James Ihaka at the Herald reports:

Justice Minister Simon Power has turned down calls for an independent inquiry into a 40-year-old murder mystery. …

William Rowe, a spokesman for Arthur Allan Thomas, the man wrongly accused of murdering Jeanette and Harvey Crewe, wrote to the minister’s office supporting calls for an independent inquiry.

In the email he wanted to know who, on the balance of probabilities, murdered the Crewes.

He also asked if there was evidence to bring charges against anyone involved in the investigation for the wrongful arrest and convictions of Mr Thomas based on the Thomas Royal Commission findings in 1980.

“I plead with you to do the right thing and order an inquiry,” said Mr Rowe in the email.

“Justice is the most important thing in the world and every New Zealander has the right to have faith in the system, because it belongs to them, not the police.”

In response, Mr Power said he understood the interest in seeking closure, but his hands were tied. …

“Neither I nor my ministerial colleagues can direct the police to reopen the case.”

If the request has been made 30 years ago, or even 20 years ago, then I’d say go for it. BuSt I can’t imagine in 2010, an inquiry could come to any useful conclusions. Finding out who, on the balance of probabilities, murdered the Crewes, would have been possible when key people were alive, but at least two of the suspects are dead.

So on this issue, I think the Minister has made the right decision, in fact almost the only decision possible.

The case that I do think should have had a full Commission of Inquiry is the Peter Ellis case.

Two significant things today.

We had explosion no 4. So on average an explosion every second day or so.

John Key has announced on Q+A that the Commission of Inquiry will be a Royal Commission. There is no real difference in powers (the legislation does not distinguish) and the “official” guidelines are that Royal Commissions in recent times have been for social policy inquiries. But the nice thing about being Prime Minister is you can decide to ignore things such as guidelines.

I suspect he was motivated by the fact Erebus was a Royal Commission, and not wanting this to be seen as inferior.

All eyes will be on the name of the Judge selected to chair it.

Jonathan Marshall reports in the SST:

EMBATTLED MP Pansy Wong has been “interrogated” by officials over allegations of travel perk misuse.

The National MP and former minister is under investigation by Parliamentary Services after admitting travelling to China with her husband using a travel perk that entitled her to a 90% discount. Rules state the perk can only be used for private travel but her husband, Sammy, conducted business while there.

All of Wong’s travel, including 10 trips taken while a minister in the current administration, are under review.

Last week Wong was hauled into an “interrogation” by investigators, a source close to the inquiry said.

“Pansy was spoken to and it is expected the results will be ready within a few days,” the source said.

Good. Decisions should be made on the basis of a thorough investigation and the facts as they are revealed.

There are generally seven outcomes from MP “misbehaviour”. In rough order they are:

1. No action taken at all
2. Money is repaid, but no other action – various Ministers and former Ministers who had minor inappropriate spending
3. A formal reprimand or warning – Phil Heatley
4. A demotion but no loss of pay – Chris Carter, demoted from front bench to second bench over his perks
5. Sacking/forced resignation from a role which results in loss of pay – sacked from Cabinet, or as Deputy Speaker etc
6. Suspended or expelled from Caucus
7. Criminal charges laid

No 5 has already happened. What we don’t know is whether the facts support No 6 or No 7 occuring. No 7 will not be a decision for the Government, it will ultimately be a matter for the Police of the SFO.

No 6 will be a matter for the party caucus. It is generally used over issues of party loyalty – Chris Carter for example was not suspended over his use of perks – he was suspended for his letter to the press gallery. Even Taito Philip Field was not suspended for his corrupt behaviour – he was suspended/expelled for saying he might stand against Labour.

It is possible No 6 could happen if Caucus felt that the report is so damning that Pansy should resign immediately from Parliament. However the view might be that having a by-election in election year is a waste of money, if (for example) Pansy indicates she will be retiring at the election anyway.

It is good the report is likely to be complete soon, as that will then allow judgement and decisions to be made.

Matt McCarten looks back on Mana:

These days you wouldn’t know what the differences were between the two main parties. Listening to Labour’s Kris Faafoi and National’s Hekia Parata at candidate meetings over the campaign, I’m still unsure if there’s any difference.

The only point where they disagreed was over Labour’s disingenuous promise to take GST off fresh fruit and veges to help “struggling families”.

However, at the same time, Labour said it would keep GST at 15 per cent. That means the weekly family groceries would still be more expensive than they were before the GST increase.

That is pathetic, really. But Faafoi insisted that, wherever he went, his supporters were enthusiastic with the extra scraps thrown their way.

I’m not sure the founders of the Labour Party would have bothered sacrificing their blood, sweat and tears for a socialist paradise if they had known their difference a century later to the capitalist class was GST off stuff they grew in their gardens.

Indeed not exactly bold and visionary.

Despite that, I always assumed Labour would retain Mana but I was amazed how close the final result was. At the beginning of the campaign I said that if I couldn’t get a close third or second place in the last week, then any support I had would slip to Labour.

We had identified about 2000 supporters but, in the last few days, Labour’s message that I was splitting the vote resonated andit would have been a loss – most of those people moved to Labour to keep Parata out.

They were right, too. If I had retained my earlier support, Labour certainly would have lost. Retaining the seat by just over 1000 votes is a wake-up call for Labour.

I understand around 1 in five people in Cannons Creek etc were initially saying they would vote for McCarten. If that had happened, but the Labour vote machine is quite formidable.

This brings me to whether there’s a space for a new party if Labour continues to drift. This idea was surprisingly raised on the Labour Party-aligned Standard Blog during the Mana by-election. It suggested I’d been in cahoots with Hone Harawira and Sue Bradford in planning such a project.

That is nonsense. I’ve never had any conversations about such a thing with either Harawira or Bradford. However, I do have enormous respect for both and, if such a coming together of people like them did happen, I wouldn’t stay away.

Shock horror, they made it up.

I believe in a strong progressive force within the Labour Party but my experience as the president of the New Labour Party and its successor, the Alliance, is that it’s also necessary to have a strong force outside that party.

Without such a presence outside, Labour tends to swing to the right to compete with National for the so-called centre vote. Labour’s been doing that for the past two and a half decades and trying to be National-lite won’t get Phil Goff into government next year.

So here’s my advice to Labour. If you don’t look after your left flank then it may well create an opportunity for another progressive party to appeal to people who were once reliably in your camp.

In the Mana campaign I promoted traditional Labour policies to working class people who loved them. Fortunately for you, enough of them went back to you last Saturday to save your party from humiliation.

Next year they may not. That’s the real lesson of the Mana by-election.

I can’t wait to see the reaction when Matt realises Labour policy is now to allow part-privatisations of SOE subsidiaries!

Don Brash’s speech to the Orewa National Party last night was titled “Return to Orewa”. He covers all the good stuff the Government has done, but also his deep worries. First the good stuff:

• The New Zealand economy is out of recession and is growing.
• At 6.4% of the workforce, unemployment is lower than in most other developed countries.
• Personal income tax rates have been cut significantly.
• The Government has moved to allow employers and employees to agree a 90 day probationary period in employment contracts, bringing us broadly into line with all other developed countries.
• Steps have been taken to streamline the process of approving building consents for multiple dwellings.
• A start has been made on reforming the Resource Management Act.
• The Government has ended the moratorium which has prevented the establishment of new aquaculture areas for the last decade.
• And to cap it all off, the Government, and the Prime Minister personally, stand high in the polls!

And one can add some more around cutting bureaucracy, better use of the health dollar, tertiary education changes and national standards.

The last bullet point is also rather important. If you lose the goodwill of the people, then you lose the next election. And the problem isn’t that some MPs lose their job, but that all the good policy changes you have made, get reversed and worse by a change of Government.

I worry that, despite knowing that the Labour Government’s abolition of the youth minimum wage has very substantially increased youth unemployment – by 12,000 according to Canterbury University economics professor Eric Crampton – we have taken no action (indeed, we voted against Roger Douglas’s Bill to reinstate the youth minimum wage), so that thousands and thousands of young people leave school or training and quickly become demoralized, deprived of the opportunity to support themselves, with all the social and personal harm that that does.

This is a topic I have blogged on often, and do agree with Don on. The abolition of the youth minimum wage has been devastating to the employment prospects of young people.

I know the Government doesn’t want to be seen to be “cutting wages”, but what disappoints me is they have not even attempted to have a discussion with the voting public on this issue. And there are compromise options such as freezing the current youth rate in place, and allowing the adult rate to increase over time, so there will be enough of a difference for employers to have an incentive to give that 17 year old their first job.

I worry that, despite telling New Zealanders before the electito on that we should be fast followers and not leaders in the race to reduce carbon emissions, we have introduced an all-sectors Emissions Trading Scheme in a situation where none of our three largest trading partners – Australia, China, and the United States – has yet done so, nor in two of those cases seems likely to do so.

This one I am okay with. Firstly the 2008 manifesto said National supported an all sectors all gases scheme. Secondly I think the scheduled review in 2011 will take pragmatic steps such as agriculture not entering, if there is no sign of a global post-Kyoto agreement.

I worry that, despite being a party which believes in allowing people the maximum freedom to make choices for themselves, we have to date done nothing to allow more freedom for parents to choose the school their children attend.

I’d love to see National campaign in 2011 on school choice, full funding of schools (incl salaries) and performance pay. But that was not the 2008 policy, or indeed the 2005 policy if I recall it.

First, it is absolutely imperative that Government gets its fiscal deficit under control quickly. Bill English knows this of course, and has started the process by putting a much tighter limit in place for new government spending. He’s also doing his best to condition opinion by warning that restraint on government spending will be needed for years ahead.

The Government is trying to get rid of the deficit by restricting future spending increases, rather than cutting existing spending. It is pretty finely balanced as to whether they will pull it off. Those with larger deficits like the UK and Ireland have had to actually cut spending. It isn’t popular but it is necessary in those countries.

If National had known in mid 2008 what would happen with the global recession, I don’t think it would have promised to leave Working for Families and interest free student loans untouched. I am not someone who advocates they should break their word on those policies. But what I do advocate is that National should seriously consider whether they should signal changes in the 2011 election manifesto. I do believe the public understand that you can not spend money you do not have. In the UK, polls have shown that a majority of people support spending cuts to reduce the deficit.

As the 2025 Taskforce argued in its recent report, the argument for privatisation is different today than it was in the eighties. No longer are government trading operations grossly inefficient; nor is our government debt yet at dangerous levels. Rather, the argument for privatisation today is that, by selling SOEs into the private sector, we empower them to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the future in a way which is impossible while they remain in state ownership. Nokia is today one of the world’s foremost producers of mobile phones, but it began life as a company producing lumber and electricity. If it had been in government ownership, it would still be producing lumber and electricity.

Interestingly, even Labour have started to edge away from their previous zealotry on this issue. I will do a separate blog on this, but Labour have talked about private ownership stakes in subsidiaries of SOEs. That is progress.

As a Party, we need to be at the forefront of challenging why the state should be:
• The biggest owner of dairy farms in New Zealand;
• The biggest fund managers in New Zealand;
• The 50% owner of a large chain of petrol stations;
• By far the biggest owner of rental properties;
• The dominant generator of electricity;
• The dominant owner of our trains and planes;
• The owner of our most aggressively growing bank.

What frustrates me is when parties freeze the status quo, and have blanket bans on any sales at all. Decisions on ownership should be taken on a case by case basis.

One of the problems in any democratic society is that when left-of-centre parties are in power they tax heavily the high-income minority to win votes from the majority. For at least a time, they can be almost guaranteed of winning if they take $1,000 off one voter and give $200 to each of five voters (after clipping the ticket on the way through of course!). Right-of-centre governments feel obliged to continue that policy, even where it violates their constitution and destroys the country’s future. The problem is that, unless those policies are reversed from time to time, we get a steady increase in the size of government, and a steady increase in the tax burden carried by the most productive members of our community. It takes courage, vision and moral purpose to reverse that trend.

I agree, and this must become a goal of the Government – to have a minority, not a majority, dependent on the state for income. When you add up all those on welfare, all those who receive Working for Families, those on national super, and those directly employed by the state, you end up with a lot of people whose personal interests are bettered by having a larger state, even if over time it inevitably means a smaller economy as a whole.

I’ve embedded Don’s speech below, so people can read it in its entirety, rather than just the few quotes that the media take from it. I don’t agree with all of it (as one would expect) and think it is important for National to be seen as keeping their word, but the issues Don raises are ones the Government needs to keep at top of mind when they start putting together their 2011 manifesto.

Return to Orewa (Final)

This seems to be my week for being very unhappy with the Government. This story actually offends me even more than the electoral finance changes. the electoral finance changes were at least made for the right reasons – to get bipartisan agreement on electoral law.

But this story in the HoS by David Fisher makes my blood boil, if it accurately reflects the situation.

Readers may recall that earlier this year the Government banned certain methods of killing animals, which included shechita – the traditional Jewish method, which is necessary to have food as “kosher”.

I’d not commented on the issue previously as I felt a bit conflicted. I don’t believe in religious beliefs trumping laws, but I do think it is desirable to try and allow communities to practice traditional beliefs – within limits.

If it was purely an issue of animal welfare. I was content to leave it to the  Government to find that balance between animal welfare and traditional practice. I’m not an expert on either.

But the article reveals:

A farming company part-owned by a Cabinet minister was able to give him a briefing about how the Government could protect its lucrative trade with Muslim countries by banning Jewish slaughtering.

This is where my blood boils. That it appears it was not animal welfare, but appeasing foreign Governments, that was part of the motivation for the law change. Now the Minister can’t control what people who lobby him say in their submissions to him, but what is disappointing is that he then referred to those concerns in documents to other Ministers.

Carter was being sued by the Auckland Hebrew Congregation for changing the law in May to make traditional Jewish slaughter of animals illegal. The case was set to begin in the High Court at Wellington tomorrow – until an embarrassing backdown by Carter who on Friday overturned the ban he asked Cabinet to support.

The practice of shechita on poultry was declared no longer illegal while the Government also agreed to negotiate the ban on sheep. New Zealand Jews will still have to import beef from Australia, where shechita is allowed.

Good to see a compromise. But my concern is not whether there is a ban or not, but about what was driving the ban.

Carter did not respond to requests for an interview.

In a statement he said: “Claims that business interests determined my decision on the Commercial Slaughter Code of Welfare are totally baseless. Animal welfare was the primary consideration in making this decision and I have said many times that animal welfare is a priority of mine.”

There is considerable wriggle room between trade interests “determining my decision” and “animal welfare was the primary consideration”. That does not rule out that trade interests were a strong secondary factor which influenced the decision, even if not determining it.

Victoria went to the polls yesterday. It has had Labor rule for 11 years and earlier this year were looking likely to be re-elected.

At this stage it looks like the Coalition (and it was the first election since 1999 when they were together as a Coalition) has won power with 45 out of 88 seats. Labor has 37 seats and is likely to end up with 43. It is still very possible there is a hung Parliament at 44 each.

The Coalition got 44.8% of the primary vote and Labor 36.9%. Greens did well at 10.6% but not as well as expected, and failed to win a seat. Labor attacked the Greens aggressively.

This may be the third election in a row where there has been a hung Parliament – Tasmania had one also, as did the Federal election.

Amused to read in the Dom Post that John Key has revealed more of his meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, sitting next to him at the APEC dinner.

Medvedev told the PM it would take 15 minutes for a missile from Moscow to reach Washington DC. The PM couldn’t contain his curiousity and asked how long it would take to reach NZ.

Medvedev consulted the person standing behind him and replied “22 minutes, but I’ll ring you beforehand” 🙂

In today’s Dominion Post, Vernon Small and John Hartevelt rate the high achievers and the casualties of the first tow years of the Government.Note the comments below are my extracts of what Vernon and John said – they are not my personal views.

Top of the Class

1. John Key 8.5/10
2. Simon Power 8.0/10 – they suggest he moves to Education
3. Steven Joyce 7.5/10 – possible Finance Minister in the future
4. Gerry Brownlee – has risen from defeat to become one of Govt’s best assets – they say he may be in line for deputy PM
5. Tim Groser – 6.5/10 – a good example of why you have List MPs, doing an excellent job in trade

Casualties

• Richard Worth
• Bill English over his housing allowance
• Melissa Lee over Mt Albert
• Aaron Gilmore over his CV
• Pansy Wong over her travel

Struggling

• Anne Tolley 4.5/10 – valiantly trying against the powerful education unions
• Rodney Hide – 4.0/10 – his imploding caucus
• Georgina te Hehheu – 2.5/10 – what does she do?
• Pansy Wong – 2.0/10 – even before she quit, they say she had sunk without trace

Rising Backbenchers

• Craig Foss – favoured to narrowly beat his Hawke’s Bay colleague into Cabinet
• Hekia Parata – a strong showing in Mana, and in her previous career
• Chester Borrows – a solid Chairman of Justice & Electoral Committee
• Amy Adams – has shone in the House

The Success Stories

• The tax switch
• A stable Government
• Law & Order

Disasters and Pressure Points

• The economy
• The environment
• Natural disasters

Feel free to comment on whether you agree or disagree, any additions you would make, and where?

The most obvious omission to me is Tony Ryall in the top of the class. I doubt a single MP would say he is not up there.

The Dom Post editorial:

Four year after being caught with their fingers in the parliamentary cookie jar, politicians are finally putting their affairs in order.

A parliamentary select committee has agreed to redefine the legal meaning of electioneering to make it clear that public funds cannot be used for pledge cards and other campaign material.

This is the good bit. The rules about what can be funded out of parliamentary budgets will be tighter than ever before, during the regulated period.

The change is contained in the bill that replaces the odious Electoral Finance Act – Labour’s attempt to tilt the electoral playing field in its favour by restricting the rights of its critics to express themselves in election year.

The new bill loosens the restrictions but, regrettably, does not remove them. Justice Minister Simon Power has put broad parliamentary consensus ahead of his National colleagues’ views, who loudly opposed any restriction on free speech when Labour and its allies pushed the Electoral Finance Bill through in 2007.

Labour have basically got the law they wanted.

Labour and the Greens argue that the cap is necessary to prevent wealthy interests “buying” elections. However, that could have been achieved without compromising free speech simply by requiring those who want to spend large amounts of money broadcasting their views to disclose their identities – something the new bill already requires them to do.

Voters are not stupid. If they know who is paying for advertising campaigns, they know whose interests are being served.

Indeed, and the 2010 US elections clearly showed you can not buy an election. Meg Whitman spent almost $200m on her bid to be Governor of California and she lost by a massive 14%.

Mr Power has also balked at reforming the broadcasting regime that unfairly advantages incumbent parties and politicians for the same reason.

He could not gain widespread parliamentary support for changes to the system, which gives the major parties the lion’s share of broadcasting funds and prohibits their opponents from buying TV and radio time with their own money.

Here is what annoys me. That Labour were both allowed to veto changes to the broadcasting regime, and were also allowed to get third party spending restrictions put in place, despite National opposition. What did National get in return – a miserly $5,000 extra per electorate spending.

The principle underlying the new legislation should have been transparency. Sunlight is the best protection against the buying and selling of influence.

Mr Power’s bill falls well short of the ideal, but it is still a quantum improvement on its Labour predecessor.

I agree.

Been so busy this week only got around to the quiz today.

The good news is I got 10/10 in 31 seconds.

The bad news is their Q1 is wrong.

They asked how much can lobbyists give to political parties. The answer to that question is unlimited.

The question they meant to ask (based on what they say is the right answer) is how much money could a lobbyist spend on advertising during an election campaign.

Jim Anderton has had an op ed published in the NZ Herald, which demonstrates a total ignorance of MMP. It is unbelievable that an MP could get the most basic things so totally wrong. The key aspect is:

But the most critical factor, crucial to victory, is the National-held “marginal seats”, many of which have been traditionally Labour-held seats. Their importance in any election result has been largely ignored. We only need to look to recent state and federal elections in Australia to see how important these seats are in determining the outcome.

Both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott spent what seemed like a disproportionate amount of their time in marginal seats. They knew only too well how important those seats were.

Marginal seats are oftetn pivotal to election victory and that’s where New Zealand’s election next year will be won or lost.

I might forgive a first year politics student for getting things so horribly wrong, but not an MP. Yes marginal seats are crucial in Australia – that is because they determine the election – whomever wins the most electorates wins.

But NZ has MMP. And apart from the occasional minor overhang, wining electorate seats does not gain you mroe overall seats in Parliament, as you get fewer list seats if you do. Your totla number of seats is determined by your share of the party vote.

Currently, the National-led coalition Government of four parties has 16 more seats in Parliament than the Labour-led opposition of three parties. How many more seats does Labour have to win to be in a position to form the next government by having more seats than National?

The answer is only nine seats – if the nine seats are won by Labour off National and Labour wins all its current seats.

In Labour’s favour, National has nine “marginal” seats which would be lost to Labour with a swing of less than 3 per cent.

Anderton is horribly wrong. so wrong, I don’t know whether it is stupidity or worse. If Labour won nine more electorate seats, then they would have nine fewer list seats.

What Labour need to win is to lift its party vote by 7%, not to win nine more electorate seats. Winning electorate seats is desirable, but Anderton fails POLS101 by making such moronic errors. And winning more party votes happens in all seats, not just nine marginal seats.

As far as the “party vote” is concerned, the clear evidence is that where a major party is picking up electorate seats from its opponent, it is also increasing its share of the party vote.

Actually it goes the other way around. If you increase your party vote in a seat, then the electorate vote tends to increase. But you need to increase your party vote in all seats.

If the party vote grew by 14% in the nine marginal seats, and stayed the same everywhere else, then the overall growth in the party vote would be around 2% only.

Anderton also makes some other errors, or over-states his case:

For example, Roy Morgan polls over the past six months show National and its support parties tracking downwards, with the latest (October 17) showing their support has dipped to 55 per cent from a high of 58.5 per cent in July. Meanwhile, Labour and its support parties have slowly but steadily tracked upwards – support now at 45 per cent compared to 41.61 per cent at the 2008 general election.

The 45% for the opposition includes NZ First who are not in Parliament and who have not made the threshold.

On that Roy Morgan poll Labour and the Greens would win only 51 seats out of 123 – which is fewer seats than they got in 2008.

More importantly, the confidence rating for the Government is down from a 72 per cent approval level late last year to the current 60.5 per cent. The disapproval rating over the same period has increased from 16.5 to 24 per cent.

Find me one other Government in the world with a confidence rating so high after two years in office. A net approval rating of +36% is staggeringly high.

Of course National can lose the next election. As they say a week can be a long time in politics. But Anderton’s op ed is literally garbage – it is a FPP analysis of an MMP election. If he was a student at university he’d get a F.

Audrey Young reports on the first elections in Tonga where the people elected the majority of Parliament:

The figure probably given least credit for the new Tonga is King George Tupou V whose progressive views are overshadowed by his eccentricities.

Nonetheless his long held ambition to surrender his executive power to the people is highly unusual.

Opinion remains divided on the King. Some say he is a true democrat and reformer. One less kind critic told me he is simply too lazy to govern himself, so that is why he gave up power!

King George, who went to Kings School and Kings College in New Zealand, said he would not have wanted reform if he had been educated only in Tonga.

“Like others of my generation, my education has generally been a liberal European education and I feel sure that without a European education, with a solely Tonga education, I don’t believe I would have been able to make the changes,” he told Bruce Hill.

Liberal European educations have a lot going for them. I hold a tiny amount of hope for North Korea on the basis their future ruler went to school in Switzerland.

There has just been a third explosion in the mine.

A few people might be reflecting on how perhaps that “country cop” chap may have been onto quite a good thing when he said charging into the mine wasn’t the greatest of ideas!

A guest post by Steve Rieger, Vodafone’s General Manager of Wholesale and New Business Development:

Rural Broadband – an easy answer

The Telecom-Vodafone joint bid for the Government’s Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) has certainly got attention.  Who would have thought that these traditional arch enemies would entertain such a partnership?  Well, it’s the right thing to do to deliver a step change in connectivity for New Zealand’s rural community and moreover we think it’s the way of the future.

We think rural Kiwis deserve high speed broadband, wider mobile coverage and a choice of service provider.  That shouldn’t just be the preserve of the city-dwellers.  That’s why our solution – a new open-access network which combines fibre and wireless gives better bang for the tax-payer’s buck.  It equips New Zealand’s economic heartland, which accounts for 60 percent of New Zealand’s exports, for the 21^st century.

So what will we deliver?  Fibre to 97 percent of rural schools and a minimum of 5Mbps broadband service to 80 percent of rural households within six years and priority users with fibre-based broadband services.  That’s a minimum of 5Mbps.  In time we will deliver more.  And, we will deliver it faster than the government’s timetable.

The solution looks like this: Chorus will extend Telecom’s existing fibre infrastructure to key rural points of presence, including schools and hospitals.  Vodafone will expand its wireless infrastructure to deliver wireless high speed broadband.  Chorus will build the fibre and DSL network and Vodafone will build the mobile towers.  XT and Vodafone will put their cellular equipment on the towers and provide independent services to their wholesale and MVNO customers as well as directly to retail customers.

The key is open access.  Anyone will be able to offer a retail service over the new infrastructure, whether fibre or wireless, on an equivalent basis.  2degrees, XT and regional wifi operators will be able to put their equipment on the towers and provide independent services to their customers, competing on equal terms.  The result – strong retail competition and a real choice of retail solutions and providers for rural customers.

We think this model is the new state of the telecommunications industry.  We compete vigorously on one hand and cooperate on the other.  The design of this solution means we will continue to be fierce retail competitors – and have created a platform that enables other operators to compete with us.  Trying to deliver this as a sole operator just doesn’t stack up economically.

Our proposed solution delivers choice to rural customers: either fixed broadband, or fixed wireless broadband.  In delivering wireless broadband we provide additional social advantages by enabling wider use of mobile voice and text, two important communication channels for individuals and communities.

Why not fibre to the farm? The economics just don’t stack up.  International best practice for rural communities is to deliver broadband over wireless networks.  Ireland, Germany, the US and Australia have all gone this way.  It means rural families can stay connected at home and on the farm, reducing geographical and social isolation.

Wireless is also future-proofed.  It means next generation mobile technologies such as 4G (otherwise known as Long Term Evolution – LTE), can be rolled out to rural users at the same time it’s made available to urban customers.  4G will offer faster data rates, lower latency, shorter delays and loading times, and ultimately a better experience.

Vodafone and Telecom can bridge the urban/rural digital divide in New Zealand, give other players equal access to the infrastructure, and deliver choice to rural New Zealand.

The Minister expects to make a decision by Christmas.

I am a big fan of the open access nature of the proposal, and think it is a model for future mobile expansion.

The Court of Appeal has dismissed Taito Philip Field’s appeal on all grounds. Good.

Does this mean Labour will now finally come out and say they agree Field was corrupt while an MP. All they have been able to say to date is they acknowledged the verdict.

MSD commissioned a longitudinal survey of 7,000 children born from 2008 to 2010 in the Aucland and Waikato areas. Auckland University will continue surveying them until they reach 21 years old. This is going to give us a huge amount of incredibly useful data, and yesterday the first tranche was released.

The study has a dedicated website at Growing Up.

The large size of 7,000 means it can be taken to reflect the whole of NZ. Already the antenatal data is fascinating:

• 40 percent of children were unplanned
• More than one in 10 mothers continued to smoke through their pregnancies, including 34% of Maori mothers. Onlu 0.4% of Asian mothers smoke during pregnancy.
• Many mothers consumed alcohol during pregnancy
• Forty nine percent of mothers identify as NZ European, 18 percent as Māori, 15 percent as Pacific and 15 percent as Asian
• One in three of the Growing Up children have at least one parent born overseas
• One in five children will grow up in homes where English is not the main language (although 97 percent of mothers and partners are able to converse in everyday English)
• Twenty-eight percent of mothers live either on their own or with extended family (sometimes including their partner)
• Five percent of mothers are teenagers
• Ten percent of mothers needed fertility assistance to get pregnant
• Nearly half (45 percent) of mothers in high deprivation areas were unaware of Working for Families
• the average age of parents having children in New Zealand (first or subsequent) is now greater than 30 years;
• Only 60% of parents are in a legally binding relationship
• 45% of families have a first child have household income of over $100,000 per annum
• Only 3% of mothers whose pregnancy was planned had no qualifications while 14% of mothers whose pregnancy was unplanned had no qualifications.
• 49% of planned pregnancy mothers have a degree vs 22% of unplanned pregnancy mothers
• 70% of mothers had a previous pregnancy, and of that 70%, 17% had the previous pregnancy end before 24 weeks

I find it interesting that those who most need Working for Families were least aware of it. Maybe there should have been less TV ads showing kids enjoying ipods, and more targeted direct mail.

The stats on smoking during pregnancy are a shocker – especially when you consider the huge amount of money given to literally dozens of Maori groups to try and reduce smoking rates amongst Maori.

Lots and lots of data to reflect on.

This morning’s venture is funnily enough, a morning shot. Somedays it’s rewarding to sit back & watch the sun rise. For a few short minutes the sky glowed an orange-yellow hue, before fading as the sun rose higher.

Click for higher quality, larger image

Hoping Friday finds you all well.

Bill Courtney is a critic of National Standards, a former Chair of Khandallah School, and asked if he could do a guest post to “balance the debate”. Naturally I agreed. Here is his guest blog post:

National Standards: The Inconvenient Truth

The primary purpose of this blog is to provide an alternative view on the National Standards policy, its supporting system and the implementation process to balance some of the strongly anti-schools and anti-teachers comments made in various other postings.

As a disclosure of my “political” interests, I voted for Peter Dunne / electorate MP and National / Party Vote at the 2008 election.  Since then, I have been closely involved in the NS debate in many ways.  In particular, I attended the first NS Forum, in November 2009, at which I met the four leading academics, John Hattie, Terry Crooks, Martin Thrupp and Lester Flockton.  (These four then wrote their open letter to the Minister of Education, immediately following the Forum.)  This year, I was the named petitioner on the large 37,000 signature petition, organised by NZEI, and calling for NS to be trialled before full implementation across the whole system.  I also had an opinion piece published by the Dominion Post, in which I called for a David Lange, “cup of tea” so we can get this mess sorted out and I made the same call on the TV7 show Backbenches last week.

The essence of my argument remains very simple: the National Standards system of assessment and reporting is a poor trade-off between risk and return.  There is little real evidence of what “the problem” is and how the system will positively impact on student achievement.  In contrast, there are material risks to any system that creates a “high stakes” environment based around simplistic analysis of assessment data, but especially so, if this data is based on teacher judgment.

The issue with National Standards is not about the lofty, well-intentioned goals, but rather that the method chosen – Standards-based reform – needs careful consideration before full-scale implementation is seriously considered.  But this particular system, as written and developed, is flawed as a base for genuine system-wide reform.

Here’s how the academics saw things:

“The very brief timeframe allowed for the development of the Standards and associated guidelines and requirements has resulted in fundamental flaws.  Minister, in our view the flaws in the new system are so serious that full implementation of the intended National Standards system over the next three years is unlikely to be successful.  It will not achieve intended goals and is likely to lead to dangerous side effects.” (Academics, Nov 2009)

What problem is NS really solving?  Achievement figures are the symptom; but what is the cause?

It is also clear that the system which has now emerged in practice has almost nothing to do with the originally stated objectives outlined by John Key, as far back as his April 2007 speech:

“Most kids will reach the benchmarks easily.  But if you’re missing the benchmarks that will send a loud signal that you’re off-track.”

Sensible, inclusive policy development would have ensured a far sounder approach to developing a system aligned more clearly with the real objectives Mr Key had in mind.  But the system that has now emerged has never been backed by a mandate from the electorate.

“This government is lifting the bar for student achievement, which is why the Standards have been set higher than national averages, and parents should take this into account.”  Anne Tolley press release, 28 June 2010

Given so much talk about how the Standards were “set”, I asked the Ministry under the Official Information Act, for a copy of the briefing papers given to the team who developed the Standards.  After a false start, I was told by Mary Chamberlain that:

“I acknowledge that I may not have made it clear that there are no specific policy documents that were given to the writers of the National Standards.  The co-ordinating writers of the Standards were orally briefed on what was required and worked under standards Ministry of Education contracts…”

So whose National Standards do we really have now?  How well developed and tested were the Standards?  Here is John Hattie’s view:

“The glossy, recently published New Zealand literacy and numeracy standards have no data, no evidence, and no evaluation – they are pronouncements without evidence.  If there is evidence outside committee contemplations, where is it?  Until there is evidence, the standards remain untested and experimental.”

And the writers were only “orally briefed…” and developed these Standards in an incredibly short period of time.  Here is the view of the NZ Council for Educational Research:

“These benchmarks had to be developed very rapidly in 2009, and have not been established through empirical work on actual student trajectories over time.”

There are many criticisms of the Standards in the academic literature which is a better place to discuss these flaws.  On the other hand, there are also academics who promote the positive benefits of Standards-based reform but are staying quiet about how well designed this system is.

But it is becoming clearer that implementation – under duress from the government – is being pushed well ahead of system readiness.  The recent survey released by NZCER made this quite clear:

“Originally, schools were to report where their students were performing in relation to the National Standards in 2011. That has been shifted to 2012. The material reported below, while early in the implementation phase, would suggest that date may also be too soon, if the expectation is that all judgements in respect of the Standards will be sound and consistent, both within and between schools.”

One very important point to make is that the positive support from some schools does not negate the concerns of others.  Depending on their perspective, some are indifferent to system-wide concerns, some may not even be aware of them, or some others may be strong supporters of the policy to begin with!  You also have to factor in the good old Kiwi, “She’ll be Right” attitude, which will see many schools just getting on and trying something, even if they don’t feel it will make much difference, or they just can’t be bothered getting into a fight.

However, this wide variation in interpretation and reporting against the Standards gives rise to one of the main problems: the data gathered from the system will be virtually useless for several years.  Bur how this data is used – or misused – remains the single main concern in the education sector.  It is also the main source of difference in perspective between those who are concerned about the system and those that argue strongly in favour of it.  The vocal supporters – mainly on blog sites – argue that the teacher unions are opposing the policy, in principle, because they allege that the unions are merely seeking to protect the interests of poor or mediocre teachers that may be “shown up” by analysis of achievement data.  In contrast, those with concerns site the experience of many overseas systems where the “high stakes” nature of school achievement data causes real problems.

Here is John Hattie’s view:

“National standards offers the most wonderful opportunities for refreshing and reinvigorating an already top of the world system, but it could be the most disastrous policy formulated if it turns our attention to narrowing, testing, league tables and diverting attention to between-school rather than within-school differences.”

There is substantial evidence overseas that a high stakes focus on data causes many problems in teaching and learning within schools.  It is important to note that this does not necessarily have to be the case, but the track record of such systems avoiding the problems and using data wisely is not good.

The Minister of Education has repeatedly stated that our concerns are not founded because National Standards is not national testing.  But the academics make it quite clear that National Standards could turn out to be even worse than national testing.

In a letter to me, dated 10 March, Mrs Tolley said:

“I am very much aware that aggregated data can potentially be accessed and used in unintended ways and, if used to make simplistic comparisons between schools in the form of league tables, can be misleading and detract from the overarching goal of promoting achievement.  I acknowledge the concerns of the education sector about how data from the standards might be used.  In response, I am working with those groups to determine the most effective ways of protecting the data and ensuring it is used for positive purposes such as school review an system improvement.”

The Prime Minister set out in his Social Issues statement to parliament in February that developing a policy on using the data arising from the National Standards system is a priority item for 2010.  So, where is the policy?

I believe this is the real crux of the problem.  If NZ is implementing something truly unique, how do we know it will work?  If it is truly unique and unproven, why are we rushing the design and implementation?  And, how are we so sure that we can avoid the mistakes of other countries that have tried and failed to implement Standards-based reform?

John Hattie has often said to me, in our correspondence, that two simple questions need to be asked:

“Do you think, for a minute, that any of these overseas countries set out with anything other than the very best of intentions?  If not, then how and where did they go wrong?”

I would gain far more confidence in the Minister of Education of this country if she could reassure me that she is at least aware of these challenges, let alone convince me that she is capable of developing sound policy.

But the shambles of National Standards policy is not an isolated incident for this government.  Recent commentary has included the President of the NZ Law Society expressing concern at the Search and Surveillance Bill.  Jonathan Temm spoke about “…the kneejerk populist reaction because you think it’s worth votes.”

Mark Weldon, CEO of NZX, spoke out at the draft Financial Markets Bill, saying it was: “deeply and fundamentally flawed, poorly designed and dangerous.”  Sound familiar?  I wonder if he will be brushed aside as readily as the education academics were?

And my favourite is the Emissions Trading Scheme.  On the very same day that we presented the NS petition to parliament, we were followed by the march and petition presentation on the ETS!  I see ACT released another press statement this week, urging the government to open its eyes and see that the ETS poses an enormous risk to our standard of living for absolutely no environmental benefit.  Poor risk / return, again?

I may be old fashioned but I was brought up to believe that democracy does not finish on election night.  One of my favourite quotes is from US Supreme Court Justice, Robert H Jackson:

“It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”

This government needs serious counselling.  Put the jug on, Mr Key.

Capital Times reports:

BROKE former café owner John Matias is says high rents will change the Wellington we know and love, “When people can’t afford the rent the big names move in. Streets become predictable, like Auckland’s Queen Street, and you don’t go there for fun anymore.”

A month ago, the Espresso Republic Café owner walked out of the café he’d owned for nearly seven years.
“I know in my heart I did everything a hard working person could do, but I had to leave. I have nothing now,” he says.

He’s lost his business, and the house he mortgaged in an attempt to save the business.

When Matias moved into the premises in 2003 his rent was $7 000 a month, “A year later the new landlord came in and nearly doubled the rent in one hit. Soon it was $15 000 a month.”

It’s hard to say if the rent is reasonable or not without knowing the square metres being leased. But I am curious as to how the landlord can double the rent after a year.

Normally commercial leases are for a three year term, with right of renewal for a further three years, and some sort of arbitration mechanism for setting the rent for the second term of three years.

Those who have played Angry Birds on an iPad or other device will love this.