Fragile, finite ….fucked?
The underwhelming decision on climate change follows the disappointments of the non-binding marijuana referendum, timid welfare responses, the jettison of a recommended capital-gains based redistributive tax system, labour reform limitations, and KiwiBuild’s failure to deliver affordable homes, I’m too cynical to expect much improvement in frameworks to protect endangered species from extraction, waste or exploitation.
Read More →Winston Peters and Neo-liberalism, Beat Compassion and Cool.
No wonder Winston Peters objected to the Coalition Government being called Labour-led. Because, on matters of most importance, it’s led by New Zealand First. And even though Fortune Magazine this week said Jacinda Ardern was the second most powerful leader in the world, that would make Winston the first.
Read More →What about the actual military weapons?
After the Christchurch massacre, there’s a rightful focus on the prevalence and public access to ‘semi-automatic military-style’ guns. It takes a crisis to create change but with the loopholes in our gun laws, and in light of previous governments’ missed opportunities and the current government’s previous plans to centralise gun registration inspections, in fact, reform is overdue. Shame it took a massacre to force this change.
Read More →A Tale of Terror and Love
I don’t believe in any God, but wish I did. For what good prayers and hugs in defence against violence and terrorism have served in the past, it might provide some comfort to the believers. It’s hard to believe in the saving graces of love and hope when they can so easily be overthrown by one evil man with several guns.
Read More →Government needs to act on prevalent toxic cocktail
The New Zealand Government has been criticised for delays in responding to the issue despite growing international concern. Here, some PFAS chemicals were banned in fire-fighting foam in 2006 but they weren’t banned in other products until 2011. The NZ Defence Force was in contact with the Australian Air Force about groundwater contamination here, a year before they told the New Zealand public.
Read More →National’s Environment Discussion Document Business as Usual
National’s new Environment Policy Discussion Document released this weekend in Raglan has plenty of virtue signalling, and motherhood and apple pie. But despite the Party’s claim of an ambitious approach, it fits neo-liberal solutions to ecological problems, and in many ways reflects business as usual.
Read More →An end to inhumanity to whales is still a dream
Japan has announced it will leave the International Whaling Commission, withdraw its ’scientific’ whaling fleet from the Southern Ocean and focus on ‘commercially harvesting’ whales from its own territorial waters.
Read More →Have my coins, we all need change
As well as the usual worthy, weekly calls from the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation, the Deaf Foundation, Foster Kids, Greenpeace, and a suite of non-governmental organisations doing important work ameliorating social, environmental, and physical ills, this week I was also called by UNICEF, asking for weekly donations.
Read More →Denial of Prisoners’ Votes Medieval Injustice
The fundamental right to vote shouldn’t be a political football. Imprisonment shouldn’t be a denial of civil rights as well as of liberty. Convicted criminals should be due court imposed sanctions, but not civil death, otherwise universal rights die too.
Read More →Feeling like a stranger in a familiar land
Whether it’s the Greens in Government, or Jacinda’s pragmatic idealism, our politicians are manifest oxymorons. Despite our hope and best wishes for a Labour-Green coalition, this political landscape is not the world we thought we knew. We’re strangers in a familiar land, or maybe we’re familiar, but the world is a strange one. The grief and disappointment despite the nicey nice hopeful and kindness stuff, (and some genuine wins), is real.
Read More →Abortion decisions in the hands of doctors and politicians should be in the hands of women
It’s ironic that with about 270,000 children living in poverty, and one of the highest child abuse and child death by maltreatment rates in the world, that women’s decisions about whether they can cope with a child, are still in the hands of doctors and politicians, not the women themselves.
Read More →First World Problems
Reckless, provocative and dangerous as Trump is, and despite the gravity of our first world concerns, they’re convenient distractions from unpalatable everyday wars and tyrrany of the world’s evil affecting the already most vulnerable and dispossessed. We’re just lucky Trump’s not at war with us.
Read More →MUST READ: The case against the hollowness of Jacinda’s Labour – we need more than words!
Are we so relieved that this government isn’t National-led that we will settle for less than what might have been? Now that with relief we finally have a Labour-led Government, have we lost a sense of inquiry and our ear for irony? Is it no longer acceptable to expect better, more, a real move away from the austerity and hypocrisy of the past nine years. How long should we wait and what compromises are we prepared to accept in the hope of eventual real change?
Read More →MUST READ: Talking about 1080 & dispelling the ignorance of science
Taking a view on 1080 is almost guaranteed to cause disagreement with at least half your friends. Indeed, it seems nothing causes strange cleavages across the political spectrum, like talking about 1080. But the subject is like a spectre – and if we don’t talk about it fundamental disagreements will never get reconciled; and we let untruths continue, misunderstandings prevail, malintentions inform.
Read More →Game theory and NZ Coalition Politics : Agenda Setters, Co-operation, Triumph and Suckers
By applying Game theory, Nested games and the Prisoner’s Dilemma to current NZ politics, we can see that NZ First is playing the sharpest game; it’s triumphant in many policy and funding allocations. Meanwhile the Greens celebrate relatively small wins, with no real incentive to defect, playing the sucker in Labour and New Zealand First’s game.
Read More →Plastic pollution? (Almost) Business as Usual – why the plastic bag ban is barely a victory
with most policy announcements, the devil is in the detail. And though it might seem churlish, if you look closer, this is more a victory for public relations than it is for our environment. As usual, political measures are too little, too late, and not even what they seem.
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