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Gordon Campbell - Latest News [Page 33]
Gordon Campbell On The Pope’s Visit To Iraq
Monday, 15 March 2021, 10:17 am | Gordon Campbell
As an exercise in global symbolic politics, it would be hard to top last week’s meeting in Iraq between Pope Francis and the most respected cleric in Shia Islam, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Both men have strong liberal credentials. Francis ... More >>
On Why We’ll Need Three Doses Of The Pfizer Vaccine – And On Rocket Lab’s Work For The Pentagon
Thursday, 11 March 2021, 10:07 am | Gordon Campbell
Yesterday, the government finally released a four part timetable setting out which groups will get vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and in what sequence …And yes, it did look very much like the four part plan that Australia announced ... More >>
On Some Of The Moral Objections Being Levelled At Covid Vaccines
Tuesday, 9 March 2021, 10:46 am | Gordon Campbell
Quite the switch. Barely three months ago, the government was priding itself on cannily spreading its vaccine bets between Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Novovaxx and the Johnson and Johnson vaccine being produced by its subsidiary, Janssen. It had seemed ... More >>
On Australia's Superior Ways Of Communicating About Its Vaccine Rollout
Thursday, 4 March 2021, 12:05 pm | Gordon Campbell
It isn’t only on the cricket field that Australia performs better. The clarity and degree of detail in Australian’s published schedule of the priorities for its vaccine rollout has been very impressive. Here for instance, is their initial “1a” ... More >>
On Why The Public Doesn’t Always Do What Its Told, Even In 24 Different Languages
Wednesday, 3 March 2021, 4:06 pm | Gordon Campbell
Today we were told that the Covid vaccines available to New Zealand are both halal and kosher. Good to know. And good to officially recognise that we’re no longer living in a monoculture. Reportedly, the government is putting its Covid messages ... More >>
On Who Decides On The Priority List For Covid Vaccines
Tuesday, 2 March 2021, 11:26 am | Gordon Campbell
During the past week, the nation has gone through a range of mixed feelings about south Auckland. Understandably, there’s been a hankering in some quarters to punish a few of the rule breakers who plunged all of Auckland back into lockdown…Yet alongside ... More >>
On The Rivals For The Covid Saliva Testing Dollar
Friday, 26 February 2021, 1:59 pm | Gordon Campbell
As the cliché goes, every crisis is an opportunity. The pandemic seems no exception. To be clear though: at any time, it is quite OK to make money from working in, with or on behalf of the public health system. It is also OK to be making money after ... More >>
On Labour’s Fudging On Child Poverty, And America’s Diplomatic Dance With Iran
Wednesday, 24 February 2021, 10:21 am | Gordon Campbell
If you want a good insight into what the limits of tiny, barely discernible steps to reduce poverty actually look like, delve into the latest Statistics Department figures on poverty in New Zealand Most of the nine measures utilised reveal little ... More >>
On Australia’s Attempt To Demonise Facebook
Monday, 22 February 2021, 12:43 pm | Gordon Campbell
It is a free country. Feel free to treat the battle between Australia and Facebook as a case of Facebook using its immense power to bully a sovereign nation, and as prime evidence for why Mark Zuckerberg needs to be taken down a peg. That’s certainly ... More >>
On Welcoming Pfizer’s Vaccine, And Saying Goodbye To Afghanistan
Friday, 19 February 2021, 11:16 am | Gordon Campbell
Good news, meet bad news. Co-incidentally, on the same day that New Zealand delivers its first doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to our frontline border security and managed isolation unit workers, the Pfizer company has (a) conceded that its vaccine ... More >>
On Another Epic Failure By Australia To Act Decently On The World Stage
Wednesday, 17 February 2021, 10:20 am | Gordon Campbell
Not for the first time, New Zealand’s leaders did us proud yesterday while – faced with the same moral challenge- Australia leaders fouled their nest. The case of 26-year-old Suhayra Aden and her two surviving pre-school children is clear cut. ... More >>
On The Latest Lockdown, And On Air NZ’s Saudi Military Sales
Monday, 15 February 2021, 12:01 pm | Gordon Campbell
A three day Covid lockdown feels like the pandemic equivalent of T20 cricket. Just as T20 isn’t really cricket, this three day breathing space isn’t a realistic timeframe for detecting and isolating the potential spreaders of a disease that has ... More >>
On Why The Reserve Bank Won’t Be Spooked By Inflation Making A Comeback
Friday, 12 February 2021, 11:24 am | Gordon Campbell
One year into the pandemic, people are still getting sick and dying at different rates according to their age, gender, ethnic background and income level – and those same patterns have been evident in the economic impacts of the virus as well. ... More >>
On Leaving Women Out Of The Job Creation Plans, Plus The Current Vaccine Blues
Wednesday, 10 February 2021, 10:12 am | Gordon Campbell
Women workers have taken an unequal impact of the job losses caused by the pandemic but so far almost all the government’s job creation efforts have been concentrated in sectors – e.g. on “shovel ready” projects in the construction industry where ... More >>
On Why Matariki Will Be A Valuable Cultural Counterpart To Waitangi Day
Tuesday, 9 February 2021, 10:20 am | Gordon Campbell
Now that Matariki has been added to the roster of national holidays, it is bound to become more meaningful than most of our other holiday occasions, many of which have lost much of the symbolic power they once had. For example: the religious holidays ... More >>
On The Case For Investing In Coastal Shipping
Wednesday, 3 February 2021, 9:35 am | Gordon Campbell
The enduring damage done by the economic reforms of the 1980/1990s is still playing out in the communities that lost thousands of well-paid full time jobs, and with a subsequent influx of drugs, domestic violence and mental health problems. A far ... More >>
On The Climate Change Commission’s Slow Motion Response
Monday, 1 February 2021, 12:55 pm | Gordon Campbell
Good grief. An eleven to fifteen year window of adjustment to the threat from climate change is still being decried as “too ambitious” by the usual suspects: ie the farming, transport and fossil fuel sectors responsible for the vast bulk of our climate ... More >>
On The GameStop Saga, And Fox’s Bad News
Friday, 29 January 2021, 11:09 am | Gordon Campbell
For over a decade, the stock market in the US (and everywhere else) has been utterly detached from the lives and the wellbeing of ordinary people. During 2020 for instance, as the Covid economic recession raged and jobs were lost a rates unseen since the ... More >>
On The Risk Of Being Short Changed By Pfizer
Wednesday, 27 January 2021, 10:32 am | Gordon Campbell
Who knew that the delivery of the Covid vaccines was going to be such a headache? All the predictions had been around the likely distribution problems. Would there be enough trained vaccinators around the country, a sufficient number of medical ... More >>
On Northland’s Covid Case, And Biden’s Battle Lines
Tuesday, 26 January 2021, 10:39 am | Gordon Campbell
The South African variant at the centre of the Northland case of community transmission calls for a reset of several aspects of our Covid response. Some aspects of that reset are overdue. Since the pandemic began, the debate on whether transmission can ... More >>
