So this is why I work so hard??

Maybe I shold have voted National??

What do you guys think??

I think that all tax dollars should be used only for things that I personally can see a benefit in because I am omnipotent and the most sensible person there is.

hehe the placebo effect is a powerful thing. It will probably do people good to believe they are being cured, whether the treatment does anything directly or not.

Ok, but it's still costing us, the humble taxpayer $1.3million a year.

It's like that whole Te Wanaaga Aotearoa thing, just throw money at them for hardly legitamite things and watch them squander it, same thing with the head-butting case, just because he was Maori........that's why I started this thread.

I know they've had a raw deal in the past, but really, this is just ridiculous.

That's costing me an estimated $0.65 a year?

Shit.

Ooh, clever boy you get a gold star :goldstar:

I don't care too much what it is or isn't costing you Cass, it is a waste of money, common sense should dictate that to you (obviously not), $1.3 million on seawater and greenstone to "heal" people?

Where is the monetary value in the government's arts funding program? It is for cultural enrichment. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra is being funded $2.6 million dollars this year. You can find the information here. As soon as you start looking at the arts purely in terms of cost vs profit your society is, in my opinion, completely fucked.

This is cultural heritage being preserved.

It's fucking ludicrous, that's what it is. If they want to preserve their culture, they can do it on their own dime.

You'd want money allocated to health related activities to produce health related benefits. Imagine all the starving kids in Africa that we could save with this money!

We could also incarcerate an extra 26 people p/a/.

damn straight

A better way to preserve their cultural heritage would be to spend the money on real health care and education.

You assume there are no benefits. I would appreciate then if you could explain to me the exact processes and the benefits or lack thereof, since your understanding is so great.

The problem with this is that myself and Mr Heidegger would tend to argue that you are in absolutely no position to comment on the effectiveness of said processes.

If you feel so strongly about the wellbeing of the starving kids in Africa, I suggest you help them. However this has little to do with the issue at hand, given that it is an issue ofr foreign aid rather than a New Zealand Maori heath issue.

I dare say that the government spends a great deal more than $1.3 million on 'real' healthcare and 'real' education each year.

These things are, of course, European. I would suggest reading some Ranginui Walker if you are interested in knowing more about assimilation.

On Maori health and education, specific, tailored programmes. We get our palangi healthcare and education, they get their own. $1.3 million could do a lot for them, not seawater and greenstone.

Fuck if we were stupid enough to believe that seawater cured ailments and diseases, fuck even cancer, there'd be a lot of people down at the beach right now drowning.

I think it should also be noted that european healing techniques such as homeopathy which have no more scientific basis than greenstone therapy are funded in the same way.

Then the labour party has graduated from PC nonsense to raw stupidity.

I assume that there are better ways of achieving the results, i.e. with proven methods of established medical practices.

If its not proven to have any benefits, then it shouldnt be subisised through tax. Money should be allocated from overall cultural grants.

Good point Oob.

Cartoons really do teach us everything.

South Park can be hilariously prophetic at times. For instance, the 'awesome-o' episode where the movie execs are asking awesome-o for movie ideas, apparently there's actually a program that predicts rather well which movies are going to be successes, and that Hollywood is actually consulting it.

Also the 'gay cowboys eating pudding' ~= Brokeback Mountain.

these things don't have a direct benefit, but seem to feel better after having the treatments. The placebo effect is an area of psychology that is not properly understood, so I tend to just say let people do what they want to do as long as they feel better afterwards. Of course this money should probably be coming out of the cultural budget but that makes little diference to rate payers in the end.

Going out on my boat makes me feel better when I'm sick. I guess you could call that the placebo effect. Would you like to contribute financially to my next fishing expedition?

I'll have my mum bake up some 'gata', and tell you all it's 'Armenian way bread'. Placebo effect on the cheap.

Oob, your mum is all right :clap:

Gata is a roll of the dice, sometimes it's really good, but sometimes it's too dry.

That is one of my favourite movie quotes (although I think it starts 'A lawyer with his briefcase...'), along with:

"Lawyers are like nuclear weapons: they've got theirs, so I've got mine, and if you use them, they fuck everything up."

I'm sure that tax payer money is going into supporting boating. Wouldn't be surprised if it was more than $1.3mil even :o

Don't get me started on fucking boating. We poured millions into an America's Cup...where's the Cup now, huh?

Sure, taxpayers provide the coast guard which will (hopefully) come and rescue my ass should I drive my boat into a reef or something. Taxpayers also provide the emergency services which would aid Maori in the event that they somehow managed to endanger their lives via their 'traditional maori therapy.'

However, the taxpayer should not help us initiate either activity in the hope that it will improve our health because some subjective effect on the mind.

Yeah but that has monetary returns. I'm all for the government throwing money at things if it expects to get more money back... key word here being 'expects', it won't be successful every time of course.

Oh man, I haven't had Gata in ages, but damn it's soo nice! We should give Gata to everyone and no one will be sick ever again!

Remind me next time you're here, I'll see if we have any around.

Sweeet

I'm not talking about just sporting boating here, there's also recreational boating.

I regularly cure myself through the use of greenstone and prayer. One of these cures is a real cure.

I know what you're thinking, punks. You're thinking, "Did he really give us two choices, or did he really present us with a false dichotomy?". And to tell you the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being El Comandante from the Cocaine Club speaking, the most powerful man in the world, and I will blow your head clean off in any debate, you've got to ask yourself a question. Do I feel lucky? Well do you, punk?

Bah well I want my natural remedies subsidised as well. My biggest problem with these things are that they are usually based on race. They won't ever be able to help me. Same with scholarships for Maori students etc.

The problem here is that people are looking at this purely from a healthcare perspective, which is really not the case, nor I suspect has the story been accurately reported.

Of course if you read some actual articles on the subject you might know that the Charter of Health Practitioners chief executive Patrick Fahy, said there should be funding for all forms of healthcare, "rather than just the medical model which is clearly not working. The more you look at the common health problems of our times the more apparent it is that natural healthcare has something to offer".

And maybe you would see that the acting dean of Waikato University's school of Maori and Pacific development, Tom Roa, said the mainstream health system had left Maori health lagging. "There is clearly a need for another approach to Maori unwellness." Roa said he used rongoa clinics for some complaints. They did not claim to be cure-alls, but had "a very careful and sensitive way" of dealing holistically with their patients.

He went on to say "There is still some reluctance within a section of our community in terms of Pakeha medicine and Pakeha healing. One way of assisting these people with their treatments is through rongoa services."

And of course the National Advisory Committee on Core Health and Disability Services recommended in 1995 that aspects of traditional Maori healing should be publicly funded, and at the time you might recall that National were in government.

Ah right, well then yeah that sucks too.

And if it can prove that in a scientific study, then it deserves our tax money. The placebo effect doesn't deserve a penny.

The worry I have is that people will go to 'bullshit therapy that makes me feel warm and fuzzy' instead of 'actual therapy that fixes the problem'. Like chiropractors (bullshit) vs physiotherapists. Quackery under the guise of cultural sensitivity is still quackery.

I wouldn't mind if this was funded providing that other forms of alternative healthcare were as well...For instance if say I wanted to have a Reiki massage done, it is not covered by the government (as far as I know). They need to calrify what forms of alternative healthcare they are willing to fund. Not just base it on a cultural thing.