Membership of New Zealand’s domain registry suddenly triples, which isn't entirely welcome Membership of InternetNZ, the administrator of New Zealand's .NZ country code top-level domain, has more than tripled in a week after the org's review of its constitution was criticized by a free speech advocacy organization. InternetNZ started work on a new constitution in late September 2023 and in October 2024 the org …
While not lived in the Land of the Long White Shroud† since I was a child, I am fairly sure anyone whose forebears go back four or five generations in NZ would be able to claim such descent even those ostensibly identifying as pākehā.
The last general election in NZ returned a hodgepodge coalition more or less opposed to the differential treatment afforded Māori and Pacific Islanders (Pacifika) compared with the pākehā etc instituted mostly by the previous labour governments.
Like most nations the most pressing problems facing NZ are economic including employment, health and housing - other issues are largely considered as an unwelcome distraction with the election of an oddball patchwork government tending to confirm this interpretation.
So I would say this little contretemps is just one small bubo on the plague of ideological warfare being mindlessly waged globally.
I suppose it would be right bugger if .NZ was eagerly sought after by the fascists and ultra right because .nazi is never likely to a tld but subtract the vowels et voilà. Would likely make the day of those billionaire American survivalists who have dismal bolt holes in the South Island.
† where ambition and progress are interred. For a flightless bird a surprising number of Kiwis fly NZ for AU for greater opportunities.
Yeah I also did a runner many years ago and I agree that the whole Treaty industry is a distraction from the real problems the country has. There's a lot of potential there, but the locals keep going down rabbit holes, only some of which are related to a treaty signed nearly 200 years ago, and ignoring the real issues. My kiwi brother-in-law (my sister and her family also did a runner, but a few years after I did) suggested to me once that part of the problem is the amount of weed people smoke there, which would probably account for their reputation for being laid back.
The whole descendancy thing is just plain weird - when I left you were regarded as Māori if you were a little as 1/16th; these days I gather it's sufficient with 1/32nd. My brother's grandkids are sixth generation kiwi, but don't qualify as tangata whenua ('people of the land'), which I think is pretty stupid.
I reckon the south of the South Island would be a great spot for data centers for cloud hosting - cool weather and plenty of water for further cooling, electricity (at least if they knock that stupid aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point on the head), a timezone opposite that of Europe, no wars likely in the vicinity, etc etc. From there you could probably build up a cluster of industries - it's a nice spot down there with good fishing and hunting, so I'm sure there'd be a lot of interest from people looking for a better quality of life.
Are there any other kiwis reading this? What do you think? It's be a poke in the eye to those Aucklanders as well if Southland turned into a major IT center.
(You got to be a bit circumspect about criticizing NZ though - the locals are inclined to whinge about the place, but get very defensive if anybody suggests they might need to look at the way they are doing things)
Re: "the locals are inclined to whinge about the place, but get very defensive if anybody suggests they might need to look at the way they are doing things"
People only accept criticism from their own same minded/cultured peers, everyone around the world does the same, be it about their own country, town or football club
In the case of Kiwiland, pointing out the relatively obvious stuff even as a local will have you being painted up as Public Enemy #1
The OECD has 30 definitions of corrupt behaviour. New Zealand only has one (bribery) and if it's not illegal it must be OK, right?
The result is that a LOT of dodgy stuff is fully normalised, particularly influence peddling and cronyism
Transparency International NZ was taken over by a small group, kicked out its activists and has been utterly opaque since the late 1990s, with 100% government funding. When TI International became aware of it they distanced themselves from the NZ operation. The Corruption Perception Index is at odds with what Kiwis self-report - over 1/3 admitted to engaging in behaviour in the last 12 months which fits the OECD corruption definitions (usually having to placate some official in order to get things done)
That's before you get into stuff like challenging the National Myth of "Clean, Green and Honest" - The first two are only an appearance due to the very low population index and having the Roaring Forties blowing through constantly. Kiwis are amongst the worst carbon emitters in the world and in the last 25 years EVERY LOWLAND RIVER in the country has become unsafe to swim in, let alone drink from due to farming effluent and unchecked giardia spread. The Manawatu river in particular is the most polluted river in the Southern Hemisphere and has held this status since the 1980s - quite a feat for a river with no industry and only one city (85k) along its length (The city has a very effective sewage works. It's not the source of the problem)
You'll run into two kinds of kiwis overseas - those on their Big OE (Overseas Experience) who will return and live a mundane life after a couple of years, and those whose eyes were opened to how bad things are at home and have given up on trying to fix anything, so simply don't go back
Back on topic: InternetNZ has a "history", as long-term (1990s) vulture readers will know and it exported many of its issues to ICANN when the ousted chairman of what was then ISOCNZ ended up chairing ICANN
Transparency International - not the Kiwi branch, the whole international shebang - rates NZ the third least corrupt country in the world. Yes the rivers are filthy, but at least we know about it.
The Ardern govt had a plan to make Maori responsible for managing the rivers, but rightwing opposition scuppered it.
> Re: "the locals are inclined to whinge about the place, but get very defensive if anybody suggests they might need to look at the way they are doing things"
Show me a nation where it ain't th' truth.
All the Kiwis I know are of UK origin, and emigrated because the other person's grass is always greener.
I certainly wouldn't suggest, to Maori or migrant alike, how to do things better.
@MiguelIC
"People only accept criticism from their own same minded/cultured peers, everyone around the world does the same, be it about their own country, town or football club"
I'm quite happy for anyone to criticise town / country I was born in, football team I support etc. Don't care if they were born there.
I was born in UK (plenty of worse places to be born), but that does not mean I have a blind allegiance to the place & due to some of military & political actions over the years being dubious to say the least, then a big chunk of the globe has (IMHO legitimate) reasons to criticise the UK
"I reckon the south of the South Island would be a great spot for data centers for cloud hosting - cool weather and plenty of water for further cooling, electricity (at least if they knock that stupid aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point on the head), a timezone opposite that of Europe, no wars likely in the vicinity, etc etc."
For most cloud datacenter purposes, there are some major downsides. They have some datacenters in NZ already for serving the local market, but for serving any other market, you have latency and network contention problems. Australia is the cheapest place to use NZ datacenters, and they probably could, but they have many there already so they may not need to. Any other continent isn't going to want to use them for many purposes. Compare to European datacenters, which often have similar climatic conditions and reliable, if not as green, power, and are also close to their users and much larger oceanic cable systems.
Your suggested datacenters might still be viable if they were specifically aimed at the AI-style use case, namely workloads that aren't time-sensitive but use tons of processing and thus power. It might work, but that may not be enough given how many other places that can work in. Especially if building one relies on a smelter shutting down, because they wouldn't want to build unless they know it's going to happen if the consequences of it being delayed is that their datacenter operations are also delayed.
Data centres in NZ would also be alarmingly vulnerable to sabotage of their connections. Big oceans equals lots of places to cut the cables. And that would both knock out the data centres and piss off and, to varying degrees, incapacitate the rest of the country.
So on the whole, we'd rather not make ourselves a high value target for that kind of sabotage. (A specific kind of sabotage that seems to be gaining popularity.)
Haha - the good old negative "too difficult and too complicated and it's bound to fail and we can't do that here" kiwi attitude - one of the reasons I'm never going to move back to the country.
Edmund Hilary and Bill Hamilton, to name a couple of kiwi blokes who gave things a go in the past, must be spinning in their graves.
How is pointing out a possible problem equivalent to saying it's too difficult so we should give up? What they suggested was a reason that it might not be worth doing so you would choose not to even though you could, same as mine, not a reason why you could never do it.
That said, I don't think theirs is a very good reason. Undersea cables do get tampered with, but I don't see a reason why many countries would want to cut the ones going to New Zealand. New Zealand isn't in a war zone, nor do its neighbors plan on invading it as far as I know (I'm watching you, Australia). Hotspots for intentional cable cuts are the Baltic, around Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the red sea, all of which are more sensitive than the waters around New Zealand. Nor would damage to those cables cause too many problems for the average New Zealander. Anything on those servers intended for the local market would still be available to people in New Zealand. The people would have reduced or no access would be people in other countries that wanted to run their workloads on those servers. I still think latency will be a problem, but I wouldn't worry much about someone trying to break those cables.
The current NZ government has taken an alarming turn to the hard right. A bit unexpected from a country with so much to offer.
IMO Māori Culture has a lot to offer. We could all learn from them.
I guess the Great Orange Bigot has influenced many of the far right nutters across the world.
FWIW it's been suggested that the far right "explosion" may be "extinction burst" behaviour
In the world of psychology, an extinction burst happens when a behavior that used to get a result doesn't work anymore. It's a brief, often intense, increase in that behavior as an attempt to return to the familiar. It's the brain's way of saying, “Hey, this used to work. Maybe if I try harder, it'll work again.”
I wish that was true but worry it's not
In the case of NZ, it went from being the most socialist country in the western bloc in the 1970s (both National and Labour had socialist policies even if they didn't call them that) to being somewhat to the right of Thatcher by 1995 (Largely thanks to Roger Douglas et al). Whilst a lot of the reforms were necessary, many of them were ideologically driven and fed by/into Neoliberalist policies. The problem with Neoliberalism is that eventually you run out of public assets to privatise and NZ's NHS is still picking up the pieces after those policies almost destroyed the health system - policies Britain is now trying to foist on its people despite past evidence that it's a bad idea
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That’s true, but I think it came as something of a shock to Labour when they realised exactly what was going on. Roger Douglas is the son of Norman Douglas, who was certainly old school labour. The fact he turned out to be a puritanical Chicago-school economist caught a lot of people off guard. His swing from 1980s labour to his hideous “association of consumers and taxpayers” party is about as far a move across the political spectrum as you can get.
That man did a lot of harm.
"The Free Speech Union was formed initially as the Free Speech Coalition in response to the cancelling of an event at an Auckland Council-owned venue to be held by the far-right white supremacists Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. Although it claims support from both sides of the political and ideological spectrum, the positions expressed by the Free Speech Union since its formation in 2018 seem to be concerned with the safeguarding of a particular form of free speech- the freedom to speech of those occupying positions of privilege. This form of speech is organised to target and silence the speech, health and safety of those at the margins of societies."
Full article here - https://www.massey.ac.nz/about/news/opinion-the-right-wing-version-of-academic-freedom-and-communicative-inversions/
OK there is a lot skipped over on the background here. In 1840, the treaty was signed between Maori chiefs and the British crown, creating a new nation. The articles of the treaty were as follows...
1. Maori surrender sovereignty to the crown
2. the Crown will ensure property rights of all NZ'ers will be respected
3. All maori and non maori are equal before the law
All fine and dandy until one judge in the 1980s said in an adjunct to a decision that the treaty was "akin to a partnership". Since then, all those with an axe to grind have claimed that NZ is not one nation, but 2, and that the 17% of Maori have formed a partnership with the 83% of non-Maori.
When settling treaty disputes between the crown and maori tribes (called iwi), natural resources that maori used to control but sold to the crown, are sometimes managed under a "co-governance arrangement", where maori have a proven historical connection and this has been examined and agreed with the crown.
Nowadays it is trendy to make "co-governance" arrangements within organisations that are not the crown and therefore not subject to the treaty, which is constitutionally troublesome. There is also a trend towards creating "principles of the treaty" which are defined adhoc by the courts and not by the government of NZ. (one wag noted that the treaty was quoted as "a living document" but once changes beneficial to maori had been made, it stopped becoming "living".)
A popular refrain over the last 40 years in NZ is that Maori did not surrender sovereignty under the treaty and therefore require separate systems of benefit to them (health, education, justice, etc) Interesting to note the tax system does not seem to be part of that split.
One minor political party has a bill being progressed through parliament that would seek to define once and for all what the articles of the treaty actually mean, so naturally those who enjoy priviledge from it's current interpretation are rather resistant to this, and have cowed the major political parties into siding with them. Polling shows popular support for the bill but machinations mean it will not progress further in this election cycle.
A refrain from the politician promoting this Bill (David Seymour, who is himself of maori ancestry), is twofold. He asks
"What is so unfair about equal rights for all?", and
"Can you name me a successful democracy country where political rights are different for different races?"
Also interesting to note, emigration from NZ to Australia is ramping up, and is noted as having a result of a drop in support for the political right. The political left are floating the idea of a "treaty overseer" (essentially a house of lords) who will have veto rights over laws passed by parliament. This will not end well.
The Maori translation of the treaty, which is what the chiefs at the time actually signed, stated that Maori would retain sovereignty (rangatiratanga) while the British would be able to govern themselves (kawangatanga) in the areas they occupied, which at the time was a few whaling towns and odd small farm. Due, as best we can tell, to genuinely attempted but inexperienced translation, the English version had it the other way around. Cue 200 years of difficulty..
Having a separate health system for Maori (just started implementation by the last Labour-Green govt only to be cancelled by the current coalition) actually makes sense, because the unified system that served the 83% was delivering terrible outcomes for the 17%. Having separate other stuff is sometimes good sometimes bad, I'm not up with all the details.
I am yet to hear of those in favour of the Treaty Principles Bill volunteer to experience equally three or four generations of land theft, racist laws (e.g. Maori who fought in WW1 being unable to go into a pub to drink with a white trenchmate), and being caned anytime they speak their mother tongue in school. See how they feel about needing a bit of "special treatment" after that.
The conversation seems to have moved away from the actual problem: a right-wing, somewhat Trumpian, political grouping (actually aligned with NZ's ACT party and its neolib leader David Seymour) is trying to suborn a national Internet registry. That can't be a good thing.
Other way around, they figured out they could just join their Iwi to get the numbers to take it over. Has happened to many other organisations and charities where an Iwi joins and uses their numbers to take control of the organisation, changes the rules to entrench themselves then plunders the assets. High court sometimes intervenes but it takes decades and the people involved hide out with whanau rurally and are hard to serve summons to.
It's no secret that the Five Eyes have been undertaking HEAVY censorship and draconian surveillance during the last five years.
Maybe the toe-sucking leftoids would like to tell us why?
(How is the building of 'detention camps' for the unvaccinated coming along, by the way?)
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