Category: imported_guest

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Speech to the Future of the Heartland Forum

My brief is to talk from the Local Community and District Council perspective about the issues facing our district and particularly our export producers as we contemplate Heartland Hurunui’s contribution toward the Governments goal of doubling export earnings by 2025.


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The Folly that is Whanau Ora

This week, even Lyn Provost, the Auditor General who has presumably spent many, many hours putting together a report on Whanau Ora said, "It was not easy to describe what it is or what it has achieved." These outsider inabilities to understand the concept may not matter if insiders did. But there is now evidence that parties directly involved disagree about aims and purposes.


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Why ponytailgate is nonsense

I made two predictions. First, that within the hour, that groaning giveaway of journalistic shoal fish mediocrity would emerge, namely the appendix "gate". Sure enough, exactly 38 minutes later, the Stuff website kicked off with the first "ponygate", the others all duly lapdogging along thereafter.


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UK Welfare reform and unemployment

Whatever else you think about this government, there is no doubt it has presided over an astonishing boom in job creation like nowhere else in the developed world. The milestones are impressive: an average of a thousand new jobs a day over five years; a jobless rate half the eurozone’s; the highest percentage of the population in work since records began. All this while the public sector has been shedding 300 jobs a day.


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Water yours mine or nobody’s

The ownership of water is coming to the top of the political agenda with sinister connotations that it can be bought and sold and allocated on the basis of race. Before public opinion is led down this road to hell it is timely to revert to first principles and to consider just what it is the politicians and their in house advisors are dealing with.


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Alcohol and behaviour in New Zealand

One of the strongest and most universal beliefs we encountered in our research among adult New Zealanders is in alcohol’s transformational powers. A belief in the ‘disinhibiting’ power of alcohol runs through New Zealand society from the youngest to the oldest.


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Error Prone Bureaucracy

In December 2013, draft legislation was introduced into Parliament to amend the way the Building Act deals with seismic risk to buildings. The key element in the legislation is the ‘earthquake prone’ building definition.


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Resource Management for the 21st Century

The 1991 Resource Management Act (RMA) is under fire because it is seen in many quarters as an impediment to much-needed investment in housing and business. At the same time, communities are concerned that the Act is not serving the environment well,


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Sovereignty in New Zealand

The official British Government position concerning who exercised sovereignty over New Zealand at the beginning of the ninetieth century is summarised in the instructions given by Lord Normanby to his appointed Consul Captain William Hobson before he sailed for New Zealand on the 25th August 1839.


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New lending restrictions target property investors

The Reserve Bank has its sights set on property investors. The Bank has said for some time now that Auckland's runaway property market is unsustainable and a risk to the financial stability of the NZ economy.