Straylan and Kiwi politics

Dargonk said:
Sounds like NZ is definitively heading in the wrong direction :(. After driving around for a month there and enjoying all the nature conservationism, and beauty, the one that really annoys me as the idea that they are pushing for mining in those types of areas is just infuriating.
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The crazy thing is its Dept of Conservation areas.
 
So our new PM has decided not to live at the Prime Ministers residence in Wellington, the excuse given the maintenance on it is going to be very expensive. To be fair to him its been a well understood shit hole for a long time.
However he has decided to take the $52k accomodation allowance afforded to the PM if they decide to live away from the Prime Ministerial residence. That would seem like a reasonable thing to do but he has decided to stay in his own apartment he owns freehold in Wellington. He is the first PM to take this allowance. The previous PM decided to live in his own house but didnt take this allowance.
The thing that is bullshit is that this Govt has been slashing jobs and welfare allowances, some for sickness welfare whilst calling for cuts in all Govt sectors and asking Govt departments to find savings. He had last year spoken about the Labour Govt treating NZers as an ATM machine yet here he is doing exactly that. He is well within the rules to take this entitlement but given the current economic situation and his call for others to cut spending this is amazing to have such a lack of self awareness.
Its amazing how those that tell the rest of us to cut costs or to be ready for cuts to services will so often not act as they demand of others.
The housing subsidy he is claiming is more than NZers earn on the minimum wage.

Also on top of this he is claiming $3750 a month ($45000 a year) to rent his electoral office, a building he also owns. Of course well within the rules but still shitty in the context of whats happening.

Two quotes of his
"The days of tax payers being treated like a bottomless ATM are over"

"If you can pay you should pay". A reference to people who can afford it paying for their prescriptions when they slashed a prescription subsidy.
 
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So the Reserve Bank of NZ, National and ACT have all stated in recent months that we need to increase the numbers of unemployed so employers have more choice.
Benefits have been slashed and interestingly social media here has been flooded with all manner of benefit bashing.
Now they are looking at killing off a free school lunch program.
Who will this hurt the most? Families of those unemployed or on minimum wage.

The people who are paying the most to drag NZ of the inflation problem are those earning the most.

This is a vile and cruel Govt we have elected here.
 
Stack said:
So the Reserve Bank of NZ, National and ACT have all stated in recent months that we need to increase the numbers of unemployed so employers have more choice.
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Won't anyone think of the poor multinationals?
 
Wibble said:
Won't anyone think of the poor multinationals?
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Oh thats all been taken care of, soon they will be able to obtain oil and gas exploration permits and mining permits for conservation areas. Also they get to take advantage of our stepping back from international treaties on deep sea trawling.
We cant let them suffer
 
This is horrific.
Im not a Kiwi having a go at you Aussies, we have awful shit going on here too but this really is vile.
 
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Clive Palmer banging on about his Titanic II fantasy again. Apart from his terrible grammar, his aim to to build a vessel “far, far superior than the original Titanic” is a petty low bar given what happened to the first one. He also seems to think that the film was a documentary as in a very weird sentence he told journalists that,

Clive Palmer AKA Jabba The Hutt said:
"The love story of Rose and Jack is one that touches the hearts of everybody.

The Titanic we hope can act as a catalyst to reinvigorate some of those values that we’ve got, which will hopefully lead to peace."
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https://www.theguardian.com/austral...08245f0c992036#block-65f0e9cb8f08245f0c992036
 
Unfolding incident in Australia, 4-6 people stabbed and possibly killed in a shopping centre and suggestion an infant has been stabbed.



 
mariachi-19 said:
The demise of this cnut will be delicious.

its quite indicative that when these sociopathic cnuts get pulled up on their bullshit by person who are more than just mere mouthpieces, they get their arse handed to them.
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Let's just hope he gets saddled with millions in legal costs.
 
mariachi-19 said:
Right wing media will be loving this. They’ll have a field day about how wrong the decision is and how he wasn’t proven guilt in the criminal case therefor it’s not a proper guilty verdict.
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Even the more right wing papers seemed to he reporting this ok (judging by my Google news feed) except for Sky News who went with the headline "Brintney's untruths" or some such idiocy. Although it has disappeared now.
 
The Church stabbing has been designated as a terrorist incident. The attacker is young (15 or 16) and seems to have attacked the bishop beause he has been critical of Islam in the past. The attacker suffered injuries, possibly losing some fingers, and it is unclear if this was self-inflicted, accidental during the melee that followed the attack or deliberate by those who were restraining him after the attack before the cops turned up.

The Guardian said:
In a video shared via private WhatsApp groups, the alleged attacker is seen being held on the ground inside the church, surrounded by people.

Amid the chaos, the alleged attacker can be heard speaking. He allegedly says in Arabic:

"If he [the bishop] didn’t get himself involved in my religion, if he hadn’t spoken about my Prophet, I wouldn’t have come here.
If he just spoke about his own religion, I wouldn’t have come."

The video reportedly shows the mayhem that followed the attack, with people in bloodied clothes walking around as the alleged attacker is held against the ground.

It is unclear who was holding him down and why, or if there were any authorities present at the time.

Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, who has a popular online presence, has previously criticised Islam and the Prophet Mohammed in public sermons.
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I really have to laugh every time the defamation case is discussed in the media. If he never bothered to bring the case forward I would have long forgotten about the whole things by now. Yet because of it we get constant reminders, and now everyone reporting he is a rapist as per the judgement.
 
Dargonk said:
I really have to laugh every time the defamation case is discussed in the media. If he never bothered to bring the case forward I would have long forgotten about the whole things by now. Yet because of it we get constant reminders, and now everyone reporting he is a rapist as per the judgement.
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We can now all all him a rapist and laugh further when he is bankrupted by the cists judgement next week.
 
Dargonk said:
I really have to laugh every time the defamation case is discussed in the media. If he never bothered to bring the case forward I would have long forgotten about the whole things by now. Yet because of it we get constant reminders, and now everyone reporting he is a rapist as per the judgement.
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This aged well :)

 
So here in NZ we now have a situation where there was a list of preferred companies for the fast track approvals bill. This enables companies to bypass many previous environmental and social standards and speed up approval of projects and shorten consenting times. Among the changes we have the situation where we can no longer make public submissions opposing any of these approvals. There was a hidden list of companies on this fast track approval list but the govt were forced to name the companies after an official information act query forced them to do so. Of the companies on the hidden or secret list every single one of those companies was a donor to the new govts parties. We have a thing here called the Dept of Conservation and the land they administer is public land, wilderness areas etc etc. This fast track bill is going to bypass many of the protections our conservation areas have had and enable mining on these conservation areas.
 
Stack said:
So here in NZ we now have a situation where there was a list of preferred companies for the fast track approvals bill. This enables companies to bypass many previous environmental and social standards and speed up approval of projects and shorten consenting times. Among the changes we have the situation where we can no longer make public submissions opposing any of these approvals. There was a hidden list of companies on this fast track approval list but the govt were forced to name the companies after an official information act query forced them to do so. Of the companies on the hidden or secret list every single one of those companies was a donor to the new govts parties. We have a thing here called the Dept of Conservation and the land they administer is public land, wilderness areas etc etc. This fast track bill is going to bypass many of the protections our conservation areas have had and enable mining on these conservation areas.
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Typical, particularly for right wing politicians. Their snouts are usually firmly in the trough.
 
Wibble said:
Typical, particularly for right wing politicians. Their snouts are usually firmly in the trough.
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Its awful, one of my clients is a property developer called Winton. Last year the now minister of finance Nicola Willis complained there were too many Lobbyists in parliament and called for greater transparency with respect to lobbyists. This was in response to a Labour MP who had quit politics and had become a lobbyist.
The very first thing the new Speaker of the House did ( he had just finished as National Party MP) was to grant anonymity to 4 lobbyists. Winton are one of those 4. Winton are a major donor to the National Party.
Another example of "in the trough" is the amusing situation where the current Govt made huge political hay out of the previous Govts use of consultants. They have now hired 4 previous party members, 2 of them former PM's on daily salaries ranging from $2.5k per day to $4.5k a day.
 
WPMUFC said:
Radicalised kid stabbed a person in the car park of a local hardware store.

Supposedly made comments on social media and the family and local Muslim community called emergency services straight away.

Victim is critical but stable in hospital


https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-05/willetton-police-incident-details/103806436
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Not far from me either.

Second religiously motivated stabbing by a radicalised teen in a couple of weeks and both straight after the Bondi Junction stabbing murders. I wonder if each event has been triggering?

We also had an attempted armed carjacking (probably with a fake gun) - meth head I'd guess - and a domestic murder where the son sat with his Mum's body for days very close to us in the last week.

I'm moving back to Sydney ;)
 
I’m not buying that story. Truck tires my arse. Something else was going on.

Also noticed how quick the Mexican police were to arrest people for the murders. It’s really not good for business to have Americans (& Aussies) getting killed so cynical me says the police had to be seen to move fast so as not to affect the tourist dollars flowing into Baja CA on a daily basis.
 
@utdalltheway I think that it is quite possible that they were murder for resisting an attempted theft of their UTE. As with this case where 2 more Aussie surfers were murdered for resisting being robbed it is also quite possible that the relatively petty criminals caught might not be the only ones involved and that they were killed by mistake in a cartel related incident as is suggested here. However, it could also just be what it has been reported as. Sadly, in Mexico you just may never know for sure.
 
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It’s awful what happened to those guys and as those articles state it’s quite common for Mexicans to get killed too.
Not sure what the fix is but I’m going to keep avoiding those areas for the foreseeable future.
 
The latest unconfirmed rumor is that they were murdered for resisting their vehicle being stolen by low level criminals and very minor drug dealers. The local Cartel were furious as it wasn't anything they organised but something that would bring much unwanted attention to them no matter what. So they in effect found them and handed them over to the authorities.
 
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