Posts by Hilary Stace
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Giovanni, you go up even more in my estimation.
Whatever the attribution It still sounds like a Harry Potter spell, as some astute Potterphile noted upthread.
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CTRL+, CTRL- and CTRL-0 work in IE and Firefox on Windows for myself.
It works, wonderful thanks, nice big font. Good, I'll be able to keep reading PA till I'm 100.
But I'm not so sure about the party analogy - I'm one of those people who has to find a nice quiet place to have a good argument.
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Did I hear Len Brown say on Morning Report that they don't want to sell their Auckland airport investments because they provide a 24% return?
Brendon Burns recently wrote about Synlait, a partially Japanese owned dairying company keen to buy up water resources in Canterbury, and the company just happened to have Ruth Richardson on the board.
No wonder foreign investors are keen on NZ assets.
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This is tangentially relevant to this thread as it is to do with participation in citizenship and employment. I am really angry about the Government scrapping the Training Incentive Allowance. People on benefits have for years been able to access tertiary education because of the TIA, including the current Minister of Social Development, Paula Bennett, who used it to get her BA while on the DPB,
This is just the sort of help that people who are on the dole or the DPB, or the Invalid's benefit need to get ahead.
Why scrap this, and at the same time also remove funding for night classes (which are of course particularly helpful for immigrants). Just crazy, short sighted policy.
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Kerry, thank you for your story. Having been through something similar (although not NTD) I very much believe that parents should be able to make informed decisions about such things.
What I was saying is that there are probably many people with spina bifida (and I know of adults with the condition, who are taxpayers even) who may feel that their lives are not valued as this debate swirls around. Some of the language is very insensitive and some posts have even put a dollar value on the 'burden' they create for society. I have not heard their voices (their voices - not their parents'). And this is a big gap especially as we have NZ Disability Strategy and a UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which claim that we do value the lives of disabled people.
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How times have changed
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What I haven't heard in this whole folic acid debate, are the voices of anyone with spina bifida. Who are we (general public, policy people, politicians etc) to judge their right to exist, and make assumptions about their quality of life?
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Interesting bio of ARD Fairburn on the Book Council site and it also links to the Dictionary of NZ Biography essay (www.dnzb.govt.nz). Met and married Jocelyn Mays who was an Auckland art student at the Slade in London. [An NZer on her OE in the 1930s - that's another thread] They returned to NZ and he was a relief worker in the Depression. Moved to Devonport in 1946. Died 1957.
The volume of his letters edited by Lauris Edmond (OUP,1981) is worth reading to get a sense of the man. (And just incidentally it was the first book I indexed). Had some pretty rigid ideas about things but not unusual for his era.
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My own experience and anecdata (I like that word) disputes some of the historical assumptions on this thread. Some of my earliest memories are of regular farewelling and greeting relations and other travellers at the Wellington wharves. People did their OE mainly by ship in the 50s and 60s, but they certainly went, and in large numbers. My parents' first overseas trip together was by sea plane from Evans Bay. From the early 1960s my father regularly took tour parties of engineers and their wives (that's how it was then) on extensive air trips through several countries on their way to conferences in exotic parts of the world, such as Russia, Romania.India and Japan. Each trip preceded by his doomed attempts to learn the local language.
Several embassies - many representing Asian countries - sent their children to my 1960s primary school (which was already full of immigrants or children of immigrants- mostly from Europe) who became absorbed into the general school culture and invitations to their birthday parties were sort after for the interesting food and customs - particularly the Thais.
My parents were friends with some of the European Jewish families who had come to NZ before and during the war. And both my parents were taught by the unhappy temporary refugee Karl Popper in his brief time at Canterbury University.
So we were a nation of immigrants and travellers 50 years ago. And the immigrants brought new foods and ideas that became mainstream. As for cafe culture it was very much alive in 1960s and 70s Wgtn, eg the Monde Marie, and Suzy's (who was another immigrant) where I spent many angst ridden teenage hours.
What we didn't have in my world were many Maori kids, and I can't remember any obviously disabled children, although there were many polio and TB survivors with minor physical impairments. So not much diversity obvious there.
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This thread should have a warning: Do not read on a Friday afternoon if you have low blood sugar!