Senior journalist with The Press. Author of THE QUIET HERO (Allen & Unwin, 2023). Reviewer of the year (Voyager Media Awards 2022). These opinions are my own.
In case you forgot how weird reality is becoming, a pop singer sent Hilary Barry a death threat, Tariana Turia called Ardern a Nazi and Gilda Kirkpatrick and Russell Coutts have joined the resistance. And that’s just the last 24 hours.
"As of 3pm Wellington Free Ambulance has made the difficult decision to no longer enter the protest area at Parliament.
"This decision has been made to prioritise the safety of our paramedics following the increase in hostilities experienced both this morning and yesterday."
I just think it's interesting that the second wave of Covid was reported in the week starting August 10, which is of course 10/08, which is more or less 1080. Just interesting that's all. Then divide 20 by 5(G) and you get 4, and I hardly need to spell that out.
Jenna Lynch: "So you could change the name of Te Papa?"
Luxon: "Look, we'll work that out in government."
That Luxon even had to hesitate FOR A SINGLE MOMENT about the idiotic idea of changing the name of the national museum we've all used since 1998 ... unbelievable.
I'm pretty sure the Govt's largely successful quarantine measures have been called "a fiasco" or "a shambles" more times in one week than the previous Govt's actual mismanagement of post-quake Chch was in six years.
Sean Plunket really seems to think the Booker Prize is no longer called the Man Booker Prize because "luvvies in the book world said we can't have man in there".
Er, it's because the Man Group stopped sponsoring it in 2019.
Kind of wishing McAnulty had been in charge of selling cannabis reform.
"Gidday, here's the guts of it. Heaps of people smoke cannabis in New Zealand. It's no worse than alcohol. Let's have a controlled market instead of letting gangs get rich and we get to keep the tax."
A pandemic is sweeping the world and its worst effect in New Zealand is that some viewers wish the prime minister would make the preamble shorter when she's announcing stuff
A couple of things: Luxon looks angry in this interview, and that doesn't help; people don't want to hear it's not easy from someone who's earning half a million and owns seven houses. He and his ministers nearly always look defensive and negative. There's not much aspiration.
Chris Luxon: "You think you've got it tough, I'm the one who has to cut thousands of jobs & kick people off benefits and evict people from public housing. No one's doing it tougher than me."
Winston Peters:
"We are going to go back to calling our country New Zealand. We are not going to have a French Polynesian name that is offensive to people in the South Island."
Remember when Kiri Allan talked about RNZ? This is what David Seymour said at the time:
"There is a real problem when the people who hold the purse strings aren't absolutely critically cautious about even the perception of interfering with media.
1/2
Can’t wait till I no longer feel ashamed to speak English in public. For so long us English speakers have been marginalised, practicing our culture in secret.
Did you know that English is not an official language? Well, we're changing that by delivering on a key campaign promise - we are making English an official language of New Zealand. We will continue to fight for common sense ideas and work in the interests of all New Zealanders.
I once asked Jacinda Ardern if she is religious. It was a week after the mosque shootings. She said: "I consider myself to be agnostic, but given I was raised in a religious household, I like to think I'm very open-minded to everyone's choices and faiths and their ways of life."
The PM looks uncomfortable. Her pinched voice and body language suggests she does not 100% believe what she’s saying. Ardern is laying blame. This isn’t leadership. It’s opportunism.
Deporting a family at Christmas because the father fraudulently used food vouchers to feed his family in the middle of a pandemic is some Herod-level shit
The last line of the Hosking column is interesting.
"They sold-out mainstream New Zealand, and divided the country in the process, only to see their best efforts rewarded with electoral humiliation."
Mainstream here means white. To be Māori is not to be mainsteam.
"It's not only sending negative signals through to the rangatahi, the young people, but it elevates lunatic fringe thinking which has got no place in modern New Zealand politics given the economic challenges that we face."
@ChrisPenknz
The thing is Ardern didn’t keep talking about a fish and chip shop as ideal background to being PM whereas Luxon does it all the time with Air NZ
Home finally. As with the earthquakes, we can’t thank Christchurch’s teachers enough for the amazing job they did with our children. Also the police, other responders, nurses. The adrenaline wears off and now it’s just sadness and disbelief.
@dissdisinfo
@David_Cormack
Just been holidaying in Zimbabwe and Namibia. In the middle of nowhere when we said we were from new zealand even waiters said All Blacks. Can you imagine if we said aotearoa🤔
It's appalling that anyone thinks they have a right to hide books in a bookstore from buyers and readers, because they dislike the author. It's cancel culture and a kind of vandalism. It's also childish and stupid. Whether the author is Ardern, Shaneel Lal or anyone else.
People who complain about Christian holidays, Maori holidays, who just want us to work and shop. What a bland, conformist worldview. Let’s have more holidays, more diverse ones: Muslim holidays, Hindu holidays, Jewish holidays.
So we’ve got a poet who just won the PM’s Award for Literary Achievement getting harassed by a party in govt, which threatens to cut arts funding over one poem she wrote (not that it has the power).
And from the PM? The Arts Minister, Paul Goldsmith? Creative NZ?
Nothing.
This is utterly bizarre. Here is Sean Plunket claiming the Chch terrorist (a term Plunket questions, btw) had no widely held or clear philosophy. Bro, he wrote a manifesto.
I remember when one of our kids texted me from CGHS on March 15, 2019, to say there was a gunman on Deans Ave and she was scared. This is before the mosque shootings had been reported. So maybe we need to let kids have phones in schools.
I always find that rhetoric around “people know best how to spend this money” quite strange. I’m not going to buy my own school, hospital, army or highway.
Nikki Kaye yesterday: students should learn a second language at secondary school, such as Mandarin, French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and potentially Hindi.
Bill English today: but it's up to Māori to keep the Māori language alive.
Why is TVNZ’s youth platform promoting (and the "content partner" for) an event featuring past and present Māori Party MPs that will “debunk colonial narratives, examine the implications of Tiriti mythmaking and discuss how sovereignty was never ceded”?
Will it also join with
Anti-trans activists in London are protesting against NZ, a country where (checks notes) Immigration approved PP's visit, the High Court agreed she could enter, she was able to speak in public despite poor security and organisation, and where she was given police protection.
“Be strong. But be kind. We will be OK.” That was
@jacindaardern
's message to New Zealanders, as her Government announced a $12.1b relief package. Read more:
Got to agree with Trotter:
"In a week when smoke billowed over Kyiv and Wellington: when New Zealanders had been frightened and angered by a series of shattering and bewildering events; what did National’s leader offer?
"Tax cuts."
I kind of dig Rawiri Waititi’s view that you should try to be on the right side of history when it happens, and when it matters, not in retrospect. As you get older, you can recognise those moments when they appear.
This is just to say
I have eaten
the sausage rolls
that were in
the pie warmer
and which
you were probably
saving
for a snack with a coffee
Forgive me
they were delicious
so warm
and so flaky