Category: imported_guest
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?
In the last five years there has been a shift in the strategies used by iwi in their quest for property rights and constitutional recognition. The shift is from a Treaty of Waitangi justification to a more comprehensive indigenous group rights argument. The group rights argument is used to claim customary rights, and in an extension, to claim that those customary rights are property rights guaranteed under English Common Law.
THE GOVERNMENT’S DECISION to rush through the remaining stages of the Marine Coastal Area Bill is as ill-considered as it is dangerous. For this is no ordinary piece of legislation, easily repealed by a newly-elected House of Representatives. It is a bill which confers upon Maori, by virtue of their indigeneity, a new kind of property right (Customary Title), along with a powerful new set of legal powers to enforce that right – powers which the legislation’s many critics believe will undermine the generally accepted principles of liberal democracy.
As with September’s earthquake and the Pike River disaster, the devastating effects of this week’s catastrophe are tempered by only one thing: the compassion, generosity and big-heartedness New Zealanders show to their fellow human beings when tragedy and hardship strike.
It’s 7 pm and you’re either making the dinner or eating it in peace. The phone rings. You think you know why, but family is always a concern, so you have to answer it. No, it’s not an Indian call centre trying to flog off time sharing or phone shifting. It’s a survey, and do you have a few moments? No, you don’t; or if you’re less polite, ‘bugger off and stop wasting my time!’ And the same for online surveys, of which I get one a week, all asking for ‘just ten minutes of your time’.
In the cop spoof comedy “Sledgehammer”, the policeman hero Mike Hammer used to pull out a huge silver gun in the presence of frightened women and children and say, “Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” The National-led government is in the same position with attempting to force the Marine and Coastal (Takutai Moana) Bill through Parliament as soon as it can get away with it.
Minimum wages are a bit like minimum speed limits. For a while, they can seem not to matter too much. Then all of a sudden they start to bite.
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