Displaying items by tag: the hound

OPINION: Your old mate reckons townie Brooke van Velden, the Minister of Workplace (or is it Woke Place) Relations is now showing how underemployed she is as a minister by initiating an investigation into whether young children should be banned from collecting eggs on farms and feeding animals.

OPINION: There's an infamous term coined by a US general during the Vietnam war, specifically in reference to the battle of Ben Tre: "We had to burn the village to save it."

OPINION: The sudden departure of Jim Ward, manager of Molesworth Station for 24 years, highlighted some major dysfunction in the way conservation estate is managed in this country - the biggest problem, as the Hound sees it, being idealogues who harp on about "taonga" and use all means possible to block sensible commercial operations on conservation land.

OPINION: While the destruction of NZ's oil and gas industry by Jacinda Ardern's band of merry vandals was virtue signalling on a heroic scale - producing no environmental benefit whatsoever - the politician vowing to make that industry whole again, Shane Jones, is not above a bit of virtue signalling of his own.

OPINION: Your old mate's ear has been chewed off recently by farmers voicing their displeasure with the National Party, particularly relating to how they're treating their farmer base.

OPINION: Your old mate hears that at a recent China Business Summit, PM Christopher Luxon delivered a none-too-subtle "could try harder" report card on the red meat industry regarding its exports to China - particularly when compared to Australia.

OPINION: Spare a thought for the arable farmer, squeezed on one side by soft global prices and on the other by limits on further yield increases.

OPINION: The huge success of former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson's new TV show, Clarkson's Farm, and the boost it has given the image of farming in the UK, has prompted one scribe to wonder aloud who could fill a similar role here in NZ.

OPINION: Labour leader Chris 'Chippy' Hipkins is carrying on the world-class gaslighting of the nation that he and his cohorts started after their disastrous Covid response; now trying to undermine the Covid inquiry to protect his own backside.

OPINION: Forget about the fabled 'rural-urban' divide, the real fault-line in farming might actually be the divide between grass-roots farmers and the industry corporates who claim to be 'speaking on behalf of farmers'.