The Breaking Views blog is administered by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research at NZCPR.com. The views expressed are those of the author alone.
It’s become fashionable to talk about an intergenerational divide, but I’m not sure I totally buy this argument.
The latest installment of this argument came yesterday from the ANZ economic report which argued that the wealth gap between the young and old is growing .
That’s because of three things:
Today we are bringing you this show from Parliament.
It’s the last sitting day of Parliament before the House wraps up for the year.
Which means it’s not a bad time to reflect back on the political year, and what to expect next year.
Looking back now, it feels like there are two parts to the last year, even to the last term of government: before Covid and after Covid.
Nothing from before Covid really counts any more, does it?
One Maori party co-leader – in his maiden speech to Parliament – pledged to be an unapologetic Maori voice while the other railed against early New Zealand governments as “monsters, murderers and rapists” and projected herself as a survivor of a “holocaust”.
A “holocaust”?
That same powerful word was bandied by the party’s founder, Dame Tariana Turia, some 20 years ago. She later apologised for using it to describe the experience of Maori.
Shrinks seek to make Britons accept radical Net Zero restrictions
In this newsletter:
Deals were struck (usually accompanied by the tinkle of gold) with local personages who would see to it that the favour would be returned by all members of that constituency under their influence (bearing in mind that numbers of electors were much smaller in the days when only men who owned property could vote).
The Lancet, once a respected medico-scientific journal and now just another me-too mouthpiece for theusual suspects, ran an editorial this week on climate change – on which subject it has neither expertise nor a missio canonica to pronounce. Here is a letter to the editor in response:
Sir, – Your notion of a “climate crisis” (editorial, December 2), though fashionable among the classe politique, is misplaced. That notion sprang from an elementary error of physics perpetrated in the 1980s by climate scientists who had borrowed feedback formulism from control theory, another branch of physics, without quite understanding it. Interdisciplinary compartmentalization delayed its identification until now.
I brought my young family to live here in Uawa / Tolaga
Bay 40 years ago last June.
At the time, l had this unquenchable thirst to have a go farming on my own account before the opportunity would pass me by. Although, on balance, it was a decision l don’t regret, in retrospect the hardship encountered during those years is something we could have done without.
Someone should advise those nutritional dunderheads that all real meat is plant-based. Real beef and lamb are built from live plants like grasses, lucerne and mulga, plus salt, minerals and clay; the best chicken is built mostly on seeds and shoots of wheat, corn and grasses plus a few worms, insects and gizzard-grit; and when I was a kid our bacon was built by porkers from pollard, whey and vegetable scraps.
EU leaders poised for clash over climate targets
In this newsletter:
1) Green Deal in doubt as EU's existential crisis deepens
Associated Press, 4 December 2020
2) EU leaders poised for clash over climate targets
Bloomberg, 3 November 2020
Study reveals 90% of global atolls are stable or growing
In this newsletter:
EU faces existential threat over conflict with Poland and Hungary
In this newsletter:
1) Will Trump send the Paris Agreement to the US Senate?
Benny Peiser, GWPF, 30 November 2020
2) 'Not a developing economy': Biden pressed to maintain Trump's pressure on China
Guy Taylor, The Washington Times, 29 November 2020
What a deflating experience it was Friday reading watching listening to all those in the horticulture industry responding to the government’s 2,000 Recognised Seasonal worker decision.
The manipulation I would like to think hasn’t passed most of us by.
The shabby and shoddy way these farmers are being treated is really an outrage dressed up as a solution.
They all said basically what they had to say when you’re dealing with the government and afraid to say what you really think for fear of your livelihood being stuffed completely.
God bless the 20 year old Young Greens activist who wants a citizen initiated referendum on the decriminalisation of cannabis.
All he’s doing is highlighting how the government got this wrong first time round.
How much the pro lobby shot itself in the foot with its attempts to legalise? Mixed messaging, confusing misleading statements about medicinal, the advantage it would give big business, the smattering of weed shops around the country. It over shot the mark, went too far, and it didn’t convince enough New Zealanders to make it a reality.
It should've focused on decriminalisation not legalisation in the first place. It should have kept the messaging simple. But that’s all history now. The fact is, they lost.
