The bewildering incompetence of the Dunedin lead water poisoning and Amberley tyre fire highlights the need for us as New Zealanders to undergo a desperately needed mindset change.
We are not a Country, we are an Island.
The Amberley tyre fire was warned about for four years before the inevitable erupted and Dunedin has lead levels twice that of the infamous Flint, Michigan water poisoning.
How and why?
The how is being investigated, but the why seems very obvious.
We are under the false impression that we are a country.
A country envisions levels of bureaucratic competence that NZ no longer has. 35 years of neoliberal underfunding has left no capacity for oversight which is why a mountain of tyres can catch fire and a City has higher lead levels than the worst example in America.
We need to see ourselves as Island.
An Island mindset demands a level of self sufficiency coupled with sustainability that ignores the false pretence of bureaucratic competence and demands a local ownership that doesn’t shit in its own nest.
No one is held accountable for the tyre fire and no one will be held accountable for the lead poisoning, our faith in the oversight of incompetent, poorly funded and toothless bureaucrats is terribly misplaced.
We are not a country, we are an Island.
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Face it, when NZ went full Globalist Rogernomics it was always a race to the bottom. Government wanted to expand a certain culture here.
Examples are our favourite migrants to offer compassion too seem to be rapists, child abusers and drug smugglers, essential skills here is running a burger chain or being an entrepreneur aka owning a shop to exploit workers or money launder. Cigarette factories and liquor stores are considered essential businesses in lockdown. We don’t seem to be able to build a house that doesn’t leak, costs a fortune and have remedial work needed within 10 years of being built.
Our media and the woke are more excited by the ‘racism’ generated by a coffee receipt https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/auckland-falls-restaurant-accused-of-racism-after-group-called-asians-on-receipt/news-story/2775a495772124e8f5398886d3c230b5 than the racism of mass rape and torture by our largest trading partner.
Does not surprise me that high lead levels in town water were someone else problem to be addressed in an email to one official who was on holiday…. Pike River, toxic waste from Rio Tinto left in towns for years….
A collection of islands, Martyn.
And with governments worldwide doing NOTHING to curb CO2 emissions and the NZ government in complete denial about the rate of meltdown and its consequences, we will see the North Island split in two in the Otahuhu-Pakuranga region, as sea levels rise ‘faster than expected’.
Incompetence and ducking for cover reign supreme in NZ (along with money-printing to prop up dysfunctional arrangements). It’s much the same everywhere in the world, with outright theft by those in power and rigging of elections more common in some nations.
it’s a f#kn joke not even Venezuela have led poisoning
By the way:
Diesel fumes along highways, and particularly in city streets.
Cadmium in soils, accumulated after decades of application of superphosphate.
2,4-D and 3,4,5-T, plus dioxins, in the soil and leaking from steel drums dumped by Ivan Watkins Dow.
Copper-chromium-arsenic residues left over from closed-down timber treatment facilities.
Dross left over from aluminium smelting.
Cow shit in streams, rivers and lakes.
Human shit on beaches when sewage systems fail because the planners failed to plan for actual conditions.
Plastics and microplastics EVERYWHERE.
And with nowhere for most rubbish to go, and with poor recycling practices (or recycling opportunities), huge amounts of rubbish is trucked around the country (islands) to out-of-the-way places where it gets buried.
There’s no way to capture and bury the CO2 that is contaminating the atmosphere and oceans, though.
Daily CO2 (CO2.earth)
Feb. 4, 2021 = 419.12 ppm
Feb. 4, 2020 = 413.9 ppm
Yes, 419 ppm! And it’s only February on our annual CO2 rollercoaster.
So, here we are in the last years of the failed experiments of neoliberalism and industrialism, with maniacs and the incompetent in control.
The Amberley tyre pile was to have been dismantled and sent to the Golden Bay cement works in Wangarei, to be burned in the furnace. From the perspective of the people living just north of Amberely it’s a pity that couldn’t have been organised several years ago.
On the other hand, the rubber would have ended up in the same place, and largely in the same form. CO2.
People just don’t get it: current economic-social arrangements are both unsustainable and toxic. And ultimately deadly.
Be careful what you eat and what you drink. Salmon from the Northern Hemisphere is loaded with mercury (from the burning of coal). Imported shellfish are not from pristine oceans but are from factory farms adjacent to polluted Asian rivers. Corn syrup contains high levels of fructose (poisonous to humans when ingested in large quantities). Most fizzy drinks contain excessive amounts of sugar and other tooth-rot ingredients…..
The increased levels of pollution, along with population overshoot and resource depletion were foreseen, and a good attempt to document them was made 50 YEARS AGO in ‘Limits to Growth’*.
At the time, it was believed that limits to growth would be reached ‘some time in the next one hundred years, i.e. by 2070, and that ‘sudden and uncontrollable decline’ would occur.
‘1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be
reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could
be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.’
Well, due to the corrupt nature of the political-economic-financial system, repeated warning have been ignored and we are hitting the limits right now. We are witnessing the consequences of societies being manipulated by the political-commercial sector into taking the wrong path and persisting with the wrong path, for the sake of short-term gain of the few.
Even now, as everything starts to visibly ‘turn to shit’, far from recognising that we are on the wrong path and that the consequences will be even more dire than already witnessed, our [corrupt] political system persists with everything that is unsustainable and destructive, and even attempts to increase the rate of destruction!
http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Growth-digital-scan-version.pdf
” have led poisoning”.. Is that what happens when we listen to too much Led Zeppelin? It is to their eternal shame that a child of one of the more effective movers and shakers of the labour movement, turned out to be the most effective saboteur of his party… What was the “salt being rubbed into the wound” was just how enthusiastically the tories latched on to this opportunity to lay waste to common sense, or sensible economics for a democratic society.. It has “led” to an almost total destruction of a system that produced world class tradespeople. The Clarke government started the process of rebalancing, but the next round of tory attacks under the American import Key took it to a whole new depth.. We’re looking at at least a decade before NZ’s bureaucracy Gets back to some kind of rational operation, assuming we don’t let the tories loose on it again too soon..
” It is to their eternal shame that a child of one of the more effective movers and shakers of the labour movement, turned out to be the most effective saboteur of his party… ”
Roger Douglas was born on 5 December 1937. His family had strong ties with the trade-union movement, and actively engaged in politics. His grandfather, William Theophilus “Bill” Anderton, (1891–1966), was a left-wing Methodist lay preacher and small business owner in Birmingham, England, who migrated to New Zealand with his wife in 1921.[1] Anderton served as MP for Eden from 1935–1946, then as MP for Auckland Central from 1946–1960. He was Minister of Internal Affairs in the 1957–1960 Second Labour Government, establishing the Arts Council.[2] Roger Douglas’s father, Norman Vazey Douglas, (1910–1985), a former trade union secretary, served as MP for Auckland Central from 1960–1975, and as opposition spokesman for labour, education, and social security from 1967–1972.[3] Roger’s brother Malcolm Douglas was briefly Labour MP for Hunua 1978–1979.
Douglas grew up in a state house in Ewenson Avenue, One Tree Hill, Auckland. He attended Ellerslie Primary School, excelling in arithmetic and sports.
Nah lead poising ? Tyre fires ? In NZ ? Yeah nah we are 100% clean and green mate , its got to be fake news !!
lmao , all that to make a point out of ‘ led
led led led
maybe play some stairway , shouldn’t be too hard for a garage rock guitarist
I completely agree with this comment. The vaccine nationalism in Europe is just another example that when the shit hits the fan we need to be in a position to have the capacity to look after ourselves.
I think the essence of Martyn’s Fortress Aoteroa concept is sound, ultimately we need to widen the definition of national security and focus on what adapting to a warming work really means.
Toothless, incompetent Local Bodies not acting on Environmental Hazards and one wonders why our cancer rates are going through the roof.
We are selling our fresh water supplies to Offshore Interests for a pittance and leaving our own people to drink contaminated water supplies ie Christchurch, Bay of Plenty, and Hawkes Bay what is going on ?
Utter Madness ?
In Chch a group tried to use legal means to stop, the water being taken and have finished up with an $ 80000 bill cause they lost.
In town we have a building signed off by council as ok but a student in engineering noticed a mistake which was proved correct and the building has sat for 2 years as they deside what to do.
This is the same council that said the CTV building was safe and we know where that lead
We are ruled by muppets !
+1 Trevor – something is wrong with standards in NZ.
‘No man is an island, entire of itself.’ (Please don’t ask me for a link..)
Can a country be so?
Our country/island seems to lack any understanding of Donne’s poem to begin with.
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