National has released the total extra borrowing that will be needed under Labour’s policies, just in the next four years. It’s an extra $9 billion of debt. And these are generally conservative costings. The document doesn’t include the cost of their compulsory superannuation policy which will be released later today. I have no doubt it will be updated regularly.

Costs of Labour’s Promises

Paul Gorman at The Press reports:

Damaged election hoardings are some of the first visible signs the country is going to the polls a month from today.

Billboards for National Party and Green Party electorate candidates have been smashed or badly vandalised in parts of Christchurch in the past week.

What a coincidence. Certain parties are not being targeted. I have no idea why.

The story does remind me of a funny conversation I had with a National candidate last week. I asked her if many of her hoardings had been damaged, and she replied that for some reasons her hoardings are just disappearing all-together, rather than being vandalised.

She seemed genuinely bewildered by why this was the case. I couldn’t resist offering a rationale for their disappearances 🙂

3 News have just announced that Labour have done a massive u-turn on the age of eligibility for superannuation. After 15 years of scare-mongering and saying National will put up the age (which led Key to rule it out so definitively), they are saying if elected they will increase the age of eligibility from 65 to 67, starting in 2020 and ending in 2033 with an increase of two months a year.

I personally warmly welcome the policy. The current age is not sustainable in the long term. This policy gives Labour greater credibility on economic issues, even though I suspect their motivation is more trying to force the PM into breaking a promise than a real belief in raising the age. But regardless of motivation, it is a good policy and congratulations to Labour for putting the issue back on the table. We should be debating not just the retirement age but the whole design of our public superannuation scheme. This is the first step towards being able to have that debate.

There will be some opposition – the unions traditionally have been very opposed to an age increase as manual workers are less able to keep working until 67. Also Maori groups are normally opposed as the average life expectancy for a Male Maori is just 70, which means the numbers of years they would receive superannuation is reduced by 40%.

The biggest challenge Labour may have, is their coalition partners. There is no way Labour will form Government alone. The Greens might sign up to such a policy, but one can only assume Winston will fight it with all his might. Is this a case of Labour promising it, knowing they won’t have to implement it? Would they have made this policy pledge if they were at 40%?

The challenge now for National is to respond to the policy. The PM unwisely ruled out any change to the entitlement age not just in his first term of office, but for his duration as PM, so it doesn’t leave them a lot of room to respond. If they maintain that there is no need to raise the age, then Labour will gain in the economic credibility stakes – not necessarily enough to overcome all their other negatives, but any gain will be welcome for Labour.

As a fiscal conservative, I welcome Labour’s policy on the retirement age. I’ll cover the other aspects once they are released.

The vote of Telecom shareholders was 99.8% in favour of structural separation. This is the final barrier to separation occurring later this year,  into two new companies – Telecom and Chorus.

Business Day reports:

Communications Minister Steven Joyce said it was the most significant change in the industry for 20 years, when Telecom was privatised.

It is the biggest change in 20 years, and one of the most positive. It is superb that as a result of the Government open access policies, Telecom chose to separate. So many of our problems of the last decade or more have come about from the fact that Telecom was a vertically integrated monopoly. It is a far better model to have the access company separate to the companies that offer services over those networks.

The analogy I used to use is imagine if Air New Zealand owned the airports, and got to decide how much its competitors paid to land at them, what times they could land, had their own planes get quicker service etc etc.

With the benefit of hindsight, Telecom should have been separated when Phil Goff and colleagues sold it in the 1980s. We would have avoided many of the problems of the last 20 years if it had been. It was as natural that Telecom would try to exploit its access monopoly as it is natural a dog will lick its balls – because they can!

The Telecom of today, even pre-separation, is a much different company to the Telecom of old. I hope both Chorus and Telecom do well in thenew environment, Most of all I hope we get a more competitive market.

An unusual media strategy from Labour’s Campaign Spokesman Grant Robertson:

I think that everyone can see that John Key is an extremely popular Prime Minister …

I hope Grant keeps on talking about how Key is so popular, and what he is implying about his own leader.

In the UK they have a website where parents can go and say what they think (good and bad) of the school their children attend. What a great idea. You get asked your view on 12 areas, being:

The BBC reports the 12 areas include:

• My child is happy at this school
• My child feels safe at this school
• My child makes good progress at this school
• My child is well looked after at this school
• My child is taught well at this school
• My child receives appropriate homework for their age
• This school ensures the pupils are well behaved
• This school deals effectively with bullying
• This school is well led and managed
• This school responds well to any concern I raise
• I receive valuable information from the school about my child’s progress
• I would recommend this school to another parent

I can only hope for a similar site in NZ. I was sent the link by a parent whose children are attending a great school in Wellington, and they’d like to be able to share their views on it with prospective parents.

Someone in the Southern Young Nats has done a very good parody of Labour’s campaign ad. They’ve timed the voice-over or song-over very nicely.

Please go to Cactus Kate and look at her photos of the Occupy Auckland site, and read her scathing commentary. The best journalism to date on the occupiers. Some extracts:

These people aren’t even Labour voters. They are worse than that. We are talking Alliance or Mana. Or even too stoned to vote.

I was not dressed in a suit which would be a sign of war. Given I had showered that morning and blonde it was quite apparent I was there on my Blackberry to take photos and perhaps I was the 1% enemy. Any competent protest movement would have at least questioned my presence. Alas not our Occupiers.

Now I’m not anti-weed. But it was soon evident that the non-violent, non-alcoholic protest was fuelled on dak. The rolling eyes of the 40 people I counted in the vicinity were proof they were either psychiatric patients, or stoned. Or perhaps both.

Superb.

I didn’t realise that the interviews with different politicians as part of the OU Vote Chat 2011 were on You Tube. You can view the channel here.

The most viewed one so far is Part I with Hone Harawira. I’ve listened to many of them. Bryce has a good interviewing style, where he lets the pollies talk, but also comes back to stuff they gloss over.

I was up in Hamilton a couple of weeks ago as the guest speaker at a Chamber of Commerce Afters Fives function. The function was hosted by Child Matters.

Child Matters, formerly CPS , specialise in education to prevent child abuse. In the 15 years they have operated they have trained 15,000 adults how to recognise and respond to child abuse. If one can recognise it is occurring at an early stage, then it is the fence at the top of the cliff, rather than the ambulance at the bottom.

At times, I despair of the well publicised child abuse cases. I have problems recognising than human beings can actually do stuff such as stick babies in clothes dryers or hang them on clothes lines with clothes pegs. The easy response is to just categorise those who do such things as sub-human, and conclude nothing can be done but to stop them breeding.

However not all cases are as extreme as the ones we read out in the media, and early intervention can work in many cases.

A photo of me with some of the Child Matters team. The cardboard cut outs are for Buddy Day, on 18 November. There will be 180 buddies in Hamilton (representing 1,800 cases of child abuse in the Waikato last year) that will be lent out to schools, childcare centres and community groups to look after for the day. It’s a fun child-centric way of talking about child abuse, and raising awareness of keeping kids safe.

Some sad but interesting facts from their FAQ on common myths:

Myth: Children are usually sexually abused by strangers.
Fact: 85 – 90% of children who are sexually abused are sexually abused by someone they know.

Myth: The most common form of abuse suffered by children at home is sexual abuse.
Fact: Children are seven times more likely to be beaten badly by their parents than sexually abused by them.

Myth: Most physical abuse is carried out by men, especially fathers.
Fact: Violent acts towards children are more likely to be carried out by mothers than fathers.

Myth: Sexual attacks on children from strangers are common.
Fact: Sexual assaults involving contact by strangers are very rare.

There’s a wealth of information on their website, for those who want to know more about what they can do to help.

Danya Levy at Stuff reports:

The public sector is coping well with budget constraints and the Government’s plan to move resources “from the back office to the frontline,” Mr Ryall maintains. “While it is fair to say we have 2400, or 2700 fewer positions within the core public service, we have actually used that money to employ 1600 more teachers, 2000 more nurses, 800 more doctors and 600 more police.”

So 2,400 fewer people in administrative or backroom roles, and 5,000 more nurses, teachers, police and doctors.

Worth remembering that the parties of the left have spent the last three years denouncing this, resisting every single efficiency gain in in the public sector. They’ve battled as if every single policy analyst or communications advisor job is sacred, and without them, it will be a disaster.

Claire Trevett at the Herald reports:

The Labour Party has broken from tradition by deciding not to have an official campaign launch this year.

It will instead mark the start of its campaign in a low-key way – with a policy announcement on savings to media tomorrow in its own caucus room.

The decision not to have a launch event is unusual – the events are considered to provide valuable media and television coverage of a leader speaking to an audience of supporters in the lead up to the election.

This is almost unheard of. A campaign launch generally gets you a couple of minutes on the TV news that night promoting your message, and guaranteed coverage in all the dailies the next day.

For Labour not to do a campaign launch, suggests things are dire.

I suspect they were worried so few supporters would turn up, that it would draw unfavourable comparisons to National’s campaign launch, or even Labour’s 2008 campaign launch.

Or they are broke and can’t afford one, as the parliamentary funding tap has been turned off for them.

A third possibility is they thought two minutes of Phil Goff in prime time would actually lose them votes. But I doubt that is the reason, as they have him taking part in the debates.

Can people think of any other reason that Labour are not having a campaign launch? Apart from the official spin line that they are concentrating on policy!

Readers may recall Daljit Singh. He was the Labour candidate for the Papatoetoe Community Board who was arrested by the Police and charged with forgery. Singh is a real estate agent, whom Labour made a JP some years ago. The Police allege Singh and a partner forged documents to register multiple voters to addresses, sometimes as many as 40 at one place.

Now Singh has not yet had his trial. But the laying of charges indicates the Police believe they have proof of his offending, and then Labour Party President Andrew Little said:

There is no tolerance in our party for conduct that undermines the integrity of the electoral process

But it appears there is a great deal of tolerance. Whale has this photo from two weeks ago in October:

Singh is three to the left of Phil Goff. But this was not just some random fundraiser than Singh happened to occur. It seems he was one of the organisers of it!!!

So Labour are happy to have someone who is facing electoral fraud and forgery charges, organise fundraising functions for them? This is what they call no tolerance? Having the Party Leader pose for photos with a candidate who has been charged with forgery?

Innocent until proven guilty only applies to the imposition of criminal sanctions such as prison or a fine. It is a very bad look for a political party to be using someone who not only is facing criminal charges, but is facing criminal charges specifically related to political activity.

With Labour’s Back to the 70s workplace policy, this video about UK Labour seemed appropriate for NZ also!

iPredict has just launched stocks on which party’s leader will be Prime Minister after the 2014 election – National or Labour?

These stocks do not assume the result of the 2011 election. If people say National after 2014, then that could either be a 3rd term for National or it could be Labour win in 2011 and then National come back in 2014.

Currently the stocks sit at 69% for National and 32% for Labour, so National are seen at this stage to be twice as likely to win in 2014, than Labour.

What will be fascinating to see if how these stocks change over time, and especially how the actual 2011 election results affects these 2014 stocks.

When you consider the cost of capital, the market seems quite optimistic that National will govern after the 2014 election. Say you have $69 to invest. If you stuck it in a term deposit for three years at 6% then in three years you would have $82. If you stick it in iPredict and National wins in 2014, you would have $100. So in reality the market is saying they think National has around a 82% chance of winning in 2014. That seems a bit over-priced for me, but I amsure the price will vary a lot over the next three years.

InternetNZ released earlier this month a discussion document called Future:Digital, talking about possible priorities for a future Government. It’s only nine pages so an easy read. There are five themes:

1. The Internet drives economic growth
2. A digitally inclusive society
3. A vibrant, multi-cultural identity
4. Protecting the environment for future generations
5. A Government that “gets” the Internet

Waldo Kuipers from Microsoft talks about some of these themes in a blog post. He makes an interesting point:

In a paper looking back on 125 years of refrigeration (PDF), Dr Andrew Cleland explains, “In 1882 the first refrigerated meat left New Zealand for London, the pioneering use of a technology that was to transform the New Zealand economy. Animals were no longer grown for wool only, and the wealth of the nation developed rapidly. From 1882 until as recently as the early 1990s refrigerated food has returned at least 30% of New Zealand’s export income. Whilst much of the equipment has been imported, expertise in the application of refrigeration was developed in New Zealand.”

For New Zealand, the internet could be the best thing since refrigeration.

Reps from five of our political parties also debated Internet issues last week. If you missed it, you can view or listen to it at this page.

Probably because of the Holocaust. Israelis have a culture where they hate leaving any Israeli behind.  They will move mountain and earth to recover a solider.

hence there was much rejoicing in Israel last week when they negotiated the return of Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped from Israel by Hamas in 2006.

For his return, Hamas got 1,027 convicted prisoners released whom between them had killed 569 Israeli civilians.

Already one woman released has vowed to become a suicide bomber again. She says it has been her ambition since childhood, and has encouraged dozens of cheering schoolchildren to follow her lead. She almost blew up a hospital last time. She may succeed this time.

I admire Israel’s willingness to leave no one behind. But I wonder if the price they have paid is too high, and if it will result in more deaths. Releasing prisoners is good if part of a peace treaty. Releasing them so they can go out again and try to blow up more hospitals and civilians is not so good.

First John Pagani writes a post on national standards I agree with, and now Rob Salmond does a post on assessment data which I also largely agree with.  Rob blogs:

The Los Angeles Times has produced a detailed set of estimates about how much value each teacher in Los Angeles adds to their classroom. That is hugely valuable information. New Zealand’s education establishment should be doing something similar.

I blogged last year on the remarkable data published by the LA Times. It basically measures the effectiveness of individual teachers.

Why should we follow the Times’ lead? Because it helps us to reward great teachers and provide remedial support for teachers in difficulty. And because it allows us to diagnose, early, easily, and with reasonable precision, what is going wrong when a school is performing badly. Is it one or two bad teachers? A bad english department? Poor school-wide leadership? Or is the issue in the community itself, a problem at home rather than in the classroom? The data can answer that crucial question better than a big round of finger-pointing in front of an inspector from ERO.

We can do all kinds of helpful things with this information. If one school has a dysfunctional maths department and there is a great maths teacher at another school, the government can fund the Board of Trustees to pay generous incentives to convince the great teacher to take on the troubled department as HoD. Same thing for giving great teachers powerful incentives to teach at generally underperforming schools.

Absolutely agree.

It is true that there are already multiple ways to assess teachers in New Zealand. There is teacher registration. There are periodic assessments against professional standards. In some situations, there are Teacher’s Council investigations. There is ERO. Those are all good things to have, and this data-driven assessment should be used to extend those assessment regimes, not to replace them. The data based assessment does add real value, however, both as a nationwide diagnostic tool for educators and administrators and as an individual assessment tool for rewarding great teachers and helping others improve.

True. But with teacher unions so against even allowing data on schools to be collated and analysed, I can only imagine how far they would go to stop what Rob proposes.

Who should find out the results? Well, the teachers for a start. They need to know how they are doing. And their local Board of Trustees. And the government folk should know, too. They are collectively charged with improving the educational outcomes for New Zealand’s tragically long “education tail.” Once they know how their teaching resources are distributed, they can better shuffle them around to make the system more effective.

Which is of course what the Government is trying to do with national standards, as well as give parents better information.

Parents should probably get some information about how their kid’s school does compared to other schools with similar student demographics. That is a valuable accountability mechanism for Principals, who get paid good money to be accountable to their local communities. But unfiltered league tables of area schools do more harm than good, presenting an apples to oranges comparison as if it were apples to apples.

The answer to bad league tables is good league tables. Not banning league tables.

Parents should also not get access to individual teacher rankings. Here I disagree with the Times. Why? Because it is little more than a recipe for school administrators to be drowned in a tide of the pushiest, over-caffeinated parents demanding that Little Johnny should move over to that excellent Mrs Paki’s home room. Now! We don’t get to see the latest performance review of the cop that pulled us over, or the nurse in the hospital ward, or the customs agent at the border. And rightly so. Teachers are no different.

I’m okay with parents not seeing results of individual teachers, so long as School Boards and the Government does.

Rob also says in his comments:

Secondary teachers with a BA and a teaching diploma start at $47k and can earn up to $71k at current scales, even without any of the additional salary Units under the control of Boards of Trustees. The top of their base salary scale is more pay than 90% of New Zealand adults recieve, according to IRD data. I think **great teachers** should receive substantially more compensation than this, but I do not think **all teachers** should get a big raise.

Again I agree. I’d love School Boards and Principals to have the ability to have performance pay.

This is almost too funny for words. Labour’s bold new defence policy is:

Labour will withdraw New Zealand’s SAS troops from Afghanistan within 90 days of assuming office

Why is this so funny? Well the SAS are scheduled to return home in March 2012.

The election is on 26 November 2011. 90 days after that is 24 February 2012. So the impact of their policy is to bring them home a week early.

But in reality, it probably isn’t even that. They say within 90 days of assuming office, not of the election. it normally takes at least a week to arrange a coalition, appoint Ministers and be sworn in. As a Labour-led Government this time would involve getting agreement with the Greens, with NZ First and with Mana, its actually possible the SAS would be home before they’re even sworn in 🙂

The NZ Institute has published an update on its scorecard of 16 measures to assess how NZ is doing. Their summary:

Social

• Life Expectancy B
• Unemployment C
• Income Inequality D
• Assault Mortality D
• Suicide C

Economic

• GDP per capita C
• household Wealth D
• Labour productivity D
• Innovation D
• Educational Achievement B

Environmental

• Agricultural land per capita B
• Water Quality C
• CO2 concentration D
• CO2e per capita D
• Invasive species C

Overall they give a C grade, the same as last time. They note:

There is an improving trend for five of the measures and deterioration for four. New Zealand gets three B grades reflecting valuable strengths in education, agricultural land per capita and life expectancy. But there are also still seven D grades and not one A grade.

And

With widespread recognition of the issues New Zealand faces, and action in place to improve outcomes on almost all the measures, there is definitely evidence of effort. However, the efforts are not all well-directed and some do not comply with best practice for performance management. There are not clear and widely understood strategies for success. Progress toward goals is not always monitored and reported, and efforts in one area are not always well coordinated with other efforts. On balance, New Zealanders care and are taking action. Overall an unchanged grade of B- for effort.

Moving some of those grades is not something that can be done in just a year or two. Some of them are very long-term. But hopefully the NZ Institute will keeps its scorecard going for many years, as an interesting ongoing assessment. Their summary is also below.

THIS WEEK ON BACK BENCHES—THE WEST COAST-TASMAN DEBATE: Watch Wallace Chapman, Damian Christie, the Back Benches Panel and special guests discuss the week’s hottest topics!

FUTURE OF MINING: The West Coast is New Zealand’s mining country. The electorate, the people and the industry are still reeling from the Pike River tragedy. How is the Pike River recovery? And what about the future of mining in New Zealand? Should we continue mining? How is mining safety? How do we prevent further disasters?

GET A JOB: The economy is the centrepoint of the election and at the heart of the economy is JOBS. How do we create jobs? Especially, on the West Coast where there are fewer industries. And when it comes to employment—are our workplace laws fair? Is it time to abolish the 90-day probation period? Or Monday-ise holidays? Or raise the hourly wage? Or will changes only make job creation more difficult?

Join us for a night of LIVE pub politics from the Backbencher Pub: Wednesday, 26th of October. Our Panel: Green Party Candidate Kevin Hague, Labour Candidate Damien O’Connor, and National Candidate Chris Auchinvole.

Back Benches screens on Wednesdays at 9.05pm with encore screenings on Thursdays at 9.05am and 1.05pm, Saturdays at 10.05pm, Sundays at 10.05am and 2.05pm – TVNZ 7

Over at Stuff I blog on how the PREFU released today does show a path out of debt. An extract:

Today the Government opened the books. It is required to do this by law. The law was introduced in the early 1990s after the outgoing Labour government hid the true state of the crown accounts, and the fact that the then government-owned Bank of New Zealand needed a bailout. The incoming government received a shock when it realised the true state of the books.

This law showed its worth in 2008. The Budget in June 2008 painted a rosy picture of economic growth and ongoing surpluses.  However, by October it was a different picture. We learned in the 2008 Pre-Election Fiscal and Update (Prefu) that in fact the economy had been in recession all year, and that the ongoing surpluses had been replaced with a decade of deficits.

The news got even worse two months later when Treasury did its December Economic Forecast Update (Defu). The decade of deficits had become a structural deficit that would have seen New Zealand ending up in a similar situation to Greece if no changes were made. Gross crown debt as a percentage of the economy was forecast to hit 57 per cent in 2023, or if the global economy continued to worsen, possibly as high as 76 per cent. At that stage you are like Greece, and the interest on the debt is so high that massive cuts in spending on welfare, health and education are necessary to be able to make the interest payments. …

 If there is no change of fiscal policies, then the Government is still forecast to achieve a surplus again in the 2014-15 fiscal year, which should also be the year when net debt peaks at 29 per cent of GDP. It’s a much better outlook than three years ago.

There’s also some interesting stuff on how our trade with the US and China has changed over the last decade.