The Herald reports:

One of New Zealand’s largest schools has banned from its ball any students whose parents don’t pay annual school fees – a move one father says verges on extortion.

Avondale College says if the donation is not paid, students cannot attend the school ball on June 15 as it is an “extra-curricular activity” and ticket prices do not cover the cost.

Most schools ask for donations, and tens of millions are paid by parents each year. But schools cannot legally force parents to pay.

I don’t see the problem. The fees are used to subsidise the ball, so of course they can restrict eligibility.

It is educational services that must be provided free of charge, not social events.

Questions for Oral Answer 2pm-3.15pm

Questions to Ministers

1. DAVID SHEARER to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by all his statements?
2. Hon TAU HENARE to the Minister of Finance: What measures did Budget 2013 take to help build economic growth based on more exports, productive investment and sustainable jobs?
3. METIRIA TUREI to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statement that “I am deeply concerned about every child in New Zealand who is in poverty”?
4. JACINDA ARDERN to the Prime Minister: Does he stand by his statement “We would prefer that we were a more equal society with less inequality”?
5. COLIN KING to the Minister for Economic Development: How is Budget 2013 advancing the Government’s work to build a more productive and competitive economy?
6. EUGENIE SAGE to the Minister of Conservation: Why did he grant Bathurst Resources’ access application, for an opencast coal mine on conservation land a day before the Crown Minerals Act 1991 changed to require public consultation?
7. Hon SHANE JONES to the Minister for Economic Development: Does he agree that New Zealand is operating as a two-speed economy in the regions given that unemployment in Northland is 10 percent, 8 percent in the Bay of Plenty and 8.4 percent in Gisborne/Hawke’s Bay?
8. Hon KATE WILKINSON to the Minister of Justice: What recent action has been taken to protect victims of serious violent and sexual offences?
9. Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE to the Minister for State Owned Enterprises: How many of the 113,000 “mum and dad” investors in Mighty River Power at float were companies, trusts or New Zealand investment institutions and what proportion of shares were they allocated?
10. TRACEY MARTIN to the Minister of Education: What reports, if any, has she received on the 2012 STAR test and the 2012 e-asTTle tests as markers for achievement against National Standards?
11. Dr PAUL HUTCHISON to the Minister of Health: What investments in Budget 2013 is this Government making to provide more health and development checks for children under five?
12. GRANT ROBERTSON to the Minister of Justice: How many expressions of interest or nominations for the position of Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner were received by the Ministry of Justice after the advertised deadline of 13 October 2012?

Today, National are asking 4 questions in the house on issues such as export growth, productivity, crime and health checks for children under 5 years old. Labour are asking 5 questions in the house ranging from the standard daily question of “Does he stand by all his statements?” to questions on equality, unemployment, SOE sales and Dr Jackie Blue’s appointment as Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner.

The Greens are asking 2 questions debating issues such as poverty and mining with New Zealand First asking a question on education.

Pasty of the day

Today’s pasty of the day goes to question 1 from David Shearer asking “Does he stand by all his statements?. Most pasty question anyone could ask to a politician.

Budget Debate 3.15pm – 6pm – 7.30pm – 10pm 

Today in Parliament, Members will be continuing on with the budget debate. The budget debate is a yearly event that happens after the budget speech from the Finance Minister allowing members up to 10 minutes  to speak about the budget. Expect this to last most of the night.

Yahoo reports:

The Labor and Liberal parties have struck a secret deal to siphon more than $30 million of taxpayer funds into political organisations.

Described as a “dirty cash grab” by some senior government MPs, the two big parties agreed to award themselves $1 for every House of Representatives and Senate vote they get at the September 14 poll.

The “administrative funding” will be separate and on top of the election funding paid to parties or candidates who get at least 4 per cent of first preferences.

This rate is $2.47 a vote but will be indexed for inflation on July 1. From the 2010 election, political parties and candidates shared $53 million in election funding.

Disgraceful. This is what the left are pushing for in NZ – MPs voting taxpayer money to their own political parties, to help themselves get elected.

NZ is not totally immune. We have around $2 million effectively given to parties for broadcasting advertisements – but out situation is hugely better than in Australia.

Parties that don’t have to go out to their supporters and members for donations, get corrupt and out of touch. NZ has quite low spending limits for election campaigns, so there is no need for taxpayer funding of political parties.

The Dom Post editorial:

All the debate about whether the state should have to provide breakfast for children in schools doesn’t change the bottom line. Some children are going to school with empty bellies.

Of course the Government should not need to join with Fonterra, Sanitarium and children’s charity KidsCan to offer Weet-Bix and milk five mornings’ a week to children in low decile schools. Feeding one’s children is perhaps the single most important responsibility a parent has.

And the hope is, that parents won’t use the scheme as a reason not to do breakfast at home. Kids having breakfast with their parents is important not just nutritionally, but also socially.

Once seeking assistance from the state was viewed as a last resort. The New Zealand ethos was that individuals stood on their own feet and helped their neighbours. Anything that weakens that ethos is regrettable.

However, this is an instance where practicality trumps theory.

But we need to be careful to make sure the exception is not the rule. While breakfasts in schools helps deal with the symptom, we must do more to deal with the problem of some parents not having the parenting skills they need.

The Government is budgeting to spend $4.6 billion on benefits this year and more than another $7b on other forms of assistance to low-income individuals and families. There is no reason for any child to go to school without breakfast, particularly when families can apply for hardship grants in emergencies, and a couple of Weet-Bix and some milk to pour over the top costs only about 50 cents.

We have one of the most generous welfare states in the world.

Hungry children are unable to concentrate and unable to learn. They are also more likely to disrupt their classmates’ opportunities to learn.

In addition they are more likely to leave school without the skills to cope in the wider world and more likely, as adults, to become a continuing burden on society.

If a few million dollars will increase the chances of them achieving their potential and becoming good citizens, it will be money well spent. …

Also deserving of praise for good corporate citizenship are Sanitarium, the Australian food group owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church and New Zealand’s biggest company, Fonterra. Together the two companies expect to inject as much in the scheme in the form of cereal and milk as the Government in cash. 

There is one other party to the deal without whose participation it cannot succeed – local communities.

They will run the breakfasts and provide bowls and spoons. Their involvement makes the scheme a genuine partnership between the state, business and local communities and makes it a potential model for the delivery of other forms of assistance.

A far far better solution than merely passing a law requiring the Government to take over breakfast from parents.

Will Labour still vote for Hone Harawira’s bill, and vote for the state to become legally responsible for breakfasts?

Fairfax released their latest Ipsos poll this morning. I’ve blogged it on Curiablog.

National is up 4% to 49% and Labour down 4% to 32%.

Tracy Watkins writes:

How long before Labour asks whether David Shearer is the solution or the problem? If the results of today’s Fairfax Media-Ipsos poll are a precursor to the next election, the news is all bad for Labour – and not just because the poll has it shedding support, though that is bad enough.

But because it reverses a trend that had Labour slowly clawing into contention. …

Mr Shearer may be morphing from Mr Invisible to something worse in voters’ eyes. Mr Negative. …

Labour MPs’ sights are not trained on Mr Shearer yet.

But there is always a tipping point. And if the trend continues, Labour MPs must be wondering what to do when they reach it.

Here’s why Shearer is probably safe. The caucus would happily replace Shearer with Robertson is the polls do not improve. He’s already in charge of all the important stuff such as the leader’s office, strategy, campaign etc. But their problem is that if Shearer goes, then the leadership goes to a full member vote – which would be a Robertson vs Cunliffe battle. Robertson would win the caucus 40%, Cunliffe the members 40%, so the unions would decide with their 20%.

How curious. Labour MP Damien O’Connor is writing to the Minister urging him to do whatever he can to get the mine approved, and to battle against Forest & Bird.

Yet Labour MP and environment spokesperson Maryan Street has said the coal should be left in the hole.

Typical Labour trying to be all things, for all people.

Can anyone from Labour answer the question. What is the official policy of the Labour Party of whether or not the Denniston mine should be approved?

Before the 2011 election I weighed 110 kgs. That took 20 years of effort, and usually election campaigns are worse for health and fitness, so I was determined to try and reverse the trend of the last 20 years before it became too serious a health issue.

I set myself a goal of losing 30 kgs to get back to under 80 kgs. I knew it would be hard, and it is the hardest thing I think I have ever done.

I got it down to 100 kgs in the six months before the election.  The next 5 kgs took another six months to make 95 kgs. A further 5 kgs to make 20 in total was a further six months. Then it sped up a bit and it took just six weeks to get to 85 kgs. And 10 more weeks to finally hit my goal, as this morning my weight starts with a 7, not an 8, 9, 10 or even 11. I made 79.3 kgs.

I’ve had some great support from friends and family over the last 21 months and also had many questions about what did I do, from others who have struggled with getting their weight to a healthy level.

I don’t think I’m any role model. I regret taking so long to do it, and I still regard myself as overweight – just less so than before. I’ve still got some further work to do – but making my goal of 30 kgs off is a pretty good achievement for now. It also means I can finally go clothes shopping – I’ve been putting it off as I didn’t want to do a shop partway through, in case I got incentivised to stop.

So what did I do to lose 30 kgs? Well it’s actually really simple. Not easy, but simple. You eat less and exercise more. There is no alternative to that.

Here’s the 10 things I did, which worked for me. They won’t work for everyone, or be appropriate for everyone. But they’re what I did.

1. Balance

I’ve actually been going to the gym on and off for 15 years. But I never managed to lose much weight, or sustain it. The reason is that the experts are all right – you need to do both exercise and diet to lose weight. Doing one without the other just doesn’t work.

If you want to lose say half a kg a week, and are eating the normal intake of 2,000 calories a day, then you’d need to spend 17 hours a week walking. And if your intake was say 2,200 calories a day (which it probably has been if you were putting on weight) then it would need 22 hours a week of walking.

So balance is crucial, I found.  Exercise alone is rarely enough.

2. Measure

In the early days I set up a spreadsheet to measure my daily intake of calories, carbs, fats, sugars, sodium etc. I’d enter in details for food I purchased or go to a calorie count website to estimate various meals. That worked pretty well, but what made things so much easier for when Duncan Babbage introduced me to My Fitness Pal.

My Fitness Pal makes it so easy to monitor your calories and make informed choices. On the food side, it has a huge database of foods. But even better it can scan barcodes and use the manufacturer’s information. Plus you can enter in your own meals.

It also allows you to enter in each day how much walking, jogging, kayaking, cycling etc you have done, and estimates the calories burnt from that.

I’ve told heaps of people about My Fitness Pal, and most have started using it. Just with it alone, I’ve seen others do dramatic weight loss. Once you understand how many net calories you should be consuming in a day, you can be empowered to make better decisions.

I’m a bit of a numbers geek, so here’s the numbers I focused on:

• 2,000 calories a day will keep you at about your normal weight. It is a bit more if you are already overweight. But 2,000 is the general target per day, which is 14,000 a week.
• An extra 9,000 calories over your target will result in an extra kg of weight. Likewise 9,000 calories under your target will mean you lose a kg of weight.
• If you want to lose half a kg a week, then you need to average around 9,500 calories a week instead of 14,000. That is around 1,400 calories a day.

3. Walking

Walking is a great way to not just lose weight, but as importantly increase fitness so you can do more strenuous exercise. It won’t do the job by itself, but will work well alongside watching your food.

An hours walking at around 5 kms an hour will burn around 260 calories off. At 5.5 kms an hour it is 300 calories. An hour’s walking a day is 2,100 calories which is around half of the 4,500 a week to lose half a kg a week.

I used to bus or taxi to meetings in town. Now, so long as I have the time, I walk everywhere from Thorndon. If I am going to the movies at the Embassy Theatre I’ll walk there around the waterfront. It takes 30 to 35 minutes but hey that is 300 calories gone (which then allows you an ice cream during the movie :-))

On top of just walking more during the week, I also tried to do one big walk every Sunday with friends – normally a 3 to 4 hour walk along a scenic path. A great way to get some great views, enjoy some good company, get fitter and lose weight.

More recently I have joined the MeetUp Wellywalks group. Rather than me having to arrange the walk every weekend, I can go on walks other people organise. This weekend just gone I did a four and a half hour walk on Saturday to the Pencarrow Lighthouse and around part of a lake there, and on the Sunday a two hour walk in the Wainuiomata Waterworks Recreation Area, including along the Tana Umaga track!

4. Focus on Calories

There’s all these different diets. People tell you it is all about carbs, or about sugars, or the fats. There are good reasons to keep an eye on all of those things, but for me I just focused on calories.

I learnt that sadly many of my favourite foods such as chinese meals, whitebait fritters, pastas just have too many calories. Now that doesn’t mean I never have them. I just have them rarely. If I have a high calorie meal (inevitable in some restaurants) then I’ll just try to compensate the next day.

I used to check sugars, fats, carbs and all that. Probably still should. But for me, just focusing on the calories has worked.

5. Gym

You can lose weight by diet alone, but the great thing about going to the gym regularly is you both get fitter, and lose weight. And the fitter you get, the easier it is to exercise.

I used to hate going to the gym. Now I get restless if I have gone more than one day without a run or going to the gym. I actually feel bad if I don’t exercise. Now that doesn’t mean, the workouts still are not hard. They are. but they do get better over time. It is worth persevering with.

I live five minutes from CityFitness Thorndon so go there five times a week. I do three sessions a week on the treadmill, and two sessions with a trainer. Trainers do cost money, but for me it was a good investment into my health. Thanks to Amanda, Hamish, Russell and Sam for their efforts.

I’ve also started spin classes, as I want to do the Otago Rail Trail at some stage.

A good gym session can burn 500 to 600 calories. But what I’ve discovered is they’re more for increasing fitness and strength so you can exercise all the time – not just in the gym. You absolutely can’t under-estimate the importance of building up your core. Most of my trainer sessions now are focused on weights, as I can do the cardio by myself or in a group.

6. Alcohol

I’ve almost become a non-drinker. If you want to get people to drink less, then I have a simple solution – stick calorie labels on them.

I still have the odd wine if entertaining at home, and if there is something to celebrate will let loose and have a big night of it. But otherwise, I’m drinking water or diet coke rather than alcohol.

Wine has some health benefits, but a couple of wines is 250 calories. If you have four rum and cokes then that is 1,100 calories – around double a typical dinner.  I like to drink, but I only do so occasionally now to avoid the weight gain.

7. Running

As my fitness improved, I started to jog. It took a long time to get there. Trying to jog with a heavy body weight and being unfit is a bad combo. I could manage around a minute at best.

What I did as I tried to increase capacity was use road side reflector signs and run between one set, walk the next, run the next etc. Then after a while I’d run two, walk one.

But what made a real difference was again another smartphone app. It’s called 10K Runner. After I managed to walk the 7 km Around the Bays course in Feb 2012, I wanted to try and train so I could run it in Feb 2013. The app was a big help for that.

It sets out a 14 week training programme, with three sessions a week. Ideal for a treadmill, or outside. At first it is a 15 minute session where you run for a minute, then walk for 90 seconds and repeat six times. By week four it is three minute runs and two minute walks for a total of 30 minutes. Week eight is a 25 minute run, and eventually you can run for 60 minutes.

The great thing with the app is they know from experience for fast to push you. Each session is based on being just a bit more than the one before. Occasionally if it was getting too hard I’d just repeat a session before moving onto the next one.

The end result is I managed to do the 7 km run in under 40 minutes and will be doing a 10 km run next month. I never thought I’d be able to be fit enough to run for an hour, as the last time I did it I was 17.

8. Portion Size

My biggest challenge is portion size. Buffets are a particular form of evil (but good evil). When left to my own devices I will happily eat far too much food.

A major part of losing weight was controlling portion sizes, and being able to measure what I eat.  The meals home delivered by eat.co.nz have been a major help in doing that. the meals are 400 or 500 gms in size, and they have lite and non-lite meals. The lite meals are around 300 calories and the fuller meals 400 to 600 calories.

They are tasty, nutritious, cook in four minutes and are fresh. If like me, you tend to cook too much for yourself, they are a good discipline substitute.

When eating out, I will do two courses max. I wish restaurants had calory counts for their dishes though!

9. Snacks

In Wellington I can often have two or three functions a week where you are invited to something and they put on nibbles, and drinks. They’re great fun, but you spend two to three hours nibbling on snacks not realising they’ve got more calories in them than lunch and inner combined. Add on a few drinks and you can hit your 2,000 calories off one function – and even worse, have dinner afterwards!

I now limit myself to three or four snacks max at a function, and say one glass of fine. And no dinner afterwards – that is your dinner.

I appreciate hosts who put on more than sausage rolls, and include healthier options such as sushi. I’ve grown to love sushi. Treasury – please take note for future Budget lockups!

I snack a bit during the day, as I work mainly from home. I try to have fairly healthy stuff such as grapes and apples around, so I can snack on that.

My basic calorie calculation for a day is breakfast 300, lunch 300, dinner 600 and snacking 200 – 300.. With that you can lose weight.

10. Don’t Give Up

Some weeks you go backwards. I put on 3 kgs in one week – mind you that was celebrating the 2011 election! Some other weeks I have had the weight go up, when I thought I had done well. It is hellishly discouraging.

But you just carry on. Your individual weight on a day can vary by a kg or so depending on time of day, when you last went to the toilet etc.

Over time, exercising more and watching your food does work. I wasn’t one of those people that could lose half a kg a week consistently. Some weeks I lost over a kg, some weeks I went backwards. But so long as the direction was overall good, I stuck with it. there were times I wanted to quit.

Also occasionally you do have a huge blowout. You go away on holiday and the girls bake all weekend and you end up having a great holiday, but undoing the hard work of the last few weeks. You just decide that is the price of a weekend off, and carry on.

There is a bit of a realisation that I can never go back to the bad old days of eating whatever I wanted to eat. But once I just need to maintain my weight, and by exercising regularly, I will have a lot more latitude in what I eat and drink. However that is still some way off. While 80 kgs was the original target, I want to carry on. I figure my natural weight in somewhere in the low 70s.

Also having got into this exercise lark, I plan to keep it up for as long as my body will let me. I figure running was probably easier at 25 than 45, but as I said hope to do a 10 km race next month and if things go well possibly (not definite) try the Round the Bays half marathon next February.

Also planning to do heaps more tramping – in fact plan to do the nine Great NZ Walks over the next three summers. Super looking forward to them. And also keen to do the Otago Rail Trail, and then some other bike trails. Thanks for the $50m for them John!

So that’s what I did to lose 30 kgs. It won’t work for everyone, but it did work for me.

This graph is from the Washington Post.

I’ve mapped out the results above. The greener countries are more ethnically diverse and the orange countries more homogenous. There are a few trends you can see right away: countries in Europe and Northeast Asia tend to be the most homogenous, sub-Saharan African nations the most diverse. The Americas are generally somewhere in the middle. And richer countries appear more likely to be homogenous.

Correlation is not causation and North America is more diverse than South America. but still interesting.

European countries are ethnically homogenous. This is, to me, one of the most interesting trends in the data. A number of now-global ideas about the nation-state, about national identity as tied to ethnicity and about nationalism itself originally came from Europe. For centuries, Europe’s borders shifted widely and frequently, only relatively recently settling into what we see today, in which most large ethnic groups have a country of their own. That developed, painfully, over a very long time. And while there are still some exceptions – Belgium has ethnic Walloons and Dutch, for example – in most of Europe, ethnicity and nationality are pretty close to the same thing.

This goes against some perceptions.

Strong democracy correlates with ethnic homogeneity. This does not mean that one necessarily causes the other; the correlation might be caused by some other factor or factors. But here’s the paper’s suggestion for why diversity might make democracy tougher in some cases:

Again – not a rule. North Korea is ethnically homogenous. But interesting.

The Economist reports:

SAINT GORAN’S hospital is one of the glories of the Swedish welfare state. It is also a laboratory for applying business principles to the public sector. The hospital is run by a private company, Capio, which in turn is run by a consortium of private-equity funds, including Nordic Capital and Apax Partners. The doctors and nurses are Capio employees, answerable to a boss and a board. Doctors talk enthusiastically about “the Toyota model of production” and “harnessing innovation” to cut costs.

A hospital owned by equity funds and run like a car company? The instinct would be to deplore it as everything that a hospital shouldn’t be. But what is the reality?

The hospital today is organised on the twin lean principles of “flow” and “quality”. Doctors and nurses used to keep a professional distance from each other. Now they work (and sit) together in teams. (Goran Ornung, a doctor, likens the teams to workers in Formula One pit stops.) In the old days people concentrated solely on their field of medical expertise. Now they are all responsible for suggesting operational improvements as well.

So staff are empowered.

One innovation involved buying a roll of yellow tape. Staff used to waste precious time looking for defibrillator machines and the like. Then someone suggested marking a spot on the floor with yellow tape and insisting that the machines were always kept there. Other ideas are equally low-tech. Teams use a series of magnetic dots to keep track of each patient’s progress and which beds are free. They discharge patients throughout the day rather than in one batch, so that they can easily find a taxi.

The best ideas are often simple. My staff came up with the idea of using Facebook to organise rosters. It turned what was teh most challenging part of our operations to simplicity – as it allowed staff to arrange their own replacements.

St Goran’s is the medical equivalent of a budget airline. There are four to six patients to a room. The decor is institutional. Everything is done to “maximise throughput”. The aim is to give taxpayers value for money. Hospitals should not be in the hotel business, the argument goes. St Goran’s has reduced waiting times by increasing throughput. It has also reduced each patient’s likelihood of picking up an infection. However, scrimping on hotel services means that it has to invest in preparing patients for admission and providing support after they are released.

Sounds all positive. Reduced waiting times, reduced infections, better pre and post admission support.

Sweden has gone further than any other European country in embracing the purchaser-provider split—that is, in using government money to buy public services from whichever providers, public or private, offer the best combination of price and quality. Private firms provide 20% of public hospital care in Sweden and 30% of public primary care. Both the public and private sectors are obsessed with lean management; they realise that a high-cost country such as Sweden must make the best use of its resources.

I think it is a pity the funder provider split was never fully implemented in NZ.

St Goran’s also acts as a hare for Capio, one of Europe’s largest health-care companies, with 11,000 employees across the continent and 2.9m visits from patients in 2012. Sweden is Capio’s biggest market, accounting for 48.2% of its sales (France comes second with 37.6%). The firm performs 10% of all Swedish cataract operations, and much more besides. Capio thinks it can make huge savings in other countries by transferring the lessons it has learned in Sweden. The average length of a hospital stay in Sweden is 4.5 days, compared with 5.2 days in France and 7.5 days in Germany. Sweden has 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 citizens. France has 6.6; Germany, 8.2. Yet Swedes live slightly longer.

A great stat.

Readers will recall the fuss over John Key making a phone call to Ian Fletcher informing him of the GCSB vacancy. Labour would have had you believe this was an unprecedented ministerial involvement.

As has happened in all the recent appointments that Labour has criticised, all were recommended by a panel of neutral civil servants.

This got me thinking. Has there even been an interview panel that didn’t include just neutral civil servants but a Minister?

It’s one thing to have the Minister sign off on an appointment, but do you want Ministers actually sitting on CEO interview panels? Wouldn’t that be far worse than merely making a phone call.

So I asked the State Services Commission if any Ministers in the last 14 years have sat on interview panels for state sector chief executives. They replied that this has happened on four occasions – in 2000, 2004, 2007 and 2008.

What is disturbing about these ministerial membership of appointment panels is all the roles were ones of pivotal importance to our democratic institutions. They were:

• 2000 – Margaret Wilson on interview panel for the Solicitor-General
• 2004 – Trevor Mallard on interview panel for the State Services Commissioner
• 2007 – Michael Cullen on interview panel for the Clerk of the House of Representatives
• 2008 – David Parker on interview panel for the State Services Commissioner

So this puts it all into perspective – a phone call, vs actually sitting on the interview panel – which means you are effectively hand picking your preferred candidate.

Ministers should be consulted on recommendations and for some roles they make the final appointment. But i think it is generally undesirable for Ministers to sit on interview panels for state sector chief executives. It is rather hypocritical to complain about bad process in appointments, when they did far far worse themselves.

The OIA response is here – Scan-to-Me from 11-util2 ssc govt nz 2013-05-15 124921

Paula Bennett has announced:

Social Development Minister Paula Bennett believes the Government has struck the right balance by supporting the KickStart Breakfast expansion.

“This is a genuine partnership between the Government, the community and New Zealand business which will benefit children,” says Mrs Bennett.

The KickStart Breakfast programme will increase from two to five mornings a week in decile one to four schools. Higher decile schools that want and need it, can opt in during 2014.

Government will back the programme with resources, Fonterra and Sanitarium will distribute the food, and communities will run the breakfasts and provide the bowls and spoons needed. 

Parents should be feeding their kids. If parents are failing to do, it is a parenting problem -not a money problem. The cost of a breakfast at home is almost trivial.

But until those parents are feeding their kids properly, I’d far rather have an initiative involving the community, charities, businesses with some Govt resources – than merely saying the Government should be held responsible for feeding all school children.

“Parents are responsible for feeding their children. But we can’t ignore the fact that some children turn up hungry and can’t learn on an empty stomach.”

“We don’t want to replace parental responsibility, but the Government,  community, non-government organisations and business partners all have a shared responsibility for children,” says Mrs Bennett.

The cost to the Government is up to $9.5 million over five years, matched in value by Fonterra and Sanitarium.

Well done Fonterra and Sanitarium for playing a part, on top of their current commitments.

“I’m delighted we’re also increasing our investment in KidsCan to $1.5 million over three years to provide children with basic necessities like raincoats and shoes,” Mrs Bennett says.

“I have huge respect for the work they do and the way they do it.”

“Stepping in to provide breakfast to children is not a solution to poverty, but it does fit into a vast programme of initiatives and policies targeted to vulnerable and low income families with children.”

It isn’t a solution, but it will help some kids whose parents aren’t able.

The Government has a strong record over the past four and a half years of targeting assistance and support to those who need it most. Budget 2013 included further initiatives targeted to low income families like:

• $100 million to extend the home insulation programme

• $24 million for rheumatic fever prevention

• $41 million for ECE for vulnerable children

• $35 million for carers of children

• Low and no interest loan options

No doubt some will say it isn’t enough, but I reckon that is a significant contribution considering the huge deficits NZ has had since the GFC.

Of course the Greens will say we should just print more money, and hand it out to poor families. Yes, seriously.

The NZ Community Trust have pointed out:

NZCT, one of New Zealand’s largest funders of amateur sport, is urging Auckland Council not to implement a sinking lid policy for gaming machines, as this will reduce community funding and do nothing to address problem gambling rates.  Instead, NZCT proposes Council set gaming machine numbers according to the risk assessment of problem gambling in each ward, and allow machines to be relocated out of high risk areas. 

A targeted approach does seem more sensible than a blanket sinking lid.

NZCT chief executive, Mike Knell, says he can understand the Council’s desire to reduce problem gambling, but evidence shows that reducing gaming machine numbers does not change problem gambler numbers.

“Statistics from the Department of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Health show that since 2007 the country has lost over 2,000 pokie machines, but problem gambling rates have remained low and relatively static,” says Mr Knell.  “The only thing a sinking lid policy will achieve is a reduction in funds available for gaming trusts to distribute to sports and community groups. 

Pokie machines get used by problem gamblers. But do they create them?

“We believe that implementing a policy which allows gaming trusts to relocate gaming machines out of high risk areas, and sets machine numbers in accordance with risk factors would be a better approach.  A sinking lid is a blunt policy instrument that could severely impact the financial viability of hundreds of Auckland’s sports clubs and community groups. 

The NZ Community Trust gave almost $38 million to amateur sports and other activities last year. We do need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The Herald reports:

Claire Nathan says she had her dreams of being an air hostess dashed after Air New Zealand turned her away because of her ta moko.

Ms Nathan applied for her dream job in January, but last month, the national flag carrier terminated an interview when she declared the traditional Maori motif on her lower arm.

Last night, she told Maori TV show Native Affairs how the interview initially went well, until it came to filling out a form that asked if she had any visible tattoos.

“I thought, ‘This is interesting. I wonder why they are asking me that. Maybe it’s because they want to know if I have a ta moko.’

“I thought that they would be quite proud to have someone with a ta moko working and representing New Zealand. [But it’s] not the case. [It] was the total opposite.”

Ms Nathan said she was told tattoos that could not be covered by the uniform were unacceptable.

People make a choice whether to get tattoos. I think many tattoos look cool, but if you want a job in certain roles you need to think about whether having a visible tattoo will be hinder you in that.

If someone was covered with skull and crossbones tattoos, then you would not expect to see them in certain frontline roles.

Now of course a ta moko is very different to the above example. But here’s where I have sympathy for Air NZ.

Do they become the tattoo police and decide on an individual basis which tattoos are allowable, and which are not? I’d guess that would land them in even more trouble.

She said it was a double standard from an airline whose logo is a koru.

Heavily tattooed singer Gin Wigmore has appeared in Air NZ ads, as have numerous inked All Blacks.

There’s a world of difference between someone appearing in a television advertisement, and someone being in a customer service role.

I’m sure Air NZ do not mind how many tattoos staff in non front line roles have.

Ms Nathan said she never thought her ta moko – depicting her heritage and her two children – would limit her career choices.

Well of course it would. She made a choice.

Air New Zealand said last night that tattoos were seen as “frightening or intimidating” in many cultures.

“Naturally we want all of our customers to feel comfortable and happy … and this has been a key driver of our grooming standard which, like many other international airlines, prevents customer-facing staff from having visible tattoos.”

As I said, I think many tattoos look great if done well (would never have one myself though). But Air NZ is a company that lives or dies on customer service, and their rule isn’t an anti moko rule – it is an anti visible tattoo rule.

You can argue that they should show some flexibility, but then they have to start inspecting individual tattoos and telling prospective staff whether they approve of their individual designs. Imagine the nightmare that would cause!

The Herald reports:

A new law which would mean tougher penalties for online child sex abuse will be introduced to Parliament this week.

The Objectionable Publications and Indecency Legislation Bill increases maximum penalties for crimes related to making, trading or possessing offensive material, such as images of sexually exploited children.

It also means anyone convicted of a child sexual exploitation offence for a second time will be sent to prison.

That should be a deterrent.

The new measures include:

– maximum penalty for possession, import or export of an objectionable publication increased from five years to 10 years imprisonment

– maximum penalty for distributing or making an objectionable publication increased from 10 years to 14 years imprisonment

– any person convicted of a child sexual exploitation offence for a second time will be sentenced to a term of imprisonment

– making it clear in the Classification Act that possession of objectionable material includes intentionally viewing electronic material without consciously downloading or saving it

That last measure could be problematic. The Q+A on the bill says:

Would a computer user who accidentally clicks on an offensive link be guilty of possession? 

No. The change to the Classification Act will make it clear that possession relates to intentional viewing of electronic objectionable material. 

If a person accidentally or unintentionally clicks on a link to offensive material, they will not be committing an offence. Forensic analysis of a person’s computer will enable enforcement agencies to distinguish between accidental (or unintentional) and deliberate viewing of objectionable publications.

The exact wording of the bill is not out, but this is an area where some caution may be needed. A browser loads images onto your computer, without you even asking it to. You may click on a page, realise it is not a page you want, but by then every image on the page is downloaded.

After I blogged about my family link to Hedy Lamarr, a reader checked out an online genealogy site and e-mailed me the graphics below.

That should surely qualify me for a knighthood or something.

But Comrade Marx is a closer relative!

The Herald editorial:

New Zealand once prided itself on being a “social laboratory” for advances in public welfare. Within a few months it will become a laboratory in every sense: for the approval of new recreational drugs. Other countries are taking a close interest in Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne’s proposed licensing system for synthetic psychoactive substances, as Mr Dunne found when he addressed a United Nations Drug Convention in Vienna recently. Drug researcher Chris Wilkins told the Weekend Herald he found the same interest at a drug policy conference in Bogota, Colombia last week.

Neither Mr Dunne nor Dr Wilkins relishes the idea that New Zealand could be the first legal, regulated market for recreational drugs thanks to the Psychoactive Substances Bill before Parliament. The bill’s purpose is to put a stop to present sales of untested, unregulated party drugs. It will require them to be proven safe before they can be put on sale and the regulators probably would not mind very much if their testing regime proves prohibitive.

I can’t say I have a problem with a regime that drugs need to be proven safe before being allowed to be sold.

Campaigners for the legalisation of cannabis must be watching with interest. While the law would apply only to synthetic equivalents, it might be hard to deny the same tests to naturally grown leaf.

Exactly. What not subject all drugs to the same regime?

The Dom Post reports:

A woman has been banned from a Wellington childcare centre after a Ministry of Education staff member saw her “inappropriately restraining” a child.

What did she do? Did she put him in a head lock? Tackle him to the ground? Sit on him?

The child was not hit or hurt

Yet she got banned?

The daughter of the centre’s supervisor had been on the floor with the children and was seen “stopping” a 4-year-old boy from hitting another child by putting her hand on his arm, she said.

How terrible. She must be kept away from children in case she stops other children from hitting each other.

The centre had a no-hitting policy, but staff usually told children verbally to stop if they were found to be “rough-playing”.

And if they don’t, we send them a stern note asking them to stop.

UPDATE: A friend who owns and operates an ECE says that the issue is likely to have been the fact the woman was not a parent or teacher at all, yet able to have contact with the kids – rather than the actual action of stopping one kid hitting another.

Don Brash writes in the NZ Herald:

Of course Dr Hosking is right if the supply of land is fixed, as indeed it has been by council decision. But it doesn’t have to be fixed. At the moment, less than 1 per cent of New Zealand’s area is urbanised. We are one of the least densely populated countries in the world. The council has quite deliberately chosen to make land expensive.

The price of land in Auckland is not an accident. It is, as Don says, deliberate.

And the consequences of that decision are disastrous, socially and economically.

It’s disastrous socially because for most low and middle-income families, buying a house in Auckland is now not even remotely possible, and for those families who do make the attempt, it almost inevitably means both parents working outside the home. Most low and middle-income families can’t even make the attempt, and often live in over-crowded, poor quality rental accommodation.

Don asks:

Why is it possible to buy 500sq m sections on the outskirts of Houston for $40,000, whereas 400sq m sections on the outskirts of Auckland cost $400,000? The answer lies simply in the fact that in Houston there are relatively relaxed attitudes towards using land on the outskirts of the city, whereas in Auckland that has been prohibited.

Town planners turn their nose up at Houston, and claim it is an awful place to live. However families from all over the US are heading there – because they can buy a reasonably sized home at a decent price there.

The very first report of the New Zealand Productivity Commission was on the cost of housing. The commission concluded that there were various reasons why housing is so expensive in New Zealand – but overwhelmingly the biggest single factor is the price of land, and that in turn has been a quite deliberate policy choice.

There are multiple factors, but ignoring land supply is ignoring the elephant in the room.

Dr Hosking mentioned that four of the five cities in the Mercer quality of living survey are “intensified”. And the fifth is Auckland. What he didn’t note was that Auckland is already more intensified than one of the other five, namely Vancouver. In fact, according to the Demographia survey of many hundreds of urban areas around the world, no city in the United States, Canada or Australia has more people per square kilometre than Auckland has now.

Again, a deliberate choice by the Council. And the fact Auckland is one of the most expensive cities in the world to buy a home is deliberately linked to that. And politicians from the left near universally are opposed to doing anything meaningful about it.

After Juliet was written by Sharman Macdonald after her 13 year old daughter saw the film version of Romeo and Juliet and asked “What comes next?”. Macdonald’s daughter went on to act in the play itself, and is fairly well known today as Keira Knightley.

I greatly enjoyed the Circa production of After Juliet. It’s a lively sequel to the famous classic. Those with a good memory will recall that before Romeo loved Juliet, he had an unrequited infatuation for Rosaline. It turns out that the infatuation was in fact mutual, but Rosaline was just playing hard to get. Now Romeo is dead, and she blames the Montagues for it.

The play is produced by 1st Gear Productions, and all the cast were aged between 17 and 23. It was a nice showcase of emerging talent.  Neenah Dekkers-Reihana shone as the lead Rosaline. She was feisty and commanding.

Photos by Stephen A’Court

Also a great performance from Sylvie McCreanor who played Bianca. Bianca is a cousin of Juliet who suffers from petit mai seizures, and she is very convincing.

After the deaths of Romeo and Juliet there is a truce between the Montagues and Captulets, laid down by the Prince of Verona. You also have a number of trials of those deemed responsible for their deaths, such as the nurse and the apothecary that sold Juliet the poison.

Rosaline is torn between her lost love, her anger, and another apparently unrequited love interest. She wants the feud to continue, and is challenging to be leader of the “Cats”, the younger members of the Captulets.

The set consists of a corrugated iron fence, a tangled scaffolding type tower where the Montagues gather, and at the bottom of it flowers marking the graves of Romeo and Juliet.

One thing I loved about the play was the mixture of old and new. you had Montagues and Captulets battling it out with swords, while some of the Montague girls were videoing it on their iPhones!  While it is an ancient setting, they used modern devices to get across that this could also be a modern day story.

There were a few good laughs during the play, but mostly it is dramatic tension between the various cast, and most of all to see whether it ends with war or peace – or both.

The play lasted 90 minutes, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was good to see a talented cast of younger actors and actresses and a sequel to a Shakespeare classic.

Also reviewed by John Smythe at Threatreview. It is on at Circa 2 until Saturday 8 June.

I got sent this via e-mail. It was originally penned by Naomi Ragan.

It all started with a skin flick.
 
In 1933, a beautiful, young Austrian woman took off her clothes for a movie director.  She ran through the woods, naked.  She swam in a lake, naked.  Pushing well beyond the social norms of the period, the movie also featured a simulated orgasm. To make the scene “vivid”, the director reportedly stabbed the actress with a sharp pin just off-screen.
 
The most popular movie in 1933 was King Kong.  But everyone in Hollywood was talking about that scandalous movie with the gorgeous, young Austrian woman.  Louis B Mayer, of the giant studio MGM, said she was the most beautiful woman in the world.  The film was banned practically everywhere, which of course made it even more popular and valuable.  Mussolini reportedly refused to sell his copy at any price.
 
The star of the film, called Ecstasy, was Hedwig Kiesler.  She said the secret of her beauty was “to stand there and look stupid”. 
 
In reality, Kiesler was anything but stupid.  She was a genius.  She’d grown up as the only child of a prominent Jewish banker.  She was a Mathematics prodigy.  She excelled at science.  As she grew older, she became ruthless, using all the power her body and mind gave her.  Between the sexual roles she played, her tremendous beauty, and the power of her intellect, Kiesler would confound the men in her life, including her six husbands, two of the most ruthless dictators of the 20thCentury, and one of the greatest movie producers in history.  Her beauty made her rich for a time.  She is said to have made – and spent – $30 million in her life.  But her greatest accomplishment resulted from her intellect, and her invention continues to shape the world we live in today.
 
You see, this young Austrian starlet would take one of the most valuable technologies ever developed right from under Hitler’s nose.  After fleeing to America, she not only became a major Hollywood star, her name sits on one of the most important patents ever granted by the U.S. Patent Office.  Today, when you use your mobile telephone or, over the next few years, as you experience super-fast wireless Internet access (via something called “long-term evolution” or LTE Technology), you’ll be using an extension of the technology a 20-year-old actress first conceived while sitting at dinner with Hitler.
 
At the time she made Ecstasy, Kiesler was married to one of the richest men in Austria.  Friedrich Mandl was Austria’s leading arms maker.  His firm would become a key supplier to the Nazis.  Mandl used his beautiful young wife as a showpiece at important business dinners with representatives of the Austrian, Italian, and German fascist forces.  One of Mandl’s favourite topics at these gatherings – which included meals with Hitler and Mussolini – was the technology surrounding radio-controlled missiles and torpedoes.  Wireless weapons offered far greater ranges than the wire-controlled alternatives that prevailed at the time.
 
Kiesler sat through these dinners “looking stupid”, while absorbing everything she heard.  Being Jewish, Kiesler hated the Nazis.  She abhorred her husband’s business ambitions.  Mandl responded to his wilful wife by imprisoning her in his castle, Schloss Schwarzenau.  In 1937, she managed to escape.  She drugged her maid, snuck out of the castle wearing the maid’s clothes, and sold her jewellery to finance a trip to London.   She escaped just in time.  In 1938, Germany annexed Austria.  The Nazis seized Friedrich Mandl’s factory as he was half-Jewish.  Mandl fled to Brazil.  Later, he became an adviser to Argentina’s iconic populist president, Juan Peron.
 
In London, Kiesler arranged a meeting with Louis B Mayer.  She signed a long-term contract with him, becoming one of MGM’s biggest stars.  She appeared in more than 20 films.  She was a co-star to Clark Gable, Judy Garland, and even Bob Hope.  Each of her first seven MGM movies was a blockbuster.  But Kiesler cared far more about fighting the Nazis than about making movies.  In 1942 at the height of her fame, she developed a new kind of communications system, optimised for sending coded messages that couldn’t be “jammed”.  She was building a system that would allow torpedoes and guided bombs to always reach their targets.  She was building a system to kill Nazis.
 
By the 1940’s, both the Nazis and the Allied forces were using the kind of single-frequency radio-controlled technology Friedrich Mandl had been peddling.  The drawback of this technology was that the enemy could find the appropriate frequency and “jam” or intercept the signal, thereby interfering with the missile’s intended path.  Kiesler’s key innovation was to “change the channel”.  It was a way of encoding a message across a broad area of the wireless spectrum.  If one part of the spectrum was jammed, the message would still get through on one of the other frequencies being used.  The problem was, she could not figure out how to synchronise the frequency changes on both the receiver and the transmitter.  To solve the problem, she turned to perhaps the world’s first techno-musician, George Antheil.
 
Antheil was an acquaintance of Kiesler who achieved some notoriety for creating intricate musical compositions.  He synchronised his melodies across twelve player pianos (or pianolas), producing stereophonic sounds no one had ever heard before.  Kiesler incorporated Antheil’s technology for synchronising his pianolas.  Then, she was able to synchronise the frequency changes between a weapon’s receiver and its transmitter.  On the 11th of August, 1942, US Patent Number 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and to “Hedy Kiesler Markey”, which was her married name at the time.  Most of you wouldn’t’ recognise the name Kiesler, or remember the name Hedy Markey.  But it’s a fair bet than anyone reading this newsletter of a certain age will remember one of the great beauties of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” –Hedy Lamarr.  That’s the name Louis B Mayer gave to his prized actress.  That’s the name his film company made famous.
 
Meanwhile, almost no one knows Hedwig Kiesler – aka Hedy Lamarr – was one of the great pioneers of wireless communications.  Her technology was developed by the US Navy, which has used it ever since.  You’re probably using Lamarr’s technology, too.  Her patent sits at the foundation of “spread spectrum technology”, which you use every day when you log on to a Wi-Fi network or make calls with your Bluetooth-enabled mobile telephone.  It lies at the heart of the massive investments being made right now in so-called fourth-generation “LTE” Wireless technology.  This next generation of mobile telephones phones and their accompanying towers will provide tremendous increases to wireless network speed and quality, by spreading wireless signals across the entire available spectrum.  This kind of encoding is only possible using the kind of frequency switching that Hedwig Kiesler invented.

Hedy Lamarr was called the most beautiful woman in Europe. The e-mail was of special interest to me, because as it happened Hedy was married to my grandfather’s cousin. In fact she used to help babysit my father in Vienna!

Rachel Smalley asked Hekia Parata on The Nation at the weekend “Can you at some times be a bit of a bitch to work for?”

I have no problem with asking the are you difficult to work for question, and in fact thought the interview overall was well done.

However would a male MP be asked a question like that?

Would any male MP be asked “Can you at some times be a bit of a prick to work for?”. If not, why not?

Power Gift is a reverse auction site.

It features stuff like restaurant meals and online store items and works like a reverse auction. Each time someone ‘shares’ an item on their Facebook page, it goes down in price (by a random amount – between $0.01 and $2.00). The more people share something, the cheaper it becomes, first to buy wins it. It works for the users because there’s no limits to how cheap something becomes and it works for a business because they give away just one item, but if it goes ‘viral’ they get plenty of exposure. 

That’s quite a novel business model. You can login to the site via Facebook.

I’ve just shared an auction for two one metre pizzas 🙂