The Weekly Hoon: A winter flu crisis & homeless deaths; Climate blame avoidance game; NZ’s shameful silence over the US attacking the ICC

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night featured co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guests Cathrine Dyer and Robert Patman about geopolitics, the economy, climate change and politics.

In this week’s edition:

• Bernard and Peter talked about developments in New Zealand’s political economy in the last week, including the winter flu crisis stress on an already-stressed hospital system, along with the deaths from cold of three homeless people;

• Peter, Bernard and Catherine then talked about Cathrine’s article for The Conversation with Massey Uni’s Robert McLachlan that asked: Why is NZ spending far more on responding to climate disasters than on reducing future risk?. Cathrine talked about this paper on blame avoidance.

• Peter, Bernard and Robert then talked about the latest US sanctions1 on the International Criminal Court (ICC) and New Zealand’s shameful silence on the issue, along with the latest SIS report on China’s espionage in New Zealand.

• Peter mentioned this book by Sam Dalrymple: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in last year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free.

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

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