Independence does not mean never taking sides. That would be neutrality.
Independence does not entail never deploying one's military, either. That would be pacifism.
Independence means to make one's own choices based on one's values.
Such value-driven choices can (and indeed should) lead towards taking sides when democracies and dictatorships collide. - Oliver Hartwich
With tens of thousands of jobs currently going begging, it surely remains a fiscal and moral failure that tens of thousands of fully able working-age Kiwis are sticking with the dole. - Mike Yardley
Welfare dependency has rapidly expanded since Labour took office nearly five years ago.
In December 2017, there were 289,788 on a main benefit, or 9.7% of the working-age population. That has grown to 11% today. - Mike Yardley
Under Labour's watch, jobseeker support recipients have soared from 123,042 four years ago to 173,735 today.
Despite the recent downtick, that still represents a 42% increase in four and half years. - Mike Yardley
How is it kind to stand idly by and allow so many people to diminish their horizons and wither their lives away in a perpetual state of dependency?
And what meaningful efforts are being made to enhance the work-ready potential of so many jobseeker recipients who have specified health issues? They aren't serious enough health-related issues to have their benefit status changed to the supported living payment. - Mike Yardley
So don't blame cows. Ruminants have been roaming the planet for millennia. Blame people. Climate change is a man-made problem.
The primary sector is responsible for 80 per cent of our export income. This pays the bills for a country which, in the next few months, will depressingly have 80 per cent of the population receiving some sort of state benefit. - Jamie Mckay
The country has lost its mojo after a decade of feeling good about itself. - Oliver Hartwich
The biggest contributor to New Zealanders' grumpiness is the discrepancy between political promises and reality. Without constant promises of world-class performance, even mediocre results would be easier to bear. - Oliver Hartwich
NZTA is symptomatic of a much wider problem in New Zealand, even though it is only a small puzzle piece. Faced with a serious problem, the government sets an ambitious long-term goal. It then launches massive public relations campaigns. Following that, it blows up the bureaucracy but fails on deliverables.
It is the same story in practically every major policy area. - Oliver Hartwich
New Zealanders used to be proud of their education system, which was considered world-class.
Today, the only measure by which New Zealand schools lead the world is in declining standards. - Oliver Hartwich
Aside from such big policy failures, New Zealanders are bombarded with worrying news daily. There are GPs reportedly seeing more than 60 patients per day. Patients are treated in corridors at some hospitals' A & E departments, where waiting times now often exceed ten hours.
As gang numbers have grown, gun crime has also become a regular feature in news headlines. Ram raids, where youths steal cars and crash them into small shops, have become common.
Rather than dealing with these and many other issues, the government appears determined to add new challenges to doing business. It is about to introduce collective bargaining in the labour market and an extra tax on income to fund unemployment insurance.
And these are just the big-ticket items. Practically every industry can tell its own stories about new complex regulations, usually rushed through with minimal consultation, if any.
Furthermore, there is growing unease about the government's move towards co-governance. It sounds harmless but it would radically alter how democracy operates in New Zealand and undermine basic principles of democratic participation.
All in all, the picture that emerges is that of a country in precipitous decline. That would be alarming enough. What makes it even more so is a perception that the core private and public institutions lack the understanding of the severity of the crisis or the ability to counteract it. - Oliver Hartwich
New Zealand needs to be careful not to turn into a failed state. That does not mean it should expect civil unrest, but a period of prolonged and seemingly unstoppable decline across all areas of public life.
The only way to reverse this process would be for New Zealand to regain its mojo: its mojo for serious economic and social reform. It has happened before. And it must happen again. - Oliver Hartwich
Although we "returned" to the university campus this past semester, students are reluctant to physically attend classes. They can't see a future. Their mojo & buzz are gone. Despondency rules. One student said she'll never know what opportunities may have arisen these past years & what doors may have opened had nearly her entire course not been on Zoom. Many say they want to leave NZ after graduating for foreign climes offering higher pay and lower living costs.
What did the government do to them? How did it manage to suck the oxygen out of the air they breathe? An answer has now emerged. It took away their dreams. - Robert MacCulloch
The proportion of people with high levels of psychological distress increased by far the most for 15-24 year olds between 2020 and 2021. It stands at record levels, rising from 5% in 2012 to nearly 20% in 2021. By contrast, for over 55 year olds, distress has fallen these past years to just 5% today. New Zealand has become a country for oldies to enjoy whilst the young silently drown.
There's more evidence of our youth's angst. National now polls better than Labour for voters under 40, an incredible turnaround for the PM. Gone are the days when the young embraced her. Their concerns about saving the world from itself have given way to anxiety about personal survival. - Robert MacCulloch
For starters, NZ's virus policies, which included stringent lock-downs for everyone, regardless of age, were primarily designed for the benefit of the elderly. - Robert MacCulloch
What's more, the Reserve Bank's $52 billion money-printing programme during the pandemic favoured the asset-rich elderly. It inflated their wealth by increasing the value of their property and shares, crushing the young's dream of home-ownership. - Robert MacCulloch
They've been robbed of income, since their cost-of-living-adjusted wages are dropping at the same time that inflation is "creeping" them into higher tax brackets.
Most students are hard up, but on the way up. They don't want to live off the State. They want to be successful. Independent. Yet rewards for achievement don't figure in our politics. Instead, it is dominated by David Parker-style talk about the evils of inequality between the top 1% and bottom 1%, as if the 98% don't exist. - Robert MacCulloch
So all told, the unwillingness to vote of young, ambitious, non-work-shy Kiwis, except with their feet to leave the country, is not hard to explain. - Robert MacCulloch
With methane, scientists know that the flow of methane into the atmosphere from New Zealand ruminant animals is close to what it was 30 years ago. As a consequence, and linked to the scientific knowledge that about eight percent of methane molecules decompose each year, an approximate balance in the atmospheric 'bath tub' has been reached and the atmospheric cloud of NZ pastoral-sourced methane is close to stable. Hence, this argument goes, New Zealand's agriculturally-sourced methane is contributing to further global warming in a minimal way. - Keith Woodford
If the new system is to have any hope of giving Kiwis the health services they deserve, there is only one certainty - the Government is going to need the buy-in of those on the frontline.
There is every sign of the opposite being the case.
Imposing another health system restructure on them at a time when workers are already exhausted by one of the most demanding health crises in decades, and especially when they already feel undervalued and misunderstood by the Government, is not a great way to start. - Tracy Watkins
It's very Ardern to gloss over the reality and spin the theory. - Mike Hosking
The vast amounts of money given away by officials to businesses who did not need it has cost each taxpayer several thousand dollars and all the surplus cash started an asset price bubble.
This has impacted on the wellbeing of many New Zealanders by greatly increasing inequality, unaffordable housing, child poverty and inflation. The predictable outcome was the opposite of what the Government said that it wanted to achieve.
The failure of public servants to act in the public interest and the lack of accountability and transparency has highlighted the need for the public service to have greatly improved financial objectives and standards.
A royal commission of inquiry could investigate the management of taxpayer funds since March 2020 and recommend reforms. - Grant Nelson
But everyday life seems to be getting more difficult, more costly, more tiring.
Sorting even the simple things appears harder than it used to be. Slower, dearer, harder seems a suitable motto.- Kevin Norquay
New Zealand's economic foundations are starting to crack pretty severely.
"If we do not see a substantial change in economic direction, there is a risk the whole house gets blown down.
You need those strong economic foundations and more and more of the pillars are starting to take knocks. A lot of warning bells are starting to ring. We are not heading to a nice place. - Cameron Bagrie
We've got a very divided society, ethnically, the haves versus the have-nots, wealth inequality… and educational attainment levels, whether you look at actual achievement, or attendance.
If you wanted to pick a variable as to where New Zealand is going to be economically 30 years out, educational attainment today would be probably the best predictor.
The fact that we've let that one go for a long time is flashing warning signs about where we are going to be about 30 years down the track. - Cameron Bagrie
We can't just say New Zealand is broken. New Zealand is a great place, but … cracks are appearing very quickly, and they're big cracks, and not the sorts of things you can ignore.
You can't ignore inflation. You can't just keep on spending and think it's going to fix inflation. - Cameron Bagrie
There's a shortsightedness.
They don't think 'if I train really hard and get good at this, I can make a load of money for myself, and have my freedom, and the sorts of things that people want'.
Whether it's a general problem with society, the youth can't see a way out. It's 'I'm never going to own a house, I'm never going to have that', so they just give up, and just do what's easiest to get by. - Duncan Field
Angry people on Twitter is not a legal basis. I'm amazed WCC don't realise this. - David Farrar
John Cochrane, another American economist, asked why free trade agreements are so long; thousands of pages.
He says that these trade agreements should say no more than: "We do not charge tariffs, nor restrict quantities with quotas, nor will government procurement discriminate in favour of local companies.
"We will do the same."
Job done. That is a free trade agreement.
Any free trade agreement that is longer than these few sentences will be an opportunity for special interests on the right and the left, both unions and big corporations, to feather their own nests. - Jim Rose
The EU deal has brand-new gremlins, such as a climate change chapter and restrictions on the use of wine and cheese product names.
These rules give up a little bit too much sovereignty for little in return, and legitimise the fraught concept of green tariffs between us and the European Union.
The modelling released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade suggests that the EU trade agreement will in time boost the level of New Zealand's real GDP by between NZ$1 billion and NZ$2 billion.
That is a tiny amount, one-fifth to one-third of 1% of real GDP, in return for a box of tricks. - Jim Rose
Using carbon taxes, an optimal realistic climate policy can aggressively reduce emissions and reduce the global temperature increase from 4.1°C in 2100 to 3.75°C. This will cost $18 trillion, but deliver climate benefits worth twice that. The popular 2°C target, in contrast, is unrealistic and would leave the world more than $250 trillion worse off.
The most effective climate policy is increasing investment in green R&D to make future decarbonization much cheaper. This can deliver $11 of climate benefits for each dollar spent. - Bjorn Lomborg
I think even the most law abiding lockdown fanatic would find it hard to stomach more restrictions coming back, just as we've worked so hard to shrug them off and find some normality. Compliance would be an issue. - Kate Hawkesby
Nor would it be a great look in the middle of the PM's globe-trotting exercise, pitching the Great Re-Opening of New Zealand and assuring the word we were open for business. Open for business provided you are seated and separated doesn't have the same ring. - Claire Trevett
First, we are all in a Covid new normal. It's hanging around for a fair while longer.
Second: let's all remember to have a little humility about what has and hasn't worked. No country has got it entirely right. Not the UK, but not NZ either. We are increasingly working out Covid policies are not just about Covid health, strictly speaking, but have wider health, economic, social, and – ultimately – societal ramifications, short and much longer term.
Incidentally, the normalisation of Covid means we can't stay in crisis settings – and I am not suggesting the New Zealand Government has. Good official advice whether about, say, masks, lockdowns, or borders needs to be coupled with realism about what a populous fatigued by everything will take from its political masters. - Simon Bridges
There is no doubt that people are sick of the virus but the problem is, the virus is not sick of us. - Brent Edwards
She has been in New Zealand for a decade, working in healthcare and studying towards a nursing degree.
But after graduating late last year, she was denied the ability to apply for fast-tracked residency and told she must wait two more years.
Uncertain, overworked and unable to buy a house, she is now looking for work in Australia. Of course, she will find it. - Erica Stanford
The Government's policy to exclude nurses from the fast-track residence list makes no sense.
Ultimately, it is costing New Zealanders their lives. - Erica Stanford
Perhaps it makes sense that women — those supposedly compliant and agreeable, self-sacrificing and everything-nice creatures — were the ones to finally bring our polarized country together.
Because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don't count. - Pamela Paul
Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Women's rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.
But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.
As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word "women" has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world's population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like "pregnant people," "menstruators" and "bodies with vaginas." - Pamela Paul
The noble intent behind omitting the word "women" is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side. - Pamela Paul
If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it's assumed women will be the ones to serve other people's agendas rather than promote their own.
But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?
Women didn't fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn't call ourselves women anymore. This isn't just a semantic issue; it's also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.
Seeing women as their own complete entities, not just a collection of derivative parts, was an important part of the struggle for sexual equality.
But here we go again, parsing women into organs. Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to "bodies with vaginas." It's almost as if the other bits and bobs — uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains — were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable. - Pamela Paul
Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word "transgender" combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who don't step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist," which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, "TERF" has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves.
But in a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category don't exist. - Pamela Paul
When not defining women by body parts, misogynists on both ideological poles seem determined to reduce women to rigid gender stereotypes. - Pamela Paul
The women's movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too. - Pamela Paul
But women are not the enemy here. Consider that in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men but, in the online world and in the academy, most of the ire at those who balk at this new gender ideology seems to be directed at women. - Pamela Paul
Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own — with their own specific needs and prerogatives.
If only women's voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up. - Pamela Paul
Combatting stereotypical thinking is not assisted by pretending that there is no difference between the present and the past. - Chris Trotter
How are young people supposed to understand the racism and sexism of their grandparents' generation if they're never allowed to see it depicted on the screen, or read about it in novels? How will their grasp of how far women have travelled toward equality be assisted by recasting Jim as Jackie Hawkins, and installing our diversity-affirming heroine, now a thirteen-year-old girl, on a schooner crewed by cut-throats?
All Dame Lynley is guilty of is delighting generations of Kiwi kids. A much lesser crime, I would have thought, than telling lies about the past to placate the woke censors of the present. - Chris Trotter
Is it fair to actively seek out a relationship knowing full well a potential partner might find themselves dealing with my cancer, chemo and all the other unpleasant things that go with it? . . .
I've asked around and, whilst I'd originally thought I'd be selfish to do so, the resounding answer has consistently been YES. Dive in and test the waters. Go for it. What have you got to lose? If a potential partner can't handle your uncertain future, then they probably aren't right for you anyway.
Ultimately, none of us know what's around the corner in any relationship. So why deny myself opportunities to meet someone who might be willingly all-in to support me through whatever life might have in store? Even when I know it's highly unlikely we will end up growing old together.
So I'll dip a toe back in. I know I'll be OK on my own but who knows who is out there and what adventures might be had.
Because we all deserve a chance at love – no matter how long that might last… right?
Life is short – wish me luck. - Kelly Hutton
The state housing waiting list had increased to more than 27,000, up 500 per cent, since Davis' government took office, and more than 4500 children now live in taxpayer-funded motels.
The total motel bill so far has topped $1 billion. Won't be too long and it will exceed the $1.6 billion value of the free-trade agreement the PM signed in Europe last week. - Peter Jackson
How exactly is it an achievement to concede that national superannuation is insufficient to enable goodness knows how many pensioners to keep warm over winter, without a top up?
How is it an achievement to concede that more than two million of us, earning less than $70,000 a year, which until recently was the threshold for the top income tax bracket, are unable to feed themselves and their families without extra help (over and above Working for Families, which supposedly makes the tax system fair)?
And how, exactly, is $27 a week for three months going to solve that problem? - Peter Jackson
The only people who seem to be thriving are those who work for the Government, and that seems to be most of us these days. And why shouldn't they be buoyant? They are well paid, secure in their employment (at least until the next election), and now they can aspire to very senior positions in the civil service without even having to produce a CV. Good times indeed.
For the rest of us, this country is rapidly becoming a cot case, and it is galling to hear senior members of the administration, who have done to this to us, boasting about what they have achieved. Forgive us, Kelvin, if some of us are struggling to get into party mood. Apart from those who might have been hanging out for an extra $27 a week for three months, there doesn't seem to be much to celebrate, let alone cause for congratulations. - Peter Jackson
It used to be that if Jim Bolger, Helen Clark or John Key spoke, we tended to believe what they were saying. Today, Beehive press conferences are laced with spin and half-truths.
We even have a Prime Minister who says things like "we have a mandate to do this" despite never having mentioned what "this" was during the election campaign. - Bruce Cotterill
We seem to have empowered a group of politicians, at both national and local government levels, to do things we don't want them to do. And yet their so-called "mandate" sees them driving major constitutional change irrespective of what the people might think or say.
Because we don't say much really, do we? Compared to most countries, we have tended to be a society that does not stage massive protests. - Bruce Cotterill
I suspect that part of the reason has been that we are relatively happy with our lot. And until the past few years, we have been broadly trusting of those in positions of power and authority. We have traditionally respected our leaders, and expected them to do the right thing.
However, we're not like that at the moment. To me, it feels as though we are more divided than we have ever been. Many of us are certainly more openly critical of the government or the direction the country is taking.
In the opinion of the many people I speak to, a Government majority does not authorise that Government to do whatever it wants to do. No, in theory that right should only extend to the policies and initiatives they campaigned on.
Those policies did not include the centralisation of education or healthcare, changes to governmental governance structures, Three Waters or ute taxes. - Bruce Cotterill
So mistrust creeps in. We find it difficult to believe what we are being told. So they tell us again, this time with more selective detail. So the spin increases. We disrespect the source. Trust is lost. It's a vicious circle. - Bruce Cotterill
In the meantime, our Prime Minister goes to the United States, supposedly to promote New Zealand business. However, on her two major platforms — a prime-time TV audience and a high-profile university lecture — she speaks of gun control and social media.
There is no doubt in my mind that she is travelling the globe promoting herself, not New Zealand.
As an aside, you have to laugh at the PM telling the Yanks how successful our post-massacre gun control initiatives have been while we're in the middle of our worst spate of gun violence that I can recall. -Bruce Cotterill
I believe the outcomes of the task forces, the working groups, the government reviews and the inquiries will see the Government and their co-conspirators cleared of any blame or wrong-doing.
But the behaviours are more common. And those behaviours should make us ask questions. We ask questions because we don't believe what we're hearing any more. As a result, trust is lost. The lack of trust turns into scepticism. And if they can get away with it, maybe we can, too. It's a slippery slope.
We can accuse our leaders of misrepresenting the truth, deliberately misleading us or even telling porkies. The language doesn't matter. What does matter is where such behaviours lead. - Bruce Cotterill
We were told we would have the most transparent Government ever. It turned out to be the opposite. So, we have to start calling this stuff out now. The trouble with corruption is that it creeps up on you over time. You don't want to start getting used to it.
You have to stop it before it becomes commonplace or acceptable and we become desensitised to it. If we don't, it becomes very difficult to turn around. - Bruce Cotterill
A strident coalition of housing advocacy groups, the left-leaning Auckland Council and motivated journalists melted into the background after the 2017 election as quickly as they had arisen, confident their work was done and sanity restored.
Flash forward five years and it's hard to believe how horrendous the situation now is. The $12m on motel accommodation has become $1.2 billion. Whole streets of motels like Ulster St in Hamilton and Fenton St in Rotorua have become permanent emergency housing suburbs.
The waiting list for social housing has risen five-fold to a massive 27,000 and this week, despite all the extra investment in wrap-around services, a woman died while living in her car. How did things get so bad? And if all this was a crisis five years ago, what is it now? - Steven Joyce
Sepuloni should look closer to home. Her Government has made three big policy changes that have made the house rental market immeasurably worse for society's most vulnerable, and they can't even claim ignorance. Each time they were warned about the impact of the changes, and on they went.
First, they made the private rental market hugely less attractive for people to invest in. . . .
Second, the Government stopped asking people to move on when they no longer needed the support of Government-owned social housing. People sitting in houses often too big for them, regardless of their circumstances, and until the end of their lives, means fewer houses for those who need them.
Third, they placed all their bets for expanding social housing supply on one provider, Kāinga Ora, the latest incarnation of the old Housing New Zealand. This is purely ideological.
While in this post-socialism age nearly everybody would be happy with a warm, dry house in preference to a motel unit, the Labour Party believes it will somehow be better if it is a warm, dry government-owned house. - Steven Joyce
The situation is making people desperate. It is no surprise our inner cities are being blighted with crime and an assertive and growing gang culture.
Being forced into living in long-term temporary accommodation with no hope and no plan to move elsewhere can do that to people. - Steven Joyce
We need to correct course and mobilise all our resources to get these kids into a real house, quickly. That means recruiting private investors and community housing providers, as well as Kāinga Ora.
This is no time for ideological blinkers. - Steven Joyce
An excellent challenge was thrown out in Sydney yesterday to immigration authorities — to think more like a recruitment agency than a police force. - Fran O'Sullivan
The primary sector faces big headwinds — Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, inflation, labour markets, export markets and coping with major regulatory change.
The sector is the engine room of the economy. But the notion that it can easily diversify away from China is fanciful. China takes 37 per cent of NZ's agricultural exports. The US takes 10 per cent, Australia 8 per cent, the UK 8 per cent and the EU 2 per cent.
Even while we have two new free trade agreements — and in the UK's case will get a decent deal for our dairy over time — that won't happen with the EU.
Some $52.2 billion was brought in through agricultural export receipts in the past year. This is 81.8 per cent of our overall trade. It just does not make sense to trivialise the sector's call to relax rules. - Fran O'Sullivan
If a civilization is dying or has died, however, who is to blame or what is to account for it? Do civilizations, or parts of civilizations, die of their own accord, by a natural process akin to the apoptosis of a living cell, or are they killed either by neglect or design?
The old always blame the young for what they dislike in them—for example, their taste for crude and vulgar music—but they do so as if they bear no responsibility whatever for what they think undesirable in the younger generation. If the taste for the almost miraculous artistic achievements of the past has been all but extinguished, and is now but the secret garden of a tiny and insignificant number, no doubt of the highly privileged, must not this be because the older generation has signally failed to instill any love for it in their own children?
Why didn't they? Therein lies the rub. - Theodore Dalrymple
With legions of Kiwis set to leave the country – and the hospitality, education and healthcare sectors crying out for workers, why is it the Government seems to have no trouble in staffing the Wellington bureaucracy? - Andrea Vance
It seems there is no problem so intractable that it can't be outsourced. Labour has a record of refusing to make the hard decisions of governance, happy to let 'experts' and zombie policy managers take over.
In 2010, then-Prime Minister John Key decried the growth of the industrial-bureaucratic complex. New Zealand's state service was too large for a country this size, he argued. Since then, the bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the expanded bureaucracy (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde).- Andrea Vance
The 'core business' of the sector is to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of New Zealanders. Will the Ministry for Disabled People have any significant impact on the difficulties faced by the people it purports to represent? If we look to Te Puni Kōkiri, Ministry for Pacific Peoples, the Ministry for Women, the Office for Seniors or the Children's Commissioner, then likely not.
Will the new health agencies be staffed with street-level bureaucrats: the doctors, nurses, and other professions responsible for actual care? Experience suggests we can instead expect an overpaid legion of pen-pushers drawing power into an ever-growing administrative vortex. - Andrea Vance
A strength of New Zealand farming has always been the willingness to get the job done no matter the obstacles, and to share ideas and information. Gatekeeping is a foreign concept to most Kiwi farmers, and the rise of social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok have only accelerated the pace at which we are exposed to new ideas and methods of farming. - Craig Hickman
Despite the huge diversity in farming, we are all bound by some very common things: we are in it for the long haul, and we look to make incremental gains season on season over a very long period of time. We rarely gamble on big changes that might revolutionise the farm because we simply cannot afford the consequences if it goes wrong. We are planners and incrementalist by necessity, not disruptors.
As a group we also find it very hard to articulate our thoughts. We've never had to in the past and the rise of social media makes it easier to blurt those emotions out without being able to articulate the reasoning behind it, and unfortunately those social media posts are very easy to mock. - Craig Hickman
The classic Kiwi farmer is no longer Dagg or Footrot or even Crump. Farmers have always been willing to change, albeit slowly, and the massive growth of the industry in the past two decades only served to hasten the change at a pace more than a few found uncomfortable.
The Hiluxes Barry Crump used to drive in those old TV commercials are now classics simply by virtue of having been around for more than 20 years, and I think that's a fitting way to classify the new generation of classic Kiwi farmers; we've been in the game long enough to know what we're doing but we've not been in it so long that we're constrained by ties to the past. - Craig Hickman
It just doesn't feel right. Whatever your view on assisted dying, I don't think anybody would support that system, where you've got a free choice to die, or an expensive service to live. - Dr Catherine D'Souza
The Ministry of Health has six full-time workers dedicated to euthanasia; none dedicated to palliative care.
The fear is that it's not a free choice at all between euthanasia and palliative care when the odds are so heavily stacked against dying patients accessing the sort of palliative care they deserve. - Tracy Watkins
This was my fear in 2020 when the euthanasia laws were being debated; that we hadn't earned the right to euthanasia so long as we continued to do palliative care on the cheap.
Clearly nothing has changed since then. If anything, the situation has worsened.
Shame on us. We need to do better. - Tracy Watkins
We will never fix truancy while schools are paid for the number of pupils they enrol, not the number they teach. Make funding dependent on attendance. Stopping truancy will then be every school's priority. - Richard Prebble
It is time for the Government to admit that believing it can build houses better than the private or community sector is a failed hypothesis. And for the electorate to stop believing Labour when it says it does. - Brigitte Morten
Those of us authentically comfortable with Māori language and culture can take a more balanced view. Like many of the chiefs at Waitangi, we understand that both worlds have their strengths and weaknesses.
We understand that liberal democracy, the idea that one person should have one vote, and every human being is born alike in dignity, is the best system of government humans have discovered, period. - David Seymour
New Zealanders have literally fought for these values because the alternative is apartheid, oppression, violence and hate. There is no good reason to think New Zealand is uniquely immune to human reality. Treating people differently based on race is not just misguided, but dangerous. - David Seymour
That our country has been prepared to look back 180 years for injustices and breaches of property rights, and offer redress where possible, is a triumph. In some cases, rather than giving back land fee simple, an interest in governing the asset has been offered.
The co-governance of Auckland's volcanic cones is an example of that. It was an appropriate way to recognise a specific loss.
Wholesale co-governance of councils, healthcare, Three Waters infrastructure, and resource consenting decisions is quite different. There is no historic grievance, such a grievance is impossible. - David Seymour
These modern public institutions were created in a democracy, post-Treaty. They should be governed democratically. Co-governing them means that Māori have inherently different political rights, rather than the same rights to their property as everyone else.
Proponents of that view want a "tiriti-centric Aotearoa", with "tangata whenua" (land people), here by right and "tangata tiriti" (Treaty people), here by permission. Assigning different races different rights is racist.
Dame Anne Salmond has forcefully argued that the corporatist conception of the Treaty as a partnership between two races is a product of a time and place. Namely the judiciary in the 1980s. It is not consistent with the events surrounding the Treaty's signing, or the way New Zealand society has evolved since.
A better conception of the Treaty is that it means what it says. It grants nga tikanga katoa rite tahi, the same rights and duties, to all. It guarantees tino rangatiratanga or self-determination over all your land and property. - David Seymour
Our best future is a modern, multi-ethnic, liberal democracy. Each of those words matters. We should be a leading society with an equal place for all, no matter a person's background.
Nobody should be born special, nobody should be born a second-class citizen. It's a sad sign of the times that you can have a regular column in the country's largest paper, and think such beliefs are "racist". - David Seymour
A government which began with a show of capability, if not in a blaze of glory, is now finding that almost everything it touches fades into ashes so quickly that there is nothing, or very little, to see. Read more of this post
No comments:
Post a Comment