{"id":346,"date":"2008-01-25T16:25:29","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T16:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/25\/heaven-on-earth\/"},"modified":"2008-01-25T16:25:29","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T16:25:29","slug":"heaven-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/2008\/01\/heaven-on-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Heaven on Earth?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A link from Atanu&#8217;s blog led me to some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.deeshaa.org\/new-zealand-according-to-gordon-dryden\/\" target=\"_blank\">fascinating facts<\/a> about a place I&#8217;d known of for quite a while&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>World\u2019s first democracy: the first in which all women joined men in having the vote for Government: 1893.<\/li>\n<li>Has long since virtually eliminated poverty.<\/li>\n<li>One of the world pioneers (since mid-1930s) of the welfare state, along with Sweden and Norway.<\/li>\n<li>From about 1938 to early 1970s, 100 per cent full employment. Even now, national unemployment well under 4 per cent.<\/li>\n<li>(Has a) robust grassroots democracy. Every school, public and private, is elected by the school\u2019s parents, with minority board-posts elected by teachers, and, in high schools, by students too&#8230; General election turnouts for most of the last half century have regularly topped 90 per cent, although have dropped slightly below that in some recent years.<\/li>\n<li>In the mid-part of the 20th century, consistently in the world\u2019s top five countries to lead the world in productivity.<\/li>\n<li>Among the world\u2019s top-book-buying and reading nations.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What an impressive set of indicators for an outstanding quality of Life, wouldn&#8217;t you agree?\u00a0 No wonder, I&#8217;ve been wanting to move to <strong>New Zealand<\/strong>, for as long as I&#8217;ve known of it!\u00a0 (Thanks for the reinforcement, Atanu)<\/p>\n<p>Read the complete list <a href=\"http:\/\/www.deeshaa.org\/new-zealand-according-to-gordon-dryden\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A link from Atanu&#8217;s blog led me to some fascinating facts about a place I&#8217;d known of for quite a while&#8230; World\u2019s first democracy: the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-travel"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}