented earthly events. The thought of someone not just being in charge but responsible (you know, where the buck ultimately stops) gives a warm fuzzy feeling, doesn't it…….
Huge fan of MOW. Compare their sturdy projects with extortionate public-private road projects, with little redress to overseas behomeths for poor design and build; and DHB shoddy hospital builds. The main structural differences are that public accountability remains within government, and that the $$$ stay majorly in the country.
I'd say that the forestry 'slash' issue is one that could be dealt with tomorrow with a combination of central and local government legislation/regulation.
A simple requirement for all forestry harvesting to remove and deal with slash (might be chipping, or composting, or bio-char – or any of a series of agreed-by-local-government solutions) – before logs are allowed to be removed from the site for sale.
With very hefty financial penalties (including liability for downstream consequences) for any slash washed off.
Not really worried if it makes forestry more expensive – ATM, they're transferring their environmental cleanup cost to the tax/rate-payer.
That would deal with any newly harvested slash. Then existing companies should be required to clean up (either themselves or contracting others to do so), the downstream waterways to remove any washed down slash – and handle as above. This requirement would be tied to the land (so selling off the land or the forest, transfers the clean-up requirement – not letting companies opt out).
Apart from the forestry owners/management companies. I'd think this would be highly popular with just about everyone else.
Foresters know how deal with the 'slash' issue.
The owners objection to paying to deal with the 'slash' is the issue.
https://www.uidaho.edu/extension/idahoforestrybmps/how-to/build-windrow
http://nzjf.org.nz/free_issues/NZJF16_1_1971/BFDC3F5F-4A47-467E-A797-9C44CC9D3C02.pdf
Yes.
What happens is the main contractor gets the cutting rights on a site and works away till most trees are harvested. Then they move onto another site thats pre scheduled and the remnants and trees that werent removed are sub contracted to a smaller harvester who tries to make as much money in the short time before they too pack up and leave.
Guess what is left that no one wants . The forest owner says its not my problem
Some time ago there was mention of shipping forest residues to India for use in Funeral Pyres as there is a major wood shortage there for that use. I recollect that containers full of one pyre bundles was being investigated pre-Covid.
Searching for any reference links
It's not so much the logging companies but the forest owners that need to be targeted.
I'd suggest we need a levy on every tree planted and harvested to fund clean up operations and we need to have a good look at the regulations around harvesting.
Pretty clear that slash is heavily contributing to infrastructure failure.
Russia's national amnesia has metastasised into a national dementia.
Never mind the 1939-mid 1941 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact when Zakharova starts squealing about how the West left Russia to its fate prior to 1943.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=234&v=0MIF8KgN3Ws&feature=youtu.be
Batshit crazy
TBF, at least 500k Russians with the wit to leg it out of a failed state with a mad leader.
https://twitter.com/k_sonin/status/1625207037947744402
Similar figures to those avoiding the draft in the US during the Vietnam War.
"Some went to college or graduate school or faked medical conditions, while others fled to Canada. In all, half a million Americans dodged their Vietnam War service." https://www.military.com/history/how-see-drafted-vietnam.html
Let us not think that those fleeing to avoid the Ukraine conflict are 'draft-dodgers' like Donald Trump.
Many, many will be principled people who do agree with Putin, but unlike me in my time do not have the recourse of conscientious objection
I read that neither does Ukraine, having suspended the right to CO there as well as in Russia.
I reckon 10 percent of the country’s IT workers leaving indicates a brain drain of younger, western looking Russians done with the corruption of Poots' siloviki, the oligarchs, and their gangster petrostate.
Blimey, "do not agree with Putin", that should have read.
Also these will be the youngest and most (economically) productive workers.
Further hollowing out the Russian economy, and skewing the demographics even further towards a rapidly ageing population.
ha ha whats "mindboggling " is the bullshit spouted by publications like the WP after all whats 500k of a pop of 143mil ?? .Russia prob gained ten times that figure from people emigrating from the donbass regions .Besides its likely a good number of those that left will return once the economy has stabilised properly and they,ve had their full of big macs coca cola and the madness's of the woke west .!!!
Oh yeah, the madness's of the woke west .!!!
//
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1625091664347041792
So?
Imagine the conversations over the turkey between Sidney Blumenthal and his son Max
You're right
Russia has the most Ukrainian refugees of any other country
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1312584/ukrainian-refugees-by-country/#:~:text=Nearly%202.9%20million%20refugees%20from,as%20of%20January%2031%2C%202023.
And thats not counting the refugees to Russia from the Eastern provinces who fled the bombing in 2014
Even now, Russia is the fourth country in the world for the most immigrants
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country
russia is desperate for more people. putin has long put effort into increasing the birth rate. still not increasing, but decreasing even faster.really the only population demographic that is increasing, is the amount of africans fleeing there own situations.
A scant third of refugees fleeing the country they're trying to destroy. That's fucking big of them. But hey, Ukrainians fleeing Russian barbarism should be grateful that they're not Syrians fleeing Russian barbarism.
/
https://thestandard.org.nz/pick-a-side/#comment-1875702
The Russians are throwing away 800+ soldiers lives every day. Troops fighting in Bakhmut have a 4 hour life expectancy.
https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1624707961019924481?s=20
A Ukraine Victory celebratory editorial from 26 Feb last year is beginning to circulate.
Hard to say which is more delusional – Russian imperial ambition, or economic development by neo-liberal means.
In a book I was reading recently, Colossus – the Rise and Fall of the American Empire, the historian, Lyall Ferguson, points that while empires, of one sort or another, have existed since the beginning of recorded history, nationalism is something new, having started during the nineteenth century in opposition to empire, and which may not last too much longer. In other words empires may be here to stay.
It's a complex subject – but Russia, already in the throws of a demographic crisis, does not have surplus healthy male population to thrust into the mincer at Bakhmut. But then, as those of us who have survived Rogergnomics know, governments rarely act in the public interest.
The empire as commonwealth is a promising model, but the outlying members are wont to regret joining, or forcible assimilation. Certainly a decaying state as unenlightened and frankly backward as that responsible for invading Ukraine will have no queue of aspiring members.
From the RSS feed,
https://thekaka.substack.com/p/national-emergency-declared-for-gabrielle#details
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/state-national-emergency-declared
Tell us where she's wrong, Joe90.
DNFTT
Woolly, her interviewee certainly couldn't have safely rebutted her position. Since 2014, it has been illegal in Russia to question the official view that Russia's role in WW2 began in 1941, and not at the brutal partitioning of Poland in 1939. He would have attracted large fines or up to 5 years in prison. Kinda suspiciously, a law seeks to revise history, in the best Stalinist tradition.
https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/insights/soviet-role-world-war-ii-realities-and-myths
Rawira Waititi posted on his MP Facebook page today to commemorate the 14th of February except instead of the traditional romantic side of Valentines day he is celebrating the death of Captain Cook.
Recently Waititi was caught out on national TV not being able to articulate exactly what racist rhetoric the ACT party and David Seymour were supposedly guilty of. It is clear from his comments that it is he who is guilty of such rhetoric.
He is quite clearly gleeful over the fact Captain Cook was killed and eaten and states explicitly that colonisation was an infection on the Pacific (which suggests that by extension the people who now live here as a result must be part of that infection).
https://www.facebook.com/RawiriWaititiMP
Rawiri can speak for himself (the Cook reference is gratuitous) but the statement "that colonisation was an infection on the Pacific" is simply historical fact. Europeans may not have intended to bring deadly diseases with them to the Pacific, Americas, etc, but they surely did. The natives had no immunity and so the result was a catastrophe.
It's surprising that you don't know that. Please read up a little.
Colonisation was not an infection. Indeed it is essentially what Iwi leaders signed up to in 1840 when they signed the Treaty of Waitangi. The English translation of the Maori version of the preamble states the following:
"…agree to the Queen's Government being established over all parts of this land and (adjoining) islands4 and also because there are many of her subjects already living on this land and others yet to come."
That is a explicit acknowledgement that NZ would be colonised as it talks about many British subjects in NZ and that more would follow. Maori can not claim they were unaware that colonisation was not the outcome.
You have deliberately missed the point.
The horrendous death toll from infection had nothing to do with any treaty. Nobody signed up for it.
Again, read the history. Don't pretend it didn't happen. Or worse, pretend it didn't matter.
No. Colonisation was the infection according to Rawiri Waititi not that colonisation brought infections. Colonisation didn't even bring infections. Interaction with the outside World did that. It would have happened regardless of any moves to colonise NZ.
"Colonisation didn't even bring infections. Interaction with the outside World did that. It would have happened regardless of any moves to colonise NZ."
In fact infectious diseases existed amongst Maori before Europeans arrived in NZ, including pneumonia and tetanus. According to Teara:
"Early European visitors often described Māori as a fit and healthy people. They led active lives, and many of the infectious diseases common in other parts of the world were unknown to them. However they were probably affected by pneumonia, tetanus, gastroenteritis, arthritis, rheumatism and various skin diseases."
From the same source, the consumption of bracken root fern also increased the chance of cancer, and "the fibrous Māori diet meant people tended to wear their teeth out, which over time led to malnutrition, disease and death.:
Maori face genuine inequalities around health outcomes, but the solutions lie in solutions targeted at need across the entire population, not rewriting history and racist dog whistling by the likes of Waititi.
"they were probably affected by "
Probably??
"racist dog whistling by the likes of Waititi."
His claims are not racist, they are anti-colonial, if anything.
Why do you say, "racist"?
His comments include a tweet (which he later denied) that describes Pakeha as an 'archaic species'.
He singles out for celebration the violent death of a renowned European explorer, while failing to mention the genocide of the Moriori committed by Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama.
In a debate in Parliament he accused David Parker of "caucasity".
Yes, his claims are racist.
There's a reason why we ask for people to provide evidence of claims of fact. People need to fact check, but also context matters a great deal for nuance and understanding.
You are making the argument that RW is racist, but we can't see if you are right because you have made assertions without evidence.
For instance, when I looked up the 'archaic species', this is what I found from 2021.
https://twitter.com/Biorealism/status/1367990296580026368
That tweet was deleted. Waititi then tweeted this,
https://twitter.com/Rawiri_Waititi/status/1367029559934152709
https://twitter.com/Rawiri_Waititi/status/1367029563423744005
I'm ok with accepting that at face value and that someone running his twitter account misrepresented his position. But even if that's not true, he still corrected it/himself and made a point of clarifying his position. I read that as the old Pākeha system that dominates is being replaced by a partnership between Iwi and the Crown representing non-Māori.
Can you now please provide the evidence for your other two examples?
"You are making the argument that RW is racist,"
Not quite. I'm making the same claim about RW he made about DS, that his rhetoric is racist.
1. On the tweet, I made the comment that he later denied having made it. Whether or not we believe him or accept his explanation is a matter of opinion.
2. On the comment about 'caucasity', I linked to it in my post on the words 'debate in parliament'. The link is Rawiri Waititi swipes at Attorney-General David Parker for deeming proposed Rotorua Māori ward restructure discriminatory | Newshub.
3. The Captain Cook comment is on RW's FB page. I'm not sure how to link, so I'll cut and paste:
"This day 14 February 1779 our Kanaka Maoli whanaunga killed Captain James Cook with his own knife, after his attempt to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, an Ali’i nui (Arikinui) of Hawaii. They cooked him and then ate him. Cook opened the door for the British coloniser to infect Te Moana Nui a Kiwa.
Valentines Day is a distraction to the true importance of today for all of our peoples of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. Not today coloniser! Today we celebrate and stand in solidarity with our Kanaka Maoli of Hawaii
"
thanks for all that.
To link to a specific FB post, click on the date/time stamp of the post. This will reset the URLin the address bar and you can then copy and paste that. We require the link to the post rather than someone’s FB page, because the post can disappear down a feed over a day or so.
oh, and fair point about the distinction between calling someone racist and naming an idea or rhetoric racist.
"To link to a specific FB post, …"
Thanks!!
It's like you learned nothing from the pandemic. If colonisation hadn't happened, Māori would have retained their landbase and resources and been able to adapt to emerging diseases. They could have quarantined and controlled immigration. Instead they were pushed into poverty and overwhelmed by the numbers of immigrants arriving.
https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-hauora-maori-i-mua-history-of-maori-health/page-2
Maori did adapt.
In the 20th century, Māori population numbers increased considerably. This was an impressive demographic recuperation. In addition to an increasing resistance to common introduced infections, an important factor was a vigorous health campaign mounted by Māori and by the government in the early decades of the 20th century.
"Although levels of immunity to new diseases had increased, and death rates were dropping, poor economic circumstances and unsatisfactory living conditions still made many Māori susceptible to ill health."
And it is those issues that need to be targeted. And for all NZ'ers.
of course. My point was that if colonisation hadn't happened, there wouldn't have been the same numbers of deaths in the 1700s and 1800s.
The forcing of Māori into poverty was a big part of the disease vulnerability, and we've never fully resolved that, to our shame.
"The forcing of Māori into poverty was a big part of the disease vulnerability, and we've never fully resolved that, to our shame."
Replying to Liberty Belle
“The Captain Cook comment……. I'm not sure how to link, so I'll cut and paste:
"This day 14 February 1779 our Kanaka Maoli whanaunga killed Captain James Cook with his own knife, after his attempt to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, an Ali’i nui (Arikinui) of Hawaii. They cooked him and then ate him. Cook opened the door for the British coloniser to infect Te Moana Nui a Kiwa.
Valentines Day is a distraction to the true importance of today for all of our peoples of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa. Not today coloniser! Today we celebrate and stand in solidarity with our Kanaka Maoli of Hawaii”
I am unsure why this is called either racist or racist rhetoric. It is pretty plain and clear writing. He uses a figure of speech 'infect' but that is the extent of it.
Because the subject matter is not to one's taste does not mean the writing has something wrong with it! He is urging people to remember on Valentines Day that 'lovey dovey' did not have a totally good influence on ancestors. He also makes the extended metaphor 'infect' work about the madness/infection that swept across European seagoing nations to colonise.
"Not today coloniser! Today we celebrate and stand in solidarity with our Kanaka Maoli of Hawaii”"
Celebrate what?
"This day 14 February 1779 our Kanaka Maoli whanaunga killed Captain James Cook with his own knife, after his attempt to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, an Ali’i nui (Arikinui) of Hawaii. They cooked him and then ate him. "
"Cook opened the door for the British coloniser to infect Te Moana Nui a Kiwa."
Yeah it's racist rhetoric all right.
Rawiri is using 'infection' and 'colonisation' together as a figure of speech. I think an extended metaphor? simile?
He is linking the rampant race to discover by many European nations to an infection. He is saying that because it was so prevalent you could, as a figure of speech, call it an infection.
No doubt this colonisation did bring infections of many different kinds not resident in NZ.
RW is speaking English. It grieves me so much that many cannot understand this. There is truly a case for plain English where it counts. But please sometimes we should be grateful for a bit more from our language. This is where those who are fluent and those who are not differ.
I have been astounded recently:
Michael Woods Churchillian speech about the Parliamentary protest was fiendishly, and I suspect deliberately, misinterpreted by some, others just did not understand it. Not plain enough
The examples of print media articles from known satirists having to be labelled 'satire' I suppose in case people misunderstood them..
I was 'had on' on TS when I mentioned my experience that the common age that Govt press releases was pitched at was 9-11years.
Not all the pacific islands were colonised , Tonga merely became a 'protectorate' and today has the same form of government as when the British and others arrived
Maybe a similar form – in 2008, and particularly in 2010, there were significant changes, at least according to my Tongan stepfather.
To keep its form of self government and institutions from 1900 ( when came part of the British Empire) to 2008 isnt too bad, when its neighbours literally became colonies
An absolute monarchy until more recently was what the nobility wanted.
Gosman the iwi leaders did not sign the English version, almost all signed the version that was in their own language and had been explained to them by Henry Williams whom they trusted. The knew what they were signing, and it wasn't as you want to conveniently render it to be. Generally speaking internationally where a covenant between two parties is agreed the wording of the covenant in the language of the indigenous people is the wording that is given the most weight.
Furthermore the English version signed by Hobson and at most 40 Rangatira was written after the 6th Feb 1840 from memory
But we need to go back even further to understand how Te Tiriti came to be in the first place. The concept of a covenant between Maori and the Crown was conceived by Lord Glenelg (Secretary for the Colonies) and Sir James Stephen, (Permanent Undersecretary), who were committed to seeing Maori interests protected in the colonisation of New Zealand. In fact they initially opposed colonisation, and wanted to see an independent Maori nation. However, they eventually realised colonisation was a tide they could not hold back. Instead, they opted to try to establish British law as a restraint on land-grabbing colonists. Their influence resulted in Hobson being dispatched with instructions to seek Crown sovereignty on the basis of the ''free and intelligent consent'' of Maori and to ensure their land and political rights were protected.
Hobson wouldn't have gotten past first base on his own, and Te Tiriti was really the product of the Rev Henry Williams and the 40 Rangatira who were at Waitangi on the 6th Feb. With his son, Williams translated the English draft into Maori. He then played a leading role in explaining the Treaty to the gathered chiefs and as an interpreter at the proceedings. There were then negotiations, and a second version was finally agreed which was the version finally signed by the 400 Rangatira around the country. It is this version of Te Tiriti to which Maori assented.
What happened in the years that followed is another story. Despite efforts by Rev Williams, and other missionaries like Octavius Hadfield and Thomas Grace, settler pressure for land prevailed.
The Treaty was dishonoured, injustice and war followed.
The Contra proferentem is an arcane bit of law that applies to commercial contracts and not to ones involving matters of sovereignty. There is an actual international convention on international treaties that deals with this. You should take the time to read it especially Article's 33.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_the_Law_of_Treaties
No, Cook's crew were an actual infectious agent, introducing TB and sexual diseases on the trip previous to the one where he was killed. The Hawai'ians called them out on it when Cook returned. Here is a Hawai'ian version of Cook's crew's infectiousness and his death.
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/how-the-foolish-rumour-that-hawaiians-ate-cook-began/xpl1a9z86
I went to Waititi's post and I didn't get the same interpretation that you did from his text. You seem a little primed to see racism, where there is anti-colonialism, which is a perfectly valid political view.
BHN do a really cool dissection of why Seymour's rhetoric is racist, between 50 -55 min of this episode.
Yesterday's Big Hairy News episode
PS the Captain Cook death day celebration is a Hawai'ian tradition, as reported in the sbs link.
please link to the actual post rather than someone's FB page. If you click on the date/time stamp of the post, the URL loads in the address bar and you can copy and paste that (remove everything from the ? onwards if it's a long link) Thanks.
https://www.facebook.com/RawiriWaititiMP/posts/pfbid02JHyaC6XYFaxafs1Nih3QLjQXVB6gL4dPxKrkedor3Y5HWeJQWGj6itnkHUnn7Qzxl
Thank you very much.
Yes the infection rhetoric is disgraceful.
Cook was not the first European to visit Tahiti, so the slander that he brought syphilis there is just that.
Mind, the Europeans blamed the New World for syphilis for centuries. Brief History of Syphilis – PMC (nih.gov) Archeology has since found evidence of syphilis in Greek and Roman port cities.
Plays well as a dog-whistle to the voters he means to mislead I guess.
But, according to oral history, he DID bring it to Hawaii where Cook's death day is celebrated, see previous post.
By 'oral history', do you mean anecdote, rumour, or gossip?
Bryce's roundups are often wide of the mark, but in this case the collection of RW commentators (Hooton, Grant etc) have summed up Luxon's problem well enough. He's a phoney and unlike Key, not a good enough actor to play the role of regular bloke:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/political-roundup-christopher-luxons-leadership-under-threat/6PSHXF2X3JH2JC2IV6QX2OPSOA/
Even bad leaders like Collins still had their cheerleaders (however deluded). Luxon has none.
key could fake sincerity. luxo cant even do that. when the nats media cheerleaders are asking questions, you know there is trouble . dare they bring in willis, when misogynism is a basic nact foundation? collins was only accepted, because she acted like a male(crusher, playing with guns,etc) once she started pretending to be human, her appeal lessened to the shoutback radio set.
Dr Bryce did suggest National could bring in Willis in the same way Labour did Ardern. But Willis is no Ardern.
If the electorate thought Simon Bridges was cringe they will think the same about Willis. I just cannot see Willis being up to the demands of PM.
If Nicola Willis doesn’t cut the mustard, then who?
Bishop, Reti, Collins?
Oh how we laugh!
maureen pugh is waiting for the call.
what happened?
Which people are badly affected by this? People who lose their job and can't get another one? I think they would be badly affected anyway.
https://twitter.com/OpinionistNZ/status/1625271990880989187
People who had the income to service a 90% + mortgage in an overheated market. and the bank wouldn't have given them the mortgage unless they could still service it when the market went sour. So they would have been pulling in a good wicket.
If they loose their job, well it might be a bit tough and the bank could sell them up, but banks are reluctant to bring about a mortgagee sale if they are going to loose money, more likely to support the borrower though it. That can be a character building experience for the borrower, and they won't be so keen on the big mortgage again.
Negative equity is only an issue if you have to sell, and history shows it only a temporary situation. The market stabilises / recovers and the borrower pays down the loan and things come right, or eventually the borrower can sell and try again.
that's what I was thinking. How many of the people who 'have to sell', have to sell? As opposed to those who want to sell but could stay put.
I guess the problem is that the high prices mean that the gap in equity is proportionally bigger. But it's not like this wasn't always on the cards.
The "Have to sell" thing is usually real estate speak for the vendor has other things on, like moving somewhere else, or the three Ds. Rarely is it the bank, or if it is, it's related to something other than the house. It's rare that a bank will go to a mortgagee sale on a first home buyer with just a loan on the house, they'll try very hard to make it work provided the borrower does their part to the best of their abilities. But with banks, fuck about and you'll find out…
The people who get fucked over with negative equity are people who have maxed the mortgage to build up a business and it doesn't go as well as they hoped. Run out of equity, and the ability to borrow more, in that situation and it can get tricky.
I was thinking 'have to sell' being people who get transferred in a job, or need to live in another city to look after an elderly parent. Or as Craig suggests, marriage separation.
Of those, not all will be 'have to' eg the house can be rented out. But then it’s an issue if the rent doesn’t cover the mortgage.
The business one makes sense. All of them are really about people taking on big mortgages at a time when that was a risk.
Also the bright line test swings into action if the house is rented out. Which matters, especially with divorce, when the 'plan' is for the equity (if any) or liabilities to be equally shared between the two individuals. Bright line, means that the equity won't be fully available for 10 years after purchase.
Certainly where divorce involves children, both parents (usually) want a house which is large enough for the kids – to facilitate shared care. [An unsung reason for the housing shortage – divorce rates, resulting in double the house space required for a single family]. And, if you're leveraged to the max on a double income to afford the house, you're not going to be able to afford an additional mortgage (or rent, for that matter).
half the country is used to not getting everything they want, or even most of what they want. What I'm getting at here is that the drop in market value may cause problems for people, but some of those problems are normal level not catastrophic. We need to be living within our means. A couple with three kids that divorces and wants two four bedroom houses but has an upside down mortgage, this family has some choices and it's not the end of the world if they have to make changes to the way they live and the priorities they have.
Divorced couples have the option of
Work and Income could make it easier for relationships for those on sole parent benefits (allow the DPB person to receive a payment without partner income test for up to 3 years – the term which determines relationship status, with a work test for the payment once the youngest is over 3 or 5).
That would ease housing demand pressures.
In the US, Freddie Mac and Minnie Mae mortgage financing crash, I read somewhere that banks extending loans were forced to suck up 20% of the equity loss. I agree with the lenders taking some of the hit, where mortgagee sales occur due to this large market swing.
In the US the mortgagee can simply leave the keys in the letterbox for the Bank and walk away with no further obligation but here in NZ the borrower is still "on the hook" for the remaining debt unless full bankruptcy proceedings are done.
Anyone with negative equity who has to sell e.g. marriage separations if they were first home buyers at the top of the market.
true, although of those how many have to sell? Instead the house can be rented out, or one person stays and there's a new contract around equity.
Assuming they're maxed out on the mortgage – they're unlikely to be able to afford an additional rent payment for the separated spouse.
for some that will be true. For others, take in a border. I'm not saying no-one is badly affected, I'm saying that some of the people have more choices.
Seriously negative equity would be small numbers, more common would just be to have not much or nothing left after the sale and both have to rent which obviously isn't ideal long term but totally agree that it's no more or less problematic than any other time (happens every day even in high markets).
With negative equity, that would include paying back the remainder of the mortgage, so cobbling together 2 lots of bonds might be difficult for lower-income families. That's still not particularly catastrophic unless there were other joint debts to resolve as well and someone ends up in bankruptcy over it (I know there are other options like No Asset Procedures, but not everyone will qualify for those). Obviously that's a more likely outcome if either spouse is unemployed or in a low-income job.
Amicable separations (or at least ones who listen to their lawyers) will find a way like one stays under some agreement around equity and payments to sort it out later, or just carry on living in the same house as flatmates in the short term e.g. separate bedrooms, rent a sleepout/caravan, insulate the garage etc. Renting it out might work but yields aren't that good currently, so no guarantee that will cover even interest-only payments – still worth having in the mix of options on the spreadsheets though. Not all separations are amicable however.
sorry, I dropped your duplicate comment in Trash, looks like you trashed the other one at the same time. Best I can do is copy and paste one of them back here. One is longer than the other, which one do you want?
lol…wondered what happed…longer one thanks
do you want the reply you did as well?
Think the reply was the end of the longer one anyway when I was wondering what had happened….post longer version and I'll edit if necessary, or add in reply.
sweet. I'll copy and past both, and you can copy and paste the into a new comment and set them up how you like. Sorry about that.
No worries…will teach me to complete post before submitting…bad habit.
Thanks.
I should have checked the time and seen you were still within the edit window.
Pat said,
the reply is the last paragraph of that one.
I'll delete it once you've made your new copy.
Thats covered it ..thanks
Found this article on Jacobin.com and would be of interest to quite of few here especially those of the Pro 🇷🇺 Supporters.
Jacobin is a very left wing & was a little surprised to see this article, it's well written & research. So it's worth reading than some of the other garbage out there.
https://jacobin.com/2022/03/ukraine-socialist-interview-russian-invasion-war-putin-nato-imperialism
Testing. Can't seem to get past 14 Feb on my phone. TS OK on computer.
Valentine’s Day does feel like Groundhog Day
It's still groundhog day on my phone 🙁
Even the my above comment doesn't appear.
Tried shutting down, clearing cache, clearing data, using different browser app.
All other sites working fine.
Blame it on the cyclone. 😉
Hmmm, I know there have been some caching issues lately and I thought they had been fixed. I went on another browser on this same PC and did not log in and indeed the TS website seems stuck at some time in the early morning of 15 Feb. The last posted comment I can actually read is https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-14-02-2023/#comment-1935330 @ 2023/02/15 at 4:47 am. The next and last comment in the Comment feed (https://thestandard.org.nz/is-it-too-early-to-talk-about-climate-change/#comment-1935331) @ 2023/02/15 at 6:25 am I can actually not read when I click on it; it is not there. I checked on a third browser (same PC) without logging in and it is the same issue.
I’ll leave a note for Lprent in the back-end.
everything looks normal on my iphone 👍