At long last, Donald Trump will leave office tomorrow.
His presidency and administration will be remembered for unprecedented incompetence and corruption.
I was here through it all, and can attest to Trump's historic legacy of failure.
[Thread]
Some NZ farmers and their supporters, appear furious about the idea that they may be helping to subsidise urban buses.
They would rather you didn't look at the bill they've been running up.
Agriculture produces roughly half of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions — more than any other sector in any developed nation.
It pays nothing for them.
In 2024, the coalition government didn't just maintain that exemption.
They legislated it permanently.
At a conservative carbon price of $40/tonne, that's an estimated $1.6 billion a year, silently transferred from every other sector of the economy to one.
The roads beneath the milk tankers?
Roading damage scales with the fourth power of axle load — a 50-tonne tanker doesn't cause fifty times more damage than a car, it causes thousands of times more.
Road User Charges don't cover the full cost of local road networks.
Ratepayers pick up the tab.
When Mycoplasma bovis arrived in 2017, taxpayers covered 62% of the $870 million eradication bill.
The disease came in through private cattle movements.
- The financial risk fell on the public.
The TBfree possum-control programme gets 40% of its funding from the Crown — to protect private livestock assets.
Environmental costs:
Agriculture leaches 200 million kilograms of nitrate into our waterways annually. Auckland Council is spending $7 billion over ten years upgrading water infrastructure to deal with deteriorating source water quality.
The farms that produced the pollution pay nothing toward that bill.
We do.
Under this govt, farmers have a licence to treat kiwi rivers like open sewers, many, turning our local rivers green brown when flushing their sewage holding tanks...
- those of us who live rurally have all seen what this does to local fish stocks and waterways.
Those farmers should be dealing with their own waste, preferably putting it back on the land, not shitting in our rivers.
They pay nothing for this damage.
The New Zealand Ministry of Education actually spends more than $200 million annually on its school transport system, which delivers vital, free daily bus services primarily targeting rural and isolated farming communities
Urban kids navigate public bus networks, or they find other means.
Adding it up conservatively: $2.0–2.5 billion per year in identifiable public support. Across 50,000 farm enterprises, that's roughly $40,000 per farm, per year.
Working for Families — the programme politicians actually debate as welfare — pays around $7,500 per eligible family per year.
None of this shows up as "SUBSIDY" in the accounts. It's buried across climate policy, biosecurity, infrastructure investment, education, and tax expenditure — each item looking like something else, none of it assembled into a single line. That fragmentation is not an accident of government accounting. It is a feature of it.
The sector is not self-reliant. It is publicly underwritten at a scale that would be politically indefensible if it arrived by cheque.
Next time a farmer posts about city buses, or some righteous idiot complains about labours proposed public transport policy, ask:
Who, exactly, is subsidising whom?
---
*Sources: Stats NZ (2024) · MPI 2025 · OSPRI · https://t.co/IulEsmeir4 · Rogers et al., Journal of Hydrology (2023) · PHCC 2024 · RNZ/1News April 2026 · Stats NZ Agricultural Census 2022*
🚨 DISGUSTING: France 24 confirms the Zionist regime just committed another horrific war crime.
They intentionally fired two missiles into a densely populated residential building right on top of a civilian bakery in Beirut with absolutely zero evacuation warning!
Amazing: KPMG wrote a report describing the successful use of AI by businesses. But the case studies turned out to be AI hallucinations.
https://t.co/s3LE8vedNi
Infantino claims he can't do anything about Referees, players, journalists and fans being banned from the World Cup because in every country there are Governments.
In 2023 Indonesia refused to let the Israeli U23 squad have visas
FIFA instantly moved the tournament to Argentina
Referee denied entry.
Officials denied entry.
Players denied entry.
Fans denied entry.
The U.S. is proving exactly why it never should’ve been chosen to host the World Cup.
Scotland fan Michael had his ESTA travel document allowing entry to the US for the World Cup approved in March. Just 1 hour before he was due to fly out it was revoked, & dozens of other people have similar stories.
Woolworths has announced it will move hundreds of HR, IT and finance jobs offshore to Asia and India.
They rake in over a billion dollars in profits annually from Australian shoppers, yet still send our jobs overseas.
How greedy can a company be?
“Constitutionally abhorrent”
Expert reveals the advice he gave to the NZ government on its plan for a law change to protect big polluters from legal consequences.
Luxon’s lot are a dire threat to our democracy.
https://t.co/cE17UugkmX
ASB has been ordered to pay $6.731 million over its "inadequate" anti-money laundering systems – the highest penalty of its kind ever imposed in New Zealand
https://t.co/izugk9OykD