Press Release: Boycott Countdown – Supermarket heavyweight punches down on Kiwi farmers
This week, the Head of Sustainability for supermarket giant Countdown was published in the media discussing the company’s desire to reduce its carbon footprint. “Companies should be assessing their impacts on our environment. However, instead of looking at how they, an Australian-owned multinational with 194 stores New Zealand-wide, can reduce their emissions, they have decided to blame farmers,” Groundswell NZ co-founder Bryce McKenzie says. “It is, unfortunately, a narrative New Zealand’s food producers are all too familiar with. Accustomed to being the Government’s environment scapegoat, farmers and rural communities are hardly surprised to see big corporate players dancing to the same tune.
“Groundswell NZ are very sceptical of Countdown’s claim that most of their emissions are the fault of local suppliers. This is a massive chain operation that utilises refrigerants, has massive distribution networks requiring a great deal of fuel, and substantial energy costs to run nearly 200 stores. They also import huge amounts of products from overseas, relying on air and sea travel. They cannot expect us to believe that they are practically carbon neutral except for emissions that farmers are responsible for.
“Countdown also uses GWP100 to calculate emissions which is an outdated and less accurate way to measure methane emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have reported that using the GWP100 method overestimates methane’s warming potential by 3-4 times. They advocate for the use of the updated GWP* metric and for accounting correctly for carbon sequestered on farms through trees, bush, crops, grass, and soil.
“We call BS on Countdown’s buck passing and suggest they substantiate their claims. Following that they might like to reflect on why they had to push out their own zero-waste-to-landfill target from 2020 to 2025 while spending $400million on a rebrand. “New Zealand’s farmers are among the most efficient in the world. We pride ourselves on our sustainable practices and the care we take of our environment. It is fair to say that as a community we are sick to death of being the scapegoats of governments and big corporations who don’t want to take responsibility for their own environmental impacts.
“So we have decided to take action. From Monday 24th July to Sunday 7th August, Groundswell NZ will be calling on our supporters to join us in boycotting Countdown. We, the food producers of New Zealand, have had enough.”
Censorship is very much alive here in NZ with the Main Stream Media and Youtube/Google/ facebook still shadow banning or ‘fact checking’ ‘unapproved’ opinions and facts.
Lizz Gunn, a former TV news presenter has started her own political party and is been ‘silenced’ for having ‘unapproved’ views on the mandates and all that covid stuff.
In the interest of free speech, a link to a video where she talks about her vision for New Zealand is below.
This is partly because the mandates are mostly gone, and we don’t watch TV or listen to any Main Stream Media at all, which means we aren’t bombarded with whatever ’emergency’ or crap narrative they are pushing this week.
The kids are home schooled, so they aren’t encumbered with whatever narrative the public schools Government is promoting at the moment. eg Gender LGT…whatever
We are mostly insulated from the crazy stuff and life is good
We get a glimpse every now and then of whats out there from some reliable sources, one of which I’ve copied and pasted below. It’s a bit long, but it illustrates the denial and confusion over sports people just dropping dead for ‘no reason’.
My cousin was a police superintendent in the UK. He was unaware that he had acquired CJD (mad cow disease), and his condition was not diagnosed until after his death. To the dismay of his colleagues and relatives, his behaviour became increasingly erratic. You can imagine the position, he is wielding significant authority over the lives of others, but he is making increasingly irrational decisions. Everyone feels confused by his behaviour. Do you think this might have relevance to current events?
It is hard to escape the notion that the world is going mad from an undiagnosed cause. Renowned mathematician G H Hardy wrote in 1940 faced with the incomprehensible horror of war, “When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne”. An anodyne is something that allays pain. As someone who analyses data, I am very clear that the mathematics of health data can no longer be ignored. The data is telling me something has gone terribly wrong.
The New Zealand Herald leads this morning (26 June 2023) with a story “Two Auckland Suburbs Rugby Club players suffer critical, life-threatening injuries in consecutive weeks”. The article covers not just two but four players critically affected mid game. Two are in hospital, and two died. Read on, and you discover that not all of these were necessarily rugby injuries, rather, some, if not most, were quite possibly medical events caused by something other than rugby.
The events were reported as a blood clot in the brain, a seizure requiring CPR (symptoms typical of a cardiac arrest), a critical brain injury with an undisclosed cause, and an unspecified on-field collapse. All the victims were young with a life ahead of them.
According to the article, NZ Rugby is on edge. The Auckland Rugby Union (ARU) said they were “unaware of the cause”, but inexplicably added “we are fortunate that events of this nature are extremely rare” (or maybe they should have used the past tense ‘were’?). The Herald commented that playing rugby amounts to suffering a weekly car accident, so there is no need to look any further for a cause.
You might believe that if it wasn’t for all the other people who are not rugby players hospitalised or dying suddenly from medical events that sound suspiciously similar. Leaked Wellington Region statistics record hospitalisation for heart attacks up 83% and strokes up 25%. 2023 excess deaths are up 18% above the long term history, a hundred extra people are dying each week in our nation of just five million people.
The events reported on the rugby field are tragic, but when unexpected health events are consistently way above historical levels over a period of two and a half years they can no longer be described as a series of isolated and unrelated tragedies, it has become a statistically significant mathematical trend that stands in need of explanation.
Unfortunately, mathematics is not a strong suit of our current crop of politicians. They are dismissing alarming statistics as irrelevant. David Seymour, ACT Party leader thinks vaccine side effects are a fiction. Ditto for the Greens. Labour are still using our tax dollars to promote more Covid vaccines. Chris Luxon, National Party Leader, says he doesn’t want any votes from people he describes as anti-vaxxers (ironically 50% of eligible people have not taken the latest Covid bivalent vaccine).
This is becoming a crime, a crime of denial, the denial of the obvious. We have an election coming. On current evidence, it is madness to think that re-electing ANY of our politicians is anything other than a prescription for a still greater health disaster. None of our political parties are loudly calling for the closure of the Disinformation Project currently funded by the PM’s office. A project squarely aimed at controlling discussion of alarming health data.
The media, the health service, and politicians appear focused on deflecting attention from the situation by repeated allusions to conspiracy theorists. This is a huge canard. From the available data, I am registering something completely different, we are in the midst of an evolving health crisis with no precedent whose outcome is already dire, but may get much worse.
The health crisis has arisen from a combination of Covid infection, novel Covid vaccines, the effect of lockdowns, and longstanding poor health habits. Asserting that Covid vaccines are safe, against the evidence, misleads the public. The health crisis is not just being inadequately addressed, its possible causes are being deliberately hidden from the public.
Like New Zealand, Australia is busy enshrining this mad situation in law. Nine News reports “Under new draft legislation, social media giants could be fined for breaching an industry standard of misinformation – which would amount to billion-dollar fines for some companies.” And here’s the rub, national and local government authorities are excluded from any liability if they misinform the public—a clause that will allow mainstream media to misinform if they are merely quoting the government. Welcome to the future.
The dimensions of the health crisis are huge and far reaching. Read this article in the UK Telegraph detailing the catastrophic effects of lockdowns on children’s mental health and academic achievement. A 50% jump in those seeking help for mental health problems. Absenteeism. Declines in reading, writing, maths, and science attainment. Increases in self-harming. A 42% rise in eating disorders. Here in New Zealand, we additionally have a youth crime wave.
It is important to realise that the relative effects of Covid, Covid vaccination, and lockdowns blur together if you fail to do research and ignore the problems, as our government and other governments are doing. Thereby enriching pharmaceutical corporations and guaranteeing a biotech dystopian nightmare.
Locked up in the beehive during the pandemic, an entirely artificial view of the world incubated. Politicians found they could just tell people what to do without needing to answer their questions. Heady stuff.
Our present political landscape would have been unthinkable ten years ago.
Plans to coup people up in cities, the most polluted areas of our nation.
Complaints that not enough people have access to euthanasia.
Mandated medical interventions and loss of employment.
Borrowings on a scale that mortgages our national future
Government control of the press and censorship of social media
Most of all, the sidelining of the New Zealand Bill of Rights effectively removing our right to free speech. Anyone who thinks that is a good idea needs to think again. When Hitler instituted the systematic killing of the terminally ill, the insane, and the disabled in 1939, only public protest made him scale it back.
Without any right to free speech and public protest, there is no limit to the power and stupidity of government. All 120 of our elected politicians have let us down and taken advantage of our trusting nature. It is time for some new faces and some old values like honesty, truth, and rationality. Public debate has been missing in action for 3 long years, if it is not reinstated in November, we will be locked into a system without a voice and subject to experimentation.
Avi is an Australian journalist, who was about fly to New Zealand to report on an anti-mandate protest in Wellington.
Photo credit -Rebel News
He was stopped from doing so by Immigration NZ, due to a past minor conviction (so they said), but that was proven to be an outright lie.
It turns out a newspaper purposely created a story, to help the police and the immigration department keep him out of the country. They even asked interpol to help them out. The damning details of this is in the link below.
He managed to get the ban overturned, (just in time to promote his new book).
Avi Yemini’s unlawful New Zealand ban has been OVERTURNED, book tour announced
Rebel reporter to kick off book tour in Auckland and Wellington.
By Rebel News | June 27, 2023 | News
Avi Yemini’s New Zealand travel ban has been overturned almost a year after the Rebel News reporter was sensationally banned from entering the country to cover an anti-government protest.
In August 2022, New Zealand’s immigration authorities cited a minor criminal conviction as the reason for the ban, over an incident amplified by mainstream media detractors and their political allies, that Avi can now finally debunk in his book.
Even if the conviction were legitimate, Yemini argues that it did not meet the threshold to stop him from entering, as it only resulted in a small fine rather than the prescribed 12 months in prison.
Despite evidence that Avi’s minor criminal conviction had nothing to do with the ban, the mainstream media uncritically echoed the official narrative.
Internal communications later revealed that the real reason behind the ban was the authorities’ fear of Avi’s “propensity to challenge opposing [establishment] views”.
Avi points out the irony of a so-called democratic state like New Zealand banning a journalist solely because he held different opinions from those in power, likening such behavior to that of communist China.
Undeterred by the unjust ban, Avi vowed to fight until the decision was overturned, regardless of the obstacles in his path.
New Zealand authorities employed delaying tactics and made him jump through hoops, but his determination prevailed.
The unlawful decision was overturned just as he finished writing his book, presenting a perfectly timed opportunity to launch his official book tour in Auckland and Wellington.
Avi also extends an invitation to former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, emphasising that he has a special signed copy reserved for her as a gesture of appreciation for the unintended boost she provided to his book launch.
If you would like attend the official book launch and have your copy of A Rebel From The Start signed by Avi or purchase a copy head over to RebelFromTheStart.com to get all of the details.
Uncoffined 
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