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notices and features - Date published:
6:00 am, September 2nd, 2025 - 42 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
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Step up to the mike …
Today's Posts (updated through the day):
Foreign Buyers Ban Reversal A Sell Out By Winston Peters & His Party [posted last night]
Guest Post – Planning By Firing Squad
New Post up:
Guest Post – Planning By Firing Squad
A shout out to our colleagues in nursing who are on strike again today.
Rest assured the strike is about safe staffing levels. In another cruel irony our local hospital Ed cannot go on strike because they don't have the staffing levels to provide life preserving services.
The link is to a senior clinician representing Te Whatu Ora. He has a PhD but specialises in obfuscation and distraction.
Once again Te Whatu Ora claims that the staffing level application is not fit for purpose, this is being so since the 90s.
It's curious they wait till strike action is taken to seek to remedy this. It is not fit for purpose in the same way a checkbook is not fit for purpose if there isn't enough money in the account.
It's also curious he didn't have details of major bargaining issues but was all over the number of operations and procedures that would be postponed.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2019002453/health-nz-on-nurses-midwives-and-healthcare-assistants-strike
This would always be the case with an ED. By definition, they are an emergency service, and can never shut down because of the absence of critical personnel.
Which is why this statement routinely appears in all hospital strike action notifications
"Hospitals and all emergency departments would remain open during the strike, with a small number of staff providing life-preserving services."
https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/09/02/more-than-36000-nurses-take-two-day-strike-action/
The ED is struggling to provide the skeleton staff to provide LPS.
The usual or all too common practice is to redeploy nurses from other wards to EDs.
The scales during strikes have tipped too far in favour of the employers. Providing staff used to the job of management not unions/staff.
It touches on another fib the doctor is telling in the audio clip. He makes it sound like TWO is organising the cover. They aren't.
This BS peddled by the doctor along with Judith Collins's lies makes me think we need a rejinking of labour laws back in favour of labour.
Your comment was in relation to ED staff not being able to strike. This has always been the case – for obvious reasons.
If you want to discuss ED staffing and hospital staffing in general – I'm almost certainly in agreement with you.
I do also think there are larger issues (bed blocking is a huge one, as is appropriate care for difficult and dangerous patients) – but staffing ratios are not adequate.
Hello Belladonna. When I predicted what would happen with CoC austerity, you told me to
"have a cup of tea and a lie down"
You come here only when your mates are not doing so well as their perfidy is being uncovered.
So there were no nurses strikes during the Ardern government. For exactly the same reasons, as they're striking now (pay and staffing ratios)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/09/new-zealand-teachers-and-nurses-to-hold-first-mass-strike-in-a-generation
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/125372846/prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-says-nurses-wanted-17-per-cent-pay-increase-government-financially-constrained
NB: I don’t recall telling you to have a cup of tea and a lie down. Perhaps you could link to the comment concerned.
Not sure if this helps – 'Sandra Le Cron', who commented here late in 2023 for one month only before copping a ban, wrote "Calm down Patricia ! Go for a cup of tea and a few deep breaths!"
I doubt many Standardistas miss ‘Sandra’.
100% Nurses deserve better. Board buddies get an 80% rise!! Nurses offered 1% ….says it all about Luxon's "compassion" mentioned in his Maiden speech. All smoke and mirrors.
I had to look up perfidy and it's the perfect word.
My wife has taken on the role of delegate for her ward. One of the various challenges she is navigating is a colleague who is a single mother of two kids, living pay to pay. She pretty well can't afford to strike.
This is in a profession, degree qualified. Ok, the union does have a hardship grant able to be applied for. It sounds like something established in the 90s.
An initiative NZNO could consider is the likes of a Givealittle campaign. Package up a paragraph outlining the real issues, counter Brown's smears and Collins lies and give the public the chance to support with a few dollars.
At the heart if this, they are taking action to protect the public.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360809602/amazon-invest-75b-nz-create-1000-jobs
Thats 7.5million per job!!!
Exactly the kind of jobs New Zealand needs.
Also an impressive move by Luxon to actually get Winston Peters to agree to this change in the "Golden Visa" to buy NZ properties over $5million. Noteworthy that Hipkins on RNZ this morning says it's not likely to be able to be reversed due to signing the CPTPP.
And also great to see the Southland economic development agency hook some more funding for its southland base as Space Operations New Zealand.
Investment Support For Southland Space Sector | Scoop News
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360809602/amazon-invest-75b-nz-create-1000-jobs
Chippy is claiming it as labours work
Fair enough. This announcement is ageing faster than a 9 day peach.
Yes, began in 2021. When Ardern "wasn't doing anything!!'
It was. A number of people got recruited from companies I was working with.
Here is one post I found in 20 seconds:
"Amazon's US East 1 data center, which is located in Virginia, and among other things hosts most non-classified government websites and applications, had a draw of 2.7 gigawatts in 2022.
For reference, this is as much as the entire Seattle area power grid used that year, and about half as much as the entirety of New York City used that year."
I think we need lots more specific detail on this Amazon proposal.
Also the banner headline of "1000 jobs" is just a lie.
That $7.5B and 1000 jobs isn't coming from Amazon, it is what Amazon estimates would be spent/created by users of the data centre. Amazon's investment is in the range of $250-350M in construction costs (inflate that figure as it is a few years old), and then the running costs. Direct employment by Amazon is in the range of 20 people.
Also someone needs to give an answer on what has happened to the near-abandoned datacentre that Amazon already had under construction in west Auckland.
This is a silly sugar-rush announcement that Labour had already done 3 years ago.
This isn't going to age well in the next 48 hours.
Stuff goes a little deeper.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360809895/amazons-75b-new-zealand-investment-whats-real-and-whats-not
Good luck with that. So far there’s been spin and obfuscation.
https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/09/02/amazon-aborts-construction-of-west-auckland-data-centre/ [behind priority-access wall for now]
Luxon is so desperate to get anything on the score-board that even a seagull shit is considered a ‘win’.
The wall is gone and the excellent article is freely accessible.
I guess they'll join the queue….
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/97d4604079b545448280423f9269b9ea/page/Dashboard/
Newsroom has some detail on the Amazon assholes..IMO these plundering, anti union, fuckwits are not anything NZ needs….
Earlier…
And as they are wont…
The 1000 jobs?
Herald story on this
https://archive.li/kNzYC#selection-4059.12-4059.268
People are cheaper than hardware. Most of that investment is in hardware, and the data centres infrastructure.
Be nice to make it possible to move the azure webapps and databases I'm working on to a local datacentre. On the other hand aussie is a deeper potential market and they like their data to be stored locally.
We had a brief look at what services were available in the new region yesterday and took about 5 minutes for us to decide to write a long and detailed email to our bosses saying there's no way we're going to shift from Sydney/Melbourne any time soon.
No Security Centre, Athena, or backups. And no timeline for when they'll become available. Which makes it functionally useless for any big data or data lake workloads.
For comparison, they stood up Melbourne something like 7 years ago and it still doesn't provide the full service catalog.
News item, 2 Sept 2025: PM says Amazon will invest $7.5 billion in NZ, creating “up to 1000 jobs.”
I just happened to watch a documentary on Al Jazeera last night about data centres in Mexico. The amount of power they need is mind boggling. In addition the amount of water for cooling meant the local farmers in the area in Mexico didn't have enough water to grow food.
Madness. These oligarchs are pillaging the world.
If there was so much conflict of interest…and hence extensive measures in place, I have a one word question : Why?
Ol' Wily Winnie says NO…(there is some interesting content in the article.)
Earlier from Ol' Wily hisself….(no mention then of the conflicted Scott?)
I had earlier raised this confliction….
Assuming Dynes Transport is a trucking operation, he should resign today.
It most certainly is! https://www.dynes.co.nz/
Typical NZ top-level recruitment:
"Whoa, this mofo would have a shitload of conflicts of interest in this role!"
"Hire him anyway, he can 'manage' the conflicts of interest."
Beats the hell out of me how surveys consistently rank us among the least corrupt countries. If that's true, what the hell are the other countries like?
Liverpool have just bought a player, Isak, for the equivalent of NZ$290 million.
They could have bought 58 houses in NZ for that.
Around 318 houses – looking at the average price. OFC, if you pitch below the average, then a bit more.
https://www.qv.co.nz/price-index/
But, the ridiculous fees clubs give to elite sportspeople internationally, have little relevance to life in NZ.
While elite football players get paid plenty, transfer fees are paid between the clubs involved. If the club makes profitable trades its the club owners who benefit.
In Britain the player used to collect 10% of the fee, provided he hadn't requested the transfer. Dunno if that's still the case.
Happy to modify my comment – in line with your info.
"The ridiculous fees that international sports clubs pay for players internationally, have little relevance to life in NZ"
Riedl is a senior at a conservative think outfit, former chief economist for a GOP senator and the 2016 Rubio presidential campaign's director of budget and spending policy.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5o6k7jvowuyaquloafzn3cfw/post/3lxrgz55ll22g?
David Seymour Seymour speaking for ACT and Shane Jones speaking with love for all things carbon and mining at the expense of the sea, conservation estate and environment protection want out of the Paris Accord.
The Right Honourable Christopher Luxon, having thrown the gumboot as far as he can to please farmers, does not see the point of it.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/571796/act-wants-out-of-paris-agreement-national-says-no
Responsible spending rules being set by Lotto.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/lotto-revolution-new-spend-limit-some-games-gone-as-lotto-bosses-make-major-tech-changes/QHZ6JAMCKZDZHERBCWFA3YUTXY/
The TAB now has a betting monopoly.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/racing/nz-bans-offshore-betting-tab-gains-monopoly-with-new-law/YL2MJEWX25EK5IY5XV7KOJH62Y/
In practice, this means that it is not illegal for someone in New Zealand to participate in gambling over the Internet if that website is based overseas
https://www.dia.govt.nz/gambling
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/566995/online-casino-bill-greens-vote-with-coalition-govt-to-pass-first-reading
According to Gerard Otto latest Roy Morgan:
Lab 34.0 Gre 13.5 TPM 2.5=50.0
Nat 29.0 ACT 10.5 NZF 7.0=46.5
If this is genuine 29% means Luxon is a gonner.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10164119750212033&set=a.65048947032