A useful guide to how councils and other local government bodies work in New Zealand. Aimed at journalists but readable for anyone interested. Created by Local Government NZ.
LGNZ publishes the guide under the following copyright policy: “This site provides users with easy access to publicly held information. You may copy, print or download any government material on this site. Any use of scripts or code requires permission from the administrator.”
[Click to enlarge] “Sketch map of the North Island of New Zealand shewing native tribal boundaries, topographical features, confiscated lands, military and police stations, etc. 1869.” – Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, NZ Map 471.This 1869 map of New Zealand’s North Island shows Māori iwi (tribal) boundaries, confiscated land, location of armed police and military bases, and where gold was found.
It’s fascinating in many ways, not least because it shows the staggering amount of land confiscated in the Waikato – more than 1.2 million acres. The confiscations were made under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863.
The Crown created various laws in the 1860s to allow it to take land. The New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 allowed it to confiscate the land of North Island iwi deemed to have rebelled against the Crown. The Public Works Act 1864 let it take land for roads, railways, and other public works.
The Native Land Court, established in 1865 (and renamed the Māori Land Court in 1954), encouraged Māori to sell land to private buyers. But the Crown remained the biggest purchaser. It on-sold most of its Māori land, often for a profit.
By 1939, almost 100 years after the Treaty was signed, Māori retained just 1 percent of the South Island and 9 percent of the North Island. Land losses continued as the 20th century progressed, again supported by legislation.
The merchant fleet is divided into five categories, each of which has a filter and a CO2 and freight counter for the hour shown on the clock:
Container (e.g. manufactured goods): number of container slots equivalent to 20 feet (i.e. a 40-foot container takes two slots)
Dry bulk (e.g. coal, aggregates): combined weight of cargo, fuel, water, provisions, passengers and crew a vessel can carry, measured in thousand tonnes
Tanker (e.g. oil, chemicals): same as dry bulk
Gas bulk (e.g. liquefied natural gas): capacity for gases, measured in cubic metres
Vehicles (e.g. cars): same as dry bulk
If you’re interested in tracking ships around New Zealand (or anywhere, really), I can recommend marinetraffic.com. The website and the app are great.
You might also be interested in the arrival and departure of ships at New Zealand’s ports:
Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult.
And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;–and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed.
The Overton window “is an approach to identifying which ideas define the domain of acceptability within a democracy’s possible governmental policies. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public in order to move and/or expand the window. Proponents of current policies, or similar ones, within the window seek to convince people that policies outside it should be deemed unacceptable.”
A group of NASA aquanauts headed under water for 16 days to carry out research during a simulated space mission.
The NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) 21 mission began on July 21, 2016, as an international crew of aquanauts splashed down to the undersea Aquarius Reef Base, located 62 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The NEEMO 21 crew will perform research both inside and outside the habitat during a 16-day simulated space mission.
During simulated spacewalks carried out underwater, they will evaluate tools and mission operation techniques that could be used in future space missions. Inside the habitat, the crew’s objectives include testing a DNA sequencer, a medical telemetry device, and HoloLens operational performance for human spaceflight cargo transfer.
Pictured at the end of Mission Day 1 are the NEEMO 21 aquanauts, clockwise from top: Matthias Maurer (ESA), Marc O Griofa (Teloregen/VEGA/AirDocs), NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, Dawn Kernagis (Institute for Human & Machine Cognition), and Noel Du Toit (Naval Postgraduate School). Inside the Aquarius habitat are Florida International University Habitat Technicians Hank Stark (left) and Sean Moore (right). Image Credit: NASA/Karl Shreeves
NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s magnetosphere and recorded what it sounds like:
Juno’s Waves instrument recorded the encounter with the “bow shock” over the course of about two hours on June 24, 2016. “Bow shock” is where the supersonic solar wind is heated and slowed by Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
It is analogous to a sonic boom on Earth. The next day, June 25, 2016, the Waves instrument witnessed the crossing of the magnetopause. “Trapped continuum radiation” refers to waves trapped in a low-density cavity in Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
“If Jupiter’s magnetosphere glowed in visible light, it would be twice the size of the full moon as seen from Earth,” said William Kurth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, lead co-investigator for the Jupiter Waves investigation.
“And that’s the shorter dimension of the teardrop-shaped structure; the dimension extending outward behind Jupiter has a length about five times the distance between Earth and the sun.”
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
A brief but interesting TED talk by policy analyst Benedetta Berti about when and why armed groups (insurgents, militias, terrorists) get involved in politics and start providing social services.
She notes that war has changed: it less often involves a state fighting a state. “Of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between a state and a non-state actor.”
Berti notes that we, in the West, tend to think about armed groups in terms of their violence. Natural, I suppose, given that it’s the violence we mostly see on the news, and its awfulness leaves us breathless.
But she argues that our governments need to work harder at looking past the violence to understand the groups’ strengths,strategies and long-term visions. It is there that solutions might best be found.
“These groups are hybrid.They rise because they fill a gap left by the government,and they emerge to be both armed and political,engage in violent struggle and provide governance.
“What do you call a group like Hezbollah?They run part of a territory, they administer all their functions,they pick up the garbage, they run the sewage system.Is this a state? Is it a rebel group?
“We live in a world of states, non-states, and in-between,and the more states are weak, like in the Middle East today,the more non-state actors step in and fill that gap.This matters for governments, because to counter these groups,they will have to invest more in non-military tools.Filling that governance gaphas to be at the center of any sustainable approach.”
Thanks, as ever, to TED for making these talks readily available under a BY- NC-ND Creative Commons licence and for going the extra mile with sub-titles and transcripts.
