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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.