As much as LeesGalloway is trying to nudge his officials under the bus, the responsibility for making the decision is his own.

Presumably the Immigration Minister’s decision on Karel Sroubek (News, October 26) will be reversed after a predictable interest-quelling investigation, ostensibly because of surprisingly new information, such as some possible risk to Sroubek’s wife, whose safety would seem to be much more important than is the safety of us hapless public. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever be told why this habitual criminal and illegal immigrant was not to be deported. My guess is that the decision to grant Sroubek residency was part of a softening up strategy to ready us for the pending assimilation of some very suspect refugees, asylum seekers, and queue-jumpers.

I’m scratching my head after reading about Sroubek.

I spent almost 20 years in New Zealand. My Kiwi wife brought me there in late 1995, I got my residency and life was great. I was working in construction, bought a home, had a couple of kids and settled in.

Then my marriage fell apart and I ended up becoming illegal in New Zealand. No one in Immigration would help.

I chose to go underground so I could stay with my two sons, but Immigration finally caught up with me three years ago, and told me to leave or be deported.

My appeal was given to the Minister of Immigration at the time, Michael Woodhouse, who has been very vocal recently on an immigration matter. He passed it on to the associate minister, who told me to leave.

Only months prior Peter Thiel got a passport despite having no ties of any kind to New Zealand. I didn’t want a passport, I just wanted to stay in New Zealand to be with my sons

Wand continue my job as a parent.

I hope the current minister, Iain Lees-Galloway, is reading this. I sent an email to his office just a week ago begging for permission to visit my sons in February 2019. That’s how bad things are, I have to beg people to let me visit my sons. I can’t believe Bryan Ferry is returning to New Zealand. During his last tour his guitarist fell over onstage. This was put down to an apparent heart condition but I think the guy just dozed off along with most of the audience.

Having picked up a few replacement feathers along the way, 70s rockers the Eagles also have us in their sights. This band seem determined to become one of their own songs.

Desperado loosely translates as desperate although it’s difficult to say whether this applies mainly to the group or their fans. Isn’t it enough they have condemned legions of guitar players to be ‘‘prisoners of their own device’’ as the struggle endlessly to achieve that noteperfect version of the the solo in Hotel California?

Try as they might, these old rockers struggle to recreate anything close to their glory days. I totally agree with the international disgust expressed against white supremacist Robert Bower’s attack on innocent worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh recently. Also, Aung San Suu Kyi’s seeming indifference to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya e were in the district court, talking with a woman who had worked there 30 years and seen it all. She said: ‘‘The people we see the most are young men. The reason they end up here is because they can never think more than one step ahead.’’

This is not an affliction that entirely wears off. If there had been a bit more thinking a few more steps ahead, we might not be facing ecological catastrophe from burning fossil fuels.

If there had been a bit more thinking a few steps ahead, the cost of a roof over your head might not be such a nightmare for so many New Zealanders.

Welcome back my friends, to the housing show that never ends. Will Kiwibuild solve all our problems?

No, said various people noisily this week. ‘‘Losers!’’ Sneered anonymous National party functionaries on Twitter, ‘‘Don’t know what they’re doing.’’

‘‘All of a sudden people were saying ‘hang on we thought these were going to people in need’,’’ said Judith Collins in her characteristic posture of nonretreat from an error.

She had mistaken a young couple’s expression of love for a travel brag and was now somehow panel-beating that into a story about Phil Twyford people in Myanmar is justly receiving widespread condemnation.

However, it is a great pity that similar outpourings of disgust are not directed towards the supremacist behaviour of Israeli Zionists. Where is the outrage at the on-going slaughter of unarmed Palestinian protesters including innocent children and clearly identifiable medics at the Gaza border?

Murder is murder and racism is racism whoever is the perpetrator or victim. The issue of whether or not abortion should be considered as a health rather than a justice issue is a red herring.

The real issue is whether there should be any restrictions at all on the gestational age at which abortions can be performed.

All three ‘models’ put forward by the Law Commission would allow abortion on demand right up to birth.

The big change from the current situation would be the increase in late-term abortions, which enter completely new territory in order to achieve the object of terminating the pregnancy.

The commission explains that this is because the woman would need to agree to ‘feticide’, which involves the direct killing of the unborn child in utero by means of a lethal injection to the heart.

Without this there would be a significant danger that the child would be born alive as in many cases it would already have reached the stage of viability.

Imagine what a dilemma this would cause to the mother and to her healthcare team.

The commission’s report is being wrong about everything, which is one she never tires of telling.

Are they losers? Do they not know what they’re doing?

Be fair, said Phil Twyford, who is always confident he’s not wrong. What you have to fix is not just one thing but a whole bunch of them, he said.

They aren’t just building properties for firsthome buyers, they’re also putting three billion into renovating existing state homes and building