My submission on this bill is in the following thread. Please feel free to use any of it you find useful, and a huge thank you to everyone who commented with ideas.

Please make your submission *before Wednesday*

https://twitter.com/farmgeek/status/1793835901757641120

1. The Bill as proposed is a flagrant breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi:

The complete and utter lack of consultation with Māori roopu on the Bill, breaches partnership and Article 2 as it takes away a mechanism which safeguards democratic participation for Māori in local councils.

Is it time to focus on climate adaptation? A wee thread of my thoughts.

I've personally been aware of the need to *mitigate* climate change for at least 30 years and many others have been at it much longer than that (The party that became the Greens started 50 years ago). 1/n Over those decades we have been told that unless we mitigate against climate change, things will get bad. The "bad" was always some abstract, future thing and time. Well, as we're seeing now, the bad stuff is happening now, and it's only going to get worse. 2/n

Our Omicron wave in March resulted in more than a million reported Covid cases. The BA4/5 wave we are seeing now - four months later - already has us at 1.5 million cases, with the 2nd million likely by early September, at the current rate of daily cases. 1/ For perspective, in the entirety of last year - 2021 - we had 10,000 Covid cases in TOTAL. Now, that's our daily figure. 2/

I want to share some thoughts on the cannabis referendum (Cannabis legalisation and control referendum) and why I'm voting YES. It's not one of those threads with references and endless links to studies. This is how I feel. Come for the ride (or mute me, whatever ;-) 1/ First off, cannabis is here and almost 80% of NZers have admitted to using it at least once. So if you have never tried it or think nobody you know is into it, you are already in a small minority of kiwis. Cannabis is already our reality in NZ. 2/

Like many of National's policies "get a Negative Covid test before flying to NZ" might sound good on the surface, but a little bit of thought reveals a terrible policy that will actually do more harm than good. A wee thread. 1/n I'm no expert on this stuff, but if I can see a heap of issues, no doubt the experts will come up with even more. National want a clear Covid-19 test result 3 days before anyone flies back to NZ. 2/n

What if, instead of framing the two week isolation as something to be paid for, we saw it as a modest investment to bring back tens of thousands of smart Kiwis to invigorate our post-Covid innovation economy? That time could be used to identify their strengths and connect them. We have potentially the singles greatest opportunity to “bring home the smarts” ever, as the rest of the world struggles with Covid. Every Kiwi has the right to return, but let’s not make it hard for them to come back and contribute.

Update thread on a wee lockdown project (now it's tested OK over a few days :-)

We have a spring on the farm that we used to pump water from for the stock (and the house) with an old rattly diesel water pump. I finally replaced it with a solar version. 1/4 It's a Davies pump - using piston displacement and spring valves to pump water to a high head. In our case, the main tank for the farm is 80m above the spring. A 1kW electric scooter motor provides the power, running at very low throttle to keep the RPM sensible for the pump. 2/4

The Australian bushfires are a catastrophe. Too many people and countless animals have already lost their lives or homes. If you are concerned about the misinformation swirling around this disaster, you're not alone. We are now watching real-time information warfare unfold. 1/9 The idea that the Greens (or greenies in general) are to blame for the severity of the fires for opposing hazard reduction burns keeps cropping up, despite being regularly debunked 2/9 theguardian.com/australia-news…

It's going to be a long two weeks on Twitter if we don't put this National-Green fantasy government idea to bed. So a short thread... 1/n First (and this should be enough) any coalition arrangement must be ratified by the membership at a SGM. Nat-Grn is not going to happen. 2/n