There is considerable merit in having a tax free threshold as Phil Goff has proposed. I personally think no income should be taxed until a person is earning enough to live on – otherwise you just plough that tax back to them in the form of welfare which leads to inefficient tax churn.

But, and this is crucial, you need to make changes to welfare, WFF, child tax credits etc at the same time as you bring in a tax free threshold. It is worth remembering that many workers do not even pay net income tax until they reach $50,000 income (if they have two kids).

The other issue is affordability. If Labour had proposed a $5,000 tax free threshold when we had massive surpluses in the mid 2000s, then I would have cheered. But the Government is currently borrowing $300 million a week just to finance current spending. And if National had not made changes to Labour’s spending plans, the deficit and debt would be on a track to be ever-increasing – which would require Ireland or Greece type intervention.

The proposed “rich prick” tax on those who dare to earn a six figure income will not raise anywhere near enough money to cover a tax free threshold of $5,000. And frankly there are limits to how much one can clobber the top taxpayers – recall that the Tax Working Group found the top 10% of taxpayers pay 76% of net income tax. The more you try to clobber them, the more they will avoid tax – or leave. Recall also the finding that of the 100 wealthiest NZers, only half I think were actually paying the 38% tax rate.

Phil Goff should know this. He was part of the Government that got rid of Muldoon’s top tax rate and put in a top tax rate of 33%. And if you recall, that actually led to more tax being collected.

Then we have the so called crack down on tax avoidance:

Labour is also promising to crack down on lucrative tax loopholes used by property investors, saying it will set up an Anti-Avoidance Tax Taskforce to close the loopholes.

Billions were estimated to have been lost by people dodging tax, Mr Goff said. He singled out the ability of investors to offset rental properties against their salary to avoid paying tax.

First of all, one thing I guaanatee is that tax avoidance will increase not decrease if you stick the top tax rate up.

Secondly Goff has missed the boat. The current Government in the last Budget clamped down on several tax avoidance loopholes, plus has funded the IRD to be more aggressive here.

But even more critically, the investment property route to making money has been almost killed off by the Government’s changes to depreciation rates, plus the bubble bursting on house prices. Goff is two years too late with his policy.

I’ve just purchased a new apartment (in fact moved into it yesterday) and one of the decisions I’ve had to make is whether I sell the old apartment or keep it and become a property investor (like Phil Goff is). I’ve done the sums and now you can’t claim depreciation, the interest and other costs well outstrip the income you would get from rent – and any tax reduction on a loss, is less then the actual loss. If I was certain that property prices will increase constantly, then it would be worth doing for the capital gain. But I don’t think that is at all certain.

Up until this announcement, Labour had already indicated they wish to borrow an extra $6b a year or so (if you add up all the extra spending they have called for etc). With this policy that becomes over $7b a year.

These photos from Stuff show the old and the new Goff.

This is in fact a significant new policy direction for Labour. Their previous policy was to photoshop photos of their Leader. Their new policy is to dye their hair.

The Court of Appeal has just released a decision, that may have political ramifications.

Erin Leigh has had her case for defamation restored, after the High Court had struck it out. This does not mean she will eventually win, but it does mean there will be a trial, which could include evidence from Labour MPs and their former officials.

Leigh was a whistleblower who alleged wrog-doing over the appointment of Clare Curran as  a comunications contractor to the Environment Ministry, on the recommendation of David Parker, the then Minister.

The Ministry provided a written and oral briefing on her to Trevor Mallard, who then said very uncomplimentary things about her in Parliament. She is not suing Mallard (as he is protected by parliamentary privilege) but is suing the Government for the contents of the briefings.

So the case will proceed to court, and it will be a very interesting case. I’ll let people know once a date is scheduled.

Hat Tip: Steven Price

The NZ Herald reports:

One in three road deaths are caused by speeding, young and repeat drunk drivers, according to a new report released by Transport Minister Steven Joyce.

The Ministry of Transport report shows that between 2005 and 2009 642 people were killed in crashes where high-risk drivers were at fault.

The report is well worth reading. There is lots of interesting info in it.

The report defines high-risk drivers as unlicensed and disqualified drivers, those with previous speed and alcohol offences, or those who drive over the legal alcohol limit, evade enforcement or take part in illegal street racing.

Those drivers were at fault in 35 per cent of fatal crashes, the research shows.

It’s good to have some research focusing on the drivers who cause a disproportionate nunber of road deaths. It would have been useful to have them also calculate what percentage of the driving population are “high risk”, so one might then have a figure along the lines of “The 4% of drivers who are high risk cause 35% of fatal crashes”.

I tend to favour road safety measures that target high risk drivers.

The minister also released an addition to the report showing that when at-fault young drivers who were not already classified as high risk were added to high-risk drivers, together they comprised 53 per cent of at-fault drivers in fatal crashes and 48 per cent of at-fault drivers in fatal and serious injury crashes.

Hence the Minister says his priorities are:

• A zero drink drive limit for young drivers and repeat drink drivers
• Raising the driving age
• Tougher licensing tests for new drivers
• Alcohol interlocks for repeat drink drivers
• Doubling the prison penalties for dangerous drivers who cause death.

Sensible targeted measures, which target the drivers who cause the most crashes, rather than targetting those who drive at a BAC of 0.05 to 0.08 – a level at which almost no over 25 year old drivers are involved in fatal crashes.

Had a wonderful quirky time on Saturday night attending the world premiere of The Motor Camp at Circa.

Sometimes a production manages to bring it all together – the plot, the stage, the acting, the script all combining seamlessly – and The Motor Camp achieved this. It was a first rate production. 

The setting is native Kiwi-ana. A couple of old caravans tethered at a motor camp, with awnings stretching out from them. The unseen but often heard camp manager, Dutchie, provides some of the humour with his stern rules and notices.

One of the characters, liberal university education lecturer Frank (played convincely by Tim Sprite), rails against Dutchie and his wife, Jude, asks him what he has against Holland. Frank responds that he loves Holland, it is a wonderful liberal country – because all the fascist Dutch have left it and come to New Zealand. There’s just enough truth in it, to be bloody funny.

But Dutchie is not crucial to the plot. At the heart of it, it is a tale of two families, especially two fathers and two kids. The other family is headed up by tradesman Mike Hislop (Phil Vaughan who plays the role hilariously), who is everything Frank isn’t – rude, crude and semi-neathandal. Frank has him pigeon-holed as a racist, but has to reconsider when his Maori wife and step-son enter the scene.

The plot is very crafty – many things mentioned early on you take just as humourous asides, but they turn out to be quite important to the story later on – the phonics vs non phonics fixation of Frank for example.

The two younger actors were excellent – Florence Mulheron as 15 year old Holly Redmond and Anthony Young at 16 year old Jared Tairoa. Florence just nailed being a surly 15 year old who wants to be at “The Mount” with her boyfriend, and Anthony captured being a softly spoken youth on the verge of being an adult.

Danielle Mason plays Jude Redmond, the long-suffering wife of Frank. My first reaction was that she was far too young/hot to be cast as the mother of a 15 year old, but being a MILF forms part of the hilarity that ensues.

I won’t give away more of the plot, because I do recommend people go see it for themselves. It manages to blend a nice story about culture clash, with a boatful of laughs. I was cracking up almost non-stop.

Some of the play is a bit r-rated. Not at all offensive, but you might not want to have your ten year old attend it, and possibly not the grand-mother either.

My only criticism is that the ending was too perfect, too happy – a bit unreal – but hey its is a play, not a biography. The final line of the play however is hilarious as Holly and Jared head off to the lake, and in response to him asking what they should do, she replies they should keep out of her parents hair.

Vaimoana Tapaleao in the NZ Herald reports:

Sports broadcaster Martin Devlin – the celebrity who was arrested and charged with disorderly behaviour – says he sought name suppression to protect his children from embarrassment. But doing so only made things worse, he admitted yesterday.

Yep. If his lawyer advised him to do so, he was very badly advised. The quest for name suppression generated far more publicity for Devlin, than he would have attracted for a very minor offence. And it was of course ineffective. Even though there were no blatant high profile breaches of the suppression order, his identity became well known through word of mouth.

“I sought name suppression in an effort to try and protect my children from being identified and embarrassed by my behaviour,” he said in a statement to media. “Obviously the only effective way to prevent that was not to do it in the first place.”

Indeed.

Rebecca Todd in The Press reports:

Kiwi children are running the gauntlet of fast-food restaurants every day – with outlets five times more likely to be clustered around schools, research shows.

Who would have thought – fast food outlets are situated near customers. Shock horror. This must be stopped. Who would have thought that a shop would locate near 1,000 customers, rather than on remote rural roads.

The high number of burger joints and chip shops close to schools is thought to be a factor in the childhood-obesity epidemic sweeping the Western world.

Or a lack of exercise, plus a failure of parents to provide school lunches. I was provided with a healthy lunch by my Mum almost every day, and was skinny as a rake at school (things changed alas later on). We did have a fish and chips shop opposite the school, and maybe every few weeks would buy from it – very useful on freezing cold days.

The problem has prompted the Secondary Principals Association to call for restrictions on what dairies near schools can sell during certain hours.

Oh yes. And let us have a legion of inspectors to swoop on dairy owners and arrest them for selling some wine gums at 11 am.

Mr Day studied the clustering of fast-food and convenience stores around schools in Lower Hutt, Wellington, Christchurch, North Shore and Waitakere. In poor areas, there were 24.5 fast-food and convenience stores per 1000 pupils within 800 metres of a school, compared with 9.7 in richer areas.

Now this is interesting. You would expect there to be more stores in richer areas, because there is more money available to be spent. You would think terribly expensive fast food would do badly in poorer areas, as families would be saving money by making their lunches at home.

If this is not the case, then target the real problem – bad parenting.

Secondary Principals Association president Patrick Walsh said many principals were concerned about the prevalence of fatty-food outlets near their schools.

“They work very hard to ensure that their canteens sell healthy food, but they know the dairy down the road is prepared to sell a can of Coke and pie for $2,” he said.

More like $4 I would say. And again, the cheapest lunch is one prepared at home.

I was very relieved that the abduction on Great Barrier Island ended without loss of life. I was pretty pessimistic about the outcome, as it is rare and difficult for someone to go bush fleeing the Police, and having an abductee with them.

GBI is one of my favourite spots in New Zealand, and while it is not entirely a crime free paradise, such violence leaves a horrible stain on the community. Made even worse by the fact that in such a small community, the victim is known personally to almost everyone.

Sunday News reported:

Nortessa’s alleged abductor was yesterday taken to Auckland for questioning. He had not been charged last night.

Tait said police did well to surround him as the locals were “very angry” and she didn’t know how they would have reacted if they’d found him first.

Heh. Almost a pity they didn’t.

Peter praised his fellow islanders who came out in droves to assist police and the armed offender squad in finding Nortessa.

“There’s so much love on this island, you must have seen that. You don’t get that in too many places in the world,” he said.

“There’s been two dozen Barrier boys out there the whole time. Searching non-stop.

“All night they’ve been looking, they’ve covered hundreds of acres.”

Detective Inspector Scott Beard, who led the investigation, added: “She’s a local girl, she was part of their community, they felt a duty to come out. The whole investigation team, the locals, everyone’s happy.”

One of the many things I love about Great Barrier Island – that sense of community. If I lived in Auckland and was able to travel there more frequently, I’d seriously look at buying a home there.

I wonder how successful it was? Hat-tip: Spare Room

Just saw this editorial:

Those who read newspapers and magazines during the Christmas break – most of us, surely – will have seen a series of big Post-Primary Teachers Association advertisements. They said: “Around the world, the countries that believe in investing in education understand the central importance of teachers … Attracting great teachers for our children, and keeping them in New Zealand, costs money. How can the government … not make that investment?”

The PPTA is wasting their money. Well, not entirely. If their aim is to get a better pay deal for their members, the money is wasted. If the aim is to help Labour by painting National as anti-education, then they may feel it is a good investment.

PPTA members do not believe that an administration that has supported the Rugby World Cup, South Canterbury Finance, Warner Bros and hated private schools cannot afford to give them a 4 per cent pay rise. That they have had three successive rises of 4 per cent when many parents got nothing or lost their jobs seems to have happened in a parallel universe.

I wonder if they will keep their strike action going for all of 2011.

An irony of the PPTA’s advertising campaign is that, under Helen Clark’s Electoral Finance Act, the union would have had to think twice about mounting it. Third-party advertising was heavily proscribed throughout an entire election year.

That this highly political union can now advertise its distress about pay rates to the full extent of its members’ willingness to fund it until three months before polling day – without falling foul of an anti-free speech law – is thanks only to its enemy, the Key-led Government.

Very true.

Dr Richard Ekins has done a guest post responding to the guest post by David Garrett:

David Garrett’s defence of the three strikes legislation has not improved with the passing of time.

He says:

“As some commentators at the time have noted – with some justification – indecent assault can cover a fairly broad continuum from the “drunken grope” to near rape. In my view the relative seriousness of various forms of indecent assault is a red herring – or at least a separate debate. None of the other “strike” convictions thus far can be described as “minor offences”, although others will no doubt argue otherwise.”

I was one of those ‘commentators’ (see the Guest Paper published by the Maxim Institute.

It’s nice to see Mr Garrett now conceding we had some justification for our concerns (at the time he, together with the Hon Judith Collins MP just blithely asserted that there were no relatively minor offences) but it is wildly misleading to say that the relative seriousness of indecent assault is a red herring. 58 of the first 209 strike convictions are for indecent assault. That is over a quarter of all convictions.

It is extremely likely, if this law is not repealed in the next few years, that some persons convicted of a minor indecent assault (a drunken grope, not premeditated, no serious harm to the victim, where the offender pleads guilty, is remoresful and pays compensation to the victim) will be sentenced to 7yrs in prison, without parole. That sentence is longer than is imposed on an ‘ordinary’ case of rape, if the offender pleads guilty (and the rapist is eligible for parole).

The assertion that all the other convictions, other than for indecent assault, were “pure violence” offences is also misleading. Doubtless, some, and probably many, of them involved actual infliction of violence. But one can commit robbery or even aggravated robbery without inflicting violence – threats of violence, even if minor, are enough. Obviously many robberies are extremely violent and they are all wrong. But it is just not true to suggest that all those convicted of robbery (or aggravated burglary, which one can commit by breaking into an empty warehouse with a crowbar) have commited crimes of “pure violence”.

Mr Garrett relies on his friend the District Court Registrar, who tells him “that almost without exception, they are familiar faces, having appeared before – some on many occasions – often for violent offending.” What does this tell us? 132 offenders were convicted of the 209 strike offences. There are 66 District Courts in the country. On average then, each District Court has seen 2 offenders. The fact that the 2 offenders the Registrar is likely to have seen (or, be generous and say her District Court has seen far more than any other in the country, say 8 offenders) have been before the courts doesn’t prove that these are ‘the worst of the worst’ (as Garrett reports her, some of the previous offences are for non-violent offences, and many of the violent offences may be common assault) as the legislation was said to be focused.

The main problem in principle with the three strikes law, setting aside the practical problems (it will mean there are a great many unnecessary, expensive trials, putting victims through unnecessary anguish and making it more difficult to convict offenders, many of whom now have no incentive to cooperate with prosecutors and to testify), is that it imposes arbitrary punishments. Many offenders deserve severe punishment. The three strikes law ignores nearly everything that is relevant to deciding what punishment an offender deserves (premeditation, cruelty, impact on the victim, remorse, etc…) instead requiring severe punishments to be imposed on an arbitrary, irrational basis.

It will be interesting to observe what happens as offenders notch up a second or a third strike. If those getting third strikes are repeat violent offenders, the law will remain very popular. If people do get sent away for seven years no parole for a grope, then there will be a backlash.

What will also be interesting from my perspectuve, is how Judges will use the “manifestly unjust” provisions. If they never use it (and it is a high threshold) then the chances of someone getting seven years for a grope will be increased. On the other hand it is possible Judges may use it too much, watering down the effectiveness of the law.

I suspect we are a year or two away from second strikes starting to accumulate, and we may not even get any third strikes for five years or so.

Incidentially I agreed with some (not all) of the changes proposed in the Maxim paper by Dr Ekins and Professor Brookbanks.

John Roughan writes:

Not much that happens in summer grinds my teeth but last weekend the Herald on Sunday reported outrage among a certain class of campers because the Department of Conservation might let private operators run its camp grounds.

Their outrage was particularly rich because the previous Sunday the same reporter, Kieran Nash, had found at Urupukapuka Island in the Bay if Islands that some of DoC’s regular customers are cheating those who would like to share the pristine places we pay for.

In case you missed it, they book out their favourite places every season by reserving much more than the tent site they need. One way they do this is by booking a site for every person in the tent.

They don’t have to be very clever, the department’s online booking clerks don’t appear to care how many sites someone takes. The sooner the place is booked out the better for the booking team. They were all on holiday when the paper sought comment.

Nor do the greedy need much money. In the hallowed principles of public ownership the department lets each site for as little as $8-$15 a night.

You could take three or four sites for the price of a night in a privately run camping ground.

No wonder DoC’s website usually has no vacancies. It is only when disappointed customers make a day trip that they find just a few scattered campers enjoying paradise.

Which is one of the reasons why subsidies often lead to inefficient allocation of resources.

In principle the Conservation Department wants as many of the public as possible to enjoy the estate their taxation maintains. In practice, it is not very good at making that possible.

Happily the department also has to minimise the public outlay and supplement its income where possible by allowing some commerce in the parks. Profit-makers are very good at maximising public use.

They have the right incentives to do so.

The department is talking to the New Zealand Holiday Parks Association about running its camp grounds and there is consternation in the wild.

A petition is circulating against roads, bollards and marked sites. The Green Party says the camps will resemble the suburbs people go on holiday to escape. Labour’s tourism spokesman predicts “canvas subdivisions”.

I camped in a canvas subdivision at a Coromandel beach last week. It was not the sort of suburb I live in – it was open to the neighbours, children played everywhere, family life was public. During the day people walked around totally unconcerned about how they looked. In the evening they socialised.

I thought people who talk of caring, sharing and social equality liked this sort of thing.

No, no, no, no. One can’t actually mingle with the masses.

So what exactly would be the problem for critics of private enterprise? It can’t be the cost because DoC’s fortunate few will pay that much for multiple sites. And it can’t be the environment because a camp operator would have an interest in helping to protect it.

Their problem, it’s very obvious, is people – too many people sharing their space and in their face. There’s no snob like a social democrat.

Exactly.

Driving around the Coromandel last week it struck me again how daft we are to lock up the mineral wealth of that whole peninsula. It is not wild and rugged like the Southern Alps, it is not covered in native rainforest like the Ureweras. It has attractive coasts, common in the north.

This country is not so blessed with economic resources that we can preserve the conservation estate for an intrepid few. Obviously a beautiful lonely landscape has to be kept that way for its economic value but there is plenty of room in our pristine environment to hide accessible resorts operated properly, profitably and fairly for the greater good.

Yep.

An interesting interview with Chris Trotter by Whale Oil.

His thoughts on Labour are especially insightful:

On Labours “Get John Key” campaign:

“Com­pletely mis­taken, did not read the man at all well”

“One sus­pects that they despair of find­ing some other way through.”

On how mod­ern Labour can become more appealing:

“It does very well when it plays to the best, in New Zealan­ders, when it booths artic­u­lates and asks peo­ple to respond to the bright side rather than the dark side of the NZ way of doing things.”

“When they find some­one who can artic­u­late them, as they did with Michael Joseph Sav­age  as they did with Nor­man Kirk, as they cer­tainly did with David Lange, then they are very hard to beat, but if those two things are lack­ing, if they lack some­one who is able to artic­u­late that appeal to New Zealand’s bet­ter angels, to bor­row Abra­ham Lincoln’s famous phrase and if they aren’t dri­ven in a sense by adverse eco­nomic winds then Labour does find it dif­fi­cult his­tor­i­cally to win.”

On Phil Goff:

“He hasn’t demon­strated to date, either the rhetor­i­cal skills nec­es­sary to make that appeal, and cer­tainly to date he hasn’t been able to emote in a way that New Zealan­ders can believe.”

On Labour entic­ing bet­ter candidates:

[They need] “life expe­ri­ence which you cer­tainly don’t get in any great breadth on the ninth floor of the beehive”

A guest post by former MP David Garrett on the Three Strikes law:

This week, figures on convictions since the “three strikes” legislation came into force were released. 132 offenders were convicted of 209 “strike” offences. 151 of the convictions were for “pure violence” offences –including aggravated robbery (59), robbery(29), wounding with intent (33) and injuring with intent (20). There were also 58 convictions for indecent assault.

As some commentators at the time have noted – with some justification – indecent assault can cover a fairly broad continuum from the “drunken grope” to near rape. In my view the relative seriousness of various forms of indecent assault is a red herring – or at least a separate debate. None of the other “strike” convictions thus far can be described as “minor offences”, although others will no doubt argue otherwise.

These early results are entirely to be expected. At the time the Bill was being debated, there was all manner of ill informed – and downright dishonest – claims that “three strikes” would see people locked up for minor offences including theft. It seemed not to matter how often it was explained that the Bill was carefully drafted to target only repeat violent offenders – the misinformation campaign went on.

All of the convictions since June 2010 were first strikes, meaning the offenders who were actually sent to prison are still eligible for parole as before. The only thing that changed was those offenders now have a first warning on their file – which will have real consequences when they appear again for a violent offence – and most of them will.

A registrar of my acquaintance runs a District Court in a provinical area. She has paid particular attention to the “strike” offenders appearing for sentence in that court. She tells me that almost without exception, they are familiar faces, having appeared before – some on many occasions – often for violent offending.

She also tells me that most of those sentenced appear to pay little attention to the warning, although if their lawyers are doing their jobs, the offenders will have been told that as a result of it, a further conviction for a strike offence will have a significantly different outcome. Next time, any custodial sentence will have to be served without parole, and even in our ridiculously liberal justice system, a second conviction for a strike offence will almost certainly result in a prison sentence.

The debate about whether three strikes “works” will continue regardless of the results. I have no doubt that even if in three years time violent crime has dropped significantly, the liberal left will refuse to believe that a more punitive approach has anything to do with it. Sadly the left are like that.

The late Dr Dennis Dutton told me a few years ago of his great amusement at the disquiet in American liberal academia when homicides in New York City plummeted in the early 1990’s. Those in the ivory towers embarked upon a feverish search for “the real reason” homicide had declined from about 2500 in 1990 to about 450 per year at the end of the decade. They simply could not accept that something as “simplisitic” as more police on the street with a different attitude, and sentence enhancement measures similar to a “three strikes” approach could have been the reason.

New Yorker’s didn’t care what the reason was, they were just happy to be able to take their kids to Times Square on a Sunday afternoon without being hassled by drug dealers or robbed. Most New Zealanders will be similarly happy that 132 violent offenders now have their first strike, and that within a few years a good proportion of them will be locked up for a long time.

Like David, I’m looking forward to the legislation leading to some repeat violent offenders getting locked up for a long time, so they can’t continue to offend.

Like many, I watced the first episode without Simon Cowell last night. It was pretty good.

While Cowell had become famous through American Idol, J-Lo and Steven Tyler have literally been idols to many of the contestants, and it showed.

J-Lo managed to become the nice one, but without being annoying like Paula Abdul, and resisted telling crap singers they are not crap.

Tyler seemed to join in half the acts, which was probably equally terrifying and awesome to the prospects. He makes some very off the wall comments.

They didn’t show as many “bad” auditions in the first episode. There were a few, but most of the show was on a few memorable auditions – memorable for the personalities more than the singing to a degree.

I suspect ratings for Season 10 will be as high as the other seasons. How did others find the first show of Season 10? Any favourite performers?

The Dom Post reports:

A Wellington judge has told a doctor appearing on child exploitation charges that he was “extremely sad” to sentence him because there was a worldwide shortage in his profession.

Wellington trainee radiologist Andrew Jeremy Dunkley, 35, was sentenced in Wellington District Court yesterday on six charges of possessing objectionable publications after police discovered 50,000 images on his computer.

Dunkley’s house was raided in September and his computer seized after a tip-off that resulted from an international police operation.

Crown prosecutor Alice McCobbin-Howell said Dunkley had admitted to police that he had been accessing images of children on the internet for the past 10 years.

The international investigation had led to three children in Britain being identified and removed from sexually abusive homes, she said.

“The children depicted in the images are real children and this is not victimless offending.”

Defence lawyer Greg King said the 50,000 images had not been downloaded and stored but accumulated on the computer’s cache after visiting websites.

No jail when you have 50,000 child porn images is getting off lightly. Now if it was true that he had never deliberately downloaded them, but they were just all cached images, that could explain such a light sentence.

But how credible is it? Let us say that each image is 100 KB. So to have 50,000 images in your cache, the cache would need to be at 5 GB – and that is if you had not looked at any other sites.

Vernon Small in the Dom Post reports:

Meanwhile, Labour has announced its nominees as candidates for the Botany by-election with a virtual concession of defeat.

Labour Party president Andrew Little said Botany was a safe National seat. “So we don’t expect to win.”

The party would use the by-election, forced by the resignation of National MP Pansy Wong, as an opportunity to promote policies, issues and values it believed were important to the electorate and the country, he said.

Its nominees are former Botany Community Board member Roy Bootle, electrician and Howick Local Board member David Collings, and Michael Wood, a former unionist and candidate for Pakuranga and current Puketapapa Local Board member.

Interesting that Raymond Huo is not seeking the nomination. I guess the Tizard factor is still concerning them, as if Huo won the seat, Tizard would be offered his list place.

Stuff is running an NZPA story:

The tragedy at the Pike River Coal mine would not have happened if New Zealand had maintained a mining inspector programme canned more than a decade ago, a mining specialist says.

A chief inspector would have noticed the dangerous levels of gases pooling at the West Coast mine, and the 29 men who died in explosions from November 19 on would still be alive.

Safety officials do monitor mines around the country, but the system was inferior to the inspector system that was used until the late 1990s, Dave Feickert said.

I am automatically suspicious of any so called expert who without any evidence at all claims the mine explosion would not have happened if x had been done. Considering we have a Royal Commission about to hear actual evidence on what caused the explosion, you wonder about the motives of someone who states opinion as fact.

It was not right that Prime Minister John Key was making decisions about mine safety because he was not an expert in the area, Mr Feickert said.

“No wonder the families of the 29 dead are furious. So they should be.”

I get even more suspicious when this expert makes a personal attack on the PM which is factually incorrect (Key has not made any decisions), and is encouraging the families to blame John Key.

Then a birdie from Whanganui tells me that Mr Feickert is in fact the Chairman of the Whanganui Labour Party. Suddenly it all makes sense.

A google search has not verified he is currently a Labour Party Chairman, but what it does reveal is that Feickert is:

• a former top official in the militant British National Union of Mineworkers
• the CTU unions Wanganui secretary
• a member of the NZ Labour Party
• supported Arthur Scargill in 1984 UK strikes

This is not to say that Feickert does not know a lot about mining. He does. But by not reporting he is a militant unionist and labour party office holder, then people don’t understand the context of why he is attacking John Key on false grounds.

UPDATE: Now confirmed that Feickert is (or at least was earlier this year) Labour’s Whanganui chairman.

The first poll of 2011 is out by Roy Morgan. It was taken from 4 to 16 January. The seats based on this poll would be:

• National 69
• Labour 36
• Greens 9
• Maori 5
• ACT 2
• United 1

It is broadly in line with the two TV polls in December. The sample size is 1815 which gives a very small margin of error.

Ironically I understand Phil Goff is in fact hosting a BBQ at his place next week.

Hat Tip: Whowuddathort