I’d just like to use this introduction paragraph to let you all know that I am not a journalist – I am simply a fuckwit with internet access and a couple of pages in Aotearoa’s best student magazine. Will I give you well researched, impartial stories about things that may affect you? No, probably not. Will I put my bias aside and report on the things that really matter? No, absolutely not. Here’s a summary of some of the news I read last week tho:
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New Zealand’s Labour Party have released their budget for 2022. In an incredibly boring, four hour long meeting of Parliament, Deputy Prime Minister / Minister of Finance Grant Robinson announced a package that includes $1b towards the cost of living crisis, over $11b in healthcare, a couple billion on climate and education, and around $500m for Māori and Pacific initiatives. The announcement was followed by National leader Chris Luxon and ACT leader David Seymour yelling about how much they thought it sucked, which just goes to show how incredibly intelligent they must be to be able to process and understand a complicated budget immediately after they first heard about it. It’s also looking like students will be getting a lump sum of $350 some time soon, which I feel is more of a handout to landlords and supermarkets, rather than something that is actually going to meaningfully help students. We also covered the budget live on our Instagram – you can check out the highlights at @nexusmedia_nz
Australia’s Labor Party won last week’s Federal Election for the first time in almost a decade. While Labor did gain a few seats over the Liberal and National Party coalition, a bunch of independent / Green Party members winning long-held, traditionally conservative seats paved the way for Labor leader Anthony Albanese to take the throne last week. Political commentators attribute the so-called ‘teal independents’ and Green Party’s successes to the public’s frustration with climate change inaction, after years of extreme weather events finally convinced people that climate change is real. Many have been overjoyed to see the back of exiting Prime Minister Scott Morrison – perhaps none more than French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who described ScoMo as ‘unequivocally incompetent.’ Bye!
A freak tornado has damaged up to 50 homes in the town of Levin. Around 6:30am last last Friday, the tornado tore through the Horowhenua district and saw roofs lifted off houses, powerlines and trees ripped out of the ground, and a subsequent gas leak causing nearby SH1 to close. In addition to the tornado, Metservice reported 12,000 lightning strikes over the course of the morning, and a hail storm in nearby Ōhau was so powerful it caused dents in resident’s cars. The Horowhenua District Council reports that around 250 volunteers helped out over the weekend with clean up efforts, and so far, seven houses have been rendered uninhabitable – although that probably still wouldn’t stop Lodge from trying to rent them out for $700 a week. Scientists predict that with global temperatures rising due to climate change, weather events will be more extreme and happen more often.
10,000 health workers across the country walked off the job last week as part of a strike for ‘fair pay and conditions.’ At the moment, many of our most crucial hospital and healthcare workers are being paid just over the minimum wage – much less than any middle-manager at Waikato DHB, and certainly much less than they deserve for keeping people alive. It has been an incredibly rough few years for our healthcare workers on the frontline dealing with COVID-19, and the Public Service Association believes that now is the best time to push for change before DHBs around the country get absorbed into new entity HealthNZ on July 1st. After declining a ‘completely inadequate’ pay offer from DHBs, the PSA union is now ‘calling for negotiations to be handed over to HealthNZ… as we have lost confidence in the Ministry of Health.’ Who hasn’t, tbh.