Oil Spill Latest

October 24, 2011August 5, 2018

As I’m sure most people who know me know I think all politicians are low life, so don’t take this as support for any of them, but Labour would be no different than this current lot of fools with regard to cleaning up this mess. Labour was ok with all the current laws while in power the past 9 years, they left the fines etc at extremely low levels (what? 12 million per clean up) They are all ok with dodgy ships travelling around NZ, all of which have this highly toxic crap in their holds. We have to burn ‘clean’ fuel in our cars, but just off the coast you can burn whatever you want.
Labour approved deep sea drilling, they had to and so does National, it is a MUST, if ‘we’ do not have deep sea oil the system dies, your Kiwi Saver investments go to zero, we have to keep growing, we have to keep building more roads, we have to put in water meters, we have to have more police, more council control of our lives, more pollution, get the picture? to have growth we have to have more of everything …. that includes bad stuff.
To avoid a 9.1% decline in global oil supply, the International Energy Agency said in 2007 the world needed to spend billions on deep sea oil exploration, as deep sea is about the only place left.
So if you want children, grandchildren, and a retirement fund, you better hope and pray they strike oil, because without it we are back in the dark ages.*
As I said in 2000 Transmission Gully will never be built, and that goes double for the express-way.
* the fun thing is, burning oil has cemented us into extinction already.

Kāpiti Coast councillors have toured of one of Aotearoa's unique buildings, the heritage - listed Rotunda at the former Otaki Health Camp, the country’s first.

Jeremy Smith reports that the 105-year-old, eight-sided rotunda predates the Health Camp.

It wasn't actually built in Otaki, but was one of two built in Rotorua in 1915 as part of a military hospital, on the site of Rotorua’s present public hospital.

Later they were taken to Otaki for the opening of the health camp in 1931.

Full story in the main column (December 19).

Māori politics was dominated by the influential MPs (and sometime Cabinet ministers) Māui Pōmare ( Waitara statue photo above) and Apirana Ngata.

The 1920's also saw the rise of Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana’s religious movement, and the emergence of Te Puea Hērangi in Waikato.

Ngata worked hard to foster Māori scholarship and education and preserve traditional arts and culture.

He convinced the government to establish a Board of Maori Ethnological Research (1923), a Maori Purposes Fund Control Board (1924) and a School of Maori Arts and Crafts in Rotorua (1927).

The Reform government also took the first, tentative steps towards settling longstanding Māori grievances.

Agreements with Te Arawa in 1922 and Ngāti Tūwharetoa in 1926 recognised their respective rights over the Rotorua lakes and Lake Taupō, and led to the establishment of trust boards with some government funding.

Commissions of inquiry which examined Ngāi Tahu grievances (1920–21) and the Waikato and Taranaki confiscations (1926–27) recommended that modest compensation be paid.