Nicky’s Hager’s last book had an enquiry led by a former Supreme Court Judge, and a former Attorney General and Prime Minister. They concluded that the “principal allegations” in Hager’s book “are not accurate”.

This book is even worse. I could spend most of the week detailing the untruths in it, but frankly there is no need. Just take a few.

He claimed the Taxpayers’ Union paid out a sexual harassment complaint against the CE. The TU Chair, Ruth Richardson, has put out a release saying she has consulted every former chair (and me), and can conclusively say that there was not only no payment in a sexual harassment case, there was no complaint. Call me old fashioned – but isn’t printing a false claim in a book without verification, umm dirty politics?

He claimed I supplied data from the National Party to the TU for their affordable housing campaign. This is 1000% false. It never ever happened (or would ever ever happen). The TU purchased some property data from a commercial property company. What sort of so called journalist publishes such an allegation without checking first?

He claimed he only started the book after the TU did a release in mid 2023 saying he was writing a book on them. He claimed former staff contacted him after that. This is false. He contacted former staff aggressively and persistently before then. I’ve seen the e-mails!

He claims I pushed the TU into engaging on the Three Waters issue as some sort of Maori bashing exercise. Again false. I did agree that the TU should engage on Three Waters, but on the issue of accountability – that if you have half the overseers of water companies not democratically accountable that is bad public policy – and that it would apply equally if the proposal was that Federated Farmers appoint half the overseers.

He claimed a former Chair left because of a change in the mission statement. False. The Chair had resigned before that change was debated and made. I could carry on and on.

Basically what we have learnt is that a hard left activist doesn’t like the Taxpayers’ Union. Hold the presses!

Radio NZ reports:

A new rangatahi-led campaign is calling on young people to help deliver the biggest youth-voter turnout in Aotearoa’s history.

‘Roll With Us’ has launched on Sunday as part of ‘On A Roll’, a kaupapa aimed at getting more young people enrolled and voting in this year’s general election.

Whenever I read about a new campaign, I get inquisitive. I check out their website. Who is involved. Who funds them etc.

They didn’t have a website a few days ago, but they do now. They say they are a collaboration between:

• Climate Club Aotearoa
• Social Change Collective
• Ngā Māhuri Tiaki | Forest & Bird Youth

Their aim is to increase youth turnout, but specifically:

To increase youth voter turnout by 15% across the motu, especially among rural, Māori, and Pasifika rangatahi.

No surprise who Maori and Pacifika youth tend to vote for.

And who are their key people. The co-convenor is Ethan Reille, who stood for Labour at the last election, and is an organiser for the PSA (which are running a Change the Government campaign)

Now I’m all for left wing lobby groups running get out the vote campaigns. But I bet you that a huge amount of taxpayer dollars has found their way to this group.

Federated Farmers have calculated what would be the net impact of TOP’s land tax and UBI on the average farmer. This is what they found:

• A single dairy farmer would be $16, 215 worse off each year ($312 a week)
  
• A dairy farming couple under 65 would be $3185 better off each year ($61 a week)
  
• A dairy farmer over 65 would be $35,615 worse off each year ($685 a week)
  
• A single sheep and beef farmer would be $28,511 worse off each year ($528 a week)
  
• A sheep and beef farming couple under 65 would be $9111 worse off each year ($175 a week)
  
• A sheep and beef farmer over the age of 65 would be $47,911 worse off each year ($921 a week)

$921 a week in extra tax!!

1 News reports:

Labour will make no changes to interest deductibility rules for residential landlords if elected, as party leader Chris Hipkins confirms he wouldn’t revisit the settings.

Thi is some rare common sense for Labour. They called it a tax break for landlords, when it was no such thing.

Labour changed the law the last time they were in government to target landlords and treat them different to every other business owner in NZ, by saying they could not deduct the costs of borrowing from their business income. It was entirely unprincipled.

All National did was restore the law so that all businesses are taxed the same – ie can deduct borrowing costs from taxable income.

Pleased that Labour have agreed this is the right thing to do, despite spending three years condemning it.

The Post reports:

Labour leader Chris Hipkins says he is not aiming to make state spending and taxation 33% of the economy, despite his party’s fiscal strategy suggesting it would eventually get there. …

National has attacked the 33% figure, arguing it shows that Labour will need to enact more than just the CGT, which is only expected to raise $1.5 billion within the forecast period ‒ which would not get anywhere close to raising revenue to 33%.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday following some of these attacks, Hipkins suggested 33% was more of a ceiling than a target.

I’ve heard that before – almost identically.

In 2017 Labour and Greens promised to cap spending at 30% of GDP. In the 2018 budget I noted (with approval) in the Budget lockup that spending was below 29% of GDP, and Grant Robertson replied that 30% was not ceiling, not a target.

Alas, it turned out to be neither, and Labour exceeded the so called ceiling by almost 4% of GDP.

If a ceiling of 30% turns into an actual of 34%, I can only imagine what a ceiling of 34% will turn into!

Radio NZ reports:

But asked about systemic racism, Naidoo said he had seen no evidence of it during his nearly 25 years in the police force.

“I’ve personally never witnessed any racism within police,” he said. “I do not believe there is institutional racism.”

Naidoo said officers themselves were subjected to racism while dealing with the public, pointing to a broader rise in hate and declining trust in institutions as issues that motivated him to enter politics.

With this common sense, I’m glad he’ll be in the Labour caucus. He not only says he has never seen racism within the Police, but observes it is police officers themselves that are subject to racism from some members of the public.

Chris Penk makes some good observations:

The number of left bloc parties needed to form a coalition to govern, on a good day, would be no fewer than four. That’s Labour, the Greens, Te Pati Maori and Opportunity. When I say “on a good day”, naturally I mean from the perspective of Chris Hipkins, Chloe Swarbrick and the taxi drivers who will be transporting the rest of us to Auckland Airport’s international terminal.

I think the idea that you need four parties to agree to form a Government will be off-putting to some people. And TPM is effectively two parties (Tamihere faction and the rest) co-existing together so it could well be more like five parties.

But what of Opportunity’s policies, I hear you ask? It may well be that they have a large number of thoughtful offerings across a range of policy areas. Their hastily-withdrawn policy around “youth justice” was not one of them, however. Raising the age of the Youth Court jurisdiction for a thug just shy of his 25th birthday involves relatively little “youth” and even less “justice”, at least from the victim’s perspective.

Yep, 24 year old rapists would get a family group conference!

A guest post by I am Spartacus:

Both National and Labour are promising to make the installation of roof top solar easier, in the belief that doing so will help the electricity supply. 

It will and there’s something to be said for a dispersed system. However, it does not help on those days when there’s no sun there’s no wind, and everyone’s dinky little battery has run out of juice.

That’s when the grid takes over and supplies ALL the countries power requirements 

To cope you need good old fashioned base load power 

Here’s an Idea;

Instead of Average Joe spending $15,000 on solar cells for his house. He gives a $10,000 lump sum to the power producers.

The power producers deduct 4,500KWH from Joes bill every year for 15 years

After all, had Joe installed solar cells, that reduction in consumption would have cost the power producers anyway

Assuming a 2% rise per KWH each year over that 15 years Joe recovers that $10,000 in about 8 Years, and gets an effective rate of return of 9.2% over the 15 years

The producers mean time amas money sufficient to build actual power stations, lets say Geothermal Power Stations. 

I have run the modelling on AI, assuming the scheme up take is around 15 thousand a year, and over time 2, one hundred MW Geothermal station are built, each costing seven hundred million, then the producers, who still have negative equity for about 3 years, break even after 13 years, and are 4 billion better off 15 years later.

The country has genuine base load power that works on cold windless nights

The overall community cost per KWH has decreased by 50%

Theres no roof top furniture wearing out

Its transferable house to house

The country is better

Joe is Happy

You’re welcome

Charlotte Gill is a freelance journalist in the UK. She specialises in reporting on wasteful spending, especially insane academic projects that get huge amounts of UK taxpayer funds.

We’ve had our share of wasteful spending on woke activism posing as academic research, but we are amateurs when compared to the UK. So if you subscribe to Charlotte you may feel depressed about the UK, but you may also feel a but better about NZ.

A guest post by Nick Kearney:

Wayne Brown and John Glover are right, and it’s worth saying so plainly.

Their joint letter to Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop, warning that fast-tracked greenfield housing is being forced into places without the roads, water and wastewater capacity to support it, isn’t mayoral posturing.  It’s the correct diagnosis of a genuine flaw in the fast-track legislation.

Chris Bishop’s proposed fix, letting councils update development contributions after a fast-track application is lodged, is a reasonable solution to a real problem.  Nevertheless, it is a proposed solution by the government to a problem created by the government.

Watercare telling the Delmore panel it can’t connect water services near Ōrewa until 2050 is exactly the kind of problem the fast-track legislation created: It allows virtually no cross-checks and balances during the consent process.

New Zealand has a habit of acting in this manner. 

We have issues that appear to be unresolvable through current legislative frameworks, and so the counter reaction is to swing the balance to the extreme in the other direction.

There is a project much closer to my home that deserves exactly the same scrutiny the mayors are demanding of fast-track housing: Ngā Wairau, and specifically the AF Thomas Park works at the heart of it.

This project takes the most used public golf facility in the country, nestled on ~42 hectares of public reserve and conservation land, and converts almost half of it into a wetland and flood detention basin.

All mature trees on the site will come down to make way for it. 

The region, indeed the country, will lose accessible and affordable public golf probably forever, and certainly for somewhere beyond 10 years counting from today.

Costs are already moving in one direction, and so is the expected timeframe for the completion of the works.

Anyone who has watched an Auckland Council infrastructure project over recent years will know which way these numbers tend to move once diggers are on site.

The government is contributing 62% of the Stage 1 costs, estimated to be $112 million (including consent work).  We all know that Crown budgets are also skin-tight. 

The part that should trouble ratepayers most, though, is what the project actually buys them.  Or should I say, what Council has told ratepayers it will buy them.

The Council’s own website proclaims that work in the Wairau commercial area “…are not included in the Stage 1 and 2 project scope due to the significant costs associated and ineligibility for the Crown funding.” 

In other words, the commercial heart of Wairau Valley, the businesses the catchment is named after, gets none, or very little, of the flood protection this project is being sold on. 

It is believed that of the 216 commercial properties affected by the terrible events of January 2023, 211 receive no benefit from the golf course project.

Further, a meaningful share of the “homes protected” figure that does get quoted includes Milford properties.  Yet, of the 165 homes affected by the events of early 2023, in the surrounding area, 133 of them have been bought by council under the Category 3 scheme, with most of those being in Milford.  Those houses aren’t being protected at all from the flood detention work proposed at AF Thomas Park.  They’re already removed from the risk equation, because council itself already has paid to take them out of it.

That is not a small or minor technicality.  It is the same failure the mayors are describing in their letter to Bishop – a project whose costs and benefits were never properly tested against each other, running ahead on momentum rather than analysis.  That is what the fast-track legislation does.  

The difference is that when a fast-track developer does it, council can at least point the finger at Wellington.  When council does it to its own public reserve, its own regional public asset and golf course, and its own ratepayers, there is nobody else to blame.

None of this is an argument against fixing Wairau’s flood risk, or the flood risk of properties downstream.  The events of January 2023 were real, and the catchment needs a genuine answer. 

But a genuine answer starts with an honest benefit-cost case, published in full, that says clearly who is protected and who isn’t.  

It means being straight with North Shore residents about how many years they lose their park, and their golf course, how the public conservation land will be remediated, and when and who pays for it, how the groundwater drawdown effect will affect local properties, and most pressingly whether the benefits outweighs the cost.  The cost must include the net present value of the golf course over a thirty-year lease term, estimated to be in excess of $70 million dollars.  

It is imperative these questions are answered now, and not leaving them “to be determined” for any fast-track consenting process, that is now showing to be very flawed.

Brown and Glover want Wellington to make sure infrastructure spending is properly costed before the bulldozers arrive.  Simon Watts, the local government minister, climate change minister and local member of parliament, asked the same question of councils some weeks ago.  

Ratepayers on the North Shore and throughout Auckland, and taxpayers (because they are funding 62% of the works) are entitled to ask both the government and the Auckland Council for exactly the same things, before all trees at AF Thomas Park come down; the wildlife decimated; the golf course disappears for however many years; and the conservation land becomes a barren wasteland.

Growth paying its way is the right principle.  

It shouldn’t only apply to other people’s projects.

Disclosure: Nick is a lawyer practicing in Auckland and is the lawyer representing the leaseholders of Takapuna Golf Course.

Very little to say here as the data speaks for itself. I would be interested in what people think the explanations are. For the odd person who states that ethnicity differences are due to IQ – they may be a bit stumped here. Or do females inherently have higher IQs than males?

Within School Difference Example: Mt. Albert Grammar 2025 Schools Leavers (2024 for Progression to Degree)

[email protected]

The Daily Mail reports:

Britain’s strictest head mistress has proved her critics wrong yet again with top GCSE results to rival Eton despite serving one of the capital’s most deprived areas.

Katharine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela Community School in Brent, north London, is celebrating more than 50 per cent of her entries being grade 9 – ten times the national average of 5 per cent.

In addition, 82 per cent of all grades were at least a 7 – the equivalent of the old A – compared with around 22 per cent nationwide.

The school in a highly deprived area is achieving scores close to Eton College.

A grade 9 is the top possible, 99% of her school got at least a grade 5. 82% got a 7 or higher (an A), compared to 19% of schools with a similar deprivation.

You could pay 65,000 pounds a year to go to Eton, or you could be lucky enough to go to a school with Birbalsingh is the head mistress.

Emma Camp did a pithy 75 second video on why rent controls fail. It caught on. It has now had 4.7 million views.

She now has over 120,000 followers.

Newsroom ran an article by Dr Chris Pook and Dr Julia Schaletzky. He is a trained biologist and she is a professor of molecular therapeutics. Now not unusual to run an article by two academics.

What is unusual is they were “allowed” to say something that once was verboten! They write:

Newsroom recently published an article claiming that MP Jenny Marcroft’s proposed definition of “woman” and “man” “fails basic science”. Yet the article itself does not accurately describe basic science.

It asks readers to believe that the two sexes are an eighteenth-century European adoption, that XX and XY chromosomes were merely “allocated” to women and men, that rare developmental disorders demonstrate a spectrum of sexes, and that scientists increasingly reject male and female as biological categories. …

These false claims blend developmental biology, social identity, historical speculation and advocacy terminology until a political position appears to be a scientific conclusion.

Human sexual development involves chromosomes, genes, hormones, gonads and anatomy. Its molecular machinery is complex. That doesn’t mean it’s indeterminate.

Humans reproduce through two gamete types: ova and sperm. The sexes, female and male, designate the corresponding reproductive organisations. Children, infertile adults and postmenopausal women remain male or female because their reproductive systems are organised around one pathway, whether or not they currently produce gametes.

There is no third human gamete and no continuum between sperm and ovum. Hormones, anatomy and secondary sexual characteristics may vary, but variation in traits does not create additional reproductive classes.

The article mistakes variation in sex-associated traits for variation in sex itself. Variation within categories does not abolish them. Polydactyly, the presence of more than five fingers or toes, does not make five digits an arbitrary convention; congenital heart defects do not mean there is no normal organisation of the heart.

Basically they write (convincingly) that sex is real, unchangeable and binary.

I think that trans activist have done immeasurable harm to their cause, by trying to argue that sex is not real, is not binary and can be changed. For decades people were very accepting of others whose gender identity differed from their biological sex. Georgina Beyer was elected a small town Mayor and rural MP, because people were open minded and accepting.

There is a huge difference between social acceptance, courtesy, and recognition – and trying to argue that sex is not real. This has generated so much of the backlash.

Incidentally I would also say that some in the “gender critical” community also do their cause no good by trying to deny that gender identity is also real, and that we should not make any legal allowance at all for those who do transition their gender (identity).

My position is simple. Sex is real. Any argument that tries to convince people sex is not real, is not binary, and is changeable will fail. But likewise I think gender dysphoria is very real, and the answer to that isn’t to just say “Tough”, but to look at what we can do as a society to allow people to live their lives as they want – while recognising in some areas (such as women’s sports, prisons) there are competing interests that have to be balanced out.

Anyway what is remarkable is that Newsroom published an article, that a few years ago I suspect they never would have allowed. I do note though they were not quite brave enough to allow comments on it!

I’ve now done 28 out of 71 electorate races on my Patreon. Have covered all of the South Island, and the lower North Island. The breakdown to date of the 28 eats is:

• National – Safe 8, Likely 2, Leans 2
• Labour – Safe 7, Leans 5
• Greens – Likely 1, Leans 1
• TPM – Likely 1
• Too close to call: 1

I was never taught by Dame Margaret Clark, but almost everyone I know was. She was a legend in the VUW Politics Department and beyond.

Jon Johansson writes:

It is hard talking about losing someone you love, but today I will because a great and wise New Zealander, Dame Professor Margaret Clark, died on Friday.

She was my teacher, colleague, mentor, confidant, partner-in-crime, marriage witness, one of my pillars and dearest friend. …

Her introductory course, POLS 111 (and its forerunner POLS 110 for we oldies) was an institution up the hill at Vic. Margaret is a legend to thousands of us.

I recall so many stories, especially about the lectures later in the day when Margaret may have had a wine at lunch, and would be even more to the point.

One of my Beehive colleagues Gus – one of four of us in Minister Peters’ office who took POLS 111 with Margaret – told me on news of her passing: “Margaret believed everyone must have a grounding in Aristotle. In teaching generations of practitioners – peers, politicians and public servants – she instilled in New Zealand’s body politic the wisdom of the ancients.”

Alas far too few young people today learn about Aristotle.

Margaret’s legend status inside political circles meant that MPs always accepted invitations to talk to our 350 first year politics students, a tradition we maintained when I joined her in what Margaret described as our “Punch and Judy” routine.

Margaret would get everyone from the Prime Minister down into her classes.

A brilliant young Margaret Clark was herself quite a catch – courted early by an All Black – but she once told me in her understated way that she did have a small place in our political history. She claimed responsibility for the Maoist movement collapsing.

How so? Well, there were only two self-declared Maoists left in the 1960s, but they duked it out at the bottom of Cable Car Lane in a fight to win over Margaret’s affection. “I split the Maoist movement Jon.”

Heh.

Stuff reports:

Nearly half of New Zealand general practices still have a GP vacancy, despite signs the sector is beginning to recover from years of intense financial and workforce pressure.

And Labour’s policy is to have taxpayers fund three visits a year to GPs, which could lead to up to 600 extra GPs needed just to cope.

The United Kingdom is a state of four countries. Some things are run at the UK level, and some at the individual country level. This allows us to do comparisons that are far better than comparing entirely different countries such as say France and Canada.

So let’s look at how the four parts of the UK have done in mathematics, as measured by PISA.

In 2006 England scored the same as Northern Ireland, below Scotland and above Wales. But after 2009, something happened.

England has declined only 3 points in 19 years. Northern Ireland declined 21 points, Wales 28 points and Scotland 39 points.

So English students were 11 points behind Scottish students, and they are now 25 points ahead.

It is hard to get better evidence than this about which schooling system one should try to emulate.

The Herald reports:

About 10,000 public servants are set to strike tomorrow following prolonged pay negotiations.

This is great timing. The Government needs to reduce the public service headcount by around 10,000 staff, and by coincidence 10,000 staff are going to stop working for a while. I hope the strike lasts at least a fortnight, so one can properly measure what the impact of their absence was.

“For members, effectively that’s saying to them that you’re gonna take a pay cut from this round of negotiations. A lot of them, we’re talking roles that pay anywhere from $65,000 to $70-75,000.

I’m sure there are a few roles that pay at that level, but the reality is public sector jobs are paid on average 25% more than private sector – $2,062 a week vs $1.642.