Category: imported_weekly
New Zealand’s ETS is the only country-wide trading scheme in the world outside of the European Union. The EU scheme is not an “all gasses, all sectors” scheme like New Zealand’s, but instead it targets just 43 percent of industrial emissions. It excludes the transport sector, households and small businesses, agriculture, and construction and waste. In addition, the EU scheme is based solely on carbon dioxide and excludes methane, which is such a major part of our emissions profile.
A decision on the future ownership of the Crafar Farms, a large North Island farming operation that went into receivership in October 2009 owing $194 million, is imminent.
There is a growing consensus amongst western leaders that policies and practices that divide citizens along ethnic and cultural lines are immensely damaging to societies and nations. British Prime Minister David Cameron, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and former Prime Ministers - John Howard of Australia, Jose Aznar of Spain, and Yves Leterme of Belgium - have all condemned multiculturalism as a failed policy that undermines national identity, promoting separatism and extremism
One of the key concerns about MMP is the existence of the race-based Maori seats. Introduced in 1867 as a temporary measure for a five year period, they are an anachronism from the past.
A half page advertisement promoting our Citizens Initiated Referendum (CIR) to restore Crown ownership of the foreshore and seabed will appear in community newspapers throughout the country this week. The ad asks those people who believe that our coastline out to the 22km edge of the Territorial Sea belongs to all New Zealanders equally regardless of race, to sign our petition for a nation-wide referendum. If we can gather the support of 320,000 registered voters by the end of June, this will become only the fifth CIR petition to ever succeed in triggering a citizens’ referendum.
New Zealand has always had a strong welfare state tradition. In its original form, as introduced by Michael Joseph Savage in 1938, state welfare supplemented the community-based charitable efforts that had traditionally assisted the needy. For thirty years until the late sixties fewer than 15,000 people received state welfare, with under a thousand unemployed.
By agreeing to the Maori Party’s demand for a Constitutional Review, as part of their 2008 and 2011 Confidence and Supply Agreements, the National Party is advancing the agenda of radical forces determined to change our constitutional arrangements in their favour. Their goal is to elevate the Treaty of Waitangi into ‘supreme’ law to give tribal members superior rights and privileges that would forever be outside the reach of elected Members of Parliament who might want to change it in the future.
There incidents are widespread problems with local government. At a time when central government is tightening its belt, striving to reduce debt and lower its costs, local government appears to be moving in the opposite direction. In contrast to households and farms, which have been reducing debt since the onset of the global recession in 2008, council debt has been on the rise with borrowings growing from $500 million in 2007, to $800 million in 2008, $1,100 million in 2009, and to $1,800 million in 2010...
View CommentsIn its Green Paper for Vulnerable Children, the government estimates that 15 percent of children under the age of 18 are particularly vulnerable. By that they mean that “without significant support and intervention...
Revelations that the Maori Council has lodged a new Waitangi Tribunal claim for the ownership of the country’s fresh water supplies has been greeted with widespread concern. At a time when no new historic Treaty grievances are meant to be able to be lodged, the public are asking whether such claims will ever stop.
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