Paying too much to keep us warm?
The Winter Energy Payment (WEP) provides older people extra income to keep warm during the winter. It sounds kind, but is it a glaring example of wasteful expenditure and poor allocation of scarce resources?
Setting the Agenda
Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
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“We’re All Behind You.”
THE 720,000 SUBSCRIBERS to the “Neighbourly” social media platform recently received a letter from the Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt. In it he offers advice on how to call out racist behaviour and who to call if you think it crosses the line.
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Closing the gap between the minimum wage and the living wage
As the minimum wage gets closer to the living wage the goal of cementing in a living wage rate (or preferably the two-thirds of the average wage goal) to be written into our collective employment agreements becomes more realistic.
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US-Saudi-Israeli State Sponsors Of Errorism Against Iran
I’m pretty sure that if *anybody’s* guilty of the whole aiding and abetting “terrorism as a tool of statecraft”, and generally being a “state sponsor of terror”, it’d be the Americans.
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The Multiple Faces Of Radicalisation
The readiness to withhold empathy from those whose values the radical extremist abhors has always been the first step on the staircase that leads to terrorist atrocity. The second is the radical’s hate and rage when those deemed to hold abhorrent values refuse to be silent.
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On Bolsonaro’s Ahistorical Naziism
Several days ago, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro made headlines for his visit to a Holocaust memorial in Israel. Not so much for the visit itself, of course – it’s the sort of thing that is almost de rigueur for newly minted world leaders heading to that particular country on political pilgrimages. But rather, for his ensuing statement upon exiting the remembrance center, about those archetypal villains of the narrative of the 20th Century, the Nazis. Namely, that they were of the “left”.
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Convenient Fictions
THE APPALLING CONDUCT of the Waikato DHB raises broader questions about the robustness of New Zealand’s liberal democracy. Most particularly, it challenges the whole notion that the administrators of New Zealand society remain accountable to the people they administrate
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Dave Macpherson: Waikato DHB tries to bully legal system into changing Coronial outcome in Nicky Stevens case
After trying for two months to get a copy of Waikato DHB’s complaint to the Solicitor General about the Coroners findings regarding our son Nicky’s death, our family has finally got its hands on a copy – and no wonder the DHB was refusing to give us a copy!
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Dr Liz Gordon – Under the sea
No-one wishes a stroke on anyone, and I was sorry to hear that he-who-had-a-right-wing-website-that-shall-not-be-named had two last year and has now declared bankruptcy. I wish him a speedy recovery. A friend of mine wondered how the big fish website was going now it was no longer owned by ‘he-who-had’.
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Tom Scott and Aramoana’s Long Shadow
From Tom Scott’s collection of cartoons, “Life in New Zealand”‘ – his take on the Aramoana massacre on 13 November 1990 where a crazed gunman shot and killed thirteen people.