Category: imported_guest

At its core, the Indigenous child welfare system is broken because so many Indigenous families are broken. Until this is recognized and confronted, it will be impossible to make progress. Blaming colonialism or other past injustices is a triumph of the victim narrative that will put more Indigenous children at risk.

A watershed moment point came for me when I heard political commentator Richard Harman state the unthinkable on Jim Mora’s The Weekend Panel when he called on Bloomfield to resign for misleading his minister.

The return of COVID-19 community transmission, with Auckland back in a level 3 lockdown and the rest of New Zealand at level 2, raises real questions about New Zealand’s upcoming general election.

We have been hearing the expression “the new norm” for some time but it is only starting to sink in that this ‘norm’ may be – as the term implies – long-term.

No doubt the middle classes who fashionably use cannabis for recreation will happily bear the extra costs of their habit and also be relieved that their reputations are no longer at risk from prosecution. The harm that is being done with the growth of the cannabis, meth and heroin markets elsewhere is to them someone else’s problem.

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years.

The links between welfare dependence from birth and poor, if not disastrous outcomes for children, have now been well-explored by institutions like AUT and Treasury.

Is New Zealand’s Covid-19 track record really the envy of the world? And did Ms Ardern’s Captain’s Calls improve or worsen the outcome? With Parliament suspended during the crisis, the Prime Minister adroitly leveraged her celebrity status and thespian talent.

Consenting processes are already slow enough and councils are hardly well positioned to assess the carbon effects of anything. Consultants providing climate impact assessments may do well, but it won’t help New Zealand’s net emissions where those emissions are already covered under the ETS.

Andrew Borrowdale, a former parliamentary draughtsman and author of respected law texts, alleges that the “special powers” delegated by section 70 of the Health Act 1956 cannot provide Parliamentary authority for the entire populace to be locked up at home.