PP have lost more than half their seats: "The People's Party is a liberal-conservative, Christian-democraticpolitical party in Spain." To the left of the socialists is one of them rainbow alliance sort of things: "Unidos Podemos (English: "United We Can"), re-styled to its female form Unidas Podemos ahead of the 2019 Spanish general election, is a left-wingelectoral alliance formed by Podemos, United Left, Equo and other left-wing parties in May 2016". But becoming politically correct was a bad move for them: they lost 29 seats.
I get that Simon Bridges is a right winger and therefore tends to be reflexively punitive towards the poor end of town. But the slushies are for the guards not the inmates. He seems to have inverted his own ideology and needs a dog whistling refresher course. Judith could help with that.
And as someone just pointed out on Morning Report, he seems to have forgotten hair straighteners and curved screens as part of the Joyce/Coleman vanity project at the Ministry for Everything
Yep……..and all that's all just the superficial sort of stuff that gets into the media.
Then there's what I'd call the 'James Casson Effect'. Something that's been allowed to become pervasive in a number of Munstries and Departments, especially over the past decade or so – and it's probably the biggest roadblock (at least so far) to what we've been promised from our current Coalition Government.
We get what we deserve though at times eh? The signs and the record was there in plain sight for Ministers to see
The CGT debacle flushed out some anti-boomer sentiment from younger journalists, but one is doing a reality check on that bias:
"Things look a little different once you zoom in a little, where the idea that boomers are exceptionally propertied starts to get a little murkier. According to the Ministry of Social Development, in the 2013 Census, only 60% of those aged 65-69 (boomers, in other words) were owner-occupiers, compared to nearly 52% of those who were aged 40-44. Compare that to the whopping 82% of those aged 65-69 in 2001 – the preceding Silent Generation – who owned their own homes."
"More discouraging statistics abound when you dig deeper. More than 60% of those aged 65 and over rely on superannuation for all or most of their income, meaning they make at the very most $33,000 a year if they’re married, and $21,000 if they’re living alone. Those over 65 are the most likely age group to have persistent low income, and more likely than other age groups to drop into low income territory. 2013 Census data shows only 8.7% of those aged 65 or over at the time got more than $60,000 a year in income, the largest share (25%) receiving between $15,001 and $20,000." https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/29-04-2019/stop-demonising-the-boomers/
Won't surprise anyone here, but popular delusions abound when younger generations lack the time and effort to discover what's really going on. Generalisations gain currency instead, feeding generational bias, whereas fact-based class analysis shows that the old triadic class structure has fractured, and the current fractured social structure provides a more realistic form of wealth and income grouping.
Bernard Hickey has an interesting take on Jacinda dumping the CGT.
One advantage the baby boomer generation had through the 2000s was it was larger and voted at a higher rate. But those electoral advantages are ending, which makes Ardern's complete capitulation for a decade doubly surprising.
Voting rates tend to rise a bit as cohorts age, and that will happen as the bulge of millennials goes through the electoral system and become more numerous.
Put simply, the electoral tailwinds for the 2020, 2023 and 2026 elections are behind any party that appeals to those aged 18-39, and they are the age groups that have been hit hardest by the explosion in housing costs over the last decade. This chart of the demographic layout for the 2026 election shows the contrast with the 2008 chart above: the young will overpower the old in electoral terms.
Hickey goes on to highlight the volatile political landscape developing:
The Greens would argue they are the party to reap this whirlwind, but a party of the nativist right could just as easily grab that support with calls for aggressive redistribution of wealth, along with tough migration controls and heavy state investment in housing and public transport.
Scarily for the Greens, this landscape is tailor-made for a backlash against climate change policies that increase the living costs of the poor.
The surprisingly strong showing of the Finns Party in last week's Finnish elections gives a hint of how volatile this new landscape could be. It opposed both migration and policies aimed at combating climate change.
Agree, all relevant considerations. Shows just how out of touch rightists in Aotearoa have gotten in recent years, too. That pending demographic swing ought to be the primary design criterion in respect of a support party for the Nats.
Rightist here operate in a culture of moderation, or even passive pragmatism, whereas those over in Trumpland are vociferous in a culture of bigotry, denial, racism, you name it. So I think designing a new rightist party here is a different kettle of fish. How to be sensible, principled and future-oriented? That's what I'd design for, if I was with them. You can immediately see the problem eh? People saying "You're kidding. That's way less than 5%!"
With Labour's growing failure to deliver coupled with the lefts focus on race and identity, it reminded me of what Steve Bannon said.
“If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people.
Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it.
These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.
So, Joan C. Williams is a professor and the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. She does contemporary class analysis (unusual for a law prof):
"I wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review in which I explained what I (a white, liberal law professor) thought so many of my white, liberal, highly educated peers were failing to see: that middle-income white people had voted for Trump not so much because they liked him (though many did) or because they were racist (though plenty were) but foremost as an expression of class anger. After the essay went viral, I expanded it into a book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America."
"All told, I’ve spent a good deal of the past two years talking with progressives about the broken relationship between elite white people and the white working class. (I use the term working class to refer to Americans with household incomes between the 30th and 80th percentiles. This group, which has median earnings of about $75,000, is also commonly referred to as the “middle class.”) Democrats presently have a unique opportunity to appeal to the working class, because their base is newly open to a populist message: Income inequality has gotten so bad that people across the political spectrum, college-educated and non-college-educated alike, are feeling a serious pinch. Bernie Sanders got 72 percent of the votes from Democrats under 30 in the 2016 primaries in part by decrying the rigged economy. In the past three decades, education costs have nearly tripled at public universities and doubled at private ones; at the same time, too many people with a college degree are settling for jobs that don’t require one."
The Pelosi blather stance hasn't contained any signal that the Dems are learning why their voters have been losing enthusiasm for liberal establishment thinking.
“Why not just wait for the white working class to die off?” asked an audience member at last year’s Berkeley Festival of Ideas. I get this question a lot, and I always reply: “Do you understand now why they voted for Trump? Your attitude is offensive, and Trump is their middle finger.”
Answer: no. Who would expect a Dem to understand anything? They even make our Labour folk here seem relatively clued up.
"An important, largely overlooked 2017 study by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group identified five distinct types of Trump voters. Two of them—Staunch Conservatives and Free Marketeers, who together account for more than half of Trump voters—are unlikely to ever go for Democrats in substantial numbers. (Free Marketeers may not like Trump’s trade wars, but many cheer his gutting of regulations.) The other two big blocs, American Preservationists and Anti-elites, each include about a fifth of Trump voters, and believe that the economy is rigged in favor of the wealthiest Americans. (The final bloc, the Disengaged, accounted for 5 percent of Trump voters.)"
Such sophisticated usage of identity-politics is rare in political analysis. If it were to replace stereotype-driven over-generalisations, there would be a drop in the banality level of blog commentary.
It is difficult when someone abuses you for doing nothing. Like abuse for an absence without any context or understanding just based on their own sad lives – still hurtful and hateful though imo.
After the murders of our Muslim brothers and sisters in Christchurch I put lots of links and articles up to try and create change. A change for the better where hate and supremacy ideas are discarded, where toxic 'whiteness' and toxic 'masculinity' can be put away to allow non-toxic interactions and connections, to allow others into the space normally reserved for non-others. Some have taken that as an attack on them – if they are toxic then yes you need to change, if not then you don't.
I have been shell shocked by the carnage in Sri Lanka and have really struggled to find a way to talk about it. So much pain.
This link tells some of the stories from the horror over there.
One week ago many dozens of children were killed in Sri Lanka's Easter Sunday attacks. Dressed in their finest clothes for one of the most important church services of the year, this was the first generation in decades to grow up free of violence. Their stories – and the struggle for the surviving children to comprehend the carnage – take the island down a devastatingly familiar path.
A change for the better where hate and supremacy ideas are discarded, where toxic 'whiteness' and toxic 'masculinity' can be put away to allow non-toxic interactions and connections, to allow others into the space normally reserved for non-others. Some have taken that as an attack on them
Absolutely there is no question that Anglo-Europeans have dominated the past 200 years of world history. There is nothing new about this, at all points in our history there always was at least one dominant empire or culture that led the way for a time.
But since the end of WW2 something entirely new has been going on. For most of human history empires endured for centuries or even millenia, but this is no longer true. The American's barely managed 50 years, the Chinese I predict will struggle to match even that … the age of empire is over. It's dying before our eyes. This 'white supremacy' trope you're so obsessed with is already a zombie, the British Empire is long gone, the Americans are like the road runner off the edge of the cliff waiting for gravity to take hold.
There are already more middle class Indians and Chinese than there are white people altogether. Almost 4 billion people have escaped absolute poverty and entered a basic middle class life. Another 4 billion will follow in the next few decades. Twenty years ago places like Panama were desperately undeveloped, now I have on my cellphone pictures taken in a small town supermarket indistinguishable from anything in New Zealand. The world is changing at incredible speed everywhere.
The scientific revolution began with just a relative handful of intellectual giants. People like Newton, Leibniz and Kepler were systemically developing extraordinary ideas at a time when their next door neighbours had barely gotten over burning witches at the stake. For 200 years progress was slow and sporadic, but then from around the middle of the 1800's everything changed. There was a literal explosion of technologies and engineering, resulting in the transformation of human life. The human revolution may have started within a small cultural and elitist confine, but was rapidly extended everywhere.
Now the revolution is global and there is no going back to our old ways. Every nation, every culture has arrived at this unique point in our evolution along their own path. It was often a dark, brutal and tragic journey, but we made it. We are all the children of thousands of generations of men and women who overcame impossible odds to gift to us this moment in time.
Because this is the moment in our story when we cease being children and take up our adult burdens. We are now responsible for our future as a species, and we must now repay our unfathomable debt to the planet who nurtured us thus far. This is the moment when open our inner eyes and seek out the hidden gems in each one of us, when the transcendent connections become visible. This is when we join together as one human race in all of our glorious diversity. There is nothing 9 billion humans cannot achieve.
But this vision will crumble to bitter ashes if we cannot take the first step, we must first learn to trust each other again. Trustworthiness is the foundation of all things, without we will be lost.
"You just didn't care. You don't give a shit about the victims of these massacres, they were nothing to you if they couldn't be used to energise your anger and resentment."
That is what you said to me yesterday. If you think your insincere, toady comments are going to get me to 'repair' with a sack of shit like you white bollox you are sadly mistaken. I can't stand 'white' supremacists mainly because they are so dim.
there is no conflict – bit like when I call you weeze and pooze one two – a play on words if you will, an attempt at wit, biting and direct for sure, to make sure the point is received.
You seem really confused and desperate for friends – maybe stick to what you know – umm lol sorry lol – real world stuff is not your strong point
That you don't recognize the conflict your comments so emphatically portray, is unsurprising…it is why you can flip flop between outright abuse in one comment, then in another seek to signal your humility in offering condolence…
You flat out called others racist on a regular basis…
How are your comments not deeply confused, conflicted…and rank hypocrisy?
flip flop is an interesting one – you may struggle with this but here we go – people can hold ideas in their head that sometimes appear to conflict – this is called dialectical thinking – here's some very basic information for you to learn about this – and I've added the link to an interesting question – see if you can work out why it's relevant one two.
"Dialectical thinking is thinking that approaches insight by reconciling opposites. For example, international peace is a good thing, but nations must protect the interests of citizens — those statements can come into conflict, especially for people who believe in both. The reconciliation may be that nations must cease to be in one world, or it may be that peace is unattainable, or that citizens’ paramount interest is that their nation not go to war, or several other possible statements that allow both statements to be true."
And The Alien loves to get a kick in. A bit of argy bargy gets you all excited apparently.
Coming from you, Ghandi one minute, Dr Evil Mini Me the next, that's more than a little hypocritical, but at least I'm consistent. If I want to stab someone in the back, I always aim for the face so they see it coming.
Anyway, lesson learned, 12 is spelling ‘racist’ correctly now.
Is coming here just a way to fill your time in The Alien? A personal mental fitness test that you undertake cutting and thrusting at other commenters and their opinions. Just an empty exercise which you consider is thinking about politics.
I am here because I can see that politics and the world is unravelling and most of what we have been doing and thinking over the past century has been wrong, as it has led to this present which finds us not ready to think our way to a reasonable future, but to acknowledge what is the actual present.
So amuse yourself child-mind, you have noticed how I cast around for different approaches to life and going-forward which could be helpful. We have to be adaptive, in finding a broad path to follow that all who are serious about living a better way that is practical and sustainable.
Belief in white supremacy is an unusually banal form of conservatism. Multiculturalism made it irrelevant, globalisation left it behind, so anyone still clinging to that belief is delusional at best, sociopathic at worst.
I recently read a book about cultural elites in America. Only some are white, making a strong case that skin colour is incidental to success (regardless of birth advantage). In The Triple Package: What Really Determines Success (2014), Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld identify three components which, in combination, create remarkable success for groups. Implications for political collaboration are obvious!
A superiority complex is the first. Not, as usually understood, in a person, but shared as a key feature of the identity of the group: a "deeply internalised belief".
The second seems almost contradictory: insecurity. It provides a powerful incentive for group motivation. It "runs deep in every one of America's most successful groups".
The third is impulse control (traditionally part of self-discipline). It's "the ability to resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship or quit instead of persevering at a difficult task."
They document this theory effectively in respect of various groups using social science stats. Also, there are 78 pages of notes prior to the index! "Every one of the premises underlying the theory of the triple package is supported by a well-substantiated and relatively uncontraversial body of empirical evidence." They cite various studies to prove that point.
From the intro: "One of the two authors has written for almost twenty years about successful ethnic minorities all over the world" – that's Amy Chua. "The other has written extensively on how the desire to live in the present has come increasingly to dominate modern Western culture, particularly in America, undermining the country's ability to live for the future." So that's why the US leads the way of climate-change denial.
Globalisation has horrors all its own. The nation state is the unit of political accountability – globalism is a way for feckless politicians to betray their constituents. This is a lot of the reason behind Brexit – high migration into the UK (fully a quarter of the per capita migration into NZ) under EU rules actually causing poorer outcomes for UK citizens.
So where is the accountability for these lousy outcomes? Corporatized governments love to gift cheap migrant labour to corporates in hopes of largess – how are we to contain their sociopathy?
globalism is a way for feckless politicians to betray their constituents.
All forms of governance has it horrors, from the family unit upward. Our present forms of globalisation are manifestly inadequate, but that is only reason to improve them rather than discard them.
It took Europe centuries of bloody strife to get from dozens of tiny duchies and warlord fiefdoms to the nation state entities we have today. You'd better hope we get to a democratically accountable form of world federation much quicker than that.
What saddens me is that we are facing real problems – a backlog of environmental issues that have been left to fester while our self-styled representatives have sold off our dreams to chase the bright elusive butterfly of free market monetarism.
They can't even fess up to having made a total bollocks of everything they've touched, but they're relying on a unified response to these crisies, as if they have some right to our support, these wankers who've sold us out at every opportunity and have been consistently too arrogant to listen when we've tried to help them mitigate their most egregious errors.
It is always interesting to read your comments. My take is that nature will take its course. Everything dies before something new comes. We are the Dinosaur's of our millennium and with the current pollution and obvious unwillingness to do something about this, it will not matter what race or skin color or what the exchange rate of the day is. The damage is so much bigger than all of this. The technology to do some serious work exists but ideology, envy, greed etc is not having it. I doubt we have any time left for philosophy 101, let alone for some old fashion political discussion about the pro and cons of human endeavour. The younger generation senses the urgency but unfortunately, with those very old men running large nations, I fear chances are very very slim to get out of this one.
I fear chances are very very slim to get out of this one.
Objectively, from a purely materialistic perspective I can only agree with you. You make a case for despair that is hard to argue with.
Some people here persistently misread me, imagining that I argue for nothing but the status quo. Quite the opposite is true; I point to the extraordinary transformation in the material aspects of human life this past 200 years as evidence that radical change is not only possible, but that we are living in it right now.
And that while Western civilisation may have been dominant it this process to date, this is nothing like the apex or end point of the narrative. The next phase is nothing less than the transformation of the human heart across the entire planet; everyone knows this.
As a simple matter of personal faith I choose to believe in the unlimited potential of not only each single one of us, but in the as yet unsuspected, untapped potential when we learn how to spiritually connect collectively.
I'm not talking of the trivial case where like-minded people make easy company with each other, but what happens when people who don't like each other, who clash horribly and contend bitterly not only find ways to trust each other, but are able to put into action that deep mystery in Matthew 5:44 "Love thine enemy". Then we will work what would look like miracles.
This is the pivotal point in our human evolution. A dear friend once said to me that religious history to date was primarily about the development of the sanctified individual, but now we had to consider what the sanctified society might look like. We have only the dimmest of ideas, no more than any random person living in 1820 might grasp the nature of our lives in 2020.
I choose optimism and irrational defiance of the odds because it is the only moral option available to me. All other paths lead to death.
RL, I really admire you for your stance. It wont be our call though, China and India polluting the planet at a rate that is/will be irreversible.
We need to look no further than NZ: at the rubbish loads being thrown into the landscape, drink water being used to bath cows, or sucked out of the ground at a rate that will most likely salinate the water table
Yes, we should fight "the dying of the light" just to make sure that any ever so slight sliver of a chance is taken up to get things turned around.
"I fear chances are very very slim to get out of this one."
That's how I see it too. The enormous increases in material wealth, comfort, convenience and security, and the enormous global population increase, have brought us collectively to a precipice.
What needs to be done is obvious – we must back up. Wealthy nations need to accept significantly lower standards of living (and spread (gift) their wealth globally), and nations still in the grip of crippling population growth need to find practical and moral ways to curb reproduction rates (a global one child policy might do the trick, if it could be maintained for a couple of generations – this might also precipitate localised collapses, but it would be worth the risk IMHO).
Neither of these changes will happen on the scale and at the pace needed to avoid toppling over the edge of our precipice – that's if they happen at all!
An alternative response involves continuing on the same path, further ramping up the pace of change and propelling ourselves skywards in the somewhat magical hope that humankind will evolve 'wings' before the 'splat'.
Don't want to be a pessimist – I prefer optimism. But we risk outsmarting ourselves if we try to negotiate with gravity.
I'm with RL re faith in our future but have a problem with "we". I acknowledge holism is best, but I see humanity currently like a waka in which the conservative paddlers are trying to take us one way, and the progressive paddlers are pulling us another way.
You could break it down to past-oriented vs future-oriented. Thinking we will get a consensus on trajectory seems currently unrealistic. Best case scenario is more paddlers will switch to heading for the future.
Innate human nature predisposes most folk to conceive the future in terms of the past – we recycle attitudes & values we are attached to. For the first time ever we collectively must engage a traumatic global process, but aversion to accepting the necessity runs deep.
Things will have to get worse to shift those addicted to complacency, conformity, denial, business as usual etc. Ultimately, though, collective resolution must prevail over despair. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, as the old saying goes. Determination will get us there, regardless how much damage gets done in the process.
As regards the thinking of the paddlers, neither left nor right will prevail. Both/and logic will. Agreement on whatever works, forged under increasing pressure, becomes the only way to survive.
"However, Mr Bridges told Morning Report he never said that and the comments he made were in reference to a regional conference he attended in Hamilton."
"I've come from a regional conference in Hamilton, they delivered a really clear message to me in our conservation". If you read the tea-leaves here, he seems to be sending the signal that conservation is just as viable a path to power as discipline & unity. Not many National Party members realise that the Bluegreens are more than a pet poodle, so he's positioning them as a pathway to power ever so subtly… 😎
The Grauniad, AKA Pravda, AKA Völkischer Beobachter is not merely a dull newspaper, it's a propaganda vehicle, “Assange’s principal media tormentor" and a "collaborator with the secret state."
Part 1 of 3
The night of Assange’s arrest, BBC Newsnight presenter Katie Razzell began in standard ‘impartial’ manner in describing his status: “Out of his hiding place and under arrest”.
‘Hiding place’ is BBC newspeak for ‘political asylum’. The implication was that Julian Assange had hidden in an attempt to evade justice. This was fake news, repeated on the airwaves and across the BBC website.
One of the most notorious examples of Assange-related fake news was the front-page accusation in the Guardian last November that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaigns manager, had met Assange in the embassy three times. No shred of evidence has ever been produced for this claim, which WikiLeaks and Manafort have both vehemently denied, and the story has been widely regarded as fake from virtually the hour of its publication. Luke Harding, the lead journalist on the story, and his editors Paul Johnson and Katharine Viner, have never apologised or retracted the story; nor have they responded to the many challenges about it. As we have previously noted, the Guardian has a disreputable record in publishing nasty, abusive and derogatory pieces about Assange.
A Guardian editorial on the eve of Assange’s expulsion at least stated that Assange should not be extradited to the US: “[He] has shone a light on things that should never have been hidden”. However, John Pilger was scathing of the paper he called “Assange’s principal media tormentor [and] a collaborator with the secret state”, noting that its editorial had “scaled new weasel heights”. He continued: “The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called ‘the greatest scoop of the last 30 years’. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
“With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.”.
The editorial misled its readers on why Assange had sought refuge: “When he first entered the Ecuadorian embassy he was trying to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape and molestation. That was wrong”.
As we saw above, this is a grotesque twisting of the facts. Indeed, the Guardian editorial was steeped in sophistry: “the Assange case is a morally tangled web. He believes in publishing things that should not always be published – this has long been a difficult divide between the Guardian and him”.
Pilger demolished the Guardian’s obfuscation: “These ‘things’ are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.”
She's a hard road working out which news outlet one can trust.
I have it on fairly good authority that The Guardian is the place to go to find out what the establishment wants you, as a 'leftie', to think.
After groping around in the convoluted cess-pit that is the Jackie Walker persecution and the commentary from the Guardian on the issue…https://witchhuntfilm.org/
Somewhat surprised that Kim Hill passed up the opportunity to put Guardian journalist Freedland on a hot griddle.
Somewhat surprised that Kim Hill passed up the opportunity to put Guardian journalist Freedland on a hot griddle.
I was not at all surprised. She has a history of remaining silent as Grauniad hacks lie to her face. Did you hear her allow the notorious and discredited Luke Harding to chunter on uninterrupted last year?
She has a long and dishonorable record of allowing U.S. government functionaries to smear and ridicule Julian Assange…..
I remember when Freedland was the American correspondent on Kim's Nine to Noon. His book when he got back to Britain was about the virtues of the American political system his country could gain from. Nup.
I got angry listening to the Politics section of RNZ Nine to Noon today when it was revealed the supposed Left spokesman had worked for/ believed in the Rogernomics govt. The guy who tried to tell us the Labour Party preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Why don't you put a pillow over my face and stifle me. Mike Williams being cute about that revolutionary govt before him, though he obviously provided all the details about the Left's objection to Rogernomics for Paul Holmes's intelligent column on the matter. Says EVERYTHING about Labour.
And Trotter who could talk to point being forced out of the main media. Says a lot about RNZ also under Richard his-communist-father-a-much-better-man-than-him.
Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis has stamped out any hope Brian Tamaki may have held of winning government funding to deliver his Man Up programme in prisons…
… Tamaki has repeatedly criticised the Government for not funding him to deliver his programme in New Zealand prisons, despite never making a formal application as part of the Corrections tender process.
Davis said there was no verified, independent research showing the programme has achieved success, and lashed out at Tamaki, calling his claims duplicitous.
He said that, despite what Tamaki claims, Man Up has never been shut out of prisons, and has never followed the proper application process.
“If they’re going to lie about the small stuff, how am I going to trust them with the big stuff?”
Hi Marty, A bit of a pedantic question… are you happy about the decision because of the political side of it, i.e. Tamaki is potentially politically toxic?
Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of Tamaki nor fundamentalist anything.
Tamaki has his 'constituents' in prison and as we know there are many ways to skin a cat. By that I mean reaching out and communicating with inmates must take many forms and appearances.
I oppose tamaki, the man up program, toxic christianity, and lying. If prisoners use faith to help them sort stuff out I am all for it – I'm not convinced a person doing tamaki's plan ends up better or worse tbh.
Tamaki has his 'constituents' in prison and as we know there are many ways to skin a cat.
If one of those ways is a "Man Up" programme telling domestic abusers it's their wives' fault for provoking them, it would be better if the cat kept its skin on.
Well said Kelvin Davis. Brian Tamaki is pretty self-serving with double heapings of pudding. And a bit of Christmas holly on the top for the look of the thing.
Israel destroyed the Notre Dame of Gaza – but there was only silence from the West
by TONY GREENSTEIN, 28 April 2019
Since 2009 53 mosques and churches have been vandalised or set fire to in Israel. As is normally the case with attacks on non-Jews, the Israeli Police have not exerted themselves. Only 9 indictments to date have been filed by the police.
What makes this worse is that there are sections of Israeli society who openly justify the destruction of churches and mosques on religious grounds.
Yes. Like the sections of Israeli society in this story… some appear not to like The Daily Blog too much – that's their loss; good thinks happen there too, such as this. How to stamp out other people's sacred places? With glittering balls and booze, that's how.
Government needs “National NZ Port Strategy”
Sunday, 28 April 2019, 1:10 pm
Press Release: Citizens Environmental Advocacy Centre
Citizens Environmental Advocacy Centre press release- 28- April 2019.
“Government needs “National NZ Port Strategy” so Ports work together not fighting over freight”
A new “National NZ Port Strategy” is needed here in NZ for export of freight.
Today on News hub’s ‘The nation’ show there was a ‘Port discussion’ that was enlightening to us. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/shows/2019/04/exclusive-no-point-investing-in-northport-without-building-rail-link-working-group.html
After watching the panel discussion about the mess our NZ Port issues are about, we now see clearly that the current Government needs a new “National NZ Port Strategy Plan” for NZ Ports to be actively working together instead of fighting over freight, as the current model of ‘independent’ scrapping over freight is damaging both the regions and the loss of residential wellbeing in regions who undercut other Ports to get freight income from capturing ‘lower cost freight’ through their Port because those Ports are now operating at a loss and now forced to sell part of their Port as Napier Port is attempting to do now.
Napier Port are leaving us with a legacy of a residential environmental disaster in their ‘wake.’
History of CEAC meetings with two of our central Port executives; – At both Napier and Gisborne ports.
2016:
Our Committee was invited to the Napier Port boardroom in November 2016 to discuss the massive truck noise and pollution affecting all Napier residents living near the ‘truck network roads’ to and from Napier port, and we sought funding for mitigation for smooth quiet road surfacing and noise barriers and Napier Port said they had no money then.
At that meeting we were sadly advised that sending logs out of NZ was virtually not viable for them, as the Port staff advised us ‘they could not compete with Wellington Port’ who were actually sending their logs out at such a low cost that Napier Port could not afford to compete for freight at those charges.
2011:
In 2011 we brokered a meeting with the Gisborne ‘Eastland Port’ Executives as we were asking them to use rail to move logs to their Port for export rather than using trucks.
The executives also confirmed to us at the meeting that the cost to send each log out of NZ was so low that they made very little money on shipping logs.
So it is now painfully clear now that we need to send a clear message to Government that the whole transportation of our export freight from our NZ Ports is in need of a reset policy.
One that now can offer all forms of ‘land transport’ using rail and road options to make freight costs lower so freight is viable to ship from NZ while giving all Ports adequate funding to offer residential citizens adequate mitigation to lower the transportation effects of road truck freight noise and pollution adversely affecting all those living near busy export road networks to their local port facilities.
Shane Jones, as Regional Development Minister, was also shown on a video clip saying he will be setting up an election policy to change the way the ports in NZ operate “independently” as he said it is not acceptable and needs to change”.
We welcome Shane Jones’ position on this change.
So we seek the labour caucus acceptance to a real Port policy change away from the current conflicting manner that all ports are currently undercutting the charges of freight at the expense of residents and Ports not having any capital to offer residents any mitigation.
All HB/Gisborne residents living near Port bound trucks are now facing a legacy of a residential environmental disaster in their ‘wake’
Business
National weekly rent edges closer to $500
Monday, 29 April 2019, 9:13 am
Press Release: Trademe
New Zealand’s national median weekly hit $495 in March after climbing 5.3 per cent on last year, as every region in the country experienced an annual increase in rent, according to the latest Trade Me Rental Price Index.
Trade Me’s Head of Rentals Aaron Clancy said the country’s rental market was looking very healthy and this was the first time in five months that every region in the country experienced a year-on-year increase. “There’s a high demand for rentals across the country with a significant 28 per cent increase in the number of enquiries compared to March 2018.
No it is not govt policy, Andrea Vance is just stirring, she know's it isn't, and you know it isn't. Hooten of course believes his own spin. Next week Labour will be accused of being flat earthers if a govt MP says they can see for miles and miles.
It’s not easy being a government in the age of the internet and pretending to have power over something that is essentially beyond control, but that doesn’t stop them trying.
The British government is ignoring its previous online mishaps and outlined tough new measures to police the internet, which is all well and good, but all it’s going to do is make Britain a global center for Virtual Private Networks (VPN).
A White Paper last week detailed how the UK wants to bring in a “code of practice” for social networks and internet firms, giving it the power to be able to fine them if they breach it and perhaps even block offending sites.
However I did glace at a program on BBC today about Google power over us and the guy explaining the power of Google takes every letter we place on Google into a large search engine to send to millions to attach their interest of selling to you their items.
The google system uses algorithms to identify what we look at all the time.
Ecuador shows how technology built for China’s political system is now being applied — and sometimes abused — by other governments. Today, 18 countries — including Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and Germany — are using Chinese-made intelligent monitoring systems, and 36 have received training in topics like “public opinion guidance,” which is typically a euphemism for censorship, according to an October report from Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group.
With China’s surveillance know-how and equipment now flowing to the world, critics warn that it could help underpin a future of tech-driven authoritarianism, potentially leading to a loss of privacy on an industrial scale. Often described as public security systems, the technologies have darker potential uses as tools of political repression.
“They’re selling this as the future of governance; the future will be all about controlling the masses through technology,” Adrian Shahbaz, research director at Freedom House, said of China’s new tech exports.
Of all of the David Icke alternative media view of the world order, he decides to believe the one about Jews being the ones who are descended from "the reptilians" …
Lovetosee the proponents of this cite evidence in Jewish DNA (warning what Jewish DNA, do not have either common Y chromosome or maternal ancestry).
When it comes to the largest companies in the world like those selling cellphones, it is wise to ignore all PR and go to the science. I expect this study will lead to 'debate' rather than change. But there it is.
I can't find the study referred to in the article (Kumiko Nakata is a bona fide fertility researcher). But there's others.
"Cell phone radiation may negatively affect sperm quality in men by decreasing the semen volume, sperm concentration, sperm count, motility, and viability, thus impairing male fertility."
Thanks for putting that up as I was about to after I spotted it, so Wifi causes infertility to as we put up a post two years ago that high frequencies from 'smart meters' also cause cancer and other affects.
Eco Maori worrys about OUR Kaumatua not finding the time to pass there great knowledge of speaking on the Pae Pae and other great Maori culture knowledge on to Te Mokopuna we must never let this knowledge go as that is what some peoples goals to make Maori look so bad that te Mokopuna don't want to have anything to do with OUR GREAT CULTURE .Maori have to do what ever it takes to keep OUR CULTURE Pumping. We must look after our kaumatua and there knowledge there is HEAPS that has already been misplaced or losted if we try hard enough we will find it Kia kaha Whanau.
But historical traumas related to colonisation, cultural and language suppression through assimilation policies along with a move from rural to urban areas, which broke ties with iwi and hapū, had all directly impacted on the length and quality of Māori lives.
"Everything around them was in turmoil," he said.
The flow on effects ares still being felt as well, Edwards said, with some Māori lacking in confidence or ability to fulfil cultural expectations placed on them as they got older, including taking on speaking roles at the marae
But historical traumas related to colonisation, cultural and language suppression through assimilation policies along with a move from rural to urban areas, which broke ties with iwi and hapū, had all directly impacted on the length and
The flow on effects ares still being felt as well, Edwards said, with some Māori lacking in confidence or ability to fulfil cultural expectations placed on them as they got older, including taking on speaking roles at the marae.
Another sobering statistic is the gap between Māori and non-Māori life expectancy, which is about seven years. Life expectancy for Māori females was 77.1 years, when compared to non-Māori females at 83.9 years.
Māori male life expectancy sat at 73 years, with non-Māori men at 80.3 years.
"And I ask, is that a just society, is that a society we can be proud of
Ka kite ano links below P.S I am talking to my WHANAU about this issue of our GREAT kite aronui
I know why simon didn't get rolled I have hinted at that.
Methanthamean is causing heaps of damage to OUR society why is methamphetamine higher in places with high tangata whenua populations its a big problem in Te tairawhiti as well a North land both with 45 % Maori populations.? ? ? ? ??
We must be vigilant on our boarder security as if we get a bad disease that will cost many billions lost income to NZ.
Its sad all the WARS being waged around the world at the minute I have said that it's the tamariki that suffer the most from WAR fools don't GET IT.
I have come to the conclusion that intelligent people under estimate there mahi + the carbon barons money influenceing society that climate change is a hoaxes that has lead to the under estimate of glaciers melt and other facts about climate change .
The beluga whale is a awesome creature we are there Guardians .
Condolences to the people of Mozambican I did not realise that it was the same country hit six weeks ago by a hurricane OUR African cousin are feeling the brunt of human caused climate change Kia kaha people .
That's good that soft plastic recycling in Auckland has resumed its sad that the rest of the country could not be included but is all about being cost effective.
Condolences to John the African American directors Whanau I like his movies I have seen quite a few of them . Ka kite ano P.S had a bit of pressure to deal with lately like water of a ducks back
Gregory you are barking up the wrong tree who can afford those expensive driving lessons you are taking about another point us how much driving do you actually do on NZ Roads not much at all I say it will be a plane ride on most of your journeys Deflecting the road toll road problems from the people WHOM are responsible for it.
Insurance premiums rising it will be a luxury for the wealthy cause by global warming and climate change can you see how the common people are going to suffer this is just one phenomenon .
I have a food allergy if I see kai moana I eat it I just found out why my children did not eat fish when they were younger long story it use to piss me off heaps of fish and only I eat it . the epiepen Pharmac issue I hope Pharmac can come up with a viable solution to the problem. Maybe get someone to come up with a better cheaper design to admit the drugs many ways to solve a problem.
Children living at home till 25 because its to expensive to live in Aotearoa . That's the side effects of having a banker run the country for nine years setting the system up to serve the wealthy it displaces Alot of others and causes a big mess I see this all around the world . ?
We should never stop learning new things when we don't we end up stuck in the PAST like some neanderthal.
I agree with Chris people need to make sure there houseing is safe from the effects of climate change Yea plastic is a big problem for all of Papatuanukue. And I seen it with my own eyes building on land filled in with sand a tsunami or earth quake will make a big mess of these houses . It's cool having a well known person taking about plastic waste issues the Papatuanukue has.
I ran across a recent essay from The Brothers Krynn, which attempts to map common horror monsters onto the Seven Deadly Sins: https://canadianculturecorner.substack.com/p/horror-monsters-and-vice My interest, however, is not in the meat of the piece, but rather the opening paragraph: It is an interesting fact that in recent decades, Vampires have ...
Buzz from the Beehive Transport Minister Simeon Brown dutifully issued advice to all road users to keep safe on our roads during the Easter weekend. He encouraged them to stay safe, plan their journeys ahead of time, and be patient with other drivers while travelling around this Easter long weekend. ...
Oliver Hartwich writes – New Zealanders recently learned about a new feature film. It will be about former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – and taxpayers will subsidise it to the tune of NZ$800,000. Ardern had nothing personally to do with either the film or the subsidy. But her government’s ...
TL;DR: Here’s the top six news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa-NZ this week, and a discussion above that was recorded yesterday afternoon above between and The Kākā’s climate correspondent : An independent review panel into the emergency response to Cyclone Gabrielle in Hawkes Bayconcluded “that ...
There are now only a few days left to give feedback on the Draft Government Policy Statement (GPS) on Land Transport 2024-34 (see our earlier post this week on GPS submission guides). As we’ve reported, the GPS is a disaster for Local Government, so we were particularly interested to hear ...
Willis has pledged to go ahead with the debt-funded tax cuts, despite growing opposition from her own supporters worried about appearing fiscally irresponsible. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The five things that mattered in Aotearoa’s political economy that we wrote and spoke about via The Kākā and elsewhere for ...
Open access notables A survey of interventions to actively conserve the frozen North, van Wijngaarden et al., Climatic Change:The frozen elements of the high North are thawing as the region warms much faster than the global mean. The dangers of sea level rise due to melting glacier ice, increased ...
Bryce Edwards writes – New Zealand’s biggest-ever political donations scandal is finally at an end. But what is the conclusion? No one can really be sure. The Court of Appeal released its judgement on Tuesday about the Serious Fraud Office case against the NZ First Foundation. On ...
In 2015, then-Prime Minister John Key announced plans for a huge ocean sanctuary around the Kermadec Islands, banning fishing and mining from 15% of Aotearoa's EEZ. It was bold, it was ambitious, and it suggested that National might actually care about the environment. Except they fucked it up: Key failed ...
1. Who has just been given the accolade New Zealander of the Year?a. The Kokakob. The Cook Strait Ferryc. Fair God. Dr Jim Salinger 2. Which of these is an affront to decent society?a. Dame Edna Everageb. Mrs Doubtfire c. Dr. Frank-N-Furterd. Brian 3. Who is Penny Simmonds?a. The aspiring actress in Big ...
New Zealand’s biggest-ever political donations scandal is finally at an end. But what is the conclusion? No one can really be sure.The Court of Appeal released its judgement on Tuesday about the Serious Fraud Office case against the NZ First Foundation. On the face of it, the court found ...
Buzz from the Beehive Waves of rain are set to lash much of the North Island during Easter Weekend as a low-pressure system forms east of New Zealand, according to a weather forecast published in the past day or so. Niwa was warning of a “moisture-laden” long weekend, with rain expected ...
Look around us…Nicola Willis’ promises of balancing the books, of cutting spending without reducing services, and of delivering game changing tax cuts are disappearing before her eyes.Everyday we see stories of violent crime ending in horrific injuries, or worse. The cost of living worsens, whereas the PM claimed renters would ...
TL;DR: My top six news of note on the morning of Thursday, March 28 include:The Government will have to borrow between $10 billion to $15 billion more than previously expected in order to make up for a slowing economy and to pay for $14.9 billion of tax cuts, according to ...
This story by Naveena Sadasivam and Kate Yoder was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The long-awaited jobs board for the American Climate Corps, promised early in the Biden administration, will open next month, according to details shared exclusively ...
Should landlords be able to deduct the interest on the loans they take out to bankroll their property speculation? The US Senate Budget Committee and Bloomberg News don’t think this is a good idea, for reasons set out below. Regardless, our coalition government has been burning through a ton of ...
Treasury’s first report on the economy since the change of government presents a damning indictment of Labour’s economic management. The problem for National is that it is so damning that logically, coupled with a rapidly slowing economy, Finance Minister Nicola Willis should respond to it by postponing or even cancelling ...
Budget tensions are becoming evident within the Coalition Government. Winston Peters made numerous political points in his speech to the NZF annual conference. But the attack on his own government’s fiscal policies raised issues of substance. ‘Today in the Sunday Star Times, journalist and former advisor to the Labour ...
Buzz from the Beehive The media – sure enough – have been binging on Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ release of the Budget Policy Statement and a statement headed Government announces Budget priorities This assures us – or rather, this parrots the Luxon team mantra – that the Budget “will deliver ...
The Ides of March brought me COVID followed by a bereavement. No wonder they tell you to be careful of them.I’m home now and have resumed the interrupted recuperation. Very much looking forward to getting back to regular things. Meanwhile, some thoughts…OneThis new Prime Minister guy just keeps getting more dire. ...
News that the Chinese ATP 40 cyber-hacking unit penetrated parliamentary internet networks in 2021 has renewed concerns about the PRC’s malign intentions in Aotearoa. But is the hack that significant given the length of time that has passed since its … Continue reading → ...
When Parliament passed the Intelligence and security Act in 2017, they assured us all that it was full of safeguards. Any intrusive surveillance of New Zealanders would be subject to a "triple lock", requiring the approval of the Minister and (supposedly independent) Commissioner of Intelligence Warrants, as well as post-facto ...
Eric Crampton writes – Richard Harman’s Politik newsletter provides a bit of the context that ought to have been showing up in other media reports on potential reductions in public service staffing. Media has been reporting on staffing cuts on the order of about 7%. Is that ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – It’s becoming increasingly apparent that many perceive free speech to have become the preserve of the politically right wing, the religiously conservative, the libertarian fringe, the anti-trans, the anti-Māori and…. well, just fill in with whatever groups or individuals you don’t like and don’t ...
Don Brash writes – As everybody who is not blind and deaf is aware, there is a huge political preoccupation with climate change at the moment, a widespread (though by no means unanimous) belief that global temperatures are rising mainly as a result of the greenhouse gases created ...
TL;DR: My six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy on Wednesday, March 27 include:Chris Bishop laid out his vision for filling Aotearoa-NZ’s $100 billion infrastructure deficit in a speech yesterday, emphasising user pays and private funding, but failed to say how to achieve bipartisanship on population, public borrowing and ...
Bryce Edwards writes – Former Finance Minister Grant Robertson and former Prime Minister Chris Hipkins have been conveying how unhappy they are with the tax system. Last week in his valedictory speech, Robertson called for the introduction of a wealth or capital gains tax. And this week Hipkins ...
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 ...
Buzz from the Beehive China has loomed large in Beehive considerations over the past 24 hours, largely because of that country’s mischief-making in the cyber espionage department. Two media statements emerged on that subject hard on the heels of the PM baulking at questions put to him on RNZ’s Morning ...
Chris Trotter writes – WHY IS THE NATIONAL PARTY doing so much for landlords, property developers, trucking, and construction companies, and so little for everybody who isn’t already pretty well-off? It’s as if protecting landlords’ investments and building apartments and roads now constitute the whole of National’s ...
Bryce Edwards writes – When she was campaigning to be Minister of Finance last year, Nicola Willis pledged that she would resign from the job if she failed to deliver tax cuts in her first Budget. Now, it’s that pledge, along with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s ...
Robert MacCulloch writes – The Reserve Bank has doubled staff numbers in five years to 510, with personnel costs rising to $80 million in 2023 from $32 million in 2018 – up by a whopping 150%. I guess when you print $50 billion and flood markets with liquidity, ...
The furore. In case you didn’t notice there was a controversy in the weekend involving dolphins in a little town off the South Island. Don’t panic, they haven’t declared independence and resumed whaling, this was simply a sailing event.The problem began when racing was cancelled on the opening day of ...
For 20 years or more, the case for a meaningful capital tax gains has been mulled over and analysed to death, including by the tax working group chaired by Sir Michael Cullen. More than once, the International Monetary Fund has said a CGT would be a good idea for New ...
TL;DR: My top 10 news and analysis links this morning include:Today’s must-read: The Public Health Communications Centre (PHCC) call for urgent preventive action and a risk assessment survey of long covid in this briefing noteLocal scoop: NZ road deaths surpass OECD rates, so why is the govt reversing safety plans? ...
This story was originally published by Grist and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. This story is part of a collaboration with Grist and WABE to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission, the small but powerful state-elected board that makes critical decisions about everything from raising ...
This is a guest post from Robert McLachlan Global warming is accelerating; 2023 was off the charts. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. In New Zealand, transport accounts for half of all fossil fuels burnt. In the Emissions Reduction Plan, transport emissions fall 41% by 2035. As the ...
Labour productivity has been receding rapidly over the past two years, reversing a post-lockdown rise. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy as at 6:26am on Tuesday, March 26 include:Workers have been treading water in output per hour worked for 12 years, ...
TL;DR: The key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 2 include:Today, Parliament resumes sitting at 2pm for the second week of a two-week session. Officials for SIS and GCSB report their annual reviews in public to the Intelligence and Security Select Committee from 5.10pm.Tomorrow, ...
Faced with a barrage of criticism over the promised tax cuts from usually supportive commentators, Finance Minister Nicola Willis yesterday reaffirmed her intention to include them in this year’s Budget. The Government is up against it over the cuts just about every way it turns. Commentators like Fran O’Sullivan, Matthew ...
Here’s my pick of today’s substack posts as of 6:26pm on Monday, March 25: writes via his substack that Market-rate housing will make your city cheaper writes via his substack about the problems talking to double-cab ute (truck) drivers about their vehicles. today about moments of radicalisation in ...
Buzz from the Beehive Just before Christmas, Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivered something that was pitched as a mini-budget and brayed about the decisive action being taken to repair the Government books and support income tax relief in Budget 2024. In a statement headed Fiscal repair job underway. she introduced ...
My sister Belinda asked Dad yesterday what one word would describe Mum best. He said: vivacious.If you only knew her from the photos on the slideshow we've made for today,you might wonder about that, because the camera tended to lie with Mum.If ever she saw a camera pointed at her, she ...
There are two major public consultations closing in the next week, Auckland Council’s Long Term Plan (LTP), and the draft Government Policy Statement on Land Transport (GPS). Closing dates and times: LTP closes Thursday 28 February, at 11.59pm – a minute to midnight! GPS closes Tuesday 2 April, at 12pm noon – note that’s ...
From Kiwiblog’s David Farrar – Bryce Wilkinson writes: Senior Fellow Bryce Wilkinson’s analysis reveals that since March 2009, New Zealand has spent $158 billion more overseas than it has earned, but its NIIP has only fallen by $32 billion.Statistics New Zealand shows that receipts from overseas reinsurers have ...
Is she hinting that the Coalition Government will have to back down on key promises it made in Opposition? Brian Easton writes – The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is telling an evolving story about her fiscal challenges. In Opposition she was confident that she could ...
Dear Nicola Willis,Right now you’ve probably got lots of competing demands coming at you. Ministers who’ve inherited quite a mess, or so you’ve told us, looking for money in the budget to improve things. I imagine that’s why they came to parliament - to make things better.You’ll have to make ...
The Local Government, Transport and Auckland Minister hasthreatened councils with intervention if they don’t merge water assets to take them off balance sheet, just as the now-repealed Three Waters plan directed. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: My six things of note this morning for Monday, March 25 include:Simeon ...
A listing of 36 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 17, 2024 thru Sat, March 23, 2024. Story of the week Thanks to John Mason having the stamina to sit down to watch "Climate - the Movie" ...
This morning the Q&A programme had Simeon Brown on to talk about National’s replacement for Three Waters. In case anyone’s forgotten the three are - drinking water, waste water, and sewerage. It’s quite important not to get them mixed up. In much the same way that you wouldn’t want to ...
Today’s newsletter comes with a mini-podcast conversation between me and my buddy Liv Tennet, talking about her time as a child actor in Lord of the Rings. It’s a conversation with a lot of giggles as she talks about falling off a horse, and becoming a meme. Read ...
The Desmog Climate Disinformation Database documents, "individuals and organisations that have helped to delay and distract the public and our elected leaders from taking needed action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight global warming." It's a who's who of the organised climate change denial movement, in other words. In ...
Bob Edlin writes – A High Court judge has decided miscreants who have mana – or who claim to have mana – should be treated differently from miscreants who have none. It’s a ruling that suggests indigenous law-breakers have a better chance of securing a discharge without conviction ...
Welcome to the first, and possibly last, edition of Brickbats, Bouquets and Bull’s Wool. In which I’ll take a look at the events of the last week or so, and rate them.In such ratings the numbers usually have more to do with the opinions of the reviewer, than the actual ...
Roger Partridge writes – My earlier column this month, New Zealand’s highest court could be facing a turning point, prompted a flood of feedback from business readers and lawyers alike. A common query was what Parliament can do to restrain an overreaching judiciary. This week I discuss two steps Parliament ...
TL;DR: In today’s ‘six-stack’ of substacks at 6.16pm on Friday, March 22: writes about New Zealand's Building Boom—And What the World Must Learn From It over at his substack. challenges the Auckland Council’s use of a 3.8 degrees of warming forecast to oppose a wave-park and data centre project ...
Is she hinting that the Coalition Government will have to back down on key promises it made in Opposition?The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is telling an evolving story about her fiscal challenges. In Opposition she was confident that she could deliver her promised income tax cuts. Appointed minister, she ...
Buzz from the Beehive Ministers of the Crown have drawn attention to one sector of the science sector which is unlikely to be subjected to heavy spending cuts, a state-funded broadcaster which is doing nicely, thank you, and a sporting event that had $5.4 million from the public purse puffed ...
Abbott’s Freestyle Libre sensors allow continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). The sensor is applied to the back of the patient’s arm, with a thin filament under the skin measuring glucose levels constantly. But it costs around $100 per sensor and must be replaced once every 14 days. Photo by BSIP/Universal Images ...
The Inspector General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) recently released a report in which he exposes the existence of a foreign intelligence partner-controlled technological “capability” inside the headquarters of the GCSB, NZ’s 5 Eyes-affiliated signals intelligence collection and analysis agency. … Continue reading → ...
Peter Dunne writes – Nearly three decades after the introduction of MMP and multiparty governments there should be a greater level of understanding about their finer points than often appears to be the case. The reaction to the despicable outburst from the Deputy Prime Minister at the weekend highlights ...
The sweet kisses from fruit of summerHave slowly been turning dullerYou say, "those times"And "remember the daysWhen we went outside and there still was the shade?"Taking no reason into play…Autumn. Clear, blue days shortening to longer nights, growing colder. Aotearoa.That’s us. The temperature dropping, the looming car crash - so ...
Bryce Edwards writes – “It is often said that behind every great man is a great woman”. This is the pitch by the National Party Botany electorate branch to attend their “Ladies Afternoon Tea with Amanda Luxon”. For $110 including GST, you can turn up on Saturday 20 April ...
David Farrar writes – The Electoral Commission has published the expense returns for political parties for the 2023 election. I’ve put them in a table with how many votes a party got so we can see the spend per vote. National only spent $3.34 for every vote they got, almost ...
Winston Peters’ headline-making actions over the past week may have been a show of political power intended to strengthen his hand in Budget negotiations. It was no accident that his State of the Nation speech was as it was. He made it as New Zealand First Leader, not as Deputy ...
Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāTL;DR: The five things that mattered in Aotearoa’s political economy that we wrote and spoke about via The Kākā and elsewhere for paying subscribers in the last week included:Former Labour Finance Minister Grant Robertson bowed out of politics this week, giving a series of exit ...
Graham Adams writes — If you love the law or sausages, as the saying goes, best not to look too closely at how they are made. And after watching the orgy of self-pity when Newshub’s closure was announced on February 28, television journalism should definitely be added to the list of those ...
Venerable New Zealand political commentator, Chris Trotter (https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com/), is a sad creature these days. Once one of the most reliable Leftist writers out there – Economic Left at that – Trotter seems to have absorbed the worldview of Auckland culture-war obsessives. It is not for me to categorise what he ...
The Coalition Government’s plan to ‘get Auckland moving’ is a cuts cover-up that will ultimately cost Aucklanders more to move around the city, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Slashing the Ministry of Pacific Peoples by 40% will have a devastating impact on pacific communities and further highlights how little this government cares about anything other than cutting taxes for the wealthiest few. ...
Labour has proposed an urgent inquiry to investigate the ever-increasing profits of supermarkets, aiming to lower costs for shoppers and food producers alike, says Labour Spokesperson for Commerce and Consumer Affairs Arena Williams and Primary Production Spokesperson Cushla Tangaere-Manuel. ...
With 14% of jobs on the line at the Ministry for Ethnic Communities, the responsible Minister Melissa Lee is failing to stand up for the very communities she’s meant to be representing. ...
COURT OF APPEAL: TRIFECTA OF VICTORY FOR NZ FIRST, TRIFECTA OF FAILURE FOR OPPONENTS For the third time since April 2020, New Zealand First has defeated the Serious Fraud Office and all those complicit in a malicious attack against a political party going about its lawful business in a lawful ...
The Green Party stands with people who live in public housing, people in dire housing need, experts and advocates in demanding better than the Government’s archaic approach to housing those who need our support the most. ...
New Zealand has recently lost the hosting rights of some major international sporting events including the America’s Cup, the Rugby Championship, Netball World Cup, and the Wellington Sevens. We are now at a huge risk of losing SailGP as well. And it won’t stop there. The recent issues with SailGP ...
A Member’s Bill drawn this week would modernise insurance law and make things fairer and more transparent for consumers, Christchurch Central MP Duncan Webb said. ...
The Minister for Disability Issues has confirmed she was aware of funding issues in mid-December and did nothing to stop it. On 14 March, she signed off on changes that were announced and implemented on 18 March without any consultation with disability communities. ...
Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter says her members' bill is an opportunity for the coalition government to plug the gap in electric vehicle incentives. ...
The National Government continues to talk about irresponsible tax cuts that will only drive up inflation, despite the country entering a technical recession. ...
The Minister for Disability Issues must act urgently to reinstate flexibility around the funding for disability support and apologise to disabled carers. ...
This story has been initiated by a leftie shill reporter who proactively sought to call a member of a former band, which disbanded twelve years ago, give their biased appraisal of what was said in my speech, and concocted a ham-fisted attempt at a story that does nothing but show ...
The Government has accepted Labour’s change to the Road User Charge (RUC) discount for hybrid vehicles, meaning there will still be some incentive for people to buy greener vehicles. ...
Many in the mainstream media have taken what was said in New Zealand First’s State of the Nation Speech in Palmerston North on Sunday and deliberately, deceitfully, and ignorantly misrepresented what I said and why I said it. The headlines and commentary on the news stated that I compared ‘co-governance ...
Kicking the most vulnerable people out of state housing and pushing them towards homelessness will result in a proliferation of poverty and trauma across our most vulnerable communities. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader and MP for Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi has penned a letter asking MPs to support his members bill to remove GST from all food. The bill is expected to go through its first reading in parliament this Wednesday. “I’m calling on all political parties to support my ...
Good afternoon. Thank you for, in your very busy lives, turning up to this meeting today. On October 14th last year New Zealanders overwhelmingly voted for change. That is exactly what this new government is bringing. New Zealand First campaigned to ‘take back our country’ and stop the disastrous economic ...
This year is about getting real with Kiwis and discussing the tough issues, as the National Government exacerbates inequality and divides New Zealand, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said ...
The Government adding Significant Natural Areas (SNAs) to its already roaring environmental policy bonfire is an assault on the future of wildlife that makes Aotearoa unique. ...
After 12 years of fighting to protect our moana we are finding ourselves back at square one and back at court. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency is sitting in Hawera to reconsider an application from Trans-Tasman Resources to dig up 50 million tonnes of the seabed in South Taranaki. This ...
Minister Shane Jones’ decision to step away from a seabed mining project is evidence of the murky waters surrounding the Government’s fast-track legislation. ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The growth of Treaty of Waitangi clauses in legislation caused so much worry that a special oversight group was set up by the last government in a bid to get greater coherence in the publicservice on Treaty matters. When ministers first considered the need for tighter oversight in 2021, there ...
The Coalition Government’s miscalculation saga continues as it has forgotten an eyewatering $90 million gap in its interest deductibility cost figures, say Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds and Revenue Spokesperson Deborah Russell. ...
He Pou a Rangi Climate Change Commission has today released advice that says if the Government doesn’t act now New Zealand is at risk of not meeting its climate goals. ...
The Coalition Government has today confirmed it is abandoning first home buyers who are struggling to get ahead, says Labour Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds. ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed the passing of legislation to move light electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) into the road user charges system from 1 April. “It was always intended that EVs and PHEVs would be exempt from road user charges until they reached two ...
New Zealand is strengthening its ability to combat illegal fishing outside its domestic waters and beef up regulation for its own commercial fishers in international waters through a Bill which had its first reading in Parliament today. The Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill 2023 sets out stronger ...
Economists Carl Hansen and Professor Prasanna Gai have been appointed to the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee, Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced today. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is the independent decision-making body that sets the Official Cash Rate which determines interest rates. Carl Hansen, the executive director of Capital ...
Apartment owners and buyers will soon have greater protections as further changes to the law on unit titles come into effect, Housing Minister Chris Bishop says. “The Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Act had already introduced some changes in December 2022 and May 2023, and ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters will travel to Egypt and Europe from this weekend. “This travel will focus on a range of New Zealand’s traditional diplomatic and security partnerships while enabling broad engagement on the urgent situation in Gaza,” Mr Peters says. Mr Peters will attend the NATO Foreign ...
Transport Minister Simeon Brown is encouraging all road users to stay safe, plan their journeys ahead of time, and be patient with other drivers while travelling around this Easter long weekend. “Road safety is a responsibility we all share, and with increased traffic on our roads expected this Easter we ...
About 1.4 million New Zealanders will receive cost of living relief through increased government assistance from April 1 909,000 pensioners get a boost to Superannuation, including 5000 veterans 371,000 working-age beneficiaries will get higher payments 45,000 students will see an increase in their allowance Over a quarter of New Zealanders ...
Ensuring social housing is being provided to those with the greatest needs is front of mind as the Government restarts social housing tenancy reviews, Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka says. “Our relentless focus on building a strong economy is to ensure we can deliver better public services such as social ...
The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary will not go ahead, with Cabinet deciding to stop work on the proposed reserve and remove the Bill that would have established it from Parliament’s order paper. “The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill would have created a 620,000 sq km economic no-go zone,” Oceans and Fisheries Minister ...
Dam safety regulations are being amended so that smaller dams won’t be subject to excessive compliance costs, Minister for Building and Construction Chris Penk says. “The coalition Government is focused on reducing costs and removing unnecessary red tape so we can get the economy back on track. “Dam safety regulations ...
The coalition Government is expanding the medium-scale adverse event classification to parts of the North Island as dry weather conditions persist, Agriculture Minister Todd McClay announced today. “I have made the decision to expand the medium-scale adverse event classification already in place for parts of the South Island to also cover the ...
The passing of legislation giving effect to coalition Government tax commitments has been welcomed by Finance Minister Nicola Willis. “The Taxation (Annual Rates for 2023–24, Multinational Tax, and Remedial Matters) Bill will help place New Zealand on a more secure economic footing, improve outcomes for New Zealanders, and make our tax system ...
Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Judith Collins and Tertiary Education and Skills Minister Penny Simmonds today announced plans to transform our science and university sectors to boost the economy. Two advisory groups, chaired by Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, will advise the Government on how these sectors can play a greater ...
The Budget will deliver urgently-needed tax relief to hard-working New Zealanders while putting the government’s finances back on a sustainable track, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. The Finance Minister made the comments at the release of the Budget Policy Statement setting out the Government’s Budget objectives. “The coalition Government intends ...
The coalition Government will look at options to address a zoning issue that limits how much financial support Queenstown residents can get for accommodation. Cabinet has agreed on a response to the Petitions Committee, which had recommended the geographic information MSD uses to determine how much accommodation supplement can be ...
Cabinet has agreed to a short extension to the final reporting timeframe for the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care from 28 March 2024 to 26 June 2024, Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden says. “The Royal Commission wrote to me on 16 February 2024, requesting that I consider an ...
The coalition Government is delivering an $18 million boost to New Zealanders needing to travel for specialist health treatment, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says. “These changes are long overdue – the National Travel Assistance (NTA) scheme saw its last increase to mileage and accommodation rates way back in 2009. ...
The Government is recognising the innovative and rising talent in New Zealand’s growing space sector, with the Prime Minister and Space Minister Judith Collins announcing the new Prime Minister’s Prizes for Space today. “New Zealand has a growing reputation as a high-value partner for space missions and research. I am ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has confirmed New Zealand’s concerns about cyber activity have been conveyed directly to the Chinese Government. “The Prime Minister and Minister Collins have expressed concerns today about malicious cyber activity, attributed to groups sponsored by the Chinese Government, targeting democratic institutions in both New ...
Independent Reviewers appointed for School Property Inquiry Education Minister Erica Stanford today announced the appointment of three independent reviewers to lead the Ministerial Inquiry into the Ministry of Education’s School Property Function. The Inquiry will be led by former Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully. “There is a clear need ...
State Highway 1 across the Brynderwyns will be open for Easter weekend, with work currently underway to ensure the resilience of this critical route being paused for Easter Weekend to allow holiday makers to travel north, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Today I visited the Brynderwyn Hills construction site, where ...
Introduction Good morning to you all, and thanks for having me bright and early today. I am absolutely delighted to be the Minister for Infrastructure alongside the Minister of Housing and Resource Management Reform. I know the Prime Minister sees the three roles as closely connected and he wants me ...
New Zealand stands with the United Kingdom in its condemnation of People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-backed malicious cyber activity impacting its Electoral Commission and targeting Members of the UK Parliament. “The use of cyber-enabled espionage operations to interfere with democratic institutions and processes anywhere is unacceptable,” Minister Responsible for ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Defence Minister Judith Collins today announced New Zealand will provide logistics support for the upcoming Solomon Islands election. “We’re sending a team of New Zealand Defence Force personnel and two NH90 helicopters to provide logistics support for the election on 17 April, at the request ...
The European Union Free Trade Agreement Legislation Amendment Bill received Royal Assent today, completing the process for New Zealand’s ratification of its free trade agreement with the European Union. “I am pleased to announce that today, in a small ceremony at the Beehive, New Zealand notified the European Union ...
Public consultation on the terms of reference for the Royal Commission into COVID-19 Lessons has concluded, Internal Affairs Minister Hon Brooke van Velden says. “I have been advised that there were over 11,000 submissions made through the Royal Commission’s online consultation portal.” Expanding the scope of the Royal Commission of ...
Hardworking families are set to benefit from a new credit to help them meet their early childcare education (ECE) costs, Finance Minister Nicola Willis says. From 1 July, parents and caregivers of young children will be supported to manage the rising cost of living with a partial reimbursement of their ...
A specialised Independent Technical Advisory Group (ITAG) tasked with preparing and publishing independent non-binding advice on the design of a "green" (sustainable finance) taxonomy rulebook is being established, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. “Comprising experts and market participants, the ITAG's primary goal is to deliver comprehensive recommendations to the ...
Defence Minister Judith Collins has thanked the Chief of Army, Major General John Boswell, DSD, for his service as he leaves the Army after 40 years. “I would like to thank Major General Boswell for his contribution to the Army and the wider New Zealand Defence Force, undertaking many different ...
25 March 2024 Minister to meet Australian counterparts and Manufacturing Industry Leaders Small Business, Manufacturing, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly will travel to Australia for a series of bi-lateral meetings and manufacturing visits. During the visit, Minister Bayly will meet with his Australian counterparts, Senator Tim Ayres, Ed ...
Government commits almost $3 million for period products in schools The Coalition Government has committed $2.9 million to ensure intermediate and secondary schools continue providing period products to those who need them, Minister of Education Erica Stanford announced today. “This is an issue of dignity and ensuring young women don’t ...
Good morning, it’s great to be here. First, I would like to acknowledge the New Zealand Institute of Building Surveyors and thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning. I would like to use this opportunity to outline the Government’s ambitious plan and what we hope to ...
Minister for Pacific Peoples Dr Shane Reti has announced the Government’s commitment to the Auckland Secondary Schools Māori and Pacific Islands Cultural Festival, more commonly known as Polyfest. “The Ministry for Pacific Peoples is a longtime supporter of Polyfest and, as it celebrates 49 years in 2024, I’m proud to ...
Before moving onto the substance of today’s address, I want to recognise the very significant and ongoing contribution the Breast Cancer Foundation makes to support the lives of New Zealand women and their families living with breast cancer. I very much enjoy working with you. I also want to recognise ...
New Zealand has notched up a first with the launch of University of Canterbury research to the International Space Station, Science, Innovation and Technology and Space Minister Judith Collins says. The hardware, developed by Dr Sarah Kessans, is designed to operate autonomously in orbit, allowing scientists on Earth to study ...
Introduction Thank you for inviting me to speak with you today and I’m sorry I can’t be there in person. Yesterday I started in Wellington for Breakfast TV, spoke to a property conference in Auckland, and finished the day speaking to local government in Christchurch, so it would have been ...
The Coalition Government is contributing more than $1 million to support the establishment of an emergency multi-agency coordination centre in Northland. Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell announced the contribution today during a visit of the Whangārei site where the facility will be constructed. “Northland has faced a number ...
New Zealanders have enjoyed a broader range of voices telling the story of Aotearoa thanks to the creation of Whakaata Māori 20 years ago, says Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka. The minister spoke at a celebration marking the national indigenous media organisation’s 20th anniversary at their studio in Auckland on ...
Commercial catch limits for some fisheries have been increased following a review showing stocks are healthy and abundant, Ocean and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The changes, along with some other catch limit changes and management settings, begin coming into effect from 1 April 2024. "Regular biannual reviews of fish ...
COMMENTARY:By Ronny Kareni Since the atrocious footage of the suffering of an indigenous Papuan man reverberates in the heart of Puncak by the brute force of Indonesia’s army in early February, shocking tactics deployed by those in power to silence critics has been unfolding. Nowhere is this more evident ...
Analysis - Nicola Willis is holding firm on tax cuts despite the economic outlook being worse than forecast and critics urging her to wait, writes Peter Wilson for The Week In Politics. ...
Opposition MPs and unions are criticising a proposal by New Zealand’s Ministry of Pacific Peoples to cut staff by 40 percent. The country’s largest trade union — The Public Service Association — says the ministry has informed staff that it is looking to shed 63 of 156 positions. Opposition MPs ...
A poem by Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2024 featured poet Carin Smeaton. Daughtr of the 90s when she gets promoted to usherette a baby blu eel carries her all the way up to mothership she’s hovering high she lets the underaged in to see keanu reeves she lets the only lonely ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin. Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. My earlier article – Can ‘Good’ be the Greater Evil? – looked at the issue of how wars should end, and how Good versus Evil ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 AMMA by Saraid de Silva (Moa Press, $38)A stunning debut novel reviewed by Brannavan ...
From Steve Martin to Ricky Stanicky, a pick’n’mix of things worth watching and listening to this long weekend. This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. If you’re at a loss for something to occupy yourself with this Easter, don’t panic: The Spinoff’s got ...
Jesus had dinner with his 12 disciples right before he died. Noted historian Madeleine Chapman finds out who really deserved to be there.First published in 2018 but let’s be honest, the subject is timeless. As you sit on your couch this Easter Sunday, eating a chocolate egg you know ...
The newly-promoted Northern League club is on a mission to return to the National League for the first time in two decades. Plenty about domestic football in New Zealand has changed in that time – but the sense that this amateur competition is not an entirely level playing field remains. ...
NONFICTION 1 BBQ Economics by Liam Dann (Penguin Random House, $40) “It’s official,” wrote Dann nine days ago in the Herald, where he works as business editor at large, “we’re in recession.” Yeah, great. He delivered the bad stats: “GDP fell 0.1 percent in the December 2023 quarter, compared with ...
Comment: Every year on February 2, a dozen men in tuxedos and top hats approach the burrow of a groundhog in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania and entice the beaver-like rodent to emerge and predict the weather. If the groundhog, named Punxsutawney Phil, sees its own shadow when it is summoned, legend ...
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Auckland Council has put a deadline on new weather-impacted property owners applying for categorisation as government funding looks set to run out. Councillors have voted to support a deadline of September 30 for property owners who haven’t accessed support to come forward and engage with the council’s recovery office. It ...
By Anneke Smith, RNZ News political reporter A petition urging the New Zealand government to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people has been tabled in the House. More than 200 people gathered on Parliament’s forecourt today and they were met by MPs from Labour, the Greens and Te ...
Pacific Media Watch The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog RSF (Reporters Without Borders) has appealed for information about the “disappearance” of Palestinian journalist Bayan Abusultan. She was reportedly last seen on March 19 among people “sequestered” in this week’s raid and siege of Al Shifa hospital by Israeli troops in ...
EDITORIAL:The Jakarta Post It happens again and again; indigenous Papuans fall victim to Indonesian soldiers. This time, we have photographic evidence for the brutality, with videos on social media showing a Papuan man being tortured by a group of plainclothes men alleged to be the Indonesian Military (TNI) members. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Director of the Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Policy & Associate Professor, New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity A strange and eclectic range of activities takes place across these few weeks of the year. Some ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Panizza Allmark, Professor Visual & Cultural Studies, Edith Cowan University It’s Easter weekend, which means many of us will be kicking back with the greatest hits on repeat. But whether you’re a boomer, or an ‘80s or ’90s kid, you might be ...
RNZ Pacific Fiji’s Acting Public Prosecutor has filed an appeal against the sentences of former prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama and suspended police chief Sitiveni Qiliho in their corruption case. Bainimarama was granted an absolute discharge for attempting to pervert the course of justice while Qiliho received a conditional discharge with ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arosha Weerakoon, Senior Lecturer and General Dentist, School of Dentistry, The University of Queensland Casezy idea/Shutterstock How does toothpaste work? What did people use before toothpaste was invented? – Amelia, age 7, Meanjin (Brisbane) Thanks for your ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brett Hallam, Associate professor, UNSW Sydney IM Imagery/Shutterstock Solar SunShot is well named. The Australian government announced today it would plough A$1 billion into bringing back solar manufacturing to Australia, boosting energy security, swapping coal and gas jobs for those ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Dix, Research Fellow in Nutrition & Dietetics, The University of Queensland Easter is the time for chocolate. The shops are full of fantastically packaged and shiny chocolates in all shapes and sizes, making trips to the supermarket with children more challenging ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Felton, Adjunct Senior Researcher, University of South Australia Even in a stubborn cost-of-living crisis, it seems there’s one luxury most Australians won’t sacrifice – their daily cup of coffee. Coffee sales have largely remained stable, even as financial pressures have ...
Mining company Trans-Tasman Resources has unexpectedly withdrawn its application for a consent to suck the valuable metals vanadium and titanium from the Taranaki seafloor, as it apparently wagers on the Government’s new fast-track process. It had spent two-and-a-half days putting its case to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision-making committee, at ...
Contrary to the Associate Minister of Education’s claims, analysis of Healthy School Lunches Programme - Ka Ora, Ka Ako assessments has revealed it provides excellent value for the taxpayer dollar, as a groundswell of public opposition to Government ...
Greenpeace says wannabe Taranaki seabed miner Trans-Tasman Resources is likely banking on Christopher Luxon’s fast-track process to side-step proper scrutiny of its Taranaki seabed mining proposal by bailing out of the Environmental Protection Agency hearing ...
Kiwis Against Seabed mining today slammed Australian owned would-be seabed miner Trans Tasman Resources (TTR) for abandoning its application to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to mine the seabed of the South Taranaki Bight. The company ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Attwell, Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia Ground Picture/Shutterstock Months after COVID vaccines were introduced in 2021, governments and private organisations mandated them for various groups. Health and aged care workers were among the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak, CEO and Founder of Diraq, UNSW Sydney Diraq For decades, the pursuit of quantum computing has struggled with the need for extremely low temperatures, mere fractions of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin or ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne A national Essential poll, conducted March 20–24 from a sample of 1,150, gave the Coalition a 50–44 lead including undecided, a reversal ...
The Taxpayers’ Union has today made a formal request under the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information () for information held about how New Zealand Members of Parliament are spending taxpayer ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Nelson, Honorary Principal Fellow, The University of Melbourne A Byzantine depiction of the Eucharist in Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv.Jacek555/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA A nasty quarrel arose in the 11th century over what kind of bread should be used in holy ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Hesp, Professor, Flinders University Patrick Hesp In some parts of Australia, coastal dunes are retreating from the ocean at an alarming rate, as waves carve up the beach and wind blows the sand inland. But coastal communities are largely ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke Heemsbergen, Senior Lecturer, Digital, Political, Media, Deakin University With an impressive 60% of the US smartphone market, Apple is undeniably big, but not a clear monopoly. Yet, years of innovation by Apple have effectively given the company its own exclusive ...
Whether you’re facing layoffs or are just an emotional junior staffer, it’s always a good idea to scout out a good crying place before you need it. It’s an incredibly hard time for Wellington. Across the city, thousands of public servants are hearing tough news about redundancies and layoffs. Government ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Miller-Jones, Professor, Curtin University Nuclear explosions on a neutron star feed its jets. Danielle Futselaar and Nathalie Degenaar, Anton Pannekoek Institute, University of Amsterdam, CC BY-SA How fast can a neutron star drive powerful jets into space? The answer, it ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daryl Adair, Associate Professor of Sport Management, University of Technology Sydney Earlier this week, independent MP Andrew Wilkie accused the AFL of conducting “off the books” illicit drug testing to identify players using substances of abuse, then inappropriately withdrawing them from matches ...
The Government’s announcement that it will scrap plans for a vast marine sanctuary around the Kermadec Islands is ‘shameful’ and will make it impossible for Aotearoa New Zealand to meet its international commitments, says the World Wide Fund for Nature ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland Shutterstock The federal government has bowed to pressure from the car industry, announcing it will relax proposed emissions rules for utes and vans and delay enforcement of the new standards ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzanne Rutland, Professor Emerita, University of Sydney In his latest book, Jewish Life in Medieval Spain, Jonathan Ray focuses on the tumult of the 14th century in Spain – a time of the plague, civil strife and war between the two largest ...
While creating a slate of world-class shows, Whakaata Māori also developed a generation of world-class creatives. Television is an odd word. It mixes the Ancient Greek and Latin languages, and its most literal meaning is “far-off sight”. In the contemporary and living language of te reo Māori, “whakaata” as a ...
Yesterday the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza. This significant step and the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza prompted an urgent debate in the New Zealand Parliament. Leader ...
The Government’s decision to reduce access to continuous glucose monitors (CGM) not only threatens the lives of children with type 1 diabetes and increases the potential for ‘Dead in Bed’ syndrome, but also threatens the health of their parents an ...
Apples are available year-round, but the wide variety on offer involves intensive scientific research – and large-scale commercialisation. What’s beautiful, red, sweet and crunchy? Tony Martin’s favourite kind of apple: Sassy. The CEO of apple and pear breeding organisation Prevar, Martin’s fondness for Sassy represents professional success as well as ...
Family violence specialist service Shine is calling on employers to stop asking for proof of domestic violence in order for employees to access domestic violence leave. The call comes five years after the introduction of the Domestic Violence ...
The Deputy Chairperson of the Finance and Expenditure Committee is calling for public submissions on the Budget Policy Statement 2024. The Budget Policy Statement 2024 (BPS) sets out the Government's priorities for the 2024 Budget. It explains the approach ...
Brutal government spending cuts that will see the size of the Ministry for Pacific Peoples slashed by 40% will hit Pasifika communities hard, the PSA says. The Ministry has told staff that it is seeking voluntary redundancies, and to redeploy and reassign ...
I live with five people I mostly love, but our different ideas about generosity are starting to really irk me.Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nzDear Hera,This is a bit of a random one but here goes. I’m 22 and work an OK job (OK meaning I get paid ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria Nicholas, Senior Lecturer in Language and Literacy Education, Deakin University Earlier this month, the New South Wales government announced it would roll out programs for gifted students in every public school in the state. This comes amid concerns gifted school ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Rudge, Law lecturer, University of Sydney Massachusetts General Hospital In a world first, we heard last week that US surgeons had transplanted a kidney from a gene-edited pig into a living human. News reports said the procedure was a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Tombs, Howard Paterson Chair of Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago The 5th-century Maskell panel showing Jesus in a loincloth.British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA When Jesus is shown on the cross, he is almost always depicted wearing a loincloth around ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Panizza Allmark, Professor Visual & Cultural Studies, Edith Cowan University Shutterstock When you think about a red object, you might picture a red carpet, or the massive ruby in the Queen’s crown. Indeed, Western monarchies and marketing from brands such ...
COMMENTARY:Jewish Voice for Peace The UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza on Monday — and for the first time since the beginning of the Israeli military’s genocide of Palestinians, the United States abstained rather than vetoing it. Security Council resolutions are legally binding, ...
Asia Pacific Report A New Zealand investigative journalist and author says the US spy system hosted by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) appears to be a controversial intelligence system used in global capture-kill operations. Writing a commentary for RNZ News today, Nicky Hager, author of Secret Power, a 1996 ...
While Nicola Willis wouldn’t give any details on its size, she said a package of tax cuts is definitely still coming in this year’s budget, writes Catherine McGregor in this excerpt from The Bulletin, The Spinoff’s morning news round-up. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here. ...
The Taxpayers’ Union is welcoming the investigation into the Department of Internal Affairs after it was revealed that the Department’s Chief Executive personally reached out to expedite a DJs passport application. Taxpayers’ Union Campaigns ...
Finance minister Nicola Willis delivers her first budget statement, and unwittingly helps Joel MacManus save his relationship. Nicola Willis strode into the Beehive Theatrette. Around me, on the green foldout seats, were the country’s top business and political journalists. They were all here to see her announce the Budget Policy ...
Twenty years ago today, Māori Television launched after much controversy. Jamie Tahana looks back on its survival and impact across two decades. Chad Chambers stepped onto the stage, the brim of his cap casting a shadow across his face. His smile beamed as bright as his white freezing works gumboots, ...
Looks Iike Pedro Sanchez has won some sort of victory in the Spanish general election.
"With more than 11 million votes counted, PSOE are projected to get 129 seats, PP 67, Citizens 54 and Podemos 32. The far-right party Vox received strong support in polling before Sunday’s vote, but that has not materialised into as many votes as they had hoped. The anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-Catalan party is projected to win 23 seats in the Spanish parliament." https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2019/apr/28/spain-election-turnout-increases-as-voters-head-to-polls-for-third-time-in-four-years-live-updates
PP have lost more than half their seats: "The People's Party is a liberal-conservative, Christian-democratic political party in Spain." To the left of the socialists is one of them rainbow alliance sort of things: "Unidos Podemos (English: "United We Can"), re-styled to its female form Unidas Podemos ahead of the 2019 Spanish general election, is a left-wing electoral alliance formed by Podemos, United Left, Equo and other left-wing parties in May 2016". But becoming politically correct was a bad move for them: they lost 29 seats.
Thank God for Mr Sanchez.
The EU elections desperately needed a left wing signal.
I get that Simon Bridges is a right winger and therefore tends to be reflexively punitive towards the poor end of town. But the slushies are for the guards not the inmates. He seems to have inverted his own ideology and needs a dog whistling refresher course. Judith could help with that.
And as someone just pointed out on Morning Report, he seems to have forgotten hair straighteners and curved screens as part of the Joyce/Coleman vanity project at the Ministry for Everything
limos with heated seats…
Yep……..and all that's all just the superficial sort of stuff that gets into the media.
Then there's what I'd call the 'James Casson Effect'. Something that's been allowed to become pervasive in a number of Munstries and Departments, especially over the past decade or so – and it's probably the biggest roadblock (at least so far) to what we've been promised from our current Coalition Government.
We get what we deserve though at times eh? The signs and the record was there in plain sight for Ministers to see
Once was tim Yes it appears Steven Joyce is not preparing Bridges for 'election material this time.
We wonder who 'Scheming Steven Joyce has in his sights' this time to take over National now?
The CGT debacle flushed out some anti-boomer sentiment from younger journalists, but one is doing a reality check on that bias:
"Things look a little different once you zoom in a little, where the idea that boomers are exceptionally propertied starts to get a little murkier. According to the Ministry of Social Development, in the 2013 Census, only 60% of those aged 65-69 (boomers, in other words) were owner-occupiers, compared to nearly 52% of those who were aged 40-44. Compare that to the whopping 82% of those aged 65-69 in 2001 – the preceding Silent Generation – who owned their own homes."
"More discouraging statistics abound when you dig deeper. More than 60% of those aged 65 and over rely on superannuation for all or most of their income, meaning they make at the very most $33,000 a year if they’re married, and $21,000 if they’re living alone. Those over 65 are the most likely age group to have persistent low income, and more likely than other age groups to drop into low income territory. 2013 Census data shows only 8.7% of those aged 65 or over at the time got more than $60,000 a year in income, the largest share (25%) receiving between $15,001 and $20,000." https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/29-04-2019/stop-demonising-the-boomers/
Won't surprise anyone here, but popular delusions abound when younger generations lack the time and effort to discover what's really going on. Generalisations gain currency instead, feeding generational bias, whereas fact-based class analysis shows that the old triadic class structure has fractured, and the current fractured social structure provides a more realistic form of wealth and income grouping.
Bernard Hickey has an interesting take on Jacinda dumping the CGT.
Hickey goes on to highlight the volatile political landscape developing:
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2019/04/18/543088/jacinda-ardern-just-did-a-john-key
Agree, all relevant considerations. Shows just how out of touch rightists in Aotearoa have gotten in recent years, too. That pending demographic swing ought to be the primary design criterion in respect of a support party for the Nats.
Indeed. Opposed to the likes of Trump in the States who took advantage of both the growing demographic and wealth disparity.
Rightist here operate in a culture of moderation, or even passive pragmatism, whereas those over in Trumpland are vociferous in a culture of bigotry, denial, racism, you name it. So I think designing a new rightist party here is a different kettle of fish. How to be sensible, principled and future-oriented? That's what I'd design for, if I was with them. You can immediately see the problem eh? People saying "You're kidding. That's way less than 5%!"
With Labour's growing failure to deliver coupled with the lefts focus on race and identity, it reminded me of what Steve Bannon said.
Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people.
Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it.
These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-democrats-white-people-problem/573901/
So, Joan C. Williams is a professor and the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. She does contemporary class analysis (unusual for a law prof):
"I wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review in which I explained what I (a white, liberal law professor) thought so many of my white, liberal, highly educated peers were failing to see: that middle-income white people had voted for Trump not so much because they liked him (though many did) or because they were racist (though plenty were) but foremost as an expression of class anger. After the essay went viral, I expanded it into a book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America."
"All told, I’ve spent a good deal of the past two years talking with progressives about the broken relationship between elite white people and the white working class. (I use the term working class to refer to Americans with household incomes between the 30th and 80th percentiles. This group, which has median earnings of about $75,000, is also commonly referred to as the “middle class.”) Democrats presently have a unique opportunity to appeal to the working class, because their base is newly open to a populist message: Income inequality has gotten so bad that people across the political spectrum, college-educated and non-college-educated alike, are feeling a serious pinch. Bernie Sanders got 72 percent of the votes from Democrats under 30 in the 2016 primaries in part by decrying the rigged economy. In the past three decades, education costs have nearly tripled at public universities and doubled at private ones; at the same time, too many people with a college degree are settling for jobs that don’t require one."
The Pelosi blather stance hasn't contained any signal that the Dems are learning why their voters have been losing enthusiasm for liberal establishment thinking.
“Why not just wait for the white working class to die off?” asked an audience member at last year’s Berkeley Festival of Ideas. I get this question a lot, and I always reply: “Do you understand now why they voted for Trump? Your attitude is offensive, and Trump is their middle finger.”
Answer: no. Who would expect a Dem to understand anything? They even make our Labour folk here seem relatively clued up.
"An important, largely overlooked 2017 study by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group identified five distinct types of Trump voters. Two of them—Staunch Conservatives and Free Marketeers, who together account for more than half of Trump voters—are unlikely to ever go for Democrats in substantial numbers. (Free Marketeers may not like Trump’s trade wars, but many cheer his gutting of regulations.) The other two big blocs, American Preservationists and Anti-elites, each include about a fifth of Trump voters, and believe that the economy is rigged in favor of the wealthiest Americans. (The final bloc, the Disengaged, accounted for 5 percent of Trump voters.)"
Such sophisticated usage of identity-politics is rare in political analysis. If it were to replace stereotype-driven over-generalisations, there would be a drop in the banality level of blog commentary.
It is difficult when someone abuses you for doing nothing. Like abuse for an absence without any context or understanding just based on their own sad lives – still hurtful and hateful though imo.
After the murders of our Muslim brothers and sisters in Christchurch I put lots of links and articles up to try and create change. A change for the better where hate and supremacy ideas are discarded, where toxic 'whiteness' and toxic 'masculinity' can be put away to allow non-toxic interactions and connections, to allow others into the space normally reserved for non-others. Some have taken that as an attack on them – if they are toxic then yes you need to change, if not then you don't.
I have been shell shocked by the carnage in Sri Lanka and have really struggled to find a way to talk about it. So much pain.
This link tells some of the stories from the horror over there.
I'm sending love to the synagogue victims too – and to all victims of hate murders.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/28/san-diego-synagogue-shooting-rabbi-wounded
A change for the better where hate and supremacy ideas are discarded, where toxic 'whiteness' and toxic 'masculinity' can be put away to allow non-toxic interactions and connections, to allow others into the space normally reserved for non-others. Some have taken that as an attack on them
Absolutely there is no question that Anglo-Europeans have dominated the past 200 years of world history. There is nothing new about this, at all points in our history there always was at least one dominant empire or culture that led the way for a time.
But since the end of WW2 something entirely new has been going on. For most of human history empires endured for centuries or even millenia, but this is no longer true. The American's barely managed 50 years, the Chinese I predict will struggle to match even that … the age of empire is over. It's dying before our eyes. This 'white supremacy' trope you're so obsessed with is already a zombie, the British Empire is long gone, the Americans are like the road runner off the edge of the cliff waiting for gravity to take hold.
There are already more middle class Indians and Chinese than there are white people altogether. Almost 4 billion people have escaped absolute poverty and entered a basic middle class life. Another 4 billion will follow in the next few decades. Twenty years ago places like Panama were desperately undeveloped, now I have on my cellphone pictures taken in a small town supermarket indistinguishable from anything in New Zealand. The world is changing at incredible speed everywhere.
The scientific revolution began with just a relative handful of intellectual giants. People like Newton, Leibniz and Kepler were systemically developing extraordinary ideas at a time when their next door neighbours had barely gotten over burning witches at the stake. For 200 years progress was slow and sporadic, but then from around the middle of the 1800's everything changed. There was a literal explosion of technologies and engineering, resulting in the transformation of human life. The human revolution may have started within a small cultural and elitist confine, but was rapidly extended everywhere.
Now the revolution is global and there is no going back to our old ways. Every nation, every culture has arrived at this unique point in our evolution along their own path. It was often a dark, brutal and tragic journey, but we made it. We are all the children of thousands of generations of men and women who overcame impossible odds to gift to us this moment in time.
Because this is the moment in our story when we cease being children and take up our adult burdens. We are now responsible for our future as a species, and we must now repay our unfathomable debt to the planet who nurtured us thus far. This is the moment when open our inner eyes and seek out the hidden gems in each one of us, when the transcendent connections become visible. This is when we join together as one human race in all of our glorious diversity. There is nothing 9 billion humans cannot achieve.
But this vision will crumble to bitter ashes if we cannot take the first step, we must first learn to trust each other again. Trustworthiness is the foundation of all things, without we will be lost.
Just pretend words from you – oh great gatekeeper of the status quo – self centred feathering of your own toxic nest – yucky
I expressed myself clearly and sincerely in an attempt to repair the chasm between us. I hoped you might have risen to that.
"You just didn't care. You don't give a shit about the victims of these massacres, they were nothing to you if they couldn't be used to energise your anger and resentment."
That is what you said to me yesterday. If you think your insincere, toady comments are going to get me to 'repair' with a sack of shit like you white bollox you are sadly mistaken. I can't stand 'white' supremacists mainly because they are so dim.
a sack if shit like you white bollox…
And yet you shout rascist at any opportunity while also sending messages of support …out the other side of your face ..
You understand the negative feedback loop your conflicting messages create…right?
there is no conflict – bit like when I call you weeze and pooze one two – a play on words if you will, an attempt at wit, biting and direct for sure, to make sure the point is received.
You seem really confused and desperate for friends – maybe stick to what you know – umm lol sorry lol – real world stuff is not your strong point
That you don't recognize the conflict your comments so emphatically portray, is unsurprising…it is why you can flip flop between outright abuse in one comment, then in another seek to signal your humility in offering condolence…
You flat out called others racist on a regular basis…
How are your comments not deeply confused, conflicted…and rank hypocrisy?
flip flop is an interesting one – you may struggle with this but here we go – people can hold ideas in their head that sometimes appear to conflict – this is called dialectical thinking – here's some very basic information for you to learn about this – and I've added the link to an interesting question – see if you can work out why it's relevant one two.
"Dialectical thinking is thinking that approaches insight by reconciling opposites. For example, international peace is a good thing, but nations must protect the interests of citizens — those statements can come into conflict, especially for people who believe in both. The reconciliation may be that nations must cease to be in one world, or it may be that peace is unattainable, or that citizens’ paramount interest is that their nation not go to war, or several other possible statements that allow both statements to be true."
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-dialectical-thinking-and-critical-thinking
All at an elementary level…you clearly have misunderstood…which is another indicator why you apparently can't recognize your own behaviours…
It's not posaible to reconcile your own behaviour if you don't recognize that a pattern exists…
Jekyll and Hyde is more where you're at, mm…
No that isn't why it is relevant to you one two – try again.
Shitwit mardymardy. Never bite shit.
gave it a go trev, to be fair
He wouldn't – MM can spell racist properly
Why did you join in 1-2. You really are a space-filler here, and a contentious one that I don't look to for authentic comment. Have you another home?
And The Alien loves to get a kick in. A bit of argy bargy gets you all excited apparently.
Coming from you, Ghandi one minute,
Dr EvilMini Me the next, that's more than a little hypocritical, but at least I'm consistent. If I want to stab someone in the back, I always aim for the face so they see it coming.Anyway, lesson learned, 12 is spelling ‘racist’ correctly now.
At times, I feel so close and then my hopes get dashed, in such a cold unthinking way …
Change your login to etc'. and wing it for the win
greywarsshark.
well said 1000%
I couldnt have said it better except others besides The Alien are roaming around here trying to tick off us all with their 'kicks'. like;
James.
Ad
Gosman.
Psyco milt.
ect'.
I feel left out! How disappointing!
You know you've made it when you get on some wet blanket's top five list. 🙄
Is coming here just a way to fill your time in The Alien? A personal mental fitness test that you undertake cutting and thrusting at other commenters and their opinions. Just an empty exercise which you consider is thinking about politics.
I am here because I can see that politics and the world is unravelling and most of what we have been doing and thinking over the past century has been wrong, as it has led to this present which finds us not ready to think our way to a reasonable future, but to acknowledge what is the actual present.
So amuse yourself child-mind, you have noticed how I cast around for different approaches to life and going-forward which could be helpful. We have to be adaptive, in finding a broad path to follow that all who are serious about living a better way that is practical and sustainable.
Belief in white supremacy is an unusually banal form of conservatism. Multiculturalism made it irrelevant, globalisation left it behind, so anyone still clinging to that belief is delusional at best, sociopathic at worst.
I recently read a book about cultural elites in America. Only some are white, making a strong case that skin colour is incidental to success (regardless of birth advantage). In The Triple Package: What Really Determines Success (2014), Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld identify three components which, in combination, create remarkable success for groups. Implications for political collaboration are obvious!
A superiority complex is the first. Not, as usually understood, in a person, but shared as a key feature of the identity of the group: a "deeply internalised belief".
The second seems almost contradictory: insecurity. It provides a powerful incentive for group motivation. It "runs deep in every one of America's most successful groups".
The third is impulse control (traditionally part of self-discipline). It's "the ability to resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship or quit instead of persevering at a difficult task."
They document this theory effectively in respect of various groups using social science stats. Also, there are 78 pages of notes prior to the index! "Every one of the premises underlying the theory of the triple package is supported by a well-substantiated and relatively uncontraversial body of empirical evidence." They cite various studies to prove that point.
From the intro: "One of the two authors has written for almost twenty years about successful ethnic minorities all over the world" – that's Amy Chua. "The other has written extensively on how the desire to live in the present has come increasingly to dominate modern Western culture, particularly in America, undermining the country's ability to live for the future." So that's why the US leads the way of climate-change denial.
Globalisation has horrors all its own. The nation state is the unit of political accountability – globalism is a way for feckless politicians to betray their constituents. This is a lot of the reason behind Brexit – high migration into the UK (fully a quarter of the per capita migration into NZ) under EU rules actually causing poorer outcomes for UK citizens.
So where is the accountability for these lousy outcomes? Corporatized governments love to gift cheap migrant labour to corporates in hopes of largess – how are we to contain their sociopathy?
globalism is a way for feckless politicians to betray their constituents.
All forms of governance has it horrors, from the family unit upward. Our present forms of globalisation are manifestly inadequate, but that is only reason to improve them rather than discard them.
It took Europe centuries of bloody strife to get from dozens of tiny duchies and warlord fiefdoms to the nation state entities we have today. You'd better hope we get to a democratically accountable form of world federation much quicker than that.
What saddens me is that we are facing real problems – a backlog of environmental issues that have been left to fester while our self-styled representatives have sold off our dreams to chase the bright elusive butterfly of free market monetarism.
They can't even fess up to having made a total bollocks of everything they've touched, but they're relying on a unified response to these crisies, as if they have some right to our support, these wankers who've sold us out at every opportunity and have been consistently too arrogant to listen when we've tried to help them mitigate their most egregious errors.
Perhaps time for a name change to Resigned Logix, I'm tired of hearing about how the world changes over aeons, the get used to it approach.
I'm tired of hearing about how the world changes over aeons, the get used to it approach.
Maybe it was where I wrote above "The world is changing at incredible speed everywhere."
Was that it?
Hi RL
It is always interesting to read your comments. My take is that nature will take its course. Everything dies before something new comes. We are the Dinosaur's of our millennium and with the current pollution and obvious unwillingness to do something about this, it will not matter what race or skin color or what the exchange rate of the day is. The damage is so much bigger than all of this. The technology to do some serious work exists but ideology, envy, greed etc is not having it. I doubt we have any time left for philosophy 101, let alone for some old fashion political discussion about the pro and cons of human endeavour. The younger generation senses the urgency but unfortunately, with those very old men running large nations, I fear chances are very very slim to get out of this one.
Indeed
I fear chances are very very slim to get out of this one.
Objectively, from a purely materialistic perspective I can only agree with you. You make a case for despair that is hard to argue with.
Some people here persistently misread me, imagining that I argue for nothing but the status quo. Quite the opposite is true; I point to the extraordinary transformation in the material aspects of human life this past 200 years as evidence that radical change is not only possible, but that we are living in it right now.
And that while Western civilisation may have been dominant it this process to date, this is nothing like the apex or end point of the narrative. The next phase is nothing less than the transformation of the human heart across the entire planet; everyone knows this.
As a simple matter of personal faith I choose to believe in the unlimited potential of not only each single one of us, but in the as yet unsuspected, untapped potential when we learn how to spiritually connect collectively.
I'm not talking of the trivial case where like-minded people make easy company with each other, but what happens when people who don't like each other, who clash horribly and contend bitterly not only find ways to trust each other, but are able to put into action that deep mystery in Matthew 5:44 "Love thine enemy". Then we will work what would look like miracles.
This is the pivotal point in our human evolution. A dear friend once said to me that religious history to date was primarily about the development of the sanctified individual, but now we had to consider what the sanctified society might look like. We have only the dimmest of ideas, no more than any random person living in 1820 might grasp the nature of our lives in 2020.
I choose optimism and irrational defiance of the odds because it is the only moral option available to me. All other paths lead to death.
RL, I really admire you for your stance. It wont be our call though, China and India polluting the planet at a rate that is/will be irreversible.
We need to look no further than NZ: at the rubbish loads being thrown into the landscape, drink water being used to bath cows, or sucked out of the ground at a rate that will most likely salinate the water table
Yes, we should fight "the dying of the light" just to make sure that any ever so slight sliver of a chance is taken up to get things turned around.
Thank you for holding the torch.
Thanks for droppin in Foreign Waka, and I follow your reasoning closely. This time you are truly prescient.
"I fear chances are very very slim to get out of this one."
That's how I see it too. The enormous increases in material wealth, comfort, convenience and security, and the enormous global population increase, have brought us collectively to a precipice.
What needs to be done is obvious – we must back up. Wealthy nations need to accept significantly lower standards of living (and spread (gift) their wealth globally), and nations still in the grip of crippling population growth need to find practical and moral ways to curb reproduction rates (a global one child policy might do the trick, if it could be maintained for a couple of generations – this might also precipitate localised collapses, but it would be worth the risk IMHO).
Neither of these changes will happen on the scale and at the pace needed to avoid toppling over the edge of our precipice – that's if they happen at all!
An alternative response involves continuing on the same path, further ramping up the pace of change and propelling ourselves skywards in the somewhat magical hope that humankind will evolve 'wings' before the 'splat'.
Don't want to be a pessimist – I prefer optimism. But we risk outsmarting ourselves if we try to negotiate with gravity.
I'm with RL re faith in our future but have a problem with "we". I acknowledge holism is best, but I see humanity currently like a waka in which the conservative paddlers are trying to take us one way, and the progressive paddlers are pulling us another way.
You could break it down to past-oriented vs future-oriented. Thinking we will get a consensus on trajectory seems currently unrealistic. Best case scenario is more paddlers will switch to heading for the future.
Innate human nature predisposes most folk to conceive the future in terms of the past – we recycle attitudes & values we are attached to. For the first time ever we collectively must engage a traumatic global process, but aversion to accepting the necessity runs deep.
Things will have to get worse to shift those addicted to complacency, conformity, denial, business as usual etc. Ultimately, though, collective resolution must prevail over despair. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, as the old saying goes. Determination will get us there, regardless how much damage gets done in the process.
As regards the thinking of the paddlers, neither left nor right will prevail. Both/and logic will. Agreement on whatever works, forged under increasing pressure, becomes the only way to survive.
Infrequent visitor here, but I appreciate your deep trawling for truth.
Really interesting post Redlogix, (gee it’s got me posting and not just reading here!)
A lot in there that I hadn’t thought of but makes sense, really like the point about the age of empires being over.
Certainly lessons from the past but your right, the future will be different to what we think.
RNZ: "The New Zealand Herald yesterday reported that National leader Simon Bridges was expected to deliver a strong message to his caucus tomorrow that the only path to power was through discipline and unity." https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/387990/simon-bridges-responds-to-national-leadership-and-unity-rumours
"However, Mr Bridges told Morning Report he never said that and the comments he made were in reference to a regional conference he attended in Hamilton."
"I've come from a regional conference in Hamilton, they delivered a really clear message to me in our conservation". If you read the tea-leaves here, he seems to be sending the signal that conservation is just as viable a path to power as discipline & unity. Not many National Party members realise that the Bluegreens are more than a pet poodle, so he's positioning them as a pathway to power ever so subtly… 😎
He prolly needs to praxis saying 'conversation' franko.
The Grauniad, AKA Pravda, AKA Völkischer Beobachter is not merely a dull newspaper, it's a propaganda vehicle, “Assange’s principal media tormentor" and a "collaborator with the secret state."
Part 1 of 3
The night of Assange’s arrest, BBC Newsnight presenter Katie Razzell began in standard ‘impartial’ manner in describing his status: “Out of his hiding place and under arrest”.
‘Hiding place’ is BBC newspeak for ‘political asylum’. The implication was that Julian Assange had hidden in an attempt to evade justice. This was fake news, repeated on the airwaves and across the BBC website.
One of the most notorious examples of Assange-related fake news was the front-page accusation in the Guardian last November that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaigns manager, had met Assange in the embassy three times. No shred of evidence has ever been produced for this claim, which WikiLeaks and Manafort have both vehemently denied, and the story has been widely regarded as fake from virtually the hour of its publication. Luke Harding, the lead journalist on the story, and his editors Paul Johnson and Katharine Viner, have never apologised or retracted the story; nor have they responded to the many challenges about it. As we have previously noted, the Guardian has a disreputable record in publishing nasty, abusive and derogatory pieces about Assange.
A Guardian editorial on the eve of Assange’s expulsion at least stated that Assange should not be extradited to the US: “[He] has shone a light on things that should never have been hidden”. However, John Pilger was scathing of the paper he called “Assange’s principal media tormentor [and] a collaborator with the secret state”, noting that its editorial had “scaled new weasel heights”. He continued: “The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called ‘the greatest scoop of the last 30 years’. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
“With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.”.
The editorial misled its readers on why Assange had sought refuge: “When he first entered the Ecuadorian embassy he was trying to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape and molestation. That was wrong”.
As we saw above, this is a grotesque twisting of the facts. Indeed, the Guardian editorial was steeped in sophistry: “the Assange case is a morally tangled web. He believes in publishing things that should not always be published – this has long been a difficult divide between the Guardian and him”.
Pilger demolished the Guardian’s obfuscation: “These ‘things’ are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.”
http://coldtype.net/Assets19/pdf/ColdType183.May2019.pdf?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_trials_of_julian_assange_coldtype_special_issue_is_now_on_line&utm_term=2019-04-27
She's a hard road working out which news outlet one can trust.
I have it on fairly good authority that The Guardian is the place to go to find out what the establishment wants you, as a 'leftie', to think.
After groping around in the convoluted cess-pit that is the Jackie Walker persecution and the commentary from the Guardian on the issue…https://witchhuntfilm.org/
Somewhat surprised that Kim Hill passed up the opportunity to put Guardian journalist Freedland on a hot griddle.
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018692568/jonathan-freedland-the-man-without-shame-has-tremendous-power
Somewhat surprised that Kim Hill passed up the opportunity to put Guardian journalist Freedland on a hot griddle.
I was not at all surprised. She has a history of remaining silent as Grauniad hacks lie to her face. Did you hear her allow the notorious and discredited Luke Harding to chunter on uninterrupted last year?
She has a long and dishonorable record of allowing U.S. government functionaries to smear and ridicule Julian Assange…..
https://morrisseybreen.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-hatchet-man-speaks-alex-gibney.html
Rosemary,
"trust nothing you hear or see.".
Only trust your own powerful 'women's premonition.'.
I remember when Freedland was the American correspondent on Kim's Nine to Noon. His book when he got back to Britain was about the virtues of the American political system his country could gain from. Nup.
His book when he got back to Britain was about the virtues of the American political system…
A pamphlet then?
Or perhaps a simple flyer?
I got angry listening to the Politics section of RNZ Nine to Noon today when it was revealed the supposed Left spokesman had worked for/ believed in the Rogernomics govt. The guy who tried to tell us the Labour Party preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Why don't you put a pillow over my face and stifle me. Mike Williams being cute about that revolutionary govt before him, though he obviously provided all the details about the Left's objection to Rogernomics for Paul Holmes's intelligent column on the matter. Says EVERYTHING about Labour.
And Trotter who could talk to point being forced out of the main media. Says a lot about RNZ also under Richard his-communist-father-a-much-better-man-than-him.
Why don't you put a pillow over my face and stifle me.
No, no sumsuch, no need for anything that drastic.
Smiles, and maybe even laughter when you close your eyes and picture Mike Williams on a Lime scooter.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12206865
Medialens has consistently, convincingly and exhaustively exposed The Guardian journalists over the past ten years.
Good one.
Hi Marty, A bit of a pedantic question… are you happy about the decision because of the political side of it, i.e. Tamaki is potentially politically toxic?
Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of Tamaki nor fundamentalist anything.
Tamaki has his 'constituents' in prison and as we know there are many ways to skin a cat. By that I mean reaching out and communicating with inmates must take many forms and appearances.
I oppose tamaki, the man up program, toxic christianity, and lying. If prisoners use faith to help them sort stuff out I am all for it – I'm not convinced a person doing tamaki's plan ends up better or worse tbh.
Tamaki has his 'constituents' in prison and as we know there are many ways to skin a cat.
If one of those ways is a "Man Up" programme telling domestic abusers it's their wives' fault for provoking them, it would be better if the cat kept its skin on.
Mighty big 'if' there PM.
What 'if' the program was useful for some inmates and provided support for them to make the changes needed in their life?
I get we aren't supposed to like Tamaki, but we need to be doing something for our growing prison population, and perhaps the 'Bishop' has a way.
Not that much of an "if", really.
Oops.. perhaps not.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/112332984/prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-says-brian-tamaki-going-about-getting-programme-in-prison-the-wrong-way
Well said Kelvin Davis. Brian Tamaki is pretty self-serving with double heapings of pudding. And a bit of Christmas holly on the top for the look of the thing.
Good on Kelvin Davis. And how can you have social services delivered by a dickhead like Tamaki who believes homosexuals are evil?
Man Up sounds like macho bullshit to me.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12093681
Israel destroyed the Notre Dame of Gaza – but there was only silence from the West
by TONY GREENSTEIN, 28 April 2019
Since 2009 53 mosques and churches have been vandalised or set fire to in Israel. As is normally the case with attacks on non-Jews, the Israeli Police have not exerted themselves. Only 9 indictments to date have been filed by the police.
What makes this worse is that there are sections of Israeli society who openly justify the destruction of churches and mosques on religious grounds.
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/04/should-we-set-fire-to-churches-mosques.html
Yes. Like the sections of Israeli society in this story… some appear not to like The Daily Blog too much – that's their loss; good thinks happen there too, such as this. How to stamp out other people's sacred places? With glittering balls and booze, that's how.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2019/04/24/guest-blog-lois-griffiths-the-crusades-have-not-ended/
Thanks for that, JO. It's a pity we never hear Lois Griffiths on RNZ any more. She was "let go" after 2005.
Yesterday we sent this report to media.
Government needs “National NZ Port Strategy”
Sunday, 28 April 2019, 1:10 pm
Press Release: Citizens Environmental Advocacy Centre
Citizens Environmental Advocacy Centre press release- 28- April 2019.
“Government needs “National NZ Port Strategy” so Ports work together not fighting over freight”
A new “National NZ Port Strategy” is needed here in NZ for export of freight.
Today on News hub’s ‘The nation’ show there was a ‘Port discussion’ that was enlightening to us.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/shows/2019/04/exclusive-no-point-investing-in-northport-without-building-rail-link-working-group.html
After watching the panel discussion about the mess our NZ Port issues are about, we now see clearly that the current Government needs a new “National NZ Port Strategy Plan” for NZ Ports to be actively working together instead of fighting over freight, as the current model of ‘independent’ scrapping over freight is damaging both the regions and the loss of residential wellbeing in regions who undercut other Ports to get freight income from capturing ‘lower cost freight’ through their Port because those Ports are now operating at a loss and now forced to sell part of their Port as Napier Port is attempting to do now.
Napier Port are leaving us with a legacy of a residential environmental disaster in their ‘wake.’
History of CEAC meetings with two of our central Port executives; – At both Napier and Gisborne ports.
2016:
Our Committee was invited to the Napier Port boardroom in November 2016 to discuss the massive truck noise and pollution affecting all Napier residents living near the ‘truck network roads’ to and from Napier port, and we sought funding for mitigation for smooth quiet road surfacing and noise barriers and Napier Port said they had no money then.
At that meeting we were sadly advised that sending logs out of NZ was virtually not viable for them, as the Port staff advised us ‘they could not compete with Wellington Port’ who were actually sending their logs out at such a low cost that Napier Port could not afford to compete for freight at those charges.
2011:
In 2011 we brokered a meeting with the Gisborne ‘Eastland Port’ Executives as we were asking them to use rail to move logs to their Port for export rather than using trucks.
The executives also confirmed to us at the meeting that the cost to send each log out of NZ was so low that they made very little money on shipping logs.
So it is now painfully clear now that we need to send a clear message to Government that the whole transportation of our export freight from our NZ Ports is in need of a reset policy.
One that now can offer all forms of ‘land transport’ using rail and road options to make freight costs lower so freight is viable to ship from NZ while giving all Ports adequate funding to offer residential citizens adequate mitigation to lower the transportation effects of road truck freight noise and pollution adversely affecting all those living near busy export road networks to their local port facilities.
Shane Jones, as Regional Development Minister, was also shown on a video clip saying he will be setting up an election policy to change the way the ports in NZ operate “independently” as he said it is not acceptable and needs to change”.
We welcome Shane Jones’ position on this change.
So we seek the labour caucus acceptance to a real Port policy change away from the current conflicting manner that all ports are currently undercutting the charges of freight at the expense of residents and Ports not having any capital to offer residents any mitigation.
All HB/Gisborne residents living near Port bound trucks are now facing a legacy of a residential environmental disaster in their ‘wake’
http://www.scoop.co.nz/?from=top-banner-purotu-1
Business
National weekly rent edges closer to $500
Monday, 29 April 2019, 9:13 am
Press Release: Trademe
New Zealand’s national median weekly hit $495 in March after climbing 5.3 per cent on last year, as every region in the country experienced an annual increase in rent, according to the latest Trade Me Rental Price Index.
Trade Me’s Head of Rentals Aaron Clancy said the country’s rental market was looking very healthy and this was the first time in five months that every region in the country experienced a year-on-year increase. “There’s a high demand for rentals across the country with a significant 28 per cent increase in the number of enquiries compared to March 2018.
Labour wants to impose control over the NZ media
https://twitter.com/avancenz/status/1120933475484176384
No it is not govt policy, Andrea Vance is just stirring, she know's it isn't, and you know it isn't. Hooten of course believes his own spin. Next week Labour will be accused of being flat earthers if a govt MP says they can see for miles and miles.
It may not be Government policy just yet, but it seems it is something the Government is considering.
The media should face the same consequences for lying and inciting violence as MPs do.
How Russia wants to control the internet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKn4CcmNRXM
Have you Russiagate Truthers heard of the Five Eyes? The NSA?
I've heard of 5 eyes and the NSA but I'm yet to fully grasp your point.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/456667-internet-uk-control-vpn/
It’s not easy being a government in the age of the internet and pretending to have power over something that is essentially beyond control, but that doesn’t stop them trying.
The British government is ignoring its previous online mishaps and outlined tough new measures to police the internet, which is all well and good, but all it’s going to do is make Britain a global center for Virtual Private Networks (VPN).
A White Paper last week detailed how the UK wants to bring in a “code of practice” for social networks and internet firms, giving it the power to be able to fine them if they breach it and perhaps even block offending sites.
Freedom of speech confined within the "code of practice". The global influence of China?
Yes Chairman
I would not be at all surprised there.
However I did glace at a program on BBC today about Google power over us and the guy explaining the power of Google takes every letter we place on Google into a large search engine to send to millions to attach their interest of selling to you their items.
The google system uses algorithms to identify what we look at all the time.
Scary eh?
Bet China are using this system all the time too.
Yes, cleangreen. Big Brother is growing and becoming more technologically advanced.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-surveillance-cameras-police-government.html
A week back I thought I was being darkly funny when I suggested outsourcing NZ’s control of the internet to the Chinese.
Naomi Klein was warning of this over a decade ago
American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric are all in on it.
http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
The google system uses algorithms to identify what we look at all the time.
Why I use Brave.
Hell I'd vote for him! If nothing else he has balls. Aussie candidate shares social media post claiming world run by Jewish shapeshifting lizards.
https://www.news.com.au/national/federal-election/federal-election-2019-live-on-the-campaign-trail-on-monday-april-29/live-coverage/4c4e7062bfa29b1ca6994ad40a344028
And after David Icke was banned from Australia too
Of all of the David Icke alternative media view of the world order, he decides to believe the one about Jews being the ones who are descended from "the reptilians" …
Lovetosee the proponents of this cite evidence in Jewish DNA (warning what Jewish DNA, do not have either common Y chromosome or maternal ancestry).
WiFi causing the rising infertility? Short term exposure causes declines in sperm motility and raises their death rates.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=12226105
When it comes to the largest companies in the world like those selling cellphones, it is wise to ignore all PR and go to the science. I expect this study will lead to 'debate' rather than change. But there it is.
I can't find the study referred to in the article (Kumiko Nakata is a bona fide fertility researcher). But there's others.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4074720/
And again
"Cell phone radiation may negatively affect sperm quality in men by decreasing the semen volume, sperm concentration, sperm count, motility, and viability, thus impairing male fertility."
http://www.journal-ina.com/article.asp?issn=2394-2916;year=2018;volume=5;issue=1;spage=1;epage=5;aulast=El-Hamd
Wethebleeple;
Thanks for putting that up as I was about to after I spotted it, so Wifi causes infertility to as we put up a post two years ago that high frequencies from 'smart meters' also cause cancer and other affects.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2644196/
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/387843/secret-green-party-donor-to-match-contributions-up-to-25k
They are correct in saying that.
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute
https://youtu.be/hlfQVvsNLFk
I see some producers are still trying to set Eco Maori up puppets
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
https://youtu.be/GKSRyLdjsPA
Some people are trying to blame me for their actions
Eco Maori worrys about OUR Kaumatua not finding the time to pass there great knowledge of speaking on the Pae Pae and other great Maori culture knowledge on to Te Mokopuna we must never let this knowledge go as that is what some peoples goals to make Maori look so bad that te Mokopuna don't want to have anything to do with OUR GREAT CULTURE .Maori have to do what ever it takes to keep OUR CULTURE Pumping. We must look after our kaumatua and there knowledge there is HEAPS that has already been misplaced or losted if we try hard enough we will find it Kia kaha Whanau.
But historical traumas related to colonisation, cultural and language suppression through assimilation policies along with a move from rural to urban areas, which broke ties with iwi and hapū, had all directly impacted on the length and quality of Māori lives.
"Everything around them was in turmoil," he said.
The flow on effects ares still being felt as well, Edwards said, with some Māori lacking in confidence or ability to fulfil cultural expectations placed on them as they got older, including taking on speaking roles at the marae
But historical traumas related to colonisation, cultural and language suppression through assimilation policies along with a move from rural to urban areas, which broke ties with iwi and hapū, had all directly impacted on the length and
The flow on effects ares still being felt as well, Edwards said, with some Māori lacking in confidence or ability to fulfil cultural expectations placed on them as they got older, including taking on speaking roles at the marae.
Another sobering statistic is the gap between Māori and non-Māori life expectancy, which is about seven years. Life expectancy for Māori females was 77.1 years, when compared to non-Māori females at 83.9 years.
Māori male life expectancy sat at 73 years, with non-Māori men at 80.3 years.
"And I ask, is that a just society, is that a society we can be proud of
Ka kite ano links below P.S I am talking to my WHANAU about this issue of our GREAT kite aronui
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/103759887/tide-turning-regarding-mori-experiences-of-ageing-academic
Some people still under estimate Eco Maori just blind with HATE.
https://youtu.be/xkVMdwPkEyg
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute .
https://youtu.be/Us-TVg40ExM
Kia ora Newshub.
I know why simon didn't get rolled I have hinted at that.
Methanthamean is causing heaps of damage to OUR society why is methamphetamine higher in places with high tangata whenua populations its a big problem in Te tairawhiti as well a North land both with 45 % Maori populations.? ? ? ? ??
We must be vigilant on our boarder security as if we get a bad disease that will cost many billions lost income to NZ.
Its sad all the WARS being waged around the world at the minute I have said that it's the tamariki that suffer the most from WAR fools don't GET IT.
I have come to the conclusion that intelligent people under estimate there mahi + the carbon barons money influenceing society that climate change is a hoaxes that has lead to the under estimate of glaciers melt and other facts about climate change .
The beluga whale is a awesome creature we are there Guardians .
Condolences to the people of Mozambican I did not realise that it was the same country hit six weeks ago by a hurricane OUR African cousin are feeling the brunt of human caused climate change Kia kaha people .
That's good that soft plastic recycling in Auckland has resumed its sad that the rest of the country could not be included but is all about being cost effective.
Condolences to John the African American directors Whanau I like his movies I have seen quite a few of them . Ka kite ano P.S had a bit of pressure to deal with lately like water of a ducks back
Gregory you are barking up the wrong tree who can afford those expensive driving lessons you are taking about another point us how much driving do you actually do on NZ Roads not much at all I say it will be a plane ride on most of your journeys Deflecting the road toll road problems from the people WHOM are responsible for it.
Kia ora The AM Show
Insurance premiums rising it will be a luxury for the wealthy cause by global warming and climate change can you see how the common people are going to suffer this is just one phenomenon .
I have a food allergy if I see kai moana I eat it I just found out why my children did not eat fish when they were younger long story it use to piss me off heaps of fish and only I eat it . the epiepen Pharmac issue I hope Pharmac can come up with a viable solution to the problem. Maybe get someone to come up with a better cheaper design to admit the drugs many ways to solve a problem.
Children living at home till 25 because its to expensive to live in Aotearoa . That's the side effects of having a banker run the country for nine years setting the system up to serve the wealthy it displaces Alot of others and causes a big mess I see this all around the world . ?
We should never stop learning new things when we don't we end up stuck in the PAST like some neanderthal.
I agree with Chris people need to make sure there houseing is safe from the effects of climate change Yea plastic is a big problem for all of Papatuanukue. And I seen it with my own eyes building on land filled in with sand a tsunami or earth quake will make a big mess of these houses . It's cool having a well known person taking about plastic waste issues the Papatuanukue has.
Ka kite ano P.S – – – – –
Ka pai to Hangi Masters NZ in Auckland Rewi to much we need to keep OUR culture pumping and Kai is a big part of our culture Kia kaha .