Eamon Sloan

  Covid Comments Everyone has something to say about Covid. The everlasting question is who to believe. What you read here is I hope believable. First off I feel the NZ government is doing a creditable job – on most fronts but not all. More about that later. It would not matter which party was in power as it would be guided by the available science. We cannot expect all of our politicians of whatever stripe to be super scientists. All of the arguments going around today seem to centre on personalities and whether Labour is using the issue for its own political advantage. It is inescapable that anything a government does will always be viewed as being politically motivated. I am tiring of the way so many commentators are using the issue to mount personal attacks on Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins and Ashley Bloomfield. Richard Prebble out of the NZ Herald has not missed a beat. Covid is a first-time experience for all of us. Don’t get me wrong. I do have many other real problems...

Science Debate The current Science debate has for me raised more than a few questions. Some of those questions could lead us down a goodly number of rabbit holes. Be careful of rabbit holes – there might be a taniwha or two down there at the same time. More about taniwhas further on where I will differ with one of the protagonists in the science debate. The Auckland professors have brought to our attention again that science is science, is science (Listener 26 th July). And that there are rules, procedures and methods to be followed in producing whatever the science might be. Think in terms of theory, experimentation, proof, argumentation, peer review and so on it goes. The argument advanced by the professors deals with the origins of science, plus the separation of and definitions of science and knowledge. The professors were, in what I can describe only as a fair, reasonable and understandable manner, explaining that Maori knowledge cannot be regarded as science. While point...