Old rich man, Don Brash, arch-advocate of private property rights, arguing against the property rights of iwi because they’re Maori. He says we shouldn’t have race-based ownership. No-one’s arguing for that. Iwi are arguing for the contract they signed with the Crown to be honoured. You would think a rightwinger would be the first to support that.
When you have the legal power to control aspects of how something is used, those are property rights, and when you have the legal power to exclude use of something by someone -for instance, by allocating exclusive usage rights to someone else – that’s ownership. The Crown allocates water rights, ipso facto, the Crown believes it owns the water.
The Government has binned part of the Northern Wellington Corridor ‘Road of National Significance’ – the four-lane expressway between Otaki and Levin that would have cost $400m. The government’s not getting enough road tax revenue and they had already cut all other transport funding to the bone – so something had to give. But it’s just the start.
John Key has been running round repeating that no one owns water. He’s just being cute with semantics. What is the effective difference between owning water, and owning water rights?
Climate change is causing the world’s temperatures and seas levels to rise but this isn’t a steady process. Instead we see more frequent and more extreme weather events. The record-busting heatwave in the US and floods in Russia are examples. The big problem is the effects of these weather events on our production of food and other vital goods.
Some of the media reckon that Key slagging off the Waitangi Tribunal was an accident of honesty: he was just stating reality that the Tribunal’s findings aren’t binding, he didn’t realise it would provoke a firestorm of reaction. Others say he knew exactly what he was doing and provoked the firestorm to try to split the opposition to asset sales along racial lines.
The oceans are doing their best to save us from climate change apparently… but just ending up dooming us in another way.
Just 32 hours after Key started running the line that the Government would ignore the Waitangi Tribunal’s decision on the Maori Council water rights claim if it didn’t go his way, the Maori Party reacted. Key is abusing the privilege of his office by trying to pre-empt a judicial body’s decision says Pita Sharples. Tariana Turia says they will talk about their ‘future’ with National.
Are you keen to buy shares in Mighty River Power with a dividend return of 4% pre-tax? You can beat that in the bank, and paying off debt is a far better use of money. But say you’re still keen. What about the threat of Mighty River losing water rights or having to pay for them – will you buy in with that unresolved? Only nutters would take Key’s offer with that up in the air.
As the Sir Graham Latimer and the Maori Council launch their bid to halt asset sales in the Waitangi Tribunal, the grassroots campaign is gathering steam too. This Saturday is to be a National Day of Action.
Tim Groser: “Our farmers have been reducing their emissions by 1.3% per year for two decades” (that’s emissions per unit of output, btw, not absolute – although total agriculture emissions are down in recent years). Groser on why farming should be out of the ETS: “we’ll introduce biological emissions into the ETS when we think there credible abatement technologies out there.”
I’m going to try and put up a piece each Sunday of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring). This week: Work, American Lies and Science.
Well said. What a tragedy that they heard, but did not listen.
Remember back in February 2010 when John Key announced that he had a super-secret plan to end whaling? I’m sure there’s some real clever strategy behind why nothing has come of it so far and Key never mentions it. But I think, now that he’s called South Korea’s plan to restart ‘scientific whaling’ “abhorrent“, it might be time to unveil the plan. It is real, eh?
Yesterday National pollster David Farrar excitedly quoted from a George Monbiot article saying peak oil isn’t happening. Two problems: 1) Farrar omitted to quote the bits of the article saying that the flipside of no peak oil would be runaway climate change. 2) the report Monbiot’s article is based on is written by an oil executive who claims we’ll stumble on endless cheap oil and all live happily ever after.
Tim Groser in the NBR: “Our enemies who are internal, will find one cow in one stream and feed it back to environmental activists in the developed world to be used to try to exclude New Zealand’s products and services in the ludicrous belief this will somehow help New Zealand.” Paranoid, much? And don’t you think the polluters are the problem, not the people who fail to hush it up?
As many of us expected, National has no intention of ever enforcing the ETS in the area where it makes the most difference to NZ emissions – agriculture.
The Exxon Mobil CEO now acknowledges that the world is warming, but claims that there will be an “engineering solution”. This glib reassurance is simply the next phase of Exxon’s well funded and carefully planned denier tactics.
House prices and rents are rising quickly in Auckland. The reason is pretty simple: from 2008 to 2011, it added 70,000 people and only 10,000 houses. The shortfall will have been worsened by the exodus from Christchurch since then. While the population’s growing, more houses are needed. But is the Right’s answer – more sprawl – the way to provide them?
Shanghai Pengxin’s bid to buy the Crafar Farms was accepted the 2nd time on promises it would invest in building the farms’ productivity in a way a New Zealand buyer couldn’t. Instead, they immediately turned around and tried to sell 3 of the farms at an outrageous profit. Pengxin has shown it has no intent of being bound to the commitments it has made.
My uncle Jack Fleming joined the RNZAF two weeks after his brother Andy was killed flying a biplane against Zeros in Malaya. Jack’s first and last operational flight was in a Stirling bomber shot down over Germany; only one of the crew baled out and survived. Jackwas one of the 1861 New Zealanders who did not return home. Today a memorial will be unveiled in London’s Green Park to all those brave men.
How do we move forward from here? How do we get the consensus we need? How do we get more politicians around the world making not just speeches like David Cunliffe’s, but acting on them? Setting the targets and the plan behind them to avoid the brutal logic of climate change.
The Greens have discovered that National is having world heritage areas in Northland and the West Coast aerial surveyed for minerals. They’re exploiting a loophole where some of the heritage areas haven’t been included in Schedule 4 of the Conservation Act. The next stage will be to give away the data to miners and let them rip up our world heritage areas.
It’s sickening to see rich ministers and columnists saying ‘of course we need to green the economy’ and then turnaround and promote fossil fuel extraction and agricultural intensification – things that will ultimately wreck the environment and the economy that is built on it. The truth is, we’re a hugely wealthy country already – it’s just most of the wealth is with the endlessly greedy elite.
“Markets have become increasingly concerned that the austerity programmes in the eurozone are causing a vicious circle of recession”, and “Markets were confused by mixed messages from European capitals”. I have only one word of reply: Bollocks. Did anyone phone me to ask how I, The Markets, was feeling about these subjects? Did they hell!
Grant Robertson and David Cunliffe will be talking environment & economy at Titirangi Saturday at 1pm.
It’ll be interesting to watch how Labour positions itself on this pivotal question vis-a-vis the Greens.
A strong safety warning today about sheeptruck disaster met Ministerial indifference from Associate Transport Minister Simon Bridges. He said Australian legislation to promote safety and fairness in the road transport industry was not needed here because “New Zealand already has a system of work time requirements to help manage the risk of fatigue”. More infamous last words from a National politician – but the police are really worried.
A draft agreement has been negotiated for the Rio+20 summit that starts today, but anyone who cares about the future of our planet should be disappointed. The expert panel of nobel laureates, scientists and ministers’ call to ‘seize the moment’ has largely gone unheeded, as the agreement is full of empty promises and lacking in concrete commitments.
Iain Lees-Galloway has been leading an admirable campaign to keep Palmy North’s Capital Connection.
His latest effort is to have petition (online & offline versions) to present to Parliament at the end of the month. It has to be then, because it’s expected that the government (through NZTA) will cut the service in July or August.
We are using more than the planet can provide, and are growing both in population and in resource use per capita. Rio+20 is meant to be the opportunity to ensure both that the developing world can access the clean water and other resources they’re currently missing out on, while also committing ourselves to living within the planet’s limits. Is there any hope it will succeed? And is there any hope that we, as the nation with the world’s greenest image, might live up to our hype?
No-one seems to know why the fish keep dying at King Salmon’s Waihinau farm in Pelorus Sound – or if they do they aren’t telling us. Maybe it had something to do with stuffing tens of thousands of these fish into an environment that is nothing like they have evolved to deal with. It is interesting that this has not been offered up as a potential cause.
Five to fifteen years of economic turmoil. Peak oil. Climate change. For “Western” / OECD countries it’s time to start creating a world based on a different kind of growth.
NRT on the situation in Canterbury, and the Nats’ contempt for elected democracies.
People are driving less because of high fuel prices. That means less road tax for the government – a $120m shortfall in the last two years -, which pays for the transport budget. The biggest slice of the transport budget – the uneconomic roads of national significance. So, National is quietly delaying the RoNS until after they know they’ll be out of government.
