Kiwiblog

The Taranaki Daily News reports:

Labour Party top-dog Andrew Little could step forward for a tilt at the New Plymouth electorate seat in next year’s national elections.

Mr Little, the party’s president and touted by many as a future Labour leader and prime minister, has refused to rule out the possibility.

“It’s certainly no secret I want to get into Parliament next year,” he told the Taranaki Daily News yesterday.

“As to how I do that, or where, I’ve made no decisions.”

He said he hopes to have made a decision within the next two or three months and wouldn’t rule out running in New Plymouth.

This is no surprise. The fact that Labour did not open nominations for New Plymouth at the same time as the other seats they lost, was obviously to keep options open for their President.

Andrew can of course just place himself at No 3 on the list, and be assured of entering Parliament that way. However a seat is almost a pre-requisite to becoming leader.

The city electorate is often viewed as a swing seat come election time and in 2008 National candidate Jonathan Young squeaked in past Labour’s 15-year encumbent MP Harry Duynhoven, with the tightest margin in the country – just 105 votes.

Mr Little has strong personal and family links to New Plymouth, having grown up here.

It was a very tight contest between Young and Duynhoven, but that is not the same thing as being a marginal seat between National and Labour.

While the electorate vote margin was only 0.2%, the party vote margin was a whopping 19.1%. Now nationwide the party vote margin was 11%, so 19% is a huge amount.

Harry Duynhoven had 13% of National voters, voting for him as the candidate. Will Andrew Little attract 13% of National voters?

It is a difficult decision for Andrew. His four main options are:

1. Stand for Rongotai, with Annette King going list only, allowing Annette to retire easily if Labour lose in 2011.
2. Stand for Hutt South if Trevor decides to retire in 2011 to become a full time blogger
3. Stand for New Plymouth.
4. Stand list only

No 1 is what I would go for if I was Andrew. There are rumours that Darren Hughes may seek that nomination though, and Annette is very good mates with Darren and would probably support him. It is also possible Annette will want to keep her seat, as many would see her going lost only as an indication she is not confident they will win the election.

No 2 depends on whether and when Trevor makes a judgement call that Labour are unlikely to win in 2011. He has said he doesn’t want another term of opposition. But I think Trevor still thinks the Government is on the verge of collapsing and is looking pretty comfortable where he is.

No 3 is Andrew’s for the taking. But the big negative is that he may lose, and lose big – which would not help him with his leadership aspirations.

No 4 is the default fall back option. As President, he would receive a massively high rating. But no one has yet become Prime Minister without not just a seat, but in fact a safe seat,

Received this message:

I was sitting behind him in a National Standards meeting and he was using his touch phone to video and record ‘discreetly’ Anne Tolley, Sam Lotu-Iiga and other members of the publics questions and comments. We all realised he was doing it, and at one point Anne said something like “If you want a copy of the slides Trevor i’ll send them to you”.

If I was a parent genuinely concerned about what was going on, someone who cares about my children’s progress who comes along to one of these meetings I don’t think I’d want my voice to be used in the Labour party caucus- he’ll probably bring us segments in the house or try and table his phone.

I have to question whether this is the best use of time for a constituency MP- and the use of tax payers money for him to fly up to Auckland to ‘hold’ Carol Beaumont’s hand. Time that he could be using to solve cases in his community, perhaps teaching children how to read considering he’s so concerned. Concerned about children’s progress enough to spend recess here videoing a public meeting.

Speaks for itself. More strange behaviour.

Trevor posted at Red Alert:

My calculation is that the average residential rental property will inolve a loss of about $45 to the landlord v current depreciation arrangements.

(Average house price 416k but I’ve used median 360k. 2% depreciation = $7,200. 33c tax rate = $2,400 say $45 per week)

Can John Key guarantee that all families that rent their houses and get this increase as well as that in their GST will not be worse off.

Now Trevor has been slaughtered in the comments there for his basic errors, he has done a partial retraction:

Comments below have suggested that my estimate is high because I haven’t taken out land prices. Other emails have suggested that there are higher depreciation rates and that because a proportion of rented premises are apartments land is not quite the issue some suggest. I’m happy to use the property investors $34/week figure for the purpose of the discussion. The post goes to the principle.

Trevor retreats behind principle, after going on TV talking about his $45 a week figure. Shame on the media for running with it, without checking it out.

What are the mistakes Trevor made.

1. The no depreciation on land is the big one. The median house value is $360,000. Looking through the WCC property database, I would estimate this averages out to $190,000 building and $170,000 land. So Trevor’s figures are already out by close to 100%
2. The depreciation rate is 2% straight line or 3% diminishing value. For an exercise of this nature, SL is better in my opinion, so no problem there.
3. The other massive mistake Trevor has made is overlooking that the depreciation has to be repaid when the house is sold. The gain to the landlord is not the tax rebate on the depreciation, but the interest free use of that money for some years. Now that can still add up to a useful amount (as I calculated here) but way way less than the tax rebate itself.

So taking 1 and 3 together, Trevor may be out by literally a magnitude.

Putting aside Trevor’s faulty maths, how great is it to see Labour championing the cause of landlords to claim non existent depreciation? If Labour has a strategist in their ranks, he or she must be in tears at Labour’s inability to run a coherent message.

UPDATE: If you thing I have been harsh on Trevor, read Keith Ng at Public Address:

Of course, this means Trevor Mallard’s own back-of-a-napkin adventures were even more full of shit.

As he acknowledges in his update, he included land values, so he massively overstates the cost, and he didn’t even consider clawback. The curious thing is how his clearly, completely and massively wrong estimate ended up being in the same ballpark as the Property Investors Federation’s completely unsubstantiated figure…

Oh. Right.

Full. Of. Shit.

I love it how Labour have become shrills for the Property Investors Federation.

At 11.33 am Trevor Mallard posts that National MP Katrina Shanks removed a web poll from her site, because 85% of respondents had voted against national standards.

He said:

Talk about dishonest. Goebbels would be proud of her attempt to rewrite history.

The irony and hypocrisy is wonderful as at 11.57 am Trevor Mallard made another post on Red Alert called “A big group that will be worse off following the tax cuts”. In it Trevor rails against removing the depreciation write off on rental properties, claiming it will push rental prices up by $60 a week.

And you know what, that post has disappeared off Red Alert a few minutes later. To use Trevor’s language, in a fashion Goebbels would be proud of.

So how stupid do you have to be to do a post bagging someone else for deleting something off their site, and then just minutes later do the same thing yourself.

Now of course it was stupid for Katrina (or whomever did it) to remove the web poll. No one should take them seriously anyway.

This is not the first Goebbels type editing done on Red Alert. on 2 February I highlighted a Trevor post that disappeared, and back on 29 October, a censored post where they tried to cover up that Trevor referred to Chris Finlayson as:

I don’t know what the Chief Justice saw in him. He is a nasty sarcastic man – so twisted that if he ate nails he would pass screws

So we are up to the third strike for Trevor and trying to rewrite online history. So the irony and hypocrisy of Trevor ripping into Katrina Shanks is immense.

I wonder how long we will wait for Trevor’s latest deleted post to reappear, and have it blamed on a technical glitch.

Trevor Mallard blogged last week:

Quick post coz doing electorate stuff but couldn’t resist sharing the Spotless results. These people are currently offering parliamentary cleaners a 25c wage increase that would take them to $12.80/hour despite employing cleaners (sometimes the same people) at $14.62/hour in hospitals and schools.

Their net profit after tax has increased by 40.8% to over $24 million.  Their earnings per share is up 25%.

Message to CEO Farnik – stop screwing our cleaners. Maybe you should pay $15 not $14.62/ hour. But $12.80/hour for parliamentary cleaners is just not enough.

I’ll fisk this post in more detail in a second, but first want to comment that I think it once again shows that most Labour MPs have no idea about how private businesses work. Profit is always treated as a bad thing, and basically as a margin there to be soaked up by increased wages. The concept of a return on capital seems foreign.

Now we are supplied two figures – a NPAT of $24 million and an hourly rate of $12.80, with a conclusion that one can afford to increase wages to $15 an hour. But business is not so simple.

Now let us take Trevor’s figure of NPAT increasing 40% to $24 million. This is correct, and not surprising as a company comes out of a recession. But Spotless have many divisions to their work, and each one has to be profitable (or you stop doing that type of work). The relevant information is the revenues and expenses for the cleaning division.

Now the earnings before interest and tax for the cleaning division actually fell 9.2% from $7.6 million to $6.9 million. So the 40% NPAT figure is irrelevant when it comes to what one can afford to pay cleaners.

Now the cleaning division had revenues of $133.1 million and implied expenses of $126.2 million. This means expenses are 94.8% of revenue and profit is 5.2% of turnover – hardly massive. We don’t know what proportion of expenses are staff wages, but let us assume it is 50%, or $63 million.

Now Trevor is calling for wages to go up by at least 16%, maybe 20%. Now if that was to happen across the board, then that would be additional costs of $12.6 million, which would send their cleaning division into making a loss of $5.7 million.

Now one can dispute the assumptions, and my motivation is not to defend Spotless per se. It is to highlight that the figures Trevor are using to make his case are meaningless. A net profit means nothing unless one is talking about it as a proportion of revenue or capital or both. A company with a $1 million NPAT may be in a far better position to afford pay increases than a company with a $20 million NPAT, as the second company may have $1 billion of equity and the former company $5 million of equity.

Barnsley at Gotcha is worried about the theme of a cartoon blogged by Trevor at Red Alert, but I’m more interested in the increasing shrillness of the posts.

First he basically called John Key a racist because John criticised Hone Harawira, now he calls Anne Tolley a liar because she claimed to fully understand the national standards system, and Trevor proclaimed that no living person can possibly fully understand the system, so she must be a liar. Sounds bizarre, but this is true. I’ll take you through it slowly.

Trevor asked in Parliament:

Hon Trevor Mallard: Going back to the primary answer, is she in the group of 11.9 percent who claim that they fully understand her system or in the 88 percent who acknowledge that they do not?

This was in relation to a Herald poll that found 88% o people did not fully understand national standards. Now Trevor was obviously trying to get Tolley to say she did not understand her own national standards system. Anne tried to avoid a direct answer to the equivalent of a “Have you stopped beating your wife” type question but Lockwood showed why he is such a fair Speaker and insisted Anne give a direct answer,which was:

Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I understand perfectly well what the national standards are …

Trevor then blogs:

… everyone that has half a brain knows that  no one can fully understand a system that vital components of, including what will be an expensive and time consuming moderation system,  have not been designed yet.

So, once again, Tolley is a liar …

So think carefully about Trevor’s logic here. He is saying that no one at all in the entire world can claim to understand the national standards system, and that anyone claiming to is a liar.

It is the sort of verbal semantics you expect from a ten year old, not a former Minister of Education. In Trevor’s world Anne has to either say I don’t understand the National Standards system, or she is a liar. This is why I call it a “Have you stopped beating your wife” question – there is no good answer.

By itself I would not blink – we all know Mallard hates Tolley and his idea of Opposition is to abuse and denigrate her. But when you look at the nonsense over calling Key a racist because Key criticised Hone Harawira, well I think there is a pattern of increasing shrillness or worse.

Trevor’s post at Red Alert are just getting more bizarre. And I say this as someone who said many times last year Trevor was an excellent blogger. Something has happened over summer.

Trevor’s latest missive is to call John Key racist for criticising Hone Harawira!

So why has John Key been so aggressive in his criticism of Hone?

Hone is a sometimes an easy target. He puts his head up and I’ve certainly had a go at him when it is appropriate.

But contrast this question of a perceived (but not actual) conflict of interest of a member of Hone’s family with the decade of the English whanau ripping the taxpayer off by pretending to live in Dipton. And Wiremu was found to have an interest. And it is continuing.

So is Key kicking Hone because he is Maori and if not what is his explanation for his hypocrisy?

First of all Trevor is lying about Bill. No less than the Auditor-General, Jonathan Hunt, Margaret Wilson and Lockwood Smith have all ruled Bill has been eligible for the Wellington accommodation supplement.

But even putting that falsehood aside (and teh stupidity of trying to compare an issue about a flag with housing allownaces), it is pitiful to suggest that John Key is racist because he criticised Hone Harawira.

Calling the Prime Minister a racist is not an accusation an MP should make lightly. I wonder if Phil Goff would agree with Trevor that Key is a racist for criticising Hone? Maybe someone could ask Phil in front of Hone as he welcomes him onto Waitangi.

Around 9 pm last night Trevor Mallard made a rather bizarre post on Red Alert. And presumably one of his colleagues stepped in and hid it from view as it disappeared for around several hours.

One would have thought they would have learnt from the Chris Finlayson episode, that it is a bad idea to delete stuff you regret, as it is cached and stored all over the place.

As people on Red Alert asked what happened to it, it then reappeared a few hours later.George Orwell would be proud his novels were so accurate!

The post was rather stupid, to be blunt. It says/said:

It is going to be interesting to see how hard the Nats push their policy of shifting from a pretty strict zoning system based on a right to enrol if in zone to giving flexibilty to schools to pick and choose students.

Being in the Auckland Grammar zone increases the value of a house by between $100 and $150k, it will be interesting to see how Nikki Kaye balances her pretty extreme free market views with the writing off of property values.

Big + for Jacinda I think.

I know Labour are desperate to try and talk the Auckland Central race up, but really describing Nikki as holding “pretty extreme free market views” is hilarious. All I can say is that whatever Trevor is inhaling needs to be reclassified from Class C to Class A!!

More to the point, Trevor needs to visit Auckland more often. The Auckland Grammar zone is here. Almost none of it is actually in Auckland Central. It is almost all in Epsom and Mt Albert. I can only presume he was desperately trying to come up with an issue, and this is the best he could come up with.

The only parts that are in zone are the CBD on and east of Queens Street, and Grafton. Now I don’t think anyone thinks many families live in CBD apartments, and their value is not greatly affected by the Grammar zone (look at apartment values on Queen St vs Albert St). So that only leaves Grafton which is around 5% of the electorate.

I do like the fact that Trevor defends school zoning on the basis that house values in Epsom will decrease too much if one makes it more flexible. Good to see Labour focused on helping kids get the best education.

Incidentally, while I think it is very unlikely the Grammar zone will disappear, I would say it would be incredibly popular in the other 95% of Auckland Central, as their parents would get a choice of schools.

UPDATE: Clare Curran has commented that the Red Alert post disappeared due to a technical glitch, and it was not done deliberately.

Trevor Mallard hits back at Metiria Turei after she highlighted how he had unfriended her on Facebook:

Last night Metiria Turei used my status to attack Labour. Of all things it was on our record on the minimum wage – probably one of the best areas of progress the last government – but the subject doesn’t matter.

As I said above I’m new to facebook.  I regard my page like my home. I chose who is there. While there are lots of discussions initiated by constituents I decide whether they run or not. But the idea of politicians using the comments section of my status to attack me just doesn’t seem right.

Good God. If you are an MP and you use your Facebook page to try and score political points, it is rather precious to then ban people because they disagree with you. Let alone the co-leader of your own remaining friendly party.

Metiria herself is an avid user of social media and on Twitter (for example) people often disagree with her on an issue. She normally responds constructively, and all is fine.

ps   I found Rod Donald and Sue Bradford good to work with (and Jeanette but only for a short time) – so its not a green allergy.

Ouch that makes it worse. He is saying it is personal with Metiria. And consider his earlier comment:

Not much real help from you guys esp since Russel started cuddling tories.

So Trevor is slagging off not one but both co-leaders of the Greens. Way to go.

I really wonder if Phil Goff is in control of his own caucus.

Metiria Turia blogs:

Trevor Mallard defriended me on Facebook last night and I have to tell you the story. He also defriended another person for asking the same questions I did. Not terribly sporting, I would have thought.

Metiria’s sin was to point out the gap between Labour’s rhetoric on the minimum wage and their record.

And Trevor got so annoyed he unfriended her!! Seriously – just like a teenager does when they are in a huff.

I love Labour’s strategy for making friends and influencing people.

First Shane Jones insults a priest at Ratana, and them declares war against the Maori Party.

And now Trevor Mallard defriends on Facebook the co-leader of the Green Party.

What next? Will Annette King call Jim Anderton a authoritarian tyrant, to get rid of their one remaining friend?

Throng blog:

Ok, so I’m not 100% sure on the math here (need to check up the tax rules) but both bulletins can’t be right here in their calculations.  Using IRD’s website, currently for a minimum wage earner, they pay $2.27 in total for their tax and ACC levies.  I’m trying to double check these figures quoted, but I think 3 News is wrong – it can’t be right thatminimum wage earners are taxed 40%!

ONE News: $10 – $2.10 in tax – $0.20 in ACC levies = $7.70 in the hand
3 News: $10 – $3.00 New ACC levies in April – $1.00 PAYE tax = $6.00 in the hand

Note: Trevor Mallard also said about $6 in his 3 News interview.

Trevor Mallard is of course wrong, and if TV3 relied on him, shame on them.

One News had is absolutely correct. The marginal tax rate for a FT worker on the minimum wage is 21% and the ACC levy for next year will be 2%, so a $10 gross increase will be a $7.70 net increase.

In opposition you can propose all sorts of things, without having to worry about the consequences. We see this today with Trevor Mallard’s private members bill to have the minimum wage go from $12.50 to $15.00 in just two years.

Increases in the minimum wage can destroy jobs. Not automatically in every situation, but certainly in many situations. If this was not the case the minimum wage would be $50 an hour.

With the abolishment of the youth minimum wage, I have no doubt that the record high youth unemployment is partially because some young workers have already been priced out of the market.

On the other hand the economy had strong enough economic growth for most of the 2000s that the minimum wage was increased without a significant impact on employment.

So let us look at Labour’s record vs their rhetoric.

In Labour’s first term, they had a booming economy (inherited from the previous Government). How much did they increase the minimum wage by? Their annual increase were 55c, 15c and 30c.

So Labour are demanding that just as we come out of a major recession with high unemployment, the Government should increase the minimum wage by $1.25 a year, when in their first term the increases averaged 33c a year. National’s increases have been 50c and 25c, around the same as Labour in their first term, but not quite as high as a percentage. Of course a key difference is the inherited recession.

Is anyone stupid enough to think that if Labour was in Government they would be increasing the minimum wage to $15?

In fact we know this from their own election policy. All their policy said was that they would increase it to keep pace with (the greater of) inflation or average wage increases. Now as neither inflation or the average wage is at 10%, it shows how hypocritical Labour is being – now promising something they know would be bad for jobs, purely because they know they don’t have to deliver on it. If they really thought it was a good idea they would have promised it at the last election.

Labour in their second term increased the minimum wage by just 50c a year.

The one period where it did increase much faster was 2005 – 2008, but that was not because of Labour – that was forced on them by NZ First and the Greens. But even then, they never did an annual increase of $1.25.

So again, when the economy is booming and unemployment is low, Labour implements relatively modest minimum wage increases. Once they are in Opposition and unemployment is high and we have just come out of recession, they advocate the highest ever increase.

Do you really want them running the country again?

The Herald reports:

Sixty-one per cent of people want the minimum wage lifted to $15 an hour, a Herald Summer Survey has found, weeks before the Government is to set the wage for this year.

The minimum wage is now $12.50 an hour, and the Cabinet is expected to decide within a fortnight whether to increase it.

61% probably support a minimum wage of $20 an hour is you asked them.

Trevor Mallard also blogs his support:

Kate Wilkinson would have got a report in October with options for a November Cabinet paper on lifting the minimum wage. In government Labour just about always made a decision before Christmas and there was always an increase effective from 1 April.

Each increase pushed up a relatively small but increasing group directly but a much bigger group indirectly.

I think it is time for the government to commit to $15 an hour from either 1 April this year, or 1 April next year at the latest.

There are a big stack of equity arguements in favour of the change. And it could be a good boost to the increasingly fragile recovery.

Business NZ  would squeal. But most employers know that lifting wage rates encourages investement in capital equipment and training to make their labour force more productive. It is all part of the movement to a high skill, high wage economy.

I am an employer. Trevor is not. In fact as far as I can tell, Trevor’s only jobs have been a teacher, an MP and a unionist. So when Trevor elects himself to speak on behalf of employers, this should be treated with the same degree of credibility as me speaking on behalf of Olympic atheletes.

You do not get to a high skill high wage economy by bankrupting companies that are not high skill and high wage.

At a time of rising unemployment, it would be stupid to have a massive 20% increase in the minimum wage. It would be particular devastating for youth employment. Already we have seen the abolition of the youth minimum wage which has had a devastating impact on youth employment levels.

The simple fact of the matter is that a 15 year old working at a department store (my first significant job) does not produce $15 an hour worth of value. And hell most 15 year olds don’t expect to be earning an hourly wage worth $30,000 a year fulltime. They are living at home, and want to just earn some spending money, and gain some work experience.

A move to $15 an hour would be inflationary also, which would mean higher interest rates, and again fewer jobs and reduced economic growth.

I’m interested in data on how many people actually earn the minimum wage, and how long they stay on the minimum wage for. I suspect most people on the minimum wage do not stay earning at that level for their working life. They gain experience and skills and become more valuable. That is my preferred way to get people off the minimum wage.

Does anyone know of any data about frequency and duration of people earning the minimum wage in NZ?

UPDATE: The survey cited by the Herald is seriously flawed, I can reveal. Not because it was an Internet based survey (even though that by itself makes it fairly self selecting), but because they gave respondents only three options – that the minimum wage should be reduced from $12.50, that it should stay at $12.50 and that it should increase to $15.00.

That is an appalling list of options, as it doesn’t allow people who support a smaller increase (say of 50c to keep pace with inflation) to say so. The Herald has done a disservice to readers by not making clear what the options were, when they report 61% back a rise to $15. That was the only option people were given for a rise.

Trevor Mallard blogs at Red Alert:

Kerre Woodham’s column in the HoS today promotes letting or even encouraging kids to take some risks.

Too often risk averse parents and schools wrap kids in cotton wool to the point where they don’t develop the power to judge risk and make their own decisions.

I agree, but find such a stance hilarious from the party that set out to remove choice in so many areas, especially around risk. I commented:

Hell next Trevor will be advocating that a kid should be allowed to decide for him/her self whether or not to buy a pie from the school tuckshop after a sports game.

Hard to see that the party that doesn’t even trust a kid to decide on whether or not to have a pie, is about to roll back nanny state,

Trevor Mallard blogged:

Back in 2000 I was acting Minister of Communication while Paul Swain was sick. I made it very clear at the time that the Crown did not accept that the radio spectrum was an asset that attracted rights for Maori from the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Frankly I thought, and still think, that that concept is nonsense.

Yet back in 2000 Hansard records:

The Government has decided that preferential bidding access to one of the four 15 megahertz blocks of third generation spectrum will be given only to those parties able to demonstrate some commitment to involve Maori in the development of this spectrum. This is likely to be telecommunications working in partnership with Maori. The third generation spectrum will provide significant opportunities for new investment and technological advancement in New Zealand’s telecommunications sector. The Government considers that it is very important to ensure that Maori can take part in this process.

Now to be clear, Trevor did not say that the telecommunications spectrum was a “right” under the Treaty of Waitangi. But he did advocate policy of preferential access for Maori to it, regardless of treaty claims. That is something he somehow forgot to mention.

The Herald reports:

United Future leader Peter Dunne has given up on his annual list of worst-behaved MPs, saying Speaker Lockwood Smith’s reign has ushered in a new era of dignity and propriety.

To be fair, I think the absence of Winston helps also. But the House has been a far less toxic place this year.

Mr Dunne did honour Labour’s Trevor Mallard with a lifetime achievement award in bad behaviour “for services to melodrama, fisticuffs, and generally aberrant behaviour”.

When Lockwood orders him to apologise, you can actually see the supressed rage in his eyes!!

The Herald does find a few insults though:

Labour’s Moana Mackey apologised for referring to Hekia Parata as “Lady Parata” and “her royal highness”. National’s Paul Quinn was pulled up for calling Labour’s backbench “monkeys”.

I’d rather be called Lady Parata than a monkey I have to say – well if I was a female Parata that is!

Some apologies:

SHANE JONES
For saying of Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee, “the notion of him and energy is a mathematical impossibility”.

PHIL HEATLEY
For claiming another “fiddled the books” in ACC and Housing; for wishing the Speaker would use a 90-day eviction order on Trevor Mallard.

Heh.

RODNEY HIDE
For North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams’ “madness”, for calling Trevor Mallard “the angry one”.

Isn’t truth a defence?

JOHN KEY
For claiming Green MP Metiria Turei thought Phil Goff was “racist”. She had said his speech was “the worst kind of politics”.

So worse than racism?

Stuff reports:

The Labour Party would scrap national primary and intermediate education standards if elected, says education spokesman Trevor Mallard.

Wonderful news.

Now we just need Labour to confirm how much it will increase income tax rates by to cover all its spending pledges.

Trevor Mallard knocked a very impressive 30 minutes off his 2008 time for the 160 km Taupo Cycle Challenge.

In 2008, Trevor got 5:35:32. This was at the 50th percentile for male competitors so dead on the median.

In 2009 Trevor’s training got him 4:58:40. This is the 22nd percentile for male competitors. That is a huge improvement. All that training paid off.

NZPA report:

Kaye Breaks Ankle Ending “Beauty Versus The Beast” Race

Excitement over an upcoming parliamentary cycle race dubbed “beauty versus the beast” has been dashed by National MP Nikki Kaye, who has crashed and broken an ankle.

As amused as I am by the headline, I have to say I’d never heard anyone refer to the contest in that way previously.

Central Auckland MP Ms Kaye was due to square off against senior Labour MP Trevor Mallard in the upcoming race around Lake Taupo.

They and other MPs have been in intensive training , but it all ended in tears for Ms Kaye yesterday when she fell on the streets of Auckland.

Ms Kaye said a car had moved close to her, so she had swerved to avoid it but crashed with her foot locked into the pedal.

Her awkward fall resulted in a very painful break in her fibula, near the joint with ankle.

She was expected to be in plaster and on crutches for up to six weeks.

Where’s a dedicated cycleway when you need one!

Some around Parliament joked Mr Mallard had knobbled Ms Kaye as he feared defeat by a younger MP, but Labour MPs insisted he was nowhere near the accident scene.

What I find funny is that Labour MPs actually checked that Trevor wasn’t in Auckland and were briefed to deny it was him

Trevor has been training massively for the race, and is set to knock 20 minutes or more off his 2008 time of 5:35. I hope he keeps the motivation level high as the more time Trevor is on a bike, the less time he spends making trouble in Parliament!

The Dom Post report:

Labour MP Trevor Mallard has been caught up in a police investigation into an alleged road rage incident in central Wellington.

Mr Mallard says he was forced to defend himself from a driver on Willis St who drove through a group of cyclists then hit him with a bag.

“I very nearly fell off my bike from this guy jumping out and swinging his bag at me,” he said. “I got my foot out of the [bike] pedal because I thought I was going to fall off and there was contact between my foot and his bag.”

The car’s occupants laid a complaint against Mr Mallard, but police would not give details of the complaint. They confirmed they knew of an incident but would not say if charges would be laid.

Now I know some here will automatically conclude Mallard must be in the wrong, but I would advise people not to jump to conclusions.  First of all in my experience many motorists are very inconsiderate around cyclists. Secondly, the eye witnesses back up Trevor on what happened.

Mr Mallard said he had been riding with a bunch of cyclists on Wednesday morning and was on the way back to Parliament about 8.10am when a car drove through the group “and got comments from a few of them”.

A man then got out of the car and swung a bag at Mr Mallard.

When asked if he hit or grabbed the man, the MP said: “No, I defended myself against him. I didn’t touch him at all.”

When asked if the man hit him, he said: “Yes, he did hit me with his bag.”

Mr Mallard said there was shouting from both sides over the incident, and he rode off.

I would be surprised if the Police charge anyone, if the reports of what happened are accurate. I would say that most blame lies with the motorist who got out of his car, if the facts are correctly reported.

At Red Alert, there is a blog post saying:

Wilkinson wasn’t in the House today so Finlayson answered. I don’t know what the Chief Justice saw in him. He is [deleted after careful consideration - Clare]

Now when will Labour learn about Google and the Internet. I would have through the Mussolini debacle was lesson enough, but no. Here is what Google records Trevor as originally saying:

I don’t know what the Chief Justice saw in him. He is a nasty sarcastic man – so twisted that if he ate nails he would pass screws

What a wonderful reminder of the old Trevor, and the last Labour Government. Anyone recall “cancerous and corrosive”?

I mean this is what one of Labours most senior MPs think is appropriate to write on their parliamentary blog, about an opponent. The vitriol just drips.

Also featuring on the Labour blog, is this comment by a Jennifer:

By the way, I also was somewhat shocked to see the ‘mean and nasty’ side of Tinkerbell.

Now I of all people don’t believe a blog owner is responsible for comments made on their blog. But there is more to this, than meets the eye. You see Labour MPs – especially Trevor Mallard – yell out Tinkerbell at the Attorney-General constantly in the House. So Jennifer is just following the lead of her caucus.

Now I think everyone knows Chris is gay. He doesn’t make a big fuss about it, it is just the way things are. But Labour seem obsessed with the fact an openly gay politician is a front bench National Minister. The so called party of tolerance and equality call him Tinkerbell. Maybe Rainbow Labour would like to show some balls, and point out to their own Caucus why this is a bad and stupid thing to do.

Trevor Mallard blogs:

Anne Tolley will announce a progressive introduction of bulk funding for schools starting soon with the staffing component for guidance and careers counsellors being abolished and a small increase going into the bulk operations grant.

Now it comes from Trevor, so it is hardly reliable, but we can all keep our fingers crossed that it is actually true.

Bulk funding is in fact how almost every other part of society operates.

Hospitals don’t have their staff paid out of one budget on a fixed scale, and an operations grant for everything else.

Universities don’t have their staff paid out of one budget, and an ops grant for everything else.

It is pretty much only in the school sector that you have this abnormal arrangement.

When I talk on blogging, I joke how most people are calm and reasonable in real life, but put them behind a blog and they turn into a foaming abusive person but that the opposite effect has been seen with Trevor Mallard in that he comes across on the blogs as far more calm and reasonable than he sometimes does in the House.

Generally I have been full of praise for Red Alert, and Trevor’s contributions specifically. But sometimes he goes too far. Yesterday Trevor blogged:

In 1999 and 2000, and again in the few days he was deputy leader of the National Party, Nick Smith has shown an inability to cope when the pressure comes on.

Widely circulating Beehive rumours now indicate that John Key has overloaded him giving him Climate Change and ACC at the same time.

Now this is just nasty stuff. Sure criticise a Minister on issues, and point out areas where he or she may be under stress. But Trevor is either fabricating or spreading rumours designed to remind people that Nick had some stress issues during his brief tenure as Deputy Leader.

I know of a Labour MP who once had a similar issue. I would never ever keep harping on about that on the blogs. I think it is great it is all behind them, and don’t see it as a weapon to be used against him or her.

Anyway I commented on Red Alert:

I must remember to link to this post in 2011, when reminding people why not to vote Labour.

This is just a different version of you yelling out “Take your pills” in the House. I think you forget how deeply unpopular such antics are.

My second sentence was censored on the grounds it takes it beyond Trevor’s limits. In fact it got censored because I was explicit at point out what Trevor was trying to say implicitly.

I probably shouldn’t say anything, as letting people show their nasty side is unpopular. This is part of why Labour was thrown out – their attacks on Key and others did look nasty.

I hope this is the last time we see that sort of post on Red Alert.

As I said a post criticising specifics of Nick’s handling of either ACC or climate change would be quite legitimate. But as I said, this is just a cyber-version of yelling out “Take your pills” in the House – something that only declined in frequency after the media started to report on why Labour were doing it.

On Monday night, we had a rare meeting of Presidents and leading representatives from Young Labour, Young Nationals, Young Greens and Act on Campus.

It was to discuss some of the options canvassed in the Law Commission’s review of alcohol law, and on top of 15 or so youth reps, we also had executives from the Drug Foundation, Hospitality Association, Lion Nathan and the Law Commission (to observe and provide info).

The four youth sections came together three years ago to (successfully) fight against Parliament’s move to raise the purchase age of alcohol to 20. The idea of the meeting was not just to focus on the purchase age, but consider many of the wider issues and see if there was a consensus on what options they agreed with, and what options they did not think would be effective.

I was involved with the original Keep It 18 campaign, so facilitated the meeting and to a certain degree played Devil’s Advocate on some of the issues. Issues discussed included the purchase age, should there be a drinking age, a split purchase age for on and off licenses, supply of alcohol to minors, restricted hours for off and on licenses, other access issues, excise tax levels, price issues, advertising restrictions, loss leading, blood alcohol limits for driving, open alcohol in cars, should cars have mandatory alcohol ignition locking devices, fake IDs, should drinking or being drunk in public be an offence etc.

I thought the meeting was really good, Not that I agreed with them on all issues, and not that they agreed with each other all the time. But it was a very practical discussion from a group of young people with first hand experience of youth drinking. It was around 50/50 guys and gals, but I didn’t pick up any huge difference in perspectives between the genders. There were some issues where there were differences between “left” and “right” but a surprisingly large number of issues where there was widespread agreement. The result is the four youth sections are going to do a joint submission (which may be a first) on the stuff they agree on, and individual submissions (or minority reports to the main submission) on the issues they have different perspectives on.

Not going to get into details of all the discussion, but there were three parts that stood out to me. They were:

1. When the current code of practice for alcohol advertising was summarised as banning ads that imply drinking can lead to sexual, sporting or social sucess, there was fairly widespread laughter as an automatic reaction. That was a very instinctive judgement that the current code is not working, or not being rigorously applied by all players. In fact many in the room cited ads that seem to quite specifically imply sexual, sporting or social sucess from drinking.
2. The discussion on the excise tax and price levels was very economically literate. There was a reasonable consensus that if alcohol use generates external costs (which it does), then there should be an excise tax set to cover the cost of that externality. However they rejected the notion that the tax be increased beyond covering the externality as a way to decrease demand, pointing out that would probably just send people into buying cheaper alcohol per volume (such as spirits). There was of course also reference to the considerable divergence in economists views of what the external costs of alcohol are, and the point was made that any figure used as justification for an increase should be very robust or bulletproof.
3. Very amusing in the discussion on price and excise tax was the points made by AoC that the real problem is people don’t pay for their own health care and a no faults ACC scheme which caused much merriment. Now to be fair to AoC their points are absolutely valid, but I did have to say I think we can assume that the Government is unlikely to privatise the health system and abolish ACC, so if we taken these as a given, then what is the best way to cover the externalities.

As I said, despite differences on a fair number of issues, it was a very mature and constructive discussion. I was really impressed with those who took part.

Also thanks are due to Labour’s Trevor Mallard (and his secretary) and Iain Lees-Galloway for providing a meeting room at Parliament, and attending (with useful contributions). When it became clear Parliament would be the best place to hold the meeting I considered the easiest way to get an MP to sponsor the meeting. I figured if I approached a National MP they might get worried about any perception of doing me a favour so I e-mailed Trevor on the rationale that no one could ever criticise him for helping me secure a room

As I said, was a really good meeting, and who knows there might be other issues in future they come together on.

After some lobbying on my behalf, Backbenches has arranged MPs Paul Quinn and Trevor Mallard to be on the same panel tomorrow night.

Now for those who don’t know, Paul and Trevor both stood for Hutt South, both are pretty adept at winding each up, and both can be pretty stroppy fellas.

So it should be a wonderful night’s viewing. I recommend getting in early for a seat. And bring popcorn.

While the show should be entertainment enough, I’ve been thinking we could make it even more enjoyable for spectators with the launch of the Mallard-Quinn drinking game. The proposed rules are:

• Drink one sip if either interject each other
• Drink one sip if either puts the other down
• Drink two sips if either appears to compliment the other, but it is really a veiled insult
• Drink two sips if either use a moderate term of abuse (idiot, dumb, thick etc)
• Drink three sips if either use one of the seven banned words.
• Drink four sips if use of if the seven banned words is in a way which is anatomically impossible
• Drink five sips if one of them whacks the other. Drink a bonus sip if they accidentally hit Wallace by mistake.
• Scull the jug if they agree with each other

Additional rule suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE: The Paul Quinn fan club has suggested the official names for the bout should be Mallard the Hammer v the Maori side-step Quinn, and they are backing Moimoi Quinn.