1 News reports:

The Government’s independent advisory group has recommended brand new Cook Strait ferries, similar in size to the current fleet, 1News understands. 

Last week, Ministers received a report from the group in which it’s understood options were laid out for the specifications of the new ferries and when they could arrive. 

The group has recommended that the ferries be smaller than the proposed iRex ferries and not rail-enabled, although rail would still be able to be shunted onto the vessels as often happened now.

In other words, ferries that would not require $2 billion to be spent on new ports, would not be banned from the Tory Channel as being too big, and would have the same capacity as present.

doesn’t seem like rocket science.

CNN reports:

Bolivia’s President Luis Arce called on the country to “organize and mobilize against the coup d’état, in favor of democracy” as soldiers and armored military vehicles positioned themselves around governmental buildings in La Paz on Wednesday.

“We cannot allow coup attempts to take Bolivian lives once again. We want to urge everyone to defend democracy,” Arce said from the presidential residence, Casa Grande.

According to footage from the scene, armed soldiers were seen gathering around Murillo Plaza, a main square in La Paz where the national executive and legislative offices are located. It is unclear why military units are in Murillo Plaza and how many there are.

CNN is trying to contact Bolivia’s government for comment.

Armored vehicles were seen ramming into the doors of Bolivia’s government palace, according to Associated Press, as the country’s former President Evo Morales, who, like the incumbent, is in Bolivia’s Movement to Socialism (MAS) party, said on X that a “coup d’état is brewing.”

Bad Governments should be removed by votes, not guns.

Sadly this is normal in Bolivia which has had 150 coups since 1825. The last was in 1982 so it was hoped these were in the past.

The Post reports:

Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has delivered a slap-down to Wellington’s regional council as it weighs up buying the city council’s shares in the capital’s airport.

The Post revealed on Thursday that regional councillors had met behind closed doors to discuss options to retain public ownership of Wellington City Council’s 34% stake in the asset.

Do they not think 20% rates increases are enough? Do they want them even higher?

Stuff reports:

While Abel’s early activism was divisive and performative, his approach to being an MP has been quite the opposite.

Throughout multiple interviews and conversations leading to this profile, Abel repeatedly talks about his dream of bolstering the wool industry – and his alliance with NZ First’s Mark Patterson to try to make that happen.

He also has an unlikely friendship, of sorts, with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. It started back in 2020, when Luxon was first elected to Parliament. Abel attended the MP induction sessions that year, as there was a chance he would make it once the final vote count came through.

During MP training, Luxon and Abel had lunch together and have remained on good terms since. “We had quite a constructive conversation about environment stuff,” Abel recalls.

“He’s a guy you can have a conversation with. We talk about various things, but I won’t tell you what we talked about on that night,” says Abel.

Connection remains a key focus for the new MP. After we meet over lunch for the initial interview for this story, Abel asks to talk again about the theme of inter-party relationships. He’s been thinking about it a lot, and has a few more thoughts about why he’s as comfortable talking with National and NZ First MPs as he is those on the political Left.

“The world is becoming far more divisive,” he says.

“But we have a responsibility to be civil, to have dialogue, even if we disagree fiercely. It allows for an understanding of where another person is coming from.”

It is really good to see an MP saying this, because we do not want to go down the US route where more and more people see the opposing side as having bad intentions. It is vitally important that people can disagree and still have civility and dialogue.

1 News reports:

Whangārei Mayor Vince Cocurullo is being slammed by five of his councillors for refusing to allow council debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict next week.

Mayor Cocurullo said he had turned down both representations under the Local Government Act because the matter was not related to the council’s role or function.

He said his position to refuse the quintet’s notice of motion and the petition was not an affront to democracy.

It was in contrast protecting democracy to ensure an overall dispassionate view, rather than the position of one group of people dictating to others, Cocurullo said

Finally a Mayor who understands what the job of Council is. It isn’t foreign policy.

Radio NZ report:

Wellington city council officers say the $180 million Tākina convention centre has made “lower-than-expected revenue” in its first year of operation.

The multi-level 1280 square metre CBD site was opened just over a year ago, with Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau saying after it was complete that the building would be “the first step in the rebirth of Wellington.”

But one year on the results did not look to be quite as rosy.

This is absolutely unsurprising. Business cases done for organisations who don’t have to wear the cost of failure, almost always are far too optimistic.

Let’s consider you work for a Big 4 consultancy firm and a Council comes to you saying we want a business case for a convention centre. Then of course you deliver them a business case that shows it can be profitable, because that is what the client wants. You just have to make the right assumptions.

But let’s say you are a hotel chain owner, and you are considering building say a hotel and convention centre in Wellington. You’ll do a business plan, and the last thing you’ll want in there are optimistic assumptions. You’ll take a cynical approach to the development, because if it ends up loss making, you’ll probably lose your job, and the company’s owners (who appoint the board) will lose money. So you look very carefully at any assumptions, the evidence behind them, and what it will mean if they end up wrong.

When the Council is paying for it, then the price to pay for getting it wrong ids basically zero. The staff do not get impacted. The CE does not get impacted. And the current Council can blame it on the former Council who authorised it. The loser are the ratepayers.

Under the convention centre’s operating model Te Papa was appointed to run the business side of the building (its operating costs and revenue related activities) and the council would contribute to its building costs.

The centre’s financial issues prompted council officers to conduct a review into its operating model.

That report found in three options for the centre’s operating model that the council has been asked to consider.

They were maintaining the status quo, adjusting the existing model, or changing the arrangements between the existing parties (Te Papa and the council).

The agenda stated neither the council nor Te Papa supported maintaining the status quo, while Te Papa were not confident, they could adjust the existing model to make it achievable for them.

This is code for that Te Papa can see no way at all to make the convention centre profitable (and they don’t even have to cover capital costs) which means inevitably the Council will take on the losses.

And we wonder why rates are going up almost 20%.

In case people here may want to use it, I have started archiving links to all NZ polls on Parliament or policy issues at Curia’s website. You can browse by date, company or issue.

I had never heard of the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective, until they were quoted at length in this Newsroom article, criticising the Government’s curriculum refresh. I looked up their website and found this is their policy platform:

• The primary responsibility for schooling is to create critical creative citizens invested in participatory democracy with capacity to combat social injustice.
• Education should address long seated inequities and injustice through curriculum design.
• Success at school cannot be reduced to achievement in literacy and numeracy

So they want schools focus on giving students the capacity to be social justice activists, and to deprioritise literacy and numeracy.

If they are unhappy with what the Government is doing, this can only be a very good thing.

The topics for Day 2 were:

• “Grain and Waves: Odesa Emerges as the World’s Major Port”
• “A Dive in the Black Sea for Trump: Post-Election Speculations and Implications
• Wartime challenges for the Black Sea states
• “The Black Sea: A Crucial NATO Asset – Rectifying Missteps from the Bucharest Summit”
• “Charting the Path to Resolve the Transnistrian Conundrum”
• “From the Varangians to the Greeks: The Revival of the Baltic-Black Sea Union”
• “HOW could we STOP the RUSSIAN influence on the elections IN MOLDOVA?”

Panelists included:

• Taras Vysotskyi, Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine
• Brooks Newmark, former British MP, former Minister of Civil Society
• Rémi Duflo,Charge d’Affaires, EU Delegation to Ukraine
• Ambassador Cindy McCain, Executive Director of World Food Programme
• Michael C. Ryan, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy
• James O’Brien, US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs
• Ambassador Kurt Volker, former Special Representative for Ukraine of the US
• Michał Kamiński, Deputy Speaker of the Senate of the Republic of Poland
• Francois Hollande, former President of France
• Jeanne Shaheen, U.S. Senator
• Mihai Popșoi, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Moldova
• Pavlo Klimkin, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine
• Margareta Cederfelt, Swedish Member of Parliament,
• Kira Rudik, Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, Leader of Party “Golos”,
• Indrek Saar, former Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Estonia
• Alexandru Balan former deputy director of SIS Moldova
• Radu Burduja, former Deputy Minister of Defense and Military Representative of Moldova to NATO and the EU

I list them just to get across that these were not garden variety pundits (like me). These were very senior and experienced politicians and officials from not just Ukraine, but also Moldova, Sweden, Estonia, Poland, France, the US and UK.

One (semi) amusing thing I learnt is that when there are foreign dignitaries in Ukraine, they actually increase missile and bombing activity, to send a message to pother countries to stay away. The reason I call this semi-amusing is because I had assumed the opposite. When deciding whether to attend, I reasoned that Russia would be more restrained and do less bombings as they wouldn’t want to kill a former President of France. But as it turns out, it was the opposite!

My notes are not as detailed as Day 1, as I was too busy listening to write as much, but some salient points:

• 20% of grain to other countries through World Food Programme comes from Ukraine, and much of it through Odesa and Black Sea. The conflict there has huge impact on food security
• Port of Odesa has annual traffic capacity of 40 million tonnes
• Ukrainian farmers have been targeted as well as soldiers. Russia has bombed tractors.
• Both sea mines and land mines are big challenge to food security
• Crimea is strategically vital, and if it remains with Russia, there will never be security in the Black Sea
• There was a UN negotiated grain corridor, but it lapsed a year or so ago, yet Ukraine has managed to unilaterally manage a corridor by sinking so many Russian ships
• A fascinating discussion on turning Odessa into a free trade zone like Hong Kong, once the conflict is over
• Lots of discussion on what a Trump win will mean for the conflict.
• One Trump supporters said that you need to make an economic case to Trump – Ukrainian victory is cheaper than alternative
• Also highlighted that Trump likes to back a winner and take credit for it. So the better Ukraine can do in the next six months, the more likely he will continue support
• Was stressed that who Trump appoints as NSA and in key staff roles will be key
• Moldova has little domestic energy capacity – used to import almost everything from Russia, giving Russia huge influence and even control
• Since the invasion of Ukraine, Moldova has now freed itself from Russian gas supplies but is still dependent on electricity from a province controlled by Russia.
• There have been a total of 10 wars since the collapse of USSR in this region – all involving Russia

The final point was the most salient one – that the biggest threat to Russian security is the Kremlin.

Putin has pushed Sweden and Finland into NATO

He has turned Ukraine towards Europe forever.

He has sent Moldova towards energy independence from Russia

NATO isn’t expanding because of NATO. NATO is expanding because all of Russia’s neighbours have seen that they need protection against Putin.

I spent a lot of time in Ukraine chatting to locals. I would always ask them what their reaction was when Russia invaded. Did they think it would happen? And most of them said that despite all the warnings it was coming, it was still a huge shock that Putin was trying to take over their country. Crimea had always been an area of dispute, but to actually have a fully fledged invasion was unthinkable.

The reason it was is that Ukrainians and Russians are like New Zealanders and Australians. They are friends and relatives. Many Ukrainians have Russian ancestry. They do not bear any ill well against ordinary Russians, just against Putin.

Yahoo News reports:

Madison Wells will produce a documentary focusing on the public and private life of Jacinda Ardern, the trailblazing Prime Minister of New Zealand who helped introduce strict gun laws following the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. She also led her country through the Covid pandemic and grappled with issues such as child poverty and climate change.

She did grapple with them. A careful choice of words.

The feature-length film is currently untitled. It follows Ardern from the moment she receives the Labour Party nomination to the birth of her child to her resignation in 2023, when she was at the height of her power and popularity. 

This statements suggests the so called documentary will not be based in the real world.

Here is a chart I previously published on her popularity.

Hard for their statement to be more wrong. Ardern’s popularity peak was +72%. When she resigned from office it had plummeted to -1%.

Stuff reports:

Suspended Green MP Darleen Tana told a migrant worker he was able to work in her husband’s bike shop on a seasonal work visa – despite that visa clearly stating he could only work in horticulture and viticulture jobs.

The worker also claims Tana advised him to keep working in the shop during lockdown as it was essential work.

Previously the allegations were only around breaches of employment law. Now we also have breaches of immigration law and Covid-19 laws to add in.

And while just allegations, the article cites many messages from the MP or her husband as proof.

The Herald reports:

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown says heads must roll at Transpower after the grid provider revealed the collapse of a transmission tower and the resulting power outage in Northland was due to too many nuts on the pylon being removed.

Transpower chief executive Alison Andrew today confirmed a maintenance crew had removed the nuts of three legs of the pylon last Thursday. She said the proper maintenance procedures were not followed and called the improper work “unprecedented and inconceivable”.

It’s almost comical, apart from the impact. Hey lets remove all the nuts at the same time from three of the four four legs of this really tall tower, as that is quicker than cleaning them one at a time!

The Herald reports:

Former Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman will find out her punishment on Thursday for shoplifting more than $9000 in clothing. …

The sentencing hearing began with defence lawyer Annabel Cresswell telling the court a mental health report about Ghahraman was the crux of her submissions.

It found a “clear diagnosis of complex PTSD” with two key contributing factors: her early life in war-torn Iran and the “public vitriol, threats and abuse” she received while in Parliament.

As I blogged previously, Ghahraman grew up in Mashad, which is around 1,600 kms from the border with Iraq. That is like the distance between Auckland and Invercargill.

Cresswell said the “threats of rape and death were constant and ongoing and credible”, to the point where her security detail was similar to that of the Prime Minister.

It was not similar to the PM. In no way does that mean the threats were not vile and disturbing. The PM has 24/7 armed police officers. Ghahraman had a parliamentary security officer escort her on and off the campus.

Crown Solicitor Alysha McClintock said the offending had the hallmarks of pre-meditation.

“This was a spree of offending. It’s not a one-off event. It’s not a ‘moment of madness’-type case.”

There might be another explanation for the offending other than a mental health breakdown, McClintock said: “Simply that she wanted the items that she took.

”On its face, that explanation, given the [pre-meditated] nature of the conduct, appears the more likely of the two,” she said. …

The link between Ghahraman’s mental health and her criminal conduct was not as strong as the defence made it out to be, the prosecutor argued, noting a mental health assessor found there was “a possible link”.

”The possibility of that is no more than that – a possibility.”

So that’s the case for the defence and the prosecution.

Stuff reported:

Both the Crown and defence agreed that if the application for a discharge without conviction was dismissed, an appropriate sentence would be to convict Ghahraman and discharge her.

So the only issue is whether or not Ghahraman receives a conviction for her serial shoplifting.

1 News reports:

An alcohol harm prevention expert is calling for change after a damning report estimated the cost of alcohol harm to be at $9.1 billion dollars. 

The report was commissioned by the Ministry of Health in an attempt to estimate the cost of alcohol harm in New Zealand. 

It found the cost of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder at $4.8 billion, $4 billion in loss of productivity, and $2.1 billion in the societal cost of road crashes.

So half the cost is FASD. Reducing that will have huge benefits both economically and quality of life for those affected.

He said there was “really good strong evidence” and “international consensus” that the price, availability, and marketing of alcohol were “the most effective” things that New Zealand could change to reduce harm.

Not if we’re talking about FASD. FASD is not caused by me drinking. It is not caused me most people drinking. It is caused by moderate to heavy drinking by pregnant women in later stages of pregnancy. Eric Crampton tweets relevant stats here. Basically around 1% of pregnant women (who themselves are 1% of the population) drink heavily after the first trimester. Those pregnant women tend to be younger, lower income Maori or Pacific, smokers, have had previous children, pregnancies were unplanned and have no secondary qualifications.

Their heavy drinking during pregnancy does impose huge costs on society, and on the kids born with FASD who often go on to have wretched lives.

So how do you best make change here? You need to target 1 in every 10,000 New Zealanders. Do you do that with measures that impact everyone such as trading hours, price or do you look to do interventions aimed at a very small group of New Zealanders who can fairly easily be identified as likely to drink heavily in pregnancy?

Newsroom has a ridiculous story on David Seymour, which can be summarised as this:

• David Seymour responds to messages sent to him on social media, including Snapchat
• Seymour does not ask people for their age before responding
• No one has suggested any of his messages were in any way inappropriate
• Seymour never initiated messaging someone, he only responded to their messages

Not one of Newsroom’s better stories.

Ben Thomas writes:

Seymour told the committee he used a working definition of regulation as “rules which restrict the use of private property”, causing Labour MP Duncan Webb to demand how rules like, say, clean air quality which did not relate to private property or money fit in.

Seymour, with an admirable restraint, explained the economic principle of externalities. That is costs (for example pollution) that are produced by individuals’ exercising property rights (like running a factory) and imposed on the majority, a market failure which invites the government to step in. Good regulation, in other words.

Economics may not be the be-all and end-all of government action. But it is a powerful tool for looking at policy problems. Webb, a former Minister of Commerce who was responsible for some of the Crown’s key regulators in the previous government, appeared to be encountering the concept for the first time.

This is very telling.

The rolling reviews of existing regulatory areas (so far early childhood education and agricultural veterinary products have been announced) by themselves represent a sea-change for the way “red tape” in the wild is reviewed. In the past departments have marked their own work, and politicians have rarely risen above gimmickry, like searches for archaic funny-sounding statutes or once-over lightly inquiries into (in a particularly cringeworthy 2017 exercise) “loopy rules”.

In contrast, the ministry will co-ordinate agencies across government to look at the impacts of regulation on all sides, as well as interviewing sector stakeholders. They will then, with the Parliamentary Counsel Office, produce concrete recommendations for amendments, rather than generalised 400-page reports useful as little except doorstops while the government “considers” their findings forever.

If the Ministry’s work produces actual legislative and regulatory changes, rather than just lengthy reports, then that will be a great thing.

A guest post by Owen Jennings:

John Christy, the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Centre at The University of Alabama, is widely recognised as an authority on what is happening climate-wise.

He shows with great clarity, in the graph below, why our government departments, regional and district councils plus some pressure groups who continue to use RCP 8.5 as a basis for policy-making are dishonest, deceptive and disillusioned. 

This extremism is not based in science or logic.  It is evidence of another agenda.

The BBC reports:

French President Emmanuel Macron has said that schools in France are being threatened by the “scourge of antisemitism” after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped in what police said was a hate crime.

According to French media, the girl told police she had been in a park in Courbevoie, north-west of Paris, with a friend last Saturday when three boys – two aged 13 and one aged 12 – approached her. She knew at least one of them.

The victim said the boys dragged her away to an isolated location before hurling antisemitic abuse at her and raping her.

The boys were arrested on Monday and two of them were charged with gang rape, antisemitic insults and violence, and issuing death threats.

French media also reported that one of the attackers threatened to kill the girl if she went to the police.

This is shocking in so many ways. Rape is terrible, but rape of a 12 year old is even more terrible. But then add to that where it seems she was targeted because she is Jewish, and the fact the rapists were also 12 and 13, and it is beyond disturbing.

I do wonder where the alleged offenders learnt their hatred – was it parents, was it online or somewhere else?

Invercargill just can’t get a break.

First they had to endure the final term of Tim Shadbolt, who obviously was no longer able to perform, the job. They had years of negative headlines, and probably relieved when Noddy Clark took over in 2022.

But alas, the current Mayor seems to be equally embarrassing.

This is a good example of why we should have recall elections in NZ.

A guest post by Sparticus Oblivious:

There are 327 police stations in NZ

Drive past 90% of them and you feel like you are living in soviet Russia, High mesh fences, Locked Gates, half a dozen police cars, and an old house resolutely shut.

Try ringing the local police station

You cant, you just bloody cant

You are told to ring somewhere else if it’s important

You are given an array of options, hanging yourself being the last one

You will be invited to partake in a survey

Your call will probably be diverted to the 105 call centre

They don’t actually say that your call is important to them, so its nice to know they are not yet that cynical, but they may as well tell you to fuck off.

You will be told there may be a considerable delay but if you are persistent, and have enough years still left to live, you will be put through to someone based god-knows where who will be really helpful, but who thinks Oratia is somewhere near Taupo.

All of the little police stations have their own web page, they generally say they are open 8.00am to 4.00pm. They have individual phone number that are listed as a cruel joke 

But there is a solution

Man the Stations

I know I know, radical, get out of here you subversive jerk.

By “man the stations” I mean have an open door through which any one can walk, and there will be a warm body there that will talk back to you when you talk to them, and if you ring the actual individual number for the actual individual police station you will get an actual person residing at the actual police station.

Imagine how much safer you would feel if you knew that that Colditz police station down the road was always manned by a friendly officer.

You could march your intransigent little 8 year old snot down to the cop shop for a stern telling off.

You could call in while walking your dog to say there was s suspicious looking car cruising around the neighbourhood.

It would be a safe haven for anyone being hassled for whatever reason.

It would cost say $20 million to upgrade the Stations, and maybe $60 million a year to man them from say 10am to 6pm each day. I would suggest 2 people be at each station, one Uniformed officer and one civilian. I am sure there would be many trainable semi-retired people who know the area and would be keen to help.

It would be the modern equivalent of bobbies on the street and the community engagement engendered would make us all feel safer.