If you care to read the 12 chapters of my soon to be published on paper, book, "The Essential Forest Gardener", the link is here.
Weka, who authors posts on The Standard blog, put the chapters up for me, week after week for 12 weeks, then compiled them into one place and that's where my link will take you. I've also linked, here, to Ad's post on the same blog, where he (or she, I don't know Ad's gender) sums up after the series finished. It's a lovely follow up to the 12 posts and I'm grateful for the mention. The work is not quite as polished as it needs to be before being printed out in the form of a hold in hand book, but Antoinette, part of the Happen Films crew that filmed "An Invitation for Wildness" in our garden and home recently (here's the link to that film - 102,917 views so far!), is professionally proof-reading it for me and pruning off the extraneous bits to make it more readable. Exciting times!
Showing posts with label The standard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The standard. Show all posts
Saturday, January 7, 2017
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Friday, July 1, 2011
I don't know Frank...
... but he makes some very interesting comments over on The Standard.
Frank Macskasy 4.1.4
Rusty, I think you’re being somewhat optimistic about New Zealand reaping incredible rewards from mining.
For one thing, minerals are mostly exported. As you know, exported goods are zero-rated for gst purposes. Hence no tax in that area.
Next, government receives only 1% to 2% in royalties from mining. Not very much and if we tried increasing it, like our Aussie cuzzies did, a couple of years ago – mining companies would come down on us like a tonne of… [insert mineral here].
On top of that, the mining industry employs only a fraction of the people that tourism does. Even if we doubled mining in this country, we wouldn’t have the skilled workforce to operate any expansion. We’d have to bring workers in from offshore. It’s not hard to understand why – mining is a highly specialised profession and you can’t just dump a few thousand unemployed ex-NiWA staff or railway workers from Dunedin down a mineshaft.
Our top industries – tourism and food production – have far more potential and are re-newable/sustainable. Especially as the world’s population soars from the current 7 billion to 9 billion in 2050. That is when we will earn incredible wealth by selling food to the planet’s population.
(If we haven’t been stupid in the meantime and sold our farms to China, the Americans, or Nestle in the meantime… )
Frank Macskasy 4.1.4
Rusty, I think you’re being somewhat optimistic about New Zealand reaping incredible rewards from mining.
For one thing, minerals are mostly exported. As you know, exported goods are zero-rated for gst purposes. Hence no tax in that area.
Next, government receives only 1% to 2% in royalties from mining. Not very much and if we tried increasing it, like our Aussie cuzzies did, a couple of years ago – mining companies would come down on us like a tonne of… [insert mineral here].
On top of that, the mining industry employs only a fraction of the people that tourism does. Even if we doubled mining in this country, we wouldn’t have the skilled workforce to operate any expansion. We’d have to bring workers in from offshore. It’s not hard to understand why – mining is a highly specialised profession and you can’t just dump a few thousand unemployed ex-NiWA staff or railway workers from Dunedin down a mineshaft.
Our top industries – tourism and food production – have far more potential and are re-newable/sustainable. Especially as the world’s population soars from the current 7 billion to 9 billion in 2050. That is when we will earn incredible wealth by selling food to the planet’s population.
(If we haven’t been stupid in the meantime and sold our farms to China, the Americans, or Nestle in the meantime… )
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Getting nasty
The battle, and that's what it has become, between schools and the Ministry has taken an unpleasant turn with the initiation of action by ministry officials that looks to be conscious intimidation of schools, principals and Boards of Trustees.
This from Rob at The Standard:"The Auckland office was supposed to swing into action with the first stages of the ‘Escalation Process when Schools are Not Implementing National Standards’. (A copy was obtained under the Official Information Act.) The first stage involves ringing up the principal and board of trustees in a manner deliberately intended to be threatening."
Read the whole article here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)