Category: Guest Posts
I am not normally one to get involved in politics or public demonstrations. But when I realised how the anti-smacking bill would directly affect the way I was raising my children, I just knew that I had to do something. And I discovered very early on that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way - many of the parents I talked to thought the bill was ludicrous. So ludicrous, they felt that there wasn’t even a need for a petition… surely our politicians weren’t that blind. The ironic thing about it was that many children also thought it was illogical!
How effective is New Zealand’s education system? Based on the performance of 15 year old students in the OECD’s 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, where students are ranked near the top out of 30 countries, some argue that there is cause for celebration.
I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector. FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology, and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.
Extract from a speech launching the Conservative Party by-election in Glasgow East.
In democracies like New Zealand and Australia, much of our attention is focused on what’s happening in our political front gardens.
Five years ago Reeds published my novel True Facts. Before you scream, understand that the title was not a grammatical error, rather it was deliberate and highly pertinent to the plot, as I shall explain.
As a youngster in a post war London I was brought up on lamb and anchor butter from New Zealand.
An old adage declares that nothing is as permanent as a temporary expedient. Four Maori seats were established within the New Zealand Parliament in 1867 as a very temporary expedient, originally for a mere five years while Maori communal title to land was converted by the Native Land Court into freehold title. (At that time, only adult males possessing sufficient landed property were entitled to vote, but legal opinion considered communally-owned property an inadequate qualification.) Those four seats remained an established part of the political landscape until the introduction of a proportional representation system (MMP) by the Electoral Act 1993. They were not abolished then, though, as the Royal Commission on the Electoral System had recommended in its 1986 report, but extended, so that the number of Maori seats reflects (by a strange and complicated formula) the Maori population, including the Maori population not even on the Maori electoral roll.
Visiting China is a disconcerting experience these days. The main or central campus of Xiamen University , which is where I’ve just been, has nearly 30,000 students, every single one of them postgraduate. It’s a startling experience to deliver an official lecture and to have so many students ask perceptive and knowledgeable questions -- in very good English!
Following the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, powerful political forces are now being applied to voters in western democracies to do something about global warming.
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