Guest and sponsored opinion pieces published on The Daily Blog, offering diverse perspectives within clear editorial guidelines.
I am not saying that constructive criticism is not a valuable and important tool when work is not up to standard or when improvement in performance is necessary. However, we are not all the same. We respond to different motivators and triggers.
I note in recent weeks Prison Directors in Christchurch and Invercargill have acknowledged individual suicides in their prisons after family pressure.
There has been a lot of discussion lately here in Ōtepoti about something called “cultural appropriation”. It first came to my attention when a well-meaning friend starting objecting to our plan to have a “Gypsy Party” as part of a local festival, with Eastern European and Arabic influenced music, a performance by our local belly dancer troupe, and decoration to fit the theme.
John Key’s announcement of his Government’s $1 billion infrastructure investment fund is a brilliant political gesture but as with everything else this Government has done with housing it won’t provide any affordable housing.
It’s an alarming statistic and I can well believe it .
My position on Brexit was that workers should have abstained in a dispute between their bosses over how to make workers pay for their crisis.
The Indonesian Government has developed strategies for avoiding international criticism over its appalling human rights record in West Papua. One strategy is to keep the outside world out and ensure that approved visitors such as journalists and diplomats are carefully guided and get to meet with the ‘right’ people.
Food insecurity, a housing crisis and a welfare system that now has so many gaps in it that it resembles more of a giant hula hoop than a safety net are three of the many gifts that eight years of a National Government have given us
All water supplies are controlled by the Israelis, including West Bank mountain aquifer water which by international law should be a Palestinian resource. Practising ‘hydrological apartheid’ , control of water is used as weapon to drive Palestinians off the land, and if not to another country then into squeezed isolated miserable ‘bantustans’.
The Brexit vote represents the current progressive paradox: the left should be able to represent the many marginalised by neo-liberal capitalism; but is struggling to connect with them in reality, particularly young people and males. The result is that extremist nationalist figures are converging far right and left wing dissatisfaction thinking under a nationalistic, populist banner.