Auckland Deep Thinkers

Michael Moore presents “Planet of the Humans”, a 2019 documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jeff Gibbs.

The film examines mainstream environmental groups' partnerships with billionaires, corporations, and wealthy family foundations in the fight to save the planet. The film questions whether green energy can solve society's expanding resource depletion without reducing consumption and/or population growth, as all existing forms of energy generation require some kind of consumption of finite resources.

Essentially the film questions whether renewable energy sources such as biomass energy, wind power, and solar energy are as clean and renewable as they are portrayed to be.

Join us to view the movie with like-minded people and stay on for a discussion afterwards about it!

Door: Members $5 - Non-Members $10
Free entry for new Members joining on the night!

Please arrive earlier to buy food or drinks before the movie starts at 7pm. We will also have a short interval after the end of the movie and before the discussion starts.

The property bubble in New Zealand is a major national economic and social issue. Since the early 1990s, house prices in NZ have risen considerably faster than incomes, putting increasing pressure on public housing providers as fewer households have access to housing on the private market. The property bubble has produced significant impacts on inequality in New Zealand, which now has one of the highest homelessness rates in the OECD and a record-high waiting list for public housing. Government policies have attempted to address the crisis since 2013 but have produced limited impacts to reduce prices or increase the supply of affordable housing. However, prices started falling in 2022 in response to tightening of mortgage availability and supply increasing. Some areas saw drops as high as around 9% - albeit from very high prices.
Unaffordable housing has produced profound impacts on New Zealand society. Between 1986 and 2013, home ownership dropped from 74% to 65%.

So – if there’s a housing crisis, where did it come from? Is it an excuse to justify yet another tax on those who have, ultimately for the net benefit of those who don’t have, after the Government clips the ticket? Surely one of the first steps in determining how to fix a crisis, would be to determine its source – What about the lack of new housing, or the fact our interest rates were kept ultra-low even though by all accounts, they should have actually increased.

The weaponization of tariffs by US President Donald Trump has clearly generated fear and loathing across the world. These threats are not only purely performative; nor are they just transactional in nature.
The logic of these tariff threats in most cases is questionable at best, and the declared aims are varied: from demanding “parity” of tariffs with trading partners no matter what their level of development, to seeing any bilateral trade deficits with other countries as inherently problematic, to viewing threats of tariffs as a measure to force other policy changes on the part of the trading partner.

However, the panic about the possible tariffs and their impact that is being spread especially by popular media in many lower income countries, is overplayed. It is important to keep in perspective the significance of the US economy as a major importer, even for lower income countries. The truth is that the US is much less important in driving world trade than it was in the decade leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, and it is certainly less significant for Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDEs) which effectively encompass the set of lower and middle income countries around the world.