The Irish have voted for gay marriage in a referendum, good news. But in a week which featured a lot of nonsense about gender assignment surgery again wedging a bunch of hapless white male MP Labour twits what are the lessons for the left in NZ from the Irish referendum?
Anyone who favours my posts by generously reading them will know I’ve lately been much taken by the ideas of Pablo Iglesias and Spain’s Podemos. One of the things that Podemos advocate is the left forming broad alliances for specific issues, looking not to the parliament for top down leadership, but rather by-passing the political & media elites to force change. This piece in the Irish Times –
notes that “…It looks like a victory for articulacy. This was indeed a superb civic campaign…” A civic campaign that gave the political elites in Ireland absolutely no choice. Compare and contrast a confused, ideologically exhausted Labour party bickering over gender re-assignment surgery with the sort of populism of Podemos, and the sort of mechanisms (referendums, civic campaigns) in Ireland and the sort of “new left” we need for the 21st century here in NZ is becoming clearer.
Podemos are interesting in that they’ve used Loomio in such a massively constructive way. They’re a true grass roots political movement.
It’s what we need here in NZ. Where the representatives are representing the choices of the people and not their own desires and beliefs as we have now.
maybe the standardistas should set up a loomio and run through various scenarios/decisions based on current posts. See what happens when we have to actually work together 😈
“but rather by-passing the political & media elites to force change”
Completely with you on that one.
Can you recommend some reading on Podemos for someone who’s unfamiliar with it? Something easily accessible and not too dense to start with would be good.
“…Third, in my opinion the nature of the breakthroughs being achieved is largely a populist one. That is to say, it is when new formations manage to puncture the bubble of bipartisan niceties, with slogans that are both resonant and pit ‘the people’ against a ‘power bloc’ that is insulated from popular opinion, that they succeed…”
Also read up on the “Pink Tide” in South America, where non-traditional alliances between the left and local capitalists have rolled back globalised capitalism. In New Zealand, such an alliance might be the left championing local import substitution whilst attacking foreign owned banks. That would offer opportunities to split right wing business orgainsations like Business New Zealand. for example.
If you (or anyone) look into Ireland’s distant past, and where its culture has come from and the general default “mindset” of the Gaelic people, the way Gay marriage has been dealt with comes as no surprise.
Without wanting to present the idea that the Irish are all a bunch of happy dancing leprechauns, unlike NZ, Ireland’s cultural heritage is one of the most advanced and… hmmm… “liberal” or “progressive” in the Western world.
Where NZders traditionally seek advantage between peers, and maintain inequality between gender and sex, foreigners and locals, and enforcement of law comes from the State – as per their English/Monarchist roots – Ireland traditionally seeks equality and community, and enforcement of law is the decision of the family/clan – as per their Clan roots.
In very loose terms, of course, but that’s the point: despite having a modern tendency to shoot each other over which street one lives in, and despite early culture still being Patriarchial, they are more prone to integration of all-comers lifestyle requirements (women, gays, and foreigners) , rather than exclusion. The source of the cultural echo being Brehon Law.
Secret meeting in London to discuss making cash illegal, meaning total government control over taxation, spending….or more specifically what is able to be brought and sold.
Probably inevitable b waghorn but this was suggested not as evolution but a sudden lurch. Imagine a cashless society where a Government agency could if they wanted, track a dissident and know exactly their activites. And no more coins for the buskers or charity collectors. Why even the very rich could be tracked and taxed so what a calamity that would be!
Yes this is all part of implementing authoritarian big brother control and surveillance over every aspect of our lives. True democratic dissent will be ending shortly thereafter.
A cashless society will be a great step on the way to the total removal of money. Interestingly enough, it’s happening anyway:
Approximately two-thirds of total spending in New Zealand is done electronically on eftpos and credit cards,” says Paul Whiston, spokesman for electronics payment provider Paymark.
The question isn’t that we’re going cashless but if we’re going to continue to let the private banks control our money and our spending. I’m of the opinion that we need to stop that ASAP. When we go cashless it needs to be a government service, well backed up and with very strict rules about access.
Going cashless brings about a number of advantages:
1. It would be near impossible to lose money. Sure, you could drop your swipe card but that can easily be replaced and any money spent via it returned and the thief caught.
2. It would be impossible for someone to break in to the server and steal your money that way either. They can’t transfer it out to another country because any NZ$ outside of the server doesn’t exist and any internal transfer will be readily apparent even if the hackers managed to hide their own tracks.
3. Taxes. It would be incredibly easy for IRD to track where money is going and thus be able to determine who owes what taxes. In fact, they could do it in real time making a Financial Transaction Tax viable (At the moment implementation of an FTT would have many people moving to cash to prevent having to pay the tax).
4. Crime. Money laundering would be a thing of the past. It’s difficult to launder ill-gotten cash when it doesn’t exist. Other crime networks would also be easily detected. Essentially, crime that involves money would be gone along with the money laundering.
5. Inflation could be more accurately measured. Instead of having people go around shops recording the prices for a basket of goods all sales would be reported back with the system then automatically measuring inflation in near real time.
6. The recording of every sale would be great for informing people where they would get the best deal via a government funded website similar to PriceSpy.
As I say, it’s not a question of if we’re going cashless (We are already) but when, how and who controls it. IMO, we need to do so ASAP and we need to control it and not the private banks (although I’m sure that the private banks would love to rip us off some more for allowing us to use our own currency).
You’re kidding yourself, backing the movement towards a cashless society when that movement is completely engineered, supported, and structured from the ground up by the large capitalist institutions.
Yep, the only way NZ will get to be cashless is if it is forced to do so (and people will just invent new forms of non-traceable tokens for recording exchange anyway). That we have increasing tech for managing transactions is a different thing than removing cash as well.
I’m expecting increasing adverse events (weather, economy) that make a cashless society the far less resilient option.
Absolutely. Trying getting food from a supermarket when the EFTPOS network goes down. Usually a “cash only” check out opens up, but fuck all people have enough cash on hand to use it, so you get hundreds of hungry people milling around surrounded by groceries unable to transact any business.
As I said, we need to stop the large capitalist institutions from doing it and do it ourselves via our government. Private industry should not have control of our money and they will have if we don’t do something to stop them.
Yours are all fantasy conditions. I’m talking about what the actual conditions are, now, today. The fact is that moving to a cashless society, which is simply a part of moving to a fully online security and surveillance state, needs to be opposed on all fronts.
Nope. We need to keep track of our resources so that we can use them sustainably and for the benefit of NZ. Cash doesn’t allow us to do that in a meaningful way as it’s so easily untraceable.
We need to keep track of our resources so that we can use them sustainably and for the benefit of NZ.
That has got nothing to do with having a cashless society. Societies have managed to keep a close eye on their resource use for millenia without electronic money. Often on stone tablets and papyrus.
You are linking ideas as pre-requisites when they are not.
Societies have managed to keep a close eye on their resource use for millenia without electronic money.
Not really. They’ve been able to keep track of transactions but not resource use in relation to what resources are actually available. This is a rather important development that we need to implement to help us becoming a sustainable society.
How much oil is left in NZs wells?
How much food is produced daily on NZs farms?
How much water is there available to those farms to produce that food?
How much iron ore in our black sands?
How much titanium?
Now, how much is available sustainably (ie, in perpetuity) and how much is actually being used?
There’s a reason why I kept saying in relation to. One of the main reasons that Rome collapsed was over use of resources. They ran out of the resources needed to maintain the empire.
A cashless society would allow better booking keeping of the use of those resources. Of course, we still need to measure what resources we have available.
you see and all your points are why i like cash – the government issues legal tender, and it is untracable unless othewise marked.
as for the cashless world fantasy, and then you have a day or three without electricity and non of your eftpos machines works.
As for your bullet points: essentially all of you points listed we already have with our eftpos accounts.
* Any purchase you make is already tracked, just have a look at your bank statements. (anyone can have access to that, as identity thiefs and hackes have proven on more than one account)
* you are already getting ads in regards to your spending….Just look at the farmer emails that come courtesy of your farmer card, google, hack even the aa knows what you buy on your smart cad, every single one of your online purchases is recognised adn will reflect the next ads you see courtesy of google
* the government could/should prevent tax evasion, but considering that the polititians are at the front of tax evasion, maybe we should simply stop dreaming that they will do something to prevent it. 🙂
* loose your bank card and you risk loosing more then just a 20 $ bill.
* anyone who knows how to hack can steal more then just your money from your bank account….i think they made a few movies about that already.
* criminals don’t care what government do. They will find a replacement for cash, like cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, sexual favors, etc etc
* non criminals with no access to a bank card will also find a replacement of official cash such as cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, work for food/housing, sexual favours for food/housing or jobs, … etc etc (this was how life was handled in the direct year/s after the war ended in germany. my grandmother and my mother had a few stories of cleaning cigarette butts, rolling new zigs out of them and selling them for a few pennies or some potatoes)
No for the poor, cash is king, because it is untracable. Having a Food card that prohibits certain stores, or certain foods, or certain hygiene articles etc etc is not going to make your life easier.
those that are rich or very rich already have their cash less society, and their bank accounts in switzerland, singapore, hong kong and london and they still don’t pay any tax.
also note that the legalised gangsters and banksters in our society seem to transact their business electronically and cashlessly just fine. It’s their system after all.
I don’t think a purely government operated banking system is a good idea. The current system has the advantage of creating a separation of roles between government regulators and the banks themselves.
The standard of regulation is not strong and should be increased but that is another issue.
Ireland seems to show what happens when politicians get too cozy with bankers. An entire political party lost its hegemony due to massive corruption which was fueling a property bubble there.
you see and all your points are why i like cash – the government issues legal tender, and it is untracable unless othewise marked.
That one sentence shows that you failed to understand what I said. The most important being that we actually need to track resources used. That’s not an option, not if we want to become a sustainable society.
as for the cashless world fantasy, and then you have a day or three without electricity and non of your eftpos machines works.
Shit happens and it really doesn’t happen that often. We mitigate against it but it’s still going to happen. As an example I’m pretty sure that a hell of a lot of Wellington couldn’t go shopping during the recent storm nor for some time after.
As for your bullet points: essentially all of you points listed we already have with our eftpos accounts.
I’m pointing out that the private sector shouldn’t actually have that information because of the many point you make about advertising and tracking.
loose your bank card and you risk loosing more then just a 20 $ bill.
As I pointed out, there’s actually less risk because of the nature of electronic transactions. A simple call to the help desk to report it lost and it gets frozen.
anyone who knows how to hack can steal more then just your money from your bank account…
There’s a risk of that but a) not as high as people believe and b) we need to risk a bit to become a better society.
criminals don’t care what government do. They will find a replacement for cash, like cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, sexual favors, etc etc
And that would be why we still have police.
Having a Food card that prohibits certain stores, or certain foods, or certain hygiene articles etc etc is not going to make your life easier.
Doing that would have to be illegal and any government that tries should immediately go to jail for a minimum of 5 years. I did say strict rules about it.
those that are rich or very rich already have their cash less society, and their bank accounts in switzerland, singapore, hong kong and london and they still don’t pay any tax.
That requires other tax and law changes but one point I should point out is that, with a cashless society, NZ$ would only exist in NZ on the government servers.
That requires other tax and law changes but one point I should point out is that, with a cashless society, NZ$ would only exist in NZ on the government servers.
oh you mean like the difference between the “finance rate” and the “interest rate” in a consumer debt agreement?
The bank takes money from you for holding your deposit. Thats effectively a negative interest rate, albeit you are correct technically that it is not the same thing.
[The bank takes money from you for holding your deposit. Thats effectively a negative interest rate, albeit you are correct technically that it is not the same thing.]
Interest charged, whether positive or negative, is proportional to the amount deposited and varies with the duration. A bank charge is a fixed charge intended to cover the bank’s processing costs.
We could of course avoid both negative interest and and bank charges by only using cash. Which would be one reason the banking fraternity would be very much in favour of bringing about a cashless society.
to cover the bank’s processing costs? I know what you are saying but that is not true. Its straight out gouging of our economy to the tune of billions a year.
You can regard those charges and interest as separate or categorise them differently as much as you like but the bottom line is that they are taking money off you for holding your deposit and you can calculate that as an effective negative interest rate based on the principal that you have with them.
[You can regard those charges and interest as separate or categorise them differently as much as you like but the bottom line is that they are taking money off you for holding your deposit and you can calculate that as an effective negative interest rate based on the principal that you have with them.]
If we were to abolish (positive) interest I don’t see how the the banks could remain in business were it not for bank charges. Even state owned banks wouldn’t want to have to rely on subsidies from the taxpayer to meet their running costs.
not sure what world you are living in man, if you’ve been following the news, the banks with direct access to the Fed funds window get their money for free, then lend it to us charging us shitloads.
Lack of bank profitability is not an issue we are facing right now but i am sure that the banksters find your concern touching.
[not sure what world you are living in man, if you’ve been following the news, the banks with direct access to the Fed funds window get their money for free, then lend it to us charging us shitloads.]
Whatever. Bank charges and interest (positive or negative) are still two different things. So if the banks charged negative interest on deposits it would place an additional burden on depositors – additional, that is, to bank charges, which are generally accepted by customers as a reasonable charge for the services provided in operating cheque accounts, clearing of cheques, provision of plastic cards, etc. If the banks started charging negative interest I would want to be able to take my money out of the bank and operate mostly in cash. This however would not be possible in a cashless society.
1. the private sector allready has all the information, especially the banks.
2. loose your card in the morning, or have your bag stolen, and not know it for a few hours….your idendity is stolen, and your money is gone, and someone signed you up for a loan. Happens all the time, and been happening for years. Even when peeps call in to cancel a card, with wave and pay the chances are you are gonna loose more than a bit.
3. Identity theft, and subsequent financial abuse is a big issue. It does not just happens every now and then. This is what the FBI says about financial crime together with Identity theft.
4. In cash less world the cops will be payed off with Cigarettes, booze, sex, chocolate etc etc etc. They will be as corrupt as they are today.
5. Food cards have been already introduced by WINZ http://www.workandincome.govt.nz/individuals/payment-card/ and now, the approved businesses that one can use are not forcibly the cheapest businesses to use for someone on welfare. (but heck we must take away choice in the name of welfare fraud, lest they buy something that offends our, mine, yours and humpty dumpty sensibilitys. Cause we all know lazy, bludgers and the likes. – Still waiting for the government to resign.
6. And the government servers are immune to hacking, will never crash, always work and …..Novo pay?
1. Yes and they shouldn’t
2. and 3
3. Last time I lost a CC I called them up and they asked me what was my last transaction stopping it from that point. There hadn’t been any other transactions but I’m sure that they would have taken the correct action in correcting them if there had been including the return of any monies spent. Can’t do that with cash
4. Which means we need procedures that find and correct that corruption
5. yep and they need to be removed
6. Nope but then, neither is cash – stolen wallets have been around forever. And Novopoay wasn’t a government problem per se but a private sector problem brought about by the dismantling of government over the last 30 years
Odd that there are a number who post here that seemingly can’t or won’t connect the dots between the total financial disaster foisted upon the planet and its inhabitants and the to move towards a ‘cashless’ society
Note: Cashless can’t and won’t work unless all nations implement it at the same time and if that ‘big bang’ was to come into effect the consequences would be nothing short of catastrophic
It is impossible to rid the world of cash money and impossible to police the creation of ‘unofficial’ forms of cash money which is why the exercise is propaganda which has been openly talked about by the establishments for an age now
In my opinion the forces behind this blindly believe such a system of control will lead to the utopian digitized slave state but are forcing the swing back towards localized production and community based society as human beings realize what is necessary for the their own survival
1. It would be near impossible to lose money. Sure, you could drop your swipe card but that can easily be replaced and any money spent via it returned and the thief caught.
What you meant to say is it will be impossible to stop the bank or other institutions taking your ‘money’
2. It would be impossible for someone to break in to the server and steal your money that way either. They can’t transfer it out to another country because any NZ$ outside of the server doesn’t exist and any internal transfer will be readily apparent even if the hackers managed to hide their own tracks.
Your faith in technology is bizarre and your understandings primitive while simultaneously endorsing Capital controls which will be immediately implemented and you can wave good-bye to freedom of movement….for everyone else
3. Taxes. It would be incredibly easy for IRD to track where money is going and thus be able to determine who owes what taxes. In fact, they could do it in real time making a Financial Transaction Tax viable (At the moment implementation of an FTT would have many people moving to cash to prevent having to pay the tax).
Corporations already do business electronically so you have not thought this through at all
4. Crime. Money laundering would be a thing of the past. It’s difficult to launder ill-gotten cash when it doesn’t exist. Other crime networks would also be easily detected. Essentially, crime that involves money would be gone along with the money laundering.
Q. You understand the crime networks own and control the financial systems eh ?
The banks will continue laundering they will not even break stride while stopping your access anytime they like
5. Inflation could be more accurately measured. Instead of having people go around shops recording the prices for a basket of goods all sales would be reported back with the system then automatically measuring inflation in near real time.
You don’t understand what you’re talking about or what inflation is or the causes
6. The recording of every sale would be great for informing people where they would get the best deal via a government funded website similar to PriceSpy.
Yes we are aware of your big brother authoritarian preferences which you openly parade once again
You don’t understand what you’re talking about or what inflation is or the causes
It’s bizarre actually as current day point of sale systems already allow real time monitoring of economic activity and prices throughout the retail and service sectors.
The problem being that it’s the corporates with the information and not the people. And that information is then used against the people rather than supporting them.
The information is already there, its already being collected in real time, the infrastructure already exists to do all of that, further the government already has the capability to take all that information, sort it search it and store it into perpetuity
Seems to me the answer is already right there in front of our faces if you want to go down that road (to a turnkey authoritarian central state).
What you meant to say is it will be impossible to stop the bank or other institutions taking your ‘money’
No, if I’d meant that then I would have said that.
… endorsing Capital controls which will be immediately implemented and you can wave good-bye to freedom of movement….for everyone else
That’s below your usual standard of meaningless drivel but still meaningless.
Corporations already do business electronically so you have not thought this through at all
Actually, I have. The problem is that you didn’t get the full article which states that the servers would be government owned and no NZ$ would exist outside of those servers. This means that it would be very easy to trace where money has gone and thus what taxes the corporations owe on it.
You understand the crime networks own and control the financial systems eh ?
Which, again, is why I keep saying that our monetary system needs to be removed from the control of the corporates.
You don’t understand what you’re talking about or what inflation is or the causes
Yes I do.
Yes we are aware of your big brother authoritarian preferences which you openly parade once again
Allowing people to see where they can get the best deal is Big Brother? Man, are you fucken delusional.
Allowing people to see where they can get the best deal is Big Brother? Man, are you fucken delusional
No it’s the faith in such systems who would own the systems and how the information will be used is delusional
Before we even begin to discuss the delusion that the ‘government’ will be in control of any such systems
Q. How do you propose the government will ‘assume control’ over the private banking system which currently operates throughout most of the worlds nations ?
Q. Do you believe governments event want to take control ?
How do you propose the government will ‘assume control’ over the private banking system which currently operates throughout most of the worlds nations ?
I don’t expect them to. I expect them to assume control of the NZ system and integrate it into the global systems. I expect other governments to follow suit.
Do you believe governments event want to take control ?
This is an important point about democracy – it’s not parliament that are the government but the people.
I don’t expect them to. I expect them to assume control of the NZ system and integrate it into the global systems. I expect other governments to follow suit.
Q. How would you remove the barrier of ‘state capture’ ?
Do you believe governments event want to take control ?
This is an important point about democracy – it’s not parliament that are the government but the people.
Yeah great but that’s currently not the situation going around the Western World
Dude the way you insist that centralised infrastructure locking people in to establishment systems is the only way ahead, is pretty bloody scary.
Its like you have never paid attention to how payment systems are used by the elite as weapons of war against Russia, Wikileaks, Kim Dotcom etc. Anybody and any organisation the establishment of the day thinks is a dissenter and a threat to them. And now you want to tie everyone in NZ to similar?
The modern Left appears riven with incoherancy and incongruent principles. Patients rights but force vaccinations. Abortions more available but treasure babies. Cut down emissions but increase consumption of the masses.
a fair question. The pot needs to be stirred if there is any hope of this stew getting better. The pro-establishment greasers and the political careerists won’t.
btw the “modern right” are just as locked into ultimately self defeating behaviours. They just spend more of the time in power during.
Chur. The older I get the less of an establishment loyalist I feel like being. Especially when “the establishment” is that which has lead us to this shite place in history.
“Abortions more available but treasure babies”
These aren’t contradictory. Indeed a society that protects the rights and wellbeing of women is going to be a better society for babies.
Its like you have never paid attention to how payment systems are used by the elite as weapons of war against Russia, Wikileaks, Kim Dotcom etc.
I’m quite aware of that which is why I keep saying, and you keep ignoring, that these systems need to be removed from the elites control.
Anybody and any organisation the establishment of the day thinks is a dissenter and a threat to them. And now you want to tie everyone in NZ to similar?
They’re already in that position – I want to remove them from it.
The point that you seem to fail to understand is that we do need a system. It’s not optional.
Dunno who the uncorruptible angels you are going to get to run your all seeing all reaching system.
I don’t expect incorruptible angels – I expect everyone to have a say/voice/power rather than just a few. Overall, everyone isn’t corruptible but a few are.
I don’t expect incorruptible angels – I expect everyone to have a say/voice/power rather than just a few. Overall, everyone isn’t corruptible but a few are
Q. Will you be proposing a solution about how you foresee this coming about ?
“It amazes me that all these warriors of the air don’t regularly crash into each other…”
Into this mess walks New Zealand troops ….at the command of jonkey Nactional and chicken hawks
…the New Zealand Labour Party along with the Green Party and NZF and Mana/Int co-Left ( who opposed sending them there in the first place)…..should demand NZ troops are pulled out now!
Chooky. The article on the sidebar “After Vietnam: changes in imperialist strategy” gives a different take on the Middle East activity. Essentially that the West now has learned to get the unfortunates to carry out the bloodshed by proxy. Suits us to see the barbaric bad guys as an excuse to carry out remote “defence” activity. No more disasters labelling USA as bad guys as in Vietnam eg MiLai Massacre. https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/after-vietnam-changes-in-imperialist-strategy/
Camp Taji, were NZ’s troops are stationed is surrounded by ISIS on three sides with one side open towards Baghdad. Baghdad is facing an ISIS assault. That is according to the New York Times propaganda rag du jour in the US (Responsible for the yellow cake story that got the US invading Iraq in 2003 in the first place) that is.
The distance between ISIS troops and Camp Taji is only ± 15 km.
Vice President Joe Biden declared in early April that “ISIL’s momentum in Iraq has halted, and in many places, has been flat-out reversed.”
A couple of weeks later, the President proved equally upbeat following a meeting with Iraqi leader Haider al-Abadi: “We are making serious progress in pushing back ISIL out of Iraqi territory. About a quarter of the territory fallen under Daesh control has been recovered. Thousands of strikes have not only taken ISIL fighters off the war theater, but their infrastructure has been deteriorated and decayed. And under Prime Minister Abadi’s leadership, the Iraqi security forces have been rebuilt and are getting re-equipped, retrained, and strategically deployed across the country.”
But that was so last month. Post-Ramadi, conservatives like Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, have lost no time in labeling such views out of touch and “delusional.” And, indeed, Obama sounded strangely detached on Tuesday when he told The Atlantic that ISIS’s advance was not a defeat.
“No, I don’t think we’re losing,” he said, adding: “There’s no doubt there was a tactical setback, although Ramadi had been vulnerable for a very long time, primarily because these are not Iraqi security forces that we have trained or reinforced.” It was rather like the captain of the Titanic telling passengers that the gash below the waterline was a minor opening that would soon be repaired.
Because the mainstream media only report what the Defence Force wants them to. Journalists get to be embedded within military forces on the ground, only if they tow the line and report what the hierarchy wants.
John Pilger talks a little about general western media bias here, from 12:40 in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41YTAZHIWN8
The first really big polar blast of the season arriving today, straight off the edge of Antarctica. Bundle up folks, esp in the South which is expecting heavy dumps of snow.
US government documents show rise of ISIS was predicted, supported and considered an “asset” in getting rid of Assad
Supporting militant Sunni extremism in Syria and Iraq would also act to curb Iranian influence, it was noted. Fueling militant Islamic extremism in Syria/Iraq has also given the same security and surveillance state the excuse to demand more power and more budgets to use on its own western citizens.
However, the newly declassified Pentagon report proves unambiguously that years before ISIS launched its concerted offensive against Iraq, the US intelligence community was fully aware that Islamist militants constituted the core of Syria’s sectarian insurgency.
Despite that, the Pentagon continued to support the Islamist insurgency, even while anticipating the probability that doing so would establish an extremist Salafi stronghold in Syria and Iraq.
As Shoebridge told me, “The documents show that not only did the US government at the latest by August 2012 know the true extremist nature and likely outcome of Syria’s rebellion”?—?namely, the emergence of ISIS?—?“but that this was considered an advantage for US foreign policy. This also suggests a decision to spend years in an effort to deliberately mislead the West’s public, via a compliant media, into believing that Syria’s rebellion was overwhelmingly ‘moderate.’”
Pepe Escobar refers to this as the empire of chaos.
the US has history of shipping in Islamic militants, training and arming them, in order to undermine entire states. And interesting isnt it how despite all these anti ISIS US airstrikes, ISIS is able to close in on Damascus and Assad quite rapidly.
Something Draco has often bought up here is the need for us to get out of the mindset of needless duplication, i.e. everyone having everything in every home.
This looks like an example of a step in an interesting direction: Four tiny homes on a shared piece of land. Each tiny home has its own bathroom, but the kitchen and living area is in a shared building.
Yep. And these solutions are not new. Communitarian or social accommodation. Barracks, student hostels and monastaries all have set ups with similar principles. Simply update with modern ideas and for the modern sensibility – and voila – save a tonne of money on corporatised retirement accomodation.
Nice overview article. Biggest thing stopping this from happening in NZ is the lack of legal models for shared ownership.
Chch was an ideal opportunity to work with these alternative housing options. I think a few people have done tiny homes there but not the shared resources bit.
Biggest thing stopping this from happening in NZ is the lack of legal models for shared ownership.
???
What do you mean??? Shared ownership of financial assets is an utterly standard situation. Whether it is company shareholders, spouses or people who have an account at a bank or managed by a hedgefund.
Outside of marriage it’s rare for people in NZ to share ownership of homes/land. It does happen but we don’t have good cultural practice yet on how to do it, and people get stuck on assets issues, what happens when someone wants out, how to make decisions collectively etc.
There are many people wanting to do this but few really good examples that can be easily replicated. I know about it from people trying to go this with larger pieces of land, and it’s possible it might be easier on smaller suburban blocks. But again, Chch was the obvious opportunity and it hasn’t really happened. I think that’s because the right models don’t exist yet.
Thanks. Let me clarify, by ‘model’ I mean the whole thing not just the legal structure. See my comment to CV above. Probably should have left the word legal out of my first comment.
Everything from traditional Kiwi flatmates (shared cooking and shared bills) to communal student hostel living and everything in-between. There are many models and ideas familar to NZ culture to pick from. And if they don’t work, try out a Pasifika or Maori model extended family mode of living.
weka, I already answered above that there are many options for shared or joint legal ownership of assets including property.
Now it is hardly my fault if you cannot accurately formulate what you are asking for. Ownership of assets falls under the area of commercial and property law. It’s very clear.
I’m not asking for anything. I’m sharing some experience. I’m talking about what ordinary people are trying to do in sharing ownership of homes and why that is difficult in NZ. I’m guessing you are commenting again from a place of poor knowledge. If you can’t tell the difference between ownership and flatting, you could try listening instead of pontificating.
If a group of people buy land together with the intention of forming community, some of the issues that arise are around how to make decisions, and how to remove assets if someone wants to leave. Yes, the technicals on that exist, but how it plays out in real life isn’t always so straight forward (eg what happens if you want to sell but the other owners get to have a say in who buys in and you can’t find someone suitable?). There’s also a whole class thing that happens as well, around people with assets and how they protect them vs how they share them.
And how to just get on with each other in a living situation that many aren’t used to (I agree with you that Māori and Pasifika are better at this than Pākehā). The ‘model’ I am referring to is how to navigate this without having to reinvent the wheel all the time. Lots of people in NZ have done various models, and many have failed (esp intentional communities). There are some good successes too, but my original comment was pointing to these things not being cultural norms yet, so both regulations and patterns of relating haven’t evolved to support them.
In the linked article, the couples have known each other for 20 years. That makes a big difference.
Co-housing seems one of the more successful models in NZ, but most cohousing is for people with large buy in (eg they sell an existing house/have a big mortgage). I was interested in the article that was looking at medium level buy in (although I don’t think they talk about the land price), plus what felix was pointing to about shared ammenities.
I know of a few groups of people who’ve done rural subdivisions privately where the land is owned collectively but each family builds their own home. You need a certain group of people who know and trust each other for that to work. It does work, but it’s not common and I think the reason for that is that both around regulations on rural land, and that we’re not that good at sharing when it comes to larges amounts of assets, or how to make decisions in small groups once we get past whānau size. These are not unresolvable problems, we’re just not there yet.
Beyond that, and esp in response to what Maui said, I’m thinking of even lower buy ins. The moveable tiny home allows people more flexibility re commitment, and is way cheaper if land is rented instead of bought. There are still issues on how to live together.
Community Land Trusts are one of the models now being used in NZ. I’m not sure how successful that is yet and the one I am familiar with still has a substantial buy in.
There are a lot of nuances that you raise, and important ones weka.
In olden days, blood ties, tribal ties, religious ties, formed the basis of the trust, mutual understanding and common culture required for these things to work and work well.
I agree with you that its more difficult now and that it depends on each specific situation and each specific group of people and their dynamics.
If people want to be really arms length and independent away from each other then residential units or town house units might be used. But that’s not really communitarian living either.
what I find is that if you ask people you know who are talking about housing or home ownership whether they would share land with others, most people will just say no flat out, others will say yeah maybe, but it’s generally unclear what it means and how to do it and when they realise it’s a lot of work that becomes a barrier. A few will respond positively. What we need are models that make it much easier for the middle group to be more interested, as simple as say buying a house, or renting long term.
“In olden days, blood ties, tribal ties, religious ties, formed the basis of the trust, mutual understanding and common culture required for these things to work and work well.”
Yep that’s the one.
“If people want to be really arms length and independent away from each other then residential units or town house units might be used. But that’s not really communitarian living either.”
True, but it’s probably a step in the right direction. The set up in that article looks much more workable for most people I know than say an intentional community where families are more in each others space. It’s a mix of own space and shared space, and it sounds like they figured out how to make it work for them specifically. That’s closer to what most of us have been raised with so it makes sense.
Appreciate you taking the time to share the thoughts you have on this topic. I think this kind of project is going to be an important way forward for many.
Yep sign me up! I’ve thought about looking for a small piece of land to put a tiny house on. Unfortunately land parcels don’t come in sizes of 50sqm.. Minimum Lot sizes where I live would be around 300sqm according to Council zoning, so no chance of subdividing existing land. The most feasible way would be finding a friendly farmer who doesn’t mind you renting a portion of paddock.
The great thing about moveable tiny homes is they circumvent so many regulations. Renting land is going to be a good option for many going forward. It also means no mortgage and thus not supporting the pro-CC global economy.
Yeah, I would. The trouble is I don’t really know anyone else who wants to do this – maybe it’s time to join the Transition Towns group. And then finding a vacant piece of land close to the city is important for me too.
There will be a lawyer or planner here who can give you suggestions. From an amateur standpoint it sounds to me like you need a bit of land which can be zoned for high density housing. Buy the land as a group. Buildings can then come and go on to the land leasehold. Just an example. Need to talk to the local council and its planners early on as if the concept does not fit into the district plan in some way, it won’t be able to proceed.
Alternatively, find a group of people and buy a 5 bedroom house together. Knock off the mortgage collectively in a few years. It’s then collective and supportive living in your own home – for the younger set it’d be called flatting.
Another solution is the movable cabin (less than 10 sq m so no need for building consent). A shared utility provides the kitchen, bathroom (building consent required here – but once that hurdle over your on your way). Decks between cabins and utility allow flow. A separate cabin as communal living space.
I’ve seen a number of these springing up at my local beach. 4 or 5 small cabins linked by decks sharing a communal utility and living space.
No need for a 10m2 cabin to be movable. Schedule 1 of the building act applies. The important part is that to be legal as sleeping acom, it must be used in connection with a dwelling on the same property, which is where the fully consented kitchen/bathroom/living room comes in.
As long as you have this legal “dwelling” on the property, and your 10m2 buildings contain no cooking or sanitary facilities, you can have as many of them as you like. There may be restrictions on how many people can live on your property at any one time, but that’s a question for your local council.
You also have to make sure they’re no closer to each other or to any building or boundary than their own height.
It lists all the building work that you can do without a permit. Clause 3 is the relevant one in this matter.
The work still needs to comply with the building code standards (NZS:3604) so you can’t build them out out cellophane and coat hangers.
And as noted above, you still need to comply with the district plan for your area as well.
BUT as long as you haven’t made enemies with your council officers or your neighbours you’re probably not going to be inspected, and you can avoid all the extra cost and hassle of the consent process.
Jointly buy a decent sized section with a small house on it. Due diligence on the LIM to ensure that all consents are present and correct. Then build a number of those 10m2 sleeping huts around the site, within what is considered a permitted activity.
Ideally there would be money (and consents) to refit the main house as a common space; additional bathroom, open plan living area/dining, high capacity kitchen etc.
Whole thing could be owned as a company with the residents as shareholders; people could then buy in/sell their shares and come and go as their life circumstances required.
LOL. Well, social isolation is a killer; if there was a common area with a bar, a pool table, some arcades and board games, hobby space, piano etc. that would be a lot of fun. A different kind of living than sitting in front of a screen surfing the interwebs 😯 lolz
Felix, what’s the limit on how many dwellings with kitchen/bathrooms you can have on a residential site?
The advantages of having it be moveable are that you don’t need building consent above the 10m2 (which makes it much cheaper), and you don’t have to own land. It’s a very affordable way to get housing for people that either build, or pay someone to build.
Or in Macro’s scenario, you don’t need the cost of a consented shared amenities block.
(I have a feeling some councils have reduced the minimum dwelling size to prevent people from doing this).
“what’s the limit on how many dwellings with kitchen/bathrooms you can have on a residential site?”
That’s down to the zone rules of your local District Plan. Where I am it’s one, or one + an ancillary dwelling (sometimes called dependent person’s dwelling or granny flat, which contains all facilities but is limited to a certain maximum size). I don’t know how much this varies from place to place.
Macro’s scenario still includes a shared utilities building of some sort. This has to be consented.
Ah yes that’s right. Sewerage and greywater, and stormwater, and probably a potable water supply.
And if your section is big enough and in the applicable zone you’re allowed to dispose of all of that on site (with an engineer’s design specific to your site for the council to approve), so that could work with a mobile building of some sort.
Yes I have a mobile building at my beach section – its actually bigger than 10 sq m and comes in 2 parts that are wheeled onto the site and then placed together. The advantage is that it can be quickly built off site and located and ready to use within the day, and moved t a new site if necessary. I bought mine new about 7 years ago and it has been moved from just north of Auckland to the Coromandel Peninsula in that time.
We have this technology in NZ and i never ceases to depress and astound me that such buildings were never employed to house those who lost there homes in Christchurch. It takes 6 weeks to construct these small dwellings and they are of a very high standard complete with bathroom 2 bedrooms and well equipped kitchen. carpeted, outside deck areas, the lot. I understand Alan Gibbs has one on his property north of Helensville as well – so it gives you some idea of the standard of finish.
+ zillion re Chch. They could have set up apprentice and owner/builder schemes too, so they would have upskilled a whole bunch of locals. Instead the dumb fucks in charge spend all that money at the start on motorhomes that no-one wanted to live in.
What’s involved in the move Macro? Is the building towable? By what?
the web site is here: http://www.go-homes.co.nz/
They are transported to the site then moved into position using a standard 4×4 ute. Hooked up to facilities – caravan plug (builders pole), water, waste can be normal sewage collection – but we used a separate septic system on the farm (separate grey water and black water) http://www.naturalflow.co.nz/
Have you seen the recent posts here on TS re. XX not even trying anymore with the nice middle digit gesture? Key has never tried because he never has, he doesn’t, and never will give a shit; it has nothing to do with ineptness although there’s a lot of that too.
The paradox is that the Labour leadership (not just in Britain but elsewhere in the English speaking democracies as well) are so paralysed by fear and lack of confidence that they have failed to notice that the world has moved on. All the major central banks have abandoned the cautious conservatism of conventional monetary policy. The IMF has turned its back on austerity as a proper response to recession. The OECD says that inequality is not the price that has to be paid for economic efficiency but is a major obstacle to that efficiency.
Other countries have shown how living standards higher than our own can be raised still further through an appropriate policy mix. The way is open to learn from them and to offer the British people a new approach to running the economy – one that does not require us to choose between social justice and economic efficiency (or, for that matter, between Labour’s core values and Tory “aspiration”) but that recognises that we will all be better off if we give proper value to all our citizens and to the contribution they can all make to the general welfare. There is no mystery as to how this can be done if we only open our eyes; the necessary policy levers are just waiting to be pulled.
Ok, so basically he’s saying Labour needs a new Vision because they can’t move left or right.
“As to precisely what alternatives should be adopted, why not at least begin to think about them? They are not in short supply.”
For the uninitiated, what policy ideas do you think Gould is thinking of for Labour?
I think he’s saying that Labour need to stand on principles again and to believe in those principles. The RWNJs are wrong but they believe in what they’re saying and people can tell. Labour, on the other hand, don’t really believe in what they’re saying largely because they’re saying the same things as the RWNJs and people can tell that too.
It’s pretty much a giveaway when both major parties are selling the same vision.
The remits up for discussion today at the Labour Region 5 conference were clearly concerned about that. Linking minimum wage to the average wage so they move upward of their own accord rather than at a politician’s whim, taxing wealth as well as income, UBI (some of the remits had clearly come from someone who had read the Big Kahuna), abolishing youth, training and starting out minimum wage rates, repealing a number of ERA amendments, promoting collective bargaining and awards etc.
The Future of Work was also a big part of the day’s activities, as Grant Robertson gave a speech and then we did some workshopping on it. This commission’s work will inform Labour policy in this area, and is huge. UBI was also brought up here, and I suspect will become Labour policy at some point in the nearish future.
Housing was brought up, and it is acknowledged as a big part of any future Labour government.
Buzz from the Beehive Much more media attention is being paid to something Winston Peters said about former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr than to a speech he delivered to the New Zealand China Council. One word is missing from the speech: AUKUS. But AUKUS loomed large in his considerations ...
Is the economy in another long stagnation? If so, why?This is about the time that the Treasury will be locking up its economic forecasts to be published in the 2024 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) on budget day, 30 May. I am not privy to what they will be ...
The annual list of who's been bribing our politicians is out, and journalists will no doubt be poring over it to find the juiciest and dirtiest bribes. The government's fast-track invite list is likely to be a particular focus, and we already know of one company on the list which ...
In the weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Southern Israel I wrote about the possible 2nd, 3rd and even 4th order effects of the conflict. These included new fronts being opened in the West Bank (with Hamas), Golan … Continue reading → ...
Peter Dunne writes – It is one of the oldest truisms that there is never a good time for MPs to get a pay rise. This week’s announcement of pay raises of around 2.8% backdated to last October could hardly have come at a worse time, with the ...
David Farrar writes – Newshub reports: Newshub can reveal a fresh allegation of intimidation against Green MP Julie-Anne Genter. Genter is subject to a disciplinary process for aggressively waving a book in the face of National Minister Matt Doocey in the House – but it’s not the first time ...
The Treasury has published a paper today on the global productivity slowdown and how it is playing out in New Zealand: The productivity slowdown: implications for the Treasury’s forecasts and projections. The Treasury Paper examines recent trends in productivity and the potential drivers of the slowdown. Productivity for the whole economy ...
Winston Peters’ comments about former Australian foreign minister look set to be an ongoing headache for both him and Luxon. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The podcast above of the weekly ‘hoon’ webinar for subscribers features co-hosts and , along with regular guests on Gaza and ...
These puppet strings don't pull themselvesYou're thinking thoughts from someone elseHow much time do you think you have?Are you prepared for what comes next?The debating chamber can be a trying place for an opposition MP. What with the person in charge, the speaker, typically being an MP from the governing ...
The land around Lyme Regis, where Meryl Streep once stood, in a hood, on the Cobb, is falling into the sea.MerylThe land around Lyme Regis, around the Cobb that made it rich, has always been falling slowly but surely into the sea. Read more ...
Buzz from the Beehive Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters was bound to win headlines when he set out his thinking about AUKUS in his speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. The headlines became bigger when – during an interview on RNZ’s Morning Report today – he criticised ...
The Post reports on how the government is refusing to release its advice on its corrupt Muldoonist fast-track law, instead using the "soon to be publicly available" refusal ground to hide it until after select committee submissions on the bill have closed. Fast-track Minister Chris Bishop's excuse? “It's not ...
As pressure on it grows, the livestock industry’s approach to the transition to Net Zero is increasingly being compared to that of fossil fuel interests. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / Getty ImagesTL;DR: Here’s the top five news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above ...
The New Zealand Herald reports – Stats NZ has offered a voluntary redundancy scheme to all of its workers as a way to give staff some control over their “future” amidst widespread job losses in the public sector. In an update to staff this morning, seen by the Herald, Statistics New Zealand ...
On Werewolf/Scoop, I usually do two long form political columns a week. From now on, there will be an extra column each week about music and movies. But first, some late-breaking political events:The rise in unemployment numbers for the March quarter was bigger than expected – and especially sharp ...
David Farrar writes – The Herald reports: TVNZ says it is dealing with about 50 formal complaints over its coverage of the latest 1News-Verian political poll, with some viewers – as well as the Prime Minister and a former senior Labour MP – critical of the tone of the 6pm report. ...
Muriel Newman writes – When Meridian Energy was seeking resource consents for a West Coast hydro dam proposal in 2010, local Maori “strenuously” objected, claiming their mana was inextricably linked to ‘their’ river and could be damaged. After receiving a financial payment from the company, however, the Ngai Tahu ...
Alwyn Poole writes – “An SEP,’ he said, ‘is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a ...
Our trust in our political institutions is fast eroding, according to a Maxim Institute discussion paper, Shaky Foundations: Why our democracy needs trust. The paper – released today – raises concerns about declining trust in New Zealand’s political institutions and democratic processes, and the role that the overuse of Parliamentary urgency ...
This article was prepared for publication yesterday. More ministerial announcements have been posted on the government’s official website since it was written. We will report on these later today …. Buzz from the BeehiveThere we were, thinking the environment is in trouble, when along came Jones. Shane Jones. ...
New Zealand now has the fourth most depressed construction sector in the world behind China, Qatar and Hong Kong. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 8:46am on Thursday, May 2:The Lead: ...
Hi,I am just going to state something very obvious: American police are fucking crazy.That was a photo gracing the New York Times this morning, showing New York City police “entering Columbia University last night after receiving a request from the school.”Apparently in America, protesting the deaths of tens of thousands ...
Winston Peters’ much anticipated foreign policy speech last night was a work of two halves. Much of it was a standard “boilerplate” Foreign Ministry overview of the state of the world. There was some hardening up of rhetoric with talk of “benign” becoming “malign” and old truths giving way to ...
Graham Adams assesses the fallout of the Cass Review — The press release last Thursday from the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls didn’t make the mainstream news in New Zealand but it really should have. The startling title of Reem Alsalem’s statement — “Implementation of ‘Cass ...
This open-for-business, under-new-management cliché-pockmarked government of Christopher Luxon is not the thing of beauty he imagines it to be. It is not the powerful expression of the will of the people that he asserts it to be. It is not a soaring eagle, it is a malodorous vulture. This newest poll should make ...
The latest labour market statistics, showing a rise in unemployment. There are now 134,000 unemployed - 14,000 more than when the National government took office. Which is I guess what happens when the Reserve Bank causes a recession in an effort to Keep Wages Low. The previous government saw a ...
Three opinion polls have been released in the last two days, all showing that the new government is failing to hold their popular support. The usual honeymoon experienced during the first year of a first term government is entirely absent. The political mood is still gloomy and discontented, mainly due ...
National's Finance Minister once met a poor person.A scornful interview with National's finance guru who knows next to nothing about economics or people.There might have been something a bit familiar if that was the headline I’d gone with today. It would of course have been in tribute to the article ...
Rob MacCulloch writes – Throughout the pandemic, the new Vice-Chancellor-of-Otago-University-on-$629,000 per annum-Can-you-believe-it-and-Former-Finance-Minister Grant Robertson repeated the mantra over and over that he saved “lives and livelihoods”.As we update how this claim is faring over the course of time, the facts are increasingly speaking differently. NZ ...
Chris Trotter writes – IT’S A COMMONPLACE of political speeches, especially those delivered in acknowledgement of electoral victory: “We’ll govern for all New Zealanders.” On the face of it, the pledge is a strange one. Why would any political leader govern in ways that advantaged the huge ...
Bryce Edwards writes – The list of former National Party Ministers being given plum and important roles got longer this week with the appointment of former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett as the chair of Pharmac. The Christopher Luxon-led Government has now made key appointments to Bill ...
TL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy at 10:06am on Wednesday, May 1:The Lead: Business confidence fell across the board in April, falling in some areas to levels last seen during the lockdowns because of a collapse in ...
Over the past 36 hours, Christopher Luxon has been dong his best to portray the centre-right’s plummeting poll numbers as a mark of virtue. Allegedly, the negative verdicts are the result of hard economic times, and of a government bravely set out on a perilous rescue mission from which not ...
Auckland Transport have started rolling out new HOP card readers around the network and over the next three months, all of them on buses, at train stations and ferry wharves will be replaced. The change itself is not that remarkable, with the new readers looking similar to what is already ...
Completed reads for April: The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling Carnival of Saints, by George Herman The Snow Spider, by Jenny Nimmo Emlyn’s Moon, by Jenny Nimmo The Chestnut Soldier, by Jenny Nimmo Death Comes As the End, by Agatha Christie Lord of the Flies, by ...
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 ...
Have a story to share about St Paul’s, but today just picturesPopular novels written at this desk by a young man who managed to bootstrap himself out of father’s imprisonment and his own young life in a workhouse Read more ...
The list of former National Party Ministers being given plum and important roles got longer this week with the appointment of former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett as the chair of Pharmac. The Christopher Luxon-led Government has now made key appointments to Bill English, Simon Bridges, Steven Joyce, Roger Sowry, ...
Newsroom has a story today about National's (fortunately failed) effort to disestablish the newly-created Inspector-General of Defence. The creation of this agency was the key recommendation of the Inquiry into Operation Burnham, and a vital means of restoring credibility and social licence to an agency which had been caught lying ...
Holding On To The Present:The moment a political movement arises that attacks the whole idea of social progress, and announces its intention to wind back the hands of History’s clock, then democracy, along with its unwritten rules, is in mortal danger.IT’S A COMMONPLACE of political speeches, especially those delivered in ...
Stuck In The Middle With You:As Christopher Luxon feels the hot breath of Act’s and NZ First’s extremists on the back of his neck and, as he reckons with the damage their policies are already inflicting upon a country he’s described as “fragile”, is there not some merit in reaching out ...
The unpopular coalition government is currently rushing to repeal section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. The clause is Oranga Tamariki's Treaty clause, and was inserted after its systematic stealing of Māori children became a public scandal and resulted in physical resistance to further abductions. The clause created clear obligations ...
Buzz from the Beehive The government’s official website – which Point of Order monitors daily – not for the first time has nothing much to say today about political happenings that are grabbing media headlines. It makes no mention of the latest 1News-Verian poll, for example. This shows National down ...
It Takes A Train To Cry:Surely, there is nothing lonelier in all this world than the long wail of a distant steam locomotive on a cold Winter’s night.AS A CHILD, I would lie awake in my grandfather’s house and listen to the traffic. The big wooden house was only a ...
Packing A Punch: The election of the present government, including in its ranks politicians dedicated to reasserting the rights of the legislature in shaping and determining the future of Māori and Pakeha in New Zealand, should have alerted the judiciary – including its anomalous appendage, the Waitangi Tribunal – that its ...
Dead Woman Walking: New Zealand’s media industry had been moving steadily towards disaster for all the years Melissa Lee had been National’s media and communications policy spokesperson, and yet, when the crisis finally broke, on her watch, she had nothing intelligent to offer. Christopher Luxon is a patient man - but he’s not ...
Chris Trotter writes – New Zealand politics is remarkably easy-going: dangerously so, one might even say. With the notable exception of John Key’s flat ruling-out of the NZ First Party in 2008, all parties capable of clearing MMP’s five-percent threshold, or winning one or more electorate seats, tend ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is ...
Luxon will no doubt put a brave face on it, but there is no escaping the pressure this latest poll will put on him and the government. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political ...
This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler In the wake of any unusual weather event, someone inevitably asks, “Did climate change cause this?” In the most literal sense, that answer is almost always no. Climate change is never the sole cause of hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, or ...
Something odd happened yesterday, and I’d love to know if there’s more to it. If there was something which preempted what happened, or if it was simply a throwaway line in response to a journalist.Yesterday David Seymour was asked at a press conference what the process would be if the ...
Hi,From time to time, I want to bring Webworm into the real world. We did it last year with the Jurassic Park event in New Zealand — which was a lot of fun!And so on Saturday May 11th, in Los Angeles, I am hosting a lil’ Webworm pop-up! I’ve been ...
Education Minister Erica Standford yesterday unveiled a fundamental reform of the way our school pupils are taught. She would not exactly say so, but she is all but dismantling the so-called “inquiry” “feel good” method of teaching, which has ruled in our classrooms since a major review of the New ...
Exactly where are we seriously going with this government and its policies? That is, apart from following what may as well be a Truss-Lite approach on the purported economic “plan“, and Victorian-era regression when it comes to social policy.Oh it’ll work this time of course, we’re basically assured, “the ...
Hey Uncle Dave, When the Poms joined the EEC, I wasn't one of those defeatists who said, Well, that’s it for the dairy job. And I was right, eh? The Chinese can’t get enough of our milk powder and eventually, the Poms came to their senses and backed up the ute ...
Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is higher than for any other mayor ...
Buzz from the Beehive Pharmac has been given a financial transfusion and a new chair to oversee its spending in the pharmaceutical business. Associate Health Minister David Seymour described the funding for Pharmac as “its largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff”. ...
Bryce Edwards writes – 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 ...
TL;DR: Here’s my top 10 ‘pick ‘n’ mix of links to news, analysis and opinion articles as of 10:10am on Monday, April 29:Scoop: The children's ward at Rotorua Hospital will be missing a third of its beds as winter hits because Te Whatu Ora halted an upgrade partway through to ...
span class=”dropcap”>As hideous as David Seymour can be, it is worth keeping in mind occasionally that there are even worse political figures (and regimes) out there. Iran for instance, is about to execute the country’s leading hip hop musician Toomaj Salehi, for writing and performing raps that “corrupt” the nation’s ...
Yesterday marked 10 years since the first electric train carried passengers in Auckland so it’s a good time to look back at it and the impact it has had. A brief history The first proposals for rail electrification in Auckland came in the 1920’s alongside the plans for earlier ...
Right now, in Aotearoa-NZ, our ‘animal spirits’ are darkening towards a winter of discontent, thanks at least partly to a chorus of negative comments and actions from the Government Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on ...
You make people evil to punish the paststuck inside a sequel with a rotating castThe following photos haven’t been generated with AI, or modified in any way. They are flesh and blood, human beings. On the left is Galatea Young, a young mum, and her daughter Fiadh who has Angelman ...
April has been a quiet month at A Phuulish Fellow. I have had an exceptionally good reading month, and a decently productive writing month – for original fiction, anyway – but not much has caught my eye that suggested a blog article. It has been vaguely frustrating, to be honest. ...
A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 21, 2024 thru Sat, April 27, 2024. Story of the week Anthropogenic climate change may be the ultimate shaggy dog story— but with a twist, because here ...
Hi,I spent about a year on Webworm reporting on an abusive megachurch called Arise, and it made me want to stab my eyes out with a fork.I don’t regret that reporting in 2022 and 2023 — I am proud of it — but it made me angry.Over three main stories ...
The new Victoria University Vice-Chancellor decided to have a forum at the university about free speech and academic freedom as it is obviously a topical issue, and the Government is looking at legislating some carrots or sticks for universities to uphold their obligations under the Education and Training Act. They ...
Do you remember when Melania Trump got caught out using a speech that sounded awfully like one Michelle Obama had given? Uncannily so.Well it turns out that Abraham Lincoln is to Winston Peters as Michelle was to Melania. With the ANZAC speech Uncle Winston gave at Gallipoli having much in ...
The Government is again adding to New Zealand’s growing unemployment, this time cutting jobs at the agencies responsible for urban development and growing much needed housing stock. ...
With Minister Karen Chhour indicating in the House today that she either doesn’t know or care about the frontline cuts she’s making to Oranga Tamariki, we risk seeing more and more of our children falling through the cracks. ...
The Labour Party is saddened to learn of the death of Sir Robert Martin, a globally renowned disability advocate who led the way for disability rights both in New Zealand and internationally. ...
Labour is calling for the Government to urgently rethink its coalition commitment to restart live animal exports, Labour animal welfare spokesperson Rachel Boyack said. ...
Today’s Financial Stability Report has once again highlighted that poverty and deep inequality are political choices - and this Government is choosing to make them worse. ...
The Green Party is calling on the Government to do more for our households in most need as unemployment rises and the cost of living crisis endures. ...
Unemployment is on the rise and it’s only going to get worse under this Government, Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds said. Stats NZ figures show the unemployment rate grew to 4.3 percent in the March quarter from 4 percent in the December quarter. “This is the second rise in unemployment ...
The New Zealand Labour Party welcomes the entering into force of the European Union and New Zealand free trade agreement. This agreement opens the door for a huge increase in trade opportunities with a market of 450 million people who are high value discerning consumers of New Zealand goods and ...
The National-led Government continues its fiscal jiggery pokery with its Pharmac announcement today, Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall says. “The government has increased Pharmac funding but conceded it will only make minimal increases in access to medicine”, said Ayesha Verrall “This is far from the bold promises made to fund ...
This afternoon’s interim Waitangi Tribunal report must be taken seriously as it affects our most vulnerable children, Labour children’s spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime. ...
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 Minister Responsible for RMA Reform, Chris Bishop today released his decision on four recommendations referred to him by the Western Bay of Plenty District Council, opening the door to housing growth in the area. The Council’s Plan Change 92 allows more homes to be built in existing and new ...
Thank you, John McKinnon and the New Zealand China Council for the invitation to speak to you today. Thank you too, all members of the China Council. Your effort has played an essential role in helping to build, shape, and grow a balanced and resilient relationship between our two ...
The Government is modernising insurance law to better protect Kiwis and provide security in the event of a disaster, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly announced today. “These reforms are long overdue. New Zealand’s insurance law is complicated and dated, some of which is more than 100 years old. ...
The coalition Government is refreshing its approach to supporting pay equity claims as time-limited funding for the Pay Equity Taskforce comes to an end, Public Service Minister Nicola Willis says. “Three years ago, the then-government introduced changes to the Equal Pay Act to support pay equity bargaining. The changes were ...
Structured literacy will change the way New Zealand children learn to read - improving achievement and setting students up for success, Education Minister Erica Stanford says. “Being able to read and write is a fundamental life skill that too many young people are missing out on. Recent data shows that ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay says Canada’s refusal to comply in full with a CPTPP trade dispute ruling in our favour over dairy trade is cynical and New Zealand has no intention of backing down. Mr McClay said he has asked for urgent legal advice in respect of our ‘next move’ ...
The rights of our children and young people will be enhanced by changes the coalition Government will make to strengthen oversight of the Oranga Tamariki system, including restoring a single Children’s Commissioner. “The Government is committed to delivering better public services that care for our most at-risk young people and ...
The Government is making it easier for minor changes to be made to a building consent so building a home is easier and more affordable, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “The coalition Government is focused on making it easier and cheaper to build homes so we can ...
New Zealand lost a true legend when internationally renowned disability advocate Sir Robert Martin (KNZM) passed away at his home in Whanganui last night, Disabilities Issues Minister Louise Upston says. “Our Government’s thoughts are with his wife Lynda, family and community, those he has worked with, the disability community in ...
Good evening – Before discussing the challenges and opportunities facing New Zealand’s foreign policy, we’d like to first acknowledge the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. You have contributed to debates about New Zealand foreign policy over a long period of time, and we thank you for hosting us. ...
From today, passengers travelling internationally from Auckland Airport will be able to keep laptops and liquids in their carry-on bags for security screening thanks to new technology, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Creating a more efficient and seamless travel experience is important for holidaymakers and businesses, enabling faster movement through ...
People with an interest in the health of Northland’s marine ecosystems are invited to a public meeting to discuss how to deal with kina barrens, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones will lead the discussion, which will take place on Friday, 10 May, at Awanui Hotel in ...
Kiwi exporters are $100 million better off today with the NZ EU FTA entering into force says Trade Minister Todd McClay. “This is all part of our plan to grow the economy. New Zealand's prosperity depends on international trade, making up 60 per cent of the country’s total economic activity. ...
There are heartening signs that the extractive sector is once again becoming an attractive prospect for investors and a source of economic prosperity for New Zealand, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. “The beginnings of a resurgence in extractive industries are apparent in media reports of the sector in the past ...
The return of the historic Ō-Rākau battle site to the descendants of those who fought there moved one step closer today with the first reading of Te Pire mō Ō-Rākau, Te Pae o Maumahara / The Ō-Rākau Remembrance Bill. The Bill will entrust the 9.7-hectare battle site, five kilometres west ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has announced 25 new high-speed EV charging hubs along key routes between major urban centres and outlined the Government’s plan to supercharge New Zealand’s EV infrastructure. The hubs will each have several chargers and be capable of charging at least four – and up to 10 ...
The coalition Government will not proceed with the previous Government’s plans to regulate residential property managers, Housing Minister Chris Bishop says. “I have written to the Chairperson of the Social Services and Community Committee to inform him that the Government does not intend to support the Residential Property Managers Bill ...
The Government has announced an independent review into the disability support system funded by the Ministry of Disabled People – Whaikaha. Disability Issues Minister Louise Upston says the review will look at what can be done to strengthen the long-term sustainability of Disability Support Services to provide disabled people and ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has attended the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva and outlined the Government’s plan to restore law and order. “Speaking to the United Nations Human Rights Council provided us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while responding to issues and ...
The Government and Rotorua Lakes Council are committed to working closely together to end the use of contracted emergency housing motels in Rotorua. Associate Minister of Housing (Social Housing) Tama Potaka says the Government remains committed to ending the long-term use of contracted emergency housing motels in Rotorua by the ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay heads overseas today for high-level trade talks in the Gulf region, and a key OECD meeting in Paris. Mr McClay will travel to Riyadh to meet with counterparts from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). “New Zealand’s goods and services exports to the Gulf region ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford has outlined six education priorities to deliver a world-leading education system that sets Kiwi kids up for future success. “I’m putting ambition, achievement and outcomes at the heart of our education system. I want every child to be inspired and engaged in their learning so they ...
The new NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) App is a secure ‘one stop shop’ to provide the services drivers need, Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Digitising Government Minister Judith Collins say. “The NZTA App will enable an easier way for Kiwis to pay for Vehicle Registration and Road User Charges (RUC). ...
Whānau with tamariki growing up in emergency housing motels will be prioritised for social housing starting this week, says Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka. “Giving these whānau a better opportunity to build healthy stable lives for themselves and future generations is an essential part of the Government’s goal of reducing ...
Racing Minister Winston Peters has paid tribute to an icon of the industry with the recent passing of Dave O’Sullivan (OBE). “Our sympathies are with the O’Sullivan family with the sad news of Dave O’Sullivan’s recent passing,” Mr Peters says. “His contribution to racing, initially as a jockey and then ...
Assalaamu alaikum, greetings to you all. Eid Mubarak, everyone! I want to extend my warmest wishes to you and everyone celebrating this joyous occasion. It is a pleasure to be here. I have enjoyed Eid celebrations at Parliament before, but this is my first time joining you as the Minister ...
Associate Health Minister David Seymour has announced Pharmac’s largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff. “Access to medicines is a crucial part of many Kiwis’ lives. We’ve committed to a budget allocation of $1.774 billion over four years so Kiwis are ...
Hon Paula Bennett has been appointed as member and chair of the Pharmac board, Associate Health Minister David Seymour announced today. "Pharmac is a critical part of New Zealand's health system and plays a significant role in ensuring that Kiwis have the best possible access to medicines,” says Mr Seymour. ...
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 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicola Henry, Professor & Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Social and Global Studies Centre, RMIT University Shutterstock Following an emergency meeting of the National Cabinet this week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a raft of measures to tackle the problem ...
Analysis - A poll showing the opposition is more popular than the government raises questions, politicians go through their 'trial by pay rise' and a Green MP loses her cool in the debating chamber. ...
The entire stretch of Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast will be subject to a joint customary marine title for two hapū, and extending up to four miles out to sea. A High Court judge has found the two groups, who during the case settled a dispute over boundaries for ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Hall, Lecturer, Media & Cultural Studies, Edith Cowan University A longstanding feud between TikTok and Universal Music Group seems to have finally reached an end, with both parties signing a deal that will see Universal-backed music returned to the social media ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Siobhan O’Dean, Postdoctoral Research Associate, The Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney After several highly publicised alleged murders of women in Australia, the Albanese government this week pledged more than A$925 million over five years ...
Political parties have now fully disclosed the donations they received last year - with National getting more than double the cash of any other party. ...
A Pacific regionalism expert has called out New Zealand's Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters for withholding information from the public on AUKUS military pact. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard de Grijs, Professor of Astrophysics, Macquarie University Bruno Scramgnon/Pexels All systems are “go” for tonight’s launch of China’s next step in a carefully planned lunar exploration program. Placed on top of a powerful Long March 5 rocket, the Chang’e 6 ...
National returned a massive donation the day after a Newsroom story linked the donors to a property being investigated for operating unlawfully as a migrant workers’ hostel. The party’s 2023 donation filings, released on Friday, show it returned a $200,000 donation from Buen Holdings on August 23. That was the ...
Pacific Media Watch New Zealand has slumped to an unprecedented 19th place in the annual Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index survey released today on World Press Freedom Day — May 3. This was a drop of six places from 13th last year when it slipped out of its ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Black, Political Historian and Administrator Officer, Australian Historical Association, Australian National University Australia has had its fair share of public record-keeping controversies in recent years. Some have been mere farce, as in the case of two formerly government-owned filing cabinets (containing ...
Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light (HWPL), a United Nations-affiliated organization dedicated to fostering peace through civilian-led initiatives, has issued a statement in response to the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran. ...
A poem by Tessa Keenan, from AUP New Poets 10. Mātou These days we are a photograph; one of a farm strewn with cows that used to be bright harakeke or swamp. The kids point at it and say the sun sits behind a smudge (left by someone at Christmas); ...
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 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber, $25)The masterful Irish writer ...
Marriage and civil union statistics record the number of marriages and civil unions registered in New Zealand each year, and divorce statistics record the number of divorces granted in New Zealand each year. Key facts Marriages and civil unions In ...
Marriage and civil union statistics record the number of marriages and civil unions registered in New Zealand each year, and divorce statistics record the number of divorces granted in New Zealand each year. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lennon Y.C. Chang, Associate Professor of Cyber Risk and Policy, Deakin University Taiwan stands out as a beacon of democracy, innovation and resilience in an increasingly autocratic region. But this is under growing threat. In recent years, China has used a variety ...
In this excerpt from her new memoir, Dame Susan Devoy remembers her turn as star contestant on the 2022 season of Celebrity Treasure Island. The most anxious time of every day was pre-elimination, when you knew this could be your final day on the show. I felt such contradictory emotions, ...
A week that began in triumph ended in an all-too-familiar disaster for the Green Party. Duncan Greive asks if there’s something in the mission that breaks its best and brightest. A long, strange week for the Green party began with a fantastic poll result. On one level this is hardly ...
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist Vanuatu’s former prime minister and opposition MP Ishmael Kalsakau has stepped down — just two days after he confirmed he was the rightful opposition leader. Kalsakau, MP for Port Vila, confirmed to ABC’s Pacific Beat, and the Vanuatu Daily Post on Thursday that he ...
What’s to blame for the coalition’s choppy start? Six months in, and the mojo meter is in the doldrums. A new poll would put National out of power and sees its leader, Chris Luxon, sliding in popularity. How much is it about policy, how much coalition management and a perception ...
The striking report goes far beyond the proposed repeal of the Oranga Tamariki Act’s Treaty of Waitangi provision, and its impact should be felt far beyond the unique circumstances of the claim it addresses. Earlier this week, the Waitangi Tribunal released an interim report on the government’s proposed repeal of ...
The world has been experiencing a productivity slowdown, from which New Zealand has not been exempt. COVID-19 temporarily boosted labour productivity, but more recently, productivity has retreated. The overall trend since 2007 has been one of slow productivity ...
What’s more wasteful than spending $315k on syrup and machine maintenance? Trying to drum up a controversy about it.Cast your mind back to the pre-pandemic idylls of 2019. A “rat” was a disgusting rodent and not a self-administered plague test; the sixth Labour government was in power; and the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Professor of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Monash University Ken stocker/Shutterstock In the wake of numerous killings of women allegedly by men’s violence in 2024, thousands of Australians have joined rallies across the country to demand action ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Henry Cutler, Professor and Director, Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy, Macquarie University Oleg Ivanov IL/Shutterstock Waiting times for public hospital elective surgery have been in the news ahead of this year’s federal budget. That’s the type of non-emergency surgery ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Konstantine Panegyres, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne Amna Artist/Shutterstock One of the earliest descriptions of someone with cancer comes from the fourth century BC. Satyrus, tyrant of the city of Heracleia on the Black Sea, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Rose, Professor of Sustainable Future Transport, University of Sydney LanaElcova/Shutterstock Electric vehicles are often seen as the panacea to cutting emissions – and air pollution – from transport. Is this view correct? Yes – but only once uptake accelerates. Despite the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Giselle Natassia Woodley, Researcher and Phd Candidate, Edith Cowan University There is widespread agreement Australia needs to do better when it comes to gender-based violence. Anger and frustration at the numbers of women being killed saw national rallies over the weekend and ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Graham, Lecturer in Economics, University of Sydney Mark and Anna Photography/Shutterstock As home ownership moves further out of reach for many Australians, “rentvesting” is being touted as a lifesaver. Rentvesting is the practice of renting one property to live ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sukhmani Khorana, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW Sydney Netflix The new season of Heartbreak High is garnering mixed reviews. Critics are writing about the racy story lines, comparing it to other coming-of-age series about teenage relationships and ...
Bob Carr intends to launch legal action against Winston Peters and Julie Anne Genter is facing a second allegation of bullying. Both sucked the air out of an announcement on education, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in ...
In 1995, Sally Clark went out on her own in a bold and unorthodox attempt to join an illustrious group of equestrian riders conquering the world. In the days of glovebox road maps, brick cell phones, and the hit song How Bizarre, Clark refused to follow Sir Mark Todd, Blyth ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Beaglehole, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago niphon/Getty Images The number of people accessing medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in Aotearoa New Zealand increased significantly between 2006 and 2022. But the disorder is still under-diagnosed and ...
To celebrate the start of New Zealand music month, we look back at the best local tuneage that managed to weasel its way into Hollywood productions. There’s nothing quite like the thrilling zap of recognition when New Zealand weasels its way into a glamorous Hollywood production. Crack open a Tui ...
People trust other people more than institutions. So how can the media gain that trust through journalists without losing what’s important about the institution? Anna Rawhiti-Connell reflects on two years of curating the news for The Bulletin.Amonth ago, armed cops descended on my neighbourhood as calls to “lock your ...
Opinion: PFAS – per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances – are a class of thousands of man-made chemicals used widely in everyday consumer items such as textiles, packaging, and cookware, popular for their water, grease and stain-repellent properties. However, the very properties that make PFAS so attractive to manufacturers are also what ...
NONFICTION 1 The Last Secret Agent by Pippa Latour & Jude Dobson (Allen & Unwin, $37.99)’ This is the hottest book in New Zealand, number one with a bullet in its first week, selling more than any overseas title, and demand is so huge that it’s already been reprinted. A ...
Loading…(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){var ql=document.querySelectorAll('A,DIV,A[data-quiz],DIV[data-quiz]'); if(ql){if(ql.length){for(var k=0;k<ql.length;k++){ql[k].id='quiz-embed-'+k;ql[k].href="javascript:var i=document.getElementById('quiz-embed-"+k+"');try{qz.startQuiz(i)}catch(e){i.start=1;i.style.cursor='wait';i.style.opacity='0.5'};void(0);"}}};i['QP']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)})(window,document,'script','https://take.quiz-maker.com/3012/CDN/quiz-embed-v1.js','qp'); Got a good quiz question?Send Newsroom your questions. The post Newsroom daily quiz, Friday 3 May appeared first on Newsroom. ...
A warning – suicide is discussed in this podcast New Zealand’s own long-running soap Shortland Street doesn’t hesitate to kill off its much-loved characters. But would TVNZ dare to kill off our favourite soap? That’s the fear as times get tough in television – even though it’s been pointed out ...
Essay: If the Crown harms children, how do you hold it accountable? Analysis by Aaron Smale in light of the Waitangi Tribunal court decision. The post The Crown versus Māori Children appeared first on Newsroom. ...
Asia Pacific Report A West Papuan resistance leader has condemned the United Nations role in allowing Indonesia to “integrate” the Melanesian Pacific region in what is claimed to be an “egregious act of inhumanity” on 1 May 1963. In an open letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Organisasi Papua Merdeka-OPM ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra A key part of the Albanese government’s political strategy is to fill the news cycle with its presence and messaging. Ministers are deployed to the maximum, even when they’ve little to say. This week ...
Recent extreme weather events showed the importance of a well-functioning insurance system, says Commerce and Consumer Affairs minister Andrew Bayly. ...
By Jo Moir, RNZ News political editor, and Craig McCulloch, deputy political editor New Zealand’s Labour Party is demanding Winston Peters be stood down as Foreign Minister for opening up the government to legal action over his “totally unacceptable” attack on a prominent AUKUS critic. In an interview on RNZ’s ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christian Brakenridge, Postdoctoral research fellow at Swinburne University, Centre for Urban Transitions, Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute The Conversation, Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock People have a pretty intuitive sense of what is healthy – standing is better than sitting, exercise is great for overall ...
The Wellington-based Reserve Force soldier is now almost three years into his New Zealand Army career with 5th/7th Battalion, Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment. ...
"The Government needs to release the review immediately as this reckless approach to change risks disjointed decision making and creates more distress and uncertainty for staff," Fitzsimons said. ...
The Irish have voted for gay marriage in a referendum, good news. But in a week which featured a lot of nonsense about gender assignment surgery again wedging a bunch of hapless white male MP Labour twits what are the lessons for the left in NZ from the Irish referendum?
Anyone who favours my posts by generously reading them will know I’ve lately been much taken by the ideas of Pablo Iglesias and Spain’s Podemos. One of the things that Podemos advocate is the left forming broad alliances for specific issues, looking not to the parliament for top down leadership, but rather by-passing the political & media elites to force change. This piece in the Irish Times –
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/fintan-o-toole-ireland-has-left-tolerance-far-behind-1.2223838 –
notes that “…It looks like a victory for articulacy. This was indeed a superb civic campaign…” A civic campaign that gave the political elites in Ireland absolutely no choice. Compare and contrast a confused, ideologically exhausted Labour party bickering over gender re-assignment surgery with the sort of populism of Podemos, and the sort of mechanisms (referendums, civic campaigns) in Ireland and the sort of “new left” we need for the 21st century here in NZ is becoming clearer.
Podemos are interesting in that they’ve used Loomio in such a massively constructive way. They’re a true grass roots political movement.
It’s what we need here in NZ. Where the representatives are representing the choices of the people and not their own desires and beliefs as we have now.
maybe the standardistas should set up a loomio and run through various scenarios/decisions based on current posts. See what happens when we have to actually work together 😈
heh thats a good idea…
“but rather by-passing the political & media elites to force change”
Completely with you on that one.
Can you recommend some reading on Podemos for someone who’s unfamiliar with it? Something easily accessible and not too dense to start with would be good.
http://left-flank.org/2015/01/02/understanding-podemos-33-commonsense-policies/
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2014/06/populists-against-elites.html
“…Third, in my opinion the nature of the breakthroughs being achieved is largely a populist one. That is to say, it is when new formations manage to puncture the bubble of bipartisan niceties, with slogans that are both resonant and pit ‘the people’ against a ‘power bloc’ that is insulated from popular opinion, that they succeed…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eK7yvmdSRg
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/31/podemos-revolution-radical-academics-changed-european-politics
then the heavy lifting…
http://www.amazon.com/Hegemony-Socialist-Strategy-Democratic-Politics/dp/1781681546/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1432428627&sr=8-1&keywords=Hegemony+and+Socialist+Strategy
And of course Gramsci.
Also read up on the “Pink Tide” in South America, where non-traditional alliances between the left and local capitalists have rolled back globalised capitalism. In New Zealand, such an alliance might be the left championing local import substitution whilst attacking foreign owned banks. That would offer opportunities to split right wing business orgainsations like Business New Zealand. for example.
cheers Sanctuary.
If you (or anyone) look into Ireland’s distant past, and where its culture has come from and the general default “mindset” of the Gaelic people, the way Gay marriage has been dealt with comes as no surprise.
Without wanting to present the idea that the Irish are all a bunch of happy dancing leprechauns, unlike NZ, Ireland’s cultural heritage is one of the most advanced and… hmmm… “liberal” or “progressive” in the Western world.
Where NZders traditionally seek advantage between peers, and maintain inequality between gender and sex, foreigners and locals, and enforcement of law comes from the State – as per their English/Monarchist roots – Ireland traditionally seeks equality and community, and enforcement of law is the decision of the family/clan – as per their Clan roots.
In very loose terms, of course, but that’s the point: despite having a modern tendency to shoot each other over which street one lives in, and despite early culture still being Patriarchial, they are more prone to integration of all-comers lifestyle requirements (women, gays, and foreigners) , rather than exclusion. The source of the cultural echo being Brehon Law.
Secret meeting in London to discuss making cash illegal, meaning total government control over taxation, spending….or more specifically what is able to be brought and sold.
http://armstrongeconomics.com/archives/30862
Cashless society is a natural evolution IMO all cash is is glorified shells and pebbles.
Probably inevitable b waghorn but this was suggested not as evolution but a sudden lurch. Imagine a cashless society where a Government agency could if they wanted, track a dissident and know exactly their activites. And no more coins for the buskers or charity collectors. Why even the very rich could be tracked and taxed so what a calamity that would be!
Yes this is all part of implementing authoritarian big brother control and surveillance over every aspect of our lives. True democratic dissent will be ending shortly thereafter.
A cashless society will be a great step on the way to the total removal of money. Interestingly enough, it’s happening anyway:
The question isn’t that we’re going cashless but if we’re going to continue to let the private banks control our money and our spending. I’m of the opinion that we need to stop that ASAP. When we go cashless it needs to be a government service, well backed up and with very strict rules about access.
Going cashless brings about a number of advantages:
1. It would be near impossible to lose money. Sure, you could drop your swipe card but that can easily be replaced and any money spent via it returned and the thief caught.
2. It would be impossible for someone to break in to the server and steal your money that way either. They can’t transfer it out to another country because any NZ$ outside of the server doesn’t exist and any internal transfer will be readily apparent even if the hackers managed to hide their own tracks.
3. Taxes. It would be incredibly easy for IRD to track where money is going and thus be able to determine who owes what taxes. In fact, they could do it in real time making a Financial Transaction Tax viable (At the moment implementation of an FTT would have many people moving to cash to prevent having to pay the tax).
4. Crime. Money laundering would be a thing of the past. It’s difficult to launder ill-gotten cash when it doesn’t exist. Other crime networks would also be easily detected. Essentially, crime that involves money would be gone along with the money laundering.
5. Inflation could be more accurately measured. Instead of having people go around shops recording the prices for a basket of goods all sales would be reported back with the system then automatically measuring inflation in near real time.
6. The recording of every sale would be great for informing people where they would get the best deal via a government funded website similar to PriceSpy.
As I say, it’s not a question of if we’re going cashless (We are already) but when, how and who controls it. IMO, we need to do so ASAP and we need to control it and not the private banks (although I’m sure that the private banks would love to rip us off some more for allowing us to use our own currency).
You’re kidding yourself, backing the movement towards a cashless society when that movement is completely engineered, supported, and structured from the ground up by the large capitalist institutions.
Yep, the only way NZ will get to be cashless is if it is forced to do so (and people will just invent new forms of non-traceable tokens for recording exchange anyway). That we have increasing tech for managing transactions is a different thing than removing cash as well.
I’m expecting increasing adverse events (weather, economy) that make a cashless society the far less resilient option.
Absolutely. Trying getting food from a supermarket when the EFTPOS network goes down. Usually a “cash only” check out opens up, but fuck all people have enough cash on hand to use it, so you get hundreds of hungry people milling around surrounded by groceries unable to transact any business.
As I said, we need to stop the large capitalist institutions from doing it and do it ourselves via our government. Private industry should not have control of our money and they will have if we don’t do something to stop them.
Yours are all fantasy conditions. I’m talking about what the actual conditions are, now, today. The fact is that moving to a cashless society, which is simply a part of moving to a fully online security and surveillance state, needs to be opposed on all fronts.
Moving to a cashless society needs to be done properly but it does need to be done.
That’s nothing more than a recital of faith from the Religion of Progress.
Nope. We need to keep track of our resources so that we can use them sustainably and for the benefit of NZ. Cash doesn’t allow us to do that in a meaningful way as it’s so easily untraceable.
Q. How do you come up with this sort of thinking Draco ?
Q. Do you actually believe in your own thoughts ?
That has got nothing to do with having a cashless society. Societies have managed to keep a close eye on their resource use for millenia without electronic money. Often on stone tablets and papyrus.
You are linking ideas as pre-requisites when they are not.
Not really. They’ve been able to keep track of transactions but not resource use in relation to what resources are actually available. This is a rather important development that we need to implement to help us becoming a sustainable society.
Whatever Draco. Ancient armies on the march could keep track of their provisions and their rate of use precisely but you imagine it your way.
/facepalm
How much oil is left in NZs wells?
How much food is produced daily on NZs farms?
How much water is there available to those farms to produce that food?
How much iron ore in our black sands?
How much titanium?
Now, how much is available sustainably (ie, in perpetuity) and how much is actually being used?
There’s a reason why I kept saying in relation to. One of the main reasons that Rome collapsed was over use of resources. They ran out of the resources needed to maintain the empire.
A cashless society would allow better booking keeping of the use of those resources. Of course, we still need to measure what resources we have available.
Yeah I’m over this Draco.
you see and all your points are why i like cash – the government issues legal tender, and it is untracable unless othewise marked.
as for the cashless world fantasy, and then you have a day or three without electricity and non of your eftpos machines works.
As for your bullet points: essentially all of you points listed we already have with our eftpos accounts.
* Any purchase you make is already tracked, just have a look at your bank statements. (anyone can have access to that, as identity thiefs and hackes have proven on more than one account)
* you are already getting ads in regards to your spending….Just look at the farmer emails that come courtesy of your farmer card, google, hack even the aa knows what you buy on your smart cad, every single one of your online purchases is recognised adn will reflect the next ads you see courtesy of google
* the government could/should prevent tax evasion, but considering that the polititians are at the front of tax evasion, maybe we should simply stop dreaming that they will do something to prevent it. 🙂
* loose your bank card and you risk loosing more then just a 20 $ bill.
* anyone who knows how to hack can steal more then just your money from your bank account….i think they made a few movies about that already.
* criminals don’t care what government do. They will find a replacement for cash, like cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, sexual favors, etc etc
* non criminals with no access to a bank card will also find a replacement of official cash such as cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, work for food/housing, sexual favours for food/housing or jobs, … etc etc (this was how life was handled in the direct year/s after the war ended in germany. my grandmother and my mother had a few stories of cleaning cigarette butts, rolling new zigs out of them and selling them for a few pennies or some potatoes)
No for the poor, cash is king, because it is untracable. Having a Food card that prohibits certain stores, or certain foods, or certain hygiene articles etc etc is not going to make your life easier.
those that are rich or very rich already have their cash less society, and their bank accounts in switzerland, singapore, hong kong and london and they still don’t pay any tax.
also note that the legalised gangsters and banksters in our society seem to transact their business electronically and cashlessly just fine. It’s their system after all.
Which is why I keep saying that we need to take it off them.
I don’t think a purely government operated banking system is a good idea. The current system has the advantage of creating a separation of roles between government regulators and the banks themselves.
The standard of regulation is not strong and should be increased but that is another issue.
Ireland seems to show what happens when politicians get too cozy with bankers. An entire political party lost its hegemony due to massive corruption which was fueling a property bubble there.
That one sentence shows that you failed to understand what I said. The most important being that we actually need to track resources used. That’s not an option, not if we want to become a sustainable society.
Shit happens and it really doesn’t happen that often. We mitigate against it but it’s still going to happen. As an example I’m pretty sure that a hell of a lot of Wellington couldn’t go shopping during the recent storm nor for some time after.
I’m pointing out that the private sector shouldn’t actually have that information because of the many point you make about advertising and tracking.
As I pointed out, there’s actually less risk because of the nature of electronic transactions. A simple call to the help desk to report it lost and it gets frozen.
There’s a risk of that but a) not as high as people believe and b) we need to risk a bit to become a better society.
And that would be why we still have police.
Doing that would have to be illegal and any government that tries should immediately go to jail for a minimum of 5 years. I did say strict rules about it.
That requires other tax and law changes but one point I should point out is that, with a cashless society, NZ$ would only exist in NZ on the government servers.
Not if you want a convertible currency
I never said that offshore people couldn’t have NZ$, only that they would exist only in the government servers.
jeeezus Draco that still means that the NZD would not be a convertible currency. It would be like the renmenbi from four or five years ago.
It will make it easy for banks to introduce negative interest rates.
Which they effectively do anyway, charging “fees” on small deposits.
That’s not the same thing as negative interest.
oh you mean like the difference between the “finance rate” and the “interest rate” in a consumer debt agreement?
The bank takes money from you for holding your deposit. Thats effectively a negative interest rate, albeit you are correct technically that it is not the same thing.
[The bank takes money from you for holding your deposit. Thats effectively a negative interest rate, albeit you are correct technically that it is not the same thing.]
Interest charged, whether positive or negative, is proportional to the amount deposited and varies with the duration. A bank charge is a fixed charge intended to cover the bank’s processing costs.
We could of course avoid both negative interest and and bank charges by only using cash. Which would be one reason the banking fraternity would be very much in favour of bringing about a cashless society.
to cover the bank’s processing costs? I know what you are saying but that is not true. Its straight out gouging of our economy to the tune of billions a year.
You can regard those charges and interest as separate or categorise them differently as much as you like but the bottom line is that they are taking money off you for holding your deposit and you can calculate that as an effective negative interest rate based on the principal that you have with them.
[You can regard those charges and interest as separate or categorise them differently as much as you like but the bottom line is that they are taking money off you for holding your deposit and you can calculate that as an effective negative interest rate based on the principal that you have with them.]
If we were to abolish (positive) interest I don’t see how the the banks could remain in business were it not for bank charges. Even state owned banks wouldn’t want to have to rely on subsidies from the taxpayer to meet their running costs.
not sure what world you are living in man, if you’ve been following the news, the banks with direct access to the Fed funds window get their money for free, then lend it to us charging us shitloads.
Lack of bank profitability is not an issue we are facing right now but i am sure that the banksters find your concern touching.
[not sure what world you are living in man, if you’ve been following the news, the banks with direct access to the Fed funds window get their money for free, then lend it to us charging us shitloads.]
Whatever. Bank charges and interest (positive or negative) are still two different things. So if the banks charged negative interest on deposits it would place an additional burden on depositors – additional, that is, to bank charges, which are generally accepted by customers as a reasonable charge for the services provided in operating cheque accounts, clearing of cheques, provision of plastic cards, etc. If the banks started charging negative interest I would want to be able to take my money out of the bank and operate mostly in cash. This however would not be possible in a cashless society.
1. the private sector allready has all the information, especially the banks.
2. loose your card in the morning, or have your bag stolen, and not know it for a few hours….your idendity is stolen, and your money is gone, and someone signed you up for a loan. Happens all the time, and been happening for years. Even when peeps call in to cancel a card, with wave and pay the chances are you are gonna loose more than a bit.
3. Identity theft, and subsequent financial abuse is a big issue. It does not just happens every now and then. This is what the FBI says about financial crime together with Identity theft.
4. In cash less world the cops will be payed off with Cigarettes, booze, sex, chocolate etc etc etc. They will be as corrupt as they are today.
5. Food cards have been already introduced by WINZ http://www.workandincome.govt.nz/individuals/payment-card/ and now, the approved businesses that one can use are not forcibly the cheapest businesses to use for someone on welfare. (but heck we must take away choice in the name of welfare fraud, lest they buy something that offends our, mine, yours and humpty dumpty sensibilitys. Cause we all know lazy, bludgers and the likes. – Still waiting for the government to resign.
6. And the government servers are immune to hacking, will never crash, always work and …..Novo pay?
1. Yes and they shouldn’t
2. and 3
3. Last time I lost a CC I called them up and they asked me what was my last transaction stopping it from that point. There hadn’t been any other transactions but I’m sure that they would have taken the correct action in correcting them if there had been including the return of any monies spent. Can’t do that with cash
4. Which means we need procedures that find and correct that corruption
5. yep and they need to be removed
6. Nope but then, neither is cash – stolen wallets have been around forever. And Novopoay wasn’t a government problem per se but a private sector problem brought about by the dismantling of government over the last 30 years
And the trouble with Winz payment cards is that people can’t use cash at the local market where the vegs are so much cheaper.
This is all designed to fuck with peoples lives and to remove control from people over even the smallest details of their day.
An authoritarian big brother security and surveillance centralised state is the absolute inversion of a democratic, liberal society.
Odd that there are a number who post here that seemingly can’t or won’t connect the dots between the total financial disaster foisted upon the planet and its inhabitants and the to move towards a ‘cashless’ society
Note: Cashless can’t and won’t work unless all nations implement it at the same time and if that ‘big bang’ was to come into effect the consequences would be nothing short of catastrophic
It is impossible to rid the world of cash money and impossible to police the creation of ‘unofficial’ forms of cash money which is why the exercise is propaganda which has been openly talked about by the establishments for an age now
In my opinion the forces behind this blindly believe such a system of control will lead to the utopian digitized slave state but are forcing the swing back towards localized production and community based society as human beings realize what is necessary for the their own survival
Yep. It’s hardly a conspiracy theory when they are basically laying it out in the open.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101266173
Cashless society: A huge threat to our freedom
1. It would be near impossible to lose money. Sure, you could drop your swipe card but that can easily be replaced and any money spent via it returned and the thief caught.
What you meant to say is it will be impossible to stop the bank or other institutions taking your ‘money’
2. It would be impossible for someone to break in to the server and steal your money that way either. They can’t transfer it out to another country because any NZ$ outside of the server doesn’t exist and any internal transfer will be readily apparent even if the hackers managed to hide their own tracks.
Your faith in technology is bizarre and your understandings primitive while simultaneously endorsing Capital controls which will be immediately implemented and you can wave good-bye to freedom of movement….for everyone else
3. Taxes. It would be incredibly easy for IRD to track where money is going and thus be able to determine who owes what taxes. In fact, they could do it in real time making a Financial Transaction Tax viable (At the moment implementation of an FTT would have many people moving to cash to prevent having to pay the tax).
Corporations already do business electronically so you have not thought this through at all
4. Crime. Money laundering would be a thing of the past. It’s difficult to launder ill-gotten cash when it doesn’t exist. Other crime networks would also be easily detected. Essentially, crime that involves money would be gone along with the money laundering.
Q. You understand the crime networks own and control the financial systems eh ?
The banks will continue laundering they will not even break stride while stopping your access anytime they like
5. Inflation could be more accurately measured. Instead of having people go around shops recording the prices for a basket of goods all sales would be reported back with the system then automatically measuring inflation in near real time.
You don’t understand what you’re talking about or what inflation is or the causes
6. The recording of every sale would be great for informing people where they would get the best deal via a government funded website similar to PriceSpy.
Yes we are aware of your big brother authoritarian preferences which you openly parade once again
It’s bizarre actually as current day point of sale systems already allow real time monitoring of economic activity and prices throughout the retail and service sectors.
The problem being that it’s the corporates with the information and not the people. And that information is then used against the people rather than supporting them.
The information is already there, its already being collected in real time, the infrastructure already exists to do all of that, further the government already has the capability to take all that information, sort it search it and store it into perpetuity
Seems to me the answer is already right there in front of our faces if you want to go down that road (to a turnkey authoritarian central state).
No, if I’d meant that then I would have said that.
That’s below your usual standard of meaningless drivel but still meaningless.
Actually, I have. The problem is that you didn’t get the full article which states that the servers would be government owned and no NZ$ would exist outside of those servers. This means that it would be very easy to trace where money has gone and thus what taxes the corporations owe on it.
Which, again, is why I keep saying that our monetary system needs to be removed from the control of the corporates.
Yes I do.
Allowing people to see where they can get the best deal is Big Brother? Man, are you fucken delusional.
Allowing people to see where they can get the best deal is Big Brother? Man, are you fucken delusional
No it’s the faith in such systems who would own the systems and how the information will be used is delusional
Before we even begin to discuss the delusion that the ‘government’ will be in control of any such systems
Q. How do you propose the government will ‘assume control’ over the private banking system which currently operates throughout most of the worlds nations ?
Q. Do you believe governments event want to take control ?
corporations, the government and the 0.01% are all merging into the same authoritarian establishment…
I don’t expect them to. I expect them to assume control of the NZ system and integrate it into the global systems. I expect other governments to follow suit.
This is an important point about democracy – it’s not parliament that are the government but the people.
I don’t expect them to. I expect them to assume control of the NZ system and integrate it into the global systems. I expect other governments to follow suit.
Q. How would you remove the barrier of ‘state capture’ ?
Do you believe governments event want to take control ?
This is an important point about democracy – it’s not parliament that are the government but the people.
Yeah great but that’s currently not the situation going around the Western World
Yes, we need to do something about that.
Dude the way you insist that centralised infrastructure locking people in to establishment systems is the only way ahead, is pretty bloody scary.
Its like you have never paid attention to how payment systems are used by the elite as weapons of war against Russia, Wikileaks, Kim Dotcom etc. Anybody and any organisation the establishment of the day thinks is a dissenter and a threat to them. And now you want to tie everyone in NZ to similar?
Sorry mate, get fucking lost.
Forced vaccinations and cashless society…
Q. Why the heck would anyone wish to be living under such conditions ?
The modern Left appears riven with incoherancy and incongruent principles. Patients rights but force vaccinations. Abortions more available but treasure babies. Cut down emissions but increase consumption of the masses.
question.
why are you here if you despise the modern left so much.
would you not be happier hanging with the modern right?
a fair question. The pot needs to be stirred if there is any hope of this stew getting better. The pro-establishment greasers and the political careerists won’t.
btw the “modern right” are just as locked into ultimately self defeating behaviours. They just spend more of the time in power during.
The energy and resource crunch is coming, fast.
CV (or CR depending on the time of day) is simply engaging his critical faculties. Something I wish a few more of my fellow Lefties would do.
Chur. The older I get the less of an establishment loyalist I feel like being. Especially when “the establishment” is that which has lead us to this shite place in history.
“Abortions more available but treasure babies”
These aren’t contradictory. Indeed a society that protects the rights and wellbeing of women is going to be a better society for babies.
They aren’t morally and spiritually contradictory? OK if you say so.
No, they aren’t. You’ve fallen into the old foetus = baby trap.
thats a scientific judgement, not a moral or spiritual one.
I’m quite aware of that which is why I keep saying, and you keep ignoring, that these systems need to be removed from the elites control.
They’re already in that position – I want to remove them from it.
The point that you seem to fail to understand is that we do need a system. It’s not optional.
Dunno who the uncorruptible angels you are going to get to run your all seeing all reaching system. Maybe you want it run by AI?
I don’t expect incorruptible angels – I expect everyone to have a say/voice/power rather than just a few. Overall, everyone isn’t corruptible but a few are.
I don’t expect incorruptible angels – I expect everyone to have a say/voice/power rather than just a few. Overall, everyone isn’t corruptible but a few are
Q. Will you be proposing a solution about how you foresee this coming about ?
I have done, several times, now learn to use the search feature.
I suspect that we all may start using cigarettes as cash as in the POW camps. A cashless society would give the banks too much control.
‘Robert Fisk: Who is bombing whom in the Middle East?’
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-who-is-bombing-whom-in-the-middle-east-10222938.html
“It amazes me that all these warriors of the air don’t regularly crash into each other…”
Into this mess walks New Zealand troops ….at the command of jonkey Nactional and chicken hawks
…the New Zealand Labour Party along with the Green Party and NZF and Mana/Int co-Left ( who opposed sending them there in the first place)…..should demand NZ troops are pulled out now!
Chooky. The article on the sidebar “After Vietnam: changes in imperialist strategy” gives a different take on the Middle East activity. Essentially that the West now has learned to get the unfortunates to carry out the bloodshed by proxy. Suits us to see the barbaric bad guys as an excuse to carry out remote “defence” activity. No more disasters labelling USA as bad guys as in Vietnam eg MiLai Massacre.
https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/after-vietnam-changes-in-imperialist-strategy/
Uh, this has been a hallmark of western empire for 400 years
Debunking the child poverty myths by Rob Stock is an excellent read, in fact a must read.
Camp Taji, were NZ’s troops are stationed is surrounded by ISIS on three sides with one side open towards Baghdad. Baghdad is facing an ISIS assault. That is according to the New York Times propaganda rag du jour in the US (Responsible for the yellow cake story that got the US invading Iraq in 2003 in the first place) that is.
The distance between ISIS troops and Camp Taji is only ± 15 km.
Why don’t we hear about this in the MSM?
Why Islamic State Is Winning :
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41954.htm
From the link:
Vice President Joe Biden declared in early April that “ISIL’s momentum in Iraq has halted, and in many places, has been flat-out reversed.”
A couple of weeks later, the President proved equally upbeat following a meeting with Iraqi leader Haider al-Abadi: “We are making serious progress in pushing back ISIL out of Iraqi territory. About a quarter of the territory fallen under Daesh control has been recovered. Thousands of strikes have not only taken ISIL fighters off the war theater, but their infrastructure has been deteriorated and decayed. And under Prime Minister Abadi’s leadership, the Iraqi security forces have been rebuilt and are getting re-equipped, retrained, and strategically deployed across the country.”
But that was so last month. Post-Ramadi, conservatives like Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, have lost no time in labeling such views out of touch and “delusional.” And, indeed, Obama sounded strangely detached on Tuesday when he told The Atlantic that ISIS’s advance was not a defeat.
“No, I don’t think we’re losing,” he said, adding: “There’s no doubt there was a tactical setback, although Ramadi had been vulnerable for a very long time, primarily because these are not Iraqi security forces that we have trained or reinforced.” It was rather like the captain of the Titanic telling passengers that the gash below the waterline was a minor opening that would soon be repaired.
Juan Cole says it best: Washington didn’t lose Ramadi because Washington never had Ramadi
http://www.juancole.com/2015/05/washington-ramadi-never.html
Because the mainstream media only report what the Defence Force wants them to. Journalists get to be embedded within military forces on the ground, only if they tow the line and report what the hierarchy wants.
John Pilger talks a little about general western media bias here, from 12:40 in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41YTAZHIWN8
The first really big polar blast of the season arriving today, straight off the edge of Antarctica. Bundle up folks, esp in the South which is expecting heavy dumps of snow.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=173.90,-52.04,512
http://www.metservice.com/warnings/severe-weather-outlook
The polar night jet flowing between the pressure gradients is flowing from antarctica onto NZ.
http://pamola.um.maine.edu/fcst_frames/GFS-025deg/DailySummary/GFS-025deg_NH-SAT5_WS250.png
http://pamola.um.maine.edu/fcst_frames/GFS-025deg/DailySummary/GFS-025deg_NH-SAT5_PMSL.png
Thanks!
US government documents show rise of ISIS was predicted, supported and considered an “asset” in getting rid of Assad
Supporting militant Sunni extremism in Syria and Iraq would also act to curb Iranian influence, it was noted. Fueling militant Islamic extremism in Syria/Iraq has also given the same security and surveillance state the excuse to demand more power and more budgets to use on its own western citizens.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-23/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-us-created-isis-tool-overthrow-syrias-president-assad
Imperialism by proxy?
Pepe Escobar refers to this as the empire of chaos.
the US has history of shipping in Islamic militants, training and arming them, in order to undermine entire states. And interesting isnt it how despite all these anti ISIS US airstrikes, ISIS is able to close in on Damascus and Assad quite rapidly.
Something Draco has often bought up here is the need for us to get out of the mindset of needless duplication, i.e. everyone having everything in every home.
This looks like an example of a step in an interesting direction: Four tiny homes on a shared piece of land. Each tiny home has its own bathroom, but the kitchen and living area is in a shared building.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/home-property/68805274/Best-mates-build-tiny-row-of-houses-in-new-take-on-small-living-trend
Yep. And these solutions are not new. Communitarian or social accommodation. Barracks, student hostels and monastaries all have set ups with similar principles. Simply update with modern ideas and for the modern sensibility – and voila – save a tonne of money on corporatised retirement accomodation.
Nice overview article. Biggest thing stopping this from happening in NZ is the lack of legal models for shared ownership.
Chch was an ideal opportunity to work with these alternative housing options. I think a few people have done tiny homes there but not the shared resources bit.
???
What do you mean??? Shared ownership of financial assets is an utterly standard situation. Whether it is company shareholders, spouses or people who have an account at a bank or managed by a hedgefund.
Outside of marriage it’s rare for people in NZ to share ownership of homes/land. It does happen but we don’t have good cultural practice yet on how to do it, and people get stuck on assets issues, what happens when someone wants out, how to make decisions collectively etc.
There are many people wanting to do this but few really good examples that can be easily replicated. I know about it from people trying to go this with larger pieces of land, and it’s possible it might be easier on smaller suburban blocks. But again, Chch was the obvious opportunity and it hasn’t really happened. I think that’s because the right models don’t exist yet.
Legal models for shared ownership of assets including property are a bog standard part of property and commercial law.
Day to day living arrangements and how they would suit individuals living together are another matter.
Off the shelf.
http://www.homelegal.co.nz/tenancy-in-common/
Thanks. Let me clarify, by ‘model’ I mean the whole thing not just the legal structure. See my comment to CV above. Probably should have left the word legal out of my first comment.
Everything from traditional Kiwi flatmates (shared cooking and shared bills) to communal student hostel living and everything in-between. There are many models and ideas familar to NZ culture to pick from. And if they don’t work, try out a Pasifika or Maori model extended family mode of living.
I’m talking about ownership. Try reading my comments properly.
weka, I already answered above that there are many options for shared or joint legal ownership of assets including property.
Now it is hardly my fault if you cannot accurately formulate what you are asking for. Ownership of assets falls under the area of commercial and property law. It’s very clear.
🙄
I’m not asking for anything. I’m sharing some experience. I’m talking about what ordinary people are trying to do in sharing ownership of homes and why that is difficult in NZ. I’m guessing you are commenting again from a place of poor knowledge. If you can’t tell the difference between ownership and flatting, you could try listening instead of pontificating.
So educate me. For starters maybe you can tell me what the non-legal aspects of property ownership structures you were referring to.
If a group of people buy land together with the intention of forming community, some of the issues that arise are around how to make decisions, and how to remove assets if someone wants to leave. Yes, the technicals on that exist, but how it plays out in real life isn’t always so straight forward (eg what happens if you want to sell but the other owners get to have a say in who buys in and you can’t find someone suitable?). There’s also a whole class thing that happens as well, around people with assets and how they protect them vs how they share them.
And how to just get on with each other in a living situation that many aren’t used to (I agree with you that Māori and Pasifika are better at this than Pākehā). The ‘model’ I am referring to is how to navigate this without having to reinvent the wheel all the time. Lots of people in NZ have done various models, and many have failed (esp intentional communities). There are some good successes too, but my original comment was pointing to these things not being cultural norms yet, so both regulations and patterns of relating haven’t evolved to support them.
In the linked article, the couples have known each other for 20 years. That makes a big difference.
Co-housing seems one of the more successful models in NZ, but most cohousing is for people with large buy in (eg they sell an existing house/have a big mortgage). I was interested in the article that was looking at medium level buy in (although I don’t think they talk about the land price), plus what felix was pointing to about shared ammenities.
I know of a few groups of people who’ve done rural subdivisions privately where the land is owned collectively but each family builds their own home. You need a certain group of people who know and trust each other for that to work. It does work, but it’s not common and I think the reason for that is that both around regulations on rural land, and that we’re not that good at sharing when it comes to larges amounts of assets, or how to make decisions in small groups once we get past whānau size. These are not unresolvable problems, we’re just not there yet.
Beyond that, and esp in response to what Maui said, I’m thinking of even lower buy ins. The moveable tiny home allows people more flexibility re commitment, and is way cheaper if land is rented instead of bought. There are still issues on how to live together.
Community Land Trusts are one of the models now being used in NZ. I’m not sure how successful that is yet and the one I am familiar with still has a substantial buy in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_land_trust
There are a lot of nuances that you raise, and important ones weka.
In olden days, blood ties, tribal ties, religious ties, formed the basis of the trust, mutual understanding and common culture required for these things to work and work well.
I agree with you that its more difficult now and that it depends on each specific situation and each specific group of people and their dynamics.
If people want to be really arms length and independent away from each other then residential units or town house units might be used. But that’s not really communitarian living either.
what I find is that if you ask people you know who are talking about housing or home ownership whether they would share land with others, most people will just say no flat out, others will say yeah maybe, but it’s generally unclear what it means and how to do it and when they realise it’s a lot of work that becomes a barrier. A few will respond positively. What we need are models that make it much easier for the middle group to be more interested, as simple as say buying a house, or renting long term.
“In olden days, blood ties, tribal ties, religious ties, formed the basis of the trust, mutual understanding and common culture required for these things to work and work well.”
Yep that’s the one.
“If people want to be really arms length and independent away from each other then residential units or town house units might be used. But that’s not really communitarian living either.”
True, but it’s probably a step in the right direction. The set up in that article looks much more workable for most people I know than say an intentional community where families are more in each others space. It’s a mix of own space and shared space, and it sounds like they figured out how to make it work for them specifically. That’s closer to what most of us have been raised with so it makes sense.
Appreciate you taking the time to share the thoughts you have on this topic. I think this kind of project is going to be an important way forward for many.
Ownership models and protocols were covered in this episode of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs about a self build community.
(If you can beat the geo-blocking)
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/on-demand/26262-003
google turns up a few examples too
http://www.cohousing.org.uk/category/4/27/case-studies
http://www.selfbuild-central.co.uk/first-ideas/examples/hedgehog-co-op/
http://www.selfbuildportal.org.uk/case-studies
Thanks joe. McCloud is always good. Not sure if I’ve seen that one, will have a look.
This answers a few questions about structure and ownership.
http://www.lilac.coop/about-lilac/faqs.html#ecovillage
Yep sign me up! I’ve thought about looking for a small piece of land to put a tiny house on. Unfortunately land parcels don’t come in sizes of 50sqm.. Minimum Lot sizes where I live would be around 300sqm according to Council zoning, so no chance of subdividing existing land. The most feasible way would be finding a friendly farmer who doesn’t mind you renting a portion of paddock.
Would you consider shared ownership?
The great thing about moveable tiny homes is they circumvent so many regulations. Renting land is going to be a good option for many going forward. It also means no mortgage and thus not supporting the pro-CC global economy.
Yeah, I would. The trouble is I don’t really know anyone else who wants to do this – maybe it’s time to join the Transition Towns group. And then finding a vacant piece of land close to the city is important for me too.
Sounds like a good plan.
There will be a lawyer or planner here who can give you suggestions. From an amateur standpoint it sounds to me like you need a bit of land which can be zoned for high density housing. Buy the land as a group. Buildings can then come and go on to the land leasehold. Just an example. Need to talk to the local council and its planners early on as if the concept does not fit into the district plan in some way, it won’t be able to proceed.
Alternatively, find a group of people and buy a 5 bedroom house together. Knock off the mortgage collectively in a few years. It’s then collective and supportive living in your own home – for the younger set it’d be called flatting.
Another solution is the movable cabin (less than 10 sq m so no need for building consent). A shared utility provides the kitchen, bathroom (building consent required here – but once that hurdle over your on your way). Decks between cabins and utility allow flow. A separate cabin as communal living space.
I’ve seen a number of these springing up at my local beach. 4 or 5 small cabins linked by decks sharing a communal utility and living space.
No need for a 10m2 cabin to be movable. Schedule 1 of the building act applies. The important part is that to be legal as sleeping acom, it must be used in connection with a dwelling on the same property, which is where the fully consented kitchen/bathroom/living room comes in.
As long as you have this legal “dwelling” on the property, and your 10m2 buildings contain no cooking or sanitary facilities, you can have as many of them as you like. There may be restrictions on how many people can live on your property at any one time, but that’s a question for your local council.
You also have to make sure they’re no closer to each other or to any building or boundary than their own height.
Ahhhh ha good tip felix
Schedule 1 is here: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2004/0072/latest/DLM5770963.html
It lists all the building work that you can do without a permit. Clause 3 is the relevant one in this matter.
The work still needs to comply with the building code standards (NZS:3604) so you can’t build them out out cellophane and coat hangers.
And as noted above, you still need to comply with the district plan for your area as well.
BUT as long as you haven’t made enemies with your council officers or your neighbours you’re probably not going to be inspected, and you can avoid all the extra cost and hassle of the consent process.
Yes…can’t really start a community living project in a sincere fashion by pissing everyone off…
Referencing my own comment above
Jointly buy a decent sized section with a small house on it. Due diligence on the LIM to ensure that all consents are present and correct. Then build a number of those 10m2 sleeping huts around the site, within what is considered a permitted activity.
Excellent idea.
Ideally there would be money (and consents) to refit the main house as a common space; additional bathroom, open plan living area/dining, high capacity kitchen etc.
Whole thing could be owned as a company with the residents as shareholders; people could then buy in/sell their shares and come and go as their life circumstances required.
Heh now we’re talking, just don’t call it a commune 😉
LOL. Well, social isolation is a killer; if there was a common area with a bar, a pool table, some arcades and board games, hobby space, piano etc. that would be a lot of fun. A different kind of living than sitting in front of a screen surfing the interwebs 😯 lolz
Felix, what’s the limit on how many dwellings with kitchen/bathrooms you can have on a residential site?
The advantages of having it be moveable are that you don’t need building consent above the 10m2 (which makes it much cheaper), and you don’t have to own land. It’s a very affordable way to get housing for people that either build, or pay someone to build.
Or in Macro’s scenario, you don’t need the cost of a consented shared amenities block.
(I have a feeling some councils have reduced the minimum dwelling size to prevent people from doing this).
“what’s the limit on how many dwellings with kitchen/bathrooms you can have on a residential site?”
That’s down to the zone rules of your local District Plan. Where I am it’s one, or one + an ancillary dwelling (sometimes called dependent person’s dwelling or granny flat, which contains all facilities but is limited to a certain maximum size). I don’t know how much this varies from place to place.
Macro’s scenario still includes a shared utilities building of some sort. This has to be consented.
Ok thanks.
“Macro’s scenario still includes a shared utilities building of some sort. This has to be consented.”
But not if it’s moveable I think. Sewerage and greywater would have to be though.
Ah yes that’s right. Sewerage and greywater, and stormwater, and probably a potable water supply.
And if your section is big enough and in the applicable zone you’re allowed to dispose of all of that on site (with an engineer’s design specific to your site for the council to approve), so that could work with a mobile building of some sort.
Yes I have a mobile building at my beach section – its actually bigger than 10 sq m and comes in 2 parts that are wheeled onto the site and then placed together. The advantage is that it can be quickly built off site and located and ready to use within the day, and moved t a new site if necessary. I bought mine new about 7 years ago and it has been moved from just north of Auckland to the Coromandel Peninsula in that time.
We have this technology in NZ and i never ceases to depress and astound me that such buildings were never employed to house those who lost there homes in Christchurch. It takes 6 weeks to construct these small dwellings and they are of a very high standard complete with bathroom 2 bedrooms and well equipped kitchen. carpeted, outside deck areas, the lot. I understand Alan Gibbs has one on his property north of Helensville as well – so it gives you some idea of the standard of finish.
+ zillion re Chch. They could have set up apprentice and owner/builder schemes too, so they would have upskilled a whole bunch of locals. Instead the dumb fucks in charge spend all that money at the start on motorhomes that no-one wanted to live in.
What’s involved in the move Macro? Is the building towable? By what?
the web site is here:
http://www.go-homes.co.nz/
They are transported to the site then moved into position using a standard 4×4 ute. Hooked up to facilities – caravan plug (builders pole), water, waste can be normal sewage collection – but we used a separate septic system on the farm (separate grey water and black water)
http://www.naturalflow.co.nz/
@GenerationZer0: The final #climatemeeting is in Wellington tomorrow 7pm at Rydges Hotel, 75 Featherston St. #fixourfuture
Good interview for anyone wanting to understand the Greens co-leadership contenders (being chosen next weekend), or just the GP in general.
http://ruminator.co.nz/its-not-easy-being-green-while-running-for-male-co-leader/
http://i.stuff.co.nz/business/money/68788282/NZ-hands-tied-on-foreign-home-buyers-under-Korea-FTA-bungle
Keys ineptness shining through again.
Have you seen the recent posts here on TS re. XX not even trying anymore with the nice middle digit gesture? Key has never tried because he never has, he doesn’t, and never will give a shit; it has nothing to do with ineptness although there’s a lot of that too.
Nothing to Lose But Our Fears
Hammer -> nail.
Ok, so basically he’s saying Labour needs a new Vision because they can’t move left or right.
“As to precisely what alternatives should be adopted, why not at least begin to think about them? They are not in short supply.”
For the uninitiated, what policy ideas do you think Gould is thinking of for Labour?
I think he’s saying that Labour need to stand on principles again and to believe in those principles. The RWNJs are wrong but they believe in what they’re saying and people can tell. Labour, on the other hand, don’t really believe in what they’re saying largely because they’re saying the same things as the RWNJs and people can tell that too.
It’s pretty much a giveaway when both major parties are selling the same vision.
The remits up for discussion today at the Labour Region 5 conference were clearly concerned about that. Linking minimum wage to the average wage so they move upward of their own accord rather than at a politician’s whim, taxing wealth as well as income, UBI (some of the remits had clearly come from someone who had read the Big Kahuna), abolishing youth, training and starting out minimum wage rates, repealing a number of ERA amendments, promoting collective bargaining and awards etc.
The Future of Work was also a big part of the day’s activities, as Grant Robertson gave a speech and then we did some workshopping on it. This commission’s work will inform Labour policy in this area, and is huge. UBI was also brought up here, and I suspect will become Labour policy at some point in the nearish future.
Housing was brought up, and it is acknowledged as a big part of any future Labour government.
Any talk of working with the GP?
That’s good news about the UBI.
heh
Manchester MP Gerald Kaufman described the new SNP intake as ‘goons’ and their behaviour as ‘infantile’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3093537/Invasion-McManiacs-Boorish-Boozy-Picking-fights-Nicola-Sturgeon-s-alarmed-Commons-antics-SNP-s-yob-MPs.html