“We see a real opportunity to cut carbon pollution,” said one of the White House officials. “And I think one of the most important and relevant points is that today we already set limits for arsenic, mercury and lead, but we let power plants release as much carbon pollution as they want.”
Scientific American
Political leaders from around the world give their reaction.
From the European Union:
After a number of important speeches from President Obama and Secretary Kerry, Europe has been eagerly waiting for the US to set out concrete steps. So this plan is a most welcomed step forward and, if implemented, it can put the US on a path towards a low carbon future.
Connie Hedegaard EU Climate Action Commissioner
“I very much welcome President Obama’s renewed push to tackle global climate change,”…..
“The plans set out are positive steps that will create further momentum for international climate action.”…..
(this will) “help give the world confidence that it’s possible to win this fight, if we fight it together”.
José Manuel Barroso President of the European commission
From the United Nations:
It remains vital that the United States as the world’s largest developed economy is seen to be leading serious action to deal with climate change, both at home and abroad….
…..”This US climate action plan must also be leveraged into fresh, high-level political consensus among countries that will smooth the way for faster progress in the international climate change negotiations under the United Nations.”
Christiana Figueres UNFCCC Executive Secretary
From Britain:
“President Obama is right when he says tackling climate change is a moral obligation and also right when he says cutting carbon pollution will help spark business innovation and create jobs. I welcome his Climate Action Plan. It’s a decisive step by the world’s second largest emitter and demonstrates the growing global momentum toward tackling the threat of dangerous climate change. The UK will work closely with the US on energy efficiency and low carbon technologies, and on securing ambitious global action on climate finance and emission reduction. We will also keep up the pressure elsewhere, including in Europe. The EU should adopt a 50% emissions reduction target by 2030 in order to help secure a global deal in 2015.”
Edward Davey UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
From the Pacific Islands:
“US President Obama’s announcement represents a positive step on climate change and we hope it translates into even more constructive engagement at the international climate negotiations, particularly when it comes to dramatically reducing greenhouse gases in the next few years, which is essential to keep the seas from washing over some of the world’s lowest lying island nations.
“However, we are painfully aware that coastal erosion, ocean acidification, degraded reefs and fisheries, droughts, floods, and relentless storms represent the new normal for many vulnerable communities. Therefore, any adequate response to climate change must also address permanent losses and damages stemming from the crisis.” Ambassador Marlene Moses Permanent Representative to the United Nations for Nauru and Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States
From the New Zealand Green Party:
“We need to be supporting international action on climate change not obstructing it.
“New Zealand is not doing its fair share.
“The National Government is stuck in the past examining the scientific consensus, to quote President Obama, ‘we don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society’.
“While Obama is stepping up action, National is stepping up pollution….
Under National, New Zealand’s net emissions have hit a record high and are continuing to grow.
“Last weekend’s storm, and this summer’s drought are a preview of the legacy we will leave for our children if we do not act now.
“We can make a difference, we can prepare, we can work internationally for binding targets, we can reduce emissions at home; but we need to start now,”
To date their has been no response to Obama’s speech from either Labour or National. And I think neither can we expect one.
Time for David Cunliffe to fill the gap perhaps? If Labour keep up its silence… Might we see ia press statement from Cunliffe to make up for the missing leadership sadly lacking in his own party?
I also notice that so far there has been no post on Obama’s speech from anyone at The Standard
Why is this?
Does nobody have any opinion on Obama’s speech?
Or could it be, that The Standard authors (consciously, or unconsciously), don’t want to acknowledge or bring attention to the uncomfortable fact that National and Labour’s policies are generally in alignment on further increasing CO2 emissions through more and riskier oil drilling and coal mining etc?
[lprent:
Firstly – What speech? I heard a brief mention on it on the car radio on my late return home last night. Looking at the timestamp on the news story and allowing for date lines, it would have been when? late in the day yesterday? We aren’t a news service, nor are we journalists and we tend to work hard on things other than this blog.
Secondly – Authors write on what they wish to and when they want to – as is stated clearly in the about and the policy.
Thirdly – I see that there was a post scheduled for this morning at the time you wrote that comment. I’d guess that it was written late last night. It gives Anthony’s opinion (which is what we are here to express) on the speech. Changes in policy direction usually take time to digest because the detail is important – not the headline.
Fourthly – You are banned for a week for again trying to tell us what we should be writing – read the policy. ]
“The National Government is stuck in the past examining the scientific consensus, to quote President Obama, ‘we don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society’.
Kennedy Graham Green Party Spokesperson for Climate Change
What Graham has said for the Nacts, could, painfully, be just as easily be said of Labour.
I can’t even bear to listen to the man at the moment. He has no credibility left at all, imo. How can you trust that what he says in a speech is what he really means after Guantanamo not being ended, drones in Pakistan, NSA spying, Bradley Manning incarceration conditions etc, etc? Not to mention people living in tent cities and the nation having to subsidise Walmart pay with food stamps.
All I’d expect from this speech is that he’s trying to change the topic, not that he might mean what he says. So no, I don’t have an opinion on the speech, but I have a very negative opinion about why he might be making in right now, and I can’t believe he means a word of it.
Thats right Mozza, Jenny et al have not done their homework into the General Electric (GE) backing of Obama, and what this means to that company’s NUCLEAR power plant production revenue streams, and control of the *energy market*!
Its why we are in this mess, because people like Jenny, have NFI, what they are contributing to!
I wonder if the Obama’s ephinany on US emissions has anything todo with the discovery of massive quantities of shale gas via large scale fracking. Is converting their coal burning to gas burning much better?
That too – I forgot about the fracking in the credibility stakes.
Biggest shale gas boom since whenever, isn’t it? Apparently it’s better than oil for climate change emissions, even more important is the shift from coal to gas. Although apparently the U.S. is displacing, rather than reducing, it’s emissions through coal exports.
Obama, like many of the names who have quoted above, Jenny, Barosso et al, is a criminal, who does exactly what he is told, by those who put him in power!
kia ora jenny, 2 things strike me about the whole obama thing;
firstly i think your enthusiasm for it is more about the position he holds talking about what he is talking about.
secondly and more importantly you seem to be desiring equal leadership, concerning climate change, to be shown in this country.
GINETTE McDONALD: He came up to me and said, “Ginette McDonald, do you know who I am? My name is Paul Scott Holmes and I am a great broadcaster!”
JIM MORA: Ha ha ha ha! Did he say that, Paul Holmes? ….[Long pause to indicate mourning]…. Peter Sinclair was cerebral. He wrote some very insightful columns.
GINETTE McDONALD: How smart he was and how vulnerable! What a sacrifice it is to be a public figure!
MORA: We could riff on THAT for the next ten minutes!
….Several minutes later….
MORA: Mahhh-vellous! I’ll never forget your interview with Sir Elton John! He ADORED you!
….Later….
GINETTE McDONALD: I think the young are completely mahhhh-vellous!
—-Eight Months to Mars, Afternoons with Jim Mora, Radio NZ National, Monday 11 February 2013
Yes indeed. I have tried listening to this stuff for as long as I can bear, in the hope that something useful might be discussed. But always I have to end by either switching off or changing to another channel, before my brain dissolves.
This poll is a concern and the flatness of the past polls is a concern. Between now and the spring the Caucus need to reform itself dramatically. It is possible.
As Toby Manhire suggested in the Herald last week “..the promotion of an MP who had served his time would project strength, evidence of the leader’s vaunted experience in conciliation..”
I’d add to that the early retirement of Goff, King and Mallard coupled with the appointment of new managers in Shearer’s office who are NOT selected by Grant Robertson. Shearer has to stop what he is currently doing. It is not working. He needs to create a new team.
Cunliffe seems to be more focused than ever on his portfolio. He continues to show that he can engage with business people and issues as well as with the workers, consumers and the disenfranchised. His recent contributions to debates in Parliament show he is more centered than ever. Cunliffe looks like a guy who has learned from whatever was done to him last year. He has demonstrated that he can swallow a rat, and get on with folk in the beltway as well a burbs.
Shearer has the choice: to continue as is or to make a change.
Go on Shearer, make the necessary changes, now, refresh and position yourself to get our score out of the low 30s and into the 40s.
Your last chance.
Don’t confuse Obama with Gandhi: Norman Finkelstein
At UBC on January 21, 2009, the day after Obama’s inauguration, Norman Finkelstein gave a short speech about his research into the life and works of Mahatma Gandhi. He claims there is no comparison between Gandhi, who gave up his life to a cause he believed in, and Barack Obama, who is merely a clever politician coasting on a wave of change that he didn’t work to create.
So today in Christchurch we will hear how Brownlee will lump a giant great dull convention centre right onto two of the very best blocks of CBD Christchurch so that all manner of private business can do private business. Brownlee will require the ratepayers to pay for these private businesses.
Why don’t private businesses pay for their private business? I thought Brownlee and his ilk believed in user-pays and the free market and not corporate handouts or picking winners? Why do they force elderly ratepayers to pay for them?
Secondly, a lumpen great convention centre is completely the wrong thing to place in that location. White elephant city here we come…..
i despair.
and so do countless others – witness the decaying hole of the donut city.
Christchurch central city rebuild is failing. I hope I am proved wrong.
When the work is complete, and Christchurch looks like the National Party, and violence and crime flourish, will it be too late to tear their monuments to greed and corruption down? Of course not!
Well that’s kind of what is hoped for – that given the time it will take to bring these giant monuments to fruition and given that time and tide and new and different governments and councils will come and go and shoulder and shove and pull and push these projects all around and they will get variously dumped and amended and shrunken and expanded as the will of the peoples dictate.
That is the hope.
But when all you have is hope you have nothing (sorry JK (kirwan that is)…)
Apparently Lancaster Park, I mean Jade Stadium, oh I mean AMI Stadium, whatever the f… its current corporate tag is…. is not even bloody broken. It is apparently structurally sound and the only problem is that from one end of the field to the other the stadium drops 200mm.
That’s about 8 inches. About $45million to repair so the rumour goes. Why not leave it at that? And don’t tell visiting teams as we will then get the downhill advantage….
He certainly is a lot more fluent than Dave.
David Cunliffe should be and is ready to be the Leader of Labour, I didn’t really think so last year but he’s certainly developed a bit more humility and lost the arrogance and pompousness.
I guess having your colleagues lining up to kick you in the nads does that, tends to make you reassess your approach and how you do things.
Well, it’s a bit of a back-handed compliment to David Bennett, for knowing all the loopholes that needed to be ended, having specialised in fiddling farm accounts in the past.
Clearly David is a criminal mastermind…..according to the police.
Disregarding the new evidence, the crown story is just daft:
22 yr old David gets up, shoots 4 of his family in the house and then pops out to do the paper run as an alibi. Gets back home just in time to hide behind the curtains and snuff the old man. Then he just has to leave a wee note on the computer to implicate dad and then finally ring the police and turn on the water works.
Or as you suggest ,
An elderly man gets up , puts on his sons’ clothes and glasses, shoots 4 of his family. takes off his sons clothes, puts the bloodied clothes in the washing machine,
Changes his clothes, goes into the front room, logs on the family computer, types a note obsolving the son ,whos clothes hes just worn ,while murdering his family.
Shoots himself ,the guns’ mag falling out of the gun and landing on its edge beside Robin Bains’ ‘hand.
Robins. body found with no blood on him ,except his own.
David, who is found with his siblings blood on him. cant remember how he knows his family his dead, or why he waited 20 mins to ring an ambulance.
Sounds like something a defence lawyer would come up with.
It wouldn’t wash as an Agatha Christie novel.
Alternatively, dad wants to shoot his entire family except for one son. Equally bizarre.
Fortunately, we don’t have trial by TV or blogosphere.
Meanwhile, a relative of mine has to avoid watching the news for the next few days because every time pundits spout opinions (based solely on TV reports or the internet, which compete for the award for disseminating the most utter BS) or cheer their particular team, it reminds her how much she misses her friend, even after all this time.
Some folk try Agatha Christie whodunnits, others just don’t bother with hiding a murder-suicide. Arguing that one or the other could not be done because it sounds “just daft” in the cold light of day in my opinion shows a marked under-estimation of (to quote WSBurroughs) “just how far human kicks can go”.
I still have one question. What is the first thing most men do first thing after the get up? Have a piss . . . amirite or amitire?? So, how is it explained that Robin Bain didn’t empy his bladder before setting about murdering his family?
Don’t get me wrong, I believe this whole thing has been yet another ongoing, ochestrated miscarriage of justice perpetrated by, if not corrupt, then bumbling police officers aided and abetted by officious bureacrats and their babmboozled and indifferent politicians. Milton Weir . Kevin Anderson, Phill Goff, Crusher Collins, Peter Doone, Peter Robinson, Jim Doyle, Kim Jones, N C Jaine, B P Duncan . . . “when honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose?”
I still have one question. What is the first thing most men do first thing after the get up? Have a piss . . . amirite or amitire?? So, how is it explained that Robin Bain didn’t empy his bladder before setting about murdering his family?
I would have thought that the body would have all sorts of overrides to normal biological functions when one was about to commit mass murder.
The full bladder, therefore victim, argument has no evidential weight.
This always supposes improbability Robin slept and committed crime soon after rising without emptying his bladder.
What evidence is there that Robin may not have had a sleepless night contemplating shooting his family or woke well before the shooting. In such scenarios he could easily have started with a partially full bladder and accumulated further urine during the activity of shooting his family.
I have not studied this David Bain case – but the thing that has always been the BIG question to me – is MOTIVE?
What MOTIVE did David Bain have to murder all these members of his family?”
The link you posted Penny goes to the review of the case that is damning of the police. We will never know who killed the Bain family, because the police didn’t do their job properly. What was the motive for that?
We will never know who killed the Bain family, because the police didn’t do their job properly. What was the motive for that
An excellent question, Weka!
Dunedin, moreso than many NZ cities, has a very dark history, one which includes police, politicians etc, being tied to organized, and underaged crime, and various other sadistic goings on.
Rather like it being, the Adelaide of NZ, if you will!
so, they want to intercept Skype? 1/3 of all internet traffic. Good luck with that Amy and co.
(You better you better you bet).
Seven Sharp characterize Assange as an “albino weasel”. Really?
DHB’s fail to meet safety stds (Health Quality and Safety Board).Only a 1/4 to a 1/3 of all DHB’s “doing enough” to prevent falls, infection etc.
RB seriously considering restrictions on low-deposit loans, first-home buyers not exempt. “Something has to be done to prevent damage (wreckage) to the financial system.”
This morning around the time on Morning Report about 7.45am that radionz reads out the headlines of the main papers I thought I heard that the Waikato Times had an item on spending by the NZ Forces likely to go into drones etc. I haven’t been able to track this down. Did anybody else hear the full mention, very short, or have seen it in a newspaper? I would like to look at it, hear it further.
In my day Joe, we believed everything that authorities told us. (Almost.) Now we should doubt everything that authorities tell us. Skills learnt to predict the bad guy in a stirring”whodunnit” will nowadays be focussed on real authority figures selling real misinformation. My brain hurts.
Message to Christine Rankin …
A Doz size 7 eggs are on special at New World for $3.99.
That’s great aye Krussy?
That means the kuds can live on weetbix and milk for breakfast (at 57cents?); noodles for lunch; and egg and toast for dinner for the next week.
Well I know mine couldn’t possibly have, but as you know Krussy Rankin seems to know better.
(i.e. basing her experiences of a couple of decades ago transposed on today’s reality).
They’d probably have to be raw eggs as well, given the lack of electricity.
So little birdies on the twittery grapevine saying things about how that there Auckland Council voted 10-7 that they weren’t interested in some deal involving no skycity and some pokies and a convention centre so that’s a thing.
The comments list seems to becoming overwhelmed with some material from Gaza GPJA.. And Karol’s one on Women receiving awards also extra long, the wording of headings if too long is hard to read.
Remember last year? When ABC were using Garner and Gower to dump on Cunliffe … all off the record, whispering in the dark, using the TV3 twins to push their self-serving agenda.
It’s on again. But this time Shearer is the target. Remember there are no real Shearer supporters, they were Parker supporters a couple of weeks before the leadership ballot in 2011, they just wanted a front man, and Shearer got the nod.
Turns out he’s not up to the job (who could have guessed, eh?) so they’re leaking into Gower’s ear (eww) and tonight on TV3 they got him to do their work – it’s their usual method. And the next idiot who says “Non-story! MSM!” try and think for a moment … who’s feeding him? And why?
Shearer will be dumped by the people who put him there. Next up, Robertson.
Yes. But don’t they need to put it to a full membership vote? They may try to go for someone like Andrew Little, or Jacinda Ardern. They are short on options.
But I thought Gower was supposed to have pretty much made everything up last time to make headlines? But this time he’s being fed?
Or maybe last time “ABC” fed gower the idea of a Cunliffe coup in order to discredit cunliffe, (who didn’t need discrediting if he wasn’t planning a challenge), and this time they’re feeding gower the idea of a caucus challenge because, well, whatever.
Or maybe gower realises his paycheck rests on taking unwary comments and blowing them out of proportion. Where’s the benefit in flagging a challenge months down the road? There is none.
Got that.
The reports gower was making last year about Shearer’s leadership facing a possible challenge within months were complete falsehoods spread by confidential sources. The reports gower is making right now about Shearer’s leadership facing a possible challenge within months are complete truths spread by confidential sources.
Did you see the story? Long, detailed quotes. Not somebody caught off guard, but somebody planting.
I said (and you ignored) Garner because it was his blog that started it all last year. A blog that was brought about by senior Labour MPs attacking Cunliffe – anonymously, of course.
Funny thing about anonymous attackers. You never know what was the actual quote and what is the intermediary’s little bit of editorialising. Sometimes they’re 100% accurate, sometimes it’s all just an invention by the intermediary, usually it’s somewhere in between. The point is, you can never know.
If s/he said the complete opposite, you’d be right. But if the reporter is the only one with recordings or notes of the meeting, there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation that wouldn’t ruin come to light.
And if a journo does burn a source who is expendable, what could the anonymous source do?
unless he got something slightly less clear cut, but he now has the lens through which everything can be interpreted and the mp is therefore no longer needed.
I mean, the difference is whether they had lunch for an hour and gower drew together disparate lines and placed less emphasis on qualifications and equivocations, or had a 2 minute chat in the john where the mp wasn’t interrupted at all and spoke straight into the recorder.
No, the difference is the quote marks. And it doesn’t matter if Gower is ignoring all the kumbayah stuff they may have said. They also said this stuff, to Gower, (and Dannat TVNZ). It’s deliberate that they said this stuff, it’s something they chose to do, to get a story like this.
I’ve been “quoted” in the paper once or twice – different hats back in the day. Just in the local pages, nothing earth shattering. Quotation marks seemed to be largely similar to the role of the target in the Texas Sharpshooter analogy.
And that’s without the interview style “would you say something roughly along the lines of xxxxxx?” “yes”.
What is the problem with someone saying that Shearer has to either demonstrate that he can get his performance right or step aside?
What is the problem with telling the media?
The Membership and the public would like to know that the Party leaders are taking the continual poll paralysis seriously.
The sooner the Leadship issue is opened to a proper debate the better.
But according to the “Shearer’s a patsy” theory, doesn’t that mean that I’d be undermining shearer at this time so Robertson can take the leadership?
But of course your justification for that delusion is even more tenuous than CV’s guess: it consists solely of amateur-hour content pattern analysis. Even a political news editor would regard that as a bit thin.
By the way, your content analysis is as mistaken as your trend analysis.
There has been one Labour MP who has been providing information to Gower. This goes back a long way ….. Gower himself has mentioned in passing the name of that MP when I was with a small group of people a few years ago.
Labour leader David Shearer has been put on two months’ notice by his own MPs – if the poll ratings don’t improve, his leadership will be challenged.
A Labour MP told 3 News today that Mr Shearer had until spring – two months away – to pick up his and Labour’s performance.
The MP, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “The caucus is just really flat. It’s not panic or anxiety just yet, but a couple more bad polls and it will be. David’s got a couple more months. A change in leadership cannot be ruled out before the end of the year.
“Spring time is when people will get really nervous, just over a year out from the election. We don’t want to get into the “Goff-zone”, where it’s too late to change the leader, but you’ve got someone in there the public just don’t want -the phone is just off the hook.”
It is rare for Labour MPs to speak so openly of leadership concerns.
The MP who spoke to 3 News is not a loyal supporter of leadership rival David Cunliffe. That makes the comments more significant as it shows there are broader concerns in the caucus about Mr Shearer’s performance.
Meanwhile Mr Shearer was on the by-election battlefield of Ikaroa-Rawhiti with Meka Whaitiri, Labour’s candidate for the seat.
There he vowed to be the Labour leader come the next general election.
3 News
let’s refresh everyone on the basis you have for saying that Robertson and I are “old friends”. I said:
The only relationship I have with Robertson is that he was present of the students’ association at about the same time I started uni.
From that you draw a long bow from “uni at roughly the same time”, through “actually spoke to each other at the time” all the way to “are friends” [present tense = “are friends now”]. And spout on as if it’s fact.
this would be the brilliant tactic of creating rumours of a cunliffe challenge because mallard didn’t want cunliffe to be leader, even though cunliffe was extremely loyal and in no way going to challenge.
No challenge = no need to purposefully create rumours.
But if there was a challenge, gower didn’t need mallard to make anything up.
The MP who spoke to 3 News is not a loyal supporter of leadership rival David Cunliffe. That makes the comments more significant as it shows there are broader concerns in the caucus about Mr Shearer’s performance.
That suggests to me the MP was a member of the broader caucus and not notably aligned at any point to either the Shearer or the Cunliffe camp.
That’s why I said at any point. The Robertson/Parker acolytes joined with the Shearer-ites once the deals were done. One faction leader got deputy and the other finance. I’m inclined to think this was someone who kept in the background during the leadership battle and its aftermath.
Great, more Labour MPs spilling their guts to news reporters. Also, I’m pretty sure that apart from a very few MPs, there is no actual “Shearer camp”.
EDIT ffs, this Labour caucus instability is Hooten’s wet dream planned well over a year ago, coming true. I’m just amazed though that none of us on The Standard spotted the plan before.
The leader is (usually) not in Parliament on Thursday – today he was campaigning in Ikaroa-Rawhiti. So it’s safe to talk to the gallery, cat’s away, mice play …
In unrelated news, Trevor Mallard *was* in Parliament today.
I can’t believe someone from Caucus chose to leak this to Gower instead of working within caucus to bring a resolution to the Leadership problem. Unbelievable, I don’t think we can blame Hooten for this, I’m afraid that Labour is seriously fucked if a senior member of caucus has gone to the media with this.
Who ever it is is putting their ambitions ahead of the Party’s (Its per emptive, Shearer is gone!)…they need to be outed. Clearly it is the same person who set up Cunliffe in November. This person is poisonous, Labour will never succeed with this person within its ranks IMO.
Hmmm, I thought the whole point was that Shearer was put in to prevent Cunliffe, and he would then later be rolled to get who the ABCs really want. At least that’s what the Standardistas were talking about last year.
Sorry Saarbo, but it’s a given that too many Labour MPs put their own careers ahead of the good of the party.
btw, Labour MPs playing bullshit internal politics and Hooton having his hand in things are not mutually exclusive.
Y’all know I’m neither a LP member nor list voter, so take this as whatever.
But this stuff hurts your party. From now till ‘spring’ Gower has been given an explicit narrative. All political stories will now be in the frame of “What does this mean for Shearer’s position as leader’.
You might think “So, what’s new?” and fair enough, but this has made it official. It’s a Labour party framing, the media don;t need to speculate that caucus is looking, they can state it all as fact.
So LP members should be writing letters and making calls to your mps, and letting them know that this anonymous sniping should stop, and that whoever is doing it should launch a challenge and get this ball rolling. You’ve got your new process, it will take time, but it needs to be put to bed, and that can only happen one way or the other through a vote. Untill the party wide vote happens, this story will run, and Labour will not look like a govt in waiting. That vote needs to happen as soon as possible.
Have the bloody NATs been taking lessons from the UK tories? Conservative Government has just announced a massive £100B infrastructure and social housing build plan…but none of it starts for at least 4 years.
This is more bullshit “things will get better in the future” BAU messaging.
So if Labour falls below 30% will people here finally admit, “hey we’re in trouble here” or will you be like bob dole who thought because his cousin friend in tempe was going to vote for him, hes still in with a chance.
Every 2 or 3 fortnightly Morgan polls I have a look at the trends. Basically I am ignoring jitter.
I essentially ignore the other polls as they happen so infrequently for each poll as to be useless because of their infrequencies and that they only seem to make and effort to get an accurate population sample close to the election – which is why they always have dramatic shifts then.
As far as I can see, most people here do the same. Reading the right blogs is amusing. Many if not most seem to largely ignore Morgan despite its sampling rate and despite the fact that it seldom shifts much leading into an election and is usually the most accurate. Instead they concentrate on the infrequent polls with piss poor track records.
I guess they are either credulous fools with little understanding of statistics, or they are credulous fools with delusions that the “big lie” technique keeps working.
in the roy morgan, I probably would. Especially if it was coupled with a noticable reversal in the trend (as opposed to a single 8-point drop from 37%).
You can relax McFlock. The true mean of support for Labour sits on or very close to 32%. It’s very unlikely that it will fall under 30%, except perhaps momentarily.
I get the impression that you pray it does dip below 30%, otherwise all the helpul advice for Labour you’ve offered here is just useless horseshit you’ve been spouting since feb 2012.
Either someone is manipulating iPredict to push their point, or there really has been backroom talk over the last few weeks and the leak is just it eventuating.
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Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice conducted a public consultation exercise on whether to hold a review of the Official Information Act (this replaced their previous plans to hold a secret consultation with handpicked people). 285 people submitted on ...
Always Playing Catch-Up: Throughout the 1970s, the purchasing power of the ordinary worker’s pay packet – the only meaningful measure of his or her wealth – was being eaten away every passing year by seemingly inexorable rises in the cost-of-living. ...
The Interim Climate Change Committee's report on Action on agricultural emissions: Evidence, analysis and recommendations was finally released today, and as you might guess from the title, it is recommending that we actually act, rather than let farmers keep ...
On Sunday July 7, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter announced their intention to review the Ministry of Health’s Funded Family Care policy and repeal Part 4Aof the 2000 NZ Public Health and Disability Act. These are festering injustices ...
Agriculture is our biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for 48% of the total. It follows that meeting any credible emissions reduction target requires cutting agricultural emissions, most likely by having fewer cows. But National thinks people shouldn't be ...
How scummy is the UK Home Office? This scummy:The Home Office lied to EU member states to remove victims of human trafficking and modern slavery in breach of European law, according to whistleblowers. Legal experts have said the practice is ...
Belle is a lovely fifteen year-old border collie who belongs to our friends and neighbours at Bryan’s Beach, Michael and Judy Corboy. Belle, in her old age, can hardly see or hear, but – as a constant participant at social ...
“We wuz robbed!” is the classic cry of the disappointed losers of a closely contested sporting contest – it is very much to the credit of the Black Caps that we heard no such sentiment from them following the stunning ...
The Youth Parliament is being held this week, and some of the youth MPs are campaigning for a lower voting age:Molly Doyle, 17, is one Youth MP who wants this to change. She is part of a non-partisan campaign run ...
Up till now, Australia has made its living by digging up coal and exporting it to other countries, destroying the global climate in the process. But now they have a new option: exporting solar power:The desert outside Tennant Creek, deep ...
Later this month, thousands of people are expected to march to parliament as part of the #HandsOffOurTamaraki movement. At its heart, the movement is about preserving whānau and demanding that the state stop removing children from their whānau, hapū and iwi. ...
by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh The recent statements made by the former FARC commander, Carlos Lozada (legal name Julian Gallo), where, from his seat in Congress, he praised the Colombian Army demonstrate how low the farianos have sunk. Lozada began by ...
A Woman’s Place is on the Podium was a public meeting in London on 10 July to discuss women’s sports and the impact of transwomen competing against women. The venue was sold out with a packed hall of 750 people. ...
Last month I talked about the no-fly movement: people who refuse to fly or limit it to absolute necessity to avoid destroying the climate. Now, that movement has a somewhat surprising new member: Dutch airline KLM:Dutch airline KLM has launched ...
In the 1960's, humanity faced a terrible threat: global thermonuclear war. Nuclear weapons were uniquely destructive and dangerous, and if more countries got them, the logic of MAD and the pre-emptive strike would put us on a hair-trigger to destruction. ...
An occasional series where I will ponder allegations of anti-Semitism directed at the British Labour Party and its members.In this case, we are thinking about an allegedly anti-Semitic image shared by a Labour Party member. Its origins appear to be ...
Matariki has been and gone, but this year we saw a couple of op-eds arguing that it should be a public holiday, replacing the foreign monarch's fake birthday. And now, New Zealand Republic - a group which campaigns for an ...
The discussion on the quality of economic advice, which we reported last week, has spilled over into a discussion about whether so many senior appointments should be of non-New Zealanders. Recall I discussed the failure to develop career paths within ...
When Nicky Hager revealed US footage of the Operation Burnham raid, obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, one of the obvious questions was whether Ministers had seen it - and in particular, whether they'd been told that it ...
Northern Ireland is the Alabama of the UK: a backwards region where women and gay people are denied fundamental rights. But Westminster has just decided to fix that:MPs have voted resoundingly to extend same-sex marriage and access to abortion to ...
There's a problem with "synthetic cannabis", and not just the one you think. It's the name.We're in the midst of a wave of news stories that link synthetic drugs to serious harm, through deadly road accidents and accidental overdoses (which ...
Ranjit Kauri, The Dancing Maharani and Other Stories, Swansea, Head and Heart, 2019, £6.99; reviewed by Don Franks Working people are not the same country to country. Our struggles for a better life take place in surroundings of very different ...
Let's Do Them! All Jacinda Ardern has to do to clinch the 2020 General Election is frighten the bejesus out of the electorate by describing in the most graphic terms imaginable what will happen to all the positive beginnings her ...
It may be that we have all misinterpreted the somewhat surprising “bromance” between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. It has been all too easy to assume that it is Kim who is cosying up to Trump rather than the ...
by Michael Roberts So the full circle is completed. The corrupt pro-business conservative New Democracy party in Greece that was ousted by the anti-capitalist Syriza party in 2015 has been returned to office in yesterday’s general election, with an outright ...
When the Australian government passed a series of new spy laws over the last few years, they pinky-promised that they wouldn't use them to spy on journalists and subvert freedom of the press. They lied:The anti-encryption laws passed by the ...
From 1975 to 1989, the spy agencies of South America's right-wing military dictatorships cooperated in Operation Condor, a joint campaign of extermination against the continent's left. Roughly 400,000 people were imprisoned, 30,000 disappeared, and 60,000 murdered - kidnapped, tortured, executed, ...
When she was standing for office, Jacinda Ardern promised she would take abortion out of the Crimes Act. And to be fair, there was some early action on that, with an immediate referral of the issue to the Law Commission ...
When the government introduced the Zero Carbon Bill, people rightly asked what they planned to do to reduce transport emissions, which basicly had no policy at all other than the ETS. Today, they responded, announcing a "feebate" system which would ...
At almost every level, the problem with medicinal cannabis is a lack of good information. In the US, FDA regulations make it hard to research. Most doctors aren't familiar with what research there is and most patients don't know either. ...
Redline is critical of Corbyn for his political weaknesses, but he’s no anti-Semite. There is no substance to the McCarthyist witch-hunt being run by the right wing, and the pro-Israel lobby inside and outside the Labour Party in the UK. ...
The government's billion trees program is the sort of policy which could make a real difference to our emissions and the fight against climate change. But climate scientist Jim Salinger isn't convinced:The Forestry Minister Shane Jones' one billion trees won't ...
Last month the government was celebrating another surplus. Meanwhile, children are starving:One in five children are living in households where putting food on the table is a struggle, according to a new report from the Ministry of Health. It found ...
Show Me The Money! The alternative to state funding of infrastructure is, of course, to fund it by taking on massive amounts of private debt. On this issue, at least, Auckland mayoral challenger, Tamihere, has some solid points to make. ...
If we are to avoid making the earth uninhabitable, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to practically nothing over the next decade. But that will still leave us with the problem of the carbon we have already emitted, which ...
Former Waikato DHB CEO Nigel Murray allegedly misused public funds, spending more than $120,000 of public money on unjustified travel. He was forced to resign and the Serious Fraud Office began an investigation. But despite the SFO finding that the ...
Jeremy Corbyn, we are told, is being advised – not least by his deputy (as well as by some of his would-be successors) – that he must come “off the fence” on the Brexit issue if he wants to bolster ...
The End of Life bill has been read a second time and is now heading for the House for further debate. Personally, I support the proposal. I don't ever epect to take advantage of the Bill's provisions myself, but as ...
Before the substantive issue which this column is about – whether there has been a deterioration in the economic advice given to the government – a paragraph about the budget leaks.read more ...
Below is a translation of the editorial in the June 24 round of weekly workplace bulletins issued all over France by the revolutionary workers’ organisation Lutte Ouvriere. Last Saturday, 8,000 people took to the streets of Belfort (eastern France) to ...
Why hasn't Parliament followed the lead set by our local authorities and declared a climate emergency? The answer is the National Party:The Prime Minister’s admission that she is open to the idea of declaring a climate change emergency is nothing ...
Back in May the government released its Zero Carbon Bill. While much of the bill was welcome, there was one big exception: it contained a secrecy clause, requiring the Climate Change Commission to maintain secrecy over practically everything it does. ...
by Phil Duncan This past week has marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Stonewall Inn riots in Christopher Street, New York, the event generally regarded as kicking off the gay liberation movement. Quite a few articles have ...
Southland - land of coal-burning dairy farmers - has become the first region in the country to explicitly vote against declaring a climate emergency. Their reason? They didn't want to "devalue" the word "emergency". Its an argument addressed powerfully in ...
New Zealand has a problem with police chases: officers going after fleeing drivers like rabid dogs, without any consideration for proportionality or public safety, often with fatal results. And according to an in-depth article in the Guardian today, the UK ...
Welcome to another heaping helping of research publications related to climate change drivers and mechanisms, the effects of climate change and how we might yet grope our way into systems approaches to dealing with the mess we're making, despite ourselves. ...
Holly Lawford-Smith is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Melbourne. She’s currently writing a book about radical feminism. This article appeared on Feminist Current Academics should be standing together in defence of universities’ fundamental values: the ...
The Otago Daily Times has an in-depth article about the future of wind energy in New Zealand, and it is looking bright:The news that wind will play the leading role in New Zealand’s energy future was put up in lights ...
If the sight of schoolkids striking for a future has been filling you with hope, good news: they want you to join them on September 27:Students will take to the streets again demanding action on climate change, and this time ...
The People's "Friend": In this masterpiece of revolutionary propaganda, the homicidal political psychopath, Jean-Paul Marat, has been transformed by Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's most accomplished artist, into a martyred hero of the ordinary people of Paris. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, ...
The principle of one person, one vote doesn’t apply for local elections. In fact, you don’t even need to be a person to have voting rights. Welcome to the ratepayer roll. While the ratepayer roll accounts for less than 1% ...
I have been working my way through a 47,000 document tranche of declassified US government communications related to Argentina and the “Dirty War” of 1976-83. I grew up in Argentina in the period leading up to the March 24, 1976 ...
To express concern about foreign ownership and control in New Zealand is often to invite accusations of xenophobia and economic illiteracy. It is worthwhile, therefore, to rehearse the grounds for that concern, and to explore the various forms it can ...
It must be a day ending in Y because the Guardian - remember when it used to be a good paper1 - is running another spurious story about Corbyn's leadership being threatened over anti-Semitism.The headline the Guardian runs is: "MPs tell ...
A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Jun 23 through Sat, June 29, 2019 Editor's Pick When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope is contagious'Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and ...
A new digital platform aims to make it easier for small businesses to access services from multiple government agencies, leaving them more time to focus on their own priorities. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Small Business Stuart Nash ...
Million-dollar start to gun collection eventsPolice Minister Stuart Nash says a solid start has been made to the gun buyback and amnesty after the first weekend of community collection events. “Gun owners will walk away with more than ...
Police Minister Stuart Nash has praised Police and gun owners after the first firearms collection event saw a busy turnout at Riccarton Racecourse in Christchurch. “Police officers and staff have put a tremendous effort into planning and logistics for the ...
Seventy-eight new Police constables are heading out to the regions following today’s graduation of a new recruit wing from the Royal New Zealand Police College. Police Minister Stuart Nash says the record high number of new Police officers being recruited, ...
July 19 (BusinessDesk) - The government is looking to tighten control and impose harsher penalties after the Mycoplasma bovis outbreak revealed cracks in the country's stock management system. ...
Kia Anga Mua Ngā Hapū o Ngāpuhi (KAM) has reached a pivotal milestone following a hui yesterday at Waitangi with the Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Andrew Little. ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union can reveal that the Government spent $133,530 on producing its ‘Wellbeing Budget’ document, a cost blowout largely driven by spending on graphic design and photography. The $133,530 price tag compares to $86,268 ...
Kahungunu Māori Language Awards. Nominations closed on 5 July 2019, and were judged by the Senior Management Team of Ngāti Kahungunu Iwi Incorporated. The judges wish to acknowledge the very high calibre of all nominations received making it a very ...
High Court of Australia Judge, Justice Stephen Gageler, will address recent criticism of court judgment delays in Australia, at the University of Canterbury (UC) on 23 July at 6.15pm. ...
This summary is provided to assist in the understanding of the Inquiry’s proceedings but does not constitute the official record. The full Minute is available at the link below. ...
The Tertiary Education Commission is laying charges under section 292A of the Education Act 1989 against three individuals for making a false representation for the purpose of receiving, or continuing to receive, free tertiary education from a tertiary education ...
New Zealand food businesses today welcomed a trio of new food safety tools, designed to make it faster, easier and more affordable to follow the rules and keep consumers safe. ...
AUT research shows that Māori children are almost four times more likely than those of European descent to be placed out of home by child protection services ...
The Government announced today that grants of up to $2,500 for energy efficient heaters are now available as part of the Government’s Warmer Kiwi Homes programme. ...
Fonterra’s use of coal has been the target of numerous grassroots campaigns in recent years. Last year 350 Aotearoa affiliated groups, Fossil Free Aoraki and 350 Nelson launched a petition dismissing the dairy giant’s initial target of no new ...
Information sessions on proposals for The Medicinal Cannabis Scheme take place in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch over the next fortnight. The sessions are open to anyone with an interest in learning more about the proposed scheme. ...
“Our children are our most vulnerable, most innocent victims and we do not want to see any more children harmed by these ‘known sex offenders’. The safety of our community must be the paramount consideration.” ...
“The announcement that Fonterra will immediately stop installing any new coal boilers or increasing capacity to burn coal is the signal that the biomass fuel supply industry welcomes” said Brian Cox, Executive Officer of the Bioenergy Association. ...
18 July 2019-- Coal Action Network Aotearoa (CANA) today welcomed Fonterra’s commitment to build no new coal plants, a “no brainer” for the climate crisis the world faces. The group has been urging this transition for six years now and ...
The increase in demand for cage-free eggs is set to continue according to animal rights organisation SAFE, who says the egg industry should expect this and prepare. ...
Wellington, New Zealand – 350 Pacific made a formal submission to the New Zealand Government’s Environment Parliamentary Select Committee on the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill, led by the Pacific Climate Warriors (PCWs) based in ...
There used to be a school of thought on the centre right side of politics that the best way to neuter the Greens as a political force would be to let them have a spell in government. Then, according to ...
Today (18 July) is Nelson Mandela International Day when the United Nations highlights the importance of humane conditions of imprisonment. In New Zealand our prisons are overcrowded and understaffed. At 214 prisoners per 100,000 people, we have the fifth ...
NZEI Te Riu Roa will take legal action over the lengthy delay in implementing pay increases for teachers. Novopay announced yesterday that teachers would have to wait until 11 September to see pay increases that they won when they settled ...
EDS has filed its submission on the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill. The Bill sets targets for greenhouse gas reductions, provides for the government to set a series of carbon budgets, and sets up a new, independent, Climate ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union has identified an absurd case of mission creep at Wellington City Council: the decision to spend $21,750 on two Consumer NZ investigations into different brands of bike lights. ...
The Motor Trade Association is welcoming the release of the Government’s new draft road safety strategy. MTA Chief Executive Craig Pomare says the association is pleased to see vehicle safety has been made a priority in the Road to Zero ...
The Department of Conservation continue to repeat the same old story about attacks on staff and how it is affecting their role in protecting our precious wildlife. NZ herald https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12249704 ...
The government's silence on the fact that the country's second-largest milk processor is on the brink of becoming 25% Chinese Government owned has been deafening. ...
School Strike 4 Climate NZ welcomes the coalition Government’s endeavour to take action on reducing agricultural emissions but is disappointed at the weak stance that the Government has taken on the issue. ...
The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has issued a formal warning under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (AML/CFT Act) to seven reporting entities within the Regus Management Limited (RNZML) designated business ...
The Northland Regional Council (NRC) has voted to exclude all GM/GE precautionary provisions in its regional plan, despite years of community engagement showing support for such protection. There is a sense of betrayal following the way the NRC Chairman ...
New Zealand’s ‘mission-driven’ charities working in international aid are showing early signs of changing the way they work, in particular prioritising building the capacity and resilience of local communities to do their own development. ...
Teachers will have to wait until 11 September for pay increases won as part of their collective agreement negotiations settled in June, according to an update sent to schools today from Novopay. ...
July 16 (BusinessDesk) - Energy Minister Megan Woods says the government “won’t die in a ditch” if its goal of 100 percent renewable electricity generation isn't reached by 2035. ...
The Electricity Networks Association (ENA) is welcoming the Government’s response to the Interim Climate Change Committee (ICCC) Report released today. Graeme Peters, chief executive of the ENA, said one of the key recommendations, endorsed by the ...
An article* published this month in the Journal of Health Organization and Management raises questions over the way health board members are elected and whether the boards are even needed. ...
NZEI Te Riu Roa's kindergarten teacher members will vote on a proposed settlement to their collective agreement after four days of negotiations with the Ministry of Education and kindergarten employers. ...
Vector has today welcomed the ICCC’s report on Accelerated Electrification . Vector agrees that accelerating the electrification of transport and process heat will play a major role in reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Initiatives to ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union is calling on the Porirua City Council to cancel its underwriting of a proposed Canadian-led privately owned adventure park slated for public land after a similar project created a huge liability for Christchurch ...
Youth climate change campaigners Generation Zero welcome the Interim Climate Change Committee’s (ICCC’s) reports: Accelerated Electrification and Action on agricultural emissions ; which were finally released by the Government today, almost three months ...
Fish & Game New Zealand notes the announcement today that the Government and the intensive agriculture leadership have reached a ‘historic consensus’ and are exploring using a formal sector-government agreement instead of bringing agriculture ...
The independent Interim Climate Change Committee’s report on Accelerated Electrification was released today by the Minister for Energy and Resources, Hon Dr Megan Woods. ...
The independent Interim Climate Change Committee’s report Action on agricultural emissions was released today by the Minister for Climate Change, Hon James Shaw and the Minister of Agriculture, Hon Damien O’Connor. ...
Please find attached embargoed copies of two media statements from the Interim Climate Change Committee http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/1907/Embargoed_Interim_Climate_Change_Committee_Accelerated_electrification_MEDIA_STATEMENT.pdf ...
Greenpeace Executive Director, Dr Russel Norman, has reacted with disbelief that the Government’s latest climate proposal includes an option for dairy to voluntarily deal with their emissions over the next six years. ...
This week’s “Youth Parliament” is an expensive waste of time that promotes taxpayer-funded junketeering, says the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union . “We shouldn’t be training kids on the joys of the trough,” says Taxpayers’ Union spokesperson ...
Infrastructure Minister Shane Jones admitted on Q+A tonight that the state of New Zealand’s infrastructure planning is “dismal” and the government needs to get on with building “rather than writing more reports about it.” ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra [embedded content]University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Professor Deep Saini discusses the week in politics with Michelle Grattan – one with a reduced pace, despite the 24 ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and ...
Jacinda Ardern’s Melbourne trip wrapped up with nothing to show on longstanding trans-Tasman concerns, but was a potent reminder of her international appeal. ...
Pricing agricultural emissions first at the processor level - such as Fonterra - rather than right down at farm level stacks up as a gap measure says Catherine Leining. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Children and Technology, Western Sydney University Instagram is running a social media experiment in Australia and elsewhere to see what happens when it hides the number of likes on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Cross, Research Fellow, Curtin University Sign up to the Beating Around the Bush newsletter here, and suggest a plant we should cover at batb@theconversation.edu.au. Billabongs in the northern Kimberley are welcome ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling You’ve probably heard that this week marks 50 years since humans first set foot on the Moon – a feat that still boggles the mind given ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dennis Gentilin, Adjunct Fellow, Macquarie University As strange as it might sound, whistleblowers in Australia have reason to rejoice – so long as they are in the private sector. Thanks to new ...
The fourth season of Queer Eye drops today on Netflix. Sam Brooks reflects on his difficult relationship with the show, and where it sits in mainstream culture.For depressingly many people, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was an introduction not just to ...
The collapse of a multi-billion dollar deal to sell AMP's life insurance division to a British company for $3.6 billion is the fault of the companies, according to the Reserve Bank. ...
A poem by Miramar poet Geoff Cochrane.Channel HoppingStupa or Stuka?Weet-Bix or Welsh rabbit?Galactic aerodrome or Matchbox truck?*I’m young in my dreams, still young.*Beautiful Keanu’s wearing shades—antique shades with iodine-coloured lenses.*I’m young in my dreams, still young,and I still have some ...
For the month of July, Josie Adams is taking on the challenge of being low-waste. That means minimising plastics, emissions, and even recyclables. Each week we release her diary. This is week two.Read week one here.I’ll be honest, week two ...
By Royson Willie in Port Vila Two Vanuatu Daily Post journalists were literally given a pat-down by the police criminal investigation unit yesterday over a story they had written about the vehicle of the Chairman of the Public Service ...
By Gorothy Kenneth in Port Moresby Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape will visit Australia this weekend for a week-long state visit and the Bougainville independence referendum in less than three months is expected to be high on ...
Tougher laws governing the movement of animals and harsher penalties for non-compliance are on the table under an overhaul of two key pieces of legislation. ...
Wtf did we just watch?That sound you heard was a million furries screaming in ecstasy as their fantasy and everyone else’s nightmare came to life in the form of the first trailer for the live action version of Cats.Is it ...
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 Three Women by Lisa Taddeo (Bloomsbury, $35)Fucking ...
Tougher laws governing the movement of animals and harsher penalties for non-compliance are on the table under an overhaul of two key pieces of legislation. ...
As we mark the fiftieth anniversary the July 20th Moon landing Dr Nick Long reflects on what that's meant for New Zealand and considers the space 'gold rush' ahead. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine Griebsch, Specialist and Senior Lecturer in Small Animal Medicine, University Veterinary Teaching Hospital Sydney, Sydney School of Veterinary Science, University of Sydney Recently reported cases of the often fatal bacterial infection ...
My selection of the eight best morning news links from here and overseas, along with eight lunchtime lean-back long reads. Also, the full list of links, including Jacinda Ardern's trip to Australia, the big emissions report, Fonterra's coal move and a new ...
Heaven is a place on earth, and June is saving the world one ’80s pop hit at a time. Tara Ward recaps season 4, episode 9 of The Handmaid’s Tale. Praise be, for there was a tiny bit of good news ...
Finance companies say they shouldn’t have to be ‘fit and proper’ even though in some cases they charge more than the planned clampdown on high cost lending. A group of finance companies that charges well over the government’s proposed cap on ...
An ANZ shareholder is demanding the bank disclose more information about the sale of an Auckland residential property to its former chief executive and his family. ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s contentForeign Affairs and trade Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): The new, ...
Tara Ward sets out on a valiant quest to find the best apple in Aotearoa. The idea that every apple is a good apple is fake news. We’ve all got stories about shit experiences with apples, when it looked good on ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Sarkissian, Operations Scientist, CSIRO The role Australia played in relaying the first television images of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the Moon 50 years ago this July features in the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lyndal Sleep, Research Fellow, Griffith University In Australia’s social security laws, the “couple rule” is used to determine if a person is in a relationship, tying access to Centrelink payments to the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Walker, Lecturer (Management), Victoria University of Wellington We live in a society obsessed with performance. For both young and old, competitions, awards and rankings are an inescapable feature of life. How ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Megan O’Connell, Honorary Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne One-third of all preschools may lack a qualified teacher in the next four years if nothing changes, my new modelling shows. Currently, half of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirsty Volz, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland Of all the mantras for modernism, the one I think most befitting for Australian mid-century modern houses is L’esprit Nouveau – The New Spirit. ...
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Skifield snowmaking a sign of the future, vaccination rates fall alarmingly, and construction industry encouraged to lower emissions.Snowmaking has saved the ski industry from disaster this year, after the weather ...
Joel Rindelaub explains why it's so important for those weighing on climate science to be transparent about their funding sources and conflicts of interest. ...
Neil Armstrong may have been the first man on the moon, but if we define the ‘space race’ as spaceflight capability, the Soviets won it hands down, writes Jennifer Frost. ...
Our government and leaders are (still) divided on the question of compulsory te reo Māori. Who’s for it, who’s against it, and who’s flip flopping around in the middle?Under article two of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the government pledges to ...
When teenagers today are being called upon to solve the problems of tomorrow, why aren’t they given the right to participate in democracy? Fourteen-year-old Oli Morphew makes the case for lowering the voting age. If you’re going to deprive someone of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University Australia’s relations with China will be further complicated by the news that Australian citizen Yang Hengjun is set to be charged with ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Kyne, Senior Research Fellow in conservation biology, Charles Darwin University More than 28,000 species around the world are threatened, according to the Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the International ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE), Charles Sturt University Two Australian universities, University of Technology Sydney and Curtin University, are conducting internal reviews of ...
Open mike 27/06/2013 
Our conversations and push against specific supremacist and ultra-Nationalist groups, and the pseudo-intellectual underpinnings of them, need to mature at all levels. But in doing so, it’s going to have to include a more thorough and brutally honest self-examination ...3 hours ago
This week, in the wake of National's opposition to even talking about reducing agricultural emissions and Simon Bridges' refusal to recognise that there is a climate emergency, I've been saying that National is unfit to govern. And it looks like ...5 hours ago
Something I missed: not only did Youth MPs declare a climate emergency; they also launched a campaign to lower the voting age to 16:Youth Parliament week in Parliament has seen the establishment of Make it 16, a campaign to ...8 hours ago
I have been reading and listening to the aftermath of Trump’s comments about the four female first term Democratic representatives, all of whom are “people of color.” I found the US coverage interesting both as evidence of partisanship and the ...1 day ago
The proposed Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill treats biogenic methane emissions differently from all other carbon emissions. The latter are to be measured net so that emissions from fossil fuels can be offset by carbon stored in trees. ...2 days ago
by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh This article aims to answer a simple question, whether the conflict is only a rural one or whether it is also urban. The verb ‘to be’ is conjugated in the present tense as ,despite what some ...2 days ago
2 days ago
On Sunday July 7, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter announced their intention to review the Ministry of Health’s Funded Family Care policy and repeal Part 4Aof the 2000 NZ Public Health and Disability Act. These are festering injustices ...3 days ago
Belle is a lovely fifteen year-old border collie who belongs to our friends and neighbours at Bryan’s Beach, Michael and Judy Corboy. Belle, in her old age, can hardly see or hear, but – as a constant participant at social ...3 days ago
A Woman’s Place is on the Podium was a public meeting in London on 10 July to discuss women’s sports and the impact of transwomen competing against women. The venue was sold out with a packed hall of 750 people. ...5 days ago
An occasional series where I will ponder allegations of anti-Semitism directed at the British Labour Party and its members.In this case, we are thinking about an allegedly anti-Semitic image shared by a Labour Party member. Its origins appear to be ...1 week ago
1 week ago
2 weeks ago
Welcome to another heaping helping of research publications related to climate change drivers and mechanisms, the effects of climate change and how we might yet grope our way into systems approaches to dealing with the mess we're making, despite ourselves. ...2 weeks ago
The People's "Friend": In this masterpiece of revolutionary propaganda, the homicidal political psychopath, Jean-Paul Marat, has been transformed by Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's most accomplished artist, into a martyred hero of the ordinary people of Paris. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, ...2 weeks ago
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More details come out on Obama’s plan of attack to address climate change.
Obama’s climate plan will limit emissions from plants and trucks
Political leaders from around the world give their reaction.
From the European Union:
From the United Nations:
From Britain:
From the Pacific Islands:
From the New Zealand Green Party:
To date their has been no response to Obama’s speech from either Labour or National. And I think neither can we expect one.
Time for David Cunliffe to fill the gap perhaps? If Labour keep up its silence… Might we see ia press statement from Cunliffe to make up for the missing leadership sadly lacking in his own party?
I also notice that so far there has been no post on Obama’s speech from anyone at The Standard
Why is this?
Does nobody have any opinion on Obama’s speech?
Or could it be, that The Standard authors (consciously, or unconsciously), don’t want to acknowledge or bring attention to the uncomfortable fact that National and Labour’s policies are generally in alignment on further increasing CO2 emissions through more and riskier oil drilling and coal mining etc?
[lprent:
Firstly – What speech? I heard a brief mention on it on the car radio on my late return home last night. Looking at the timestamp on the news story and allowing for date lines, it would have been when? late in the day yesterday? We aren’t a news service, nor are we journalists and we tend to work hard on things other than this blog.
Secondly – Authors write on what they wish to and when they want to – as is stated clearly in the about and the policy.
Thirdly – I see that there was a post scheduled for this morning at the time you wrote that comment. I’d guess that it was written late last night. It gives Anthony’s opinion (which is what we are here to express) on the speech. Changes in policy direction usually take time to digest because the detail is important – not the headline.
Fourthly – You are banned for a week for again trying to tell us what we should be writing – read the policy. ]
What Graham has said for the Nacts, could, painfully, be just as easily be said of Labour.
And a month ago you were calling the greens climate change deniers and sellouts.
“Does nobody have any opinion on Obama’s speech?”
I can’t even bear to listen to the man at the moment. He has no credibility left at all, imo. How can you trust that what he says in a speech is what he really means after Guantanamo not being ended, drones in Pakistan, NSA spying, Bradley Manning incarceration conditions etc, etc? Not to mention people living in tent cities and the nation having to subsidise Walmart pay with food stamps.
All I’d expect from this speech is that he’s trying to change the topic, not that he might mean what he says. So no, I don’t have an opinion on the speech, but I have a very negative opinion about why he might be making in right now, and I can’t believe he means a word of it.
And Jenny is aware, I take it, that Obama is advocating a massive reinvestment in NUCLEAR power. That’s how committed to conservation the man is.
It’s like being lectured on victims’ rights by Garth McVicar. Some people have simply no credibility at all.
Thats right Mozza, Jenny et al have not done their homework into the General Electric (GE) backing of Obama, and what this means to that company’s NUCLEAR power plant production revenue streams, and control of the *energy market*!
Its why we are in this mess, because people like Jenny, have NFI, what they are contributing to!
Whats the link between nuclear power and conservation, Moz?
I wonder if the Obama’s ephinany on US emissions has anything todo with the discovery of massive quantities of shale gas via large scale fracking. Is converting their coal burning to gas burning much better?
That too – I forgot about the fracking in the credibility stakes.
Biggest shale gas boom since whenever, isn’t it? Apparently it’s better than oil for climate change emissions, even more important is the shift from coal to gas. Although apparently the U.S. is displacing, rather than reducing, it’s emissions through coal exports.
then of course there are the tar-sands they are also going gangbusters for..
phillip ure..
Obama, like many of the names who have quoted above, Jenny, Barosso et al, is a criminal, who does exactly what he is told, by those who put him in power!
What part of that, do you NOT get!
kia ora jenny, 2 things strike me about the whole obama thing;
firstly i think your enthusiasm for it is more about the position he holds talking about what he is talking about.
secondly and more importantly you seem to be desiring equal leadership, concerning climate change, to be shown in this country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EaCr1aRits
in response to the first; the first minute of this clipsays it very succintly (if darkly).
secondly; dont look to wellington for leadership, it starts and ends with yourself
Luvvies on the Loose
No. 1: Ginette McDonald
GINETTE McDONALD: He came up to me and said, “Ginette McDonald, do you know who I am? My name is Paul Scott Holmes and I am a great broadcaster!”
JIM MORA: Ha ha ha ha! Did he say that, Paul Holmes? ….[Long pause to indicate mourning]…. Peter Sinclair was cerebral. He wrote some very insightful columns.
GINETTE McDONALD: How smart he was and how vulnerable! What a sacrifice it is to be a public figure!
MORA: We could riff on THAT for the next ten minutes!
….Several minutes later….
MORA: Mahhh-vellous! I’ll never forget your interview with Sir Elton John! He ADORED you!
….Later….
GINETTE McDONALD: I think the young are completely mahhhh-vellous!
—-Eight Months to Mars, Afternoons with Jim Mora, Radio NZ National, Monday 11 February 2013
I’m amazed you listen to this stuff…
Yes indeed. I have tried listening to this stuff for as long as I can bear, in the hope that something useful might be discussed. But always I have to end by either switching off or changing to another channel, before my brain dissolves.
You listen to other channels??!!!
What the famous fair and balanced ZB?
I’m amazed you listen to this stuff…
It’s poetry, Paul. Poetry is what it is.
‘luvvies on the loose’..?
this example is happening now/today..a whole gaggle of them..
..in parts foreign..
http://whoar.co.nz/2013/commentwhoar-ed-local-celebs-go-on-charity-wheezeboys-own-adventure-but-was-it-actually-just-a-free-junketscam-of-sorts/
(excerpt:..)
“..ed:..breakfast television has reported how a gaggle of local celebs have been on a ‘wheeze’ of an adventure..”
phillip ure..
Hell Morrissey don’t your ears bleed listening to this this drivel.
This does not have to be hard.
This poll is a concern and the flatness of the past polls is a concern. Between now and the spring the Caucus need to reform itself dramatically. It is possible.
As Toby Manhire suggested in the Herald last week “..the promotion of an MP who had served his time would project strength, evidence of the leader’s vaunted experience in conciliation..”
I’d add to that the early retirement of Goff, King and Mallard coupled with the appointment of new managers in Shearer’s office who are NOT selected by Grant Robertson. Shearer has to stop what he is currently doing. It is not working. He needs to create a new team.
Cunliffe seems to be more focused than ever on his portfolio. He continues to show that he can engage with business people and issues as well as with the workers, consumers and the disenfranchised. His recent contributions to debates in Parliament show he is more centered than ever. Cunliffe looks like a guy who has learned from whatever was done to him last year. He has demonstrated that he can swallow a rat, and get on with folk in the beltway as well a burbs.
Shearer has the choice: to continue as is or to make a change.
Go on Shearer, make the necessary changes, now, refresh and position yourself to get our score out of the low 30s and into the 40s.
Your last chance.
Don’t confuse Obama with Gandhi: Norman Finkelstein
At UBC on January 21, 2009, the day after Obama’s inauguration, Norman Finkelstein gave a short speech about his research into the life and works of Mahatma Gandhi. He claims there is no comparison between Gandhi, who gave up his life to a cause he believed in, and Barack Obama, who is merely a clever politician coasting on a wave of change that he didn’t work to create.
So today in Christchurch we will hear how Brownlee will lump a giant great dull convention centre right onto two of the very best blocks of CBD Christchurch so that all manner of private business can do private business. Brownlee will require the ratepayers to pay for these private businesses.
Why don’t private businesses pay for their private business? I thought Brownlee and his ilk believed in user-pays and the free market and not corporate handouts or picking winners? Why do they force elderly ratepayers to pay for them?
Secondly, a lumpen great convention centre is completely the wrong thing to place in that location. White elephant city here we come…..
i despair.
and so do countless others – witness the decaying hole of the donut city.
Christchurch central city rebuild is failing. I hope I am proved wrong.
When the work is complete, and Christchurch looks like the National Party, and violence and crime flourish, will it be too late to tear their monuments to greed and corruption down? Of course not!
Well that’s kind of what is hoped for – that given the time it will take to bring these giant monuments to fruition and given that time and tide and new and different governments and councils will come and go and shoulder and shove and pull and push these projects all around and they will get variously dumped and amended and shrunken and expanded as the will of the peoples dictate.
That is the hope.
But when all you have is hope you have nothing (sorry JK (kirwan that is)…)
What they believe in is user pays for the poor and government handouts from taxing the poor to themselves and their rich mates.
Yep, it’s what happens when dictators take over.
Covered Sports Stadium, Indoor Sports Stadium, Convention Centre; a monumental Tory.
(Crown- 2.9B Council- 1.9B; Game, set, match).
what? * cough splutter choke croak ….*
next government and council please
overturn coming
Apparently Lancaster Park, I mean Jade Stadium, oh I mean AMI Stadium, whatever the f… its current corporate tag is…. is not even bloody broken. It is apparently structurally sound and the only problem is that from one end of the field to the other the stadium drops 200mm.
That’s about 8 inches. About $45million to repair so the rumour goes. Why not leave it at that? And don’t tell visiting teams as we will then get the downhill advantage….
Really, sheesh, where is the thinking?
… thinking thinking thinking ….
And Brownlee better steer well fucking clear of tossing a covered stadium into the mix. That will seriously bring down the house.
Isn’t politics a funny thing sometimes …
Following is a recent speech by David Cunliffe where he praises Todd McClay, compliments David Bennett and agrees with Matthew Hooton …
I kid you not!
The video is here.
He certainly is a lot more fluent than Dave.
David Cunliffe should be and is ready to be the Leader of Labour, I didn’t really think so last year but he’s certainly developed a bit more humility and lost the arrogance and pompousness.
I guess having your colleagues lining up to kick you in the nads does that, tends to make you reassess your approach and how you do things.
Well, it’s a bit of a back-handed compliment to David Bennett, for knowing all the loopholes that needed to be ended, having specialised in fiddling farm accounts in the past.
I’m afraid that for a Tory its actually a 100% sincere compliment, nothing backhanded about it.
You know what, Auckland’s support for the CRL is proof that we’d get better governance from referendum than we get from representatives.
The latest David Bain revelations………….
(Just posted this comment on the Radio Live facebook page).
“Seen this Sean Plunket?
I would have put this on your facebook page directly – but you seem to have ‘blocked’ me?
(Don’t you believe in ‘freedom of expression’ Sean? 🙂
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/twelve-reasons-worry-about-bain-case-lf-134942 ”
______________________________________________________________________________
I have not studied this David Bain case – but the thing that has always been the BIG question to me – is MOTIVE?
What MOTIVE did David Bain have to murder all these members of his family?
A bad day on the paper run?
DUH?
Penny Bright
Clearly David is a criminal mastermind…..according to the police.
Disregarding the new evidence, the crown story is just daft:
22 yr old David gets up, shoots 4 of his family in the house and then pops out to do the paper run as an alibi. Gets back home just in time to hide behind the curtains and snuff the old man. Then he just has to leave a wee note on the computer to implicate dad and then finally ring the police and turn on the water works.
Sounds like something from Agatha Christie.
Or as you suggest ,
An elderly man gets up , puts on his sons’ clothes and glasses, shoots 4 of his family. takes off his sons clothes, puts the bloodied clothes in the washing machine,
Changes his clothes, goes into the front room, logs on the family computer, types a note obsolving the son ,whos clothes hes just worn ,while murdering his family.
Shoots himself ,the guns’ mag falling out of the gun and landing on its edge beside Robin Bains’ ‘hand.
Robins. body found with no blood on him ,except his own.
David, who is found with his siblings blood on him. cant remember how he knows his family his dead, or why he waited 20 mins to ring an ambulance.
Sounds like something a defence lawyer would come up with.
It wouldn’t wash as an Agatha Christie novel.
Alternatively, dad wants to shoot his entire family except for one son. Equally bizarre.
Fortunately, we don’t have trial by TV or blogosphere.
Meanwhile, a relative of mine has to avoid watching the news for the next few days because every time pundits spout opinions (based solely on TV reports or the internet, which compete for the award for disseminating the most utter BS) or cheer their particular team, it reminds her how much she misses her friend, even after all this time.
“Alternatively, dad wants to shoot his entire family except for one son. Equally bizarre.”
Why? Surely not any more bizzare than shooting one or all?
“equally”.
Some folk try Agatha Christie whodunnits, others just don’t bother with hiding a murder-suicide. Arguing that one or the other could not be done because it sounds “just daft” in the cold light of day in my opinion shows a marked under-estimation of (to quote WSBurroughs) “just how far human kicks can go”.
+1
a shooter is likely to have powder residue on his hands, regularly; shooting birds for example.
‘
I still have one question. What is the first thing most men do first thing after the get up? Have a piss . . . amirite or amitire?? So, how is it explained that Robin Bain didn’t empy his bladder before setting about murdering his family?
Don’t get me wrong, I believe this whole thing has been yet another ongoing, ochestrated miscarriage of justice perpetrated by, if not corrupt, then bumbling police officers aided and abetted by officious bureacrats and their babmboozled and indifferent politicians. Milton Weir . Kevin Anderson, Phill Goff, Crusher Collins, Peter Doone, Peter Robinson, Jim Doyle, Kim Jones, N C Jaine, B P Duncan . . . “when honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose?”
I still have one question. What is the first thing most men do first thing after the get up? Have a piss . . . amirite or amitire?? So, how is it explained that Robin Bain didn’t empy his bladder before setting about murdering his family?
I would have thought that the body would have all sorts of overrides to normal biological functions when one was about to commit mass murder.
The full bladder, therefore victim, argument has no evidential weight.
This always supposes improbability Robin slept and committed crime soon after rising without emptying his bladder.
What evidence is there that Robin may not have had a sleepless night contemplating shooting his family or woke well before the shooting. In such scenarios he could easily have started with a partially full bladder and accumulated further urine during the activity of shooting his family.
“The latest David Bain revelations………….
I have not studied this David Bain case – but the thing that has always been the BIG question to me – is MOTIVE?
What MOTIVE did David Bain have to murder all these members of his family?”
The link you posted Penny goes to the review of the case that is damning of the police. We will never know who killed the Bain family, because the police didn’t do their job properly. What was the motive for that?
An excellent question, Weka!
Dunedin, moreso than many NZ cities, has a very dark history, one which includes police, politicians etc, being tied to organized, and underaged crime, and various other sadistic goings on.
Rather like it being, the Adelaide of NZ, if you will!
http://www.critic.co.nz/features/article/631/dunedins-dark-past
There has been a massive cover up, it always was, with the reasons most likely becoming, *future conspiracy theories*.
“There has been a massive cover up,”
Got any evidence of that muzza?
Just saw this gif on facebook:
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!!!!!
Very funny
so, they want to intercept Skype? 1/3 of all internet traffic. Good luck with that Amy and co.
(You better you better you bet).
Seven Sharp characterize Assange as an “albino weasel”. Really?
DHB’s fail to meet safety stds (Health Quality and Safety Board).Only a 1/4 to a 1/3 of all DHB’s “doing enough” to prevent falls, infection etc.
RB seriously considering restrictions on low-deposit loans, first-home buyers not exempt. “Something has to be done to prevent damage (wreckage) to the financial system.”
Is David Shearer merely a ‘great-souled-man’?
New Horizon Poll out today on how Aucklanders view the government, titled Government suffers poor performance ratings on Auckland issues.
Also worth a read is the follow up commentary:
What happened to Government supporters in the performance rating poll?
Guessing they knew this was the case when they swallowed the dead rat before them, and made noises about supporting the CRL.
This morning around the time on Morning Report about 7.45am that radionz reads out the headlines of the main papers I thought I heard that the Waikato Times had an item on spending by the NZ Forces likely to go into drones etc. I haven’t been able to track this down. Did anybody else hear the full mention, very short, or have seen it in a newspaper? I would like to look at it, hear it further.
Maybe this?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/8850279/Kiwi-drones-won-t-be-killers
Truthers!.
/
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/here_come_the_edward_snowden_truthers/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/my-creeping-concern-that-the-nsa-leaker-edward-snowden-is-not-who-he-purports-to-be/5339161
http://tarpley.net/2013/06/19/how-to-identify-a-cia-limited-hangout-operation/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/06/25/snowden-an-exercise-in-disinformation/
How would we ever, actually know!
We can’t, and have to draw our own conclusions!
In my day Joe, we believed everything that authorities told us. (Almost.) Now we should doubt everything that authorities tell us. Skills learnt to predict the bad guy in a stirring”whodunnit” will nowadays be focussed on real authority figures selling real misinformation. My brain hurts.
Maybe Naomi Wolf really works for the CIA. Or the KGB. Or the Al Qaeda!
That would not be any real surprise, Weka.
What all three? Busy woman I guess.
Message to Christine Rankin …
A Doz size 7 eggs are on special at New World for $3.99.
That’s great aye Krussy?
That means the kuds can live on weetbix and milk for breakfast (at 57cents?); noodles for lunch; and egg and toast for dinner for the next week.
they wouldn’t live on that mate.
it sounds like a recipe for enteric dysfunction.
i.e. diaorhea.
Well I know mine couldn’t possibly have, but as you know Krussy Rankin seems to know better.
(i.e. basing her experiences of a couple of decades ago transposed on today’s reality).
They’d probably have to be raw eggs as well, given the lack of electricity.
So little birdies on the twittery grapevine saying things about how that there Auckland Council voted 10-7 that they weren’t interested in some deal involving no skycity and some pokies and a convention centre so that’s a thing.
Don’t understand the point Pascal. As an out of Aucklander that is.
http://norightturn.blogspot.co.nz/2013/06/embarrassing.html
The comments list seems to becoming overwhelmed with some material from Gaza GPJA.. And Karol’s one on Women receiving awards also extra long, the wording of headings if too long is hard to read.
So the back-stabbing has begun.
Remember last year? When ABC were using Garner and Gower to dump on Cunliffe … all off the record, whispering in the dark, using the TV3 twins to push their self-serving agenda.
It’s on again. But this time Shearer is the target. Remember there are no real Shearer supporters, they were Parker supporters a couple of weeks before the leadership ballot in 2011, they just wanted a front man, and Shearer got the nod.
Turns out he’s not up to the job (who could have guessed, eh?) so they’re leaking into Gower’s ear (eww) and tonight on TV3 they got him to do their work – it’s their usual method. And the next idiot who says “Non-story! MSM!” try and think for a moment … who’s feeding him? And why?
Shearer will be dumped by the people who put him there. Next up, Robertson.
Yes. But don’t they need to put it to a full membership vote? They may try to go for someone like Andrew Little, or Jacinda Ardern. They are short on options.
Ahhh, yes they do. TRP, you asked me why I was still a member?
I’d always wondered that myself. Makes sense now.
makes it too easy for the bastards if you let them have it all their own way.
But I thought Gower was supposed to have pretty much made everything up last time to make headlines? But this time he’s being fed?
Or maybe last time “ABC” fed gower the idea of a Cunliffe coup in order to discredit cunliffe, (who didn’t need discrediting if he wasn’t planning a challenge), and this time they’re feeding gower the idea of a caucus challenge because, well, whatever.
Or maybe gower realises his paycheck rests on taking unwary comments and blowing them out of proportion. Where’s the benefit in flagging a challenge months down the road? There is none.
lolz Gower was being fed BS then, he’s being fed BS now, and thanks for repeating the BS McFlock.
Got that.
The reports gower was making last year about Shearer’s leadership facing a possible challenge within months were complete falsehoods spread by confidential sources. The reports gower is making right now about Shearer’s leadership facing a possible challenge within months are complete truths spread by confidential sources.
“Unwary comments”?
Did you see the story? Long, detailed quotes. Not somebody caught off guard, but somebody planting.
I said (and you ignored) Garner because it was his blog that started it all last year. A blog that was brought about by senior Labour MPs attacking Cunliffe – anonymously, of course.
Same MO.
Funny thing about anonymous attackers. You never know what was the actual quote and what is the intermediary’s little bit of editorialising. Sometimes they’re 100% accurate, sometimes it’s all just an invention by the intermediary, usually it’s somewhere in between. The point is, you can never know.
Nah Quotes are quotes. If a journo misrepresents an off the record quote they’ll never get another one.
If s/he said the complete opposite, you’d be right. But if the reporter is the only one with recordings or notes of the meeting, there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation that wouldn’t ruin come to light.
And if a journo does burn a source who is expendable, what could the anonymous source do?
An mp who has pretty much promised you two months worth of storyline is by definition, not burnable.
Paddy will be, quite rightly, wanting to follow this story up at some point.
unless he got something slightly less clear cut, but he now has the lens through which everything can be interpreted and the mp is therefore no longer needed.
I mean, the difference is whether they had lunch for an hour and gower drew together disparate lines and placed less emphasis on qualifications and equivocations, or had a 2 minute chat in the john where the mp wasn’t interrupted at all and spoke straight into the recorder.
No, the difference is the quote marks. And it doesn’t matter if Gower is ignoring all the kumbayah stuff they may have said. They also said this stuff, to Gower, (and Dannat TVNZ). It’s deliberate that they said this stuff, it’s something they chose to do, to get a story like this.
I’ve been “quoted” in the paper once or twice – different hats back in the day. Just in the local pages, nothing earth shattering. Quotation marks seemed to be largely similar to the role of the target in the Texas Sharpshooter analogy.
And that’s without the interview style “would you say something roughly along the lines of xxxxxx?” “yes”.
http://www.3news.co.nz/Shearer-put-on-notice-by-Labour-MPs/tabid/370/articleID/303006/Default.aspx
What is the problem with someone saying that Shearer has to either demonstrate that he can get his performance right or step aside?
What is the problem with telling the media?
The Membership and the public would like to know that the Party leaders are taking the continual poll paralysis seriously.
The sooner the Leadship issue is opened to a proper debate the better.
Btw, McFlock is a Grant Robertson tool.
But according to the “Shearer’s a patsy” theory, doesn’t that mean that I’d be undermining shearer at this time so Robertson can take the leadership?
But of course your justification for that delusion is even more tenuous than CV’s guess: it consists solely of amateur-hour content pattern analysis. Even a political news editor would regard that as a bit thin.
By the way, your content analysis is as mistaken as your trend analysis.
There has been one Labour MP who has been providing information to Gower. This goes back a long way ….. Gower himself has mentioned in passing the name of that MP when I was with a small group of people a few years ago.
Shearer should have a word with his deputy.
http://www.3news.co.nz/Shearer-put-on-notice-by-Labour-MPs/tabid/370/articleID/303006/Default.aspx
text version
Labour leader David Shearer has been put on two months’ notice by his own MPs – if the poll ratings don’t improve, his leadership will be challenged.
A Labour MP told 3 News today that Mr Shearer had until spring – two months away – to pick up his and Labour’s performance.
The MP, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “The caucus is just really flat. It’s not panic or anxiety just yet, but a couple more bad polls and it will be. David’s got a couple more months. A change in leadership cannot be ruled out before the end of the year.
“Spring time is when people will get really nervous, just over a year out from the election. We don’t want to get into the “Goff-zone”, where it’s too late to change the leader, but you’ve got someone in there the public just don’t want -the phone is just off the hook.”
It is rare for Labour MPs to speak so openly of leadership concerns.
The MP who spoke to 3 News is not a loyal supporter of leadership rival David Cunliffe. That makes the comments more significant as it shows there are broader concerns in the caucus about Mr Shearer’s performance.
Meanwhile Mr Shearer was on the by-election battlefield of Ikaroa-Rawhiti with Meka Whaitiri, Labour’s candidate for the seat.
There he vowed to be the Labour leader come the next general election.
3 News
Read more: http://www.3news.co.nz/Shearer-put-on-notice-by-Labour-MPs/tabid/1607/articleID/303006/Default.aspx#ixzz2XOu4ZQaZ
Flock off McFuck, you know full well that most people thought Trevor Mallard was leaking to Gower during the conference.
Please excuse him. McFlock is an old Dunedin and Otago uni friend of Grant Robertson.
That’s the sort of thing that should be called “doing a gower”, CV
Loyalty is a value underestimated these days, and it’s great that you are loyal to your friends. Good on ya mate.
let’s refresh everyone on the basis you have for saying that Robertson and I are “old friends”. I said:
From that you draw a long bow from “uni at roughly the same time”, through “actually spoke to each other at the time” all the way to “are friends” [present tense = “are friends now”]. And spout on as if it’s fact.
I think we can call that “a gower”.
Ummm.. I never knew that (on the same basis) Lyn was a close personal friend of R…
Nah….
this would be the brilliant tactic of creating rumours of a cunliffe challenge because mallard didn’t want cunliffe to be leader, even though cunliffe was extremely loyal and in no way going to challenge.
No challenge = no need to purposefully create rumours.
But if there was a challenge, gower didn’t need mallard to make anything up.
That suggests to me the MP was a member of the broader caucus and not notably aligned at any point to either the Shearer or the Cunliffe camp.
But it doesn’t rule the informant out from being a Robertson/Parker supporter.
That’s why I said at any point. The Robertson/Parker acolytes joined with the Shearer-ites once the deals were done. One faction leader got deputy and the other finance. I’m inclined to think this was someone who kept in the background during the leadership battle and its aftermath.
One fond of saying “a couple more”.
Great, more Labour MPs spilling their guts to news reporters. Also, I’m pretty sure that apart from a very few MPs, there is no actual “Shearer camp”.
EDIT ffs, this Labour caucus instability is Hooten’s wet dream planned well over a year ago, coming true. I’m just amazed though that none of us on The Standard spotted the plan before.
😉
It’s a classic “Thursday story”.
The leader is (usually) not in Parliament on Thursday – today he was campaigning in Ikaroa-Rawhiti. So it’s safe to talk to the gallery, cat’s away, mice play …
In unrelated news, Trevor Mallard *was* in Parliament today.
I can’t believe someone from Caucus chose to leak this to Gower instead of working within caucus to bring a resolution to the Leadership problem. Unbelievable, I don’t think we can blame Hooten for this, I’m afraid that Labour is seriously fucked if a senior member of caucus has gone to the media with this.
Who ever it is is putting their ambitions ahead of the Party’s (Its per emptive, Shearer is gone!)…they need to be outed. Clearly it is the same person who set up Cunliffe in November. This person is poisonous, Labour will never succeed with this person within its ranks IMO.
Hmmm, I thought the whole point was that Shearer was put in to prevent Cunliffe, and he would then later be rolled to get who the ABCs really want. At least that’s what the Standardistas were talking about last year.
Sorry Saarbo, but it’s a given that too many Labour MPs put their own careers ahead of the good of the party.
btw, Labour MPs playing bullshit internal politics and Hooton having his hand in things are not mutually exclusive.
Onya Edith.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-edie-windsor-doma-supreme-court-20130626,0,3126206.story
This labour party Gower thing.
Y’all know I’m neither a LP member nor list voter, so take this as whatever.
But this stuff hurts your party. From now till ‘spring’ Gower has been given an explicit narrative. All political stories will now be in the frame of “What does this mean for Shearer’s position as leader’.
You might think “So, what’s new?” and fair enough, but this has made it official. It’s a Labour party framing, the media don;t need to speculate that caucus is looking, they can state it all as fact.
So LP members should be writing letters and making calls to your mps, and letting them know that this anonymous sniping should stop, and that whoever is doing it should launch a challenge and get this ball rolling. You’ve got your new process, it will take time, but it needs to be put to bed, and that can only happen one way or the other through a vote. Untill the party wide vote happens, this story will run, and Labour will not look like a govt in waiting. That vote needs to happen as soon as possible.
Fuck spring.
So when will Labour give up on winning this election and concentrate on 2017?
“Three more years!, three more years!”
Have the bloody NATs been taking lessons from the UK tories? Conservative Government has just announced a massive £100B infrastructure and social housing build plan…but none of it starts for at least 4 years.
This is more bullshit “things will get better in the future” BAU messaging.
It is ‘pretend and extend’ creeping into policy promises.
So if Labour falls below 30% will people here finally admit, “hey we’re in trouble here” or will you be like bob dole who thought because his cousin friend in tempe was going to vote for him, hes still in with a chance.
I think you are right Brett. No-one on ts has ever speculated before now that Labour might be in trouble.
weka:
every time there is a poll here, it doesnt matter what it shows, everybody jumps
up and down and acts like its a victory for labour.
The only poll that counts is on election day unless that poll shows an increase for Labour in which case its an indicator of Labours resurgence
Brett Dale. Please attempt to pay more attention to what people actually say here, next time.
Every 2 or 3 fortnightly Morgan polls I have a look at the trends. Basically I am ignoring jitter.
I essentially ignore the other polls as they happen so infrequently for each poll as to be useless because of their infrequencies and that they only seem to make and effort to get an accurate population sample close to the election – which is why they always have dramatic shifts then.
As far as I can see, most people here do the same. Reading the right blogs is amusing. Many if not most seem to largely ignore Morgan despite its sampling rate and despite the fact that it seldom shifts much leading into an election and is usually the most accurate. Instead they concentrate on the infrequent polls with piss poor track records.
I guess they are either credulous fools with little understanding of statistics, or they are credulous fools with delusions that the “big lie” technique keeps working.
in the roy morgan, I probably would. Especially if it was coupled with a noticable reversal in the trend (as opposed to a single 8-point drop from 37%).
You can relax McFlock. The true mean of support for Labour sits on or very close to 32%. It’s very unlikely that it will fall under 30%, except perhaps momentarily.
I get the impression that you pray it does dip below 30%, otherwise all the helpul advice for Labour you’ve offered here is just useless horseshit you’ve been spouting since feb 2012.
Pretty amazing that iPredict hinted this last week.
https://www.ipredict.co.nz/app.php?do=contract_detail&contract=SHR.DEPART.2013
Either someone is manipulating iPredict to push their point, or there really has been backroom talk over the last few weeks and the leak is just it eventuating.
Interesting times!
El Pueblo Unido Jamas sera vencido!
Viva el Chile, viva el mundo, viva Novo Zelanda, viva!!!
Libertad por Chile Y el mondo, especial por latin america!!!
Not taking sides, just detected info and downloaded, for others to research!