News

新闻 / WIHIRI NIUHI

NEXUS

Landlords still be landlording as TradeMe continues to pull illegal lodging listings from their website.

A property in Auckland suburb Ellerslie was advertised at $550 a week, but didn’t include any cooking facilities, which are required by law under the Residential Tenancies Act 1986.

When questioned by Stuff, the landlord claimed he wasn’t aware that property managers had to meet legal requirements for cooking facilities, and that tenants could just use an ‘air fryer’ or something - likely indicating he hadn’t read the Residential Tenancies Act 1986 at all.

The listing was only removed after a screenshot went viral on social media, aided by Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick tagging TradeMe’s official Twitter account.

Things continue to be grim for renters in this country, but hey, look on the bright side - if you’re getting sick of Uni, you could always become a landlord. You don’t have to have any qualifications, you aren’t required to pay any attention to the law, and you get to bottom feed off your tenant’s wages as you sit at home and do nothing.

Score!

A CEO of an Aotearoa chemical manufacturing company has been heavily criticised after making sexist and racist comments about a prominent New Zealand businesswoman.

In an interview with National Business Review, DGL Group founder Simon Henry inexplicably took aim at My Food Bag co-founder Nadia Lim, calling her ‘Eurasian fluff’ and making incredibly inappropriate comments about a photo of her as it appeared in their prospectus. Following Simon’s comments, Stuff reports that DGL Group’s value dropped $304 million in less than a week, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern even weighed in on the situation, telling New Zealand Herald ‘I imagine [his comments] would be insulting to all women.’ On recently launched online radio station The Platform, Sean Plunket made the charitable claim that Simon Henry was merely trying to make a comment about ‘star power or celebrity endorsement’ in business, but even he agreed that you’d have to be ‘seriously odd’ to see the image in question as sexual. I can only imagine that Simon Henry lashed out at Nadia out of jealousy, as no one would ever accuse him of using his physical appearance to sell anything (aside from birth control).

Small Town Short News

Jared Ipsen

Sure, mainstream news has all the gore, glitz and glamour that the public lusts for so strongly - but where else are you going to find stories of everyday citizens standing up to the big man (New Zealand Food Safety) and standing up for what they believe in (selling unsafe food products)? And just where else are you going to read about men from Tokoroa falling out of trees? I guess you could just go and read every single small town newspaper like I do. But you won’t. You’ll keep crawling back to Nexus like you always do.

A peat fire in Whatawhata has been blanketing residents with smoke and fog for the last few weeks.

Peat fires happen when partially decayed plant material on or under the soil gets ignited, and can burn for years underground without being detected. Our very own Professor Dave Campbell from Waikato University told Stuff that the fire was part of a much larger issue in the Waikato, saying ‘all 80,000 hectares of drained peatland in the Waikato is on a slow burn.. Really, [peat fires are] happening all the time.’ While we don’t know yet how the fire started, Fire and Emergency had recently warned local residents against lighting fires on their properties due to incredibly dry conditions over the summer. Whoops, lol!

The debate about Te Awamutu’s controversial proposed rubbish incineration plant burns on as residents try to prevent 23 tonnes of daily ash being added to the atmosphere.

While construction company Global Contracting Solutions say the opposition group’s claims are ‘scandalous,’ environmental groups worry the so-called ‘waste to energy’ plant will be a ‘toxic nightmare.’ Talking to the Te Awamutu Courier, a spokesperson for the capitalist corporation GCS pushed back against claims from Zero Waste Network Aotearoa that the plant would heavily damage the surrounding environment - but when asked by Nexus to cite their sources, they chose not to reply to our emails. Councils often pay third party companies to deal with their region’s trash, and the waste industry is an incredibly profitable hustle, with international projections valuing the industry at almost $4 trillion NZD.

A Manakau couple in their 70s have been busted selling raw milk in a nationwide sting by the Ministry for Primary Industries.

A 2019 operation which saw an undercover agent purchase the illegal milk led to a $30,000 fine for the elderly pair, who were allegedly using a loophole in the laws to slang their nasty cow juice. For those unfamiliar with gross shit, ‘raw’ milk is cow titty juice that hasn’t been pasteurised (meaning, heated to a certain temperature to kill bacteria and disease), and drinkers claim it’s better for you even though the only research around raw milk concludes that you definitely shouldn’t drink it. During MPI’s raid on the raw milk trap house, criminal Phillippa Martin told NZ Herald that ‘they went through our trash [and] confiscated our computers and hard drive.’ Her husband was quoted saying ‘I am not ashamed of anything I've done.. My conscience is clear.’

Also,

duck shooting season is underway.

Much like our friends the koi fish and the possum, mallard ducks were introduced in to Aotearoa in the 1870s, and thanks to their rapid breeding schedule are now the most common waterfowl in the country. Duck shooting has become somewhat of a colonial pastime in New Zealand, with hunting licensing body Fish & Game estimating around half a million of them get absolutely blasted to death each year. Some people claim to eat the deceased ducks, and others still claim that they’re culling the birds to keep the numbers down, but I think some dudes just loooooooove the feeling of just fucken slaughtering small defenseless animals. In saying that, I’m not a big fan of ducks anyway so go wild, you bloodthirsty psychos.