Earlier this week, a poll came out indicating that a majority – almost two thirds – of New Zealanders are allegedly in support of either decriminalizing or legalizing cannabis. This is hardly significant, as it is merely a reification of what many of us have either known or strongly suspected for some time.
Admittedly, there is nothing so obvious and egregious to the Watson case that has yet come out as the planted bullet which did in Arthur Allan Thomas – but even taking a cursory run-through of the case and judgements against Watson, it would be exceedingly hard to argue that his conviction is in any way “safe”.
Remember when John Key boldly declared that New Zealand was not a tax haven?
“How dare Putin think he can meddle in the internal politics of a foreign country! Who does he think he is?! Hillary Clinton?!”
The game of vice presidential candidate selection in American Politics is among the single most complex-yet-simple parts of the four yearly quasi-armed-madhouse they call their Presidential election cycle.
In reaction and response to news that the New Zealand Government has gotten a bit uneasy about decidedly sub-standard Chinese steel being put into our own domestic infrastructure projects (and accompanied by fraudulent safety standard certification, no less), the PRC is apparently considering raising punitive “reprisal tariffs” on Kiwi primary produce exports in order to force our government to move to protect Chinese interests rather than our own.
Over this weekend just gone, I was deployed alongside more than a dozen members of New Zealand First’s new, nascent youth wing into the Wairarapa electorate. The mission was simple: train and upskill a group of ardent young people in preparation for the necessary exigencies of what promises to be a thrilling 2017 campaign.
To insist that our elderly citizens should be steadfastly deprived of their right to vote purely because of some ineluctable combination of a referendum result on the literal other side of the world and spiraling youth apathy about politics is heinous.
In many countries around the world, statistics about things like the rates of unemployment or crime are used by the government of the day to demonstrate changes in those areas. In New Zealand, by contrast, changes in statistics (as in, changes in what the statistics actually represent) are used instead to obscure a lack of improvement in same.
Due to the obvious importance of New Zealand First to either side forming a government in 2017, from now til the next Election there will be an absolutely huge quantity of political pontification from pundits, politicians, and assorted other somewhat self-important talking heads as to what Winston – or, more properly, NZF as a whole – might do.