It started off with an article on climate change.....

Works been so busy lately that I haven't had time to post any articles, or do my rants about the government  (yes I can hear the sighs of relief lol)

And I haven't written in my blog lately, so I thought i'd vent here instead of writing essays on my FB status. So here it is my first entry for 2013. And on such a positive note lol....

But as I'm reading this article I am critically questioning NZ and it's role as a supposed leader in the Pacific, and wonder if most people know that this government, has pulled NZ out of the second stage of the Kyoto Protocol. (Probably wouldn't have because of the holidays). Purely based on the fact that "well Australia and the USA haven't signed up so why should we". National Government logic has done wonders for our public service. Just look at how perfect Education and Welfare are doing.....

I wonder how this makes people feel, especially our Pacific people. Especially given that a lot of us have witnessed first hand the terribly significant devastation natural events have caused to our homelands in the Pacific, which have no doubt been further intensified by processes of global warming and climate change. And yet we have a situation here where developed nations (including NZ) are refusing to commit to do their part to reduce their carbon footprint/levels of emissions basically because it isn't economically viable to do so. When it comes down to it, it's always about money and power!

But we're not talking just money here, we're talking about the state of our planet, we're talking about the kind of world we want our future generations to inherit, but we're also talking about current peoples lives. We don't have to look far to see how this is impacting on our people. We only need to look at what is happening with Tuvalu sinking, increasingly consistent and severe droughts in Samoa, Kiribati having to buy land in Fiji to relocate it's entire population in anticipation of the inevitable. Then there is the story of one women, Ursula Rakova, and her mission to save the people of the Carteret Islands (which up until this point I knew never existed) from rising sea levels. You'll notice that all of my links are not mainstream media links, why would they even bother. 

But you start to see a general pattern emerging. And the sad thing is, the stories are becoming more frequent. The government needs to be held accountable. And we as the people need to be asking the hard questions! The government does after all represent us (however I want to make it clear I did not vote for any of these fools), and therefore what our government does, we  bare some of the responsibility for the actions of our country.

 I saw and heard a whole lot of my own people, yapping away after Cyclone Evan, complaining that they were not going to donate because of all the corruption, misuse of funds that occurred during the Tsunami Relief effort in 2009.

I even heard one person say they wanted receipts for everything Samoa purchased through financial aid. At first I thought SHUTUP! I still do. But then I thought about it again, and was amazed at how quick the Samoa NZ community jumped to immediately condemn, and then demand transparency from the Government and people of Samoa. 

Interestingly though, we're not as quick to demand accountability and transparency from this government on most matters. And especially on such a critical issue of global warming/ climate change, given what we know about it's devastating impacts on our islands. 

I don't have the answers. It continues to baffle me today.

But I'm hoping that by writing this, that it will get people to start taking this issue seriously. Or even just to get some people thinking about it. That would be a start.