Senior National MP Judith Collins claims in her memoir to have been ‘thrown under a bus’ by former Prime Minister, John Key, over the Oravida influence allegations that prompted the PM to stand her down from Cabinet in the previous government. I can shed light on parts of the Oravida story, going right back to New Zealand media reports of the company activities in April 2013 – months before a
In relation to a Stuff story describing a Colonial New Zealand governor, Edward John Eyre, his history is more nuanced than the reference to his brutal suppression of a slave uprising later in his career. His story would have been so much more intriguing if his activity in NZ had been included. An official history says Edward John Eyre, while in New Zealand, took a keen interest in Maori affairs
The Sickness in Our Food Supply By Michael Pollan The Sickness in Our Food Supply “Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A
In November 2019 I spent a week in Fiji for a social rugby tournament, where a group of us were lucky enough to visit Nadi School. This is an account of that visit. In 2012 Nadi District School was hit by flooding and in 2016 it was walloped by a cyclone. The state school is one of Fiji’s oldest, going back to the early 1900s. But it’s far
Jack’s mother Winifred knew the Latin name for every plant in the garden but Bill Blain did most of the work. Bill came out to New Zealand from London in 1882 on the same ship as the English cricket team, who were heading to Australia for the first ever Ashes series. He had been working in the tramway stables in London, where at one stage he had been in charge
A continuation of a family story, as first told in 2005 – Straight off the Tussock James Fulton, Jack’s grandfather, was a teacher on the Isle of Bute, half an hour by ferry from Glasgow. The island is only about eight by four miles wide but when he was headmaster there at Rothesay in about 1845, the school had around 1000 children, stuck out in the Firth of Clyde.
Canterbury – and NZ too – ‘just one big paddock’ – Federated Farmers South Canterbury President Jason Grant. What great comment at https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/120637860/120000-cantabrians-will-work-through-lockdown-some-are-even-business-as-usual NZ farming may come out of this trauma more appreciated than it was previously.
Memories of Ohoka Rugby Club life member, the late Harold Stone An interview in 2008 Harold Stone grew up in swamp country, on a farm near Ohoka that would normally flood every two or three years. Eighty acres was a big farm “and you survived on what you could do”. “We were on very heavy ground, swamp ground and there was still a lot of black pine stumps, driftwood
It says something about media coverage of amateur sport that all we hear in the wake of coronavirus is talk of sport ‘shutting down’. We’re told it’s impending disaster for pro competitions, but what about the impact of those of us who play sport purely for love? This is sport in its oldest, arguably purest form, but appears more forgotten than ever. It may soon be a dark spell for