I heard Mike King once say that the most important thing he tells young men around NZ about suicide is that they are loved. It’s a message that is being ignored everywhere else because we have become a broken nation of unloved fatherless sons.
Parliament is currently looking to criminalise smoking in cars with children. Seeing as the largest block of people this would impact are young Māori women, the idea of green-lighting Police to hassle young Māori women any more than they currently do sounds like a recipe for disaster.
National’s 9 years in power were built upon selling as much cheap milk powder to China and foreign speculation in the domestic property market, so when National make policy, are they answering to Wellington or Beijing?
One of the interesting dynamics for the 2020 election will be the overseas vote. Typically this always benefits the Greens…
So National are promising a bonfire of red tape that doesn’t exist while ignoring a climate crisis that does exist???
Yay! The first generation of user pays, Gen X, are now going to have to wait longer to get their…
…The Dark Art of politics now is not in the proposal and debate of ideas, it is the promotion of anger as policy which is communicated to potential voters based on the outrage it generates amongst identifiable tribal protagonists.
Our under funded social infrastructure, our ‘me first’ consumerism, our 30 years of neoliberal mythology, our disconnection from one another, our untreated pain, our lack of hope from grinding poverty in a first world country, our damaged masculinity, the intergenerational consequences of colonialism, our unspoken rage culture, our inability to express emotion beyond anger – all of this demands questions we don’t want to hear as a society and the shame of suicide continues to hide and smother any healing.
It’s time to start rethinking our support for Dairy, Tourism and the fraud that is international education. Unfortunately the political power each of those industries have mean any Government is too frightened to challenge them.
When you think about it, the privacy breach at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage for the 250th year of James Cook sailing around NZ is actually all part of the colonial experience.