Category: Guest Posts
Act was formed because we could see that, without further policy change, some disastrous outcomes could be expected by the year 2010. As we all know, adequate changes were not made. Now, in the year 2006, the outcome is all round us, across the board in everything from our falling trade balance to our rising crime rate. That consideration imposes some fundamental constraints on all of us.
Muriel Newman talks to America's toughest sheriff: Sheriff Joe Arpaio is known as “America's toughest Sheriff”. He is head of the country’s fourth largest Sheriff's Office in Maricopa County, Arizona.
The rest of the world often looks to Sweden as a model – a form of socialism that managed to produce wealth. The third way. The best of both worlds.
School around New Zealand are holding team sports events but are refusing to allow scores to be kept, in case the children are unable to cope with defeat. What kind of lesson do the teachers think they are giving that children can't think; that games are not about lessons for life? The children are certainly smart enough to keep the scores anyway, as one youngster was overheard telling her father, “There is no score, but we won by three goals.”
Although I’ve been back briefly over the summer for the past 4 years, New Zealand hardly makes the front pages of the Anglo-American print media I’m addicted to, and inevitably one loses contact. I’m conscious of that and also Tom Stoppard’s line about Russia that one must be careful about becoming a spurious expert about any place just because it has an airport.
Australia has been going through an unprecedented and unbroken period of prosperity. The economy is booming, employers are complaining of labour shortages, and real incomes are higher than they have ever been. Yet rates of welfare dependency are still rising.
Twelve months ago, I gave a major speech to the Orewa Rotary Club about the National Party’s commitment to welfare reform. I noted that 30 years ago the number of working-aged adults on a benefit in New Zealand was fewer than 40,000, whereas in 2005 the figure was over 300,000, despite the economic buoyancy induced by some of the strongest export prices in a generation.
“Rust never sleeps” nor does the movement opposed to genetic modification. Despite setbacks at the Royal Commission, in the courts and at the polls anti-GM groups continue to chip away searching for that weak link. They have had more than ten years to mount a credible scientific argument against the use of genetic modification yet sadly for them they have not managed it.
In April 1994 my wife and I opened the 20-hectare Kowhai Vale Predator Proof reserve on Banks Peninsula. This was the largest predator proof reserve on mainland New Zealand. Around the reserve is a 2.2km long, 2 metre high predator-proof fence.
Who would have thought that a woman taking a front-row seat at a graduation ceremony for offenders would have caused such uproar?
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