Out of the chaos has come good - Malcolm Mullholland
New Zealanders will live long or live better, and that's something that's really hard to put a dollar value on. - Shane Reti
The case, however, is not an isolated one; wherever you look, you find the same willful incompetence, combined with ever-escalating costs. Nothing succeeds like failure. Whether it be in education, social security, health care, infrastructure, border control, armed forces, etc., the whole apparatus now touches nothing that it does not cause to decay. No wonder that disenchantment is widespread and that people, no doubt naively, turn to alternatives. - Theodore Dalrymple
Taxes are at an all-time high and will almost certainly have to be raised yet again. The rise of so-called populism is no mystery. - Theodore Dalrymple
We've got tourists and we've got trade and we've got exports that need to get to market. But what I really want to know too, is how do you get cost projections so wrong? Is it really just Covid? I mean, we heard about the supply chain delays and we heard about the cost increases. Can a project really quadruple in cost in the space of four years, because of Covid?
Or is it that the billions of dollars spent on consultants over the past six years has been money really poorly spent? How do you how do you in the private sector allow for cost overruns? Is that just the way business works? I would really love to know.
And I'd really love to know, for those of you who use the ferries, what do you think needs to be done? Do we need brand new, flash, fit-for-purpose ferries that understand the Cook Strait, or can we just keep cobbling on with these ones?
It would appear not, and it looks like the Aratere was a lemon from the time it arrived.
What do we need to keep State Highway 1, the length and breadth of the country running? - Kerre Woodham
The calculation that Hamas made was that the humiliation, pain, terror and psychological torture their recordings inflicted would be worth it, and outweigh any outrage, any damage to their cause, and you know what? They were right.
They were right, because there are those around the world, including in New Zealand, including academics and politicians, who despite all the evidence, are willing to infantilise, trivialise, justify, defend, and celebrate Hamas and its evildoing. But they were also right because there are those who reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. - Juliet Moses
Perhaps worst of all is the denial that rape was used as a tool of war on that day, despite countless eye witness testimonies, and forensic and other evidence that I won't discuss. Apparently progressive people, who a few years before were happy to destroy a man's career based on a rumour that he touched a woman's knee without her consent because #believe all women, suddenly found themselves disbelieving substantial, undeniable, evidence of unspeakably savage rape and sex-based violence, as some of us saw on Wednesday night when we watched Sheryl Sandberg's powerful documentary Screams before Silence. - Juliet Moses
Third, we must stand for the truth for the sake of truth itself, because open, free and liberal societies, which are the societies that Jews thrive in but are also the best for civilisation itself, depend on the truth. If all we have is feelings, moral relativism, and narratives, we as a society will be destroyed. - Juliet Moses
Remember that, while we are not physically fighting for Israel, we can play a critical part in the battleground for the truth, to combat the falsification, distortion, revision and erasure of history and to be the guardians of our collective memory. And at this moment in time for the Jewish people, I would suggest that it is a moral necessity for us to do so, and to play our part in continuing the most inspiring, unbreakable story of an ancient people who have survived and stayed true to ourselves for over 3000 years against all odds. - Juliet Moses
The world is becoming far more divisive. But we have a responsibility to be civil, to have dialogue, even if we disagree fiercely. It allows for an understanding of where another person is coming from. - Steve Abel
Attacking Peters, Labour through Hipkins, laboriously defends creating a society which for a time resembled a totalitarian state, throwing borders around Auckland for much longer than it was warranted.
Claims that New Zealand was a world leader in saving the country from the apocalypse, saving thousands of lives, are spurious if you read analysis of country fatality records carried out by John Hopkins University, among others. - Barry Soper
I'd be really interested to know whether there's any explanation for 'the computer says no' letters that so many families were given when they couldn't be with loved ones who were very, very ill or dying. Despite the fact that they were vaccinated, the family they were going to were vaccinated, there was just a simple computer say no denial from MBIE, a nameless official at MBIE, saying they could not be with a dying family member, or somebody who was very, very ill. And the pain that that caused was immeasurable. The grief that that generated was immeasurable. So I'd really love to know how you made the decision and who these faceless, nameless people were at MBIE who just deny, deny, denied access across the border, which all sounds incredibly weird. - Kerre Woodham
I don't know that it's going to resolve anything. I mean basically I'd be quite happy with stocks in the public square, quite frankly. But then there are others who will be not satisfied until anybody who dared to so much as criticise any of the decisions made, abases themselves before the likes of Ardern, and Hipkins, and Robertson, and all the public health officials and kisses the hem of their garment and repeats three times, I am so sorry. I am so grateful to be alive and it's only thanks to you. I am so sorry. I'm so grateful to be alive. And it's only thanks to you, which I think is tosh.
I do think the hard questions have to be asked this first patsy inquiry was precisely that. How well did you do Labour government? Ooh very well. Really. Just how well? Exceptionally well. Any learnings? Oh, a few. You have to be able to weigh the costs. You have to be able to weigh the different decisions that were made that had so many impacts on so many different people's lives. Some breezed through, loved it, thought it was amazing, thought every decision made was the right one, but not everybody did. And I think we're going to see the damage for a very long time to come. As I've always said, it'll be 100 years from now, there'll still be people debating whether that second year of decision making they were making the right decisions. But it would be good to start now, to ask a few tough questions now, rather than just sugar coating the response, which is all we'd have got from the first inquiry. - Kerre Woodham
Having lost a couple of jobs myself there is no question it sucks, especially if it comes as no fault of your own.
The job ads may be down and the applications may be up, but at no point is what we are going through any more arduous, difficult or unusual than we have been through many a time before, and indeed will go through again.
What I suspect has changed is resilience.
There isn't as much of it about these days and that's why "normal" seems like the Hunger Games. - Mike Hosking
This reduction of voters to their religious and ethnic identities is severely degrading political discourse. It has already led some candidates to neglect issues that affect all British citizens, like healthcare, roads and jobs. - Charlotte Littlewood
The emergence of this vicious sectarianism is a real threat to our democracy. Every individual should be able to vote free of tribal pressure and foreign-state influence. But thanks to the rise of identity politics, people are being divided up into religious, ethnic groups and encouraged to vote accordingly.
The problem here is not religion per se. Religious values have long informed people's political principles and activism. The problem comes from those seeking to exploit religion in order to advance their own sectarian causes. We need our prospective MPs to start pushing back against this retrograde development. They need to start addressing us as citizens, not as representatives of identity groups. - Charlotte Littlewood
Saying the wrong thing could get you killed in the Britain of the 15th century, or the 16th or the 17th. And it can still get you threatened with death in the 21st. Rosie Duffield, the Labour politician, and JK Rowling, the author, know this to be true from personal experience. Both were threatened with murder by a man for daring to dispute the transparent absurdities of the extreme trans lobby, and championing the right of women to enjoy female-only spaces free of men who identify as women. Like Galileo before them, the two women prefer science to "luxury beliefs" as a guide to truth. They happen to share the view that some things just are, and whether or not people like them is neither here nor there.
So it is with the immutable biological differences between men and women. Both Ms Duffield and Ms Rowling have dared to point out that a man, a human with a XY chromosome, cannot turn himself into a woman, a human with XX. - The Times
Intellectual progress is not linear: at any time man — and woman — can regress into illogical belief systems. Ms Duffield and Ms Rowling do not hate trans people, or wish them anything other than dignified and happy lives, as all right-thinking people should. But they do believe in empirical truth. In that they should be supported. - The Times
It is crucial that we do not encourage the next generation to resort to cruelty or dismissiveness. Engaging in reasoned debate when faced with differing opinions is essential. By fostering an environment where respectful dialogue is the norm, we prepare them better for a world where facing confronting perspectives is inevitable.
Embracing this approach not only enriches our understanding but also ensures we contribute positively to their development. I tell students, "always remember; you don't win a debate by suppressing discussion – you win it with a better argument" - Samira Taghavi,
What is "empathy"? It's nearly indistinguishable from the message of "love thy neighbor", espoused religious leaders. So how can Ardern's message possibly be dangerous? Because we need competent leaders who run nations in ways that make them prosperous and which protect the rights & freedoms of the citizens, who should be left to decide on their own moral values & how best to seek fulfillment. Politicians need not have led particularly virtuous private lives themselves. That's the point. We don't want Popes, Imans, Monks, Rabbis or Archbishops leading countries on the basis of claims that they have higher moral virtues. We need leaders who run the economy well, allow us to flourish and let us choose our own beliefs. This forms the basis of separation of Church and State. - Robert MacCulloch
Due to the decline in religious attendance and beliefs, our former PM is, in my view, trying to replace the prophets of the past, by copying and rebranding their messages, like empathy toward fellow humans and to love one another. But that is not the job of political leaders. Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke warned of the dangers of politicians exercising authority in the realm of individual conscience. Ardern seems to think that copying the "comms" of the world's Great Religions, relaunching & marketing them as her own brand, can bring her global appeal. The world should be wary.
What was Ardern's record in NZ in terms of healing division and getting Kiwis to love one another? Isn't she the leader who turned vaccinators against anti-vaxxers, who fired nurses whose personal beliefs led them to not want to take "the jab", who labelled those who disagreed with her for not wanting to be part of her own team of five million as folks best ostracized from society, whose policies resulted in an unprecedented violent occupation of Parliament's grounds, who turned farmers against environmentalists, poor against wealthy, who presided over a rise in burning anger in NZ society that burst open in an epidemic of youth crime, who sent race relations, which had been on the mend, back a hundred years, who left the country in a state of economic & social collapse that will take a decade to fix, who precipitated over an unprecedented exodus of Kiwis from their homeland, whose government printed & spent endless amounts of money leaving us only with high inflation, a pile of debt & broken infrastructure, who promoted incompetent people into high positions because other factors took precedence over meritocracy, and who then personally bailed out of NZ when her own popularity ratings plummeted to shack up at Harvard & lecture the world about how much Kiwis loved her and how much she loves us? - Robert MacCulloch
This feeling, this rawness and emotion, will never go away and I think, to be fair, it's a fair strength that drives me. But on the other hand, you can pull yourself out of it and come out the other side and actually turn that weakness into a strength. - Wayne Langford
Perhaps the most general educational principle from the science of learning is that knowledge that is essential to later learning must be reliably consolidated in long-term memory before attempting to build on it. Failure to do that risks overwhelming students' short-term 'working' memory, leading to feelings of confusion, frustration and, eventually, demotivation. - Michael Johnson
There is much water to go under the bridge before our school system is restored to its world-beating heights of the mid-twentieth century. Many devils will lurk in the detail of implementation. Nonetheless, for the first time in two decades, we are rowing in the right direction. - Michael Johnson
You can't silence someone else and not expect it to come back on you eventually. Free
speech is consistent, and we must strive to keep it that way, or it doesn't work.
Too often, councils find excuses for cancelling views they don't like, or they bow to
pressure to cancel views that others don't like. - Nadia Braddan-Parsons
Our current law gives too much room in the first place for manipulation and making exaggerated claims in order to suppress certain views. We need to get the word out that council staff, like librarians and publicly funded venue managers, are not the thought or speech police. They do not, and should not, have the authority to pick and choose
who's platformed. This is not a fight we should keep coming up against. - Nadia Braddan-Parsons
But, well ahead of their peers once again, New Zealanders have learned the dispiriting difference between what political progressives are winningly quick to promise, and what they then prove to be unwilling and/or unable to deliver. New Zealanders have also learned how little stock progressives place in even the plainest evidence that such policies as they have managed to deliver are both unwanted and unpopular. - Chris Trotter
Trying to impose unwanted and unpopular policies on a majority of the population, in a democracy, can mean only one thing: you are going to lose. Attempting to do so by stealth, subterfuge and misrepresentation, no matter how tempting, will only guarantee that your party loses even more painfully. - Chris Trotter
I think the judge got it about right. It's always bugged me that those with the most to lose will argue that they should avoid conviction, because they have more at stake than some other poor wretch.
My view has always been that if you've got a lot to lose - maybe that should be your motivation before you go and do something stupid. - Tim Beveridge
But ultimately, to be honest with you, I'm still not convinced that Golriz really takes responsibility for offending. In fact, I'm not convinced at all, because her excuses seem to say "Well, yes, I did take the items, but here are a bunch of reasons why I did it." - Tim Beveridge
And, by the way, look at all the number of people from diverse backgrounds and women who are doing quite well, thank you very much, regardless of the colour of their skin, ethnicity or culture.
Who knows what motivations she had? In the end, we make up our own minds. And as I say, a good night's sleep can take a bit of the heat out of it.
But from the judge's point of view: there's been consequences to this offending, they've been entered on the record - and for that I'm grateful.
But if you're looking for accountability - then I'm afraid you'll need to look elsewhere. - Tim Beveridge
The political and bureaucratic class were using a State-Owned Enterprise to pursue a wider economic program. They were trying to run a trucking business when they should just have built the road. It has ended badly.
I am unsure if cancelling the iRex program was the right one but it is clear that we will soon have a severe supply constraint on a vital node in our transport infrastructure and those best placed to respond have been falsely vilified by the political and bureaucratic class seeking to cover their own ineptitude. - Damien Grant
Our farmers are the world's most carbon efficient, so it doesn't make sense to shut down farms only to send production overseas and raise global emissions.
This Government understands that farmers need practical tools to reduce their biogenic methane emissions without reducing production or exports. - Penny Simmonds
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