For Hekia to use this populist, down-home stuff to distract from the way she has ripped the heart out of New Zealand schools, especially primary schools, and to further her plans for more rough surgery (better called the ‘big shakedown’), demonstrates she senses a problem of tenure, and she knows it.
Census figures reveal that the number of print, radio and television journalists fell from 2,214 to 1,170 between 2006 and 2013. Ellis notes that remaining journalists must respond to print, broadcasting and digital platforms as news budgets contract. Unsurprisingly, tabloid news values have predominated. Ellis` front page,weekday survey of five metropolitan dailies (during January 2014) showed that 60 per cent of the New Zealand Herald`s lead stories were about crime or emergencies.
The Christchurch earthquakes that violently shook the ground underneath our feet did not distinguish between the rich and poor, East and West.
Dave Macpherson is The Daily Blog’s mental health blogger after losing his son to mental health incompetence. He is also a candidate for the Waikato DHB.
Every day when you open the newspaper it seems there’s a new study, record broken or super storm related to climate change. Alongside 190 other nations, New Zealand has agreed to start reducing our emissions, but the country’s next power station looks like it will run on gas and release climate-changing pollution.
Politically, the champions of neoliberal globalisation are under siege, not always in ways we would welcome. This is evident in the US presidential contest, the vote for Brexit and the re-election of Jeremy Corban as Labour leader, but also in the rise of racism and fascism in other parts of Europe, including in the imminent Austrian re-election, and the support for Donald Trump.
For the entirety of the campaign, Hillary has delighted in highlighting the grossly offensive racist and sexist trash that has given him his Nascar Dad cred. The phenomenal number of viewers tuning in were expecting a fanged monster who spits acid between devouring babies.
From the get go, the process for considering the Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill was flawed. This is a serious piece of legislation which is 454 pages long and therefore we expected that the maximum time available should have been given to the public to consider the detail and offer feedback. Instead the report back time was condensed to 4 months instead of the standard 6 months.
So it’s in the bag for Goff. And the whole thing could have been as boring as that. Until Chloe Swarbrick came along.
One of the fundamental instincts of the political conservative is to Punish. To ‘Protect’. To levy the superior powers of the state as a mechanism with which to push ‘down and out’ against perceived ‘undesirables’ who may be living in our society’s midst.