Category: Guest Posts
New Labour leader Jacinda Ardern is promising to run an election campaign characterised by “relentless positivity”. And, so far, there’s been an almost relentlessly positive response to her rise to the top. It appears that Ardern’s extraordinary elevation is going to lift this election campaign out of the ordinary, too.
Until the passing of the Resource Management Amendment Act 2017 the business of territorial local authorities was conducted by the elected representatives of the citizens living in the particular area. That is no longer the case.
New Zealand First looks like the only stabilizing element in coalition governments that would otherwise fall under the extremist sway of either or both the Greens and the Maori Party.
A number of European countries, responding to public demand, have now made begging illegal, as it once was here. It’s long overdue to restore illegality, thereby removing the difficult burden from Councils. Judging by how many senior police have urged the public not to give money and also the true nature of these layabouts, they will, once legally empowered, eagerly put an end to this disgrace.
The National Party’s desire to pander to the minor Maori Party led in March 2011, to the Marine and Coastal Area (MACA) Act. It gives major property and other rights to any Maori tribal group that can prove that it has “exclusively used and occupied an area of coast from 1840 to the present day”.
There is also the problem of drugs: Kiwis turn up to work refusing to be drug tested or failing to pass the drug tests. So much so, that I know of workplaces that have given up, sadly and reluctantly, on hiring Kiwis sent by Work and Income.
Under an aboriginal child welfare system, the best interests test, namely the cardinal rule in child welfare that an agency must do what is in the best interests of the child was abandoned. Instead, racial identity was given primacy.
I can say without hesitation that this was the worst election I have known in my sixty years of election watching. A seemingly insuperable lead of over 20% disappeared as blunder after blunder was made by our supposed team of brilliant strategists.
The Trump administration has bit the bullet, and to the outraged dismay of the political left has withdrawn from the Paris accords. That agreement, which went into effect on November 4, 2016, just days before Donald Trump’s election is a complex affair in which the United States made the key “voluntary” commitment to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions in the next decade by about a quarter of their 2005 rate, with further reductions to come thereafter.
Professional people have a ‘public’ life as working professionals, and a ‘private’ life as ordinary citizens. This may occasionally lead to inner conflict. The nurse who does not believe in vaccination may find herself pumping vaccines into thousands of children as part of a mass vaccination campaign...
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