No more new clothes! by Angela Caldin
I don’t usually make new year’s resolutions, but on 1 January 2021, I made one. It was this: not to buy any new clothes for a year. I subsequently discovered that lots of other people have made the same resolution, have written about the experience in various publications and have joined Facebook support groups to exchange ideas and encourage each other to continue. What’s the benefit? I’m still not sure of what the logic is behind this resolution or in what way it will benefit anybody at all. I’m no longer in… Read More
Get it together and get it right by Susan Grimsdell
Sometimes I think different parts of the NZ government live on different planets. One part is always warning of the risk to the economy of New Zealanders’ high level of indebtedness. We’re told we’re deeper in debt than almost anyone else in the world: Fitch Ratings (whoever that is) reports that this country has one of the world’s highest household debt levels, at 93% of GDP. Save or spend? By the same token, we’ve also been told time and again that we need to save more. Consumer advocates urge us not to… Read More
Young people on the streets by Susan Grimsdell
I’ve come across two crowds of young people in the past couple of weeks. On 24 May hundreds and hundreds of students marched down Queen Street in Auckland blocking the entire street. They were angry at us – oldies – who have used and abused the planet: the damaged, degraded planet they will be obliged to cope with in the coming years. They carried handmade placards with messages from the heart. These were not mass-produced as is the case in some protests. “I’d be in School if the Planet were Cool”, “I’ll… Read More
DIY Aliens by Trevor Plumbly
They’re Coming to Get Us I remember with some fondness the 1950s and 60s. The popular theory at the time was that the Aliens were up there and intended to invade; indeed, according to the more fanciful newspaper accounts of the time, ‘they’ had actually visited, abducted a few of America’s fairest, transported them to the mother ship and impregnated them. However, time has shown that if indeed ‘they’ are up there, they’re either not in any hurry to ‘get’ us or they’re quite happy to let us ‘get’ ourselves. By virtue… Read More
Youth Crime – Dealing with the Half-Pint Pirates by Trevor Plumbly
Countless Agencies in the Field of Youth Crime To my jaundiced eye, it seems that there must be more people fighting juvenile crime than there are juvenile criminals to go round. From politicians to parents and the liquorice all-sorts of agencies in between, it’s astonishing to me that an army of this size can’t solve a problem that a clip round the ear might have sorted out a few years ago. But parents, even if they could be bothered, aren’t allowed to do that anymore. Contribution of Consumerism to Juvenile Crime I… Read More
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