Mostly a fair comment from Abi but here it is true that a comment from Andrew is likely blown up an out to misrepresent his position. For example his wondering about the immigration list including so any cooks. Or his comment regarding the Middle NZ voter. Both fair comments but mangled by the media. A hard row to hoe.
The sad thing is, as soon as ShonKey opens his mouth, he’s lying…. The subject matter is irrelevant….. And his team follow suit, they feel untouchable.
Trump is enthusiastically fact checked. Key not so much. And anyway Key’s words are so ambiguous that he can always deny that that was what he said. Headlines about the previous poll showing 26% but not a whisper about the Morgan poll of 33.5%.
IKR, not a whisper of the Morgan poll. Maybe the televised political debates during next years election should be fact checked too.. now that would prove very interesting for NZ
True.
I heard a rumour of another overheard conversation, this one involving Obama and Key.
Barack told him that the US couldn’t support such a weak candidate as Helen Clark was and why didn’t New Zealand put forward an A-list candidate and Key stand himself?
He thought that Key would easily gain enough support.
Not sure it is true but it sounds much more likely than the idea that HC can get any further than seventh place,
Meantime going by articles on CNBC this morning Duetsche Bank looking/may need bailout (surely that has wide ramifications?).. and US cash 3.4 trillion… debt 34 trillion… and here was i worried about out $1.69bn debt being 70% of our GDP silly me… when do you esteemed standaristas forecast that we will enjoy zero int rates? 🙂
With the exception of a few thousand very powerful people, the entire world’s population, all seven billion of us, are trapped … trapped into a criminal debt creating banking ‘system’ that has taken hundreds of years to perfect and to come to fruition. This ‘system’ results in enslavement and servitude. It creates dreadful unhappiness amongst ordinary decent people and causes wars, debt, starvation, pollution and environmental destruction. It feeds on greed, fear and division. It forces people onto the corporate treadmills of mass mindless production and mass mindless consumption. It uses lies, deception, intimidation and entrapment at all times. It is a system that is so clever and so cunning that most of the world is completely oblivious to its existence. It is a system that allows a few winners at the expense of a huge number of losers. It is a system that considers itself to be unbeatable and indestructible and is now so arrogant that it believes it can control everything and everyone on its terms. It is a system where psychopaths and sociopaths can flourish. And without question the centre of this system, the heart of this global corporate beast is the innocent sounding Square Mile known as the City of London.
Warning ….. many outside Auckland will be shocked at this …..
$720,000 will enable you to buy this in outer Auckland situated on a busy arterial road (But at least a bus stop is directly outside), then you have to build a house that can only have a 45% building coverage or 135m2. http://www.realestate.co.nz/2907125
How much more scope is there for the bubble to inflate before …
Wow!! I’m still shocked about the neighbours, they sold their house in 10 days and whacked an extra $100,000 on the price since they purchased 16 mths ago in Motueka. Relationship breakup reason for selling.
I’ve never seen so many real estate agents and prospective buyers, anyone would have thought there was a huge street party happening with the volume of vehicles in our street.
Huge contrast from when the prior owners sold it last time, huge contrast, property took well over a month to sell last time and there was not much interest in the open homes.
135 m2 is a perfectly good-sized 3-bedroom house, in fact possibly too big. NZ’s need to get out of the habit of thinking that big is better when it comes to houses. We have adopted the same unrealistic and unsustainable attitude as Oz and the US on this.
Agreed, but remember that modern house plans usually include a garage when quoting size, so 130-140m2 is the new 90-100m2. Also, a 2 storey house might be an option.
Maybe, however I think in Oz and US they have minimal occupancy in large houses, compared to NZ where there are large families, extended families and grandparents all in one house.
Also climate dependent, people whom live in areas that have harsh winters or summers are more likely to have a larger house as they spend less time outside than us kiwis.
“in Oz …. they have minimal occupancy in large houses”
That is a significant outcome of the Australian policies of having Capital Gains taxes and means-tested superannuation. Both of these exempt the family home from the calculation. It is very cost-effective, particularly for retired people, to put their money into an excessively large house rather than into investments. Then they can collect the National Super and they don’t have to worry about the Capital Gains tax. You lose ALL the National super if a couple has assets, excluding their house, of about $800,000.
Look at all the “McMansions” in Sydney’s west, and remember this when someone claims that Capital Gains taxes that exclude the family home are good for New Zealand and will bring down house prices. They are talking absolute rubbish.
” large families, extended families and grandparents all in one house. ”
I suspect you are exaggerating the number of these in New Zealand. From the 2013 census results the average household size was only 2.7 people and the highest value, in Mangere, was only 4. That doesn’t really allow very many of the households you describe, does it?
I had a little deeper look at the tables published with the census.
There are about 1.55 million households.
Those with 8 or more usual inhabitants, which would I think be the groups you mention, totalled about 13,800. That is only 0.9%.
Those with 7 usual inhabitants were about 15,500 or another 1%.
Doesn’t seem very many does it?
The biggest family I can remember from my youth had 12 kids still at home so would have been a household of 14. Seemed enormous to a little boy like me from a household of 6. Nowadays 6 would be classed as large I suppose.
“135 m2 is a perfectly good-sized 3-bedroom house”
It was, for a while during the Labour Government of 1972-1975, the maximum sized house you were allowed to build in New Zealand. The then Kirk-led Government decided that no-one should be allowed to build a house that was larger than that and it was all anyone, regardless of family size needed.
The rumour was that Norm had worked out the size of his own house in Kaiapoi, which came to 1500 square feet and used that size as the limit. Nobody deserved a home bigger than his.
I was very unhappy about it at the time. I was having a house built which was about that size but had been consented with a carport. I wanted to change it to a garage but wasn’t allowed to as it would have then exceeded the legal limit.
Ugh, gross. I thought that bit of land was supposed to stay green space.
A bus stop might be directly outside, but it’s an obscenely long ride into town or indeed anywhere really. Not a smart place to be putting in housing developments. Town planning for failure.
future million dollar slums, but then i guess these will be slums paid for by foreign investors that won’t live in these houses so all is good.
and if the rent for these future slums are to high, the taxpayer of nz will be picking up slack and provide the funds for WINZ to dole out the Accomodation Supplement (cause it ain’t a benefit as i was told by a Winz Drone Customer of mine).
hes not that good a writer – often writers articles loaded with straw man arguments poor logic and nonsense. He routinely gets shown up in any comments
he may be right on this one – but i wouldnt trust him as a source
Pretty sure that you saying something is unexplained doesn’t actually mean its unexplained
My first post was a link about Labour calling everything a crisis and my next posts were specific links to crisis that Labour was highlighting followed by links that showed the crisis had been adverted
If the unemployment rate and the GDP growth rate track about where they are or better, it’s going to really narrow the attack line options available to Labour or the Greens.
I won’t be convinced of different until there’s a clear polling preference for Labour and Greens to govern by themselves. Reliance on any others won’t last a term.
Absent a further major economic shock, the best attack line to shift this government is still housing.
I agree, Labour has traction with housing…I mean I wouldn’t be calling it a state of emergency but its still Labours best option for attacking National
Well Maui didn’t seem to get it so I thought I’d be helpful and explain it to him/her
To be fair my point was that Labour have a habit of calling each and everything a crisis and when they do the crisis in question usually sorts itself out which to me suggests there wasn’t a crisis in the first place
No, they don’t call everything a crisis and not all of the problems you blithely linked to with no explanation have been solved (even if they have meandered away from media attention).
Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered clicking on half a dozen links that had no real context, until you later explained your point.
the boy who cried wolf did actually cry wolf when he saw a wolf.
Are you sure that you would recognise a wolf (when any potential wolf is decried by you and your rwnj mates as a sheep) any better than labour because by using this example you are saying that there is a wolf coming, at some point.
They sure are and they are teaching Chinese in African schools flat out. Al Jazeera did a story on it not so long ago. Didn’t realise they were doing the same in South American.
And Japan was buying America and going to own the world in the 80s, the sooner you lot learn the world and its economy is a complex system and stop applying linear abstraction and chicken little analysis the better
This might be old news for some people, but someone was in the right place at the right time with a video camera to record the last moments of Malaysian Airways flight
MH17.
That’s not MH17. Probably a military aircraft. As I recall, the rebels had already shot down a couple of Ukrainian planes prior to killing the civilians. It might one of those incidents or video from somewhere else altogether.
In the video it appears that most of the plane is staying together until it goes out of frame at lowish altitude. Which seems inconsistent with the debris field of MH17 which had major parts of the plane kilometres apart.
On the other hand, the plane appears to have a grey underside and white top and tail, which are consistent with MH17, and unlikely for a military plane…so maybe, maybe not.
Wadhams has visited the Polar Regions more often than any other living scientist – 50 times since he was on the first ship to circumnavigate the Americas in 1970 – and has a uniquely authoritative perspective on the changes they have undergone and where those changes will lead. From his observations and the latest scientific research, he describes how dramatically sea ice has diminished over the past three decades, to the point at which, by the time this book is published, the Arctic may be free of ice for the first time in 10,000 years.
Just found out that Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture has died. What a guy, someone who could change your life, and not many can change so many lives like he did.
I have a couple of his books, and such a clear vision of sustainable living.
What a great legacy to leave behind – the permaculture movement, and all those who are inspired by it and choose the principles in small or large endeavours.
Hands up if you’re appalled by RNZ National’s Susie Ferguson.
She makes Mike Hosking look informed and balanced.
RNZ National, Friday 30 September 2016, 8:40 a.m.
As the U.S.-sponsored Al Qaeda insurrection in Syria continues on its bloody course, the suffering of the Syrian people is immense, and getting worse. At present the people of Aleppo are subjected to massive bombing from not only the U.S.-backed insurrectionists, but also from the Assad regime and its Russian ally. We in the West look on in horror, or feigned horror [1], and are ourselves bombarded, not with barrel bombs or white phosphorus, but with the most appalling, black-hearted, cynical propaganda.
If ever the world needed sound and principled reporting, and intelligent and informed journalists, it is now. Unfortunately for RNZ National listeners, the crisis in Syria seems to be the domain of Susie Ferguson. We have discussed her terrible inadequacies on this forum in the past. [2] Sadly, her performance this morning shows that she has not improved one iota.
She spoke to Kieran Dwyer of UNICEF about the humanitarian catastrophe in Aleppo, especially the toll on children there. Although she does not seem to have any detailed knowledge of the situation, Ferguson made it clear who who she holds responsible for all the carnage. The children are “victims of the regime of Bashar al Assad,” she intoned. She then asked Kieran Dwyer if “cutting off of water is being used as a weapon of war here?”
Speaking from Damascus, Kieran Dwyer made it clear that the situation was the responsibility of not only the Syrian government and Russia, but also the U.S.-backed Al Qaeda insurrectionists: “When you attack such densely urban areas this is what happens… All sides of the conflict bear responsibility.”
A few minutes later, toward the end of the programme, Susie Ferguson chose to read out an email by a fellow Kool Aid drinker: “Bob from Gisborned has contacted us about Aleppo. He writes: Why can’t the government of Syria and its murderous ally Russia be indicted for war crimes?
Ferguson is pretty useless. Espiner is the man for the serious interviews (except when he is crawling up Key’s backside).
I can’t believe Trotter (yet again) attacking Little on Bowalley Road today partly on the basis of a Ferguson interview. Trying to define the centre ground in politics is always going to be difficult. And Trotter also has a go at Little for praising Bill Shorten. While I personally love Corbyn and Sanders, Shorten actually showed a lot of backbone and stuck to his policy guns, was honest and believable and nearly pulled off the unwinnable in the Oz election. Not bad qualities for Little to admire.
Trotter should give Little a break-wait for the policies next year.
Just give him another 6 months. And I think the general belief from the polls is that the Labour/GR block is confidently neck and neck with a quickly declining National. Right?
Yes I am told it’s looking pretty sweet for the Left next year: tide going out on National, country in the mood for change, people realising that Little beats that tiresome liar phoney Key, polling showing that the Lab/Gr/NZF block will have 64 plus MPs
So yeah should be good times on The Standard, yeah
Theres a difference and that difference is that National chose to give those parties a say but they didn’t have to, last election National could have governed with only the Maori Party
So if National had wanted to it could have been a coalition of two but they chose to be inclusive
The other factor is that National is overwhelmingly dominant with MP numbers. They could have another couple of 1-2 MP support parties on side and people would still regard it as a National Government. (Not a “National-led Government.”)
It’s not like a Labour comprising government where 40% of the MPs are from other parties.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard Ferguson ask an open question. She invariably presents her opinion and dares the interviewee to disagree. I guess it’s a step up from the Dipshit Henry ‘Why do you hate babies and want them to die?’ approach.
This one’s for you weka as I’m sure you’ve raised this good point before
“The set up is that Rosa Scott is a surgeon in London, 20-years in the future, trying to save lives when most of the antibiotics are no longer working. Everything else plays out of that set-up and so inevitably the obstacles she faces are related to this world.”
1. Most antibiotics will still work in 20 years.
2. There will be an increased number of strains resistant to existing antibiotics but a normally functioning immune system will still deal with them in most instances.
3. There are new antibacterials being developed.
4. There are increasing numbers of vaccines available and being developed for bacterial and viral agents.
etc etc etc
sure, assuming everything goes according to some plan you have thought of and articulate so convincingly. The world has a way of being a little more unpredictable in reality.
Not sure about the whole doom thing though. Technically a simple cut can theoretically kill someone if it gets infected, but it’s unlikely that in the age of understanding hygiene that this will be an issue.
Just waiting now for the medical lot (and the Science is god lot) to catch up on the fact that a huge number of plants are anti-bacterial, have a very long traditional use for preventing and treating bacterial infection, and we already know how to use them for many of things that antibiotics are currently overused for. We should have been saving the antibiotics for the very serious stuff, instead of squandering it on colds and flus and growing factory chickens. Hopefulll we will get there before it’s too late.
If the graphic’s ideas about things like less surgery are right, then it’s also an opportunity for us to shift to holistic preventative medicine.
Are you trying to censor me with your passé 20th century scientism-nazism?
Please tell me
Who you think I was advising
And what did you think that advice was
Not my problem that you cannot recognise that in the long haul (next 40-50 years), conventional western medicine will not out race the evolution of microbes.
Also, not my problem if you can’t tell the difference between advice for living a healthier more natural more sustainable life, and “medical” advice.
Now, I said, “long haul” but its not even two generations away. My family is ready for it, are you.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and figured that you were being your usual cowardly passive-aggressive self and stopping just short of explicitly stating your bullshit, rather than assuming that you were simply vomiting forth an assortment of irrelevant and unconnected statements with no awareness of context or coherence.
But Shu Lam, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls.
“We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways,” Lam told Nicola Smith from The Telegraph. “One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself.”
As a matter of interest.
How do all the commenters here, who think there is not problem ,expect to house, teachers, nurses, police, cleaners etc with the house prices?
Funnily enough three of the four professions you named all make more then I do (and rightfully so, my job isn’t all that special in the whole scheme of things) yet I still manage to live in a decent house in a decent suburb…
Lovely logic from PR there. It’s the same logic that says that if there are 100 jobs and 150 people, everyone can have a job. What is it with neoliberals’ inability to understand basic physics?
How about people do what people have always done since we were, well, people and that’s move to a better location. Why is it now, specifically, that moving is apparently a bad thing to do?
Pretty sure you have had this explained to you before, so I’m guessing your question is rhetorical and disingenuous, but for others reading there is this.
For most of human history, humans have lived around people they know. We have a whole bunch of social and biological evolutionary traits connected with that that lead to healthy community.
Expecting any or all of the population to be transient creates instability and is not the human norm. How we are experiencing it currently is an invention of neoliberalism, but it pops up periodically (think the Highland Clearances). You are advocating economically forced immigration.
It destroys communities because it removes the people with the long memory of how things work, or the people with specialist non-commercial knowledge. Community groups function better when they are made up of people who know each other over the long term.
It harms families because it forces people to either move away from their loved ones and their essential support or stay where they belong and be poor.
Telling people to move in response to the housing crisis is like telling people move in a famine. Which makes sense if you have such an emergency and are desperate, except this famine is created by the investor/political class and is completely preventable and resolvable, and moving somewhere else just spreads the famine because the underlying causes aren’t being addressed.
It destroys communities because it removes the people with the long memory of how things work, or the people with specialist non-commercial knowledge. Community groups function better when they are made up of people who know each other over the long term.
– What load a semi-romantic bollix, might as well add in the gold old days for good measure
It harms families because it forces people to either move away from their loved ones and their essential support or stay where they belong and be poor.
– how about helps families because they can move somewhere cheaper to live
You make it sound as if Auckland is NZ and vice versa, it isn’t
In other words you’ve got nothing. Try making an actual argument rather than pointing and you’re wrong.
Eg The nuclear family that moves away from its extended support base is better off financially for a while until it needs things you can’t buy. Then what?
No idea what your last sentence means and it’s certainly not what I said or think.
Your argument is based on emotional clap trap and pseudo-science
How do you explain the amount of trade and travel and immigration and yes even conquests between human populations that have happened since man first became man
“Your argument is based on emotional clap trap and pseudo-science”
Still can’t address the actual points 🙄 Go on then, point specficially to the pseudo-science. If you’re going to resort to insults, let’s at least see if they have any meaning.
How do you explain the amount of trade and travel and immigration and yes even conquests between human populations that have happened since man first became man
There are lots of ways to explain those PR, but what does that have to do with my assertion that forcing economic immigration on people harms communities and families?
Here’s a clue, NZ was colonised in part by the downstream effects of the Highland Clearances. If you think that the Clearances didn’t negatively affect families and communities in Western Scotland, I’d really like to hear your argument.
I’m guessing that if you own your own home you’ve done so for a while, and bought when prices were on par with incomes?
Your logic is the same as Bennett or Key saying if they can do it everyone can do it. That’s the trouble with right-wing thinking. There’s an assumption that everyone’s the same.
So you bought during the slump around 2008. Lucky bugger. Now your mates in the parasite rentier and banker class have gobbled up the market, with the Nats standing on the sidelines and drinking champagne, as thousands of kiwis are locked out of ownership, forced out of their communities, and kicked onto the streets.
Congratulations on your financial success & moral failure.
Geez I am glad weka that was not the view a 100 thousand or so years ago or we would never have got out of Africa, human movement is a factor of human history from year dot, what a load of idealogical, Theoretical nonsense that simply does not stack up to the facts, saying that such thinking is case in point for most left wing thought, nonsense
Poxish Rouge, despicable troll – what do you know about the effects of vagrancy? I can tell you that the school-kids who move through 27 different schools by the time they get to the 5th form (Year 11) are pretty well doomed to educational failure. Nor can any of the schools (or rather their teachers whom you trolls like to blame) be fairly accused. You have no idea, do you? And here we are now speculating about the possible price of a house? This is the sort of diversion that Poxish Rouge loves to cause. Go jump into your log-burner.
they all gonna homebirth, and if it goes pearshaped either way, no biggie in the olden gooden days not all women or children survived childbirth, get a second model and try again
they gonna all home teach – abstinence only and creative design – cause to much science is no good for anyone
they gonna have all their own neighborhood watches – guns mate, guns.
they all gonna clean their own offices, public toilets, restaurants, cafes etc etc or else simply not leave home (those that have one)
they all gonna pass buckets should a house catch fire – you know just like in the gooden olden golden days.
cause thus spoke the libertarian god of fuckwittery we don’t need no stink’n state, no stink’n socialism, no stink’n community minded good-doery and all that shit. We are self reliant, full of personal responsibility and if your shit gets stolen, burned or other wise damaged that might be good business for me 🙂
Mind, they – the owner of empty houses and unused land could just import some slaves and call them “skill- migrants” who will be housed for food n water rations twice daily. Clothes are optional, depending if the slave is a 10 on the scale of Trump.
But anyways, you will not get any answer from our believers. Cause you see there is no housing crisis, there are no homeless people, there are just lazy ‘ useless’ kiwis that made bad choices. And Ms. Bennett is only buying a Motel cause she is bored doing nothing cause there is no Housing Crisis and there are no homeless. I think she is trying to re-invent herself as an interior designer or some such thing.
Lynn, a few things broken since the upgrade. The name and email fields no longer remember my details (mac Firefox and iphone Safari). We’ve had that happen before, can’t remember if the fix is your end or ours.
Craig naive I reckon while that Williams fellow seems to do just nasty things in collaboration with Whaleoil. The Taxpayers Union? Nasty arm of the undermine Opposition scheme.
Well I got that wrong. Not that it matters really either way-Williams hardly comes out of the case with his reputation enhanced and Craig was already on the political scrapheap. I wonder if he will appeal?
“It’s the latest revelation in a story survivors say has haunted them for decades: the money behind the Sixties Scoop.
The scoop, as it is called, refers to the era from the 1960s to the 1980s, when child welfare authorities scooped up Indigenous children and adopted them out to non-Indigenous families..”
It serves to confirm for me that the average Kiwi punter is pretty ignorant and biased. While Craig deserved to pay a price for being so foolish but he didn’t deserve to have to pay out $1.4 million to a slimy, dishonest, lying, creepy toad such as Jordan Williams.
So you agree that Teina Pora shouldn’t have got as much money either because he had criminal convictions, was a gang prospect and confessed only to get the reward money?
This “verdict” is more mob rule than anything remotely like justice. It is a “verdict” of comparable calibre to the O.J. Simpson “verdict” in 1995 and the George Zimmerman “verdict” in 2013.
In what possible universe do you dwell that makes it “fair” for a demonstrated liar and scoundrel to have been ruled to have been defamed by one of his victims?
I think you’ll find the amount is so large due to the fact that Craig has been found guilty of defamation and more importantly the defamation was in the form of a document sent to every household in NZ.
I also don’t know what the ‘average kiwi punter’ has to do with it ?
Not really Garibaldi.
Its good to be reminded they are members of the same slimy, dishonest, lying, creepy R.W. gang as the toad, J Williams. If you look at the smiling picture of J Williams on the web sites, it is exactly what you would expect a human version of a toad would look like. Quite uncanny. 🙂
Tony Ryall, just been appointed chair of Transpower by Bill English, slipping under the headlines quietly today.
Well done Tony who recently retired from National as health minister, after many years of living off the taxpayer and has been installed By National to chair a power company. Good stuff, expect power costs to increase in an area near you soon.
Oh Richard have a closer look TP, they have just spit of their renewable side, both high in debt and at a cost of about 75-85 million, Dene McKenize of ODT fame wanked on about it last Saturday I think, cant link, to inept, but goggle be your friend, as Draco says.
I’m surprised nobody has made mention of the Silver Scrolls 2016 held last night. Moana Maniapoto was inducted into the NZ Music Hall of Fame and gave the most fantastic speech imaginable. It is begins at 13:18 mins into this vid on RNZ.
It’s the time on the video where Moana begins her speech, although I recommend watching the whole 34 minutes. In fact the whole event is available to watch here at RNZ . Begins properly 3 hours and 18 minutes into the 6 hour coverage.
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Bryce Edwards writes – Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has surprised everyone with his ruthlessness in sacking two of his ministers from their crucial portfolios. Removing ministers for poor performance after only five months in the job just doesn’t normally happen in politics. That’s refreshing and will be extremely ...
TL;DR: These are the six things that stood out to me in news and commentary on Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the two days to 6:06am on Thursday, April 25:Politics: PM Christopher Luxon has set up a dual standard for ministerial competence by demoting two National Cabinet ministers while leaving also-struggling ...
Hi,Today I mainly want to share some of your thoughts about the recent piece I wrote about success and failure, and the forces that seemingly guide our lives. But first, a quick bit of housekeeping: I am doing a Webworm popup in Los Angeles on Saturday May 11 at 2pm. ...
It is hard to see what Melissa Lee might have done to “save” the media. National went into the election with no public media policy and appears not to have developed one subsequently. Lee claimed that she had prepared a policy paper before the election but it had been decided ...
Open access notablesIce acceleration and rotation in the Greenland Ice Sheet interior in recent decades, Løkkegaard et al., Communications Earth & Environment:In the past two decades, mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated, partly due to the speedup of glaciers. However, uncertainty in speed derived from satellite products ...
Buzz from the Beehive A statement from Children’s Minister Karen Chhour – yet to be posted on the Government’s official website – arrived in Point of Order’s email in-tray last night. It welcomes the High Court ruling on whether the Waitangi Tribunal can demand she appear before it. It does ...
Mr Bombastic:Ironically, the media the academic experts wanted is, in many ways, the media they got. In place of the tyrannical editors of yesteryear, advancing without fear or favour the interests of the ruling class; the New Zealand news media of today boasts a troop of enlightened journalists dedicated to ...
It's hard times try to make a livingYou wake up every morning in the unforgivingOut there somewhere in the cityThere's people living lives without mercy or pityI feel good, yeah I'm feeling fineI feel better then I have for the longest timeI think these pills have been good for meI ...
In 1974, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in United States v. Nixon, finding that the President was not a King, but was subject to the law and was required to turn over the evidence of his wrongdoing to the courts. It was a landmark decision for the rule ...
Every day now just seems to bring in more fresh meat for the grinder.In their relentlessly ideological drive to cut back on the “excessive bloat” (as they see it) of the previous Labour-led government, on the mountains of evidence accumulated in such a short period of time do not ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Megan Valére SosouMarket gardening site of the Itchèléré de Itagui agricultural cooperative in Dassa-Zoumè (Image credit: Megan Valère Sossou) For the residents of Dassa-Zoumè, a city in the West African country of Benin, choosing between drinking water and having enough ...
Buzz from the Beehive Melissa Lee – as may be discerned from the screenshot above – has not been demoted for doing something seriously wrong as Minister of ...
Morning in London Mother hugs beloved daughter outside the converted shoe factory in which she is living.Afternoon in London Travelling writer takes himself and his wrist down to A&E, just to be sure. Read more ...
Mike Grimshaw writes – The recent announcement of the University Advisory Group, chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, makes very clear where the Government’s focus and priorities lie. The remit of the Advisory Group is that Group members will consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector including: ...
Eric Crampton writes – The Reserve Bank of New Zealand desperately wants to find reasons to have workstreams in climate change. It makes little sense. They’ve run another stress test on the banks looking to see if they could find a prudential regulation case. They couldn’t. They ...
Rob MacCullough writes – Pundits from the left and the right are arguing that National’s Fast Track Bill that is designed to speed up infrastructure decisions could end up becoming mired in a cesspool of corruption. Political commentator ...
Looking at the headlines this morning it’s hard to feel anything other than pessimistic about the future of humanity.Note that I’m not speaking about the future of mankind, but the survival of our humanity. The values that we believe in seem to be ebbing away, by the day.Perhaps every generation ...
Swabbing mixed breed baby chicks to test for avian influenzaUh oh. Bird flu – often deadly to humans – is not only being transmitted from infected birds to dairy cows, but is now travelling between dairy cows. As of last Friday, Bloomberg News reports, there were 32 American dairy herds ...
On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a ...
What is it with the mining industry? Its not enough for them to pillage the earth - they apparently can't even be bothered getting resource consent to do so: The proponent behind a major mine near the Clutha River had already been undertaking activity in the area without a ...
Photo # 1 I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to housing, as described here two years ago by copying and pasting from The ConversationWhat Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed land, ...
Buzz from the Beehive Reactions to news of the government’s readiness to make urgent changes to “the resource management system” through a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) suggest a balanced approach is being taken. The Taxpayers’ Union says the proposed changes don’t go far enough. Greenpeace says ...
I’m starting to wonder if Anna Burns-Francis might be the best political interviewer we’ve got. That might sound unlikely to you, it came as a bit of a surprise to me.Jack Tame can be excellent, but has some pretty average days. I like Rebecca Wright on Newshub, she asks good ...
Chris Trotter writes – Willie Jackson is said to be planning a “media summit” to discuss “the state of the media and how to protect Fourth Estate Journalism”. Not only does the Editor of The Daily Blog, Martyn Bradbury, think this is a good idea, but he has also ...
Graeme Edgeler writes – This morning [April 21], the Wellington High Court is hearing a judicial review brought by Hon. Karen Chhour, the Minister for Children, against a decision of the Waitangi Tribunal. This is unusual, judicial reviews are much more likely to brought against ministers, rather than ...
Both of Parliament’s watchdogs have now ripped into the Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMy pick of the six newsey things to know from Aotearoa’s political economy and beyond on the morning of Tuesday, April 23 are:The Lead: The Auditor General,John Ryan, has joined the ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Sarah SpengemanPeople wait to board an electric bus in Pune, India. (Image credit: courtesy of ITDP) Public transportation riders in Pune, India, love the city’s new electric buses so much they will actually skip an older diesel bus that ...
The infrastructure industry yesterday issued a “hurry up” message to the Government, telling it to get cracking on developing a pipeline of infrastructure projects.The hiatus around the change of Government has seen some major projects cancelled and others delayed, and there is uncertainty about what will happen with the new ...
Hi,Over the weekend I revisited a podcast I really adore, Dead Eyes. It’s about a guy who got fired from Band of Brothers over two decades ago because Tom Hanks said he had “dead eyes”.If you don’t recall — 2001’s Band of Brothers was part of the emerging trend of ...
Buzz from the Beehive The 180 or so recipients of letters from the Government telling them how to submit infrastructure projects for “fast track” consideration includes some whose project applications previously have been rejected by the courts. News media were quick to feature these in their reports after RMA Reform Minister Chris ...
It would not be a desirable way to start your holiday by breaking your back, your head, or your wrist, but on our first hour in Singapore I gave it a try.We were chatting, last week, before we started a meeting of Hazel’s Enviro Trust, about the things that can ...
Calling all journalists, academics, planners, lawyers, political activists, environmentalists, and other members of the public who believe that the relationships between vested interests and politicians need to be scrutinised. We need to work together to make sure that the new Fast-Track Approvals Bill – currently being pushed through by the ...
Feel worried. Shane Jones and a couple of his Cabinet colleagues are about to be granted the power to override any and all objections to projects like dams, mines, roads etc even if: said projects will harm biodiversity, increase global warming and cause other environmental harms, and even if ...
Bryce Edwards writes- The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. ...
Michael Bassett writes – If you think there is a move afoot by the radical Maori fringe of New Zealand society to create a parallel system of government to the one that we elect at our triennial elections, you aren’t wrong. Over the last few days we have ...
Without a corresponding drop in interest rates, it’s doubtful any changes to the CCCFA will unleash a massive rush of home buyers. Photo: Lynn GrievesonTL;DR: The six things that stood out to me in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Monday, April 22 included:The Government making a ...
Sunday was a lazy day. I started watching Jack Tame on Q&A, the interviews are usually good for something to write about. Saying the things that the politicians won’t, but are quite possibly thinking. Things that are true and need to be extracted from between the lines.As you might know ...
In our Weekly Roundup last week we covered news from Auckland Transport that the WX1 Western Express is going to get an upgrade next year with double decker electric buses. As part of the announcement, AT also said “Since we introduced the WX1 Western Express last November we have seen ...
TL;DR: The six key events to watch in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy in the week to April 29 include:PM Christopher Luxon is scheduled to hold a post-Cabinet news conference at 4 pm today. Stats NZ releases its statutory report on Census 2023 tomorrow.Finance Minister Nicola Willis delivers a pre-Budget speech at ...
A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 14, 2024 thru Sat, April 20, 2024. Story of the week Our story of the week hinges on these words from the abstract of a fresh academic ...
The ability of the private sector to quickly establish major new projects making use of the urban and natural environment is to be supercharged by the new National-led Government. Yesterday it introduced to Parliament one of its most significant reforms, the Fast Track Approvals Bill. The Government says this will ...
This is a column to say thank you. So many of have been in touch since Mum died to say so many kind and thoughtful things. You’re wonderful, all of you. You’ve asked how we’re doing, how Dad’s doing. A little more realisation each day, of the irretrievable finality of ...
Identifying the engine type in your car is crucial for various reasons, including maintenance, repairs, and performance upgrades. Knowing the specific engine model allows you to access detailed technical information, locate compatible parts, and make informed decisions about modifications. This comprehensive guide will provide you with a step-by-step approach to ...
Introduction: The allure of racing is undeniable. The thrill of speed, the roar of engines, and the exhilaration of competition all contribute to the allure of this adrenaline-driven sport. For those who yearn to experience the pinnacle of racing, becoming a race car driver is the ultimate dream. However, the ...
Introduction Automobiles have become ubiquitous in modern society, serving as a primary mode of transportation and a symbol of economic growth and personal mobility. With countless vehicles traversing roads and highways worldwide, it begs the question: how many cars are there in the world? Determining the precise number is a ...
Maintaining a safe and reliable vehicle requires regular inspections. Whether it’s a routine maintenance checkup or a safety inspection, knowing how long the process will take can help you plan your day accordingly. This article delves into the factors that influence the duration of a car inspection and provides an ...
Mazda Motor Corporation, commonly known as Mazda, is a Japanese multinational automaker headquartered in Fuchu, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. The company was founded in 1920 as the Toyo Cork Kogyo Co., Ltd., and began producing vehicles in 1931. Mazda is primarily known for its production of passenger cars, but ...
Your car battery is an essential component that provides power to start your engine, operate your electrical systems, and store energy. Over time, batteries can weaken and lose their ability to hold a charge, which can lead to starting problems, power failures, and other issues. Replacing your battery before it ...
In most states, you cannot register a car without a valid driver’s license. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. Exceptions to the RuleIf you are under 18 years old: In some states, you can register a car in your name even if you do not ...
Mazda, a Japanese automotive manufacturer with a rich history of innovation and engineering excellence, has emerged as a formidable player in the global car market. Known for its reputation of producing high-quality, fuel-efficient, and driver-oriented vehicles, Mazda has consistently garnered praise from industry experts and consumers alike. In this article, ...
Te Pāti Māori are demanding the New Zealand Government support an international independent investigation into mass graves that have been uncovered at two hospitals on the Gaza strip, following weeks of assault by Israeli troops. Among the 392 bodies that have been recovered, are children and elderly civilians. Many of ...
Our two-tiered system for veterans’ support is out of step with our closest partners, and all parties in Parliament should work together to fix it, Labour veterans’ affairs spokesperson Greg O’Connor said. ...
Stripping two Ministers of their portfolios just six months into the job shows Christopher Luxon’s management style is lacking, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said. ...
Tonight’s court decision to overturn the summons of the Children’s Minister has enabled the Crown to continue making decisions about Māori without evidence, says Te Pāti Māori spokesperson for Children, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi. “The judicial system has this evening told the nation that this government can do whatever they want when ...
It appears Nicola Willis is about to pull the rug out from under the feet of local communities still dealing with the aftermath of last year’s severe weather, and local councils relying on funding to build back from these disasters. ...
The Government is making short-sighted changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA) that will take away environmental protection in favour of short-term profits, Labour’s environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said today. ...
Labour welcomes the release of the report into the North Island weather events and looks forward to working with the Government to ensure that New Zealand is as prepared as it can be for the next natural disaster. ...
The Labour Party has called for the New Zealand Government to recognise Palestine, as a material step towards progressing the two-State solution needed to achieve a lasting peace in the region. ...
Some of our country’s most important work, stopping the sexual exploitation of children and violent extremism could go along with staff on the frontline at ports and airports. ...
The Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill will give projects such as new coal mines a ‘get out of jail free’ card to wreak havoc on the environment, Labour Leader Chris Hipkins said today. ...
The government's decision to reintroduce Three Strikes is a destructive and ineffective piece of law-making that will only exacerbate an inherently biased and racist criminal justice system, said Te Pāti Māori Justice Spokesperson, Tākuta Ferris, today. During the time Three Strikes was in place in Aotearoa, Māori and Pasifika received ...
Cuts to frontline hospital staff are not only a broken election promise, it shows the reckless tax cuts have well and truly hit the frontline of the health system, says Labour Health spokesperson Ayesha Verrall. ...
The Green Party has joined the call for public submissions on the fast-track legislation to be extended after the Ombudsman forced the Government to release the list of organisations invited to apply just hours before submissions close. ...
New Zealand’s good work at reducing climate emissions for three years in a row will be undone by the National government’s lack of ambition and scrapping programmes that were making a difference, Labour Party climate spokesperson Megan Woods said today. ...
More essential jobs could be on the chopping block, this time Ministry of Education staff on the school lunches team are set to find out whether they're in line to lose their jobs. ...
Te Pāti Māori is disgusted at the confirmation that hundreds are set to lose their jobs at Oranga Tamariki, and the disestablishment of the Treaty Response Unit. “This act of absolute carelessness and out of touch decision making is committing tamariki to state abuse.” Said Te Pāti Māori Oranga Tamariki ...
The Government is trying to bring in a law that will allow Ministers to cut corners and kill off native species, Labour environment spokesperson Rachel Brooking said. ...
Cancelling urgently needed new Cook Strait ferries and hiking the cost of public transport for many Kiwis so that National can announce the prospect of another tunnel for Wellington is not making good choices, Labour Transport Spokesperson Tangi Utikere said. ...
A laundry list of additional costs for Tāmaki Makarau Auckland shows the Minister for the city is not delivering for the people who live there, says Labour Auckland Issues spokesperson Shanan Halbert. ...
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi, and Mema Paremata mō Tāmaki-Makaurau, Takutai Tarsh Kemp, will travel to the Gold Coast to strengthen ties with Māori in Australia next week (15-21 April). The visit, in the lead-up to the 9th Australian National Kapa haka Festival, will be an opportunity for both ...
The Green Party has today launched a step-by-step guide to help New Zealanders make their voice heard on the Government’s democracy dodging and anti-environment fast track legislation. ...
The National Government’s proposed changes to the Residential Tenancies Act will mean tenants can be turfed from their homes by landlords with little notice, Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. ...
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is calling on all parties to support a common-sense change that’s great for the planet and great for consumers after her member’s bill was drawn from the ballot today. ...
A significant milestone has been reached in the fight to strike an anti-Pasifika and unfair law from the country’s books after Teanau Tuiono’s members’ bill passed its first reading. ...
New Zealand has today missed the opportunity to uphold the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, says James Shaw after his member’s bill was voted down in its first reading. ...
Today’s advice from the Climate Change Commission paints a sobering reality of the challenge we face in combating climate change, especially in light of recent Government policy announcements. ...
Hon Paula Bennett has been appointed as member and chair of the Pharmac board, Associate Health Minister David Seymour announced today. "Pharmac is a critical part of New Zealand's health system and plays a significant role in ensuring that Kiwis have the best possible access to medicines,” says Mr Seymour. ...
Hundreds of New Zealand families affected by Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) will benefit from a new Government focus on prevention and treatment, says Health Minister Dr Shane Reti. “We know FASD is a leading cause of preventable intellectual and neurodevelopmental disability in New Zealand,” Dr Reti says. “Every day, ...
Regional Development Minister Shane Jones today attended the official opening of Kaikohe’s new $14.7 million sports complex. “The completion of the Kaikohe Multi Sports Complex is a fantastic achievement for the Far North,” Mr Jones says. “This facility not only fulfils a long-held dream for local athletes, but also creates ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ engagements in Türkiye this week underlined the importance of diplomacy to meet growing global challenges. “Returning to the Gallipoli Peninsula to represent New Zealand at Anzac commemorations was a sombre reminder of the critical importance of diplomacy for de-escalating conflicts and easing tensions,” Mr Peters ...
Ambassador Millar, Burgemeester, Vandepitte, Excellencies, military representatives, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen – good morning and welcome to this sacred Anzac Day dawn service. It is an honour to be here on behalf of the Government and people of New Zealand at Buttes New British Cemetery, Polygon Wood – a deeply ...
Distinguished guests - It is an honour to return once again to this site which, as the resting place for so many of our war-dead, has become a sacred place for generations of New Zealanders. Our presence here and at the other special spaces of Gallipoli is made ...
Mai ia tawhiti pamamao, te moana nui a Kiwa, kua tae whakaiti mai matou, ki to koutou papa whenua. No koutou te tapuwae, no matou te tapuwae, kua honoa pumautia. Ko nga toa kua hinga nei, o te Waipounamu, o te Ika a Maui, he okioki tahi me o ...
Paul Goldsmith will take on responsibility for the Media and Communications portfolio, while Louise Upston will pick up the Disability Issues portfolio, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced today. “Our Government is relentlessly focused on getting New Zealand back on track. As issues change in prominence, I plan to adjust Ministerial ...
Recreational catch limits will be reduced in areas of Fiordland and the Chatham Islands to help keep those fisheries healthy and sustainable, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones says. The lower recreational daily catch limits for a range of finfish and shellfish species caught in the Fiordland Marine Area and ...
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed an important milestone in New Zealand’s hydrogen future, with the opening of the country’s first network of hydrogen refuelling stations in Wiri. “I want to congratulate the team at Hiringa Energy and its partners K one W one (K1W1), Mitsui & Co New Zealand ...
The coalition Government is delivering on its commitment to improve resource management laws and give greater certainty to consent applicants, with a Bill to amend the Resource Management Act (RMA) expected to be introduced to Parliament next month. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop has today outlined the first RMA Amendment ...
Overseas models for regulating the oil and gas sector, including their decommissioning regimes, are being carefully scrutinised as a potential template for New Zealand’s own sector, Resources Minister Shane Jones says. The Coalition Government is focused on rebuilding investor confidence in New Zealand’s energy sector as it looks to strengthen ...
Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell has today released the Report of the Government Inquiry into the response to the North Island Severe Weather Events. “The report shows that New Zealand’s emergency management system is not fit-for-purpose and there are some significant gaps we need to address,” Mr Mitchell ...
Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is today travelling to Europe where he’ll update the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Government’s work to restore law and order. “Attending the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva provides us with an opportunity to present New Zealand’s human rights progress, priorities, and challenges, while ...
Associate Agriculture Minister, Mark Patterson, formally reopened the world’s largest wool processing facility today in Awatoto, Napier, following a $50 million rebuild and refurbishment project. “The reopening of this facility will significantly lift the economic opportunities available to New Zealand’s wool sector, which already accounts for 20 per cent of ...
Hon Andrew Bayly, Minister for Small Business and Manufacturing At the Southland Otago Regional Engineering Collective (SOREC) Summit, 18 April, Dunedin Ngā mihi nui, Ko Andrew Bayly aho, Ko Whanganui aho Good Afternoon and thank you for inviting me to open your summit today. I am delighted ...
The Government is delivering on its commitment to bring back the Three Strikes legislation, Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee announced today. “Our Government is committed to restoring law and order and enforcing appropriate consequences on criminals. We are making it clear that repeat serious violent or sexual offending is not ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has today announced four new diplomatic appointments for New Zealand’s overseas missions. “Our diplomats have a vital role in maintaining and protecting New Zealand’s interests around the world,” Mr Peters says. “I am pleased to announce the appointment of these senior diplomats from the ...
New Zealand is contributing NZ$7 million to support communities affected by severe food insecurity and other urgent humanitarian needs in Ethiopia and Somalia, Foreign Minister Rt Hon Winston Peters announced today. “Over 21 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance across Ethiopia, with a further 6.9 million people ...
Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith is congratulating Mataaho Collective for winning the Golden Lion for best participant in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. "Congratulations to the Mataaho Collective for winning one of the world's most prestigious art prizes at the Venice Biennale. “It is good ...
The Government is reforming financial services to improve access to home loans and other lending, and strengthen customer protections, Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Andrew Bayly and Housing Minister Chris Bishop announced today. “Our coalition Government is committed to rebuilding the economy and making life simpler by cutting red tape. We are ...
“China remains a strong commercial opportunity for Kiwi exporters as Chinese businesses and consumers continue to value our high-quality safe produce,” Trade and Agriculture Minister Todd McClay says. Mr McClay has returned to New Zealand following visits to Beijing, Harbin and Shanghai where he met ministers, governors and mayors and engaged in trade and agricultural events with the New ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has completed a successful trip to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines, deepening relationships and capitalising on opportunities. Mr Luxon was accompanied by a business delegation and says the choice of countries represents the priority the New Zealand Government places on South East Asia, and our relationships in ...
New Zealand is demonstrating its commitment to reducing global greenhouse emissions, and supporting clean energy transition in South East Asia, through a contribution of NZ$41 million (US$25 million) in climate finance to the Asian Development Bank (ADB)-led Energy Transition Mechanism (ETM). Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Climate Change Minister Simon Watts announced ...
The Government is today releasing a list of organisations who received letters about the Fast-track applications process, says RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop. “Recently Ministers and agencies have received a series of OIA requests for a list of organisations to whom I wrote with information on applying to have a ...
Attorney-General Judith Collins today announced the appointment of Wellington Barrister David Jonathan Boldt as a Judge of the High Court, and the Honourable Justice Matthew Palmer as a Judge of the Court of Appeal. Justice Boldt graduated with an LLB from Victoria University of Wellington in 1990, and also holds ...
Education Minister Erica Stanford will lead the New Zealand delegation at the 2024 International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) held in Singapore. The delegation includes representatives from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) Te Wehengarua and the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) Te Riu Roa. The summit is co-hosted ...
A stopbank upgrade project in Tairawhiti partly funded by the Government has increased flood resilience for around 7000ha of residential and horticultural land so far, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones says. Mr Jones today attended a dawn service in Gisborne to mark the end of the first stage of the ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters will represent the Government at Anzac Day commemorations on the Gallipoli Peninsula next week and engage with senior representatives of the Turkish government in Istanbul. “The Gallipoli campaign is a defining event in our history. It will be a privilege to share the occasion ...
Science, Innovation and Technology and Defence Minister Judith Collins will next week attend the OECD Science and Technology Ministerial conference in Paris and Anzac Day commemorations in Belgium. “Science, innovation and technology have a major role to play in rebuilding our economy and achieving better health, environmental and social outcomes ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon held a bilateral meeting today with the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Prime Minister was accompanied by MP Paulo Garcia, the first Filipino to be elected to a legislature outside the Philippines. During today’s meeting, Prime Minister Luxon and President Marcos Jr discussed opportunities to ...
The Government has announced that $20 million in funding will be made available to Westport to fund much needed flood protection around the town. This measure will significantly improve the resilience of the community, says Local Government Minister Simeon Brown. “The Westport community has already been allocated almost $3 million ...
The Government is proud to support the first ever Repco Supercars Championship event in Taupō as up to 70,000 motorsport fans attend the Taupō International Motorsport Park this weekend, says Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee. “Anticipation for the ITM Taupō Super400 is huge, with tickets and accommodation selling out weeks ...
Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced an increase to the Rates Rebate Scheme, putting money back into the pockets of low-income homeowners. “The coalition Government is committed to bringing down the cost of living for New Zealanders. That includes targeted support for those Kiwis who are doing things tough, such ...
The Coalition Government is investing in a project to boost survival rates of New Zealand mussels and grow the industry, Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has announced. “This project seeks to increase the resilience of our mussels and significantly boost the sector’s productivity,” Mr Jones says. “The project - ...
Benefit figures released today underscore the importance of the Government’s plan to rebuild the economy and have 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “Benefit numbers are still significantly higher than when National was last in government, when there was about 70,000 fewer ...
The Government’s commitment to doubling New Zealand’s renewable energy capacity is backed by new data showing that clean energy has helped the country reach its lowest annual gross emissions since 1999, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts says. New Zealand’s latest Greenhouse Gas Inventory (1990-2022) published today, shows gross emissions fell ...
The Government is bringing the earthquake-prone building review forward, with work to start immediately, and extending the deadline for remediations by four years, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “Our Government is focused on rebuilding the economy. A key part of our plan is to cut red tape that ...
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his Thai counterpart, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, have today agreed that New Zealand and the Kingdom of Thailand will upgrade the bilateral relationship to a Strategic Partnership by 2026. “New Zealand and Thailand have a lot to offer each other. We have a strong mutual desire to build ...
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Transport Minister Simeon Brown have today announced the Coalition Government’s intention to extend port coastal permits for a further 20 years, providing port operators with certainty to continue their operations. “The introduction of the Resource Management Act in 1991 required ports to obtain coastal ...
“Our exporters should, therefore, be deeply concerned that the Fast-track Approvals Bill was not assessed for consistency with any of our free trade commitments prior to being introduced to the House,” says Gary Taylor, Chief Executive of the Environmental ...
NZCTU President Richard Wagstaff is calling on all political parties to support the new Member’s Bill from Labour’s workplace relations and safety spokesperson Camilla Belich MP that would ensure negligent companies are held accountable when their employees ...
A historian with an uncanny track record of predicting US election winners tells RNZ's Sunday Morning that President Biden looks to be on track for another term, but things could still go very wrong for him. ...
A historian with a track record of predicting US election winners tells RNZ's Sunday Morning that President Biden looks to be on track for another term, but things could still go wrong for him. ...
Ngaio Marsh House is one of Christchurch’s best kept secrets – and contains more than a few mysteries of its own.Trust Ngaio Marsh to leave more than a few mysteries scattered through her house long after her departure. For a start, there’s the curious concrete portal in the garden, ...
Appointment viewing has been lost to the mists of time, but memories of Montana Sunday Theatre can still be conjured by hitting play on a particular piece of classical music. “You’re not going to be able to sell it.” Over 30 years on, Karen Bieleski still recalls how the task ...
Performance Review King Luxon sat behind His massive polished oak desk. It is Performance Review time. There is a knock on the door. “Enter!” says the King. In steps Minister of Disabilities and Carer Pedicures, Penny Simmonds. “I can explain everything …” she begins. “Fine,” says King Luxon, pressing the ...
The pair opened their first fully collaborative exhibition, Nina for Flowers, last Saturday. Gabi Lardies visited their studio to find out who Nina is and what working together was like.‘It didn’t start out like, ‘This is a show about Nina,’” says Josephine Jelicich, gripping a thermos of peppermint tea. ...
Thank you, Dr Maximilian Oskar Bircher-Benner, for your brilliant invention. I’m another mid-20s Kiwi who had an OE last year. I hopped on my bicycle where France meets the Atlantic and cycled east. I pedalled through the Loire Valley, down rivers lined with willows and ancient wisteria-draped chateaus. I relished ...
Asia Pacific Report From France to Australia, university pro-Palestine protests in the United States have now spread to several countries with students pitching on-campus camps. And students at Columbia and other US universities remain defiant as campuses have witnessed the biggest protests since the anti-Vietnam war and anti-apartheid eras in ...
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards, Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)New Zealand Government’s Fast Track legislation. Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government ...
Tara Ward talks to presenter Naomi Toilalo about the new TV show that turns food waste into a three course feast. Naomi Toilalo is standing in the warehouse at Good Neighbour Tauranga, helping unpack the two-and-a-half tonnes of rejected food that will arrive at the community support hub that day. ...
Scout is our latest Dog of the Month. This feature was offered as a reward during our What’s Eating Aotearoa PledgeMe campaign. Thank you to Scout’s human, Avril, for her support. Dog name: Scout (named after the little girl in To Kill a Mockingbird – she inherited the independent spirit ...
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An interesting article by an MSM journalist (from the UK, but relevant here too I believe).
https://medium.com/@AbiWilks/speech-momentum-panel-on-media-bias-dd09d9b103b7#.wb1zmrmgn
I guess we don’t yet have the “upsetting the status quo” of a Corbyn (fingers crossed??) but still some relevant things.
Mostly a fair comment from Abi but here it is true that a comment from Andrew is likely blown up an out to misrepresent his position. For example his wondering about the immigration list including so any cooks. Or his comment regarding the Middle NZ voter. Both fair comments but mangled by the media. A hard row to hoe.
+1
The sad thing is, as soon as ShonKey opens his mouth, he’s lying…. The subject matter is irrelevant….. And his team follow suit, they feel untouchable.
Trump is enthusiastically fact checked. Key not so much. And anyway Key’s words are so ambiguous that he can always deny that that was what he said. Headlines about the previous poll showing 26% but not a whisper about the Morgan poll of 33.5%.
IKR, not a whisper of the Morgan poll. Maybe the televised political debates during next years election should be fact checked too.. now that would prove very interesting for NZ
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11714028
Definite lies
More like the kiss of death I would think.
True.
I heard a rumour of another overheard conversation, this one involving Obama and Key.
Barack told him that the US couldn’t support such a weak candidate as Helen Clark was and why didn’t New Zealand put forward an A-list candidate and Key stand himself?
He thought that Key would easily gain enough support.
Not sure it is true but it sounds much more likely than the idea that HC can get any further than seventh place,
Meantime going by articles on CNBC this morning Duetsche Bank looking/may need bailout (surely that has wide ramifications?).. and US cash 3.4 trillion… debt 34 trillion… and here was i worried about out $1.69bn debt being 70% of our GDP silly me… when do you esteemed standaristas forecast that we will enjoy zero int rates? 🙂
When we get serious about money reform and understand two things:
* That saving money saves nothing
* That having the private banks creating our money results in us being debt slaves
+100
New Zealand should consider the Bradbury Pound approach, remove the banks from the process entirely.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/bring-back-the-bradbury
Bankers, Bradburys, Carnage And Slaughter On The Western Front
Thanks for the link.
Warning ….. many outside Auckland will be shocked at this …..
$720,000 will enable you to buy this in outer Auckland situated on a busy arterial road (But at least a bus stop is directly outside), then you have to build a house that can only have a 45% building coverage or 135m2.
http://www.realestate.co.nz/2907125
How much more scope is there for the bubble to inflate before …
Wow!! I’m still shocked about the neighbours, they sold their house in 10 days and whacked an extra $100,000 on the price since they purchased 16 mths ago in Motueka. Relationship breakup reason for selling.
I’ve never seen so many real estate agents and prospective buyers, anyone would have thought there was a huge street party happening with the volume of vehicles in our street.
Huge contrast from when the prior owners sold it last time, huge contrast, property took well over a month to sell last time and there was not much interest in the open homes.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/home-property/79386614/High-prices-low-wages-shut-Motuekas-poor-out-of-property-market
yep very similar over The Hill too
135 m2 is a perfectly good-sized 3-bedroom house, in fact possibly too big. NZ’s need to get out of the habit of thinking that big is better when it comes to houses. We have adopted the same unrealistic and unsustainable attitude as Oz and the US on this.
+1
I remember when 90m2 was considered big.
Agreed, but remember that modern house plans usually include a garage when quoting size, so 130-140m2 is the new 90-100m2. Also, a 2 storey house might be an option.
Maybe, however I think in Oz and US they have minimal occupancy in large houses, compared to NZ where there are large families, extended families and grandparents all in one house.
Also climate dependent, people whom live in areas that have harsh winters or summers are more likely to have a larger house as they spend less time outside than us kiwis.
“in Oz …. they have minimal occupancy in large houses”
That is a significant outcome of the Australian policies of having Capital Gains taxes and means-tested superannuation. Both of these exempt the family home from the calculation. It is very cost-effective, particularly for retired people, to put their money into an excessively large house rather than into investments. Then they can collect the National Super and they don’t have to worry about the Capital Gains tax. You lose ALL the National super if a couple has assets, excluding their house, of about $800,000.
Look at all the “McMansions” in Sydney’s west, and remember this when someone claims that Capital Gains taxes that exclude the family home are good for New Zealand and will bring down house prices. They are talking absolute rubbish.
” large families, extended families and grandparents all in one house. ”
I suspect you are exaggerating the number of these in New Zealand. From the 2013 census results the average household size was only 2.7 people and the highest value, in Mangere, was only 4. That doesn’t really allow very many of the households you describe, does it?
good points
I had a little deeper look at the tables published with the census.
There are about 1.55 million households.
Those with 8 or more usual inhabitants, which would I think be the groups you mention, totalled about 13,800. That is only 0.9%.
Those with 7 usual inhabitants were about 15,500 or another 1%.
Doesn’t seem very many does it?
The biggest family I can remember from my youth had 12 kids still at home so would have been a household of 14. Seemed enormous to a little boy like me from a household of 6. Nowadays 6 would be classed as large I suppose.
A 135m2 house would cost to build $270k+ then the cost of land …. $720k = $1m = the average house in Auckland. So land represents 72% of the finished price. If they built a 2 level home 200m2 =$450k+ = 60% land value which is being touted as being the norm.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11353622
– Can some not see the major driver in the cost of a house. If land was not worth as much, then developers would pay less for the undeveloped land, everything else could remain status quo.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/83627681/nick-smith-is-millliondollar-minister-as-average-auckland-house-passes-1m-mark
@Alwyn “A 135m2 house would cost to build $270k+”
Make that closer to $330-340k according to my builder mates.
Yep, $2K per sq m will get you sweet F.A.
“135 m2 is a perfectly good-sized 3-bedroom house”
It was, for a while during the Labour Government of 1972-1975, the maximum sized house you were allowed to build in New Zealand. The then Kirk-led Government decided that no-one should be allowed to build a house that was larger than that and it was all anyone, regardless of family size needed.
The rumour was that Norm had worked out the size of his own house in Kaiapoi, which came to 1500 square feet and used that size as the limit. Nobody deserved a home bigger than his.
I was very unhappy about it at the time. I was having a house built which was about that size but had been consented with a carport. I wanted to change it to a garage but wasn’t allowed to as it would have then exceeded the legal limit.
Damn, that’s harsh
Ugh, gross. I thought that bit of land was supposed to stay green space.
A bus stop might be directly outside, but it’s an obscenely long ride into town or indeed anywhere really. Not a smart place to be putting in housing developments. Town planning for failure.
future million dollar slums, but then i guess these will be slums paid for by foreign investors that won’t live in these houses so all is good.
and if the rent for these future slums are to high, the taxpayer of nz will be picking up slack and provide the funds for WINZ to dole out the Accomodation Supplement (cause it ain’t a benefit as i was told by a Winz Drone Customer of mine).
http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/84641982/liam-hehir-no-crisis-here-move-along-please
Good points
So others realise, Hehir’s articles are promoted on KiwiBlog and Whale Oil.
Yawn, if you’re going to troll at least put some effort into it
hes not that good a writer – often writers articles loaded with straw man arguments poor logic and nonsense. He routinely gets shown up in any comments
he may be right on this one – but i wouldnt trust him as a source
I guess you just need to look at how many times Labour and the Greens throw around the term “crisis” to see if it has any validity
i guess you cant resist bringing the straw man to the party
Geezus. Reading that is I imagine similar to supping some JK wine, easing a restless nat voter to sleep at night.
Sure because Labour have never called anything a crisis before:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/8805482/Opposition-manufacturing-inquiry-report-released
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU1609/S00493/manufacturing-powerhouse-of-nz-growth.htm
I mean:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/298869/low-milk-prices-'wiping-farmers-out‘
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/dairy/83230951/global-dairy-prices-massive-rise-at-trade-auction
Sorry got that wrong again but don’t worry heres a real crisis Labour can help with:
https://www.change.org/p/new-zealand-labour-party-labour-to-declare-the-all-blacks-in-crisis-so-they-win-the-rugby-world-cup
Praise the lord, we’re back to celebrating dairy price rises again.
Farrar getting 120 signatures for something, wow, how many I wonder weren’t paid for.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/hawkes-bay-today/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503462&objectid=11615925
http://www.labour.org.nz/on_refugees_a_timely_reminder
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/10133645/Obesity-epidemic-at-crisis-point (not a Labour announcement but riding on the coattails)
Ok, pasting unexplained links is a bannable offence I thought, and you do this quite often.
Pretty sure that you saying something is unexplained doesn’t actually mean its unexplained
My first post was a link about Labour calling everything a crisis and my next posts were specific links to crisis that Labour was highlighting followed by links that showed the crisis had been adverted
Basically Labour are the boy who cried wolf
If the unemployment rate and the GDP growth rate track about where they are or better, it’s going to really narrow the attack line options available to Labour or the Greens.
I won’t be convinced of different until there’s a clear polling preference for Labour and Greens to govern by themselves. Reliance on any others won’t last a term.
Absent a further major economic shock, the best attack line to shift this government is still housing.
I agree, Labour has traction with housing…I mean I wouldn’t be calling it a state of emergency but its still Labours best option for attacking National
Actually, providing an explanation afterwards strongly implies that the links pasted by themselves were, in fact, unexplained.
Anyway, glad to know that there are no more refugees, all the farmers are happy, and NZ is once again a manufacturing powerhouse /sarc.
Well Maui didn’t seem to get it so I thought I’d be helpful and explain it to him/her
To be fair my point was that Labour have a habit of calling each and everything a crisis and when they do the crisis in question usually sorts itself out which to me suggests there wasn’t a crisis in the first place
No, they don’t call everything a crisis and not all of the problems you blithely linked to with no explanation have been solved (even if they have meandered away from media attention).
Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered clicking on half a dozen links that had no real context, until you later explained your point.
the boy who cried wolf did actually cry wolf when he saw a wolf.
Are you sure that you would recognise a wolf (when any potential wolf is decried by you and your rwnj mates as a sheep) any better than labour because by using this example you are saying that there is a wolf coming, at some point.
“the boy who cried wolf did actually cry wolf when he saw a wolf.”
Correct and as I’m sure you’re aware he’d cried wolf so many times before that no one believed him
Sort of the problem Labour has now, Labour cried crisis and the voting population go “we’ve heard that one before”
China Is Buying Land in Africa and South America to Ensure Its Food Supply
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/china_is_buying_land_in_south_america_and_20160926
They sure are and they are teaching Chinese in African schools flat out. Al Jazeera did a story on it not so long ago. Didn’t realise they were doing the same in South American.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2014/03/interactive-china-african-spending-spree-2014320121349799136.html
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/08/china-sponsors-africa-teach-mandarin-schools-150813073745219.html
And Japan was buying America and going to own the world in the 80s, the sooner you lot learn the world and its economy is a complex system and stop applying linear abstraction and chicken little analysis the better
Yes dear.
Those are big words you are using. Do you now what they mean?
This might be old news for some people, but someone was in the right place at the right time with a video camera to record the last moments of Malaysian Airways flight
MH17.
That’s not MH17. Probably a military aircraft. As I recall, the rebels had already shot down a couple of Ukrainian planes prior to killing the civilians. It might one of those incidents or video from somewhere else altogether.
I personally don’t think it is either, but how did you tell from the video that it’s not MH17?
In the video it appears that most of the plane is staying together until it goes out of frame at lowish altitude. Which seems inconsistent with the debris field of MH17 which had major parts of the plane kilometres apart.
Cheers Andre. I would also be surprised if that plane was higher than 10,000 to 20,000 feet up.
On the other hand, the plane appears to have a grey underside and white top and tail, which are consistent with MH17, and unlikely for a military plane…so maybe, maybe not.
Wadhams has visited the Polar Regions more often than any other living scientist – 50 times since he was on the first ship to circumnavigate the Americas in 1970 – and has a uniquely authoritative perspective on the changes they have undergone and where those changes will lead. From his observations and the latest scientific research, he describes how dramatically sea ice has diminished over the past three decades, to the point at which, by the time this book is published, the Arctic may be free of ice for the first time in 10,000 years.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/273799/a-farewell-to-ice/
Just found out that Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture has died. What a guy, someone who could change your life, and not many can change so many lives like he did.
Here’s a doco that gives a good impression of what Mollison was all about.
https://youtu.be/k5iHc3oTgao
RIP Mr Mollison.
I have a couple of his books, and such a clear vision of sustainable living.
What a great legacy to leave behind – the permaculture movement, and all those who are inspired by it and choose the principles in small or large endeavours.
Yes a sad loss of a good person. RIP
Aaahh… very sorry to hear it.
thanks for the news maui.
his work has profoundly influenced how i live my life and informed how i engage with people.
Hands up if you’re appalled by RNZ National’s Susie Ferguson.
She makes Mike Hosking look informed and balanced.
RNZ National, Friday 30 September 2016, 8:40 a.m.
As the U.S.-sponsored Al Qaeda insurrection in Syria continues on its bloody course, the suffering of the Syrian people is immense, and getting worse. At present the people of Aleppo are subjected to massive bombing from not only the U.S.-backed insurrectionists, but also from the Assad regime and its Russian ally. We in the West look on in horror, or feigned horror [1], and are ourselves bombarded, not with barrel bombs or white phosphorus, but with the most appalling, black-hearted, cynical propaganda.
If ever the world needed sound and principled reporting, and intelligent and informed journalists, it is now. Unfortunately for RNZ National listeners, the crisis in Syria seems to be the domain of Susie Ferguson. We have discussed her terrible inadequacies on this forum in the past. [2] Sadly, her performance this morning shows that she has not improved one iota.
She spoke to Kieran Dwyer of UNICEF about the humanitarian catastrophe in Aleppo, especially the toll on children there. Although she does not seem to have any detailed knowledge of the situation, Ferguson made it clear who who she holds responsible for all the carnage. The children are “victims of the regime of Bashar al Assad,” she intoned. She then asked Kieran Dwyer if “cutting off of water is being used as a weapon of war here?”
Speaking from Damascus, Kieran Dwyer made it clear that the situation was the responsibility of not only the Syrian government and Russia, but also the U.S.-backed Al Qaeda insurrectionists: “When you attack such densely urban areas this is what happens… All sides of the conflict bear responsibility.”
A few minutes later, toward the end of the programme, Susie Ferguson chose to read out an email by a fellow Kool Aid drinker: “Bob from Gisborned has contacted us about Aleppo. He writes: Why can’t the government of Syria and its murderous ally Russia be indicted for war crimes?
All right, you can put your hands down now.
[1] https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/28437746705_d14cdb3255_k.jpg
[2] https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-18112015/#comment-1097377
Ably assisted in the propaganda by John Campbell.
Ferguson is pretty useless. Espiner is the man for the serious interviews (except when he is crawling up Key’s backside).
I can’t believe Trotter (yet again) attacking Little on Bowalley Road today partly on the basis of a Ferguson interview. Trying to define the centre ground in politics is always going to be difficult. And Trotter also has a go at Little for praising Bill Shorten. While I personally love Corbyn and Sanders, Shorten actually showed a lot of backbone and stuck to his policy guns, was honest and believable and nearly pulled off the unwinnable in the Oz election. Not bad qualities for Little to admire.
Trotter should give Little a break-wait for the policies next year.
Yeah give Little some more time I mean he’s only been Labour leader since Nov 2014
Just give him another 6 months. And I think the general belief from the polls is that the Labour/GR block is confidently neck and neck with a quickly declining National. Right?
So theres nothing to worry about, the left block can confidently sleep-walk to victory
it is known
Yes I am told it’s looking pretty sweet for the Left next year: tide going out on National, country in the mood for change, people realising that Little beats that tiresome liar phoney Key, polling showing that the Lab/Gr/NZF block will have 64 plus MPs
So yeah should be good times on The Standard, yeah
Far too close to call.
The electorate will cope with a coalition of two.
But any more than that, National will successfully attack like they did last time that the alternative government is simply too unstable.
The instability factor is more and more important, the more highly leveraged couples rely on interest rates staying precisely where they are.
We do have a 4-headed monster at the moment…N/ACT/UF/MP
Theres a difference and that difference is that National chose to give those parties a say but they didn’t have to, last election National could have governed with only the Maori Party
So if National had wanted to it could have been a coalition of two but they chose to be inclusive
The other factor is that National is overwhelmingly dominant with MP numbers. They could have another couple of 1-2 MP support parties on side and people would still regard it as a National Government. (Not a “National-led Government.”)
It’s not like a Labour comprising government where 40% of the MPs are from other parties.
hi bg,
“We do have a 4-headed monster at the moment…N/ACT/UF/MP”
why isn’t this highlighted more?
LAB/GR will never be able to reach 50% by themselves. Not in 2017, not in 2020, not in 2023.
Their politics don’t speak to enough Kiwis to do so.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard Ferguson ask an open question. She invariably presents her opinion and dares the interviewee to disagree. I guess it’s a step up from the Dipshit Henry ‘Why do you hate babies and want them to die?’ approach.
This one’s for you weka as I’m sure you’ve raised this good point before
“The set up is that Rosa Scott is a surgeon in London, 20-years in the future, trying to save lives when most of the antibiotics are no longer working. Everything else plays out of that set-up and so inevitably the obstacles she faces are related to this world.”
http://www.treehugger.com/health/surgeon-x-apocalyptic-graphic-novel-about-how-antibiotic-resistance-will-change-way-we-live.html
1. Most antibiotics will still work in 20 years.
2. There will be an increased number of strains resistant to existing antibiotics but a normally functioning immune system will still deal with them in most instances.
3. There are new antibacterials being developed.
4. There are increasing numbers of vaccines available and being developed for bacterial and viral agents.
etc etc etc
Cool, let’s keep going on this track then
BTW how many nosocomial infection deaths in the western world last year?
How’s that woo you deliver coming along for my diabetes ?
Maybe you can answer me, how many nosocomial infection deaths occurred in the western world last year?
You know, hospital acquired pneumonia, skin infections, sepsis, etc. Come on give me a guess.
What? Please explain?
Only if you give the data for people injured or harmed by alternative therapies.
sure, assuming everything goes according to some plan you have thought of and articulate so convincingly. The world has a way of being a little more unpredictable in reality.
The artwork looks top-notch
Cheers marty.
Not sure about the whole doom thing though. Technically a simple cut can theoretically kill someone if it gets infected, but it’s unlikely that in the age of understanding hygiene that this will be an issue.
Just waiting now for the medical lot (and the Science is god lot) to catch up on the fact that a huge number of plants are anti-bacterial, have a very long traditional use for preventing and treating bacterial infection, and we already know how to use them for many of things that antibiotics are currently overused for. We should have been saving the antibiotics for the very serious stuff, instead of squandering it on colds and flus and growing factory chickens. Hopefulll we will get there before it’s too late.
If the graphic’s ideas about things like less surgery are right, then it’s also an opportunity for us to shift to holistic preventative medicine.
silver
don’t know about that, but probably better to not shift to another extractive, unsustainable technology.
You may not want silver/colloidal silver as a help around the home but I’m definitely going to have it ahead of standard antibiotics/anti-septics.
Why am I not surprised to see you pumping potentially dangerous medical advice. Colloidal silver is pure BS.
Hey fuck head
Are you trying to censor me with your passé 20th century scientism-nazism?
Please tell me
Who you think I was advising
And what did you think that advice was
Not my problem that you cannot recognise that in the long haul (next 40-50 years), conventional western medicine will not out race the evolution of microbes.
Also, not my problem if you can’t tell the difference between advice for living a healthier more natural more sustainable life, and “medical” advice.
Now, I said, “long haul” but its not even two generations away. My family is ready for it, are you.
So it was “advice”, you just reckon that taking silver before antibiotics isn’t a medical decision.
Genius.
Hmmmm, if it was “advice” then it was advice to myself. Try reading next time.
I did read it.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and figured that you were being your usual cowardly passive-aggressive self and stopping just short of explicitly stating your bullshit, rather than assuming that you were simply vomiting forth an assortment of irrelevant and unconnected statements with no awareness of context or coherence.
Who is censoring you?
Don’t confuse censoring you with ridiculing your dumb ideas.
Wait until you learn how the qi of the organs moves throughout the body nourishing and supporting all of life’s vital functions.
Qi? Seriously?
Doubling down on your woo now?
That CV consumes his own qi responding to you is his decision to make
Ignorance is a terrible position to live life from and your ignorance is as naked as it is possible to be..
There is promising research going on.
But Shu Lam, a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has developed a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls.
“We’ve discovered that [the polymers] actually target the bacteria and kill it in multiple ways,” Lam told Nicola Smith from The Telegraph. “One method is by physically disrupting or breaking apart the cell wall of the bacteria. This creates a lot of stress on the bacteria and causes it to start killing itself.”
http://www.sciencealert.com/the-science-world-s-freaking-out-over-this-25-year-old-s-solution-to-antibiotic-resistance
This is seriously nuts. The sad thing is that it’s the new normal.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/314476/motel-tenant-told-to-leave-to-make-way-for-homeless
As a matter of interest.
How do all the commenters here, who think there is not problem ,expect to house, teachers, nurses, police, cleaners etc with the house prices?
Stick ’em in old motels.
Funnily enough three of the four professions you named all make more then I do (and rightfully so, my job isn’t all that special in the whole scheme of things) yet I still manage to live in a decent house in a decent suburb…
Guess there’s no housing problem, then, eh?
Lovely logic from PR there. It’s the same logic that says that if there are 100 jobs and 150 people, everyone can have a job. What is it with neoliberals’ inability to understand basic physics?
How about people do what people have always done since we were, well, people and that’s move to a better location. Why is it now, specifically, that moving is apparently a bad thing to do?
Pretty sure you have had this explained to you before, so I’m guessing your question is rhetorical and disingenuous, but for others reading there is this.
For most of human history, humans have lived around people they know. We have a whole bunch of social and biological evolutionary traits connected with that that lead to healthy community.
Expecting any or all of the population to be transient creates instability and is not the human norm. How we are experiencing it currently is an invention of neoliberalism, but it pops up periodically (think the Highland Clearances). You are advocating economically forced immigration.
It destroys communities because it removes the people with the long memory of how things work, or the people with specialist non-commercial knowledge. Community groups function better when they are made up of people who know each other over the long term.
It harms families because it forces people to either move away from their loved ones and their essential support or stay where they belong and be poor.
Telling people to move in response to the housing crisis is like telling people move in a famine. Which makes sense if you have such an emergency and are desperate, except this famine is created by the investor/political class and is completely preventable and resolvable, and moving somewhere else just spreads the famine because the underlying causes aren’t being addressed.
It destroys communities because it removes the people with the long memory of how things work, or the people with specialist non-commercial knowledge. Community groups function better when they are made up of people who know each other over the long term.
– What load a semi-romantic bollix, might as well add in the gold old days for good measure
It harms families because it forces people to either move away from their loved ones and their essential support or stay where they belong and be poor.
– how about helps families because they can move somewhere cheaper to live
You make it sound as if Auckland is NZ and vice versa, it isn’t
In other words you’ve got nothing. Try making an actual argument rather than pointing and you’re wrong.
Eg The nuclear family that moves away from its extended support base is better off financially for a while until it needs things you can’t buy. Then what?
No idea what your last sentence means and it’s certainly not what I said or think.
There are a shit tonne of people in Auckland whose roots, and home towns, and relatives are outside of Auckland.
Give them decent jobs back in the provinces where they are from and they will be gone in a flash.
I figure you can get 200,000 people out of Auckland in 48 months doing just that.
And, all these people will be back in the neighbourhoods and communities that they grew up in – how good is that 🙂
Your argument is based on emotional clap trap and pseudo-science
How do you explain the amount of trade and travel and immigration and yes even conquests between human populations that have happened since man first became man
“Your argument is based on emotional clap trap and pseudo-science”
Still can’t address the actual points 🙄 Go on then, point specficially to the pseudo-science. If you’re going to resort to insults, let’s at least see if they have any meaning.
How do you explain the amount of trade and travel and immigration and yes even conquests between human populations that have happened since man first became man
There are lots of ways to explain those PR, but what does that have to do with my assertion that forcing economic immigration on people harms communities and families?
Here’s a clue, NZ was colonised in part by the downstream effects of the Highland Clearances. If you think that the Clearances didn’t negatively affect families and communities in Western Scotland, I’d really like to hear your argument.
Oh I’m sorry I forgot, personal experiences are permitted here
I’m guessing that if you own your own home you’ve done so for a while, and bought when prices were on par with incomes?
Your logic is the same as Bennett or Key saying if they can do it everyone can do it. That’s the trouble with right-wing thinking. There’s an assumption that everyone’s the same.
I do own my own home the bank, however, owns a whacking great part of the mortgage
I’ve owned my home for about 7 years just after National came to power and after the massive increase in house prices under National
Stop relying on tired, old cliches
So you bought during the slump around 2008. Lucky bugger. Now your mates in the parasite rentier and banker class have gobbled up the market, with the Nats standing on the sidelines and drinking champagne, as thousands of kiwis are locked out of ownership, forced out of their communities, and kicked onto the streets.
Congratulations on your financial success & moral failure.
Geez I am glad weka that was not the view a 100 thousand or so years ago or we would never have got out of Africa, human movement is a factor of human history from year dot, what a load of idealogical, Theoretical nonsense that simply does not stack up to the facts, saying that such thinking is case in point for most left wing thought, nonsense
Lived there long then?
Less then a year, before that I was in another, decent suburb but I moved because I wanted to live closer to work and have a log burner
so you are renting?
No
So you have owned for a number of years.
Difficult to buy $600k on about 50k salary
Poxish Rouge, despicable troll – what do you know about the effects of vagrancy? I can tell you that the school-kids who move through 27 different schools by the time they get to the 5th form (Year 11) are pretty well doomed to educational failure. Nor can any of the schools (or rather their teachers whom you trolls like to blame) be fairly accused. You have no idea, do you? And here we are now speculating about the possible price of a house? This is the sort of diversion that Poxish Rouge loves to cause. Go jump into your log-burner.
nah, don’t worry mate,
they all gonna homebirth, and if it goes pearshaped either way, no biggie in the olden gooden days not all women or children survived childbirth, get a second model and try again
they gonna all home teach – abstinence only and creative design – cause to much science is no good for anyone
they gonna have all their own neighborhood watches – guns mate, guns.
they all gonna clean their own offices, public toilets, restaurants, cafes etc etc or else simply not leave home (those that have one)
they all gonna pass buckets should a house catch fire – you know just like in the gooden olden golden days.
cause thus spoke the libertarian god of fuckwittery we don’t need no stink’n state, no stink’n socialism, no stink’n community minded good-doery and all that shit. We are self reliant, full of personal responsibility and if your shit gets stolen, burned or other wise damaged that might be good business for me 🙂
Mind, they – the owner of empty houses and unused land could just import some slaves and call them “skill- migrants” who will be housed for food n water rations twice daily. Clothes are optional, depending if the slave is a 10 on the scale of Trump.
But anyways, you will not get any answer from our believers. Cause you see there is no housing crisis, there are no homeless people, there are just lazy ‘ useless’ kiwis that made bad choices. And Ms. Bennett is only buying a Motel cause she is bored doing nothing cause there is no Housing Crisis and there are no homeless. I think she is trying to re-invent herself as an interior designer or some such thing.
John Oliver at his scathing best…
It’s still on going, the whole Panama Papers.
And we still neck deep in it.
https://www.icij.org/offshore/former-eu-official-among-politicians-named-new-leak-offshore-files-bahamas
Is it just me or the fact one of the directors mixed up in this stuff is really hard to find information on.
https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=Craig+Alan+Hemsworth&oq=Craig+Alan+Hemsworth&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i61&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=Craig+Alan+Hemsworth&start=0
Oh well nothing to see here, move along.
Lynn, a few things broken since the upgrade. The name and email fields no longer remember my details (mac Firefox and iphone Safari). We’ve had that happen before, can’t remember if the fix is your end or ours.
The comments tab is stuck on
“lprent on
Open Mike 27/09/2016”
Yes noticed that about the latest comments tab…but no one else had mentioned it so I thought it was just my set up!!! 😛
Could have been worse, might have been perpetually a comment from PR pointing his finger and saying preposterous! 😉
you’re going to give me nightmares now weka lol
PR is OK really, we can turn him around, might take a while though 😀
Preposterous will henceforth be my go to word
A potentially preposterous peccadillo
Finger pointing and saying preposterous will henceforth be known as the PR defence 😈 😉
Same.
same
had that too, it seems to be fixed now – although my “replies” tab is blank
Looks fixed to me too, plus the fields work, and yes my replies tab is blank too, but that’s how it was before the upgrade…
Well cricket just got that tiny bit less interesting
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11718497
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/84790345/colin-craig-jury-returns-in-defamation-case
Hopefully Colin Craig learns a lesson but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say he’ll appeal
Craig naive I reckon while that Williams fellow seems to do just nasty things in collaboration with Whaleoil. The Taxpayers Union? Nasty arm of the undermine Opposition scheme.
Craig is not naïve when it comes to defamation, the courts and the law, politically sure but he knew exactly what he was doing
Williams won-$1.3m in damages.
Well I got that wrong. Not that it matters really either way-Williams hardly comes out of the case with his reputation enhanced and Craig was already on the political scrapheap. I wonder if he will appeal?
The odds on him appealing would so short it wouldn’t even be worth putting a bet down
Tough but necessary read
“It’s the latest revelation in a story survivors say has haunted them for decades: the money behind the Sixties Scoop.
The scoop, as it is called, refers to the era from the 1960s to the 1980s, when child welfare authorities scooped up Indigenous children and adopted them out to non-Indigenous families..”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/sixties-scoop-americans-paid-thousands-indigenous-children-1.3781622
It serves to confirm for me that the average Kiwi punter is pretty ignorant and biased. While Craig deserved to pay a price for being so foolish but he didn’t deserve to have to pay out $1.4 million to a slimy, dishonest, lying, creepy toad such as Jordan Williams.
Can’t edit :remember this?
http://4.1m.yt/vqrExQE.png
And this:
https://twitter.com/helenkellyUnion/status/775688779923329025/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Sorry can’t edit. TS is a bit broken at the moment.
So you agree that Teina Pora shouldn’t have got as much money either because he had criminal convictions, was a gang prospect and confessed only to get the reward money?
@Puckish
Comparing Teina Pora with Jordan Williams? I didn’t think you could reach a new low, but you’ve succeeded.
+ 1 Kinda good to be reminded of the real puckish rogue – a rwnj scum-sucking turd instead of the bullshit he usually presents.
Try reading the comments, not the comments you imagine
Actually I think Teina Pora, despite his criminal background, deserves the compensation hes getting
Jordan Williams, despite his background and morals also deserves the compensation he’ll, eventually, end up getting
I’m asking Anne why Williams shouldn’t get compensation, apart from the fact that she dislikes Williams
Jordan Williams, despite his background and morals also deserves the compensation he’ll, eventually, end up getting
No he does not. He has no reputation, due to his being exposed irrefutably as a fraud and a liar. You need to read Nicky Hager’s Dirty Politics.
That’s why we have a court to decide things like this and not mob rule. However I do get and understand the emotions around this.
This “verdict” is more mob rule than anything remotely like justice. It is a “verdict” of comparable calibre to the O.J. Simpson “verdict” in 1995 and the George Zimmerman “verdict” in 2013.
Sure it is, to you, but to me its fair and just however I’d also say the money paid out to David Bain was mob rule as well
That’s why you and I don’t decide on this
In what possible universe do you dwell that makes it “fair” for a demonstrated liar and scoundrel to have been ruled to have been defamed by one of his victims?
The same universe that has you stinking up the interwebs with your uniformed cant ?
Jordan Williams didn’t spend 20 years in jail, unless I’ve got that wrong.
One “Stunned Mullet” writes, hilariously, about this writer, i.e. moi,
Is this the funniest, most deranged, not to mention illiterate, piece of rhetoric since Jordan Williams’ spew in court? I think it might be.
Stunned Mullet, my illiterate chum, you’re a LEGEND…
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4Du-w1bVNbs/hqdefault.jpg
Did you take that shot before or after felating that fine gent Moz ?
I think you’ll find the amount is so large due to the fact that Craig has been found guilty of defamation and more importantly the defamation was in the form of a document sent to every household in NZ.
I also don’t know what the ‘average kiwi punter’ has to do with it ?
I’m guessing its because the average kiwi punter voted for John Key?
How can someone with no credibility be defamed? I see, by the way, that Chris Trotter has penned a pompous and absurd attack on Craig, one that he can file away with his defence of Florida lynch law a few years ago.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/84593628/chris-trotter-colin-craigs-behaviour-would-embarrass-a-spotty-adolescent
Yet another day ruined by Puckish Rogue and his mates.
I assure I had nothing to do with this 🙂
Not really Garibaldi.
Its good to be reminded they are members of the same slimy, dishonest, lying, creepy R.W. gang as the toad, J Williams. If you look at the smiling picture of J Williams on the web sites, it is exactly what you would expect a human version of a toad would look like. Quite uncanny. 🙂
Gee Anne, you are particularly bitter today.
Thanks for the laughs.
Hollow laughs from another hollow troll. Well said, Anne. I suppose you will now make a dumb comment about bias, James…
I would argue that you are a lot more biased than the average kiwi punter who you consider to be pretty ignorant.
It was interesting case to follow.
Cant wait for the Hagaman’s vs Little – a little election year comedy.
If Little loses – wonder what the compensation and punitive damages would be on a case like that…..
pacific fisheries ambassador?
“If Little loses – wonder what the compensation and punitive damages would be on a case like that…..”
I think little will be shitting himself now.
“Cant wait for the Hagaman’s vs Little – a little election year comedy”
True that, Colin Craig vs Cameron Slater will be interesting too.
Tony Ryall, just been appointed chair of Transpower by Bill English, slipping under the headlines quietly today.
Well done Tony who recently retired from National as health minister, after many years of living off the taxpayer and has been installed By National to chair a power company. Good stuff, expect power costs to increase in an area near you soon.
You have to admire how the Tories look after their own. As long as you keep towing the line and not rocking the boat.
Was he the one who sold Bowen House all those years ago, an asset which now has to be rebought or replaced at taxpayer expense?
Oh Richard have a closer look TP, they have just spit of their renewable side, both high in debt and at a cost of about 75-85 million, Dene McKenize of ODT fame wanked on about it last Saturday I think, cant link, to inept, but goggle be your friend, as Draco says.
I’m surprised nobody has made mention of the Silver Scrolls 2016 held last night. Moana Maniapoto was inducted into the NZ Music Hall of Fame and gave the most fantastic speech imaginable. It is begins at 13:18 mins into this vid on RNZ.
Thanks, have been wanting to see that.
what does 13:18 mins mean?
It’s the time on the video where Moana begins her speech, although I recommend watching the whole 34 minutes. In fact the whole event is available to watch here at RNZ . Begins properly 3 hours and 18 minutes into the 6 hour coverage.
Sorry, here’s the Moana vid
Thank you so much fender – that video made me cry and laugh – so good, Moana shows us how we can be. My gods I needed that video.
I liked it on fbook ☺
A wonderful person well deserved accolade.