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NZCPR CAMPAIGNS
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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.
It appears that the Prime Minister was planning to push ahead with a September election, until Winston Peters threatened to bring down the Government unless the election was delayed. It was this threat that forced the Prime Minister to put fairness above political self-interest.
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.
Given the lackadaisical approach by the Government to border management that has been reported by workers, it certainly looks as if their failure to keep our borders secure may have led to this community outbreak that has closed down Auckland and put the rest of the country at risk.
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.
As we look to the election, a major question on the mind of most voters is which government will best manage New Zealand out of the current crisis – one led by Labour or National.
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.
While many of the adverse effects of cannabis use are well recognised, the adverse respiratory effects are not. Cannabis is much more damaging to the lungs than tobacco: one cannabis joint is equivalent to between 2.5 and 5 tobacco cigarettes for adverse effects on lung function and in terms of lung cancer risk, it is similar to 20 tobacco cigarettes.
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.
Scaremongering is, of course, not uncommon, but what is surprising is how blind societies are to recognising when fear is being used as a tool for political persuasion.
