I would probably kneel before the Queen, God and Mrs Watson, that's it. - Stephen Watson
There's no doubt in my mind that if you don't tend to anti-social behaviour, which is symptomatic of crime, eventually things will deteriorate to the point where you get embedded endemic, deep-rooted crime and anti-social behaviour. - Stephen Watson
The sense of why we were put on earth is the same. Everything is about keeping people safe and if you don't think that, don't be in policing. - Terry Woods
If you bludgeon people - you lose.
If you lie to them about the perfection of transition - you lose.
If you leave a gap where the lights can't be turned on, on renewables - you lose.
If you pretend EV's are the answer but ignore the mining aspect of batteries - you lose.
If you close down oil and gas with no consultation - you lose.
If you thrash farmers by telling them to have fewer cows and drown them in red tape - you lose.
In Europe last week, they lost.
The theory around renewables and the climate story of late might have smashed into reality and a general fatigue by most of us over the zealous BS that is pedalled at all costs.
The kids in Europe got it. The Environment Commissioner clearly gets it. I hope those at that conference, once they picked themselves off the floor, got it.
How about the Chloe's and Jacinda's of this world start waking up a bit and reading the room too. - Mike Hosking
We have just had six years of a Government and its supporters turning up their noses at nearly all the industries that have been this country's primary sources of income over the decades.
They didn't like farming, they didn't like mining, they banned the oil and gas exploration industry, they were suspicious of forestry and fishing, they weren't fans of aquaculture, and they were at best ambivalent to horticulture, as evidenced by their willingness to let fruit rot on the ground rather than bringing in workers to pick it.
But it was worse. One of the arguments advanced against extractive industries is that they tarnish New Zealand's clean and green tourism image. Yet ministers were even ambivalent about tourism. Remember all the arguments about fewer but higher-value tourists that Minister Nash used to bang on about? Well, we certainly ended up with fewer. As for our fifth-largest export of the time, international education, they were about shrinking that too, even before it was conveniently decimated by Covid.
It was alarming, and even more so in hindsight. If you add in their dislike of the aluminium smelter in Invercargill, ministers had a negative view on pretty much all of New Zealand's top dozen exports, and often too the overseas-based investors that provided the capital to them. Which is difficult when exports are the way we pay our way in the world. - Steven Joyce
We need all our industries firing and growing to retain our status as a successful first-world country.
Which brings us back to last weekend's protests. As much as they were ostensibly about the fast-track legislation and lifting the oil and gas exploration ban, they were mostly about stopping stuff the protesters don't like the sound of.
And yet if you asked them what we should do instead, the things which would create the same or higher incomes for all of us, they would stare at you blankly. Either wilfully or ignorantly they don't make the connection. The connection between how much we pay our teachers and doctors and what the country earns. The connection between their own wages and what the country earns. The connection between the number of people who head overseas to find their future, versus the strength of opportunities we provide them here.
The nadir of that unreality had to be the image of perennial protester Russel Norman reading his speech to the gathering from his expensive, imported, made-of-minerals smartphone. Supremely unaware of the irony, I understand Norman forgot to cover how we'd all afford our smartphones, or how they would even be constructed, if we followed his policy prescription. - Steven Joyce
I have long thought that the management of environmental effects should be separated from the planning decision about where and if something is built. These days most environmental effects can be successfully managed, without going to the extreme of saying a point-blank no to a development.
But that's not what those in the anti-crowd are about. The fast-track bill and the repeal of the oil and gas ban are just convenient whipping boys. They don't want any new developments at all and would close down much of what has been built if they had their way. These are extreme positions, and if we don't reject them we stand to get much poorer, and much lonelier, as more and more people shift overseas. - Steven Joyce
Nobody is talking about covering the place in concrete or developing everything everywhere. A trip in a plane tells you that whatever industrial development we have, it's a tiny footprint on our landscape. And as we all know, it is in the farming sector's interest to also protect our environment. They, after all, have to live off it.
We are at an inflection point. We can see from the last Budget that government spending can no longer hold up the sky. It has to be a commercial investment.
After the past six years many companies I know, some of whom I currently work with, see the present RMA (Resource Management Act) reforms as their last roll of the dice. If it all remains too hard, they may just invest elsewhere. After all, economic growth and prosperity remains a geographic play. It will always happen somewhere.
Progress is inexorable. The question for us is simple. How much of it do we want to have happen here? How wealthy, or poor, do we want to be? - Steven Joyce
The problem with hate speech is the hate, not the speech. Dealing with hate speech through law is like trying to deal with climate change by breaking all the thermometers. - Jonathan Rauch
The planes that we are flying at the moment that keep breaking down cost us $70 million in maintenance - just in the last two years. That's two new planes right there. Every year that we keep on flying these old birds, we're wasting the money. So every single year that we continue to fly them from here on in, that's a new plane flushed down the toilet. Because we insist on being povos. So we just need to stop doing this. Stop being cheap. Stop trying to sweat the last bit of life out of these planes - which is now becoming more expensive than just buying new ones. Stop pretending that we can fly the Prime Minister commercially. Just buy two new planes. - Heather du Plessis-Allan
Throughout the Western world the infusion into universities of critical social justice (CSJ) theory and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) politics - now, ironically, exclusionary, racist and intolerant - is producing a generation of graduates steeped in postmodern relativist (frequently anti-science) thinking, embracing identity politics and the victim-oppressor mindset. It has caused division in our country rather than encouraging much-needed unity.
Our tertiary institutions and public research funding system have also been placing equity ahead of merit and drifting towards mediocrity. Do we want this sort of thinking in the next generation of public service or business employees, or indeed in our politicians? - John Raine
In this country, Treaty politics, destructively escalated by Te Pati Māori since the October 2023 election, have perhaps diverted attention from the continuing quiet revolution that has gone on in the education system, and in the introduction of tikanga into the law [7]. While we can hope that Erica Stanford's curriculum working group will put a stop to the cultural re-engineering in the draft schools' curriculum of the last government, the university sector operates with greater independence. - John Raine
There is clearly an imperative on universities to provide a welcoming and supportive environment for Māori, but that should not mean a major cultural transformation of the institution. Apart from not recognising that our universities have students from over 100 ethnic/cultural backgrounds, this development runs counter to the idea of the university as a secular, apolitical body. Asian students, for example, comprise nearly half the student population at the University of Auckland in 2024, but have little or no voice in the running of the institution.
In academic programmes, we are seeing the introduction of mandatory matauranga Māori courses and/or course content, notably in the sciences, where matauranga Māori cannot be equated with modern science. However, such course content cannot be questioned by non-Maori and therefore becomes indoctrination. This situation recalls earlier days of the Catholic Church where to question dogma was heresy.
The move to give greater recognition to Te Ao and matauranga Māorihas also unduly influenced our national research funding system. In contestable research funding, applicants to the MBIE Endeavour Fund have been advised that they should not apply if their project does not engage with Māori communities, or does not include Māori academics, with a Māori mentor to support Māori researchers. This is an oppressive and unreasonable imposition for researchers, for example in the fundamental sciences such as nuclear physics or biochemistry, or in engineering and technology areas such as micro-electronics, software and AI. Because of this, many top researchers are now cut out of the funding system.
In acknowledging Treaty principles, University Councils must operate with a light touch so that we do not see cultural transformation of our universities into ethno-institutions that will be given little credence internationally among the group of respected universities that have managed to overcome, or at least sensibly moderate, the CSJ/DEI movement. If aspects of rangatiratanga, whai wāhi, tikanga and kawa are imposed rather than optional, this leads to politicisation of the university environment and militates against political neutrality, academic freedom, freedom of speech and the very essence of what the university should be, as described in the Kalven report [13]. - John Raine
It is in my view wrong that the country should see its universities pressured into an ethnically defined culture when they should be politically and culturally neutral.
Resistance to oppressive DEI politics in the university has appeared in a few US universities [14] but this worldwide situation could get worse before it gets better. Calls for moderation need to be joined up internationally as a collective voice for preservation of the essential character of the university, a recovery of the values of the liberal enlightenment, merit as the key criterion for assessing student admissions and performance, and in measuring staff teaching and research,
In this regard, the University Advisory Group has a responsibility to recommend as a priority the preservation of institutional neutrality and the restoration of meritocracy in the university and research systems. - John Raine
Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one.
Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale.
It's a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence.
That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.
We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual.
We believe that people should be judged by the content of their character — and, as colleagues, be additionally judged by their talent, skills, and work ethic.
There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the "right" or "wrong" race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.
Upholding meritocracy is good for business and is the right thing to do. This approach not only results in the strongest possible team, but also ensures we're treating our colleagues with fairness and respect.
As a result, everyone who joins Scale can be confident that they were chosen for their outstanding talent, not any other reasons. - Alexander Wang
Members can scoff and mutter, they don't have to scoff and mutter through the chair. But they do have to ask questions through the chair. - James Meager
Does resilience mean enhancing our ability to continue to achieve life-fulfilling roles in regional NZ? The answer is yes. Will I have the appetite or will I have the pūtea to solve every climate change-related problem? No. - Shane Jones
Part of the benefit of going to university is building up an immunity to hearing upsetting, disagreeable, offensive points of view – learning how to rebut them - Toby Young
These are attacks on human civilisation itself – on some of humanity's most significant artistic, architectural and political achievements. And there is a very good reason why the cult of Just Stop Oil thinks nothing of vandalising them.
After all, these eco-irritants are not merely 'concerned' about climate change – they are gripped with apocalyptic terror by climate change. The group's mastermind, Roger Hallam, likes to tell his acolytes that in the coming decades, climate change is going to kill as many as six billion people – the vast majority of human beings, in other words. In the eyes of this millenarian eco-cult, climate change is not a problem to be managed or overcome, but a near inevitable catastrophe that will bring destruction on the scale of a global nuclear Holocaust. (There is, needless to say, absolutely zero scientific evidence that climate change could possibly lead to such an outcome.) - Fraser Myers
This alarmist outlook is also what drives JSO's incredibly deranged demands. Just stop using oil, gas and fossil fuels? The human suffering that would result from eliminating 80 per cent of the world's energy use is frankly unimaginable. - Fraser Myers
So no, it's not enough to decry the 'tactics' of Just Stop Oil. Rational and reasonable people need to start taking on its arguments, too. We need to say loud and clear that climate change is not the end of the world. That stopping the use of fossil fuels would be an unspeakable catastrophe. That our great monuments, artworks and civilisational achievements are not fair game for these destructive and nihilistic stunts. Just Stop Oil has got to be stopped – and so does the climate alarmism that's fuelling it. - Fraser Myers
A revealing moment was Ardern's 2022 address to the United Nations; "After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists?"
The problem is that she has defined the objective. How do you achieve the correct outcomes if people do not agree with her starting premise? She does not consider that her prior assumptions could be wrong, and that is the foundation of the worst form of censorship; where it is being done for our own good. - Damien Grant
It's disgraceful that nurses are ending up in tears prior to their shifts. We are there to be an emotional support for patients who are about to undergo surgery, and it's very difficult to do that if you're in a state of distress from having to change in front of a male.
'I think women need to stop being fearful about this and use their voice. We have fought for so long to get women's rights but it's just gone backwards, and I'm not prepared to see that. - Bethany Hutchison
We're not transphobic and we're not fearful of trans people – we believe they need their own changing space that's safe for them. - Bethany Hutchison
We've all been really uneasy about [coming forward]. We know there's a lot of trans activists who will probably hate us for what we're doing. But it's not against trans people. This is about protecting a female's space. It's not to hurt anybody, we want a safe policy. - Lisa Lockey
You scan the changing room before you start to undress. It's just very uncomfortable. I don't want to get changed in front of a biological man, and I don't want to see him getting changed either.
We're not asking for him to go in the male changing room either, he should be provided for. Everybody should be provided for so they feel comfortable and safe. - Tracey Hooper
This case demonstrates as clear as day that this is an issue of biology not ideology. Once we lose a sense of physical reality all kinds of real and dangerous consequences emerge.
Legislating to protect and promote "gender identity" places women at risk, which is so strikingly evidenced in this case.
There should be no place in workplaces for transgender ideology that denies science and biological reality, and which is exploited in this way. - Andrea Williams
But more than anything, a Green-led council fighting in public is hardly a spectacle a centre-right central government should rush to hide. WCC became the darling of left-wing voters when it was the only council that moved left in an election where most councils shifted to the right.
But the disaster they've turned into has even members of the Green Party distancing themselves from the Green mayor.
As they say, never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake.
It's just a pity Wellington ratepayers have to suffer that mistake. - Heather du Plessis-Allan
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