Another day in John Key’s neo-liberal nightmare.
We have become a cruel, greedy, uncaring and selfish nation under his wretched leadership.
Yet there are people who still care and who are unselfish.
Te Puea marae represents the best of New Zealand.
Uncaring.
The present regime running WINZ and Housing NZ represents the worst.
‘Te Puea Marae steps up to find cancer teen and family a home
Her father, who previously worked as a painter in Hamilton, tried to find his family a home.
“He would go to Winz for appointments, he told them about me having cancer, about us.
“They did nothing. He went to Housing NZ, told them. They couldn’t find us a house. Too full, they said, too full.”
When things at her aunt’s “got really tense”, the family left and had stayed at the marae since.’
Another day in John Key’s neo-liberal nightmare.
We have become a cruel, greedy, uncaring and selfish nation under his wretched leadership.
Uncaring and incompetent.
Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett
‘Social housing and community agencies have not yet had approaches from clients wanting to take up a relocation grant, available from today, to move out of Auckland.
The grant of up to $5000 announced last month by Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett will be available from today. The money for relocation costs will not need to be paid back unless the person moved back to Auckland within a year.
Despite the scheme being launched today, the Ministry of Social Development could not tell RNZ News how many Housing New Zealand houses were available outside of Auckland, and where they were.
“It is too soon to answer this question. The grant is available for any vacant housing, including private rentals, or social housing,” the department said in a statement.
At the time she announced the grant, Paula Bennett said there were dozens of empty houses in other parts of New Zealand, such as Lower Hutt where there were 18 state houses ready to let, Palmerston North where there were 15 and Gisborne with four.’ http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/306790/'little-information'-on-grant-to-move-to-regions
or maybe instead of reading the future with the help of tealeaves and bones, they ‘Ministry of Social ‘Welfare” is waiting for Paula Bennett to drop a dump and then they gather around the turd and read the future out of that.
Nor does it say that $ 5000 is the amount anyone who moves is going to get. Firstly, its “up to”…, secondly knowing WINZ they will want quotes for everything, then pay out not a cent more, even if those quotes were a guess. Family and friends helping out won’t get anything for their efforts, but a moving company will.
If anyone hears of (and proves) a case where this offer was taken up and the person given $ 5000 to relocate at their leisure, I will eat my hat.
Another day in John Key’s neo-liberal nightmare.
We have become a cruel, greedy, uncaring and selfish nation under his wretched leadership.
Yet there are people who still care and who are unselfish.
Kai for Kids represents the best of New Zealand.
A government that rejected Mana’s Feed the Kids Bill 4 years ago represents the worst.
‘1200 school lunches in under an hour: Porirua community pitches in to help hungry kids
“Attendance is really low on Mondays and Tuesdays because Wednesday is benefit day.”
“Kids don’t come to school because they don’t have any food to bring.”
Two months later, Clifford and her volunteers now make 1200 lunches for a dozen Porirua schools.”
The fucking Herald must be being paid for this shit. It has run a piece on poor Paula as a victim ” I’ Ve been cyber bullied because of my size”. Well stop eating so many fucking pies then !.
its when National decamp from the chamber for Bellamys, as soon as question time in Parliament is over. I doubt they serve pies.
The media are getting irrelevant, from promoting social engineering like bullying ,oh poor me child Max Key, and reading his latest antics of his music video, to children of musico’s complaining they just get sex offers from men because their daddy is famous.
Nationals brighter future is the homeless sleeping in Aucklands Well lite CBD.
Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what large people do, they always attract abuse including in the form of people telling them there is something wrong with them for the way they eat. In other words the problem with fatphobia is that too many people have prejudices about fat.
Call Bennett out on her politics, her meanness and the atrocious government she works for. Plenty of material there without going for the prejudices about fatness.
“Call Bennett out on her politics, her meanness and the atrocious government she works for. Plenty of material there without going for the prejudices about fatness.”
+1
Same goes for Gerry Brownlee too. Call him out on his stubborn bullish authoritarian ways, not his size.
Prejudice against another’s body is unhelpful. We have no right to make judgements or assumptions about people’s diets, especially as we don’t know, and have no right to know their medical history, such as prescription medicine side effects, endochrinological/hormonal disorders and or injuries that prevent exercise that may have contributed to a person’s weight gain. It’s not all about food.
I called her out because she intimated that she couldn’t,t help being that big, I doubt that she has an endocrinological or hormonal problem because that only occurs in a very very small percentage of people, ( but it makes a good excuse for those unafficted ) and she was half that size when she entered politics and got introduced to the trough in all its permutations.
BTW, I’m overweight and I’m that way because I eat too much and if someone calls me fat I have to agree with them.
Your weight is irrelevant Adrian. It’s not about others agreeing whether you are over weight or not. You know that and so what. If you know you eat too much then that’s your buzz, it doesn’t mean EVERY other big person is big for the same reason as you.
Your weight doesn’t give you license to attack others for the same reasons.
Pullya Benefit is a nasty vindictive spiteful person who bullies others by disclosing sensitive and private information so she can put herself in a position of power.
Her size has got nothing to do with it, and we know nothing of her medical history and shouldn’t speculate on it either. That’s her business, not yours or mine.
Rosie I see where you are coming from, but she has been, not so long ago much smaller than she is now, she yo yo’s with her weight but she can obviously get smaller from eating less, so it probably isn’t a hormonal problem. I see it more as an emotional problem as being an eater for comfort because of the stress of her job and/or being out of her depth or just because she over eats because she enjoys her food. What I cannot understand is seeing she is seen as an intelligent women, surely she sees the health issues she is bringing on herself, heart problems and definitely diabetes because of all her “belly fat” which is what the medical profession call it. Its difficult not to criticise when there are many people who can lose weight and keep it off – self discipline plays a part and pride in one’s appearance is another. Now don’t bite my head off please.
Again. Some one else’s size is their own business. Why do we feel we have a right to criticise or even speculate about their supposed issues? What’s it got to do with us? It doesn’t matter if Pullya Benefit’s shape has changed in the time that we have seen her in parliament.
Speaking of “self discipline and pride in one’s appearance” is very much the line fatphobics use. What you are saying is fat people are ugly and lazy. That is highly prejudiced.
Another sign of fatphobia is faux concern for another persons health. And you do realise that not all heart disease is weight related don’t you? My father died at age 54 from heart disease and he was an average size man. Mr Dr tells me the biggest indicator for heart disease is genetics, even above and beyond smoking. Stress is a bigger killer than weight, so why aren’t we hating on all the stressed people? A person can be overweight but still be fit and healthy and live a long life.
Don’t get sucked into the hate Kate. You’re better than that.
I hope the NZ police are keeping an eye on this website, whose readers are celebrating the killing of Jo Cox and looking forward to similar acts here: https://yournz.org/2016/06/19/crusader-rabid/
Not really, I try to see things in a positive light and see no point in trying to bring everyone down with a daily dose of repetition. The sun is shining, it’s the shortest day onward and upwards.
Tarquin, how about the eye of the beholder thing? Winter solstice, I mourn because I love the cold, short dark days of winter – all moody and introspective as they are, yet cosy, safe and warm by the fire.
Like a true former teen goth I celebrate summer solstice as it’s marks the countdown to winter. Until Autumn comes it’s long wait through the drunken violence of summer (other’s, not me), water restrictions, insufferable heat, mozzies and flies, phoning noise control at 1am, and invites to hideous work xmas parties.
Very true, I’ve only just finished moaning about the heat and now I’m wishing it back again. Up here in Northland we don’t get a real winter, maybe a frost or two and it just rains all the time. I had a white Christmas in England a few years ago – that’s how winters should be.
Ha ha. Well you’re living in the right part of the country if you like it warm.
Like wise, in winter in the southern hemisphere can you pull off an alright mid winter xmas, minus the snow unless you live somewhere really cold. I’ve done some good solstice parties over the years, around the fire.
As for Paul. What he is posting is politically and socially relevant. It IS the depressing truth. It’s really hard to jazz up our reality in any way that makes it palatable. Because of that I find it a bit much early in the morning myself so flick through. However I always read Paul’s posts he posts separate to the early wake up morning cup of depression. I guess we all have ways of expressing our anger and grief over our witnessing of our country going to the dogs.
You sound very much like National’s ex-party president Michelle Boag, who was on the panel of Q&A last Sunday. She appeared to be oblivious of the strive people were going through in this country, apparently in her eyes all was rosy;-)))
Funny how John Key only has time for a few minutes before 8am to be interviewed on RNZ.
By the time he blusters and confuses the issue under questioning the time pips sound. End of story.
Wonder if he chooses the time for the interview?
Guyon could record an interview that went past 8am and play the balance after 8.
Hone’s interview by Guyon would be more interesting but his attempt at humour, trying to be the ‘comeback kid’ in an analogy to a band with singers and bass players etc. is about as silly as his artificial dote com fiasco.
German Foreign Minister Steinmeier says NATO should not be inflaming the situation with Russia
Berlin (AFP) – German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has criticised NATO for having a bellicose policy towards Russia, describing it as “warmongering”, the German daily Bild reported.
Steinmeier pointed to the deployment of NATO troops near borders with Russia in the military alliance’s Baltic and east European member states.
“What we should avoid today is inflaming the situation by warmongering and stomping boots,” Steinmeier told Bild in an interview to be published Sunday.
“Anyone who thinks you can increase security in the alliance with symbolic parades of tanks near the eastern borders, is mistaken,” Germany’s top diplomat added.
“It seems like we have waves of momentum, and then gaps. What can we do to fill the gaps or at least tide us over?”
Probably best if someone who has been in a leadership in activism for decades to answer this curly one. However my 2 cents worth centres around socialising. Yes, socialising, on and off line.
Personally though, I prefer the off line version. In meeting new people and growing bonds with those we know, in person, we don’t miss out on all the subtle non vocal expressions that create a depth to the relationship. We can create intellectual relationships on line and they can be enhanced as we, as a collective (I”m talking about the wider world, not us on TS necessarily) create and ride a wave, but energy falls a bit flat during the troughs does it not? EG, look at online conversation pre and post general elections.
Although, in saying that, I noticed the opposite on the Bella Caledonia site post Scottish indyref – the talk was flat out, soul searching, expressing feelings etc. They even had a guest post by a psychologist to analyse the results and fall out. Their response could be down to different cultural approaches to communication – The Scots might be better communicators than NZer’s, I don’t know. (but the Scots I know and have met are great talkers and listeners)
So, I see advantages in socialising as in holding momentum during trough periods. During these times we build loyalty, maintain bonds, maintain solidarity, and maintain the flow of ideas. New ideas can be discussed and existing ones reworked. The group’s mutual interest remains a living thing rather than it being sucked into a vacuum of loss. Socialising keeps an interest alive and when the time comes to ramp up activism the platform is stable and the group is already in synch to go to work on a project or campaign.
Wow, that is such a great comment Rosie, I wasn’t expecting it to go in that direction.
I completely agree. I’ve been in online communities where there is more relationship building than happens here or on places like FB or twitter, and so that social thing where you have something solid happens more. But still I agree that the place it needs to happen most is in the physical world. I don’t know how to make that happen in my own life because most people I know are really focussed on life outside of political realities. I guess that’s why I come here.
But it reminds me of something that Naomi Klein said last year, when asked how she keeps going, she said it’s really important to get in a room with people who are doing the same kind of work, struggling with the same kind of things. I think you’ve really nailed it there, where it needs to happen within normal community interactions if it’s going to be stable and resilient (maybe Klein was talking about something else).
I empathise with your situation of not being physically around others who are focused on political issues/emerging social realities. It’s the same for me.
I do believe group social meeting is what we are going to need, to strengthen us for the next election, just for starters, as we have far bigger ongoing threats to our very existence, in climate change, as well as maintaining momentum and influence.
I think a while back Bill set up a regular meeting in Dunedin, where people met in a park. Hows that going people? Is there a way for Standardista’s to meet in person in their regions?
As I thought about socialising being a key thing to strengthening a group committed to a similar goal I received mail in my inbox from the Labour Party gen sec. He was asking if you were a 20 – 30 something professional interested in socialising. A great move I thought, along the lines of what I’d been thinking about. If that wasn’t your thing, age wise or work wise there was a survey to fill in with your thoughts about doing something similar.
I would be interested to see how many people turn up to a party AGM compared to how many people turn up to a party social gathering, especially if it’s a low cost thing. $ is a barrier for some of us.
Personally, in light of the Lab/Green MOU, I’d like to see a seasonal social get together, to build solidarity and to forge ties at the grass roots, where it really counts.
I think a while back Bill set up a regular meeting in Dunedin, where people met in a park. Hows that going people? Is there a way for Standardista’s to meet in person in their regions?
Unconnected to the Standard, there are a few interested politically aware Dunedinites meeting in the next week as part of a Matariki event. I haven’t been involved in the organisation of the event but I would expect there to be 20-30 very politically interested minds show up.
In general terms I agree that face to face, in person political socialising is crucial to our future.
Endless war, endless greed: The Pentagon is lining its pockets with taxpayer dollars
Obama now plans to rebuild America’s nuclear weapons cache, the latest in a series of military enrichment schemes
Trump’s lies aren’t unique to America: Post-truth politics are killing democracies on both sides of the Atlantic
Voters no longer value truth, and Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are dangerously exploiting the new paradigm
You’ve been pretty harsh with a couple of my comments last couple day so i’m bringing it here to open it up and sort it.
Yep I made a couple boo boo’s, I retaliated too this
[deleted as irrelevant]
[lprent: This isn’t a negotiation, it is an observation of a continued pattern of behaviour and a demand for a permanent modification of some of those behaviours from a moderator. There is no point in various moderators continuing to point out deficiencies in your behaviour if you are too damn lazy or too thick or too self-entitled an arsehole to modify those behaviours.
1. Read the policy again. It is clear you haven’t understood it.
2. How you feel about it has absolutely no relevance and I suspect you don’t have sufficient experience with operating a blog to even be able to offer it. You are a guest on this site, your host is telling you to shape up or ship out.
This is a heart wrenching article. And in our back doorstep. Why do not NZ take the Nauru refugees – it is hard to see how these detention centres can be considered legal under human rights legislation – in particular for the unaccompanied children committing suicide.
“The worst I’ve seen – trauma expert lifts lid on ‘atrocity’ of Australia’s detention regime
Exclusive: In his 43-year career, Paul Stevenson has worked in the aftermath of the Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami but says nothing he witnessed was as bad as the treatment of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus”
How many people out there think mental illnesses equate to a lower intellect, or reduced mental capacity?
I have found here some resistance to my points of view based on the fact I am mentally ill.
I am in fact B-Polar, and I have an IQ of over 160 according the 2 of the Psychologists who treated me through Hep C treatment.
My illness caused a chemical imbalance in my brain which causes me to have periods of massive empathy/depression and periods of manic/sleepless, fast thinking, impusiveness.
if untreated.
Currently outlooks for Bi-polar people are good, it does take time to find the right chemicals and once a balance of chemicals has been restored we live completely normal lives.
I recently found the right medication , for me it was Effexor, I snapped out of depression in the time it took for the pill to get into my blood stream and have been stable for over two months now.
Comments from LPRENT such as..
“I really can’t be bothered dealing with commenter’s mental issues over and over again and having them disrupting a reasonably rational debate. I suspect you don’t understand yourself well enough to understand your own issues and therefore are unlikely to be able to control yourself. So any ban that I am forced to issue will be for some time”
and the other day you insulted me and my mental health just like someone who knows absolutely nothing and is predjudiced.
I am shocked at the way you talk to and treated me, uses my disabilty and mental health to question my intellect and integrity.
Hi Richard. I can’t comment on the exchange you’ve had with LPrent.
I can, whole heartedly support you in your recovery from depression and your belief (or what I see as fact) that mental illness is in no way related to intelligence.
I’m someone who struggles with depression and chronic insomnia to the point where I can no longer work/ or find suitable part time work, so I’m thrilled to hear you’ve found a medicine that works. That can be a really liberating feeling.
Thanks Rosie, after so many years trying it was super liberating to not dive into depression whenever a saw a animal run over or bad news.
I have 2 months of stress less life now and i’m chilling back out daily. I feel the tension relax and everyday gets better without having to worry if I was about to swing in moods.
Prozac, citalopram, epillim by the truckload, they give you the antidepressants and assume you’ll be fine come back in a month they say, it never did squat, they even thought I was lying and putting it on after all the tablets didn’t do much, it took me over ten years of that and a Hep C treatment that has side effects of making you suicidal, to find a brilliant new Dr who took me over from my old Dr and she cured me in one med change.
I had given up, never give up if the meds aren’t working change them don’t linger on non active antidepressants Rosie is all I can say.
Awesome to hear you’re doing so well Richard after years of suffering. That really is a breakthrough. Well done you! It’s a good feeling, I find, to be back to one true self and feeling safe and well.
It is hard for people in a clinically depressed state to cope with problems, bad news, and upsetting sights. You become sensitised to things and it spirals down. I’ve had to work with being overly empathetic to animal suffering but deal with it in different ways now.
I’m fine and dandy on the paroxetine now but still an insomniac. I use sleeping pills about 3 times a week to get by. I also try to keep a different future in mind too. Once the clouds lift you can see there are good things that ARE going on.
I’ve had to deal with acute depression a number of times in my life, and seem to have quite a few friends and family with various mental aliments – including bigotry. I expect to help and deal with issues to do with it as and when I need to.
But what I was referring to was your attitude and actions on this site. Here I’m not interested in dealing with, protecting or helping you. I’m interested in protecting and helping this site as a place for debate. The way we do to deal with bad behaviour for WHATEVER cause, is to warn about behaviour and (if required) to remove the ability to write comments.
The proportion of people commenting or authoring on this site with various afflictions (mental, physical, bigotry or addictive) probably isn’t that too dissimilar from society at large. However most of them manage to control their behaviour to the level that I don’t notice them. I can’t see any reason that I should treat you differently to them.
There are limits to the amount of time that I (or any other moderator or author) can be expend on this site. And after more than 8 years of doing it, I tend to push so that I don’t have to spend too much time dealing with someone acting like an arsehole. I find it is less of a problem to whack hard once so I don’t have waste time to play whack-a-mole with dickheads.
Respect Lprent, sorry you had too crack out the sledgehammer , but I respect your doing it, now that we had a chance to one to one, vs catching each other on a thread, and distracting from the thread.
Some of the odd comments were tongue in cheek and I have learned humour often gets taken literally here if your not super careful to announce how your inferring a comment.
My comments should tidy up as a I get more familiar with the morally accepted peer standards here.
Thanks again for posting this and allowing me to relate my concerns and have them answered.
Kind regards
Richard
[lprent: Ok, the warning has been heard. Removed from moderation. We will see how it goes. ]
Some of the odd comments were tongue in cheek and I have learned humour often gets taken literally here if your not super careful to announce how your inferring a comment.
Humour, more often than not, simply doesn’t come across in text. To indicate that you’re being humorous usually means that you have to add smileys and/or tags.
Humour, more often than not, simply doesn’t come across in text. To indicate that you’re being humorous usually means that you have to add smileys and/or tags.
Yes. I learnt the hard way in earlier days. Tongue-in-cheek comments were taken too literally by some and I ended up on the receiving end of a few unpleasant barbs. Even adding emoticons or plain language tags is not always a guarantee. Best to confine oneself to such comments when the post itself is humorous and/or satirical in content.
C’mon Stuart Munro. Just because we have a teeny wee bit of fun doesn’t mean we don’t feel strongly for those who are the victims of this heartless and horrible government. Some of us have even been there in one form or another.
There’s still room to lighten up and maybe even have a laugh at ourselves.
Yes… except that with a pretty vacuous and actively biased MSM there is little or no channel for normal outrage. A not too politically interested person who gets their news from TVNZ, stuff, and the Herald could be forgiven for thinking that Nick Smith was vaguely competent or Paula Bennett compassionate.
There is a need to roundly damn this government, in adition to dispassionately discussing alternatives. The trolls never sleep, and never miss an opportunity to paint this vicious and dysfunctional kleptocracy as marginally competent and technically human.
I agree that that part of Lynn’s statement was a form of prejudice in terms of mental health and I wish he hadn’t made it. I hope you can pull back a bit anyway, because I like your contributions on ts in general, and I think you bring perspectives that we don’t otherwise have and I find that valuable. There are rules though, and if you break them too often it’s easier for the site to give you time out.
I do think you are stepping over the bounds a lot at the moment, and you will get moderated for that. Different moderators have different ways of approaching that.
fwiw, Lynn is an equal opportunity moderator and will be abusive to everyone pretty much equally if they piss him off as a moderator. That’s the bit to understand, it’s not a personal thing so much as what is seen with a moderator hat on. It takes time to moderate, there is more involved than in just making a comment. And that time is time we don’t get to spend doing other things. One of Lynn’s trigger points is where he finds he is having to use a lot of time on one person when they’ve already been warned.
My own is people derailing threads (you’ve noticed I’m sure) either by posting off topic or by posting things that are inflammatory.
I’m really happy to explain where I think you are overstepping the bounds if that’s helpful. It is good to reread the Policy, and they still need to be understood in the context of the culture of ts. Lots of people don’t get that, and some of those people end up with bans.
Moderation has changed a bit in the last 6 months, and IMO there has been an improvement in the debate culture. There is less tolerance for bickering and troll derailments. Shutting them down early on keeps discussions much more focussed on the topic of the post, which is the point of the site.
I’d see two main things happening with you at the moment. One is taking personal grudges across multiple conversations. It just disrupts thread, so if you can let it go, or keep it in the thread it originated in if it’s appropriate, that’s going to cause less disruption and get less moderator attention. If all else fails, do what you have done today and take it to Open Mike.
The other is to focus more on the politics. You have interesting ideas and ones that are challenging to some here, so finding ways to communicate those without having a go at people will work better in the long run. Yes, lots of what happens here is unfair (e.g. someone is rude to you and doesn’t get called on it). But it’s on all of us to act within the rules as much as we can and lower the need for moderation in the first place.
edit, just seen Lynn’s comment above, which is a very clear explanation that behaviour will be moderated no matter what the cause.
I agree that that part of Lynn’s statement was a form of prejudice in terms of mental health…
Only in that I view the type of bigotry that he was displaying as being a type of mental illness. It is pretty damn hard to explain it any other way. I’ve talked to enough bigots on various subjects (including some very intelligent ones) to realize that in some people it appears to be hardwired well below any cognitive layer.
I think it was more just that thing of equating behaviour with mental illness when it’s pretty hard to know how much of anyone’s behaviour comes from that. And people with formal mental health diagnosis like bipolar already get stigmatised more than most, and attributing behaviour to their mental illness tends to make that even more so.
Bigotry is a different thing IMO.
I’m glad you explained what you meant to Richard and that he gets it now. All good.
I don’t know if this has been posted today but its a weak and cowardly position of Andrew Little over this and its even more cowardly and weak of john Key in not picking this up as well
Basically every politician, no matter what party they’re with, that doesn’t support this is a gutless coward
Maryan Street is completely right about this, we at least need to start talking about it
“staunchly prolife” engenders a whole spectrum of political beliefs in of itself, starting with an understanding that life is sacred and it is not man’s place to play God with and take others’ lives.
Yes, for various reasons, I think that any Government Authorised Suicide programme is a bad idea.
There are hundreds of improvements which should be made to the care of terminally ill people before this measure is even considered.
BTW if NZ ended up performing euthanasia at the same rate that the Dutch do, we would have 1,450 Kiwis a year die under a Government Authorised Suicide programme.
Yes, that’s four times NZ’s annual road toll.
And we’d be investigating whether or not the programme should be extended to children under 16 years of age.
I doubt the National Party Board and their major funders consider Joyce as an electable leader for the National Party. So I do not think that he will have any support from that quarter. And without that support, any leadership coup attempt is going nowhere.
I’m just working on the idea that Slater doesn’t give an opinion without an ulterior motive – a comment above suggests that his “Catholic mafia” line could have been aimed at knobbling any number of contenders 🙂
Before you jump to conclusions about the Catholic Mafia you may want to read this interview (plus 2 comments) with Simon O’Connor who is the chairman of the Health Select Committee that is tasked with the inquiry. Mr O’Connor was almost ordained as Catholic Priest.
The fossil fuel industry’s business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world’s addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.
As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.
It’s an interesting history lesson that connects the dots of US imperialism for the last 60+ years.
How nice it would be for the Western Empire to have a Qatari pipeline going through Syria; it would ensure energy supplies to Israel and the EU could access a massive amount of gas while cutting Russia out of the loop.
Damn that Assad for not allowing the use of his country for this project. He’s simply got to go.
Although I went to the trouble of identifying the work and the man portrayed I managed to get myself involved in a rather unpleasant flame war with another blog host when he posted the image below.
But he didn’t seem to be able to understand why some would find the manipulation offensive.
What sort of cultural infant would even think to do that?
And as for the shower curtains!! 😒
I wonder if the descendants have made any representation to these unthinking idiots?
If NZ took a leaf from the yanks’ book we’d make reproductions of moko illegal, and then try to extradite the sellers for “money laundering” because the payments were transferred from one account to another.
I heard it. Not before time, although it took a bit to get him to shut up. Talk about verbal diarrhoea! Never heard Kathryn Ryan so exasperated. Can’t she turn him off or something ?
Key said the intention was not to go beyond two years and the mission would be reviewed in 12 months. At the initial deployment.
really,
Now he extends them for another 18 months.. that’s 18 months on top of the 2 years. Oh btw did he not mention we are at war now or is that coming later.
So John Key , how do you feel about people sleeping under bridges?
JK : We’ve had a bit of a discussion about that and we are quite comfortable with that really, I mean there is no real safety issue here as the vehicles are well above them and being under the bridge they shouldn’t pose a distraction for the motorist. If they want to live under a bridge then be my guest.
Arrr, I was more referring to the homeless problem.
JK: Well I haven’t had any homeless approach me directly about this, but we desperately need more roads and bridges and we are pushing that through so that should produce a win win situation with the extra bridges.
Open access notables A survey of interventions to actively conserve the frozen North, van Wijngaarden et al., Climatic Change:The frozen elements of the high North are thawing as the region warms much faster than the global mean. The dangers of sea level rise due to melting glacier ice, increased ...
Bryce Edwards writes – New Zealand’s biggest-ever political donations scandal is finally at an end. But what is the conclusion? No one can really be sure. The Court of Appeal released its judgement on Tuesday about the Serious Fraud Office case against the NZ First Foundation. On ...
In 2015, then-Prime Minister John Key announced plans for a huge ocean sanctuary around the Kermadec Islands, banning fishing and mining from 15% of Aotearoa's EEZ. It was bold, it was ambitious, and it suggested that National might actually care about the environment. Except they fucked it up: Key failed ...
1. Who has just been given the accolade New Zealander of the Year?a. The Kokakob. The Cook Strait Ferryc. Fair God. Dr Jim Salinger 2. Which of these is an affront to decent society?a. Dame Edna Everageb. Mrs Doubtfire c. Dr. Frank-N-Furterd. Brian 3. Who is Penny Simmonds?a. The aspiring actress in Big ...
New Zealand’s biggest-ever political donations scandal is finally at an end. But what is the conclusion? No one can really be sure.The Court of Appeal released its judgement on Tuesday about the Serious Fraud Office case against the NZ First Foundation. On the face of it, the court found ...
Buzz from the Beehive Waves of rain are set to lash much of the North Island during Easter Weekend as a low-pressure system forms east of New Zealand, according to a weather forecast published in the past day or so. Niwa was warning of a “moisture-laden” long weekend, with rain expected ...
Look around us…Nicola Willis’ promises of balancing the books, of cutting spending without reducing services, and of delivering game changing tax cuts are disappearing before her eyes.Everyday we see stories of violent crime ending in horrific injuries, or worse. The cost of living worsens, whereas the PM claimed renters would ...
TL;DR: My top six news of note on the morning of Thursday, March 28 include:The Government will have to borrow between $10 billion to $15 billion more than previously expected in order to make up for a slowing economy and to pay for $14.9 billion of tax cuts, according to ...
This story by Naveena Sadasivam and Kate Yoder was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The long-awaited jobs board for the American Climate Corps, promised early in the Biden administration, will open next month, according to details shared exclusively ...
Should landlords be able to deduct the interest on the loans they take out to bankroll their property speculation? The US Senate Budget Committee and Bloomberg News don’t think this is a good idea, for reasons set out below. Regardless, our coalition government has been burning through a ton of ...
Treasury’s first report on the economy since the change of government presents a damning indictment of Labour’s economic management. The problem for National is that it is so damning that logically, coupled with a rapidly slowing economy, Finance Minister Nicola Willis should respond to it by postponing or even cancelling ...
Budget tensions are becoming evident within the Coalition Government. Winston Peters made numerous political points in his speech to the NZF annual conference. But the attack on his own government’s fiscal policies raised issues of substance. ‘Today in the Sunday Star Times, journalist and former advisor to the Labour ...
Buzz from the Beehive The media – sure enough – have been binging on Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ release of the Budget Policy Statement and a statement headed Government announces Budget priorities This assures us – or rather, this parrots the Luxon team mantra – that the Budget “will deliver ...
The Ides of March brought me COVID followed by a bereavement. No wonder they tell you to be careful of them.I’m home now and have resumed the interrupted recuperation. Very much looking forward to getting back to regular things. Meanwhile, some thoughts…OneThis new Prime Minister guy just keeps getting more dire. ...
News that the Chinese ATP 40 cyber-hacking unit penetrated parliamentary internet networks in 2021 has renewed concerns about the PRC’s malign intentions in Aotearoa. But is the hack that significant given the length of time that has passed since its … Continue reading → ...
When Parliament passed the Intelligence and security Act in 2017, they assured us all that it was full of safeguards. Any intrusive surveillance of New Zealanders would be subject to a "triple lock", requiring the approval of the Minister and (supposedly independent) Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants, as well as post-facto ...
Eric Crampton writes – Richard Harman’s Politik newsletter provides a bit of the context that ought to have been showing up in other media reports on potential reductions in public service staffing. Media has been reporting on staffing cuts on the order of about 7%. Is that ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – It’s becoming increasingly apparent that many perceive free speech to have become the preserve of the politically right wing, the religiously conservative, the libertarian fringe, the anti-trans, the anti-Māori and…. well, just fill in with whatever groups or individuals you don’t like and don’t ...
Don Brash writes – As everybody who is not blind and deaf is aware, there is a huge political preoccupation with climate change at the moment, a widespread (though by no means unanimous) belief that global temperatures are rising mainly as a result of the greenhouse gases created ...
TL;DR: My six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy on Wednesday, March 27 include:Chris Bishop laid out his vision for filling Aotearoa-NZ’s $100 billion infrastructure deficit in a speech yesterday, emphasising user pays and private funding, but failed to say how to achieve bipartisanship on population, public borrowing and ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Former Finance Minister Grant Robertson and former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins have been conveying how unhappy they are with the tax system. Last week in his valedictory speech, Robertson called for the introduction of a wealth or capital gains tax. And this week Hipkins ...
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 China has loomed large in Beehive considerations over the past 24 hours, largely because of that country’s mischief-making in the cyber espionage department. Two media statements emerged on that subject hard on the heels of the PM baulking at questions put to him on RNZ’s Morning ...
Chris Trotter writes – WHY IS THE NATIONAL PARTY doing so much for landlords, property developers, trucking, and construction companies, and so little for everybody who isn’t already pretty well-off? It’s as if protecting landlords’ investments and building apartments and roads now constitute the whole of National’s ...
Bryce Edwards writes – When she was campaigning to be Minister of Finance last year, Nicola Willis pledged that she would resign from the job if she failed to deliver tax cuts in her first Budget. Now, it’s that pledge, along with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s ...
Robert MacCulloch writes – The Reserve Bank has doubled staff numbers in five years to 510, with personnel costs rising to $80 million in 2023 from $32 million in 2018 – up by a whopping 150%. I guess when you print $50 billion and flood markets with liquidity, ...
The furore. In case you didn’t notice there was a controversy in the weekend involving dolphins in a little town off the South Island. Don’t panic, they haven’t declared independence and resumed whaling, this was simply a sailing event.The problem began when racing was cancelled on the opening day of ...
For 20 years or more, the case for a meaningful capital tax gains has been mulled over and analysed to death, including by the tax working group chaired by Sir Michael Cullen. More than once, the International Monetary Fund has said a CGT would be a good idea for New ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read: The Public Health Communications Centre (PHCC) call for urgent preventive action and a risk assessment survey of long covid in this briefing noteLocal scoop: NZ road deaths surpass OECD rates, so why is the govt reversing safety plans? ...
This story was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. This story is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising ...
This is a guest post from Robert McLachlan Global warming is accelerating; 2023 was off the charts. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. In New Zealand, transport accounts for half of all fossil fuels burnt. In the Emissions Reduction Plan, transport emissions fall 41% by 2035. As the ...
Labour productivity has been receding rapidly over the past two years, reversing a post-lockdown rise. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy as at 6:26am on Tuesday, March 26 include:Workers have been treading water in output per hour worked for 12 years, ...
TL;DR: The key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 2 include:Today, Parliament resumes sitting at 2pm for the second week of a two-week session. Officials for SIS and GCSB report their annual reviews in public to the Intelligence and Security Select Committee from 5.10pm.Tomorrow, ...
Faced with a barrage of criticism over the promised tax cuts from usually supportive commentators, Finance Minister Nicola Willis yesterday reaffirmed her intention to include them in this year’s Budget. The Government is up against it over the cuts just about every way it turns. Commentators like Fran O’Sullivan, Matthew ...
Here’s my pick of today’s substack posts as of 6:26pm on Monday, March 25: writes via his substack that Market-rate housing will make your city cheaper writes via his substack about the problems talking to double-cab ute (truck) drivers about their vehicles. today about moments of radicalisation in ...
Buzz from the Beehive Just before Christmas, Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivered something that was pitched as a mini-budget and brayed about the decisive action being taken to repair the Government books and support income tax relief in Budget 2024. In a statement headed Fiscal repair job underway. she introduced ...
My sister Belinda asked Dad yesterday what one word would describe Mum best. He said: vivacious.If you only knew her from the photos on the slideshow we've made for today,you might wonder about that, because the camera tended to lie with Mum.If ever she saw a camera pointed at her, she ...
There are two major public consultations closing in the next week, Auckland Council’s Long Term Plan (LTP), and the draft Government Policy Statement on Land Transport (GPS). Closing dates and times: LTP closes Thursday 28 February, at 11.59pm – a minute to midnight! GPS closes Tuesday 2 April, at 12pm noon – note that’s ...
From Kiwiblog’s David Farrar – Bryce Wilkinson writes: Senior Fellow Bryce Wilkinson’s analysis reveals that since March 2009, New Zealand has spent $158 billion more overseas than it has earned, but its NIIP has only fallen by $32 billion.Statistics New Zealand shows that receipts from overseas reinsurers have ...
Is she hinting that the Coalition Government will have to back down on key promises it made in Opposition? Brian Easton writes – The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is telling an evolving story about her fiscal challenges. In Opposition she was confident that she could ...
Dear Nicola Willis,Right now you’ve probably got lots of competing demands coming at you. Ministers who’ve inherited quite a mess, or so you’ve told us, looking for money in the budget to improve things. I imagine that’s why they came to parliament - to make things better.You’ll have to make ...
The Local Government, Transport and Auckland Minister hasthreatened councils with intervention if they don’t merge water assets to take them off balance sheet, just as the now-repealed Three Waters plan directed. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My six things of note this morning for Monday, March 25 include:Simeon ...
A listing of 36 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 17, 2024 thru Sat, March 23, 2024. Story of the week Thanks to John Mason having the stamina to sit down to watch "Climate - the Movie" ...
This morning the Q&A programme had Simeon Brown on to talk about National’s replacement for Three Waters. In case anyone’s forgotten the three are - drinking water, waste water, and sewerage. It’s quite important not to get them mixed up. In much the same way that you wouldn’t want to ...
Today’s newsletter comes with a mini-podcast conversation between me and my buddy Liv Tennet, talking about her time as a child actor in Lord of the Rings. It’s a conversation with a lot of giggles as she talks about falling off a horse, and becoming a meme. Read ...
The Desmog Climate Disinformation Database documents, "individuals and organisations that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming." It's a who's who of the organised climate change denial movement, in other words. In ...
Bob Edlin writes – A High Court judge has decided miscreants who have mana – or who claim to have mana – should be treated differently from miscreants who have none. It’s a ruling that suggests indigenous law-breakers have a better chance of securing a discharge without conviction ...
Welcome to the first, and possibly last, edition of Brickbats, Bouquets and Bull’s Wool. In which I’ll take a look at the events of the last week or so, and rate them.In such ratings the numbers usually have more to do with the opinions of the reviewer, than the actual ...
Roger Partridge writes – My earlier column this month, New Zealand’s highest court could be facing a turning point, prompted a flood of feedback from business readers and lawyers alike. A common query was what Parliament can do to restrain an overreaching judiciary. This week I discuss two steps Parliament ...
TL;DR: In today’s ‘six-stack’ of substacks at 6.16pm on Friday, March 22: writes about New Zealand's Building Boom—And What the World Must Learn From It over at his substack. challenges the Auckland Council’s use of a 3.8 degrees of warming forecast to oppose a wave-park and data centre project ...
Is she hinting that the Coalition Government will have to back down on key promises it made in Opposition?The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is telling an evolving story about her fiscal challenges. In Opposition she was confident that she could deliver her promised income tax cuts. Appointed minister, she ...
Buzz from the Beehive Ministers of the Crown have drawn attention to one sector of the science sector which is unlikely to be subjected to heavy spending cuts, a state-funded broadcaster which is doing nicely, thank you, and a sporting event that had $5.4 million from the public purse puffed ...
Abbott’s Freestyle Libre sensors allow continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). The sensor is applied to the back of the patient’s arm, with a thin filament under the skin measuring glucose levels constantly. But it costs around $100 per sensor and must be replaced once every 14 days. Photo by BSIP/Universal Images ...
The Inspector General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) recently released a report in which he exposes the existence of a foreign intelligence partner-controlled technological “capability” inside the headquarters of the GCSB, NZ’s 5 Eyes-affiliated signals intelligence collection and analysis agency. … Continue reading → ...
Peter Dunne writes – Nearly three decades after the introduction of MMP and multiparty governments there should be a greater level of understanding about their finer points than often appears to be the case. The reaction to the despicable outburst from the Deputy Prime Minister at the weekend highlights ...
The sweet kisses from fruit of summerHave slowly been turning dullerYou say, "those times"And "remember the daysWhen we went outside and there still was the shade?"Taking no reason into play…Autumn. Clear, blue days shortening to longer nights, growing colder. Aotearoa.That’s us. The temperature dropping, the looming car crash - so ...
Bryce Edwards writes – “It is often said that behind every great man is a great woman”. This is the pitch by the National Party Botany electorate branch to attend their “Ladies Afternoon Tea with Amanda Luxon”. For $110 including GST, you can turn up on Saturday 20 April ...
David Farrar writes – The Electoral Commission has published the expense returns for political parties for the 2023 election. I’ve put them in a table with how many votes a party got so we can see the spend per vote. National only spent $3.34 for every vote they got, almost ...
Winston Peters’ headline-making actions over the past week may have been a show of political power intended to strengthen his hand in Budget negotiations. It was no accident that his State of the Nation speech was as it was. He made it as New Zealand First Leader, not as Deputy ...
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The five things that mattered in Aotearoa’s political economy that we wrote and spoke about via The Kākā and elsewhere for paying subscribers in the last week included:Former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson bowed out of politics this week, giving a series of exit ...
Graham Adams writes — If you love the law or sausages, as the saying goes, best not to look too closely at how they are made. And after watching the orgy of self-pity when Newshub’s closure was announced on February 28, television journalism should definitely be added to the list of those ...
Venerable New Zealand political commentator, Chris Trotter (https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/), is a sad creature these days. Once one of the most reliable Leftist writers out there – Economic Left at that – Trotter seems to have absorbed the worldview of Auckland culture-war obsessives. It is not for me to categorise what he ...
The cruelty of short-term memory loss is that each time you ask where she is, you get the fresh shock and grief of the news. That was Dad's day yesterday.Comfortingly, it seems to be less so today. Last night he looked crumpled, today he seems more settled. There's a card ...
Photo by Alvan Nee on UnsplashIt’s that new day of the week (Thursday rather than Friday) when and I co-host our ‘hoon’ webinar with paying subscribers to The Kākā for an hour at 5 pm. Jump on this link on YouTube Livestream for our chat about the week’s news ...
Buzz from the Beehive One minister is talking tough while a colleague – whose ministry had acted tough and drawn a barrage of flak – has shown an official softening. Some ministers are doing what Labour was good at, which is distributing public funds to causes regarded as worthy or ...
A ballot for 4 Member's Bills was held today, and the following bills were drawn: Insurance Contracts Bill (Duncan Webb) Income Tax (Clean Transport FBT Exclusion) Amendment Bill (Julie Anne Genter) Crimes (Increased Penalties for Slavery Offences) Amendment Bill (Greg Fleming) Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) ...
One of the strongest narratives about "our" spy agencies is that they are basically institutional traitors, working for foreign powers (or just themselves), without any control or oversight by the elected government. And today, we have yet another report from the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security which explicitly confirms this. ...
“It is often said that behind every great man is a great woman”. This is the pitch by the National Party Botany electorate branch to attend their “Ladies Afternoon Tea with Amanda Luxon”. For $110 including GST, you can turn up on Saturday 20 April to meet the Prime Minister’s ...
The Coalition Government’s plan to ‘get Auckland moving’ is a cuts cover-up that will ultimately cost Aucklanders more to move around the city, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Slashing the Ministry of Pacific Peoples by 40% will have a devastating impact on pacific communities and further highlights how little this government cares about anything other than cutting taxes for the wealthiest few. ...
Labour has proposed an urgent inquiry to investigate the ever-increasing profits of supermarkets, aiming to lower costs for shoppers and food producers alike, says Labour Spokesperson for Commerce and Consumer Affairs Arena Williams and Primary Production Spokesperson Cushla Tangaere-Manuel. ...
With 14% of jobs on the line at the Ministry for Ethnic Communities, the responsible Minister Melissa Lee is failing to stand up for the very communities she’s meant to be representing. ...
COURT OF APPEAL: TRIFECTA OF VICTORY FOR NZ FIRST, TRIFECTA OF FAILURE FOR OPPONENTS For the third time since April 2020, New Zealand First has defeated the Serious Fraud Office and all those complicit in a malicious attack against a political party going about its lawful business in a lawful ...
The Green Party stands with people who live in public housing, people in dire housing need, experts and advocates in demanding better than the Government’s archaic approach to housing those who need our support the most. ...
New Zealand has recently lost the hosting rights of some major international sporting events including the America’s Cup, the Rugby Championship, Netball World Cup, and the Wellington Sevens. We are now at a huge risk of losing SailGP as well. And it won’t stop there. The recent issues with SailGP ...
A Member’s Bill drawn this week would modernise insurance law and make things fairer and more transparent for consumers, Christchurch Central MP Duncan Webb said. ...
The Minister for Disability Issues has confirmed she was aware of funding issues in mid-December and did nothing to stop it. On 14 March, she signed off on changes that were announced and implemented on 18 March without any consultation with disability communities. ...
Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter says her members' bill is an opportunity for the coalition government to plug the gap in electric vehicle incentives. ...
The National Government continues to talk about irresponsible tax cuts that will only drive up inflation, despite the country entering a technical recession. ...
The Minister for Disability Issues must act urgently to reinstate flexibility around the funding for disability support and apologise to disabled carers. ...
This story has been initiated by a leftie shill reporter who proactively sought to call a member of a former band, which disbanded twelve years ago, give their biased appraisal of what was said in my speech, and concocted a ham-fisted attempt at a story that does nothing but show ...
The Government has accepted Labour’s change to the Road User Charge (RUC) discount for hybrid vehicles, meaning there will still be some incentive for people to buy greener vehicles. ...
Many in the mainstream media have taken what was said in New Zealand First’s State of the Nation Speech in Palmerston North on Sunday and deliberately, deceitfully, and ignorantly misrepresented what I said and why I said it. The headlines and commentary on the news stated that I compared ‘co-governance ...
Kicking the most vulnerable people out of state housing and pushing them towards homelessness will result in a proliferation of poverty and trauma across our most vulnerable communities. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader and MP for Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi has penned a letter asking MPs to support his members bill to remove GST from all food. The bill is expected to go through its first reading in parliament this Wednesday. “I’m calling on all political parties to support my ...
Good afternoon. Thank you for, in your very busy lives, turning up to this meeting today. On October 14th last year New Zealanders overwhelmingly voted for change. That is exactly what this new government is bringing. New Zealand First campaigned to ‘take back our country’ and stop the disastrous economic ...
This year is about getting real with Kiwis and discussing the tough issues, as the National Government exacerbates inequality and divides New Zealand, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said ...
The Government adding Significant Natural Areas (SNAs) to its already roaring environmental policy bonfire is an assault on the future of wildlife that makes Aotearoa unique. ...
After 12 years of fighting to protect our moana we are finding ourselves back at square one and back at court. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency is sitting in Hawera to reconsider an application from Trans-Tasman Resources to dig up 50 million tonnes of the seabed in South Taranaki. This ...
Minister Shane Jones’ decision to step away from a seabed mining project is evidence of the murky waters surrounding the Government’s fast-track legislation. ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The Coalition Government’s miscalculation saga continues as it has forgotten an eyewatering $90 million gap in its interest deductibility cost figures, say Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds and Revenue Spokesperson Deborah Russell. ...
He Pou a Rangi Climate Change Commission has today released advice that says if the Government doesn’t act now New Zealand is at risk of not meeting its climate goals. ...
The Coalition Government has today confirmed it is abandoning first home buyers who are struggling to get ahead, says Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds. ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed the passing of legislation to move light electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) into the road user charges system from 1 April. “It was always intended that EVs and PHEVs would be exempt from road user charges until they reached two ...
New Zealand is strengthening its ability to combat illegal fishing outside its domestic waters and beef up regulation for its own commercial fishers in international waters through a Bill which had its first reading in Parliament today. The Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill 2023 sets out stronger ...
Economists Carl Hansen and Professor Prasanna Gai have been appointed to the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee, Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced today. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is the independent decision-making body that sets the Official Cash Rate which determines interest rates. Carl Hansen, the executive director of Capital ...
Apartment owners and buyers will soon have greater protections as further changes to the law on unit titles come into effect, Housing Minister Chris Bishop says. “The Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Act had already introduced some changes in December 2022 and May 2023, and ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters will travel to Egypt and Europe from this weekend. “This travel will focus on a range of New Zealand’s traditional diplomatic and security partnerships while enabling broad engagement on the urgent situation in Gaza,” Mr Peters says. Mr Peters will attend the NATO Foreign ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown is encouraging all road users to stay safe, plan their journeys ahead of time, and be patient with other drivers while travelling around this Easter long weekend. “Road safety is a responsibility we all share, and with increased traffic on our roads expected this Easter we ...
About 1.4 million New Zealanders will receive cost of living relief through increased government assistance from April 1 909,000 pensioners get a boost to Superannuation, including 5000 veterans 371,000 working-age beneficiaries will get higher payments 45,000 students will see an increase in their allowance Over a quarter of New Zealanders ...
Ensuring social housing is being provided to those with the greatest needs is front of mind as the Government restarts social housing tenancy reviews, Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka says. “Our relentless focus on building a strong economy is to ensure we can deliver better public services such as social ...
The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary will not go ahead, with Cabinet deciding to stop work on the proposed reserve and remove the Bill that would have established it from Parliament’s order paper. “The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill would have created a 620,000 sq km economic no-go zone,” Oceans and Fisheries Minister ...
Dam safety regulations are being amended so that smaller dams won’t be subject to excessive compliance costs, Minister for Building and Construction Chris Penk says. “The coalition Government is focused on reducing costs and removing unnecessary red tape so we can get the economy back on track. “Dam safety regulations ...
The coalition Government is expanding the medium-scale adverse event classification to parts of the North Island as dry weather conditions persist, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced today. “I have made the decision to expand the medium-scale adverse event classification already in place for parts of the South Island to also cover the ...
The passing of legislation giving effect to coalition Government tax commitments has been welcomed by Finance Minister Nicola Willis. “The Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill will help place New Zealand on a more secure economic footing, improve outcomes for New Zealanders, and make our tax system ...
Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Judith Collins and Tertiary Education and Skills Minister Penny Simmonds today announced plans to transform our science and university sectors to boost the economy. Two advisory groups, chaired by Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, will advise the Government on how these sectors can play a greater ...
The Budget will deliver urgently-needed tax relief to hard-working New Zealanders while putting the government’s finances back on a sustainable track, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The Finance Minister made the comments at the release of the Budget Policy Statement setting out the Government’s Budget objectives. “The coalition Government intends ...
The coalition Government will look at options to address a zoning issue that limits how much financial support Queenstown residents can get for accommodation. Cabinet has agreed on a response to the Petitions Committee, which had recommended the geographic information MSD uses to determine how much accommodation supplement can be ...
Cabinet has agreed to a short extension to the final reporting timeframe for the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care from 28 March 2024 to 26 June 2024, Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden says. “The Royal Commission wrote to me on 16 February 2024, requesting that I consider an ...
The coalition Government is delivering an $18 million boost to New Zealanders needing to travel for specialist health treatment, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says. “These changes are long overdue – the National Travel Assistance (NTA) scheme saw its last increase to mileage and accommodation rates way back in 2009. ...
The Government is recognising the innovative and rising talent in New Zealand’s growing space sector, with the Prime Minister and Space Minister Judith Collins announcing the new Prime Minister’s Prizes for Space today. “New Zealand has a growing reputation as a high-value partner for space missions and research. I am ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has confirmed New Zealand’s concerns about cyber activity have been conveyed directly to the Chinese Government. “The Prime Minister and Minister Collins have expressed concerns today about malicious cyber activity, attributed to groups sponsored by the Chinese Government, targeting democratic institutions in both New ...
Independent Reviewers appointed for School Property Inquiry Education Minister Erica Stanford today announced the appointment of three independent reviewers to lead the Ministerial Inquiry into the Ministry of Education’s School Property Function. The Inquiry will be led by former Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully. “There is a clear need ...
State Highway 1 across the Brynderwyns will be open for Easter weekend, with work currently underway to ensure the resilience of this critical route being paused for Easter Weekend to allow holiday makers to travel north, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Today I visited the Brynderwyn Hills construction site, where ...
Introduction Good morning to you all, and thanks for having me bright and early today. I am absolutely delighted to be the Minister for Infrastructure alongside the Minister of Housing and Resource Management Reform. I know the Prime Minister sees the three roles as closely connected and he wants me ...
New Zealand stands with the United Kingdom in its condemnation of People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-backed malicious cyber activity impacting its Electoral Commission and targeting Members of the UK Parliament. “The use of cyber-enabled espionage operations to interfere with democratic institutions and processes anywhere is unacceptable,” Minister Responsible for ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Judith Collins today announced New Zealand will provide logistics support for the upcoming Solomon Islands election. “We’re sending a team of New Zealand Defence Force personnel and two NH90 helicopters to provide logistics support for the election on 17 April, at the request ...
The European Union Free Trade Agreement Legislation Amendment Bill received Royal Assent today, completing the process for New Zealand’s ratification of its free trade agreement with the European Union. “I am pleased to announce that today, in a small ceremony at the Beehive, New Zealand notified the European Union ...
Public consultation on the terms of reference for the Royal Commission into COVID-19 Lessons has concluded, Internal Affairs Minister Hon Brooke van Velden says. “I have been advised that there were over 11,000 submissions made through the Royal Commission’s online consultation portal.” Expanding the scope of the Royal Commission of ...
Hardworking families are set to benefit from a new credit to help them meet their early childcare education (ECE) costs, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. From 1 July, parents and caregivers of young children will be supported to manage the rising cost of living with a partial reimbursement of their ...
A specialised Independent Technical Advisory Group (ITAG) tasked with preparing and publishing independent non-binding advice on the design of a "green" (sustainable finance) taxonomy rulebook is being established, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. “Comprising experts and market participants, the ITAG's primary goal is to deliver comprehensive recommendations to the ...
Defence Minister Judith Collins has thanked the Chief of Army, Major General John Boswell, DSD, for his service as he leaves the Army after 40 years. “I would like to thank Major General Boswell for his contribution to the Army and the wider New Zealand Defence Force, undertaking many different ...
25 March 2024 Minister to meet Australian counterparts and Manufacturing Industry Leaders Small Business, Manufacturing, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly will travel to Australia for a series of bi-lateral meetings and manufacturing visits. During the visit, Minister Bayly will meet with his Australian counterparts, Senator Tim Ayres, Ed ...
Government commits almost $3 million for period products in schools The Coalition Government has committed $2.9 million to ensure intermediate and secondary schools continue providing period products to those who need them, Minister of Education Erica Stanford announced today. “This is an issue of dignity and ensuring young women don’t ...
Good morning, it’s great to be here. First, I would like to acknowledge the New Zealand Institute of Building Surveyors and thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning. I would like to use this opportunity to outline the Government’s ambitious plan and what we hope to ...
Minister for Pacific Peoples Dr Shane Reti has announced the Government’s commitment to the Auckland Secondary Schools Māori and Pacific Islands Cultural Festival, more commonly known as Polyfest. “The Ministry for Pacific Peoples is a longtime supporter of Polyfest and, as it celebrates 49 years in 2024, I’m proud to ...
Before moving onto the substance of today’s address, I want to recognise the very significant and ongoing contribution the Breast Cancer Foundation makes to support the lives of New Zealand women and their families living with breast cancer. I very much enjoy working with you. I also want to recognise ...
New Zealand has notched up a first with the launch of University of Canterbury research to the International Space Station, Science, Innovation and Technology and Space Minister Judith Collins says. The hardware, developed by Dr Sarah Kessans, is designed to operate autonomously in orbit, allowing scientists on Earth to study ...
Introduction Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today and I’m sorry I can’t be there in person. Yesterday I started in Wellington for Breakfast TV, spoke to a property conference in Auckland, and finished the day speaking to local government in Christchurch, so it would have been ...
The Coalition Government is contributing more than $1 million to support the establishment of an emergency multi-agency coordination centre in Northland. Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell announced the contribution today during a visit of the Whangārei site where the facility will be constructed. “Northland has faced a number ...
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Comment: Every year on February 2, a dozen men in tuxedos and top hats approach the burrow of a groundhog in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania and entice the beaver-like rodent to emerge and predict the weather. If the groundhog, named Punxsutawney Phil, sees its own shadow when it is summoned, legend ...
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Auckland Council has put a deadline on new weather-impacted property owners applying for categorisation as government funding looks set to run out. Councillors have voted to support a deadline of September 30 for property owners who haven’t accessed support to come forward and engage with the council’s recovery office. It ...
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By Anneke Smith, RNZ News political reporter A petition urging the New Zealand government to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people has been tabled in the House. More than 200 people gathered on Parliament’s forecourt today and they were met by MPs from Labour, the Greens and Te ...
Pacific Media Watch The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog RSF (Reporters Without Borders) has appealed for information about the “disappearance” of Palestinian journalist Bayan Abusultan. She was reportedly last seen on March 19 among people “sequestered” in this week’s raid and siege of Al Shifa hospital by Israeli troops in ...
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Contrary to the Associate Minister of Education’s claims, analysis of Healthy School Lunches Programme - Ka Ora, Ka Ako assessments has revealed it provides excellent value for the taxpayer dollar, as a groundswell of public opposition to Government ...
Greenpeace says wannabe Taranaki seabed miner Trans-Tasman Resources is likely banking on Christopher Luxon’s fast-track process to side-step proper scrutiny of its Taranaki seabed mining proposal by bailing out of the Environmental Protection Agency hearing ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne A national Essential poll, conducted March 20–24 from a sample of 1,150, gave the Coalition a 50–44 lead including undecided, a reversal ...
The Taxpayers’ Union has today made a formal request under the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information () for information held about how New Zealand Members of Parliament are spending taxpayer ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Nelson, Honorary Principal Fellow, The University of Melbourne A Byzantine depiction of the Eucharist in Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv.Jacek555/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA A nasty quarrel arose in the 11th century over what kind of bread should be used in holy ...
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Whether you’re facing layoffs or are just an emotional junior staffer, it’s always a good idea to scout out a good crying place before you need it. It’s an incredibly hard time for Wellington. Across the city, thousands of public servants are hearing tough news about redundancies and layoffs. Government ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Miller-Jones, Professor, Curtin University Nuclear explosions on a neutron star feed its jets. Danielle Futselaar and Nathalie Degenaar, Anton Pannekoek Institute, University of Amsterdam, CC BY-SA How fast can a neutron star drive powerful jets into space? The answer, it ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daryl Adair, Associate Professor of Sport Management, University of Technology Sydney Earlier this week, independent MP Andrew Wilkie accused the AFL of conducting “off the books” illicit drug testing to identify players using substances of abuse, then inappropriately withdrawing them from matches ...
The Government’s announcement that it will scrap plans for a vast marine sanctuary around the Kermadec Islands is ‘shameful’ and will make it impossible for Aotearoa New Zealand to meet its international commitments, says the World Wide Fund for Nature ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland Shutterstock The federal government has bowed to pressure from the car industry, announcing it will relax proposed emissions rules for utes and vans and delay enforcement of the new standards ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzanne Rutland, Professor Emerita, University of Sydney In his latest book, Jewish Life in Medieval Spain, Jonathan Ray focuses on the tumult of the 14th century in Spain – a time of the plague, civil strife and war between the two largest ...
While creating a slate of world-class shows, Whakaata Māori also developed a generation of world-class creatives. Television is an odd word. It mixes the Ancient Greek and Latin languages, and its most literal meaning is “far-off sight”. In the contemporary and living language of te reo Māori, “whakaata” as a ...
Yesterday the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza. This significant step and the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza prompted an urgent debate in the New Zealand Parliament. Leader ...
The Government’s decision to reduce access to continuous glucose monitors (CGM) not only threatens the lives of children with type 1 diabetes and increases the potential for ‘Dead in Bed’ syndrome, but also threatens the health of their parents an ...
Apples are available year-round, but the wide variety on offer involves intensive scientific research – and large-scale commercialisation. What’s beautiful, red, sweet and crunchy? Tony Martin’s favourite kind of apple: Sassy. The CEO of apple and pear breeding organisation Prevar, Martin’s fondness for Sassy represents professional success as well as ...
Family violence specialist service Shine is calling on employers to stop asking for proof of domestic violence in order for employees to access domestic violence leave. The call comes five years after the introduction of the Domestic Violence ...
The Deputy Chairperson of the Finance and Expenditure Committee is calling for public submissions on the Budget Policy Statement 2024. The Budget Policy Statement 2024 (BPS) sets out the Government's priorities for the 2024 Budget. It explains the approach ...
Brutal government spending cuts that will see the size of the Ministry for Pacific Peoples slashed by 40% will hit Pasifika communities hard, the PSA says. The Ministry has told staff that it is seeking voluntary redundancies, and to redeploy and reassign ...
I live with five people I mostly love, but our different ideas about generosity are starting to really irk me.Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nzDear Hera,This is a bit of a random one but here goes. I’m 22 and work an OK job (OK meaning I get paid ...
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The Taxpayers’ Union is welcoming the investigation into the Department of Internal Affairs after it was revealed that the Department’s Chief Executive personally reached out to expedite a DJs passport application. Taxpayers’ Union Campaigns ...
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A lengthy response to the recently released draft Government policy statement on transport will soon be delivered from Auckland Council to Minister of Transport Simeon Brown. A submission raising concerns about funding distribution and the plan’s treatment of Auckland passed through the council’s transport committee on Wednesday, despite some councillors ...
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Another day in John Key’s neo-liberal nightmare.
We have become a cruel, greedy, uncaring and selfish nation under his wretched leadership.
Yet there are people who still care and who are unselfish.
Te Puea marae represents the best of New Zealand.
Uncaring.
The present regime running WINZ and Housing NZ represents the worst.
‘Te Puea Marae steps up to find cancer teen and family a home
Her father, who previously worked as a painter in Hamilton, tried to find his family a home.
“He would go to Winz for appointments, he told them about me having cancer, about us.
“They did nothing. He went to Housing NZ, told them. They couldn’t find us a house. Too full, they said, too full.”
When things at her aunt’s “got really tense”, the family left and had stayed at the marae since.’
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11659501
Another day in John Key’s neo-liberal nightmare.
We have become a cruel, greedy, uncaring and selfish nation under his wretched leadership.
Uncaring and incompetent.
Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett
‘Social housing and community agencies have not yet had approaches from clients wanting to take up a relocation grant, available from today, to move out of Auckland.
The grant of up to $5000 announced last month by Social Housing Minister Paula Bennett will be available from today. The money for relocation costs will not need to be paid back unless the person moved back to Auckland within a year.
Despite the scheme being launched today, the Ministry of Social Development could not tell RNZ News how many Housing New Zealand houses were available outside of Auckland, and where they were.
“It is too soon to answer this question. The grant is available for any vacant housing, including private rentals, or social housing,” the department said in a statement.
At the time she announced the grant, Paula Bennett said there were dozens of empty houses in other parts of New Zealand, such as Lower Hutt where there were 18 state houses ready to let, Palmerston North where there were 15 and Gisborne with four.’
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/306790/'little-information'-on-grant-to-move-to-regions
making shit up as they go along.
or maybe instead of reading the future with the help of tealeaves and bones, they ‘Ministry of Social ‘Welfare” is waiting for Paula Bennett to drop a dump and then they gather around the turd and read the future out of that.
Oh look, she had sushi last week for dinner.
Apparently ( according to Tracy Watkins of Fairfax) Bennett was at the Field Days a lot last week.
Too busy to be dealing with the housing crisis…….
Apparently ( according to Tracy Watkins of Fairfax) Bennett was at the Field Days a lot last week.
Too busy to be dealing with the housing crisis…….
I wonder if she realises that $5000 isn’t actually enough to cover the expenses of moving a family.
Nor does it say that $ 5000 is the amount anyone who moves is going to get. Firstly, its “up to”…, secondly knowing WINZ they will want quotes for everything, then pay out not a cent more, even if those quotes were a guess. Family and friends helping out won’t get anything for their efforts, but a moving company will.
If anyone hears of (and proves) a case where this offer was taken up and the person given $ 5000 to relocate at their leisure, I will eat my hat.
+1
Another day in John Key’s neo-liberal nightmare.
We have become a cruel, greedy, uncaring and selfish nation under his wretched leadership.
Yet there are people who still care and who are unselfish.
Kai for Kids represents the best of New Zealand.
A government that rejected Mana’s Feed the Kids Bill 4 years ago represents the worst.
‘1200 school lunches in under an hour: Porirua community pitches in to help hungry kids
“Attendance is really low on Mondays and Tuesdays because Wednesday is benefit day.”
“Kids don’t come to school because they don’t have any food to bring.”
Two months later, Clifford and her volunteers now make 1200 lunches for a dozen Porirua schools.”
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/81198151/1200-school-lunches-in-under-an-hour-porirua-community-pitches-in-to-help-hungry-kids
http://www.maoritelevision.com/news/politics/feed-kids-bill-looks-doubtful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4hDkENOy6M
The fucking Herald must be being paid for this shit. It has run a piece on poor Paula as a victim ” I’ Ve been cyber bullied because of my size”. Well stop eating so many fucking pies then !.
its when National decamp from the chamber for Bellamys, as soon as question time in Parliament is over. I doubt they serve pies.
The media are getting irrelevant, from promoting social engineering like bullying ,oh poor me child Max Key, and reading his latest antics of his music video, to children of musico’s complaining they just get sex offers from men because their daddy is famous.
Nationals brighter future is the homeless sleeping in Aucklands Well lite CBD.
Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what large people do, they always attract abuse including in the form of people telling them there is something wrong with them for the way they eat. In other words the problem with fatphobia is that too many people have prejudices about fat.
Call Bennett out on her politics, her meanness and the atrocious government she works for. Plenty of material there without going for the prejudices about fatness.
“Call Bennett out on her politics, her meanness and the atrocious government she works for. Plenty of material there without going for the prejudices about fatness.”
+1
Same goes for Gerry Brownlee too. Call him out on his stubborn bullish authoritarian ways, not his size.
Prejudice against another’s body is unhelpful. We have no right to make judgements or assumptions about people’s diets, especially as we don’t know, and have no right to know their medical history, such as prescription medicine side effects, endochrinological/hormonal disorders and or injuries that prevent exercise that may have contributed to a person’s weight gain. It’s not all about food.
Drop the fatphobia folks. It’s discrimination.
I called her out because she intimated that she couldn’t,t help being that big, I doubt that she has an endocrinological or hormonal problem because that only occurs in a very very small percentage of people, ( but it makes a good excuse for those unafficted ) and she was half that size when she entered politics and got introduced to the trough in all its permutations.
BTW, I’m overweight and I’m that way because I eat too much and if someone calls me fat I have to agree with them.
You know, there are other reasons for people being fat than “endocrinological or hormonal problem[s]”, or “because [they] eat too much”.
Your weight is irrelevant Adrian. It’s not about others agreeing whether you are over weight or not. You know that and so what. If you know you eat too much then that’s your buzz, it doesn’t mean EVERY other big person is big for the same reason as you.
Your weight doesn’t give you license to attack others for the same reasons.
Pullya Benefit is a nasty vindictive spiteful person who bullies others by disclosing sensitive and private information so she can put herself in a position of power.
Her size has got nothing to do with it, and we know nothing of her medical history and shouldn’t speculate on it either. That’s her business, not yours or mine.
+1
+2
For what its worth, agreed
Noted, pr. I suppose we can all experience life’s little surprises now and then, like you and me agreeing on something 😀
Rosie I see where you are coming from, but she has been, not so long ago much smaller than she is now, she yo yo’s with her weight but she can obviously get smaller from eating less, so it probably isn’t a hormonal problem. I see it more as an emotional problem as being an eater for comfort because of the stress of her job and/or being out of her depth or just because she over eats because she enjoys her food. What I cannot understand is seeing she is seen as an intelligent women, surely she sees the health issues she is bringing on herself, heart problems and definitely diabetes because of all her “belly fat” which is what the medical profession call it. Its difficult not to criticise when there are many people who can lose weight and keep it off – self discipline plays a part and pride in one’s appearance is another. Now don’t bite my head off please.
Again. Some one else’s size is their own business. Why do we feel we have a right to criticise or even speculate about their supposed issues? What’s it got to do with us? It doesn’t matter if Pullya Benefit’s shape has changed in the time that we have seen her in parliament.
Speaking of “self discipline and pride in one’s appearance” is very much the line fatphobics use. What you are saying is fat people are ugly and lazy. That is highly prejudiced.
Another sign of fatphobia is faux concern for another persons health. And you do realise that not all heart disease is weight related don’t you? My father died at age 54 from heart disease and he was an average size man. Mr Dr tells me the biggest indicator for heart disease is genetics, even above and beyond smoking. Stress is a bigger killer than weight, so why aren’t we hating on all the stressed people? A person can be overweight but still be fit and healthy and live a long life.
Don’t get sucked into the hate Kate. You’re better than that.
I hope the NZ police are keeping an eye on this website, whose readers are celebrating the killing of Jo Cox and looking forward to similar acts here: https://yournz.org/2016/06/19/crusader-rabid/
Another day of Pauls impotent whining. Do us all a favour and stay in bed.
Sounds like you make a special effort to read Paul’s comments 🙄
Not really, I try to see things in a positive light and see no point in trying to bring everyone down with a daily dose of repetition. The sun is shining, it’s the shortest day onward and upwards.
desperately looking for that brighter future, eh?
Tarquin, how about the eye of the beholder thing? Winter solstice, I mourn because I love the cold, short dark days of winter – all moody and introspective as they are, yet cosy, safe and warm by the fire.
Like a true former teen goth I celebrate summer solstice as it’s marks the countdown to winter. Until Autumn comes it’s long wait through the drunken violence of summer (other’s, not me), water restrictions, insufferable heat, mozzies and flies, phoning noise control at 1am, and invites to hideous work xmas parties.
Can’t all see the world the same way eh?
Very true, I’ve only just finished moaning about the heat and now I’m wishing it back again. Up here in Northland we don’t get a real winter, maybe a frost or two and it just rains all the time. I had a white Christmas in England a few years ago – that’s how winters should be.
Ha ha. Well you’re living in the right part of the country if you like it warm.
Like wise, in winter in the southern hemisphere can you pull off an alright mid winter xmas, minus the snow unless you live somewhere really cold. I’ve done some good solstice parties over the years, around the fire.
As for Paul. What he is posting is politically and socially relevant. It IS the depressing truth. It’s really hard to jazz up our reality in any way that makes it palatable. Because of that I find it a bit much early in the morning myself so flick through. However I always read Paul’s posts he posts separate to the early wake up morning cup of depression. I guess we all have ways of expressing our anger and grief over our witnessing of our country going to the dogs.
You sound very much like National’s ex-party president Michelle Boag, who was on the panel of Q&A last Sunday. She appeared to be oblivious of the strive people were going through in this country, apparently in her eyes all was rosy;-)))
By the sounds of things you should be the one staying in bed. You obviously need the rest as you’re getting overly stressed-out.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/cyber-bullying/news/headlines.cfm?c_id=1504076
PB oinks about bullying this morning, does anyone else find this ironic?
Funny how John Key only has time for a few minutes before 8am to be interviewed on RNZ.
By the time he blusters and confuses the issue under questioning the time pips sound. End of story.
Wonder if he chooses the time for the interview?
Guyon could record an interview that went past 8am and play the balance after 8.
Hone’s interview by Guyon would be more interesting but his attempt at humour, trying to be the ‘comeback kid’ in an analogy to a band with singers and bass players etc. is about as silly as his artificial dote com fiasco.
We have enough clowns in parliament already.
enough clones also
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11659634
A new, to me, Herald news summary online with visuals. Like TV I guess.
German Foreign Minister Steinmeier says NATO should not be inflaming the situation with Russia
https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-slams-nato-warmongering-russia-115515814.html?ref=gs
So weka, back to answer your question, you raised here:
http://thestandard.org.nz/kiaora-matariki-puaka/#comment-1190406
or at least attempt to.
“It seems like we have waves of momentum, and then gaps. What can we do to fill the gaps or at least tide us over?”
Probably best if someone who has been in a leadership in activism for decades to answer this curly one. However my 2 cents worth centres around socialising. Yes, socialising, on and off line.
Personally though, I prefer the off line version. In meeting new people and growing bonds with those we know, in person, we don’t miss out on all the subtle non vocal expressions that create a depth to the relationship. We can create intellectual relationships on line and they can be enhanced as we, as a collective (I”m talking about the wider world, not us on TS necessarily) create and ride a wave, but energy falls a bit flat during the troughs does it not? EG, look at online conversation pre and post general elections.
Although, in saying that, I noticed the opposite on the Bella Caledonia site post Scottish indyref – the talk was flat out, soul searching, expressing feelings etc. They even had a guest post by a psychologist to analyse the results and fall out. Their response could be down to different cultural approaches to communication – The Scots might be better communicators than NZer’s, I don’t know. (but the Scots I know and have met are great talkers and listeners)
So, I see advantages in socialising as in holding momentum during trough periods. During these times we build loyalty, maintain bonds, maintain solidarity, and maintain the flow of ideas. New ideas can be discussed and existing ones reworked. The group’s mutual interest remains a living thing rather than it being sucked into a vacuum of loss. Socialising keeps an interest alive and when the time comes to ramp up activism the platform is stable and the group is already in synch to go to work on a project or campaign.
Hope that makes sense.
Wow, that is such a great comment Rosie, I wasn’t expecting it to go in that direction.
I completely agree. I’ve been in online communities where there is more relationship building than happens here or on places like FB or twitter, and so that social thing where you have something solid happens more. But still I agree that the place it needs to happen most is in the physical world. I don’t know how to make that happen in my own life because most people I know are really focussed on life outside of political realities. I guess that’s why I come here.
But it reminds me of something that Naomi Klein said last year, when asked how she keeps going, she said it’s really important to get in a room with people who are doing the same kind of work, struggling with the same kind of things. I think you’ve really nailed it there, where it needs to happen within normal community interactions if it’s going to be stable and resilient (maybe Klein was talking about something else).
Take it from a pro, Naomi Klein would know. 😀
I empathise with your situation of not being physically around others who are focused on political issues/emerging social realities. It’s the same for me.
I do believe group social meeting is what we are going to need, to strengthen us for the next election, just for starters, as we have far bigger ongoing threats to our very existence, in climate change, as well as maintaining momentum and influence.
I think a while back Bill set up a regular meeting in Dunedin, where people met in a park. Hows that going people? Is there a way for Standardista’s to meet in person in their regions?
As I thought about socialising being a key thing to strengthening a group committed to a similar goal I received mail in my inbox from the Labour Party gen sec. He was asking if you were a 20 – 30 something professional interested in socialising. A great move I thought, along the lines of what I’d been thinking about. If that wasn’t your thing, age wise or work wise there was a survey to fill in with your thoughts about doing something similar.
I would be interested to see how many people turn up to a party AGM compared to how many people turn up to a party social gathering, especially if it’s a low cost thing. $ is a barrier for some of us.
Personally, in light of the Lab/Green MOU, I’d like to see a seasonal social get together, to build solidarity and to forge ties at the grass roots, where it really counts.
That should read “Naomi Klein’s a pro, she would know”. Just so there’s no confusion about who the pro actually is. 😀
Unconnected to the Standard, there are a few interested politically aware Dunedinites meeting in the next week as part of a Matariki event. I haven’t been involved in the organisation of the event but I would expect there to be 20-30 very politically interested minds show up.
In general terms I agree that face to face, in person political socialising is crucial to our future.
That’s really good to hear CV. Off the keyboards and exercising the vocal chords instead of the fingers. Hope it’s a fruitful event 🙂
Endless war, endless greed: The Pentagon is lining its pockets with taxpayer dollars
Obama now plans to rebuild America’s nuclear weapons cache, the latest in a series of military enrichment schemes
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/18/the_pentagon_is_soaking_us_all_partner/
Trump’s lies aren’t unique to America: Post-truth politics are killing democracies on both sides of the Atlantic
Voters no longer value truth, and Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are dangerously exploiting the new paradigm
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/19/trumps_lies_arent_unique_to_america_post_truth_politics_are_killing_democracies_on_both_sides_of_the_atlantic/
_LPRENT
You’ve been pretty harsh with a couple of my comments last couple day so i’m bringing it here to open it up and sort it.
Yep I made a couple boo boo’s, I retaliated too this
[deleted as irrelevant]
[lprent: This isn’t a negotiation, it is an observation of a continued pattern of behaviour and a demand for a permanent modification of some of those behaviours from a moderator. There is no point in various moderators continuing to point out deficiencies in your behaviour if you are too damn lazy or too thick or too self-entitled an arsehole to modify those behaviours.
1. Read the policy again. It is clear you haven’t understood it.
2. How you feel about it has absolutely no relevance and I suspect you don’t have sufficient experience with operating a blog to even be able to offer it. You are a guest on this site, your host is telling you to shape up or ship out.
3. Your only viable alternative to changing your behaviour here is contained in the last section of the about.
4. The only reason I’m bothering with this tedious exercise is because you haven’t been a particularly obnoxious
pestguest until recently.5. I really don’t care what you decide to do. So I won’t waste any more time on it. ]
This is a heart wrenching article. And in our back doorstep. Why do not NZ take the Nauru refugees – it is hard to see how these detention centres can be considered legal under human rights legislation – in particular for the unaccompanied children committing suicide.
“The worst I’ve seen – trauma expert lifts lid on ‘atrocity’ of Australia’s detention regime
Exclusive: In his 43-year career, Paul Stevenson has worked in the aftermath of the Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami but says nothing he witnessed was as bad as the treatment of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus”
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jun/20/the-worst-ive-seen-trauma-expert-lifts-lid-on-atrocity-of-australias-detention-regime
How many people out there think mental illnesses equate to a lower intellect, or reduced mental capacity?
I have found here some resistance to my points of view based on the fact I am mentally ill.
I am in fact B-Polar, and I have an IQ of over 160 according the 2 of the Psychologists who treated me through Hep C treatment.
My illness caused a chemical imbalance in my brain which causes me to have periods of massive empathy/depression and periods of manic/sleepless, fast thinking, impusiveness.
if untreated.
Currently outlooks for Bi-polar people are good, it does take time to find the right chemicals and once a balance of chemicals has been restored we live completely normal lives.
I recently found the right medication , for me it was Effexor, I snapped out of depression in the time it took for the pill to get into my blood stream and have been stable for over two months now.
Comments from LPRENT such as..
“I really can’t be bothered dealing with commenter’s mental issues over and over again and having them disrupting a reasonably rational debate. I suspect you don’t understand yourself well enough to understand your own issues and therefore are unlikely to be able to control yourself. So any ban that I am forced to issue will be for some time”
and the other day you insulted me and my mental health just like someone who knows absolutely nothing and is predjudiced.
I am shocked at the way you talk to and treated me, uses my disabilty and mental health to question my intellect and integrity.
Hi Richard. I can’t comment on the exchange you’ve had with LPrent.
I can, whole heartedly support you in your recovery from depression and your belief (or what I see as fact) that mental illness is in no way related to intelligence.
I’m someone who struggles with depression and chronic insomnia to the point where I can no longer work/ or find suitable part time work, so I’m thrilled to hear you’ve found a medicine that works. That can be a really liberating feeling.
Go well and stay well.
Kia Kaha!
Thanks Rosie, after so many years trying it was super liberating to not dive into depression whenever a saw a animal run over or bad news.
I have 2 months of stress less life now and i’m chilling back out daily. I feel the tension relax and everyday gets better without having to worry if I was about to swing in moods.
Prozac, citalopram, epillim by the truckload, they give you the antidepressants and assume you’ll be fine come back in a month they say, it never did squat, they even thought I was lying and putting it on after all the tablets didn’t do much, it took me over ten years of that and a Hep C treatment that has side effects of making you suicidal, to find a brilliant new Dr who took me over from my old Dr and she cured me in one med change.
I had given up, never give up if the meds aren’t working change them don’t linger on non active antidepressants Rosie is all I can say.
Awesome to hear you’re doing so well Richard after years of suffering. That really is a breakthrough. Well done you! It’s a good feeling, I find, to be back to one true self and feeling safe and well.
It is hard for people in a clinically depressed state to cope with problems, bad news, and upsetting sights. You become sensitised to things and it spirals down. I’ve had to work with being overly empathetic to animal suffering but deal with it in different ways now.
I’m fine and dandy on the paroxetine now but still an insomniac. I use sleeping pills about 3 times a week to get by. I also try to keep a different future in mind too. Once the clouds lift you can see there are good things that ARE going on.
Take care. Rosie
I’ve had to deal with acute depression a number of times in my life, and seem to have quite a few friends and family with various mental aliments – including bigotry. I expect to help and deal with issues to do with it as and when I need to.
But what I was referring to was your attitude and actions on this site. Here I’m not interested in dealing with, protecting or helping you. I’m interested in protecting and helping this site as a place for debate. The way we do to deal with bad behaviour for WHATEVER cause, is to warn about behaviour and (if required) to remove the ability to write comments.
The proportion of people commenting or authoring on this site with various afflictions (mental, physical, bigotry or addictive) probably isn’t that too dissimilar from society at large. However most of them manage to control their behaviour to the level that I don’t notice them. I can’t see any reason that I should treat you differently to them.
There are limits to the amount of time that I (or any other moderator or author) can be expend on this site. And after more than 8 years of doing it, I tend to push so that I don’t have to spend too much time dealing with someone acting like an arsehole. I find it is less of a problem to whack hard once so I don’t have waste time to play whack-a-mole with dickheads.
Respect Lprent, sorry you had too crack out the sledgehammer , but I respect your doing it, now that we had a chance to one to one, vs catching each other on a thread, and distracting from the thread.
Some of the odd comments were tongue in cheek and I have learned humour often gets taken literally here if your not super careful to announce how your inferring a comment.
My comments should tidy up as a I get more familiar with the morally accepted peer standards here.
Thanks again for posting this and allowing me to relate my concerns and have them answered.
Kind regards
Richard
[lprent: Ok, the warning has been heard. Removed from moderation. We will see how it goes. ]
Thanks for that.
Humour, more often than not, simply doesn’t come across in text. To indicate that you’re being humorous usually means that you have to add smileys and/or tags.
Yes. I learnt the hard way in earlier days. Tongue-in-cheek comments were taken too literally by some and I ended up on the receiving end of a few unpleasant barbs. Even adding emoticons or plain language tags is not always a guarantee. Best to confine oneself to such comments when the post itself is humorous and/or satirical in content.
Try being humorous on here if you’re seen as a tory 🙂
Right wingers with a sense of humour are usually given credit on this site. Just remember to add the smiley or a humour tag so we know… 😉
Or a /sarc tag so I (and others) don’t take what is said literally.
You have to remember that in this environs we can’t see the puckish smile (wasn’t he a rodent in one of williams plays ?) /sarc .
… we can’t see the puckish smile (wasn’t he a rodent in one of williams plays ?) /sarc .
No, he was fairy. 😀
I played him once in a high school play.
It doesn’t come across as puckish when a policy hurts someone – making a joke of their pain is provocative.
C’mon Stuart Munro. Just because we have a teeny wee bit of fun doesn’t mean we don’t feel strongly for those who are the victims of this heartless and horrible government. Some of us have even been there in one form or another.
There’s still room to lighten up and maybe even have a laugh at ourselves.
Yes… except that with a pretty vacuous and actively biased MSM there is little or no channel for normal outrage. A not too politically interested person who gets their news from TVNZ, stuff, and the Herald could be forgiven for thinking that Nick Smith was vaguely competent or Paula Bennett compassionate.
There is a need to roundly damn this government, in adition to dispassionately discussing alternatives. The trolls never sleep, and never miss an opportunity to paint this vicious and dysfunctional kleptocracy as marginally competent and technically human.
I agree that that part of Lynn’s statement was a form of prejudice in terms of mental health and I wish he hadn’t made it. I hope you can pull back a bit anyway, because I like your contributions on ts in general, and I think you bring perspectives that we don’t otherwise have and I find that valuable. There are rules though, and if you break them too often it’s easier for the site to give you time out.
I do think you are stepping over the bounds a lot at the moment, and you will get moderated for that. Different moderators have different ways of approaching that.
fwiw, Lynn is an equal opportunity moderator and will be abusive to everyone pretty much equally if they piss him off as a moderator. That’s the bit to understand, it’s not a personal thing so much as what is seen with a moderator hat on. It takes time to moderate, there is more involved than in just making a comment. And that time is time we don’t get to spend doing other things. One of Lynn’s trigger points is where he finds he is having to use a lot of time on one person when they’ve already been warned.
My own is people derailing threads (you’ve noticed I’m sure) either by posting off topic or by posting things that are inflammatory.
I’m really happy to explain where I think you are overstepping the bounds if that’s helpful. It is good to reread the Policy, and they still need to be understood in the context of the culture of ts. Lots of people don’t get that, and some of those people end up with bans.
Moderation has changed a bit in the last 6 months, and IMO there has been an improvement in the debate culture. There is less tolerance for bickering and troll derailments. Shutting them down early on keeps discussions much more focussed on the topic of the post, which is the point of the site.
I’d see two main things happening with you at the moment. One is taking personal grudges across multiple conversations. It just disrupts thread, so if you can let it go, or keep it in the thread it originated in if it’s appropriate, that’s going to cause less disruption and get less moderator attention. If all else fails, do what you have done today and take it to Open Mike.
The other is to focus more on the politics. You have interesting ideas and ones that are challenging to some here, so finding ways to communicate those without having a go at people will work better in the long run. Yes, lots of what happens here is unfair (e.g. someone is rude to you and doesn’t get called on it). But it’s on all of us to act within the rules as much as we can and lower the need for moderation in the first place.
edit, just seen Lynn’s comment above, which is a very clear explanation that behaviour will be moderated no matter what the cause.
Only in that I view the type of bigotry that he was displaying as being a type of mental illness. It is pretty damn hard to explain it any other way. I’ve talked to enough bigots on various subjects (including some very intelligent ones) to realize that in some people it appears to be hardwired well below any cognitive layer.
I think it was more just that thing of equating behaviour with mental illness when it’s pretty hard to know how much of anyone’s behaviour comes from that. And people with formal mental health diagnosis like bipolar already get stigmatised more than most, and attributing behaviour to their mental illness tends to make that even more so.
Bigotry is a different thing IMO.
I’m glad you explained what you meant to Richard and that he gets it now. All good.
Equally understood, Weka, again sorry for the trouble.
I replied to Lprent and the same curtesy and sentiment is given to you.
Nice one Richard, glad you sorted it out 🙂
Rant begins
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/81219380/renewed-calls-for-euthanasia-debate-as-petition-submissions-set-to-break-record
I don’t know if this has been posted today but its a weak and cowardly position of Andrew Little over this and its even more cowardly and weak of john Key in not picking this up as well
Basically every politician, no matter what party they’re with, that doesn’t support this is a gutless coward
Maryan Street is completely right about this, we at least need to start talking about it
Rant over
I’ve seen Whaleoil mention the Catholic Mafia within National as being the main block in the euthanasia debate.
Same probably applies to Labour,
Didn’t think the Catholic Church still had that amount of power today
I’d say Bill English is staunchly prolife.
“staunchly prolife” engenders a whole spectrum of political beliefs in of itself, starting with an understanding that life is sacred and it is not man’s place to play God with and take others’ lives.
So you’d be against euthanasia, CV?
http://thestandard.org.nz/voluntary-euthanasia/#comment-1124288
Yes, for various reasons, I think that any Government Authorised Suicide programme is a bad idea.
There are hundreds of improvements which should be made to the care of terminally ill people before this measure is even considered.
BTW if NZ ended up performing euthanasia at the same rate that the Dutch do, we would have 1,450 Kiwis a year die under a Government Authorised Suicide programme.
Yes, that’s four times NZ’s annual road toll.
And we’d be investigating whether or not the programme should be extended to children under 16 years of age.
Bill English, Michael Woodhouse ,Chris Finlayson, Chester Borrows and probably quite a few others.
Well that’s depressing
Yes, there’s always a chance that joyce might make a tilt at the top job at any time. Slater needs to head that one off at the pass for his mate.
I think Steven Joyce prefers to be the power behind the throne.
as an imminent grease
I doubt the National Party Board and their major funders consider Joyce as an electable leader for the National Party. So I do not think that he will have any support from that quarter. And without that support, any leadership coup attempt is going nowhere.
I’m just working on the idea that Slater doesn’t give an opinion without an ulterior motive – a comment above suggests that his “Catholic mafia” line could have been aimed at knobbling any number of contenders 🙂
Before you jump to conclusions about the Catholic Mafia you may want to read this interview (plus 2 comments) with Simon O’Connor who is the chairman of the Health Select Committee that is tasked with the inquiry. Mr O’Connor was almost ordained as Catholic Priest.
Syria: Another Pipeline War
It’s an interesting history lesson that connects the dots of US imperialism for the last 60+ years.
How nice it would be for the Western Empire to have a Qatari pipeline going through Syria; it would ensure energy supplies to Israel and the EU could access a massive amount of gas while cutting Russia out of the loop.
Damn that Assad for not allowing the use of his country for this project. He’s simply got to go.
horrible misappropriating bastards
http://fineartamerica.com/shop/shower+curtains/lindauer
so culturally wrong but someones got to make money somehow //bangs head on anything…
gosh.
That entire site is Trump-tacky-ular…
shower curtains, I mean bloody hell!!!
Although I went to the trouble of identifying the work and the man portrayed I managed to get myself involved in a rather unpleasant flame war with another blog host when he posted the image below.
But he didn’t seem to be able to understand why some would find the manipulation offensive.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BD0t7ELvUV-/
that one made me sick joe
What sort of cultural infant would even think to do that?
And as for the shower curtains!! 😒
I wonder if the descendants have made any representation to these unthinking idiots?
If NZ took a leaf from the yanks’ book we’d make reproductions of moko illegal, and then try to extradite the sellers for “money laundering” because the payments were transferred from one account to another.
Might even get a helicopter raid on their home…
Am I the only one who heard Kathryn Ryan shout down Matthew Hooton this morning? First good moment in bloody years…
Ah that kind of explains felix’s somewhat obscure tweet today,
https://twitter.com/bsidebeats/status/744673898101248001
Off to have a listen now.
*shock*
I heard it. Not before time, although it took a bit to get him to shut up. Talk about verbal diarrhoea! Never heard Kathryn Ryan so exasperated. Can’t she turn him off or something ?
I wonder – she never stops him normally, but this time she was defending RNZ’s integrity..
I wonder if she has wanted to do the same in the past, but only today did she feel that she would have the backing of her own bosses?
Can’t she turn him off or something ?
That’s what I kept yelling out to her to do. She couldn’t hear me.
Kiwi troops to stay in Iraq for another 18 months. No one saw this coming.. then again I remember various spokespeople from the left saying this is exactly what would happen.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/81265744/kiwi-troop-deployment-to-iraq-has-been-extended-by-18-months
Yep deployment to now extend beyond the next election
Key said the intention was not to go beyond two years and the mission would be reviewed in 12 months. At the initial deployment.
really,
Now he extends them for another 18 months.. that’s 18 months on top of the 2 years. Oh btw did he not mention we are at war now or is that coming later.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11659951
Last line of that article:
Wtf!
Yes, amusing. I don’t know how poor Gerry can sleep at night, knowing that so many swords of Damocles are swaying and hovering above our heads…
vino
The only imminent threat NZ is experiencing is the National party, led by John Key they are doing far more damage to people than ISIL have in NZ.
Sadly that’s actually a fact.
Reminds me of this tweet from the Economist:
My reply:
Nice 1 DTB.
When will John Key speak out against this scofflaw regime?
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jun/20/the-worst-ive-seen-trauma-expert-lifts-lid-on-atrocity-of-australias-detention-regime
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=11660016
Now don’t bust your mouse furiously following this link nor froth so much your unable to offload your love of all things Paula Bennet.
However Barry Soper’s lovely post on PB just popped up and what do you know a comments section on her is open.
Good luck guys let her and Soper know we know, if you know what I mean.
She does not care, she’s a bully, you know the truth.
The $5000 is in part to be given to the removal Company and just $2000 given to the people as a start up grant, they said on Morning report today.
So John Key , how do you feel about people sleeping under bridges?
JK : We’ve had a bit of a discussion about that and we are quite comfortable with that really, I mean there is no real safety issue here as the vehicles are well above them and being under the bridge they shouldn’t pose a distraction for the motorist. If they want to live under a bridge then be my guest.
Arrr, I was more referring to the homeless problem.
JK: Well I haven’t had any homeless approach me directly about this, but we desperately need more roads and bridges and we are pushing that through so that should produce a win win situation with the extra bridges.