Conscience– an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior; the inner sense of what is right or wrong in one’s conduct or motives, impelling one toward right action; source of moral or ethical judgment or pronouncement; conformity to one’s own sense of right conduct; the awareness of a moral or ethical aspect to one’s conduct together with the urge to prefer right over wrong; the complex of ethical and moral principles that controls or inhibits the actions or thoughts of an individual; an inhibiting sense of what is prudent; the part of the superego in psychoanalysis that transmits commands and admonitions to the ego.
Need attitude change not age change
30/08/2012MPs face another conscience vote tonight, this time on the sale of liquor.
Graeme Edgeler explains there are three choices and the manner of voting might not lead to the result favoured by most.
I’ve never supported a return to a purchase age in both licensed or off-license premises of 20.
I was initially supportive of a split age – 18 in licensed premises and 20 for off licence outlets.
But on further consideration am convinced that will merely be a band-aid on one symptom of a much wider problem of alcohol abuse and misuse.
That is by no means confined to 18 and 19 year-olds and it would be most unfair to restrict the majority who drink responsibly because a few of their contemporaries don’t, while doing nothing for the many over 19 who drink to excess.
We do need to address the attitude to alcohol and the problems associated with it but that won’t be achieved by tinkering with the purchase age.
Job ready – or not
30/08/2012Which bit of job-ready do people opposing Social Development Minister Paula Bennett’s determination that beneficiaries with work expectations will face sanctions if they refuse to apply for drug-tested jobs not understand?
Expecting employees to be drug-free is a reasonable expectation from employers.
Expecting beneficiaries who could work to be ready for work is also reasonable.
What’s wrong with a sanction for those who could work but do something which makes them ineligible for a job they are otherwise capable of doing?
Transparency International co-founder dies
30/08/2012Jeremy Pope, ONZM (1938-2012) who was the co-founder of Transparency International has died.
At Transparency International (TI), Pope co-created the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) which identified best and worst practices related to corruption and ranked countries accordingly. He wrote the international organization’s “manual” on preventing corruption entitled Confronting Corruption: The Elements of a National Integrity System, which was translated into more than 20 different languages.
A barrister in New Zealand and England, Pope worked for 17 years as legal counsel and then director of the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Legal Division. He was secretary to the Commonwealth Observer Group that oversaw Zimbabwe’s independence elections in 1980 and was a member of the Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons that visited South Africa in 1986 and triggered the release of Nelson Mandela.
Pope wrote guide books about New Zealand in the early 1970s and 1980s with his wife, Diana. During the 1970s he was active with the “Save Manapouri” environmental movement in New Zealand. He was for many years editor of the New Zealand Law Journal and the Commonwealth Law Bulletin.
When Pope moved to London in the 1970s, he kept close touch with New Zealand events, advising on international solutions including in relation to the South African Rugby Tour. In 1982 he became the founding trustee of Interights, which is an international human rights NGO.
In 2007, Jeremy was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for “services to international affairs.” He served as a Commissioner on the New Zealand Human Rights Commission (Te Kāhui Tika Tangata) from 31 January 2008 until his death. . .
Corruption is a plague and one of the weapons needed to fight it is transparency.
The world is a better place for the work of Mr Pope.
Joined not separated
30/08/2012Quote of the day:
. . . we are nations joined by a large ocean, rather than separated by it. Too often the obvious potential of the Pacific is overlooked. We need to focus more on the strengths and assets of our part of the world, rather than pondering on what we allegedly don’t have. Prime Minsiter John Key in his address to the Pacific Island Forum opening ceremony.
It’s good advice for more than the forum.
Farmers face ‘perfect policy tsunami’
30/08/2012Farmers would face a perfect policy tsunami in the agricultural policies of a Labour-Greens government, Federated Farmers vice-president Dr William Rolleston said.
This tsunami included adding agricultural emissions to the ETS, resource rentals for water, land and water plans put out by regional councils around the country and a capital gains tax.
It was not unreasonable to think a Labour-Greens government would be formed in 2014, he told farmers and scientists at a forum at Lincoln on the emissions trading scheme organised by the New Zealand Institute on Agricultural and Horticultural Science.
“We cannot sustain a tsunami of policies that drowns agriculture in a sea of red ink,” he said.
He gave examples of costs a Labour-Greens government would impose on farming including $40,000 a year if agriculture was forced into the ETS.
MAF modelling showed that had agriculture been in the ETS sheep farmers would have made surpluses in only two of the last four years and those surpluses would have been $4000 and $468.
Water resource rentals would add to costs, turning small profits into big losses.
All of New Zealand farms would be foreign-owned and all would be dairying because it would be the only way for land owners to achieve an economic return, he said.
Dr Rolleston also spoke of the extreme nutrient limits being set in land and water plans which would drive production levels down to those of hobby farms.
It could also trigger a banking crisis as the reality of digesting these policies all at once could sink the economy. Farmers would walk off their land and the banks would face a $48 billion write down of the debt owed to them in the rural sector.
“Foreign buyers funded by foreign banks would be the winners,” Dr Rolleston said.
Opposition to genetic modification meant the agricultural sector was being denied the tools to address its environmental responsibilities in the short timeframe demanded by environmentalists.
“It’s vital that the Greens and Labour wake up to the risks this policy tsunami imposes to the entire economy.”
This is strong speaking from the vice-president of an organisation which is non-partisan but it is not an exaggeration.
The Timaru Herald reports on farmers’ fears of needing consent to farm under Environment Canterbury’s land and water plan.
Farmers in other regions have similar concerns and if they are worried now they will be even more so under a Labour-Greens government.
I listened to an Opposition MP speak at a seminar recently.
It was under Chatham House rules so I cannot give any details. But I will say it left all of us listening with exactly the same view Dr Rolleston has on the devastating impact a Labour-Greens government would have not just on farming but the wider economy and society too.
August 30 in history
30/08/20121363 Beginning date of the Battle of Lake Poyang; the forces of two Chinese rebel leaders— Chen Youliang and Zhu Yuanzhang—were pitted against each other in what is one of the largest naval battles in history, during the last decade of the ailing, Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty.
1574 Guru Ram Das became the Fourth Sikh Guru/Master.
1590 Tokugawa Ieyasu entered Edo Castle.
1720 Samuel Whitbread, English brewer, was born (d. 1796).
1791 HMS Pandora sank after running aground on a reef the previous day.
1797 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, English writer, was born (d. 1851).
1799 Capture of the entire Dutch fleet by British forces under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby and Admiral Sir Charles Mitchell during the Second Coalition of the French Revolutionary Wars.
1800 Gabriel Prosser led a slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia.
1813 Battle of Kulm: French forces defeated by Austrian-Prussian-Russian alliance.
1813 Creek War: Creek Red Sticks carried out the Fort Mims Massacre.
1835 Melbourne was founded.
1836 The city of Houston was founded by Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen.
1862 American Civil War: Battle of Richmond: Confederates under Edmund Kirby Smith routed a Union army under General Horatio Wright.
1862 – American Civil War: Union forces were defeated in Second Battle of Bull Run.
1871 Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand-born Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, was born(d. 1937).
1873 – Austrian explorers Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht discover the archipelago of Franz Joseph Land in the Arctic Sea.
1903 Guide Joseph Warbrick and three tourists were killed instantly when Roturua’s Waimangu geyser erupted unexpectedly.
1908 Fred MacMurray, American actor, was born (d. 1991).
1909 Burgess Shale fossils discovered by Charles Doolittle Walcott.
1912 Nancy Wake AC GM, New Zealand-born World War II secret agent, was born (d. 2011).
1914 Battle of Tannenberg.
1918 Fanny Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
1922 Battle of Dumlupinar, final battle in Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922).
1930 Warren Buffett, American entrepreneur, was born.
1935 John Phillips, American singer/songwriter (The Mamas & the Papas), was born (d. 2001).
1942 World War II: Battle of Alam Halfa began.
1943 Jean-Claude Killy, French skier, was born.
1945 Hong Kong was liberated from Japan by British Armed Forces.
1945 – Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Douglas MacArthur landed at Atsugi Air Force Base.
1946 Peggy Lipton, American actress, was born.
1951 Dana, Irish singer and politician, was born.
1956 Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opened.
1962 Japan conducted a test of the NAMC YS-11, its first aircraft since the war and its only successful commercial aircraft.
1963 Hotline between the leaders of the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union went into operation.
1967 Thurgood Marshall was confirmed as the first African American Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
1972 Cameron Diaz, American actress, was born.
1974 A Belgrade–Dortmund express train derailed at the main train station in Zagreb killing 153 passengers.
1974 – A powerful bomb exploded at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters in Marunouchi, Tokyo – 8 killed, 378 injured.
1984 The Space Shuttle Discovery took off on its maiden voyage.
1995 – NATO launches Operation Deliberate Force against Bosnian Serb forces.
1999 – East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia in a referendum.
Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia