The Auckland City Council wants to clean homeless people out of the city centre.

How could this be done… Perhaps they might provide a new homeless shelter in the city where rough sleepers can crash, get some soup, medical attention, assistance with getting back on their feet and integrated into society.

Maybe that’s a bit too much of a budget-stretcher. Maybe the council could just provide a place to sleep, and skip all the social service trimmings.

But no, even that would be too much, it seems. Read the rest of this article »

Team New Zealand flittered $130 million on its failure in Valencia last year, and more than a quarter of that came from the Government.

In John Key-ese, that’s equal to about 3,217,350 blocks of cheese the government could have given to hard-working families. Instead they preferred to blow the $33.75 million on a rich white man’s sport.
Read the rest of this article »

Journalists may be low in public esteem, but I reckon if those surveys asked respondents to rank student reporters, we’d fare even worse.

The general aura of suspicion that often greets journalists is frequently augmented by fear (of being wildly misquoted, I suppose) when our subject hears they’re talking to a student journalist.

Either that, or we’re patronised: patted on the head and asked, “is that all you’ve got?” with a smirk when we get to the end of our questions.
Read the rest of this article »

While New Zealand sleeps, most of the world is busy getting on with life.
Yet, it seems the New Zealand Herald’s foreign editor goes to bed at the same time as the rest of us.
How else could you explain the lack of acknowledgement in today’s world section that Russia had called a halt to the conflict with Georgia?
Read the rest of this article »

There was the woman who wet her pants at work after chomping through three packs of chewing gum a day. And then there was the man who went blind after regularly drinking seven bottles of fizzy a day.

But altogether the most disturbing aspect of What’s Really in Our Food (TV3, Tuesday night) was the attitude of the Food Safety Authority.
Read the rest of this article »

On her weekend visit, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice indicated that the US is open to “warming” relations with New Zealand. This wee country has been left out of all the fun and games (the US won’t do military training exercises with Kiwis, despite the fact the two countries’ troops are active in Afghanistan, for example) because of a ban on nuclear ships entering its waters.

Media talk has edged around a free trade agreement. It’s a long way off, but it’s not a bad goal – depending on how far backwards New Zealand would have to bend to sign it. At the moment, a small-scale dairy exporter who wants to try its luck in the US market has to give a fifth of its takings to the US government in import tariffs. Cutting that back would be a good thing.
Read the rest of this article »

The New Zealand government’s makeover of the 1987 immigration act is still in the pipeline.
The select committee considering the immigration bill was due to report back on Monday, but recently they’ve pushed their deadline out until July 21.
It’s a huge topic to be looking at, so it’s not surprising they want a bit more time. But I’d like to see new legislation go through before the election – I wouldn’t like to run the risk of New Zealand First having any more say in the matter than they already do.
Read the rest of this article »

If factories can pick up and move overseas when they want, then why can’t workers? That’s what the US Socialist Worker Party’s candidate for the Presidency, Roger Calero, reckons.

I interviewed Calero a few weeks ago and, on the whole, our perspectives on world affairs were so far apart that I sometimes wondered if we were both talking about the same global system.

But I agreed with what he had to say about immigration.
Read the rest of this article »

Justice at the hands of security services is a bizarre paradox. They say, we know you are bad, really bad, and we can prove it. But you are so bad, that we can’t tell you what we know about you, nor show you the evidence against you. But trust us, it’s bad. Just like you.

If you find yourself guilty according to the security services, the onus is on you to prove yourself innocent - against unknown accusations.

In Canada, Mohammed Harkat has been under house arrest for the past two years, unable to even go to the supermarket without advising the police 48 hours in advance. He spent four years in prison. No charge, no trial, just the word of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Read the rest of this article »

Today the government told New Zealanders how it’s going to spend their money over the next three years. Yet a murder trial led both major channels’ evening news bulletins.

They were the day’s “top stories”: the budget and the Kahui case. Presenters on both stations gave a token nod to the economics of the country before launching into the most salacious story of recent weeks.

Read the rest of this article »