Its Not That We Cant Feed the Poor Satiate
John Roughan has an extraordinary article in today's Herald. He is normally a measured commentator on public affairs, but in this case, so anxious was he to attack the Prime Minister at any cost that he took aim at the speech she made at the UN on the subject of ...
3 hours ago
Last week the Labour government announced an expansion of the Recognised Seasonal Employee (RSE) Scheme for the horticulture and viticulture sectors. The number of workers allowed under the scheme has been raised from 16,000 to 19,000. This is the largest increase in over a decade. The cap on RSE workers ...
4 hours ago
A group of Italian scientists recently published a paper in which they critically assessed extreme [weather] event trends . This has received quite a lot of attention amongst some "skeptics" since it concludes that …on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing ...
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The evidence from the past is that the neoliberal crash-through approach proposed by the new Truss-Kwarteng British government does not lift economic performance. The successful campaign of Liz Truss for British Prime Minister emphasised her neoliberal ambitions and her wish to further 'free up' the British economy Will the policies ...
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Probably the most corrupt and broken part of the New Zealand political system is the role of corporate lobbyists influencing policy decisions of governments on behalf of vested interests. This is a group of political insiders – usually former politicians, party staffers or senior Beehive officials – who work at ...
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Relentless Advance: The Anglo-Saxon colonisation of North America and Australasia was a very different proposition from the colonisation of India and Africa. In a relatively short period of time the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand were reduced to insignificant minorities by an unceasing flood ...
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At this point in 2022, the Christchurch Call looks like a somewhat forlorn effort to keep alive some of the political good will that PM Jacinda Ardern earned from her response to the mosque shootings. Reportedly, the next Christchurch Call project will be a joint research effort with Twitter and ...
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"Stare not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss stare back into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche . THE PROBLEM OF EVIL – ah yes – an old and flavoursome chestnut. How many nights, fuelled by Velluto Rosso (and other brave attempts at a palatable New Zealand red) did I wrestle with ...
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Experts agree: Pay attention and drive In a commentary for AGU's journalEarth's Future, Wynes et al. call attention to the durability of climate change as humankind's chief environmental threat among risks"which could put us on a path toward irreversible or catastrophic outcomes that manifest after the 10-year timespan,"this belief shown as common ...
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Writing in Stuff, Morgan Godfery argues that Labour has forgotten why it won the 2020 election: Politics is more than just killing a bad run of stories in the latest media cycle. Politics requires stated aims and actions taken to secure them. Politicians are fearful of leaning too ...
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Over in the UK, the radical Tory government is planning more benefit cuts to screw the poor. Meanwhile, there's also a timely reminder of exactly what that means: mass-murder: More than 330,000 excess deaths in Great Britain in recent years can be attributed to spending cuts to public services ...
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For a long time now the Climate Change Commission has been expressing concerns about the place of forestry in the Emissions Trading Scheme. Our net-zero emissions target encourages us to plant trees to soak up our emissions, but if we plant too many, then carbon prices will be too low ...
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I hate daylight saving. I really do. It's the loss of an hour in the morning that just messes with me. But the arrival of daylight saving in mid-September is as good an indication as any that summer is on the way. Alas, the weather has had other ideas… ...
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Levelling Down: What will happen when streaming is no more? Will the children of New Zealand emerge from the public education system with the skills and qualifications necessary to foot-it in the modern world? Or, will their education be limited to whatever the least engaged and least talented students allow ...
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We occasionally receive excellent questions and/or comments by email or via our contact form and have then usually corresponded with the emailer directly. But, some of the questions and answers deserve a broader audience, so we decided to highlight some of them in a series of blog posts. Yet, again, an ...
3 days ago
Stuff reports that former Minister Kris Faafoi has become a lobbyist, planning to distort policy for profit by leveraging the relationships formed as a Minister with public servants and Ministerial colleagues. And in case anyone thinks I'm exaggerating there, its in his slogan: "results through relationships". This is, obviously, corrupt. ...
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The "No Confidence" vote in local body elections could be as high as 60 per cent by the end of this week. That's essentially what it is when only 40 per cent of the public choose to vote, which is what is happening at the moment. In fact, voter turnout ...
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It is an old point to make… But boomers did get a pretty good deal out of their free education and plentiful unionised vacation jobs. Then they got into power and cut taxes on their own incomes, thus going a long way to denying the same privileges to subsequent generations. ...
3 days ago
Not Light Viewing: Did the creators of the 1971 television series The Guardians intuitively grasp the political utility of religious extremism, or did somebody they met in a bar tell them? The early 1970s were a dangerous and dubious time. Shadowy figures gathered in great houses and plotted coups. Assassination ...
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Cynical Assumptions: British Prime Minister LizTruss and her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, appeared to be operating on the cynical assumption that there is insufficient historical memory available to the British political class for anyone to recall that her "supply-side economics" remedy has been applied, off-and-on, and always catastrophically, ...
4 days ago
The Tertiary Education Union (TEU) has announced with considerable fanfare that members at eight NZ universities have voted overwhelmingly (a claimed average of 80 percent in favour) to strike in pursuit of an eight percent wage increase in the current negotiating round. I used to be a member of the ...
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Voter turnout in local body elections is traditionally low and now, more than halfway through this year's election period, this trend looks likely to continue. Turnout has been below 50 percent since 2004 and in 2019 was 42 percent – around half the turnout for national elections. Voter turnout is ...
4 days ago
The 2022 local elections have failed to excite Aucklanders. Early voting returns suggest turnout won't be much different to 2019, when only 35.3% of eligible voters cast a ballot. But the contest for mayor is a fascinating case study in political leadership and the role of ideology. For the first ...
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The Opportunities Party (TOP) is putting other political parties to shame with its bold and innovative policies. Yesterday TOP announced their latest tax, housing, and income policies, and they were the sort of bold and transformative innovations that supporters of parties like Labour and the Greens have been desperately wanting ...
5 days ago
Allegedly, New Zealand is a highly taxed country with a government prone to big spending. Supposedly, that's why we need to scrap the top tax rate, in order to attract and retain top talent. National's deputy leader Nicola Willis said exactly that last week, when trying to defend National's plan ...
5 days ago
TOP has always been a pretty progressive party - in 2017 they campaigned on a universal basic income and a (complicated) property tax (as well as arrogance and cat-hating). Their new leadership is now pushing a simpler version: switching taxes from income to land: The Opportunities Party has hung ...
5 days ago
Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis took turns to trot out their tax cut plan in the last week or so, or whatever passes for one over that side of the fence, and while both absolutely know they're struggling to sell the benefits of this to anyone not actually either ...
6 days ago
We are now officially three-quarters through the first season of The Rings of Power. After a thoroughly disappointing fifth episode, I feel the series is back on track, though the sixth episode is sufficiently distinct from its predecessors that it makes comparing them a bit difficult. Indeed, it has ...
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You've got to wonder at the mental capacity of Auckland Mayoral candidate, Wayne Brown, after he was exposed airing his childish grievances about senior NZ Herald reporter, Simon Wilson. I mean what exactly makes Mr Brown think that such disgusting comments are warranted, let alone to Newshub reporters who are ...
6 days ago
A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Sep 25, 2022 thu Sat, Oct 1, 2022. Food for Thought What the Climate Movement Can Learn From Collective Trauma Healing Practices for helping large groups of people integrate traumatic histories could inform ...
7 days ago
Completed reads for September: The Finnsburh Fragment (poem) Vainglory (poem), by Anonymous Soul and Body (poem) (2 versions), by Anonymous Solomon and Saturn (poem), by Anonymous The Partridge (poem), by Anonymous Almsgiving (poem), by Anonymous Pharaoh (poem), by Anonymous The Lord's Prayer [Exeter Book] (poem), by Anonymous Descent ...
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The proposal to organise fresh water, storm water and waste water into four entities reflects the contempt that New Zealand's central government has for local communities. It is not the only example of the centre ignoring the localities. Other recent examples include overriding local preferences in voting arrangements and excluding ...
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by Don Franks Their special winter bonus ending, overworked New Zealand nurses want an ongoing payment to reflect the pressure on nurses working extra hours. Nurses are set to turn down all extra shifts next week and the new health authority Te Whatu Ora is running to the law. In ...
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Controversial Māori politician and president of Te Pāti Māori, John Tamihere, is in hot water over large financial donations relating to his 2019 Auckland Mayoral campaign and Te Pāti Māori's 2020 election campaign. For him and his supporters, the allegations are "inherently racist". For others, they illustrate that there are ...
1 week ago
Repeat After Me: Te Ao Maori is a metaphor, not a place. Te Tiriti o Waitangi is not a bridge, it is a highly contentious political document. Human-beings inhabit one world, not many. KELVIN DAVIS believes that Karen Chhour is looking at the world through a "vanilla lens". Racially-charged sentiments of this sort used ...
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What's in the envelope? Why, Democracy – of course! ON THE EVIDENCE to date, the turnout for this year's local government elections will plumb new depths. Some will blame indifference, others apathy, and a courageous few will interpret the record low turnout as proof that democracy itself is failing.The case that democracy is failing ...
1 week ago
Retailers' Worst Nightmare: Bowing to hardliners' demands that young offenders be incarcerated might produce a short-term fix. It might also satisfy at least some of the public's thirst for vengeance. But, the introduction of a policy that even its advocates realise is bound to make matters worse, is like sowing dragons' ...
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For the first time in nearly twenty years, I've been reading through Kalevala, or at least an English translation thereof. Back then it was the old Kirby translation (1907), having swapped over from Crawford (1888). Now I've finished reading Bosley (1989). I have some thoughts to offer about these ...
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Pantone Chart of moral staining In the daily grind of cranking out PR engineered to soothe consumers and keep them cemented into undesirable behaviors, it's probably an unconscious matter to become distant from disturbing thoughts such as "1/3rd of a country of 220 million went underwater last month and I likely ...
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Public service bosses earn mega-salaries, yet oversee bureaucracies that frequently undermine transparency and frustrate public and media scrutiny. The obvious answer is to start docking the pay of chief executives for the failures of their agencies. This is the upshot of an investigation by the Chief Ombudsman's Office into the ...
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When the Intelligence and Security Act was passed in 2017, it required that every five to seven years, that the Intelligence Agencies and the Act itself be reviewed. Following from the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch masjidain, the review was moved up. ...
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As predicted in this column on Tuesday, the Bank of England has finally intervened to bail Britain out of its self-inflicted economic crisis. The Bank has introduced emergency measures to halt the headlong fall in the British currency triggered by the tax cut package that the Truss government unveiled last ...
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This is a re-post from Circle of Blue by Hannah Richter Saltwater intrusion threatens coastal agriculture on the Delmarva Peninsula and in the Carolinas. Thousands of acres are already unable to be farmed. Conservation easements can facilitate a transition of cropland to salt marsh, providing numerous ...
1 week ago
Today the Ombudsman released Ready or Not, a followup to their 2015 report Not a Game of Hide and Seek. And the first revelation in it? That the Ombudsman lied to me. Last year, I'd grown curious about what problems had been identified in Not a Game of Hide and ...
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Newsroom today has an article asking Is the SFO too powerful for its own good?. The article is about the NZ First Foundation fraud trial, and much of it is about the allegation that Labour politicians were charged and questioned solely to protect the SFO from expected government moves to ...
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On Friday, RNZ carried a story about the police use of Auror, a private surveillance network. Police use it to track people and vehicles using ANPR, washing their hands of any legal restrictions or privacy obligations because the actual surveillance is being done by a private company. That's bad enough, ...
2 weeks ago
Well, that didn't take long. Briefly, the pageantry of the royal funeral had made Britain look like a world power again. But last Friday's package of tax cuts and borrowing announced by the UK's new Chancellor, Kwasi Karteng, has spooked investors, caused markets to tumble, and sent the pound crashing ...
2 weeks ago
Jacinda Ardern intends to continue a more pro-Western foreign policy strategy, if her agenda from a hectic week of diplomacy is anything to go by. New Zealand's Prime Minister met with four G7 leaders – Liz Truss, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron – in various settings while she ...
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Charisma. Style. Fascism? The rest of Europe is looking on aghast at Italy's electoral behaviour. Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) party traces its ideological lineage all the way back to Mussolini's fascists. Indeed, she has been known to proclaim the original fascists' slogan: "God, Country, Family"; at her party's ...
2 weeks ago
The Rings of Power has yet to unveil Annatar. Or, as you might also know him, Sauron. As it currently stands, the invented Adar is the major on-screen villain, while the show has been gleefully dangling potential Annatar candidates in front of the viewer, to the point where "Everyone ...
2 weeks ago
A chronological listing of news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Sep 18, 2022 thu Sat, Sep 24, 2022. Story of the Week Tipping points: How could they shape the world's response to climate change? The Larsen Ice Shelf is situated along the ...
2 weeks ago
Bryce Edwards examines how politics got captured by the middle class, and why it's a problem (Reprinted from the Democracy Project, 8 September 2022) One of the world's leading progressive political thinkers and journalists died last week. Barbara Ehrenreich was 81 years old, had written more than 20 books and ...
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Well. That was something else. Hot on the heels of The Rings of Power's first unapologetically good episode, we now encounter its first unapologetically bad one. As you might have noticed, I have been generally positive – or at least charitable – about the show, but I cannot in ...
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A pandemic is declared "over" by the US President (but let's not fool ourselves because it's not really), world leaders gather at the UN in person after zooming in over the last few years even as tensions escalate in Ukraine, extremism continues to rise worldwide and also locally, all ...
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Jean Luc Godard and Hilary Mantel within a few days of each other?FFS, 2022. Juck fuck off already. ...
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The carbon, energy and dollar cycles do not integrate well. The strategy of mitigating global warming by sequesting carbon in trees involves three separate cycles: a carbon cycle, an energy cycle and a dollar cycle. I am not sure they are well integrated. Our oil-based carbon cycle involves extracting underground ...
2 weeks ago
My local body voting papers arrived earlier in the week, so its time for the usual post in which I try and work out who I'm voting for. Essential tools for this have been Vote Climate, which looks at climate and public transport policy; Policy.nz, which gives a more general ...
2 weeks ago
In 2017, Labour leader Jacinda Ardern said that climate change was "my generation's nuclear-free moment" and promised action. In 2019 and 2021 school students walked out of classrooms to demand she deliver. And today, they walked out again, because she still hasn't. The strikes are smaller today, because the movement ...
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The New Zealand Herald has released the results of its annual "Mood of the Boardroom" survey today. Should we care what businesses think of politics, the economy and society? There's a good argument that we should be more concerned with the "Mood of the Foodbank" or "Mood of the workers". ...
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In the 1980's and 1990's, Aotearoa faced a succession of governments who brazenly lied to the public, promising one thing to get elected, then doing something completely different in office. As revenge, we inflicted MMP on politicians, to saddle them with coalition partners and deprive them of the absolute majorities ...
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"Grief is the price we pay for love." –Queen Elizabeth IIIT WAS HEART-BREAKING. It was heart-warming. It was as contemporary as a smartphone. It was as old as the Middle Ages. It was the antithesis of democracy. It was what the people wanted.The Queen, at 96, has passed away, but what ...
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The end of the Queen's reign has provided us here in New Zealand with a powerful and prolonged reminder of the extent to which our heritage is bound up with that of the United Kingdom. It may, therefore, be an odd moment to register what is becoming a significant change ...
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Source: https://thestandard.org.nz/we-cant-feed-the-poor-2/
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