Kiwiblog

Bronwyn Torrie at the Dom Post reports:

A literary dame, an internationally published poet and a celebrated historian have been recognised for their impact on New Zealand’s literary landscape.

Dame Fiona Kidman, Peter Bland and James Belich received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement at Premier House in Wellington last night. Each receives $60,000.

Established in 2003, the annual awards recognise writers who have made significant contributions to non-fiction, poetry and fiction.

I happened to be at the awards last night, and it was lovely to see the awards presented to some of our literary giants.

Two of the awards were presented by Arts Minister Chris Finlayson, and one by Opposition Arts Spokesperson Steve Chadwick. I thought it was a nice touch, to share the presenting duties.

The funniest moment of the night was when Finlayson was making his introductory remarks, and greeting the various MPs, Ambassadors and other VIPs there. He saw Justice Joseph Williams in the audience and quipped “Good to see Justice Williams here, I presume he is here as his recent judgements are a finalist for the literary fiction award“.

It’s a rare sight to see the Attorney-General dissing a High Court Judge. Lots of laughter, including I suspect from Justice Williams.

I’ve actually recruited people to join a union in the past, and believe some unions do a good job of advocating for their members. There are some bad employers out there, and sometimes a collective approach is desirable in dealing with them.

But a real issue I have with many unions, is that they are literally part of the Labour Party, and put the interests of the political party ahead of the interest of their own members. A situation in Australia is a prefect example of this.

A federal Labor MP, Craig Thomson, is under huge scrutiny as when he was the head of the Health Services Union he spent around $150,000 on his union credit card including several prostitutes. He sued Fairfax a couple of years ago who reported this, but has now dropped the lawsuit, but Fairfax has all the documents under discovery.

There is no doubt he stole money off the union, and used their funds for his personal expenses. He denies he hired prostitutes and say someone else signed the chits.However the escort agencies were also rung from his cellphone and handwriting experts say the signatures are his.

There’s a more detailed post on this from someone in Australia tomorrow, but I want to focus today on the issue of why has he not been charged? Well simply because the Police say they can’t investigate unless the union complains.

So why has the union not complained? Wouldn’t any other organisation that had someone do this, complain?

The answer is because he is a Federal Labor MP, and if they complained, then he might be found guilty and might have to resign his seat which would cause a by-election. And if Labor lost the by-election, they may lose Government.

So to protect their mates in Labor, the union won’t complain to the Police. Never mind the fact $150,000 of their members fees were spent by this Labor MP. They put protecting Labor above their own members interests.

Tertiary education specialist Dave Guerin corrects some errors by Rod Oram:

Rod Oram wrote an opinion piece on industry training yesterday that sets out some strong views on industry training but also has some enormous errors. I often disagree with Rod Oram’s prescriptions, mainly on pathways rather than outcomes, but he usually gets the relevant facts right.

First up, he seems to have taken hook, line and sinker the Labour myth that National destroyed industry training in the 1990s and Labour fixed it – check out the following quote.

Oram said:

Reviving industry training was one of the key planks of Helen Clark’s 1999 election campaign. The Modern Apprenticeship Act of 2002 was one of her government’s first major pieces of legislation. It created Industry Training Organisations, each tasked with developing government-funded programmes for its specific sector.”

Guerin points out:

First, ITOs were established by the Industry Training Act 1992, by National, 7 years before Helen Clark gained power.

Oram said:

But this was exactly the deeply damaging mistake the Bolger government made with the Industry Training Act of 1992. It radically reformed skills training, leaving only skeletal government support.

Guerin responds:

Second, there was no “skeletal” support for ITOs. They got substantial start-up grants to explore feasibility (which is partly why we ended up with so many ITOs) and then had funding transferred from polytechnics to purchase training. Everyone wants more money, but ITOs were not starved.

Oram said:

As a result, the number of people in formal workplace training plunged and skills shortages became chronic.

Guerin responds:

Third, workplace training did not plunge due to the Industry Training Act 1992. The table below shows that industry training numbers started falling in the March 1988 year, when Labour was in power. The drop is unsurprising given the huge structural changes being made in the economy, education and in labour markets over that period – an increase would have been surprising. Even though the decline started under Labour, it reached its highest percentage decline in the June 1992 year (the Industry Training Act became law on 22 June 1992, so can’t bear too much blame). The decline continued until the June 1993 year, after which numbers rose the next year.

In 1988 there were 28,240 trainees. This fell to 14,904 by June 1994. However by June 1999 it was 49,577 and June 2000 hit 63,102.

Guerin also points out:

Rod Oram also wrote that ITOs “offer a confusing array of 4600 qualifications at levels one to six”, whereas readers will know that the majority of qualifications are owned by providers, not ITOs.

It’s great to have had those myths dispelled.

Enjoy this mashup of John Belushi in Blues Brothers, with Obama talking about the credit downgrade.

Dr Greg Clydesdale says:

We cannot rely on Auckland to drive the New Zealand economy according to Dr Clydesdale who today releases a discussion paper ‘A middle path for the New Zealand economy’. 

 A key feature of recent economic debate has been the idea that Auckland will be the country’s economic driver.  The argument states that there are economic advantages to having many firms located close together.  However, Auckland’s industries have low rates of innovation and exports: key drivers of economic growth.  The city lacks the capabilities to deliver desired growth rates.

 Auckland’s location does present many economic advantages, but to expect it to drive growth is going too far.  Recent policy was inspired by recent literature from economic geography, diversity and immigration.  Dr Clydesdale states it is time to end the myths and alchemy that has influenced the New Zealand economy for so long.  It is time to get back to basics. …

Definite food for thought. The full paper is embedded below.

Conference Fashionable Policy With Super Font

From Q+A interview with Mana candidate John Minto:

GUYON         OK, let’s talk about some of those economic ideas that you did raise in my first question.  You want a maximum wage of 10 times the minimum wage – minimum wage about 25,000 – so you want a maximum wage so that anyone who earns a dollar over $250,000 pays 100% tax to the government.

 JOHN That’s one of the ideas that’s in our draft policy, yes.

This policy is not new. It is identical to what the Soviet Union and other communist countries had. They declared doctors should not be paid a huge amount more than street cleaners. They did indeed set maximum wages.

It failed. It has failed in every country that has tried it.

But nevertheless Mana is unhappy Labour will only whack the rich pricks for 39%. They want a 100% top tax rate.

You’ve got the people who work the hardest, work the longest hours on the lowest pay

Minto is wrong with his assertion that lower paid workers work longer hours. A 2008 study of working women found 50% worked for over 40 hours a week, while only 33% of lower paid women (less than $15.30 an hour) worked over 40 hours a week.

Of course Minto’s 100% proposed top tax rate only applies to people who don’t work for UNITE. If you work for UNITE your tax rate is 0%, as they don’t pay their taxes.

A guest post by Mike Wilkinson, who analysed the economics of retail payment system development in a recently completed MA thesis.

While travelling overseas, it’s easy for New Zealanders to see that we use our payment cards a lot more than people from other countries.  Indeed, the figure below shows this observation is backed up by statistics from official sources: relative to many other developed countries, the nation’s debit card system (known as EFTPOS) is very well-used.

What makes it so?  Many would have you believe it’s because such a system was developed here, first.  Yet, the second figure demonstrates that that’s actually a big urban myth – even in my small sample of developed countries, New Zealand was by no means the first to have such a system.  That title looks like it goes to the United States.

If it isn’t that EFTPOS was developed here first, what is it about our country’s system that makes it so useful?  The two most well-used systems in this sample, New Zealand’s and Norway’s, have one thing in common: merchants or retailers in neither country pay significant fees for transactions completed at the point-of-sale.  In both places, they generally need to buy or rent terminals, but, once they have those, most are quite happy to accept transactions for nothing at all.  In other countries, merchants are charged fees that make them unwilling to accept small transactions; instead many prefer their customers to pay with cash.  Meanwhile New Zealand and Norwegian consumers are required (or at least during the years following the systems’ introduction, were required) to pay transaction fees for debit cards.  That these consumers still used debit cards demonstrates that many people really don’t like using cash.

In the case of Norway, such an approach to pricing was encouraged by the Norwegian Government.  What about New Zealand?  Why did the country’s banks adopt this approach even when their Australian parents elected to charge merchants fees?  The answer to this question is firmly rooted in the history of the country’s banks, particularly their regulation by our Government.

In the period following World War 2, New Zealand’s banking system was characterised by intrusive, prescriptive regulation.  Organisations were separated into three groups: trading banks, thrift institutions (including trustee savings banks) and other financial institutions.  In 1984, members of the first two groups introduced their own EFTPOS trials, which some readers may recall.  The trustee savings bank system was called Cashline.  The trading banks’ system, called Quicksmart, was operated by Databank, their joint-venture originally created in the 1960s for processing cheques.  Evidence demonstrates that an adversarial relationship existed between the groups with little prospect of smooth cooperation over a combined system.

In 1987, legislation passed by the Lange-Douglas government came into effect, substantially changing the way banks were regulated.  Under it, any organisation could become a Registered Bank, if it met permissive criteria administered by the Reserve Bank.  The climate for cooperation changed substantially and a merger of Cashline and Quicksmart was being contemplated.  However, the 1987 sharemarket crash made banks much more conscious of costs.  In 1988, two former trading banks, BNZ and ANZ, decided to withdraw their support for Quicksmart.  The two remaining participants, National Bank and Westpac, purchased the EFTPOS assets from Databank, renaming the system, Handy-point.  In order to attract merchant account business, they decided not to charge merchants transaction fees for this new system.

The Handy-point system proved successful and its approach to pricing was adopted when it was merged with Cashline to form Electronic Transaction Services Ltd (ETSL) in 1989.  BNZ eventually joined ETSL, which was later renamed Paymark.  ANZ invested in its own EFTPOS services that interconnected with ETSL, which were later brought into a company ANZ had purchased, EFTPOS New Zealand Ltd.  National Bank and Westpac and, later on, the owners of ETSL were happy to cooperate with the other banks because they saw EFTPOS as a marketplace rather than as a proprietary asset.

New Zealanders have benefited from their successfully developed EFTPOS system because the country’s comparatively light regulation of banks fostered cooperation, and because at no stage has our Government become involved by choosing among the relevant systems.  In my view, were it not for the Lange-Douglas reforms, New Zealand’s EFTPOS would have developed much less successfully.

The success of EFTPOS makes the Snapper bus ticketing stored-value system more useful for non-bus related payments because it can be used for faster payments than can EFTPOS.  The Snapper system is also lightly regulated (relative to how comparable systems would be regulated, overseas), allowing it to offer payment services cheaply.  These two factors combine to make Snapper one of the few privately-owned stored-value systems based on public transport that can be used for other sorts of transactions in the world.  Snapper’s development shows that New Zealanders continue to benefit from the country’s market-driven approach to banks and to payments.

What a train wreck. I hardly know where to start.

Labour MP Clare Curran first blogged:

Have had a gutsful of the white-anting of Labour from both the right and the left of politics.

Then a second blog post:

And on another note, re white-anting; the attempts by the Greens to encroach on Labour territory is also happening in Australia.

The comments flowed quick and fast. Gregor said:

Greens white-anting Labour?

Surely you mean, contesting the same constituency rather than ‘encroaching’, right?

You seriously think you have the unquestioning allegiance of my vote as a worker?

And Sacha:

Is it seriously Labour policy to attack the party’s MMP allies now?

Followed by Curious:

Go look up the definition of democracy Clare, political parties put forward policy to convince voters to vote for them. This isn’t white-anting.

And Me Too:

As a Green Party voter and life-long unionist I am staggered by the suggestion that Labour ‘owns’ the area of labour rights.

Waiting for the justified mocking in the Dim Post blog… Despairing of there ever being a Labour-led government in this country ever again…

Dim-Post has obliged. I’ll come to him later.

Then Idiot/Savant from No Right Turn:

The concept that some votes are Labour’s exclusive “territory” is a perfect example of what is wrong with Labour ATM.

Wake up. There is no Divine Right in democracy. Votes don’t “belong” to your party – you have to earn them. And if you can’t, if other people are doing a better ob of appealing to your traditional constituencies, then you have no-one to blame but yourself.

Chris M:

I’m voting for Greens this year because Labour has failed dismally at representing itself as a viable alternative to National. You’ve broken election advertising/campaigning laws repeatedly, put up what was apparently only the barest resistance to National passing ludicrously bad laws, and to put it simply Phil Goff is a non-entity in the realm of potential leadership.

Then Regan:

I’m just as peeved as the next person that we’re losing votes to the Greens,but I know that politics is a competition and as such Labour has to earn its votes. As a Labour Party member, to make such a blatantly uninformed comment is exactly the reason why we’re doing so poorly in the polls, because Labour MPs are arrogant enough to assume they “own” votes

And Chris Trotter weighs in:

Well, Clare, if Labour really wanted to test the Greens commitment to building (or should that be re-building?) a strong trade union movement, it could simply ask for the Green Party’s support in re-introducing an industrial relations system in which every worker was guaranteed the protection of union membership, including automatic inclusion, at the time of hiring, in an industry-wide agreement setting forth minimum wage-rates and conditions.

Try that one on them. Hell! Try it on your caucus colleagues!

Matthew Dentith:

Really? So the Greens are stealing your rightful votes, are they? I didn’t realise that when I switched away from voting Labour to voting Green that I was being stolen.

Now after this barrage of criticism, from Labour and Green party members and supporters, you might think a conciliatory note would be struck. Instead Curran rips into them:

Listen to you all. Go and knock on some bloody doors will you and stop pontificating. Get down to South Dunedin and see what it’s really like. Foodbanks are empty.
People are desperate.

Yes I am angry and it shows.

Idiot/Savant responds:

Yes, and its terrible. But if you want to do anything about it, you actually need to persuade people to vote for you. Instead, you’re just arrogantly demanding we do, like some medieval king ordering his peasants.

Aaron adds in:

I’ve been fence-sitting between Labour and the Greens for a number of years now and recently took the plunge to become a full member of the Green party. Posts like this show this was the right thing to do.

The Green Party should send Clare some chocolates to thank her for recruiting on their behalf. David comments:

Clare: I am a trustee of a charitable trust that has, this month, raised over $10,000 for those in extreme poverty. I also volunteer for my local Green candidate’s election campaign. So, how about instead of pulling out childish attacks on people who could well be your supporters, you rethink your silly and sanctimonious attack on an ally?

Debbie jumps in:

Way to go Clare, You were the last labour MP I still had any respect for & you write this!? You own me? I’m poor & have always voted Labour so I ‘must’ vote for you now? I can’t make up my own mind? Maybe my mind just isn’t up to the job.

Danyl at the Dim-Post has a post well reading, including screen shots from Twitter. He says:

So I’ll be voting for the Greens this election, as previously stated. I’d like to vote Labour again in 2014 – but it simply wouldn’t be ethical to cast a vote for a party this dysfunctional, so there will have to be a lot of changes before I can switch back.

And getting rid of MPs like Claire Curran will be a big part of that. I’ll be casting my electorate vote for Grant Robertson, because he’s a good MP – but if you live in an electorate like, oh say, Dunedin South I think the best thing you can do for the left is cast your party vote for Labour or the Greens, or whoever, but cast your electorate vote for the National candidate. It won’t impact on the outcome of the election (unless you live in Ohariu) but it will send a message to Labour that if they force poor quality MPs on us in safe seats then they face the risk of losing that seat.

For my 2c worth I’m not that surprised by the blog post. I’ve often observed that most in National think Labour are wrong, but do not think those on the left are evil. However many in Labour believe that those on the right are evil people motivated purely by self interest. The consequence of this, is that they believe that it is treasonous for anyone not to support them in their mission to get rid of the evil right wingers. So if someone from the left criticises Labour, they are seen as traitors.

UPDATE: Also some comments made at Dim Post worth highlighting:

Me Too:

Really, she used to work in PR? Who for – Adidas? Telecom?

Russell Brown:

This is a disastrous blurt from Curran, not so much with the voters at large but with the kind of people who actually might be inclined to put a shoulder to the wheel as she would wish. Gawd.

Max:

I have worked for (in a parliamentary capacity) and door knocked for Labour in the past. But this just makes me mad, and the reason why I will also most likely vote Green.

Newtown News:

This sort of shit makes me yearn for the good old days of David Benson-Pope MP

Danyl again:

What gets me is that Curran thinks that door-knocking in her own electorate is some selfless act of charity that she does out of the goodness of her heart, and makes her a worthy person. Door-knocking is public relations! She does it because she’s the MP for that electorate and she wants to get re-elected to her extremely well paid job! So using it as a pretext to claim the moral high-ground is really repulsive.

University of Auckland says:

Dr Geoffrey Pritchard and Dr Mark C. Wilson, members of the Centre for Mathematical Social Science at the University of Auckland, have created a simulator intended to voters to compare the 5 proposed electoral systems in a quantitative way, by allowing them to compute quickly, for a given polling scenario, the party seat distribution in Parliament under each system.

The simulator is here.

Its a useful resource, and it is great they have provided it. However it is also a good example of the difficulties you can get when you take an academic approach to an issue, rather than a more practical approach.

This is best shown by way of example. The simulator predicts that the 2002 election, if held under FPP would have had a result of 110 seats for Labour and 10 for National.

Now in 2002 National actually won 21 electorate seats out of 69 or 70. So this model is saying if there were 50 extra electorate seats, National would win 11 fewer seats!!

Why? Because they have come up with a formula based on the last 50 years or so of FPP elections, which they applied to the party vote figures for 2002. They ignored the actual electorate vote. It is a classic academic approach.

The more pragmatic approach, which is what others have done, is to say well if National won 21 electorate seats in 2002 out of 70, then if there 120 seats, their estimated number of seats would be 21*120/70, which is 36 seats.

For the same reasons, the model doesn’t predict the Maori Party would have won any seats in 2008 under FPP (as they had a low party vote), even though the Maori Party won 5/7 Maori seats, and hence if there were 12 Maori seats, one would expect they might have won 10/12, not 0/12.

So it is a useful resource, but it should not be treated as particularly authoritative in terms of alternate scenarios. Of course no alternate scenario is ever authoritative.

THIS WEEK ON BACK BENCHES: Watch Wallace Chapman, Damian Christie, the Back Benches Panel and special guests discuss the week’s hottest topics!

SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS: More and more small children are being kicked out of school for bad behaviour…reaching an all new high. Why is this becoming such a problem? Some are blaming it on the parents, some on exposure to drugs and alcohol, some say food & environment are to blame. What can be done to make sure the troubled kids get an education? How do we make sure well-behaved children aren’t being held back? What about teachers—are teachers becoming more than teachers? What role do the teachers and the schools have to play? And where does learning fit in on all of this? And for those teachers who don’t perform well—should they get paid less?

CLEAN RIVERS: The Green Party wants to clean up our rivers and streams. No surprise there. The Government wants to clear up our waterways too but the Greens say they don’t go far enough. Do we need national water standards? Limits of amount of water used? Can we limit the amount of pollution going into our rivers & streams? Should we be charging for water used in irrigation and commercial use? Is this a job for our new EPA? Is charging for irrigation fair to our agriculture industry? Should we all be doing our part any pay for the water we use?

Join us for a night of LIVE pub politics from the Backbencher Pub: Wednesday, 24^th of August. Our Panel: ACT MP Sir Roger Douglas, Green Party MP Sue Kedgley, Labour MP Chris Hipkins and National MP Aaron Gilmore.

 

Don Brash said in a speech yesterday:

For the most part, my teachers were outstanding, giving me a strong love of learning and a strong grounding in the basics. This was the era – in the late forties and fifties – when English teachers still taught grammar, and that means that to this day I still know when to use “I” and “me,” “who” and “whom” and where to put commas and apostrophes – knowledge which seems totally beyond more recent school graduates! (And yes, I’m fluent in text-ese as well! I can butcher words with the worst of them!)

In fact when Reserve Bank Governor, Don e-mailed all the staff a grammar guide, as so many staff were making basic mistakes!

We have some outstanding schools – primary, secondary, and tertiary – and some extremely well-educated people. But far too many people are coming out of 11 or even 13 years of schooling without even the rudiments of literacy or numeracy, while even those who come out with good qualifications are too often unable to write grammatical English: an inability reinforced, I would suggest, by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s position that in NCEA assessments, “any spelling, punctuation and/or grammar errors that do not appreciably affect the intended message” don’t matter.

Sigh. So sad

And this leads on naturally to my main concern about the educational system in its entirety – the fact that education in New Zealand is effectively a one-size-fits-all state monopoly.

The overwhelming majority of New Zealand children attend state-owned or state-controlled (integrated) schools – fewer than 4 percent attend independent schools. Not only that, but many children also have no choice over the particular state school they attend, thanks to rigid zoning laws. The remuneration of teachers is highly centralised, and is determined as a result of negotiations between a bureaucratic Ministry of Education and two powerful teacher unions, one covering primary schools and the other covering secondary schools. There is little scope to reward good teaching performance, and almost no scope to dismiss teachers for poor performance.

Absolutely correct. And ACT’s policy proposals:

Have state funding for primary and secondary schools “follow the child” – to any school, state or private, meeting basic standards, including standards of literacy and numeracy. In other words, you’d get to decide which school you’d send your child to with the money the state now spends on his or her education – currently some $80,000 over the 12 or 13 years of primary and secondary schooling.

There’d be no quicker way of incentivising existing schools to lift their game.  Schools that once had guaranteed state funding would now have to answer to the parents instead. And if they didn’t respond to their children’s needs, these parents could take their money to a school that would. Free schools, such as Tū Toa, would be opened to respond to children’s needs. Bad schools would close because their once captive audience would have been freed.

You may even have good schools take over bad schools, and turn them around.

*ACT would allow and require popular schools to expand to meet demand, including by taking over the land and buildings of failing schools. Massey University has campuses in Albany and Wellington as well as Palmerston North; why couldn’t secondary schools do the same? Could you imagine the demand for places if, for example, Auckland Grammar established a Porirua campus?

Exactly. They would be flooded with applications.

We would ensure the best teachers, and principals, are the highest-paid. Boards of Trustees would be allowed to negotiate directly with staff and be able to offer performance pay and incentives. The national award system between the government and the Council of Trade Unions was dismantled in the late 1980s because it was outdated and inefficient. It is long past time we abolished it in education.

This is so important. Good teachers should be earning over $100,000 a year, but bad teachers should not even be earning $50,000 a year.

ACT should campaign to parents up and down New Zealand on this policy. Many parents would welcome choice.

And if ACT get a decent enough proportion of the vote, this should be their primary policy demand of National. They should say we don’t want want any portfolios, we don’t want any baubles of office, we just want you to implement our education policy because it is so important to the future of New Zealand.

Audrey Young reports:

Prime Minister John Key has committed himself to seek agreements again with all three of his support partners – United Future, Act and the Maori Party – irrespective of whether National needs their votes to govern after the election.

“If we are in a position, come November 26, to get around the table irrelevant of how large our party vote is, we are definitely going to make the phone call to these support parties and sit down and have a discussion with them,” he said after the United Future conference in Wellington.

This is the major difference between 2002 and 2011. In 2002 Clark called a snap election so she could try and gain absolute power, and cut out the need to share power.

In 2011 John Key announced the election date 10 months before the election (removing his tactical ability to go early while polls are high), and reaffirms that he will share power with other parties, even if he is able to govern alone.

What I think will be of most interest (if National is re-elected) is whether they “upgrade” the co-operation agreement with the Greens. While the Greens will always choose a Labour-led Government over a National-led Government, it is not impossible they could agree to abstain on confidence and supply in return for portfolios such as Biosecurity or even a new “Public Transport” portfolio with its own dedicated budget.

The Greens have announced their water policy. One item is:

Introduce mandatory metering on all water takes for commercial use

Now I support them on this. Users of water, a limited resource at times, should pay for it.

But they should be consistent and also support water meters for all users. Why should the 80 year old granny who uses 25 litres of water a day pay the same for her water as the family down the road with a spa pool and use 200 litres a day?

They do say:

Support councils to use water meters for each residence and commercial property, so that water use is monitored and recorded for educational purposes and promotion of water conservation and demand side management.

That is a useful step, but again not enough. Water is not free and never has been unless you catch your own. The debate is how you pay for it – should you pay for it based on the value of your property, or based on a flat standard charge, or based on how much water you actually use.

Only the last scenario will see better water conservation. They again go half way there:

Allow councils to adopt a progressive charging system for water when deemed necessary. In such a system the first unit, which provides for commencement and continuation of water supply and reasonable personal consumption, will be funded from rating revenue and free of direct user charges, while additional units may incur progressively higher direct charges;

I’d just have a flat rate for water – say x cents per 1000 litres.

But overall I give the Greens 7/10 for their water charging policy generally. Note that score doesn’t apply to the rest of their water policy which is full of claptrap about the spiritual life-force of bodies of water and the evil private sector.

A cracker post from Danyl:

If elected to a second term the National Government will introduce a series of harsh reforms to the welfare system targeting Toby, a twenty year old unemployment beneficiary living in New Plymouth, Prime Minister John Key announced today.

The new policies directly target Toby’s lifestyle and will prevent him from staying up late and then sleeping in, playing Call of Duty on his playstation and wearing baggy clothing, Key told a regional National Party conference.

You know there would be votes in banning baggy clothing!

A task-force led by former Treasury Secretary Murray Horn will monitor the outcomes of the reforms over an eighteen month period, and he will also try and convince Toby’s girlfriend Amanda that she is too good for him and that Toby is probably cheating on her.

The Horn Inquiry is budgeted at $1.25 million dollars, a sum that has drawn criticism from opposition MPs. Mr Key defends the cost, saying, ‘The reality is, first, that if you want someone of the calibre of Murray Horn then you have to pay an internationally competitive rate, and secondly, Amanda has beautiful eyes and her photography of cemeteries and abandoned farm buildings are amazing. Just about anyone would be better for her than that douchebag.’

Heh.

Additional components of the package targetting Toby are:

• Amendments to the Bill of Rights Act restricting Toby from wearing any non-elastic banded trousers, specifically preventing him from wearing hipsters that show off his disgusting, hairy, acne-covered buttocks.
• A new WINZ department to enforce strict sleeping and waking schedule so that Toby is not lying around in bed when the rest of us are on our way to work, sitting in traffic or waiting for a bus in the rain. The actual enforcement of the schedule will be contracted out to community groups.
• These groups will also replace the metalcore songs on Toby’s iPod with a selection of tunes from Tim Finn, The Feelers and Hayley Westenra

Danyl shouldn’t give the Government ideas while they are looking for new policy.

The Welfare Working Group was convened by Social Development Minister Paula Bennett to study welfare reform, and it looked into Toby in 2010, and recommended that his benefit payments be transferred to a community based private welfare provider who would receive a bonus if they drilled holes in Toby’s head and poured sulphuric acid into his brain.

Key has rejected this option, and Ms Bennett has also distanced herself from the Working Group’s findings. ‘The National Party has made a commitment not to torture any young people to death during our second term in office,’ she told reporters at a Parliamentary press conference.

Only for the second term though!

The Labour Party has been reluctant to comment on the reforms, but vetern welfare activist Sue Bradford has slammed them as mindless and doomed to fail.

Bradford has also spoken out against Nationals’ reforms. ‘They also, are mindless.’

Oh, how subtle. I almost missed that.

Toby made a brief phone statement yesterday in which he insisted he knew nothing of the new reforms but intended to vote for John Key and National in the upcoming election. ‘I saw a photo of him hanging with [All Blacks hooker] Andrew Hore, who is an awesome dude.’ Toby explained. ‘Taranaki kicks ass.’

You have to wonder if Danyl invented Toby or met him?

Belinda McCammon writes:

His party is less than a month old but multimillionaire businessman Colin Craig’s Conservative Party could already be in violation of the electoral rules.

The former Auckland mayoral candidate launched the party this month to contest the general election, saying it would campaign on tougher sentences for criminals, cutting social welfare payments if beneficiaries were not prepared to work, and a review of smacking laws.

But neither the party’s website nor a billboard outside its Auckland headquarters carries an authorisation statement – as required by law.

Not a good start. But that is not what grabbed my attention. It is the name Colin Craig’s Conservative Party, which abbreviated is the CCCP.

Now younger readers may not know what CCCP used to stand for, but stamp collectors will. It is Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, which is Russian for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

So I think CCCP should become the official acronym for the Colin Craig Conservative Party.

NZPA reports:

A South Auckland school boy who did not like the way he was tackled in a schoolyard game of touch rugby allegedly stabbed his 10-year-old school mate.

The boy was stabbed with a weapon, believed to be a small kitchen knife, behind a classroom at decile 1 school Jean Batten Primary in Mangere last Wednesday, the New Zealand Herald reported.

Police said both boys were aged 10 – but it was understood the victim was in Year 6 and his alleged attacker in Year 4.

I can’t believe this happens in New Zealand. How does a 10 year old even have a knife at school, let alone think an appropriate reaction to a tackle is to stab a fellow 10 year old with a knife?

In my “By the numbers” blog at Stuff I ask:

The One News and 3 News polls out last night both showed National with around a 26 per cent lead over Labour. The election is only 96 days away, so the question is, can such a gap be closed in a short period of time?

I point out, that the gap is in fact less than that:

If they can persuade the Maori Party to support them, then they have 52 seats to 71 for National, ACT and United Future. They need to pick up 10 seats or around 8 points to be able to govern 62 seats to 61.

But their problem is:

But with Phil Goff, only 26 per cent say he is performing well and 53 per cent say he is performing poorly. These results are bad enough by themselves, but equally of concern is they they are getting worse, not better. In December 2010 only 39 per cent of New Zealanders said Goff was doing a bad job, and he has managed to increase that to 53 per cent of New Zealanders. And if you go back to February 2009, he was regarded poorly by only 27 per cent of New Zealanders. A cruel observation would be that two years of campaigning has managed to double the number of people who think he is doing a poor job.

You can comment over at Stuff.

Reuters reports:

Hundreds of euphoric Libyan rebels pushed to the western outskirts of Tripoli without meeting any resistance after they overran a major military base that defends the capital.

The trappings of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime were crumbling fast, with opposition forces rising up from within his stronghold at the same time.

Associated Press reporters with the rebels said they reached the Tripoli suburb of Janzour around nightfall Sunday (early today, NZ time). They were greeted by civilians lining the streets and waving rebel flags. Hours earlier, the same rebel force of hundreds drove out elite forces led by Gaddafi’s son Khamis in a brief gunbattle.

Hopefully the Gaddafis will flee, and the civil war will end soon. That of course does not guarantee a bright future for Libya, but it does give the Libyan people a chance to build a democratic society.

I don’t think Anthony Hubbard would object if I describe him as not a member of the VWRC. So his views can not be blamed on drinking too much wine with Matthew Hooton.

So with that context, read his article in the SST:

All choices are hard for Labour now. Another leader might not lose as badly as Goff, but the party would be stuck with him (nobody thinks the next leader will be a woman). And a choice made amid terror and despair is unlikely to be the best bet long-term. That means: stick with Goff until the election.

There is an alternative. Rather than make a choice “amid terror and despair” they could just stick the names of the entire caucus in a hat, and pull a name out, making that person leader. A random chance might actually do better.

The worst result for Labour and the left-of-centre bloc would be a narrow loss by National. A “losers’ coalition”, as Tim Groser calls it, is by no means impossible. …

But a win for a rag-tag coalition of the left and centre would be a disaster for Labour. Voters still have a strong feeling that the party with the largest share of the votes should lead the government.

What Hubbard calls the “worst result” is the hope and dreams of Labour. They desperately need Winston and Hone to make it.

And think what a losers’ coalition would look like. Labour would be somewhere in the 30s, the Greens might be on 10%. They would almost certainly need the support of another party. The most likely group in that case would be Winston Peters’. The coalition would look, in short, like a collection of retreads and has-beens with a Green heart. That isn’t a recipe for long-term government.

Even with Winston, they would need the support of probably both Mana and Maori. The only laws they could pass are those Labour, Greens, Winston, Hone and maybe the Maori Party agree on.

Above all, Labour can never claim to be a new party while it is led by Goff. Goff has many strengths. He has an excellent grasp of policy across the board, the result of many years in government and of his own high seriousness. He is a policy wonk, with a grasp of detail that Key could never match. He would make a splendidly competent cabinet minister.

I agree. Goff’s problem is that he simply isn’t new. He entered Parliament when Muldoon was Prime Minister. The only MP who entered Parliament earlier was Roger Douglas who came in during the Holyoake era.

Does it have a new leader in its ranks, ready to grab the new opportunities? Certainly it will have talent. Andrew Little, the former union leader, will be a genuinely new face, and nobody can blame him for past Labour errors. David Parker was a Cabinet minister under Clark but was hardly well-known. And he is the man most responsible for Labour’s new policies. Parker’s heart is on the left, although he has also been a successful businessman. He has cross-over appeal. Shane Jones appeals to Maori and Pakeha alike and has a bodgy charm, although Labour’s women might have trouble forgiving him for the blue movie thing.

Nobody knows whether any of these blokes could do it for Labour next term. But one thing is certain. All would be a better bet than Phil Goff.

I wouldn’t say all would be better than Goff. But they have have better potential. Goff’s major weakness is what he can’t change – having been around for too long. The contenders don’t have that problem, but they may end up more accident prone etc. Time will tell.

A reader highlighted this story from July:

Mr Little joined the union as a lawyer in 1992 and was elected unopposed as national secretary in 2000.

His family lived in Wellington now, and although he planned to spend five days a week in New Plymouth campaigning, he would not move them there until he won the seat.

Would he move if he lost in the seat but was elected as a list MP?

“Not sure about that. I will gauge that closer to the time.”

Andrew is all but guaranteed to be an MP after the election. He could easily pledge to remain in New Plymouth. I don’t think locals will be overly impressed by someone who won’t commit to the region.

I suspect the reason Andrew won’t commit to New Plymouth, is because he will want to stand in Rongotai if there is a by-election after the general election.

Congrats to Trevor Mallard who won the 60 km bike race against Whale Oil by several kms at least. He’s just crossed the line. Trevor has done a very good job of downplaying expectations, and exceeding them on the day.

I did note earlier this month:

I’d have to say that Trevor would be considered the favourite and Cameron the underdog.

Trevor is basically a professional full-time cyclist, an amateur part-time blogger and an occasional MP. He did the 160 km Taupo cycle race in under 5 hours in 2009. Off memory he was in the top 5% of cyclists for his age group.

Cameron got on a bicycle around three months ago for the first time in 10+ years. Now Cameron has been training pretty hard, doing 20 km rides most days. But Trevor used to be able to do 20 kms in around half an hour. Whale does have a slight advantage with the course being local to him.

Now of course the big factor is Trevor’s bike crash and broken bones. If Trevor had not had his injury, it wouldn’t even be a contest. What we don’t know is to what extent Trevor is still injured. The crash was just over four and a half months ago which normally would be enough time to rebuild some of the leg muscles etc. And I suspect his overall level of fitness is still pretty good.

I was tempted to joke about what an achievement it is to beat a sickness beneficiary who hadn’t been on a bike for 10 years, until three months ago, but that would be unfair to Trevor who did have a pretty nasty injury to overcome. Full credit to him.

In one sense I think the race has been a win-win. It gave Trevor the motivation to get back on the bike seriously, and it gave Whale the motivation to get seriously into shape and be better both physically and mentally.

Anyway congrats to Trevor and Cameron, and I look forward to donating $1,000 to the CCS far more than I suspect Cactus will enjoy donating $1,000 to the Labour Party!

Not picking on Phil, but this photo from the SST is just too good to resist.

Captions should be funny, not nasty, please.

Don’t expect much blogging today. Had a belated house (apartment) warming last night. Was lots of fun, and the last few guests left at 5.30 am. Started at 7 pm so a decent effort. Today is for sleeping and clean up primarily!