Congratulations to Kristine Bartlett and the mostly female 55,000 care workers who have finally been shown the dignity and respect they are so long overdue. The work they perform is critical to our social infrastructure and they deserve to be treated far better than they have.
It is a day they should celebrate.
When this story first surfaced last week I thought that I must have caught the wrong end of the stick…
As a country we have been manipulated by lynch mob grief manipulators, ‘get-tough-on-crime’ politicians and a crime porn media more interested in ratings than sensible public debate. This vile cocktail of anger and vengeance have helped build a prison empire whose cost was so large that we embarked upon the private prison experiment to try and lower costs.
With one or two notable exceptions, the three main opposition parties have to date missed multiple golden opportunities to raise an issue that a very large number of ordinary kiwis are highly concerned about. You only have to raise your concerns about the state of mental health services at any community meeting anywhere in New Zealand to see the nods of agreement right around the room.
Is the Pope a Catholic?
Of course it’s broken; let’s look at a few reports from the last fortnight:
You can’t tell your largest City that they are about to be hit by a huge storm that doesn’t eventuate because the next time it happens, they won’t believe you and that matters because we know from global warming that these extreme weather events are going to occur more and more often and if you have a cynical population who don’t believe the warnings, that will cost lives.
As a co-organiser* of Waiheke Island’s Ditch Double-Decker protest and as someone involved with the petition to remove these buses from Waiheke, I believe that Mike Hoskings has completely misrepresented this issue.
I was involved in this defamation trial so was front row for most of this and it very much shook my faith in our Jury system. When I sat down in front of that Jury I suddenly realised that for most of them this was the most important thing any of them had ever been involved in.
Which in of itself was deeply concerning.
The people engaging in window-washing are, for the most part, unemployed and to a certain extent possibly unemployable. They may be subsisting on a benefit [which, let’s remember, even the Minister of Social Development herself implicitly stated one couldn’t survive on without engaging in criminal behavior]; and one has to wonder – if prevented from attempting to earn a bit of extra cash window-washing, where else might they go in order to try and make ends meet.
Newshub, who were earlier today trying to u-turn on a fake news story about an alligator were still able to get their teeth into Labour’s new high roller funding programs, the ‘President’s Club’. Here’s Lloyd Burr doing his best Paddy Gower impersonation with all the huff and puff of an asthmatic meth smoker..