Category: Democracy
What James Shaw didn’t spell out is that the Green School, which has just received $11.7m in taxpayer funding, is an elite private school that charges annual tuition fees of $24,000 for New Zealand students and $43,000 for international students.
The ‘by Maori, for Maori, with Maori’ separatist “solution” that’s being proposed is sinister. It not only fails to address the real cause of the child abuse crisis, but it also fails to even acknowledge it. The real problem is not the government agency - nor institutional racism or colonisation - but family members threatening the safety of their children.
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.
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.
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