Category: Social Issues

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Whanau Ora

Whanau Ora is the birthchild of MMP. It is the Maori Party’s policy for tribal self determination. It has been designed to direct hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into empowering tribal groups for self-rule - independent from the state but funded by it.


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Interesting Policies on Offer in UK Elections

Good policies do not have international borders. What works in one country, can often be successfully adapted and used in another. For policy analysts, general elections provide a rich hunting ground for cutting edge policy options - and the United Kingdom’s 2015 general election on May 7 is no exception.


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UK Welfare reform and unemployment

Whatever else you think about this government, there is no doubt it has presided over an astonishing boom in job creation like nowhere else in the developed world. The milestones are impressive: an average of a thousand new jobs a day over five years; a jobless rate half the eurozone’s; the highest percentage of the population in work since records began. All this while the public sector has been shedding 300 jobs a day.


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Drunkenness is no excuse

If New Zealanders continue to believe that alcohol causes people to behave badly, we should expect undesirable conduct in and around drinking venues. The script needs to be changed from excusing such conduct to, “You are in control of your behaviour at all times. Drunkenness is no excuse.”


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Alcohol and behaviour in New Zealand

One of the strongest and most universal beliefs we encountered in our research among adult New Zealanders is in alcohol’s transformational powers. A belief in the ‘disinhibiting’ power of alcohol runs through New Zealand society from the youngest to the oldest.


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Concerns over Amnesty

Instead of solely raising awareness of prisoners’ rights in dictatorial regimes, Amnesty International now campaigns on such populist issues as globalisation, capitalism, poverty, and gay rights.


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Show us the "systematic discrimination"

Amnesty International makes pronouncements about every country in the world (in this particular report, 160 countries) but cannot intimately understand the development of child poverty locally. The only purpose this report serves is to provide headline fodder for the political Left.


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Transport Matters

Wellington’s low road toll can be largely attributed to their focus on improving the region’s problem roads. $15 million was invested in the construction of a 3.5-kilometre median barrier on the dangerous Centennial Highway south of Paekakariki.


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Expanding New Zealand's Dependency Culture

Child poverty has become a new frontier for socialist activism. It has been transformed from a social cause into a political agenda. The objective is to discredit the government and undermine parental responsibility in order to introduce more state intervention, higher taxes, and greater levels of income redistribution.


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MSD ups efforts to detect sole parent benefit abuse

The trial applied to sole parent support beneficiaries because this is the only benefit that has relationship status a requirement for eligibility. The participants were those who had been on Sole Parent Support benefit for 20 weeks.