Category: society

Should We Lower Women’s Pensions to Bridge The “Gender Death Gap”?

The average Kiwi female enjoys 26% more life post-retirement than the average Kiwi male – this is dubbed the “gender death gap”

The national consciousness is currently in a state of hysteria over an Auckland electrician’s decision to offer a 12% discount to female customers on account of New Zealand’s “gender wage gap”. For those of you not in the matrix, the gender wage gap refers to the fact that the average weekly income of a woman is lower than the average weekly income of a man.

Although Dan McGlashan proved in Understanding New Zealand that the wage gap is entirely due to the fact that men work full-time jobs more often and the women work part-time jobs more often, and that there is no difference in wages for those men and women who are part of the professional class, the perception persists that women are deliberately ripped off in remuneration for their labour by some nefarious conspiracy of people with Y chromosomes.

Some, like the Auckland electrician mentioned above, seem to believe that this perception of a malevolent bias against women justifies giving women discounts when it comes to trade, in an effort to redress the imbalance in wages.

The real injustice when it comes to differential treatment of the genders is that women live much longer than men do. Females born today are expected to live 3.7 years longer than men do, an injustice many times more cruel than a piddling difference in wages.

The average female can expect to live 83.2 years from birth, whereas the average male can not even count on getting to 80. His average life expectancy is only 79.5.

Another way of looking at it is that the average female gets another 18.2 years of life after hitting retirement age at 65, compared to the paltry 14.5 years of the average male.

Measured in percentages, this means that the average female gets to enjoy 26% more life in their golden years than the average male. This is a disparity that weighs much heavier than that of mere money. Here we are talking about life itself.

We can call this disparity the “gender death gap”. Knowing about this gap in life expectancy, and knowing that there are tireless calls for restitution from working age men on account of the gender wage gap, one question immediately arises: should we call for restitution from pension age women?

It could be argued that, if tradesmen like the electrician mentioned earlier give discounts to working age women on account of the gender wage gap, they also should give discounts to pension age men. After all, the clock is ticking for those men in a way that does not compare to the experience of the female.

Perhaps the fairest solution would be to immediately cut female pensions by 26%, which would equalise the amount of post-retirement money that the different genders got out of the Government.

Why A Canterbury Government Is The Natural Successor To The Fifth National

The Helen Clark-Winston Peters alliance of 2005-2008 was the last time the New Zealand Government didn’t suck

The National Party is clearly and evidently falling out of favour with the New Zealand electorate. An opinion poll publicised last night showed that the Labour Party now has more public support than National, for the first time since John Key became Prime Minister in 2008. The various coalition possibilities after September 23 are numerous, but this essay argues that a Canterbury Government would be the best for New Zealand.

This means Canterbury as in red and black, not the province. In other words, a coalition of Labour and New Zealand First would be the most likely to improve the standard of living of New Zealanders.

We can’t take it for granted that Labour will win just yet, but the signs are ominous for Bill English. Usually the incumbent Prime Minister dominates the Preferred Prime Minister poll against all comers. This has been the case ever since Jim Bolger was in charge. However, Jacinda Ardern is now ahead of English in the latest poll, despite being in opposition.

Moreover, the Labour Party has leaped almost 20% in the polls since Ardern became leader. This is partly because the electorate did not think highly of the stuffy Andrew Little, but mostly because of the growing perception that the National Party has completely lost control of immigration, of housing and of mental healthcare. The long-term effects of slashing funding to rape crisis centres and suicide hotlines for the sake of tax cuts are now starting to be felt, and the feeling is bitter.

The heartfelt desire in many quarters is for a Watermelon Government after the 23rd, namely Labour in coalition with the Greens. Indeed, this seemed like the most likely outcome for a long time – the Greens were, until recently, polling at close to 15%, and that meant that Labour only had to get up to 32-33% for the two parties to rule without any outside help.

Unfortunately for Meteria Turei and her Greens, the chaos of recent weeks has eaten away at that support. The party effectively committed seppuku in the wake of Turei’s confession about cheating WINZ and the electorate no longer seems to consider them to be a competent and reliable party.

This is where a Canterbury Government could be the most effective. The black of New Zealand First could help moderate the excesses of the reds in Labour, and prevent the lunatics in the Greens from having any excess influence.

Perhaps the most dangerous, if not outright suicidal, of the Greens’ policies relates to their desire to raise the “refugee” quota to several thousand. Letting in hordes of fighting age men who are possessed by criminal religious attitudes has been a catastrophe for Europe, yet the Greens, mad with ideology, would happily make the same error here.

As we have seen in Europe, the problem with letting in even a thousand “refugees” is that they soon become eligible to bring their families here, and then those family members become eligible to bring other family members here, and eventually the floodgates cannot be closed.

Peters and New Zealand First would provide a much-needed nationalist bulwark to this fashionable Marxist insanity. Peters is not afraid to have crowds of hysterical teenagers and twentysomethings shrieking “Racist!” at him – he’s endured much worse in his time in politics.

If he does become the kingmaker after the 23rd, he is therefore in a good position to reject the demands of the Greens to throw open the borders. This will make it possible for the Sixth Labour Government to focus on the issues that matter to all Kiwis, in particular housing, wages, mental health and drug law reform.

Considering that Peters has already shown himself entirely capable of working successfully with a younger, intellectual, female Prime Minister, as he did with Helen Clark between 2005 and 2008, there is good reason to think that a Canterbury Government is the best option for maintaining and raising the Kiwi standard of living for the next electoral cycle.

New Zealand Is Losing Badly From Our Refusal to Legalise Cannabis

As the technology and knowledge to best grow cannabis develops further in legal territories, New Zealand falls further and further behind

With news that the North American cannabis industry grew by 30% in 2016 to reach a total of USD6,700,000,000 worth of sales, savvy investors in North America are scrambling to get a piece of the action. Stats show that the cannabis industry is projected to grow at a compound rate of over 25% until 2021, a faster pace of growth than even the Internet managed during the dotcom era.

New Zealand could easily become one of the world leaders in the cannabis industry. Almost nowhere in the world has the same combination of excellent growing conditions and a passionate and knowledgeable workforce. But, sadly, almost nowhere else in the world has a political class as cowardly and short-sighted as ours.

The New Zealand Government and our business elites constantly stress the importance of innovation for our future economic well-being. We are told everyday that we need to be smart and be one step ahead of our competition. Well, our competition is blazing ahead – 21% of the American population now lives in states where recreational cannabis is fully legal. This equates to over 60 million people.

The 4.7 million people trapped on our archipelago at the bottom of the South Pacific are losing out, and because of the incompetence of our political leadership we are falling further and further behind. Every quarter that passes means that our competition in North America advances their business practices further ahead of ours, meaning that it will be harder and harder for New Zealanders to compete in this market once we are finally allowed to do so.

For example, much of the new investment money flowing into the North American cannabis industry is establishing a capital base that, if we keep sitting on our hands, we won’t be able to compete with.

New technologies such as sensors that precisely measure the environmental conditions inside grow rooms, and computer software that makes adjustments to these conditions for the optimal possible plant growth, are being developed and rolled out in territories where it is legal to do so. New LED lighting technology is making it possible for growers to tailor the precise wavelength frequency of the light in their growing operation to the specific needs of the strain being grown.

These are examples of the kind of innovation that is generating money for people in more enlightened jurisdictions. New Zealanders could be competing with the North Americans for a share of this market, but we’re not allowed to.

We are also falling behind our competition when it comes to knowledge.

This is a double mistake because much of the knowledge of how to best produce a cannabis crop is in the hands of Maoris, who are the most desperate for new economic opportunities. As demonstrated by Hikurangi Enterprises, who have conducted a successful trial for growing hemp, many of the most knowledgeable Kiwis when it comes to cannabis are Maoris, who generally never believed the Government’s bullshit about cannabis anyway.

Ironically, a former Waikato farmer, John Lord, has used the agriculture knowledge that New Zealand excels in to become one of the heavyweights of this burgeoning industry in Colorado. He states openly that if New Zealand legalised cannabis like Colorado did five years ago, it would be worth thousands of jobs to the New Zealand economy (his estimate is 15,000). This is over and above the $400,000,000 we would save every year from costs relating to prohibition.

New Zealand is missing out on a plethora of economic opportunities in the cannabis market for no other reason than that our ruling class is backwards, cowardly and ignorant. It’s a terrible waste.

Climate Change Is The Left Wing’s War On Terror

When George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” in the wake of 9/11, right-wing parties in every Western nation immediately won a great victory. Ever since then, they have been able to appeal to the need to fight this war on terror in order to get votes. This has given them a big advantage over the left-wing parties, but now the left wing has its own equivalent of the War on Terror: climate change.

George W. Bush and his Republican Party knew full well that there would never be an end to terror, because there will never be an end to the human nature that impels sexually frustrated young men towards political violence. The Middle East will always be violent, because it’s in their nature to be, and even if they weren’t someone else would be.

Somewhere in the world, there will always be violence and terror, and this means that the War on Terror is an endless war. It is a battle that can never be won. No matter the circumstances, right-wing parties will always be able to use the violence somewhere in the world to justify increasing military spending and cracking down on civil liberties.

This has given them a permanent advantage over the left wing – until now.

If there’s one thing that can be said for certain about Nature it is that she is ever-changing. And she always will be – for over four billion years, Nature has thrown up an ever-shifting set of environmental conditions and admonished her children to adapt or die. There is absolutely nothing we can do about this, because Nature is infinitely stronger than even our collective will.

At any given time, somewhere in the world, there will be people suffering due to the whims of Nature. Somewhere in the world there will be droughts, somewhere else there will be floods, and in other places there will be storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis.

What the left wing has recently caught on to is the fact that, insofar as we have a moral obligation to fight climate change, this obligation will never and can never be discharged.

If the political class is at all capable of persuading the people they rule to submit to further taxation in the belief that the money will be used to “fight climate change”, they will be able to do so in perpetuity, because the climate will always change.

Because it’s a law of Nature that the climate will always change, no matter what humans do or don’t do, the left wing will always be able to use climate change as a justification for increasing government reach and cracking down on civil liberties. In this regard, the left wing has a weapon that matches the power of the right wing’s War or Terror. Any time anything bad naturally happens as a result of freak weather events, the left wing will be able to use it as an excuse to turn the screws.

This is how we have ended up with politicians like Jacinda Ardern saying that climate change is the “nuclear free moment” of our generation. The Labour Party knows that it can thump the drum of climate change forever, and therefore there is greater scope for long-term gathering of political capital if they prioritise this issue rather than issues like cannabis law reform (which will be soon be solved and moved on from).

Ten years, twenty years, fifty years from now, the left wing will still be prattling on about climate change.