Category: Guest Posts
Some have described the 2011 budget as cautious and safe. Cautious, yes. Safe – maybe politically, but not in terms of removing economic risks. And no one to my knowledge described it as strategic – constituting a coherent, medium-term plan for restoring balanced growth.
One of the problems of being a doctor in New Zealand is being asked to sign documents that are untrue for the benefit of patients or patient’s parents. I wrote to the Minister of Social Development twice after I had a confrontation with a patient’s parent
There is an old joke, which I am afraid I have used more than once on occasions where speeches may be required to run along very familiar lines, in which one remarks that ones job as a speaker is a little like the challenge which faced Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth husband on their wedding night ~ he knew what to do, but he didn’t know how to make it interesting. Something similar, I fear, must be the lot of those who write on the subject of the Treaty. There is only so much to be said. After that one can only repeat oneself.
It’s been an odd sort of government, these last three years. The one thing they’ve done really well, namely the slick PR job on Mr Key (and the awful one on the hapless Mr Goff) should be enough to get the National Party back on the treasury benches. Looked at more dispassionately, however, the economic consequences of the Key Gang are pretty disturbing.
The great Maori language rort is one of a series of frauds being perpetrated on New Zealanders by part-Maori looters of taxpayer funds and Crown assets (or in the case of the foreshore and seabed, ex-Crown assets).
Highly sexist, intellectually eclectic, and champion of numerous public health campaigns, the founder of Plunket, Sir Frederic Truby King is a difficult customer for the modern mind to understand. But some coherence can be brought to bear to King’s mercurial career when seen in the light of the influence of the British libertarian philosopher, Herbert Spencer.
There are so many untruths and uncertainties about National's highly controversial Marine and Coastal Area Act that the public has been vindicated for massively opposing it. The Act claims to address the uncertain issue of Maori customary rights in 1840, something that nobody alive today has any direct knowledge of.
The Emission Trading Scheme was put in place to help New Zealand meet its obligations to the Kyoto Protocol. The ultimate purpose of that Protocol and the ETS is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that some say may be causing global warming. While I find it extraordinary that our Government is prepared to impose costs on its people based on nothing more than a theory, the focus of my concern is the way in which the ETS treats livestock emissions of methane. While the debate over global warming may never be finished, the way livestock emissions of methane are treated clearly demonstrates the folly that is the ETS.
As 2011 begins, academic staff at New Zealand Universities will emerge from all the ‘formative exercises’, ‘mentoring’ and ‘coaching’ sessions of recent years, to get straight into the real thing: the 2012 round of Performance Based Research Funding. This will be the third (and, dare one hope, the last) in a sequence of formal evaluations of the value of academic research, which began in New Zealand in 2003 and was repeated in 2006.
Last year New Zealanders were informed a new Marine and Coastal Area Bill, scheduled to replace the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act would mean “nothing would change.” Despite this claim, further down the track New Zealanders were presented with a 101 page Marine and Coastal Area Bill which appears to deliver the contrary and places that statement in the political misinformation file. New Zealanders have every right to rationalize if “nothing would change” then why a 101 page change?
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