Robertson to win Wellington Central candidacy

Written By: all_your_base - Date published: 9:02 pm, November 11th, 2007 - 74 comments
Categories: labour - Tags: labour

Charles Chauvel has withdrawn his nomination for Wellington Central.

This leaves Grant Robertson the uncontested Labour candidate, likely to be confirmed on November 17th.

Chauvel will instead seek to re-enter Parliament by means of the Party list.

74 comments on “Robertson to win Wellington Central candidacy ”

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Bryce Edwards 1

11 November 2007 at 10:37 pm

It certainly sounds like the party hierarchy (ie H1 and H2) have put Chauvel in his place. I can imagine they didn’t think much of his threats to resign from the Labour Party when he didn’t make Cabinet in the recent reshuffle.

Bryce
http://www.liberation.org.nz
mardypants 2

11 November 2007 at 11:58 pm

I haven’t had first-hand dealings with Charles but know several others that have and they’ve all spoken very highly of him. He mis-spoke recently, his enthusiasm got the better of him and it looks like he’s paid a price.

That aside, I’m not unhappy with the outcome. I’ve had a fair bit to do with Grant Robertson and think he’s easily one of the most talented and decent blokes I’ve worked with.

He’s certainly got plenty of smarts, but it’s not just his brain that I think makes him a strong candidate, it’s the fact that he’s honest, open-minded and genuine. He’s apparently crap at cricket, not that you’d know it since he’s on about it enough, and despite having seen every other NZ band since ’78, he’s not exactly tuneful… but, he’s a great partner and mate and will make a fine parliamentarian.
Santa Claws 3

12 November 2007 at 9:39 am

Well, I guess Chauvel is hoping for a better list place than 44th this time, and needing to wait for an aging MP to be bought out of parliament before he can get in.

After all, he ticks all the boxes for Labour list status

– Unionist (Hotel Workers Union even)
– Princes St veteran, therefore experienced in the dirty underbelly of Labour)
– Long term connection to H1
– Labour party member since 15 (and many roles in The Party)
– Lawyer
– Homosexual (and Rainbow Section co-chair)
– Father of 2yo son
– Recipient of Labour favours (Meridian Energy director 2002-2005 – good thing he bailed for the election and didn’t get tarred with the disconnection brush)
– Managed to reduce Dunne’s majority in OB to ‘only’ 7,702
– Stood against Bill Birch (!)
– Son of Pacific Islander

Its hard to think of a more perfect Labour MP CV – I guess Maori rather than Tahitian descent would be better, but thats hardly something that can be changed.
mardypants 4

12 November 2007 at 9:46 am

Thanks for doing the deep under-cover Santa. Heaven help Labour if they attract such talented and experienced candidates. Far better to have blow-ins like Key?
Robinsod 5

12 November 2007 at 1:33 pm

DPF – Claws! I didn’t see you on teh telly but I’ll try to find it on the interweb eh? I see you’ve got your research unit to get the Chavel fact sheet out asap. Do you have one on me yet?
Santa Claws 6

12 November 2007 at 1:58 pm

Mardypanties – Nothing much you couldn’t find on Chuck’s offical website. I assume you know the link?

Robespierre – I see you’ve been bailed after the weekend.

Really, I wonder if a lifetime spent in the Labour and Union backrooms is a suitable qualification to run the country? The voters of Ohariu Belmont obviously didn’t think so.

At least Chauvel has done something else with his legal career though. I see that well known leftie, Prof Hodge is proposing that a real lawyer be AG. Maybe Chauvel would have the balls to actually do the job, compared to Cullen’s habit of dumping the tough decisions on the SG.

Here’s a list that Matt McCarten provided of HWU honcho’s who’ve made it into parliament

Taito Phillip Field
Rick Barker
Lianne Dalziel
Mark Gosche
Mark Peck
Laila Harre
Matt Robson
Willie Jackson
Dave Hereora
Sue Moroney
Darien Fenton
Charles Chauvel

What a dynamic crowd who have really done wonders for NZ eh?

Here’s McCarten’s comment

“Now of course it would have been the greatest coup ever to have these MPs regularly meeting as a group, strategising on tactics to win benefits for working people. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen. In fact some of them despise each other.”

Oh dear!
Matthew Pilott 7

12 November 2007 at 2:09 pm

“Really, I wonder if a lifetime spent in the Labour and Union backrooms is a suitable qualification to run the country? The voters of Ohariu Belmont obviously didn’t think so.”

Only an ignorant muppet would think this comment holds any semblance of intelligence.

Chauvel took a whopping bite out of Dunne’s majority in the last election. To do that against what is probably the safest seat for any incumbent in NZ isn’t something to piss on, unless you’re thick as pigshit.
Michele Cabiling 8

9 January 2008 at 11:08 am

Mardypants wrote:

“Heaven help Labour if they attract such talented and experienced candidates. Far better to have blow-ins like Key?”

Matthew Pilott quotes Santa Claws:

“Really, I wonder if a lifetime spent in the Labour and Union backrooms is a suitable qualification to run the country? The voters of Ohariu Belmont obviously didn’t think so.”

then makes the predictable leftard personal attack: “Only an ignorant muppet would think this comment holds any semblance of intelligence.”

The Labour Party caucus in recent years boasts two MPs (Dover Samuels and Jim Sutton) who have ever employed another New Zealander with their own money. The balance consists of teachers and trade unionists. Some, like Phil Goff, have been both.

How representative are these people of ordinary New Zealanders who operate small businesses and work for a living? Not very, I venture to suggest!

These are people who produce or create nothing, and have always lived off others, irrespective of productivity or personal ability. Teachers (including university lecturers) live off the taxpayer in comfortable sinecures from which they are not dismissed for poor performance. Union reps live off the union dues of members, and mostly appear to travel around in member-funded cars from one talk-fest and slap-up lunch to another.

For both these groups, wealth is not something to be created which is what those of us who live in the real world understand, but something to be stolen from the productive and redistributed.
Phil 9

9 January 2008 at 11:17 am

I disagree Matthew – there are lots of safer seats around the country. I can think of one or two where (to paraphrase Jeffrey Archer in ‘First among equals’) they don’t count the Labour party vote – they weigh it.
The PM’s electorate, perhaps? Anything in South Auckland? Oh, then there is Southland and Ilam for the Nats, Jonkey’s place too…

Additionally, in the three years leading up the the election, that particular part of Wellington (Oh-Belmont) went through some reasonable demographic change (plus, I moved in!).
I also suspect that a number of voters saw a vote for CC not as necessarily a vote for Labour, but as a vote of ‘no confidence’ in Peter Dunne – my partner at the time was one of those.
Michele Cabiling 10

9 January 2008 at 11:54 am

Anyone Labour puts up will lose ignominiously to former ACT MP and soon-to-be National Party candidate, Stephen Franks.

What we need are more “citizen-politicians” who have made their mark in private enterprise and want to “put something back” (Franks is a corporate lawyer who gave up a high six figure annual income for a backbencher’s salary when an ACT MP) rather than professional politicians off the Labour-Union Axis production line.

Steve Franks is hugely competent, a family man not a faggot, and a helluva nice guy to boot. A future Attorney-General anyone!!!
Matthew Pilott 11

9 January 2008 at 12:12 pm

“These are people who produce or create nothing, and have always lived off others, irrespective of productivity or personal ability. Teachers (including university lecturers) live off the taxpayer in comfortable sinecures from which they are not dismissed for poor performance. Union reps live off the union dues of members, and mostly appear to travel around in member-funded cars from one talk-fest and slap-up lunch to another.

For both these groups, wealth is not something to be created which is what those of us who live in the real world understand, but something to be stolen from the productive and redistributed.”

Right, let’s do away with teachers and see how well the country does. (ok I know (hope!!) that’s not what you mean, but I think your statement on teachers needs some qualification). Teaching performs best universally as a cooperative enterprise. In a competitive system, the best teachers would recieve the best pay, requiring greater fees for their services. That would prepetuate underperformance in areas where parents were unable to stump fees for the best education, leaving their children with the same limited prospects to pass onto their children.

Teachers do not create wealth as I understand you see it. They do not make goods, or provide a service to paying customers in a free market. They are, however, wealth enablers, and vital in their own right; not some form of parasitic class as you appear to describe.

I’d be interested in your ideas though, in regards to teacher performance, and why you feel theachers believe wealth is something to be stolen. My perception is that many teachers take low-paying jobs in order to help children and young adults, quite often for their appreciation of teh job and its satisfaction. This goes some way to ameliorate the limited income, but its a far cry from your perception!

If you compare the contract of a worker who is not fortunate enough to own their own business, with the legal requirements for employment, you’ll find that unions have done quite a lot for the average worker in this country. I won’t bother to contradict your stereotyping of Union activities, not worth trying to counter that perception!

Phil, I agree with that – CC was a virtual unknown competing against Mr O-B, so was unlikely to make the in roads he did purely by his own virtues. Still, to have performed as well as he did means he did a lot right in presenting a viable alternative to Dunne.

You are also right about his not being the safest seat in the country, it’s probably on a par with some of those you mentioned though.

Oh. leftard. Brill :p Equating with retard, one can only assume. Nice and, ah, impersonal?? Hello pot, hello kettle.
Matthew Pilott 12

9 January 2008 at 12:23 pm

Steve Franks is hugely competent, a family man not a faggot, and a helluva nice guy to boot.

That type of comment ain’t going to do you any favours. Funny, with your other posts you seemed too rational and intelligent to be a homophobe. What a shame.

I really hope Franks gets nominated in Central, Robertson will easily destroy him.

But while we’re at it, instead of Right ex-laywers wouldn’t we do better with people who were on the minimum wage in industries such as the service industry? These people represent more of NZ than someone on a six-figure salary, and would work to improve the lot of those in their previous position.
Matthew Pilott 13

9 January 2008 at 12:35 pm

Crap. Take two:

“Steve Franks is hugely competent, a family man not a faggot, and a helluva nice guy to boot.”

That type of comment ain’t going to do you any favours. Funny, with your other posts you seemed too rational and intelligent to be a homophobe. What a shame.

I really hope Franks gets nominated in Central, Robertson will easily destroy him.

But while we’re at it, instead of Right ex-laywers wouldn’t we do better with people who were on the minimum wage in industries such as the service industry? These people represent more of NZ than someone on a six-figure salary, and would work to improve the lot of those in their previous position.
Phil 14

9 January 2008 at 2:01 pm

The last MP to come into parliament on or near minimum wage (a benefit?) was Alamein Kopu… yeah, she did a great job, didn’t she?

That said, I agree completely that parliament should be more representative of the true ‘flavour’ of voters… the problem is that in order to get on a party list with a remote chance of getting into parliament, you need to A) have done something pretty special in your career and be willing to take a massive pay cut or B) know the right people in the right places, at the right time.

Sadly, your average secretary or plumber just isn’t going to cut the mustard most of the time.
Michele Cabiling 15

9 January 2008 at 2:12 pm

Matthew Pilott wrote:

“Teachers do not create wealth as I understand you see it. They do not make goods, or provide a service to paying customers in a free market. They are, however, wealth enablers, and vital in their own right …”

Consider today’s state school teacher. Many should never have been allowed to matriculate from high school, let alone be awarded a university degree or teaching diploma.

Gramscian Marxists colonised the academy more than 30 years ago with the deliberate intention of using our universities as factories of ideological reproduction.

Once they attained critical mass in verious departments, particularly those specialising in the study of society, their dominance on faculty hiring committees enabled them to systematically exclude those holding other views.

A cursory glance at the course outline for a teaching degree discloses little focus on pedagogy and a curriculum heavily loaded [the analogy of a full bowel springs to mind] with Marxist race/gender/class strutural analysis. Alternative world views are simply not presented and students are told by their instructors that they are clever for accepting the programming, and all too frequently leave the academy viewing themselves as academically anointed “agents of social change.”

The curriculum typically consists of one-sided politically correct class participation in conversation which can be heard at any leftard-dominated wine and cheese evening. Graduate teachers have an exaggerated self-estimation of their capacities whilst being educationally limited to functioning as angry social activists.

I, for one, would not want my children subjected to the state school indocrination process.
Michele Cabiling 16

9 January 2008 at 3:31 pm

Matthew Pilott wrote:

“[W]ith your other posts you seemed too rational and intelligent to be a homophobe.”

Interesting how a principled opposition to what is, on all the evidence (since deleted by the moderators) a dirty, dangerous pathological sexual addiction, merits a label rather than an argument.

Are you a sodomite, Matthew?
Matthew Pilott 17

9 January 2008 at 4:04 pm

Interesting how a principled opposition to what is, on all the evidence (since deleted by the moderators) a dirty, dangerous pathological sexual addiction, merits a label rather than an argument.

Are you a sodomite, Matthew?

No. Do you think it’s fair to assume as much should someone object to the term ‘faggot’? Do you consider using a juvenile term such as that a ‘principled stand’?

Are you seven years old, Michele?

P.S. i doubt the moderators deleted your comment, every time such an event has happened before (rarely, at that) there is a note to say that such an action has taken place.

That captcha – it could fool a seven year old!
Psycho Milt 18

9 January 2008 at 4:13 pm

Warning, Matthew: Michele has a serious, positively frightening obsession with sodomy. Don’t encourage him!
Michele Cabiling 19

9 January 2008 at 4:25 pm

Please note, Sucko Milt, I am female.

Sodomy is unnatural behaviour.

That which is normal is that which functions according to its design. The anus is an organ of excretion, not procreation.

As Joe Sobran puts it, “How bright do you have to be to work out the consequences of inserting a life giving organ into the poop chute?”

End of story.
Kimble 20

9 January 2008 at 4:42 pm

“wouldn’t we do better with people who were on the minimum wage in industries such as the service industry? These people represent more of NZ than someone on a six-figure salary, and would work to improve the lot of those in their previous position.”

Wow, I dont think you could have said anything more retarded.

Thats who we need writing our laws! Fry cooks and toilet cleaners! I mean, they are obviously the most qualified.

Hell, more New Zealanders have an IQ around 100-105 than any other 5 point bracket. By your argument THEY should be running the country!
Kimble 21

9 January 2008 at 4:44 pm

“Sodomy is unnatural behaviour.”

How about if two guys just suck each other off? Is that unnatural too?

You know what else is unnatural? Practically everything in modern society.
Psycho Milt 22

9 January 2008 at 4:46 pm

Please note, Sucko Milt, I am female.

We all can be, on the internet. Forgive my skepticism.
Matthew Pilott 23

10 January 2008 at 9:46 am

Kimble, I was trying to make a point that it’s pretty much obscene to say we need politicians of X experience; best we judge them upon their individual merits, work experience being one of a multitude of factors. To be honest, I don’t see a lawyer as someone who would have contributed to society any more than a teacher.

However your lowly cooks and toilet cleaners might have a better idea of how a law would affect New Zealanders in general, as opposed to Michele’s 6-figure-salary lawyer!! They’d just ned more help in drafting the law 😉

Michele, back in the dark ages, a wonam who was able to count and reason was considered unnatural and a witch. Fortunately for you, that phase has passed, I guess people grew out of the idea that women should be ignorant and subservient.

Maybe you’ll grow out of your ideas too, but I shan’t hold my breath.

As for accusing me of being a sodomite, if you’d said anything equally stupid I would probably react similarly. For example if you’d said you’d support Franks because he’s white and not a nigger or chink, or that he’s normal height and not some midget to be tossed about, or because he’s a gool ol’ Hummin and not one of dem aliens I’d still suggest it’s not a good way to interact with people.

After which I can only assume you’d accuse me of being black, asian, a midget and an alien, respectively. Not what I’d call intelligent discourse.

As for homosexuality being unnatural, well if God decided 1 in 10 people were going to be gay, who am I to argue?

So how is that diet of organic fruit and veg from your own garden going? Given everything else we eat is unnatural, and, well, supermarkets don’t grow in the wild so I don’t suppose you use them.

Speaking of it, why are you using a computer? I can’t think of anything more unnatural than a powered series of components that alows you to communicate with people anywhere in the world. C’mon, keep true to your homophobic self Michele, face-to-face from now on – it’s the only natural way!
Kimble 24

10 January 2008 at 12:11 pm

“To be honest, I don’t see a lawyer as someone who would have contributed to society any more than a teacher.”

That is because you lack imagination.

“lowly cooks and toilet cleaners might have a better idea of how a law would affect New Zealanders in general, as opposed to Michele’s 6-figure-salary lawyer!!”

All you are doing is taking the experience of hundreds of thousands of people, attributing it to one mythical person, and then saying that this “person” would be best placed to know how a law would affect those other hundreds of thousands of people.

Tell me why a cook or a cleaner would have any better idea than a lawyer how a change to New Zealands monetary system would affect ‘ordinary’ New Zealanders.

“Michele, back in the dark ages, a wonam who was able to count and reason was considered unnatural and a witch.”

Bullshit. You dont even know why they are called the Dark Ages, do you?

“I guess people grew out of the idea that women should be ignorant and subservient.”

Yup. Queens = subservient and ignorant.
Matthew Pilott 25

10 January 2008 at 1:05 pm

“All you are doing is taking the experience of hundreds of thousands of people, attributing it to one mythical person, and then saying that this “person” would be best placed to know how a law would affect those other hundreds of thousands of people.”

This is basically my point Kimble – you can’t say that a lawyer on a six figure salary is better than a cleaner on minimum wage, it is a base generalisation. You must judge a candidate on their individual merits.

However, if we’re in the business of generalisations, there are a lot more cooks and cleaners than wealthy lawyers, so their life experiences would be similar to a greater number of people. I won’t get into generalising as to their abilities to make changes or comprehend the effects for obvious reasons.

I’ve used the term dark ages in the widely percieved contemporary context, not the classical academic context of the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. That’s why I didn’t capitalise ‘Dark Ages’, to make the distinction, but I suppose I could have chosen a better term.

Yes there were Queens. The weren’t, last I checked, among a majority of females in the past. Nor was their status representative thereof…
Kimble 26

10 January 2008 at 1:42 pm

“so their life experiences would be similar to a greater number of people.”

You assume that their life experience is a positive. It could just as easily be a negative.

Would you want your reckless driving case to be decided by a jury of people who have recently lost a child to a drunk driver?

The very policies that a cook or cleaner may put in place (based upon their life experiences) could perpetuate their circumstances.
Kimble 27

10 January 2008 at 1:43 pm

The queen example proves that subservience and enforced ignorance wasnt based upon gender. Men were just as often oppressed. It wasnt gender specific.
Matthew Pilott 28

10 January 2008 at 2:49 pm

“The very policies that a cook or cleaner may put in place (based upon their life experiences) could perpetuate their circumstances.”

They’d probably have to like their ex-circumstances in order to do that intentionally, and have very poor advisors and information to do so accidentally..?

This level of conjecture actually makes for a rather pointless convesation…
Michele Cabiling 29

10 January 2008 at 3:35 pm

Matthew Pilott wrote:

“As for homosexuality being unnatural, well if God decided 1 in 10 people were going to be gay, who am I to argue?”

For starters, the “one in ten” fallacy originated with sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey, who although married, and thus technically bisexual, was actually far more enthusiastic about sodomy and masochism than about making it with his wife.

Kinsey’s stated agenda in the 1950s was to undermine the existing Judeo-Christian consensus of American society, thus normalising his own perversion.

In “Kinsey: Sex and Fraud” Dr Judith Reisman identifies a number of deliberate and egregious errors in Kinsey’s data gathering process which point up the fact that Kinsey commenced his studies of human sexual behaviour with strong priors.

Kinsey was warned by noted social researcher, Dr Abraham Maslow [Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — for anyone who has studied Psychology or Marketing] that in conservative 1940s and 1950s America there was a self-selection bias built into the research Kinsey was conducting, and that those volunteering to reveal their sexual behaviour to the Kinsey team would therefore report a higher incidence of unconventional behaviour than a randomly chosen sample.

Kinsey’ sample was also deliberately contaminated with male prostitutes, prison habituees and mental patients, thus skewing the results in favour of the conclusion Kinsey wished to present to the public. Reisman suggests that around 33 percent of the Kinsey’s male sample fell into this category.

The “one in 10” claim is therefore politically useful to the Lavender Lobby, but factually vacuous.

More reliable estimates of the numbers of gay males range from 1 – 3 percent, despite the efforts of the New Zealand Labour Party to make it compulsory.
Michele Cabiling 30

10 January 2008 at 4:08 pm

Repeat after me: “that which is normal is that which functions according to its design!”

Jay and Young (two gay researchers) found around 99% of homosexual males engage in oral sex; 91% engage in anal sex; 82% engage in “rimming” (touching the anus of one’s partner with one’s tongue and inserting the tongue into the anus); 22% engage in “fisting” (inserting one’s fist into the rectum of the partner); 23% engage in “golden showers” (urinating on each other); 4% engage in “scats” (the oral ingestion of faeces)and in “mud rolling” (rolling on the floor where faeces have been deposited).

With the exception of oral sex, the vast majority of straights would no more consider engaging in the other behaviour reported above than flying to the moon. Yet the evidence shows that gay males routinely do these things.

Modern science unequivocally warns of the health perils of buggery as an unsanitary and pathological act, of either a hetero or homosexual kind. Under the best of clinical conditions the rectum is a hostile area subject to fissure, tearing and the transmission of highly contagious diseases.

It is not designed for the intromission of penises, fists, forearms or rimming, but the expulsion of disease-ridden excrement. On these central considerations, medical opinion is very decided! Sexual diseases arising from anal intercourse are well-documented, but now recent research from the UCLA AIDS research centre demonstrates that anal cytology predicts anal precancer In HIV-positive gay men. Their findings show that HIV-positive men who have sex with men are up to 90 times more likely than the general population to develop anal cancer.

The structure and function of the male and female human reproductive systems are fully complementary. Anatomically the vagina is designed to receive the penis. It is lined with squamous epithelium and is surrounded by a muscular tube intended for penile intromission.

The rectum, on the other hand, is lined with a delicate mucosal surface and a single layer of columnar epithelium intenuea primarily for the reabsorption of water and electrolytes. The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage to the colonic mucosa can result if objects are inserted into the rectum that do not belong there.

The anus and rectum, unlike the vagina contain no natural lubricating function. Thus insertion of foreign objects or inadequate dilation of the anus before insertion of a large object can result in tissue laceration. The internal and external anal sphincters are elastic rings of muscle which generally remain tightly constricted except during defecation. The anal sphincters are also intended for material to pass through them in a direction that leads out of the body. When an attempt is made to insert something in the reverse direction, the muscles of the sphincter reflexively constrict.

From the perspective of pathology and pathophysiology, the sexual practices of homosexual men have resulted in a diverse and expanded concept of sexually transmitted disease and associated trauma. Four general groups of conditions may be encountered in homosexually active men: classical sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhea, infections with chlamydia trachomatis, syphilis, herpes simplex infections, genital warts, pubic lice, scabies); enteric diseases (infections with Shigella species, Campylobacter jejuni, Entamoeba histolytica, Giardia lamblia, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis non-A, non-B, and cytomegalovirus); trauma (fecal incontinence, hemorrhoids, anal fissure, foreign bodies, rectosigmoid tears, allergic proctitis, penile edema, chemical sinusitis, inhaled nitrite burns, and sexual assault of the male patient); and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

In addition to infections and trauma, tumours are a definitive risk for homosexual men. Homosexual behaviour in men is a risk factor for anal cancer. Squamous-cell anal cancer is also associated with a history of genital warts, an association suggesting that papillomavirus infection is a cause of anal cancer. Anal warts are commonly found among individuals who practice anal intercourse and only rarely found among heterosexuals practicing vaginal intercourse.

The enteric disorders referred to above are transmitted by “rimming” and by the gay male practice of engaging in oral sex with an unwashed penis that has already been in a rectum.

Gays are also extremely promiscuous in a manner that would stagger most straights. According to gay researchers Bell and Weinberg’s “Homosexualities” around 23 percent of gay white males reported having 1, 000 or more lifetime sexual partners. Some reported as many as 10, 000. Some 53.3 percent recorded 500 or more lifetime sexual partners.

More telling, upwards of 70 percent of those partners were men who were unknown to one another, and with whom the men surveyed had sex just once. “Hook ups” in other words.

The natural and intended purpose of sex is two-fold: [1] procreation; and [2] “good relationship” ie creating the pair bond needed for couples to remain together while raising their offspring.

In “Homosexualising America,” Robert Altman gloats that gays have changed the way in which straights view sex. What he means (and the statistics above bear this out)is that gays have spearheaded a widespread attitudinal change such that sex for many people is no longer about “good relationship” but simply about “feeling good” or “if you have an itch, scratch it.”

On all the evidence, homosexuality is a dirty, dangerous, pathological sexual addiction that is an obscene parody of normal, natural sexual relations.

“It’s all about love and commitment” witters the Lavender Lobby. That’s because they know that few straights would see anything romantic in the idea of sticking their tongue into someone else’s rectum.
Matthew Pilott 31

10 January 2008 at 4:35 pm

Sweet Jesus…

Without delving so deeply into the physiology of the sexual details, as you seem to relish, you’re happy to discriminate against people based upon this? Who/how you fuck is the basis for your chosen electoral representative, regardless of ability? Does one need to be good in the sack to get your vote?

Not to imply you’re a prude, but there’s a lot of sexual behaviour out there that heterosexual couples engage in that you would clearly consider unnatural. I take it you’d vote against anyone who engaged in any form of sexual congress that wasn’t missionary with the lights out?

Finally do you consider it a sickness, something that can be cured, or something that is inherent without volition in a certain percentage of society?

I.e. are they to be condemned in your judgement?

Oh & ain’t it a laugh that females emit a pheromone that naturally repells men after sex – part of male’s natural instinct to spread his genetic material far and wide. You are aware that monogamy hasn’t been proven to be natural per se? I guess you must be a ‘swing’ voter? 😉
Michele Cabiling 32

10 January 2008 at 4:59 pm

“Not to imply you’re a prude, but there’s a lot of sexual behaviour out there that heterosexual couples engage in that you would clearly consider unnatural. I take it you’d vote against anyone who engaged in any form of sexual congress that wasn’t missionary with the lights out?”

You exhibit a willful intention to disregard what I say above:

“The natural and intended purpose of sex is two-fold: [1] procreation; and [2] “good relationship” ie creating the pair bond needed for couples to remain together while raising their offspring.”

Any sexual activity between a man and a woman uses their genitals for their natural and intended purpose. It doesn’t necessarily have to be full intercourse, let alone in one position or with the lights out. Oral sex, mutual masturbation, props, sex games and toys may well contribute to pair-bonding outcomes and indeed do on many occasions.

It is when inanimate obects or body parts become fetishised that normal sexual behaviour becomes a perversion.

As already noted above , the natural function of the anus means that using it for sexual purposes is similarly perverse, irrespective of whether those engaging in the behaviour are gay or straight.

On all the evidence, a tiny minority of straights have ever engaged in rimming, fisting and sodomy. Most people I talk to, especially other women, express considerable disgust if anal intercourse comes up as a topic (“Eeeew!” is the most common response).

That there are those who actually engage in rimming and fisting, that’s so far off the radar for most people that they are not even aware such things exist as sexual possibilities.

The handful of people I know who admit to having had anal sex admit to trying it once, usually under the influence of alcohol, and say they didn’t like it and will be sticking to conventional methods from now on.

Remember the Playboy (derived from Kinsey) Philosophy of “outlet sex” where sex is seen a a purely physical activity on a par with taking a dump to be undertaken with anyone available? Aussie comedian, Kevin “Bloody” Wilson expresses this in typical Aussie style as: “If a sheila lays down and me dick stands up, I’ll fuck anybody at all!”

No, monogamy isn’t “natural” in that we can be sexually attracted to any number of people on a physical level, but since 80 percent of sex is emotional, most of us prefer the full monty with someone we care about, not the fleeting scratching of an itch with someone of no importance.

If you struggle with monogamy don’t project that on others. As outlined above, “It’s the culture,stupid!”
Jum 33

10 January 2008 at 5:39 pm

Michele Cabiling

You really are a nasty piece of work – a sort of cross between a Judith Collins and a Muriel what was her name again. The one who said poor people should make a few holes in a rubbish sack to use as a raincoat. Oh that’s right – Newman. Are you one of them. Are you an anagram for arsehole?

You still haven’t answered my questions on Spain’s banning of hitting children.

Silly me – I thought I was having a genuine debate with people on this website – you cretins are too gross for words. Yuk. I must go and wash my hands and the keyboard in case what you and your nasties have is catching.
Michele Cabiling 34

10 January 2008 at 6:30 pm

So, Jum, we have seen that you have:

[1] Issues with males and masculinity;

[2] Sexual (and probably underlying sexuality) issues; and

[3] Issues with bodily functions.

My guess is you suffer from what we might call “princess syndrome” or “MSDS [my shit don’t stink] Syndrome,” meaning when anything associated with bodily functions comes up in conversation, it triggers an instant distancing reaction, because being reminded of these things interferes with cerebral or imaginative identities.

How you manage to change a tampon or wipe your ass whille carrying around all those hangups is beyond me. I guess you must wait outside the toilet while someone else goes in to take care of business for you, and you compelled your whipped husband change all the diapers, right?

I’m simply reporting facts, and if that hurts your virgin eyes, go dig up an old copy of Janet & John, which is guaranteed to contain nothing so disturbing.

I feel sorry for your kids given your warped attitudes to gender relations, sexuality and bodily functions. No doubt mine will have to pick up the tab should the learned social pathologies of yours come to impact the community in future years.

Your facile personal abuse of Muriel Newman cuts no ice with me or anyone but the deliberately dim. Having chaired her Whangarei electorate committee for several years I can attest that she’s 100 times the woman and the human being you are.

Before marrying her second husband, Muriel raised two children on the DPB, while concurrently achieving a black belt in Nam Wai Pai kung fu, then graduating with a PhD. in Mathematics from Rutgers University in the United States.

See, you don’t know shit!

You emetic!
Santi 35

10 January 2008 at 6:39 pm

Jum, you’ve been vanquished. Acknowledge defeat and retreat immediately.
Psycho Milt 36

10 January 2008 at 7:20 pm

I warned you guys – it’s a frighteningly intense obsession with rectums Michele has.

It brings to mind Richard Pryor’s line: “How come all you honkies are so tight-assed?” Michele must have hung around only tight-assed honkies if she’s never met anyone who’s figured out the anus is an erogenous zone. No rim jobs? Not even a finger? Er, but the mouth is OK? Is there like, a list of acceptable activities posted somewhere so we can try and figure it out?
mardypants 37

10 January 2008 at 9:20 pm

I’d honestly thought this kind of appalling bigotry had been largely expelled from our society; I’m sadden to discover there’s still people who believe it their right to pass judgment on others because of who they love.

[captcha: nounces quiche… meh]
Matthew Pilott 38

10 January 2008 at 10:13 pm

Psycho Milt, you did indeed. The wonders of the internet – you can get these types of views without actually having to meet the person. I like to hear ideas from as diverse a crowd as posible, although I suppose there’s only so much one can take (in the context of the above, perhaps that was the wrong turn of phrase!!).

I’d like to see the officially published list of Natural Acts according to Michele Cabling however, I imagine it would be, err, quite in depth.

Michele, you’re mixing business with pleasure here:

“No, monogamy isn’t “natural” in that we can be sexually attracted to any number of people on a physical level, but since 80 percent of sex is emotional, most of us prefer the full monty with someone we care about, not the fleeting scratching of an itch with someone of no importance.”

Given your propensity to brand acts unnatural, I find it surprising you’d vote for anyone who is married, for example. While 80% of the pleasure of sex may be emotional (the difference between males and females is marked here, ut that’s another kettle of fish), the point of sex is not to have pleasure. It is to reproduce. Males instinctively try to share their genetic material far & wide. That is what is natural. The Judeo-Christian idea of monogamy and mariage is, in that context, a perversity upon the natural world. You could say it’s as bad as…well I’ll leave the gory details to your imgination.

Now, I don’t actually believe in what I have said above (marriage and monogamy being a perversity), for the reason that we are a civilised society, and have evolved into a state where stability in the family is amenable to the raising of children, amongother things. Just one way in which society surplants what is “natural”.

There are numerous sociatal constructs that have normalised what is not natural on a biological, psychological and physiological level. It is an acceptance of these, I believe, that leads to the reaction Mardypants had to your views, as an example.

What you’ve done here is to bore down upon a single act you consider unnatural, and create an idea around it. The flaw is in your perception of ‘unnatural’ – as Kimble said so succinctly, “You know what else is unnatural? Practically everything in modern society.” Do you hate everything ‘unnatural’? Are you picking and choosing for political expediancy, or some personal crusade perhaps?
Michele Cabiling 39

10 January 2008 at 10:55 pm

Every act of heterosexual intercourse, whether intended for pleasure or procreation, uses our sex organs for their natural and intended purpose.

The mechanics of sodomy have been well documented by me in previous posts, so I see no need to recap for the benefit of the deliberately dim.

A simple joke will suffice.

Randy comes home from work to find Cyril pushing a turd around the bath with his hand. “What are you doing, Cyril?” askd Randy. “I’m teaching Junior how to swim,” replies Cyril.

Heterosexual intercourse creates life. Homosexual intercourse creates nothing but bacterial life. End of story boys …
Matthew Pilott 40

10 January 2008 at 11:30 pm

A simple joke won’t suffice actually; however, it’s edifying (on one level) to see you resort to jokes and toilet humour.

You consider homosexual intercourse unnatural, but can’t define what is or is not ‘natural’ outside of this dubiously limited context. There are countless other examples of unnatural acts, a few examples of which I have given.

I therefore await your crusade against marriage, consumption of MSG, and people driving vehicles at speeds faster that that which they can run for starters, as based upon your value system, people who engage in these acts are performing something for wich they were not intended, and are therefore to be denigrated, ridiculed, abused and, presumably, are unfit for public office.

I’m not being deliberately dim (might I note you have ignored the entire content of my post), I’m merely trying to demonstrate what an unfortunately narrow view of the world you have chosen to express here (forgive the understatement), and presumably hold dear.
Jum 41

11 January 2008 at 12:09 am

I’ve changed my mind. You people are actually a bit of a laugh. Haven’t changed my mind about Muriel, tho. I can understand from the description why she’s got a thing about black polythene bags. You for instance, Michele.

What!!! Muriel accept the DPB. What a hypocrite. All that bleating about people living off the smell of an oily rag and now, even worse, I have to picture you two casting electorate spells over a cup of hot chocolate urine, with turd marshmallows I guess or horned toads’ legs. Whatever.

The idea that you two jekyll and hydes are/were working in a political arena that may influence my life is way too scary.
Jum 42

11 January 2008 at 8:56 am

SANTI

‘Vanquished’? That word suggests a time of idealism and chivalry. Michele has neither.She’s vicious and vacuous and predictable when she’s losing.

MICHELE’s

pompous arse extended diatribes are boring and unnecessary. They are nothing to do with the matter in hand. Speaking of hands – she’s doing a snow job or is it a blow job in your world, with blow ins like Key.

Michele and Key can (e)vacuate together.
Jum 43

11 January 2008 at 9:52 am

Michele Cabiling

How many MOTIONS did you and Muriel pass when you were on da committay, passing rasulooshunssssssssss?

Sorry

I guess I didn’t wash my hands fast enough.
Michele Cabiling 44

11 January 2008 at 11:44 am

Jun wrote:

“Muriel accept the DPB. What a hypocrite.”

Muriel accepted the DPB as a temporary expedient because she was dumped by a deadbeat dad and left on her own with two small children. Rather than seeing the DPB as a lifestyle, she used it as a hand-up not a handout — the manner in which it was originally intended. Rather than taking it as an unconditional ENTITLEMENT, Muriel met her reciprocal RESPONSIBILITIES by raised her children to be unversity graduates, not inter-generation dole bludgers.

Over the course of her subsequent career (PhD. in Mathematics from a prestigious US university, successful business owner, President of the Northland Chamber of Commerce, Member of Parliament) I’m sure that she has paid way more in taxes than she ever received from the welfare state.

No hypocrisy there.

All in all a good investment by Nanny State, I’d have thought.

It seems like you have something against successful women, Jum. Could it have something to do with envy perhaps? Feelings of personal inadequacy and lack of fulfillment in your own life?

“I have to picture you two [Michele and Muriel] casting electorate spells over a cup of hot chocolate urine, with turd marshmallows I guess or horned toads’ legs.”

Must be some kind of Freudian slip. I have to picture you feverishly praying to the Goddess that advances in medical technology allow you to clone yourself twice, so you can dance around a cauldron.
Phil 45

11 January 2008 at 11:57 am

Jum/Michelle

Are you two parts of the same split personality disorder a-la “Criminal minds” last night?
Michele Cabiling 46

11 January 2008 at 12:08 pm

1. Jum wrote:
“MICHELE’s pompous arse extended diatribes are boring and unnecessary. They are nothing to do with the matter in hand.”

In Ancient Greece, major issues were decided by direct particpatory democracy. Accordingly, oratory ability was highly prized in terms of being able to influence the outcome of political debate.

A school of “anti-philosophy” called “Sophism” arose teaching inferior intellects how to demagogue the arguments of better-armed opponents.

As Friedrich Hayek puts it, this enables the demagogue to: “gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”

To adequately address any topic requires serious engagement, something that doesn’t readily translate into a “sound bite.”

Attacking the style of my posts rather than their substance is simply sophistry.
Michele Cabiling 47

11 January 2008 at 12:10 pm

Jum wrote:

“How many MOTIONS did you and Muriel pass when you were on da committay, passing rasulooshunssssssssss?

“Sorry I guess I didn’t wash my hands fast enough.”

Obviously obsessed with maintaining what Freud describes as “the immaculate anus” and probably something to do with receiving the wrong kind of toilet training as a child.

All I can say is that you strike me as a candidate for some serious psychoanalysis.
Michele Cabiling 48

11 January 2008 at 12:15 pm

Phil wrote:

“Jum/Michelle

Are you two parts of the same split personality disorder a-la “Criminal minds” last night?”

More like polar (NOT bipolar) opposites.

1. Educated v Uneducated.

2. Married to a real man not a pussywhipped feminist lackey.

3. Libertarian, not statist.

4. Confortable with my body and sex, not someone with a diseased imagination about such matters.

5. Able to argue dispassionately for the inherent rationality of my ideas, not a quivering bundle of primitive emotions, who has internalised a particular world view, and therefore has a hysterical hissy fit when it it is questioned.
mardypants 49

11 January 2008 at 1:28 pm

Michele, I share your hope that Franks is nominated for the National Party. Although I agree with him on very few matters, he is a good candidate albiet somewhat of a chameleon. What I find excruiating is your insistence on some sort of hyper-conservative Christian filter for NZ politics. You’re entitled to your view, but please don’t insist that others agree; the world is a far more diverse place than you appear willing to accept.

I also hope you’ve got a key role in his campaign. I respect the fact that you’re very open in your beliefs, I genuinely respect this. There is a place for such beliefs in our broad democracy, however I’m not at all sure the good people of Wellington, or the Wellington National Party for that matter, would feel well represented by you or by Franks if, in fact, he shares your world view (which I doubt he’d state publicly).

Lets leave aside the issues of sexuality which, thankfully, are not qualifications for elected office and instead focus on the qualities the different candidates might being to parliament.
Jum 50

11 January 2008 at 2:16 pm

As usual, National/Act clones band together to produce the same gut spilling garbage directed at people who disagree with their, at best, bovine views.

1. Educated? All you do is quote other people and then try to ridicule anyone who disagrees with you, especially when you know they have a valid point.

2. Hee Hee…. send PHIL over here and tell my husband he’s not a real man and all 6 foot and a bit of him will turn Phil into a split personality – but no, he won’t. He’s not a violent man but he would clearly display his dislike for anyone who tries to tell him he’s pussy whipped. He’s one of the few men I do have any respect for.

Notice I said send Phil. You’re obviously one of those people who pick fights and then send your ‘real’ husband to deal with it. I guess Phil is your closet ‘real’ man for posting purposes.

Add Michael Cullen to that list of men I respect. He and Helen Clark make a good team and I look forward to a long and happy working partnership between them as the government of a real man’s and real woman’s choice.

3. The only time people admit to being libertarian is when they’re not being badly affected by it.(sort of like going on the DPB but only for a little while and not that anyone else should, because only I had this really bad relationship, sob).

4. Comfortable with our bodies and sex – now there is an interesting subject Michele. My personal belief has always been ‘sex between/among consenting adults has no boundaries providing no one gets damaged by it’. I guess the difference between you and me is that I don’t need to use every sexual word in the alphabet to prove that. And thus if I consider it okay for homosexuals to have sex that actually makes me more understanding about differences in people than you Michele. Maybe you’re the one who needs Uncle Freudie, or even PsychoMilt – now that would be an interesting session.

5. Calling me an emetic is not dispassionate Michele. It’s probably quite witty but definitely not dispassionate. I’ve found, when dealing with types like you on blog sites, I have to reduce down to your style/substance in order to communicate. My apologies for that.

I should thank you also – you’ve given me some excellent insights into your political world.
Jum 51

11 January 2008 at 2:34 pm

Phil

Criminal Minds is one of the best profiling shows on television. How people tick interests me greatly and I have seen some of the most telling profiles emerge on this blog. I have also gained insight into how the political parties National/Act behave. It’s not a pretty sight and certainly Act would not be welcomed as a party of choice to lead NZ from reading those posts.

I both Jum Michele and would prefer not to be lumped together whether in split fashion or otherwise.
Jum 52

11 January 2008 at 2:43 pm

Phil

Correction

Both Jum and Michele would prefer not to be lumped together, whether in split fashion or otherwise.
Michele Cabiling 53

11 January 2008 at 3:12 pm

Mardypants wrote:

“What I find excruiating is your insistence on some sort of hyper-conservative Christian filter for NZ politics.”

Where did that come from? As already stated, principled opposition to dirty, dangerous, pathologically promiscuous sexual behaviour is not restricted to “hyper-conservative Christians.” Never at any point have I invoked Bible-based arguments in support of my position.

“Lets leave aside the issues of sexuality which, thankfully, are not qualifications for elected office and instead focus on the qualities the different candidates might being to parliament.”

The oft-heard argument from the political and lifestyle left is that a person’s sexual preference [‘sexuality’ wrongly implies a person is ‘born gay’] is of no importance when it comes to assessing their suitability for public office.

I do not accept this position. Edmund Burke stated: “”A representative owes the people not only his industry, but his judgment, and he betrays them if he sacrifices it to their opinion.”

That means ALL the people, not a narrow interest group he/she believes themself anointed to represent.

Friedrich Engels, in a letter to Karl Marx about a book penned by 19th Century German gay actvist Karl-Hans Ulrichs, wrote “The pederasts start counting their numbers and discover they are a powerful group in our state. The only thing missing is an organisation, but it seems to exist already, though it is hidden.”

In “The Pink Swastika,” Lively and Abrahams state: “the implicit goal of homosexual political activism is to legitimise homosexual conduct and relationships in a society. This necessarily requires a society to abandon its commitment to marriage as the exclusive domain of acceptable sexual conduct.

“The abandonment of this standard logically opens the door to every other form of sexual promiscuity. Clearly, such a transformation of
attitude is now occurring … What we will find is that this transformation is not the result of random social forces, but of deliberate and systematic political activism
by the ‘gay’ movement.”
Jum 54

11 January 2008 at 3:16 pm

If the DPB had not been available to dear Muriel and she had to stay with her husband – oh dear, could have been a whole different story.

Actually, I’ll have to think about that. If we didn’t have the DPB, we wouldn’t have had Muriel in Parliament. Hmmmm.

Nah, however much I’d like to be rid of Muriel and her coven, I would not have seriously dismantled the DPB – there are far too many more deserving women out there, and some men.
Jum 55

11 January 2008 at 3:31 pm

Mardypants

Please leave Michele alone – she’s doing a great job for Greens, Maori, United Future, New Zealand First, Progressive, Labour…, the gays, et cetera.

Mind you with all this quoting from other people, does Michele actually know who she is. Have we had an actual sentence that doesn’t involve some other alive or dead person’s viewpoint?
Matthew Pilott 56

11 January 2008 at 3:35 pm

“That means ALL the people, not a narrow interest group he/she believes themself anointed to represent.”

I would imagine that the anti-gay lobby is far fewer in number than those who are neutral (i.e. have no objection to a human being based upon their sexuality) or pro-gay. Run a rampant homophobe against a homosexual for public office and I suspect you’ll get your answer.

“This necessarily requires a society to abandon its commitment to marriage as the exclusive domain of acceptable sexual conduct.

“The abandonment of this standard logically opens the door to every other form of sexual promiscuity. Clearly, such a transformation of attitude is now occurring”

Boo-bloody-hoo, the Judeo-Christian stranglehold on sexual activites might end, along with it, one can only imagine, civilised society, the world, and potentially the universe. We’ve got some real conspiracy theorists on our hands, though, if they believe that it is only the gay lobby that has caused a transformation in restrictive traditional and conservative values.
Michele Cabiling 57

11 January 2008 at 4:13 pm

Jum wrote:

“He’s [my husband] one of the few men I do have any respect for.”

That’s telling, isn’t it. Any man who can co-exist in the same space as a sour, bitter misandrist like you may as well have handed you a razor and invited you to cut it off.

I guarantee “respect” for your husband lasts only for as long as he continues to leave the toilet seat down on command.

Oh, he’s “whipped,” all right!

“You’re obviously one of those people who pick fights and then send your ‘real’ husband to deal with it.”

Really? I don’t seem to be too much on the back foot to you in an intellectual sense, so why would I need to up the ante to physical violence?

“My personal belief has always been ‘sex between/among consenting adults has no boundaries providing no one gets damaged by it’.”

What about the fact that gays are are physically and psychologically damaged by the sexual practices they elect to engage in. These consist primarily of oral-genital or oral-anal contact and anal intercourse. Such practices are inherently dangerous because of the proclivity to produce occult and overt physical trauma, often spreading sexually transmitted disease.

The rectum is particularly vulnerable to sexual trauma, where breaks in the protective membrane barrier facilitate blood exchange and, in turn, the transfer of infectious agents. Furthermore, certain male homosexual practices, such as “fisting,” i.e. the insertion of the entire hand into the recipient’s anal canal, are likely to cause more serious injuries. Surgery has been required for some rectal injuries cause by insertion of “sex toys,” such as vibrators.

Infection rates for HIV are highest among homosexual men compared to intravenous drug users and heterosexual men and women, and may approach 50% in urban environments. HIV infection and AIDS is by far the leading cause for early mortality in this group. High-risk behaviours will continue to be associated with serious life-threatening consequences and significantly shortened life expectancies among gay and bisexual men.

Homosexual men are also at increased risk for certain malignancies, including lymphoma and anal cancer. Research has shown that human papilloma virus (HPV) infection in gay men is primarily responsible for their high rate of anal cancer. The incidence of anal cancer among homosexual men now exceeds that of cervical cancer in women. Co-existent HIV infection increases the risk even more.

As a Libertarian I believe everyone is entitled to go to hell in their own way as long as they do so in private with other consenting adults and there is no collateral damage to non-consenting third parties.

However, I still reserve the right, as a thinkng being, to pass comment as I see fit on the viability of that behaviour. Homosexuality is undoubtedly a dangerous, pathological and unsanitary lifestyle, not to mention biologically redundant behaviour. It is impossible to take seriously the suggestion there is no functional difference between sperm swimming towards eggs or sperm swimming towards faeces.

I regard myself as under no political or moral obligation to fund the medical treatment of self-inflicted ailments suffered by those electing to engage in promiscuous anal sodomy. Its consequences are documented, known in advance, and therefore shouldn’t be passed on to others in the community who don’t engage in that behaviour.

Open question: “If you needed a blood transfusion, would you prefer to have blood from a gay man who says he always uses condoms, or from married heterosexual who says he’s faithful to his wife?”
Michele Cabiling 58

11 January 2008 at 4:35 pm

Jum wrote:

“Mind you with all this quoting from other people, does Michele actually know who she is. Have we had an actual sentence that doesn’t involve some other alive or dead person’s viewpoint?”

Thats called an ad hominem attack, not a reasoned rejoinder to anything I’ve stated. Educated people often use quotes in marshalling and supporting an argument. But of course you wouldn’t know that ….

Perhaps it makes you feel insecure that others possess superior erudition?

Matthew Pilott wrote:

“Boo-bloody-hoo, the Judeo-Christian stranglehold on sexual activites might end, along with it, one can only imagine, civilised society, the world, and potentially the universe. We’ve got some real conspiracy theorists on our hands, though, if they believe that it is only the gay lobby that has caused a transformation in restrictive traditional and conservative values.”

Let’s broadden your understanding of the mechanics of political manipulation a little:

The shifting paradigm of sexual morality is a source of much controversy in Western culture, and homosexuals, though less than 3 percent of the population, are at the centre of this controversy.

The secular civil rights of consenting adults are increasingly coming into conflict with the traditional Judeo-Christian foundation for the family and society. This is no accident.

The notion that particular groups of people meet together secretly or in private to plan various courses of action, and that some of these plans actually exert a significant influence on particular historical developments is typically rejected out of hand and dismissed as the figment of a paranoid imagination.

What we do know for sure is that Marxist-Leninists have for decades agitated among various minority groups in order to bring about the breakdown of our existing society and its replacement with a model of their own choosing.

The three main roadblocks to its goal of a secular and socialist world order are private property (which provides material independence from state power), the family (which affords loyalties prior to the state), and religion (which claims authority above that of the state).

Homosexual activism was long ago identified by Marxist-Leninists as a social force that could be harnessed and directed to undermine the traditional family and the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western culture.

Marx had claimed that society is evolving inexorably toward socialism through a process called dialectical materialism. An existing condition (thesis) comes into conflict with a new condition (antithesis) that is attempting to emerge. Out of the dialectical conflict between these two opposing forces a new, higher condition (synthesis) emerges. This is then put through the process again as the new thesis, until socialism is achieved.

Lenin expanded Marx’s dialectical analysis from its early focus on economic relationships to take in social and political relationships, thus widening the role of the revolutionary as a change agent. The task of the revolutionary was now to identify and exploit pressure points for dialectical conflict, thus undermining the legitimacy of the existing social and political order, and hastening the eventual triumph of socialism.

Groups who can be helped by Communists to see that they are “marginalised” from capitalist society due to their race, gender, class and sexual preference have long proved particularly fertile ground for those looking to promote dialectical conflict. Marxist-Leninists, worldwide, have practised for decades a process of agitating amongst such groups in order to achieve social breakdown and eventual socialist control.

The notion that homosexuals are an oppressed group or class first gained broader currency through the efforts of university professors influenced by Antonio Gramsci, one of the many disreputable Communists enshrined as intellectual icons by the academic left.

As an innovative Stalinist in the 1930s, Gramsci pondered the historic inability of Communist parties to mobilise workers to seize the means of production and overthrow the capitalist ruling classes. He saw that Western society, steeped in traditions of freedom and liberty, would never succumb to a frontal assault and its workers were too busy accumulating capital to be cannon fodder for a socialist revolution.

Gramsci responded by expanding Marx’s ranks of the oppressed from the working classes alone to include other “marginalised groups” such as women, racial minorities and homosexuals. Due to the ideological supremacy of the existing powerful groups in society, said Gramsci, these groups lacked consciousness of their own oppression. By internalising the value systems and world views of the privileged groups, they had consented to their own marginalisation.

For a revolutionary social transformation to occur, the revolution must therefore first take place at the level of consciousness. Gramsci saw intellectuals as having a key role in delegitimising and unmasking the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups to empower “marginalised groups.” He urged radicals to acquire “cultural hegemony” by which he meant capturing the institutions that produce society’s governing ideas. Helping “marginalised groups” to an awareness of their own class oppression would be the key to controlling and transforming the society itself. Universities were to be first-line political weapons in this “war of position.”

Marxist intellectuals first slithered into the academy in the 1930s. They covertly increased their numbers over succeeding decades, and by the 1960s were a significant presence at universities throughout the Western world. After achieving critical mass in the liberal arts faculties, particularly those dealing with the study of society itself, they systematically excluded anyone holding viewpoints outside the leftist spectrum.

Many academics now see themselves not primarily as educators, but as agents of an “adversary culture” at war with the world outside the university. Their agenda is to produce students who will go forth from the academy as “agents of social change,” committed to achieving “social justice” for the “marginalised groups” Gramsci had identified.

For three decades students have been taught that rather than living in free societies, they are trapped in a wicked caste system of race, gender and sexuality crying out for revolutionary change. There are few, if any dissenting voices. Under the saturating drumbeat of this “cultural pessimism,” many intellectuals from “dominant groups” were induced to “switch sides” as Gramsci had envisaged.

After their consciousness-raising by Marxist academics, intellectuals from “subordinate groups” and those from “dominant groups” induced to throw in their lot with the “oppressed” moved from the academy directly into government, the media, entertainment, the trade unions, the churches, the education system and other opinion-shaping activities or careers. Once there, they worked tirelessly to promote the Marxist-Leninist agenda. As a result, the values of a free society have been subjected to three decades of unrelenting attack from within.

Two kinds of intellectuals are pushing the notion of homosexuals as a “marginalised” or “oppressed” group. The first is a numerically small hard-core left wing activist class that derives a sense of intellectual superiority from knowing it is manipulating the situation. The second consists of large numbers of passive enablers who have unwittingly embraced socialist doctrines, largely because their leftist professors ensured that they were never exposed to intellectual alternatives.

The person most responsible for bringing “gay rights” to the forefront of Western social discourse is an obscure American “civil rights” campaigner named Harry Hay. In the 1930s, Hay renounced his family’s privileged social status to become a Marxist-Leninist agitator. He married a political colleague; the couple adopted two children and for years worked together to advance the Communist cause in various parts of America. Throughout his youth and marriage, Harry Hay fought off homosexual inclinations. By 1950, he had abandoned his wife and children to fully embrace a homosexual lifestyle.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (of which Hay and several gay friends were members) frowned on homosexuality in Marxist-Leninist ranks. But Hay and his friends remained unconvinced that their sexual preference necessarily represented a liability to the advancement of socialism.

Hay had read Gramsci. He’d also read Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and been struck by Kinsey’s finding that around 10% of men Kinsey surveyed had been “exclusively homosexual” for at least some significant part of their lives. If Kinsey’s 10% figure was even close to accurate, Hay reasoned, homosexuals must represent a large and significant group that could be mobilised to advance the socialist cause. Hay soon concluded that the general public’s sympathy could be aroused for gay people if homosexuals were painted as yet another “oppressed minority” in need of liberation and government advocacy.

In 1950, Hay and a number of fellow Marxist-Leninist intellectuals founded the Mattachine Society, America’s first “homosexual activist” organization. Its ostensible goals were to educate the public about homosexuality and work for the repeal of the (at that time) 48 States’ so-called “sodomy laws” (which viewed homosexual behaviour as a criminal offence).

Capitalising on still-unsevered social connections, Hay and his fellow Mattachines traversed America addressing various audiences and spread their views still further through an ever-widening circle of influential publications. Inspired by the Mattachines, several lesbian intellectuals founded a “sister” organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, in 1955.

In line with Marxist-Leninist “Popular Front” doctrine, Harry Hay’s claim that homosexuals were both a sexual and a political “minority” welded together sexuality and politics. With constant repetition, Hay’s propaganda claim — “homosexuals are an oppressed minority” — has come to resonate strongly with many “useful idiots” looking to engage in moral preening for their commitment minority “civil rights.”

But “civil rights” was just a fish hook to attract the support of respectable people, who are then persuaded that the social suffering of homosexuals can be alleviated only by the radical social change gay activists are demanding.

Gay activists regard legal recognition of same-sex partners as the first step in securing gay marriage and adoption rights, thus relegating heterosexual marriage to just another lifestyle option among many. Publications meant for a homosexual readership today openly state that the gay activist agenda is to subvert and destroy heterosexual marriage.

Behind this push is the Marxist-Leninist propaganda claim that the formative family normalises heterosexual relations, thus marginalising alternative sexualities. Gay activists (whether they know it or not) are being used as a cat’s-paw to advance the Marxist-Leninist agenda of eradicating the formative family as the basic building block of a capitalist civil society.

Gay activism is therefore highly dangerous to the established social order. If gay activist demands are met, the Marxist anti-family agenda moves a step closer to completion.
Jum 59

11 January 2008 at 5:31 pm

Michele

Your statement about choosing between a gay and a straight is nowhere near as good as the line in the film Carrington where the lawyer asks gay pacifist Lytton Strachey, ‘if a German was raping your sister what would you do then and Lytton replies “I would attempt to come between them”. Now that is what I call an immortal and funny line. Way better than your earlier joke. At least mine is refined.

Personally if I had to choose between you, who is supposedly straight, and a gay, I’d go for the gay. After the nasty unfounded comments you continue to make about my husband and me, and since I believe that the holistic attitude of the person is in part responsible for the overall health of their body, you would poison me far more than any gay.

Since they test blood, there should not be a problem.

I would also defend your right Michele to speak your piece but don’t tell me I’m a lesser person than you just because we disagree.

Sour and bitter – oh plusseeese, Michele. You really are a nasty person. I suggest you start a daily regime of watching Spongebob Squarepants 4pm on 2 and get a better take on life.

Toilet seats look better down. It’s a fact. My husband was putting the toilet seat down long before I met him. In fact he’s reminded me to do the same a couple of times. You really are scraping the bottom now.

You are scaremongering with fisting this and cancerous that. Shouldn’t you also be discussing gonorrhoea and syphilis and all those other exciting words that YOU can give and get Michele?

I don’t remember suggesting that semen swimming towards eggs is the same as swimming towards faeces.

Next I suppose you’ll be telling me that rape of a woman is more acceptable than anal sex between two men. Then you’ll be telling me that female genital mutilation is more acceptable than anal sex between two men.

Surgery has also been necessary after giving birth. Next you’ll be telling me that’s unnatural.

When we talk of damage to gays, again the attitude towards them is just as damaging. Being gay comes back to the nature, nurture argument. Whichever you believe does not interest me and we probably agree (ohh did I say that!) on the whole process of gay sex being rather uncomfortable to say the least.

Read carefully what I said “providing no one gets damaged by it”. What do you think that means Michele? Damage is when one person gets hurt physically or mentally. That does not necessarily happen during a homosexual act. But, you were so busy spouting your mindless rubbish – no you definitely weren’t ‘thinking’ then – that you did not read my words.
Jum 60

11 January 2008 at 8:10 pm

Michele

Educated people like you use other people’e thoughts, ideas and opinions to speak for you.

Educated people like me look at the same information let it sift through my life experiences and then formulate my own opinion.

No, Michele, sigh, I am not in the least bit jealous of the educational route you took. Your opinions will be the same as all the other people in your educational sphere.

You have no original single thought, just a hodgepodge of other people’s that you all learned by rote. That’s why your party’s foreign based ideology is so dangerous for New Zealand. You’re not a thinker, you’re a user of other people’s intellect, and also in a practical way , eg in the use of cheap Labour for bigger profit, eg which is why you’ll scrap the ECA improvements IF you get into power.

Your arrogance is overwhelming and to think you people have the nerve to accuse our Prime Minister Helen Clark of arrogance. I just shake my head at the wonder of you and your types’ hypocrisy and moral corruption.

What does worry me is that your narrow sphere of mental education may be in a position to influence my life and that of my family.
Michele Cabiling 61

11 January 2008 at 9:07 pm

Ju, wrote: “No, Michele, sigh, I am not in the least bit jealous of the educational route you took. Your opinions will be the same as all the other people in your educational sphere.”

My opinions are despite, rather than due to, my education.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the academy is full of Gramscian Marxist who began colonising western universities decades ago. Upon attaining critical mass in many departments, especially those specialising in the study of society, they were able to use their dominance on faculty hiring committees to systematically exclude others who didn’t share their political opinions.

Universities are now factories for the reproduction and dissemination of radical leftist ideology. Outside of the hard sciences and practical professions, there is no penalty for being wrong, and Marxism and the ideologies it spawned continue to flourish in the academy, despite the lessons of history in the wider world. As Erich Hoffer famously stated: “Intellectuals don’t function at room temperature.”

It’s now possible to go all the way to PhD. level in the Humanities and never be taught by a single conservative professor. Whole schools of thought that completely debunk leftist ideology may as well not exist. How many ACT or National voters would you expect to find in a NZ sociology department, and if one did apply, to you think he’d be offered a job?

The leftists wank on about “diversity,” yet practice intellectual apartheid. Students are brainwashed into accepting radical leftist ideology, yet would laugh at you if called “Marxists.” They are told by their professors they are clever and virtuous for accepting the programming, and happily move into the wider world in self-congratulation mode, though only equipped to be clerks or angry social activists.

Students graduate largely ignorant of the ideas and perspectives that would equip them intellectually question the radical leftist agenda. The works of von Mises, Hayek, Aron, Oakeshott, Sowell, Popper, Strauss, Bloom, Bastiat, and other anti-socialist thinkers are virtually unknown on the left — excluded from the canons of the Marxist-dominated universities.

Despite the collapse of the socialist empire following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the marginalisation of conservative ideas in the academic culture has proved so pervasive that they may as well not exist.

As far back as 1922, Ludwig von Mises wrote a 500 page treatise proving that socialism would not work. As close as any analysis could, von Mises anticipated the social, political and economic debacle that would characterise the next seventy years of socialist history.

History has confirmed the correctness of von Mises’s insights, and just as dramatically refuted his left wing opponents, yet his intellectual contributions remain as unrecognised today as they were before Communism fell.

While the intellectual tradition that gave rise to von Mises’s insights is marginalised at every Western university, Marxism and its variants flourish, and provide the principal texts for the next generations of intellectuals.

Von Mises’s writings are invisible, yet the works of Stalinists, ignorant of even the most basic economic realities of how societies function, are familiar to most undergraduates.

In the humanities and social sciences, the discredited traditions of Marxism have become the intellectual wellspring of the main schools of current academic theory — critical studies, cultural studies, historicism, structuralism, post modernism, queer theory, and radical feminism. The comparable schools of conservative and libertarian thought barely exist within university walls.

And you have the nerve to accuse me of having been captured and brainwashed by my professors!

Perhaps you are looking in the mirror.

“Uneducated you are!” as Yoda would say.
Jum 62

11 January 2008 at 10:24 pm

Michele Cabiling

Life’s a bitch and then ya die – I’d hate to think we hadn’t finished this ‘conversation’ by then. I must admit, the visual feast you portrayed in paragraph one had me laughing in my chair. It reminded me of Harry Potter and his school chums racing in to ‘vanquish’ (this was a good novel for that word)the nasty Voldemort and the dementors.

I am slightly suspicious Michele in that you have made it plainly obvious that you think I am a stupid ‘sour bitter…’ and yet you are devising these poetic feasts for me to read. WHY? Wouldn’t anyone pay you enough attention when you were young – boarding school perhaps?

Let me come back to you tomorrow on your post. I’m watching The Worst Christmas of my Life and I won’t be sour and bitter enough if I post tonight.
Jum 63

12 January 2008 at 4:25 pm

Michele

Luckily I saved this particular blog because it seems to have disappeared off the radar and I would hate you to think I had abandoned you in your hour of need.

I’ve just delivered my poor deranged (as per your last insult about my mothering abilities)capitalist son to his part time job. Terrible isn’t it that he’s forced out to work because his mother and father refuse to supply all his wants, only his needs. Shame on us. And my daughter next. Is there no end to my despotism? And no driving until after 18. I have to drive them everywhere. Is there no end to my sadism. Shoot me now.

No Spongebob Squarepants to lift my spirits until Monday avo’. Only the news about some male despot keen to rid his country of his own people by killing, maiming, torturing and raping them – Pakistan, America (although they do it in someone else’s country), Africa, and all of them with a good religious upbringing, all ‘dementors’ in their funny little ways, sucking the spirit out of people – which brings me back to you Michele.

Hence my sour ugly bitter self is back. I’m back here communicating with you because I always keep my word.

Probably the worst thing I can insult anyone with is that they are boring and I observed the symptoms of being bored in connection with you last night in that I did not blog into the middle of the night with you. Still, a good night’s rest does wonders.

I’ve also thought further about boarding school and wonder ‘was there fagging? Is your bottom obsession something to do with having your head dunked down the toilet too many times?

And speaking of dementors in describing the first part of your usual ‘somebody said this and somebody studied that’ diarrhoea diatribe –

PARAGRAPH ONE. Harry Potter and his enlightened fellow students entering Hogwarts to free it from the creationist Voldemort (Yesteryear’s Brian Tamaki) and his demented dementors (today’s Gordon Copeland, Larry Baldock, Bob McCoskrie, the convicted paedophile Graham Capill), all of who(m) certainly wouldn’t have let you in Michele except to make the tea. We could have gone back still further, Michele, to the 1890s, the original nanny state, ruled by men, where railways and everything else was owned by t’gummint, and Premier/Prime Minister/King Dick Seddon, the man who gave women the vote through a giant ‘boob’ he made, and thanks to a couple of men who could see a rosier future with equality for women.

PARAGRAPH TWO. Not quite right about the intellectuals don’t function at room temperature. Genius doesn’t function at room temperature. Intellectuals are people who either think and make decisons to make improvements – ‘the greatest good for the greatest number'(that is Helen Clark) or quote studies to denigrate. (starts with M, ends with a very small e.)

PARAGRAPH THREE.
sentence one – should I assume from your comment that conservatives aren’t humane?
sentence two – you talk about ‘schools of thought that debunk leftist ideology’. Thought is not proof and a good analyst creates a level playing field to find the truth. You use ‘thought’ on both sides or ‘ideology’ on both sides. I know you didn’t because you see ‘thought’ as being morally loftier and ‘ideology’ as being swampmuck. I also use the word ‘ideology’ on National’s damaging and disastrous experiments because I want people to feel my anger at their historical stupidity and inability to learn from their mistakes.
sentence three – I can’t answer that unless I know those people. Most people keep their political beliefs to themselves. I would have thought that if you feel these places are overrun with lefties then as a good act supporter you would seek a job there to change it from the inside. What worries me once again about National/Act is that it would never be for ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.

Part 2 after I have done my mothering duties.

Do your children keep you as busy as mine do me, Michele?
Jum 64

12 January 2008 at 4:33 pm

Michele

Before I go, I suggest a DNA marriage between you and D4J. Hopefully the baby would have your obvious ability with words but they’d be shorter in shape and post size.
Michele Cabiling 65

12 January 2008 at 6:37 pm

Amy worthwhile explanation can be condensed (after its been made in long-hand.

Quite simply, most people are approval seekers. If they are repeatedly told that their badge of membership of “club virtue” is the adoption of certain views and values, they will adopt them virtually (or even entirely) unquestioned

I refer you to this link and suggest you check it out in order to broading your understanding of deliberate academic brainwashing:

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a33b0424856.htm

Now for another one of those illustrative academic quotes that educated people use, this one from Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” [you HAVE read this book, right?}.

Hayek refers to: “[T]he docile and the gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept any ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”

If you have been through the modern academy, especially if you have studied in the liberal arts field, chances are you are not educated at all, but simply a bundle of conditioned reflexes.

Since your knee jerk reaction is that all the evils of the world are down to males, capitalism and business owners, you’re a classic case in point, Jum, which is why I regard you as uneducated.

You have internalised a particular world view and therefore have an emotional resistance to having it questioned. Because you are unable to argue dispassionately for the inherent rationality of your idead, you will always be a third rate intellect.

Because you have created a self-referencing system of values in order to synthesise a personality for yourself, anything that disturbs your small, complacent world is waved away with labels.

As Oscar Wilde reminds us: “If you cannot answer a man’s argument, do not panic. You can always call him names.”
Jum 66

12 January 2008 at 8:38 pm

Michele

You are quoting Oscar Wilde at me which I find very strange considering his personal sexual tastes, to take umbrage about me calling you names. That was my introduction to your character in the first place a) about buggery and b) when you started by vilifying me and then moved on to my husband and children.

You make some strange allusion to me being an approval seeker in that I follow certain societal regimes which seem to benefit my family. The only approval I seek is my own. The only reason I am on this blog is to look at other people’s opinions and beliefs and how I might adopt them, if they are worthwhile. Any chance of considering any of yours disappeared by the end of the first blog of yours that I read.

You are a piece of work, Michele and I am having to finally admit that you are not sufficiently at peace with yourself to discuss anything dispassionately with people who disagree with you.

Look back over your posts – not one of them has been dispassionate. They have all been about one study or another. None of them convinced me that you know anything about real life. You’re a charlatan, Michele.

I’ll tell you about a study I read of in the papers – men conducted a study about dust, yes, money spent on a dust study – no, not to find out how to get rid of it, or how to stop it causing Asthma, not to prevent it collecting in corners but WHO notices it.

The answer they wanted from their study is that women notice dust more so they are better suited to housework. In NZ more women do housework. It was a predictable result.

Their purpose was to retain the internalised world view that women are more suited to housework. I thought it was quite clever of them, albeit a money waster.

You seem to think I blame men and capitalism and business owners for all the problems in the world. I always put blame where blame is due, but just as in the case of the dust study – more men have held more positions of power in our history and therefore have been to blame for more bad policy than women.

Business owners
are responsible for my children’s part time jobs. As long as both sides treat each other fairly and the business pays a decent wage for a fair day’s work, I have no problem with that.

But if a government of National/Act pulled the same stunt it did with the Employment Contracts Act, it gives business an unfair advantage to treat workers like serfs. And they did. That’s why people like you give rise to bile within my ‘internalised self’.

Capitalism implodes if it isn’t continually creating more product and forcing people to buy it. I remember seeing a television play years ago where these robotic men in lookalike grey uniforms were delivering a lounge suite and taking the other perfectly okay one away, while the householders were crying out, we can’t afford it. We don’t want it. That to me is the plague of productivity that you and John Key want to unleash upon the world. Useless stuff for people who don’t want it and can’t afford it and brainwashing marketing tactics to ‘persuade’ them that they do. Ohh, that’s now isn’t it, thanks to Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson.

People like you have no idea of fairness or the greatest good for the greatest number, when you gain power. You want cheap labour for your businesses. I have no intention of allowing you to use my children as cheap labour. I know they work hard for their money. They are learning how to survive the world that National/Act set up which puts greed at the heart of all thinking.

You are like a petrified forest in your thinking Michele. You insult my comfortable world and political and lifestyle beliefs and yet you have nothing to persuade me otherwise.

I can see that going through your posts in a detailed, thoughtful and hopefully humorous way sometimes was a waste of time, so I’ll just swap insults with you which is something you are quite gifted at.

What a waste of my time. Since you seem to get more satisfaction from insulting people, I guess it won’t be a waste of yours.

Oh by the way, there is an interesting documentary on prime Friday 18 January – the write up was hilarious.

I quote ‘ True stories un cut: The Perfect Penis, a documentary about men who will go to desperate lengths for unregulated surgery to give them what nature hasn’t’.

Weellll, Michele, it seems that women aren’t the penis envy group at all. Because of the ridiculous macho posturing about men’s grapple, grapes, I could go on, there are men who envy other men; there are some men who will never be at peace with their bodies. I blame women like you who keep talking about women having penis envy and now you’ve hurt the very people you seem to think are perfect.
Psycho Milt 67

13 January 2008 at 9:30 am

Now for another one of those illustrative academic quotes that educated people use, this one from Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” [you HAVE read this book, right?}.

The true mark of educated gentlefolk everywhere is of course their ability to brag about the books they’ve read…
Kimble 68

13 January 2008 at 3:07 pm

“They’d probably have to like their ex-circumstances in order to do that intentionally,”

Yup, just like the perpetuation of domestic violence, people have to LIKE their previous circumstances to recreate them.

” and have very poor advisors and information to do so accidentally..?”

Ban the import of semi-high emission cars leads to older, higher emission cars being used for longer. Examples of unintended consequences abound in every government.

And if the advisers are the ones pointing them in the right direction, why not simply elect the advisers?
Michele Cabiling 69

13 January 2008 at 4:09 pm

Jum wrote:

“Their purpose was to retain the internalised world view that women are more suited to housework.”

Well if the cap fits, wear it …

“I always put blame where blame is due, but just as in the case of the dust study – more men have held more positions of power in our history and therefore have been to blame for more bad policy than women.”

That’s funny, I thought the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world …

Maybe all those poor benighted “sisters” who collude in their own class oppressions by internalising the world view of their oppressors still stubbornly resist a feminist consciousness raising.

I guess if they can whip their husbands and male offspring into not leaving the toilet seat up on pain of castration that’s “progress,” right? Not much to show for four decades of feminism …

“Useless stuff for people who don’t want it and can’t afford it and brainwashing marketing tactics to ‘persuade’ them that they do.”

In a free society people are at liberty to do things you or I might consider stupid with their own money. My mom always said: “a fool and his money are soon parted.” In a free society, people are free to succeed and free to fail. The consequences of being a dumbass rightly fall where they lie, and it’s “liberals” like you who think it’s “compassionate” to insulate people from corrective reality by allowing them to socialise the consequences of their bad decision-making.

“People like you have no idea of fairness or the greatest good for the greatest number, when you gain power.”

The wealth of ignorant leftard knee-jerking in that statement will take several paragraphs to deconstruct.

“The greatest good for the greatest number”? Whose good, and who decides? The world is full of leftards who think they know what’s best for everyone, and therefore have a right to impose it on others by force.

Leftards claim people are poor because they are “exploited” by “greedy capitalists.” Not only is this bollocks, but for the most part, people are poor not because of what others have done “to” them, but because of what they haven’t done for themselves.

“Poverty” in terms of a lack of material wealth is the natural state of social existence simply because it requires no effort to achieve it. Poverty is not caused by those who choose to elevate themselves above it, but becomes visible when there is wealth created with which to compare it.

This leads perception-bound and economicallay ignorant leftards to view the creation of wealth by some as the cause of poverty in others. Contrary to leftard redistributive dogma, the elimination of poverty can only come about through the creation of wealth. This requires intelligence, initiative, risk, effort, hard work — and a response to public need that no government could ever dare to match.

As Adam Smith famously noted, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

In a free society, irrespective of how selfish people might be on a personal level, they must be “other-centred” and provide goods and services that people want to buy. Otherwise, they don’t eat (unless of course they can compel others to feed them by electing a government to plunder the productive on their behalf).

To illustrate the leftard mentality towards poverty, consider two castaways on a deserted island, Peter and Paul. While Paul chooses to wait to be “saved”, Peter plants a garden, builds a hut, and saves his produce for harder times. Begrudgingly, Peter shares some small percentage of his produce to keep Paul from starving, but gives Paul no more than is necessary to save him from starvation. Paul has no hut, no stored food, and no means of production (i.e., a garden) to produce more food.

A leftard would view this situation and the first thing he would see would be an economic disparity. Peter is “wealthy while Paul exists in poverty! And poor Paul must rely on charity for his subsistence! A social injustice!”

Instead of rightly condemning Paul for failing to take responsibility for his own survival, a leftard would morally condemn Peter for being productive, and for not being concerned enough with the plight of Paul. It is understandable that leftards must do this.

In order to justify robbing Peter to pay Paul, it is important that Peter be morally denigrated. After all, robbing Peter for his virtue might even offend a leftard. Thus, it is a pre-requisite of being a leftard that productivity and wealth creation be viewed in a negative moral light.

“You want cheap labour for your businesses.”

The wages in any particular labour market are set by the interaction of supply and demand in that labour market. This is a function of the number of qualified people who want to work at the wages on offer. The market is neither “fair” nor “unfair” but a fact of life.

In a free society, people are not obliged to take any particular job. They are not obliged to stay in a job if they dislike the terms or conditions of employment.

To illustrate, if your kids think they aren’t paid enough at Burger King or the boss is a slave driver, they are at liberty to move to McDonalds, try the checkout at Foodtown, or borrow their parents’ lawnmower and start their own business mowing the lawns of neighbours.

Minimum wage laws inpose an abovemarket wage rate on employers, substituting the visible hand of government for the “invisible hand” of the free market. Like all statist meddling with free markets, this has unintended and deleterious consequences.

The beneficiaries of such short-sighted government actions are those fortunate enough to find work at the artificially inflated minimum wage rate. Employers will work around it either by putting in more hours themselves, making existing staff work harder, substituting a cheaper input (eg a machine) for overprices labour, or simply by going out of business.

Those who suffer are the unskilled who would have been employed at the market wage rate but can’t find a job at the minimum wage rate. Perception-bound leftards are unable to see that the vast majority of those who start in unskilled entry-level jobs are students supporting their studies, or people who once they acquire works skills (punctuality, intiative, obedience to authority)move onwards and upwards into better-remunerated, higher-skilled employment.

Leftards are never concerned with the actual OUTCOME of the policies they advocate, but with GOOD INTENTIONS, i.e. the opportunities for moral preening that flow from taking a particular world view.

Harking back to the example above, if 100 people would have been taken on at the market wage rate, and only 60 at the leftard-imposed minimum wage, are we better off in terms of your “greatest good of the greatest number” criterion?

What has in fact occurred is that 40 people have just lost the opportunity to get their feet on the first rung of the job ladder — so that do-gooders who pay no personal price for being wrong (because they can socialise the consequences via the welfare system) can give themselves a big pat on the back for belonging to “club virtue.”

Come back and talk to me when you are economically literate and not before.
Robinsod 70

13 January 2008 at 4:52 pm

You are a parody Michele, aren’t you? I mean nobody in their right mind would come out with the rubbish you do and put their real name to it? Right?

But.

Just in case you’re not (lord help us!) the idea of you claiming economic literacy is astounding. If this is your idea of intelligent debate then you better hope we don’t get the meritocracy you seem to yearn for ‘cos baby, you’ll get eaten (and not in the good way).
Psycho Milt 71

13 January 2008 at 5:49 pm

I particularly like the way Michele’s obsession with the anus and rectum segues into the toilet seat serving as a metaphor for male/female relationships. If it is a parody, it’s very well thought out.

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Chauvel does a Captain Oates « KiwiBlogBlog: posted on 12 November 2007 at 12:09 am
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Health Officials say Casey Costello’s Advice is “Crap” & Luxon Refuses To Prot...

Ngā mihi maioha. A tremendous thank you to all who commented, supported and read my recent post. In appreciation.First, an update on the Prime Minister’s press conference yesterday with Stanford - rounding up the 3 key messages you may have missed.1. ERICA STANFORD FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF NZ SPREADS MISINFORMATIONEducation ...

Mountain TuiBy Mountain Tui

13 hours ago
Gordon Campbell On US Voter Suppression, Plus The Races To Watch

On Wednesday evening, as our television relays images of long lines of people queuing to vote, keep this in mind: since 2012, America has closed 20% of its polling places. Crucial swing states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Georgia have collectively lost 400 Election Day polling places since 2010. Five of ...

WerewolfBy ScoopEditor

19 hours ago
Hell no

When do you know that a big international news story might be looking like An Historic Moment? When it gets a bunch of utterly superfluous New Zealand reporters inserted into it.I've been sympathetic to our media fretting about hanging on by a thread, but each time they despatch their microphone-holders ...

More Than A FeildingBy David Slack

1 day ago
Sabotaging justice

One of the achievements of the Labour-led government was the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2019. After decades of high-profile miscarriages of justice, and judges looking the other way on state conspiracies of silence and each other's fuckups, we finally got an outside body to cast an ...

No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant

1 day ago
Mike King and the Free Market

I was two sentences in (and stuck on) a defence of Mike King, where I was going to highlight that he was merely the well-carved figurehead of a neoliberal-shaped problem that neither begins nor ends with him, when I stumbled across a most interesting article about corporate propaganda being disseminated ...

Sapphi’s SubstackBy Sapphi

1 day ago
Volunteer activity: Evaluate automated climate misinformation debunkings

A new challenge and a new opportunity for research AI-generated disinformation threatens to make debunking climate misinformation even more challenging, swamping already scanty capacity. We are exploring ways to counter this burgeoning flood of harm by employing the same tools now employed by malefactors as a force for good. We've already published research ...

Skeptical Science

1 day ago
Don’t Lux-Speak

Don't speak, I know just what you're sayin'So please stop explainin'Don't tell me 'cause it hurtsDon't speak, I know what you're thinkin'I don't need your reasonsDon't tell me 'cause it hurtsSongwriters: Eric Stefani / Gwen StefaniDo you remember the first time you encountered Corporate Speak? Important-sounding buzzwords used to camouflage ...

Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel

1 day ago
Budget cuts penny wise & pound foolish

Kia ora. Long stories short, here’s my top six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Monday, November 4: Budget cuts are storing up costs for future taxpayers and Governments. Scoop of the day: The Government is set to deliver another budget-cutting blow for ...

The KakaBy Bernard Hickey

1 day ago
A Fresh Horizon for Greater Auckland

A few months ago we asked for your help, and you answered. Thanks to the generous support we received, you may have noticed a more consistent and diverse stream of content over the last few months – which is in large part due to us being able to pay for ...

Greater AucklandBy Greater Auckland

1 day ago
2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #44

A listing of 35 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Mon, October 28, 2024 thru Sun, November 3, 2024. Topics covered this week Here are the main topics and the media outlets where they appeared in: Climate Change Impacts ...

Skeptical Science

2 days ago
Hey, I Need Your Help

For those of you who are new here, I’m Mountain Tui.National Geographic imageI’m the one that first started badgering NZ about Atlas Network - and it went mainstream easily from that: from Mihirangi Forbes asking David Seymour about it, to David Seymour and Chris Bishop lying, to the evidence easily ...

Mountain TuiBy Mountain Tui

2 days ago
Official Flightless Bird T-Shirts!

Hi,It’s a big election in three days. Like me, you’re probably sick of hearing about it, but like it or not — what America does tends to trickle down everywhere else. America farts and we’re all under the sheet being hotboxed against our will.I’ll do a fresh Webworm on election ...

David FarrierBy David Farrier

2 days ago
All I Ever Am

I lose all my life like thisReflecting time and memoriesAnd all for fear of what I'll findIf I just stop and empty out my mindOf all the ghosts and all the dreamsAll I hold to in beliefThat all I ever amIs somehow never quite all I am nowLyrics Robert Smith.Today’s ...

Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel

2 days ago
The Book of Evidence-based-evidence

Now, in the land of leaky buildings and the Warehouse-where-everyone-gets-a-bargain, there came an electionAnd this was the one known as the show-bloody-Labour-the-bloody-door electionAnd there came into this election the one known as ChrisAnd of fresh thought or original idea, Chris was full emptyBut this was all good broFor Chris was ...

More Than A FeildingBy David Slack

3 days ago
Fact brief – Are most glaciers growing?

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park from the Gigafact team in collaboration with members from our team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Are most glaciers ...

Skeptical Science

3 days ago
It’s not (just) about the economy, stupid.

In 1992 James Carville, Bill Clinton’s lead strategist, hung a sign on the wall of the Democratic candidate’s campaign office in Little Rock, Arkansas. It had three lines on it to focus the team on the key vote-swinging issues and one of those lines would become so famous it’s turned ...

PunditBy Tim Watkin

3 days ago
Let’s Make Things Better

If you're down and out and you feel really hurtCome on over to the place where I workAnd all your loneliness, I'll try to sootheI'll play the blues for youLyrics: Albert King.Often, in these newsletters, I tell you about what is wrong. You know the sort of thing - oh ...

Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel

3 days ago
Floating a few ideas

Hello! Here comes the Saturday edition of More Than A Feilding, catching you up on anything you may have missed.Share Read more ...

More Than A FeildingBy David Slack

4 days ago
Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

A new book challenges how we need to think about technological innovation.Last week’s column mentioned the three 2024 Nobel laureates in economics. The column focused only on the 2012 book Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson with little reference to Simon Johnson, although the three have worked ...

PunditBy Brian Easton

4 days ago
Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles thanks to the Sabin Center for Cl...

Earlier this year our volunteer editor Marc Kodack spotted an impressive answer to climate change solutions denial, "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles," which he included in our weekly climate research survey. Written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel ...

Skeptical Science

4 days ago
An expert walks into a bar

Quiz1. On what study was Mike King basing his assertion that Alcohol is not a problem for people with mental issues. It’s actually the solution ?a. Klein, Sawyer, Chomsky et al; Harvard, 2002b. Black Brown and Bleu; Yale, 1999c. Bloomfield, Verall, Ardern et al, Otago 2022d. Homer, Lenny, Carl and ...

More Than A FeildingBy David Slack

4 days ago
The High Court says “Land Back”

Way back in 1839, the New Zealand Company bought the area that is now Nelson from local iwi and hapu. As part of the deal, they promised that Māori would retain their homes, fields, and burial grounds, and that in addition, 10% of the land in the planned township and ...

No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant

4 days ago
US military-industrial-sports complex.

A US friend of mine wrote on social media about attending a Homecoming football game at her niece’s Red State university. Although the referees stunk and her team lost, my friend said that she enjoyed her visit, especially the halftime … Continue reading → ...

KiwipoliticoBy Pablo

4 days ago
The Hoon around the week to November 1

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts & talking about the week’s news with:The Kākā’s climate correspondent on the latest climate news, including research showing the lethality of gas hobs and research on the health effects of climate ...

The KakaBy Bernard Hickey

4 days ago
‘Get ready for more landlord buying’

The RBNZ sees the potential for a spike in demand from landlords. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāKia ora. Long stories short, here’s my top six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Friday, November 1: The RBNZ has warned the Government’s tax changes ...

The KakaBy Bernard Hickey

4 days ago
Alcohol and Mental Health

Are you so lonely?You don't even know meBut you'd like to stone meMr Writer, why don't you tell it like it is?Why don't you tell it like it really isWhy don't you tell it how it really isBefore you go on home?Writers: Stuart Cable, Richard Mark Jones, Kelly Jones, Marshall ...

Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel

4 days ago
Weekly Roundup 1-November-2024

Wow, we’re in November already and it’s a Friday so welcome to another round-up of interesting stories about what’s happening in Auckland and other cities. Feel free to add your links in the comments! This post, like all our work, is brought to you by a largely volunteer crew and ...

Greater AucklandBy Greater Auckland

4 days ago
A Mysterious Sound

Hi,Thanks for all your feedback to Hayden Donnell’s fantasy of communal living. “Camping in summer is really the only time I get to experience village life and I love it so much,” said Michelle. “You’ve infuriated me by writing the article that’s been in my head only much better than ...

David FarrierBy David Farrier

5 days ago
Toxic positivity and toxicity in the kitchen

Long stories short, here’s the top six news items of note in climate news for Aotearoa this week, and a discussion above between Bernard Hickey and The Kākā’s climate correspondent Cathrine Dyer:A study looking at psychological distress associated with climate change has stimulated discussion about the insistent demands for ‘hope’ ...

The KakaBy Bernard Hickey

5 days ago
Geoffrey Miller: New Zealand’s breakthrough free trade deal with the Gulf

New Zealand’s new free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council is a major win for both sides. Todd McClay, New Zealand’s trade minister, announced the long-awaited deal on Thursday with his counterparts in Doha, Qatar. It is a remarkable, yet also surprising sudden success: the genesis of the agreement ...

Democracy ProjectBy Geoffrey Miller

5 days ago
Todd McClay wins breakthrough for women in Saudi Arabia

In a major international breakthrough, New Zealand has negotiated a free trade agreement with Saudi Arabia and other Arabian Peninsula countries, which includes a provision requiring them to uphold the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Trade Minister Todd McClay signed the agreement in Doha overnight. The ...

PolitikBy Richard Harman

5 days ago
Gordon Campbell on America’s fear of foreigners

Mike King’s latest comments about the relationship between alcohol and mental health – according to King, alcohol does more good than harm – raises red flags once again about this organisation, and the quality of the “counselling” it provides. Here’s what the scientific research says. The latest example of King’s ...

WerewolfBy ScoopEditor

5 days ago
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #44 2024

Open access notables Communicating the most accurate and reliable science on climate change to society: A survey of editors from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Molina & Abadal Abadal, Geoscience Communication: This study focuses on the perspectives of scientists involved in the IPCC AR5 and AR6 synthesis reports, examining ...

Skeptical Science

5 days ago
Gumboot Friday’s Founder Says Drugs and Alcohol Is A “Solution”

This afternoon, I turned to the fellow sitting near me and called out:“Guess what? A guy who runs a charity for mental health just said alcohol is a solution!”And his eyes popped out…his mouth opened ajar.That gave me some satisfaction - only because this person has zero care when it ...

Mountain TuiBy Mountain Tui

5 days ago
What can you do about bad journalism?

Day after day of David Seymour being accorded media time and attention like he’s doing this stuff in good faith and advancing these ideas in earnest. Come on. He’s a cosplaying libertarian who is really just a glove puppet for anti-democratic capitalist pigs. Read more ...

More Than A FeildingBy David Slack

5 days ago
A collapse in police legitimacy

Last week, the government had a big wank about police raids in Ōpōtiki, crowing about "gangs" and "drugs" and "law and order". Unfortunately the police did exactly the same shit they did in the Urewera terror raids 17 years ago, dragging people off in front of their kids and terrorising ...

No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant

5 days ago
2024 Reading Summary: October (+ Writing Update)

No, I haven’t vanished from the Internet. Or died. Completed reads for October: The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole The Sidereal Messenger of Galileo Galilei, by Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler Jurgen, by James Branch Cabell A very quiet reading month, and a very quiet writing month ...

A Phuulish FellowBy strda221

5 days ago
Suicide Rates Continue To Climb (Because We Are Not Treating Suicidal Patients)

Our suicide rates are skyrocketing again, and I’m going to spare you the faux-shock I could put on here, given that it would be frankly more surprising to me if our death toll had gone in the other direction. Preliminary data from 2023-24 shows that our annual suicide deaths have ...

Sapphi’s SubstackBy Sapphi

5 days ago
Are We The Baddies?

Difficult Questions: Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does.THE DEMON OF UNREST documents the descent of the United States into civil war. The primary focus of its author, Erik Larson, is the period of roughly five months ...

Bowalley Road

5 days ago
Thursday 31 October 2024

Health and safety campaigner Sonya Rockhouse has come out in support of the joint open letter from the NZCTU, Business NZ and others. A new Xero Small Business Insights report shows that small businesses are cutting staff and keeping wages low, while the Salvation Army’s State of the Pacific Peoples ...

NZCTUBy Jeremiah Boniface

5 days ago
Today’s Political Roundup – From Health to Self-Certification Risks

The focus on budgets is "going to cripple the health system".1. Cardiac specialist quits, saying Dr Lester Levy, the Part Time Health Commissioner, is "living in La La Land" and has no idea what's happening on the groundDr Dean BoddingtonDr Boddington, an electrical cardiologist, was the only person who did ...

Mountain TuiBy Mountain Tui

5 days ago
A deliberate and unnecessary crash landing

Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāKia ora. Long stories short, here’s my top six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Thursday, October 31: US and European GDP growth figures overnight show the world’s largest economies, along with that of our nearest neighbour Australia, ...

The KakaBy Bernard Hickey

5 days ago
Seymour: Swastikas OK

Race hatred cannot stop usThis one thing we knowYour poll tax and Donald TrumpGreed has got to go!You’re bound to loseYou fascists bound to lose.Original Lyrics: Woody GuthrieThere are a lot of things this government doesn’t like. Te Reo - got to go, they said, it’s too confusing for our ...

Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel

5 days ago
Sumbission: Have Your Say on Work Health and Safety

Health and safety is core union mahi. Unions recognise that health and safety is a fundamental aspect of good work, and that every worker has the right to work that is safe and healthy, and to have a voice on the operation of their work. In this submission on MBIE’s ...

NZCTUBy Jeremiah Boniface

5 days ago
The hidden health toll of hurricanes

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Neha Pathak Disasters can disrupt medical care both during and long after the event. (Photo credit: U.S. Air National Guard / Sgt. Jorge Intriago) Weeks after Hurricanes Milton and Helene tore paths of destruction across the Southeast, pictures of communities ...

Skeptical Science

5 days ago
First section of Te Ha Noa Opens

Something definitely worth celebrating is the opening of the first section of Te Hā Noa, the Victoria St Linear Park. As we highlighted eight years ago, this project is vital for helping move the thousands of people that will pour out of the Te Waihorotiu station once the CRL opens. ...

Greater AucklandBy Matt L

5 days ago
Boldness be my friend

When Nicola Willis gave the annual Finance Minister’s speech to the country’s top public servants last week, what she said must have landed like a bomb. “Now is the time for your best and boldest ideas,” she said at the Institute of Public Administration (IPANZ) event. Coming from a minister ...

PolitikBy Richard Harman

6 days ago
Wednesday 30 October 2024

The NZCTU has joined with Business NZ and health and safety groups to call on the Government to drop its plans to reform health and safety law. The Postal Workers Union is opposing a plan to reduce rural postal deliveries from five to three days a week. The Government has ...

NZCTUBy Jeremiah Boniface

6 days ago
Yer doin it all wrong mate

Reader Jeff Howell is the best kind of social media friend to have. When there's outrage and denunciation needed he’s in there dishing it with verve; and when those storms pass you get happy Jeff, sharing his projects. His projects are awesome.Until a week or so ago it was a ...

More Than A FeildingBy David Slack

6 days ago
Out Of Sympathy.

Unsympathetic Characters: Christopher Luxon should be grateful that his principal opponent, Chris Hipkins, is as out of sympathy with the temper of the times as he is.CHRIS HIPKINS had both a good week and a bad week. He and his team were able to press home Labour’s attack on the ...

Bowalley Road

6 days ago
Two States – But No Solutions.

My Enemy’s Enemy Is My Friend: Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, at the opening of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, December 19, 1942. The elimination of the Jewish state has been the unwavering ambition of successive generations of Palestinian leaders.AMIDST ALL THE HORROR of the Israel-Hamas War, ...

Bowalley Road

6 days ago
NZ For Sale: Chris Luxon Is Concierge To The Wealthy

Watching a Christopher Luxon press conference is a masterclass in gaslighting. You just know what he’s saying is disingenuous - if not outright deceptive and lies - but out he comes - with confidence and vigour - telling me black is white, and white is red.According to the Prime Minister, ...

Mountain TuiBy Mountain Tui

6 days ago
Will banks & insurers back self-consented homes?

Kia ora. Long stories short, here’s my top six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Wednesday, October 30: The Government’s move to allow qualified builders, plumbers and drainlayers to self-consent their work faces potential hurdles from reluctant insurers and bankers wanting protection against ...

The KakaBy Bernard Hickey

6 days ago
Ātahu from Moana Maniapoto

We are blessed in Aotearoa with certain people that you might call National Treasures—those with great talents and a strong affinity for this place they are the custodians of. It’s not an official list; the people you think of might differ from those I think of.What are the attributes of ...

Nick’s KōreroBy Nick Rockel

6 days ago
Henderson Station Upgrade but will it Improve Customer Experience

Over the long weekend rail shutdown a new project got underway, an upgrade to Henderson station but the plans highlight that improving the customer experience by making it easier to use public transport is not a part of Auckland Transport’s agenda. ...

Greater AucklandBy Matt L

6 days ago
Climate Adam: Is climate change fuelling mega hurricanes?

This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). From hurricanes like Helene and Milton, to typhoons like Gaemi, vast storms are causing devastation: destroying cities and tearing up lives. ...

Skeptical Science

7 days ago
Get in the sea, old mate

For the State Highway One traveller, some sights remain dramatic no matter how many times you see them: Wellington harbour opening out at the bottom of Ngauranga Gorge; the first glimpse of Ruapehu; three quarters of the South Island. Also: the moment when you reach the top of the Brynderwyns and ...

More Than A FeildingBy David Slack

1 week ago
Taking the piss again

Remember Casey Costello? The government's most ignorant Minister? First she was referred to the Chief Archivist after claiming that key advice on her cancer promotion policy had simply magically appeared on her desk one day, and that she had no idea where it came from. Then, when the Ministry of ...

No Right TurnBy Idiot/Savant

1 week ago
Monthly Employment Data shows weakness in economy

Monthly employment data released today by Statistics New Zealand showed our continuing labour market weakness, and particularly challenging conditions for young working people, said NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi Economist Craig Renney. “There are 21,000 fewer filled jobs than this time last year, and the fall has been led by those ...

NZCTUBy Jeremiah Boniface

1 week ago
Copy of Rwanda’s Kagame: from Saviour to Tyrant?

Is Rwanda turning into a country that seeks regional dominance and exterminates its rivals? This is a contention examined by Dr Michela Wrong, and Dr Maria Armoudian Dr Wrong is a journalist who has written best-selling books on Africa. Her latest, Do Not Disturb. The story of a political murder ...

Fabians

1 week ago

Release: Government’s disgrace for Christchurch homeowners

The Government is backtracking on existing commitments to do the right thing by homeowners let down by EQC (now the Natural Hazards Commission). ...

Labour Blog

1 day ago
Release: National’s FamilyBoost a colossal flop

Nicola Willis continues to over promise and under deliver, with most families receiving only $30 a week from National’s flagship FamilyBoost flop. ...

Labour Blog

1 day ago
Ngarewa-Packer Demands Support for Palestine Ceasefire from New Plymouth Mayor

Te Pāti Māori Co-Leader and MP for Te Tai Hauāuru, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer is calling on the Mayor for New Plymouth, Neil Holdom, to do the right thing. “I am shocked at his decision to disregard the petition presented by Palestine Solidarity Taranaki calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire”, said ...

Māori Party

1 day ago
Release: Trade deal with Gulf states welcomed

Labour welcomes the conclusion of a trade deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that was restarted under a Labour government after languishing for many years. ...

Labour Blog

1 day ago
Release: Labour welcomes OAG fast track inquiry

The Government should consider the outcome of an Auditor-General report into conflicts of interest before progressing the Fast track Approvals Bill through Parliament. ...

Labour Blog

1 day ago
Greens reignite call for free dental

A new report detailing the enormous social and economic costs of our dental system has reignited the Greens' call for free dental care. ...

Greens

1 day ago
Greens call for bottom trawling ban and call out Minister for lacklustre response

The Green Party is urgently calling on the Government to ban bottom trawling, following news a New Zealand bottom trawler caught 37kg of coral in international waters, prompting the suspension of all fishing in the area until 2026. ...

Greens

4 days ago
Mark Patterson: Farmers understand we have their backs

Spring is here which means the start of the A&P show season. Those treasured community days where town meets country. There's no rural-urban divide here, just a chance to meet up with family and old friends and celebrate all things that make rural New Zealand so special. I'm embarking on ...

NZ First Press Release

5 days ago
Release: Funding for Gumboot Friday should pause

The National Government should review its support for Gumboot Friday after unacceptable comments by its leader and champion Mike King. ...

Labour Blog

5 days ago
Louise Upston cherry-picks data to punch down on the poor

The Government has very conveniently cherry-picked data from the latest MSD projections to justify its cruel agenda and punch-down policy when it comes to people living in poverty. ...

Greens

5 days ago
Luxon needs to address the cow in the room

The Green Party was appalled to hear Prime Minister Christopher Luxon claim we are “doing everything we can” on climate change, while his government does nothing to address emissions in our most polluting sector. ...

Greens

1 week ago
Govt Must Clean Up ‘Its Shit’ From Sunken HMNZS Manawanui

Te Pāti Māori is calling out the Government and New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) for their inaction and disgraceful downplaying of the impact caused by the sunken HMNZS Manawanui in Samoa. “We demand the Government move without further delay to clean up its shit from the sunken HMNZS Manawanui in Samoa,” said co-leader Debbie ...

Māori Party

1 week ago
Jamie Arbuckle: Inquiry into Banking Competition

This week was the start of the bank inquiry hearings into banking competition. The inquiry was confirmed in the NZ First/National Coalition agreement. 140 submissions were received on the inquiry, and we will hear from over 60 submitters including all the major banks. ANZ, New Zealand's largest bank, was first ...

NZ First Press Release

1 week ago
Tanya Unkovich: It’s time to start the debate on palliative care as a ‘right’

There is one topic that is the great human leveller, and that is of death and dying. One day, we will all have to face it, and I am of the belief that being able to pass away with grace and dignity is a vital, basic, human right. How we ...

NZ First Press Release

2 weeks ago
Release: Labour backs Christchurch City Council sanctions on Israel

Labour is backing Christchurch City Council’s decision not to do business with firms involved in Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories. ...

Labour Blog

2 weeks ago
Release: Government driving away offshore wind industry

The Government has created a hostile environment for companies seeking to build offshore wind farms. ...

Labour Blog

2 weeks ago
Another step towards Pasifika justice

The Green Party acknowledges the historical importance of MP Teanau Tuiono’s Member’s Bill, Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill, passing its second reading in Parliament today. ...

Greens

2 weeks ago
Sanctions Soar, Jobs Vanish – National’s Cruelty Exposed

Te Pāti Māori is enraged at the National government’s ruthless punishment of beneficiaries, all while jobs are disappearing. MSD data shows a 133% increase in sanctions over the past year, with over 14,000 sanctions in just three months. The kicker? The jobs this government insists people should find are nowhere ...

Māori Party

2 weeks ago
Police Perpetuate Siege on Ōpōtiki

Te Pāti Māori MP for Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi, says today’s police-sponsored terrorism in Ōpōtiki is a continuation of the State’s predatory behaviour towards the iwi of Te Whakatōhea. "Ōpōtiki is once again being intentionally targeted and is the direct byproduct of this Government’s 'tough on crime' legislative changes,” said MP ...

Māori Party

2 weeks ago
Release: Govt cuts school lunches even further

The Government has gone back on its word and cut the full school lunch programme in primary schools after saying it wouldn’t. ...

Labour Blog

2 weeks ago
Time to shut down failed Youth Justice Residences

The Green Party is calling for Youth Justice Residences to close, following a protest in which a group of young people spent the night on the roof of an Oranga Tamariki justice facility. ...

Greens

2 weeks ago
Tell Luxon to Kill the Treaty Principles Bill

Te Tiriti o Waitangi is our country’s founding document. It forms the basis of the relationship between Māori and the Crown – and the Aotearoa New Zealand we live in today. ...

Labour Blog

2 weeks ago
Release: Appalling process on three strikes law

The Government is subverting parliamentary process on laws the evidence already shows don’t work. ...

Labour Blog

2 weeks ago
Release: Labour calls for investigation into tobacco tax cut

The Government’s decision to award a $216 million tax break for Philip Morris’ heated tobacco products reeks of tobacco industry interference and needs to be thoroughly investigated. ...

Labour Blog

2 weeks ago
Release: Delay to retirement village review won’t help residents

The National Government is treading water on a much-needed review of the Retirement Villages Act, kicking any amendments down the road till the next parliamentary term in 2027. ...

Labour Blog

2 weeks ago
Release: Serious concerns ignored in Govt’s fast track bill

National’s fast track bill enables the most radical and unbalanced consenting regime in living memory. ...

Labour Blog

3 weeks ago
Fast-Track, off the rails: Submitters show strong opposition to Bill

Despite resounding public opposition, the fast-track legislation is being pushed through Parliament with provisions that could have real consequences for people and planet. ...

Greens

3 weeks ago
Release: Labour supports continuing fight for dairy access

Labour welcomes the National Government’s decision to further pursue our access to the Canadian dairy market under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) ...

Labour Blog

3 weeks ago
Release: Job losses devastating for Timaru

Confirmed news that the Smithfield meatworks will close is devastating for the hundreds of people who work there, Timaru and the wider region. ...

Labour Blog

3 weeks ago
New Zealand First Member’s Bill to Improve Access to Palliative Care

New Zealand First has introduced a Member’s Bill which aims to improve access to palliative care for all New Zealanders, ensuring kiwis have better access to the compassionate palliative support they may need. The ‘Improving Access to Palliative Care Bill’ seeks to guarantee that every New Zealander has the right ...

NZ First Press Release

3 weeks ago
Release: Further uncertainty for Kiwirail as jobs set to go

KiwiRail offering voluntary redundancy to all its staff is hugely concerning given the future of New Zealand’s rail system is under threat. ...

Labour Blog

3 weeks ago
ASA Declares Hobson’s Pledge Advertising Misleading and Socially Irresponsible

Te Pāti Māori Co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer welcome today’s ruling from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which found that a Hobson's Pledge advertisement regarding customary marine titles was misleading and socially irresponsible. The two-page wraparound ad, published in The New Zealand Herald, suggested that nearly the entire coastline ...

Māori Party

3 weeks ago
Release: Benefit numbers continue to soar under National

National’s all pain approach to beneficiaries has yielded no gain as benefit numbers continue to surge past projected figures. ...

Labour Blog

3 weeks ago
Casey Costello: What Once Was…

Entering politics is a privilege afforded to very few and, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. Being an MP is a call to service. Whatever your politics you have a duty to show up. Whatever your party's policy, you have made a promise to those who ...

NZ First Press Release

3 weeks ago
Soaring benefit sanctions push more into poverty

Sanctions on beneficiaries have sky-rocketed since the Coalition Government came to power, pushing more families into poverty. ...

Greens

3 weeks ago
International Energy Agency issues wake-up call on climate action

Today’s report from the International Energy Agency highlights how far this Government’s actions are dragging us backwards in the fight against climate change. ...

Greens

3 weeks ago
Release: Lack of funding puts pressure on frontline Police

News that 173 roles are being cut at Police will only put more pressure on the frontline. ...

Labour Blog

3 weeks ago
Release: Bipartisan agreement on outdated marriage law

Changes to outdated relationships legislation has passed its third reading giving family violence survivors the power to quickly dissolve abusive marriages. ...

Labour Blog

3 weeks ago

Oranga Tamariki Oversight Bill passes first reading

Legislation to strengthen oversight of the Oranga Tamariki system has passed its first reading in Parliament today, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. “These changes will build on New Zealand’s current child protection system by clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the agencies that oversee it, including greater ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

3 hours ago
NZTA confirms preferred option for second Mt Vic Tunnel and SH1 upgrades

The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) Board has confirmed next steps on the SH1 Wellington Improvements Road of National Significance (RoNS), including an expanded package to reduce Wellington’s gridlock and support economic growth, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “Our Government is committed to delivering a second Mt Victoria Tunnel for Wellington to ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

4 hours ago
Appointments strengthen Conservation Boards

The latest Conservation Board appointments will help to strengthen environmental efforts across Aotearoa New Zealand, Conservation Minister Tama Potaka says. Mr Potaka today announced 64 appointments to the country’s 14 Conservation Boards. “Conservation Boards play a vital role as liaison between DOC with their regions, making their community’s voice heard ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

7 hours ago
First steps towards National Infrastructure Plan

Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop has welcomed the first steps from the Infrastructure Commission in developing New Zealand’s 30-year National Infrastructure Plan. The Commission today released a discussion document which outlines the Commission’s thinking in developing the 30-year plan, including looking at what’s needed over the next 30 years, what our ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

8 hours ago
Stats show Medsafe accelerates approval assessments

Associate Health Minister David Seymour says that Medsafe’s annual performance statistics released today show that Medsafe are accelerating their approval process. “The data produced in Medsafe’s annual statistics show that in 2023/2024 Medsafe expedited their assessment process for almost every category of medicine,” says Mr Seymour. For innovative new medicines ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

9 hours ago
New rules mean faster payment times for small businesses

New requirements for government agencies to pay their invoices faster and adopt labour-saving technology are an important part of our plan to rebuild the economy and support small businesses, Small Business and Manufacturing Minister Andrew Bayly and Economic Development Minister Melissa Lee say. “The Government is ambitious about lifting New ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

9 hours ago
Speech – Diwali 2024

Namaste. Namaskar. Namaskaram. Vanakkam. Sat Sri Akal. Kem chho. Greetings to you all. It is my great privilege, as Minister for Ethnic Communities, to host this year’s Diwali Celebration at Parliament. I am truly excited to be with you all for Diwali as your Minister, and I warmly welcome each ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 day ago
Accelerating maths achievement for Kiwi kids

The Government is continuing to transform maths education, by trialling a targeted maths acceleration programme to give more Kiwi kids confidence in mathematics. “After discovering just 22 per cent of Year 8 students are at the expected standard for maths, we launched our Make it Count Action Plan to give our ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 day ago
Government’s creative sector strategy released

The Government’s creative sector strategy is designed to increase Kiwis’ engagement with culture and creativity and to boost its economic contribution, Arts Minister Paul Goldsmith says. “Amplify has been released for public consultation and I encourage people to read the strategy and to share their feedback. “There’s an opportunity to ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 day ago
On-sold programme changes bring resolution to homeowners and taxpayers

Associate Finance Minister David Seymour has asked the Natural Hazards Commission (NHC) to make changes to how it delivers the On-sold support package to prevent a cost blowout while helping eligible homeowners repair their homes in a timely manner. The On-sold programme was set up by the Government in 2019 ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 day ago
Todd McClay to lead large trade mission to China

Trade and Agriculture Minister Todd McClay will lead a large trade delegation to the 7th annual China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai next week, followed by a visit to Guangzhou. This year, almost 70 New Zealand companies will participate in CIIE, to interact with over 3,400 exhibitors and 410,000 visitors. “This ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

2 days ago
New Charter to guarantee better access for hunting and fishing

Minister for Hunting and Fishing Todd McClay has today launched an Access Charter (the Charter) to ensure better access for recreational hunting and fishing on public conservation land (PCL) across New Zealand. “This Charter establishes guiding principles for the Department of Conservation (DOC) to provide clear and transparent decisions on ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

3 days ago
Pou Whenua blessing honours Tongariro

A beautiful new Pou Whenua at the beginning of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing will introduce visitors to the sacred landscape they are entering, says Conservation Minister Tama Potaka. Mr Potaka attended a blessing for the specially carved Pou Whenua at Mangatepopo, at the start of the track on 1 November. ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

4 days ago
New members appointed to the NZTA Board

Transport Minister Simeon Brown has today announced two new appointments to the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) Board. Mary-Anne Macleod and Mike Rudge have both been appointed as members for three-year terms commencing 1 November 2024 and ending 31 October 2027. “Transport is a critical part of our Government’s plan ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

4 days ago
Welcome relief from new oestradiol gel funding

Associate Health Minister David Seymour is welcoming Pharmac’s funding of oestradiol gel, following global shortages of oestradiol patches earlier this year. “I’m well aware of the stress caused by the global shortage earlier this year. At the time I said I was confident Pharmac was working hard to find a ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

4 days ago
Deputy Prime Minister visit to Australia

Foreign Minister and Racing Minister Winston Peters will visit Australia next week. “Australia is New Zealand’s closest partner, and we are pleased to make this second official visit there for 2024 following the first ever Foreign and Defence Ministers 2+2 Meeting between our two countries in Melbourne in January,” ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

4 days ago
Applications now open for new training pathway

Applications have now opened for tertiary education organisations to seek Government funding to develop New Zealand’s first postgraduate diploma programme for associate psychologists, Minister for Mental Health Matt Doocey announced today. “Investment in this new training pathway supports the Government’s target to grow our mental health and addiction workforce and ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

4 days ago
Increased medicines access continues following budget boost

Associate Health Minister with responsibility for Pharmac David Seymour is pleased to see further increased availability of medicines for Kiwis following the Government’s increased investment in Pharmac. “Pharmac operates independently, but it must work within the budget constraints set by the Government,” says Mr Seymour. “When this Government assumed office, ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

4 days ago
New Zealand concludes high quality trade deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)

New Zealand and the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have concluded negotiations on a trade agreement that will open up significant opportunities for New Zealand exporters in the Gulf region, Minister for Trade and Agriculture Todd McClay announced from Doha today. Today’s announcement follows significant reengagement with the GCC following meetings ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

5 days ago
Government seeks views on remote court attendance

The Government is exploring how to modernise the law around people attending court remotely, to support access to justice and enhance court performance. Courts Minister Nicole McKee says the current law has not kept up with evolving court practices and public attitudes to the use of remote technology, nor been ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

5 days ago
Breast screening age extension begins in Nelson Marlborough

Free breast screening has been extended for 70 to 74-year-old women living in the Nelson Marlborough district, ahead of a national roll-out late next year, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti announced today. “Breast cancer is the most common cancer in New Zealand with about 3,400 women diagnosed with the disease ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

5 days ago
Te Māori Manaaki Taonga Trust Board strengthened

He toi whakairo, he mana tangata. The reappointment of one trustee and the appointment of four new trustees to the Te Māori Manaaki Taonga Trust Board will enable the legacy of Te Māori to be carried forward into the future, Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka and Arts Minister Paul Goldsmith ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

5 days ago
Affordable housing project supporting home ownership

Up to 300 affordable, healthy, community-tailored homes helping to support home ownership are set to be built in eastern Porirua, supported by Government funding for Our Whare Our Fale through the Building Homes for Pacific in Porirua initiative, Minister for Pacific Peoples Dr Shane Reti and Associate Housing Minister Tama ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

5 days ago
Dire benefit forecasts show the need for Welfare that Works

A new report that forecasts young people on benefits will spend an average of 20 more years relying on welfare underscores the need for the Government’s reforms, Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says. MSD’s latest Benefit System Insights report, released today, which estimates how many future years different ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

5 days ago
Trade Minister travels to Doha for GCC trade discussions

Trade Minister Todd McClay will hold trade discussions with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) trade ministers in Doha this week. Minister McClay will meet with all six GCC Trade Ministers, as well as the GCC Secretary General. “This will be my seventh visit to the region this year including two Ministerial ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

6 days ago
Podiatry prescribers will boost patient care

Health Minister Dr Shane Reti and Associate Minister David Seymour say it’s great news that podiatrists will soon be able to prescribe medicines, meaning patients with painful foot and leg conditions don’t have to make a separate trip to the doctor. “This simple step means a big change for people ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

6 days ago
Historic redress inequities finally resolved for Lake Alice Unit survivors

The Government is addressing historic redress inequities for some survivors abused at the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit. In 2001, the Crown reached a $6.5 million group settlement with 95 survivors subjected to abuse at the Lake Alice Unit. Law firm Grant Cameron & Associates (now GCA Lawyers) represented ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

6 days ago
ERO report shows Government’s truancy emphasis is vital

Associate Education Minister David Seymour says that the Education Review Office’s (ERO) timely report on chronic school absence released today is further evidence of a truancy crisis. “Chronic absence has doubled since 2015. This report reinforces that action is needed to ensure this generation reaches its full potential,” says Associate ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

6 days ago
Minister welcomes business view on AML

Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee welcomes BusinessNZ’s report which addresses reducing the compliance burden on small businesses. “The challenges outlined in the report released today echo many of the concerns I have heard from businesses, which have informed my Anti Money Laundering/Countering Financing Terrorism (AML/CFT) priorities,” she says. “I have ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Mangamuka Gorge opening in time for Christmas

State Highway 1 through the Mangamuka Gorge will be open for Christmas, with critical work currently underway to clear the large slips and dropouts that have caused significant disruption for Northlanders trying to get where they want to go quickly and safely, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says. “The Mangamuka Gorge ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Trusted building professionals able to self-certify

The Government is proposing further significant action to reform the building and construction sector to support more affordable homes and a stronger economy, Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk says. “If we want to grow the economy, lift incomes, create jobs and build more affordable, quality homes we need a ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
New appointments to the TEC board

Dr Alan Bollard CNZM and Mr Bharat Guha have been appointed to the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) board, Tertiary Education and Skills Minister Penny Simmonds says. “I would like to welcome the two new members joining the TEC board,” Ms Simmonds says. “Dr Alan Bollard CNZM is an experienced public ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Move to fast-track overseas doctors welcomed

Fast tracking applications for registration by eligible specialist doctors wanting to practice in New Zealand is in line with the Government’s push to improve the health outcomes for New Zealanders, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti says. This fast-track pathway applies to specialists trained in anaesthesia, dermatology, emergency medicine, general practice, ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Address to Western Sydney University: Constitutional and Rule of Law challenges in current global en...

Tēnā koutou Nau mai haere mai ki tenei hui Thank you to Vice Chancellor Williams, and the University of Western Sydney, for inviting me to speak today. I speak to you today in my capacity as Attorney-General – the New Zealand Crown’s Senior Law Officer. In this capacity, I serve ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Security advice for start-ups welcomed

Minister responsible for the security and intelligence agencies Judith Collins has welcomed new guidance that aims to protect New Zealand’s start-up and emerging technology sector from the threat of economic espionage. “We are a nation well-known for our ingenuity, and our willingness to openly collaborate in the spirit of enterprise ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Funding support to strengthen frontline volunteer service organisations

The Government has approved $23.1 million for four critical frontline volunteer service organisations to replace storm-damaged assets and provide training and equipment to improve New Zealand’s response to future emergency events, Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Associate Transport Minister Matt Doocey says. $14.6 million for Surf Life Saving New ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Jones heads to international mining conference

Resources Minister Shane Jones will speak at Australia's largest annual mining event in Sydney this week to mark New Zealand’s return to the international industry stage. Mr Jones will attend the International Mining and Resources Conference (IMARC) where he will update the sector’s most influential players on the work the ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
NZ investing in Pacific disaster preparedness & climate resilience

New Zealand will contribute $20 million to the Pacific Resilience Facility, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters have announced. “The Pacific Islands region faces severe challenges from natural disasters and climate change impacts and New Zealand is committed to doing its part to help meet them,” ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Police to increase presence on Auckland public transport

Aucklanders will see a greater Police presence on public transport services to boost safety and reassure public transport workers and passengers, Police Minister Mark Mitchell and Transport and Auckland Minister Simeon Brown say. “Minister Brown and I are working together, alongside Police and Auckland Transport in response to the horrific ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

1 week ago
Government funds helicopter replacements

The Government is investing in eight new emergency helicopters to replace some of New Zealand’s ageing air ambulance fleet, Associate Health Minister Casey Costello and ACC Minister Matt Doocey announced today. “Our air ambulance helicopters play a vital role in saving lives around New Zealand,” Casey Costello says. “This is ...

BeehiveBy beehive.govt.nz

2 weeks ago

A new campaign rewards young gamers on Roblox for engaging with the US election. What does it mean f...

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Digital Literacy and Digital Wellbeing, Western Sydney University Alex Photo Stock/Shutterstock If historical trends are anything to go by, most young people in the United States will not vote at this week’s presidential election. For example, at the ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

1 hour ago
Donald Trump ‘unfit to lead’ – vote for Harris, warns New York Times

Pacific Media Watch The editorial board of The New York Times has demolished Donald Trump in a single paragraph calling on readers to vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris in today’s US elections. The editorial, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president in the run-up ...

Evening ReportBy Asia Pacific Report

1 hour ago
Two new tunnels: Simeon Brown reveals government’s preferred plan to lower congestion

The changes are aimed at reducing Wellington's gridlock and supporting economic growth, says Transport Minister Simeon Brown. ...

Radio NZ – political

2 hours ago
Fijian journalists embrace multimedia landscape for the digital age

By Catrin Gardiner, Queensland University of Technology In the middle of the Pacific, Fiji journalists are transforming their practice, as newsrooms around Suva are requiring journalists to become multimedia creators, shaping stories for the digital age. A wave of multimedia journalists is surfacing in Fijian journalism culture, fostered during university ...

Evening ReportBy Asia Pacific Report

2 hours ago
Costello advice: Heated debate sees tensions boil over in the House

Debate over who provided the advice on heated tobacco products to the Associate Health Minister led to the Prime Minister being made to withdraw and apologise in Parliament this afternoon. ...

Radio NZ – political

2 hours ago
What to expect on Election Day: history could be made, or we’re in for a long wait (and plenty of ...

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University As Americans vote in one of the most important presidential elections in generations, the country teeters on a knife edge. In the battleground states that will likely decide ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

3 hours ago
Wellington council observer to be announced ‘shortly’

The decision would be made ahead of the council's meeting to hash out what should remain in its long-term plan, Simeon Brown says. ...

Radio NZ – political

3 hours ago
Ōpōtiki raids: Iwi rejects minister’s denial children were left without parents

Te Whakatōhea is standing by claims children were left to fend for themselves after their parents were arrested. ...

Radio NZ – political

3 hours ago
Live: US election 2024, the final countdown

With election day but hours away, the candidates are completing their final campaign lap and pundits are desperately seeking other ways to say ‘on a knife edge’. Keep up to date with the latest here. It’s squeaky bum time in the land of the free, with the clock ticking inexorably ...

The SpinoffBy Toby Manhire

3 hours ago
Staff will use force in youth boot camps as ‘a last resort’, Prime Minister says

Cabinet has signed off on those running the boot camps using force to protect themselves or others, or stop young offenders escaping. ...

Radio NZ – political

4 hours ago
Primary care involves more than GPs. A new review shows how patients can better access care

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock Australians today are more likely than previous generations to live with complex and chronic diseases, such ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

4 hours ago
IRD Data Leaking Killed By 9,000-strong Taxpayers’ Union Campaign

Commissioner Mersi needs to stop burying his head in the sand, and explain to Kiwis how his department are going to clean up the mess of the data they’ve already leaked: Taxpayers’ Union Policy and Public Affairs Manager, James Ross said. ...

Scoop politics

4 hours ago
I survived a night camping with my dog

Alex Casey takes her rescue dog Maggie on a dog-friendly camping adventure and lives to tell the tale. Part of my bargaining in us adopting a dog this year was that I swore not to become one of those barmy people who takes their dog with them on holiday and ...

The SpinoffBy Alex Casey

4 hours ago
What Kamala Harris’ Converse All-Stars tell us about how shoes shape our identity

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexandra Sherlock, Lecturer, School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT University Like most public figures, Kamala Harris adapts her footwear to different occasions. While her wardrobe includes traditional choices such as formal black heels, it was her appearance in Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

5 hours ago
‘I can make a band play like a singer sings’: Quincy Jones shaped our listening for seven decade...

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Leigh Carriage, Senior Lecturer in Music, Southern Cross University The legendary composer, musical arranger and producer Quincy Jones has died at 91. Over his long career, Jones arranged and produced for a broad range of genres. His work blended the traditions of ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

5 hours ago
Govt Science Cuts Take NZ Even Further Backward

The Government talks about the need to tackle our poor productivity performance, and the need for a longer-term plan to arrest our decline, but their actions continue to take us in the opposite direction ...

Scoop politics

5 hours ago
Costello’s accusation has had ‘chilling effect’ on democracy, public servants say

The complaint comes after the Associate Health Minister accused health officials of undermining her efforts. ...

Radio NZ – political

6 hours ago
‘I didn’t get the HRC job’: Stephen Rainbow’s human rights commission appointment just got w...

New messages released under the OIA show Rainbow acknowledged he ‘didn’t get the HRC job’ – then suddenly he did. Madeleine Chapman reports. “I didn’t get the HRC role but still very keen to help out,” wrote Stephen Rainbow to Act Party chief of staff Andrew Ketels in a text ...

The SpinoffBy Madeleine Chapman

6 hours ago
West Papuan outcry over Prabowo’s plan to revive transmigration

By Victor Mambor in Jayapura Just one day after President Prabowo Subianto’s inauguration, a minister announced plans to resume the transmigration programme in eastern Indonesia, particularly in Papua, saying it was needed for enhancing unity and providing locals with welfare. Transmigration is the process of moving people from densely populated ...

Evening ReportBy Asia Pacific Report

7 hours ago
Police minister denies claims children left on their own following police raids in Ōpōtiki

Police Minister Mark Mitchell says those claiming children were left on their own following police raids on homes in Ōpōtiki are "wrong". ...

Radio NZ – political

7 hours ago
Home Education: On the road with the Rasmussens

Home Education follows the everyday lives of six families in Aotearoa educating their children at home. Today, education in a house bus with the Rasmussens. The new docuseries Home Education is filmed across Aotearoa, in and around the homes of six families who have taken schooling outside the ...

The SpinoffBy The Spinoff

7 hours ago
Nobody panic, but we’re in the midst of a global chocolate crisis

Price hikes, disappearing products and sourcing struggles – could this be the new normal for the chocolate industry? Last week, Whittaker’s announced its chocolate was changing. Its cacao will no longer be sourced exclusively from Ghana, with the global cocoa shortage forcing the company to get the key ingredient from “several” ...

The SpinoffBy Gabi Lardies

7 hours ago
On the road with the Rasmussens | Home Education | The Spinoff

“We thrive on proving people wrong.” | Watch the full series: http://thespinoff.co.nz/videos/home-education 🚌 The Rasmussens have travelled the country in a house bus for over a decade. Bridie is the ‘road-schooling’ mum to seven kids, all at different stages. She says the family runs into judgement all the time, but ...

The SpinoffBy The Spinoff

7 hours ago
NZ hopes for Harris, prepares for Trump

Comment: The American presidential election on Wednesday (NZ time) looks like it is going down to the wire. Polls put Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump within the margin of error, both nationally and in key battleground states. As the votes are counted, governments across Asia and ...

NewsroomBy David Capie

8 hours ago
Appalling Attack On Public Service Official By Minister Crosses The Line

"Publicly attacking a public servant for giving advice that you disagree with is unacceptable within our democratic system," said Kerry Davies, National Secretary for the Public Service Association Te Pūkenga Here Tikanga Mahi. ...

Scoop politics

9 hours ago
Every travel disaster I can think of – and how travel insurance would help

While you might be reluctant to buy travel insurance, you’ll be glad to have it when things go wrong. As a natural catastrophiser, I spend a lot of time thinking about things that could go wrong – even on holiday. Perhaps I’ll be caught up in a life-threatening multi-car pileup ...

The SpinoffBy Tara Ward

9 hours ago
My Greatest Trip: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos

A white woman’s account of backpacking through southeast Asia? Groundbreaking. In a post-social media world, I find it impossible to regale you with my trip through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos without first doing some throat-clearing. “Doing” southeast Asia “on a shoestring” has become such a traveller’s cliche – so ...

The SpinoffBy Madeleine Holden

9 hours ago
Zero-risk policy part of ‘widespread erosion’ of access to recreational areas

Twelve associations are calling for recreational activities to be formally excluded from the Health and Safety Act 2015. ...

Radio NZ – political

10 hours ago
The cost of being: A uni tutor who spends on vapes, samosas and the odd night out

As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a 21-year-old flatting in Wellington explains how she gets by. Want to be part of The Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here. Gender: Wahine. Age: 21. Ethnicity: Māori. Role: Tutor at Victoria University. Salary/income/assets: ...

The SpinoffBy The Cost of Being

10 hours ago
Yes, burning gas is bad for the climate. But keeping it in Australia’s energy mix is sensible

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Roger Dargaville, Director Monash Energy Institute, Monash University Shutterstock Both major parties in Australia see a significant role for gas as the world shifts to clean energy in a bid to avert dangerous climate change. The Albanese government says new sources ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

11 hours ago
Live: Luxon ‘frustrated’ with officials but ‘confident’ in Cabinet conflict ...

The Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says he's confident about Cabinet's own conflict of interest processes ...

Radio NZ – political

11 hours ago
Bird flu has been detected in a pig in the US. Why does that matter?

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC L3 Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney David MG/Shutterstock The United States Department of Agriculture last week reported that a pig on a backyard farm in Oregon was infected with ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

11 hours ago
What happens if you have a HELP debt and kids? The missed opportunity in Labor’s plan to fix stude...

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Warburton, Honorary Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne Rogut/Pexels , CC BY The Albanese government has announced several significant changes to student loans to start in mid-2025. These include wiping 20% off debts, ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

11 hours ago
Memes, photojournalism and television debates: 3 images that defined the 2024 US election

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie Message, Professor of Public Humanities and Director of the ANU Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University Visual images often last in historical and popular memory. This is especially the case in presidential campaigns in the United States, which offer a vast ...

Evening ReportBy The Conversation

11 hours ago
Todd McClay, trade, and the spectre of Trump

The PM says he’ll work with whoever wins the White House, but the trade minister has previously expressed concern over higher tariffs, writes Stewart Sowman-Lund for The Bulletin. To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here. ...

The SpinoffBy Stewart Sowman-Lund

12 hours ago
America heads to the polls, and into a great unknown

Opinion: Wednesday November 6, NZ time, sees the majority of voting in the 2024 US presidential election. While it is unlikely we will have a confirmed result until later (Thursday is best case, but the result could take weeks, depending on how close it is), the next week promises to ...

NewsroomBy Hayden Thorne

12 hours ago
Live: Minister accuses health officials of undermining smoking reforms

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon will talk to Morning Report live. ...

Radio NZ – political

12 hours ago
The longest commute, day two: Joel says a sad goodbye to Invercargill

Joel MacManus attempts to travel from the bottom to the top of the country without a car or plane. Today: Invercargill to Dunedin and beyond. The mission: Get from Stewart Island to Cape Reinga as fast as possible using only public transport. Wherever I can, I’ll travel by train. In ...

The SpinoffBy Joel MacManus

12 hours ago
Scientists concerned about delays to critical report

Scientists are becoming increasingly worried about delays to a critical report that could see an overhaul of the country's science infrastructure and funding. ...

Radio NZ – political

13 hours ago
Blood cancer patients call on National to honour commitment

Patients want National to take note of a report on blood cancer medicines and remember its pre-election promise that they would not be forgotten. ...

Radio NZ – political

13 hours ago

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Robertson to win Wellington Central candidacy

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