Written By: advantage - Date published: 9:34 am, December 20th, 2020 - 22 comments
New Zealand like most countries across the world in the last year, has gone deeper and deeper into public debt.
It’s pretty clear that the New Zealand government’s response to economic crisis from lockdowns and global trade crashes by spending tonnes of debt money has been extremely effective.
Yet for some, it’s simple: debts must always be paid back.
We can still remember how Greece was treated by Germany during the GFC: pay the public debt you owe to us, and suffer.
Surely our huge new debt means taxes have to get raised in the future?
We have won so far because geographical isolation gave us about a week of decision-making space to lock down hard.
The extra week was helpful – but much more important was being prepared to make that decision to lock-down hard. The Tory party would have been incapable of such a decision no matter how many extra weeks they were handed – and that was Ed s point. A National government here would have (most likely) been unable to make that decision. Scomo looked like he wasn t capable of that decision – but fortunately state premiers took it out of his hands. It took some guts to defy the belief of the most powerful sectors of society that they have an unfettered right to ongoing capital accumulation under all circumstances. Ardern had the guts and humanity to do it. However this remarkable effort at kicking business into line looks like it was just a one-off.
Population has always been a critical driver of events and prior to the Industrial Revolution we lived in a zero sum world, with energy and resources effectively limited to that which could be harvested from photosynthesis, one person’s gain was at the limit, always someone else’s loss. Very low density hunter gather populations could thrive (often quite nicely) because they rarely approached their local resource limits, but the invention of agriculture changed this dramatically. The next 10,000 odd years of recorded history is a long story of
local competition for fundamentally constrained opportunities.
There were only three ways to survive and dominate, use what you had more efficiently, take what someone else already had, or move to somewhere not yet occupied. One drove warfare, conquest and empire, the other drove innovation and intensification … yet the diffuse and intermittent nature of sunshine and climate imposed a strict zero sum game on both of these strategies, a
Pēpi steps: Two mothers on creating taonga with te reo Māori
Essays
Celebrating a new series of the beloved Reo Pēpi bilingual board books, we have essays from Kitty Brown (Ngāi Tahu) who creates the books with her cousin Kirsten Parkinson, and Helen Steemson, a Pākehā mum determined to share te reo with her Māori son.
Kitty Brown
Recently, my two-year-old spoke her first words in te reo Māori. I was elated. However, not long afterward her cognitive development surpassed my reo skills. My struggle to keep up with her need for language means she now defaults to English first, most of the time, like me. It brings tears to my eyes sometimes when I say “Watch out bub!” and then, “Ata haere e kō!”