It does indeed look good, but I question the placing of John Campbell and Jon Stewart alongside the likes of Chomsky, Snowden, Hager, and Mihi Forbes.
I still can’t forget Campbell’s gleeful endorsement, night after night, of the National Party’s dirty tricks campaign against David Benson-Pope, and I can’t forget, or forgive, Stewart’s smarmy “Team Civilization” speech after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Not at all. I am on record here and on other fora criticising him for his thuggish behaviour in parliament—particularly his yelling out “Send him HOME!” whenever the subject of Ahmed Zaoui came up.
But the National Party and its media accomplices, like Campbell, didn’t attack Benson-Pope on those grounds. Instead they recycled wild accusations about him abusing school children, which were nothing more than a National Party dirty tricks campaign. None of the charges had any validity, but that didn’t stop the ridicule and the traducing of him In parliament and in the media. National MPs bawled “Pervert!” and “Child molester!” when he got up to speak, and perhaps the most sickening sight of all was when Judith Collins, of all people, stood in parliament, smirking at him and holding a tennis ball.
Campbell thought it was all great sport, and didn’t relent in the slightest even after Benson-Pope was reduced to tears under the National Party-led vilification.
Another article that shames our country and shows how far we have fallen since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s and our further lurch to being an extremely unequal society after 9 years of Key’s regime.
The richest 1 per cent of Kiwis have bagged 28 per cent — $42 billion — of the wealth created in a single year.
Meanwhile, the poorest 1.4 million people (30 per cent of the population), got barely 1 per cent — $1.5b — of all the wealth created in 2017.
The research also showed a mere 10 per cent of New Zealanders own more than half the nation’s wealth and the inequality gap had widened significantly in the past year.
It would be great to think that senior members of our government sat down and read the Oxfam report mentioned in this article. Then looked a the policies they have put forward to deal with issues of poverty in New Zealand. Then ripped them and listened to the suggestions made made by Rachael Le Mesurier.
Oxfam NZ executive director Rachael Le Mesurier said.
“People of the poorest population tend not to vote.
“Extreme inequality also fractures our society creating ‘us and them’, the haves and the have nots. This is not okay. “Fundamentally it’s trapping millions of people in poverty globally.”
“Governments can tackle extreme inequality here and globally by ensuring the wealthy and multinationals pay their fair share of tax by cracking down on tax avoidance — then using that money to make our country and the global economy a fairer place.
“To end the global inequality crisis, we must build an economy for ordinary working people, not the very few rich and powerful.”
Her suggestions….
tax the rich
tax multinationals
use tax to make the country a fairer place
I would add – remove all the laws in the country that enshrine neoliberalism and enact new laws that create a socialist state.
“Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her misery.”
I can’t help but suspect that the Telegraph article’s attempt to draw a line from Corbyn to the Khmer Rouge somehow suggests that its description of Venezuelan conditions and challenges might not be entirely impartial.
It may not be. But it’s hard to fault the observation of what is happening in Venezuela. Whatever the lens.
“Tearful Venezuelans had gone weeks without basic food items like milk, flour and toilet paper. It’s a sad but common part of daily life today in crisis-ridden Venezuela, a country that has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil. Colombian officials estimate that about 100,000 Venezuelans crossed the border. ” http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/20/news/economy/venezuela-world-worst-economy/index.html?iid=hp-stack-dom
Edit: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/26/venezuelas-problems-are-political-not-economic/
“Venezuelans go without basic goods like toilet paper and nourishing food; and the government appears helpless to deal with murder, robbery, assault, and corruption. Vigilantism is replacing formal policing. People die in pools of their own blood in filthy hospitals for lack of prescriptions and care. To save energy and ease the strain on the budget, government employees are required to show up for work only two days a week.”
“ismo — which is nothing more nor less than authoritarianism — has ruined Venezuela, as authoritarianism usually does. With unchecked political power, dictators are free to engage in any dumb idea they choose without a reckoning. For those who think Deng’s China or Pinochet’s Chile are examples to the contrary, note well that neither saw any economic thriving until they embraced a market economy, and only an economic illiterate or a moral idiot would encourage other countries to try their path with all the human rights abuses and instability that come with dictatorship. Chile mercifully passed into democracy with a push from the Reagan administration and its economy does well, while the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship breeds corruption and mismanagement; its economic model is obviously shaky, if not terminal. The comparison between Chile and Venezuela is also quite telling.”
I’m suggesting that you’ll post any old shit as long as you agree with its narrative, and that you’ll ignore patiently quantified data models if you disagree with where they point.
I don’t know why things are bad in Venezuela. I know a few years ago there was an attempted coup that focused on the now disfunctional oil companies, but maybe the leadership is corrupt. Maybe it’s a mixture, maybe one begat the other, maybe the shortages are the result of trade issue “encouraged” by the US – FFS Cuba put up with embargoes and crop burnings for decades, who knows what the CIA is up to.
But I am pretty sure that any relationship between someone like you (who will uncritically link to articles that compare Corbyn to Lenin) and the truth is at best purely coincidental – and quite frankly would be a statistical aberration.
You literally posted just the link. There was no accompanying criticism. So yes, you posted the link uncritically.
Corbyn’s policies […link…]) are symptomatic of the wider problems with socialist ideology.
In that case you share some of the “wider problems” of capitalism exemplified by the Belgian Congo and the Brazilian slave trade. 🙄
Love the way you keep linking to obviously deranged commenters. Corbyn is obviously just waiting to declare himself comrade generalissimo for life, according to your links. Good luck with that narrative, don’t let reality hit you in the arse on the way out.
Oh, so you present one guy’s reckons as evidence. He has an academic background, and he is also a right winger – a “liberal”, published on a website that claims to be “the leading organization opening the hearts and minds of 14–26 year-olds to the values of the free market, individual freedom, and strong personal character.”
The post you link to has little evidence, just claims, like this about socialism:
delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her misery.
eg?
Because, what I am seeing from the inequalities inherent in capitalism, is a great life for the few, and plenty of misery for large numbers of people.
He argues that capitalism is based on human behaviours, which are ignored by socialism:
The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives.
In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance. Market prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting, and private property rights provide an efficient, interrelated system of incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is based on the theory that incentives matter!
Ah but collaboration is a fundamental characteristic of human behaviours within society – without it there would be no society or development.
From the final link
“Rolling blackouts are causing infant deaths in hospitals where backup generators have ceased to function; the country is on pace to hit 700 percent inflation; outside of active war zones, the murder rate in Caracas is the highest in the world.”
How does that rate on your misery monitor?
The Russians were hoodwinked by Hitler, and found they had a common enemy. Aside from that, any association between the Soviet Union and freedom is purely accidental.
“so it was an accident that those pesky russians beat your boy hitler.”
I didn’t say it was accident. I said they became an ally with Britain out of mutual distaste for Hitler. Meanwhile, you have yet to come even close to condemning the totalitarianism, and acknowledging the ultimate failure, of the Soviet regime.
Your boy hitler was a totalitarian, and you have not condemned him yet.
“Meanwhile, you have yet to come even close to condemning the totalitarianism, and acknowledging the ultimate failure, of the Soviet regime.”
That comment means either your very dumb, or have not read anything I’ve ever said. Seriously the leninist project put back socialism back by 100 years, I think most here agree with that assertion, except unreconstructed marxist leninists.
Do you understand political economy? Or are you going to keep proving your ignorance?
But you have walked down a pathway and got lost. The Russians were hoodwinked by Hitler, who then invaded. And you still haven’t condemned soviet totalitarianism.
The lack of comprehension on your part hornet, makes me think you went to a private school. Your a purist, indeed a right royal marxist leninist in your modus operandi .
Oh well if you can’t work out where I stand from previous posts. I leave you to your hard right puffery. I’ll remind you, your boy hitler was a capitalist, .
“The lack of comprehension…”
…was on your part, and you inadequate knowledge of history. It was principally because Hitler hoodwinked Stalin that the USSR joined the allies. Until then, the Soviets were allies of Germany.
I’m accommodating for those who wish to learn:
“The invasion of Russia by Nazi Germany in 1941 shattered their formerly expedient pact and sent the USSR into the arms of the West.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ussr/
“I’ll remind you, your boy hitler was a capitalist”
Hitler was an evil dictator. And his politics were confused. If you can point to any reputable sources for your claim, I’d be interested to read more.
In the meantime, try finding capitalism out of this:
“The term “National Socialism” arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of “socialism”, as an alternative to both international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the “common good” and accept political interests as the main priority of economic organization.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
Hoodwinked, you implication that one man, hitler, was nazi germany , is quite frankly wrong.
The major corporations helped keep capitalism in place within all the fascist countries of Europe. Ever heard of IBM, ever drank Fanta? Just a couple, let alone all the car and other manufacturer companies. Ever heard of a guy call Albert Speer, he was a capitalist and in charge of war production.
Your right, they rejected free market capitalism, but not corporate or centralised capitalism. You should really read up on how capitalism works sunshine, you seem ill informed.
You could read up about Singapore, or Pinochet’s Chile to get a feel how it works. Saudi Arabia is another truly brutal capitalist country. Franco’s Spain was capitalist.
Do you even understand what your saying by capitalist, because it would appear you don’t – especially your warped ideas about how a fascist economy works. Italy was capitalist as well.
“, you implication that one man, hitler, was nazi germany , is quite frankly wrong”
I implied no such thing. But it was Hitler who made the decision to invade Russia. You seem to be moving as far away from the core point as possible to avoid admitting you were wrong.
Socialism was the only thing that saved capitalism – for a short time. It failed because capitalism still didn’t work even with the socialism bringing up the living standard of the many.
100% Draco,
Socialism was around way before capitalism in our history and was stable until they introduced a form of soft capitalism, so some took advantage of others , as capitalism can only survive if others are displaced and left to suffer and carry the burden of those who gain.l
No it’s not. It’s a piece of modelling based upon what happened in the real world and shows that we’re going down the same route as all previous civilisations.
Meanwhile, all those billions were, and are, only in poverty because of capitalism. Because of the capitalists taking control of their resources and denying them to the people.
And neoliberal capitalism is doing such a great job for our country.
You should look at the same of the stats for New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s.
Maybe the 1% like yourself couldn’t access Ferraris, but the rest of us were employed, secure and had access to free education and healthcare.
Most likely because we lived in a world in which our mum (the UK) bought all our produce, or told our sisters and brothers to buy our produce. By the mid 1980’s that world had long ceased to exist.
No, that wasn’t it. It was because the wealth got out to the general populace and the rich were well taxed.
As with all countries we’ve never needed trade to utilise our own resources for our own benefit. IMO, trade has actually kept us back as we focussed upon producing more of the same cheap shit (Primary produce) rather than developing our own economy to provide what we needed.
Our present economy is a massive waste of improving productivity and efficiency.
No it isn’t. Our present economy is employing more people than ever before, producing more trade than ever before, and delivering a standard of living higher than ever before.
“The ultimate rwnj rebuttal- it’s not as bad as them… ”
No, I didn’t say that. My claims have been about global poverty. But I repeat what I said earlier. Our present economy is employing more people than ever before, producing more trade than ever before, and delivering a standard of living higher than ever before.
“Thank the left, thank the Christians and Socialist who agreed we can do better. And did.”
There are many things socialists have done better. Destroyed economies. Slaughtered dissenters (including, btw, Christians). Starved citizens.
“Can a moral case be made for taking the rightful property of one American and giving it to another to whom it does not belong? I think not. That’s why socialism is evil. It uses evil means (coercion) to achieve what are seen as good ends (helping people). We might also note that an act that is inherently evil does not become moral simply because there’s a majority consensus.” http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/04/socialism.html
Stuart socialism failed (and continues to fail) because at its core it is an unworkable system. Capitalism is imperfect, but it is self correcting. Socialism is imperfect, and then countries run out of money.
I really wonder what impels you to flaunt your ignorance in this manner on a serious political site.
Socialism in the modern context is never fully implemented. The regimes that purported to do so fell very far short of the ideal, but they operated for 60 or 70 years nevertheless – as long as any modern capitalist state has done without a depression. They were riddled with corruption. They claimed in fact to be communist, but were totalitarian and despotic. An uncorrupted communist society would have chosen democratic processes to suppress corruption.
In NZ in the last three decades we have seen extremes of capitalism that have destroyed the basis of our economy. We are no longer a farming society, but a real estate speculating one. In spite of overwhelming public sentiment, governments continue to sell land offshore and propose to sign the frankly lousy TPP. Capitalism has no mechanisms to correct these failures – we are obliged to fall back on older civil means of punishing corrupted politicians.
The more common and more successful Fabian socialism which operated in NZ was a raging success. It inspired Popper to write The Open Society And Its Enemies. You are merely one of its enemies.
“Socialism in the modern context is never fully implemented.“
That’s an age old excuse, that you seem to believe excuses it’s abject failure.
“The more common and more successful Fabian socialism which operated in NZ was a raging success. “
No, it wasn’t. It was only viable when supported by guaranteed market access for our produce. It was an unsustainable dream, lived in a bubble.
“In NZ in the last three decades we have seen extremes of capitalism that have destroyed the basis of our economy. “
That is the height of ignorance. I can only assume you know nothing ng of the countries growth in exports, market diversification and employment.
Socialism is the only form of society that succeeds. You might long for a society with entrenched systemic poverty like India has under capitalism, but no representative democracy can aspire to such a backward state. Our people must prosper – not just those advantaged by inherited or stolen wealth.
“It was an unsustainable dream” Poppycock – it only became unsustainable when the political leaders of the time betrayed the populace and looted the public estate to enrich themselves instead of tooling up for the change in circumstances.
“I can only assume you know nothing”
Yes, fall back on insults you empty bag of wind.
Over the last three decades NZ has lost capacity in most of our productive industries, with the possible exception of dairy, which relies on unsustainable access to fresh water and to cheap foreign labour. In the meantime the capital value of such farms has risen so much that interest costs absorb much of any profit deriving from increased production.
We don’t build cars any more, or process most of our fish. Gangs of underpaid foreign workers have displaced local pickers and pruners. Post-earthquake construction has been conducted principally by foreign workers instead of upskilling locals, all of which over the long term represents a significant loss of capacity.
If someone had deliberately set out to ruin a prosperous country they wouldn’t have done a thing different – and your mythical capitalist self-correction is nowhere in evidence.
If someone had deliberately set out to ruin a prosperous country they wouldn’t have done a thing different – and your mythical capitalist self-correction is nowhere in evidence.
From what I can make out a few did purposefully set out to ruin a prosperous country. It’s far easier to get poor people to work to make a rich person richer than a well educated person who’s financially independent.
Yes, I think the exploited foreign workers prove that – no degree of local poverty is sufficient to make some local bosses as profitable as they desire.
Abstract
While it may be possible to mitigate poverty through social transfers, it is not possible to eradicate the processes that create poverty under capitalism. Eight such processes are discussed: i) the creation of the pre-conditions; ii) petty commodity production and trade; iii) technological change and unemployment; iv) (petty) commodification; v) harmful commodities and waste; vi) pauperising crises ; vii) climate-change-related pauperisation; and viii) the un-required and/or incapacitated and/or dependent human body under capitalism. Ways to regulate these processes and to protect against their impacts are discussed.
“Socialism is the only form of society that succeeds”
“To anyone not blinded to reality by their ideology, it is no secret that socialism, because of its inherent and essential nature, is, and must always be, an abject and disastrous failure. The failure of socialism and social engineering by “the best and brightest” of left-wing liberalism is once again being proven, the latest evidence coming from communist China, Canada, Britain, France, and Australia.”
RWNJ ignores all evidence, as presented by real research by the likes of Piketty and others, that shows that capitalism is the problem and not socialism. It was the height of socialism in the Western world after WWII where we also had the highest standard of living improvement.
It is since then and the implementation that we’ve seen an increase in poverty across the Western world.
None of which you support with any evidence whatsoever.
“It was the height of socialism in the Western world after WWII where we also had the highest standard of living improvement.”
Really? Socialism in the Western World? So how many people did the USSR slaughter? China?
You don’t have an argument Hornet, beyond bleating “Socialism baaaad”. You don’t even know what socialism is, you confuse it with communism and totalitarianism.
If you want further instruction from me you’ll have to pay for it.
Why would I read your sources – they’ve misled you to the point of fatal ignorance. I worked with soviet crews, saw first hand what was wrong with their system. But backward far-right nutbars always think they know better.
No moron – real experience trumps the maunderings of biased fools like yourself.
I have seen the truth of the soviet failure first hand and your callow reckons aren’t worth the pixels they’re written in.
Now, run along and play with your fellow ‘true believers’ – your view of socialism is a belief system, not a rational conclusion. It is hide-bound ignoramuses like yourself that led Karl Popper to his discovery of falsifiability.
That’s an age old excuse, that you seem to believe excuses it’s abject failure.
Communism is control of the means of production by the workers through a democratic system. None of the so-called communist countries meet that minimum requirement.
It’s not to excuse the abject failure of those systems. It’s to point out that the failure was down to the top down hierarchy. Exactly the same way that capitalism fails.
No, it wasn’t. It was only viable when supported by guaranteed market access for our produce.
Which logically means that capitalism must also fail without such guaranteed access to international markets. Guarantees that cannot be made and are, in fact, not coming. Even our FTAs aren’t guaranteeing that access as China’s threats to our exports prove.
The only sustainable means is to live within our means, within the resources available in NZ and to minimise international trade.
“None of the so-called communist countries meet that minimum requirement.”
There is no pure ‘capitalist’ nation either. Yet I’m not the one making excuses.
“Which logically means that capitalism must also fail without such guaranteed access to international markets.”
International trade is at the very heart of capitalism, making your comment a nonsense. A bit like saying ‘socialism must also fail without a central planning authority”.
“The only sustainable means is to live within our means, within the resources available in NZ and to minimise international trade.”
Tried, and failed. International trade has liberated billions of people from poverty, and opened nations and its peoples up to a vast choice of goods and services. If you want to live in the sort of environment your describe, I invite you to do so. North Korea springs to mind.
“It was your logic. We may have been somewhat socialist after WWII but we were still a capitalist economy dependent upon trade.”
But you said this “It was the height of socialism in the Western world after WWII where we also had the highest standard of living improvement.”
So which was it? Capitalist or socialist?
“Which must also apply to capitalism.”
There is no ‘guaranteed market access’ any more.
After WWII it was what was always called a mixed economy. It failed because of capitalism.
There is no ‘guaranteed market access’ any more.
That’s what the FTAs that we’ve signed and the WTO is for you moron. And they still don’t guarantee access to any market as every country can choose to not honour those agreements.
Not according to the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.
In the world and in NZ. That’s actually the whole point of the pricing mechanism – to limit access to resources. Poor people simply cannot afford them.
And the link you provide is pure ideology disconnected from reality. But that’s capitalism to a ‘T’. It sounds good but it’s not what it brings about. What it brings about is poverty and deprivation for the majority while a few get rich. Hence 8 people now having the same wealth as the poorest ~4b and it keeps getting worse. Of course, even the ideological rant that you linked to never once mentioned ownership which is what’s causing all that poverty and deprivation..
“After WWII it was what was always called a mixed economy. It failed because of capitalism.”
But that isn’t what you said. Here is what you said:
“It was the height of socialism in the Western world after WWII where we also had the highest standard of living improvement.”
The height of socialism is most certainly not a ‘mixed economy’. You have directly contradicted yourself.
“That’s what the FTAs that we’ve signed and the WTO is for you moron. And they still don’t guarantee access to any market as every country can choose to not honour those agreements.”
So you agree, there is guaranteed access.
“http://nzccss.org.nz/work/poverty/facts-about-poverty/fact-7-economic-growth-alone-does-not-solve-poverty/ https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/19/poverty-increasing-in-developed-countries-ilo.html http://www.wired.co.uk/article/global-poverty-oxfam-world-economic-forum”
Your have misrepresented your own sources. For example the Oxfam report is primarily about inequality. I quote from that report:
“While the number of people living in extreme poverty halved between 1990 and 2010, Oxfam argued that had inequality not increased during that period an extra 200 million people would have escaped extreme poverty.”
Your own cite states that the “number of people living in extreme poverty halved between 1990 and 2010.” That is a spectacularly successful outcome of capitalism.
“In the world and in NZ. That’s actually the whole point of the pricing mechanism – to limit access to resources. Poor people simply cannot afford them.”
Nonsense. Walk into a Warehouse. Or a Bunnings. The ‘poor’ in NZ can afford far more than my parents ever could.
We need to set up our society so that people can’t afford to own a huge amount of wealth. Maximum income with good capital taxes would easily achieve it.
Do you think it is morally acceptable that Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) has $100 billion in the bank while his minimum wage workers need food stamps to get by?
No, I want a society that doesn’t have rich people in it. Where everyone has access to the necessities of life and the resources necessary for them to be creative.
NZ is already unbelievably rich the problem is a few greedy arseholes hoarding all the resources for themselves. That’s Capitalism: making money off money, clipping tickets, screwing markets, insider trading, regulatory capture. In the endgame it creates a massive slave class — already modelled by the USA (prisoners), China (factory workers), and the Middle East (Indian labourers).
A few people start off poor and become rich. This isn’t great advertising as 1) for them to become rich they’ve made others poorer and 2) there’s so very few of them compared to the 7 billion people in the world.
…so by your logic, NZ as country should not aspire to become wealthy as it will make other countries poorer, and that is so morally inconceivable that we should not hold out any hope for Jacinda’s child’s generation.
Socialism, the university of life you never graduate from.
People shouldn’t be allowed to become rich as that makes others poorer. In fact, capitalism requires poverty.
And NZ is already a rich country – we have many resources per capita. Those resources are our means. Fairly distributed and used would mean that no one would be living in poverty.
Thing is, they are our means. Exporting them makes us poorer. The same applies to other countries and so us importing resources is making other countries poorer. In fact, we can see that over the last couple of centuries as resources have been exported out of poor countries to rich countries. The rich countries became much better off while the poor countries are still poor and that was most definitely at the expense of the poor countries.
The sandflys are using a dum ass trick like they did with wearing a black beany and the think they are invisible lol.
I will sue there assessor for hundreds of thousands for the way they breach my human rights and the rights of all my children. And I’m going to sue for loss off the potential earnings of ECO MAORI from the Internet this could be millions. The sandflys can carry on underestimate Me I will make my move when the time is right. I see we came from ASIA I have a lot of respect for Asian one just has to learn there cultures to understand why they do things and how they think. Ana to kai
The sandflys can not get it out of there dum ass neo liberals brains that Im not a dum ass savage Im a intelligent human and Im going to win in the end I can see there plays all the time they are desperate Mobile fuel station on Sunset road Rotorua thats a play to counter ECO MAORI statement that crime is dropping .Ana to kai
Here the link to the back my story origins of Maori.
Anyone who has been treating mainstream reporting on Syria with a degree of skepticism might, or will find this long detailed piece by Eva Bartlett of interest. In it she rather methodically and meticulously deconstructs attacks made on her journalistic integrity by, among others – Snopes, The Guardian, Ch 4 news and La Presse.
Oram says that Martin Luther King predicted the current moral decline of the US, based in extensive inequalities.
Oram refers to a quote attributed to Martin Luther King shortly before he was assasinated:
“We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”
“I’m afraid that America may be losing what moral vision she may have had. And I’m afraid that even as we integrate, we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Until we commit ourselves to ensuring that the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears at the soul of this nation.”
Oram sees Trump as someone who has cleverly exploited this decline and the related fractures in US society, politics and economy.
Oram also refers to the protests against Trump this weekend, and is optimistic a new, better US is on the rise.
How so? You’re saying by “classed as equal” that there would be economic equity, yes? But the woman is still dominated by the man and the black or brown skinned person by the white skinned person. (Off the back of cultural and/or historical reasons etc)
And pretty soon that all bleeds back into economic arrangements and….square one all over again.
So okay, your saying if issues of class and gender and race have been resolved, then there will be no ongoing issues of inequality pertaining to gender and race. Sure.
No.
At least I would assume Ed refers to class as being the divisions that allow degrees of access to ‘power’.
Within that frame, it can be reasonably argued that both race and gender are subsets of class inequality.
most people would take Ed’s comment to be about socioeconomic class though, esp as it was a response to the comment with MLK’s quote. I guess he can come back and clarify.
The USA is not one nation, it’s a federation and it’s cracking at the seams. Washington DC is now totally corrupted and it would be best for the States to disunite from this dysfunctional system.
Denigrating the basic comfort to be found between people and communities which society needs to keep cohesive and for all to prosper as a “weakness”, all while tearing up and deliberately breaking the social bonds between individuals, families and whole communities and the very support structures that they need to keep life itself together.
“Climate change is the nuclear moment our our generation”. Quote PM Jacinda Ardern.
We must use less truck freight transport on roads and switch to using rail to lower the carbon emissions and arrest the risk of climate change accelerating.
Today’s major report on RNZ ‘Nine to noon report’ is again warning us all that coastal erosion is becoming a clear hazard now.
22/1/2018.
Monday 22 January 2018 Previous episodes
On today’s show
[long cut and paste deleted. Please quote pieces to support your comment, not long tracts. People can click through to read the whole thing.
Also, if I have to spend time trying to figure out which are your words and which are the quotes, I’m more likely atm to just delete. Please come up with a system that makes it clear what are your words and what are the quotes. You can use the tags, or you can use characters. e.g.
Now isn’t that interesting – actually its much less than I would have thought in some areas.
46 km of railway – have alternative plans drawn up & activate closer to the time. 43000 houses – about 4% of the housing stock – how many are permanent dwellings as opposed to holiday homes – what is the built quality – how many can be shifted and are worth shifting? Are there clusters in some areas – that could be shifted at once.
Looks like we need to designate some land for “new” suburbs in some areas – and have a “shift it Saturday” – where south D takes it’s houses & migrates up onto a hill. At $10000 a house we are looking at $430m spread over a number of years . And houses at risk, not moveable & not yet flooding could be used as a reserve rental stock.
The airports – can swift public transport mean another nearby airport could be used? We have a lot of airports & this might be a good occasion to rethink about fewer & fast trains to areas around the airport.
Jacinda Ardern is basically PM for as long she wants and is Labours answer to John Key.
Every time theres some news they may want buried (like why the first 100 days has been a bit slow or trying to hide the extra payments to tribes) they can trot a pic of Clarke taking the kid to preschool or if someone criticises Jacinda then you can bet the media will jump all over it as bullying.
2020 election well you have preschool, 2023 you’ve got starting primary school etc etc
So how is Jacinda like John well first off educationally speaking neither are what you would call academics in that John has a BCom from Canterbury and Jacinda has a BCS from Waikato
Both went overseas, both did quite well in their respective fields and both are very media savvy as well as both having the ability to say nothing but still making their respective supporters believe they walk on water (absolutely have a conversation about that)
Both are probably more intelligent than their respective critics and opposition give them credit for and both mangle the language (poverdy anyone?)
Being that Jacinda is the PM for as long as she wants (and i do mean she, most certainly not anyone else) I just hope that she does a good a job as John Key did
I do of course admit that I am biased therefore I may be completely wrong about all this
Absolutely, can you show me how to search past comments, becasue all I get is two pages of PR’s post, they cover time since his return. Not the one that got him banned.
Edit: Because puckish has no recollection of being banned. Also my point I might add.
thanks. I find it easier to use google by site advanced search. Put the full TS URL in the ‘site or domain’ field, and whatever key words you can think of. You’ll still have to scroll through but you can narrow it down by dates too. It’s better than the internal search engine.
A cynical soul aren’t you? Have you forgotten John Key’s use of his son and daughter with their various publicity episodes, particularly Max and his gay slur to a cyclist. And his clutching of Richie at every opportunity. And his bad taste radio episodes. Well the occasional photo of a little Gayford- Ardern I think would be mild in comparison. I can’t imagine them doing anything stupid with their baby as far as publicity goes.
Sure its not a perfect comparison but wouldn’t you agree theres some similarities between the two and I do hope the media give their kid a chance to be a kid
mate, anything that gets more interesting political discussion and less people bitching at each other the better. Better for those already here, and better at attracting others to comment.
(lol, I feel I need to put a caveat in now, given your history, but I’m not quite sure what it is).
It’s early days for Jacinda, but there seems to be some intention of keeping promises – something no-one could accuse Key of.
It will of course take a long time to build NZ out of the hole neo-liberalism and naked corruption have dropped us into.
In the meantime though, perhaps you should contain your criticism to items where the government is erring. If Jacinda keeps her promises and repairs some of the wreckage the last government wrought then there is nothing wrong with positive press – it’s only when the positive press is used to cover up failures and corruption, which is all it did under Key, that it becomes odious.
“It’s early days for Jacinda, but there seems to be some intention of keeping promises – something no-one could accuse Key of.”
Labour pre-election pledged to re-enter Pike River mine and thats now a firm maybe plus depending on how you want to see it the whole TPP thing is a back track also and its been less than 100 days
You’re right, maybe they will keep their child away from the media (hopefully they will) but considering the media coverage I doubt the media will respect their wishes
“I do hope the media give their kid a chance to be a kid.”
Jacinda and Clarke were interviewed on this very point this morning and it was pretty clear that they have this well in mind – sorry won’t try to find the video in the plethora of interviews etc. Think it was the TVNZ Breakfast interview with Tame.
Both Jacinda and Clarke are well versed/qualified in media management and IMHO their announcement on Friday was timed to coincide with the end of the holiday period and the back to work for the government and the impending end of the first 100 day period.
The Labour Caucus (and many of their families) convened for a two day retreat near Martinborough yesterday where they are currently reviewing the first 100 days, what still needs to be done in the next 10 days, and drawing up the next 100 day plans. The PM is expected to give a news conference/stand-up this afternoon on the next steps in their planning etc. In other words, IMHO they announced the baby news on Friday, have given 48 hours or so for Babymania, and now the PM’s focus etc will be back to government business.
Tomorrow Tues morning it is back to Wellington for the first Cabinet meeting with Winston etc. – so back to BAU.
An interesting aside to the above (again I cannot give a link as it is lost somewhere in the plethora of interviews etc I have ‘indulged in’ over the last 48 hours and it would take hours to find) is that:
Drumroll ….
Ardern mentioned in passing in an interview (yesterday Sunday I think) that Winston Peters has actually been/still is formally Acting PM for the two or so days of the Labour Caucus Retreat in the Wairarapa.
A test run and/or a middle finger salute to the naysayers who are predicting Armageddon when Peters takes over as Acting PM in June?
“A test run and/or a middle finger salute to the naysayers who are predicting Armageddon when Peters takes over as Acting PM in June?”
Could well be but I don’t think most (imho anyway) people have a problem with Winston being PM temporarily as i think most would probably say that was a big part of the negotiations but if, no matter how unlikely, Winston is still the leader at the next election then things would get very interesting
Do you remember how Labour were going to ban foreigners buying New Zealand houses, and that the ban would be in place by Christmas?
Became they would introduce a bill and it wouldn’t affect all foreigners but you can’t expect too much can you? https://www.odt.co.nz/news/election-2017/labour-would-ban-foreign-property-purchases
As she said ‘Labour would ban sales of existing houses to non-resident, foreign buyers “by Christmas”‘.
Jacinda Ardern is basically PM for as long she wants and is Labours answer to John Key.[sic]
An interesting thesis that, based on your other comments in this thread, seems to refer to the respective popularity of said leaders and the rather huge and unique privilege this offers.
I’d argue that the persona of Key and Ardern is developed/developing by an interplay of inner and outer forces & influences. Ardern is or will be Labour’s “answer to John Key” because that’s what the general public believes and thus has come to expect/demand. The MSM, pundits, the Opposition, the NZ Labour Party & Caucus, the coalition-Government, etcetera, will all contribute to this collective projection.
When Key became leader of the National Party in 2006 and PM 2 years later his persona was not identical to the one when he bailed out in 2016.
Ms Ardern’s persona is also not static & fixed and time will tell how it will develop but suffice to say her personal trajectory may be very different from Mr Key’s – I certainly hope so …
IMO John Key cultivated & milked his popularity like a Fonterra for mostly personal ‘profit’; the National Party (and a few ‘hangers on’) benefitted by riding on his coattail and hanging in his slipstream – it was good (for them) while it lasted. So far, I cannot see this happening with Jacinda Ardern – being in power can do ‘funny things’ to people – but I could not possibly comment on why I doubt that it will happen in the foreseeable future …
The problem is that it isn’t a mistake.
He almost always uses “loosing”.
I’ve 1questioned him on what it is supposed to mean but no explanation is ever forthcoming.
Naah I got over that pretty quickly (plus it wasn’t going to change anything anyway) and as I say “Jacinda Ardern is basically PM for as long she wants and is Labours answer to John Key.” so its not like I think National will be back in power any time soon
All she has to do is cross over into National territory as John Key did so successfully and she’ll be remembered as being as, if not more, popular than John Key
All she has to do is cross over into National territory as John Key did so successfully and she’ll be remembered as being as, if not more, popular than John Key
Ardern getting more than one term still hangs on the economy staying together and voters not feeling like they’re going backwards., this baby stuff is just icing.
Also some people like icing, some like a tiny bit of icing, some don’t like icing at all and just prefer the cake.
Does it though, Jacinda is very popular so even if the economy tanks, Labour can lay the blame at Nationals feet and because Jacinda is popular she’ll be believed by enough voters (as was John Key) and Labour will get another term
Although if, for whatever reason, Winnie is the leader at the next election it’ll be a complete bloodbath and National will be back in
But most likely Labour will be in power for easily two terms, maybe three
Does it though, Jacinda is very popular so even if the economy tanks, Labour can lay the blame at Nationals feet and because Jacinda is popular she’ll be believed by enough voters (as was John Key) and Labour will get another term
You think people are that stupid and shallow?
Btw you can’t compare Key to Ardern, Ardern came to power with the economy in good shape, Key came in at the start of a global recession.
Its less stupid and shallow (and remember these are the pretty much the same arguments the left used against John Key) and more that Jacinda is an excellent communicator and that people warm to her and want to believe her which sounds a lot like John Key
John Key managed to sound both confident and switched on while still being “one of the blokes” and it worked really well for him and Jacinda is managing to do what works really well for her so i think she’ll be able to sell it to NZ especially since she’ll be given the kudos of keeping labour together (though those kudos should probably go to Little)
“Btw you can’t compare Key to Ardern, Ardern came to power with the economy in good shape, Key came in at the start of a global recession.”
The circumstances are slightly different but I’d make no difference, if you swapped Key for Ardern the results would still be the same and that is they’d both win, helped by third term-itis sure but they’d still win
The suggestion that the left loathed Key because he was popular is profoundly misleading.
“pretty much the same arguments the left used against John Key”
Nope.
The left loathed Key because he was a liar and a demagogue – his popularity, like Trump’s, was essentially a tool to mislead people.
Now, you may wheel out Pike River and pine trees and a number of other instances of broken promises – but frankly, not yet. These matters have yet to be determined, and it remains to be seen whether they will actually fail.
The public may even forgive some of these issues or ones like them if the government is candid about its reasons for abandoning any of them – but should that occur it would be in stark contrast to the almost compulsive lying and misdirection that characterized the Key Kleptocracy. That vile piece of scum never gave a straight answer about anything. Or is that something you “can’t recall”?
I can tell you now Keys clowning and schtick would have bombed if National hadn’t successfully rebuilt the economy and he wasn’t such a powerhouse on the world political stage.
People would have been “What’s he doing clowning around? do your job, Man”.
Key was a PM first and the goofy funny guy second, Ardern needs to be a PM first and a mother second, if she’s going to be anywhere near as successful as Key.
It’s going to be a big ask, and the voter will tire pretty quickly of Ardern if they don’t think her mind’s on the job.
When Key was in the spotlight a lot over the GCSB and Ian Fletcher, and then the Jason Edes episodes, was he just clowning and being a “goofy funny guy”?
Oh, and told the BBC that water quality scientists were like lawyers – will fabricate results on demand. Sort of a precursor to Trump’s cabinet choices
It’s pretty telling that when pressed BM can’t even name one thing Key, who in his words was “such a powerhouse on the world stage”, did on that stage.
Ardern has already done more than Key ever did by forcing Australia to back down on tertiary fees for Kiwis and insisting on Kiwi houses for Kiwis.
Key was the master at swanning around in his dressing gown at diplomatic events, and of course he was known worldwide for harassing female service staff. That’s about it.
This constant fatuous rubbish about Key’s economic acumen is really rather pitiful. Did wages grow vis-à-vis comparable OECD countries? Nope. Did our debt decrease? Nope. Did our credit rating improve? Nope – it fell twice.
It’s fair to say that the Key ‘economic miracle’ is no more substantial than that of previous self-styled thaumaturgists. The Nobel will not be going to NZ economists any time soon.
“Btw you can’t compare Key to Ardern, Ardern came to power with the economy in good shape, Key came in at the start of a global recession.”
—
Key did come in a the start of a global recession, but after 9 years of savings and net govt debt at record lows, English had a great starting point which he commented on at the time.
BM: Ardern came to power with the economy in good shape, Key came in at the start of a global recession
???!!! NZ now has record external debt and the Briefings to Incoming Ministers were a litany of disasters. But in 2008 Cullen had left the accounts in very good shape, as you well know.
BM: If the economy bombs, it will be on Labours head.
Bullshit unless you want to blame Key for the GFC and recession of 2008/9 as well. National presided over a fake economy so I would find it hard to blame Labour for the Nats dirty tricks of the last 9 years. Fiddling with stats and cooking the books and hiding OIA requests. What a pack of bankers they were.
“Kneel down time!”
The Patriots bore their way to another Super Bowl appearance
AFC Playoff, Sunday 21 Jan. 2018 (Boston time)
The New England Patriots hold a four-point lead over the Jacksonvile Jaguars. There’s still more than one and a half minutes of “playing” time on the clock. In any real sport, that would be more than enough time for a lot more action.
Not in the NFL, however, where time-wasting is the main strategy of every team. The Patriots have the ball, which in this sport means guaranteed possession for four plays. Therefore it’s pointless to hope for anything unexpected or spontaneous to happen.
One of the commentators yells gleefully: “Kneel down time!”
Both teams stand up from the last scrimmage and start shaking hands with more than 15 seconds still on the clock. The coaches, holding clipboards full of color-coded instructions, are jubilant. The crowd, instructed constantly to “Make Some Noise”, seems happy.
Morrie I’m no expert but some would have it that in the distant past a sarker team, on managing to goal a ball score in the start of the first period, may have as it were parked a bus, not to put too fine a point to it, across their goal to the immeasurable chagrin of their opponents. There is an obscure rumour, no names no pack drill, that a knvish lout of a sarker baller may once have feigned injury in order to prevent the opposition from progressing advantageously gamewise. Can any of this be true? What portents might it hold for the advancement of our cause onwards to the broad sunlight uplands of victory?
Passing plays stop the clock, running plays do not (unless the ball career runs out of bounds). The team with possession has 45 seconds from the whistle to start a play or they are penalised. Therefore, with less than 45 seconds of game time time remaining, the team with possession keeps the clock running by ‘taking the knee’ where the QB takes the snap, starting a running play, then kneels down to end it and keep the clock running. With less than 45 seconds of game time remaining there is no point starting a new play so the game is effectively over.
I know all that, Kevin. What you’ve written backs up what I wrote—that the game is built around stoppages. There is a multiplicity of methods to stop the game, as I pointed out.
Same goes for basketball, volleyball and baseball. The Americans are very good at ruining games.
This is a weird case of poisoning that is still a mystery. You have to wonder why there has not been a thorough police investigation to check it is “accidental” – being that nobody has found any food or reason for the poisoning around, it apparently happened within minutes and paralysed 3 people, and the children were not harmed.
Botulism was a red herring thrown into the story. It was not a likely cause – though present in NZ it is relatively rare here – an anaerobic bacteria sometimes found in mud at the bottom of pools. The more probable culprit is a widely used poison, which the reporters did not want to guess at for political reasons.
1080 was mentioned in the actual audio recordings of both of these reports on RNZ National this morning – as having been tested for as a possibility but not as a confirmed cause – but not mentioned in the written reports on the website. So you need to listen to the recordings:
AND just as I was typing the above the RNZ National 2pm News also did an item on 1080 in relation to the case and the details of recent 1080 drops in the area:
Agreed that the earlier stories did not mention 1080 – that is why it stood out to me this morning. However, there is also the aspect that presumably if 1080 or similar is involved then the case for ACC compensation is strengthened as opposed to a ‘medical’ condition such as botulism. The family’s $$$ situation is understandably of prime concern now.
Interesting if food poisoning is not covered by ACC. I would have thought that it was an accident, as opposed to disease that arises for other reasons. But possibly ACC is turning it down because the cause is unknown.
I can’t see it being a man-made poison myself. Poisons like 1080 and others have been widespread for a long time, and so has pig and deer hunting all over the country. We would have seen this sort of thing before, not out of the blue like this.
By the way I have seen evidence that pigs do feed on poison baits, but they eat anything so I guess that’s not surprising.
I tend to agree. What’s interesting me now though is if they don’t know the cause how are they tying it to the eating of the meat? And the point about the family and media having been told it was botulism is valid. Got to feel for the family. Dealing with the health system can be very hard when the illness is unknown.
The meat would be the only common and new possible vector preceeding the infection/poisoning.
So all the veges they had would have either been eaten from the same source days before, or not everyone had the swede, sort of thing.
That is, of course, assuming that the worst case didn’t happen: that they presented, everyone fixated on botulism and so never more than cursorily(?) considered other sources. Which would suck.
That makes sense but I was wondering why they were assuming food poisoning as opposed to other pathologies. So yes, they can narrow down the food that might be responsible, but if they don’t have an actual pathogen, then why assume it was food?
e.g., virus, external toxin (pesticide) etc. One would hope they did work through all that, but I’ve seen too many episodes of House 😉
My main point here is why do media releases about botulism in the absence of a positive test? Better to say “we don’t know”, as much as people don’t like doing that.
probably because they still think it’s the most likely cause, regardless of the test.
I doubt they’d be trying to prevent a panic or something so coming up with a false reason for the public – pretty solidly seems to be a one-off.
To flip from House to CSI, apparently some juries now tend to think the prosecution is incompetent if DNA tests weren’t done, even if the accused’s presence at the scene isn’t debated. Similarly, the botulism test might clinically (depending on circumstances) be regarded as the complete proof of confirmation (minimal false positive results) but with a low disproof (very high false negative rate). Not very sensitive, but highly specific.
Also, we don’t know if other likely causes were tested for and those tests more reliably excluded the other factors – or the pattern of illness doesn’t match the vectors those conditions are transmitted by.
Well, we don’t know the specifics of the case to that detail, but things like:
proximity to the meal,
lack of traces of likely poisons in the home (e.g. fly spray or bora bomb – something to disrupt nerves),
the incidence limited to one household rather than a cluster of neighbouring homes,
different people with different times spent in the home coming down in the same manner (if it was dodgy wallpaper like the old Victorian arsenic green then people who spent all day in the home for a while would have come down before people in and out for school or work),
not everyone ate the salmon mousse made from tinned salmon,
and so on would all point to the the specific food as the most likely source.
Could be a bit of chinese whispers if somewhere in the chain between diagnostician and report, a phrase like ‘symptoms are consistent with botulism’ became just ‘botulism’.
I could see that happening. Also sometimes doctors like to say something even if it’s not quite right, than say nothing, because they feel pressured to be the person that will do the saving (or at least the knowing).
Pigs will eat the possum carcasses and ingest 1080, which will accumulate and may kill the pig. If the pig was still mobile when it was “harvested” you’d need to eat a lot of the pig to be at risk.
“If a hunter shot a 60 kg feral pig that was in the latent period following ingestion of 3 kg of 1080 bait (at a rate of 1152 mg 1080/kg), and based on the unlikely assumption that half the ingested poison has become evenly distributed through the carcass, that hunter would need to eat 36.1 kg in one sitting before being at risk.”
So unlikely that this was caused by someone shooting a pig that had ingested 1080. Finding a carcass that had died from 1080, that could be another story.
“If a hunter shot a 60 kg feral pig that was in the latent period following ingestion of 3 kg of 1080 bait (at a rate of 1152 mg 1080/kg), and based on the unlikely assumption that half the ingested poison has become evenly distributed through the carcass, that hunter would need to eat 36.1 kg in one sitting before being at risk.”
This sounds a particularly dubious example, in part because wild pig behavior would not typically involve stopping at 3kgs of bait. The pig would eat all the bait available.
1080 toxicity is put between 0.5mg/kg and 10mg/kg.
The assumption that half the poison is not absorbed or available is arbitrary.
Given the variation in assigning toxicity, the figure of 36.1kg is unprofessional nonsense.
It is reasonable to assume that if secondary toxicity is sufficient to kill pigs or dogs that consume possums, that humans would be at risk if they joined that food chain. It is not necessarily safe to consume considerably less than potentially lethal doses – negative effects may commence at substantially lower levels.
Ingestion of cooked meat from 1080-poisoned animals is not thought to constitute a human health hazard due to the low concentration of toxicant present in muscle tissue, and degradation of fluoroacetate at cooking temperatures. (Temple & Edwards 1984) Poisoned carcasses are a significant risk to dogs due to their susceptibility and feeding habits. (Gooneratne et al. 1995)
Temple WA & Edwards IR (1984) Toxic ducks – 1080 residues in game birds : An exercise in applied toxicology. Vet. Hum. Toxicol. 27(1) : 20-21
Thanks for that – I’ve found a variety of sources, some of which are less sanguine about degradation – though offal as a primary location for most oral poisons makes sense.
Temple & Edwards notwithstanding, I won’t be queuing to try 1080 killed pork.
It’s only more probable if it was anywhere near the hunting zone at around the same time as the hunting occurred.
It seems this is not the case.
It could be anything – hell the pig might have eaten funny mushrooms, some random poison a nearby farmer had sly-dropped without telling anyone, or there was some random thing in the pig that we might not even see again.
The botulism test might also have a pretty high false negative rate, or maybe whatever the pig had was similar to botulism but different enough to not show up.
I don’t know. But I know enough to know that there’s still some things we don’t know about poisons and viruses and what’s in our forests.
I was thinking mushrooms, or weeds like hemlock or tutu (don’t know if the toxins pass on to people who eat the meat), and also farmers poisoning on the sly.
My 2 cents – in my own burg immigrants are only too willing to buy wild meat from dodgy as fuck sources so I reckon the victims didn’t ask too many questions when they purchased the meat from locals who IMO, would’ve known damn well not to eat it themselves.
makes sense. Do you think the Waikato family illness is related to the dog ones, or just that it’s another example of the problems with wild boar when not enough caution is taken?
Could be related to go slow but I lean towards downright disregard for food safety by the sellers of entire, un-refrigerated animals with only the gastrointestinal tract removed, and the ignorance of buyers who don’t understand just how dangerous meat from dubious sources can be.
Cost. Those tests are contracted out and have become very expensive. Last tropical suite I had to do was $400. Botulism is rare in NZ – though more common in other countries. Testing every local poisoning event for it would be foolish. Given that no cause has been identified however there is still some spadework to be done.
Draco, your research indicates that a better than current diagnostic test was in small-scale assessment a couple of years ago.
It might still be being looked at, or that study you pointed to might not match larger scale trials, or there might not be a lab in NZ certified for it, or it might even have been used in this case.
And sometimes “viral infection of unknown type” is the best we can do (if that), even if the patient is at death’s door and every conceivable test is done. Mate of mine was within hours of dying, but fortunately recovered. The best guess was a virus similar to meningitis, but all the tests came back negative. Probably just some virus that most people never have a problem with but clocked off in his case for some reason.
Not to mention the workload for labs. They’re already understaffed.
My mate the nurse reckons every year the ICU he works in sees patients admitted in dire need of support with some dying, yet nobody has a clue about what exactly ails or kills them.
Aye friends daughter was in hospital a couple of months ago along with four others who had no previous contact with each other.
All had severe vomiting and stomach pain and were placed on drips.
The best they could be told it was likely a virus and for about 50% of the people who have those symptoms they have no idea what the virus is or what to test for as the virus is likely unknown.
The world would be so much better if everything were changed to your approval, eh.
How many people would we need in order to provide a full range of screening and diagnostic tests for every person who contacts primary or secondary healthcare services, or “should” we just restrict it to hospital admissions?
Come on any attempt to break up the left is the order of the day by the rwnj’s Morrissey – you must have must have missed the “rwnj news letter” that arrived just after the election.
Fool, I’m sure you have read nothing of Glenn Greenwald, so here’s an introduction for you. I highly commend it to other, more serious, people by the way…
I too wondered about the origins and source of that pig.
Had some South Asian gentlemen wanting to buy some goat carcasses once. Took a lot of discussion to get them to understand that they weren’t fit for consumption (they weren’t even fit for dog tucker, they were headed for the gut hole) and that it was illegal for me to sell meat to people on health grounds.
Ooops, that was meant to be a reply to Stuart Munro at 12.1
This, from the woman who reckoned Arabs hated Jews more than they loved their own children.
//
In 1958, then-foreign minister Golda Meir raised the possibility of preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, a recently discovered Foreign Ministry document has revealed.
“A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration,” read the document, written by Meir to Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Katriel Katz.
The letter, marked “top secret” and written in April 1958, shortly after Meir became foreign minister, was uncovered by Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, a Polish historian at the University of Warsaw.
In recent years, Rudnicki has been researching documents shedding light on Israeli-Polish relations between 1945 and 1967.
The document had not been known to exist before this time, and scholars of the mass immigration from Poland to Israel that took place from 1956 to 1958 were unaware of Israel’s intent to impose a selection process on Jews leaving Poland – survivors of the Holocaust and its death camps.
Another shining example, of there being no left wing in Israeli politics. Mind you, quite a few plonkers on the left pre 1945 were fans of letting the disabled die.
That was not road rage I was just pissing the sandflys off looks like the sandflys got a direct line to the Rock radio. I know you 2 are up to something Thane and Duncan. Ana to kai
The sandfly haven’t got anything better than to harass me I have nothing to hide I advertise who I am ECO MAORI ON MY OLD TRUCK would you do that If you were guilty of the crimes they have told the whole world that I have done no. I could just hop on a plane and go to Australia no i’m staying to look after my whano .I am going to make the justice system treat brown people with the same respect as europeens .I had at least 4 of these muppets interfering with my trip Home from Tauranga to Rotorua .I could see the smoke coming out there ears they don’t like It when I check ALL THERE MOVES .
Go pick on someone who deserves your attention I can smell the muppets a mile away .I don’t mention all the plays the muppets make in a day but I see them all fools .
Ana to kai
The Silencing Science Tracker is a joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. It tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information, since the November 2016 election
Thank you for those links but none of that answered my quite clear & specific questions.
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We all know that NZ First is a party of and for old people who hate the young. But they've topped their previous pedophobia with a proposal that all young people be forced to do 100 hours community work:NZ First wants all young people to do 100 hours of community ...
A couple days ago the NZ Herald published a story with the headline, “Science says Bella Hadid is world’s most beautiful woman“, and followed up with the ridiculous statement that Supermodel Bella Hadid has been declared as the world’s most beautiful woman following a scientific study into what constitutes as ...
A Sustainable Proposition: With as much as 18 percent of the electorate declaring itself “undecided” about who to vote for, there is obviously plenty of space for a party like former Green Party member, Vernon Tava's, about-to-be-launched "Sustainable NZ Party" to move into. The most hospitable political territory for such ...
Keir Starmer has hinted that Labour might vote in favour of the Johnson government's shoddy deal, with the proviso that a second referendum is attached:Speaking to BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show, he said: “We will see what that looks like but it makes sense to say that by whatever ...
In 1994, I was the editor for an issue of Planet magazine focused on cannabis, its culture and the prospects for the end of its prohibition. Part of that issue was an interview with 'Ringo', an experienced cannabis dealer.I recently posted my essay from that issue, and I figured it ...
Dr Helen Waite, sports sociologist and former elite athlete, on the invasion of women’s sport by men and the anti-scientific and misogynist ideology used to rationalise it. ...
As Brexit comes to a grisly conclusion (perhaps) people on all sides are saying intemperate and uwise things. Some, like the Daly Mail, have been doing it for years.People as normally level headed as Jon Lansman are calling for automatic deselection of MPs who vote against a (likely) Labour three ...
I've got one source saying more Labour MPs than expected are mulling whether to vote for the deal - including names who were not on the letter to Juncker and Tusk— Emilio Casalicchio (@e_casalicchio) 17 October 2019 I've compiled a list of possible reasons why Labour ...
On Wednesday, the government was loudly telling us that it needed to legislate to allow it to impose "control orders" - effectively a parole regime, but imposed without charge, prosecution, conviction or real evidence - on suspected terrorists because they couldn't be prosecuted for their supposed crimes. Today, it turns ...
On Monday, the Hit and Run inquiry heard from NZDF's former director of special operations, who claimed that the defence Minister knew everything about the Operation Burnham raid. Today, the inquiry heard from that (former) Minister - and it turns out that he didn't know nearly as much as NZDF ...
Yoga gurus and cult leaders – I’ve seen a few. Two weeks ago, I unknowingly joined an alleged new-age cult at the Kāpiti coast, together with a giant kraken and some neatly dressed pensioners who would make any book club proud.They were among the two hundred people of all ages ...
The last decade has seen a trend of increasing weapons availability to police. Assault rifles. Tasers on every hip. Guns in cars. And following the march 15 massacre, pistols on every hip, all over the country. At the same time, its also seen an increase in the abuse of force: ...
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been busy preparing for our summer paper on Science Communication. Looking for something amusing about ‘risk’ in science, I came across this neat xkcd.com cartoon about why so many people come knocking on my door (or phoning me, or emailing me) desperately wanting ...
by John Edmundson The International Socialist Organisation (ISO) have recently reposted a February article, by Romany Tasker-Poland, explaining ISO’s position in the “trans rights” debate. It is available on their website and on their Facebook Page. The article sets out to explain why “socialists support trans rights”. It reads more ...
"Auckland City Mission: 10% of Kiwis experiencing food insecurity", RNZ, 16 October 2019:About half a million people are experiencing food insecurity, according to new research from the Auckland City Mission. Food insecurity, or food poverty, is defined as not having enough appropriate food. The City Mission said over the last ...
Media Statement for Immediate Release 16th October 2019 “Fake News” from Auckland City Council CCOs Board Chairs re pay and performance bonuses for top managers Despite comments from Auckland City Council CCOs Board Chairs re pay and performance bonuses for top managers—Herald Newspaper Tuesday Oct 15th–there is very little evidence ...
Would You Buy A Used Propaganda Video From This Man? Bridges and the National Party’s strategists have discovered that the ideas and attitudes considered acceptable by today’s editors and journalists are no longer enforceable. The rise and rise of the Internet and the social media platforms it spawned means that ...
There is plenty of evidence of the way the business mentality has permeated every level of society since the recrudescence of market liberalism 35 years ago. You only need to think of how citizens in need of help from their government, their state, their country, are now routinely described as ...
John MacCormickOver the last 40 years, New Zealanders – and people in other countries – have experienced big changes in the jobs they do and where they live and work. These changes include: a decline in manufacturing jobs an increase in jobs in ‘information-intensive’ industries (which are better paid ...
Nick Wilson, Leah Grout, Mereana Wilson, Anja Mizdrak, Phil Shoemack, Michael BakerProtecting waterways has the benefits of: (1) protecting water from hazardous microbes; (2) minimising cancer risk and other problems from nitrates in water; (3) avoiding algal blooms that are hazardous to health; (4) protecting mahinga kai uses (cultural ...
by The Council of Disobedient Women In a press release today Massey University announced it has decided to rebrand and reorientate after struggling to be a University for grown-ups. For some time the University has wanted to be a safe play space for wee-woke-misogynists who have been really badly triggered ...
After a brief dalliance with 'hard Revoke' it looks like the Lib Dems are changing ground on on Brexit, with leader Jo Swinson reverting to calling for a second referendum on Johnson's deal.The party has tabled an amendment to the Queen’s speech requesting that any deal brought back from Brussels ...
The government has decided that someone has done Something Bad. But despite their belief, there seems to be no evidence that they have actually broken the law. So the government's solution is to pass a retrospective law allowing them to be punished anyway, on a lower standard of proof. If ...
So, Judith Collins has done a Facebook rant about climate change, peddling the same shit National has been shovelling for the past twenty years: the impacts are overstated, there's no need to do anything about it, and its too hard anyway (oh, and its so unfair that people who peddle ...
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nzThere is a lot of discussion on the benefits of ...
I came across this song quite by accident. If it isn't one of Greta Thunberg's favourites - it should be.Video courtesy of YouTube.This post is exclusive to Bowalley Road. ...
Last month, NZDF's shoddy coverup of what it knew about civilian casualties in Operation Burnham began to fall apart, with the revelation that a report on the matter, which NZDF claimed not to have, had been sitting in an NZDF safe for the past nine years. Yesterday, the man responsible ...
While many imagine that countries like the USA and Europe dominate space activities, in fact India is now a major player on this stage. It launches satellites for its own purposes and also commercially, and has constellations orbiting our planet and returning data of vital importance to that nation in ...
Thanks to a report from the Acting Inspector General of Intelligence and Security following a complaint by Nicky Hager, we have come to find out that the SIS illegally spied on Mr. Hager on behalf of the NZDF after publication of Hager’s 2011 book, Other People’s Wars. The NZDF justified ...
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate. FACT: The HadCRUT3 surface temperature index, produced by the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, shows warming to 1878, cooling to 1911, ...
For the past week, Extinction Rebellion has been peacefully protesting in London to demand action on climate change. The British government's response? Ban their protests:Police have banned Extinction Rebellion protests from continuing anywhere in London, as they moved in almost without warning to clear protesters who remained at the movement’s ...
An essay by Judith Collins MP reported on Carbon News yesterday seems to show an alarming shift in attitude within the National Party. Collins argues against the Zero Carbon Bill, the Paris Agreement, and downplays the magnitude of climate impacts. The Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015 and ratified ...
When they were running for election, Labour promised to overhaul the Employment Relations Act and introduce fair pay agreements to set basic pay and conditions on an industry level, preventing bad employers from undercutting good ones. They followed this up by establishing a working group, which reported back in January ...
A list of indicators of bad science – many of these are found in articles promoted by anti-fluoride activists. Anti-fluoride activists have been pouring money into a scaremongering campaign warning pregnant women not to drink fluoridated water. They claim fluoride will lower the IQ of their future child. Fluoride ...
Nothing Left To Say: Labour's pollster, Stephen Mills, remains swaddled-up in the comforting myths of the 1980s. As if the experience of Roger Douglas’s genuinely radical post-Muldoon policy agenda was literally a once-in-a-lifetime thing – as much as the party could possibly absorb for at least the next 50 years.MEMO ...
The Royal Commission on abuse in care is very significant for the disability community. For many decades last century, thousands of disabled children, and adults who managed to survive, were locked away from families and communities. This was not for anything they had done, but for the perceived threat their ...
With an unfair voting system, uneven electorates and an un-elected upper house, the UK's "democracy" is barely worthy of the name. But now the government wants to make it worse:The government has been accused of suppressing voters’ rights with the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of people after plans ...
Back in the 90's and early 2000's, the building industry was building leaky homes which should never have been granted consent. Now it turns out they've been building dodgy office blocks as well:New imaging technology has revealed hundreds of major buildings nationwide have defective or missing concrete or reinforcing steel. ...
Local body election results were released over the weekend, to joy or despair depending on where you live. In Auckland, Phil Goff trounced John Tamihere, who is muttering darkly about running for Parliament again (but which party would want him?) Wellington is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Weta Workshop, except ...
How could government evolve over the next decades? Reports of democracy’s imminent demise are greatly exaggerated. However, satisfaction with political systems in many countries is low, so there is much to do for governments of all political stripes to improve relevance and trust. Digital technologies are seen as one ...
Two years have now gone by since the Friday afternoon when my university-student son and I headed out of our Barcelona flat to a nearby primary school, designated as a polling station for the vote that was to be held the following Sunday: the referendum on Catalonia’s independence from Spain ...
Overruled: The joint decision of Finance Minister, Grant Robertson (Labour) and his Associate Minister, David Parker (Labour) arguably the two most powerful ministers in Jacinda Ardern’s government, to grant OceanaGold the consents which Land Information Minister, Eugenie Sage (Greens) had earlier denied them, offers bitter proof of how hard fighting ...
More than double the number of people who will vote in this year’s local body elections have tried marijuana or urinated somewhere they shouldn’t have. As local elections look set for the lowest turnout in decades, with many regions falling well short of 40%, the Government is exploring a number ...
A Statement on Abortion Law Reform by the Council of Disobedient Women On the eve of bringing an end to antiquated, anti-women abortion laws Green MP Jan Logie intends to write women out of the Bill. With a stroke of the pen, the woke are aiming for total erasure ...
Musings continue apace about “the experienced businessman!” soon to be taking up a National Party MP position. Or to be more accurate, being parachuted into a seat to shut down their former MP Jamie-Lee Ross, who despite his own shortcomings shed at least some more light on the inner workings ...
The Ugandan government wants to murder gay people:Uganda has announced plans to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. The bill, colloquially known as “Kill the Gays” in Uganda, was nullified five years ago on a technicality, but the government said on Thursday it plans to resurrect it within weeks. The ...
Hassan Vally, La Trobe UniversityWho doesn’t want to know if drinking that second or third cup of coffee a day will improve your memory, or if sleeping too much increases your risk of a heart attack? We’re invested in staying healthy and many of us are interested in reading ...
Freedom Of Speech? The Säuberung (cleansing by fire) was the work of the German Student Union which, on 10 May 1933, under the watchful eye of the Nazi Reichminister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, consigned 25,000 books to the flames in a ritual exorcism of “un-German thought”. According to the logic of the ...
“There can be no such thing as kaupapa Māori political parties or politics in Aotearoa” (Willie Jackson, Labour Party (2017). Māori TV, General/List Election Special) I begin with that claim because at the time, I was confounded at first that it fell out of Willie Jackson’s mouth, and then ...
New Zealand has prided itself for decades with regard to its lack of pollution, and all will be aware that the ‘100% Pure New Zealand‘ meme is under threat through land, water and air pollution of various causes. There is another type of contamination that the country also faces: light ...
New Zealand’s media is doing its part in Japan, reassuring those in the path of the storm that they won’t miss any rugby while away from their flooded homes. New Zealand sports reporters stationed in Japan for the Rugby World Cup have had the rare and heartwarming opportunity to inform ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones is the only Cabinet member in favour of putting it all on green. As Finance Minister Grant Robertson finds himself with an enormous $7.5 billion surplus, the Government has begun intense, at times contentious conversations about whether to put the money on red or black at ...
by Susanne Kemp At the start of September close to 100,000 school teachers went on strike in Jordan. They demanded a 50% pay rise. A pay rise actually agreed to by the regime back in 2014. In early October, however, in the face of government repression and threats, the teachers’ ...
Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nzWhy do people still think climate change isn’t real?David ...
Back in 2011, journalist Nicky Hager published Other People's Wars, an expose on NZDF's activities over the previous decade of the "war on terror". NZDF didn't like this, and especially didn't like the fact that it was base don leaks from their own. So, they had the SIS investigate him ...
The Zero Carbon Bill is due back from select committee in two weeks, and will likely pass its final stages in November. So naturally, farmers are planning a hate-march against it. But they're not just demanding lower methane targets so they can keep on destroying the planet; they're also demanding ...
Last year, California burned. This year, to stop it happening again (or rather, to stop themselves from being found liable if it happens again), Pacific Gas and Electric is cutting power to half the state for a week:Schools are closed. Traffic lights down. Tunnels dark. Businesses unopened. Hospitals running on ...
The Best Way: Missing from the on-line voting debate is any reference to the voting system that produces turn-out figures ranging from 77 to 93 percent of registered voters. The voting system used to collect and count the votes cast in our parliamentary elections. The system that involves citizens making ...
Among the great new bunch of political friends we have been making recently is the excellent Australian-based Marxist gender-critical site, Freer Lives. So we asked the comrade who set up that blog to write something for Redline on the blog, himself, his analysis of the rise of gender politics and ...
by Don Franks The Auckland City Mission is struggling with a 40 percent increase in demand for food parcels this year. A total of 23,020 were needed by June. Last month Missioner Chris Farrelly told the Herald the “cupboards are bare” and without an emergency food drive, he can’t see ...
Journalist Andrew Dickens, reporting from the 2019 New Zealand First Conference, states that the Party once again proved “they are more than a sideshow”. In his op-ed article for NewstalkZB, Mr Dickens said he has always been an admirer of the Party, saying they are “a true centrist party”. “[NZ ...
New Zealand First's potential policy of compulsory community service for ages 15-19 years old has been getting support from those in the industry. A policy remit was passed during their recent Conference in Christchurch, gaining the support of a majority of its membership. Party leader Winston Peters has been talking ...
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says the Party hopes to decide it’s stance pill testing at music festivals "before the season of concern", with festivals generally held during the summer months. Mr Peters' comments come in an interview with TVNZ's Q+A and follow a remit from the party's youth ...
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says he has been told to be "alert" to potential cost blowouts for the light rail project in Auckland. Mr Peters said no such concerns were raised with him from ministerial colleagues, including Transport Minister Phil Twyford of the Labour Party. He suggested that ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters Leader of New Zealand First The Benefits of having New Zealand First in the Centre: Security, Experience & Balance 2.00pm, 20th October 2019 Ladies and Gentlemen Thank you all for your warm welcome to this, the party’s 26thConvention. Speaking on behalf of caucus colleagues, it’s great to ...
Fletcher Tabuteau, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Fletcher Tabuteau is travelling to the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu this week to continue toadvance important bilateral relationships in our region consistent with thePacific Reset. Mr Tabuteau will engage in a range of bilateral meetings and visit New Zealand development ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters is predicting a hard Brexit for the United Kingdom, as he believes British Prime Minister Boris Johnson won’t be able to negotiate terms before the October 30 deadline. The Minister, who was one of the first to publicly come out and predict British voters would leave ...
Speaking at the Council of Trade Unions' (CTU) biennial conference, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters told unionists that any future attacks on the Government won't work. "Now, we are being attacked by the union movement in this country. You can have your views but I'm here to say standing ...
We want every New Zealander to be happy, safe, and healthy. To do this, we need to support strong, safe communities, and a robust and efficient health system. ...
Defence Minister Ron Mark has used his powers to overrule a noise complaint ruling against Whenuapai airbase on the grounds of "national security". The Environment Court last month released a ruling in favour of a private developer, declaring the Auckland airbase had to comply with noise restrictions when it performs ...
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has opened fire against "unreconstructed morons" after NZ First MP Shane Jones was photographed on holiday holding an AR-15 rifle. Mr Peters is defending Mr Jones, telling Magic Talk host Peter Williams that his MP was just having fun "like most people do". "The ...
New Zealand First Deputy Leader and Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau was in attendance during the morning blessing of the Rotorua Lakefront development project. Around 60 people gathered on the shores of Lake Rotorua, including city mayor Steve Chadwick and deputy Dave Donaldson. The Lakefront development is a ...
Forestry Minister Shane Jones is considering reining in on conversions of farmland to forestry, and also issued a warning to foreign-owned forestry companies that make up nearly 75 per cent of the industry. He said too many foreign companies had not provided enough access for domestic processors to get timber. ...
Speaking to Radio NZ, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said the tightening of the parental category visa is a direct result of the Party’s coalition negotiations with the Labour Party. He said the new changes switch the financial onus from the parent moving to New Zealand to the child ...
The Coalition Government is set to cut red tape in the building and construction sector in an effort to allow more houses to be built, including prefabricated houses. The changes will enable the mass factory production of "high quality" buildings, slash the likely number of building inspections for factory produced ...
Since coming into Government, we’ve worked hard to tackle homelessness and make sure everyone has a warm, dry home. And today, on World Homeless Day, we want to report back and update you on our progress so far. ...
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has hit back at National Party leader Simon Bridges who criticized the Coalition Government’s approach to crime, and said that the latter isn't credible in his attack on the Government over gang recruitment. "We've got as massive drug problem in this country. It is ...
New Zealand Mānuka honey exporters have welcomed an initiative by the Coalition Government to help secure the term “mānuka honey” to be used exclusively by Kiwi exporters, ensuring that our multimillion-dollar industry is protected. Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones had recently announced that a Provincial Growth Funding of $5.7 ...
Political commentator Mike Hosking has labelled New Zealand First leader Winston Peters as “the voice of reason in a government soft on drugs”, for the Party’s stance on drug testing at music festivals. “If common sense is worth a vote, Winston Peters is quids in,” Mr Hosking said. The Labour ...
Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau has announced Provincial Growth Funding to ensure work opportunities in Turangi and Whanganui, through its skills and employment programme, Te Ara Mahi. A fund of $500,000 will go to Rafting NZ in Turangi for a 16-week river guide training course to train ...
Treasury has shown that the Coalition Government has a $7.5 billion surplus, which is $4 billion higher than what was expected in the 2019 Budget unveiled last May. It is also $2 billion higher than the actual surplus unveiled this time last year, and at a size that has not ...
Official Information Act figures released to NZME show there were 350 assaults on officers in the year to the end of June, 79 more than the year before. The increase in attacks have sparked calls for more legal protection for first responders to be enacted. The assaults included officers being ...
“Nobody wants to see babies uplifted”, this was the pronouncement of Minister for Children Hon. Tracey Martin as her department, Oranga Tamariki, faces multiple inquiries into the number of babies being taken from their families. “But a baby can die with a single punch, “the Minister continued. “So sometimes, Oranga ...
We're making progress on tackling the long-term challenges: from homelessness, to strengthening border security, to bringing banking back New Zealand's small towns. ...
Associate Transport Minister Shane Jones has backed the ambitious plan to move Auckland’s port to Northport, at Whangarei harbour, which he says will be the “King Kong of infrastructure”. The plan is part of the recommendations of a six-person independent working group, which has recommended the Ports of Auckland be ...
A six-member independent working group selected the option of moving Auckland’s port to Northport, in Whangarei, ahead of other options. In what could be New Zealand’s most ambitious infrastructure project yet, a major expansion of the Marsden Point port could happen within 15 years. The project, officially called the “Upper ...
The final Electricity Price Review recommended prohibiting prompt payment discounts but allowing “reasonable” late fees. The findings of this review was welcomed by the Coalition Government, but they hope companies will follow through with its recommendations without regulations needed to be passed. Meridian Energy had already stopped prompt payment discounts, ...
Fletcher Tabuteau, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF)through its skills and employment programme, Te Ara Mahi,will invest nearly $600,000 to ensure work opportunities for locals in Turangia and Whanganui, Parliamentary Under Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau announced today. “I’m pleased to announce the PGF ...
An export-led economy is one of New Zealand First’s key principles, and our commitment to achieving this is shown by the continuing skyrocketing demand for our beef and sheep meat exports. Beef + Lamb New Zealand's New Season Outlook 2019-20 report forecasts beef, lamb and mutton prices to lift from ...
A Bill to improve prison security and ensure the fair, safe, and humane treatment of people in prison while upholding public safety has passed its third reading. Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis says the Corrections Amendment Bill makes a number of changes to ensure the Corrections Act 2004 is fit for ...
Minister for Māori Development, Nanaia Mahuta, has selected Arihia Bennett MNZM, Chief Executive Officer of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, as the Te Puni Kōkiri appointed representative on the New Zealand-China Council. The New Zealand-China Council (the Council) was established in 2012 as a New Zealand led and funded organisation ...
Responsibility for processing the small number of Southern Response claims still to be settled will be transferred to EQC by the end of the year. “As claim numbers reduce, it no longer makes sense for the Crown to have two organisations processing the remaining Canterbury claims,” Grant Robertson says. “Since ...
Health Minister David Clark is encouraging Whanganui residents to take up the opportunity for free bowel screening, which can detect cancer early when it’s easier to treat. Over the next two years 12,000 Whanganui locals, aged 60 to 74 will be invited to participate in the National Bowel Screening ...
Minister for Pacific Peoples Aupito William Sio, heads to Oslo today to represent New Zealand at the sixth Our Ocean Conference, which is being hosted by the Norwegian Government from the 23-24 October. “The Our Ocean Conference mobilises real action on issues like marine plastic pollution and the impacts of ...
Two secondary-school initiatives are being expanded as part of the Government’s plan to see more young New Zealanders take up a trade to help close the skills gap. This includes the largest single increase in Trades Academy places in recent years. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Education Minister Chris ...
Session 4: Pacific Connectivity – Youth, Media and New Opportunities Kia ora tatou katoa and Warm Pacific greetings to one and all. Representatives of Tainui, the local people of the land, or manawhenua – the indigenous peoples of this area – have welcomed you this morning in accordance with ...
The Government today announced its support for a project that could substantially reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions from cattle. The announcement was made as part of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s and Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor’s visit to Nelson’s Cawthron Aquaculture Park. The Cawthron Institute will receive $100,000 from the Government’s ...
Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni has welcomed the first reading of the New Zealand Superannuation and Veteran’s Pension Legislation Amendment Bill. “Every New Zealander has a stake in New Zealand Superannuation and Veteran’s Pension,” says Carmel Sepuloni. “They are our most common form of social assistance – nearly 800,000 New ...
Babies in Auckland aged six months and over can receive a free vaccination and children will all have access to vaccines, Associate Minister of Health Julie Anne Genter announced today at Papatoetoe High School. The move comes as part of Government efforts to step up the fight against measles. ...
***Check against delivery*** Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here, and to have the honour of opening this important conference on behalf of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. Let us take the opportunity to acknowledge all the people who have helped make today possible, including our special ...
Police Minister Stuart Nash says the safety of frontline officers and members of the public will be the focus of a new trial of specialist Police response teams in three of our largest urban centres. Police have this morning released details of an initiative to be trialled in Counties Manukau, ...
The Minister of Fisheries is calling for entries for a new public award to celebrate innovation in our seafood sector. “I have established the Seafood Sustainability Awards to recognise and celebrate those throughout industry, tangata whenua and communities who demonstrate outstanding dedication and innovation towards the sustainability of New Zealand’s ...
Minister for Women Julie Anne Genter welcomes leaders in the private sector taking action on closing their gender pay gaps to ensure a fairer workplace for all New Zealanders. Ms Genter today launched a new report, Addressing the gender pay gap and driving women’s representation in senior leadership, from the Champions for ...
Government Ministers today welcomed the release of a marine environment report highlighting the four key issues affecting our oceans, estuaries and coastlines. The release underlines the importance of government proposals to combat climate pollution, ensure clean freshwater, protect biodiversity, make land use more sustainable, and reduce waste and plastic. Environment ...
The Government has approved funding for a new acute mental health facility for Waikato which will provide better care and support to people with mental health and addiction issues. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Health Minister Dr David Clark announced the $100 million project to replace the aging Henry Rongomau ...
The Government is making progress on its goal to integrate te reo Māori into education by 2025, with over 500 teachers and support staff already graduating from Te Ahu o te Reo Māori, Associate Education Minister Kelvin Davis announced today. Kelvin Davis made the announcement at an awards ceremony in Waikanae today, for ...
Statistics Minister James Shaw has welcomed the first release of 2018 Census data. The first release of data today, 23 September, includes key data on population, regional growth, the number of homes and the size of different ethnic groups in New Zealand. Data from the 2018 Census will support the ...
Minister for Statistics James Shaw today announced a public consultation on a proposed algorithm charter for government agencies. The charter has been developed by the Government Chief Data Steward in response to growing calls for more transparency in government use of data. Computer algorithms – procedures or formulas for solving ...
Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor, Climate Change Minister James Shaw and visiting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte co-hosted a business roundtable in Auckland this morning focused on working together to address climate change. “The Netherlands is an important partner for New Zealand. We share a strong agricultural history. Sustainable agribusiness and ...
The Government is taking action to build an inclusive economy where more of us receive our fair share at work and businesses can compete on great products and services, not undercutting wages and conditions, Immigration and Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. Two consultations launched today seek feedback ...
The future for New Zealand’s threatened indigenous freshwater fish looks brighter with the passing of the Conservation (Indigenous Freshwater Fish) Amendment Bill in Parliament today said Minister of Conservation, Eugenie Sage. “Until now, our freshwater fish legislation has been 20 years out of date. We have lacked effective tools to ...
At 1.30pm tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of Kiwis will join about 65 million people around the globe in ShakeOut, the world’s biggest earthquake drill. The annual drill is to remind people of the right action to take during an earthquake which is to Drop, Cover, Hold, and to practise their ...
Kiwis are benefiting from higher wage growth and low inflation under the Coalition Government. Stats NZ data out today shows the rise in the cost of living remains low, as annual Consumers Price Index (CPI) inflation fell to 1.5% in September from 1.7% in June. “The low inflation comes as ...
New Zealand’s economic strength and resilience has been recognised in a major update on the state of the global economy. The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook released overnight shows a reduced global growth forecast over the next two years as issues like the US-China trade war and Brexit take hold. ...
Justice Minister Andrew Little has today introduced a new Bill to prevent terrorism and support the de-radicalisation of New Zealanders returning from overseas. The Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill gives the New Zealand Police the ability to apply to the High Court to impose control orders on New Zealanders who ...
A Bill that proposes targeted changes to simplify the processes for Māori land owners when engaging with the Māori Land Court has had its First Reading today. “The approach taken by the Government is to ensure that the protection of Māori land remains a priority as we seek to improve ...
Let me first thank all the new unionists and members in the room. There is nothing more important to improving people’s working lives than people making the decision to care, to get on board and help, to take up the reins and get involved. Congratulations to you. You bring the ...
Minister of Defence Ron Mark has signed a certificate exempting the activity of engine testing at Whenuapai Airbase from the Resource Management Act 1991. The Act gives the Minister of Defence the power to exempt activities for the purposes of national security. The certificate will mean the recent Environment Court ...
Finance Minister Grant Robertson has announced New Zealand will join the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action while attending APEC meetings in Chile. The objective of the 39 member Coalition is to share information and promote action to tackle climate change. It was formed in April this year, in ...
Feedback sought– Lyttelton commercial zone parking The Associate Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration, Poto Williams, is seeking feedback on a proposal to remove on-site car parking requirements for new developments in the Lyttelton commercial zone. The proposal, by Christchurch City Council, asks that powers under section 71 of the Greater ...
Hon Minister Poto Williams Associate Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration MEDIA STATEMENT Tuesday 15 October 2019 Feedback sought – Hagley Oval The Associate Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration, Poto Williams, is seeking feedback on a proposal about Hagley Oval. The proposal was developed by Regenerate Christchurch ...
Ladies and gentlemen, NZCTU President Richard Wagstaff, members of respective unions – thank you for the invitation to speak to you today. This might be preaching to the choir, but the importance of trade unions in New Zealand’s historical arch is difficult to understate. And it is my belief that ...
"Let’s start by acknowledging that it has been a huge year. " Police Association Annual Conference James Cook Grand Chancellor Hotel Wellington Nau mai, haere mai. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, ka nui te mihi, ki a koutou katoa. President of the Police Association, Chris Cahill; Members of the Association and ...
Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters and Minister of Defence Ron Mark have announced the New Zealand Government’s decision to again deploy a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3K2 (P-3) maritime patrol aircraft to support the implementation of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions imposing sanctions against North Korea. New ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters says New Zealand continues to have serious concerns for peace and stability in north-east Syria. “Recent reports that hundreds of ISIS-affiliated families have fled from a camp are deeply concerning from a humanitarian and security perspective”, Mr Peters says. “While we acknowledge Turkey’s domestic security ...
Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor is warning travelling Kiwis to be vigilant as the high-season for the crop-eating brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) is under way. “We’re on high alert to stop BMSB arriving in NZ. The high season runs until April 30 and we’ve strengthened our measures to stop stink ...
The Government is moving swiftly to change the law to improve the welfare and pastoral care of students living in university halls of residence and other tertiary hostels. Cabinet has agreed to several changes, including creating a new mandatory Code of Practice that sets out the duty of pastoral care ...
The Minister for Conservation Eugenie Sage has launched a new comprehensive trapping guide for community trappers to help them protect our native birds, plants and other wildlife, at Zealandia in Wellington today. ‘A practical guide to trapping’, has been developed by the Department of Conservation (DOC), and was launched during ...
Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter welcomes PHARMAC’s move to improve access to long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs). PHARMAC has today announced it will fund the full cost of Mirena and Jaydess for anyone seeking long term contraception, lifting previous restrictions on access to Mirena. “I welcome women having greater choices ...
By Rebecca Ananian-Welsh Australians picked up their morning papers yesterday to find heavily blacked-out text instead of front-page headlines. This bold statement was instigated by the “Your Right to Know” campaign, an unlikely coalition of Australian media organisations fighting for press freedom and source protection. A key reform advocated by a ...
Surrounding sites evacuated and one reported hospitalised in serious condition as blaze rips through two floors of the under-construction building in the Auckland CBDLast updated: 6.30pmParts of central Auckland have been brought to a standstill this afternoon after a major fire broke out shortly after 1pm at the Sky City ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phil McManus, Professor of Urban and Environmental Geography: Head of School of Geosciences, University of Sydney In the wake of a shocking ABC report on the dismal end of many racehorses’ lives in slaughterhouses, many Australians are questioning whether the horse racing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mohiuddin Ahmed, Lecturer of Computing & Security, Edith Cowan University Machines and the internet are woven into the fabric of our society. A growing number of users, devices and applications work together to produce what we now call “big data”. And this ...
After an unusually nasty campaign for their country, Canada has gone to the polls. They’ve decided that Justin Trudeau will continue as prime minister, but just like in New Zealand, he’ll have to work with coalition politics. What’s happened?After a brutal and at times humiliating campaign, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau has ...
“The Prime Minister must publicly support an immediate ban on Gay Conversion Therapy . If I was Jacinda I would feel morally obligated to give more confidence on where I stand, when I have asked for, and received, support from that community.” ...
New abortion law marks significant and needed progress for reproductive rights in New Zealand Amnesty International has today made its submission to the Abortion Legislation Committee in Wellington. The rights at stake in the legislation include the rights ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s content by Dr Bryce Edwards.Transport Thomas Coughlan (Stuff): NZ Transport Agency to Phil Twyford: We should have done better ...
Crisis of Safety and Confidence in our Engineering, Building and Construction Industries Please find attached a copy of an Open Letter from Professor Maan Alkaisi, Spokesperson CTV Families Group. This was sent a short time ago to the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern, ...
Safe speed limits are survivable speed limits and this is what AT has endorsed in its step change decision today. This decision is a landmark that sets the scene for a new focus on road safety in New Zealand. ...
The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) says the inadequate treatment of urology patients in Southern District Health Board is distressing and should serve as a broad reminder to DHB management to listen when specialists raise concerns. ...
Informed via telegram that Netflix has released a full trailer for the new season of The Crown, Tara Ward puts on her best boxhat and white gloves to find out what round three will bring. The good Lorde told us we’ll never be royals, so the first full trailer for the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sara Dehm, Lecturer, University of Technology Sydney Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie has some sobering reading to do over the coming weeks: an 88-page Senate report into the government-sponsored bill to repeal the medevac law that allow refugees and asylum seekers in Papua ...
Eric Crampton has fun imagining a version of MBIE that worried it could be subject to cartel criminalisation provisions for the anticompetitive regimes it has established. ...
Criminologist Antje Deckert has just completed a two-year study of how women offenders are portrayed in New Zealand newspapers. The results show that journalists are telling very different stories abut Māori and Pākehā. That our criminal justice system is in desperate need of reform and that we need to reduce the ...
China continues its march into the Pacific with a China-Pacific Island Countries Economic Development and Cooperation Forum in Samoa this week. Ahead of the forum, Beijing has signed seven new agreements with Samoa covering education, trade, e-commerce, investment, infrastructure and agriculture. China’s Vice-Premier Hu Chunhua heads his delegation in Apia ...
It might be tempting to yell, but there are more effective ways to talk to doubters about the value of vaccines, write Julie Leask and Maryke Steffens.Your neighbour is telling you about his new baby. He feels nervous about vaccinating, and says he’s considering delaying Lucy’s vaccines.Your mother’s group is ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Debra Wain, Academic in Professional and Creaive Writing, Deakin University Why do we tell stories, and how are they crafted? In this series, we unpick the work of the writer on both page and screen. Anna Spargo-Ryan’s debut novel, The Paper House ...
The Movies, a documentary series that celebrates movies and their impact on culture, is available on TVNZ OnDemand today. Sam Brooks pulls some of the best quotes from its galaxy of stars.Ever wanted to get a snapshot of cinematic history without leaving the comfort of your couch, or even your ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ronald F Pol, Senior researcher NZ, La Trobe University Money laundering rarely gets as literal as the case in Thailand last week, where police raided homes of a ring suspected of laundering a billion baht (about A$48 million) of drug proceeds and ...
The NZTA chair has acknowledged the agency dropped the ball in its early handling of Auckland's light rail project, as the NZ Infra proposal grips ministers. ...
On Friday it was announced that Armed Offenders Squad patrols will be trialled in Counties Manukau, Waikato and Canterbury over the next six months. The data suggests this will increase police violence and unfairly target Māori, writes Emilie Rākete.Police Commissioner Mike Bush announced on Friday that cars of Armed Offender ...
This summary is provided to assist in the understanding of the Court’s judgment. It does not comprise part of the reasons for that judgment. The full judgment with reasons is the only authoritative document. The full text of the judgment and reasons ...
There’s something about the feeling of wind whipping my face that brings me out of my head and into the moment. Once a month we pedal as a group: recreating the feeling of childlike glee riding our bikes together, writes Helen King.The first bike I learned to ride belonged to ...
More than 10,000 school support staff around the country have begun two weeks of paid union meetings to discuss progress on pay equity, and next steps following the Ministry of Education's failure to present a collective agreement offer. ...
Government ministers are adamant New Zealand’s economic fundamentals are solid, unemployment is at a record low, growth is faster than in Australia, and the surplus in the government accounts and low debt present further opportunities to strengthen the economy. Yet, across the road from the Beehive, the view from the ...
Wellington's mayor-elect Andy Foster says talk about a recount is causing a "distraction" for the council at the start of their term, but the incumbent Justin Lester says it's essential for a democratic process. ...
Police Commissioner Mike Bush has today announced an independent review of the systems and processes NZ Police has in place to address complaints of bullying. ...
The Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry has formalised an integrated pathway for survivors to seek justice for the abuse they suffered in State care or in the care of faith-based institutions. ...
The small-claims mediation process is meant to give real people a voice, but the financial and emotional sacrifice just isn’t worth it, writes Jai BreitnauerWhen we moved to the semi-rural dreamland of Te Henga (Bethell’s Beach) in 2017, we couldn’t imagine that anything would be able to tarnish the beautiful ...
The New Zealand Bar Association welcomes a Court of Appeal decision which gives detailed guidance on sentencing people convicted of offences related to the importation, manufacture and supply of methamphetamine. ...
Methamphetamine (meth) dealers who can prove their own addiction caused their drug offending could have their sentences cut by 30 per cent, according to a landmark judgement released by the Court of Appeal. The role of an offender in a drug network ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Senior Lecturer, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland Australians picked up their morning papers yesterday to find heavily blacked-out text instead of front-page headlines. This bold statement was instigated by the “Your Right to Know” campaign, an ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul McGreevy, Professor of Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare Science, University of Sydney The slaughter of horses bred for racing in Australia, as revealed in the ABC’s investigation, highlights the challenge of what to do with racehorses when their careers are over. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carlina Black, PhD candidate, La Trobe University It’s a year since the national apology to victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse. While national apologies can acknowledge survivors, sorry is just the beginning. Access to healing is needed. Our research shows ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samantha Hepburn, Director of the Centre for Energy and Natural Resources Law, Deakin Law School, Deakin University Right now, two projects have been proposed to import gas from overseas to supply eastern Australia. This is an absurd prospect. Australia is a resource-rich ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Pitman, Senior Research Fellow, Curtin University In a recent nation-wide survey by online tutoring company Cluey Learning, 75% of Australian senior students said their ATAR score would impact on the rest of their life. And more than 80% said a score ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shih-Wen Sue Chen, Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature, Deakin University There is a new challenger to Disney’s hold on the global animation industry, and he is a Chinese demon child. [embedded content]Ne Zha: Birth of the Demon Child, from Chengdu Coco ...
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Wellington’s new mayor faces difficult three years, Zero Carbon bill select committee report comes back, and extremist preacher barred from NZPartly because it was a widely unexpected result, the opening days of Wellington mayor Andy Foster’s tenure have been gripping. He ...
Laurence Fearnley, author of a best-selling novel about perfumes, proposes a radical new scheme in which people of refined noses set out together and establish a sniffing group. ...
A string of failures over the past 25 years has drawn attention to the quality of regulatory practice in NZ. Jeroen van der Heijden looks at what we can do differently. ...
After her own troubled teenage years, Fran McEwen doesn't want to see other girls going through the same challenges. So she's running a race across a Middle Eastern desert to help them. ...
Last night, the two titans of the cannabis referendum came together for their first televised debate on the issue – Paula Bennett and Chlöe Swarbrick.From a distance, Paula Bennett and Chlöe Swarbrick don’t feel like the most likely opponents. What with Paula Bennett recently-ish stating she would not seek re-election ...
Andrew Little’s terrorism suppression bill is facing two very different forms of resistance, from National and from the Greens. What is the legislation, and why is it controversial?What this then? The Terrorism Suppression (Control Orders) Bill, introduced to parliament by the justice minister, Andrew Little, last Wednesday, seeks to introduce “a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Given her status as holding two vital Senate crossbench votes Pauline Hanson is at times, in the eyes of senior government figures, She Who Must Be Obeyed. And so it was last week, when Hanson ...
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says he'll be watching out for potential cost blow-outs for Auckland's light rail project, after warnings from a source within the transport industry. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leah Mercer, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, Curtin University Fully Sikh, directed by Matt Edgerton, Perth’s Studio Underground The foyer is adorned with colourful fabric and bunting. We’re welcomed by the sounds of Indian music while members of the Sikh community offer ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leah Mercer, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, Curtin University Fully Sikh, directed by Matt Edgerton, Perth’s Studio Underground The foyer is adorned with colourful fabric and bunting. We’re welcomed by the sounds of Indian music while members of the Sikh community offer ...
New Zealand First leader and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters with Governor General Dame Patsy Reddy and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.Trying to make sense of the New Zealand First party can be difficult at the best of times. Political journalists and commentators attempt to work out where the party ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s content by Dr Bryce Edwards.TV3 sale Tim Batt (Metro): What if THREE’s problem isn’t TVNZ but… MediaWorks? Alex Braae ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Miller, Professor of Violence Prevention and Addiction Studies, Deakin University Over recent weeks, the alcohol industry has been drumming up mediadiscussion around Australia’s new drinking guidelines. Australia’s guidelines on alcohol consumption are under ongoing review by the National Health and ...
Extremist Baptist pastor Steven Anderson has just been blocked from entering New Zealand, making us the 34th country to reject his hate speech-filled sermons. American pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church has been denied entry to New Zealand on character grounds, putting a stop to his plans to ...
Twenty years ago Stephen Chbosky had a massive hit with coming-of-age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Now the director/producer/scriptwriter is back with an epic, kid-centric horror. Early on in Stephen Chbosky’s frustrating new horror novel, Imaginary Friend, its seven-year-old protagonist Christopher is sitting down to watch his favourite cartoon, ...
Hold on to your sponge nubbins, New Zealand’s loveliest reality show Great Kiwi Bake Off is back for a second serving. Before the show’s return on November 3, Tara Ward takes a sneak peek at 2019’s contestants. Lay me down on a soft bed of whipped cream and swab my forehead with a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ronald F Pol, Senior researcher NZ, La Trobe University Money laundering rarely gets as literal as the case in Thailand last week, where police raided homes of a ring suspected of laundering a billion baht (about A$48 million) of drug proceeds and ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wilfred Wang, Lecturer, Communications & Media Studies, Monash University The Australian society has changed significantly since cemeteries in Victoria were planned and designed 150 years ago. But there haven’t been any major redevelopment or review of the community’s changing requirements for what ...
NZ Post’s failure to maintain an adequate postal voting infrastructure has been the subject of two submissions to Parliamentary Select Committees by the Postal Workers Union since the last Local Authority postal vote in 2016. The union maintained that ...
New Zealand honey growers appear to have so far avoided the heavy hand of the Australian government in their dispute with apiarists across the Tasman. ...
A downturn in Tourism Holdings' (THL) vehicle sales business in the United States is likely to have a material negative affect on its full year results, the company warns. ...
The troubled Auckland Light Rail project is back in the news again, and not for good reasons. So what does it all mean for transport and traffic congestion in New Zealand’s biggest city?What’s all this then?It seemed like such a good plan at the time. Over the course of 10 ...
Open Mike 22/01/2018 
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by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh This year marks the 20th anniversary of the La Gabarra massacre. The community organised an event to remember the most well-known of the horrendous heart-breaking events that befell the communities of this area of the municipality of Tibú: the massacre carried out on August 21st 1999. ...4 hours ago
There was another police chase in Christchurch this morning, resulting in a crash which killed one person and injured five more. Because someone died, the chase is being investigated by the Independent Police Conduct Authority. And based on previous reports by the IPCA, we know how it will go: the ...8 hours ago
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Media Statement for Immediate Release 16th October 2019 “Fake News” from Auckland City Council CCOs Board Chairs re pay and performance bonuses for top managers Despite comments from Auckland City Council CCOs Board Chairs re pay and performance bonuses for top managers—Herald Newspaper Tuesday Oct 15th–there is very little evidence ...5 days ago
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Just had a quick squizz through a blog on the sidebar I hadn’t noticed before.
exhALANt. Looks good.
Thanks for the heads up. Does look interesting – bookmarked.
It does indeed look good, but I question the placing of John Campbell and Jon Stewart alongside the likes of Chomsky, Snowden, Hager, and Mihi Forbes.
I still can’t forget Campbell’s gleeful endorsement, night after night, of the National Party’s dirty tricks campaign against David Benson-Pope, and I can’t forget, or forgive, Stewart’s smarmy “Team Civilization” speech after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Bensonpope made quite an impression on you I take it.
Not at all. I am on record here and on other fora criticising him for his thuggish behaviour in parliament—particularly his yelling out “Send him HOME!” whenever the subject of Ahmed Zaoui came up.
But the National Party and its media accomplices, like Campbell, didn’t attack Benson-Pope on those grounds. Instead they recycled wild accusations about him abusing school children, which were nothing more than a National Party dirty tricks campaign. None of the charges had any validity, but that didn’t stop the ridicule and the traducing of him In parliament and in the media. National MPs bawled “Pervert!” and “Child molester!” when he got up to speak, and perhaps the most sickening sight of all was when Judith Collins, of all people, stood in parliament, smirking at him and holding a tennis ball.
Campbell thought it was all great sport, and didn’t relent in the slightest even after Benson-Pope was reduced to tears under the National Party-led vilification.
Oxfam report – Huge wealth gap in New Zealand where richest 1% own 30% of wealth
Another article that shames our country and shows how far we have fallen since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s and our further lurch to being an extremely unequal society after 9 years of Key’s regime.
It would be great to think that senior members of our government sat down and read the Oxfam report mentioned in this article. Then looked a the policies they have put forward to deal with issues of poverty in New Zealand. Then ripped them and listened to the suggestions made made by Rachael Le Mesurier.
Oxfam NZ executive director Rachael Le Mesurier said.
Her suggestions….
tax the rich
tax multinationals
use tax to make the country a fairer place
I would add – remove all the laws in the country that enshrine neoliberalism and enact new laws that create a socialist state.
“Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her misery.”
https://fee.org/articles/why-socialism-failed/
Yes, because having guaranteed housing, healthcare and employment is hell on Earth.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/01/venezuela-collapsing-socialist-induced-chaos-yet-remains-corbynista/
Venezuela destroyed by capitalism not socialism.
Pay attention.
Hmmm.
I can’t help but suspect that the Telegraph article’s attempt to draw a line from Corbyn to the Khmer Rouge somehow suggests that its description of Venezuelan conditions and challenges might not be entirely impartial.
It may not be. But it’s hard to fault the observation of what is happening in Venezuela. Whatever the lens.
“Tearful Venezuelans had gone weeks without basic food items like milk, flour and toilet paper. It’s a sad but common part of daily life today in crisis-ridden Venezuela, a country that has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil. Colombian officials estimate that about 100,000 Venezuelans crossed the border. ”
http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/20/news/economy/venezuela-world-worst-economy/index.html?iid=hp-stack-dom
I don’t doubt you’d find that difficult. After all, confirmation bias is a wonderful thing.
Are you suggesting all is well in Venezuela?
Edit: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/26/venezuelas-problems-are-political-not-economic/
“Venezuelans go without basic goods like toilet paper and nourishing food; and the government appears helpless to deal with murder, robbery, assault, and corruption. Vigilantism is replacing formal policing. People die in pools of their own blood in filthy hospitals for lack of prescriptions and care. To save energy and ease the strain on the budget, government employees are required to show up for work only two days a week.”
“ismo — which is nothing more nor less than authoritarianism — has ruined Venezuela, as authoritarianism usually does. With unchecked political power, dictators are free to engage in any dumb idea they choose without a reckoning. For those who think Deng’s China or Pinochet’s Chile are examples to the contrary, note well that neither saw any economic thriving until they embraced a market economy, and only an economic illiterate or a moral idiot would encourage other countries to try their path with all the human rights abuses and instability that come with dictatorship. Chile mercifully passed into democracy with a push from the Reagan administration and its economy does well, while the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship breeds corruption and mismanagement; its economic model is obviously shaky, if not terminal. The comparison between Chile and Venezuela is also quite telling.”
Not at all.
I’m suggesting that you’ll post any old shit as long as you agree with its narrative, and that you’ll ignore patiently quantified data models if you disagree with where they point.
I don’t know why things are bad in Venezuela. I know a few years ago there was an attempted coup that focused on the now disfunctional oil companies, but maybe the leadership is corrupt. Maybe it’s a mixture, maybe one begat the other, maybe the shortages are the result of trade issue “encouraged” by the US – FFS Cuba put up with embargoes and crop burnings for decades, who knows what the CIA is up to.
But I am pretty sure that any relationship between someone like you (who will uncritically link to articles that compare Corbyn to Lenin) and the truth is at best purely coincidental – and quite frankly would be a statistical aberration.
The link between Corbin and Lenin was not posted ‘uncritically,. Corbyn’s policies (https://www.google.co.nz/amp/www.independent.co.uk/voices/corbyn-labour-mc-donnel-brexit-dangerous-for-the-uk-a7859501.html%3famp) are symptomatic of the wider problems with socialist ideology. But clearly you missed that.
As to your inability to understand the cause of Venezuela’s collapse, this quite is free:
“Why is it that reporters keep scratching their heads about Venezuela’s descent into extreme poverty and chaos? The cause is simple. Socialism. End it and you will end the misery.”
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/what-caused-venezuelas-collapse-is-no-mystery-except-to-economically-illiterate-journalists/
You literally posted just the link. There was no accompanying criticism. So yes, you posted the link uncritically.
In that case you share some of the “wider problems” of capitalism exemplified by the Belgian Congo and the Brazilian slave trade. 🙄
Love the way you keep linking to obviously deranged commenters. Corbyn is obviously just waiting to declare himself comrade generalissimo for life, according to your links. Good luck with that narrative, don’t let reality hit you in the arse on the way out.
Oh, so you present one guy’s reckons as evidence. He has an academic background, and he is also a right winger – a “liberal”, published on a website that claims to be “the leading organization opening the hearts and minds of 14–26 year-olds to the values of the free market, individual freedom, and strong personal character.”
The post you link to has little evidence, just claims, like this about socialism:
eg?
Because, what I am seeing from the inequalities inherent in capitalism, is a great life for the few, and plenty of misery for large numbers of people.
He argues that capitalism is based on human behaviours, which are ignored by socialism:
Ah but collaboration is a fundamental characteristic of human behaviours within society – without it there would be no society or development.
Thanks for your propaganda for the few.
Or rich people to bludge off of society.
“eg?”
Soviet Russia is probably the best example. Poverty, misery and tyranny aplenty. For other material on socialisms failures:
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/02/25/5-ways-socialism-destroys-societies-n1800086
https://mises.org/library/greece-illustrates-150-years-socialist-failure-europe
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-06/socialism-is-devastating-venezuela-and-americans-dont-seem-to-notice
From the final link
“Rolling blackouts are causing infant deaths in hospitals where backup generators have ceased to function; the country is on pace to hit 700 percent inflation; outside of active war zones, the murder rate in Caracas is the highest in the world.”
How does that rate on your misery monitor?
“Because, what I am seeing from the inequalities inherent in capitalism, is a great life for the few, and plenty of misery for large numbers of people.”
No.
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim
https://mises.org/library/data-clear-free-markets-reduce-poverty
https://www.cato.org/blog/capitalism-global-trade-reduction-poverty-inequality
Capitalism and socialism are both imperfect systems; it just so happens that capitalism can work, socialism rarely does.
You seem to have mixed up ‘Socialism’ with ‘Communism’.
No. Not at all.
Funny, don’t you like your freedom Hornet?
Those bloody Russians beat up the Germans in WW2 – what were they thinking ah?
The Russians were hoodwinked by Hitler, and found they had a common enemy. Aside from that, any association between the Soviet Union and freedom is purely accidental.
Odd view of history, so it was an accident that those pesky russians beat your boy hitler.
“Odd view of history”
That Hitler hoodwinked Stalin?
“so it was an accident that those pesky russians beat your boy hitler.”
I didn’t say it was accident. I said they became an ally with Britain out of mutual distaste for Hitler. Meanwhile, you have yet to come even close to condemning the totalitarianism, and acknowledging the ultimate failure, of the Soviet regime.
Your boy hitler was a totalitarian, and you have not condemned him yet.
“Meanwhile, you have yet to come even close to condemning the totalitarianism, and acknowledging the ultimate failure, of the Soviet regime.”
That comment means either your very dumb, or have not read anything I’ve ever said. Seriously the leninist project put back socialism back by 100 years, I think most here agree with that assertion, except unreconstructed marxist leninists.
Do you understand political economy? Or are you going to keep proving your ignorance?
I despise Hitler, and what he stood for.
But you have walked down a pathway and got lost. The Russians were hoodwinked by Hitler, who then invaded. And you still haven’t condemned soviet totalitarianism.
The lack of comprehension on your part hornet, makes me think you went to a private school. Your a purist, indeed a right royal marxist leninist in your modus operandi .
Oh well if you can’t work out where I stand from previous posts. I leave you to your hard right puffery. I’ll remind you, your boy hitler was a capitalist, .
“The lack of comprehension…”
…was on your part, and you inadequate knowledge of history. It was principally because Hitler hoodwinked Stalin that the USSR joined the allies. Until then, the Soviets were allies of Germany.
I’m accommodating for those who wish to learn:
“The invasion of Russia by Nazi Germany in 1941 shattered their formerly expedient pact and sent the USSR into the arms of the West.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ussr/
“I’ll remind you, your boy hitler was a capitalist”
Hitler was an evil dictator. And his politics were confused. If you can point to any reputable sources for your claim, I’d be interested to read more.
In the meantime, try finding capitalism out of this:
“The term “National Socialism” arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of “socialism”, as an alternative to both international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the “common good” and accept political interests as the main priority of economic organization.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
Hoodwinked, you implication that one man, hitler, was nazi germany , is quite frankly wrong.
The major corporations helped keep capitalism in place within all the fascist countries of Europe. Ever heard of IBM, ever drank Fanta? Just a couple, let alone all the car and other manufacturer companies. Ever heard of a guy call Albert Speer, he was a capitalist and in charge of war production.
Your right, they rejected free market capitalism, but not corporate or centralised capitalism. You should really read up on how capitalism works sunshine, you seem ill informed.
You could read up about Singapore, or Pinochet’s Chile to get a feel how it works. Saudi Arabia is another truly brutal capitalist country. Franco’s Spain was capitalist.
Do you even understand what your saying by capitalist, because it would appear you don’t – especially your warped ideas about how a fascist economy works. Italy was capitalist as well.
“, you implication that one man, hitler, was nazi germany , is quite frankly wrong”
I implied no such thing. But it was Hitler who made the decision to invade Russia. You seem to be moving as far away from the core point as possible to avoid admitting you were wrong.
Socialism was the only thing that saved capitalism – for a short time. It failed because capitalism still didn’t work even with the socialism bringing up the living standard of the many.
Throughout history capitalist systems have destroyed the society that they arose in. As they are destroying our society now as it brings about the 6th Extinction Event and all so that a few greedy schmucks can have ever more.
Tell me, how well will you be doing once you and your children are dead?
Because that is what capitalism is bringing about.
100% Draco,
Socialism was around way before capitalism in our history and was stable until they introduced a form of soft capitalism, so some took advantage of others , as capitalism can only survive if others are displaced and left to suffer and carry the burden of those who gain.l
Your NASA link is a piece of pure speculation. It talks about the ‘prospect’ that something ‘could’ happen.
Meanwhile, capitalism lifts billions out of poverty.
Read this…http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/greenpolitics/developingworld/12106587/Capitalism-not-Oxfam-is-defeating-poverty.html…love the picture of the maasai warrior with the cellphone!)
No it’s not. It’s a piece of modelling based upon what happened in the real world and shows that we’re going down the same route as all previous civilisations.
Meanwhile, all those billions were, and are, only in poverty because of capitalism. Because of the capitalists taking control of their resources and denying them to the people.
“No it’s not. It’s a piece of modelling …
So, yes it is.
“Meanwhile, all those billions were, and are, only in poverty because of capitalism. ”
Cite?
No, it’s not speculation. It’s a projection based upon observed reality.
A projection. Which is speculation.
Like this ‘projection’ http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/national/child-poverty-reductions-likely-to-be-less-than-treasury-first-projected/.
Your comment was “Throughout history capitalist systems have destroyed…”
Not ‘are speculated’ to cause, or ‘are projected to cause’.
It’s difficult to argue methodology with an idiot. Good luck, dtb
It’s difficult to argue at all if one agrees with stifling debate, eh McFlock.
Keep going with that fantasy. Your only positive contribution to society might be as a currently-untapped energy source.
And neoliberal capitalism is doing such a great job for our country.
You should look at the same of the stats for New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s.
Maybe the 1% like yourself couldn’t access Ferraris, but the rest of us were employed, secure and had access to free education and healthcare.
Most likely because we lived in a world in which our mum (the UK) bought all our produce, or told our sisters and brothers to buy our produce. By the mid 1980’s that world had long ceased to exist.
No, that wasn’t it. It was because the wealth got out to the general populace and the rich were well taxed.
As with all countries we’ve never needed trade to utilise our own resources for our own benefit. IMO, trade has actually kept us back as we focussed upon producing more of the same cheap shit (Primary produce) rather than developing our own economy to provide what we needed.
Our present economy is a massive waste of improving productivity and efficiency.
No it isn’t. Our present economy is employing more people than ever before, producing more trade than ever before, and delivering a standard of living higher than ever before.
Meanwhile we have higher poverty than ever before.
Not globally, we don’t.
The ultimate rwnj rebuttal- it’s not as bad as them… (which I’m going to guess is somthing racist – because that seems to be normal with your ilk)
And why is that, well not because of rwnj like you Hornet. Thank the left, thank the Christians and Socialist who agreed we can do better. And did.
“The ultimate rwnj rebuttal- it’s not as bad as them… ”
No, I didn’t say that. My claims have been about global poverty. But I repeat what I said earlier. Our present economy is employing more people than ever before, producing more trade than ever before, and delivering a standard of living higher than ever before.
“Thank the left, thank the Christians and Socialist who agreed we can do better. And did.”
There are many things socialists have done better. Destroyed economies. Slaughtered dissenters (including, btw, Christians). Starved citizens.
“Can a moral case be made for taking the rightful property of one American and giving it to another to whom it does not belong? I think not. That’s why socialism is evil. It uses evil means (coercion) to achieve what are seen as good ends (helping people). We might also note that an act that is inherently evil does not become moral simply because there’s a majority consensus.”
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/04/socialism.html
If all you read is far right loony publications like that, the only logical response – is move away from the elephant, your standing to close.
Adam you can shoot the messenger,or you can respond to the points I made.
You are wasting your time with this poster. He and James are just aggravating pests.
Where socialism failed it died of corruption, not elitist bullshit about envy. Capitalism is failing for the same reason.
Stuart socialism failed (and continues to fail) because at its core it is an unworkable system. Capitalism is imperfect, but it is self correcting. Socialism is imperfect, and then countries run out of money.
I really wonder what impels you to flaunt your ignorance in this manner on a serious political site.
Socialism in the modern context is never fully implemented. The regimes that purported to do so fell very far short of the ideal, but they operated for 60 or 70 years nevertheless – as long as any modern capitalist state has done without a depression. They were riddled with corruption. They claimed in fact to be communist, but were totalitarian and despotic. An uncorrupted communist society would have chosen democratic processes to suppress corruption.
In NZ in the last three decades we have seen extremes of capitalism that have destroyed the basis of our economy. We are no longer a farming society, but a real estate speculating one. In spite of overwhelming public sentiment, governments continue to sell land offshore and propose to sign the frankly lousy TPP. Capitalism has no mechanisms to correct these failures – we are obliged to fall back on older civil means of punishing corrupted politicians.
The more common and more successful Fabian socialism which operated in NZ was a raging success. It inspired Popper to write The Open Society And Its Enemies. You are merely one of its enemies.
“Socialism in the modern context is never fully implemented.“
That’s an age old excuse, that you seem to believe excuses it’s abject failure.
“The more common and more successful Fabian socialism which operated in NZ was a raging success. “
No, it wasn’t. It was only viable when supported by guaranteed market access for our produce. It was an unsustainable dream, lived in a bubble.
“In NZ in the last three decades we have seen extremes of capitalism that have destroyed the basis of our economy. “
That is the height of ignorance. I can only assume you know nothing ng of the countries growth in exports, market diversification and employment.
Socialism is the only form of society that succeeds. You might long for a society with entrenched systemic poverty like India has under capitalism, but no representative democracy can aspire to such a backward state. Our people must prosper – not just those advantaged by inherited or stolen wealth.
“It was an unsustainable dream” Poppycock – it only became unsustainable when the political leaders of the time betrayed the populace and looted the public estate to enrich themselves instead of tooling up for the change in circumstances.
“I can only assume you know nothing”
Yes, fall back on insults you empty bag of wind.
Over the last three decades NZ has lost capacity in most of our productive industries, with the possible exception of dairy, which relies on unsustainable access to fresh water and to cheap foreign labour. In the meantime the capital value of such farms has risen so much that interest costs absorb much of any profit deriving from increased production.
We don’t build cars any more, or process most of our fish. Gangs of underpaid foreign workers have displaced local pickers and pruners. Post-earthquake construction has been conducted principally by foreign workers instead of upskilling locals, all of which over the long term represents a significant loss of capacity.
If someone had deliberately set out to ruin a prosperous country they wouldn’t have done a thing different – and your mythical capitalist self-correction is nowhere in evidence.
If someone had deliberately set out to ruin a prosperous country they wouldn’t have done a thing different – and your mythical capitalist self-correction is nowhere in evidence.
From what I can make out a few did purposefully set out to ruin a prosperous country. It’s far easier to get poor people to work to make a rich person richer than a well educated person who’s financially independent.
Capitalism requires poverty.
Yes, I think the exploited foreign workers prove that – no degree of local poverty is sufficient to make some local bosses as profitable as they desire.
Some discussion here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4418024
Poverty and Capitalism
“Socialism is the only form of society that succeeds”
“To anyone not blinded to reality by their ideology, it is no secret that socialism, because of its inherent and essential nature, is, and must always be, an abject and disastrous failure. The failure of socialism and social engineering by “the best and brightest” of left-wing liberalism is once again being proven, the latest evidence coming from communist China, Canada, Britain, France, and Australia.”
http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/gov_philosophy/socialism_still_a_failure.htm
So, are you happy with the way socialism is working here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Laos), or here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba), or here (https://panampost.com/trino-marquez/2013/07/18/venezuela-the-failure-of-socialism/) or here (https://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/01/greek-disaster-is-all-about-socialism.html) or any number of other references.
But your defence of the indefensible is at least humorous.
RWNJ ignores all evidence, as presented by real research by the likes of Piketty and others, that shows that capitalism is the problem and not socialism. It was the height of socialism in the Western world after WWII where we also had the highest standard of living improvement.
It is since then and the implementation that we’ve seen an increase in poverty across the Western world.
None of which you support with any evidence whatsoever.
“It was the height of socialism in the Western world after WWII where we also had the highest standard of living improvement.”
Really? Socialism in the Western World? So how many people did the USSR slaughter? China?
Perhaps you should address your own blindness before embarrassing yourself in front of others Hornet.
Your antics are not amusing and your arguments are not informed.
Run along and play with your fellow travelers – you’re not up to arguing here.
Translation – “Stuart can’t follow the argument so throws toys from cot”.
You don’t have an argument Hornet, beyond bleating “Socialism baaaad”. You don’t even know what socialism is, you confuse it with communism and totalitarianism.
If you want further instruction from me you’ll have to pay for it.
“You don’t have an argument Hornet…”
Read the numerous references I have provided. You are in a heightened state of denial.
Why would I read your sources – they’ve misled you to the point of fatal ignorance. I worked with soviet crews, saw first hand what was wrong with their system. But backward far-right nutbars always think they know better.
“Why would I read your sources…”
That statement sums you up. Ignorance is bliss eh?
No moron – real experience trumps the maunderings of biased fools like yourself.
I have seen the truth of the soviet failure first hand and your callow reckons aren’t worth the pixels they’re written in.
Now, run along and play with your fellow ‘true believers’ – your view of socialism is a belief system, not a rational conclusion. It is hide-bound ignoramuses like yourself that led Karl Popper to his discovery of falsifiability.
Communism is control of the means of production by the workers through a democratic system. None of the so-called communist countries meet that minimum requirement.
It’s not to excuse the abject failure of those systems. It’s to point out that the failure was down to the top down hierarchy. Exactly the same way that capitalism fails.
Which logically means that capitalism must also fail without such guaranteed access to international markets. Guarantees that cannot be made and are, in fact, not coming. Even our FTAs aren’t guaranteeing that access as China’s threats to our exports prove.
The only sustainable means is to live within our means, within the resources available in NZ and to minimise international trade.
“None of the so-called communist countries meet that minimum requirement.”
There is no pure ‘capitalist’ nation either. Yet I’m not the one making excuses.
“Which logically means that capitalism must also fail without such guaranteed access to international markets.”
International trade is at the very heart of capitalism, making your comment a nonsense. A bit like saying ‘socialism must also fail without a central planning authority”.
“The only sustainable means is to live within our means, within the resources available in NZ and to minimise international trade.”
Tried, and failed. International trade has liberated billions of people from poverty, and opened nations and its peoples up to a vast choice of goods and services. If you want to live in the sort of environment your describe, I invite you to do so. North Korea springs to mind.
Yes you are or, to probably be more precise, you’re ignoring all the evidence that shows that capitalism is a failure.
It was your logic. We may have been somewhat socialist after WWII but we were still a capitalist economy dependent upon trade. You said:
Which must also apply to capitalism.
Socialism doesn’t have central planning. That said, we do need coordination and cooperation.
Not really. All developed economies developed locally before allowing international competition. And even then they seriously regulate access.
No it hasn’t. It’s induced ever more poverty.
Most of which most people can’t actually access. Which is the very definition of poverty.
And I suggest you try Somalia for what you have in mind. That, at least, is an accurate representation of the end result of capitalism.
“Yes you are or”
Cite the post.
“It was your logic. We may have been somewhat socialist after WWII but we were still a capitalist economy dependent upon trade.”
But you said this “It was the height of socialism in the Western world after WWII where we also had the highest standard of living improvement.”
So which was it? Capitalist or socialist?
“Which must also apply to capitalism.”
There is no ‘guaranteed market access’ any more.
“No it hasn’t. It’s induced ever more poverty.”
Not according to the IMF (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2001/12/banniste.htm), the World Bank (http://blogs.worldbank.org/trade/evidence-that-trade-does-reduce-poverty-but-only-if-the-conditions-are-right) and the WTO (https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/worldbankandwto15_e.pdf).
“Most of which most people can’t actually access. Which is the very definition of poverty.”
In NZ? Are you serious?
“And I suggest you try Somalia for what you have in mind. That, at least, is an accurate representation of the end result of capitalism.”
Try some reading https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/capitalism-misunderstood-ideal-one-somalia-law-john-minehan/.
After WWII it was what was always called a mixed economy. It failed because of capitalism.
That’s what the FTAs that we’ve signed and the WTO is for you moron. And they still don’t guarantee access to any market as every country can choose to not honour those agreements.
http://nzccss.org.nz/work/poverty/facts-about-poverty/fact-7-economic-growth-alone-does-not-solve-poverty/
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/19/poverty-increasing-in-developed-countries-ilo.html
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/global-poverty-oxfam-world-economic-forum
In the world and in NZ. That’s actually the whole point of the pricing mechanism – to limit access to resources. Poor people simply cannot afford them.
And the link you provide is pure ideology disconnected from reality. But that’s capitalism to a ‘T’. It sounds good but it’s not what it brings about. What it brings about is poverty and deprivation for the majority while a few get rich. Hence 8 people now having the same wealth as the poorest ~4b and it keeps getting worse. Of course, even the ideological rant that you linked to never once mentioned ownership which is what’s causing all that poverty and deprivation..
“After WWII it was what was always called a mixed economy. It failed because of capitalism.”
But that isn’t what you said. Here is what you said:
“It was the height of socialism in the Western world after WWII where we also had the highest standard of living improvement.”
“…we were still a capitalist economy dependent upon trade.”
The height of socialism is most certainly not a ‘mixed economy’. You have directly contradicted yourself.
“That’s what the FTAs that we’ve signed and the WTO is for you moron. And they still don’t guarantee access to any market as every country can choose to not honour those agreements.”
So you agree, there is guaranteed access.
“http://nzccss.org.nz/work/poverty/facts-about-poverty/fact-7-economic-growth-alone-does-not-solve-poverty/
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/19/poverty-increasing-in-developed-countries-ilo.html
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/global-poverty-oxfam-world-economic-forum”
Your have misrepresented your own sources. For example the Oxfam report is primarily about inequality. I quote from that report:
“While the number of people living in extreme poverty halved between 1990 and 2010, Oxfam argued that had inequality not increased during that period an extra 200 million people would have escaped extreme poverty.”
Your own cite states that the “number of people living in extreme poverty halved between 1990 and 2010.” That is a spectacularly successful outcome of capitalism.
“In the world and in NZ. That’s actually the whole point of the pricing mechanism – to limit access to resources. Poor people simply cannot afford them.”
Nonsense. Walk into a Warehouse. Or a Bunnings. The ‘poor’ in NZ can afford far more than my parents ever could.
Your source is weak.
We need to set up our society so that people can’t afford to own a huge amount of wealth. Maximum income with good capital taxes would easily achieve it.
We cannot afford the rich.
You want a society that aspires to be poor?
Do you think it is morally acceptable that Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) has $100 billion in the bank while his minimum wage workers need food stamps to get by?
If you are morally concerned about how much money Jeff Bezos has, stop buying stuff off Amazon, after all he’s not forcing you to use his service.
But he is getting massive government subsidies in the form of food stamps.
If a business cannot afford to keep it’s employees in good health then that business should collapse. And that’s pure neo-liberal ideology.
No, I want a society that doesn’t have rich people in it. Where everyone has access to the necessities of life and the resources necessary for them to be creative.
Neither of which is happening under capitalism.
NZ is already unbelievably rich the problem is a few greedy arseholes hoarding all the resources for themselves. That’s Capitalism: making money off money, clipping tickets, screwing markets, insider trading, regulatory capture. In the endgame it creates a massive slave class — already modelled by the USA (prisoners), China (factory workers), and the Middle East (Indian labourers).
+111
BTW, all the poor people out there never aspired to be poor – the rich made them that way so that they could be rich.
how about a society that changes how it quantifies ‘success’
There are plenty of examples to quantify success, but society is not necessarily the main driver.
https://blog.adioma.com/how-much-sweat-it-takes-from-zero-to-billionaire-infographic/
A few people start off poor and become rich. This isn’t great advertising as 1) for them to become rich they’ve made others poorer and 2) there’s so very few of them compared to the 7 billion people in the world.
…so by your logic, NZ as country should not aspire to become wealthy as it will make other countries poorer, and that is so morally inconceivable that we should not hold out any hope for Jacinda’s child’s generation.
Socialism, the university of life you never graduate from.
No.
People shouldn’t be allowed to become rich as that makes others poorer. In fact, capitalism requires poverty.
And NZ is already a rich country – we have many resources per capita. Those resources are our means. Fairly distributed and used would mean that no one would be living in poverty.
Thing is, they are our means. Exporting them makes us poorer. The same applies to other countries and so us importing resources is making other countries poorer. In fact, we can see that over the last couple of centuries as resources have been exported out of poor countries to rich countries. The rich countries became much better off while the poor countries are still poor and that was most definitely at the expense of the poor countries.
indeed there are plenty of ways, unfortunately the only one we appear to use is the accumulation of wealth which involves numerous negative impacts
LOL…..CC.
Good one Draco.
So, what your really saying is that the bottom 30% were each over $1000 better off under National?
No.
The bottom 30% became worse off under National.
Only the rich become better off under National as National transfers wealth from the bottom to the top.
Keep defending the plutocrats.
Not defending anyone. I think it’s marvellous that the bottom 30% are better off by 2-5% than they were the year before. This should be celebrated
But the study just pointed out that the bottom 30%’s wealth increased by an average of $1070 in 2017 Draco. You can’t argue that.
The sandflys are using a dum ass trick like they did with wearing a black beany and the think they are invisible lol.
I will sue there assessor for hundreds of thousands for the way they breach my human rights and the rights of all my children. And I’m going to sue for loss off the potential earnings of ECO MAORI from the Internet this could be millions. The sandflys can carry on underestimate Me I will make my move when the time is right. I see we came from ASIA I have a lot of respect for Asian one just has to learn there cultures to understand why they do things and how they think. Ana to kai
Maori origins Asia Ka pai
The sandflys can not get it out of there dum ass neo liberals brains that Im not a dum ass savage Im a intelligent human and Im going to win in the end I can see there plays all the time they are desperate Mobile fuel station on Sunset road Rotorua thats a play to counter ECO MAORI statement that crime is dropping .Ana to kai
Here the link to the back my story origins of Maori.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/100629585/dna-who-were-the-first-humans-to-reach-aotearoa Ka kite ano
Anyone who has been treating mainstream reporting on Syria with a degree of skepticism might, or will find this long detailed piece by Eva Bartlett of interest. In it she rather methodically and meticulously deconstructs attacks made on her journalistic integrity by, among others – Snopes, The Guardian, Ch 4 news and La Presse.
https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/a-personal-reply-to-the-fact-challenged-smears-of-terrorist-whitewashing-channel-4-snopes-and-la-presse/
An interesting article by Rod Oram on Newsroom – kind of a letter from the US where he has been travelling. it’s about the decline (and hopefully reinvention of the US).
Oram says that Martin Luther King predicted the current moral decline of the US, based in extensive inequalities.
Oram refers to a quote attributed to Martin Luther King shortly before he was assasinated:
Oram sees Trump as someone who has cleverly exploited this decline and the related fractures in US society, politics and economy.
Oram also refers to the protests against Trump this weekend, and is optimistic a new, better US is on the rise.
That quote of King’s is spot on.
It is class that trumps everything.
Class doesn’t “trump” everything, but it’s a crucial component of any rounded analysis…just as gender or race are.
Any of those three, if separated out and held aloft as the fundamental basis for analysis, leads to partial and skewed understandings.
If we were all classed as equal wouldn’t gender and race become irrelevant?
How so? You’re saying by “classed as equal” that there would be economic equity, yes? But the woman is still dominated by the man and the black or brown skinned person by the white skinned person. (Off the back of cultural and/or historical reasons etc)
And pretty soon that all bleeds back into economic arrangements and….square one all over again.
“How so?”
In all aspects of life.
So okay, your saying if issues of class and gender and race have been resolved, then there will be no ongoing issues of inequality pertaining to gender and race. Sure.
No.
At least I would assume Ed refers to class as being the divisions that allow degrees of access to ‘power’.
Within that frame, it can be reasonably argued that both race and gender are subsets of class inequality.
most people would take Ed’s comment to be about socioeconomic class though, esp as it was a response to the comment with MLK’s quote. I guess he can come back and clarify.
The USA is not one nation, it’s a federation and it’s cracking at the seams. Washington DC is now totally corrupted and it would be best for the States to disunite from this dysfunctional system.
False Prophets vs Real Profits
#MAGA MuellerAin’tGoingAway
Heh. One of the government functions that will keep going through the shutdown is Mueller’s investigation into the Chump campaign.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/robert-mueller-government-shutdown_us_5a63c3b6e4b00228300361db?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
“Climate change is the nuclear moment our our generation”. Quote PM Jacinda Ardern.
We must use less truck freight transport on roads and switch to using rail to lower the carbon emissions and arrest the risk of climate change accelerating.
Today’s major report on RNZ ‘Nine to noon report’ is again warning us all that coastal erosion is becoming a clear hazard now.
22/1/2018.
Monday 22 January 2018 Previous episodes
On today’s show
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon
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In this next article last year the outgoing ‘National government’ was quick to bury it’s head in the sand on this serious issue.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/96433693/coastal-erosion-report-urges-immediate-action
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[long cut and paste deleted. Please quote pieces to support your comment, not long tracts. People can click through to read the whole thing.
Also, if I have to spend time trying to figure out which are your words and which are the quotes, I’m more likely atm to just delete. Please come up with a system that makes it clear what are your words and what are the quotes. You can use the tags, or you can use characters. e.g.
>>>
body of text
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– weka]
Now isn’t that interesting – actually its much less than I would have thought in some areas.
46 km of railway – have alternative plans drawn up & activate closer to the time. 43000 houses – about 4% of the housing stock – how many are permanent dwellings as opposed to holiday homes – what is the built quality – how many can be shifted and are worth shifting? Are there clusters in some areas – that could be shifted at once.
Looks like we need to designate some land for “new” suburbs in some areas – and have a “shift it Saturday” – where south D takes it’s houses & migrates up onto a hill. At $10000 a house we are looking at $430m spread over a number of years . And houses at risk, not moveable & not yet flooding could be used as a reserve rental stock.
The airports – can swift public transport mean another nearby airport could be used? We have a lot of airports & this might be a good occasion to rethink about fewer & fast trains to areas around the airport.
Please do not paste the full text of articles.
moderation note to respond to, thanks.
So random musings from a right-winger time…
Jacinda Ardern is basically PM for as long she wants and is Labours answer to John Key.
Every time theres some news they may want buried (like why the first 100 days has been a bit slow or trying to hide the extra payments to tribes) they can trot a pic of Clarke taking the kid to preschool or if someone criticises Jacinda then you can bet the media will jump all over it as bullying.
2020 election well you have preschool, 2023 you’ve got starting primary school etc etc
So how is Jacinda like John well first off educationally speaking neither are what you would call academics in that John has a BCom from Canterbury and Jacinda has a BCS from Waikato
Both went overseas, both did quite well in their respective fields and both are very media savvy as well as both having the ability to say nothing but still making their respective supporters believe they walk on water (absolutely have a conversation about that)
Both are probably more intelligent than their respective critics and opposition give them credit for and both mangle the language (poverdy anyone?)
Being that Jacinda is the PM for as long as she wants (and i do mean she, most certainly not anyone else) I just hope that she does a good a job as John Key did
I do of course admit that I am biased therefore I may be completely wrong about all this
Says the little racist Puckish Rogue.
Like the poor me at the end, and the overly concern trolling – the new truly woeful Puckish Rogue.
Seems all you lies about a 4th term, have forced you like your mates, to make up new lies.
Sad man, just sad.
Um, what is racist about PR’s comment?
It’s a dig at him.
And a reminder of his past behaviour here. One should be reminded, when one sinks that low.
You going to post a link to this or just keep running your mouth?
if you’re going to do that can you please link? Not a great fan of carrying over conflicts from past convos unless there is a good reason.
Absolutely, can you show me how to search past comments, becasue all I get is two pages of PR’s post, they cover time since his return. Not the one that got him banned.
Edit: Because puckish has no recollection of being banned. Also my point I might add.
thanks. I find it easier to use google by site advanced search. Put the full TS URL in the ‘site or domain’ field, and whatever key words you can think of. You’ll still have to scroll through but you can narrow it down by dates too. It’s better than the internal search engine.
https://www.google.co.nz/advanced_search
Thanks not having much fun, really, really not having much fun. But been mildly enjoyable reading some old posts.
Will keep plodding on – got a new phrase I hope will help – “banned until 1 month after the election”
I suspect the thread you’re flailing for is here – started with links pointed to by Bill in modmode. Six month ban.
Unless you’ve got a better one.
Big, BIG, thank you McFlock.
Yes, that the one.
A cynical soul aren’t you? Have you forgotten John Key’s use of his son and daughter with their various publicity episodes, particularly Max and his gay slur to a cyclist. And his clutching of Richie at every opportunity. And his bad taste radio episodes. Well the occasional photo of a little Gayford- Ardern I think would be mild in comparison. I can’t imagine them doing anything stupid with their baby as far as publicity goes.
Sure its not a perfect comparison but wouldn’t you agree theres some similarities between the two and I do hope the media give their kid a chance to be a kid
Hey PR, thank-you for raising the standard of RW comment here a couple of notches, much appreciated.
Well thank you very much, its unexpected but a compliment is always nice to recieve
You laid out your argument well, and there was minimal taunting.
Its damn hard to taunt when your team loses 🙂
lol. Well the righties had a go at it here for a few months since spring, but I hope they take your lead now 🙂
i think we all can agree I shouldn’t take the lead in anything
very self deprecating PR, you surprise me. How about we settle on you setting a good example?
edit, you realise you’ve set the bar now.
Hey if it helps make the site more welcoming to posters i’ll give it a go
mate, anything that gets more interesting political discussion and less people bitching at each other the better. Better for those already here, and better at attracting others to comment.
(lol, I feel I need to put a caveat in now, given your history, but I’m not quite sure what it is).
As Rocky Balboa so eloquently put it:
ha ha.
It’s early days for Jacinda, but there seems to be some intention of keeping promises – something no-one could accuse Key of.
It will of course take a long time to build NZ out of the hole neo-liberalism and naked corruption have dropped us into.
In the meantime though, perhaps you should contain your criticism to items where the government is erring. If Jacinda keeps her promises and repairs some of the wreckage the last government wrought then there is nothing wrong with positive press – it’s only when the positive press is used to cover up failures and corruption, which is all it did under Key, that it becomes odious.
“It’s early days for Jacinda, but there seems to be some intention of keeping promises – something no-one could accuse Key of.”
Labour pre-election pledged to re-enter Pike River mine and thats now a firm maybe plus depending on how you want to see it the whole TPP thing is a back track also and its been less than 100 days
You’re right, maybe they will keep their child away from the media (hopefully they will) but considering the media coverage I doubt the media will respect their wishes
“I do hope the media give their kid a chance to be a kid.”
Jacinda and Clarke were interviewed on this very point this morning and it was pretty clear that they have this well in mind – sorry won’t try to find the video in the plethora of interviews etc. Think it was the TVNZ Breakfast interview with Tame.
Both Jacinda and Clarke are well versed/qualified in media management and IMHO their announcement on Friday was timed to coincide with the end of the holiday period and the back to work for the government and the impending end of the first 100 day period.
The Labour Caucus (and many of their families) convened for a two day retreat near Martinborough yesterday where they are currently reviewing the first 100 days, what still needs to be done in the next 10 days, and drawing up the next 100 day plans. The PM is expected to give a news conference/stand-up this afternoon on the next steps in their planning etc. In other words, IMHO they announced the baby news on Friday, have given 48 hours or so for Babymania, and now the PM’s focus etc will be back to government business.
Tomorrow Tues morning it is back to Wellington for the first Cabinet meeting with Winston etc. – so back to BAU.
An interesting aside to the above (again I cannot give a link as it is lost somewhere in the plethora of interviews etc I have ‘indulged in’ over the last 48 hours and it would take hours to find) is that:
Drumroll ….
Ardern mentioned in passing in an interview (yesterday Sunday I think) that Winston Peters has actually been/still is formally Acting PM for the two or so days of the Labour Caucus Retreat in the Wairarapa.
A test run and/or a middle finger salute to the naysayers who are predicting Armageddon when Peters takes over as Acting PM in June?
“A test run and/or a middle finger salute to the naysayers who are predicting Armageddon when Peters takes over as Acting PM in June?”
Could well be but I don’t think most (imho anyway) people have a problem with Winston being PM temporarily as i think most would probably say that was a big part of the negotiations but if, no matter how unlikely, Winston is still the leader at the next election then things would get very interesting
Do you remember how Labour were going to ban foreigners buying New Zealand houses, and that the ban would be in place by Christmas?
Became they would introduce a bill and it wouldn’t affect all foreigners but you can’t expect too much can you?
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/election-2017/labour-would-ban-foreign-property-purchases
As she said ‘Labour would ban sales of existing houses to non-resident, foreign buyers “by Christmas”‘.
Dear Puckish Rogue,
I don’t believe that the Labour Government can be blamed because you think a hundred days has been somehow slowed down.
“(like why the first 100 days has been a bit slow)”
I’d blame the idleness of holidays boring you, or longer summer days, the heat, the cricket, whatever.
But not the government. Even nanny state cannot alter time- Maui and his brothers could, but not the government……
http://eng.mataurangamaori.tki.org.nz/Support-materials/Te-Reo-Maori/Maori-Myths-Legends-and-Contemporary-Stories/How-Maui-slowed-the-sun
My mistake, I meant ticking off the first hundred days achievements
Also the Disney movie Moana would have been a lot more interesting had they used a few more of Mauis backstory
An interesting thesis that, based on your other comments in this thread, seems to refer to the respective popularity of said leaders and the rather huge and unique privilege this offers.
I’d argue that the persona of Key and Ardern is developed/developing by an interplay of inner and outer forces & influences. Ardern is or will be Labour’s “answer to John Key” because that’s what the general public believes and thus has come to expect/demand. The MSM, pundits, the Opposition, the NZ Labour Party & Caucus, the coalition-Government, etcetera, will all contribute to this collective projection.
When Key became leader of the National Party in 2006 and PM 2 years later his persona was not identical to the one when he bailed out in 2016.
Ms Ardern’s persona is also not static & fixed and time will tell how it will develop but suffice to say her personal trajectory may be very different from Mr Key’s – I certainly hope so …
IMO John Key cultivated & milked his popularity like a Fonterra for mostly personal ‘profit’; the National Party (and a few ‘hangers on’) benefitted by riding on his coattail and hanging in his slipstream – it was good (for them) while it lasted. So far, I cannot see this happening with Jacinda Ardern – being in power can do ‘funny things’ to people – but I could not possibly comment on why I doubt that it will happen in the foreseeable future …
Tut tut tut, PR,
Ouch!!!!
You are really hurting at loosing the “greedy mantle of the scroundlous defunct National Government” aren’t you; -, poor thing.
At least Jacinda will get real about climate change not like your hollow lot ignoring the problem.
You are rambling you silly old fool, define “loosing”.
[Loosing is what happens to commenters who try to start flame wars on TS – weka]
Oh look another troll, desperate for attention, going for the spelling mistake.
Does it feel so good?
The problem is that it isn’t a mistake.
He almost always uses “loosing”.
I’ve 1questioned him on what it is supposed to mean but no explanation is ever forthcoming.
SCREAMING —
The word is “losing” not “loosing”.
VV AKA The Spelling Pedant
Naah I got over that pretty quickly (plus it wasn’t going to change anything anyway) and as I say “Jacinda Ardern is basically PM for as long she wants and is Labours answer to John Key.” so its not like I think National will be back in power any time soon
All she has to do is cross over into National territory as John Key did so successfully and she’ll be remembered as being as, if not more, popular than John Key
All she has to do is cross over into National territory as John Key did so successfully and she’ll be remembered as being as, if not more, popular than John Key
Ardern getting more than one term still hangs on the economy staying together and voters not feeling like they’re going backwards., this baby stuff is just icing.
Also some people like icing, some like a tiny bit of icing, some don’t like icing at all and just prefer the cake.
Does it though, Jacinda is very popular so even if the economy tanks, Labour can lay the blame at Nationals feet and because Jacinda is popular she’ll be believed by enough voters (as was John Key) and Labour will get another term
Although if, for whatever reason, Winnie is the leader at the next election it’ll be a complete bloodbath and National will be back in
But most likely Labour will be in power for easily two terms, maybe three
Does it though, Jacinda is very popular so even if the economy tanks, Labour can lay the blame at Nationals feet and because Jacinda is popular she’ll be believed by enough voters (as was John Key) and Labour will get another term
You think people are that stupid and shallow?
Btw you can’t compare Key to Ardern, Ardern came to power with the economy in good shape, Key came in at the start of a global recession.
If the economy bombs, it will be on Labours head.
Its less stupid and shallow (and remember these are the pretty much the same arguments the left used against John Key) and more that Jacinda is an excellent communicator and that people warm to her and want to believe her which sounds a lot like John Key
John Key managed to sound both confident and switched on while still being “one of the blokes” and it worked really well for him and Jacinda is managing to do what works really well for her so i think she’ll be able to sell it to NZ especially since she’ll be given the kudos of keeping labour together (though those kudos should probably go to Little)
“Btw you can’t compare Key to Ardern, Ardern came to power with the economy in good shape, Key came in at the start of a global recession.”
The circumstances are slightly different but I’d make no difference, if you swapped Key for Ardern the results would still be the same and that is they’d both win, helped by third term-itis sure but they’d still win
Your determination to establish this false equivalence is nothing if not heroic.
Shouldn’t you be touting the innumerable virtues of the Gnat ‘government in waiting’ instead?
Well ok what part of what i wrote do you disagree with?
The bit where i say Jacinda is an excellent communicator, where I say she can sell it or that if the circumstances were swapped she’d still win?
The suggestion that the left loathed Key because he was popular is profoundly misleading.
“pretty much the same arguments the left used against John Key”
Nope.
The left loathed Key because he was a liar and a demagogue – his popularity, like Trump’s, was essentially a tool to mislead people.
Now, you may wheel out Pike River and pine trees and a number of other instances of broken promises – but frankly, not yet. These matters have yet to be determined, and it remains to be seen whether they will actually fail.
The public may even forgive some of these issues or ones like them if the government is candid about its reasons for abandoning any of them – but should that occur it would be in stark contrast to the almost compulsive lying and misdirection that characterized the Key Kleptocracy. That vile piece of scum never gave a straight answer about anything. Or is that something you “can’t recall”?
I can tell you now Keys clowning and schtick would have bombed if National hadn’t successfully rebuilt the economy and he wasn’t such a powerhouse on the world political stage.
People would have been “What’s he doing clowning around? do your job, Man”.
Key was a PM first and the goofy funny guy second, Ardern needs to be a PM first and a mother second, if she’s going to be anywhere near as successful as Key.
It’s going to be a big ask, and the voter will tire pretty quickly of Ardern if they don’t think her mind’s on the job.
Agree
When Key was in the spotlight a lot over the GCSB and Ian Fletcher, and then the Jason Edes episodes, was he just clowning and being a “goofy funny guy”?
I think you’ve completely missed the point I was making.
….and he wasn’t such a powerhouse on the world political stage.
Apart from photo opportunities what did this “powerhouse” of yours actually achieve on the world stage?
People would have been “What’s he doing clowning around? do your job, Man”.
Many of us were doing exactly that.
Key was a PM first and the goofy funny guy second,
Depended on what hat he was wearing at the time. And the blokey goofball schtick came very easily to him.
Apart from photo opportunities what did this “powerhouse” of yours actually achieve on the world stage?
Hmm, shame to see an obviously intelligent person blinded by their political prejudices.
You could learn a thing or two from Ad.
Letterman top ten. World shaking.
Oh, and told the BBC that water quality scientists were like lawyers – will fabricate results on demand. Sort of a precursor to Trump’s cabinet choices
Obviously some sort of left-wing reality disconnect.
I was never a great fan of Clark, but like John Key she was an excellent political operator.
What did JK achieve on the world stage?
Free trade deal with a major power?
Going into larger roles on the world stage within 6 months of leaving office?
No the alternate reality you are speaking of is Planet Key. I saw Key very clearly from the moment he came on the scene for what he is.
Sad guys, really sad.
I note you’re not actually saying what Key did to be a powerhouse on the world stage… just saying how sad it is people don’t agree with you.
What a pointless exercise that would be, those left-wing blinkers have blinded you.
It’s pretty telling that when pressed BM can’t even name one thing Key, who in his words was “such a powerhouse on the world stage”, did on that stage.
Ardern has already done more than Key ever did by forcing Australia to back down on tertiary fees for Kiwis and insisting on Kiwi houses for Kiwis.
Key was the master at swanning around in his dressing gown at diplomatic events, and of course he was known worldwide for harassing female service staff. That’s about it.
I mean, he played golf with Obama, but did that lead to any major foreign policy advances?
Snuggled closer to the yanks, but pissed off the Chinese talking about NK. The TPP fizzled. Fucked up the KDC extradition.
Foreign policy-wise, if he was a “powerhouse” he wasn’t connected to the grid or any functional machinery. No real achievements in his wikipedia page.
Shit, maybe playing golf with Obama is what BM means by “such a powerhouse on the world stage”?
It’s so shallow it just might be true…
This constant fatuous rubbish about Key’s economic acumen is really rather pitiful. Did wages grow vis-à-vis comparable OECD countries? Nope. Did our debt decrease? Nope. Did our credit rating improve? Nope – it fell twice.
It’s fair to say that the Key ‘economic miracle’ is no more substantial than that of previous self-styled thaumaturgists. The Nobel will not be going to NZ economists any time soon.
“Btw you can’t compare Key to Ardern, Ardern came to power with the economy in good shape, Key came in at the start of a global recession.”
—
Key did come in a the start of a global recession, but after 9 years of savings and net govt debt at record lows, English had a great starting point which he commented on at the time.
BM: Ardern came to power with the economy in good shape, Key came in at the start of a global recession
???!!! NZ now has record external debt and the Briefings to Incoming Ministers were a litany of disasters. But in 2008 Cullen had left the accounts in very good shape, as you well know.
BM: If the economy bombs, it will be on Labours head.
Bullshit unless you want to blame Key for the GFC and recession of 2008/9 as well. National presided over a fake economy so I would find it hard to blame Labour for the Nats dirty tricks of the last 9 years. Fiddling with stats and cooking the books and hiding OIA requests. What a pack of bankers they were.
And as we all know, John Key took the cake.
“Kneel down time!”
The Patriots bore their way to another Super Bowl appearance
AFC Playoff, Sunday 21 Jan. 2018 (Boston time)
The New England Patriots hold a four-point lead over the Jacksonvile Jaguars. There’s still more than one and a half minutes of “playing” time on the clock. In any real sport, that would be more than enough time for a lot more action.
Not in the NFL, however, where time-wasting is the main strategy of every team. The Patriots have the ball, which in this sport means guaranteed possession for four plays. Therefore it’s pointless to hope for anything unexpected or spontaneous to happen.
One of the commentators yells gleefully: “Kneel down time!”
Both teams stand up from the last scrimmage and start shaking hands with more than 15 seconds still on the clock. The coaches, holding clipboards full of color-coded instructions, are jubilant. The crowd, instructed constantly to “Make Some Noise”, seems happy.
Morrissey, I enjoy your commentary, but talking about a game you obviously know nothing about makes you look like a twat.
Thanks for the concern, Kevin, but I’m afraid it’s much to late to stop me looking like a twat.
I am intrigued though: what gives you the impression that I “obviously know nothing” about American football?
Morrie I’m no expert but some would have it that in the distant past a sarker team, on managing to goal a ball score in the start of the first period, may have as it were parked a bus, not to put too fine a point to it, across their goal to the immeasurable chagrin of their opponents. There is an obscure rumour, no names no pack drill, that a knvish lout of a sarker baller may once have feigned injury in order to prevent the opposition from progressing advantageously gamewise. Can any of this be true? What portents might it hold for the advancement of our cause onwards to the broad sunlight uplands of victory?
You might not think you’re an expert, Gabby, but rest assured: you know a lot more about the game than, say, McFlock does.
Well, to make it as simple as possible;
Passing plays stop the clock, running plays do not (unless the ball career runs out of bounds). The team with possession has 45 seconds from the whistle to start a play or they are penalised. Therefore, with less than 45 seconds of game time time remaining, the team with possession keeps the clock running by ‘taking the knee’ where the QB takes the snap, starting a running play, then kneels down to end it and keep the clock running. With less than 45 seconds of game time remaining there is no point starting a new play so the game is effectively over.
Hope this makes sense!
I know all that, Kevin. What you’ve written backs up what I wrote—that the game is built around stoppages. There is a multiplicity of methods to stop the game, as I pointed out.
Same goes for basketball, volleyball and baseball. The Americans are very good at ruining games.
This is a weird case of poisoning that is still a mystery. You have to wonder why there has not been a thorough police investigation to check it is “accidental” – being that nobody has found any food or reason for the poisoning around, it apparently happened within minutes and paralysed 3 people, and the children were not harmed.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/348571/why-was-everybody-so-sure-it-was-botulism
Botulism was a red herring thrown into the story. It was not a likely cause – though present in NZ it is relatively rare here – an anaerobic bacteria sometimes found in mud at the bottom of pools. The more probable culprit is a widely used poison, which the reporters did not want to guess at for political reasons.
1080 was mentioned in the actual audio recordings of both of these reports on RNZ National this morning – as having been tested for as a possibility but not as a confirmed cause – but not mentioned in the written reports on the website. So you need to listen to the recordings:
5.30am News
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/348571/why-was-everybody-so-sure-it-was-botulism
and on Morning Report
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018628941/putaruru-family-fights-for-acc-after-mystery-illness
AND just as I was typing the above the RNZ National 2pm News also did an item on 1080 in relation to the case and the details of recent 1080 drops in the area:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018628975
Well that’s good – but the speculation about botulism was floated in November – and those stories didn’t mention 1080.
Agreed that the earlier stories did not mention 1080 – that is why it stood out to me this morning. However, there is also the aspect that presumably if 1080 or similar is involved then the case for ACC compensation is strengthened as opposed to a ‘medical’ condition such as botulism. The family’s $$$ situation is understandably of prime concern now.
Interesting if food poisoning is not covered by ACC. I would have thought that it was an accident, as opposed to disease that arises for other reasons. But possibly ACC is turning it down because the cause is unknown.
I’m very sure that getting a disease is an accident very nearly 100% of the time. Only the very mentally disturbed would get one deliberately.
If they don’t know the cause how are they tying the illness to the meat eating?
I can’t see it being a man-made poison myself. Poisons like 1080 and others have been widespread for a long time, and so has pig and deer hunting all over the country. We would have seen this sort of thing before, not out of the blue like this.
By the way I have seen evidence that pigs do feed on poison baits, but they eat anything so I guess that’s not surprising.
I tend to agree. What’s interesting me now though is if they don’t know the cause how are they tying it to the eating of the meat? And the point about the family and media having been told it was botulism is valid. Got to feel for the family. Dealing with the health system can be very hard when the illness is unknown.
The meat would be the only common and new possible vector preceeding the infection/poisoning.
So all the veges they had would have either been eaten from the same source days before, or not everyone had the swede, sort of thing.
That is, of course, assuming that the worst case didn’t happen: that they presented, everyone fixated on botulism and so never more than cursorily(?) considered other sources. Which would suck.
That makes sense but I was wondering why they were assuming food poisoning as opposed to other pathologies. So yes, they can narrow down the food that might be responsible, but if they don’t have an actual pathogen, then why assume it was food?
e.g., virus, external toxin (pesticide) etc. One would hope they did work through all that, but I’ve seen too many episodes of House 😉
My main point here is why do media releases about botulism in the absence of a positive test? Better to say “we don’t know”, as much as people don’t like doing that.
probably because they still think it’s the most likely cause, regardless of the test.
I doubt they’d be trying to prevent a panic or something so coming up with a false reason for the public – pretty solidly seems to be a one-off.
To flip from House to CSI, apparently some juries now tend to think the prosecution is incompetent if DNA tests weren’t done, even if the accused’s presence at the scene isn’t debated. Similarly, the botulism test might clinically (depending on circumstances) be regarded as the complete proof of confirmation (minimal false positive results) but with a low disproof (very high false negative rate). Not very sensitive, but highly specific.
Also, we don’t know if other likely causes were tested for and those tests more reliably excluded the other factors – or the pattern of illness doesn’t match the vectors those conditions are transmitted by.
Well, we don’t know the specifics of the case to that detail, but things like:
proximity to the meal,
lack of traces of likely poisons in the home (e.g. fly spray or bora bomb – something to disrupt nerves),
the incidence limited to one household rather than a cluster of neighbouring homes,
different people with different times spent in the home coming down in the same manner (if it was dodgy wallpaper like the old Victorian arsenic green then people who spent all day in the home for a while would have come down before people in and out for school or work),
not everyone ate the salmon mousse made from tinned salmon,
and so on would all point to the the specific food as the most likely source.
yes, but I think that just takes us back to wondering if they were that rigorous, and why name botulism in the absence of a positive test.
Could be a bit of chinese whispers if somewhere in the chain between diagnostician and report, a phrase like ‘symptoms are consistent with botulism’ became just ‘botulism’.
I could see that happening. Also sometimes doctors like to say something even if it’s not quite right, than say nothing, because they feel pressured to be the person that will do the saving (or at least the knowing).
True, both.
At least it seems to have been a one-off incident.
thankfully!
Pigs will eat the possum carcasses and ingest 1080, which will accumulate and may kill the pig. If the pig was still mobile when it was “harvested” you’d need to eat a lot of the pig to be at risk.
http://www.centralhighlands.qld.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IPA-1080-PA5.pdf 1080 is used to target pigs in Queensland.
“If a hunter shot a 60 kg feral pig that was in the latent period following ingestion of 3 kg of 1080 bait (at a rate of 1152 mg 1080/kg), and based on the unlikely assumption that half the ingested poison has become evenly distributed through the carcass, that hunter would need to eat 36.1 kg in one sitting before being at risk.”
So unlikely that this was caused by someone shooting a pig that had ingested 1080. Finding a carcass that had died from 1080, that could be another story.
“If a hunter shot a 60 kg feral pig that was in the latent period following ingestion of 3 kg of 1080 bait (at a rate of 1152 mg 1080/kg), and based on the unlikely assumption that half the ingested poison has become evenly distributed through the carcass, that hunter would need to eat 36.1 kg in one sitting before being at risk.”
This sounds a particularly dubious example, in part because wild pig behavior would not typically involve stopping at 3kgs of bait. The pig would eat all the bait available.
1080 toxicity is put between 0.5mg/kg and 10mg/kg.
The assumption that half the poison is not absorbed or available is arbitrary.
Given the variation in assigning toxicity, the figure of 36.1kg is unprofessional nonsense.
It is reasonable to assume that if secondary toxicity is sufficient to kill pigs or dogs that consume possums, that humans would be at risk if they joined that food chain. It is not necessarily safe to consume considerably less than potentially lethal doses – negative effects may commence at substantially lower levels.
Temple WA & Edwards IR (1984) Toxic ducks – 1080 residues in game birds : An exercise in applied toxicology. Vet. Hum. Toxicol. 27(1) : 20-21
http://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/chemical/pim494.htm
Thanks for that – I’ve found a variety of sources, some of which are less sanguine about degradation – though offal as a primary location for most oral poisons makes sense.
Temple & Edwards notwithstanding, I won’t be queuing to try 1080 killed pork.
It’s only more probable if it was anywhere near the hunting zone at around the same time as the hunting occurred.
It seems this is not the case.
It could be anything – hell the pig might have eaten funny mushrooms, some random poison a nearby farmer had sly-dropped without telling anyone, or there was some random thing in the pig that we might not even see again.
The botulism test might also have a pretty high false negative rate, or maybe whatever the pig had was similar to botulism but different enough to not show up.
I don’t know. But I know enough to know that there’s still some things we don’t know about poisons and viruses and what’s in our forests.
I was thinking mushrooms, or weeds like hemlock or tutu (don’t know if the toxins pass on to people who eat the meat), and also farmers poisoning on the sly.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/northland/71061348/okaihau-vet-works-on-cure-for-dog-illness-go-slow
that was a fascinating read.
My 2 cents – in my own burg immigrants are only too willing to buy wild meat from dodgy as fuck sources so I reckon the victims didn’t ask too many questions when they purchased the meat from locals who IMO, would’ve known damn well not to eat it themselves.
makes sense. Do you think the Waikato family illness is related to the dog ones, or just that it’s another example of the problems with wild boar when not enough caution is taken?
Could be related to go slow but I lean towards downright disregard for food safety by the sellers of entire, un-refrigerated animals with only the gastrointestinal tract removed, and the ignorance of buyers who don’t understand just how dangerous meat from dubious sources can be.
if I recall my Plato, hemlock progressively goes from the feet up. But I’m not sure Phaedo is still a current medical text 🙂
Why wasn’t there a complete set of blood-tests done at the time to determine the probable cause?
In this day and age doctors shouldn’t be guessing as to what’s wrong.
Cost. Those tests are contracted out and have become very expensive. Last tropical suite I had to do was $400. Botulism is rare in NZ – though more common in other countries. Testing every local poisoning event for it would be foolish. Given that no cause has been identified however there is still some spadework to be done.
Yes, I’m fully against the national health service using contracted parties to do the testing. They tend to be more expensive and less up to date.
Research indicates that there’s a reasonably cheap, quick blood test available.
Private model means no cost savings are passed on. They turn into ‘profits’ instead.
Draco, your research indicates that a better than current diagnostic test was in small-scale assessment a couple of years ago.
It might still be being looked at, or that study you pointed to might not match larger scale trials, or there might not be a lab in NZ certified for it, or it might even have been used in this case.
You might be drawing a long bow there
What Stuart said.
And sometimes “viral infection of unknown type” is the best we can do (if that), even if the patient is at death’s door and every conceivable test is done. Mate of mine was within hours of dying, but fortunately recovered. The best guess was a virus similar to meningitis, but all the tests came back negative. Probably just some virus that most people never have a problem with but clocked off in his case for some reason.
Not to mention the workload for labs. They’re already understaffed.
My mate the nurse reckons every year the ICU he works in sees patients admitted in dire need of support with some dying, yet nobody has a clue about what exactly ails or kills them.
Not even after the third diagnosis? Yeah, they never covered that in House…
We know a zillion times what we did 100 years ago, and in another hundred years they’ll think we were in the dark ages.
Aye friends daughter was in hospital a couple of months ago along with four others who had no previous contact with each other.
All had severe vomiting and stomach pain and were placed on drips.
The best they could be told it was likely a virus and for about 50% of the people who have those symptoms they have no idea what the virus is or what to test for as the virus is likely unknown.
Which simply should not happen.
Another case of cascading shoulds.
Yes. We should actually have enough medical staff employed to ensure that an adequate level of service is provided.
It’s not really expensive as we do have the people available both to do the training and to provide that service.
The world would be so much better if everything were changed to your approval, eh.
How many people would we need in order to provide a full range of screening and diagnostic tests for every person who contacts primary or secondary healthcare services, or “should” we just restrict it to hospital admissions?
A really interesting profile of Glenn Greenwald.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/glenn-greenwald-russia-investigation.html
It’s nothing more than a smear job by a Democratic Party loyalist. Why would you bother posting up such rubbish?
Come on any attempt to break up the left is the order of the day by the rwnj’s Morrissey – you must have must have missed the “rwnj news letter” that arrived just after the election.
Good fun!
With an added bonus of rarking up moonbats!
Fool, I’m sure you have read nothing of Glenn Greenwald, so here’s an introduction for you. I highly commend it to other, more serious, people by the way…
Just another smear attack on Greenwald.
I too wondered about the origins and source of that pig.
Had some South Asian gentlemen wanting to buy some goat carcasses once. Took a lot of discussion to get them to understand that they weren’t fit for consumption (they weren’t even fit for dog tucker, they were headed for the gut hole) and that it was illegal for me to sell meat to people on health grounds.
Ooops, that was meant to be a reply to Stuart Munro at 12.1
What was wrong with them?
They’d been dead for a bit long
Yeah, that’s not good.
This, from the woman who reckoned Arabs hated Jews more than they loved their own children.
//
In 1958, then-foreign minister Golda Meir raised the possibility of preventing handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, a recently discovered Foreign Ministry document has revealed.
“A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration,” read the document, written by Meir to Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Katriel Katz.
The letter, marked “top secret” and written in April 1958, shortly after Meir became foreign minister, was uncovered by Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, a Polish historian at the University of Warsaw.
In recent years, Rudnicki has been researching documents shedding light on Israeli-Polish relations between 1945 and 1967.
The document had not been known to exist before this time, and scholars of the mass immigration from Poland to Israel that took place from 1956 to 1958 were unaware of Israel’s intent to impose a selection process on Jews leaving Poland – survivors of the Holocaust and its death camps.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t-214CN5aZQJ:https://www.haaretz.com/golda-meir-told-poland-don-t-send-sick-or-disabled-jews-to-israel-1.2523+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Another shining example, of there being no left wing in Israeli politics. Mind you, quite a few plonkers on the left pre 1945 were fans of letting the disabled die.
Not uncommon across much of the world, although New Zealand took a few Poles after World War 2.
But immigration health discrimination is pretty common still.
Current health requirements for just a visa to get into Saudi Arabia specifically include Polio right now:
https://www.saudia.com/TRAVEL-INFORMATION/About-Saudi-Arabia/Hajj-and-Umrah/Health-Requirements
Current health requirements for getting into New Zealand:
https://www.immigration.govt.nz/documents/forms-and-guides/inz1201.pdf
New Zealand has a pretty interesting history of euthenasia prior to WW2 as well.
Ain’t saying it’s right, just make sure it’s seen in the context of comparable policies.
That was not road rage I was just pissing the sandflys off looks like the sandflys got a direct line to the Rock radio. I know you 2 are up to something Thane and Duncan. Ana to kai
The sandfly haven’t got anything better than to harass me I have nothing to hide I advertise who I am ECO MAORI ON MY OLD TRUCK would you do that If you were guilty of the crimes they have told the whole world that I have done no. I could just hop on a plane and go to Australia no i’m staying to look after my whano .I am going to make the justice system treat brown people with the same respect as europeens .I had at least 4 of these muppets interfering with my trip Home from Tauranga to Rotorua .I could see the smoke coming out there ears they don’t like It when I check ALL THERE MOVES .
Go pick on someone who deserves your attention I can smell the muppets a mile away .I don’t mention all the plays the muppets make in a day but I see them all fools .
Ana to kai
I only watch 1 News from TV NZ I know they are fair and just unlike the other channel
which is influenced by the $$$$$$$$$$ Ka pai
Farking hell 🙄
medic!
Zbigniew Brzezinski armed and bankrolled Osama bin Laden;
His daughter seems to be of similar moral stature…
Nobbling climate science, one agency at a time.
The Silencing Science Tracker is a joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. It tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information, since the November 2016 election
http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/resources/silencing-science-tracker/
This might be one reason why cancer levels are so high in this country
https://scontent.fakl2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/fr/cp0/e15/q65/19264727_1361535870647855_2177768109012469917_o.jpg?oh=b3c9a7710c16d8557d5f72e4f809b28c&oe=5AF1DE98
Which “cancer levels are so high in this country”, presumably compared to other countries?
How are these possibly causatively connected to those particular practices?
Carcinogenic
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/widely-used-herbicide-linked-to-cancer/
Other countries have banned it
https://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/roundup-banned-netherlands-france-brazil-likely-soon-follow/
https://www.naturalnews.com/2017-09-30-five-countries-have-banned-glyphosate-in-the-wake-of-recent-lawsuits.html
Thank you for those links but none of that answered my quite clear & specific questions.
Which particular “cancer levels are so high in this country” and caused by aerial spraying of those herbicides? Are you expressing a personal belief and/or opinion or do you have verifiable facts to support your comment @ 20? I’m not fussed either way but just like to know where you’re coming from.