A comment on the NZ Issues blog: “I think with careful interpretation of Te Tiriti, Queen Victoria signed all commonwealth assets, the Sun, Moon and all the water, gold, oil, gas and beer to the Maori chiefs who signed. And you’re a racist if you disagree.”
A landmark Covid-19 vaccine injury class action lawsuit has been filed against the Australian government and the medicines regulator.
The nation-wide suit, which reportedly has 500 members including three named applicants, seeks redress for those allegedly left injured or bereaved by the Covid-19 vaccines.
One of the applicants who suffered a severe heart condition after getting the Pfizer jab is even claiming there was ‘cover-up’ during the vaccine rollout which hid the potential risks.
‘These injured and bereaved have suffered immense loss, pain and grief,’ Dr McCann tweeted.
‘Just as heartbreaking has been the gaslighting and silence, which has left them feeling abandoned. We cannot simply ‘move on’ from covid and leave them behind.’
Dr McCann has been critical of the existing compensation scheme, claiming it was ‘not fit for purpose’.
‘Many vaccine-injured Australians who cannot access compensation through the Services Australia scheme now find themselves abandoned, with no support,’ Dr McCann said.
“A lack of accountability from a bloated education ministry means New Zealand kids won’t receive the opportunities in life they used to,” says ACT’s Education spokesperson Chris Baillie.
“Newstalk ZB reports almost 10,000 students aren’t enrolled in Primary School anymore, an increase on the 6,300 reported last year.
“Labour is still blaming covid-19, with Ministry officials saying Omicron is the cause of the decline. Everyone knows this is nonsense, since the spike of the pandemic truancy has gotten consistently worse. There were 40 per cent more cases of truancy last year than there was in 2021.
“Despite the Ministry of Education exploding in size – FTEs are up 55.3 per cent since 2017 – it still can’t get kids to show up at school. In fact, it’s being rewarded for its failures by being given more money and staff. How is it that the education ministry can hire so many extra people and achieve such appalling outcomes? Because it is focussed on pushing nonsense like ‘teaching maths for social justice’ instead of measuring outcomes. It needs to get back to basics and let schools teach.
“The Government is warning that parents who don’t ensure regular attendance may face prosecution. Great, but it’s hard to take them seriously considering only one parent has received a fine in the past five years.
“We need accountability. That means mandatory daily attendance reporting and fines for parents who refuse to send their kids to school, as set out in ACT’s truancy plan released in November.
“Labour has no ideas to arrest the decline. They want to keep on blaming COVID-19 until they can find another excuse. ACT has solutions:
Daily national attendance reporting: The Government treated covid like a crisis and maintained a national focus on the pandemic with daily case, hospitalisation, and death numbers for over two years. Truancy is also a crisis with long term consequences. ACT will require every school in New Zealand to fill out an electronic attendance register accessible by the Ministry of Education. Schools will be required to record which students have not attended school on a particular day and whether that absence was justified or unjustified. The Ministry will publish daily attendance in real time, building a national focus on the issue.
Empowering schools to deal with truancy: Schools should be empowered to deal with poor attendance through direct, cashed-up funding. The Government spends $38.5 million on truancy services and ACT says it should be given to schools to use for hiring their own truancy officers. The funding would be weighted to the Equity Index, so schools with more vulnerable student populations would receive more funding. For example, a poor school with 600 students could have an allowance of about $113 per student for $67,800 hiring an attendance officer. A group of smaller schools could band together to hire their own officer.
Traffic light system: Collection of data will be connected to a traffic light system. This will set out clear expectations for the responsibilities of everyone relating to unjustified absences. Green light, high attendance (up to 10% absence). Require schools to attempt to make contact with a family on the day of an unjustified absence. Orange light, irregular attendance (10-30% absence) The school will be required to hold a meeting with the student and family and develop a plan to reintegrate the student back into the classroom on a regular basis. Red light, chronic absenteeism. (more than 30% truant). Children will be referred to the Ministry of Education to deal with, who will make a decision on possible actions including fines and referral to Police.
An infringement notice regime for parents: Currently parents cannot be fined for student non-attendance without a court conviction, but they can be fined on the spot for speeding to school. ACT would change the Education and Training Act to allow the Ministry of Education to introduce an infringement notice regime for truancy. Ensure Police use section 49 of the Education and Training Act to work with schools on truants and to take children they see out of school during school hours to either the school or home.
Accountability for schools through mandatory reporting: Schools would be required to report their attendance daily to a Ministry of Education database. Most businesses need to prove they have delivered before they are paid, but schools do not have to report whether their students actually attended school. Under ACT, schools that fail to report would risk losing their funding.
“Almost every aspect of someone’s adult life will be defined by the education they receive as a child. If we want better social outcomes for New Zealand, we can’t keep ignoring the truancy crisis.”
New Zealand is such a beautiful country! –Band leader
“The Friendly Invasion”
A treat at Paekakariki’s St Peter’s Hall on Wednesday was a free concert by the Hawaii-based US Marines band. The musicians are over here coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the Marines being in New Zealand during World War Two.
Prior to America entering the War, the U.S. government had agreed that they would send large forces to North Africa to help the British against the Germans and the Italians. However, immediately after Pearl Harbour the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, told the Americans that Britain could hold the line in North Africa in the meantime and that United States forces should instead be sent to Australia and New Zealand to defend them against a possible Japanese invasion.
Thousands of American servicemen, mainly Marines, were despatched to New Zealand and arrived in Auckland and Wellington in June 1942. They occupied temporary settlements that were rapidly constructed in places like the Kapiti Coast, where Camps Mackay, Russell and Paekakariki housed more than 10,000 Marines at any one time. The coastal village of Paekakariki with a population of 530 was transformed by the presence of the friendly Americans.
“Brass on the Beach”
So it was highly appropriate for the Marines Band to be playing in the village – a community their branch of the US armed forces had transformed eighty years ago. The band had been in New Zealand back in 2012 on the 70th anniversary of the Marines arriving, and played at a concert at Southwards theatre. One bandsman mentioned that he had been encouraged to come here by a member of that group of “Brass on the beach”.
The Americans played to a packed hall and the audience responded enthusiastically to the mix of jazz tunes and a range of other compositions. There was also a cameo performance by the Mayor, local Janet Holborow, who demonstrated her skill on the flute. An entertaining feature was the choreography. The trumpeters, trombonists and saxophonists performed on the floor in front of the stage and they often jived to the jazz items. Onstage there were electric guitarists, drummers and keyboard players, and two vocalists added their voices to the mix. It was a thoroughly enjoyable performance which, by audience demand, went twenty minutes past the scheduled time.
The band thoroughly enjoyed their time on the Kapiti Coast and the local Paekakariki cafés did well. “Brass on the Beach” also played in Paraparaumu Beach on Anzac Day and in Wellington on Thursday.
Did you know governments worldwide have spent over $5 trillion in the past two decades to subsidize wind, solar, and other so-called renewables?
To put that in perspective, if you earned $1 a second 24/7/365—about $31 million per year—it would take you 158,550 YEARS to make $5 trillion.
$5 trillion is an almost unfathomable amount of money.
However, even with that astronomical financial support, the world still depends on hydrocarbons for 84% of its energy needs—down only 2% since governments started binge spending on renewables 20 years ago.
That’s all according to Mark Mills in a report from the Manhattan Institute, who concludes that:
“The lessons of the recent decade make it clear that solar, wind, and battery technologies cannot be surged in times of need, are neither inherently ‘clean’ nor even independent of hydrocarbons, and are not cheap.”
With all that in mind, it should be clear that so-called renewables—more accurately, unreliables—have been a giant flop. They are not viable for baseload power—even with $5 trillion in subsidies and two decades of trying. Today, using wind and solar for mass power generation is an artificial political solution that would not have been chosen on a genuinely free market for energy.
Wind and solar power might be useful in specific situations. Still, it’s ridiculous to think they can provide reliable baseload power for an advanced industrial economy. It’s like trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
Nonetheless, governments, the media, academia, and celebrities flippantly push for an imminent energy “transition” as if it’s preordained.
It’s shocking and depressing so many adults think they can magically change the underlying economics, chemistry, engineering constraints, and physics of energy production to suit their childish fantasies and political agendas.
Joe Biden announced he’s ‘running’ for a second term, even though he can barely walk. [‘Standing’ would be the better term.]
Despite his very low poll ratings and very advanced age, I predict he will win his party’s nomination. RFK Jr. may be his biggest competition, but like Bernie Sanders, those controlling the Democrat Party will rig the primaries against him.
Biden will have the 2024 election stolen for him. Again. The octogenarian will be 86 years by the end of his second term. By that time, America’s destruction should be complete.
Older readers will remember when Edward Kennedy (John and Robert Kennedy’s brother) made a concerted effort in 1980 to take the nomination off sitting president Jimmy Carter. He didn’t get it and instead Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter in the November 1980 election so it’s no certainty that Joe will get a second term, even with rigged ballots in some states. —Eds
Taken just after a shower had made everything backlit by the sun glisten. The wetter than usual autumn so far this year has been like a second Spring for plant growth.
The size of the “anti-disinformation” industry and the resources available to it are staggering. From Andrew Lowenthal at racket.news: Andrew Lowenthal spent more than two decades defending digital rights, and watched as peers and partner organizations switched to an opposite mission called “anti-disinformation.” An inside account I knew things were bad in my world, but […]
