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Government criticised for taking too long to make immigration changes
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018885744/government-criticised-for-taking-too-long-to-make-immigration-changes
The worry being they’ll bugger off to OZ once they get here and obtain residency.
Why not simply bond then for say 5 years? If they break the bond, they’re obviously not of ‘good character’, and residency can be rescinded.
Is there some legal reason why this couldn’t happen, or is it just that ‘officials’ (i.e. those PMC managerialists) have had the mandatory imagination bypass surgery?
Meanwhile, make it more attractive to train people already in the country where skill shortages exist.
More than that, STOP treating people with appropriate skills like robots that are not allowed family and normal human affiliations. Currently, we seem to treat wives, husbands and children as unnecessary baggage
We’ve cancer, heart, covid and now MIBS? Our society has a lot of ill phenomenon to contend with. Have we enough/any MIBS surgeons? It sounds like a specialist field. A field glowing with buttercups and where a host of golden daffodils dance in the breeze? We are agriculturally centred after all; not much imagination or foresight available beyond next financial year end and Budget announcements re tax.
Government not competent to stop data harvesting by global players that they seem to want to give other people’s data to! Good enough for citizens but the GCSB doesn’t use Google Analytics, so that says how safe they think it is!
NZ Census data sounds like it is shared with at least 10 third parties getting access to Kiwis information from the online census!
It is not about marketing and spin with data, but actually getting it right and protecting people’s data and to international standards!
‘Why is Google looking over your shoulder?’ – Privacy fears over data online
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/487714/why-is-google-looking-over-your-shoulder-privacy-fears-over-data-online
extract.
“The biggest worry around the 2018 Census was the lack of data – with one in seven New Zealanders failing to fill it in.
Technology commentator and programmer Geoff Palmer was one of them – but unlike many others, this was not because he did not know his way around online.
He was worried about the potential for online spying.
For the 2023 Census he “naively” assumed Stats NZ would have “upped its game”, he said.
However, using the browser add-on Lightbeam he found by the time he actually started answering the Census questions, he was connected to 10 “third parties”, including Google Analytics, YouTube, and DoubleClick, another Google-owned data harvesting platform.
“You’re responding to very personal questions about your age, your gender, your religious beliefs, all these sort of things. And I’m just wondering why Google is looking over your shoulder while you’re answering these questions?”
extract
“However, data privacy specialist Kent Newman said it was not enough for government agencies to simply say “you can trust us”.
“That’s the opposite of what we should be doing. You should be demonstrating that you are a trustworthy service.”
Stats NZ’s assurances about privacy being a taonga were “somewhat disingenuous”, he said.
“In their privacy statement they’re saying this kind of cheeky thing: ‘We won’t use it for this purpose. We won’t be able to tell who you are.’ Google will.
“It appears that Stats NZ is failing to perform its core function, which is looking after our data.”
Newman, who previously raised the alarm about the police use of Facebook Pixel, said it was “a systemic problem” and many government agencies were guilty of a cavalier attitude towards privacy.
“Partly it’s a lack of resources, but part of it is simply the cultural approach of ‘She’ll be right’.
“Artificial Intelligence is now upon us, and New Zealand is not even dealing with cookies, which have been regulated in the EU for ten years or so.
“The issue is we’re going to get a reputation for doing it badly, and that means that hackers overseas are going to look at us as a bit of a soft target.”
extract.
“However, Council for Civil Liberties chair Thomas Beagle said New Zealanders should be able to use government websites without having their information shared with marketing companies.
“It seems odd to me that our government is wanting to give information about our people to a foreign company. And it kind of boggles my mind that they think this is a good idea.”
It was “safe to assume” that Google was not offering its services to improve New Zealand government websites, he said.
“They’re offering it because they can track people to do a better job of marketing. And of course Stats NZ is probably using it for cheap or free because Google wants this information.
“There are other tools out there you can use to do exactly the same thing, without feeding that information back to Google.”
So who is checking that New Zealanders’ private data is cleared for export?”
The government should be charged with treason for selling our data to an overseas company, and a military contractor no less. It doesn’t matter whether data is anonymized or not (anonymity probably isn’t even a thing to the big tech deep state), these are our personal records.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/2018885451/murder-in-the-pacific-bbc-airs-new-rainbow-warrior-documentary
New – Good to watch – Rainbow Warrior, 1985 story.
and summary of social history seeds flowering today!
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/487751/strikes-protests-and-collective-action-how-fighting-a-cost-of-living-crisis-wasn-t-always-about-tightening-your-own-belt
Toby Boraman – The Conversation
…In many ways, the long 1970s were similar to today, a turbulent era of wide-ranging transformation, social polarisation and economic decline. After the long post-war economic boom, the so-called “golden age” of capitalism came to a halt in the late 1960s. A long-term social and economic decline set in after the oil shocks of the 1970s.
Largely in response to this, strike levels reached historic peaks in many countries. As British journalist Andy McSmith wrote of the UK’s 1978-1979 “winter of discontent”, it was simply “irrational not to strike”, given how inflation was eroding pay packets. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, inflation averaged 11.5 percent in the 1970s and peaked at 17.2 percent in 1980.
Collective resistance wasn’t only organised in workplaces. There were also consumer campaigns such as the Campaign Against Rising Prices in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly organised by (unpaid) women domestic workers, and often supported by unions.
Toby Boraman is a lecturer in politics at Massey University
Wellington the city we love to hate, and that’s just the people who live there?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/487794/wellington-city-council-reveals-17-000-street-lamps-in-capital-prone-to-snapping
Scoop has another perspective.
https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=151570
City of squirrels
April 5, 2023 42 comments
And for those of us with an addiction – to drinking water:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/487815/concerns-sobering-freshwater-report-will-fail-to-trigger-needed-reforms
This report shows that our freshwater environments are under pressure across the country – that’s our wetlands, our lakes, our rivers and our groundwater – and that’s affecting our quality of life and the things that are important to us,” Natasha Lewis, deputy secretary for evidence at the Ministry for the Environment, told RNZ’s Midday Report on Wednesday.
“This report highlights three substantial pressures… it’s the activities we undertake on our land, it’s agriculture, it’s forestry, it’s urban expansion, as well as activities we undertake in water – so, dams and stopbanks affecting fish passage. And then of course the compounding impact of climate change.”
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/487782/feisty-and-incredibly-relaxed-wellington-zoo-welcomes-two-snow-leopards
Now wouldn’t it be a good headline if instead of snow leopards in Wellington it referred to retired people in Auckland. Read on –
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/487795/we-just-feel-powerless-kainga-ora-rejects-pensioner-housing-on-gifted-land
During the session, residents got the chance to voice their concerns about the new development. But the frustration came early, when Kāinga Ora’s regional manager Taina Jones told the room it is not obliged to reserve any of the land specifically for elderly people.
“We have decided not to designate any part of this development for pensioning housing,” she said, while residents loudly expressed their disappointment.
Benji Nathan was the one who pressured the meeting to happen, after several frustrated attempts to get his concerns through in the drop-in sessions hosted by Kāinga Ora.
Armed with a lengthy list of questions, he said he was disappointed.
“Kāinga Ora has made clear with their instance that there won’t be a chance to see pensioner housing within the plan. I don’t feel like we will get a response back in terms of the moral obligation that maybe Kāinga Ora has towards pensioner housing.”…
RNZ has had access to the recommendations that came prior to the selling of the donated land to Housing New Zealand – now Kāinga Ora – back in 2002.
In its section about pensioner units, the report recommends Housing NZ was obligated under the agreement to retain the properties in order to accommodate pensioners.
Property lawyer Joanna Pidgeon said, while council should have complied with the recommendations, Kāinga Ora was only bound by the agreement signed.
“Housing NZ is committed to social housing, not pensioner housing specifically, hence the lack of specific commitment from Kāinga Ora to pensioner housing in the sale and purchase agreement. So while the report made representations, they have not been followed 100 percent in the actual sale agreement.”
One of the lies of our governments – that they are continuing to serve the people in neoliberal land. But they do not keep faith with the people who still think in mid-20th century terms ie the government cannot be trusted by the people even when something is in writing. Slippery and lax – is that how Labour is content to be seen? It makes them look
so much like National which has had a history of being like this, and yet has achieved some good things in the past. So are the two major parties now similar?
More stress to do with housing and infrastructure.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2018884958/construction-under-stress
Woo-hoo. Duckduckgo want paid. It was free, now isn’t.
Go silent for a while?
I’m off
Duckling – do as ducks do ‘swim calm and unruffled on the surface and paddle like hell underneath’. Or am I a silly goose!
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