There is a rot at the core of schooling in New Zealand. The Ministry of Education follows unscientific advice and is in thrall to a flawed philosophy. Education is awash with debates and dichotomies. Should schooling be about knowledge or personal discovery? Should teachers provide motivation for learning or nurture it intrinsically? Should schools provide Read more
A call for help from domestic or family violence is made on average every four minutes in New Zealand, whose high statistics regularly top global lists. And South Auckland is the country’s ground zero, where 23,000 calls come in yearly for family violence. The area also has a large Māori and Pacific Islander population, but Read more
Whether it is in the Business Insider, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Deutsche Welle, Time magazine or the CBC media, New Zealand has been widely lauded as the COVID-19 “success story.” On 8 June, the island nation announced that its last person known to be infected with COVID-19 has recovered. This means that (at that Read more
Gender diversity lessons aren’t appropriate and should be stopped, a primary teacher has told a parliamentary select committee. It is the “stuff of nightmares” Waitakiri Primary School teacher Helen Houghton told the committee. “I believe our professional integrity comes under threat when we are required to teach ideology that many in our parent communities, as Read more
Last month I joined with Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) to speak at a series of public forums around the country to discuss the future for asylum seekers who remain in limbo in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. So far I have spoken in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart and Launceston, Adelaide, Perth and Benalla in Read more
The wedding invitation said ‘summer chic’. I smiled to myself as I read this request of the parents of the bride. I had to hope that my hosts would be very understanding. The black suit of a priest would hardly pass as ‘summer chic’! At any celebration, the hosts are very much in charge. They Read more
The New Zealand Wars (1845–72) had a decisive influence over the course of the nation’s history. Yet Pākehā have not always cared to remember them in anything approaching a robust manner, engaging at different times either in elaborate myth-making that painted the wars as chivalrous and noble or, when that was no longer tenable, actively choosing to ignore them Read more
One of the most persuasive myths about prostitution is that it is “the oldest profession”. Feminist abolitionists, who wish to see an end to the sex trade, call it “the oldest oppression” and resist the notion that prostitution is merely “a job like any other”. Now it would appear that the New Zealand immigration service Read more
Caught in the big, boisterous march that kicked off Māori Language Week in Wellington on Monday I wondered why it took so long for us to accept that a language is a world, and we lose something by not living in it. In a goofy, inattentive way I learned Latin and French at school, unconvinced that I’d Read more
News from Chief Coroner Deborah Marshall that a record 606 people took their own lives in 2016/17, up from 579 the previous year and 564 the year before that, shows that how this country is tackling suicide is not working. This month Health Minister Jonathan Coleman announced a $100 million allocation to fund 17 initiatives Read more