Category: Guest Posts
The current Chief of Army has doubled down on cultural priorities. Her husband, previously a serving Lieutenant Colonel, has been instrumental in helping develop the new NZDF policy. The policy embeds indigenous culture throughout initial and ongoing training and in all formal and informal meetings and ceremonial activities.
Read the 33 short chapters on the Moriori genocide, the Littlewood treaty, Tuhoe and the terror raids, the looming financial risk with a Ngapuhi settlement and the relativity mechanism. Perhaps more important is how treaty tribes treated appeasement with contempt and commissioned a plan to replace the government with a set-up that they would control.
On current polling, close to 900,000 people will give National their party vote, and none of those votes will yield an additional seat. A National voter who understands this needs no instruction from anyone. Her party vote is dead where it is but alive anywhere else on the centre-right.
At the end of July the number of properties listed for sale around NZ stood at 35,700 in seasonally adjusted terms. This was a 9% rise from a year earlier and the highest level of stocks since March 2015. There are plenty of properties for potential buyers to peruse.
Te Pāti Māori has often prospered from the canny use of tactical voting in the past. What it wants to do now, however, is a serious escalation. The party has asked supporters not to give it their party vote. It is campaigning for electorate votes only. The obvious potential effect is to create an overhang that could give it disproportionate influence in the next Parliament.
The ToW campaign to which we have all been subjected for many years now (and continue to be) is a “political cause” pure and simple. So surely the Electoral Commission is not playing by its own rules when forcing an applicant for a temporary part-time (or any) position to “agree to learn about our values and grow your knowledge of Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.
What we need is a nationally coordinated market with the prime objective of providing a reliable and economic supply based on long-term contracts with generators. Under this market, wind and solar would have to compete on genuinely equal terms, because the system coordinator would factor in their true cost by including the cost of the backup capacity and extra transmission they require, rather than passing this cost onto all consumers.
For all the noise about “simplifying” local government in Northland, one question remains unanswered: where has bigger ever proven better? No one can point to a single example in New Zealand where amalgamation has delivered lower costs, better services, or stronger communities.
The retirement of implausible baseline climate scenarios is now starting to have real-world consequences as decision makers realize they’ve been making decisions that have had unnecessary real-world, negative impacts on their constituents and clients.
New Zealand cannot afford to keep paying money funding iwi, at either local or government level. It is money people cannot afford, produces nothing, and would be better spent on roads and infrastructure. And in spite of spending more and more money on iwi, the statistics for maori are not improving. Ergo, the stats might improve if the gravy train is cut off and people take responsibility for themselves instead of sticking their hand out.
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