There was a very interesting review on Sunday’s Mediawatch program on Owen Glen’s recent public activity. Excerpts of interviews with Owen Glen were played.
He is an unusual figure. He used to provide significant financial support to the Labour Party. More recent activity includes partially funding a University Lecture hall that proudly bears his name, buying into the warriors, and setting aside $80 million to address child poverty in New Zealand. It is clear that he enjoys the publicity.
His approach could be contrasted with another philanthropist Hugh Green who, although wealthy, was very discrete with his philantrophic activity and never sought publicity. Green is quoted as saying, “I made a lot of money and I can’t spend it. So I decided to give it away and do something for somebody else.”
As was rightfully pointed out in the Mediawatch program there was something jarring about Glenn’s generosity. He had taken active steps, including the setting himself up in Monarco, to minimise the amount of tax he paid. His generosity could be no more than what he should been paying in tax.
Labour’s experience with him has made my personal views on state funding of political parties even stronger. It has to happen. Our political system should not be left to the whims of the wealthy and the attention seekers.
It is a shame that when in power last time Labour ducked the issue and did not take the opportunity to establish it. I understand that Helen was actually keen but was talked out of it by others.
“kim – why does having your name in the paper improve anyones lot?”
“owen – well…ummm…”
Its called ego owen – your ego.
” mark – where do you see Māori in NZ at the moment/”
“owen – ‘we can’t live without each other, we’re all in the same country. Why do you want to go back all the time, that somehow you were cheated or robbed – come to a conclusion and be a New Zealander first”.
I think wealthy people shouldn’t bother with helping the Left. The Right have better parties, and all without the endless moralising on why you’re not good enough for them or why your personal style and behaviour is lacking to meet their standards.
Kim Hill was a shit interviewer. Shallow and suitable only for Womans Day.
“…Why do you want to go back all the time, that somehow you were cheated or robbed – come to a conclusion and be a New Zealander first.”
cultural oppression
failed to recognise his priveledge
negating the Treaty
ignorance of NZ history
arrogance
Whether or not it’s “terrible” depends on your personal perspective. Anyone can be ignorant or arrogant, but in this context, it’s plain offensive to make believe the past doesn’t exist. I would have thought his contact with people in the Labour party over the years would have educated him a little more. Even if he just adopted certain phrases as diplomatic “technical terms”, at least then it wouldn’t cause purposeful offence. You wouldn’t use txt speak in a boardroom, so why speak like that on National Radio?
He is, of course, free to choose how he speaks and who he offends, but if he associates with Labour, it may signal what many observers already know. Glen is no Johnny-come-lately, he knows what he said and why.
You could try and read the article and the links and things before commenting on this. Glenn’s charity is welcome but he should be paying his share in tax.
If Glenn invested his (say) business interests in NZ, had a 6% return and paid 30% of this in tax he would be contributing $18 million a year in tax, over twice the amount he is donating to Otara.
If he and others of exceptional wealth paid their fair share then a great deal could be done to address poverty.
Using your ludicrous illustration if he was to reallocate his entire funds to NZ and ended up contributing $18 million a year how much of that do you think would get to the coal face ?
Good on him for putting his money directly into such worthy causes.
You are a diddle of epic proportions …………. just not in a spatial sense.
There’s good charity and bad charity. There’s charity at the bottom of the cliff that merely
endeavors to hide poverty. Owen Glen isn’t targeting systemic problems in the economy that
produce the long tail, he’s picking up the pieces from those who are at the end of the long tail, and so making it harder (if successful) to gather evidence for dealing with the long tail.
Its a strange thing when the government, supposed a right wing individualist party against big government decides that individuals thinking patterns on welfare are not only a problem, that needs solving, but thirdly requires overt intervention by the state to create the correct good think.
Government that dehumanizes welfare recipients, who would not be there had government selected them (as we select those who can make profit and rubbish the rest who don’t directly contribute).
Personally people change their habits, select their behavior, choose their thoughts freely, until they are forced by government legislating workplaces (pushing up costs and so less jobs), legislating every aspect of life (like housing where you can either live in a scarce inner city flat costing a fortune or buy a substandard moldy leaky home). People on a benefit aren’t dependent on handouts, they are surviving from big government poverty creation with a stop measure designed welfare.
National have deliberately decided to blame welfare recipients for poor government, and market failures, now twisted into a new paradigm, that there’ something wrong with the type
of individuals on welfare. Those on welfare didn’t create their dependency, that was
the active choices of parliament to reward mindless activity with the demand that work will
set citizens free.
History is full of individuals who weren’t profit makers but who have enriched society, helped society make huge profits for centuries to come.
An article in Stuff this morning. The very rich, which includes John Key’s chums Ashcroft and Myers, hide US 40 trillion in tax havens. Who are the bludgers again Paula Bennett?
The true face of greed. More than enough to live on for one lifetime, gained from working the infrastructures built with taxpayer money, and still they want more, and at the expense of less well-off and/or less greedy tax payers.
Worse. Stupid Scum since they obvious don’t seem to understand that printing money does not create wealth. People valuations create wealth, and if people don’t value the need for an expensive to run car, then the car industry collapses. When people don’t value high processed mush as food, food companies collapse. There’s only so much the people will accept until vast numbers just opt out, by local, by raw, ride a bike.
1. Europe’s debt crisis could be cured if the money was repatriated.
2. £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world’s population. That is an average of NZ$134m each.
3. If income on the amount at stake was taxed at 30% then NZ$236b per annum would be produced.
The report really makes you think that the world’s economic system is deeply flawed. Because the extremely rich simply are not paying their way.
The worlds debt based money creation system is flawed, as well as the economic systems designed to help people hoard money instead of letting it circulate through communities.
SP they are double dipping as well the money being lent at exorbitant rates is coming from these money laundering banks.
They are causing the problem by not paying any tax.
Now they are profiteering from the problem they have caused.
Their wealth is, as Henry puts it, “protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy”.
According to Henry’s research, the top 10 private banks, which include UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland, as well as the US investment bank Goldman Sachs, managed more than US$6 trillion in 2010, a sharp rise from US$2.3 trillion five years earlier.
And this culture of ruthless, selfish greed, bludging of taxpayer money, has spread throughout our society (as reported by Granny pretentiously & superficially promoting itself via Maori Language Week):
A dentist has been charged with doctoring medical notes to rip off $168,000 of taxpayers’ money.
The investigation involves claims for emergency treatment of children and teenagers – including extraction of teeth – which the Ministry of Health says did not occur.
PS: Hah! Finally. Don’t know what that CATCHA loop was all about.
I think you will find that Ashcroft and Myers are simple peasants in this.
It is the Russian and Middle Eastern, with unimaginable wealth, along with such as Arafat and Mugabe families, and Nigerian overlords who are in these schemes.
In yesterday’s Herald Matt McCarten blew smoke up the current Labour leadership’s rear. He worked off the press briefing and didn’t look at any of the detail. After confusing strategy with constitutional matters he goes on to say that the party is in great condition and in the best of hands!! Matt McCarten thinks a new team is in charge!
The same people that managed the Labour Party under Goff and got the worse result ever are running the Labour party now. No change. Same team, slightly different face.
The 67% leadership challenge rule means Shearer can be protected by 12 Caucus votes. No amount of votes by members and affiliates will have any impact. Matt McCarten has not done thorough research on the detail of the constitution and the amendments.
McCarten writes: “What I learned is that if your opponent is vulnerable, then having enthusiastic volunteers well organised and directed wins every time”. Shearer’s Teams’s bland bumbling performance to date has demotivated members.
Matt then adds: “All they need is to get their working class base to believe it’s worth trundling down to the voting booth.”. Nothing Shearer has done so far has dented the perceptions of the 100s of 1,000s who did not come out to vote.
And it is deliberate policy: they think they can win by just not making people upset with them! The current Labour strategy is targeting soft National votes and has abandoned the poor and uninspired.
As far as I can see, McCarten has only ever acted as a left wing ginger group for Labour. If they move 1mm towards wht he can define as left, he thinks he’s achieved something.
There was a link here to a speech by David Parker that I read recently, tucked away in it was a comment about state owned assets. Speech here (hat-tip to populuxe1 who reminded me of it)
“Labour published a closed list of assets that we believe ought to be run in the New Zealand interest because they have monopoly characteristics – assets such as electricity line networks, water and airports.
The list excludes telecommunications and electricity generation”
The last sentence is pretty damning. Does anyone have a link to the full list? Does it include assets like schools & prisons etc?
Haven’t seen the list but that part in the speech shows that their definition of monopoly is so narrow as to be unworkable. It won’t shift basic monopolies (services that we all need and so fees can be hiked on them) out of private hands.
I am caught in an access CAPTCHA loop trying to post a comment to open mike – one of the words I have to copy each time, has the letters so crowded together, I can’t be sure if I have copied it correctly. Have done it about 5 or 6 times now & each time it just result in giving me another pair of CAPTHCA words to copy.
Yes, but I tried logging in a while back. I can’t use a capital in my handle, but more annoying was, I couldn’t stop email notifications flooding into my account, notifying me of replies – that was a fair while back.
There could be one, now, but way back when I tried to turn it off, I couldn’t.
Actually, not logging in isn’t usually a problem. Now and then I get asked to complete a capture and it works fine. Today I just seemed to get caught in a captcha loop.
Sorry I can’t do anything about the captcha, but if you log in to The Standard you never have to enter a captcha ever again…
Oh how I wish that was true! I am always logged in and yet I get the Clidfare screen all the time. 🙁
One of life’s bitter ironies is that when I tried to post this 10 minutes ago, guess what happened? Error…
I’m interested to know what Steven Joyce means by ‘intensification of agriculture’ in his interview with Shane Taurima on Q&A in June:
… every public service is dependent on how strongly we grow the economy forward, and that means taking advantage of all the opportunities we have, and, frankly, that includes intensification of agriculture, it includes oil and gas, it includes clean tech and high-tech industries, and that’s what we’re focused on.
Joyce revisits this development theme in the ‘Labour/Green fairy tales’ meme he’s been using around the National Party conference and the Q&A inteview is printed almost word for word in an article by Audrey Young in the Herald last week. But the article ends before the mention of intensification of agriculture. Yet I’m pretty sure the Herald is where I read about this first – it bothered me so I went hunting for it and it’s not there anymore. (Given I don’t watch NZ TV there is no way I saw it on Q&A ).
I reckon Shane Taurima got Joyce to say something he didn’t mean to and a compliant media has ‘kindly’ not repeated it. It needs following up, huh?
A search on google news brings up a list of articles with the key phrase, including an NZH article from a day ago, but when I click on the link, the phrase doesn’t seem to be there.
but when I click on the link, the phrase doesn’t seem to be there.
Yeah, exactly. That’s what happened when I looked. Seems strange to me, I must have read it somewhere! And why oh why is he leaving it off his list of development objectives now?
aha…
edit: the phrase reappears – John Armstrong 5:30 this morning
Steven Joyce put things more bluntly. Delivering the best speech of the weekend, the Economic Development Minister offered a stark choice.
If New Zealanders wanted more jobs, they would have to stop being fearful of foreign investment, accept the “intensification of agriculture” and not forgo oil and mineral exploration.
In short, New Zealanders might have “to do a few things that make us uncomfortable”.
Ah, thanks. Yes, I interpret intensification of agriculture as increased number of animals per farm space, increased use of technologies, increased use of resources and of the amount of farming the land can stand.
i.e.depletion of resources to increase agriculture output. More short term thinking…. with Armstrong, as usual the sycophant and Nat cheerleader.
Thanks for the link. I’m interested in the comments about the Greens at the end of the article, showing the Nats more insecure than Armstrong is making out in the rest of the article.
Steven Joyce makes me uncomfortable every time he opens his mouth, hes so smug & so obviously lies its a wonder he hasn’t been pulled up on it. sorry if the comment comes out garbled, opera and huawei can take the blame for that
I’ve said it before – it’s not about jobs any more. Our productivity is so high that we can support our society with a fraction of the work we do now. It’s about re-purposing the economy to do that rather than having it being to enrich a few people.
All anyone who says we need more jobs is saying is that we need to make the rich richer as well as making our society so unsustainable that our children and grand-children will be paying the price in higher pollution and degraded environment.
I’m expecting ‘agriculture’ = ‘dairying’ and ‘intensification’ means factory farming in areas that are unsuitable for dairying – Canterbury, Otago, Southland. Water rights, pollution rights and other resource consent problems. Not to mention the loss of the one marketing line we have, that is trustworthy produce. New Zealand: one great dairy farm.
Rose, what Steven Joyce means is the same old same old for the likes of him…. they cannot see any other way to grow the economy other than to take take take from the environment.
Like the old kauri millers did.
Like the whalers did.
Like the orange roughy fishers did.
Like the pastoralists did.
It is just a take.
And as such it cannot be sustained because there is simply only so much environment. Only so many kauri trees, only so many whales, only so many organge roughy and only so many wild plains for conversion.
This is not smart in any sense.
So that is what Joyce and all his cohorts mean – take take take. They are still in the mindset of the early colonists.
We need a forum for some heavyweights to do heavy battle on these issues.
All we get today is rubbish answers to very genuine questions. Rubbish from the likes of gosman and pete george and tsmithfield. The other ways of getting answers to these important questions seems to be through the likes of Mike Hosking and Petra Bags – which is even worse.
So I propose that a forum be set up – perhaps on a new website – which only invited posters can comment on (to keep the rubbish out).
For example – outline and weigh the benefits and costs to New Zealand taxpayers of selling their electricity companies.
On one side – r0b and eddie.
On the other side – Farrar and Hooton.
Thrash the issue out in its entirety with only those players. See what the outcome is. Because currently it is bloody hopeless trying to get decent answers… There is not a single decent forum anywhere in this entire land
There’s a reason why I stopped reading the True Lies thread – it’s because the RWNJs had pretty much taken over the thread spreading misinformation. Their sole point seemingly to confuse the issue – they couldn’t dispute the issue that the PM was lying.
If you want to finish in last place, that’s the way you do it – indulging in unconscious defence mechanisms to make yourself feel better, rather than using conscious coping strategies that can help you actually do better. In the real world, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality exists to identify what works and what doesn’t – indispensable information if you want to things right. But in Perry’s hyper-defensive mind, it only exists to make Texas look bad. And Perry’s attitude typifies the US all too well, as you read through Fullbrook’s book. Clinging to a false sense of superiority is the absolute worst strategy for actually attaining superiority. And yet it seems to dominate American political discourse.
Sounds like typical RWNJ behaviour – denying the facts because they don’t want them to be true.
And here in NZ we’re busily following the US down the rabbit hole.
I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. “A lot from the Horn of Africa,” he added. “You don’t really hear about that in the media.”
“Where in Africa?” I asked. He said he didn’t know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. “A lot out of Djibouti,” he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from “elsewhere” in the region, too.
[…}
Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.
Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave.
This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land — young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes.
There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage.
It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes.
And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.
So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: “A contentious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”
Would it be a good idea for trying to limit the amount of flaming and RWNJ
statements if people were limited to ten comments (or 15) a day? Often
multiple comments are in reply to outrageous statements from someone
who isn’t seeking the truth.
At 11 a.m. there were 78 comments on one
thread and I think 17 from Gosman. Then there are the replies to
him, more heat than light. If it was a newspaper and someone was flaming
you would at least be able to burn it and get some useful heat.
That’s a bridge too far Prism, I think the mods (and contributors who sometime do their work for them) do a great job here and can see no need for a blanket rule – that’s my 2c anyway…
UAC yesterday was classic. Total threadjack, couldn’t spend any energy discussing serious issues because of one immature right wing asshole who kept insisting up was down, black was white, North was South, you get the idea.
Now I have days where I comment a lot. And even I think that a 15 comment limit between 8am and 8pm would work just fine.
Wouldn’t be hard to impose. I might put it in with a bit of heuristic/fuzzy logic. There are some interesting values I have been getting from running stats over our comments that would give some good starting points.
Anyone watch Dave Letterman today?
He told of 20 states and the Hudson River where the aquifers have been totally poisoned by frakking.
and we want to do it here!
CL
Often a good system is limited by the fact that no-one can bring themselves to do some tweaking. When there are some limits, more care goes into making a worthwhile comment. When our newspaper brought its wording down from 300 to 200 for letters, it resulted in more careful composition, construction and editing. So the thinking increases exponentially when trying to avoid controls on excess verbiage etc.
Incidentally in the new format my comments window doesn’t wrap at the..right hand edge and shoots off and out of sight. The only way to read the whole thing is to press the home and end buttons – like playing tennis.
Also getting visits from Cloud Flare saying cache isn’t available etc. It says that when busy this can happen so maybe it’s the time of night when I guess things are humming.
@prism I’m all for better writing, when it’s just text writing style is right up there with content in terms of creating a good experience – it’s just that your suggestion plays into the hands of anyone gaming the system with multiple IP addresses and Id’s and could actually end up gagging honest commentators.
Also there are some commentators here that I am quite happy to read a lot of – even when the discussion is essentially troll negation…
I’ve looked at such restrictions before. When I had more time few years ago I looked at the stats of discussion generated from comments as replies from different respondents (a pretty good surrogate for people’s ability to generate discussion).
Outside of the extremes (one or two line comments and ones that were pages in length), there is no significant correlation with text size, average word size, etc.
The significant correlations are :-
That crap punctuation (excessive or none or capitalization syndromes) doesn’t attract too many replies. Long sentences and long paragraphs drop replies a lot. Similarly high frequencies to words unknown to my dictionary (mostly spelling mistakes) dropped the numbers of replies a lot. All of these appeared to be additive in effect. It appears that the language police were right (damn).
There are words and phrases that have higher probabilities of replies – but all with relatively low significance. I was going to try to do a longitudinal study of phrases to see if there was a pattern in time. But it got rather hard because repetition rates are quite low once we got rid of the more boring trolls.
On the tech side. The number of replies also goes down as the number of links goes up. Smilies made no difference (took a bit to separate that from normal punctuation 🙂 ) . Clear quoting does (I used block quote and italics as it was a pain getting a reliable quote regular expression that didn’t slow the process to a crawl) – but with marginal significance.
There are people who consistently get a lot of replies to almost everything they write, and others who have a really amazing ability to never get any, or from just one person. But there is a pretty clear Pareto effect.
It was an interesting use of some of the regular expression modules out of boost, some stats modules from open sources and the toolkit used by the sphinx search engine. You could see after doing it how easy it is to do significant data mining on social media.
“recommendations were made to the minister on set criteria, including that applicants had to have spent 240 days in New Zealand for each of the past five years.”
The section was surely intended to apply to recent immigrants, which is hardly relevant in this circumstance, head meets wall repeats.
Slippery the Prime Minister is running forwards in reverse as far as ‘plain packaging’ on tobacco products goes,
Having a bob each way on the subject at the moment while He gauges if there’s any votes to be gained from doing such and having various companies and country’s involved in tobacco production sue New Zealand’s butte in various World judicial forums,
ASH fanatics should eat their hearts out as Slippery sez it will be too difficult to ban tobacco products out-right, and unsaid, His Government once the next round of 10% rises is implemented will be collecting in taxation approximately 1.3 billion dollars a year over and above the cost to the Government of our tobacco use, so why would they stoop to banning the latest cash cow,
You have to call BULLSHIT on the whole thing about here as we have one politician, Slippery doing the two-faced taxation will make New Zealand smoke-free by 2020 and then in the next breath saying that its not possible to do that,
There’s still tho the savior of the human race in the form of the Maori Party determined to ‘save their people’ from the evils of tobacco by taking all the money outta their pockets and make damn sure that the poor diet of ‘Tariana’s people’ will be assured for quite some time into the future thereby killing one hell of a lot more of them a lot sooner then the dreaded tobacco can simply by affording them only the poorest of diets,
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It is difficult to make sense of the Luxon Coalition Government’s economic management.This end-of-year review about the state of economic management – the state of the economy was last week – is not going to cover the National Party contribution. Frankly, like every other careful observer, I cannot make up ...
This morning I awoke to the lovely news that we are firmly back on track, that is if the scale was reversed.NZ ranks low in global economic comparisonsNew Zealand's economy has been ranked 33rd out of 37 in an international comparison of which have done best in 2024.Economies were ranked ...
Remember those silent movies where the heroine is tied to the railway tracks or going over the waterfall in a barrel? Finance Minister Nicola Willis seems intent on portraying herself as that damsel in distress. According to Willis, this country’s current economic problems have all been caused by the spending ...
Similar to the cuts and the austerity drive imposed by Ruth Richardson in the 1990’s, an era which to all intents and purposes we’ve largely fiddled around the edges with fixing in the time since – over, to be fair, several administrations – whilst trying our best it seems to ...
String-Pulling in the Dark: For the democratic process to be meaningful it must also be public. WITH TRUST AND CONFIDENCE in New Zealand’s politicians and journalists steadily declining, restoring those virtues poses a daunting challenge. Just how daunting is made clear by comparing the way politicians and journalists treated New Zealanders ...
Dear Nicola Willis, thank you for letting us know in so many words that the swingeing austerity hasn't worked.By in so many words I mean the bit where you said, Here is a sea of red ink in which we are drowning after twelve months of savage cost cutting and ...
The Open Government Partnership is a multilateral organisation committed to advancing open government. Countries which join are supposed to co-create regular action plans with civil society, committing to making verifiable improvements in transparency, accountability, participation, or technology and innovation for the above. And they're held to account through an Independent ...
Today I tuned into something strange: a press conference that didn’t make my stomach churn or the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Which was strange, because it was about the torture of children. It was the announcement by Erica Stanford — on her own, unusually ...
This is a must watch, and puts on brilliant and practical display the implications and mechanics of fast-track law corruption and weakness.CLICK HERE: LINK TO WATCH VIDEOOur news media as it is set up is simply not equipped to deal with the brazen disinformation and corruption under this right wing ...
NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi Acting Secretary Erin Polaczuk is welcoming the announcement from Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety Brooke van Velden that she is opening consultation on engineered stone and is calling on her to listen to the evidence and implement a total ban of the product. “We need ...
The Government has announced a 1.5% increase in the minimum wage from 1 April 2025, well below forecast inflation of 2.5%. Unions have reacted strongly and denounced it as a real terms cut. PSA and the CTU are opposing a new round of staff cuts at WorkSafe, which they say ...
The decision to unilaterally repudiate the contract for new Cook Strait ferries is beginning to look like one of the stupidest decisions a New Zealand government ever made. While cancelling the ferries and their associated port infrastructure may have made this year's books look good, it means higher costs later, ...
Hi there! I’ve been overseas recently, looking after a situation with a family member. So apologies if there any less than focused posts! Vanuatu has just had a significant 7.3 earthquake. Two MFAT staff are unaccounted for with local fatalities.It’s always sad to hear of such things happening.I think of ...
Today is a special member's morning, scheduled to make up for the government's theft of member's days throughout the year. First up was the first reading of Greg Fleming's Crimes (Increased Penalties for Slavery Offences) Amendment Bill, which was passed unanimously. Currently the House is debating the third reading of ...
We're going backwardsIgnoring the realitiesGoing backwardsAre you counting all the casualties?We are not there yetWhere we need to beWe are still in debtTo our insanitiesSongwriter: Martin Gore Read more ...
Willis blamed Treasury for changing its productivity assumptions and Labour’s spending increases since Covid for the worsening Budget outlook. Photo: Getty ImagesMōrena. Long stories short, the six things that matter in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Wednesday, December 18 in The Kākā’s Dawn Chorus podcast above ...
Today the Auckland Transport board meet for the last time this year. For those interested (and with time to spare), you can follow along via this MS Teams link from 10am. I’ve taken a quick look through the agenda items to see what I think the most interesting aspects are. ...
Hi,If you’re a New Zealander — you know who Mike King is. He is the face of New Zealand’s battle against mental health problems. He can be loud and brash. He raises, and is entrusted with, a lot of cash. Last year his “I Am Hope” charity reported a revenue ...
Probably about the only consolation available from yesterday’s unveiling of the Half-Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU) is that it could have been worse. Though Finance Minister Nicola Willis has tightened the screws on future government spending, she has resisted the calls from hard-line academics, fiscal purists and fiscal hawks ...
The right have a stupid saying that is only occasionally true:When is democracy not democracy? When it hasn’t been voted on.While not true in regards to branches of government such as the judiciary, it’s a philosophy that probably should apply to recently-elected local government councillors. Nevertheless, this concept seemed to ...
Long story short: the Government’s austerity policy has driven the economy into a deeper and longer recession that means it will have to borrow $20 billion more over the next four years than it expected just six months ago. Treasury’s latest forecasts show the National-ACT-NZ First Government’s fiscal strategy of ...
Come and join myself and CTU Chief Economist for a pop-up ‘Hoon’ webinar on the Government’s Half Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU) with paying subscribers to The Kākā for 30 minutes at 5 pm today.Jump on this link on YouTube Livestream to watch our chat. Don’t worry if ...
In 1998, in the wake of the Paremoremo Prison riot, the Department of Corrections established the "Behaviour Management Regime". Prisoners were locked in their cells for 22 or 23 hours a day, with no fresh air, no exercise, no social contact, no entertainment, and in some cases no clothes and ...
New data released by the Treasury shows that the economic policies of this Government have made things worse in the year since they took office, said NZCTU Economist Craig Renney. “Our fiscal indicators are all heading in the wrong direction – with higher levels of debt, a higher deficit, and ...
At the 2023 election, National basically ran on a platform of being better economic managers. So how'd that turn out for us? In just one year, they've fucked us for two full political terms: The government's books are set to remain deeply in the red for the near term ...
AUSTERITYText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMy spreadsheet insists This pain leads straight to glory (File not found) Read more ...
The NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi are saying that the Government should do the right thing and deliver minimum wage increases that don’t see workers fall further behind, in response to today’s announcement that the minimum wage will only be increased by 1.5%, well short of forecast inflation. “With inflation forecast ...
Oh, I weptFor daysFilled my eyesWith silly tearsOh, yeaBut I don'tCare no moreI don't care ifMy eyes get soreSongwriters: Paul Rodgers / Paul Kossoff. Read more ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bob HensonIn this aerial view, fingers of meltwater flow from the melting Isunnguata Sermia glacier descending from the Greenland Ice Sheet on July 11, 2024, near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. According to the Programme for Monitoring of the Greenland Ice Sheet (PROMICE), the ...
In August, I wrote an article about David Seymour1 with a video of his testimony, to warn that there were grave dangers to his Ministry of Regulation:David Seymour's Ministry of Slush Hides Far Greater RisksWhy Seymour's exorbitant waste of taxpayers' money could be the least of concernThe money for Seymour ...
Willis is expected to have to reveal the bitter fiscal fruits of her austerity strategy in the HYEFU later today. Photo: Lynn Grieveson/TheKakaMōrena. Long stories short, the six things that matter in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Tuesday, December 17 in The Kākā’s Dawn Chorus podcast ...
On Friday the government announced it would double the number of toll roads in New Zealand as well as make a few other changes to how toll roads are used in the country. The real issue though is not that tolling is being used but the suggestion it will make ...
The Prime Minister yesterday engaged in what looked like a pre-emptive strike designed to counter what is likely to be a series of depressing economic statistics expected before the end of the week. He opened his weekly post-Cabinet press conference with a recitation of the Government’s achievements. “It certainly has ...
This whooping cough story from south Auckland is a good example of the coalition government’s approach to social need – spend money on urging people to get vaccinated but only after you’ve cut the funding to where they could get vaccinated. This has been the case all year with public ...
And if there is a GodI know he likes to rockHe likes his loud guitarsHis spiders from MarsAnd if there is a GodI know he's watching meHe likes what he seesBut there's trouble on the breezeSongwriter: William Patrick Corgan Read more ...
Here’s a quick round up of today’s political news:1. MORE FOOD BANKS, CHARITIES, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SHELTERS AND YOUTH SOCIAL SERVICES SET TO CLOSE OR SCALE BACK AROUND THE COUNTRY AS GOVT CUTS FUNDINGSome of Auckland's largest foodbanks are warning they may need to close or significantly reduce food parcels after ...
Iain Rennie, CNZMSecretary and Chief Executive to the TreasuryDear Secretary, Undue restrictions on restricted briefings This week, the Treasury barred representatives from four organisations, including the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi, from attending the restricted briefing for the Half-Year Economic and Fiscal Update. We had been ...
This is a guest post by Tim Adriaansen, a community, climate, and accessibility advocate.I won’t shut up about climate breakdown, and whenever possible I try to shift the focus of a climate conversation towards solutions. But you’ll almost never hear me give more than a passing nod to ...
A grassroots backlash has forced a backdown from Brown, but he is still eyeing up plenty of tolls for other new roads. And the pressure is on Willis to ramp up the Government’s austerity strategy. Photo: Getty ImagesMōrena. Long stories short, the six things that matter in Aotearoa’s political economy ...
Hi all,I'm pretty overwhelmed by all your messages and emails today; thank you so very much.As much as my newsletter this morning was about money, and we all need to earn money, it was mostly about world domination if I'm honest. 😉I really hate what’s happening to our country, and ...
A listing of 23 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, December 8, 2024 thru Sat, December 14, 2024. Listing by Category Like last week's summary this one contains the list of articles twice: based on categories and based on ...
I started writing this morning about Hobson’s Pledge, examining the claims they and their supporters make, basically ripping into them. But I kept getting notifications coming through, and not good ones.Each time I looked up, there was another un-subscription message, and I felt a bit sicker at the thought of ...
Once, long before there was Harry and Meghan and Dodi and all those episodes of The Crown, they came to spend some time with us, Charles and Diana. Was there anyone in the world more glamorous than the Princess of Wales?Dazzled as everyone was by their company, the leader of ...
The collective right have a problem.The entire foundation for their world view is antiscientific. Their preferred economic strategies have been disproven. Their whole neoliberal model faces accusations of corporate corruption and worsening inequality. Climate change not only definitely exists, its rapid progression demands an immediate and expensive response in order ...
Just ten days ago, South Korea's president attempted a self-coup, declaring martial law and attempting to have opposition MPs murdered or arrested in an effort to seize unconstrained power. The attempt was rapidly defeated by the national assembly voting it down and the people flooding the streets to defend democracy. ...
National has only been in power for a year, but everywhere you look, its choices are taking New Zealand a long way backwards. In no particular order, here are the National Government's Top 50 Greatest Misses of its first year in power. ...
The Government is quietly undertaking consultation on the dangerous Regulatory Standards Bill over the Christmas period to avoid too much attention. ...
The Government’s planned changes to the freedom of speech obligations of universities is little more than a front for stoking the political fires of disinformation and fear, placing teachers and students in the crosshairs. ...
The Ministry of Regulation’s report into Early Childhood Education (ECE) in Aotearoa raises serious concerns about the possibility of lowering qualification requirements, undermining quality and risking worse outcomes for tamariki, whānau, and kaiako. ...
A Bill to modernise the role of Justices of the Peace (JP), ensuring they remain active in their communities and connected with other JPs, has been put into the ballot. ...
Labour will continue to fight unsustainable and destructive projects that are able to leap-frog environment protection under National’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. ...
The Green Party has warned that a Green Government will revoke the consents of companies who override environmental protections as part of Fast-Track legislation being passed today. ...
The Green Party says the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update shows how the Government is failing to address the massive social and infrastructure deficits our country faces. ...
The Government’s latest move to reduce the earnings of migrant workers will not only hurt migrants but it will drive down the wages of Kiwi workers. ...
Te Pāti Māori has this morning issued a stern warning to Fast-Track applicants with interests in mining, pledging to hold them accountable through retrospective liability and to immediately revoke Fast-Track consents under a future Te Pāti Māori government. This warning comes ahead of today’s third reading of the Fast-Track Approvals ...
The Government’s announcement today of a 1.5 per cent increase to minimum wage is another blow for workers, with inflation projected to exceed the increase, meaning it’s a real terms pay reduction for many. ...
All the Government has achieved from its announcement today is to continue to push responsibility back on councils for its own lack of action to help bring down skyrocketing rates. ...
The Government has used its final post-Cabinet press conference of the year to punch down on local government without offering any credible solutions to the issues our councils are facing. ...
The Government has failed to keep its promise to ‘super charge’ the EV network, delivering just 292 chargers - less than half of the 670 chargers needed to meet its target. ...
The Green Party is calling for the Government to stop subsidising the largest user of the country’s gas supplies, Methanex, following a report highlighting the multi-national’s disproportionate influence on energy prices in Aotearoa. ...
The Green Party is appalled with the Government’s new child poverty targets that are based on a new ‘persistent poverty’ measure that could be met even with an increase in child poverty. ...
New independent analysis has revealed that the Government’s Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) will reduce emissions by a measly 1 per cent by 2030, failing to set us up for the future and meeting upcoming targets. ...
The loss of 27 kaimahi at Whakaata Māori and the end of its daily news bulletin is a sad day for Māori media and another step backwards for Te Tiriti o Waitangi justice. ...
Yesterday the Government passed cruel legislation through first reading to establish a new beneficiary sanction regime that will ultimately mean more households cannot afford the basic essentials. ...
Today's passing of the Government's Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill–which allows landlords to end tenancies with no reason–ignores the voice of the people and leaves renters in limbo ahead of the festive season. ...
After wasting a year, Nicola Willis has delivered a worse deal for the Cook Strait ferries that will end up being more expensive and take longer to arrive. ...
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has today launched a Member’s Bill to sanction Israel for its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as the All Out For Gaza rally reaches Parliament. ...
After years of advocacy, the Green Party is very happy to hear the Government has listened to our collective voices and announced the closure of the greyhound racing industry, by 1 August 2026. ...
In response to a new report from ERO, the Government has acknowledged the urgent need for consistency across the curriculum for Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) in schools. ...
The Green Party is appalled at the Government introducing legislation that will make it easier to penalise workers fighting for better pay and conditions. ...
Thank you for the invitation to speak with you tonight on behalf of the political party I belong to - which is New Zealand First. As we have heard before this evening the Kinleith Mill is proposing to reduce operations by focusing on pulp and discontinuing “lossmaking paper production”. They say that they are currently consulting on the plan to permanently shut ...
Auckland Central MP, Chlöe Swarbrick, has written to Mayor Wayne Brown requesting he stop the unnecessary delays on St James Theatre’s restoration. ...
Kiwis planning a swim or heading out on a boat this summer should remember to stop and think about water safety, Sport & Recreation Minister Chris Bishop and ACC and Associate Transport Minister Matt Doocey say. “New Zealand’s beaches, lakes and rivers are some of the most beautiful in the ...
The Government is urging Kiwis to drive safely this summer and reminding motorists that Police will be out in force to enforce the road rules, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.“This time of year can be stressful and result in poor decision-making on our roads. Whether you are travelling to see ...
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says Health New Zealand will move swiftly to support dozens of internationally-trained doctors already in New Zealand on their journey to employment here, after a tripling of sought-after examination places. “The Medical Council has delivered great news for hardworking overseas doctors who want to contribute ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has appointed Sarah Ottrey to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). “At my first APEC Summit in Lima, I experienced firsthand the role that ABAC plays in guaranteeing political leaders hear the voice of business,” Mr Luxon says. “New Zealand’s ABAC representatives are very well respected and ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has announced four appointments to New Zealand’s intelligence oversight functions. The Honourable Robert Dobson KC has been appointed Chief Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants, and the Honourable Brendan Brown KC has been appointed as a Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants. The appointments of Hon Robert Dobson and Hon ...
Improvements in the average time it takes to process survey and title applications means housing developments can progress more quickly, Minister for Land Information Chris Penk says. “The government is resolutely focused on improving the building and construction pipeline,” Mr Penk says. “Applications to issue titles and subdivide land are ...
The Government’s measures to reduce airport wait times, and better transparency around flight disruptions is delivering encouraging early results for passengers ahead of the busy summer period, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Improving the efficiency of air travel is a priority for the Government to give passengers a smoother, more reliable ...
The Government today announced the intended closure of the Apollo Hotel as Contracted Emergency Housing (CEH) in Rotorua, Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka says. This follows a 30 per cent reduction in the number of households in CEH in Rotorua since National came into Government. “Our focus is on ending CEH in the Whakarewarewa area starting ...
The Government will reshape vocational education and training to return decision making to regions and enable greater industry input into work-based learning Tertiary Education and Skills Minister, Penny Simmonds says. “The redesigned system will better meet the needs of learners, industry, and the economy. It includes re-establishing regional polytechnics that ...
The Government is taking action to better manage synthetic refrigerants and reduce emissions caused by greenhouse gases found in heating and cooling products, Environment Minister Penny Simmonds says. “Regulations will be drafted to support a product stewardship scheme for synthetic refrigerants, Ms. Simmonds says. “Synthetic refrigerants are found in a ...
People travelling on State Highway 1 north of Hamilton will be relieved that remedial works and safety improvements on the Ngāruawāhia section of the Waikato Expressway were finished today, with all lanes now open to traffic, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.“I would like to acknowledge the patience of road users ...
Tertiary Education and Skills Minister, Penny Simmonds, has announced a new appointment to the board of Education New Zealand (ENZ). Dr Erik Lithander has been appointed as a new member of the ENZ board for a three-year term until 30 January 2028. “I would like to welcome Dr Erik Lithander to the ...
The Government will have senior representatives at Waitangi Day events around the country, including at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, but next year Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has chosen to take part in celebrations elsewhere. “It has always been my intention to celebrate Waitangi Day around the country with different ...
Two more criminal gangs will be subject to the raft of laws passed by the Coalition Government that give Police more powers to disrupt gang activity, and the intimidation they impose in our communities, Police Minister Mark Mitchell says. Following an Order passed by Cabinet, from 3 February 2025 the ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Justice Christian Whata as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Whata’s appointment as a Judge of the Court of Appeal will take effect on 1 August 2025 and fill a vacancy created by the retirement of Hon Justice David Goddard on ...
The latest economic figures highlight the importance of the steps the Government has taken to restore respect for taxpayers’ money and drive economic growth, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. Data released today by Stats NZ shows Gross Domestic Product fell 1 per cent in the September quarter. “Treasury and most ...
Tertiary Education and Skills Minister Penny Simmonds and Associate Minister of Education David Seymour today announced legislation changes to strengthen freedom of speech obligations on universities. “Freedom of speech is fundamental to the concept of academic freedom and there is concern that universities seem to be taking a more risk-averse ...
Police Minister, Mark Mitchell, and Internal Affairs Minister, Brooke van Velden, today launched a further Public Safety Network cellular service that alongside last year’s Cellular Roaming roll-out, puts globally-leading cellular communications capability into the hands of our emergency responders. The Public Safety Network’s new Cellular Priority service means Police, Wellington ...
State Highway 1 through the Mangamuka Gorge has officially reopened today, providing a critical link for Northlanders and offering much-needed relief ahead of the busy summer period, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.“The Mangamuka Gorge is a vital route for Northland, carrying around 1,300 vehicles per day and connecting the Far ...
The Government has welcomed decisions by the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) and Ashburton District Council confirming funding to boost resilience in the Canterbury region, with construction on a second Ashburton Bridge expected to begin in 2026, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Delivering a second Ashburton Bridge to improve resilience and ...
The Government is backing the response into high pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in Otago, Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard says. “Cabinet has approved new funding of $20 million to enable MPI to meet unbudgeted ongoing expenses associated with the H7N6 response including rigorous scientific testing of samples at the enhanced PC3 ...
Legislation that will repeal all advertising restrictions for broadcasters on Sundays and public holidays has passed through first reading in Parliament today, Media Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “As a growing share of audiences get their news and entertainment from streaming services, these restrictions have become increasingly redundant. New Zealand on ...
Today the House agreed to Brendan Horsley being appointed Inspector-General of Defence, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “Mr Horsley’s experience will be invaluable in overseeing the establishment of the new office and its support networks. “He is currently Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, having held that role since June 2020. ...
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says the Government has agreed to the final regulations for the levy on insurance contracts that will fund Fire and Emergency New Zealand from July 2026. “Earlier this year the Government agreed to a 2.2 percent increase to the rate of levy. Fire ...
The Government is delivering regulatory relief for New Zealand businesses through changes to the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act. “The Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Amendment Bill, which was introduced today, is the second Bill – the other being the Statutes Amendment Bill - that ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed further progress on the Hawke’s Bay Expressway Road of National Significance (RoNS), with the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) Board approving funding for the detailed design of Stage 1, paving the way for main works construction to begin in late 2025.“The Government is moving at ...
The Government today released a request for information (RFI) to seeking interest in partnerships to plant trees on Crown-owned land with low farming and conservation value (excluding National Parks) Forestry Minister Todd McClay announced. “Planting trees on Crown-owned land will drive economic growth by creating more forestry jobs in our regions, providing more wood ...
Court timeliness, access to justice, and improving the quality of existing regulation are the focus of a series of law changes introduced to Parliament today by Associate Minister of Justice Nicole McKee. The three Bills in the Regulatory Systems (Justice) Amendment Bill package each improve a different part of the ...
A total of 41 appointments and reappointments have been made to the 12 community trusts around New Zealand that serve their regions, Associate Finance Minister Shane Jones says. “These trusts, and the communities they serve from the Far North to the deep south, will benefit from the rich experience, knowledge, ...
The Government has confirmed how it will provide redress to survivors who were tortured at the Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital Child and Adolescent Unit (the Lake Alice Unit). “The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care found that many of the 362 children who went through the Lake Alice Unit between 1972 and ...
It has been a busy, productive year in the House as the coalition Government works hard to get New Zealand back on track, Leader of the House Chris Bishop says. “This Government promised to rebuild the economy, restore law and order and reduce the cost of living. Our record this ...
“Accelerated silicosis is an emerging occupational disease caused by unsafe work such as engineered stone benchtops. I am running a standalone consultation on engineered stone to understand what the industry is currently doing to manage the risks, and whether further regulatory intervention is needed,” says Workplace Relations and Safety Minister ...
Mehemea he pai mō te tangata, mahia – if it’s good for the people, get on with it. Enhanced reporting on the public sector’s delivery of Treaty settlement commitments will help improve outcomes for Māori and all New Zealanders, Māori Crown Relations Minister Tama Potaka says. Compiled together for the ...
Mr Roger Holmes Miller and Ms Tarita Hutchinson have been appointed to the Charities Registration Board, Community and Voluntary Sector Minister Louise Upston says. “I would like to welcome the new members joining the Charities Registration Board. “The appointment of Ms Hutchinson and Mr Miller will strengthen the Board’s capacity ...
More building consent and code compliance applications are being processed within the statutory timeframe since the Government required councils to submit quarterly data, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “In the midst of a housing shortage we need to look at every step of the build process for efficiencies ...
Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey is proud to announce the first three recipients of the Government’s $10 million Mental Health and Addiction Community Sector Innovation Fund which will enable more Kiwis faster access to mental health and addiction support. “This fund is part of the Government’s commitment to investing in ...
New Zealand is providing Vanuatu assistance following yesterday's devastating earthquake, Foreign Minister Winston Peters says. "Vanuatu is a member of our Pacific family and we are supporting it in this time of acute need," Mr Peters says. "Our thoughts are with the people of Vanuatu, and we will be ...
The Government welcomes the Commerce Commission’s plan to reduce card fees for Kiwis by an estimated $260 million a year, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly says.“The Government is relentlessly focused on reducing the cost of living, so Kiwis can keep more of their hard-earned income and live a ...
Regulation Minister David Seymour has welcomed the Early Childhood Education (ECE) regulatory review report, the first major report from the Ministry for Regulation. The report makes 15 recommendations to modernise and simplify regulations across ECE so services can get on with what they do best – providing safe, high-quality care ...
The Government‘s Offshore Renewable Energy Bill to create a new regulatory regime that will enable firms to construct offshore wind generation has passed its first reading in Parliament, Energy Minister Simeon Brown says.“New Zealand currently does not have a regulatory regime for offshore renewable energy as the previous government failed ...
By Emma Andrews, Henare te Ua Māori Journalism Intern at RNZ News The New Zealand fuel company Z Energy is swapping out street names for “correct” kupu on service stops around the country, with the help of local hapū. When Z took over 226 fuel sites from Shell in 2010, ...
Summer reissue: Was it a false measurement, a full-blown conspiracy or just some mild incompetence? Mad Chapman uncovers the truth of Maddi Wesche’s final throw. The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julie Old, Associate Professor, Biology, Zoology, Animal Science, Western Sydney University Dmitry Chulov, Shutterstock At this time of year, images of reindeer are everywhere. I’ve had a soft spot for reindeer ever since I was a little girl. Doesn’t everyone? ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Grozdana Manalo, Career Services Manager (Education), University of Sydney hedgehog94/Shutterstock Getting casual work over summer, or a part-time job that you might continue once your tertiary course starts, can be a great way to get workplace experience and earn some extra ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ty Ferguson, Research associate in exercise, nutrition and activity, University of South Australia Peera_Stockfoto/Shutterstock It’s never been easier to stay connected to work. Even when we’re on leave, our phones and laptops keep us tethered. Many of us promise ourselves we ...
The NZ Media Council upheld the complaint under principle four: comment and fact On 5 September 2024, The Spinoff published a brief article titled Made in Palestine, found in 1970s Hastings, which highlighted an upcoming art exhibition featuring photographs of vintage cosmetic products labelled “Made in Palestine.” The piece, described ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kasey Symons, Lecturer of Communication, Sports Media, Deakin University We are well and truly in cricket season. The Australian men’s cricket team is taking centre stage against India in the Border Gavaskar Trophy series while the Big Bash League is underway, as ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Woods, Lecturer, Nursing, Faculty of Health, Southern Cross University FTiare/Shutterstock Summer is here and for many that means going to the beach. You grab your swimmers, beach towel and sunscreen then maybe check the weather forecast. Did you think to ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Saman Khalesi, Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead in Nutrition, School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences, CQUniversity Australia Dean Clarke/Shutterstock The holiday season can be a time of joy, celebration, and indulgence in delicious foods and meals. However, for many, it ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia Late Night With The Devil. Maslow Entertainment Marketing is critical to the success of commercial films, and companies will often spend half as much again on top of the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Francisco Jose Testa, Lecturer in Earth Sciences (Mineralogy, Petrology & Geochemistry), University of Tasmania The Conversation As a kid, it was tough for me to grasp the massive time scale of Earth’s history. Now, with nearly two decades of experience as ...
Te Pāti Māori has had to adopt a new way of debating, operating and even thinking in Parliament in response to the Government’s “onslaught” against te ao Māori, co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer says.In an end-of-year interview with Newsroom, the Te Tai Hauauru MP reflected on how 2024 has differed from her ...
Opinion: The latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science report was announced earlier this month, yet it didn’t get the flurry of media attention and political hand-wringing that typically accompanies these announcements. This might be because it presented good news, or you could argue, no news; the results paint a ...
NewsroomBy Dr Lisa Darragh, Dr Raewyn Eden and Dr David Pomeroy
At long last, The Spinoff shells out for a nut ranking. The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a member today.It recently came to The Spinoff’s attention ...
I was one of hundreds of people who lost my government job this week. Here’s exactly how it played out. The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a ...
Summer reissue: One anxiously attentive passenger pays attention to an in-flight safety video, and wonders ‘Why can’t I pick up my own phone?’ The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up ...
Summer reissue: Why do those Lange-Douglas years cast such a long shadow 40 years on? The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a member today. First published June ...
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There was a very interesting review on Sunday’s Mediawatch program on Owen Glen’s recent public activity. Excerpts of interviews with Owen Glen were played.
He is an unusual figure. He used to provide significant financial support to the Labour Party. More recent activity includes partially funding a University Lecture hall that proudly bears his name, buying into the warriors, and setting aside $80 million to address child poverty in New Zealand. It is clear that he enjoys the publicity.
His approach could be contrasted with another philanthropist Hugh Green who, although wealthy, was very discrete with his philantrophic activity and never sought publicity. Green is quoted as saying, “I made a lot of money and I can’t spend it. So I decided to give it away and do something for somebody else.”
As was rightfully pointed out in the Mediawatch program there was something jarring about Glenn’s generosity. He had taken active steps, including the setting himself up in Monarco, to minimise the amount of tax he paid. His generosity could be no more than what he should been paying in tax.
Labour’s experience with him has made my personal views on state funding of political parties even stronger. It has to happen. Our political system should not be left to the whims of the wealthy and the attention seekers.
It is a shame that when in power last time Labour ducked the issue and did not take the opportunity to establish it. I understand that Helen was actually keen but was talked out of it by others.
These other persons are Idiots.
Its called ego owen – your ego.
Hey owen – fuck you and your slimey money.
*Shakes head*
I think wealthy people shouldn’t bother with helping the Left. The Right have better parties, and all without the endless moralising on why you’re not good enough for them or why your personal style and behaviour is lacking to meet their standards.
Kim Hill was a shit interviewer. Shallow and suitable only for Womans Day.
no – it is what he said.
What did he say that was so terrible ?
cultural oppression
failed to recognise his priveledge
negating the Treaty
ignorance of NZ history
arrogance
Whether or not it’s “terrible” depends on your personal perspective. Anyone can be ignorant or arrogant, but in this context, it’s plain offensive to make believe the past doesn’t exist. I would have thought his contact with people in the Labour party over the years would have educated him a little more. Even if he just adopted certain phrases as diplomatic “technical terms”, at least then it wouldn’t cause purposeful offence. You wouldn’t use txt speak in a boardroom, so why speak like that on National Radio?
He is, of course, free to choose how he speaks and who he offends, but if he associates with Labour, it may signal what many observers already know. Glen is no Johnny-come-lately, he knows what he said and why.
Yes what a horrible person spending up large to try and make a real difference in NZ and around the world.
http://www.glennfamilyfoundation.org/news-and-images/latest-news/2012/7/2141742038/Owen-Glenn-Announces-NZ$8-Million-Commitment-to-Community-Project-in-Otara,-New-Zealand
You could try and read the article and the links and things before commenting on this. Glenn’s charity is welcome but he should be paying his share in tax.
If Glenn invested his (say) business interests in NZ, had a 6% return and paid 30% of this in tax he would be contributing $18 million a year in tax, over twice the amount he is donating to Otara.
If he and others of exceptional wealth paid their fair share then a great deal could be done to address poverty.
Oops meant to say “(say) $1b interests in NZ”.
What is vote welfare in this country already ?
Using your ludicrous illustration if he was to reallocate his entire funds to NZ and ended up contributing $18 million a year how much of that do you think would get to the coal face ?
Good on him for putting his money directly into such worthy causes.
You are a diddle of epic proportions …………. just not in a spatial sense.
Most of it. Taxing and the public service are the most efficient means of achieving what Glenn is doing just to get his name up in lights.
Not a documentary, hs.
No wonder you seem so confused about so many things.
I think you’re the one who’s confused, it’s well known that yes minister is 9/10ths fact mixed with 1/10th satire.
Although DTBs comment that …
“Taxing and the public service are the most efficient means of achieving what Glenn is doing ….”
….certainly is comedy gold at its finest.
Ah, the RWNJ shows just where he gets his “facts” from – fictional TV shows.
Gosh so erudite Draco.
What makes me a RWNJ ?
My disgust for idiots that think paedophilia is OK ?
http://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-31052012/comment-page-1/#comment-477335
The fact that I don’t believe we can come close to making everything we need locally ?
http://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-22062012/comment-page-1/#comment-485889
Or is it just a convenient little set of letters you like to dish out to anyone who you disagree with ?
Pretty sure the “NJ” part refers to how you tried to disprove Draco’s opinion with a sitcom…
Pretty sure you’re one of the more notable badauds in NZ.
Nice word, a new one for me so I had to look it up. First hit:
“Ba`daud´
n. 1. A person given to idle observation of everything, with wonder or astonishment; a credulous or gossipy idler.”
Ironic, given the context, that you accuse me of credulity.
The value and profitability of Glenn’s company operations were 99% overseas.
Now, leaving the hypotheticals aside and simply looking at the realities of his business, can anyone justify how he could have been taxed here.
There’s good charity and bad charity. There’s charity at the bottom of the cliff that merely
endeavors to hide poverty. Owen Glen isn’t targeting systemic problems in the economy that
produce the long tail, he’s picking up the pieces from those who are at the end of the long tail, and so making it harder (if successful) to gather evidence for dealing with the long tail.
Its a strange thing when the government, supposed a right wing individualist party against big government decides that individuals thinking patterns on welfare are not only a problem, that needs solving, but thirdly requires overt intervention by the state to create the correct good think.
Government that dehumanizes welfare recipients, who would not be there had government selected them (as we select those who can make profit and rubbish the rest who don’t directly contribute).
Personally people change their habits, select their behavior, choose their thoughts freely, until they are forced by government legislating workplaces (pushing up costs and so less jobs), legislating every aspect of life (like housing where you can either live in a scarce inner city flat costing a fortune or buy a substandard moldy leaky home). People on a benefit aren’t dependent on handouts, they are surviving from big government poverty creation with a stop measure designed welfare.
National have deliberately decided to blame welfare recipients for poor government, and market failures, now twisted into a new paradigm, that there’ something wrong with the type
of individuals on welfare. Those on welfare didn’t create their dependency, that was
the active choices of parliament to reward mindless activity with the demand that work will
set citizens free.
History is full of individuals who weren’t profit makers but who have enriched society, helped society make huge profits for centuries to come.
An article in Stuff this morning. The very rich, which includes John Key’s chums Ashcroft and Myers, hide US 40 trillion in tax havens. Who are the bludgers again Paula Bennett?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/7328396/Rich-hide-US-40-trillion
+1
The true face of greed. More than enough to live on for one lifetime, gained from working the infrastructures built with taxpayer money, and still they want more, and at the expense of less well-off and/or less greedy tax payers.
SCUM
Worse. Stupid Scum since they obvious don’t seem to understand that printing money does not create wealth. People valuations create wealth, and if people don’t value the need for an expensive to run car, then the car industry collapses. When people don’t value high processed mush as food, food companies collapse. There’s only so much the people will accept until vast numbers just opt out, by local, by raw, ride a bike.
The issue is more fully covered in the Guardian.
Some interesting comments:
1. Europe’s debt crisis could be cured if the money was repatriated.
2. £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world’s population. That is an average of NZ$134m each.
3. If income on the amount at stake was taxed at 30% then NZ$236b per annum would be produced.
The report really makes you think that the world’s economic system is deeply flawed. Because the extremely rich simply are not paying their way.
The worlds debt based money creation system is flawed, as well as the economic systems designed to help people hoard money instead of letting it circulate through communities.
Return to death estate taxes, tax capital gains, tax luxuries. Remove taxes on Vegies.
SP they are double dipping as well the money being lent at exorbitant rates is coming from these money laundering banks.
They are causing the problem by not paying any tax.
Now they are profiteering from the problem they have caused.
And while “ordinary kiwi” John Key has been one of the beneficiaries of this tax have scam, he has also been one of the enablers:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10821400
And this culture of ruthless, selfish greed, bludging of taxpayer money, has spread throughout our society (as reported by Granny pretentiously & superficially promoting itself via Maori Language Week):
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10821464
PS: Hah! Finally. Don’t know what that CATCHA loop was all about.
I think you will find that Ashcroft and Myers are simple peasants in this.
It is the Russian and Middle Eastern, with unimaginable wealth, along with such as Arafat and Mugabe families, and Nigerian overlords who are in these schemes.
Probably – still thieves though and so deserve to have the whole lot renationalised.
In yesterday’s Herald Matt McCarten blew smoke up the current Labour leadership’s rear. He worked off the press briefing and didn’t look at any of the detail. After confusing strategy with constitutional matters he goes on to say that the party is in great condition and in the best of hands!! Matt McCarten thinks a new team is in charge!
The same people that managed the Labour Party under Goff and got the worse result ever are running the Labour party now. No change. Same team, slightly different face.
The 67% leadership challenge rule means Shearer can be protected by 12 Caucus votes. No amount of votes by members and affiliates will have any impact. Matt McCarten has not done thorough research on the detail of the constitution and the amendments.
McCarten writes: “What I learned is that if your opponent is vulnerable, then having enthusiastic volunteers well organised and directed wins every time”. Shearer’s Teams’s bland bumbling performance to date has demotivated members.
Matt then adds: “All they need is to get their working class base to believe it’s worth trundling down to the voting booth.”. Nothing Shearer has done so far has dented the perceptions of the 100s of 1,000s who did not come out to vote.
And it is deliberate policy: they think they can win by just not making people upset with them! The current Labour strategy is targeting soft National votes and has abandoned the poor and uninspired.
Yeah, noticed this. Not sure why McCarten was so satisfied all is well.
As far as I can see, McCarten has only ever acted as a left wing ginger group for Labour. If they move 1mm towards wht he can define as left, he thinks he’s achieved something.
There was a link here to a speech by David Parker that I read recently, tucked away in it was a comment about state owned assets. Speech here (hat-tip to populuxe1 who reminded me of it)
http://www.labour.org.nz/news/robert-walters-finance-breakfast-speech
“Labour published a closed list of assets that we believe ought to be run in the New Zealand interest because they have monopoly characteristics – assets such as electricity line networks, water and airports.
The list excludes telecommunications and electricity generation”
The last sentence is pretty damning. Does anyone have a link to the full list? Does it include assets like schools & prisons etc?
Haven’t seen the list but that part in the speech shows that their definition of monopoly is so narrow as to be unworkable. It won’t shift basic monopolies (services that we all need and so fees can be hiked on them) out of private hands.
I am caught in an access CAPTCHA loop trying to post a comment to open mike – one of the words I have to copy each time, has the letters so crowded together, I can’t be sure if I have copied it correctly. Have done it about 5 or 6 times now & each time it just result in giving me another pair of CAPTHCA words to copy.
Sorry I can’t do anything about the captcha, but if you log in to The Standard you never have to enter a captcha ever again…
Yes, but I tried logging in a while back. I can’t use a capital in my handle, but more annoying was, I couldn’t stop email notifications flooding into my account, notifying me of replies – that was a fair while back.
Interesting – I don’t get those. Try asking lprent what’s up some time when he’s about.
There’s an option to turn those off in the Dashboard that’s available to set options.
EDIT: On seconds looks, no there isn’t. Must be somewhere else that I saw it.
There could be one, now, but way back when I tried to turn it off, I couldn’t.
Actually, not logging in isn’t usually a problem. Now and then I get asked to complete a capture and it works fine. Today I just seemed to get caught in a captcha loop.
I’m interested to know what Steven Joyce means by ‘intensification of agriculture’ in his interview with Shane Taurima on Q&A in June:
(my bolding)
Does he mean intensive dairy factory farming like that declined planning permission in the McKenzie Country?
Joyce revisits this development theme in the ‘Labour/Green fairy tales’ meme he’s been using around the National Party conference and the Q&A inteview is printed almost word for word in an article by Audrey Young in the Herald last week. But the article ends before the mention of intensification of agriculture. Yet I’m pretty sure the Herald is where I read about this first – it bothered me so I went hunting for it and it’s not there anymore. (Given I don’t watch NZ TV there is no way I saw it on Q&A ).
I reckon Shane Taurima got Joyce to say something he didn’t mean to and a compliant media has ‘kindly’ not repeated it. It needs following up, huh?
A search on google news brings up a list of articles with the key phrase, including an NZH article from a day ago, but when I click on the link, the phrase doesn’t seem to be there.
https://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&gl=nz&tbm=nws&q=Steven+joyce+intensification+of+agriculture&oq=Steven+joyce+intensification+of+agriculture&gs_l=news-cc.3..43j43i400.3598.14361.0.14876.43.5.0.38.38.0.250.744.1j2j2.5.0…0.0…1ac.7SVFSlmu1Ew
I used key words “Steven Joyce intensification of agriculture” in a google news search. The title of the article also seems to have changed.
but when I click on the link, the phrase doesn’t seem to be there.
Yeah, exactly. That’s what happened when I looked. Seems strange to me, I must have read it somewhere! And why oh why is he leaving it off his list of development objectives now?
aha…
edit: the phrase reappears – John Armstrong 5:30 this morning
This makes me very uncomfortable.
Ah, thanks. Yes, I interpret intensification of agriculture as increased number of animals per farm space, increased use of technologies, increased use of resources and of the amount of farming the land can stand.
i.e.depletion of resources to increase agriculture output. More short term thinking…. with Armstrong, as usual the sycophant and Nat cheerleader.
Thanks for the link. I’m interested in the comments about the Greens at the end of the article, showing the Nats more insecure than Armstrong is making out in the rest of the article.
Steven Joyce makes me uncomfortable every time he opens his mouth, hes so smug & so obviously lies its a wonder he hasn’t been pulled up on it. sorry if the comment comes out garbled, opera and huawei can take the blame for that
I’ve said it before – it’s not about jobs any more. Our productivity is so high that we can support our society with a fraction of the work we do now. It’s about re-purposing the economy to do that rather than having it being to enrich a few people.
All anyone who says we need more jobs is saying is that we need to make the rich richer as well as making our society so unsustainable that our children and grand-children will be paying the price in higher pollution and degraded environment.
I’m expecting ‘agriculture’ = ‘dairying’ and ‘intensification’ means factory farming in areas that are unsuitable for dairying – Canterbury, Otago, Southland. Water rights, pollution rights and other resource consent problems. Not to mention the loss of the one marketing line we have, that is trustworthy produce. New Zealand: one great dairy farm.
Rose, what Steven Joyce means is the same old same old for the likes of him…. they cannot see any other way to grow the economy other than to take take take from the environment.
Like the old kauri millers did.
Like the whalers did.
Like the orange roughy fishers did.
Like the pastoralists did.
It is just a take.
And as such it cannot be sustained because there is simply only so much environment. Only so many kauri trees, only so many whales, only so many organge roughy and only so many wild plains for conversion.
This is not smart in any sense.
So that is what Joyce and all his cohorts mean – take take take. They are still in the mindset of the early colonists.
Anyone heard about a new (non) CCO being created?
intensification means opening nz up to all the diseases that come along with trying to take too much from too little.
We need a forum for some heavyweights to do heavy battle on these issues.
All we get today is rubbish answers to very genuine questions. Rubbish from the likes of gosman and pete george and tsmithfield. The other ways of getting answers to these important questions seems to be through the likes of Mike Hosking and Petra Bags – which is even worse.
So I propose that a forum be set up – perhaps on a new website – which only invited posters can comment on (to keep the rubbish out).
For example – outline and weigh the benefits and costs to New Zealand taxpayers of selling their electricity companies.
On one side – r0b and eddie.
On the other side – Farrar and Hooton.
Thrash the issue out in its entirety with only those players. See what the outcome is. Because currently it is bloody hopeless trying to get decent answers… There is not a single decent forum anywhere in this entire land
what say thou?
There’s a reason why I stopped reading the True Lies thread – it’s because the RWNJs had pretty much taken over the thread spreading misinformation. Their sole point seemingly to confuse the issue – they couldn’t dispute the issue that the PM was lying.
vto
couldnt agree more but the point is that this is good as it gets and it is up to you and I to do reall research and stick it to them.
Supermarkets shouldn’t profit from the poor
http://localbodies-bsprout.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/paulas-food-parcel-proposal.html
America in denial
Sounds like typical RWNJ behaviour – denying the facts because they don’t want them to be true.
And here in NZ we’re busily following the US down the rabbit hole.
The American dream, all yours if you work hard enough.
A disturbing piece from TomDispatch.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175568/
I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. “A lot from the Horn of Africa,” he added. “You don’t really hear about that in the media.”
“Where in Africa?” I asked. He said he didn’t know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. “A lot out of Djibouti,” he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from “elsewhere” in the region, too.
[…}
Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.
Even as the domestic economy empties out the US will continue to pour its remaining resources into its military machine.
George McGovern. September 1, 1970,
Awesome pic
That Draco, is the path of Nats “policy”.
Would it be a good idea for trying to limit the amount of flaming and RWNJ
statements if people were limited to ten comments (or 15) a day? Often
multiple comments are in reply to outrageous statements from someone
who isn’t seeking the truth.
At 11 a.m. there were 78 comments on one
thread and I think 17 from Gosman. Then there are the replies to
him, more heat than light. If it was a newspaper and someone was flaming
you would at least be able to burn it and get some useful heat.
That’s a bridge too far Prism, I think the mods (and contributors who sometime do their work for them) do a great job here and can see no need for a blanket rule – that’s my 2c anyway…
UAC yesterday was classic. Total threadjack, couldn’t spend any energy discussing serious issues because of one immature right wing asshole who kept insisting up was down, black was white, North was South, you get the idea.
Now I have days where I comment a lot. And even I think that a 15 comment limit between 8am and 8pm would work just fine.
Wouldn’t be hard to impose. I might put it in with a bit of heuristic/fuzzy logic. There are some interesting values I have been getting from running stats over our comments that would give some good starting points.
Anyone watch Dave Letterman today?
He told of 20 states and the Hudson River where the aquifers have been totally poisoned by frakking.
and we want to do it here!
CL
Often a good system is limited by the fact that no-one can bring themselves to do some tweaking. When there are some limits, more care goes into making a worthwhile comment. When our newspaper brought its wording down from 300 to 200 for letters, it resulted in more careful composition, construction and editing. So the thinking increases exponentially when trying to avoid controls on excess verbiage etc.
Incidentally in the new format my comments window doesn’t wrap at the..right hand edge and shoots off and out of sight. The only way to read the whole thing is to press the home and end buttons – like playing tennis.
Also getting visits from Cloud Flare saying cache isn’t available etc. It says that when busy this can happen so maybe it’s the time of night when I guess things are humming.
@prism I’m all for better writing, when it’s just text writing style is right up there with content in terms of creating a good experience – it’s just that your suggestion plays into the hands of anyone gaming the system with multiple IP addresses and Id’s and could actually end up gagging honest commentators.
Also there are some commentators here that I am quite happy to read a lot of – even when the discussion is essentially troll negation…
I’ve looked at such restrictions before. When I had more time few years ago I looked at the stats of discussion generated from comments as replies from different respondents (a pretty good surrogate for people’s ability to generate discussion).
Outside of the extremes (one or two line comments and ones that were pages in length), there is no significant correlation with text size, average word size, etc.
The significant correlations are :-
That crap punctuation (excessive or none or capitalization syndromes) doesn’t attract too many replies. Long sentences and long paragraphs drop replies a lot. Similarly high frequencies to words unknown to my dictionary (mostly spelling mistakes) dropped the numbers of replies a lot. All of these appeared to be additive in effect. It appears that the language police were right (damn).
There are words and phrases that have higher probabilities of replies – but all with relatively low significance. I was going to try to do a longitudinal study of phrases to see if there was a pattern in time. But it got rather hard because repetition rates are quite low once we got rid of the more boring trolls.
On the tech side. The number of replies also goes down as the number of links goes up. Smilies made no difference (took a bit to separate that from normal punctuation 🙂 ) . Clear quoting does (I used block quote and italics as it was a pain getting a reliable quote regular expression that didn’t slow the process to a crawl) – but with marginal significance.
There are people who consistently get a lot of replies to almost everything they write, and others who have a really amazing ability to never get any, or from just one person. But there is a pretty clear Pareto effect.
It was an interesting use of some of the regular expression modules out of boost, some stats modules from open sources and the toolkit used by the sphinx search engine. You could see after doing it how easy it is to do significant data mining on social media.
I will look at the comment stuff. What is it showing up on – browser, OS.
Another great NZer passes away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mahy
It feels like I’ve lost a piece of my childhood. RIP Margaret Mahy.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/7327574/Globe-trotting-musicians-bid-to-be-Kiwi-foiled
head meets wall repeats
“recommendations were made to the minister on set criteria, including that applicants had to have spent 240 days in New Zealand for each of the past five years.”
The section was surely intended to apply to recent immigrants, which is hardly relevant in this circumstance, head meets wall repeats.
Slippery the Prime Minister is running forwards in reverse as far as ‘plain packaging’ on tobacco products goes,
Having a bob each way on the subject at the moment while He gauges if there’s any votes to be gained from doing such and having various companies and country’s involved in tobacco production sue New Zealand’s butte in various World judicial forums,
ASH fanatics should eat their hearts out as Slippery sez it will be too difficult to ban tobacco products out-right, and unsaid, His Government once the next round of 10% rises is implemented will be collecting in taxation approximately 1.3 billion dollars a year over and above the cost to the Government of our tobacco use, so why would they stoop to banning the latest cash cow,
You have to call BULLSHIT on the whole thing about here as we have one politician, Slippery doing the two-faced taxation will make New Zealand smoke-free by 2020 and then in the next breath saying that its not possible to do that,
There’s still tho the savior of the human race in the form of the Maori Party determined to ‘save their people’ from the evils of tobacco by taking all the money outta their pockets and make damn sure that the poor diet of ‘Tariana’s people’ will be assured for quite some time into the future thereby killing one hell of a lot more of them a lot sooner then the dreaded tobacco can simply by affording them only the poorest of diets,
Thanks Auntie Tariana,