The Standard

Daily review 24/07/2025

Written By: - Date published: 5:30 pm, July 24th, 2025 - 17 comments
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Daily review is also your post.

This provides Standardistas the opportunity to review events of the day.

The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).

Don’t forget to be kind to each other …

17 comments on “Daily review 24/07/2025 ”

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  1. SPC 1
    24 July 2025 at 6:06 pm

    Regulatory Standards that suit the corporation, foreign investment rules that enable that good old colonial exploitation .. that place the conservation estate, the environment, our bio-security, our water, our protected land at risk, so why not raise doubts about the safety of the food that we eat.

    The three headed monster is onto this as well.

    https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/07/22/is-food-in-nz-set-to-become-cheaper-and-better-or-just-less-regulated/

  2. Ad 2
    24 July 2025 at 6:12 pm

    Boy am I loving watching 90 yr Rupert Murdoch destroy Trump one slow-leaked story at a time.

    And with DoJ firing the Epstein prisecutor Comey, there's months more leaks to come.

    And with Senate in deliberate recess, Trump as no one in Washington to defend him.

    Well deserved.

  3. Drowsy M. Kram 3
    24 July 2025 at 6:26 pm

    Overhauling unsustainable electoral laws
    The Government is overhauling outdated and unsustainable electoral laws including stopping same-day enrolment, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says.

    Astonishing – imho, same-day enrolment isn't "outdated and unstainable", and our shifty CoC govt MPs are running scared at the prospect of it being too easy for Kiwis to vote.

    Very regressive changes – anti-democratic even – stinks to high heaven. Goldsmith's ‘Aussie comparison’ justification is intriguing – is he keen on compulsory voting?

    Government to scrap same day election enrolment [RNZ, 24 July 2025]
    Leaving it to the last minute to enrol to vote will become a thing of the past, under sweeping electoral law changes the Government's announced today. The changes mean enrolment will close before the 12 day long advance voting period begins. There will also be a total ban on prisoners voting and providing free food, drink or entertainment within 100 metres of voting places will become an offence. Otago University Law Professor Andrew Geddis spoke to Melissa Chan-Green.

    Careful now RNZ.

    • SPC 3.1
      24 July 2025 at 6:45 pm

      It seems the coalition is aware of the profile of both of those in prison and those who special votes on election day.

      • Drowsy M. Kram 3.1.1
        24 July 2025 at 6:52 pm

        yes The real reason for our CoC govt's regressive anti-democractic changes.

        Hundreds of thousands of voters affected by planned electoral changes [24 July 2025]
        Those who move house and don’t update their details ahead of the 12-day advanced voting period may no longer have their electorate vote counted
        …
        During the 2023 election almost 100,000 people enrolled to vote during that 12-day period, with the number of people enrolling and voting late increasing at each election.

        New govt 100-day action plan


        Cartoon depicts Prime Minister Christopher Luxon winding a clock. The key is labelled "100 day action plan" and the numbers on the clock are years in decades. Luxon is winding the clock backwards from 2023 to the 1840s.

    • Mac1 3.2
      24 July 2025 at 9:42 pm

      Why does the law propose to discriminate between inmates in a prison and a person paying a fine or serving a home detention sentence? The inmate will lose his vote. The home detention server does not. What is the rationale for that? They can have committed similar crimes. Is the proposal limited to inmates serving a certain length of sentence? Will possible time off for good behaviour affect the right to vote?

      Concerning my point of view that voting inmates should stay more connected to society by voting, and therefore be better placed to rehabilitate, has any research been done to verify this?

      • Drowsy M. Kram 3.2.1
        25 July 2025 at 8:00 am

        The commonsense "stay more connected to society" view will be one reason why some more enlightened jurisdictions (Japan, Canada, Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands), all with incarceration rates less than half NZ's, either don't ban voting or confine bans to serious offenders.

        Imho, imprisonment is punishment enough. Did any of the parties in our CoC govt campaign on the reintroduction of universal prisoner disenfranchisement? What a witless bunch – I miss Finlayson, and I'm also missing his Report of the Attorney-General Under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 on the Electoral (Disqualification of Convicted Prisoners) Amendment Bill, which should be available on the Ministry of Justice website, but (mysteriously?) returns "Page not found".

        Otago law Professor Geddis put it well in his article for the 2011 NZ Law Review:

        Prisoner Voting and Rights Deliberation:
        How New Zealand's Parliament Failed                 [2011; PDF]
        The question whether individuals sentenced to terms of imprisonment should be able to vote has arisen periodically in New Zealand, as well as other liberal democracies. In 2010, Parliament voted to take the right to vote from all sentenced prisoners. This decision was taken despite the Attorney-General [Finlayson] indicating the legislation imposes an unjustified limit on the right .to vote contained in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, and against the international trend to enfranchise prisoners. As such, we should expect to see parliamentarians give careful attention to the rights consequences of their action. However, only the most cursory discussion of the right to vote took place during the process of enacting this legislation. This failure to engage properly with questions of individual rights means that Parliament is falling short of its duty as sovereign lawmaker for New Zealand.

        "Only the most cursory discussion" eh? Our regressive CoC govt is winding the clock back to 2010.

        I am not claiming here that matters have gotten so bad in New Zealand that the only solution is for the courts to step in to replace an irredeemably fallen institution. Nor do I want matters to get that bad: my preference is that Parliament should retain its role as supreme lawmaker for New Zealand as a nation. However, unless Parliament improves its lawmaking behaviour, its role increasingly will be open to challenge on the basis that it is not to be trusted with important decisions about individual rights.

        Lock Them Up and Throw Away the Vote: Civil Death Sentences in New Zealand [Auckland University Law Review 2013; PDF]

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_of_prisoners_in_New_Zealand#Legal_challenges_to_the_law

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_v_Attorney-General#Significance

    • Obtrectator 3.3
      25 July 2025 at 10:12 am

      Been thinking back to the post-election hiatus in 2023. On election night, it seemed a strong possibility that Nat/ACT would be able to govern without NZF. Then those damn specials rolled in, and hey presto! – they had to invite Winnie into the tent after all.

      Now here he is apparently supporting a scenario which would most likely function to the benefit of his CoC partners, but could well result in their being able to manage without him …

  4. Dennis Frank 4
    24 July 2025 at 8:03 pm

    Folks may be interested in this historical sex-change person – in relation to the trans category currently in contention. I read recently a quote from her in which she said she knew when she was 3 or 4 years old that she had been "born in the wrong body".

    She went on the British Everest expedition in which Hillary & Tenzing first reached the top.

    Catharine Jan Morris CBE FRSL (born James Morris, 1926-2020) was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.

    Morris was a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition. She was the only journalist to accompany the expedition, climbing with the team to a camp at 22,000 feet, and using a prearranged code to send news of the successful ascent, which was announced in The Times on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation (2 June 1953). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Morris

    (S)he was a father 5 times. Her 1974 book Conundrum was about the switch – a memoir. Realising she was in the wrong body that early shows how primal the sex/gender identity is. At that age (s)he would have been trying to assimilate culture identity role models to conform with parental expectations.