Tag Archives: New Zealand

Best Tsunami Response Comment

Posted on by Brad Heap

Can you imagine the near orgasmic state of the civil defence leaders as their pagers or cell phones went off this morning.

All over the east coast of NZ bearded men in walk shorts and long socks would have leapt to attention full of self importance, their partners would have asked them if they had time for breakfast, “no, we have an emergency” would have been the well practised reply.

Thermos’s would have been hurriedly filled, cut sandwiches would have been cobbled together and high visibility vests and hard hats donned as they walked briskly (no sense in placing ones self in danger by running) to their Lada’s.

The drive to civil defence headquarters would have been made at just over the speed limit (102km per hour), headlights would have been blazing, the radio’s would be tuned to national radio looking for updates, and thoughts of “I live for this” would fill their heads, as they arrived at headquarters they would again walk briskly up the stairs before grabbing hold of their favourite clipboard.

One can almost see the disappointment on their faces when the news came in that the approaching tidal wave was only 1 meter in height.

Posted by Big Bruv at Kiwiblog (http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2009/09/tsunami_warning.html#comment-613162)

Ditch the Kiwi Dollar now, and can we become another state of OZ in the process?

Posted on by Brad Heap

The herald reports that it is likely that the current taskforce on getting NZ economy back up to speed with the Australian economy will recommend replacing the Kiwi Dollar with the Aussie.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10598348

The Government’s transtasman taskforce is to investigate scrapping the Kiwi dollar and adopting an Aussie one.

Don Brash, chairman of the 2025 Taskforce and former governor of the Reserve Bank, confirmed he would report back in November on whether a common currency would help raise New Zealand living standards to Australian levels.

Brash said New Zealand would be more likely to cancel the Kiwi currency, replacing it with cash stamped “Reserve Bank of Australia”.

The notes would probably retain images like those of Sir Edmund Hillary and Sir Apirana Ngata, so they would look Kiwi – apart from that vital difference in the fine print.

A major benefit would be a fall in interest rates to Australian levels, making business more productive. But economic authorities would be concerned this cheap money would spark a property boom. Currency union would mean New Zealand could no longer adjust interest rates to control booms.

The sooner we do it the better. And while we are at it can we just hurry up and become another state of Australia, and make both countries (or the one) a completely independent republic at the same time. Or are my dreams just too good to possibly come true?

DIY its in our RIP?

Posted on by Brad Heap

The herald reports today that DIY injuries are killing nearly 600 people a year in New Zealand: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10595342

That is nearly twice the road death toll, so I expect from next week to see an aggressive anti-DIY ad campaign on TV, the banning of all commercials for Mitre 10, Placemakers and Bunnings, and the introduction of a compulsory safety harness when hammering a nail into the wall.

While the tone of the article is serious and the message is clear people need to take better care when doing work, there is a humorous subtext to the article:

DIY handymen are costing hundreds of millions of dollars in medical bills by putting up wobbly scaffolds, touching live wires and shooting themselves in the hands and feet with nail guns.

The kitchen is the most dangerous room in the house in most parts of the country.

ACC will be targeting home handymen – among others – during safety week, which starts on Monday.

Lynn Theron, a doctor in Auckland City Hospital’s emergency department, said the most common household injury she had seen was people chopping their own fingers off while cooking. Burns were also another common injury in the kitchen.

Right I thought the home handyman lived in the shed down the back garden. Not the kitchen!

So the lesson of the story is it bad to stay at home cooking, doing so means you are doing DIY and that is evil. Go out and buy some take-out food tonight – it may just save your life.

Remebering the glorious dead

Posted on by Brad Heap

Today marks 70 years since NZ joined the motherland in declaring war on Germany that started World War Two.

The dominion post has a good editorial on what it means to us today: http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/opinion/editorials/2828208/Editorial-The-enduring-lessons-of-1939

If I find some time over the weekend I will blog on how the war has shaped the modern world from the space race through to the freedom we have today.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Coddington on the Cringe Factors

Posted on by Brad Heap

From the Herald on Sunday:

Deborah Coddington: Journeys afar highlight cringe factors at home

Home to this beautiful country after five weeks overseas and why does it feel like someone inserted a crummy made-for-television movie in the nation’s main channel and pressed constant replay?

MPs know the public hates pettiness yet they’re still throwing their toys out of the cot and calling each other puerile names.

Calling Hide a Buffoon was great though. It was great to see a politician say it as he saw it, honesty at its best.

For crying out loud – Henare, Hide and Harawira are supposed to be on the same side of the House. These boys need to get out more.

Here’s a question for the Act Party: If its leader would sacrifice his ministerial portfolio for his “one law for all” policy, why does this party of principle advocate a different law for children when someone accused of perpetrating violence against a child comes before the court?

Deborah Coddington used to be a MP for the ACT Party so it is interesting to see such a public smack down of ones own party.

I cringe when I read overseas headlines proclaiming that despite New Zealand’s dreadful reputation for child abuse, we want to defy international trends and bring back pro-smacking legislation.

How to explain why we’d do this, especially if you talk about child murders like James Whakaruru or Nia Glassie?

Commentators who sneer Sue Bradford’s law change hasn’t saved a child from death miss the point.

It’s illegal to hit an adult but that doesn’t stop adults from murdering each other. Perhaps a smartypants will start a petition to permit reasonable force against wives who don’t cook their husbands’ eggs. We could call it “Jake’s Law”.

Oh can someone please start the petition. It would be fantastic just for a laugh.

The rest of the story continues on about NZ’s reputation overseas – it is a must read. Unfortunately the wake up call is probably falling on the wrong ears.

One Country or a racial seperation and a civil war?

Posted on by Brad Heap

Quite interesting to read this today:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10590496

Call to fly Maori flag with NZ Flag flies

The Maori flag should fly on all days of significance, not just Waitangi Day, Maori say.

“People are saying (the flag should fly on) days of significance and other times as well.

“Some are saying that whenever or wherever the New Zealand flag is flying, the Maori flag should also be able to fly,” Ms Katene told The Press newspaper.

“If that’s what people want, we (the Maori Party) would certainly push for that.”

Flying the flag on Waitangi Day is one thing. It is about bringing together two peoples and the birth of a nation. It is about unity and that is why the flags representing the two peoples who came together should fly. I have no issue with that.

However a separate flag to fly all the time? This isn’t a them an us game. We came together as a nation, there is one flag of this nation. That is the flag that should fly that represents the nation. It is as simple as that. And if you do not like the current flag by all means join the campaign to change it, but don’t go arguing that your own separate flag should fly at all times.

If Maori want their own flag to fly at all times why can this not be extended to Pakeha, to Pacific Islanders, to Asians, to all those ethnic groups that over the last 150 years have made New Zealand into what it is today. There is no possible way that you could argue that they should because they are Tāngata Whenua because I am certain that prior to European arrival Maori had no flag, let alone knew what one was or what it symbolised in European culture.

So coming back to Civil War for a minute. The instant that I read this I remember this quote from 2004:

“could unleash civil war on the scale of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” – Margaret Mutu

That quote was in relation to the Seabed and Foreshore act. The war didn’t happen (but a good book on it was written by David Slack). However, part of me is waiting for some fool to try and say a similar thing again over this.

Climate Change in NZ

Posted on by Brad Heap

I read the snow.co.nz forums quite a bit, and was interested to see a discussion today regarding skiing in the kaimai’s and other areas of the North Island in the past. As part of this discussion one of the forum users posted this image from NIWA showing temperature in NZ over the last 150 years.

Now I am not one to take a chart at face value so I went hunting around the NIWA website to find the source of the data etc and came across this page: http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/information-and-resources/clivar/pastclimate

Now the interesting thing about this chart is it is not based on predictions of the past. It is based on actual records as noted here:

Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2007 inclusive, based on between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the 1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted line is the linear trend over 1908 to 2007 (0.92°C/100 years).

Further interesting notes are the more recent history.

Points of interest since 1990 include the cool period in 1992-93 associated with the injection of small particles high into the atmosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and the high temperature in 1998 (the warmest year for New Zealand since measurements began). The 1998 warming was apparent in the Tasman Sea to considerable depth (Sutton et al., 2005; Bowen et al., 2006) and happened to coincide with the end of an El Niño event when New Zealand temperatures are usually below normal.

This whole data set is interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that is shows the increase in air temp in NZ over the last one hundred and fifty years as measured – this is important because almost all other charts that you see are based on predicted temp. The second is that it shows quite interesting the end of the little ice age in 1850 and the subsequent heating of the earth.

Now how this relates to global warming is even more interesting. And this is where this chart comes in:

Wiki Climate Change

This is the average temperature of the world over the last 150 years again based on actual data (thanks wiki: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Temp-sunspot-co2.svg)

If there was ever a time to sign on to lower C02 levels then now must be it. Visit http://www.signon.org.nz and sign on. Do it.

New Zealand Immigration Blocks Access To Education

Posted on by Brad Heap

I was disgusted to read in the Herald earlier this week the actions of the New Zealand Immigration service in blocking the access of some international students to attend school. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10586338

Neha, 16, from Kelston Girls’ College, and Nelisha, 13, of Bruce McLaren Intermediate School in Henderson, have been barred from school since June 10, when their mother’s work permit ran out.

Rehana Nazrin Singh, 38, a residential care worker, is appealing against the Immigration New Zealand decision not to renew it.

While the appeal is pending, she has been granted a visitor’s permit.

But her daughters have not been issued with student permits, so cannot go to school.

So lets get the facts clear right at the start, the students were attending school legally and circumstances beyond their control have prevented them from being able to.

Immigration NZ was yesterday unable to say how many children were in the same position.

This is not an isolate incident?

But Kelston Girls’ College said it had two other cases, involving students from the Philippines and Fiji.

An Auckland immigration adviser, Tika Ram, said he had three clients who were appealing against work permit decisions that also affected school-age children.

One school has in total three cases, and an adviser also have three clients, given that in NZ there are thousands of advisers and at around 1,000 schools that must mean a lot of students are being denied their right to education.

Kelston Girls’ principal Linda Fox said immigration law prevented schools from enrolling foreigners who did not have students’ permits.

My first reaction is fair enough, their parents have not paid taxes in NZ so why should they be able to access NZ schools. However, at the same time it costs no more to have an extra kid in a classroom so while the immigration status is being debated in the courts at least let them learn.

“Schools are being put in an awkward situation by the immigration department and the Government. While our first desire is to teach students, the school faces big fines – which we cannot afford – if immigration officials find there are students being enrolled illegally,” Ms Fox said.

The situation is absurd and sad.

“It is totally unfair that the future of these students is being destroyed, and educational opportunities stopped, by some of our immigration rules.”

Bang on.

Ms Fox said she had appealed to Immigration to let students continue their studies “on humanitarian grounds”, but had not yet been advised of its decision.

There should be no need for appeal, while any immigration status is in dispute the children should be able to go to school.

She said Neha is doing NCEA Level 1 this year, without which she could not progress to Year 12 (form 6) if she returned to Fiji and would have to repeat a whole academic year.

So in other words the New Zealand Immigration service is putting someones entire future at risk?

Mr Ram, who is Mrs Singh’s immigration adviser, predicted Immigration NZ would decline many more work permit applications in the recession as more New Zealanders became available to fill job vacancies.

He warned that even more children could be kept from school because of current policy.

Time for a change in policy then?

From Monday, changes to immigration policy will allow children of migrant workers who lose their jobs within a 90-day trial period to qualify as domestic students while their parents remain legally in New Zealand.

But this does not apply to those who have been working longer than the three months.

This sounds great, however the situation here does not apply because the circumstances are different.

Acting Human Rights Chief Commissioner Judy McGregor said it was “entirely unacceptable” that children in New Zealand were being denied education.

“The right to education for children is a core human right here and internationally.”

Last month, TV One reported that an estimated 1100 Pacific Island children could not attend school because their parents were overstayers.

1,100 students is  a lot, more than a lot, and this needs to change. Maybe NZ needs to read the UN Rights of a child: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm

Article 28

1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular:

(a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all;

That is right. Free and Available to all. Not based on some silly immigration policy.

(b) Encourage the development of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational education, make them available and accessible to every child, and take appropriate measures such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case of need;

Available and Accessible to EVERY child.

(e) Take measures to encourage regular attendance at schools and the reduction of drop-out rates.

Encourage attendance. Not to block it.

Poor form Immigration NZ, poor form.

And yet one wonders why so many leave

Posted on by Brad Heap

Last night TV3 reported on Don Brash leading a new taskforce to decrease the income gap between New Zealand and Australia. http://www.3news.co.nz/News/NationalNews/Don-Brashs-new-taskforce-to-tackle-the-trans-Tasman-income-gap/tabid/423/articleID/113412/cat/64/Default.aspx

Now I knew the gap was large, but not this large:

Last year the average Kiwi wage after tax was $32,000 a year, while in Australia, the average wage was NZ$49,000 – around 38 percent higher.

$17k per year in NZ Dollars difference, or $326.92 per week more, or $46.70 per day more. That is not a gap that is a gulf. How did it ever get that far apart in the first place?

Last year, over 48,000 Kiwis left New Zealand for Australia to experience its brighter beaches and bigger pay packets.

And I can’t blame them, the cost of living may be more (I may do a post investigating this if I can find the data) but increase in pay surely justifies it.