Category: imported_weekly

With the average Kiwi family being more than $5,000 better off living in Australia than New Zealand, it is no wonder that almost 500 New Zealanders a week are packing up for life across the Tasman. According to the Australian Immigration statistics, 23,906 people who were born in New Zealand settled in Australia during the 2006-07 year. This is a 25 percent increase on the year earlier.

Earlier this month a napalm bomb was detonated in a guerrilla-style exercise in a training camp deep in the Urewera Ranges. Police say that such military-style training camps have been under surveillance for over a year.

October 10th 1996 was New Zealand’s first MMP election. Eleven years on, MMP has profoundly changed the face of New Zealand politics.

Schools around New Zealand that are using Al Gore’s controversial film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to promote the Government’s climate change agenda should be warned that a High Court ruling in Britain has just found that the film is unfit for schools.

Socialism has become much more sophisticated in recent times. Socialist power no longer comes from the barrel of the gun, but from using populism to “corrupt” free market principles. There are no better examples than the present introduction of carbon trading to change the dynamics of the energy industry and the government’s intrusion into telecommunications. Both rely on “convincing” an uninformed public that a problem exists that can only be solved through government regulation.

Two years ago the opinion polls were predicting that National would win the 2005 election. But it was always going to be close.

Almost every day there are calls from one group or another for the government to “do something” about some critical problem they have identified. Whether it is immunisation rates that are said to be too low, air quality standards that campaigners claim are killing people, or too much computer spam, lobbyists are convinced that new laws are the panacea to society’s ills. The problem is that not only do new laws almost never solve the problem, but they often do far more harm than good. It seems that the “cure” is often far worse than the sickness.

At the APEC meeting being held in Sydney, member nations reaffirmed their commitment to reducing greenhouse gases with aspirational rather than binding goals. They have also opened the door for a greater use of nuclear energy.

“Widow's fury at $111-a-week rate burden”, was the sort of headline that gave rise to the Local Government Rates Inquiry. That news story from July last year told how the rates demanded from Catherine Curlett, a 79-year-old widow who had lived in the same weatherboard bungalow for over 30 years, had risen by 56 per cent in a year from $2929.47 to $4567.44. (click to view news story )

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear - President Harry S Truman.