Political Parties Covered Up Gigantic NZ Foreign Contingent Liability Debt New Zealand’s general election was a political line dance because all the main parties performed the same sequence of steps and all ended in the same position as when they started electioneering. They all sidestepped the unspoken issue of how the nation is to fund its foreign commitments in the matter of zero. The nation’s Treasury frames this debt obligation in the widest possible terms as somewhere between $3billion and $24billion. Given the disappointing outcomes of the offset auctions the liability looms as being at the more expensive end of…

Properties Lose Value in unregulated Solar Gold Rush in New Zealand The sudden advent of scores of solar generating schemes on flat land close to electricity sub stations has reduced the value of nearby residential properties. This is because real estate agents are required to notify buyers of the solar schemes and their documentation is tagged accordingly. Estimates of the reduced value are said to be in the region of 30 percent. An additional problem for residential property owners is that due to fast tracking by the Labour government these industrial solar schemes are largely unregulated. Examples are end-to-end schemes…

Submersible Power Station Symbolises Abrupt Shift in Class Politics as General Election Nears The social licence accorded to pine plantations is transferring to solar power schemes as the hazards of pine are being revealed in the extreme weather that these forestry schemes were supposed to avert. The emphasis is on solar power in spite of still even more obvious hazards. These are illustrated by the official determination to ramrod through the Auckland solar farm at Helensville in spite of the site having been underwater this year for several days at a time. Quietly the government seeks to transfer responsibility for…

Prigojine Liquidation Confirms Fate of California Banker Sergey Grishin The death of Sergey Grishin of alleged sepsis in a Moscow hospital concluded intense cross border personal litigation centred on revelations about the oligarch’s private life and which in turn was to lead to his liquidation. Oceania’s leading web site on legal topics Lawfuel had picked up details of the banker’s domestic life and it was now that the California-based oligarch sought to close down such intrusions by making an example of the Wellington-based Lawfuel site. The saga involved white shoe law firms on both sides of the Pacific in a…

Retribalism Reprised An air of barmy escapism and not entirely due to the temperature hangs over Europe in the form of an unwillingness to face reality.  In France’s second biggest city Marseilles there was a signal reluctance to accept the causes and effects of the most recent identity riots, for example. The riots were clearly awaiting a flash point for the looting-to-order to proceed. This was duly achieved with the main lootable businesses in the commercial area, the ones with higher end products, having their armoured glass fascias shattered and duly  being cleaned out. This was in spite of a…

Colonial Era Evocation Cancelled Melbourne Commonwealth Games Melbourne’s abrupt cancellation of the Commonwealth Games signalled the advent in the English-speaking realm of an instant official end to a mass cultural convocation, in this instance a sporting one. The cancellation was itself emblematic of the Victoria government. The Australian politico media sphere is always wrong footed by the way the state government emerges unscathed  from its bad news. Its formula is to simply get it out of the way as quickly as it can. Lesser governments would have given the issue a slow death with standard “reviews” and “interventions” with much…

Oceania nation 93 percent renewables energy while MPs lured by trans-Atlantic careers Dazzled by the prestige of global assemblies and their high minded objectives there has emerged even in recent weeks a suspicion that many in New Zealand politics even see their futures in these exalted organisations instead of coping with the nation’s down-to-earth issues centred as they are on crime, homelessness, cost of living and balance of payments. The problem for the everyday inhabitants is that this higher calling takes the form of politicians of most stripes claiming that any faltering in imposing on their taxpayers extreme and costly…

Covid Arbiter’s Ascension to Public Intellectual bucked the trend Fairground fortune-teller coiffed microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles has become the unlikely and even only politico-bureaucratic high profile survivor of the Covid era. Others might have been ennobled yet Dr Wiles is the only one to remain in the public gaze equipped with such useful tools of contemporary prominence as personal newspaper columns. Now she is framed in a full scale film Ms Information prominent on the marquee of the New Zealand International Film Festival. Other mainstays of the Covid era have faded from public consciousness. These include the era’s prime minister Dame…

New Zealand Prime Minister Sabotage of first luxury Adventure Lodge Mystery Explained The death in circumstances of extreme adventure of undersea explorer Stockton Rush III rekindles memories of the bizarre and even sinister vendetta visited upon his father Stockton Rush Snr while the family was resident in New Zealand. The episode was notable because the campaign was directed by New Zealand Labour prime minister Wallace Rowling whose political trademark was an apparent lack of passion about anything at all. Stockton Rush II, the father, established Takaro Lodge near Lake Te Anau. It was the first international style tourist lodge complete…

High Tech heats up von Neumann Bottleneck as do questions on Official Offsets incentives Artificial intelligence opens up a refrigeration future for New Zealand not seen since the development of frozen meat exports. The reason is that artificial intelligence processing hubs require cooling on a similar scale to the nation’s meat packing houses known as freezing works. International data processing hub operators are prospecting in New Zealand for these cooling sites. A futures and trade-offs market is developing as global companies prepare for the quantum increase in demand for accelerated coolant for the circuitry hubs. Extra cooling is required everywhere…

All Party Global Acclaim Quest Swamps Pending New Zealand General Election Distracted, bemused and somewhat entertained by the antics and pratfalls of its parliamentarians the wider electorate is successfully diverted from the hiding in plain sight fact that the pending general election has little to do with them at all. All the main parties are already fixed in their posture which is an international one centred on year zero and they are all determined to camouflage its damage to the productive economy. Official figures reveal that attaining northern hemisphere goals will cost the New Zealand taxpayer somewhere in the range…