Now taking bets as to who will be the first Māori member of the National caucus to resign because they didn't sign up to be the face of racist policy sops to New Zealand First and ACT. My money is on Reti - he's showing the signs.
I don't know what you're smoking, but I hope you brought enough for everyone. I don't care how big you try to make the centre - National is on the right of it.
Imagine if the right wing parties were laughing in your face at the suggestion.
Imagine if wishes were horses. It's at least a reasonable expectation of Labour, given the Greens tend to be their natural coalition party, although the environment seems to becoming increasingly less important to the Green back benchers.
Would you also like me to tell you I'm typing it?
What a rich fantasy life you have. Globalisation is far from dead, it's just greenwashing itself or falling into the circle of China. As for capitalism, you are funny.
He's a great friend of the Right of a given value, but he also has the chops to be a good political interviewer in the same way Piers Morgan is a first class sh*t but also a first class interviewer. He may be politically right wing, but neither does he ...
Rubbish. The only people who left Labour over the lack of a wealth tax would have voted for the Greens. None of that impacted on the overall left vote block. Labour lost because of a perception that Covid was over saw established voting patterns return, ...
Labour didn't lose because it was too centrist. That's utter nonsense. It was elected for another term in a landslide because of Covid, and it largely lost because of a lot of resentment from the way the second Auckland lockdown was handled and swing back ...
Pretty sure it's still just some imperial bullshit even if it stays in the ground
If you go into histrionics just because someone says "Aotearoa" you bloody well deserve to be judged.
You're conflating two unrelated things. Te reo Māori in New Zealand English is an organic evolution going back to the early 1800s. People living in close proximity borrow words from each other. That's nothing like dropping Latin tags into a conversation. ...
They might be more deadly, but it's the uptake that is the significant factor. What is with you people that whenever someone disagrees with you it must be a right wing talking point? Anyway, I'll try to use small words. If you tell young people they can't ...
You can certainly learn the fundamentals of te reo and tikanga in three or four weeks, and generally speaking induction in large organisations with their own culture can have soft induction carry on for months. You're not going to become a profound orator,...
Tell it to your imaginary family member who speaks four languages and works at a company that apparently operates in defiance of our employment laws. Maybe they can explain it to you.
I call bullsht. All of a sudden, he speaks multiple languages but to say which ones will somehow give away his identity? And very vague about what constitutes "speak te reo" - if said company requires its senior management to be able to deliver a mihimihi ...
It's less that I'm unable, and more that I don't want to because it's far too time consuming to unpick. China is very big, very old, and very diverse, and I don't do that kind of grunt labour for free.
Just say that you don't want to learn. The resources are there. I only ever formally studied German at high school, and a semester of Ancient Greek at uni. I taught myself French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, some te reo Māori and a smattering of Czech and ...
Mandarin is the official state language, but as anyone who has been to Guangzhou or Hong Kong can tell you, they all speak Cantonese including the elites, although Beijing has recently cracked down on that. It's not a class thing, it's mainly a regional ...
Cantonese became the prestige dialect of the Yue Chinese group of languages in Southern China during the Southern Song dynasty, which lasted roughly from 960–1279. Early versions of what Europeans began calling Mandarin is found in records going back to ...
You keep harping on about high school like human experience suddenly ends when you enter the real world. No one is demanding fluency, just a basic familiarity of what some commonly used words mean, which is usually obvious from context. No one is ...
I've you've never picked up any te reo by osmosis from the media and can't recognise a greeting from basic context, there must be something seriously wrong with you.
Mandarin just refers to the northern group of dialects and has been spoken in Beijing for over a millennium. That would make it about the same age as English. Cantonese is the Guangzhou dialect. I don't know where you get the "Cantonese is the far more ...
Which would be highly ironic given the number of university language departments that got shuttered and languages dumped from high schools under Labour...
A little hint from an old linguist. If a language is borrowing words from other languages and transliterating them in natural usage, it's clearly a living language. Dead languages don't bother.
Te reo is Māori. Don't be obtuse. And even my right wing baby boomer father knows that Te Wai Pounamu is the South Island just from watching the weather report on One News, so don't give me that crap.
Te reo training should be a compulsory part of induction.
It's a bonus. If it was just gaining a skill, you make te reo training compulsory as many cultural institutions do.
Quite. Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
All in all, I don't think National does hate te reo. It's at worst insensitive to tikanga and doesn't like paying bonuses for what should be standard in the public service. That's fairly typical for National. The most egregious policies are sops to NZF (...
It bans it for an entire generational cohort. And while I'm not against it on principle, I was never convinced by it. Firstly, because I think vapes are a bigger danger to that age demographic, and secondly, because banning it for one group while it's ...
Cats, with their independent spirit and beguiling purrs, have captured the hearts of humans for millennia. In New Zealand, felines are no exception, boasting the highest national cat ownership rate globally [definition cat nz cat foundation]. An estimated 1.134 million pet cats grace Kiwi households, compared to 683,000 dogs ...
Recent Comments