Arts in New Zealand scream conformity, acquiescence, patronage-induced passivity Anglo-New Zealand artist Derek Cowie has categorised the nation’s art scene as one in which practitioners without even realising it bend their output to the demands of a top-down patronage system. The reliance on patronage led to a passivity in which the artistic purpose of igniting discussion and debate was now submerged in an obedient quest to conform. Art, he insisted, should invite controversy, and not by-pass it. Mr Cowie’s art is renowned for its depiction of the tribulations encountered by everyday individuals and especially the damage inflicted on tem by…

Napier-based industrial authority reminds sector that machinery is UK’s biggest import category Ken Evans of Tekam NZ Ltd urges trade officials to “open their eyes,” to the enhanced export prospects in Great Britain for industrial food processing machinery. Tekam of Napier is the predominant engineering specialist in meat and fish processing heavy duty machinery. New Zealand as an internationally ranked food process machinery design and development nation is in a position to reclaim this market he said, noting that machinery already ranked as New Zealand’s eighth most significant export. Supplying the UK with heavy food processing technology was now much…

Botanist was used as example of fate that awaits Deniers Dr David Bellamy who has died at the age of 86 was an early practitioner of conservation civil disobedience and who as a populist broadcaster introduced a new technique to natural history presentation and who as pitchman for the carpet industry was able at last to describe why wool was superior as a textile. The botanist, a simplifier, used buffoonery as a teaching technique and this earned him an immense following throughout the Commonwealth and especially in Australia in New Zealand in which he was to star in numerous television…

UK-based New Plymouth–born scientist Dr Kelly blacked out as New Zealand government consolidates UN climate line The government’s ban on oil and gas exploration is the major obstacle to its own prime objective of weaning off coal the dairy exporter Fonterra. The government has been so successful in generating uncertainty about natural gas supplies that the dairy cooperative is prevented from investing in the alternative power generation. This particularly applies to the South Island where explorers OMV and New Zealand Oil & Gas hold licences to develop offshore gas. In the middle of this contrived emergency New Zealand’s most eminent…

Forty years after the Antarctic sightseeing airline crash multiple errors and omissions can be seen as the cause …… Parallels are inescapable between the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the crash onto Mt Erebus in 1979 of an Air New Zealand DC10 sightseeing flight. Both collided with Polar ice. The Titanic with an Arctic iceberg. The DC10 with Mt Erebus in the Antarctic. Both the Titanic and the DC10 were considered the most advanced technologies of their era. Sabotage did not figure in either disaster. Head office interference was cited in both disasters. For the Titanic to go…

HRH’s deft handling of awkward trade meeting revealed depth of character, patience, remembers National Press Club president Prince Andrew lamented the transition of the televised weather broadcast into entertainment. “I miss the isobars,” he confessed referring to the whorls and lines on the now disappeared diagrams that represented the connecting points having the same atmospheric pressure at a given time or on average over a given period. HRH was dismayed that so much applied science in the media was taking a back seat to the imperative to entertain. We met at government house in Wellington, New Zealand, and Prince Andrew…

Mainstream media silenced by complicity pact The actual cost of the Zero Carbon legislation that has just passed through New Zealand’s parliament is more than a trillion dollars in lost GDP. The estimate is from AgFirst the leading non-governmental source of information in this domain. AgFirst’s trillion dollar plus actual cost estimate was published in New Zealand Farmers Weekly This forecast conflicts with an officially aired report that the zero carbon by 2050 legislative objective for the Bill will in contrast add $30 billion to the economy. The independent and much higher negative estimate instantly became blacked-out through absence of…

Agri Lobby and Eco Activist share endangered species role after New York takeover of moral movement New Zealand’s farm lobby Federated Farmers once enjoyed a visibility and even power equal to that of the nation’s two main political parties, the Labour Party and National Party. The lobby’s leader was a household name, and their intervention in any issue affecting farmers to any degree at all was accompanied by fear and trembling on one side or the other. Yet now that New Zealand’s underpinning economic activity, farming, faces an ideological version of the Great Depression, and is known to do so,…

Television 3 offers an opportunity for the productive sector to advance common sense With the For Sale sign officially hoisted over New Zealand’s Television 3 channel an 11th hour remedy to the channel’s trouble emerges in the form of its presenters saying what they think, instead of what their polite society audience who do not watch television anyway, think that they should think. When the middle class family group studio presentation formula began to evolve 50 years ago the average age of the population was 25 years old. The average age of the average New Zealander is now nudging 40…

Anticipating Hitler’s rise pre-war politician told family to get as far away from Germany as possible The death in New Zealand’s Wairarapa Valley of Tony Haas (pictured) severs one of the closest human link’s with Germany’s Nazi era. Haas was the grandson of Ludwig Haas the minister for Baden and member of the Reichstag for the German Democratic Party and a determined opponent of the National Socialists, the Nazi Party. Ludwig Haas died unexpectedly in 1930. He is often considered the only politician who, had he lived, could have foiled the rise of Hitler and thus averted World War 2.…

Deluded diplomats are fed hopes of a vanishing Restoration An enduring mystery in Anglosphere diplomatic corps is the way in which so many officials insist on believing that president Donald Trump is an imposter who will be washed away by impeachment proceedings prior to the 2020 presidential elections. Two virtual diplomatic handbook periodicals proffering this point of view are The Economist and the Financial Times. Most foreign affairs officials believe that these two publications are owned in Great Britain. They are not. The Economist is controlled by the Agnelli dynasty of Fiat fame. The Financial Times is owned by the…