I have amended my submission (thank you to linger for the typo spotting). It still isn't as full as I'd like (I don't really address the new terrorist training offences), but hopefully my submission on the Counter-Terrorism Lgislation Bill will…
A new paper by ESR scientists, published in the Australian Journal of Chemistry, has confirmed what close observers of the local cannabis community already knew, or at least suspected: the cannabinoid contents of local "green fairy" products vary widely, ratios…
It started during a recent visit to a gynaecologist. Don’t worry, I’m fine. ¶ I felt an intense discomfort as I picked up my prescription and I knew immediately that this was gender dysphoria. I’d experienced it many times before but…
"We just kept saying yes," New Zealand Drug Foundation executive director Sarah Helm told me the evening before Through the Maze: On the road to health, where nearly 50 people and organisations were represented on the stage over two busy…
Last night, the New Zealand Herald posted a story from its political reporter Derek Cheng which bundles together a number of current issues around medicinal cannabis. The most alarming is that of Katy Thomas and her epileptic son Eddy, which…
It should have come as no surprise after the narrow referendum defeat last year of a bill to legalise and regulate cannabis that its loudest and best-funded opponents should have wandered off to find a new culture war. The people…
Following the storming of the US capitol building in January, Twitter cracked down on accounts that were using the site to promote false narratives about the US election, in particular accounts associated with the Qanon conspiracy theory. The mass removal…
In 1967 Owen Woodhouse proposed a principles-based comprehensive no fault compensation scheme. The principles were: ¶ Community responsibility, Comprehensive entitlements, Complete rehabilitation, Real compensation, Administrative efficiency. It was a world-leading vision but one which has never been fully implemented. The Accient…
For once, I have written my submission on a bill with enough time to spare to both enocurage any of you who wants to make a submission to do so as well, and to give you time to spot the…
Below, for those interested, I copy my submission on the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill. ¶ This is the government bill aiming to create a mandatory Internet filter. The…
After a quiet spell in the news on account of, well, other stories, cannabis and what to do about it staged a modest headline revival this week. First there was this Stuff report on a journal article by Massey University…
My sense of recent history is a mess; sometimes I can't rightly say what happened, when. I tell people about something I did two years ago and it turns out it was late last year. And still, like all of…
The Public Address Word of the Year 2020 is "doomscrolling", which narrowly beat out "bubble". But in a shocking turn of events, Public Address founder Russell Brown was unable to complete his traditional mock press release announcing the results of…
It's that time again! You can now vote for the Word of the Year 2020. Thanks very much to all the people who nominated for the long list in the form below, and to Hadyn Green for his good work…
In the normal course of things, I launch the Public Address Word of the Year with a post looking back at all the previous winners. But 2020 patently has not been a normal year, so I'll skip that part. (You…
The final count of the 2020 general election has been released, with five parties making it into Parliament. ¶ If New Zealand had no threshold, and parties just had to get enough votes to be entitled to be in the first…
Ten years ago this week, Mum died. ¶ Her death wasn't surprising: my mother Alison had been living with a terminal breast cancer diagnosis for two and a half years. ¶ But it was still shocking. One evening, she was sleeping in…
If you were listening to New Zealand’s punditocracy in the days since Labour won the general election with a record-setting outright majority, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Labour had actually lost. ¶ Last time around pundits could barely deal with…
The 2020 General Election has a preliminary result. For reasons I am unable to really explain, we will not have even a preliminary result for the end of life choice and cannabis legalisation referendums for some weeks (I dropped the…
One day in 1985, I came down from the loft where I was working as deputy editor of Rip It Up magazine, looking for lunch, and walked into a scene. There, on the corner of Queen and Darby Streets, a…
One thing I've been hearing fairly regularly, usually from more conservative voters, is that they're wary of voting "yes" for legalisation and regulation of cannabis, but that they'd definitely get behind decriminalisation if that was on offer. ¶ I think most…
Cannabis is part of our culture: 80% of adults have tried it sometime. Intuition tells us that legalising cannabis will increase use – science suggests that is not likely. Our Dunedin and Christchurch studies show that cannabis use peaks in our…
Last week, major newspapers carried a full-page ad as part of the campaign for a "No" vote to the referendum question about supporting the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill. The ad was authorised by the SAM NZ Coalition, which takes…
Last week, major newspapers carried a full-page ad as part of the campaign for a "No" vote to the referendum question about supporting the Cannabis Legalisation and Control Bill. The ad was authorised by the SAM NZ Coalition, which takes…
In a couple of months, the 53rd Parliament will meet in Wellington, and approximately 120 MPs will be sworn in, many of them for the first time. ¶ They will all have political goals, some aligning with their party platforms, some…