NZ Skeptics Articles

Articles tagged with "submission"

Response to a member's concern

19 February 2024

We recently had a member decide not to renew their membership, because of concerns about our submission to the Therapeutic Products Bill. They told us:

Once more unto the Breach

20 March 2023

I've been thrown into the editorial breach this weekend due to being the contributor who made the most…well…contributions. Fortunately, it is a job that for me has all the glory and none of the work, as the only thing that is required from me is to write up this introduction.

Is the sun finally setting on Arise?

22 August 2022

Back in April's newsletter, Craig talked about David Farrier's investigative work uncovering alleged harms that happened within Arise Church.

Conversion Therapy Bill passes final reading

28 February 2022

Despite the impromptu music festival happening on its front lawn, the New Zealand Parliament passed The Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill, colloquially known as the Conversion Therapy Bill, on its final reading on February 15th. This occurred with 112 voices in favour across all parties - and with the exception of just 8 National MPs:

Conversion Conversation

20 September 2021

Following on from our submission to the Justice Select Committee a couple of weeks ago on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill (outlawing conversion therapy), myself and Bronwyn Rideout from the NZ Skeptics committee gave an oral submission to some of the Justice Select Committee last week. I was surprised that oral submissions started so quickly after the deadline for written submissions, but thankfully in very little time we were able to put together an oral submission that was complementary to our written one, but different enough that we weren't just boring the MPs with the same information they'd already read from us.

Conversion Therapy Submission

13 September 2021

This week NZ Skeptics submitted our view on the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill. This bill proposes prohibiting so-called conversion therapies which aim to change a person's sexuality, gender identity or gender expression. Curiously, the direction of conversion seems to be exclusively in the direction of becoming “straight” or identifying with and expressing the gender which aligns with the genitals you were born with.

Hate Speech Submission

9 August 2021

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the NZ Skeptics putting together a submission for the Ministry of Justice in response to their new Hate Speech proposals. You can read our submission on our website, but I thought it would be fun to use EleutherAI's free online GPT-J-6G deep learning model to write a submission for us. I gave the software the first few paragraphs of our real submission, and then clicked the button to guess the next hundred or so words. I then fed the result back into the algorithm so that it could create the next block of text, and so on.