Hey Fisiani, now that I’ve stuck up for you (see yesterday’s comments) can you tell the truth on:
A. whether you’re a collaborative effort – i.e., actually more than one person.
B. whether your average age is under 25.
at the risk of causing the odd reader to spray coffee all over their keyboards and halfway up their monitors, it seems to me like you have some native wit that you’d be better off employing in straight pieces. puerile gets old, funnily enough.
Just one person with razor sharp insight and approaching 60.
I come here for the hysterical parallel universe comedy where the fantastic progress of the last seven years is seen as failure. Where Chicken Little would seem an optimist. Where the evidence of distorted thinking is so evident. i want to guide people to the light, the Force, the brighter side of life.
I’m afraid not @Paul. He might even lay claim to once even having voted Labour – especially in an FPP environment.
Rest assured though – he’s alright Jack. No doubt he pulled himself up by his bootstraps and is a self-made man (Get that? a M A N!) One with a ‘noble African’ handle (all trademarked, commodified and paid up in full)
Do a straight piece. too much pisstaking rots the brain. if you wrote a decent “positives of the last seven years” that was, you know, grounded in fact rather than posturing, I’m sure the guys here would consider throwing it up as a discussion piece…
Ho Ho Ho – looks like its turning to custard for the Government. 6.13 this morning on RNZ Morning Report everything in the economic department is failing – export figures you name it. Wonder why its now relegated to the summer break for news like this to emerge.
@ Hami Shearlie (2.1) – I think the distraction in the early new year will still be the flag (second referendum in March). It will hot up as the final vote gets closer, with FJK’s choice in our faces all day, every day.
But then after that one is all done and dusted, watch the panda issue become the main focus of msm acting on FJK’s instruction next April, when one very “prominent NZer” faces trial! Could even be a “choose the cutest panda” competition, just to distract from what will be going on in the court!
Wouldn’t mind betting there could well be a media blackout of the court case! Can’t have dear leader being embarrassed through some factual reporting, can we?
The first quarter of 20016 should be very interesting indeed, with the economy going down the toilet quick smart, the (rigged) flag result and then a “prominent NZer” facing his accusers!
Espiner made an ineffectual attempt to shut her up.Not easy with the Boags of this world.
Her strategy when asked what she thought of Andrew Little was dripping with fake condescendence and tried to make the interview about John Key. Viz.:’Well…Andrew Little …He’s doing quite well .. ..(insert patronizing tone here)..even though he hasn’t got John Key’s charisma or people skills…. Now John Key, this….and John Key. that…’.. ad nauseum. Must get people talking and thinking about John Key.
The other interviewee, Rob, when asked about Andrew Little, actually talked about Andrew Little as a serious person who hasn’t got time to talk about Key’s triviality .
I think the Left’s new year’s resolution should be to ignore Key’s banal clowning.
Oscar Wilde-“There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about.”.
He did not even try to call her on the blatant spin she was delivering.
Espiner is not an independent journalist; he is just another embedded corporate plant.
Michelle Boag should be removed from TV and the Radio, she is an assault on the senses, especially the ears – a true nightmare and heart failure material if you met her on a dark night. As for Espiner he is just a lap dog for Key and his Government – it couldn’t get any worse for this country.
Am off to do some lovely things like get a cake finished for a dear old lady I visit and get some soothing Baroque Christmas music on and just forget about the creeps who invade our lives by TV and Radio. Even the Listener is a load of hog wash. Whatever did NZ ever do to deserve this useless and corrupted lot dictating to us.
yea but nah ….. neither are the sharpest knAves in the drawer intellectually-woise. That’s why she has to play dress-ups all the time.
Two generations back she’d be putting a blue rinse through her hair, living in Karori and talking about what hubby got up to
I think the Left’s new year’s resolution should be to ignore Key’s banal clowning.
On the basis that I’m really slack at putting posts up (It was [may still be if it happens] going to titled ‘Jobby on a Stick’). Anyway, I’ll just say, I’ve had similar thoughts of late. I wouldn’t say ‘ignore’, though. Depersonalise – talk past the image.
There has been a huge and well crafted project devoted to creating an image of the current Prime Minister that many find appealing. As such, it’s flogging a dead horse to pivot any issue around that image or media personality.
Essentially people are being asked to take two psychological steps to address any issue at hand. The first step is to go beyond the knee jerk defensiveness (and immediate rejection of substantial matters) that comes from the positive relationship people have towards the image that’s been generated.
Refusing to name the fucker is a step towards undermining the…hmm…’cult of personality’. “The current Prime Minister” (of New Zealand?) is suitably depersonalised term. The PM…the leader of the Nats etc – they all work to degrees.
Did I say I’d love to see no more images of New Zealand’s current Prime Minister used as post images here on ‘ts’?
Bill.I agree. In he last two elections it seemed to me that those on the left
talked about Key most of the time.i.e. provided him with heaps of free publicity and not enough about their own policies.
The media is partly to blame as exasperation with Key’s antics makes better copy than dull old policies, sells more papers and gets people listening even if they then go ,”tut-tut” but give up on voting.
Yes Bill , ‘ignore ‘ is not the right word..maybe it should be dismiss with disdain.
dismiss= deliberately cease to think about.. (disdain = to regard something as unworthy of consideration).
Yes I’ll do that.
Why wait for Kauri dieback disease to decimate our heritage, we can just cut down or ring bark our ancient trees instead?
Thanks Auckland Council planners and “independent commissioners’ for not noticing the ancient Kauri’s in the 70 page report prepared by the applicants that failed to mention that. Instead burying within the document ‘high value vegetation’ is to be cut down. Deception?
Not to mention the developers also told the public they would not cut down the trees but since seemed to have changed their minds.
This story never ceases to amaze. I’m not sure why the developer didn’t change their mind at the start of this though, obviously not worried about their reputation.
Ironically, if it’s purely about money, anyone buying into that spot would likely pay more with the tree still standing and sensitively designed and built around. Certainly for me (and my neighbours, about 150m away from the site), large trees right around our houses was a major value-add.
A couple of other points: in this area the “permitted activity” for clearing bush for a building site is up to 150 sq m or 10% of the section area. There are two houses to be built on two sites of about 1000sq m each, so up to 300sq m allowed to be cleared. Eyeballing what’s already been cleared, it’s about 30m by 30m, so around 900 sq m. Plus a fair few more trees marked with “X” still for the chop. How the f*** did that get consented? Doing a drive past Lenihan and Greensmith’s listed home address elsewhere in Titirangi, it looks they’ve also cleared building sites there way in excess of what is a “permitted activity”.
So I can’t help wondering if they’ve got a corrupt relationship going on someone (or some people) in council. Also can’t help wondering what the other principals of RCG think of Lenihan’s activities.
The problem is developers moving into an area, getting a cheap site because they need a make a sensitive design and then undermining the atmosphere and ethos of the area to make money and not bothering with a sensitive design, all while profiting from the reputation of the area of being a bush green belt. These guys just got too greedy, but also exposes the role of the council. Are they just getting fees for plans and virtually rubber-stamping anything not adhering to the rules of district plan.
So the blame is the developers and planning consultants who have put together reports to hide what they are doing, and then the council for not bothering to do due diligence and then just doing some dubious activities to hide their role and let the trees be chopped further setting a precedent against the plan, public and community by allowing the travesty to continue.
From what I remember from earlier in the year they had back door access to council because they’re architects (?). So possibly not outright corrupt but certainly part of the old neoliberals network.
I hope they get pariahed. Good on the tree surgeons who downed tools last week, and shame on the ‘security’ company who wielded chainsaws this morning, hope they get named and shamed too.
“The United States is scarier than the Islamic State
Even our closest allies fear that we are a menace militarily and environmentally. The threat is lethal and real”
PHIL TORRES
Carpet bombing sorts out all the problems. It was chemical weapons in Vietnam!
Also I heard ISIS were being trained by the Israelis and ISIS were selling oil to Israel, also told ISIS are selling oil to Turkey for US weapon supplies- fact or fiction?
Thanks Red, compliments of the season. I have read his book Debunking Economic’s. Heavy going and I will have to read again to absorb all the facts. I can recommend that one if you have not already read it.
Morning Report this morning. Boag says it is only the Left who are opposing the change of flag.
Salmond says that 66% oppose the change of flag so Michelle, this is good news for the Left. Touche!
It’s a new 169 kilometre road from Tapawera to Karamea.
In the Stuff poll with 11,000 votes attached to the article, 57% supported it and 26% opposed.
Buller Mayor Garry Howard and Tasman Mayor Richard Kempthorne love it.
Their point is that 87% of Buller District and much of Tasman District is DOC estate and not open to any other kind of economic activity except tourism.
So the question of what their people do for jobs other than making life convenient for tourists is a real question.
Forest and Bird hate the idea. It’s (consultants’ thumbsuck) $100m, or about $2m per kilometre. The Treasury question that Cabinet will have to face is: if you had $100m to spend on the West Coast, would a road be the most beneficial thing for that taxpayer money?
Pretty similar to the Haast to Hollyford road that Minister Smith killed last year. With Joyce open to the idea and in need of a West Coast plan, looks like a major Parliamentary and Cabinet debate for 2016.
Minister Joyce and the Buller Mayor could possibly pop over to Ruby Bay and Collingwood and consider the high-value, high-capital and job-intensive horticulture and viticulture already going on in Tasman and get a few clues as to answer the question: if you had a spare hundred million for the West Coast ………..
+100 Ad
Yep, love the two main points in particular..
“So the question of what their people do for jobs other than making life convenient for tourists is a real question.”
and
“if you had $100m to spend on the West Coast, would a road be the most beneficial thing for that taxpayer money?”
It is about time that NZ has some sort of economic strategy that relies more on utilising what we already have here, making that better, instead of more roads, convention centres and falsifying our data to keep the illusion that NZ is clean and green (I feel after Key was laughed out of Paris the international community might be cottoning on…)
Instead the government is cancelling any innovation initiatives and giving our science grants and NIWA boats to polluting oil companies….
The tramping community has been aware of this one for a while.
Roads and cars are rapidly becoming a liability while undisturbed wilderness is regarded as increasingly valuable. Most people are still locked into thinking nothing has changed and that life is going to carry on a usual.
It isn’t.
Besides the capital and maintenance costs are absurdly poor value. Roads in this part of the country, especially in tight valleys, are subject to high rainfall and massive slips.
+100 Redlogix…part of the charm of that north end of the West Coast including Karamea is that it is at the end of the road and then there is untouched wilderness …just as Glenorchy is at the end of the road…and then untouched wilderness
People dont come to New Zealand to see roads
Wilderness and untouched nature is a draw card in itself
If I had $100m of taxpayer funds in my pocket (and as Minister I wanted to build some big stuff so I could open it), I’d look to what happened to Queenstown and Wanaka when they upgraded the nearest airport. Huge volumes of rich international people visiting longer, hotels springing up in town, and it becomes a real global destination, capital values through the roof. And for little mayors balancing little budgets, that means rates takes going through the roof.
“Pretty similar to the Haast to Hollyford road that Minister Smith killed last year”
I wish he had killed it but from what I remember he’s just said no to that proposal at that time rather than a blanket no.
It’s a collossal waste of resources to have to keep fighting these projects again and again. Both those roading projects (and the Queenstown/Milford transport one) have been repeatedly put forward in various forms for 3 decades or more. Time to put a moratorium on new roads in National Parks unless there is a conservation reason for the road, in which case it can go through the normal consent processes.
Time to put a moratorium on new roads in National Parks unless there is a conservation reason for the road,
Bloody good idea.
What’s even more aggravating is watching DoC complicitly downgrading the existing tracks in order reduce the number of people using the area. In fact there was always a great case for upgrading the Whangapeka to the same standard as the Heaphy, making for a fabulous world-class six-day round trip.
Instead they’re deliberately letting the tracks in area run down so as to discourage it’s use.
That idea should be a good starting postion for Labour and the Greens next election
Time to put a moratorium on new roads in National Parks unless there is a conservation reason for the road, in which case it can go through the normal consent processes.
Somewhat frustrating since Golden Bay, Collingwood and Ruby Bay (over in the Tasman region) all show what really intensive and productive use of land looks like. Granted, you’re not going to grow hops in Buller.
But then until the mid-1980s, no one thought you could make a wine industry out of central Otago, let alone right on the shores of alpine Lake Wanaka. But they did. And it didn’t take a new highway punching through the nearest national park to make happen.
“Probably no one-lane bridges left…”
There are quite a lot still there actually.
There is even one where the road and rail share the same bridge.
I hope that the train, whatever it is, goes slowly when they come to the bridge.
Mind you, I don’t know how many rail trips are still there on the coast.
Pity it rains so much though.
I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. More Aucklanders?
Rain, damn it. More rain! More rain! More rain!
Send it down Hughie. Save the coast from the alien invasion.
Yeah, it’s a hangover from the pioneer culture on the coast. Mr Explorer Douglas still lives on.
There’s 1661.8 km of sealed State HIghway and rural road on the coast linking all the centres of economic importance as of 2009 http://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/resources/land-transport-statistics/docs/2008-2009.pdf ( I doubt it will have grown much) which isn’t perceived to be bringing economic nirvana. How will a further 56km between two very minor townships change this? It doesn’t shorten the Nelson – Westport distance any, it’s the same, or longer.
So what’s the point, jobs for the consultants? Create a “concept” they can sell to an “investor”? It’ll probably come to an end once they discover their “thumb suck” is light by an order of magnitude, like Haast – Hollyford
For women with low-risk pregnancies, babies delivered at home with a midwife are at no greater risk of harm than those born in hospital with a midwife’s assistance, an Ontario study has found.
The three-year study of almost 23,000 pregnancies found the risk of adverse birth outcomes was low for both planned home and hospital deliveries and differed little between the two groups, said lead researcher Eileen Hutton of the midwifery education program at McMaster University in Hamilton.
But researchers found that women who delivered in hospital were more likely to have interventions such as pain relief, labour augmentation, assisted vaginal births or caesarean births, compared to those who delivered at home. There was also a higher rate of episiotomy among women who gave birth in hospital. An episiotomy is a surgical cut made at the opening of the vagina during childbirth to ease delivery and prevent tissues from rupturing.
Hutton suspects the differences may arise because women who intend to give birth at home may be “more intervention-adverse. For example, in terms of pain relief, they’re more inclined to think ‘I can manage without this and I trust my body and I’m going to do it.’
“There’s also probably the fact that you are at home, and in your home environment the physiological process of labour may work better,” she said.
hmm…well as a stoical person who tried to have a home birth( didnt like the idea of medical intervention,particularly male intervention, thought birth was a natural miraculous process etc) and ended up with an emergency cesarean at 3.00 am …after several days of labour…and getting the consultant out of bed
(and and one disappointed lovely home birthing midwife and another older home birther who was positively hostile after the event when I got home … I let the side down…should have tried harder )
….all i can say is thank God ( the Goddess) for medical specialists and monitoring…by the time I got to hospital the baby was under stress ( per moniters) and I was exhausted, couldnt take much more
…and I was later cheerfully told by my male obstetrics GP who turned up at the hospital ( and who also believed in home births or at least women’s choice)… that the baby and I would have died without medical intervention…I believed him!
at least I had the choice ( low tech/high tech)….and they were all wonderful( except the older midwife)…but for my daughter i would recommend a high tech birth and take everything that is going in a hospital …especially monitoring and epidurals
( cesareans are absolutely fabulous when you need them)
It’s the hostile politics between the two sides that is so damned futile and disappointing. My two kids were both home births so I’ve a little exposure to it all myself.
All I ever expected was that everyone involved should work together in the best interests of the babies and mothers.
well the “hostile politics” are not surprising given the stakes when things go wrong…birth always was potentially dramatic and dangerous for some women…just look at history and the plight of women in the third world
i was lucky in that I had a midwife who moved very fast when I said i wanted to go to hospital…lucky also that the high tech hospital was only 10 minutes away…lucky I had a GP /obstetrician trained in home births who met us at the hospital… and lucky he had a consultant mate who didnt mind getting up in the early hours and quickly pronouncing emergency cesarean …most lucky I had a healthy robust baby!
from what I can gather women these days are not so lucky for choice …it is either home birth with a midwife making all the judgment calls and when to go to hospital, with not necessarily immediate full support when they get there…(GP doctors have opted out)…or opting for hospital birth from the beginning with all the high tech ( and risk feeling alienated by the process)
From my experience , it is not worth the risk… I opted for hospital next time around and an elective cesarean…great for women who can have a home birth and great for women who can breast feed …but women who cant should be celebrated as well ( those babies on bottles look lovely and the mothers look lovely)….My Mother always said she envied women who had cesareans….their babies were so beautiful! ( not scrunched and red)
“That bitch is a ‘mother’ only in the technical sense.”
RETURN OF THE GRAVE-ROBBER: A REAL LIFE HORROR STORY
Five mental health doctors, all in white coats, gather round a computer screen to consider a particularly grievous case. Professor MORRISSEY BREEN leads the convocation….
DOCTOR No. 1: Oh Jesus, do we HAVE to look at this?
PROF. BREEN: Come on now. You guys work with mental health cases. This is your job.
DOCTOR No. 2: Yes, but these right wing fellows are, if not simply bewildered, then certainly depraved. They ARE all guys, aren’t they?
PROF. BREEN: Well, there’s one Catholic woman who writes crackpot stuff about religion and Russia occasionally, but, yes, I think they’re mostly male contributors.
YOUNG FEMALE DOCTOR:[grimly] Very SAD males.
PROF. BREEN: Indeed. We’ll start with this comment from someone calling himself “dime”. He writes “what a piece of human garbage”.
DOCTOR No. 4: To be honest, that’s pretty tame. Lame, but tame.
PROF. BREEN: Granted. Unfortunately, however, our friend “dime” is the intellectual heavyweight in this forum. It only gets worse from here on. For instance, a sad git called “mara” writes: “This Kahui ought to have fallen down the stairs in prison years ago.”
….Disbelieving silence for several seconds….
DOCTOR No. 1: Fuck me! These MORONS are in institutional care, I take it? PROF. BREEN: Sorry, but please bear with me if you can. A bit later a genius named “cmm” writes: “These people are always so keen to dis the white man that brings him the legal system that keeps him alive, gives him money for food, accommodation etc.”
ALL: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!… Jesus H. CHRIST, these people are D – U – M, DUMB!
PROF. BREEN: A bewildered soul called nasska writes: “Urban ferals never have & never will benefit from the millions thrown into the black hole that is the Maori grievance industry.” One “PhilP” writes learnedly that Chris Kahui is a “useless piece of shit.”
DOCTOR No. 4: Good Lord! This is like listening to a morning of Leighton Smith!
DOCTOR No. 5: Or Michael Laws. Or Sean Plunket. Or Larry “Lackwit” Williams.
PROF. BREEN: Yes, that’s right. Obviously these people get their talking points from the likes of Smith and Laws.
DOCTOR No. 3: And the ACT Party.
PROF. BREEN: Actually, No. 3, you’re close to the truth there. But we’ll get onto that in a minute. Let’s just consider the last couple of examples. Another fellow, “deadrightkev”, writes: “Kahui is a product of trash upbringing and fertilised by a social welfare state dependency problem out of control.” He then manages to top that with this gem: “Treaty settlements are fraud. They should be staying exactly where they should be – in the hands of the taxpayer.”
YOUNG FEMALE DOCTOR: More like “Deadweight” Kev, methinks.
ALL: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
PROF. BREEN: This one is my favorite, though, because he’s honest. Stupid, but honest. One “flash2846” writes learnedly: “Yet another good reason why I and others are racist! Just imagine a murderer of any other race in New zealand saying that shit. Filthy CUNT! needs castrating!!!!”
….A stunned silence ensues for several seconds…..
DOCTOR No. 1:[grimly] Farrar certainly seems to attract the intellectuals.
DOCTOR No. 3: You know what the most frightening thing about these guys is? They can breed and they can vote.
ALL: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
PROF. BREEN: Okay. Now some of you might remember this bloke. [He scrolls down the page] Sorry, fellas, before I reveal who it is, I know that like the rest of the country, you thought you’d never have to look at his ugly mug again or listen to one of his ill-informed, hate-filled rants, but he’s back—at least on Kiwiblog.
DOCTOR No. 1: Who? Murray Deaker?
DOCTOR No. 4: Not that fucking criminal JOHN BANKS?
PROF. BREEN: Now, No. 3, remember how you suggested these halfwits could be channeling the ACT Party. Well, get a load of THIS: “Of course he’s fucking unemployable… But of the two, his former “missus” is the worst in my view…male scum who couldn’t give a fuck about or abuse their progeny are a dime a dozen…somehow we expect more of mothers…That bitch is a “mother” only in the technical sense…and she is probably a killer…she certainly knows who did kill the poor little buggers… the useless mongrel – and I say that even if he didn’t kill his sons – has almost certainly sired a couple more by now….and you can bet your arse those children have “come to the attention of the authorities”
GENERAL HUBBUB: Jesus! …. What the HELL?… You can virtually feel the spittle!… Was that a quote from the late Paul Holmes?…. Sounds like Cameron Slater… Or John Ansell?… It’s hard to say which part of this is more offensive: the militant display of ignorance or the hatred. …. Are these people in care, and if not, why not? … They can vote, and they can breed…. So tell us, Prof. Breen: who was it? PROF. BREEN: I’ll give you three clues. Clue number one: he’s a disgraced ACT M.P.
DOCTOR No. 2: Doctor Muriel Newman, the dimmest medical practitioner in the world until the advent of Dr Ben Carson!
PROF. BREEN: All reasonable choices. But not the answer I’m looking for. Clue number two: he was convicted of assaulting a doctor in Tonga.
ALL: Oh Jesus, no!… I know who it is now. …. I’d blocked that person out of my memory, I’d thought…. No, no, no! Not him!… It’s that monster from the S.S. Trust!
PROF. BREEN: Clue number three: he stole the identity of a dead baby and was convicted for it, but it still didn’t stop ACT selecting him as a candidate!
GENERAL HUBBUB: The right dishonorable David fucking Garrett! … He’s the lowest of the low!… Thanks, Prof. Breen, I had banished that zombie into my mental trash can, and now you bring him back from the dead!… Absolutely reprehensible!… Compared to David Garrett, Chris Kahui is Albert fucking Schweitzer.
PROF. BREEN: Say, I LIKE that comment. I might just modify it a bit and post it up on Kiwiblog….
Unless you are privy to all the details of the case, from what was published – there does not seem to be enough evidence to make that decisive judgement call.
One of my relatives worked in the ICU at that time, and it had been noted by staff that the (somewhat regular) lack of bonding with the mother had occurred, and that substantial at home visits and supports would be necessary to address this. This did not occur after discharge.
It is by no means uncommon for parents of very premature births to have a resistance to forming bonds with their child. The children are often physically different from expectations of a healthy birth – very skinny, with loose and hairy skin, and it is a form of unconscious mental self-preservation to not invest emotionally if outcomes are uncertain.
Whether Chris Kahui was responsible for the injuries or not, seemed hard to define given the conflicting evidence that I can recall.
What is true however, is that a vulnerability was identified and a strategy defined which was not followed up on.
This is tragedy was indicative of a support system failure as well.
You could well be right, Tim. However, the discredited National Party hitman Cameron Slater is not fit to comment on him or anyone else.
The point of my post was not to defend Chris Kahui, but to show the hypocrisy of the ignorant and bloody-minded lynch-mob that were denouncing him on the right wing blogs. It’s perhaps no surprise to learn that the most foul-mouthed, crudest commenter of all on that particular thread was the disgraced ex-ACT felon David Garrett….
I enjoyed your post (as usual) and I’m glad you let those guys know how it is. It just prompted me to think about the case again and left me with a sense of anger – probably at the family as well as Macsyna and Chris, for the way in which all seemed complicit in preventing the truth coming to light at the time… Or at least that is what the media has it seem like.
…”The monument in Wiltshire has long been thought of as a place of magic used by the ancient druids, with mystery surrounding how it was built and its exact use. It is believed to have been built between 2000 and 3000 BC…
Following a monumental win against the controversial ‘Monsanto law’ in Guatemala last year, the notorious biotech firm took another big hit after Mexico’s Supreme Court suspended a permit to grow genetically modified soybeans across 250,000 hectares on the Yucatán peninsula.
The judgement stemmed from a constitutional law in Mexico that requires the consideration of indigenous communities affected by development projects. According to the Supreme Court, Monsanto failed to consult the region’s famous Maya beekeepers who filed the case against Monsanto. The beekeepers warned early on that Monsanto’s plan would require the use of “glyphosate, a herbicide classified as probably carcinogenic.” Given that bees are extremely sensitive to their environment, the beekeepers explained that Monsanto’s project jeopardize their communities, their livelihoods and the environment.
The judge commented in the ruling that co-existence between honey production and GM soybeans is simply not possible.
And yet many places in the world had thriving ecosystems before the arrival of the honey bee, which included plants that needed pollination. I’ve been following the bee problem for a long time but lately I’ve been wondering if the issue of the demise of hive bees is about global economics more than humans being able to feed themselves. We should be going back to eating local anyway. The issue isn’t that the almond orchards in California will fail when all the colonies collapse, and how that affects the global food supply, but the fact that that kind of orcharding created the collapse in the first place and is just wrong on all levels.
Yes, we should be concerned about any species decline, but if we focus on the honey bee/global cropping connections instead of the ecosystem that includes all pollinators then we will just keep shitting in our own nest (and everyone else’s).
Oh I agree – however the demise of the honey bee by wide spread applications of pesticide also includes the demise of all the other local pollinators, and that is what makes the Mexican Supreme Court decision so important.
This is why Douglas, Prebble and co should be hung by their fucking heals.
Most recently, the privatisation of the timber industry in the 1980s caused “massive job losses and severe poverty” in the west of the district, which had previously been relatively wealthy.
While the Crown did provide some support to communities in Te Urewera, they were “never near enough to counter the massive disadvantages holding back those communities”.
I remember reading an insider industry report in the early 80’s sometime, projecting that with the amount of timber potentially coming online NZ could support something like 16 world scale timber/pulp/paper mills.
We never built any of them. Most of the wood got shipped overseas as logs for other people to make money from.
Despite the injustice and deprivation of the past, which at the time I was only vaguely aware of, the people I knew and worked with in Galatea – Murupara in the 1970’s had found some measure of prosperity.
And then the 4th Labour Government, their party, my party, didn’t just sell their livelihoods out from underneath them, they did that to lots of us, they abandoned them and their communities became the poverty stricken gang dominated shit holes of the 1990’s.
+1 yep they sold us all out and so many of us are still paying the cost – while they get taxpayer funded travel and invitations to conferences – sickening.
A fucken disgrace, and I still hear of D Cagill. Did the dogs get their beach trip. 😉
Oh, and just too wind you up again, down here in Dunedin, the council have employed two Lawyers to save some money, have come up with the idea of getting rid of the word Bitch and heat from the dog control act, they don’t like blurred meaning.
The former will be replaced with, “female dog in season” I kid you not.
Or, A back handed complement to the Dog ‘male’ for always being in season, or at least in unison with the said ‘Bitch’.
But in all seriousness, that nonsense has got to stop, it’s a waste of money etc etc.
PS: leave those whitebait alone, alwyn…At lest till the first of September
Sorry, but I can’t read past the first line of Māori living in caves and eatint rotten potatoes. I love NZ but there are some shames that we will never get past.
If it was your job to ensure the people being allowed into the country did not pose a significant security risk do you think it would be easy? Would you be happy if people judged you and your entire society as sick because of a specific decision that was made which we have not heard the justification for? Do you think it is reasonable for someone to join ISIS because they were not allowed to go to Disneyland for reasons that have not yet been made clear?
“Would you be happy if people judged you and your entire society as sick because of a specific decision that was made which we have not heard the justification for?”
Isn’t that what happened to these people?
This is how they felt after, “The family were escorted from the airport but were first obliged to return every item they had bought from the airport’s duty-free shops”
“I have never been more embarrassed in my life. I work here, I have a business here. But we were alienated.”
disgusting – I hope their relatives in Southern California don’t find the spooks hanging around their kids now but I’m not hopeful.
Hey – when a kid gets arrested for bringing a home made clock to school. http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/16/14-year-old-boy-arrested-for-bringing-homemade-clock-to-school/
A female politican sends out a christmas card of her and her family packing guns http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3347927/Nevada-politician-arms-family-guns-controversial-holiday-portrait-support-Second-Amendment.html
And the number of mass killings is increasing and more deadly http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/02/mass-shootings-in-america-numbers-more-frequent-more-deadly
and people who are obviously not criminals are denied entry for no other reason than they are Muslim, you have to conclude that the states is now a highly paranoid society. Having witnessed first hand the paranoia of the USA, fostered by their main stream media, their politicians, right wing “think” tanks, and the NRA, amongst others, one can only conclude that the states is not a pleasant place to be. Frankly I couldn’t wait to leave and never wish to return, despite the fact that I met many good people and the countryside in the fall was simply stunning.
I’m sorry if you are fearful, I take it from your tone that you are a part of that society and wish to uphold it. Well take it from an outsider – its time to rethink USA foreign policy so that The US is seen not as the terrorist that it has become, but as a decent Country like it was many many years ago.
the poor and middle classes have been divided by race/ income/ religion and set against one another, and kept in perpetual fear, keeping the real gangsters in the Wall St Washington establishment safe from criticism
Not sure how that judge’s ruling makes NZ a puppet state of the US.
Best you read the judge’s full decision before forming opinion, many of those on the political right would have been well advised to do the same regarding the recent decision regarding the illegality of the police search of Nicky Hagar’s home before spouting uninformed opinion.
Dotcom looses the case but: “Dotcom’s lawyer Ron Mansfield confirmed there would be an appeal lodged over the extradition this afternoon.” Might take years to resolve.
Here it is folks, what you have all been waiting for. It’s about to begin. Episode one of the KEYdashian’s Hawaiian holiday! The fruit of FJK’s loins, begins by missing his girlfriend already! Ahhhh poor baby!
Yuk! Enough to make one have to dash rather hastily to the toilet!
…a family party of 11, about to embark on a dream holiday for which they had saved for months, were approached by officials from US homeland security (at Gatwick…in the UK ffs!) as they queued in the departure lounge and told their authorisation to travel had been cancelled, without further explanation.
“Every presidential contender says they want to destroy Islamic State, but John McAfee is the only one predicting a war involving cyberattacks, not conventional weapons. “We have to prepare ourselves” for an enemy that is “far more clever,” McAfee told RT.
Not many people know John McAfee is running for president, but possibly even fewer understand the scope of the war against Islamic State (IS, formely ISIS/ISIL) the way he does.
When asked if Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s strategy against IS was reasonable, McAfee answered, “No, absolutely not.” That’s an answer most other rivals would agree with, but to McAfee, it’s not about where and how to use the military. To defeat ISIS, America must face its own “cyber illiteracy” and other faults before engaging in what he purports to be the next World War – a cyber war…
Cyber wars are going on already. Involving nuclear reactors, airlines etc. Worth doing a Google search on the subject. I read a few blogs on the subject which linked to all sorts of instances reported in the mainstream media.
But there are some scary parallels between the Nazi Empire of the 1940’s and the Washington Empire and conquests today that revolve around the Petrodollar system that has maintained the dollar reserve currency status since the end of World War Two. This dollar world reserve currency model required that oil was only priced and sold in dollars forced all foreign nations buying and importing oil to keep major dollar reserves to pay for their oil imports guaranteed a permanent and expanding demand for dollars around the world.
Three Middle East countries first broke the oil/dollar requirement and threatened the petrodollar system including Iraq, Libya and Iran hence the US military attempts to violently overthrow these governments to maintain Washington hegemony and the dollar.
Images of US students (and others) protesting and setting up tent cities on US university campuses have been broadcast world wide and clearly demonstrate the growing rifts in US society caused by US policy toward Israel and Israel’s prosecution of … Continue reading → ...
Barrie Saunders writes – Dear Paul As the new Minister of Media and Communications, you will be inundated with heaps of free advice and special pleading, all in the national interest of course. For what it’s worth here is my assessment: Traditional broadcasting free to air content through ...
Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government is trying to achieve and its arguments for such a bold reform. ...
Peter Dunne writes – The great nineteenth British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, once observed that “the first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.” When a later British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, sacked a third of his Cabinet in July 1962, in what became ...
Ele Ludemann writes – New Zealanders had the OECD’s second highest tax increase last year: New Zealanders faced the second-biggest tax raises in the developed world last year, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says. The intergovernmental agency said the average change in personal income tax ...
We all know something’s not right with our elections. The spread of misinformation, people being targeted with soundbites and emotional triggers that ignore the facts, even the truth, and influence their votes.The use of technology to produce deep fakes. How can you tell if something is real or not? Can ...
This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Simon Clark. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). This year you will be lied to! Simon Clark helps prebunk some misleading statements you'll hear about climate. The video includes ...
It is all very well cutting the backrooms of public agencies but it may compromise the frontlines. One of the frustrations of the Productivity Commission’s 2017 review of universities is that while it observed that their non-academic staff were increasing faster than their academic staff, it did not bother to ...
Buzz from the Beehive Two speeches delivered by Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters at Anzac Day ceremonies in Turkey are the only new posts on the government’s official website since the PM announced his Cabinet shake-up. In one of the speeches, Peters stated the obvious: we live in a troubled ...
1. Which of these would you not expect to read in The Waikato Invader?a. Luxon is here to do business, don’t you worry about thatb. Mr KPI expects results, and you better believe itc. This decisive man of action is getting me all hot and excitedd. Melissa Lee is how ...
…it has a restricted jurisdiction which must not be abused: it is not an inquisitionNOTE – this article was published before the High Court ruled that Karen Chhour does not have to appear before the Waitangi Tribunal Gary Judd writes – The High Court ...
Lindsay Mitchell writes – One of reasons Oranga Tamariki exists is to prevent child neglect. But could the organisation itself be guilty of the same?Oranga Tamariki’s statistics show a decrease in the number and age of children in care. “There are less children ...
David Farrar writes: Graeme Edgeler wrote in 2017: In the first five years after three strikes came into effect 5248 offenders received a ‘first strike’ (that is, a “stage-1 conviction” under the three strikes sentencing regime), and 68 offenders received a ‘second strike’. In the five years prior to ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has surprised everyone with his ruthlessness in sacking two of his ministers from their crucial portfolios. Removing ministers for poor performance after only five months in the job just doesn’t normally happen in politics. That’s refreshing and will be extremely ...
TL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the two days to 6:06am on Thursday, April 25:Politics: PM Christopher Luxon has set up a dual standard for ministerial competence by demoting two National Cabinet ministers while leaving also-struggling ...
Hi,Today I mainly want to share some of your thoughts about the recent piece I wrote about success and failure, and the forces that seemingly guide our lives. But first, a quick bit of housekeeping: I am doing a Webworm popup in Los Angeles on Saturday May 11 at 2pm. ...
It is hard to see what Melissa Lee might have done to “save” the media. National went into the election with no public media policy and appears not to have developed one subsequently. Lee claimed that she had prepared a policy paper before the election but it had been decided ...
Open access notablesIce acceleration and rotation in the Greenland Ice Sheet interior in recent decades, Løkkegaard et al., Communications Earth & Environment:In the past two decades, mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated, partly due to the speedup of glaciers. However, uncertainty in speed derived from satellite products ...
Buzz from the Beehive A statement from Children’s Minister Karen Chhour – yet to be posted on the Government’s official website – arrived in Point of Order’s email in-tray last night. It welcomes the High Court ruling on whether the Waitangi Tribunal can demand she appear before it. It does ...
Mr Bombastic:Ironically, the media the academic experts wanted is, in many ways, the media they got. In place of the tyrannical editors of yesteryear, advancing without fear or favour the interests of the ruling class; the New Zealand news media of today boasts a troop of enlightened journalists dedicated to ...
It's hard times try to make a livingYou wake up every morning in the unforgivingOut there somewhere in the cityThere's people living lives without mercy or pityI feel good, yeah I'm feeling fineI feel better then I have for the longest timeI think these pills have been good for meI ...
In 1974, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, finding that the President was not a King, but was subject to the law and was required to turn over the evidence of his wrongdoing to the courts. It was a landmark decision for the rule ...
Every day now just seems to bring in more fresh meat for the grinder.In their relentlessly ideological drive to cut back on the “excessive bloat” (as they see it) of the previous Labour-led government, on the mountains of evidence accumulated in such a short period of time do not ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Megan Valére SosouMarket gardening site of the Itchèléré de Itagui agricultural cooperative in Dassa-Zoumè (Image credit: Megan Valère Sossou) For the residents of Dassa-Zoumè, a city in the West African country of Benin, choosing between drinking water and having enough ...
Buzz from the Beehive Melissa Lee – as may be discerned from the screenshot above – has not been demoted for doing something seriously wrong as Minister of ...
Morning in London Mother hugs beloved daughter outside the converted shoe factory in which she is living.Afternoon in London Travelling writer takes himself and his wrist down to A&E, just to be sure. Read more ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – The recent announcement of the University Advisory Group, chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, makes very clear where the Government’s focus and priorities lie. The remit of the Advisory Group is that Group members will consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector including: ...
Eric Crampton writes – The Reserve Bank of New Zealand desperately wants to find reasons to have workstreams in climate change. It makes little sense. They’ve run another stress test on the banks looking to see if they could find a prudential regulation case. They couldn’t. They ...
Rob MacCullough writes – Pundits from the left and the right are arguing that National’s Fast Track Bill that is designed to speed up infrastructure decisions could end up becoming mired in a cesspool of corruption. Political commentator ...
Looking at the headlines this morning it’s hard to feel anything other than pessimistic about the future of humanity.Note that I’m not speaking about the future of mankind, but the survival of our humanity. The values that we believe in seem to be ebbing away, by the day.Perhaps every generation ...
Swabbing mixed breed baby chicks to test for avian influenzaUh oh. Bird flu – often deadly to humans – is not only being transmitted from infected birds to dairy cows, but is now travelling between dairy cows. As of last Friday, Bloomberg News reports, there were 32 American dairy herds ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
What is it with the mining industry? Its not enough for them to pillage the earth - they apparently can't even be bothered getting resource consent to do so: The proponent behind a major mine near the Clutha River had already been undertaking activity in the area without a ...
Photo # 1 I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to housing, as described here two years ago by copying and pasting from The ConversationWhat Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed land, ...
Buzz from the Beehive Reactions to news of the government’s readiness to make urgent changes to “the resource management system” through a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) suggest a balanced approach is being taken. The Taxpayers’ Union says the proposed changes don’t go far enough. Greenpeace says ...
I’m starting to wonder if Anna Burns-Francis might be the best political interviewer we’ve got. That might sound unlikely to you, it came as a bit of a surprise to me.Jack Tame can be excellent, but has some pretty average days. I like Rebecca Wright on Newshub, she asks good ...
Chris Trotter writes – Willie Jackson is said to be planning a “media summit” to discuss “the state of the media and how to protect Fourth Estate Journalism”. Not only does the Editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, think this is a good idea, but he has also ...
Graeme Edgeler writes – This morning [April 21], the Wellington High Court is hearing a judicial review brought by Hon. Karen Chhour, the Minister for Children, against a decision of the Waitangi Tribunal. This is unusual, judicial reviews are much more likely to brought against ministers, rather than ...
Both of Parliament’s watchdogs have now ripped into the Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMy pick of the six newsey things to know from Aotearoa’s political economy and beyond on the morning of Tuesday, April 23 are:The Lead: The Auditor General,John Ryan, has joined the ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Sarah SpengemanPeople wait to board an electric bus in Pune, India. (Image credit: courtesy of ITDP) Public transportation riders in Pune, India, love the city’s new electric buses so much they will actually skip an older diesel bus that ...
The infrastructure industry yesterday issued a “hurry up” message to the Government, telling it to get cracking on developing a pipeline of infrastructure projects.The hiatus around the change of Government has seen some major projects cancelled and others delayed, and there is uncertainty about what will happen with the new ...
Hi,Over the weekend I revisited a podcast I really adore, Dead Eyes. It’s about a guy who got fired from Band of Brothers over two decades ago because Tom Hanks said he had “dead eyes”.If you don’t recall — 2001’s Band of Brothers was part of the emerging trend of ...
Buzz from the Beehive The 180 or so recipients of letters from the Government telling them how to submit infrastructure projects for “fast track” consideration includes some whose project applications previously have been rejected by the courts. News media were quick to feature these in their reports after RMA Reform Minister Chris ...
It would not be a desirable way to start your holiday by breaking your back, your head, or your wrist, but on our first hour in Singapore I gave it a try.We were chatting, last week, before we started a meeting of Hazel’s Enviro Trust, about the things that can ...
Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure that the new Fast-Track Approvals Bill – currently being pushed through by the ...
Feel worried. Shane Jones and a couple of his Cabinet colleagues are about to be granted the power to override any and all objections to projects like dams, mines, roads etc even if: said projects will harm biodiversity, increase global warming and cause other environmental harms, and even if ...
Bryce Edwards writes- The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. ...
Michael Bassett writes – If you think there is a move afoot by the radical Maori fringe of New Zealand society to create a parallel system of government to the one that we elect at our triennial elections, you aren’t wrong. Over the last few days we have ...
Without a corresponding drop in interest rates, it’s doubtful any changes to the CCCFA will unleash a massive rush of home buyers. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: The six things that stood out to me in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Monday, April 22 included:The Government making a ...
Sunday was a lazy day. I started watching Jack Tame on Q&A, the interviews are usually good for something to write about. Saying the things that the politicians won’t, but are quite possibly thinking. Things that are true and need to be extracted from between the lines.As you might know ...
In our Weekly Roundup last week we covered news from Auckland Transport that the WX1 Western Express is going to get an upgrade next year with double decker electric buses. As part of the announcement, AT also said “Since we introduced the WX1 Western Express last November we have seen ...
TL;DR: The six key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 29 include:PM Christopher Luxon is scheduled to hold a post-Cabinet news conference at 4 pm today. Stats NZ releases its statutory report on Census 2023 tomorrow.Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivers a pre-Budget speech at ...
A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 14, 2024 thru Sat, April 20, 2024. Story of the week Our story of the week hinges on these words from the abstract of a fresh academic ...
The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. The Government says this will ...
This is a column to say thank you. So many of have been in touch since Mum died to say so many kind and thoughtful things. You’re wonderful, all of you. You’ve asked how we’re doing, how Dad’s doing. A little more realisation each day, of the irretrievable finality of ...
Identifying the engine type in your car is crucial for various reasons, including maintenance, repairs, and performance upgrades. Knowing the specific engine model allows you to access detailed technical information, locate compatible parts, and make informed decisions about modifications. This comprehensive guide will provide you with a step-by-step approach to ...
Introduction: The allure of racing is undeniable. The thrill of speed, the roar of engines, and the exhilaration of competition all contribute to the allure of this adrenaline-driven sport. For those who yearn to experience the pinnacle of racing, becoming a race car driver is the ultimate dream. However, the ...
Introduction Automobiles have become ubiquitous in modern society, serving as a primary mode of transportation and a symbol of economic growth and personal mobility. With countless vehicles traversing roads and highways worldwide, it begs the question: how many cars are there in the world? Determining the precise number is a ...
Maintaining a safe and reliable vehicle requires regular inspections. Whether it’s a routine maintenance checkup or a safety inspection, knowing how long the process will take can help you plan your day accordingly. This article delves into the factors that influence the duration of a car inspection and provides an ...
Mazda Motor Corporation, commonly known as Mazda, is a Japanese multinational automaker headquartered in Fuchu, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. The company was founded in 1920 as the Toyo Cork Kogyo Co., Ltd., and began producing vehicles in 1931. Mazda is primarily known for its production of passenger cars, but ...
Your car battery is an essential component that provides power to start your engine, operate your electrical systems, and store energy. Over time, batteries can weaken and lose their ability to hold a charge, which can lead to starting problems, power failures, and other issues. Replacing your battery before it ...
In most states, you cannot register a car without a valid driver’s license. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. Exceptions to the RuleIf you are under 18 years old: In some states, you can register a car in your name even if you do not ...
Mazda, a Japanese automotive manufacturer with a rich history of innovation and engineering excellence, has emerged as a formidable player in the global car market. Known for its reputation of producing high-quality, fuel-efficient, and driver-oriented vehicles, Mazda has consistently garnered praise from industry experts and consumers alike. In this article, ...
Struts are an essential part of a car’s suspension system. They are responsible for supporting the weight of the car and damping the oscillations of the springs. Struts are typically made of steel or aluminum and are filled with hydraulic fluid. How Do Struts Work? Struts work by transferring the ...
Car registration is a mandatory process that all vehicle owners must complete annually. This process involves registering your car with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and paying an associated fee. The registration process ensures that your vehicle is properly licensed and insured, and helps law enforcement and other authorities ...
Zoom is a video conferencing service that allows you to share your screen, webcam, and audio with other participants. In addition to sharing your own audio, you can also share the audio from your computer with other participants. This can be useful for playing music, sharing presentations with audio, or ...
Building your own computer can be a rewarding and cost-effective way to get a high-performance machine tailored to your specific needs. However, it also requires careful planning and execution, and one of the most important factors to consider is the time it will take. The exact time it takes to ...
Sleep mode is a power-saving state that allows your computer to quickly resume operation without having to boot up from scratch. This can be useful if you need to step away from your computer for a short period of time but don’t want to shut it down completely. There are ...
Te Pāti Māori are demanding the New Zealand Government support an international independent investigation into mass graves that have been uncovered at two hospitals on the Gaza strip, following weeks of assault by Israeli troops. Among the 392 bodies that have been recovered, are children and elderly civilians. Many of ...
Our two-tiered system for veterans’ support is out of step with our closest partners, and all parties in Parliament should work together to fix it, Labour veterans’ affairs spokesperson Greg O’Connor said. ...
Stripping two Ministers of their portfolios just six months into the job shows Christopher Luxon’s management style is lacking, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said. ...
Tonight’s court decision to overturn the summons of the Children’s Minister has enabled the Crown to continue making decisions about Māori without evidence, says Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for Children, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “The judicial system has this evening told the nation that this government can do whatever they want when ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The government's decision to reintroduce Three Strikes is a destructive and ineffective piece of law-making that will only exacerbate an inherently biased and racist criminal justice system, said Te Pāti Māori Justice Spokesperson, Tākuta Ferris, today. During the time Three Strikes was in place in Aotearoa, Māori and Pasifika received ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
Te Pāti Māori is disgusted at the confirmation that hundreds are set to lose their jobs at Oranga Tamariki, and the disestablishment of the Treaty Response Unit. “This act of absolute carelessness and out of touch decision making is committing tamariki to state abuse.” Said Te Pāti Māori Oranga Tamariki ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
A laundry list of additional costs for Tāmaki Makarau Auckland shows the Minister for the city is not delivering for the people who live there, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, and Mema Paremata mō Tāmaki-Makaurau, Takutai Tarsh Kemp, will travel to the Gold Coast to strengthen ties with Māori in Australia next week (15-21 April). The visit, in the lead-up to the 9th Australian National Kapa haka Festival, will be an opportunity for both ...
The Green Party has today launched a step-by-step guide to help New Zealanders make their voice heard on the Government’s democracy dodging and anti-environment fast track legislation. ...
The National Government’s proposed changes to the Residential Tenancies Act will mean tenants can be turfed from their homes by landlords with little notice, Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. ...
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is calling on all parties to support a common-sense change that’s great for the planet and great for consumers after her member’s bill was drawn from the ballot today. ...
A significant milestone has been reached in the fight to strike an anti-Pasifika and unfair law from the country’s books after Teanau Tuiono’s members’ bill passed its first reading. ...
New Zealand has today missed the opportunity to uphold the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, says James Shaw after his member’s bill was voted down in its first reading. ...
Today’s advice from the Climate Change Commission paints a sobering reality of the challenge we face in combating climate change, especially in light of recent Government policy announcements. ...
Minister for Disability Issues Penny Simmonds appears to have delayed a report back to Cabinet on the progress New Zealand is making against international obligations for disabled New Zealanders. ...
Hundreds of New Zealand families affected by Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) will benefit from a new Government focus on prevention and treatment, says Health Minister Dr Shane Reti. “We know FASD is a leading cause of preventable intellectual and neurodevelopmental disability in New Zealand,” Dr Reti says. “Every day, ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones today attended the official opening of Kaikohe’s new $14.7 million sports complex. “The completion of the Kaikohe Multi Sports Complex is a fantastic achievement for the Far North,” Mr Jones says. “This facility not only fulfils a long-held dream for local athletes, but also creates ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ engagements in Türkiye this week underlined the importance of diplomacy to meet growing global challenges. “Returning to the Gallipoli Peninsula to represent New Zealand at Anzac commemorations was a sombre reminder of the critical importance of diplomacy for de-escalating conflicts and easing tensions,” Mr Peters ...
Ambassador Millar, Burgemeester, Vandepitte, Excellencies, military representatives, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen – good morning and welcome to this sacred Anzac Day dawn service. It is an honour to be here on behalf of the Government and people of New Zealand at Buttes New British Cemetery, Polygon Wood – a deeply ...
Distinguished guests - It is an honour to return once again to this site which, as the resting place for so many of our war-dead, has become a sacred place for generations of New Zealanders. Our presence here and at the other special spaces of Gallipoli is made ...
Mai ia tawhiti pamamao, te moana nui a Kiwa, kua tae whakaiti mai matou, ki to koutou papa whenua. No koutou te tapuwae, no matou te tapuwae, kua honoa pumautia. Ko nga toa kua hinga nei, o te Waipounamu, o te Ika a Maui, he okioki tahi me o ...
Paul Goldsmith will take on responsibility for the Media and Communications portfolio, while Louise Upston will pick up the Disability Issues portfolio, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today. “Our Government is relentlessly focused on getting New Zealand back on track. As issues change in prominence, I plan to adjust Ministerial ...
Recreational catch limits will be reduced in areas of Fiordland and the Chatham Islands to help keep those fisheries healthy and sustainable, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The lower recreational daily catch limits for a range of finfish and shellfish species caught in the Fiordland Marine Area and ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed an important milestone in New Zealand’s hydrogen future, with the opening of the country’s first network of hydrogen refuelling stations in Wiri. “I want to congratulate the team at Hiringa Energy and its partners K one W one (K1W1), Mitsui & Co New Zealand ...
The coalition Government is delivering on its commitment to improve resource management laws and give greater certainty to consent applicants, with a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) expected to be introduced to Parliament next month. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has today outlined the first RMA Amendment ...
Overseas models for regulating the oil and gas sector, including their decommissioning regimes, are being carefully scrutinised as a potential template for New Zealand’s own sector, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. The Coalition Government is focused on rebuilding investor confidence in New Zealand’s energy sector as it looks to strengthen ...
Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell has today released the Report of the Government Inquiry into the response to the North Island Severe Weather Events. “The report shows that New Zealand’s emergency management system is not fit-for-purpose and there are some significant gaps we need to address,” Mr Mitchell ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is today travelling to Europe where he’ll update the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Government’s work to restore law and order. “Attending the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva provides us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while ...
Associate Agriculture Minister, Mark Patterson, formally reopened the world’s largest wool processing facility today in Awatoto, Napier, following a $50 million rebuild and refurbishment project. “The reopening of this facility will significantly lift the economic opportunities available to New Zealand’s wool sector, which already accounts for 20 per cent of ...
Hon Andrew Bayly, Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing At the Southland Otago Regional Engineering Collective (SOREC) Summit, 18 April, Dunedin Ngā mihi nui, Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Ko Whanganui aho Good Afternoon and thank you for inviting me to open your summit today. I am delighted ...
The Government is delivering on its commitment to bring back the Three Strikes legislation, Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee announced today. “Our Government is committed to restoring law and order and enforcing appropriate consequences on criminals. We are making it clear that repeat serious violent or sexual offending is not ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has today announced four new diplomatic appointments for New Zealand’s overseas missions. “Our diplomats have a vital role in maintaining and protecting New Zealand’s interests around the world,” Mr Peters says. “I am pleased to announce the appointment of these senior diplomats from the ...
New Zealand is contributing NZ$7 million to support communities affected by severe food insecurity and other urgent humanitarian needs in Ethiopia and Somalia, Foreign Minister Rt Hon Winston Peters announced today. “Over 21 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across Ethiopia, with a further 6.9 million people ...
Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith is congratulating Mataaho Collective for winning the Golden Lion for best participant in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. "Congratulations to the Mataaho Collective for winning one of the world's most prestigious art prizes at the Venice Biennale. “It is good ...
The Government is reforming financial services to improve access to home loans and other lending, and strengthen customer protections, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly and Housing Minister Chris Bishop announced today. “Our coalition Government is committed to rebuilding the economy and making life simpler by cutting red tape. We are ...
“China remains a strong commercial opportunity for Kiwi exporters as Chinese businesses and consumers continue to value our high-quality safe produce,” Trade and Agriculture Minister Todd McClay says. Mr McClay has returned to New Zealand following visits to Beijing, Harbin and Shanghai where he met ministers, governors and mayors and engaged in trade and agricultural events with the New ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has completed a successful trip to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, deepening relationships and capitalising on opportunities. Mr Luxon was accompanied by a business delegation and says the choice of countries represents the priority the New Zealand Government places on South East Asia, and our relationships in ...
New Zealand is demonstrating its commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions, and supporting clean energy transition in South East Asia, through a contribution of NZ$41 million (US$25 million) in climate finance to the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-led Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM). Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts announced ...
The Government is today releasing a list of organisations who received letters about the Fast-track applications process, says RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. “Recently Ministers and agencies have received a series of OIA requests for a list of organisations to whom I wrote with information on applying to have a ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Wellington Barrister David Jonathan Boldt as a Judge of the High Court, and the Honourable Justice Matthew Palmer as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Boldt graduated with an LLB from Victoria University of Wellington in 1990, and also holds ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford will lead the New Zealand delegation at the 2024 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) held in Singapore. The delegation includes representatives from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua and the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) Te Riu Roa. The summit is co-hosted ...
A stopbank upgrade project in Tairawhiti partly funded by the Government has increased flood resilience for around 7000ha of residential and horticultural land so far, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones today attended a dawn service in Gisborne to mark the end of the first stage of the ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters will represent the Government at Anzac Day commemorations on the Gallipoli Peninsula next week and engage with senior representatives of the Turkish government in Istanbul. “The Gallipoli campaign is a defining event in our history. It will be a privilege to share the occasion ...
Science, Innovation and Technology and Defence Minister Judith Collins will next week attend the OECD Science and Technology Ministerial conference in Paris and Anzac Day commemorations in Belgium. “Science, innovation and technology have a major role to play in rebuilding our economy and achieving better health, environmental and social outcomes ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon held a bilateral meeting today with the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Prime Minister was accompanied by MP Paulo Garcia, the first Filipino to be elected to a legislature outside the Philippines. During today’s meeting, Prime Minister Luxon and President Marcos Jr discussed opportunities to ...
The Government has announced that $20 million in funding will be made available to Westport to fund much needed flood protection around the town. This measure will significantly improve the resilience of the community, says Local Government Minister Simeon Brown. “The Westport community has already been allocated almost $3 million ...
The Government is proud to support the first ever Repco Supercars Championship event in Taupō as up to 70,000 motorsport fans attend the Taupō International Motorsport Park this weekend, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. “Anticipation for the ITM Taupō Super400 is huge, with tickets and accommodation selling out weeks ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced an increase to the Rates Rebate Scheme, putting money back into the pockets of low-income homeowners. “The coalition Government is committed to bringing down the cost of living for New Zealanders. That includes targeted support for those Kiwis who are doing things tough, such ...
The Coalition Government is investing in a project to boost survival rates of New Zealand mussels and grow the industry, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has announced. “This project seeks to increase the resilience of our mussels and significantly boost the sector’s productivity,” Mr Jones says. “The project - ...
Benefit figures released today underscore the importance of the Government’s plan to rebuild the economy and have 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “Benefit numbers are still significantly higher than when National was last in government, when there was about 70,000 fewer ...
The Government’s commitment to doubling New Zealand’s renewable energy capacity is backed by new data showing that clean energy has helped the country reach its lowest annual gross emissions since 1999, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. New Zealand’s latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory (1990-2022) published today, shows gross emissions fell ...
The Government is bringing the earthquake-prone building review forward, with work to start immediately, and extending the deadline for remediations by four years, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “Our Government is focused on rebuilding the economy. A key part of our plan is to cut red tape that ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his Thai counterpart, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, have today agreed that New Zealand and the Kingdom of Thailand will upgrade the bilateral relationship to a Strategic Partnership by 2026. “New Zealand and Thailand have a lot to offer each other. We have a strong mutual desire to build ...
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Transport Minister Simeon Brown have today announced the Coalition Government’s intention to extend port coastal permits for a further 20 years, providing port operators with certainty to continue their operations. “The introduction of the Resource Management Act in 1991 required ports to obtain coastal ...
Today’s announcement that inflation is down to 4 per cent is encouraging news for Kiwis, but there is more work to be done - underlining the importance of the Government’s plan to get the economy back on track, acting Finance Minister Chris Bishop says. “Inflation is now at 4 per ...
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards, Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)New Zealand Government’s Fast Track legislation. Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government ...
Tara Ward talks to presenter Naomi Toilalo about the new TV show that turns food waste into a three course feast. Naomi Toilalo is standing in the warehouse at Good Neighbour Tauranga, helping unpack the two-and-a-half tonnes of rejected food that will arrive at the community support hub that day. ...
Scout is our latest Dog of the Month. This feature was offered as a reward during our What’s Eating Aotearoa PledgeMe campaign. Thank you to Scout’s human, Avril, for her support. Dog name: Scout (named after the little girl in To Kill a Mockingbird – she inherited the independent spirit ...
Megan Alatini takes us through her life in TV, including ‘terrible’ daytime TV, the class of Carol Hirschfeld and her most embarrassing TrueBliss moment. When she responded to a vague newspaper ad asking “do you have what it takes to be a popstar?” 25 years ago, Megan Alatini never guessed ...
A new exhibition in Wellington showcases the faces behind your local goods and services. Back in 1977, when I was a fine arts student at the University of Canterbury, I took a series of photographs of Christchurch shopkeepers. The photos were for a calendar – a project for my end ...
Toomaj and his resistance to tyranny through his songs have become an icon for the youth of Iran, so his sentence has hit the nation hard. Toomaj Salehi is not the first artist to pay the price for standing with the people. ...
My cousin Dylan and I spotted these big eels under the bridge that summer. We watched them lounging under the dark weed, facing into the flow of water, their mouths frozen open. Dylan and I couldn’t stop thinking about those eels. The night we went down to the creek, we ...
Newsroom, home of satire. My long-running weekly satirical series The Secret Diary has moved to Newsroom and will appear every Saturday, with Victor Billot’s wildly popular satirical Odes continuing to appear every Sunday. Diaries, Odes – while serious political columnists toil at meaningful opinions and stroke their chins to an ...
Tara Ward unravels the many nuanced layers of a cartoon about talking dogs.This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. It’s not often an episode of a children’s cartoon has adults sobbing into their sleeves, but that’s exactly what happened this week when ...
Working as a doctor in developing countries to help communities achieve better health outcomes is nothing short of a life goal for Jessica Tater. The University of Otago medical student has her sights firmly set on joining the international humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) when she qualifies ...
There’s an island in the far reaches of Auckland’s territory, sitting off the tip of the Coromandel Peninsula, 30 minutes by air from the city or four hours on the slow boat. Aotea Great Barrier is off-grid, it has a population of fewer than a thousand people … and most ...
Asia Pacific Report An Australian author and advocate, Jim Aubrey, today led a national symbolic one minute’s silence to mark the “blood debt” owed to Papuan allies during the Second World War indigenous resistance against the invading Japanese forces. “A promise to most people is a promise,” Aubrey said in ...
Asia Pacific Report The Freedom Flotilla is ready to sail to Gaza, reports Kia Ora Gaza. All the required paperwork has been submitted to the port authority, and the cargo has been loaded and prepared for the humanitarian trip to the besieged enclave. However, organisers received word of an “administrative ...
Pacific Media Watch Palestine solidarity protesters today demonstrated at the Auckland headquarters of Television New Zealand, accusing the country’s major TV network of broadcasting “propaganda” backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. About 50 protesters targeted the main entrance to the TVNZ building near Sky Tower and also picketed a side ...
Opinion by Lynley Hood. Forty years on from my 1985 Fulbright Grant, my disquiet over the war in Gaza evoked some troubling questions. The answer to my first question – What is the primary purpose of the Fulbright Programme? – was on the Fulbright NZ website. It says: US Senator, ...
The ministers responsible for green-lighting major projects need to be open about potential conflicts of interest, says Transparency International. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anastasia Powell, Professor, Family and Sexual Violence, RMIT University It has been a particularly distressing start to the year. There is little that can ease the current grief of individuals, families and communities who have needlessly lost a loved one to men’s ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne Lichen, the first described example of symbiosis.AdeJ Artventure/Shutterstock Once known only to those studying biology, the word symbiosis is now widely used. Symbiosis is the intimate ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kim Hemsley, Head, Childhood Dementia Research Group, Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University Olena Ivanova/Shutterstock “Childhood” and “dementia” are two words we wish we didn’t have to use together. But sadly, around 1,400 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University The government’s Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee has just published its second report. It was set up by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth in 2022 to provide: ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne The Queensland state election will be held in October. A YouGov poll for The Courier Mail, conducted April 9–17 from a sample ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amin Naeni, PhD candidate at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University There’s been much talk in recent months about what a possible second Donald Trump presidency in the United States could mean for Europe, Russia’s war in Ukraine, the ...
A brief round-up of submissions on the controversial proposed law. This is an excerpt from our weekly environmental newsletter Future Proof. Sign up here. Last week, submissions on the controversial Fast-track Approvals Bill closed just hours after the government released a list of stakeholder organisations who were sent letters advising how they could ...
A poem from Robin Peace’s new collection Detritus of Empire: feather / grass / rock. Cereal giving I see a woman’s hands, see her curious hands break a stalk as she walks through the tall prairie, the savannah, the steppe, wherever it was. See her idly bite the grass that ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Hemingway’s Goblet by Dermot Ross (Mary Egan Publishing, $38)A handsomely produced (debossed cover, lovely ...
The Commissioner's decision validates the longstanding efforts of the local community and ensures that Awataha Marae will be managed to serve the needs of the local community, particularly for hosting tangihanga. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tristan Salles, Associate professor, University of Sydney Examples of Australian landscapes.Unsplash Seventy thousand years ago, the sea level was much lower than today. Australia, along with New Guinea and Tasmania, formed a connected landmass known as Sahul. Around this time – ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Felicity Castagna, Lecturer, Creative Writing, Western Sydney University Day Day Market, ParramattaPhoto: Garry Trinh I live on the edge of Parramatta, Australia’s fastest-growing city, on the kind of old-fashioned suburban street that has 1950s fibros constructed in the post-war housing boom, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Ryan, Teaching Fellow in Economics, University of Waikato GettyImagesfatido/Getty Images There is an ongoing global debate over whether the high inflation seen in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic can be lowered without a recession. New Zealand is not ...
The ‘Wicked Game’ heartthrob is in his late 60s now. That didn’t stop him putting on a lively, goofy and very sparkly show. Apart from ‘Wicked Game’, which graces a sultry playlist of mine simply called 💋, my last sustained Chris Isaak listening session took place when I was about ...
Analysis - Two ministers were stripped of portfolios in a warning to Cabinet, drama broke out at the Waitangi Tribunal, and the gang patch ban bill ran into opposition. ...
Tara Ward makes an impassioned plea for some vital pop culture merch. In April 1999, I became obsessed with a new reality television show called Popstars. Every Tuesday night, five strangers transformed into music royalty before my very eyes as Joe, Keri, Carly, Erika and Megan were chosen to form ...
PNG Post-Courier In the early hours of ANZAC Day, aerial photographs captured an impressive gathering of Australians and Papua New Guineans at Isurava in the Northern (Oro) Province. The solemn dawn service yesterday was held at a site steeped in history, where some of the fiercest battles of World War ...
The PSA is shocked that Oranga Tamariki has used the cost cutting drive to downgrade its commitment to Te Ao Māori and remove many specialist Māori roles. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Kemish, Adjunct Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland There can be no more powerful symbol of the relationship between Australia and Papua New Guinea than the prime ministers of these neighbouring countries walking together on the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sharon Robinson, Distinguished Professor and Deputy Director of ARC Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF), University of Wollongong, University of Wollongong Andrew Netherwood Over the last 25 years, the ozone hole which forming over Antarctica each spring has started to shrink. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Viktoria Kahui, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Economics, University of Otago Getty Images/Amy Toensing Biodiversity is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. This suggests the ways we currently use to manage our natural environment are failing. One emerging concept focuses on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Colin Bednall, Associate Professor in Management, Swinburne University of Technology marvent/Shutterstock Finding the best person to fill a position can be tough, from drafting a job ad to producing a shortlist of top interview candidates. Employers typically consider information from ...
Wondering where to host your next BYO? Whether its a small gathering or a massive party, we’ve got some recommendations. I was first introduced to the concept of BYOs at Dunedin’s India Gardens, a legendary but sadly defunct establishment, which purveyed enormous quantities of mango chicken to Aotearoa’s drunkest future ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julien Cooper, Honorary Lecturer, Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University Julien Cooper The hyper-arid desert of Eastern Sudan, the Atbai Desert, seems like an unlikely place to find evidence of ancient cattle herders. But in this dry environment, my new ...
The sector says it’s hopeful her replacement Paul Goldsmith will be able to throw it a lifeline, after six months with a minister deemed missing in action, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign ...
The government can't just rely on axing public sector jobs and has to do more to cut spending, says the chief economist at a free market think tank. ...
Rock The Vote NZ, known for its advocacy for minor party unity and its role within the Freedoms NZ Coalition during the 2023 General Election, celebrates this merger as a strategic enhancement of its operational strength and outreach. ...
Nearly everyone has experienced the frustration of something you use breaking and being difficult or expensive to fix. Proposed legislation could change that. It’s been raining on and off all Sunday afternoon but people are lining up outside a building in a corner of Gribblehirst Park in Sandringham, Auckland. In ...
What does a forever relationship look like when you don’t believe in marriage? And how do you celebrate it? This essay is part of our Sunday Essay series, made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.I’m going to do it, right now. I’m going to say ...
It’s not that long ago Eliza McCartney was seriously wondering if the Paris Olympics would be her pole vaulting swansong. After years of being hounded by injury after injury, the Rio Olympics bronze medallist was still confident she would compete at her second Olympics in Paris in July, unless something ...
FICTION 1 Take Two by Danielle Hawkins (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) There’s commercial fiction, like this book, and then there’s quality fiction, quality writers, quality literature; the forthcoming Auckland Writers Festival is full of quality, and ReadingRoom has two tickets to give away to the following events: Paul Lynch (Dublin ...
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You can’t have missed the Gallipoli story as the movies, documentaries, essays and books capture what it was like for New Zealand troops in their eight-month campaign on the Peninsula. But this Anzac Day the Auckland War Memorial Museum has published a book that sheds light on a little-known aspect of the ...
The Prime Minister has committed to resuming direct flights to Thailand. But it’s not a promise he will be able to deliver on anytime soon. The post Prime Minister jumps the gun in Thailand appeared first on Newsroom. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra In the free-for-all between the Australian government and Big Tech boss Elon Musk this week, the government had to be on a winner. Most people would have little sympathy with Musk’s vociferous opposition to ...
Asia Pacific Report Chief Mandla Mandela, a member of the National Assembly of South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s grandson, has joined the Freedom Flotilla in istanbul as the ships prepare to sail for Gaza, reports Kia Ora Gaza. Mandela is also the ambassador for the Global Campaign to Return to ...
Pacific Media Watch Journalists who report on environmental issues are encountering growing difficulties in many parts of the world, reports Reporters Without Borders. According to the tally kept by RSF, 200 journalists have been subjected to threats and physical violence, including murder, in the past 10 years because they were ...
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards, Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has surprised everyone with his ruthlessness in sacking two of his ministers from their crucial portfolios. Removing ministers for poor performance after only five months in the job just doesn’t normally happen in ...
Open letter to Fisiani.
Hey Fisiani, now that I’ve stuck up for you (see yesterday’s comments) can you tell the truth on:
A. whether you’re a collaborative effort – i.e., actually more than one person.
B. whether your average age is under 25.
at the risk of causing the odd reader to spray coffee all over their keyboards and halfway up their monitors, it seems to me like you have some native wit that you’d be better off employing in straight pieces. puerile gets old, funnily enough.
Just one person with razor sharp insight and approaching 60.
I come here for the hysterical parallel universe comedy where the fantastic progress of the last seven years is seen as failure. Where Chicken Little would seem an optimist. Where the evidence of distorted thinking is so evident. i want to guide people to the light, the Force, the brighter side of life.
That’s irony, right?
No, just a typo. Should have been … guide people to the light, the Farce, …
I’m afraid not @Paul. He might even lay claim to once even having voted Labour – especially in an FPP environment.
Rest assured though – he’s alright Jack. No doubt he pulled himself up by his bootstraps and is a self-made man (Get that? a M A N!) One with a ‘noble African’ handle (all trademarked, commodified and paid up in full)
‘Razor-sharp insight” ??????????????????????? Ha,ha,ha to the power of 1000.
That’s GOT to be irony.
To the power of 1000.
“When you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It’s only painful & difficult for others. The same applies when you are stupid.”
Do a straight piece. too much pisstaking rots the brain. if you wrote a decent “positives of the last seven years” that was, you know, grounded in fact rather than posturing, I’m sure the guys here would consider throwing it up as a discussion piece…
fisi
You couldn’t guide a moth to a bright light in the dark, mate.
Ho Ho Ho – looks like its turning to custard for the Government. 6.13 this morning on RNZ Morning Report everything in the economic department is failing – export figures you name it. Wonder why its now relegated to the summer break for news like this to emerge.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/201783928/time-for-a-rethink-of-the-export-target
If this starts getting more widely reported I can see pandas on the horizon!
@ Hami Shearlie (2.1) – I think the distraction in the early new year will still be the flag (second referendum in March). It will hot up as the final vote gets closer, with FJK’s choice in our faces all day, every day.
But then after that one is all done and dusted, watch the panda issue become the main focus of msm acting on FJK’s instruction next April, when one very “prominent NZer” faces trial! Could even be a “choose the cutest panda” competition, just to distract from what will be going on in the court!
Wouldn’t mind betting there could well be a media blackout of the court case! Can’t have dear leader being embarrassed through some factual reporting, can we?
The first quarter of 20016 should be very interesting indeed, with the economy going down the toilet quick smart, the (rigged) flag result and then a “prominent NZer” facing his accusers!
Then it will be stroking pussy cats in Parnell, nice photo of Sir John and Lady Key in the Herald with the Xmas Message.
Then Espiner hosts a whitewash of the government’s performance by allowing Boag to propagandise without any intervention.
That was an appalling effort by Espiner. While political journalist Jane Patterson sat there silently.
Espiner made an ineffectual attempt to shut her up.Not easy with the Boags of this world.
Her strategy when asked what she thought of Andrew Little was dripping with fake condescendence and tried to make the interview about John Key. Viz.:’Well…Andrew Little …He’s doing quite well .. ..(insert patronizing tone here)..even though he hasn’t got John Key’s charisma or people skills…. Now John Key, this….and John Key. that…’.. ad nauseum. Must get people talking and thinking about John Key.
The other interviewee, Rob, when asked about Andrew Little, actually talked about Andrew Little as a serious person who hasn’t got time to talk about Key’s triviality .
I think the Left’s new year’s resolution should be to ignore Key’s banal clowning.
Oscar Wilde-“There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about.”.
He did not even try to call her on the blatant spin she was delivering.
Espiner is not an independent journalist; he is just another embedded corporate plant.
Morgan Godfery and the Labour Party man, Mr Salmond, also sat there mute while Boag raved.
They only invite ‘Fox Democrats’ on.
Tamed Labour spokespeople only on the airwaves.
Michelle Boag should be removed from TV and the Radio, she is an assault on the senses, especially the ears – a true nightmare and heart failure material if you met her on a dark night. As for Espiner he is just a lap dog for Key and his Government – it couldn’t get any worse for this country.
Am off to do some lovely things like get a cake finished for a dear old lady I visit and get some soothing Baroque Christmas music on and just forget about the creeps who invade our lives by TV and Radio. Even the Listener is a load of hog wash. Whatever did NZ ever do to deserve this useless and corrupted lot dictating to us.
Boag is the pretentious, sanctimonious Queen of the superficial, emotive, and bullying bee-arches of the right wing B.S machine.
JK and Boag actually believe their own BS.
yea but nah ….. neither are the sharpest knAves in the drawer intellectually-woise. That’s why she has to play dress-ups all the time.
Two generations back she’d be putting a blue rinse through her hair, living in Karori and talking about what hubby got up to
“JK and Boag actually believe their own BS.”
Problem is so does half of NZ.
Very true +1 Rodel
On the basis that I’m really slack at putting posts up (It was [may still be if it happens] going to titled ‘Jobby on a Stick’). Anyway, I’ll just say, I’ve had similar thoughts of late. I wouldn’t say ‘ignore’, though. Depersonalise – talk past the image.
There has been a huge and well crafted project devoted to creating an image of the current Prime Minister that many find appealing. As such, it’s flogging a dead horse to pivot any issue around that image or media personality.
Essentially people are being asked to take two psychological steps to address any issue at hand. The first step is to go beyond the knee jerk defensiveness (and immediate rejection of substantial matters) that comes from the positive relationship people have towards the image that’s been generated.
Refusing to name the fucker is a step towards undermining the…hmm…’cult of personality’. “The current Prime Minister” (of New Zealand?) is suitably depersonalised term. The PM…the leader of the Nats etc – they all work to degrees.
Did I say I’d love to see no more images of New Zealand’s current Prime Minister used as post images here on ‘ts’?
Bill.I agree. In he last two elections it seemed to me that those on the left
talked about Key most of the time.i.e. provided him with heaps of free publicity and not enough about their own policies.
The media is partly to blame as exasperation with Key’s antics makes better copy than dull old policies, sells more papers and gets people listening even if they then go ,”tut-tut” but give up on voting.
Yes Bill , ‘ignore ‘ is not the right word..maybe it should be dismiss with disdain.
dismiss= deliberately cease to think about.. (disdain = to regard something as unworthy of consideration).
Yes I’ll do that.
haven’t timed it, but with 4 guests it appeared Boag had about 50% of the floor
In my opinion he can always be relied upon to live up to his family name of eSPINer.
Colin is often not too far behind.
I doubt whether Michelle Boag would understand much about economic performance?
Why wait for Kauri dieback disease to decimate our heritage, we can just cut down or ring bark our ancient trees instead?
Thanks Auckland Council planners and “independent commissioners’ for not noticing the ancient Kauri’s in the 70 page report prepared by the applicants that failed to mention that. Instead burying within the document ‘high value vegetation’ is to be cut down. Deception?
Not to mention the developers also told the public they would not cut down the trees but since seemed to have changed their minds.
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/controversial-titirangi-kauri-viciously-attacked-ring-barked
This story never ceases to amaze. I’m not sure why the developer didn’t change their mind at the start of this though, obviously not worried about their reputation.
That would be Jane Greensmith and John Lenihan, who I suspect are more concerned about how much money they stand to lose.
Ironically, if it’s purely about money, anyone buying into that spot would likely pay more with the tree still standing and sensitively designed and built around. Certainly for me (and my neighbours, about 150m away from the site), large trees right around our houses was a major value-add.
A couple of other points: in this area the “permitted activity” for clearing bush for a building site is up to 150 sq m or 10% of the section area. There are two houses to be built on two sites of about 1000sq m each, so up to 300sq m allowed to be cleared. Eyeballing what’s already been cleared, it’s about 30m by 30m, so around 900 sq m. Plus a fair few more trees marked with “X” still for the chop. How the f*** did that get consented? Doing a drive past Lenihan and Greensmith’s listed home address elsewhere in Titirangi, it looks they’ve also cleared building sites there way in excess of what is a “permitted activity”.
So I can’t help wondering if they’ve got a corrupt relationship going on someone (or some people) in council. Also can’t help wondering what the other principals of RCG think of Lenihan’s activities.
The problem is developers moving into an area, getting a cheap site because they need a make a sensitive design and then undermining the atmosphere and ethos of the area to make money and not bothering with a sensitive design, all while profiting from the reputation of the area of being a bush green belt. These guys just got too greedy, but also exposes the role of the council. Are they just getting fees for plans and virtually rubber-stamping anything not adhering to the rules of district plan.
So the blame is the developers and planning consultants who have put together reports to hide what they are doing, and then the council for not bothering to do due diligence and then just doing some dubious activities to hide their role and let the trees be chopped further setting a precedent against the plan, public and community by allowing the travesty to continue.
From what I remember from earlier in the year they had back door access to council because they’re architects (?). So possibly not outright corrupt but certainly part of the old neoliberals network.
I hope they get pariahed. Good on the tree surgeons who downed tools last week, and shame on the ‘security’ company who wielded chainsaws this morning, hope they get named and shamed too.
Environmental terrorists?
From Salon… interesting perspective, Left wing Lite… too close to Right?
“Hillary Clinton is just Republican lite: Sorry, boomers, but this millennial is still only voting Bernie Sanders”
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/22/hillary_clinton_is_just_republican_lite_sorry_boomers_but_this_millennial_is_still_only_voting_bernie_sanders/
“The United States is scarier than the Islamic State
Even our closest allies fear that we are a menace militarily and environmentally. The threat is lethal and real”
PHIL TORRES
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/20/the_united_states_is_scarier_than_the_islamic_state/
Carpet bombing sorts out all the problems. It was chemical weapons in Vietnam!
Also I heard ISIS were being trained by the Israelis and ISIS were selling oil to Israel, also told ISIS are selling oil to Turkey for US weapon supplies- fact or fiction?
Interesting interview with Steve Keen author of “Debunking Economic’s”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIaXVntqlUE
Thanks for the linky halfcrown. I always find Steve thought provoking. Since moving to London he’s been doing well.
Thanks Red, compliments of the season. I have read his book Debunking Economic’s. Heavy going and I will have to read again to absorb all the facts. I can recommend that one if you have not already read it.
Cheers Halfcrown. 🙂
Morning Report this morning. Boag says it is only the Left who are opposing the change of flag.
Salmond says that 66% oppose the change of flag so Michelle, this is good news for the Left. Touche!
Those RSA folk are rabid commies, I tells you.
So Michelle Boag is predicting the next Government will be a Left NZF Coalition, probably 95% right the way the Natzi’s are going at present.
So Michelle Boag is predicting the next Government will be a Left NZF Coalition, probably 95% right the way the Natzi’s are going at present.
There’s a big push to punch a highway through Kahurangi National Park.
https://nz.news.yahoo.com/local/a/30362464/major-study-to-evaluate-new-road-linking-nelson-and-westport/
It’s a new 169 kilometre road from Tapawera to Karamea.
In the Stuff poll with 11,000 votes attached to the article, 57% supported it and 26% opposed.
Buller Mayor Garry Howard and Tasman Mayor Richard Kempthorne love it.
Their point is that 87% of Buller District and much of Tasman District is DOC estate and not open to any other kind of economic activity except tourism.
So the question of what their people do for jobs other than making life convenient for tourists is a real question.
Forest and Bird hate the idea. It’s (consultants’ thumbsuck) $100m, or about $2m per kilometre. The Treasury question that Cabinet will have to face is: if you had $100m to spend on the West Coast, would a road be the most beneficial thing for that taxpayer money?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/west-coast/75126825/forest–bird-attacks-new-national-park-road-plan
Pretty similar to the Haast to Hollyford road that Minister Smith killed last year. With Joyce open to the idea and in need of a West Coast plan, looks like a major Parliamentary and Cabinet debate for 2016.
Minister Joyce and the Buller Mayor could possibly pop over to Ruby Bay and Collingwood and consider the high-value, high-capital and job-intensive horticulture and viticulture already going on in Tasman and get a few clues as to answer the question: if you had a spare hundred million for the West Coast ………..
+100 Ad
Yep, love the two main points in particular..
“So the question of what their people do for jobs other than making life convenient for tourists is a real question.”
and
“if you had $100m to spend on the West Coast, would a road be the most beneficial thing for that taxpayer money?”
It is about time that NZ has some sort of economic strategy that relies more on utilising what we already have here, making that better, instead of more roads, convention centres and falsifying our data to keep the illusion that NZ is clean and green (I feel after Key was laughed out of Paris the international community might be cottoning on…)
Instead the government is cancelling any innovation initiatives and giving our science grants and NIWA boats to polluting oil companies….
The tramping community has been aware of this one for a while.
Roads and cars are rapidly becoming a liability while undisturbed wilderness is regarded as increasingly valuable. Most people are still locked into thinking nothing has changed and that life is going to carry on a usual.
It isn’t.
Besides the capital and maintenance costs are absurdly poor value. Roads in this part of the country, especially in tight valleys, are subject to high rainfall and massive slips.
yep – this is a non starter as it always is for anyone that knows that country.
+100 Redlogix…part of the charm of that north end of the West Coast including Karamea is that it is at the end of the road and then there is untouched wilderness …just as Glenorchy is at the end of the road…and then untouched wilderness
People dont come to New Zealand to see roads
Wilderness and untouched nature is a draw card in itself
…which people can tramp through if they wish
There’s nothing better in the world than getting to the point on a tramp when you can no longer hear cars.
“if you had $100m to spend on the West Coast, would a road be the most beneficial thing”
and the same for Northland – is a duplicate highway that doesn’t even reach the region the best way to invest $700m+ ?
If I had $100m of taxpayer funds in my pocket (and as Minister I wanted to build some big stuff so I could open it), I’d look to what happened to Queenstown and Wanaka when they upgraded the nearest airport. Huge volumes of rich international people visiting longer, hotels springing up in town, and it becomes a real global destination, capital values through the roof. And for little mayors balancing little budgets, that means rates takes going through the roof.
Yeah but the snow’s crap in Westport. 🙂
Those things haven’t improved queens town and Wanaka Ad.
“Pretty similar to the Haast to Hollyford road that Minister Smith killed last year”
I wish he had killed it but from what I remember he’s just said no to that proposal at that time rather than a blanket no.
It’s a collossal waste of resources to have to keep fighting these projects again and again. Both those roading projects (and the Queenstown/Milford transport one) have been repeatedly put forward in various forms for 3 decades or more. Time to put a moratorium on new roads in National Parks unless there is a conservation reason for the road, in which case it can go through the normal consent processes.
Plus, FFS, climate change (and Peak Oil).
Time to put a moratorium on new roads in National Parks unless there is a conservation reason for the road,
Bloody good idea.
What’s even more aggravating is watching DoC complicitly downgrading the existing tracks in order reduce the number of people using the area. In fact there was always a great case for upgrading the Whangapeka to the same standard as the Heaphy, making for a fabulous world-class six-day round trip.
Instead they’re deliberately letting the tracks in area run down so as to discourage it’s use.
That idea should be a good starting postion for Labour and the Greens next election
Rod Donald once said there would be a road from Karamea to Golden Bay over his dead body 😉
Good man was Rod. Peace to his family
In other words, we have no fucking idea on what we can do to revitalise the west coast economy, so we will build a road.
Probably no one-lane bridges left…
Somewhat frustrating since Golden Bay, Collingwood and Ruby Bay (over in the Tasman region) all show what really intensive and productive use of land looks like. Granted, you’re not going to grow hops in Buller.
But then until the mid-1980s, no one thought you could make a wine industry out of central Otago, let alone right on the shores of alpine Lake Wanaka. But they did. And it didn’t take a new highway punching through the nearest national park to make happen.
“all show what really intensive and productive use of land looks like”
what actually are you talking about? dairy farms?
You’re clearly not familiar with the area I describe.
It’s intensive horticulture and vineyards.
lol – I live in Golden Bay mate, what about you?
So, clearly I’m not talking about dairy farms then am I?
I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about in regards to The Bay – which is why I asked – and clearly you don’t know either.
“Probably no one-lane bridges left…”
There are quite a lot still there actually.
There is even one where the road and rail share the same bridge.
I hope that the train, whatever it is, goes slowly when they come to the bridge.
Mind you, I don’t know how many rail trips are still there on the coast.
Pity it rains so much though.
If it didn’t rain so much there would be no rain forest and the place would be full of aucklanders 😉
I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. More Aucklanders?
Rain, damn it. More rain! More rain! More rain!
Send it down Hughie. Save the coast from the alien invasion.
Yeah, it’s a hangover from the pioneer culture on the coast. Mr Explorer Douglas still lives on.
There’s 1661.8 km of sealed State HIghway and rural road on the coast linking all the centres of economic importance as of 2009 http://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/resources/land-transport-statistics/docs/2008-2009.pdf ( I doubt it will have grown much) which isn’t perceived to be bringing economic nirvana. How will a further 56km between two very minor townships change this? It doesn’t shorten the Nelson – Westport distance any, it’s the same, or longer.
So what’s the point, jobs for the consultants? Create a “concept” they can sell to an “investor”? It’ll probably come to an end once they discover their “thumb suck” is light by an order of magnitude, like Haast – Hollyford
It would be another “Road of National Significance”.
Not the first time research has shown this,
http://www.thespec.com/news-story/6203430-home-birth-with-midwife-no-riskier-than-hospital-birth-mac-study
Sighs … are we STILL fighting this battle?
I always thought it was blindlingly obvious most women will do better in the environment of their own choosing and familiarity.
Birth politics are still pretty fraught as far as I can tell.
hmm…well as a stoical person who tried to have a home birth( didnt like the idea of medical intervention,particularly male intervention, thought birth was a natural miraculous process etc) and ended up with an emergency cesarean at 3.00 am …after several days of labour…and getting the consultant out of bed
(and and one disappointed lovely home birthing midwife and another older home birther who was positively hostile after the event when I got home … I let the side down…should have tried harder )
….all i can say is thank God ( the Goddess) for medical specialists and monitoring…by the time I got to hospital the baby was under stress ( per moniters) and I was exhausted, couldnt take much more
…and I was later cheerfully told by my male obstetrics GP who turned up at the hospital ( and who also believed in home births or at least women’s choice)… that the baby and I would have died without medical intervention…I believed him!
at least I had the choice ( low tech/high tech)….and they were all wonderful( except the older midwife)…but for my daughter i would recommend a high tech birth and take everything that is going in a hospital …especially monitoring and epidurals
( cesareans are absolutely fabulous when you need them)
It’s the hostile politics between the two sides that is so damned futile and disappointing. My two kids were both home births so I’ve a little exposure to it all myself.
All I ever expected was that everyone involved should work together in the best interests of the babies and mothers.
well the “hostile politics” are not surprising given the stakes when things go wrong…birth always was potentially dramatic and dangerous for some women…just look at history and the plight of women in the third world
i was lucky in that I had a midwife who moved very fast when I said i wanted to go to hospital…lucky also that the high tech hospital was only 10 minutes away…lucky I had a GP /obstetrician trained in home births who met us at the hospital… and lucky he had a consultant mate who didnt mind getting up in the early hours and quickly pronouncing emergency cesarean …most lucky I had a healthy robust baby!
from what I can gather women these days are not so lucky for choice …it is either home birth with a midwife making all the judgment calls and when to go to hospital, with not necessarily immediate full support when they get there…(GP doctors have opted out)…or opting for hospital birth from the beginning with all the high tech ( and risk feeling alienated by the process)
From my experience , it is not worth the risk… I opted for hospital next time around and an elective cesarean…great for women who can have a home birth and great for women who can breast feed …but women who cant should be celebrated as well ( those babies on bottles look lovely and the mothers look lovely)….My Mother always said she envied women who had cesareans….their babies were so beautiful! ( not scrunched and red)
I was cut out of the womb, wasn’t I? You guys were excited when I was born……
Now Ian has to solve this BIG CASE.
Mike Hoskings christmas message:
http://www.watchme.co.nz/like-mike/mikes-christmas-message/
“That bitch is a ‘mother’ only in the technical sense.”
RETURN OF THE GRAVE-ROBBER: A REAL LIFE HORROR STORY
Five mental health doctors, all in white coats, gather round a computer screen to consider a particularly grievous case. Professor MORRISSEY BREEN leads the convocation….
PROF. BREEN: This is something that came to our attention late yesterday. It’s a blog post about Chris Kahui, so you can imagine some of the Paul Holmes-type comments that ensue.
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2015/12/chris_kahui_attacks_key_and_bennett.html/comment-page-1#comment-1639989
DOCTOR No. 1: Oh Jesus, do we HAVE to look at this?
PROF. BREEN: Come on now. You guys work with mental health cases. This is your job.
DOCTOR No. 2: Yes, but these right wing fellows are, if not simply bewildered, then certainly depraved. They ARE all guys, aren’t they?
PROF. BREEN: Well, there’s one Catholic woman who writes crackpot stuff about religion and Russia occasionally, but, yes, I think they’re mostly male contributors.
YOUNG FEMALE DOCTOR: [grimly] Very SAD males.
PROF. BREEN: Indeed. We’ll start with this comment from someone calling himself “dime”. He writes “what a piece of human garbage”.
DOCTOR No. 4: To be honest, that’s pretty tame. Lame, but tame.
PROF. BREEN: Granted. Unfortunately, however, our friend “dime” is the intellectual heavyweight in this forum. It only gets worse from here on. For instance, a sad git called “mara” writes: “This Kahui ought to have fallen down the stairs in prison years ago.”
….Disbelieving silence for several seconds….
DOCTOR No. 1: Fuck me! These MORONS are in institutional care, I take it?
PROF. BREEN: Sorry, but please bear with me if you can. A bit later a genius named “cmm” writes: “These people are always so keen to dis the white man that brings him the legal system that keeps him alive, gives him money for food, accommodation etc.”
ALL: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!… Jesus H. CHRIST, these people are D – U – M, DUMB!
PROF. BREEN: A bewildered soul called nasska writes: “Urban ferals never have & never will benefit from the millions thrown into the black hole that is the Maori grievance industry.” One “PhilP” writes learnedly that Chris Kahui is a “useless piece of shit.”
DOCTOR No. 4: Good Lord! This is like listening to a morning of Leighton Smith!
DOCTOR No. 5: Or Michael Laws. Or Sean Plunket. Or Larry “Lackwit” Williams.
PROF. BREEN: Yes, that’s right. Obviously these people get their talking points from the likes of Smith and Laws.
DOCTOR No. 3: And the ACT Party.
PROF. BREEN: Actually, No. 3, you’re close to the truth there. But we’ll get onto that in a minute. Let’s just consider the last couple of examples. Another fellow, “deadrightkev”, writes: “Kahui is a product of trash upbringing and fertilised by a social welfare state dependency problem out of control.” He then manages to top that with this gem: “Treaty settlements are fraud. They should be staying exactly where they should be – in the hands of the taxpayer.”
YOUNG FEMALE DOCTOR: More like “Deadweight” Kev, methinks.
ALL: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
PROF. BREEN: This one is my favorite, though, because he’s honest. Stupid, but honest. One “flash2846” writes learnedly: “Yet another good reason why I and others are racist! Just imagine a murderer of any other race in New zealand saying that shit. Filthy CUNT! needs castrating!!!!”
….A stunned silence ensues for several seconds…..
DOCTOR No. 1: [grimly] Farrar certainly seems to attract the intellectuals.
DOCTOR No. 3: You know what the most frightening thing about these guys is? They can breed and they can vote.
ALL: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
PROF. BREEN: Okay. Now some of you might remember this bloke. [He scrolls down the page] Sorry, fellas, before I reveal who it is, I know that like the rest of the country, you thought you’d never have to look at his ugly mug again or listen to one of his ill-informed, hate-filled rants, but he’s back—at least on Kiwiblog.
DOCTOR No. 1: Who? Murray Deaker?
DOCTOR No. 4: Not that fucking criminal JOHN BANKS?
DOCTOR No. 2: Not that dancing fool Rodney “The Perk Taker” Hide?
http://www.recipeapart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/55ffd0ef0f2a4f2f0375.jpeg
PROF. BREEN: Now, No. 3, remember how you suggested these halfwits could be channeling the ACT Party. Well, get a load of THIS: “Of course he’s fucking unemployable… But of the two, his former “missus” is the worst in my view…male scum who couldn’t give a fuck about or abuse their progeny are a dime a dozen…somehow we expect more of mothers…That bitch is a “mother” only in the technical sense…and she is probably a killer…she certainly knows who did kill the poor little buggers… the useless mongrel – and I say that even if he didn’t kill his sons – has almost certainly sired a couple more by now….and you can bet your arse those children have “come to the attention of the authorities”
GENERAL HUBBUB: Jesus! …. What the HELL?… You can virtually feel the spittle!… Was that a quote from the late Paul Holmes?…. Sounds like Cameron Slater… Or John Ansell?… It’s hard to say which part of this is more offensive: the militant display of ignorance or the hatred. …. Are these people in care, and if not, why not? … They can vote, and they can breed…. So tell us, Prof. Breen: who was it?
PROF. BREEN: I’ll give you three clues. Clue number one: he’s a disgraced ACT M.P.
DOCTOR No. 4: Jamie “Lock Up His Sisters” Whyte!
DOCTOR No. 1: Rodney “The Perk Taker” Hide!
http://www.recipeapart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/55ffd0ef0f2a4f2f0375.jpeg
DOCTOR No. 3: Heather Roy!
DOCTOR No. 2: Doctor Muriel Newman, the dimmest medical practitioner in the world until the advent of Dr Ben Carson!
PROF. BREEN: All reasonable choices. But not the answer I’m looking for. Clue number two: he was convicted of assaulting a doctor in Tonga.
ALL: Oh Jesus, no!… I know who it is now. …. I’d blocked that person out of my memory, I’d thought…. No, no, no! Not him!… It’s that monster from the S.S. Trust!
PROF. BREEN: Clue number three: he stole the identity of a dead baby and was convicted for it, but it still didn’t stop ACT selecting him as a candidate!
GENERAL HUBBUB: The right dishonorable David fucking Garrett! … He’s the lowest of the low!… Thanks, Prof. Breen, I had banished that zombie into my mental trash can, and now you bring him back from the dead!… Absolutely reprehensible!… Compared to David Garrett, Chris Kahui is Albert fucking Schweitzer.
PROF. BREEN: Say, I LIKE that comment. I might just modify it a bit and post it up on Kiwiblog….
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/4124887/Garrett-gives-details-of-Tonga-brawl-conviction
Chris Kahui does deserve to be in prison though. Or do you have some other plausible theory for how those injuries happened?
Unless you are privy to all the details of the case, from what was published – there does not seem to be enough evidence to make that decisive judgement call.
One of my relatives worked in the ICU at that time, and it had been noted by staff that the (somewhat regular) lack of bonding with the mother had occurred, and that substantial at home visits and supports would be necessary to address this. This did not occur after discharge.
It is by no means uncommon for parents of very premature births to have a resistance to forming bonds with their child. The children are often physically different from expectations of a healthy birth – very skinny, with loose and hairy skin, and it is a form of unconscious mental self-preservation to not invest emotionally if outcomes are uncertain.
Whether Chris Kahui was responsible for the injuries or not, seemed hard to define given the conflicting evidence that I can recall.
What is true however, is that a vulnerability was identified and a strategy defined which was not followed up on.
This is tragedy was indicative of a support system failure as well.
You could well be right, Tim. However, the discredited National Party hitman Cameron Slater is not fit to comment on him or anyone else.
The point of my post was not to defend Chris Kahui, but to show the hypocrisy of the ignorant and bloody-minded lynch-mob that were denouncing him on the right wing blogs. It’s perhaps no surprise to learn that the most foul-mouthed, crudest commenter of all on that particular thread was the disgraced ex-ACT felon David Garrett….
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2015/12/chris_kahui_attacks_key_and_bennett.html#comment-1639747
I enjoyed your post (as usual) and I’m glad you let those guys know how it is. It just prompted me to think about the case again and left me with a sense of anger – probably at the family as well as Macsyna and Chris, for the way in which all seemed complicit in preventing the truth coming to light at the time… Or at least that is what the media has it seem like.
‘Druids and pagans gather at Stonehenge for solstice (PHOTOS, VIDEO)’
https://www.rt.com/uk/326806-stonehenge-winter-solstice-celebrate/
…”The monument in Wiltshire has long been thought of as a place of magic used by the ancient druids, with mystery surrounding how it was built and its exact use. It is believed to have been built between 2000 and 3000 BC…
Worth a read to catch up on these victories
https://intercontinentalcry.org/15-indigenous-rights-victories-didnt-hear-2015/
Great News. A good decision based upon a fair perception of reality. If bees go we as a species will find our diet greatly reduced. ie we will never again live in a land of milk and honey ( or food produced by pollination)
http://www.ent.uga.edu/bees/OnEinsteinBeesandSurvivaloftheHumanRaceHoneyBeeProgramCAESEntomologyUGA.html
70-80% of the world food supply rely on bees for pollination and food production
Yes!
So we would have a very limited diet
fish and chips – if your lucky…
🙂
And yet many places in the world had thriving ecosystems before the arrival of the honey bee, which included plants that needed pollination. I’ve been following the bee problem for a long time but lately I’ve been wondering if the issue of the demise of hive bees is about global economics more than humans being able to feed themselves. We should be going back to eating local anyway. The issue isn’t that the almond orchards in California will fail when all the colonies collapse, and how that affects the global food supply, but the fact that that kind of orcharding created the collapse in the first place and is just wrong on all levels.
Yes, we should be concerned about any species decline, but if we focus on the honey bee/global cropping connections instead of the ecosystem that includes all pollinators then we will just keep shitting in our own nest (and everyone else’s).
Oh I agree – however the demise of the honey bee by wide spread applications of pesticide also includes the demise of all the other local pollinators, and that is what makes the Mexican Supreme Court decision so important.
This is why Douglas, Prebble and co should be hung by their fucking heals.
Most recently, the privatisation of the timber industry in the 1980s caused “massive job losses and severe poverty” in the west of the district, which had previously been relatively wealthy.
While the Crown did provide some support to communities in Te Urewera, they were “never near enough to counter the massive disadvantages holding back those communities”.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/75402505/crown-slammed-for-treaty-of-waitangi-breaches-in-te-urewera
(incandescent, taking dogs to beach)
I remember reading an insider industry report in the early 80’s sometime, projecting that with the amount of timber potentially coming online NZ could support something like 16 world scale timber/pulp/paper mills.
We never built any of them. Most of the wood got shipped overseas as logs for other people to make money from.
Yep! Douglas and Prebble et al did really well – for themselves.
Despite the injustice and deprivation of the past, which at the time I was only vaguely aware of, the people I knew and worked with in Galatea – Murupara in the 1970’s had found some measure of prosperity.
And then the 4th Labour Government, their party, my party, didn’t just sell their livelihoods out from underneath them, they did that to lots of us, they abandoned them and their communities became the poverty stricken gang dominated shit holes of the 1990’s.
That’s what pisses me off RL.
+1 yep they sold us all out and so many of us are still paying the cost – while they get taxpayer funded travel and invitations to conferences – sickening.
A fucken disgrace, and I still hear of D Cagill. Did the dogs get their beach trip. 😉
Oh, and just too wind you up again, down here in Dunedin, the council have employed two Lawyers to save some money, have come up with the idea of getting rid of the word Bitch and heat from the dog control act, they don’t like blurred meaning.
The former will be replaced with, “female dog in season” I kid you not.
👿
“female dog in season”
Is that like catching whitebait in season?
On the West Coast it means 1 September to 14 November.
Or, A back handed complement to the Dog ‘male’ for always being in season, or at least in unison with the said ‘Bitch’.
But in all seriousness, that nonsense has got to stop, it’s a waste of money etc etc.
PS: leave those whitebait alone, alwyn…At lest till the first of September
Privatised the forests.
Sorry, but I can’t read past the first line of Māori living in caves and eatint rotten potatoes. I love NZ but there are some shames that we will never get past.
How to win friends and influence people – to join ISIS.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/22/david-cameron-us-america-refuses-british-muslim-family-disneyland
What sort of sick sick society is USA now.
If it was your job to ensure the people being allowed into the country did not pose a significant security risk do you think it would be easy? Would you be happy if people judged you and your entire society as sick because of a specific decision that was made which we have not heard the justification for? Do you think it is reasonable for someone to join ISIS because they were not allowed to go to Disneyland for reasons that have not yet been made clear?
“Would you be happy if people judged you and your entire society as sick because of a specific decision that was made which we have not heard the justification for?”
Isn’t that what happened to these people?
This is how they felt after, “The family were escorted from the airport but were first obliged to return every item they had bought from the airport’s duty-free shops”
disgusting – I hope their relatives in Southern California don’t find the spooks hanging around their kids now but I’m not hopeful.
Hey – when a kid gets arrested for bringing a home made clock to school. http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/16/14-year-old-boy-arrested-for-bringing-homemade-clock-to-school/
A female politican sends out a christmas card of her and her family packing guns
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3347927/Nevada-politician-arms-family-guns-controversial-holiday-portrait-support-Second-Amendment.html
And the number of mass killings is increasing and more deadly
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/02/mass-shootings-in-america-numbers-more-frequent-more-deadly
and people who are obviously not criminals are denied entry for no other reason than they are Muslim, you have to conclude that the states is now a highly paranoid society. Having witnessed first hand the paranoia of the USA, fostered by their main stream media, their politicians, right wing “think” tanks, and the NRA, amongst others, one can only conclude that the states is not a pleasant place to be. Frankly I couldn’t wait to leave and never wish to return, despite the fact that I met many good people and the countryside in the fall was simply stunning.
I’m sorry if you are fearful, I take it from your tone that you are a part of that society and wish to uphold it. Well take it from an outsider – its time to rethink USA foreign policy so that The US is seen not as the terrorist that it has become, but as a decent Country like it was many many years ago.
Not forgetting the militarization of the police!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-police-departments.html?_r=0
You really have to wonder just what the people are so afraid of!
the poor and middle classes have been divided by race/ income/ religion and set against one another, and kept in perpetual fear, keeping the real gangsters in the Wall St Washington establishment safe from criticism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_In81u2xdyo
Sikh!
I hear North America was quite a nice place to live for its 60 million inhabitants before Christopher Columbus arrived.
Officially a puppet state of the U.S.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11565399
Not sure how that judge’s ruling makes NZ a puppet state of the US.
Best you read the judge’s full decision before forming opinion, many of those on the political right would have been well advised to do the same regarding the recent decision regarding the illegality of the police search of Nicky Hagar’s home before spouting uninformed opinion.
Just wait and see.
Nuclear ships next.
Og God – I hate to agree with you – but I do, on both counts.
Its a Christmas miracle.
That is a hateful comment.
Dotcom looses the case but: “Dotcom’s lawyer Ron Mansfield confirmed there would be an appeal lodged over the extradition this afternoon.” Might take years to resolve.
Here it is folks, what you have all been waiting for. It’s about to begin. Episode one of the KEYdashian’s Hawaiian holiday! The fruit of FJK’s loins, begins by missing his girlfriend already! Ahhhh poor baby!
Yuk! Enough to make one have to dash rather hastily to the toilet!
http://spy.nzherald.co.nz/spy-news/max-key-pines-away-in-hawaii/
I’ll resist the (almost overwhelming) temptation to click that link.
son of the biggest narcissist in the land:
the apple does not fall far from the tree.
lol…mary_a…seems like a trashy magazine story …from one of those magazines that you find at the hairdressers
Some good news – we need it.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11565476
The Greens on the ball.
Welcome to the Empire
…a family party of 11, about to embark on a dream holiday for which they had saved for months, were approached by officials from US homeland security (at Gatwick…in the UK ffs!) as they queued in the departure lounge and told their authorisation to travel had been cancelled, without further explanation.
[the bracketed italic added]
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/22/david-cameron-us-america-refuses-british-muslim-family-disneyland
Obviously the Immigration Department is so badly understaffed that it continues to make horrendous decisions….
the two latest stuff ups:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/regional/292617/brothers-cleared-of-human-trafficking-charges
http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2015/12/23/gordon-campbell-on-the-rejection-of-a-pakistani-polio-worker/
NZ: once was a caring society, becoming cruel and heartless under the NatCorp regime
Great picture of where NZ society is at
‘ ‘More devastating than any nuclear war’: John McAfee on the coming cyber war with ISIS’
https://www.rt.com/usa/326181-world-war-cyber-attacks-mcafee/
“Every presidential contender says they want to destroy Islamic State, but John McAfee is the only one predicting a war involving cyberattacks, not conventional weapons. “We have to prepare ourselves” for an enemy that is “far more clever,” McAfee told RT.
Not many people know John McAfee is running for president, but possibly even fewer understand the scope of the war against Islamic State (IS, formely ISIS/ISIL) the way he does.
When asked if Republican frontrunner Donald Trump’s strategy against IS was reasonable, McAfee answered, “No, absolutely not.” That’s an answer most other rivals would agree with, but to McAfee, it’s not about where and how to use the military. To defeat ISIS, America must face its own “cyber illiteracy” and other faults before engaging in what he purports to be the next World War – a cyber war…
Cyber wars are going on already. Involving nuclear reactors, airlines etc. Worth doing a Google search on the subject. I read a few blogs on the subject which linked to all sorts of instances reported in the mainstream media.
Will Syria & Iraq become Washington’s Stalingrad?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-22/christmas-2015-will-syria-iraq-become-washingtons-stalingrad
If this Stalingrad metaphor is true then New Zealand is Bulgaria.
Is that a cucku coo clock I here