Posts by Hilary Stace
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That Pic's peanut oil is very good. Healthier too as it can endure a high heat.
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Giovanni and I managed a useful little twitter conversation with Chris Hipkins last night about special ed issues - by chance. Managed to find out that Labour supported centralised funding for school support staff (long time festering issue) and the 100 extra special ed teachers in their policy would be decided and allocated after consultation with sector. I guess this is a time when politicians - if you can catch them - are keen to talk to people who care.
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Access: Power to (all) the people!, in reply to Sacha,
Great intiative
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Access: Power to (all) the people!, in reply to Angela Hart,
Forced local body amalgamations - now there is a sleeper election issue. Decisions have already been made in regions like Wellington but are not going to be announced until after the election. Unlikely to be any meaningful consultation, or any opportunity to challenge and you can bet that no disabled people's organisations have had any input.
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Access: Power to (all) the people!, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Frustrating that there is no date on that page from Tiaho Trust. I think when the court case was happening and various groups were taking philosophical positions (for an ideal world) there was a healthier political climate for disability and no one anticipated the eventual draconian law which was the outcome, particularly the outlawing of complaints using human rights law. Now there seems to be unified outrage against the PHD Act. At the handover of the petition at parliament on Tuesday, Green MP Catherine Delahunty called it the most outrageous breach of human rights in the current session of parliament. She and Ruth Dyson have been working together on it so there is some parliamentary cooperation going on which is good to see.
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Native Affairs on Monday had an interesting segment about Jennifer Ward-Lealand learning te reo and she recounted how she and her South African friend got strange looks as they chatted away in te reo on the bus. But her desire to be fluent is not that strange. Her missionary ancestor arrived in 1823, the same year as mine did. They soon learned Maori and it was the first language for the pakeha children of the following couple of generations for those missionary families. My great uncle remembered, when he was a child in the 1880s, the respectable old pakeha ladies chatting in te reo in Nelson, where they then lived. So JWL was only reviving a family tradition by learning te reo, one that is common to many thousands of descendants of those early settlers.
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I would love to see NZ Sign Language offered too (third official language and also indigenous to NZ). Some schools do so it is not an impossible idea. As I get older and my hearing less effective, especially in noisy cafes, I think how useful it would be if we all had NZSL in our repertoire. There is also a real shortage of tri-lingual interpreters which could be overcome if both these languages became more mainstream.
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For those on Facebook there is a new 20percent campaign to encourage disability activism in the political process. Led by Tiaho Trust in Northland. https://www.facebook.com/20percentNZ
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I compile content for a free disability-related e-newsletter and use a lot of links from Stuff and the Herald (also Scoop etc). I expect most readers would not pay for content, and many probably don't have access to newspapers at all. Where articles are behind a paywall or not on line I tend not to use the story. There are newspapers like one in Ashburton that have good disability articles but when they are not accessible to a wider audience there is no point in alerting people to them.
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Rosemary I agree. Lots of reactions on various FB pages today. The Health and Disability Ethics committees are open to the public and comprise Ministerial appointees with both clinical and lay expertise. The system was restructured by the minister in July 2012 to have fewer, smaller committees and a quicker process. Disclaimer: I was on one of the previous bigger committees and took a great deal of interest in anything disability related. Not sure whether any of the committees have disability expertise now.
Here is the website http://ethics.health.govt.nz/ and the committee minutes are eventually available here too.