If National wins ...

[iceman]

A good article from Rodney and I think he is spot on !
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/n...ectid=11195560

[elZorro]

A good article from Rodney and I think he is spot on !
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/n...ectid=11195560

Rodney says the Green Party are more red than green, again this is just propaganda. He is right to point out that the Greens and Labour need to get themselves organised so as to deny National the chance to get any headlines about fringe policy. The Greens have heaps of sensible policy.

The latest report from the Land and Water Forum (NOF) proposes allowing ten times the current maximum Nitrogen levels in freshwater streams, that is how they are solving the problem of water pollution in NZ. If a waterway in NZ hits the proposed upper limit of nitrogen, it will be higher concentration than the lower Mississippi River, worse than the Yangtze River at Shanghai, and similar to the River Thames (the worst river in the OECD) according to Dr Mike Joy, senior lecturer in sustainability, Massey university. The forum members have made some progress, but when arable, drystock and dairy farmers need more production quickly, they use Nitrogen predominantly, assuming other minerals are present. If they are allowed these new limits, they will certainly exploit them. Dr Joy says that the proposed standards are set so low, that virtually no rivers will fail the new weakened limits, and many will get much worse.

A vote for either Labour or the Greens should stop that sort of sabotage in our country. Vote Act if you like Iceman, but what if they don't get enough votes?

[iceman]

A vote for either Labour or the Greens should stop that sort of sabotage in our country. Vote Act if you like Iceman, but what if they don't get enough votes?

I am sure you would have liked Matt McCarten's article in todays Herald. He is a very angry Leftie who can not accept NZ has moved on far away from his political agenda.

I've never said I'm an ACT voter EZ but definitely will not be voting for the very red Greens ! I think we have several parties in the coming election that may not make it into parliament and votes on them will be wasted. I don't think ACT will be one of them.

[elZorro]

I am sure you would have liked Matt McCarten's article in todays Herald. He is a very angry Leftie who can not accept NZ has moved on far away from his political agenda.

I've never said I'm an ACT voter EZ but definitely will not be voting for the very red Greens ! I think we have several parties in the coming election that may not make it into parliament and votes on them will be wasted. I don't think ACT will be one of them.

I'll have to get a copy Iceman.

I have spent 30 mins on the web and finally found the water quality document Dr. Joy mentions. Here it is.

http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/...management.pdf

Anyone can make a submission on this, for the next 2 days or so. In Appendix 2 is the real meat of this document. The proposed National Bottom Line levels for pollutants in freshwater are set at just above the point where aquatic animals die, not 50% of the way there, but right on the edge. Algal blooms will occur much earlier than this. Appendix 2 also spells out the ABCD thresholds, (D) being not acceptable.

Total Nitrogen would be allowed to go as high as 0.75g/tonne water, P is 0.5g/tonne, and NO3-N or Nitrate-Nitrogen appears to be at 6.9g per tonne. The guidelines being used at the moment for some of these nutrient levels must be a lot lower.

Note the very small masses of nutrients in water causing these effects. Point source and leaching runoff from farms is widespread, every bit of externally sourced nutrient that a farmer purchases but doesn't export off the farm, could potentially end up in waterways.

Belgarion, I agree that more people voting would certainly help Labour's chances. Labour will need to run a very good campaign, but they do have plenty of data on their side.

[fungus pudding]

Vote Act if you like Iceman, but what if they don't get enough votes?

They will.

[Minerbarejet]

God forbid. I remember them so well - every part of them was absolute junk right down to the Skoda motor

What I loved about the Trekka was its automatic centre of gravity raising system brought about by a
transverse rear spring on independent suspension- on cornering it had a tendency to tuck the the inside rear wheel in and reducing the track width by quite a margin. Quite handy on the side of a hill- had a few OMG moments -I'm still here though - the Trekka is not.

[craic]

I will never forgive the Trekka (NZ Forest Service) that I was driving, in town with my visiting Wellington boss as a passenger. I had just spotted a very extreme version of the latest fashion, the miniskirt, and I was gazing intently at this wonder when the Trella decided to bury its left windscreen pillar in the corner of the deck of a flat deck truck that was double parked to unload. Later it was to drop its sump plug on State Highway 50 walking distance from Ongaonga.

[elZorro]

That's two good NZ Made Trekkas written off. I took the liberty of having a look on TradeMe, there are none for sale. Must be a collector's item then. BTW Craic, you appear to be accident prone .

Hounded by her parliamentary colleagues, Metiria Turei has shown the press through her $137,000 castle in Dunedin, complete with a truck tyre for a window frame.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=11195535 She's a hard case by the look of it.

I read the McCarten article Iceman, I didn't find it angry, more informative.

The tables on the stats website show that the percentage of participation in the workforce is about the same, the unemployment rate is stubbornly higher after reaching a new level of near 7% in December 2009 (from a low of 3.3%). The Labour Force survey of 15,000 households gives the unemployed number in Sept 3013 as about 148,000, plus or minus 10,000. The official stats show..

http://nzdotstat.stats.govt.nz/wbos/...=TABLECODE7080 About the same number officially unemployed. But the count of NZ's working age population is another 200,000 higher since Labour was in power, and of those an extra 100,000 are not seeking work or are outside the stats coverage (outside the labour force). The figure here is 1.1mill people outside the labour force. A big voting bloc if they could be won over.

The Green Party has an online submission form for clean rivers (send off by 4th Feb), they are very organised in this, just one example of how committed they are.

https://www.greens.org.nz/takeaction...s-are-swimming

The Greens would like the target to be that you can swim in the rivers. Federated Farmers President, Bruce Wills, on water quality in the SST and on their website 11th Dec 2011:

For the record, I don't define ‘clean water' as the ability to drink straight out of the Tamaki River, but the ability to see your hands in water without falling ill afterwards. When you look at all of your daily uses of water, where it goes and what happens to it, what does clean water mean to you?

Which is more like a target that you could approach and touch a river with caution, and that'll be OK. The media release is, unsurprisingly, missing from the achives now.

http://www.fedfarm.org.nz/publicatio...11/Default.asp

[craic]

The clean water bit is overdone. Our water land on a variety of sheds proceeds through large amounts of debris, half rotten leaves, possum and bird droppings and the odd dead sparrow or whatever through various pipes to a tank from where it is pumped back into the house. Twenty years of drinking this soup has only made me fatter. My dog, on the other hand, prefers a more stagnant brew from stray containers about the property. A couple of goats I had in the past refused to drink any water from any source at any time. Just for the record, I sometimes walk along the Thames around Mortlake and the amount of rubbish in that waterway is incredible, but, there are plenty of serious swimmers in the water from time to time.

[elZorro]

The clean water bit is overdone. Our water land on a variety of sheds proceeds through large amounts of debris, half rotten leaves, possum and bird droppings and the odd dead sparrow or whatever through various pipes to a tank from where it is pumped back into the house. Twenty years of drinking this soup has only made me fatter. My dog, on the other hand, prefers a more stagnant brew from stray containers about the property. A couple of goats I had in the past refused to drink any water from any source at any time. Just for the record, I sometimes walk along the Thames around Mortlake and the amount of rubbish in that waterway is incredible, but, there are plenty of serious swimmers in the water from time to time.

It's the thin edge of the wedge though, Craic. I'd hate to see Taupo look like Rotorua, even though it's a far bigger and deeper lake. A regional councillor I spoke to last week said that they have made some good headway in the Rotorua lakes by seeding them with alum to drop out the extra nutrients into the sediment. It's still there on the bottom however. Even Taupo now has enough weed at the southern end to support rogue catfish.

FP, Cuzzie and Iceman, I feel for you. ACT voters are a rare species by all accounts. Mr Boscowan is not in the running, that must have been an interesting internal vote considering he probably saved the party from financial ruin. So now the press turns its attention to Winston Peters, and John key has been a bit offhand to him in the past. A brutal election year ahead I think.