Nikolais Rant

Chicken and Fennel

Recipe Summary Difficulty: Easy Prep Time: 20 minutes Inactive Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 45 minutes Yield: 4 servings User Rating:

Well I finally made it to the Westcoast and Westland this year. Such a great place, with really genuinely nice people. This is our host, guide, chef, father in law, Reg. Heres Reg standing in front of the Mahi Tahi Lodge he built in Bruce Bay for John & Jacqui.

Reg took us all over the place which was so cool, lots of insider knowledge, and extensive geographic and botanical facts. Thanks heaps Reg. Heres a little sampler of some stuff.

How cool are these... I hope they do the whole trilogy =) ohhh geektastic in all their pixel glory...

Episode 4 - Star Wars

Episode 5 - The Empire Strikes Back

Whoop, Jack the box, about time for some more electro, cher check it.... Fu, this Friday 14th of October,,,

Rocking, need I say more...

Check it out, up your arse business leaders that think we have too much regulation. NZ has come out on top of the world =)

New Zealand has the most business-friendly regulations in the world, as measured by the Doing Business indicators (see table). Singapore is the runner-up. The United States is third. Five other East Asian countries -- Hong Kong (China), Japan, Thailand, Malaysia and Korea -- are among the top 30. So are the Baltic countries -- Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Their ranking is a remarkable achievement, as only a decade has passed since they first implemented reforms.

http://www.doingbusiness.org/Main/TopRanked2006.aspx

• Greens have no policy to introduce capital gains tax on private homes, in fact our policy is to look at capital gains tax on other (commercial or rental) property, exempting private homes.
• Greens carbon tax (4-5 cents per litre) and introduction of excise tax on diesel (it will still be the cheapest fuel) are much lower than claimed in the leaflet. This is part of the "it will cost us (our kids) more if we don't" idea of climate change. The Kyoto Protocol can't reverse climate change, just slow it down. Green policy is that biodiesel and any future plant-based petrol alternative will be exempt from part of the excise tax. The carbon tax is part of an overall tax reform policy that would reduce taxes on work and enterprise (e.g. my next point) and increase them on waste and pollution.
  
• The Greens policy to make the first $5000 income tax free would return about $15 per week in everybody's pocket, offsetting the $6-7 per week extra fuel costs due to our proposals above.
• "More bureaucrats?" We are proposing the creation of some new government agencies and the refocussing of others (e.g. the Electricity Commission into the Sustainable Energy Commission), this will mean a small increase in the public sector.
• We do not suggest disarming our defence forces or decreasing defence spending by 50%. We favour phasing out the frigates and switching to smaller vessels more suitable for their predominant role as peacekeepers - which would make some savings, and we support increasing our foreign aid budget from 0.24% to 0.7% of GDP. Thus our spending on making the world safer, e.g. defence/foreign aid/peacebuilding would not decrease at all.
• What the leaflet calls 'roading money' does not exist, there is a land transport fund and we do not suggest spending it on "uneconomic and novel" transport systems. Kiwis keep on importing cars and we often have no other option but to use them, more motorways = more traffic not less. Since we have been working with Labour on transport, spending on roading has increased by 68% and spending on public transport has increased by 510%, there is a long way to go as all you Aucklanders know, and there will be more motorways under a Labour/Greens government. But every large city government in the world knows that public transport, and moving more freight off trucks on to trains, is the only answer to traffic problems.
• The Resource Management Act is a facilitator of democracy, not a means to "block construction of vital new roads". National and Act want to block offaccess to the process of making new roads from the people who might be adversely affected.
• We will not be supporting any move to introduce the 'right to roam' over private property, in fact our policy specifically excludes that. We support public access via public land to publicly-owned waterways, facilitated in partnership and co-operation with the adjacent land-owners and protecting their property and rights.
• We will not be offering financial assistance to cannabis growers for alternative employment, this is a misrepresentation of our policy to support the development of industrial hemp, a crop grown in many other countries including Australia, China and USA. It has no psychoactive properties and is important to reducing our energy demands (and increasing the quality) of producing paper, rope, clothing, fuel and food (human and animal).
• We will vote to decriminalise cannabis, yes, but not for children under 18, and we do not propose decriminalising other drugs as claimed. We agree that a drug-free lifestyle is best, and we agree that cannabis use is dangerous, especially to children. However, prohibition has never worked for any drug, and it puts otherwise law-abiding users into contact with gangs and other criminal elements, while increasing the power, prestige and finances of those elements. Drugs are a health problem, and making criminals out of more than 50% of the population who have tried cannabis will not solve it. The saving made in policing cannabis (more than $30 million per year) would pay for an awful lot of drug education. In addition, the reduction in funds to gangs (the cannabis market isestimated at over $300 million per year) would give them a severe setback.
  
• We will not create "rainbow communities" - that is, communities of gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual Kiwis - they already exist. The Greens will not be "creating" them, or forcing anybody to be gay, or any other sexual orientation. We believe that all Kiwis, regardless of their sexual orientation, deserve respect, and we affirm and celebrate New Zealand as a diverse, tolerant country, and reject bigotry in all its forms. We believe that a couple's parenting skills should be the primary factor when considering eligibility for adoption, not their sexual orientation
• We did not vote against protecting private property rights, we did vote against an ACT bill that tried to give property the same status as human rights, as did other parties.
• Yes, we would like to ban the building of new prisons, the one totally true statement in the leaflet. Unless you lock away someone forever, prisons and tougher sentences do nothing to reduce crime. The reason crime rates have dropped so much over the past 6 years (despite what you see on the news) is that unemployment has dropped to the lowest in the world. We want to make victims and their families the centre of our justice system, and rehabilitation the focus of our prison system.