The final sentence, instancing baby boomers in a cheap throwaway shot. Why does he instance baby boomers? Why not leave it at just instancing residents' views. I find this a nasty piece of disrespectful ageism.
Well, one thing is that he is a former 'spin doctor for a National Treaty Negotiations minister, Chris Finlayson.'
"Much needed housing projects in leafy central Auckland suburbs are routinely scrapped by the authorities for much less – for blocking a baby boomer resident's views, or to save sagging old mid-century shopfronts."
The final few words of this take on it are "history and good planning" it gave me the chance to think about what is happening, like, probably, a lot of people I didn't know what to think of it or even have view.
After reading this I thought, why not Avondale Racecourse? Why not the golf clubs? Maybe this is uncomfortable but it does raise questions. Surely there is a solution.
Letting the Tamakis try and feed off this and protecting all other areas of Auck that are only used by a few or used rarely shouldn't be part of Auckland's future.
I notice a good picture of Ben Thomas in his article. I wonder if that is actually the main feature and intention of writing it though there is also a good aerial photo of the Stonefields volcanic cone.
The resource consent decision report describes the impact homes for other people to live in would have on Peter Lange: “He described the pleasure of sitting in his front bedroom or balcony and enjoying ‘the sunsets across the silhouetted parapets of the Edwardian shop fronts, to the Waitakeres beyond.’ He considered the imposition of a five storey building would seriously compromise this amenity.”
Yes, Mr Lange is certainly a 'resident' but that word is not shorthand for the attitudes that have been associated for many decades with the "Me" generation.
So, by the end of dinner, they decided to take on the government, the developers and the Auckland Council.
They settled on SOUL as the name for their protest group. It stands for Save Our Unique Landscape and their aim was to stop nearly 500 homes being built near their village, their ancient burial caves, the historic Ōtuataua Stonefields and their ancestral maunga, Te Puketāpapatanga-a-Hape and Ōtuataua.
For me – I am enjoying watching the ebb and flow of mana – this is how it works, live, in real time – ebb and flow. No one has to be worried because it is still moving, until it settles into the new spot it is fluid. Fixed positions, movement, change, solidity, unbreaking, ever flexible – we are getting a masterclass.
I am enjoying watching the ebb and flow of mana – this is how it works, live, in real time – ebb and flow. No one has to be worried because it is still moving, until it settles into the new spot it is fluid. Fixed positions, movement, change, solidity, unbreaking, ever flexible – we are getting a masterclass.
I don't think one more mm should be sold and in fact a lot should be GIVEN back gabbyduck. I'd give back a few other things too – mark my words on that one alright gabbs, I'd give back a FEW other things too I would, yes siree, indeed, say no more.
People have been describing this as the revolution of our generation, and the biggest Māori movement of this time, so it's really disappointing that she's not here," she said.
The call is now out for the protest crowd to get bigger as they wait for the Prime Minister to join the party.
There was something almost smug in the Prime Minister’s voice when she was asked if the government would intervene at Ihumatao. Oh no, she said – that’s an iwi dispute – nothing to do with the government – whew!
She was backed up by a phalanx of Maori Labour MPs – spineless to a person – who said it wasn’t the government’s role to get involved in internal iwi politics.
Never mind that the government set up special housing areas and approved the land for housing. Never mind that the government’s state forces – the police – are being used to drive people off the land on behalf of a private company. Never mind that the whole of New Zealand history has been built on the same scenario we see at Ihumatao.
And never mind that the colonial wars of the past have been based on the same crown logic the Prime Minister is using today.
If you've ever felt that you're not being given the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth by our elected representatives, both at central and local government level, you can take some comfort that your suspicions are well founded.
It’s not news that people doing PR and communications for the state heavily outnumber the journalists who report on the agencies employing them. But the numbers crunched by RNZ’s Phil Pennington show the gap has become a chasm – and the figures weren't easy to get.
Most government departments are having to increase the resources needed for Freedom of Information requests – most of those will probably be called communications staff . . .
I believe that some of the egregious requests should be countered by public release of both the questions and answers, and also for each request provide a "quick estimate" of person-hours spent on preparing the information. First by making more information public, questioners will only get a slight "scoop" advantage, if the requester is named (as it should be at least for all MPs and for corporations) it may give a guide to those who are seeking to bury initiative by tying up resources, but most importantly it may lead departments to review regular reporting so that systems automatically provide better public information
There is a cost to open and transparent government . . at least the emphasis now is on compliance rather than withholding information
It arises from two different National party imperatives. First they want smaller government, but they also need to be seen to increase spending. How to do that? Criticise any small part of any sector, and promise more money. No need for the criticism to be justified cancer is good because people die from it, so we are not doing enough. (Forget about all the other reasons for death, including the expensive "just getting older") Also forget about where the money comes from – if asked, point to anything the government is doing – the Regional Development Fund will do – as an example of less important spending.
The reality is that Pharmac has a mandate to look at all causes of need for treatments, and to balance those needs fairly, taking into account proven effects. The occasional political meddling is often related to a big company having a new (and nearly tested) wonder drug – sadly performance doe not always match rhetoric, but the purpose here is not to spend more money, but to be seen to be doing (or in this case promising for the future) something.
The reality for cancer treatment is that we already have a fairly concentrated system that puts specialists together in places where patients can be directed to give critical mass. We will never have a cancer specialist team on the West Coast – specialists want to see more than 2 or 3 patients a year . . . We know from the past that political decisions have not always matched clinical preferences – some of the past decisions to promise funding before an election have not survived dispassionate assessment of clinical results for a new drug.
So, 1. Where is the money coming from? Does this defer tax cuts?
2. My uncle has Heart disease / Parkinsons / Multiple Schlerosis / Dementia – what are you going to do for him and others like him? Or will treatment for them be cut to pay for the promise?
3. We are told to trust the market and to trust the medical profession – why do you think a political decision to "pick a winner" will result in better health outcomes overall. Is this just an election bribe? Does the National Party no longer believe in the benefits of a free market?
This is not about strengthening the hand of the state – $50 million a year for 4 years (presumably from 2021 when this little blurt from Simon may well have been forgotten . . .) will not make up for the cuts to the total health budget over the previous 9 years. This is a "look over there" action intended to distract. Even the basic premise that people all over New Zealand deserve to have specialist care in their neighbourhood is a nonsense – major centres are the only places with ready transport from elsewhere and enough patients to run complex speciality departments – it was I think under National that pediatric cancer services were concentrated in a small number of places. What National does believe in is crony capitalism, using money to temporarily buy support while encouraging the "self-reliance" of private health insurance . . .
The ideology dictates that government not only should not get in the way of the ‘free market’ but also that it should set policy that actively encourages and protects the ‘free market’. The government is to serve and protect markets in which individuals make rational decisions and choices that are in their best interest. What the ideology assumes is the sum of these individual actions delivers the best possible outcome for the greater good. In fact, it is claimed that this is the only ideology that can achieve this outcome. What is often downplayed or outright ignored is that people don’t make strictly rational decisions and choices and that they are heavily influenced by marketing, advertising, PR, and spin, et cetera. The ideology further ignores that choice is an allusion and in fact an illusion because it encourages mergers & acquisitions into large dominant market players and monopolies. The same market ‘principles’ feed back into the market itself in which companies and corporates make decisions that are in their (shareholders’) best interest. The madness of this ideology is that many not just believe but are convinced that the cumulative effect of an infinite number of selfish actions is a selfless benefit to all.
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
It is clear that National has not learned and moved on from their mistake to ride roughshod over PHARMAC’s decision-making process and fund Herceptin as an Election promise in 2008.
This is yet another cynical promise of frivolous spending of Taxpayers’ money sold as ‘life-saving’.
A guaranteed extra windfall of $50 million each year (!) for pharma industry thanks to the generosity of Simon Bridges and his buddies in National. How many bridges did Bridges promise again?
I’d suggest that PHARMAC adopts a no-cure-no-pay policy for expensive drugs. Given that only a fraction of patients respond to these expensive treatments and given that all treated patients are exposed to potentially severe side effects of the drugs, it makes no sense to charge the full price (not cost) to each and every patient. Unfortunately, they cannot tell who will benefit and who won’t.
Thus, set a very conservative base re-fund and then for each month or year of clinical benefit to the patient pay a little more to the point at which a patient is disease-free and/or considered cured. As soon as a patient relapses, the payments stop indefinitely. That would be true value-for-money. At the moment, it is largely a gamble with people’s lives and finances with the only real winners being the pharma industry.
Would be a useful policy if we implement fast-tracking for unproven drugs. Insurance for reducing the up-front barriers. Maybe in a 'partnership agreement' with the pharma companies?
The gold standard in clinical registration trials for anti-cancer drugs is overall survival but this can take years to measure. Unfortunately, surrogate or secondary endpoints such as progression-free survival don’t always predict for overall survival.
Pharma provide (new) drugs free to patients who participate in clinical trials but it is important to note that not all trials are equal.
The other point to consider is that trial results often are more positive than when used in the general patient population. There are a number of reasons for that.
Because of the side effects and the general lack of predictive diagnostics, I think there has to be a sound evidence-base before PHARMAC fully funds new treatments. Partly, because it could go at the expense of other expenditure on proven treatments, be it for cancer or non-cancer.
New drugs offer great promise in some cases but also come with great(er) uncertainty. IMO, this should definitely be reflected in a lower cost price to PHARMAC.
In some ways, it is the pharma’s best interest to treat as many patients as possible regardless of whether they’ll benefit or not. Patient selection based on predictive diagnostics increases the chances of clinical benefit to the patient but reduces the potential market size for the pharma.
The main issue is that the best drug should be tailored to a specific patient (best match) with the greatest chance of a beneficial outcome for the patient, which is where personalised medicine is heading, and this could be coupled to the pharma’s profit. Currently, the two are often uncoupled from each other and pricing is set by the pharma and how much ‘the market’ can tolerate and is willing to accept. It has an element of preying on the desperate and giving them hope …
Results need to be made public and there needs much more transparency and accountability from and by the pharma industry especially since we, the Taxpayers, pay for it.
Sometimes, you get the feeling that the ‘ethics’ of Big Pharma and Tobacco Industry are virtually indistinguishable. Of course, their number one priority is to satisfy their shareholders.
Regulators should make it mandatory to publish all results of all trials through peer-review. Patients shouldn’t be used as Guinea pigs to boost profits.
After market approval, all adverse events need to be collated in a central register that is open and searchable. This needs an international global approach.
I am not the only commenter here who has expressed bitter disappointment at the nation being stuck with yet another Minister of Health who is clearly unequal to the task of enabling the necessary reboot of our Public Health and Disability system.
That is, of course, if the Current Mob were speaking true when they declared their intention to be transformational and address the failings and inequities that have been allowed to flourish under the past four administrations.
A cynical person might suspect that the underlying intent is to push this nation inexorable down the path to a system where those who can go private and those who can't….suffer and die.
Choices are certainly a bitch, aren't they. Salaried medical specialists are probably in just the category that would have benefited from National's further cuts to income tax that the new government reversed. Instead the increased the minimum wage, increased benefits, stopped spending so much money on making WINZ staff proxy police and got them to actually help people in need (and surprise surprise suddenly without changing the law suddenly staff found that many people were actually eligible for a benefit). They put money into repairing and building social housing, and money into reviewing education for skills training so we don;t have to import more; they settled long overdue wage agreements with nurses and teachers. In half a term quite a bit has been achieved. Meanwhile we are looking forward to the possibility of another world recession; our debt position as a country is much higher than desirable, and a pre-election promise has led to our continuing with low income tax rates for companies and individuals, with some blatant loopholes that further reduce spending options.
I agree that there was a lurch towards private provision of health services under the Key/English governments – and yes there is a gap in earnings between private and public specialists. I well remember a news item shortly before the 2017 election where Bill English proudly attended a major extension of Bowen Hospital in Wellington; accompanied I think around the same time by the purchase by a private provider of an MRI machine – but don't worry, the public sector can contract to use it when it is not being used for private patients . . . So I too would like the public sector to "close the gap" in a lot of ways, but if priority were to be given to salaried medical specialists, what other part of spending would you be happy to reduce, Rosemary?
Sure, but that wasn’t the question, was it? It would have been more honest and clearer to reframe the question and explain why but you didn’t, did you?
You do sound a tad like Amy Adams “sniping” about or at the Budget, don’t you?
Edit:
You are an attack machine Rosemary McD. Only your problems and those of other disabled people should be looked at, nobody else matters. And talking down the ELOC (End of Life Choice) Bill is a narrow position. Less money spent on interfering with natural death; limiting the drawn-out 'life' of terminally ill means more available for those actually living, not just existing. I am as despairing as you are of intelligent and fair behaviour as needed and wanted by people who need help with their plans for their future.
Health must be a nightmare portfolio….the reality is there will never be enough resources and choices will be made. …whether the best (or right?) will be a never ending debate….it will depend on where you view it from.
"Health", ie the "Ministry of", has become an autonomous corporate monster. Regardless of which colour flies atop the Beehive, the Ministry will continue along the path laid out over two decades ago. Underfund the system and provide dysfunctional leadership. Blame and accuse those charged with providing frontline services for not being able to function as required when they're running to stand still. Contract out core services to profiteers. Allow the creation of an separate profession called 'health management and administration', whose sole role appears to be to draw $$$ away from actual treatment and care and into the salaries of those who without knowing the first thing about running a busy ward march in and start telling the medical staff how to run a busy ward….Brian Easton describes these parasites here…https://pundit.co.nz/content/who-was-accountable-for-the-shambles
A brave Prime Minister would address the Nation and say.."Look folks, our Public Health and Disability system is in deepest shit.. Decades of mismanagement has resulted in such a deficit that we have only two choices….a) give up and limp along on existing funding and under the cloud of strained relationships and encourage those who can afford it to take out private health insurance (as was the plan in the first place), or b) we do a massive reboot, a sizeable and meaningful cash injection that will truly be an investment for future generations…but this option requires us to impose and extra 2% of tax on every earner, ringfenced as an addition to the current Vote Health appropriations. This tax shall stay in place until we're out of the pooh."
Id go for 'b' as well….but would note the result would still be well short of providing everything demanded.
Health care will always be triaged….some honest discussions about what are must haves and what would be good if able are needed, but I doubt any politician of any hue is willing to risk that
David Clark seems to believe long-standing workforce issues can't somehow be solved by bringing in more trained medical specialists (from offshore) or is it a case of the Government not wanting to spend the money required to do that?
Great article worth another read in these times – we all have this tendency – some more than others – listen please, just listen.
But the truth is, she didn’t misunderstand me at all. She understood what was happening perhaps better than I did. When she began to share her raw emotions, I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say, so I defaulted to a subject with which I was comfortable: myself.
That is good MM. Shutting up and finding ways to affirm their thoughts or occasionally indicate a different way, 'Have you thought of trying…' is the best. Sometimes thoughts get so scrambled that talking through them with a trusted person gives a clarity.
What a bloody laugh as I woke up today (sunday) 28th july to see lame brain Simon Bridges saying;;
“I believe in climate change is a real threat to our nation” to Tova O;Brien, and then he tries to nail the point home by saying quote “we have two electric cars”
If that incredible statment wasn;t enough, then he says about the National Party policy was to build new roads????
What the fuck@@@@@
Is he brainless? it would seem as he is as more roads are not the way forward to lower the climate emissions!!
Using more rail is, as rail uses six times less fuel to move the same amount as trucks do, and rail uses no tyres and only “steel on steel wheels, for low friction and only has steel particulates emissions.
Vehicle tyres emit large amounts of tyre dust pollution made from oil distilates similar to plastic,
That causes cancer and nervous system damage, with 1,3,Butadience styrene,
"It is the number one issue that comes up from interviewing Treaty claimants. In negotiations, a group or individual is given a mandate, and then put under incredible pressure to get the settlement over the line.
"But in the end there is no negotiation, from a Māori view, it is all defined in terms set by the Crown, or in this case a developer, and mostly involving financial settlements.
"It leads to disputes within and/or between iwi or hapū, and leads to outcomes in favour of the Crown."
Do you think that this presents a good opportunity to revisit the whole settlement issue? Peeni Henare made it clear this morning that returning land in private ownership will render all previous settlements invalid. That could well be a legitimate outcome, do you have a perspective on that?
The strategy only works when the target group allows it to do so. Unity defeats division. Mutu ought to get real instead. If she really believes the four-year stand-off between niece & uncle was caused by the crown, she ought to produce evidence of that. She hasn't even tried to do so, has she?
The polling bump (thankfully very small) he got from "send her back" suggested that there is in fact a group of deplorables on the fence about whether he is sufficiently racist for their taste. Trying to lock down their support might be why he's going after Cummings now.
If National didn't limit itself to promising action to the citizens about decent drinking water and severe limitations on pollution in waterways then he wouldn't need to bribe voters with cancer drug offers (most of which don't cure). The appearance of concern after the fact is a sorry sight and leads to disdain, recognising the degeneracy of National from voters of principle.
Socialism in one country (Russian: социализм в отдельно взятой стране, tr. sotsializm v otdelno vzyatoy strane, literally socialism in a single country) was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin in 1924 which was eventually adopted by the Soviet Union as state policy.
So the pretence fools you that easily? He had to kill 30 million of his own people to try and get the rest to believe in the sham, and it still didn't work. Reality trumps delusion. Every time.
You made a stupid fucken statement. Stalin, and indeed virtually all so-called 'communist' countries describe themselves as 'socialist'.
'Socialism' is the phase before true 'communism' is achieved.
You obviously don't fucken know that and that shows what a dumb shit you are unqualified to comment on anything to so with the communist movement and Marxism Leninism.
30 million killed? ……sound like a naive stupid school girl.
Now answer me this. If Stalin really was such a monster, why is he so widely admired even now, in the very country he was supposed to have committed the vast majority of his crimes.
If Stalin really was such a monster, why is he so widely admired even now, in the very country he was supposed to have committed the vast majority of his crimes.
You really appear to not know much history. Perhaps you should look at the effects of mass level propaganda when the media is held and controlled by the state. It was a thing in the mid-20th century after the technology became available for it to be achieved.
If you studied the period with a little more depth, the you’d look less like a complete idiot. You might even be capable of making an argument without all of the dick pulling you just did.
I’d suggest you don’t use that kind of abuse approach to replying again. Next time I see you do it, I’ll demonstrate exactly how useless you are at it. You do appear to be a pretty incompetent dimwit – wannabe student?
If Stalin really was such a mass murdering monster then it would be in the lived memories of those few still alive who lived during his time, or at least it would have been passed down to the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of those who did.
To think that we living in the West are not subject to those same mass delusions created by the corporate media that you accuse those living in non Western countries of being subject to by their own respective media is to be completely absurd.
To think that the opinion of a Russian of his own history is less valid than a Westerner who only reads Anne Appelbaum and Robert Conquest is simply quite arrogant.
If you looked at the article I linked to in my first post, it is Western researchers themselves who have found that many many people, a majority in some former Eastern bloc countries, people who actually lived under the socialist system, find it was better in those days than what they have now.
And if life in the former Soviet Union was really such a horror show, why did Putin restore the Soviet Anthem with only the words re-written, surely nothing is more redolent of past times, good or bad, than great music.
And anecdotally, I have heard the same from Eastern Europeans who now live in New Zealand.
"Congratulating Stalin means supporting him and his cause, supporting the victory of socialism, and the way forward for mankind which he points out, it means supporting a dear friend. For the great majority of mankind today are suffering, and mankind can free itself from suffering only by the road pointed out by Stalin and with his help."
If Stalin really was such a mass murdering monster then it would be in the lived memories of those few still alive who lived during his time, or at least it would have been passed down to the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of those who did.
It was. This isn’t exactly hard to find if you look around for material from the Khrushchev thaw period between 1953 and about 1957/8 arguably later – but really the thing pretty much died after the Hungarian repression.
If you haven’t seen it, then I’d say that you probably have just been avoiding it.
To think that we living in the West are not subject to those same mass delusions created by the corporate media that you accuse those living in non Western countries of being subject to by their own respective media is to be completely absurd.
What makes you think that we aren’t? Tell you do you ever listen to anyone else apart from your own self-referential bullshit. After all I was born in 1959. My adolescence was backgrounded with the stupidity of the Vietnam war, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and all of those old soldiers who’d never talk about the first or second world wars and what they saw entering the charnel houses of Europe and Japan.
If you looked at the article I linked to in my first post, it is Western researchers themselves who have found that many many people, a majority in some former Eastern bloc countries, people who actually lived under the socialist system, find it was better in those days than what they have now.
So? My grandparents were young adults and my parents were children grew up in post-1930s depression and in WW2 and the reconstruction in the 1940s and 50s. They’d happily tell you that that world was a better place then it was when I was doing army and university in the late 1970s. In fact the only ancient person that I have ever come across who seemed to think that when they grew up was shite was my great grandmother. But she was in service in her teens and really on the arse-end of society.
Generally relying on the rose tinted recollections of the past or the even dark tinted recollections of the mentally ill or abused is simply not useful. You have a hell of a problem trying to get a un-self-selected sample because people will either want to talk about it or not depending how it is framed at them. The most significiant way of running those kinds of samples is to look at the silences – that is always where the interesting stuff is kept. The treatment of teen pregnancies in NZ being a good local example. Or the way that people don’t talk about the GULAG in the USSR. Or the silence related to the work-to-death slavery that the Japanese did in Mongolia and China in the 1930s and 40s.
To think that the opinion of a Russian of his own history is less valid than a Westerner who only reads Anne Appelbaum and Robert Conquest is simply quite arrogant.
Personally I don’t have an opinion on history. I just study it. That is something that is quite different from the kind of myth repetition that you’re referring to (and are doing yourself). History is something that I have been doing as a hobby (with a bit of uni time as well) for about 48 years after I switched from fiction to non-fiction as my main reading material.
Personally I’m not interested in dumb-arse propaganda, and it certainly doesn’t do you any favours when you try to shout it down peoples throats. Especially people who are clearly bigger skeptics than you are.
The gulag systems are about as well documented as the Japanese internment camps of the US after 1941, or the way that we used Somes Island and a few other places here or just about every other reasonably well run camp system. By their very nature, prison camp systems are at documented and accounted for because they’re pretty costly to run. Most of the time their records survive for historians. The exceptions are usually where there is an attempted coverup, like the Nazi concentration camps or the Cambodian death camps before they got over-run by advancing forces.
The gulag system wasn’t over run. It was just run-down post-Stalin. The documentation of the system (albeit somewhat cleaned up) was done in the speech by Khrushchev in 1956. The material that was prepared on was a series of studies of the gulag system by the USSR communist party hierarchy and its use in the late 1930s during the largest part of the largest purges. As a ‘skeptic’, you can probably assume that in itself was a sanitised version.
Perhaps you should find it and actually study a translation of the speech and the investigation of the 17th party congress and its aftermath. Sanitised or not, it was pretty searing indictment of a system that you seem to be trying to say never existed. Which I find to be a rather willfully self-delusional bit of stupidity.
Yes, people often do look to the past with rose tinted glasses, but not if they were supposed to have gone through the horrors of 'stalinism' as portrayed in the West.
I was responding to rather less informed commentators than yourself, people such as Dennis Frank who comes up with the fantastical 30 million nonsense, or people like Appelbaum or Timothy Snyder.
Yes, one could have gone through perhaps the 1930s depression and still have somewhat fond memories of community bonding, say, or character building.
That's different from going through the Holocaust – not many old European Jews from WWII era qill say, 'well we sure had things better in those days!' You don't get parades in Israel with Nazi banners, nor, I am sure would the Horst Wessel move people to tears.
Similarly if Stalin really did commit the sort of crimes claimed for him by the Western corporate media, he would be hated by the people he ruled, mainly Russians. Not repeatedly voted as the greatest 'Russian'
NoteStalin's popularity wildly eclipses Khruschev who is seen as a fool and a liar and particularly Gorbacheve are seen as a traitor.
Stalin, while not perfect, surely was one of the greatest men of the 20 thcentury.
And if you want to hear / learn about our propaganda towards Russia ….. This doco mentions 1947 as the year when Russia became a 'official enemy', to be attacked by every means apart from troops.
I've always wondered how many of 'stalins famine' was down to 'scorched earth' warfare' //// and the huge amount of working aged men killed in Russia…..
….Our propaganda seems to say none,,,,, and stalin killed them all…
But Even Stalin was not as bad as neo=lib western 'shock thearapy'… which is probably why the Russians hold the views they do.
Under Yeltsin, Russia’s economy collapsed some 60%, the male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56, millions were reduced to living on subsistence farming for the first time since Stalin as wages went unpaid for years at a time. Russia was on its way to going extinct—but about 3-5% of the population (plus or minus 3%) was making out like bandits. https://pando.com/2015/05/17/neocons-2-0-the-problem-with-peter-pomerantsev/
In the end, Yeltsin won by old school fraud — in Chechnya, for example, where Yeltsin’s war had killed 40,000 people and displaced half the population, elections showed 1,000,000 Chechens voted (even though less than half a million adults remained in Chechnya at the time of voting), and that 70% of them voted for Yeltsin, their exterminator. That helped deliver the numbers that the West needed to see—enough for the New York Times to declare it "A Victory for Russian Democracy"—parroting the laughably cheerful assessment of President Clinton and his team.
It seems Yelstin got a 200% voter turn out in Chechnya … … now that is impressive :0
Leading thinkers discuss the protest at Ihumātao
Magic Talk, Thursday 25 July 2019, 10:15 a.m.
AMANDA: It's the gravy train. They're being rewarded for their behaviours.
PETER WILLIAMS: Thanks for that, Amanda! Good morning, Chris.
CHRIS: Yeah g'day. Just looking at the calibre of these protestors: what would their EMPLOYERS have been thinking?
PETER WILLIAMS:[chortling conspiratorially] What are you trying to say, Chris? What are you trying to say?
CHRIS: Have they even GOT jobs? That lady from Britain you had on earlier, she needs to get her head out of the clouds. I was talking to my friend the policeman, and he says that NINETY PER CENT of the crime is Maori, and it's getting worse, and it's getting WORSE, and it's getting WORSE. …..
In 2017, the UN reported that a “child under five” in Yemen “dies every 10 minutes” from “preventable causes”. The war has already displaced over 3.6 million people and created the world’s largest recorded cholera epidemic. Cholera, which is the result of contaminated food and drinking water, results in intense vomiting and diarrhoea. If left untreated, it can kill. According to French investigative news outlet Disclose, coalition airstrikes have bombed 659 farms, 229 boats and 91 sites “supplying drinking water, including reservoirs, wells, water pumps, and also irrigation canals and water treatment plants”.
Today is the day humans have used all that Papatuanuku can produce in a year was used up in 7 months we will all have to become minimalist to survive.
Lance that is awesome the 200 Mobil doctor clinic that services is NEEDED in Te taiwhiti.
Sam Eco Maori thinks that your championing all the tamariki in foster care been given a KIWIs Saver account that would set them up for life ka pai.
Lance that was a awesome eureka moment the mobile healthcare clinic thanks. Its been a while since Eco Maori had a Eureka moment ma te wa. It would be nice if the big companies sponsored this Fontana Gull Mobile Pack and save Countdown The Warehouse Eco Maori lays a challenge for you to sponsor this great out of the square Idea
Its hard to get a doctor's appointment in rual Aotearoa the wait can be 1 to 2 weeks to see a doctor Eco Maori knowns that it pays to trear a ailment immediately if not the case just gets worse next minute hangi .q
That was well said the African American who gave trump a great serve very cool.
Winston I agree that colmar brunton poll is just use to manipulate and lie to the VOTERS.
Good to see you on the Show Winston.
Duncan you need to Google your self.
I agree Winston the Coalition Government is cleaning up a big national MESS.
There you go people playing games with imagration figure to try and make the government look bad.
The Black Caps did Aotearoa proud its not there fault that the system is bent by putea chin up guys.
Bryce statistics lie when they are massaged by right wing money to try and boost their m8 rating ie national.
Elijah your words hit a brick wall kia kaha Tangata whenua O Aotearoa get more respect than other minoritie culture get from the ruling class but we still have a lot of crap heaped on us one just has to look at the fiasco that is going on around Eco Maori to see that's a FACT.
I think it's is about time that the car manufacturers should have a solution for babies being left in car very great idea.
That man who lost his twins accidentally leaving them in a hot car. He was working in a most probably a under staffed and over worked people I say it was fatigue over worked that caused him to forget his babys he will be shattered.
I have already given my tau toko of Lance great Idea come on if it saves you money David and saves lives why not back it .
There you go Our Coalition Governments has invested more than a billion dollar into the welbing of the needy don't rock te waka to much we might get swamped.
Look like most of my Ngati Porou Whanau have a higher IQ than most as that is only a small amount of people at that protest about CYPS in Turanga A kiwa .
Condolences to Sean Whanau for their great lose Eco Maori seen quite a bit of Sean in Maori leaders circles.
I its good
Te Ao Maori News its lucky Eco Maori has a few skills up his sleeve as the sandflys tried to block my post to Maori TV.
Some muppets called shonky royalty YEA RIGHT did you hear him put his foot in his mouth he said Jacinda is a morals based person thats great for Jacinda but Eco Maori says because shonky made that statement live on TV he has admitted to having NO MORALS.
I,, Winston national are talking alot of hog wash about the putea being invested in cancer drugs and treatment they are desperate have you ever seen a political party pull all the fossil out of the cupboard to try and lift there poll ratings keep those back benches WARM.
simon you're just rambling words. The Coalition government has made more good choices and changes in 2 years than national did in 8
Sandy the Baltimore issue trump is just a bully he thinks he can control everyone
Seenothing your statement shows you don't have enough respect for Tangata Whenua O Aotearoa.
If there was no Organized Crime in NZ what about all the Pee addicts I see around NZ I see a spike in these people in Port cities Why because thats where the shit is getting into NZ.
Auckland Transport have started rolling out new HOP card readers around the network and over the next three months, all of them on buses, at train stations and ferry wharves will be replaced. The change itself is not that remarkable, with the new readers looking similar to what is already ...
Completed reads for April: The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling Carnival of Saints, by George Herman The Snow Spider, by Jenny Nimmo Emlyn’s Moon, by Jenny Nimmo The Chestnut Soldier, by Jenny Nimmo Death Comes As the End, by Agatha Christie Lord of the Flies, by ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
Have a story to share about St Paul’s, but today just picturesPopular novels written at this desk by a young man who managed to bootstrap himself out of father’s imprisonment and his own young life in a workhouse Read more ...
The list of former National Party Ministers being given plum and important roles got longer this week with the appointment of former Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett as the chair of Pharmac. The Christopher Luxon-led Government has now made key appointments to Bill English, Simon Bridges, Steven Joyce, Roger Sowry, ...
Newsroom has a story today about National's (fortunately failed) effort to disestablish the newly-created Inspector-General of Defence. The creation of this agency was the key recommendation of the Inquiry into Operation Burnham, and a vital means of restoring credibility and social licence to an agency which had been caught lying ...
Holding On To The Present:The moment a political movement arises that attacks the whole idea of social progress, and announces its intention to wind back the hands of History’s clock, then democracy, along with its unwritten rules, is in mortal danger.IT’S A COMMONPLACE of political speeches, especially those delivered in ...
Stuck In The Middle With You:As Christopher Luxon feels the hot breath of Act’s and NZ First’s extremists on the back of his neck and, as he reckons with the damage their policies are already inflicting upon a country he’s described as “fragile”, is there not some merit in reaching out ...
The unpopular coalition government is currently rushing to repeal section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. The clause is Oranga Tamariki's Treaty clause, and was inserted after its systematic stealing of Māori children became a public scandal and resulted in physical resistance to further abductions. The clause created clear obligations ...
Buzz from the Beehive The government’s official website – which Point of Order monitors daily – not for the first time has nothing much to say today about political happenings that are grabbing media headlines. It makes no mention of the latest 1News-Verian poll, for example. This shows National down ...
It Takes A Train To Cry:Surely, there is nothing lonelier in all this world than the long wail of a distant steam locomotive on a cold Winter’s night.AS A CHILD, I would lie awake in my grandfather’s house and listen to the traffic. The big wooden house was only a ...
Packing A Punch: The election of the present government, including in its ranks politicians dedicated to reasserting the rights of the legislature in shaping and determining the future of Māori and Pakeha in New Zealand, should have alerted the judiciary – including its anomalous appendage, the Waitangi Tribunal – that its ...
Dead Woman Walking: New Zealand’s media industry had been moving steadily towards disaster for all the years Melissa Lee had been National’s media and communications policy spokesperson, and yet, when the crisis finally broke, on her watch, she had nothing intelligent to offer. Christopher Luxon is a patient man - but he’s not ...
Chris Trotter writes – New Zealand politics is remarkably easy-going: dangerously so, one might even say. With the notable exception of John Key’s flat ruling-out of the NZ First Party in 2008, all parties capable of clearing MMP’s five-percent threshold, or winning one or more electorate seats, tend ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is ...
Luxon will no doubt put a brave face on it, but there is no escaping the pressure this latest poll will put on him and the government. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political ...
This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler In the wake of any unusual weather event, someone inevitably asks, “Did climate change cause this?” In the most literal sense, that answer is almost always no. Climate change is never the sole cause of hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, or ...
Something odd happened yesterday, and I’d love to know if there’s more to it. If there was something which preempted what happened, or if it was simply a throwaway line in response to a journalist.Yesterday David Seymour was asked at a press conference what the process would be if the ...
Hi,From time to time, I want to bring Webworm into the real world. We did it last year with the Jurassic Park event in New Zealand — which was a lot of fun!And so on Saturday May 11th, in Los Angeles, I am hosting a lil’ Webworm pop-up! I’ve been ...
Education Minister Erica Standford yesterday unveiled a fundamental reform of the way our school pupils are taught. She would not exactly say so, but she is all but dismantling the so-called “inquiry” “feel good” method of teaching, which has ruled in our classrooms since a major review of the New ...
Exactly where are we seriously going with this government and its policies? That is, apart from following what may as well be a Truss-Lite approach on the purported economic “plan“, and Victorian-era regression when it comes to social policy.Oh it’ll work this time of course, we’re basically assured, “the ...
Hey Uncle Dave, When the Poms joined the EEC, I wasn't one of those defeatists who said, Well, that’s it for the dairy job. And I was right, eh? The Chinese can’t get enough of our milk powder and eventually, the Poms came to their senses and backed up the ute ...
Polling shows that Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau has the lowest approval rating of any mayor in the country. Siting at -12 per cent, the proportion of constituents who disapprove of her performance outweighs those who give her the thumbs up. This negative rating is higher than for any other mayor ...
Buzz from the Beehive Pharmac has been given a financial transfusion and a new chair to oversee its spending in the pharmaceutical business. Associate Health Minister David Seymour described the funding for Pharmac as “its largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff”. ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government is trying to achieve and its ...
TL;DR: Here’s my top 10 ‘pick ‘n’ mix of links to news, analysis and opinion articles as of 10:10am on Monday, April 29:Scoop: The children's ward at Rotorua Hospital will be missing a third of its beds as winter hits because Te Whatu Ora halted an upgrade partway through to ...
span class=”dropcap”>As hideous as David Seymour can be, it is worth keeping in mind occasionally that there are even worse political figures (and regimes) out there. Iran for instance, is about to execute the country’s leading hip hop musician Toomaj Salehi, for writing and performing raps that “corrupt” the nation’s ...
Yesterday marked 10 years since the first electric train carried passengers in Auckland so it’s a good time to look back at it and the impact it has had. A brief history The first proposals for rail electrification in Auckland came in the 1920’s alongside the plans for earlier ...
Right now, in Aotearoa-NZ, our ‘animal spirits’ are darkening towards a winter of discontent, thanks at least partly to a chorus of negative comments and actions from the Government Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on ...
You make people evil to punish the paststuck inside a sequel with a rotating castThe following photos haven’t been generated with AI, or modified in any way. They are flesh and blood, human beings. On the left is Galatea Young, a young mum, and her daughter Fiadh who has Angelman ...
April has been a quiet month at A Phuulish Fellow. I have had an exceptionally good reading month, and a decently productive writing month – for original fiction, anyway – but not much has caught my eye that suggested a blog article. It has been vaguely frustrating, to be honest. ...
A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 21, 2024 thru Sat, April 27, 2024. Story of the week Anthropogenic climate change may be the ultimate shaggy dog story— but with a twist, because here ...
Hi,I spent about a year on Webworm reporting on an abusive megachurch called Arise, and it made me want to stab my eyes out with a fork.I don’t regret that reporting in 2022 and 2023 — I am proud of it — but it made me angry.Over three main stories ...
The new Victoria University Vice-Chancellor decided to have a forum at the university about free speech and academic freedom as it is obviously a topical issue, and the Government is looking at legislating some carrots or sticks for universities to uphold their obligations under the Education and Training Act. They ...
Do you remember when Melania Trump got caught out using a speech that sounded awfully like one Michelle Obama had given? Uncannily so.Well it turns out that Abraham Lincoln is to Winston Peters as Michelle was to Melania. With the ANZAC speech Uncle Winston gave at Gallipoli having much in ...
She was born 25 years ago today in North Shore hospital. Her eyes were closed tightly shut, her mouth was silently moving. The whole theatre was all quiet intensity as they marked her a 2 on the APGAR test. A one-minute eternity later, she was an 8. The universe was ...
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park in collaboration with members from our Skeptical Science team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Is Antarctica gaining land ice? ...
Images of US students (and others) protesting and setting up tent cities on US university campuses have been broadcast world wide and clearly demonstrate the growing rifts in US society caused by US policy toward Israel and Israel’s prosecution of … Continue reading → ...
Barrie Saunders writes – Dear Paul As the new Minister of Media and Communications, you will be inundated with heaps of free advice and special pleading, all in the national interest of course. For what it’s worth here is my assessment: Traditional broadcasting free to air content through ...
Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government is trying to achieve and its arguments for such a bold reform. ...
Peter Dunne writes – The great nineteenth British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, once observed that “the first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.” When a later British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, sacked a third of his Cabinet in July 1962, in what became ...
Ele Ludemann writes – New Zealanders had the OECD’s second highest tax increase last year: New Zealanders faced the second-biggest tax raises in the developed world last year, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says. The intergovernmental agency said the average change in personal income tax ...
We all know something’s not right with our elections. The spread of misinformation, people being targeted with soundbites and emotional triggers that ignore the facts, even the truth, and influence their votes.The use of technology to produce deep fakes. How can you tell if something is real or not? Can ...
This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Simon Clark. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). This year you will be lied to! Simon Clark helps prebunk some misleading statements you'll hear about climate. The video includes ...
It is all very well cutting the backrooms of public agencies but it may compromise the frontlines. One of the frustrations of the Productivity Commission’s 2017 review of universities is that while it observed that their non-academic staff were increasing faster than their academic staff, it did not bother to ...
Buzz from the Beehive Two speeches delivered by Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters at Anzac Day ceremonies in Turkey are the only new posts on the government’s official website since the PM announced his Cabinet shake-up. In one of the speeches, Peters stated the obvious: we live in a troubled ...
1. Which of these would you not expect to read in The Waikato Invader?a. Luxon is here to do business, don’t you worry about thatb. Mr KPI expects results, and you better believe itc. This decisive man of action is getting me all hot and excitedd. Melissa Lee is how ...
…it has a restricted jurisdiction which must not be abused: it is not an inquisitionNOTE – this article was published before the High Court ruled that Karen Chhour does not have to appear before the Waitangi Tribunal Gary Judd writes – The High Court ...
Lindsay Mitchell writes – One of reasons Oranga Tamariki exists is to prevent child neglect. But could the organisation itself be guilty of the same?Oranga Tamariki’s statistics show a decrease in the number and age of children in care. “There are less children ...
David Farrar writes: Graeme Edgeler wrote in 2017: In the first five years after three strikes came into effect 5248 offenders received a ‘first strike’ (that is, a “stage-1 conviction” under the three strikes sentencing regime), and 68 offenders received a ‘second strike’. In the five years prior to ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has surprised everyone with his ruthlessness in sacking two of his ministers from their crucial portfolios. Removing ministers for poor performance after only five months in the job just doesn’t normally happen in politics. That’s refreshing and will be extremely ...
TL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the two days to 6:06am on Thursday, April 25:Politics: PM Christopher Luxon has set up a dual standard for ministerial competence by demoting two National Cabinet ministers while leaving also-struggling ...
Hi,Today I mainly want to share some of your thoughts about the recent piece I wrote about success and failure, and the forces that seemingly guide our lives. But first, a quick bit of housekeeping: I am doing a Webworm popup in Los Angeles on Saturday May 11 at 2pm. ...
It is hard to see what Melissa Lee might have done to “save” the media. National went into the election with no public media policy and appears not to have developed one subsequently. Lee claimed that she had prepared a policy paper before the election but it had been decided ...
Open access notablesIce acceleration and rotation in the Greenland Ice Sheet interior in recent decades, Løkkegaard et al., Communications Earth & Environment:In the past two decades, mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated, partly due to the speedup of glaciers. However, uncertainty in speed derived from satellite products ...
Buzz from the Beehive A statement from Children’s Minister Karen Chhour – yet to be posted on the Government’s official website – arrived in Point of Order’s email in-tray last night. It welcomes the High Court ruling on whether the Waitangi Tribunal can demand she appear before it. It does ...
Mr Bombastic:Ironically, the media the academic experts wanted is, in many ways, the media they got. In place of the tyrannical editors of yesteryear, advancing without fear or favour the interests of the ruling class; the New Zealand news media of today boasts a troop of enlightened journalists dedicated to ...
It's hard times try to make a livingYou wake up every morning in the unforgivingOut there somewhere in the cityThere's people living lives without mercy or pityI feel good, yeah I'm feeling fineI feel better then I have for the longest timeI think these pills have been good for meI ...
In 1974, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, finding that the President was not a King, but was subject to the law and was required to turn over the evidence of his wrongdoing to the courts. It was a landmark decision for the rule ...
Every day now just seems to bring in more fresh meat for the grinder.In their relentlessly ideological drive to cut back on the “excessive bloat” (as they see it) of the previous Labour-led government, on the mountains of evidence accumulated in such a short period of time do not ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Megan Valére SosouMarket gardening site of the Itchèléré de Itagui agricultural cooperative in Dassa-Zoumè (Image credit: Megan Valère Sossou) For the residents of Dassa-Zoumè, a city in the West African country of Benin, choosing between drinking water and having enough ...
Buzz from the Beehive Melissa Lee – as may be discerned from the screenshot above – has not been demoted for doing something seriously wrong as Minister of ...
Morning in London Mother hugs beloved daughter outside the converted shoe factory in which she is living.Afternoon in London Travelling writer takes himself and his wrist down to A&E, just to be sure. Read more ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – The recent announcement of the University Advisory Group, chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, makes very clear where the Government’s focus and priorities lie. The remit of the Advisory Group is that Group members will consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector including: ...
Eric Crampton writes – The Reserve Bank of New Zealand desperately wants to find reasons to have workstreams in climate change. It makes little sense. They’ve run another stress test on the banks looking to see if they could find a prudential regulation case. They couldn’t. They ...
Rob MacCullough writes – Pundits from the left and the right are arguing that National’s Fast Track Bill that is designed to speed up infrastructure decisions could end up becoming mired in a cesspool of corruption. Political commentator ...
Looking at the headlines this morning it’s hard to feel anything other than pessimistic about the future of humanity.Note that I’m not speaking about the future of mankind, but the survival of our humanity. The values that we believe in seem to be ebbing away, by the day.Perhaps every generation ...
Swabbing mixed breed baby chicks to test for avian influenzaUh oh. Bird flu – often deadly to humans – is not only being transmitted from infected birds to dairy cows, but is now travelling between dairy cows. As of last Friday, Bloomberg News reports, there were 32 American dairy herds ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
What is it with the mining industry? Its not enough for them to pillage the earth - they apparently can't even be bothered getting resource consent to do so: The proponent behind a major mine near the Clutha River had already been undertaking activity in the area without a ...
This afternoon’s interim Waitangi Tribunal report must be taken seriously as it affects our most vulnerable children, Labour children’s spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime. ...
Te Pāti Māori are demanding the New Zealand Government support an international independent investigation into mass graves that have been uncovered at two hospitals on the Gaza strip, following weeks of assault by Israeli troops. Among the 392 bodies that have been recovered, are children and elderly civilians. Many of ...
Our two-tiered system for veterans’ support is out of step with our closest partners, and all parties in Parliament should work together to fix it, Labour veterans’ affairs spokesperson Greg O’Connor said. ...
Stripping two Ministers of their portfolios just six months into the job shows Christopher Luxon’s management style is lacking, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said. ...
Tonight’s court decision to overturn the summons of the Children’s Minister has enabled the Crown to continue making decisions about Māori without evidence, says Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for Children, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “The judicial system has this evening told the nation that this government can do whatever they want when ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The government's decision to reintroduce Three Strikes is a destructive and ineffective piece of law-making that will only exacerbate an inherently biased and racist criminal justice system, said Te Pāti Māori Justice Spokesperson, Tākuta Ferris, today. During the time Three Strikes was in place in Aotearoa, Māori and Pasifika received ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
Te Pāti Māori is disgusted at the confirmation that hundreds are set to lose their jobs at Oranga Tamariki, and the disestablishment of the Treaty Response Unit. “This act of absolute carelessness and out of touch decision making is committing tamariki to state abuse.” Said Te Pāti Māori Oranga Tamariki ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
A laundry list of additional costs for Tāmaki Makarau Auckland shows the Minister for the city is not delivering for the people who live there, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, and Mema Paremata mō Tāmaki-Makaurau, Takutai Tarsh Kemp, will travel to the Gold Coast to strengthen ties with Māori in Australia next week (15-21 April). The visit, in the lead-up to the 9th Australian National Kapa haka Festival, will be an opportunity for both ...
The Green Party has today launched a step-by-step guide to help New Zealanders make their voice heard on the Government’s democracy dodging and anti-environment fast track legislation. ...
The National Government’s proposed changes to the Residential Tenancies Act will mean tenants can be turfed from their homes by landlords with little notice, Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. ...
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is calling on all parties to support a common-sense change that’s great for the planet and great for consumers after her member’s bill was drawn from the ballot today. ...
There are heartening signs that the extractive sector is once again becoming an attractive prospect for investors and a source of economic prosperity for New Zealand, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. “The beginnings of a resurgence in extractive industries are apparent in media reports of the sector in the past ...
The return of the historic Ō-Rākau battle site to the descendants of those who fought there moved one step closer today with the first reading of Te Pire mō Ō-Rākau, Te Pae o Maumahara / The Ō-Rākau Remembrance Bill. The Bill will entrust the 9.7-hectare battle site, five kilometres west ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has announced 25 new high-speed EV charging hubs along key routes between major urban centres and outlined the Government’s plan to supercharge New Zealand’s EV infrastructure. The hubs will each have several chargers and be capable of charging at least four – and up to 10 ...
The coalition Government will not proceed with the previous Government’s plans to regulate residential property managers, Housing Minister Chris Bishop says. “I have written to the Chairperson of the Social Services and Community Committee to inform him that the Government does not intend to support the Residential Property Managers Bill ...
The Government has announced an independent review into the disability support system funded by the Ministry of Disabled People – Whaikaha. Disability Issues Minister Louise Upston says the review will look at what can be done to strengthen the long-term sustainability of Disability Support Services to provide disabled people and ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has attended the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva and outlined the Government’s plan to restore law and order. “Speaking to the United Nations Human Rights Council provided us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while responding to issues and ...
Trade Minister Todd McClay heads overseas today for high-level trade talks in the Gulf region, and a key OECD meeting in Paris. Mr McClay will travel to Riyadh to meet with counterparts from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). “New Zealand’s goods and services exports to the Gulf region ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford has outlined six education priorities to deliver a world-leading education system that sets Kiwi kids up for future success. “I’m putting ambition, achievement and outcomes at the heart of our education system. I want every child to be inspired and engaged in their learning so they ...
The new NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) App is a secure ‘one stop shop’ to provide the services drivers need, Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Digitising Government Minister Judith Collins say. “The NZTA App will enable an easier way for Kiwis to pay for Vehicle Registration and Road User Charges (RUC). ...
Whānau with tamariki growing up in emergency housing motels will be prioritised for social housing starting this week, says Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka. “Giving these whānau a better opportunity to build healthy stable lives for themselves and future generations is an essential part of the Government’s goal of reducing ...
Racing Minister Winston Peters has paid tribute to an icon of the industry with the recent passing of Dave O’Sullivan (OBE). “Our sympathies are with the O’Sullivan family with the sad news of Dave O’Sullivan’s recent passing,” Mr Peters says. “His contribution to racing, initially as a jockey and then ...
Assalaamu alaikum, greetings to you all. Eid Mubarak, everyone! I want to extend my warmest wishes to you and everyone celebrating this joyous occasion. It is a pleasure to be here. I have enjoyed Eid celebrations at Parliament before, but this is my first time joining you as the Minister ...
Associate Health Minister David Seymour has announced Pharmac’s largest ever budget of $6.294 billion over four years, fixing a $1.774 billion fiscal cliff. “Access to medicines is a crucial part of many Kiwis’ lives. We’ve committed to a budget allocation of $1.774 billion over four years so Kiwis are ...
Hon Paula Bennett has been appointed as member and chair of the Pharmac board, Associate Health Minister David Seymour announced today. "Pharmac is a critical part of New Zealand's health system and plays a significant role in ensuring that Kiwis have the best possible access to medicines,” says Mr Seymour. ...
Hundreds of New Zealand families affected by Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) will benefit from a new Government focus on prevention and treatment, says Health Minister Dr Shane Reti. “We know FASD is a leading cause of preventable intellectual and neurodevelopmental disability in New Zealand,” Dr Reti says. “Every day, ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones today attended the official opening of Kaikohe’s new $14.7 million sports complex. “The completion of the Kaikohe Multi Sports Complex is a fantastic achievement for the Far North,” Mr Jones says. “This facility not only fulfils a long-held dream for local athletes, but also creates ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ engagements in Türkiye this week underlined the importance of diplomacy to meet growing global challenges. “Returning to the Gallipoli Peninsula to represent New Zealand at Anzac commemorations was a sombre reminder of the critical importance of diplomacy for de-escalating conflicts and easing tensions,” Mr Peters ...
Ambassador Millar, Burgemeester, Vandepitte, Excellencies, military representatives, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen – good morning and welcome to this sacred Anzac Day dawn service. It is an honour to be here on behalf of the Government and people of New Zealand at Buttes New British Cemetery, Polygon Wood – a deeply ...
Distinguished guests - It is an honour to return once again to this site which, as the resting place for so many of our war-dead, has become a sacred place for generations of New Zealanders. Our presence here and at the other special spaces of Gallipoli is made ...
Mai ia tawhiti pamamao, te moana nui a Kiwa, kua tae whakaiti mai matou, ki to koutou papa whenua. No koutou te tapuwae, no matou te tapuwae, kua honoa pumautia. Ko nga toa kua hinga nei, o te Waipounamu, o te Ika a Maui, he okioki tahi me o ...
Paul Goldsmith will take on responsibility for the Media and Communications portfolio, while Louise Upston will pick up the Disability Issues portfolio, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today. “Our Government is relentlessly focused on getting New Zealand back on track. As issues change in prominence, I plan to adjust Ministerial ...
Recreational catch limits will be reduced in areas of Fiordland and the Chatham Islands to help keep those fisheries healthy and sustainable, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The lower recreational daily catch limits for a range of finfish and shellfish species caught in the Fiordland Marine Area and ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed an important milestone in New Zealand’s hydrogen future, with the opening of the country’s first network of hydrogen refuelling stations in Wiri. “I want to congratulate the team at Hiringa Energy and its partners K one W one (K1W1), Mitsui & Co New Zealand ...
The coalition Government is delivering on its commitment to improve resource management laws and give greater certainty to consent applicants, with a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) expected to be introduced to Parliament next month. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has today outlined the first RMA Amendment ...
Overseas models for regulating the oil and gas sector, including their decommissioning regimes, are being carefully scrutinised as a potential template for New Zealand’s own sector, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. The Coalition Government is focused on rebuilding investor confidence in New Zealand’s energy sector as it looks to strengthen ...
Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell has today released the Report of the Government Inquiry into the response to the North Island Severe Weather Events. “The report shows that New Zealand’s emergency management system is not fit-for-purpose and there are some significant gaps we need to address,” Mr Mitchell ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is today travelling to Europe where he’ll update the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Government’s work to restore law and order. “Attending the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva provides us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while ...
Associate Agriculture Minister, Mark Patterson, formally reopened the world’s largest wool processing facility today in Awatoto, Napier, following a $50 million rebuild and refurbishment project. “The reopening of this facility will significantly lift the economic opportunities available to New Zealand’s wool sector, which already accounts for 20 per cent of ...
Hon Andrew Bayly, Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing At the Southland Otago Regional Engineering Collective (SOREC) Summit, 18 April, Dunedin Ngā mihi nui, Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Ko Whanganui aho Good Afternoon and thank you for inviting me to open your summit today. I am delighted ...
The Government is delivering on its commitment to bring back the Three Strikes legislation, Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee announced today. “Our Government is committed to restoring law and order and enforcing appropriate consequences on criminals. We are making it clear that repeat serious violent or sexual offending is not ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has today announced four new diplomatic appointments for New Zealand’s overseas missions. “Our diplomats have a vital role in maintaining and protecting New Zealand’s interests around the world,” Mr Peters says. “I am pleased to announce the appointment of these senior diplomats from the ...
New Zealand is contributing NZ$7 million to support communities affected by severe food insecurity and other urgent humanitarian needs in Ethiopia and Somalia, Foreign Minister Rt Hon Winston Peters announced today. “Over 21 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across Ethiopia, with a further 6.9 million people ...
Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith is congratulating Mataaho Collective for winning the Golden Lion for best participant in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. "Congratulations to the Mataaho Collective for winning one of the world's most prestigious art prizes at the Venice Biennale. “It is good ...
The Government is reforming financial services to improve access to home loans and other lending, and strengthen customer protections, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly and Housing Minister Chris Bishop announced today. “Our coalition Government is committed to rebuilding the economy and making life simpler by cutting red tape. We are ...
“China remains a strong commercial opportunity for Kiwi exporters as Chinese businesses and consumers continue to value our high-quality safe produce,” Trade and Agriculture Minister Todd McClay says. Mr McClay has returned to New Zealand following visits to Beijing, Harbin and Shanghai where he met ministers, governors and mayors and engaged in trade and agricultural events with the New ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has completed a successful trip to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, deepening relationships and capitalising on opportunities. Mr Luxon was accompanied by a business delegation and says the choice of countries represents the priority the New Zealand Government places on South East Asia, and our relationships in ...
New Zealand is demonstrating its commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions, and supporting clean energy transition in South East Asia, through a contribution of NZ$41 million (US$25 million) in climate finance to the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-led Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM). Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts announced ...
The Government is today releasing a list of organisations who received letters about the Fast-track applications process, says RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. “Recently Ministers and agencies have received a series of OIA requests for a list of organisations to whom I wrote with information on applying to have a ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Wellington Barrister David Jonathan Boldt as a Judge of the High Court, and the Honourable Justice Matthew Palmer as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Boldt graduated with an LLB from Victoria University of Wellington in 1990, and also holds ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford will lead the New Zealand delegation at the 2024 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) held in Singapore. The delegation includes representatives from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua and the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) Te Riu Roa. The summit is co-hosted ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland A bright Eta Aquariid meteor photobombed this photo of comet C/2020 F8 (SWAN) in May 2020.Jonti Horner Meteors – commonly known as shooting stars – can be seen on any night of the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Flannery, Honorary fellow, The University of Melbourne Shutterstock Current concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in Earth’s atmosphere are unprecedented in human history. But CO₂ levels today, and those that might occur in coming decades, did occur millions of years ago. ...
Winston Peters has been keen to dismiss speculation on our involvement in Aukus but will give a speech tonight on the direction of our foreign policy, writes Anna Rawhiti-Connell in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Usmar, Lecturer in Critical Media Literacies, Auckland University of Technology Getty Images With the coalition government’s ban of student mobile phones in New Zealand schools coming into effect this week, reaction has ranged from the sceptical (kids will just get ...
A new report on protecting journalism and democracy in New Zealand recommends a levy be charged on global platforms like Facebook and Google to fund media firms undertaking public interest reporting. It also calls for the reinstatement of a powerful Broadcasting Commission to distribute public funding for journalism and other ...
On International Workers' Day, also known as May Day, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi and the wider union movement are celebrating the proud history of the labour movement during a tough time for working people. ...
From bills to beards, a walk through the former Green co-leader’s time in politics. After close to a decade in politics, James Shaw is preparing to bid farewell to parliament. Tonight will see the former minister deliver his valedictory address, certain to be a speech filled with Shaw’s trademark wit ...
Two months ago, MPs unanimously voted to give themselves a week off in Efeso Collins’ honour. On Tuesday, most were too busy to give even an hour of their time. The day Fa’anānā Efeso Collins died, parliament felt different. In a building that operates at a breakneck pace, everyone stopped ...
India’s election involves hundreds of millions of people and is a months-long affair. Here’s how voting works and what’s at stake.The biggest-ever election in world history started on April 19, with more than 10% of the world’s population eligible to vote. Elections in India, the world’s most populous country ...
Opinion: The impression from the carpark is very inviting. The area is well fenced but barred so there is easy visibility of loved ones. Inside, the spaces are welcoming and clean and staff are friendly and clearly comfortable. I am greeted by ‘Kim’. She has worked here for three years, ...
After the Christchurch earthquake, the then-national civil defence boss compared his experience to “putting a team on the rugby field who have never ever played together before”. Now, eight years later – and following a damning inquiry into the emergency response of cyclones Gabrielle, Hale and the Auckland anniversary weekend floods – ...
“I had just come off the end of a major robbery case which I had been working on for six months when I got a call on the afternoon of September 1, 1992, that some remains had been found at a building site in Devonport, so I drove over with ...
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Comment: Journalists are very good at telling other people’s stories, but they fall well short when writing about their own profession. Perhaps that is why it is so undervalued. Every successive poll on the public’s attitude toward journalism is more alarming than the last. In the last month we have ...
Opinion: A young Māori woman and her Pacific partner arrive at their local hospital by ambulance. She has gone into labour at just under 24 weeks, but the couple haven’t recognised the symptoms – and don’t know the risks of premature birth for their baby. By the time they arrive, ...
Behind closed doors, NZ First will be arguing fiercely against any watering down of the ministerial decision-making powers in the Bill The post Bishop backtracks after fast-track backlash appeared first on Newsroom. ...
Emotional scenes played out in the Invercargill courthouse on the first two days of the coronial inquest into the death of Gore toddler Lachlan Jones, in which the boy’s mother was accused of disposing of her son’s body. The second season of Newsroom’s award-nominated podcast The Boy in the Water ...
Asia Pacific Report A Pacific civil society alliance has condemned French neocolonial policies in Kanaky New Caledonia, saying Paris is set on “maintaining the status quo” and denying the indigenous Kanak people their inalienable right to self-determination. The Pacific Regional Non-Governmental Organisations (PRNGOs) Alliance, representing some 15 groups, said in ...
Koi Tū New Zealand cannot sit back and see the collapse of its Fourth Estate, the director of Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures, Sir Peter Gluckman, says in the foreword of a paper published today. The paper, “If not journalists, then who?” paints a picture of an industry ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Foreign investment proposals with implications for Australia’s strategic or economic security will face tougher scrutiny, under a policy overhaul to be announced by Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Wednesday. At the same time, the government ...
A Waitangi Tribunal inquiry report has warned government that a repeal of Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act could cause harm to children in care. ...
The Treasury has published today three new papers covering government consumption multipliers, automatic stabilisers and the impacts of global shocks on New Zealand’s economy. ...
Asia Pacific Report The Pacific state of Hawai’i’s House of Representatives has joined the state’s Senate in calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, becoming the first state to pass such a resolution, reports Hawaii News Now. In March, the Senate passed a ceasefire resolution with a 24–1 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Ferrie, A/Prof, UTS Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research and ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Technology Sydney PsiQuantum The Australian government has announced a pledge of approximately A$940 million (US$617 million) to PsiQuantum, a quantum computing start-up company based in Silicon Valley. Half ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia Cameron Prins/Shutterstock If you spend a lot of time exploring fitness content online, you might have come across the concept of heart rate zones. Heart rate zone training has become more ...
SPECIAL REPORT:By Eugene Doyle He is the most popular Palestinian leader alive today — and yet few people in the West even know his name. Absolutely no one in Gaza or the West Bank does not know him. That difference speaks volumes about who dominates the media narrative that ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Will McCallum, PhD Candidate – School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University Earlier this year, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton accused Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of not supporting Operation Sovereign Borders – the military-led border security operation that has “closed Australia’s borders ...
By Melyne Baroi in Port Moresby A Papua New Guinea MP, Peter Isoaimo, who had been ousted by the National Court in an alleged bribery case, has been reinstated by the Supreme Court on appeal. A three-member Supreme Court bench found that the National Court had erred in finding that ...
Publisher Chris Holdaway reflects on the unique project of collecting the work of the late, terrific poet Schaeffer Lemalu. One of the nice things you can do as a truly independent publisher is to make the books that writers want to make, whatever they happen to be. That’s how I’ve ...
Those profiled in the stamp series served on overseas deployments from 1995 onwards, and all have been awarded theNew Zealand Operational Service Medal. ...
Last night’s dismal poll result for the coalition government shows the limits of trying to govern as an opposition, argues Joel MacManus. There’s a quote from the American political activist Barbara Deming: “Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people’s minds, the thought ...
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A defendant charged by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has pleaded guilty to four charges of obtaining by deception in relation to a mortgage fraud scheme. Sentencing has been scheduled for 14 August 2024. ...
What to say when pesky journalists ask gotcha questions like ‘can you name a single book you’ve ever read?’ and ‘did you read it, or did you just see the movie?’This week, Act Party arts spokesperson Todd Stephenson foolishly agreed to an interview with Newsroom’s Steve Braunias regarding his ...
Explainer - What will a ban on cellphones in schools achieve? Can students use them during lunch breaks? And what happens if you need to contact your child? ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jodi Rowley, Curator, Amphibian & Reptile Conservation Biology, Australian Museum, UNSW Sydney Jodi Rowley, CC BY-NC-ND In winter 2021, Australia’s frogs started dropping dead. People began posting images of dead frogs on social media. Unable to travel to investigate the deaths ...
In the year ended March 2024, 0.4 percent of home transfers were to people who didn’t hold New Zealand citizenship or a resident visa, according to figures released by Stats NZ today. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wasay Majid, Research Assistant , University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau New Zealand’s accommodation supplement scheme is facing scrutiny, with Social Development Minister Louise Upston recently saying “there is merit in considering whether the current settings are fair and sustainable long-term”. The ...
By Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor The first prime ministerial candidate has been announced in Solomon Islands and it is not Manasseh Sogavare. The man of the hour is Jeremiah Manele, the MP for Hograno/Kia/Havulei constituency in Isabel Province, who served as minister of foreign affairs in the last government. ...
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Analysis - Christopher Luxon will be alert to the factors driving the dire polling, but won't be waving the white flag just yet, RNZ political editor Jo Moir writes. ...
Writer, teacher and academic Vincent O’Sullivan died on Sunday 28 April. Here we gather tributes from friends, colleagues, and students who remember his extraordinary contributions. I went down to the garage tonight. There was a bird shrieking out in the bush, in the dark, maybe a kākā. Miraculously, through the ...
As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a burnt-out corporate escapee explains how she gets by ‘working as little as possible’. Want to be part of The Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here.Gender: Female Age: 31 Ethnicity: Pākehā Role: Contractor in ...
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A petition signed by more than 16,500 people, demanding the government take stronger action to halt the genocide of Palestinians by the State of Israel, is being presented to the House of Representatives today by Hon Phil Twyford. ...
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The government's treatment of Māori raised eyebrows, with countries saying New Zealand needed to do more to reduce health, education and justice inequities. ...
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Above the Fold: On Monday, the biggest Māori screen production company faced down the biggest funder of Māori content at the High Court. It was an incredibly tense moment – then, just as quickly, it resolved. Duncan Greive breaks down a strange day in the screen sector.Yesterday morning, Māori ...
Is the fringe radio station really in a financial crisis, or is it just running a hyped-up donation drive? Fringe internet radio station Reality Check Radio was launched by the anti-vaccine mandates group Voices for Freedom in March 2023. For the next year, it undertook probably the most aggressive promotional ...
An opinion piece from one Ben Thomas on Ihumãtao.
The final sentence, instancing baby boomers in a cheap throwaway shot. Why does he instance baby boomers? Why not leave it at just instancing residents' views. I find this a nasty piece of disrespectful ageism.
Well, one thing is that he is a former 'spin doctor for a National Treaty Negotiations minister, Chris Finlayson.'
"Much needed housing projects in leafy central Auckland suburbs are routinely scrapped by the authorities for much less – for blocking a baby boomer resident's views, or to save sagging old mid-century shopfronts."
The final few words of this take on it are "history and good planning" it gave me the chance to think about what is happening, like, probably, a lot of people I didn't know what to think of it or even have view.
After reading this I thought, why not Avondale Racecourse? Why not the golf clubs? Maybe this is uncomfortable but it does raise questions. Surely there is a solution.
Letting the Tamakis try and feed off this and protecting all other areas of Auck that are only used by a few or used rarely shouldn't be part of Auckland's future.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/114554464/the-real-reason-why-fletchers-is-building-at-ihumtao
(the link seems to have Ihumãtao. spelt incorrectly but does work)
Can we have a link for the Ben Thomas article please.
My apologies, Sacha.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/114556346/opinion-heres-why-the-government-cant-return-ihumtao-to-iwi
All good, thanks. I will probably regret it. 🙂
Actually that's a pretty good summary of why govt has been so unwilling to get involved.
I notice a good picture of Ben Thomas in his article. I wonder if that is actually the main feature and intention of writing it though there is also a good aerial photo of the Stonefields volcanic cone.
Thomas is referring to this particularly egregious situation: https://thespinoff.co.nz/auckland/30-08-2018/this-ludicrous-dominion-road-decision-is-proof-the-planning-system-is-broken/
Yes, Mr Lange is certainly a 'resident' but that word is not shorthand for the attitudes that have been associated for many decades with the "Me" generation.
Mr Lange lives in the same little cluster of housing that got a bit of attention a couple of months ago, yeah?
Over the other side of the same street, I think.
Backgrounder
For me – I am enjoying watching the ebb and flow of mana – this is how it works, live, in real time – ebb and flow. No one has to be worried because it is still moving, until it settles into the new spot it is fluid. Fixed positions, movement, change, solidity, unbreaking, ever flexible – we are getting a masterclass.
This
is beautiful.
Thank you.
Why shun the soil enriched by your ancestors mardymardy?
I don't think one more mm should be sold and in fact a lot should be GIVEN back gabbyduck. I'd give back a few other things too – mark my words on that one alright gabbs, I'd give back a FEW other things too I would, yes siree, indeed, say no more.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/07/ihum-tao-protester-numbers-surge-into-thousands-as-ministers-enter-fray.html
Gfoffloffle issues the party invites around here chum.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2019/07/27/divide-and-rule-is-the-first-choice-weapon-of-government-the-second-is-the-police-and-the-third-is-the-army/
Eric the ripper' involved in 'pump and dump'…surely not!
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/114555844/eric-watson-named-in-fbi-search-warrant-documents-in-relation-to-insider-trading-case
Cannasouth IPO comes to mind.
If you've ever felt that you're not being given the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth by our elected representatives, both at central and local government level, you can take some comfort that your suspicions are well founded.
The Bullshit Brigade have taken over.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018705810/running-the-numbers-on-public-service-pr
It’s not news that people doing PR and communications for the state heavily outnumber the journalists who report on the agencies employing them. But the numbers crunched by RNZ’s Phil Pennington show the gap has become a chasm – and the figures weren't easy to get.
So much for open and transparent government.
SSDD
It's odd that more PR people = less info. At least the bullshit's on glossy paper.
Comms staff in risk-averse organisations are mostly focused on restricting information, not spreading it.
Most government departments are having to increase the resources needed for Freedom of Information requests – most of those will probably be called communications staff . . .
I believe that some of the egregious requests should be countered by public release of both the questions and answers, and also for each request provide a "quick estimate" of person-hours spent on preparing the information. First by making more information public, questioners will only get a slight "scoop" advantage, if the requester is named (as it should be at least for all MPs and for corporations) it may give a guide to those who are seeking to bury initiative by tying up resources, but most importantly it may lead departments to review regular reporting so that systems automatically provide better public information
There is a cost to open and transparent government . . at least the emphasis now is on compliance rather than withholding information
Good explainer on Nats proposing another $50m/year (about 5%) for Pharmac to make drug companies happy: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/07/national-promises-200-million-cancer-fund.html
It arises from two different National party imperatives. First they want smaller government, but they also need to be seen to increase spending. How to do that? Criticise any small part of any sector, and promise more money. No need for the criticism to be justified cancer is good because people die from it, so we are not doing enough. (Forget about all the other reasons for death, including the expensive "just getting older") Also forget about where the money comes from – if asked, point to anything the government is doing – the Regional Development Fund will do – as an example of less important spending.
The reality is that Pharmac has a mandate to look at all causes of need for treatments, and to balance those needs fairly, taking into account proven effects. The occasional political meddling is often related to a big company having a new (and nearly tested) wonder drug – sadly performance doe not always match rhetoric, but the purpose here is not to spend more money, but to be seen to be doing (or in this case promising for the future) something.
The reality for cancer treatment is that we already have a fairly concentrated system that puts specialists together in places where patients can be directed to give critical mass. We will never have a cancer specialist team on the West Coast – specialists want to see more than 2 or 3 patients a year . . . We know from the past that political decisions have not always matched clinical preferences – some of the past decisions to promise funding before an election have not survived dispassionate assessment of clinical results for a new drug.
So, 1. Where is the money coming from? Does this defer tax cuts?
2. My uncle has Heart disease / Parkinsons / Multiple Schlerosis / Dementia – what are you going to do for him and others like him? Or will treatment for them be cut to pay for the promise?
3. We are told to trust the market and to trust the medical profession – why do you think a political decision to "pick a winner" will result in better health outcomes overall. Is this just an election bribe? Does the National Party no longer believe in the benefits of a free market?
Yes, it is always ideologically interesting watching the Nats strengthen the hand of the state while claiming otherwise.
This is not about strengthening the hand of the state – $50 million a year for 4 years (presumably from 2021 when this little blurt from Simon may well have been forgotten . . .) will not make up for the cuts to the total health budget over the previous 9 years. This is a "look over there" action intended to distract. Even the basic premise that people all over New Zealand deserve to have specialist care in their neighbourhood is a nonsense – major centres are the only places with ready transport from elsewhere and enough patients to run complex speciality departments – it was I think under National that pediatric cancer services were concentrated in a small number of places. What National does believe in is crony capitalism, using money to temporarily buy support while encouraging the "self-reliance" of private health insurance . . .
The ideology dictates that government not only should not get in the way of the ‘free market’ but also that it should set policy that actively encourages and protects the ‘free market’. The government is to serve and protect markets in which individuals make rational decisions and choices that are in their best interest. What the ideology assumes is the sum of these individual actions delivers the best possible outcome for the greater good. In fact, it is claimed that this is the only ideology that can achieve this outcome. What is often downplayed or outright ignored is that people don’t make strictly rational decisions and choices and that they are heavily influenced by marketing, advertising, PR, and spin, et cetera. The ideology further ignores that choice is an allusion and in fact an illusion because it encourages mergers & acquisitions into large dominant market players and monopolies. The same market ‘principles’ feed back into the market itself in which companies and corporates make decisions that are in their (shareholders’) best interest. The madness of this ideology is that many not just believe but are convinced that the cumulative effect of an infinite number of selfish actions is a selfless benefit to all.
Selfishness itself is the main beneficiary of NZ's last few decades – now the embedded default for public discourse.
This:
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
US novelist & sailor (1819 – 1891)
Another small but predictably disgusting piece of selective shroud-waving from the Nats.
It is clear that National has not learned and moved on from their mistake to ride roughshod over PHARMAC’s decision-making process and fund Herceptin as an Election promise in 2008.
https://www.pharmac.govt.nz/about/our-history/hard-choices/
This is yet another cynical promise of frivolous spending of Taxpayers’ money sold as ‘life-saving’.
A guaranteed extra windfall of $50 million each year (!) for pharma industry thanks to the generosity of Simon Bridges and his buddies in National. How many bridges did Bridges promise again?
I’d suggest that PHARMAC adopts a no-cure-no-pay policy for expensive drugs. Given that only a fraction of patients respond to these expensive treatments and given that all treated patients are exposed to potentially severe side effects of the drugs, it makes no sense to charge the full price (not cost) to each and every patient. Unfortunately, they cannot tell who will benefit and who won’t.
Thus, set a very conservative base re-fund and then for each month or year of clinical benefit to the patient pay a little more to the point at which a patient is disease-free and/or considered cured. As soon as a patient relapses, the payments stop indefinitely. That would be true value-for-money. At the moment, it is largely a gamble with people’s lives and finances with the only real winners being the pharma industry.
No cure no pay?
Interesting idea.
Well, more like no-cure-much-less-pay. There’s a good post on this topic but time …
Would be a useful policy if we implement fast-tracking for unproven drugs. Insurance for reducing the up-front barriers. Maybe in a 'partnership agreement' with the pharma companies?
Perhaps better to call them not-yet-proven drugs?
The gold standard in clinical registration trials for anti-cancer drugs is overall survival but this can take years to measure. Unfortunately, surrogate or secondary endpoints such as progression-free survival don’t always predict for overall survival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progression-free_survival
Pharma provide (new) drugs free to patients who participate in clinical trials but it is important to note that not all trials are equal.
The other point to consider is that trial results often are more positive than when used in the general patient population. There are a number of reasons for that.
Because of the side effects and the general lack of predictive diagnostics, I think there has to be a sound evidence-base before PHARMAC fully funds new treatments. Partly, because it could go at the expense of other expenditure on proven treatments, be it for cancer or non-cancer.
New drugs offer great promise in some cases but also come with great(er) uncertainty. IMO, this should definitely be reflected in a lower cost price to PHARMAC.
In some ways, it is the pharma’s best interest to treat as many patients as possible regardless of whether they’ll benefit or not. Patient selection based on predictive diagnostics increases the chances of clinical benefit to the patient but reduces the potential market size for the pharma.
The main issue is that the best drug should be tailored to a specific patient (best match) with the greatest chance of a beneficial outcome for the patient, which is where personalised medicine is heading, and this could be coupled to the pharma’s profit. Currently, the two are often uncoupled from each other and pricing is set by the pharma and how much ‘the market’ can tolerate and is willing to accept. It has an element of preying on the desperate and giving them hope …
Results need to be made public and there needs much more transparency and accountability from and by the pharma industry especially since we, the Taxpayers, pay for it.
As I said, it is a great topic for a post.
Good luck getting the industry to be more open, though the European regulators may solve that one for us eventually.
Sometimes, you get the feeling that the ‘ethics’ of Big Pharma and Tobacco Industry are virtually indistinguishable. Of course, their number one priority is to satisfy their shareholders.
Regulators should make it mandatory to publish all results of all trials through peer-review. Patients shouldn’t be used as Guinea pigs to boost profits.
After market approval, all adverse events need to be collated in a central register that is open and searchable. This needs an international global approach.
Sometimes, you get the feeling that the ‘ethics’ of Big Pharma and Tobacco Industry are virtually indistinguishable.
Careful there Incognito, that's a line straight from the book I'm reading at the moment about adverse reactions to the HPV vaccine.
Given what else is going on in this world of ours is anyone surprised?
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&amp;objectid=12253391
“It counts among its members German police officers, military personnel — and even the elite anti-terror squad Spezialeinsatzkommand.”
The dad penny's been busy.
https://twitter.com/_pamcampos/status/1154725314666422272
[…]
https://twitter.com/_pamcampos/status/1154732456957943808
https://twitter.com/_pamcampos/status/1154738132241264640
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1154725314666422272.html
working link to the german police neo-n cell
Stray amp; snuck into the link
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12253391
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12253391
Outgoing head of ASMS tells Clark to " "Toughen up David; the fires are burning and you are running out of time."
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/114548766/outgoing-health-union-boss-slams-health-minister-david-clark
I am not the only commenter here who has expressed bitter disappointment at the nation being stuck with yet another Minister of Health who is clearly unequal to the task of enabling the necessary reboot of our Public Health and Disability system.
That is, of course, if the Current Mob were speaking true when they declared their intention to be transformational and address the failings and inequities that have been allowed to flourish under the past four administrations.
A cynical person might suspect that the underlying intent is to push this nation inexorable down the path to a system where those who can go private and those who can't….suffer and die.
But hey, the EOLC Bill will ease their departure.
See, they have got a plan after all.
Choices are certainly a bitch, aren't they. Salaried medical specialists are probably in just the category that would have benefited from National's further cuts to income tax that the new government reversed. Instead the increased the minimum wage, increased benefits, stopped spending so much money on making WINZ staff proxy police and got them to actually help people in need (and surprise surprise suddenly without changing the law suddenly staff found that many people were actually eligible for a benefit). They put money into repairing and building social housing, and money into reviewing education for skills training so we don;t have to import more; they settled long overdue wage agreements with nurses and teachers. In half a term quite a bit has been achieved. Meanwhile we are looking forward to the possibility of another world recession; our debt position as a country is much higher than desirable, and a pre-election promise has led to our continuing with low income tax rates for companies and individuals, with some blatant loopholes that further reduce spending options.
I agree that there was a lurch towards private provision of health services under the Key/English governments – and yes there is a gap in earnings between private and public specialists. I well remember a news item shortly before the 2017 election where Bill English proudly attended a major extension of Bowen Hospital in Wellington; accompanied I think around the same time by the purchase by a private provider of an MRI machine – but don't worry, the public sector can contract to use it when it is not being used for private patients . . . So I too would like the public sector to "close the gap" in a lot of ways, but if priority were to be given to salaried medical specialists, what other part of spending would you be happy to reduce, Rosemary?
Cut the military spend, tax the top 1 to 10 percent (income earners) more and increase that tourist entry levy to at least a hundred dollars.
Only one out of three is a reduction of spending!?
That's simply because the revenue doesn't have to solely come from cuts elsewhere.
Nevertheless, it’s strange how when it comes to health there's no money but when it comes to Mycoplasma bovis there's a blank cheque.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2018/06/grant-robertson-signs-blank-cheque-to-tackle-mycoplasma-bovis.html
Sure, but that wasn’t the question, was it? It would have been more honest and clearer to reframe the question and explain why but you didn’t, did you?
You do sound a tad like Amy Adams “sniping” about or at the Budget, don’t you?
Edit:
You are an attack machine Rosemary McD. Only your problems and those of other disabled people should be looked at, nobody else matters. And talking down the ELOC (End of Life Choice) Bill is a narrow position. Less money spent on interfering with natural death; limiting the drawn-out 'life' of terminally ill means more available for those actually living, not just existing. I am as despairing as you are of intelligent and fair behaviour as needed and wanted by people who need help with their plans for their future.
Health must be a nightmare portfolio….the reality is there will never be enough resources and choices will be made. …whether the best (or right?) will be a never ending debate….it will depend on where you view it from.
"Health", ie the "Ministry of", has become an autonomous corporate monster. Regardless of which colour flies atop the Beehive, the Ministry will continue along the path laid out over two decades ago. Underfund the system and provide dysfunctional leadership. Blame and accuse those charged with providing frontline services for not being able to function as required when they're running to stand still. Contract out core services to profiteers. Allow the creation of an separate profession called 'health management and administration', whose sole role appears to be to draw $$$ away from actual treatment and care and into the salaries of those who without knowing the first thing about running a busy ward march in and start telling the medical staff how to run a busy ward….Brian Easton describes these parasites here…https://pundit.co.nz/content/who-was-accountable-for-the-shambles
A brave Prime Minister would address the Nation and say.."Look folks, our Public Health and Disability system is in deepest shit.. Decades of mismanagement has resulted in such a deficit that we have only two choices….a) give up and limp along on existing funding and under the cloud of strained relationships and encourage those who can afford it to take out private health insurance (as was the plan in the first place), or b) we do a massive reboot, a sizeable and meaningful cash injection that will truly be an investment for future generations…but this option requires us to impose and extra 2% of tax on every earner, ringfenced as an addition to the current Vote Health appropriations. This tax shall stay in place until we're out of the pooh."
I'd go for b.
Id go for 'b' as well….but would note the result would still be well short of providing everything demanded.
Health care will always be triaged….some honest discussions about what are must haves and what would be good if able are needed, but I doubt any politician of any hue is willing to risk that
Big shoes to fill now that Ian is stepping down.
Thanks for the link, Rosemary.
David Clark seems to believe long-standing workforce issues can't somehow be solved by bringing in more trained medical specialists (from offshore) or is it a case of the Government not wanting to spend the money required to do that?
Great article worth another read in these times – we all have this tendency – some more than others – listen please, just listen.
That is good MM. Shutting up and finding ways to affirm their thoughts or occasionally indicate a different way, 'Have you thought of trying…' is the best. Sometimes thoughts get so scrambled that talking through them with a trusted person gives a clarity.
What a bloody laugh as I woke up today (sunday) 28th july to see lame brain Simon Bridges saying;;
“I believe in climate change is a real threat to our nation” to Tova O;Brien, and then he tries to nail the point home by saying quote “we have two electric cars”
If that incredible statment wasn;t enough, then he says about the National Party policy was to build new roads????
What the fuck@@@@@
Is he brainless? it would seem as he is as more roads are not the way forward to lower the climate emissions!!
Using more rail is, as rail uses six times less fuel to move the same amount as trucks do, and rail uses no tyres and only “steel on steel wheels, for low friction and only has steel particulates emissions.
Vehicle tyres emit large amounts of tyre dust pollution made from oil distilates similar to plastic,
That causes cancer and nervous system damage, with 1,3,Butadience styrene,
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/MMG/MMG.asp?id=455&tid=81
So grow some brain Simon as you are once again showing your ignorance.
Wonderful comments from academic Margaret Mutu on Ihumātao, "divide and rule" approach.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12252876
Do you think that this presents a good opportunity to revisit the whole settlement issue? Peeni Henare made it clear this morning that returning land in private ownership will render all previous settlements invalid. That could well be a legitimate outcome, do you have a perspective on that?
I tend to go along with the thinking that this is a special case. The iwi were shut out of decision making and simply don't want the land developed.
That is quite different to the pakeha fear that this would now mean all private land is up for grabs to be given back.
Ok – I think it's not so much 'pakeha fear' as a legal nightmare unless the 'special case' aspect is extremely well established as exactly that.
The strategy only works when the target group allows it to do so. Unity defeats division. Mutu ought to get real instead. If she really believes the four-year stand-off between niece & uncle was caused by the crown, she ought to produce evidence of that. She hasn't even tried to do so, has she?
What kind of people are attracted to an overt racist? … oh, right…people suffering from economic anxiety.
/
https://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/1155221137930051585
The polling bump (thankfully very small) he got from "send her back" suggested that there is in fact a group of deplorables on the fence about whether he is sufficiently racist for their taste. Trying to lock down their support might be why he's going after Cummings now.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-elijah-cummings-brutal-bully-rodent-infested-district_n_5d3c4ec1e4b0c31569eb6234
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/395386/health-expert-renews-call-for-study-on-nitrates-in-drinking-water
and
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/395379/bridges-promises-cancer-agency-200m-for-drugs
If National didn't limit itself to promising action to the citizens about decent drinking water and severe limitations on pollution in waterways then he wouldn't need to bribe voters with cancer drug offers (most of which don't cure). The appearance of concern after the fact is a sorry sight and leads to disdain, recognising the degeneracy of National from voters of principle.
Interesting:
Workers in eastern Europe and former Soviet states prefer socialism:
Former Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s approval rating has hit a record high of 70 percent amongst Russians, according to a study published by the Levada polling centre. (Stalin’s approval rating among Russians hits record high, The Moscow Times, 16 April 2019) ……
https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2019/07/26/news/workers-eastern-europe-former-ussr-prefer-socialism/
Don't need Putin's bots to win elections in Russia when you have Putin's bats to do the job for you.
Thousand arrests at Moscow rally
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49125045
https://twitter.com/howroute/status/1155205677809373186
https://twitter.com/howroute/status/1155280981059887105
Imagine you telling Stalin his system was socialism. You'd disappear real fast.
Fuck you are an ignorant fool….
Socialism in one country (Russian: социализм в отдельно взятой стране, tr. sotsializm v otdelno vzyatoy strane, literally socialism in a single country) was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin in 1924 which was eventually adopted by the Soviet Union as state policy.
So the pretence fools you that easily? He had to kill 30 million of his own people to try and get the rest to believe in the sham, and it still didn't work. Reality trumps delusion. Every time.
Oh fuck off. Don't deflect.
You made a stupid fucken statement. Stalin, and indeed virtually all so-called 'communist' countries describe themselves as 'socialist'.
'Socialism' is the phase before true 'communism' is achieved.
You obviously don't fucken know that and that shows what a dumb shit you are unqualified to comment on anything to so with the communist movement and Marxism Leninism.
30 million killed? ……sound like a naive stupid school girl.
Now answer me this. If Stalin really was such a monster, why is he so widely admired even now, in the very country he was supposed to have committed the vast majority of his crimes.
You really appear to not know much history. Perhaps you should look at the effects of mass level propaganda when the media is held and controlled by the state. It was a thing in the mid-20th century after the technology became available for it to be achieved.
If you studied the period with a little more depth, the you’d look less like a complete idiot. You might even be capable of making an argument without all of the dick pulling you just did.
I’d suggest you don’t use that kind of abuse approach to replying again. Next time I see you do it, I’ll demonstrate exactly how useless you are at it. You do appear to be a pretty incompetent dimwit – wannabe student?
If Stalin really was such a mass murdering monster then it would be in the lived memories of those few still alive who lived during his time, or at least it would have been passed down to the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of those who did.
To think that we living in the West are not subject to those same mass delusions created by the corporate media that you accuse those living in non Western countries of being subject to by their own respective media is to be completely absurd.
To think that the opinion of a Russian of his own history is less valid than a Westerner who only reads Anne Appelbaum and Robert Conquest is simply quite arrogant.
If you looked at the article I linked to in my first post, it is Western researchers themselves who have found that many many people, a majority in some former Eastern bloc countries, people who actually lived under the socialist system, find it was better in those days than what they have now.
And if life in the former Soviet Union was really such a horror show, why did Putin restore the Soviet Anthem with only the words re-written, surely nothing is more redolent of past times, good or bad, than great music.
And anecdotally, I have heard the same from Eastern Europeans who now live in New Zealand.
Thread +++
"Congratulating Stalin means supporting him and his cause, supporting the victory of socialism, and the way forward for mankind which he points out, it means supporting a dear friend. For the great majority of mankind today are suffering, and mankind can free itself from suffering only by the road pointed out by Stalin and with his help."
Mao Zedong, Dec 1939
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_24.htm
It was. This isn’t exactly hard to find if you look around for material from the Khrushchev thaw period between 1953 and about 1957/8 arguably later – but really the thing pretty much died after the Hungarian repression.
If you haven’t seen it, then I’d say that you probably have just been avoiding it.
What makes you think that we aren’t? Tell you do you ever listen to anyone else apart from your own self-referential bullshit. After all I was born in 1959. My adolescence was backgrounded with the stupidity of the Vietnam war, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and all of those old soldiers who’d never talk about the first or second world wars and what they saw entering the charnel houses of Europe and Japan.
So? My grandparents were young adults and my parents were children grew up in post-1930s depression and in WW2 and the reconstruction in the 1940s and 50s. They’d happily tell you that that world was a better place then it was when I was doing army and university in the late 1970s. In fact the only ancient person that I have ever come across who seemed to think that when they grew up was shite was my great grandmother. But she was in service in her teens and really on the arse-end of society.
Generally relying on the rose tinted recollections of the past or the even dark tinted recollections of the mentally ill or abused is simply not useful. You have a hell of a problem trying to get a un-self-selected sample because people will either want to talk about it or not depending how it is framed at them. The most significiant way of running those kinds of samples is to look at the silences – that is always where the interesting stuff is kept. The treatment of teen pregnancies in NZ being a good local example. Or the way that people don’t talk about the GULAG in the USSR. Or the silence related to the work-to-death slavery that the Japanese did in Mongolia and China in the 1930s and 40s.
Personally I don’t have an opinion on history. I just study it. That is something that is quite different from the kind of myth repetition that you’re referring to (and are doing yourself). History is something that I have been doing as a hobby (with a bit of uni time as well) for about 48 years after I switched from fiction to non-fiction as my main reading material.
Personally I’m not interested in dumb-arse propaganda, and it certainly doesn’t do you any favours when you try to shout it down peoples throats. Especially people who are clearly bigger skeptics than you are.
The gulag systems are about as well documented as the Japanese internment camps of the US after 1941, or the way that we used Somes Island and a few other places here or just about every other reasonably well run camp system. By their very nature, prison camp systems are at documented and accounted for because they’re pretty costly to run. Most of the time their records survive for historians. The exceptions are usually where there is an attempted coverup, like the Nazi concentration camps or the Cambodian death camps before they got over-run by advancing forces.
The gulag system wasn’t over run. It was just run-down post-Stalin. The documentation of the system (albeit somewhat cleaned up) was done in the speech by Khrushchev in 1956. The material that was prepared on was a series of studies of the gulag system by the USSR communist party hierarchy and its use in the late 1930s during the largest part of the largest purges. As a ‘skeptic’, you can probably assume that in itself was a sanitised version.
Perhaps you should find it and actually study a translation of the speech and the investigation of the 17th party congress and its aftermath. Sanitised or not, it was pretty searing indictment of a system that you seem to be trying to say never existed. Which I find to be a rather willfully self-delusional bit of stupidity.
Mr Prentice.
I think you miss the point, to put it politely.
Yes, people often do look to the past with rose tinted glasses, but not if they were supposed to have gone through the horrors of 'stalinism' as portrayed in the West.
I was responding to rather less informed commentators than yourself, people such as Dennis Frank who comes up with the fantastical 30 million nonsense, or people like Appelbaum or Timothy Snyder.
Yes, one could have gone through perhaps the 1930s depression and still have somewhat fond memories of community bonding, say, or character building.
That's different from going through the Holocaust – not many old European Jews from WWII era qill say, 'well we sure had things better in those days!' You don't get parades in Israel with Nazi banners, nor, I am sure would the Horst Wessel move people to tears.
Similarly if Stalin really did commit the sort of crimes claimed for him by the Western corporate media, he would be hated by the people he ruled, mainly Russians. Not repeatedly voted as the greatest 'Russian'
NoteStalin's popularity wildly eclipses Khruschev who is seen as a fool and a liar and particularly Gorbacheve are seen as a traitor.
Stalin, while not perfect, surely was one of the greatest men of the 20 thcentury.
And also, you may find this interesting:
For more informed comment on Russia and Putin than anyone at this site …. I recommend this video ….
It explains quite well the a) Power …. and b) Popularity of Putin in Russia .
And if you want to hear / learn about our propaganda towards Russia ….. This doco mentions 1947 as the year when Russia became a 'official enemy', to be attacked by every means apart from troops.
I've always wondered how many of 'stalins famine' was down to 'scorched earth' warfare' //// and the huge amount of working aged men killed in Russia…..
….Our propaganda seems to say none,,,,, and stalin killed them all…
But Even Stalin was not as bad as neo=lib western 'shock thearapy'… which is probably why the Russians hold the views they do.
It isn't a record high. When he was in power it was 100% approval.
It seems Yelstin got a 200% voter turn out in Chechnya … … now that is impressive :0
Leading thinkers discuss the protest at Ihumātao
Magic Talk, Thursday 25 July 2019, 10:15 a.m.
AMANDA: It's the gravy train. They're being rewarded for their behaviours.
PETER WILLIAMS: Thanks for that, Amanda! Good morning, Chris.
CHRIS: Yeah g'day. Just looking at the calibre of these protestors: what would their EMPLOYERS have been thinking?
PETER WILLIAMS: [chortling conspiratorially] What are you trying to say, Chris? What are you trying to say?
CHRIS: Have they even GOT jobs? That lady from Britain you had on earlier, she needs to get her head out of the clouds. I was talking to my friend the policeman, and he says that NINETY PER CENT of the crime is Maori, and it's getting worse, and it's getting WORSE, and it's getting WORSE. …..
ad nauseam, omnia mane….
https://morrisseybreen.blogspot.com/2019/07/magic-talk-is-outlet-for-racist-bilge.html
Build a wall.
Send in the marines.
Oh no.
"I'm popularly supported" claims the current Nat frontperson: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/395285/simon-bridges-on-surviving-in-leadership-role-i-m-popularly-supported
The suffering in Yemen continues.
https://twitter.com/MohammedHojily/status/1155146695568711680
Kia Ora The Am Show.
Today is the day humans have used all that Papatuanuku can produce in a year was used up in 7 months we will all have to become minimalist to survive.
Lance that is awesome the 200 Mobil doctor clinic that services is NEEDED in Te taiwhiti.
Sam Eco Maori thinks that your championing all the tamariki in foster care been given a KIWIs Saver account that would set them up for life ka pai.
Lance that was a awesome eureka moment the mobile healthcare clinic thanks. Its been a while since Eco Maori had a Eureka moment ma te wa. It would be nice if the big companies sponsored this Fontana Gull Mobile Pack and save Countdown The Warehouse Eco Maori lays a challenge for you to sponsor this great out of the square Idea
Its hard to get a doctor's appointment in rual Aotearoa the wait can be 1 to 2 weeks to see a doctor Eco Maori knowns that it pays to trear a ailment immediately if not the case just gets worse next minute hangi .q
That was well said the African American who gave trump a great serve very cool.
Winston I agree that colmar brunton poll is just use to manipulate and lie to the VOTERS.
Good to see you on the Show Winston.
Duncan you need to Google your self.
I agree Winston the Coalition Government is cleaning up a big national MESS.
There you go people playing games with imagration figure to try and make the government look bad.
The Black Caps did Aotearoa proud its not there fault that the system is bent by putea chin up guys.
Bryce statistics lie when they are massaged by right wing money to try and boost their m8 rating ie national.
Ka kite ano
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
https://youtu.be/Xo7WjnC8ekQ
Kia Ora Newshub.
Elijah your words hit a brick wall kia kaha Tangata whenua O Aotearoa get more respect than other minoritie culture get from the ruling class but we still have a lot of crap heaped on us one just has to look at the fiasco that is going on around Eco Maori to see that's a FACT.
I think it's is about time that the car manufacturers should have a solution for babies being left in car very great idea.
That man who lost his twins accidentally leaving them in a hot car. He was working in a most probably a under staffed and over worked people I say it was fatigue over worked that caused him to forget his babys he will be shattered.
I have already given my tau toko of Lance great Idea come on if it saves you money David and saves lives why not back it .
Ka kite ano.
Kia Ora Te Ao Maori News.
There you go Our Coalition Governments has invested more than a billion dollar into the welbing of the needy don't rock te waka to much we might get swamped.
Look like most of my Ngati Porou Whanau have a higher IQ than most as that is only a small amount of people at that protest about CYPS in Turanga A kiwa .
Condolences to Sean Whanau for their great lose Eco Maori seen quite a bit of Sean in Maori leaders circles.
I its good
Te Ao Maori News its lucky Eco Maori has a few skills up his sleeve as the sandflys tried to block my post to Maori TV.
Some muppets called shonky royalty YEA RIGHT did you hear him put his foot in his mouth he said Jacinda is a morals based person thats great for Jacinda but Eco Maori says because shonky made that statement live on TV he has admitted to having NO MORALS.
I,, Winston national are talking alot of hog wash about the putea being invested in cancer drugs and treatment they are desperate have you ever seen a political party pull all the fossil out of the cupboard to try and lift there poll ratings keep those back benches WARM.
Ka kite Ano
Kia Ora The Am Show.
simon you're just rambling words. The Coalition government has made more good choices and changes in 2 years than national did in 8
Sandy the Baltimore issue trump is just a bully he thinks he can control everyone
Seenothing your statement shows you don't have enough respect for Tangata Whenua O Aotearoa.
If there was no Organized Crime in NZ what about all the Pee addicts I see around NZ I see a spike in these people in Port cities Why because thats where the shit is getting into NZ.
Ka kite ano