Open mike 30/04/2025
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6:00 am, April 30th, 2025 - 24 comments
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- Monday 12 May
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The Government’s plans to limit the powers and scope of the Waitangi Tribunal is a disgrace. ...4 days ago - Tribunal review an attack on Te Tiriti o Waitangi
The Government’s plans to limit the powers and scope of the Waitangi Tribunal is a disgrace. ...4 days ago
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Survivors of abuse in state care have a right to feel disappointed and sidelined by the Government. ...4 days ago
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The Green Party is appalled by the Government’s decision to severely underfund financial compensation for survivors of abuse in state care. ...4 days ago
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The Green Party is appalled by the Government’s use of urgency to rewrite the Wildlife Act–without consultation, without an impact statement, and in direct response to a court ruling in favour of protecting wildlife. ...5 days ago
- Release: National cuts women’s pay
National has forced through a law change that will take money out of women’s pockets. ...6 days ago
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Te Pāti Māori stands in staunch and emotional opposition to the Government’s so-called Equal Pay Amendment Bill, calling it a calculated attack on working women and a cruel betrayal of the generations who have fought for pay equity in Aotearoa. “This bill doesn’t just undermine equal pay — it completely ...6 days ago
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In the last 12 months life has only got worse for Māori under Christopher Luxon’s Government. ...6 days ago
- Release: More than one in 10 Pacific people unemployed under National
There are more Pacific people unemployed as the rate increases to a staggering 10.8% under National. ...6 days ago
- Release: Unemployment remains high under National
Job losses remain stubbornly high under National, as their attack on jobs, wages, and women rages on. ...6 days ago
- Govt for the rich is failing the unemployed
The latest job market statistics show that unemployed people are being failed by a Government more focused on punishing the poor than creating jobs. ...6 days ago
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Te Pāti Māori is demanding urgent changes to the draft Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) framework, calling it a dangerous step backwards for Takatāpui, trans, and rainbow rangatahi. “This draft erases Takatāpui voices, ignores whānau diversity, and delays consent education. It’s not just inadequate, it’s unbelievably unsafe” said Te Pāti ...1 week ago
- RSE Draft Erases Rainbow and Takatāpui Youth
Te Pāti Māori is demanding urgent changes to the draft Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) framework, calling it a dangerous step backwards for Takatāpui, trans, and rainbow rangatahi. “This draft erases Takatāpui voices, ignores whānau diversity, and delays consent education. It’s not just inadequate, it’s unbelievably unsafe” said Te Pāti ...1 week ago
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Labour welcomes the Auditor-General’s inquiry into the Government’s school lunches programme. ...1 week ago
- Release: Women will keep being paid less under National
This Government is taking the women’s movement backwards, ensuring women will continue to be paid less into the future. ...1 week ago
- Govt takes workplace equity efforts backwards
The Green Party has called out the Government’s latest attack on workers with the announcement that it is halting all pay equity claims. ...1 week ago
- Release: Questions over Erica Stanford’s personal email use
Erica Stanford has been misusing her personal email address to manage sensitive information relating to Budget and visa changes prior to their public release. ...1 week ago
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Today, Green Party MP Steve Abel has added a new Member’s Bill to the biscuit tin to ensure any product sold in New Zealand meets New Zealand’s animal welfare standards, even if it’s produced overseas. ...1 week ago
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Te Pāti Māori warns that the Government’s Treaty Clause Review represents the most severe erosion of iwi rights in modern legal history. “Luxon's Government is doing what the Treaty Principles Bill failed to do. They are removing every legal reference to Te Tiriti across health, housing, conservation, and child wellbeing ...1 week ago
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This May Day Labour is standing with workers to defend decent jobs and fair pay. ...2 weeks ago
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- Prime Minister congratulates Albanese and Wong
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- New tools to help women navigate online harm
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The Trump factor has massively helped Carney and is significantly helping Albanese.
Luxon, Seymour and Peters are all showing Trump contagion. I hope the Left has realised that by tarring them with the Trump brush there are a lot of easy votes on offer next year (or earlier).
I just hope like hell the Trump saga is making people think more carefully about their political options. Too many NZers have been falling for the lines enunciated by expedient, populist right wing politicians without any understanding of the likely outcomes.
It has been a world-wide trend but hopefully the Americans, by electing Trump as president, have shone the light fully on the folly of such leaders.
If Aussie Labor manage to retain the treasury benches against another expedient, populist right-wing populist, I will have more hope for the future of this planet.
Oops… my last sentence should read: expedient, populist right wing politician.
+1000
It's such a great political moment to build on
Just in case you missed it.
Articles of impeachment issued against Trump! – By a Democrat – let's hope that it gets some traction from the moderate Republicans who are cringing with embarrassment over the past 100 days.
The good news, this is part of more research on (and there is improvement in ways to identify and earlier intervention for treatment) endometriosis.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9l533k9gwo
We are behind Oz.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/558006/we-need-to-take-action-health-experts-urge-endometriosis-reform
https://www.labour.org.nz/news-release_women_package
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/01/australian-researchers-make-world-first-endometriosis-breakthrough
@SPC thank you for those links. That is very interesting.
Though I'm still missing if this knowledge – the link between endometriosis and developing of an auto immune disease later on- can lead to prevention of Rheumatoid Arthritis, other than being put on medication earlier.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/29/phasing-out-fossil-fuels-doomed-to-fail-tony-blair-climate
Blair moves even further to the Right into Trump-like cuckoo land where in the article he promotes unproven carbon capture as a solution to climate change.
….that should have been "into Trump-like cloud cuckoo land…."
Both phrases are fine by me
Although I bet the cuckoos ate offended
I have little time for Blair, but to be fair, he is talking about the "short-term" – even though he doesn't define what the "short-term" is exactly. And there certainly is a political problem for the left of somehow not forcing any short-term sacrifice of getting to net zero on the poorest, while people like Blair himself barely notice the impact. We shouldn't let our dislike of Blair obscure that fact.
He is not offering any solutions, but rather looking for a heroic get out of jail card – carbon capture on the scale needed currently seems as implausible as bringing democracy to the Middle East by invading bits of it. That said, if the technology does turn up, we should insist that the IP goes into the public domain and everybody gets to use it at the lowest possible cost.
He thinks that because total carbon emissions are going up, despite reductions in the "West", that the current course is failing – and is becoming unpopular.
So proposes carbon capture instead – suggesting that AI will somehow enable successful forms of this. Here he is acting as salesman for Starmer's moves in this area.
This is not free.
The EU is on the right course proposing carbon tariffs on trade to incentivise cleaner production for the western market. The tariffs would finance clean tech supply to third world nations etc.
The problem with carbon capture is two fold
Fracked and emptied gas/oil geological structures are likely to just leach CO2 back into waters or the atmosphere within years or decades. Few of those basins are now gas or water proof.
That just means it extends the time to sequester fossil carbon away from the carbon cycle.
Putting it into trees, vegetation or biomass is a waste of time. At best they have a recyclable period measured only in decades. Not the thousands of years required as a minimum to get over the current doubling of accessible carbon in the carbon cycle.
The only way that works is to make it solid carbon or carbonates and store it away from oxygen. Including moving water with its oxygen. Need create some really big swamps for biotic carbon, or put carbonates into other still aerobic conditions in the deep ocean.
Those are the only confirmed and proven carbon sequestration techniques. Other carbon capture techniques to date simply won’t scale to a viable level. That includes ideas like injecting into recent basalt to form carbonates (ie Iceland). Where in the hell did the basalt come from and how soon before you get the heat to burn the carbon capture carbonates off the any location in a basalt magma plume zone….
Be nice if the scientific morons favouring carbon capture would go and do some basic geology.
Well.., even Granny has woken up and started to smell the roses this afternoon with at least 4 stories ( too many for this Octo IT illiterate to link to all of them ) RSB saying it will have to cut OCR and other interventions, The Conversation headlining that “ Austerity is Not the Answer”. Sharon Zollner of ANZ not sounding very happy as business confidence nosedives in April and again the Reserve Bank making moves to buy in huge amount of cash as insurance for a rainy day.
Āt bloody last, there must be a fair bit of quaking in boots if it has come to this. If you’ve lost The Herald Luxon, you’ve lost the country.
You do know it is business time, when it is business time.
Budget month is looming.
Incredible stuff. After tanking the economy with cuts and negativity, Willis is giving us a second helping of the same, expecting a different result? The tax cuts were meant to stimulate but that didn’t work. Instead, the public sector cuts which funded those tax cuts have suppressed business activity and tax take.
The banks and economists once bitten twice shy know that this budget will lead to further contraction of the economy are trying to head that off with calls for further rate cuts.
The grand plan seems to be to stuff NZ so bad the OCR will have to return to 1% and housing speculation will surge once more. It the only language the Nats know.
Worst government in many, many years and the worst finance minister ever.
Just heard Eric Crampton from the far right wing NZ Initiative interview by Heather Stupidity-Allen about the budget and the first thing he offered to cut was interest free student loans.
So the RW idea is to smash eager young people before they've even had a chance to earn rather than tax wealthy boomers properly, or at least means-test them.
Absolute waste of oxygen, these guys.
Crampton is not even a kiwi, he’s from Canada.
Background problem here is the fictional idea that monetary policy is more effective than fiscal policy. This fiction was only ever seen an plausible with an inflating housing bubble going on, this has ended in NZ. The effect of this is the government thinks it can avoid responsibility for causing a recession and interest rate cuts will fix the economy for it. This is unlikely to work but eventually if they persist with austerity the economy will bottom out (at a lower level than otherwise) and automatically drive fiscal policy into deficit, doing what the govt doesnt want to for it.
David Seymour of the hypocrisy party while advocating for small government, local independence, and concentrating on core responsibilities breaks all three rules and meddles with councils by sending a letter to all 65 mayors.
Then blames them for not lapping it up and asking for more.
The man has zero self awareness.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-bulletin/30-04-2025/seymours-truancy-call-to-mayors-met-with-confusion-and-exasperation
all 78 mayors
Dear god. Erica Stanford seems determined to steal whatever childhood our kids have left:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360671193/financial-education-become-compulsory-schools-2027
It also SHOULD be compulsory for MPs.
Especially NACTZ
Whanganui Mayor Andrew Tripe spells it out to Seymour:
So, instead of issuing a directive to councils to take on the truancy work listed above when at the same time councils are commanded to stick to their core work, maybe Seymour should shut up.
It's pure ACT though, ignore underlying inequities as if they don't exist, simpler to govern by command.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/559793/seymour-s-truancy-appeal-contradicts-government-s-own-directive-whanganui-mayor-says