I'm not convinced that the radical path of social transformation that the Academics, Activists and Political Elites wish to force us all down has any relevance, interest or benefit to the good people of that night.
I'm not convinced that they support the amalgamation of our Health Boards into some mega entity based in Wellington with a name few of us can pronounce or spell. I think they just want to be able to see a doctor if they get sick.
I'm not convinced that they want Co-Governance of their sewer pipes or drinking water delivery.
I'm pretty sure they don't support John Tamihere's argument that people of Maori descent own the water in this country, and even if they did, it would only be to the benefit of the Tribal Elite. Not one coin would make its way down to the lady buying a spring roll and half a scoop of chips for her Saturday night meal.
I'm not sure these folk want to fund a Restructure of TVNZ because Willie Jackson thinks New Zealand is more than Country Calendar.
I don't think Marama Davidson announcing inside that shop that Men of European descent were responsible for family violence would have been met with agreement.
Whether a man who wants to identify as a woman is free to use a woman's toilet or play woman's sport wouldn't be on their list of concerns in life I reckon.
It is my belief that the Academics, Activists and Political Elites in this country are driving a social revolution that is completely isolated from the needs and concerns of our people.
Those people in the shop are just pawns in the game.
For those people in the shop, life was hard, it was a grind, there isn't a lot to look forward to.
As I walked back to my life, I wondered, where has our education system failed? Where have our training institutions and Apprenticeship schemes gone? Where have the manufacturers who provided rewarding employment gone? Why do we make it hard for our businesses to prosper? How did our political system get hijacked by the radicals? - David Clark
The latest IMF Current Account Ratings forecasts that our current account deficit will be proportionally the largest of the world's 40 most advanced economies.
Specifically, the IMF said it would be worse than notorious cot cases such as Greece and ranks us the 3rd worst performer in its recent years decline among advanced economies.
This is a direct consequence of the appalling financial mismanagement over the last 3 years.
Thanks to our floating exchange rate it will eventually sort itself out, albeit initially at a considerable standard of living cost. - Sir Bob Jones
It all augurs badly for the next few years. All of these dire consequences are a direct result of a truly appalling government, driven by ideology and an irresponsible approach to expenditure.
Perhaps, worse of all, is the creation of a racist society which will take years to mend, if ever. - Sir Bob Jones
Compare and contrast. Our government and media have brazenly condoned the abuse of UK women's rights activist Posie Parker by transgender protesters. But UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has ramped up his support for women's rights, speaking out against the trans extremism movement where words like 'pregnant woman' and 'mother' are being censored, replaced by 'pregnant people'. - Wendy Geus
Journalist Jenna Lynch may swallow transgender bullsh*t labels such as "white cis men" (quote: Marama Davidson, painstakingly giving us a forensic definition during her propaganda slot on a Newshub bulletin).
I do not.
As more than 99.9% of people in the world born male or female identify in adulthood as a man or a woman, we do not have to adopt new labels when talking about a man or a woman. We know who we are. If when talking amongst themselves, transgender people wish to use their own labels: fine, but don't force them on us. However, the media, working in sync, are happy to oblige them.
I don't know how Simeon Brown managed to keep a straight face on the Breakfast couch beside Labour MP Arena Williams when she looked down the camera and said, with a straight face: "A man transgendering to a woman, is a woman".
And there are fairies at the bottom of my garden, Arena. - Wendy Geus
Chloe Swarbrick comes across as eloquent and presentable. However, it seems cynicism and political expediency is never far from the surface when she can describe the Albert Park riot as an experience of 'love and affirmation', thereby condoning an elderly woman being bashed in the face; the guest speaker shut down, covered with tomato soup and run out of the park; and the police refusing to protect her until after the assault.
Anarchy was the word she was looking for.
Auckland Central folk need to give much consideration to whom they elect this year. Their current MP may call herself green but, like a watermelon, she is red on the inside, just like her more radical roommates. - Wendy Geus
It's proof that free speech is very limited in New Zealand and tyranny introduced during Ardern's 'transformational' government is alive and well. Like Stephen Joyce said, we now have to say 'black is white'.
I recently saw an advertisement on TV for a medical product with small print warning against certain people taking it, including 'pregnant people'. Another example of the ideological lunacy that is being forced upon us and taking over our country. - Wendy Geus
With all this tax the rich talk and naysayers wanting punitive measures dished out to anyone showing signs of success or ambition, I just wonder if we're shooting ourselves in the foot here.
Are we not at peak tall poppy syndrome now?
Because where does all this "it's not fair, woe is me" whining actually get us? So far all I can see is that it sends our best and brightest off elsewhere. We have the 5000 nurses who've registered to work in Australia, the net migration loss of more than 8000 Kiwis to Australia just last year, we have those who've discovered cost of living is actually cheaper overseas. - Kate Hawkesby
I think we have to adjust this complacent mentality we have that we're the best little country in the world and we're invincible. -
A head in the sand approach to what is going on around us is not going to help. We need to recognise what's on in order to be able to act. -
How bad are we going to let things get? And how much do we want to give our country up to the lowest common denominator? We have to admit that we need to flip it - we need to shift the focus to productive aspects of the economy.
We need less David Parker driven ideological tax attacks on those who are productive, employ people, and get this economy going. Because guess what? They'll just leave top.
You can't keep propping up the bottom end, reducing penalties for crime, and ignoring all the stats going against us.
Because by ignoring it, we run the risk of waking up when it's all too late. - Kate Hawkesby
In recent years, the overused word 'sustainability' has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and 'degrowth'. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.
In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that 'the mantra of sustainability' starts with the assumption that humanity is 'the biggest problem of the planet', rather than the 'creators of a better future'. Indeed, many climate scientists and green activists see having fewer people on the planet as a key priority. Their programme calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.
The question we need to ask is: sustainability for whom? - Joel Kotkin
Under the new sustainability regime, the ultra-rich profit, but the rest of us not so much. The most egregious example may be the forced take-up of electric vehicles (EVs), which has already helped to make Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the world's second-richest man. Although improvements are being made to low-emissions vehicles, consumers are essentially being frogmarched into adopting a technology that has clear technical problems, remains far more expensive than the internal-combustion engine and depends primarily on an electric grid already on the brink of blackouts. Green activists, it turns out, do not expect EVs to replace the cars of hoi polloi. No, ordinary people will be dragooned to use public transport, or to walk or bike to get around.
The shift to electric cars is certainly no win for the West's working and middle classes. But it is an enormous boon to China, which enjoys a huge lead in the production of batteries and rare-earth elements needed to make EVs, and which also figure prominently in wind turbines and solar panels. - Joel Kotkin
Building cars from primarily Chinese components will have consequences for autoworkers across the West. Germany was once a car-manufacturing giant, but it is expected to lose an estimated 400,000 car-factory jobs by 2030. According to McKinsey, the US's manufacturing workforce could be cut by up to 30 per cent. After all, when the key components are made elsewhere, far less labour is needed from US and European workers. It's no surprise that some European politicians, worried about a popular backlash, have moved to slow down the EV juggernaut.
This dynamic is found across the entire sustainability agenda. The soaring energy costs in the West have helped China expand its market share in manufactured exports to roughly equal that of the US, Germany and Japan combined. American manufacturing has dropped recently to its lowest point since the pandemic. The West's crusade against carbon emissions makes it likely that jobs, 'green' or otherwise, will move to China, which already emits more greenhouse gases than the rest of the high-income world. Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership is looking to adapt to changes in the climate, instead of undermining economic growth by chasing implausible Net Zero targets. - Joel Kotkin
California's regulators recently admitted that the state's strict climate laws aid the affluent, but hurt the poor. These laws also have a disproportionate impact on ethnic-minority citizens, creating what attorney Jennifer Hernandez has labelled the 'green Jim Crow'. As China's increasingly sophisticated tech and industrial growth is being joyously funded by US venture capitalists and Wall Street, living standards among the Western middle class are in decline. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans' life expectancy has recently fallen for the first time in peacetime. Deutsche Bank's Eric Heymann suggests that the only way to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050 is by squelching all future growth, which could have catastrophic effects on working-class and middle-class living standards.
Rather than the upward mobility most have come to expect, much of the West's workforce now faces the prospect of either living on the dole or working at low wages. - Joel Kotkin
Over recent decades, many jobs that might have once supported whole families have disappeared. According to one UK account, self-employment and gig work do not provide sustenance for anything like a comfortable lifestyle. Rates of poverty and food shortages are already on the rise. As a result, most parents in the US and elsewhere doubt their children will do better than their generation, while trust in our institutions is at historic lows.
The fabulists at places like the New York Times have convinced themselves that climate change is the biggest threat to prosperity. But many ordinary folk are far more worried about the immediate effects of climate policy than the prospect of an overheated planet in the medium or long term. - Joel Kotkin
This is class warfare obscured by green rhetoric. It pits elites in finance, tech and the nonprofit world against a more numerous, but less connected, group of ordinary citizens. Many of these folk make their living from producing food and basic necessities, or from hauling these things around. Factory workers, truck drivers and farmers, all slated for massive green regulatory onslaughts, see sustainability very differently than the urban corporate elites and their woke employees. As the French gilets jaunes protesters put it bluntly: 'The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.' - Joel Kotkin
These Western concerns are nothing compared to how the sustainability agenda could impact the developing world. Developing countries are home to roughly 3.5 billion people with no reliable access to electricity. They are far more vulnerable to high energy and food prices than we are. For places like Sub-Saharan Africa, green admonitions against new agricultural technologies, fossil fuels and nuclear power undermine any hope of creating desperately needed new wealth and jobs. It's no wonder that these countries increasingly ignore the West and are looking to China instead, which is helping the developing world to build new fossil-fuel plants, as well as hydroelectric and nuclear facilities. All of this is anathema to many Western greens. To make matters worse, the EU is already considering carbon taxes on imports, which could cut the developing world off from what remains of global markets.
More critical still could be the impact of the sustainability mantra on food production, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa, which will be home to most of the world's population growth over the next three decades, according to United Nations projections. These countries need more food production, either domestically or from rich countries like the US, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and France. And they are acutely aware of what happened when Sri Lanka adopted the sustainability agenda. This led to the breakdown of Sri Lanka's agricultural sector and, eventually, to the violent overthrow of its government.
We need to rethink the sustainability agenda. Protecting the environment cannot come at the cost of jobs and growth. We should also assist developing countries in achieving a more prosperous future. This means financing workable technologies – gas, nuclear, hydro – that can provide the reliable energy so critical for economic development. It does no good to suggest a programme that will keep the poor impoverished.
Unless people's concerns about the green agenda are addressed, they will almost certainly seek to disrupt the best-laid plans of our supposedly enlightened elites. In the end, as Protagoras said, human beings are still the ultimate 'measure' of what happens in the world – whether the cognoscenti like it or not. - Joel Kotkin
Patrick West
The striking thing about all this is that if the commenters are to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt them, freedom of speech in New Zealand is far more precarious than most of us imagined. When people are afraid to speak their minds for fear of adverse consequences, we are effectively no better than Putin's Russia or Xi Jinping's China. You could be excused for wondering how long it will be before people start circulating New Zealand-style samizdats - the clandestine newsletters published by dissenters in the Soviet Union.
Things may not be so bad here that people risk arrest or imprisonment for speaking out, but the chilling effect is no less real. The threat of ostracism, career derailment or denunciation on social media can be almost as powerful as the fear of a knock on the door from the secret police in the middle of the night.
In fact in some ways it's more insidious because it's not declared or overt. Limitations on free speech are imposed not by statute or government edict, but by unwritten rules policed by vindictive zealots determined to make an example of anyone who challenges the dominant ideological consensus.
This is something new. Even during the prime ministership of Robert Muldoon, which is generally considered the high-water mark of authoritarian government in modern New Zealand history, people didn't feel this intimidated. You have to go back to the Public Safety Conservation Act, which was used to criminalise pro-wharfie comment during the 1951 waterfront dispute, to find a more oppressively censorious political environment – and that legislation was invoked on that occasion in response to a singular and relatively short-lived event. This time it's open-ended. There's no fixed time frame beyond which we can assume free speech will be permitted to flourish again. - Karl du Fresne
I still lament that many people hide behind pseudonyms for no better reason than they lack the courage to stand up for opinions they are legally entitled to hold. I also deplore the tendency for anonymity to result in commenters engaging in cheap shots and puerile slanging matches – a fate that has befallen other blogs (though not this one), and which wouldn't happen if commenters had to be named. Accordingly, people who identify themselves are far more likely to get their comments published here. Opinions carry far more weight when there's a name to them.
But what's even more lamentable than people sheltering behind pseudonyms for reasons of timidity is that many commenters are genuinely fearful of repercussions if they identify themselves. Freedom of expression is not served by denying them a voice – and ultimately, freedom of expression must take precedence over secondary concerns. -Karl du Fresne
As a parent, do you have confidence the education system is delivering?
Do employers understand what all the different levels of NCEA mean and what the results tell us about a job candidate?
Would it be better to maybe toss a real-work document in front of someone during the interview, and see if they understand it.
If it really matters to the role that the person can read and write and do simple numerical reasoning, you might be better off paying for a private test. - Tim Dower
Are we at the point where NCEA has lost its credibility? Not that it's ever had much of that.
Is it time to just give up on NCEA, and go back to using recognised qualifications like GCSE - the advantage of those being they're portable - and that matters in a global employment market.
Bottom line, as the Herald recently found, New Zealand students have been going backward against their overseas peers for the past 20 years.
NCEA was introduced in 2002.
Point made? - Tim Dower
He is wrong in his opinion that the Courts have decided that Māori have a legal right to the co-governance of naturally flowing freshwater.
He is also wrong, in my opinion, when he asserts that New Zealanders are cavalier about the destruction of their democracy by stealth which he has conceded is what is happening under the Affordable Water Reforms.
He is contemptuous of the intelligence of New Zealanders that they can be duped by the promise that in 30 years' time they will save $2,000 dollars per annuum on their rates bill.
His claim to be a prophet is a shallow and insincere political stunt which will not go unnoticed by an astute electorate come election day. - Graeme Reeves
So now we know the difference between the woke West and theocratic Iran. Between our own cultural elites that are in the grip of the religion of 'social justice' and Iran's religious elites that believe they're doing Allah's bidding. It's a difference in liquids. Over here, women who step out of line are doused in tomato soup; over there, they're doused in yoghurt. Here, their hair is turned orange as they are ritualistically humiliated with soup by fuming sexist mobs. There, their hair is turned white as they are punished with yoghurt by angry men for the crime of being unveiled in public. - Brendan O'Neill
The look of the men might differ – Iran's yoghurt-thrower was conservatively dressed, Auckland's soup-thrower was in a dress. The religion might differ, too – the misogynist in Iran was motivated by the Islamist ideology where the misogynists in New Zealand were fuelled by the trans ideology. But a strikingly similar zeal and bigotry unites these two acts of public witch-shaming. In both instances, either by yoghurt or soup, women were violently reprimanded for deviating from an ideology invented by men for the benefit of men: the unveiled women for refusing to be modest, as per the rules of Islam; Parker for refusing to check her white cishet female privilege, as per the rules of the gender cult.
There's one striking difference between the Shandiz and Auckland witch-shamings, though. In the former, men took action against the misogynist. The shop owner and another citizen angrily rebuked the yoghurt-thrower. In the latter there was far less male solidarity with the women under attack. In fact, mobs of men howled in glee at the sight of the souped witch. And they've been cackling ever since, for example by tweeting images of tins of tomato soup. I wonder if religious zealots in Iran are likewise sharing images of tubs of yoghurt as an underhand warning to any bitch who's getting ideas above her station? That there was more male support for the women in Shandiz than there was for the women in Auckland is a searing indictment of the moral disarray of the woke West. - Brendan O'Neill
One murder by cops in the US moved them more than hundreds of murders by cops in Iran.
How do we explain this dearth of agitation with Iran? Those two sexist drenchings, in Shandiz and Auckland, give us a clue. It's because, disturbingly, the woke West increasingly resembles theocratic Iran. No, women in the West do not face anything like the tyrannies endured by Iranian women. But in both vibe and belief, our cultural elites mimic Iran's religious elites. Both are agitated by women who think and speak freely, Iran's ayatollahs viewing them as a menace to the Islamic order, our woke ayatollahs viewing them as usurpers of the new gender order. Both bristle at any demeaning of Islam, though where Iran calls it 'blasphemy', the woke call it 'Islamophobia'. Witness the suspension of a schoolkid in Yorkshire for scuffing a page in the Koran or the hounding into hiding of that Batley Grammar schoolteacher for showing his pupils an image of Muhammad – acts of intolerance Iran would be proud of. And both believe it's wrong to oppose the hijab. Iran says it's a sin punishable by arrest to be anti-hijab; right-on Westerners brand criticism of the veil 'hijabophobia', yet another expression of 'racist' hatred for Islam, apparently.
It's hard to escape the sense that in both Iran and the West right now, men in dresses are persecuting women. Islamists in the thobe harass unveiled women. Trans activists in women's clothing punish women who talk about sex and gender. Nothing better captures the moral corrosion of Western society than the fact that radical activists here now spend more time defending the right of men to define themselves as women than they do standing up for women in Iran whose liberty is being violently crushed by men. In Iran, young people fight for the right of women to be treated as human beings; in the West they fight for the right of men to be treated as women. Religious hysteria is addling minds everywhere. - Brendan O'Neill
Inflation is not under control, and the OCR is not doing what it is supposed to do. In the 1990s, the RBNZ introduced the revolutionary idea of inflation targeting – later adopted by many central banks across the globe – in response to the destabilising impact of high inflation during the 1980s. It seems the RBNZ has forgotten its history. - Christoph Schumacher
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