Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
One of the most powerful effects of cannabis is to addle the minds of those who don’t use it. As we approach our once-in-a-generation chance to finally end cannabis prohibition with the referendum next year, we are in the midst of a Reefer Madness campaign of fearmongering.
BEFORE NARNIA THERE was Charn. Mighty Charn, which fell at last because Jadis, its final Queen, was willing to utter the “Deplorable Word”. C.S. Lewis describes the scene in his “prequel” to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Magician’s Nephew.
After refusing to hold further discussions with Nicky Stevens’ whanau six months ago, the Waikato DHB – under the new leadership of Commissioner Karen Poutasi – has changed tack and agreed to participate in mediation talks with his family.
Instead of allowing more permanent residents in the government has continued to allow bosses to import labour on a temporary work visa. The number of these remains around 250,000 a year – yes, a quarter of a million a year. This has created a pool of at least 150,000 workers here at any one time on a temporary visa.
A WARBLING CHARM of magpies in the macrocarpa serenaded the windy forecourt of the service station. Two weather-beaten cockies were filling up their mud-splattered gas-guzzlers and chatting away to one another in the desultory fashion of their kind.
Anyway, I will leave the technical writing to others, but I do want to talk a bit about winning. Competition is healthy until it becomes unhealthy. Whether it be a sporting game, an educational outcome or anything else, sometimes one person alone does not come put on top. What you do about that defines who you are as a person, a country or a sporting tournament.
MANY OF US want to believe that if Jacinda Ardern watched Melanie Reid’s “Taken Generation” video, she’d be outraged. What person with a heart wouldn’t be? Reid’s exposé of Oranga Tamariki’s failings is an enormously confronting piece of journalism. It has moved Maoridom like nothing else since the Foreshore and Seabed furore of 2004-05. For that reason alone, you would think the Prime Minister might consider the 45 minutes required to watch Reid’s video, time well spent.
Calling for villagers not to kill elephants destroying their crops, or tigers killing their children, are just causes for us in the west. But we live in the luxury of the system that’s delivered goods to us at the expense of those communities and ecosystems and species.
According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, the term anti-Semitism means “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”. It defines Semite as: “A member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs. From modern Latin Semita, via late Latin from Greek Sēm ‘Shem’, son of Noah in the Bible, from whom these peoples were traditionally supposed to be descended.”
The pervasiveness of the rural virtue/urban vice myth similarly explains the widespread refusal of the Right to accept the reality and urgency of climate change. The countryside cannot be disentangled from the extractive and environmentally unsustainable industries it supports. But, accepting this fact means casting rural New Zealand in the role of ecological villain, rather than economic and cultural hero. Unacceptable.