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Free Trade EU, Geothermal, and Renewables Peak Shunned

Triumphs Turn to Shame in New Zealand guilt transfer politics Jostling foreign financiers queue to fund industrial solar utilities in New Zealand and to secure the key governmental consents to implement them. Amnesia settles over the country about what happens when infrastructure is gleefully put in the hands of foreigners. New Zealand’s rail network is the most recent example. Officialdom saw the sale as the pathway to immense foreign investment. The opposite happened. After a honeymoon period devoted to adorning the rail network with carefully arranged localised publicity packaging the investment went in the opposite direction. The new foreign owners…

Zion Heartfelt by Sean Plunket of The Platform

Broadcaster Wary of going Under Knife after Hospital jab in New Zealand Celebrity South Seas talk-back host and radio station proprietor Sean Plunket was anticipating a surgical ablation operation having suffered a minor heart attack in quite recent months. The New Zealand political commentator’s pulse accelerated when he found himself prominently described in social media as “hateful scumbag Zionist.” It quickened even more when he discovered that the author worked as a heart surgeon and in the same department in which the news man was scheduled to undergo his own cardiac surgery. Mr Plunket now rang the hospital and was…

Siouxsie Film Documents Medicine Status Plunge

Graphics Designer Georgia Shattky captures The Science fall from grace A revealing moment in the film about microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles is when she worries about funding her laboratory. Then she appears to find hope in a just-arrived message from an institution only to discover that it too has turned her down with a rejection slickly encased in condescending and patronising words that she finds the money elsewhere. Nothing terribly unusual in this. Except that the nation is in the grip of the Covid pandemic and that one single category of resources that might reasonably have expected to be financed at…

Five Eyes Means NZ Target Bill Holstein Claims

Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia are Undermining our Democracy and National Security. Indications that New Zealand is an exceptional focus for Kremlin attention and at the highest level are justified by sightings of someone in newsreels and photo stills who looked like strongman Vladimir Putin immediately after the sinking of the Mikhail Lermontov and by a Radio New Zealand report to the effect that Putin posing as a shoe salesman travelled extensively here in the Cold War era. Now a leading authority has stated that New Zealand is operationally in the very front line of hostile global intelligence gathering.…

Billions NZD Pledged Globally Will be Borrowed Back

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…

Real Estate Agents Tag sales near Solar project proliferation

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…

Solar Absorbs Forestry Social Licence in New Zealand

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…

Oligarch Moscow Death Ends Australasia Stand Off

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…

A Deluded Europe Enters new age of Piety

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…

Axed Australia Games Avert Race and Gender Activist Angst

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…

Cure Cursed so Local Government Shares Pine Problem

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…

Film Festival Ms Information on Siouxsie Wiles Rise and Rise

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…