Ignore legacy parties, seize the Opportunity
The Green Party’s "all-in" push for Dunedin (ODT 18.2.26) ignores a major shift in the environmental sector.
Last week, the "big four" of conservation — Forest & Bird, WWF, Greenpeace, and EDS — boycotted National’s event to attend Opportunity’s Teal Forum instead.
This is a massive signal to Dunedin voters. While the Greens are often distracted by social side-issues, Opportunity is being recognised by experts as the serious, evidence-based choice for the planet.
Their newly released Healthy Oceans and Healthy Land policies show a level of economic and environmental integration other parties simply haven’t matched.
For a city like Dunedin, which prides itself on scientific excellence, the choice shouldn’t be about which Chris we like best, or which slogan sounds the greenest. It’s about which policy actually works.
The "wasted vote" myth is dead; experts have moved to Opportunity. Maybe Dunedin voters should too.
Nato article annoys
Once more Gwynne Dyer’s opinion piece (19.2.26) shows starkly why the ODT needs to be sourcing a wider range of worldviews in its regular syndicated foreign correspondent opinion pieces.
Only someone mindlessly locked in Western Minority World cognitive dissonance would make the staggeringly risible claims that "As far as hegemons go the United States was a relatively benevolent one . . . and we will doubtless come to regret Donald Trump's decision to dismantle it prematurely."
Who’s we Mr Dyer? Certainly not the mainly Global South nations that have been besieged invaded bombed or simply subverted since World War 2.
Canadian PM Carney’s candid, yet still limited admission that Western Minority World nations have excused or even actively supported these ongoing US hegemonic rampages from its 800 military bases worldwide, because Canada and the other WMW nations have benefited from the plunder, means Dyer has no evidence for his claim.
No empire in history has had such a violent global reach. If we are to survive as a species it must end and humanity will not regret it.
Ditch Dyer or better still, widen your choice of regular correspondents.
Responding to Hawkins
Re Aaron Hawkins’ comment in the ODT (20.2.26), saying that Dunedin City Council should upscale new community housing, this would not be an efficient use of very scarce ratepayer funds.
However, the DCC could do as other cities do and incentivise existing accredited community housing providers such as the Salvation Army, iwi and Habitat for Humanity. For example, council could waive development levies. The DCC has no formal mechanisms for any assistance to community housing providers.
It’s great that we’ve saved the 400k on the Fitzroy St housing project and I congratulated staff on this saving at the last council meeting. The truth is we can be smarter across the board of spending and save not hundreds of thousands but millions across all our capital spending.
Dunedin has suffered a severe loss of central government funding for new public housing in recent years and it’s up to the council, alongside community housing providers, to provide a compelling case to reinstate at least some of that housing.
[Russell Lund is a Dunedin City councillor.]
Smashing pictorial telling of Trump’s tariff tale
Congratulations to Shaun Yeo on his wonderful cartoon today (23.2.26).
The US Supreme Court decision ruling Trump’s "liberation day" global tariff agenda as illegal sends a powerful message to the president. True to form the Trump administration, in typical defiance, has in short order found a workaround to reintroduce a new troubling global tariff requiem.
However the overriding message has little to do about tariffs, per se, but something much bigger in that Trump’s presidency doesn’t have unlimited executive power to do what it likes.
With the US Congress failing to exercise any effective restraint or oversight on the president’s dictatorial leadership and with the midterm elections still nine months away, the US Supreme Court has sent a very clear message that nobody, and that includes the president, is above the law.
Unfortunately Trump is not listening. The predictable and inflammatory response from him was to attack their ruling as "disgraceful", coupled with a barrage of personal insults directed at six of nine Supreme Court judges.
Sadly Trump’s second term will continue to create uncertainty and chaos and challenge the very foundation and bedrocks of US society.
Gaza ceasefire? What ceasefire?
Why is it that "good" people, like many Kiwis, haven’t felt the need to write, to talk, to walk, to lobby, for the cessation of the Gaza genocide and against the annexation of West Bank Palestinian land?
Our silence may mean complicity in one of the most dreadful, horrendous assaults on a particular race by a supremely wealthy, highly militarised country which openly states that they desire the land, without the people.
Much of Western media is subservient to wealthy owners and patrons, portraying the current ethnic cleansing as a "War on Hamas", while facts are that civilians, particularly children, are the prime target, that health workers (1700) and journalists (240-plus) killed are also targets through the AI equipment employed by the Israeli military machine.
Many now believe that there is a "ceasefire" in Gaza, that the sham "Board of Peace" is a good thing for Palestinians.
Yet , the people of Gaza are now in the most desperate, dangerous phase of their entire 100 years of subjugation and oppression. Their land is disappearing under the control of the IDF, the food supply is so limited that starvation is being reported, seriously ill and injured are being denied access through the Rafah crossing and bombs and snipers continue, more than 600 (most women and children) deaths during the non-existent "ceasefire".
Any response, no matter how small, is better than silence.
Gone fishing
Interesting that Earl Bardsley (20.2.26) should state that consideration of the battery scheme for Lake Onslow is best left until the private consortium bid for fast track process is known.
Dr Bardsley reopened the subject on 9.2.26 in the Otago Daily Times, thereby attracting comment. For him to now say consideration of the project is best left for the time being seems to be self-serving and a futile attempt to halt others’ views on the subject.
Well, must end now, got another fishing trip to Onslow to help organise.
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