Kiwiblog

Phil Goff and Chris Hipkins with Issy from New Zealand’s Next Top Model.

Captions should be funny, not nasty.

I was in the office yesterday and mentioned to some of the staff that I was off to Death by Cheerleader this evening. I got a variety of puzzled looks until I explained it was a play at Bats Theatre.

The play was hilarious. It would be near impossible not to enjoy it. It’s rated R16, and certainly not one to take the kids to.

Let’s start with the three “Cheer Blacks”. Lucy (left) played by Claire van Beek is the first Cheer Black you meet. From the beginning she doesn’t seem quite right, and why does she have an ankle bracelet? You learn that when she develops a crush, boy does she develop a crush. In fact one could label her love as being of the psychotic variety.

van Beek is marvellous playing Lucy. She has perfected the art of the naughty satisfied grin as she is doing something inappropriate. She really brings her character to life.

Lucy is recruited by Jessica (not Jess) to join the Cheer Blacks. Jessica is 40 going on 28. She refuses to accept her age, despite having a teenage daughter. Her life ambition is to bed All Black hero Tane, and her route to achieve this is to have the Cheer Blacks attend the Rugby World Cup in Dubai in 2015. Amy Waller plays Jessica (and is also the playwright) and will let nothing stand in her way.

The third member of the trio is Dakota played by Julia Hyde. Dakota is the relatively normal, or even sane, one. Her burden in life is being Jessica’s daughter.

I read in the notes for the show that the original intention was to have it portray cheerleaders as noble beings, but in the end they found it too hard so went for funny, bitchy and dark. I’m glad they did, because the combination works.

My favourite line of dialogue was

He was hurting you

No he wasn’t

He was hurting you with his penis!

As we all the acting, the Cheer Blacks also well, cheer. They perform a number of funny, energetic routines to great applause from the audience.

This play is more than just a series of laughs though. Yes the dialogue is hilarious, but the acting, the choreography, the subtle and not so subtle hints all combine brilliantly.

Death by Cheerleader is on until Saturday 24 September only. If you have a spare hour between now and then, go along – it’s a load of laughs, and very decently priced (even if you don’t get review tickets).

The Herald reports:

Auckland Mayor Len Brown has this morning tabled a $5.5 billion draft plan which he hopes will turn the city into the “most liveable city in the world”.

The 254-page plan, which was launched at the new Auckland Art Gallery by Mr Brown and Local Government Minister Rodney Hide, includes the $2.2 billion central city rail loop, $2 billion of further waterfront development and $1.1 billion for central city development.

Aucklanders will have until October 25 to submit their views to council on four weighty volumes of plans – the draft Auckland Plan – a blueprint to improve the city’s quality of life over the next 20 to 30 years – and the Auckland City Centre Masterplan for 20 years, the Waterfront Masterplan for 30 years and Economic Development Strategy for 10 years.

I’ve not yet had time to read the draft plan.  But with Auckland projected to grow by 600,000 people over the next few decades it is vital they start working on how to cope with this population growth. I am of the view the city needs to expand both upwards and outwards.

What I do want to comment on at this stage is the fact that there can now be a coherent plan for Auckland. Under eight different Councils, this was impossible. The new Council doesn’t guarantee that the plan will be a good plan, but it does give Aucklanders the opportunity to develop a good plan for their city.

I’m not generally a big fan of ten or twenty year plans. They remind me too much of the USSR. but when it comes to infrastructure planning and investment, you do need to be looking long-term. The danger is when you try to expand such plans beyond those things which need to be decided on a long-term basis.

The Waikato Times reports:

A single Waikato mother of six children has been receiving benefits for almost 30 years.

She is one of an army of long term Waikato beneficiaries revealed in information released to the Waikato Times under the Official Information Act.

Social Development Ministry statistics show 1647 people in the region have been receiving some form of benefit for 15 years or more.

A further 1500 have been on it for between 10 and 15 years, 3655 between five to 10 years, 6309 between two to five years and 12,904 for less than two years.

Nationally, welfare payments cost taxpayers about $7.6 billion a year.

The case of the solo mum who has been on the DPB for 30 years makes me curious. Did she have six children to the one partner, and then he left her or died? Probably not, as then you would not be on the DPB for 30 years.

So presumably up to five of the children she has had, were while on the DPB. Not to get the DPB you have to be effectively “single” and not in a relationship with someone. So who are the fathers of the six children and are they contributing to their upkeep?

I have no problems with having the DPB available to solo parents who find themselves without a partner for reasons of death or divorce/separation. I do have a real problem with solo parents who have multiple children while receiving the DPB. Now I’m not advocating no support in these circumstances because that may punish the kids. But I do think there needs to be a disincentive to continue having children if you are unable to support them yourself.

Fresh from having conned the Waikato Times into profiling his partner as a swinging voter who has decided to vote Greens, their Hamilton East West candidate Max Coyle has sent this e-mail out to various people:

New announcement in the Max’s Daily Green Machine Mission group:
________________________
One of the easiest ways for us to get good steady stream of Green presence in the media is when a good letter to the editor is published.

It’s always a great feeling when your letter is published!

Not only do you get the 3 stars for this mission but there’s also newspaper specific missions you can grab stars for too, check em out

https://my.greens.org.nz/greenmachine/write-a-letter-to-the-editor

Have a wonderful weekend machinists and a huge kia ora for all your work!

So the Greens have actually set targets for each newspaper in terms of how many letters to the editor they want. No, that isn’t manipulation. All parties encourage supporters to write letters, but as far as I know only the Greens assign targets per newspaper, and have an online tool which presumably will insert stock slogans and phrases to use.

Heh some nice music to the North Korean military parade.

The Nelson Mail reports:

A spat has developed after the Greens took exception over Labour MP Maryan Street labelling them more blue than green in Parliament.

Nelson Green candidate Aaryn Barlow, who is on his first election campaign, hit back at Ms Street saying she was desperate for votes while she maintained National could not be trusted.

In Parliament, Ms Street had been making reference to the Greens voting for National’s Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects) Bill, which establishes an environmental protection system for the ocean beyond this country’s 12-mile territorial limit.

She claimed: “This Green Party is beginning to align itself in a foreshadowing of its possible coalition arrangements with the National Party that makes it look now more blue than green.”

The bill passed its first reading by 76 votes to 44 on Tuesday with the help of the Greens, United Future, Act and the Maori Party. Mr Barlow said the Greens would support it until select committee stage, but did not believe it went far enough to protect the environment.

He said: “I find it rich for Labour to accuse us of aligning ourselves with National when Labour have voted for National’s bills four times as much as the Greens this term. Maryan is obviously concerned about Labour voters who are leaving them in droves for the Greens and she is getting desperate.”

I think Labour are starting to get very worried about the extent of their possible vote loss to the Greens.

Let’s say you are a centre-left voter. You’d like a centre-left Government but like over 90% of New Zealanders, think National will win. You then have a choice. You can either vote Labour, knowing they will oppose pretty much everything the Government does, or you can vote Greens knowing the Greens will work with the Government to make it greener in areas they can find agreement, and that the more votes the Greens get the more influence they will have with Government.

Erin Leigh has sent me some questions and answers about her defamation court case. She’s chosen the blog format, as that way her views get across without editing. Her Q+A is below:

How do I feel about the Supreme Court ruling?

“I am absolutely rapt we won in the Supreme Court and the Crown’s defence argument was thrown out. It was the right decision by the court and has improved human rights in this country.”

What does the Supreme Court judgement actually mean?

“The Supreme Court judgement means that when Government departments and agencies provide information to a Minister, they have to either tell the truth about the individual being discussed (i.e. use ‘truth’ as a line of defence), or if they provide incorrect and inaccurate information about them; they don’t do this deliberately and out of ill-will (i.e. use a defence of qualified privilege as an alternative line of defence).

My lawyers and I, and now the Supreme Court, feel that is a very reasonable threshold for senior members of Government to reach – especially given the calibre and salaries of these officials and the fact they’re paid by the tax payer to do an honest job and be politically neutral.

However, what the Crown, including the Ministry for the Environment, Lindsay Gow and the Attorney General have been trying to do for nearly four years now is to be able to use a defence of absolute privilege for defamation (not a defence of ‘truth’ or ‘qualified privilege’), so that they can deliberately and maliciously lie about an individual or business and have complete immunity for their actions and no accountability for it at all – ensuring the victim of the deliberate and untrue slander has no human or legal rights to pursue any type of redress. This Supreme Court ruling has put a stop to that happening. Absolute Privilege cannot be used as a defence for Government departments and agencies.

A Minister who deliberately misleads the House is at least accountable to the Privileges Committee; however the Ministry for the Environment and Lindsay Gow were claiming they were accountable to no-one – no matter how damaging and untruthful their actions were. I’m glad the Supreme Court has now addressed this. “

How will this new legal precedent affect the day-to-day running of Government?

“The new legal precedent set by the Supreme Court on Friday will have an impact on all Government Departments because they will have to be truthful, and not malicious, when providing a Minister with information about a person or business.

Now taxpayers would argue that this should happen anyway. But unfortunately, as happened in my case, there are some people working in Government Departments whose moral compass is completely out of whack. So this is going to be a real challenge for those people.”

 So, now that you can legally sue the Government for defamation, what’s the next step?

“The next step would have been to continue the defamation case to a full trial in the High Court in front of a jury and seek compensation and an official apology for lying about me. However, as the Government has been dragging the matter in the courts for nearly four years now, I can no longer afford the expenses involved in going to trial. If I had been accused of murder it would be a different matter and I would be entitled to legal aid, but because it’s me suing the Government and not the other way around, my lawyers and I have to carry the full cost of the trial. The government on the other hand has an unlimited budget, a huge amount of resources available to them, a really large and expensive legal team, and have been using taxpayer’s money over the last four years to get away with being accountable for what they did to me. An everyday member of the public like me has none of these advantages – especially when they are out of work as a result of being defamed.”

So, how have you funded the case up until now given that employment has been difficult?

“I have been fortunate to have a great legal team who took on my case on the agreement that they wouldn’t be paid unless I received compensation for being defamed. So my legal team, which was led by QC Julian Miles from Shortland Chambers and included the legal firm Wilson Harle, haven’t made a dime out of this case – in fact they’re out of pocket by thousands and thousands of dollars. My responsibility in this agreement was to pay the disbursements such as court costs, flights to Wellington, hotel accommodation, photocopying etc. This doesn’t sound like much, but over four years the costs add up and it would have been enough for a deposit on a house.  These lawyers did a fantastic job and took my case on because they thought a great injustice had happened and wanted to make sure the law supported the little guy. It was an honor to be represented by them and I will be forever grateful for their hard work.”

Is there any other reason why you dropped the case?

“The main reason has been the financial cost but this was made worse by the February earthquake in Christchurch. I was in the middle of the CBD when the earthquake happened and escaped with some relatively minor injuries – but two people with me weren’t so lucky. I was really traumatised by the whole experience and affected by it financially too. So I made the decision to drop the trial at that point – which was about a week after the February earthquake. It still went to the Supreme Court though because the Judge thought it was in the public interest for the defence argument to be put to the test and he said I didn’t have pay the court fees. So even though we won and I can take the case to trial now, I can’t afford to.”

Are you disappointed it’s not going to trial now?

“Yes, my lawyers and I are a bit disappointed that, due to financial constraints we couldn’t continue the case to trial. However none of us were in this for the money; we were in it to improve the law and human rights so anyone else in caught in my situation in the future had fewer obstacles to face and a real chance of getting redress. The Supreme Court judgement is a win in our books and a very satisfying achievement. Our job is done.”

Were you confident of winning your case if it went to trial?

“We were all looking forward to going to trial as we had a lot of evidence to present and very confident of a win in front of a jury. It would have been nice to have received an official apology too and been able to have my lawyers receive payment for their hard work. However, as I have said earlier – it was never about the money – it was to make a positive difference in law and we have achieved that.”

How has this whole experience affected you?

“The cost to me has been enormous, both financially and emotionally. The way I was treated was both vicious and humiliating. However, having a top legal team prepared to represent me on a ‘fee on a win’ only basis made a huge difference in helping restore my sense of self worth. I also feel that, now we have set a new legal precedent that will help other people, I can leave this matter behind me with my head held up high.”

Why did you speak up in the first place?

“I actually didn’t – so I’m no martyr in that department. I would never proactively go to the media about such matters. I didn’t tell anyone about it for 18 months. What happened was, in May 2006, Clare Curran’s appointment was made. My manager and I felt it was the wrong thing for the Minister to do, and rather than being put in a compromising position in terms of having to work with her on politically motivated material, I quit. I only had two weeks left on my contract with the Ministry for the Environment and didn’t want the drama. When I initially took the job with the Ministry, I signed a contract with the Crown stating that my work would be politically neutral at all times. I didn’t want to break this agreement nor get in trouble for breaking it. The Ministry for the Environment had offered me a full time senior position and we were talking money when Clare Curran was appointed.  So I left on a good note and my manager completely understood the difficult position this appointment put me in, and in fact quit himself that day as well. However, he retracted his resignation about a week later.  David Parker’s office also rang me at home asking me to stay on. But, even though I had been a Labour Party voter my whole life, my conscious told me to get out of there – and I did. Everything about it was just wrong. I didn’t tell anyone about this, didn’t go to the media, didn’t blow the whistle, and continued working for other Government Departments after this. So I’m not some brave vigilante.

Then 18 months later, in late November 2007, the matter over Clare Currans’ appointment came up in the news. Duncan Garner from TV3 contacted me. He already had all the facts and knew exactly what had happened and asked me to confirm what he already knew. I knew that if I just tried to fob him off the story would still go to air anyway and I would continue to be hounded for comment. So I answered all of his direct questions honestly. I knew the Labour Party would retaliate because they’re like that and they did. They launched a smear campaign against me within minutes of the news story going to air. However, I thought the Ministry for the Environment would actually tell them the truth about me and the standard of work I did for them and that they had hired me for work for nearly two solid years and had offered me a permanent senior position at the Ministry. It never occurred to me that they would actually join in on the politically motivated smear campaign too and make stuff up. I was devastated.”

But didn’t the Ministry for the Environment apologise to you?

“For the past four years the Ministry for the Environment has said they didn’t mean to say and write untrue information about me and that Mallard misinterpreted what they said. However, if that was the case, you would think that as soon as they heard Mallard defame me in the House, they would take immediate action to remedy the situation, correct the misinformation and clear my name. However, they didn’t. They said nothing in my defence. It wasn’t until 14 days later, after realising the mud thrown at me wasn’t going to stick, that they held a media conference and apologised to the media for getting it so wrong. However, I never received a copy of this apology. It was done just to appease the public and the media – it wasn’t for me. All I received was a scruffy draft email containing incorrect information and sent to me a few days earlier. It wasn’t the final version of the apology delivered to the media and to this day I haven’t received anything official in writing or on letterhead in terms of an apology from them. Given that they have damaged my name for life not just on the Parliamentary record but on the Internet and public record (which will remain long after I am dead) I think a proper apology would be the right thing to do. But it’s been four years now and they still haven’t – so I guess they never will.”

So who is at fault for what happened? The Ministry for the Environment or Trevor Mallard?

“Both; 50/50. Both made up complete lies about me. The Ministry for the Environment started it and Mallard added to it and took it to an even more vicious level. So, in my opinion, both are equally to blame. Mallard is accountable to the Privileges Committee and the Ministry for the Environment is accountable to the State Services Commission and, now, to the High Court. Both had the power to remedy the situation and both had editorial control over what they said about me. The Ministry for the Environment could argue that they felt Mallard pressured them into providing false information but they have never said this. Both have done nothing to put things right nor issued a sincere apology to me. Iain Rennie the State Services Commissioner was in the room and in attendence when all of this took place but did nothing to intervene.”

If you had concerns about Clare Curran’s appointment why didn’t you go to the CEO of MfE or the State Services Minister at the time?

“MfE had no CEO at the time; Hugh Logan was due to start as the new CEO the following week. The Minister of State Services was David Parker – so not really a viable option.”

Was legal action through the courts your only option in getting redress for being defamed?

“Legal action wasn’t my first line of action. I first wrote to the Ministry for the Environment, and then to Iain Rennie at the State Services Commission. They both ignored me. I then wrote to the Speaker of the House, Margaret Wilson because, if you’re mentioned in Parliament you can get a rebuttal put on the parliamentary record. However the Speaker said she wouldn’t award me my right to do this unless I could prove that Mallard’s comments were hurtful and damaging to me. It was blatantly obvious to anyone that they were but what could I possibly provide her with at the time to prove this?

I then wrote to the Chief Ombudsman’s Office as I thought they’re supposed to step in on matters like this involving the Government. However, they wrote back saying they wouldn’t do anything about it and told me to take the matter to court instead. So that’s what I did. There were no other options available to me. It’s still the same for anyone else who finds themselves in my position. The people and organisations who are there to uphold standards in the public service seem to serve no purpose when the public service doesn’t do their job properly. It’s been up to me and my lawyers to try and improve part of the quality of the public service - which is wrong as this job should be done by our representatives in Parliament and the State Services Commission – not private individuals who haven’t got the money or the resources.

The Labour Party has accused you of being a National Party lackey?

“That’s a joke. I had been a Labour Party voter all my life and looked up to people like Sonja Davies and David Lange. I even had a picture of Joseph Savage on my bedroom wall as a kid. The concept that someone might have a conscious and be motivated by their own morale fibre, even at great personal cost, is beyond their realm of understanding. Everyday people get it, but they don’t – and they never will.

After they chewed me up and spat me out, they still hadn’t learnt from their mistakes and went on to attack Owen Glenn for telling the truth.  I was crushed by that and felt so sorry for him as I knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of untruthful attacks. Rather than intimidating me further, it just spurred me on even more as there were other people being hurt; it wasn’t just me.

P.S Naturally I didn’t vote Labour in the last election and never will while the same faces that were there in 2007 are still in the front rows. It would be fair to say I am a National Party supporter now though ”

Nice to know Trevor converted at least one Labour Party voter to National with this episode. I suspect that in fact it was far more than that. A number of Labour voting public servants have said they were horrified that it so easily could have been them held up in Parliament as incompetent, just for telling the truth.

Andrea Vance at Stuff reported:

The Government will overrule a decision by New Zealand’s highest court on the Urewera terror raids – using legislation to be rushed through under urgency next week.

Last week the Supreme Court ruled the warrants that police relied on to gain access to Tuhoe land did not cover planting secret cameras.

It meant evidence was improperly obtained and led to charges against 13 of 18 people arrested in the 2007 raids being thrown out.

The judgment recommended Parliament change the law and criticised it for not addressing the problem earlier.

Which I guess is what they are now doing.

First of all can I recommend you read Andrew Geddis for a factual, non-hysterical, explanation of the situation.

I said on radio that this is a classic case of the Government being damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. If they do nothing, then the ability of the Police to detect and prevent crime is seriously impacted. And as I understand it this is not about the Police being able to film whomever they want. They would still need a warrant issued by a Judge or court.

I think few would dispute that the Police should be able to film suspected criminals, if they are able to get a warrant to do so. And as this issue has been before Parliament for a couple of years, I don’t have a problem with a law change before the election, but I do agree with some of what Labour has said:

Labour says:

Labour wants a select committee to scrutinise retrospective legislation to allow secret filming on private property by police.

Leader Phil Goff said his party would only agree to support the law if the Government can make a case for urgency.

National wanted to push the bill through all its stages next week but they needed Labour to agree. Select committee hearings could delay that at least a week.

Parliament has just two sitting weeks left before November’s election.

”The bottom line is it must go through a select committee process,” Goff said. ”It needs to have expert opinion, we need to have the Law Commission, we need to have the Law Society, the other players in this game, able to comment.”

He added: ”We haven’t seen the law yet, we haven’t seen the bill, and I’m not going to support anything I haven’t seen.”

This doesn’t strike me as unreasonable, and achievable. You could do first reading on Tuesday 27 Sep and refer to Law & Order Select Committee (or Justice & Electoral) for hearings on Wednesday and the Select Committee reports back before the following Tuesday 4 October at which stage you do second reading, committee of the whole stage and third reading under urgency.

The other issue is should the law change be retrospective. The Government would argue (and I tend to agree) that the intent of Parliament has always been that the Police should be able to film crime suspects if they get a warrant, and they are just making it explicit. However there is a strong counter-argument that the Police have known the legal authority to do video surveillance was less than clear, and the Police should have stopped getting warrants for video surveillance. However I think that argument relies somewhat on hindsight – it was not inevitable how the Supreme Court would rule – and it was a narrow 3:2 decision.

So this law change is not about giving the Police the ability to film whomever they want. It is about whether warrants they obtain from Judges should be restricted to audio surveillance only, or whether we can join the 20th century (let alone the 21st) and do video surveillance also.

But the details of the law change should be made public as soon as possible, and while it will be tight, I think every effort should be made to allow for expedited select committee hearings.

Very well done. Hat Tip: Trevor Mallard at Red Alert.

Dave Burgess at the Dom Post reports:

Wellington ratepayers could become Zealandia’s owners, as it struggles to attract tourists, and it must find more money or be shut.

The Karori Sanctuary Trust has painted a bleak financial picture in its 2011 annual report, which shows the wildlife sanctuary would use its $1.79m cash reserves within the next few years. The financial crisis comes on the back of dire visitor numbers for the June year when just 89,643 people went through the sanctuary’s turnstiles, against a budgeted 140,000 visitors.

This is not a surprise. Here’s why.

Concerns that fewer visitors would visit the sanctuary were raised in March last year, when entry prices almost doubled from $15 to $28 for adults, $7 to $14 for children and $37 to $70 for family passes. The cost of entering the 225-hectare valley, without a trip to the visitor centre, jumped $3 to $18.

This is how the real world works. You double the price of something and numbers visiting almost half.

What is amazing is people think this doesn’t apply to the labour market. You increase the minimum wage, and increase the cost of labour, and it is no surprise that fewer people get employed.

An excellent blog post by Raybon Kan about the media generated nonsense regarding his tweet:

Three days later, the Herald on Sunday rang, shrill with anger. I asked her to email me questions, but she refused: “I’ve got you on the phone!” She’d located people who’d been offended. What did I have to say? Didn’t I have a responsibility? I asked the reporter to get these complainants to contact me, so I could respond. (Twitter is an open forum of back and forth, but when offended parties don’t use Twitter — for example, when a reporter uses GPS, CSI and DNA to geo-locate the most offendable people on any given topic, to tell them of a tweet that plainly wasn’t meant for them; and then with emotional, loaded questions, demands a response on the spot — well, for that, try Facebook, or this site.)

I wonder how many phone calls it took for the HoS to find someone who said they were offended? One of those quoted even said later on Twitter that while he thought the tweet was a bit offensive, he was not calling for it to be deleted.

Since the article, however, I’ve attracted much, much stronger criticism. This is what I want to address here. I’ve been accused of anti-Semitism. In fact, if you read the article at the Herald online, a picture of evil fashion designer John Galliano appears adjacent, from an article months before. Visually, the effect is ‘Holocaust joke’, and next-door, John Galliano, and in the middle, me. I wind up being painted anti-Semitic by association, innuendo, or worse, by defamatory web layout.

My tweet was anti-Adidas, anti-Nazi, and obviously, anti-bad trains. It was also really rude to Germans. But it was not anti-Semitic. If anything, it was anti-anti-Semitic. Referring to something isn’t always a recommendation. An allusion doesn’t have to be an alleluia.

Anyone who calls my tweet anti-Semitic is doing real, foaming anti-Semites a disservice. Crazy Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic. The barking mad leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who pledges to wipe Israel off the map) is anti-Semitic. Neo-Nazis are anti-Semitic.

It’s not like I released an album with the Hamas Symphony Orchestra.
It’s not like I designed a new Spring Collection with John Galliano.
It’s not like I sent al-Qaeda flowers of condolence to mark the tragic loss of Osama bin Laden.
It’s not like I went into Anne Frank’s house with members of the SS and shouted in my best German: she’s in the bookcase!

My tweet wasn’t anti-Semitic. It was insensitive (in other words, I brought up, obliquely, the subject of a tragedy, but without wearing black, playing an anthem, or making a two-part documentary.) But as Steve Martin said, comedy ain’t pretty.

Somewhere in the world, right now, there’s a disaster, a genocide, a tragedy. And quite soon, somebody will make a joke about it. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re cheerleading for it. A mention isn’t a manifesto.

Exactly. And if you’re offended by someone’s tweet, well how about you just quietly stop following them.

Just for balance though. I include this You Tube video done by a reader, showing Hitler’s reaction to Raybons tweet.

Some interesting details in Tracy Watkins column last week:

There is even deeper fury about promises that were supposedly made and not kept. When the Cabinet hauled Auckland transport officials before them to go over the plans one last time they were apparently assured there would be a person on every carriage to avoid delays when emergency buttons were pushed, but that apparently never happened. They were promised 100 extra buses, but got only 31 – many of which had to be diverted to the North Shore when the ferries become overcrowded. And they were told there would be more security on the platforms than eventuated.

If this is correct, it does sounds like some of the problems were very avoidable.

But all that is largely by the by and a direct result of the biggest failure of all – which was the inability to look past the “peer reviewed” guesstimates by consultants that a party on the waterfront on the night of the opening ceremony would probably attract only 30,000 to 50,000 people. Ministers – particularly the Auckland-based ones who regularly see crowds bigger than that for far more mundane events – can’t escape blame for not treating those figures with scepticism and caution.

I agree both Council and Government should have known better and demanded something better than a guesstimate.

It seems that on the Tuesday before the big game, government officials might have got a whiff of the behemoth- in-waiting and approached Auckland authorities about opening up the Bledisloe and Captain Cook wharfs, but were rebuffed. Auckland – the city that loves to tell Wellington to butt out of its affairs – is reaping the resulting ministerial firestorm as a result.

Again, if this is correct it is very significant.

A reader has pointed out something I missed in Labour’s announcement last week:

“Labour will give schools a choice. We believe that lifting education achievements is best left to the experts in partnership with parents, and our plan allows that to happen.

“But for any school community that genuinely supports „national standards. and believes it provides the best way to get results for their students we will not bully them into submission.

So some schools will use national standards and some will use the standards against the national curriculum. This should ensure it is impossible to get any meaningful data to compare schools with. The union will be happy.

Whale Oil has a great scoop.

The Waikato Times had a big article on a family struggling to make ends meet in Hamilton. The mother is quoted as saying she could never vote National, used to vote Labour but this time thinks the best option for her is to vote Greens.

Nowhere in the article do they mention her partner, and father of her child, is the Green Party candidate for Hamilton East – Max Dillon.

This is not a trivial oversight. It undermines the entire article.  It means either the Waikato Times never asked if they had a political affiliation, or they knew and didn’t care.

I think the fault lies not only with the newspaper though. To agree to be interviewed as a typical struggling family, who have decided to vote Green, without disclosing the father/partner is the Green Party candidate is rather unethical.

UPDATE: This appeared today:

This is very interesting. First it tells us that this was pretty much a Green Party sting. Even worse according to the Waikato Times they say they specifically asked Ms Campbell if she had any links to the Greens.

It is interesting that they used Twitter to obtain interview subjects. It makes it far more likely those with a political agenda will be interviewed as they are more likely to volunteer. Once upon a time media would have used networks to hunt out a family to profile. Better to profile someone who does not volunteer but somewhat grudgingly consents. They are more likely to be genuine.

If the Waikato Times did ask Ms Campbell for any links to the Green Party, then one can’t hold them responsible for being lied to. However we don’t know exactly what they asked and exactly what the answer was. I think there is still a lesson here – they could have searched Twitter or used Google and discovered the link quite easily.

Mike Noon from the AA writes in the Herald:

The AA is one of the leading road safety campaigners in New Zealand, we support the use of speed cameras and do not condone speeding. But let’s take a step back for a moment and consider what is the ultimate aim of the cameras? The answer is obviously getting drivers to slow down.

Fixed speed cameras (the ones mounted on permanent poles) are placed in safety black-spots where there has been a history of speed-related crashes. …

The fact that some of these cameras are still issuing thousands of tickets shows the current approach isn’t succeeding and that speeds are not being managed.

Having signs alerting drivers that there is a speed camera area or camera operating ahead will ensure more drivers slow down in these black-spots, and this has to be a good thing.

The other key point in this debate is that the AA is only calling for signs ahead of fixed speed cameras. We support the continued use of mobile cameras without signage, such as vans on the side of the road.

So if a driver chooses to slow down for a signposted fixed camera and then speed back up again, they can be caught by the anytime, anywhere mobile cameras, and of course they can be caught by police officers on patrol. Our call is not about helping drivers to avoid tickets, it’s about getting drivers to slow down and to check their speed, especially in high-risk areas.

Having signs alerting drivers to a fixed speed camera is done in Australia, Britain, and most other countries we compare ourselves to for road safety best practice.

I think the AA makes incredibly valid points, and the Police and Government should reconsider their policy. Otherwise the suspicion will remain that revenue is more important than safety.

A devastating critique of Julian Assange from Nick Cohen of the Guardian:

As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.

David Leigh and Luke Harding’s history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro’s, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. “Well, they’re informants,” Assange replied. “So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.” A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths.

Ouch, and it gets worse.

James Ball joined and thought that in his own small way he was making the world a better place. He realised that WikiLeaks was not what it seemed when an associate of Assange – a stocky man with a greying moustache, who called himself “Adam” – asked if he could pull out everything the State Department documents “had on the Jews”. Ball discovered that “Adam” was Israel Shamir, a dangerous crank who uses six different names as he agitates among the antisemitic groups of the far right and far left. As well as signing up to the conspiracy theories of fascism, Shamir was happy to collaborate with Belarus‘s decayed Brezhnevian dictatorship. Leftwing tyranny, rightwing tyranny, as long as it was anti-western and anti-Israel, Shamir did not care.

Nor did Assange. He made Shamir WikiLeaks’s representative in Russia and eastern Europe. Shamir praised the Belarusian dictatorship. He compared the pro-democracy protesters beaten and imprisoned by the KGB to football hooligans. On 19 December 2010, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the “organisers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones” who had protested against rigged elections.

Wikileaks did some great stuff in their early days, when they were the enemies of dictators. With Assange involved it is hard to see how they can recover.

In Ethiopia, however, Assange has already claimed his first scalp. Argaw Ashine fled the country last week after WikiLeaks revealed that the reporter had spoken to an official from the American embassy in Addis Ababa about the regime’s plans to intimidate the independent press. WikiLeaks also revealed that a government official told Arshine about the planned assault on opposition journalists. Thus Assange and his colleagues not only endangered the journalist. They tipped off the cops that he had a source in the state apparatus.

What fine work.

Chris Barton had a very good article in the NZ Herald detailing how we are still spending $233 million a year on public broadcasting. That is not a small amount, for a country of our size. The challenge is that costs do not scale much to size.

We spend:

• $82 million contestable NZ on Air funding (includes $15.1 million Platinum Fund)
• $58 million for Maori television (includes $25 million Te Mangai Paho contestable)
• $36 million for Radio New Zealand
• $18 million for TVNZ 6 and 7
• $11 million for Maori radio
• $9 million for other (Pacific transmission, archiving, digital, NZ On Screen, etc)
• $5 million for Freeview
• $5 million for New Zealand music
• $4 million for commercial and community radio
• $3 million for National Pacific Radio Trust
• $2 million for Parliament TV

I’d be very interested in true viewer numbers for each. The article cites monthly and weekly cumulative audiences for some channels and programmes, but that means if you watch 10 minutes of a channel once a month, you get included. What I want is the average number of viewers or listeners during a show.

In my “By the numbers” blog at Stuff, I ask the question “When will the tide turn?”. Most people expect National to drop in the polls between now and the election, but the question is when? In 2008, National stated to drop in mid July, while in 2011 it is mid September and it has yet to begin, if it does occur.

Maxim have a handy wee paper by Steve Thomas on the five electoral systems on offer in the upcoming referendum. They don’t say which one is their preference. It’s a good guide to the pros and cons of the various systems, so I’ve embedded it below.

Their summary of the five systems are:

MMP

MMP provides well for electorate representation and the representation of interests, and can provide for reasonably stable government.21 The strength of MMP is the flip-side of its drawbacks. It enables more parties to be elected to parliament, which is great for the breadth of representation, but it also gives parties a lot of power. It can also create bargaining instead of debate among parties, and a weakened accountability of the government to voters. It can also encourage interest groups to act in unhelpful ways.

FPP

FPP is simple to understand and it usually produces clear results. FPP delivers strong, stable, single party majority government most of the time, and there is usually no confusion about which party can form a government. It is easy for voters to dump a government and elect a new one since parties generally do not negotiate together to form a government.20 But, as New Zealand’s experience indicates, instances of highly disproportionate election results weakened the legitimacy of electoral outcomes and the Cabinet’s tight control over legislation and parliament weakened the public’s trust in government.21 It can also be difficult for minorities to be represented, either because safe seats make it difficult to dislodge a popular candidate or because it is difficult for minority candidates to win enough concentrated support in one electorate.

PV

PV provides for strong electorate representation, through the election of local MPs, which usually leads to the election of single-party majority governments. That said, PV gives minor party candidates a fighting chance of winning a seat when second and subsequent preferences are used to help elect a candidate. However, it is still harder for minority candidates and parties to be represented in parliament under PV because it is not a proportional system. Further, PV can sometimes produce electoral outcomes that might not be considered entirely legitimate if the most popular candidate on first preferences does not win—although this point is debatable. While PV would enable voters to more clearly express their preferences for certain candidates it could also introduce some new ways for parties and candidates to engineer electoral outcomes, as parties would advise supportive voters how to vote to give them the best advantage.

STV

STV is an attractive system in principle since it enables voters to indicate exactly which candidates they would like in multi-member electorates. STV enables voters to choose both between and within parties, meaning that parliament ought to reflect a wider diversity of opinions within society.22 The use of multi-member electorates also means that electoral outcomes will be more proportional.

The theoretical advantages of STV have to be weighed carefully against the practical issues with using it and the way voters tend to interact with this relatively complex system. For example, it could undermine the cohesiveness of political parties as candidates from the same party would compete against each other for election. The option of voting above-the-line can also give parties more control over which candidates are elected and in which order. In this case, many voters would not actually end up individually choosing their local MPs. In short, the advantages offered by STV could be eroded by measures to make it easier for voters to understand and use.

SM

In trying to blend two styles of voting system, SM has some of the benefits and some of the drawbacks of both. It is neither a completely proportional system, nor does it guarantee that one party will win a large enough majority to be able to govern alone.

In terms of representation, SM has the potential to achieve a good balance between national and local representation of interests. Electorate representation would be strong, creating good ties between parliament and voters, but a quarter of parliament would also be made up of list MPs who tend to be able to represent minority interest groups well.

Because there would be more electorate MPs under SM than under MMP the major parties would benefit, but there is also a chance coalitions would be needed to form a government and that minor parties would have more representation than they typically do under single-member electorate systems, like FPP.

The document is below.

EMBARGOED Kicking the Tyres

Key Points:

* National at record high, expected to govern alone
* Dr Pita Sharples now predicting to re-take Tamaki-Makaurau
* Trevor Mallard expected to increase majority in Hutt South while Clare Curran’s majority in Dunedin South expected to fall
* Inflation, current account deficit, unemployment, OCR and future Fonterra payout forecasts all down this week

Commentary:

Following last week’s World Cup wobble, John Key’s National Government has recovered with its forecast party vote reaching a record reported high of 49.0%, this week’s snapshot from New Zealand’s prediction market, iPredict, suggests. Maori Party Co-Leader Dr Pita Sharples is now expected to retain Tamaki-Makaurau, although the gap with Labour’s Shane Jones remains narrow. Labour’s Trevor Mallard is expected to improve his majority in Hutt South while Labour’s Clare Curran is expected to reduce hers in Dunedin South. In economics, forecasts for inflation, the current account deficit, unemployment, the OCR and future Fonterra payouts have all fallen.

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

ETS—ENVIRONMENTAL TRADING SLOW-DOWN?: The new Caygill review of the ETS puts agriculture equal to other industries but will the Government be letting farmers off the hook? The review panel says we should stay on track to bring agriculture into the ETS scheme by 2015 but Climate Change Minister Nick Smith said that farmers would only be included if there were “practical technologies…available to enable farmers to reduce their emissions,” and if other countries reduced their emissions, too. So what does this mean for our ETS? Does Nick Smith have a point? Is it fair to omit those responsible for nearly half of our emissions? Does tiny New Zealand need to be leading the world on bringing farmers into the ETS if the trading partners won’t follow suit? Is not putting farmers in the ETS–just another form of a Government handout?

HAVING IT ALL? This week we mark Woman’s suffrage. It’s been 118 years since women secured the right to vote but are they any better off? Can women have it all? Pay equality? Jobs and families? Or does suffrage also mean sacrifice? Does the Government need to do more to close the gap between men & women?

Join us for a night of LIVE pub politics from the Backbencher Pub: Wednesday, 21st of September. Our Panel: Green Party MP Keith Locke, Labour MP Annette King and National MP John Hayes.