Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
It’s like a scene from a Dracula movie where the zombie comes back from the dead. The TPPA is dead but the TPPA-11, without the US, has just opened one eye. The idea of reviving the TPPA without the US, but still including all of the dangerous aspects that the US introduced into negotiations, makes no sense.
Earlier this week, somebody asked Judith Collins what she thought of Gareth Morgan. Ever the diplomat, her curt response was that if she wound up having to deal with him … she’d “probably take up drugs”. No word, as yet, on whether she’d also find this necessary working with Winston.
The ongoing travails of our nation’s convenience store and dairy operators have grown to such a scale that even those perennial champions of Ostrich Economics in our Government are unable to ignore them.
My friend and I cast our votes for the Iranian Presidential Election in Christchurch last Friday knowing full well the election was effectively rigged in advance by unelected clerics who had decided who could and couldn’t run.
A leading suicide prevention campaigner published a social media post on the weekend asking why the Southern District Health Board had yet to apologise to her family over the poor care for her son, who was a victim of suicide 4 years ago.
Ground control to Major Tom? Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Apologies to the late lamented David Bowie. But the bullshit from the National government on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) since the Trump administration formally pulled out in January is really off the planet (apologies, I don’t usually swear in blogs, but I couldn’t find a suitable acronym).
‘The hype leading into the meeting of ministers from the eleven remaining Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement countries in Hanoi today assumes…
National is increasingly on the back-foot with New Zealand’s ever-worsening housing crisis. Ministers from the Prime minister down are desperately trying to spin a narrative that the National-led administration “is getting on top of the problem”. Despite ministerial ‘reassurances’, both Middle and Lower Working classes are feeling the dead-weight of a housing shortage; ballooning house prices, and rising rents.
My son Nicky, 21, died as a direct result of being sent off the Waikato Hospital campus, unescorted, while a known suicide risk, to smoke; when there was (and is) a perfectly good safe outside courtyard area that he could have been in.
The Spanish Inquisition, claiming to combat heresy, was a brutal political device for consolidating the power of the monarchy, leading up to and following the Christian reconquest of Andalucia. Previously, the region’s Jewish population had been among the largest in Europe, growing both in numbers and professional status.
