Open mike 27/04/2025
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6:00 am, April 27th, 2025 - 24 comments
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- Monday 12 May
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The Government’s plans to limit the powers and scope of the Waitangi Tribunal is a disgrace. ...4 days ago - Tribunal review an attack on Te Tiriti o Waitangi
The Government’s plans to limit the powers and scope of the Waitangi Tribunal is a disgrace. ...4 days ago
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- Release: Govt ignores the voices of survivors
Survivors of abuse in state care have a right to feel disappointed and sidelined by the Government. ...4 days ago
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The Green Party is appalled by the Government’s decision to severely underfund financial compensation for survivors of abuse in state care. ...4 days ago
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Labour is launching a members’ bill to stop the Government from putting tobacco industry interests ahead of public health. ...5 days ago
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The Green Party is appalled by the Government’s use of urgency to rewrite the Wildlife Act–without consultation, without an impact statement, and in direct response to a court ruling in favour of protecting wildlife. ...6 days ago
- Release: National cuts women’s pay
National has forced through a law change that will take money out of women’s pockets. ...6 days ago
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Te Pāti Māori stands in staunch and emotional opposition to the Government’s so-called Equal Pay Amendment Bill, calling it a calculated attack on working women and a cruel betrayal of the generations who have fought for pay equity in Aotearoa. “This bill doesn’t just undermine equal pay — it completely ...6 days ago
- Release: Fewer jobs and opportunities for Māori, again
In the last 12 months life has only got worse for Māori under Christopher Luxon’s Government. ...6 days ago
- Release: More than one in 10 Pacific people unemployed under National
There are more Pacific people unemployed as the rate increases to a staggering 10.8% under National. ...6 days ago
- Release: Unemployment remains high under National
Job losses remain stubbornly high under National, as their attack on jobs, wages, and women rages on. ...6 days ago
- Govt for the rich is failing the unemployed
The latest job market statistics show that unemployed people are being failed by a Government more focused on punishing the poor than creating jobs. ...6 days ago
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Te Pāti Māori is demanding urgent changes to the draft Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) framework, calling it a dangerous step backwards for Takatāpui, trans, and rainbow rangatahi. “This draft erases Takatāpui voices, ignores whānau diversity, and delays consent education. It’s not just inadequate, it’s unbelievably unsafe” said Te Pāti ...1 week ago
- RSE Draft Erases Rainbow and Takatāpui Youth
Te Pāti Māori is demanding urgent changes to the draft Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) framework, calling it a dangerous step backwards for Takatāpui, trans, and rainbow rangatahi. “This draft erases Takatāpui voices, ignores whānau diversity, and delays consent education. It’s not just inadequate, it’s unbelievably unsafe” said Te Pāti ...1 week ago
- Release: Labour welcomes inquiry into school lunches
Labour welcomes the Auditor-General’s inquiry into the Government’s school lunches programme. ...1 week ago
- Release: Women will keep being paid less under National
This Government is taking the women’s movement backwards, ensuring women will continue to be paid less into the future. ...1 week ago
- Govt takes workplace equity efforts backwards
The Green Party has called out the Government’s latest attack on workers with the announcement that it is halting all pay equity claims. ...1 week ago
- Release: Questions over Erica Stanford’s personal email use
Erica Stanford has been misusing her personal email address to manage sensitive information relating to Budget and visa changes prior to their public release. ...1 week ago
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Today, Green Party MP Steve Abel has added a new Member’s Bill to the biscuit tin to ensure any product sold in New Zealand meets New Zealand’s animal welfare standards, even if it’s produced overseas. ...1 week ago
- Iwi Rights Under Attack in Government Treaty Clause Purge
Te Pāti Māori warns that the Government’s Treaty Clause Review represents the most severe erosion of iwi rights in modern legal history. “Luxon's Government is doing what the Treaty Principles Bill failed to do. They are removing every legal reference to Te Tiriti across health, housing, conservation, and child wellbeing ...1 week ago
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After failing to be upfront about cuts to intensive care beds, it’s now becoming clear that other downgrades to Dunedin Hospital are being concealed by the Minister of Health. ...2 weeks ago
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This May Day Labour is standing with workers to defend decent jobs and fair pay. ...2 weeks ago
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- New air ambulance helicopter for Auckland and Northland
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- Raising achievement & closing the equity gap at school
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- Developing a new Action Plan for unpaid carers
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- New tools to help women navigate online harm
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- The US and China have reached a temporary truce in the trade wars, but more turbulence lies ahead
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A wee update from the front lines of the health system.
Setting aside the daily texts pleading for staff because the roster is three down (what a great state of being that is to start yr shift).
The latest is 'bed blocking'. Here in Palmy, there is a regular and growing practice of literally moving beds from one ward to another.
The post natal ward has a couple of beds free today, shift then to orthopedic ward. To replace the beds that went to Ward 27.
Then when a bed is needed someone's time is taken up retrieving a 'spare' bed from elsewhere.
At least there's enough money to increase defence budget, whoop whoop.
Is it a bad thing that I'm not at all shocked or surprised reading this? I'm not sure that any horror stories from within the health sector even register anymore, there's just too many. Perhaps it's self protection.
And don't forget the plenty of money for tax cuts and landlords…
The story is a nationwide one.
Not hiring all the trained nurses (supply), primary care in
disarray (demand ultimately transfers to hospitals) – why is anyone surprised.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360663226/nationwide-shortage-500-hospital-beds-revealed
https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/04/26/200000-kiwis-waiting-for-first-specialist-appointments/
Meanwhile across the Tasman …
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cnv56q82vnro
Ralph Fiennes is apparently the bookies early favourite to be the new pope.
Well it couldn't be American so that rules Tucci and Lithgow out
Not a done deal.
.
With two days until Election Day, it remains to be seen whether Carney has closed the deal.
There are signs, though, that polls might be underestimating Conservatives’ support. When Focaldata asked voters who they believed their local communities would vote for, Conservatives fared slightly better. James Kanagasooriam, Focaldata’s chief research officer, says drawing on the “wisdom of the crowds” proved accurate in Brexit and during both Trump elections.
“The result suggests a Conservative vote lead and a sizeable polling error,” Kanagasooriam told POLITICO in an email. He added that it’s a trick to know how much weight to give the finding since it’s the only time the firm has deployed the question in Canada.
“While most traditional survey sampling suggests a narrow majority for Carney (including our own), there is an alternative method that paints a very, very different picture,” he said.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/26/canada-election-poll-favorability-00311632
Reactions to the UK Supreme Court decision that says sex is a biological reality.
[deleted]
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/nutmegs-week-0e8
I deleted the quote, in part because I was going to have to delete the anti-trans slur at the end of it, but then it’s just a quote with no commentary, people can click through if they want to read it.
According to Richard Murphey, Starmer stands for nothing except management – no beliefs, no policy, just what needs to be done to manage a situation.
We have one just like that as our PM – except that he's easily led by the extreme right.
4.30 minutes long.
I can save you four minutes.
… and his next move will be to essentially rebuild the full relationship with the EU without actually calling a reverse of Brexit.
Other than reduce crime I can't remember a single thing of note our National coalition has done.
Whereas Starmer knows what he is doing and delivers it.
None of the above negates what Murphy said: Starmer himself said, as evidenced on the video, that he deals with a problem as it arises. And no doubt he is doing some good.
But where is his vision for a better or different UK? A vision like Jeremy Corbyn had? A more democratic socialist UK?
And really, have our CoC reduced crime?
Counterfactuals are fun, but the fact remains: Starmer won. Corbyn didn’t.
2017 was a fluke: a lucky bounce off Theresa May’s collapsed credibility, not the second coming of socialism. And after two more years of Tory scandal and Brexit chaos, the best St Jezza could do was getting absolutely trashed by a shock of hair purportedly containing the mind of Boris Johnson.
The left wins by winning power and using it. Not by daydreaming about revolutions that never happen.
I thought we’d left dialectism in the 20th century. Apparently not.
Romanticising political failure isn’t noble. It’s just self-sabotage.
Possibly so. Though Governments tend to lose support precisely because they have lost credibility, it's really not an anomalous phenomenon at all. In any case UK Labour got 40% in 2017.
Let's compare that with 2024 when the Conservatives' credibility was even more shattered after Johnson's scandals, the Truss farce and the wooden Rishi Sunak. Starmer's Labour got only 34%.
So maybe the 40% vs 34% is a valid comparison, and it's 2019 that was anomalous because of Brexit? It certainly seems to be every bit as plausible an argument as yours.
Not that I really care any more, it's ancient history. But I think we should argue with whatever honesty we can muster at any given point in time.
Popular movements are not flukes. Corbyn got 40% in 2017 because he was popular. Starmer got 33.7% in 2024, much of this an anti-Tory vote not a pro-Labour/pro-Starmer vote.
Starmer is now polling abysmally because he lied about what he said he would do to get elected as Labour Party leader, and has now shifted way to the right.
Here is just one terrible example:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/24/labour-nature-england-ecosystems-planning-bill-keir-starmer
OMG let Corbyn go. He's a nothing. He's a beached whale that has already gassed out and exploded. He's not coming back. He's not Merlin. He's a 75 year old ass-basic local MP with all the national attractiveness of George Galloway but the nice preserve of Islington North.
He lost the election twice, and lost the Labor leadership 5 years ago.
In the face of the existential changes facing the world, incrementalism is just not going to cut it!
What we need from Labour UK and NZ is a vision of a better world, one that hopefully gets us out of the mess created by neoliberalism and staves of climate catastrophe. One that resonates with the voting public, not just a desire to better manage the apocalypse!
There are good things in here – and those concerning employment law (zero-hours contracts) and more secure tenancy have the added bonus of quite quickly improving the lives of his working class base who may be in danger of defecting to Reform. But a number of these things are about intentions (plans) and will need time to deliver their promise – he has up to four years, so it's a bit early to predict either his demise or success.
One concern must be whether Rachel Reeves's Fiscal Rules will actually allow these ideas to fulfill their potential. Sticking to these Fiscal Rules seems to be the reason for Starmer doing other things that harm his potential base – such as not ending the two-child benefit cap and withdrawing the winter energy payment from many current recipients. This poll in the last few days has Reform 28%, Conservatives 20% , Labour 20%, LibDems 14% and Greens 13%. Is Find Out Now a reputable pollster? I don't know. And although it's early days yet, it's also true that Starmer's mandate with a huge majority in the Commons is a mile wide but an inch deep. It won't take much of a shift in public sentiment to see that majority wash away. This poll seems to show Labour support disappearing in three directions – to Reform, LibDems and the Greens.
I would not be surprised if Starmer soon realises that if he wants to last beyond a single term, both the Fiscal Rules and Reeves will need to be put aside. It will depend on who's advising him, and if he's cunning enough to know that the Trump-induced crisis gives him a plausible reason for doing that without losing face. If he takes a bath in 2028/9, it will be too late to blame Jeremy Corbyn for all the sins of the world.
Labor won't be saved into another term unless they can really get the economy to improve. Starmer knows that and that is where he is placing most of the effort of his team.
Regrettably that is not in their capacity because trade forces far larger than that of the UK or its government are re-ordering world trade prosperity.
all that and he still found time to cut benefits of severely disabled people.
I thought he reneged on the Zero Hour promise?
The steel nationalisation is far from certain, and very much a fluid situation.
Onshore wind wrecks landscapes in many cases. The Tories recognised this and went with massive wind farm developments offshore mostly.
Starmer thinks beautiful landscapes should be sold to the highest bidder to build on, hence his awful new planning laws.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/24/labour-nature-england-ecosystems-planning-bill-keir-starmer
"Set out a massive increase in Defence spending – largest since the Cold War…" If you think that is a positive you should move to Kiwiblog.
….and so on
Eyeroll.
There's a cost to transitioning society to electricity, and landscape viewshafts are by a long way the least environmental cost. The only reason we don't pay that cost massively here is because of a simply massive dam built programme that went on here for 60 years.
The UK Defence spending needed to be done because there is actually a massive invasion going on in Europe at the moment. You may have heard about it.
No doubt Corbyn will rise again and really win like he did last time.
The case for coastal shipping.
Damage to roads.
Lack of truck drivers.
Climate change taking out roads.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/558653/nz-s-over-reliance-on-roads-for-freight-means-natural-disasters-hit-hard-but-is-coastal-shipping-a-fix
Quite the adventure.
April 27 is Moehanga Day, the anniversary of the day in 1806 when Ngāpuhi warrior Moehanga became the first Māori to visit England. This is his story.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/26-04-2025/the-maori-who-discovered-europe