Category: Guest Posts
Two pilot warrant of fitness trials for rental properties are presently under way. One is a government initiative involving 500 Housing New Zealand properties and the other involves a “consortium” of interests involving the Auckland, Tauranga, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin councils, ACC, NZ Green Building Council, and the University of Otago.
This book contains a dozen essays on aspects of Treaty of Waitangi settlements. The fourteen contributors are all, in one sense anyway, eminently qualified to write on the subject. This book is a political tract masquerading as an academic treatise.
Something about the way the Left is presenting the ‘child poverty’ problem doesn't stack up. When interviewed, Green co-Leader Metiria Turei repeatedly stresses that 2 in 5 of officially poor children come from working homes. But for Turei and other anti-poverty advocates to continually highlight this group when attempting to influence voters implies there is something less laudable about being benefit-dependent. Not a sentiment normally associated with the Left.
Decision makers can be informed or mislead on policy decisions depending on the quality of supporting research. It is important to ask what the conclusions are, but also how those conclusions were arrived at in terms of assumptions, methods, and data reliability. A case in point is research on identifying a living wage rate for New Zealand.
Equality, more than anything else, has always been our country’s ruling principle. But there was no more to the Treaty than that. No equality of Maori and the Crown in governing our country was envisaged. Partnership is an obvious absurdity. The Queen’s subjects cannot be her partners.
You'd have to say the current National led coalition hasn't done so badly on the economic front. Our public accounts, notably the core government budget balance, are in the best state for years. The government has foreshowed a billion dollars or so new spending initiatives, but as yet we don't know the details, including how they'll be financed.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer dismisses Citizens Initiated Referenda - an important element of our democratic process - stating that we (the people) are deluded (!) if we think that referenda will improve the quality of New Zealand’s democracy.
A polite “thank you but no thank you” was the official response to a request for a meeting with Ministers Bill English and Pita Sharples to discuss constitutional issues detailed in the report A House Divided. Did the Iwi Leader’s Group get to discuss such issues directly with the government? No and yes! The next meeting is on Wednesday at Waitangi and constitutional issues may be on the agenda.
Auckland’s unfortunate political experiment in having an Independent Maori Statutory Board is being held up as a model for the rest of New Zealand’s fragmented local bodies considering amalgamation into unitary authorities.
When history is said to repeat itself, it is never for good reasons. George Bernard Shaw captured this when he said: “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”
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