Native species have been revered, feared, hunted and tamed. Now experts hope revulsion can give way to fascination
For many years, the top-rated attraction in the Tasman district of New Zealand was a cafe famed for its rural setting, seafood chowder – and tame eels.
For a few dollars you could buy a pottle of mince and a wooden stick to take down to the stream, where a blue-black mass was shining, writhing, waiting.
Continue reading...Analysis: Country has confirmed itself the weak link in the intelligence chain it joined with the US, UK, Canada and Australia
Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister from the centre-left Labour party, has offended devotees of the Anglosphere by indicating she is not prepared to take her country into the kind of trade war with China that Australia has found itself facing.
Asserting her country’s sovereignty has potentially deep implications for the “Five Eyes” alliance, the intelligence sharing partnership that emerged after the second world war and blossomed in the cold war. Indeed some say New Zealand has confirmed itself as the weak link in the intelligence chain that it joined with the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Continue reading...The critical questions of who is really in charge and who has the money still need to be answered
After decades of neglect, inequality, and outright racism in New Zealand’s health system, a shift toward indigenous sovereignty and tino rangatiratanga in healthcare is long overdue. The Māori Health Authority that the government announced this week seems like a step in the right direction. But the devil will be in the details, as we wait to see if this will produce true change, or just more window dressing.
The failure of the health and disability system to serve Māori has been apparent for decades. A visit to the Ministry of Health website will yield report after report documenting the seven-year life expectancy gap between Māori and non-Māori, higher rates of cancer and other preventable illness, worse outcomes in care, and a myriad of other inequities. Being able to describe Māori health inequities is necessary. But ultimately, it’s insufficient.
Continue reading...Australia’s glacially slow delivery of jabs derided as a ‘farce’, while in New Zealand only 4.5% of eligible people have been vaccinated
They were held up as Covid success stories, two countries at the bottom of the world that kept outbreaks under control and deaths low as the pandemic swept the rest of the globe.
Daily life in cities including Sydney and Auckland now feels largely back to pre-pandemic normal – restaurants are full, theatres are open, masks are scarce and offices are busy. A degree of international travel is also a reality thanks to the new “trans-Tasman travel bubble” – a two-way quarantine-free corridor between the neighbours.
Continue reading...Judith Collins may trail badly in the polls, but MPs should only think about replacing her if a natural alternative leader emerges
Followers of baseball in the US have a saying: winning fixes everything. A team can suffer player scandals and be beset by dysfunctional management. If they’re hitting enough home runs, however, things don’t tend to fall apart.
The corollary of this would be that losing breaks everything. And while it’s a bit trite to compare sports to politics, New Zealand’s opposition National party resembles nothing if not a losing baseball team. Thumped in last year’s general election, conceding a rare absolute parliamentary majority to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour , nothing seems to have gone right for the party that was once called the natural party of government in New Zealand.
Continue reading...After a year of closed borders, Wellington airport in New Zealand was filled with emotional reunions as hundreds of travellers touched down on the first day of quarantine-free travel from Australia
Continue reading...Emotional scenes in arrivals hall as hundreds of travellers touch down on first day of quarantine-free travel from Australia
Lisa Tetai warned her son not to take a sick day when he picked her up from Auckland airport. “I thought there might be media there,” she explains.
She wasn’t wrong.
Continue reading...When it rolls out free period products in schools the government should think about sustainability and educating boys
As Labour tries to fulfil its many election promises, there is one area it could score an easy win – the period product rollout scheduled for June.
And if New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern is serious about ending period poverty, she needs to take a good look at England and Scotland.
Continue reading...Proposals include making sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 2004 illegal
New Zealand has announced a suite of proposals aimed at outlawing smoking for the next generation and moving the country closer to its goal of being smoke-free by 2025.
The plans include the gradual increase of the legal smoking age, which could extend to a ban on the sale of cigarettes and tobacco products to anyone born after 2004, making smoking effectively illegal for that generation.
Continue reading...Australian gunman earlier said he wanted to start legal action over his designation as a terrorist and lack of access to news and letters
The Christchurch terrorist who said he wanted to take the government to court over a lack of access to news and letters in jail and his designation as a terrorist entity has failed to attend the first court hearing on the matter.
The hearing in Auckland, New Zealand, was indefinitely postponed and the terrorist must ask to have it rescheduled after his no show on Thursday.
Continue reading...From the outside, the country seems like a likely candidate for progressive drug laws but internally, change is proving hard to bring
After New Zealand’s referendum to legalise cannabis failed, social service agencies across the country are seeking a new path to decriminalisation of drug use, but obstacles are plenty.
On Monday, a broad coalition of social service, advocacy and health organisations released an open letter calling on prime minister Jacinda Ardern to repeal and replace the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 “to ensure drug use is treated as a health and social issue”. Signatories include the New Zealand Medical Association, Public Health Association, Auckland and Wellington City Missions, Mental Health Foundation, and the Māori Law Society, along with 20 others.
Continue reading...Prime minister’s comments come after border worker diagnosed last week said to have missed two vaccine appointments
Border workers have until the end of April to be vaccinated before being moved to lower risk roles, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said after a third worker from Auckland’s Grand Millenium managed isolation facility tested positive for Covid-19.
“We want everyone to be vaccinated on our frontline,” she told TVNZ’s Breakfast on Monday.
Continue reading...Community leader says: ‘We don’t feel like a part of the “team of 5 million” when Indians are singled out like this’
Community leaders have questioned the New Zealand government’s decision to temporarily close the border to people travelling from India, and say they fear the move could prompt racism and stigma.
“The question of ‘Why India?’ must be asked, and a clear answer should be given,” said Sunil Kaushal, president of the Waitakere Indian Association. He asked why the ruling applied only to India, when other nations including the United States, Brazil, France and the UK had also experienced soaring infection rates, especially when compared per-capita.
Continue reading...New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has announced details of a trans-Tasman travel bubble with Australia, meaning Australians will be able to travel to New Zealand without needing to quarantine. Though most Australian states have allowed quarantine-free visits from New Zealanders for months, New Zealand has continued with enforced isolation for arrivals from its neighbour, citing concern about small Covid-19 outbreaks. The move to allow cross-border travel is one of the first such agreements since the pandemic prompted countries to block foreign arrivals to stop the virus spreading
Continue reading...New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern warns that further Covid-19 outbreaks could mean border closures return
After nearly a year shut off from the world, New Zealand is cracking open its borders, with a trans-Tasman travel bubble allowing two-way quarantine-free travel with Australia.
The NZ prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced on Tuesday the bubble would open from 19 April, allowing quarantine-free travel between the two nations. Travellers from New Zealand have been able to enter selected Australian states without quarantining since October but the arrangements did not apply in the other direction.
Continue reading...Finds include 1980s time capsules, old collection boxes and a nativity scene with figures heads ‘taken clean off’
Ten years on from Christchurch’s devastating earthquake, the Catholic Diocese has discovered that it is missing a pair of angels.
As work continues to deconstruct the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament on Barbadoes Street – extensively damaged in the 2011 quake, along with most of the central city – many treasures thought lost have been recovered.
Continue reading...When it comes to mental health, New Zealand’s government has lost sight of what’s important
They call it a last resort, but for people placed in seclusion in New Zealand mental health units it can feel like the beginning of a nightmare. “Seclusion” itself is something of a euphemism, a gentle name for locking someone in a room for an average of 27 hours at a time. It’s meant to be a last resort to stop people from hurting themselves or others, but the practice can itself be traumatising. One woman, recalling her seclusion experience, describes how – even now – she doesn’t like the sound of keys being rattled. It reminds her of being locked up, she says, of feeling hopeless, frightened and alone.
“Being taken into seclusion is absolutely awful, scary and daunting.”
Continue reading...New Zealand may have moved to curb rising prices but could cheap money have permanently rewritten the rules?
It’s hard to disagree with the New Zealand government’s recent assessment that the country’s runaway housing market has moved from mere boom to a bubble that endangers the whole economy. Prices rose a staggering 23% over the past year, putting home ownership way beyond most people not already on the fabled ladder – younger, first-time buyers especially. If it walks like a bubble and talks like a bubble, then it must be a bubble, right?
The only problem is that bubbles might not be what they used to be. House prices are being steadily inflated in many other developed economies such as the US and UK. In Australia, prices rose 2.8% in March, the fastest monthly growth for 33 years. But governments are in no hurry to copy Jacinda Ardern’s canary in the coalmine moment, as the renowned Société Générale economist and market sceptic Albert Edwards has dubbed it, and instruct central banks to make dampening prices part of monetary policy.
Continue reading...Small outbreaks and universal genomic sequencing provides unique insights into how coronavirus spreads
Jenene Crossan doesn’t know where she got it. “I caught it in London, have no idea where or from who, in March 2020,” she says. “I’ve been sick ever since.” Crossan used to worry about it – going back over possible infection scenarios, exchanging theories with a friend who got ill at the same time. These days, though, she’s come to terms with not knowing. “The reality is it doesn’t matter,” she says. “London was awash.”
Like many of the vast majority of people unlucky enough to receive a positive Covid test result, the precise moment of infection remains a mystery. Some might narrow it down to a likely household member, friend or workmate who began showing symptoms too. Others trace it to a gathering – a wedding, funeral, or dinner party, where several attendees subsequently came down sick. But most are left wondering. As a New York Times headline put it last year: “How Are Americans Catching the Virus? Increasingly, They Have No Idea”.
Continue reading...When Polish-born Hania Żądło inquired about the strange avocado-like fruit, she was met with a mixture of indignation, hostility … and sympathy
When Hania Żądło, a new arrival in New Zealand, asked an innocent question about an unfamiliar fruit, she was not to know that she was undermining a national treasure.
As a registered nurse, Żądło and her husband, an anaesthetic technician, had both been granted “critical purpose” visas to take up jobs at Dunedin hospital. After landing in Auckland from the UK in late March, they were sent with their two children to the Crowne Plaza hotel for two weeks’ mandatory quarantine.
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