THAT'S COLD - Exploding the Myth About Sub Tropical New Zealand

There is a lovely piece of writing by Linley Boniface in the Dom Post.

It's her account about what it's like to suffer the winter cold in a "flimsy wooden shack" (aka house) in Wellington, New Zealand.

If you're tempted to emigrate to New Zealand and been seduced by stories about its sub-tropical climate read on. If you already live in New Zealand you'll know what she's talking about and will perhaps manage a laugh through your chattering teeth:

"Which settler spread the myth that New Zealand was so balmy and sub-tropical that flimsy wooden shacks would suffice?"

"Without wanting this to sound like a suggested script for recruits to the sex chatline industry, I feel an urgent need to tell you what I am wearing.

There is a coat, a scarf, a pair of fingerless gloves and a hat of such hideousness that my small son almost fell down the stairs in fright when he first saw it. There are several tops, two sets of leggings and a pair of the kind of quilted sheepskin slippers rarely seen on anyone who still possesses all their own teeth.

It is, in short, an outfit offering the level of thermal protection an Antarctic scientist might require in order to spend an afternoon dissecting a Weddell seal on an exposed ice shelf. And yet, I am wearing this not on an ice shelf, but in my home office in Wellington. Although I can't tell you exactly how cold it is in here, my gin and tonic is only a couple of degrees away from freezing over.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, especially in my house. Having once believed I would throw myself on a landmine to protect my children from injury, I now refuse to move away from the fireplace to allow them to defrost when they return home from school. This southern hemisphere Siberia has turned me into a warmth hog.

Walking into my unbelievably chilly house after nightfall last week, I was unable to respond to my dog's friendly greeting because I was transfixed by a mental image of an illustration I'd once seen of a caveman taking refuge from the cold by sheltering among the still-warm entrails of a freshly killed buck deer.

My dog seemed to sense my train of thought and quickly slunk away. Luckily for her, she is a small dog and her chest cavity would be of use only as a footwarmer: if she'd been a great dane, it would have been a different story.

Ask any migrants to New Zealand what bewilders them most about this country and they will immediately mention our cold homes - as well as our insane driving, our inability to laugh at ourselves and our inexplicable fondness for cheap pies containing mince presumably garnered from recycled camel genitalia.

The cold homes, though, are most baffling, because most people consider hypothermia a symptom of being cold, rather than an expression of national identity."

It could be worse, she could live in Dunedin.

Read the rest here Which idiot spread the myth?

The forecast for Wellington to 9am Monday 1 June : Min Temp 2, Max 8

Pregnant Women Ordered Out Of New Zealand

Lincoln Tan has written an expose in today's New Zealand Herald in which he revealed that women on temporary visas are being forced into leaving New Zealand if they fall pregnant.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that New Zealand was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) a United Nations Treaty based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

New Zealand is one of the few countries that didn't incorporate the ICCPR into law, instead it supposedly gave effect to many of the rights contained within it by passing the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act in 1990.
A report by civil rights lawyers to the United Nations says New Zealand law allows significant human rights failings and breaches of international treaties,

The shadow report written by former Council for Civil Liberties chairman Tony Ellis and a team of lawyers was submitted to the United Nations.
It said New Zealand could do better in many areas of human rights law and that there were several deficiencies in respect of New Zealand’s international human rights obligations.
The Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits "discrimination due to pregnancy", but there is a specific provision to exempt immigration matters. But within the ICCPR are provisions for protection based on gender. If throwing out a woman because she's pregnant isn't a contravention of that what is - is the 1993 Act contrary to international conventions?

It's deplorable that New Zealand openly practices eugenics in its selection of 'suitable' migrants, e.g. families with children with Downs Syndrome or Autism, or overweight mums are refused entry, without victimising women for exercising their basic human right to have a child.

Some will say that these women are a burden to an already overstretched health service struggling by on very limited resources, but the sad fact is that even if they offer to pay for private obstetric care they are still shown the door.

New Zealand is very content to rake in billions of dollars from foreign students (international education is worth over $2.3 billion a year, making it the fifth largest earner) and will tax skilled migrants to the hilt but it puts up the shutters when asked to provide something in return. Perhaps some of those dollars should be put into improving the health service for all.

Much was made recently of New Zealand placed sixth in the 2009 Save the Children's annual Mothers' Index (perhaps to draw attention away from its rather shameful position of 30 out of 43 in the Children's Index) the abuse of pregnant women's rights has got to be reflected in next year's index if it is to be taken seriously

One of the women has taken her case to the NZ Human Rights Commission but looks like she stands little chance of getting a satisfactory outcome.

What next, pregnancy tests at the border before visas are issued and women terminating their pregnancies to remain in New Zealand?

I suspect that the latter is already happening.

Adventure Tourism Industry Safety

The death of 6 high schools students and their teacher on an outward bound course resulted in the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoors Centre being ordered to pay a $40,000 fine and $440,000 in reparations.

The tragic deaths stunned the nation when the school party drowned in a rapidly flooding gorge after warnings of heavy rain weren't acted upon.

Following the court case the Department of Labour urged the adventure tourism industry to look critically at its health and safety systems in light of the Mangatepopo canyon trekking tragedy. A lot should've been learned, but has it?

A lot has already been written about the tragedy on the net so I won't go over it again, I'll just point interested readers towards an excellent thread by Steve Howe on Backpacker blogs, from which the following snippet was taken

"We Americans and our media tend to point fingers hard and fast after adventure fatalities, but Kiwis apparently follow the opposite philosophy to an almost surreal extreme. The prevailing New Zealand attitude seems to be that adventure requires risk, adventurers shouldn’t be coddled, the OPC is very professional, and no one could have predicted what happened. And I’d like to believe that, but it just doesn’t wash.

We’re not talking about adventure or adventurers here, we’re talking about high school students contracted to a commercial guide service for adventure training. When you combine risky pursuits, young guides, novice clients, and business volume, the standards have to be higher than ‘everyone knew the risk’ simply because everyone doesn’t. And that’s particularly true of canyoneering, which combines fun but risky activities like rappels, pool jumps, and whitewater swimming with sexy scenery and aerobic ease – the perfect combination for marketable adventure.

But canyons are also very committing. IMHO, slick pouroffs, whitewater currents, undercut boulders, logjams, rockfalls, flash floods, and difficulty of retreat make them generally unsuited to volume guiding or team-building exercises. And the New Zealand version of ‘canyoning’ differs greatly from American-style ‘canyoneering.’ Canyoning often involves precision pool leaps from high cliffs, or necky whitewater swims above the brink of waterfalls, risks that American outfitters would never incorporate into their operating plan.

I’m a firm believer that sudden accidents rarely happen suddenly. With a little forethought and a few case histories under your belt, you can often see accident situations setting up hours, days, even weeks in advance. I’m not interested in doing a long distance Bill Frist/Terry Schiavo diagnosis here. Lessons will indeed be learned from the investigations now underway. But I suspect those lessons were already in plentiful supply. And as evidence, I offer the following recent canyoneering incidents, each with a brief outline, news links, and perhaps a few details that never made it into the media. The similarities are obvious. The gist? Hike safe mate"
Read on http://www.backpacker.com/blogs/126

If all else fails I guess there's always the 'New Zealand Life Back Promise’ to fall back on?