The union campaign against national standards is actually a campaign against league tables. The union has made it very clear that they would be willing to work with the Government on implementing national standards, if league tables were made illegal.

Cracker666 blogs an e-mail from a teacher and former NZEI rep:

“…we teachers have been told the entire campaign by the principals and the NZEI would be dropped in a second if the Government agreed to take school assessment data and make it top secret – i.e. not public, not even if someone made an Official Information Act request.  Think about it – they’re putting school assessment data in the same category as the Official Secrets Act just so a) schools can’t be subjected to league tables and b) the dumbarse in the classroom next to mine can keep his job without fear of being found out as a hopeless teacher.  I asked the last union meeting what impact this ongoing campaign would have on the kids who are failing.  I got a cold look from the union sheila and they moved on to the next question…”

So the concern of the teacher unions is not about national standards. It is purely about keeping assessment data from public view – it is about anti-accountability and anti-transparency.

Hat Tip: Homepaddock

The Dom Post reports:

A phone scammer targeted Wellington residents last night, the second incident in two weeks.

Police said they received about 40 phone calls last night from people who had a phone call from a bogus Microsoft employee.

Last night’s incident follows about 50 calls to Wellington, Hutt Valley and Kapiti residents last Wednesday and Thursday, reporting a similar experience.

The caller claims to work for Microsoft and offers assistance to help get rid of a virus by disclosing computer passwords.

Police warn anyone who receives a call of this nature to hang up immediately.

If the calls are being made from within New Zealand, surely the Police can easily ascertain the phone line they are being made from, and take action?

Reuters reports:

Is your laptop cooking your testicles?

What a great headline. And they go on:

The researchers hooked thermometers to the scrotums of 29 young men who were balancing a laptop on their knees. They found that even with a lap pad under the computer, the men’s scrotums overheated quickly.

I use a cushion. I’m not sure if that helps much.

To hold a laptop on your knees, however, you need to sit still with your legs closed. After one hour in this position, the researchers found that men’s testicle temperature had risen by up to 2.5 C.

A lap pad kept the computer cool and also made sure less heat was transmitted to the skin. But it didn’t do much to cool the testicles, and might give “a false sense of security,” according to Sheynkin.

Guess not. However I normally have legs crossed, so hopefully that reduces the impact also.

The Herald reports:

Police were last night interviewing the mother of a 2-year-old girl found outside a McDonald’s restaurant on Saturday.

The toddler was spotted outside McDonald’s in Otara about midday and had been in the care of police and Children, Youth and Family Services since then. No one had reported the girl missing.

Yesterday afternoon, police urged anyone with information about the girl to come forward.

By 9.30pm last night, the dmother and a second relative came forward to claim the child.

Most of my friends who are parents panic if they lose track of their 2 year old for even 48 seconds. Almost impossible to conceive having your kid missing for 48 hours and you haven’t even alerted the Police.

NZPA report:

National’s Northland MP John Carter has announced he won’t stand for re-election at next year’s general election.

“This is my eighth term as MP for Northland, the region where I was born and bred,” he said today.

“I believe I have represented Northland well for 23 years…the time has come for me to move on in my life, thus giving an opportunity for new representation in Northland.”

There are few MPs I like as much as John Carter. He is a great guy, and an absolute model of an effective constituency MP. I once drove him to Palmerston North and he spent pretty much the entire trip on his cellphone ringing agencies and the like on behalf of various constituents. Northland is not the most natural seat for National, but John’s popularity turned it into a very safe seat

The union assault on national standards gets more deranged.

Marlene Campbell is the principal of Salford School in Invercargill. She writes on her Facebook wall:

And the MOE attack schools deferring setting targets, thats a constructive response? Excuse me Minister Hitler? Am I in Germany? Is this the end of self managing schools? read Kelvin Smythes latest blog, he is a true hero!

Yes having the Ministry of Education call a school up is of course Nazi Germany all over again, and a principal who calls the Minister, Hitler, is exactly the sort of leadership we want in our schools.

Campbell is on the executive of the Southland principals union.

UPDATE: This is not a one off. In the comments they have found another recent reference where she calls the Minister Hitler.

Britton Broun at the Dom Post reports:

A brawl between gang members at a five-year-old’s birthday party led to two women attacking police and one of them biting an officer’s arm.

More than 15 police officers were needed to quell the fight that erupted outside a house in Kiwi Place, Hastings, at 10.30pm on Saturday.

Senior Sergeant Luke Shadbolt said the area was well known as a Mongrel Mob enclave, with people linked to the gang at the house. The brawl began when a guest turned up wearing a patch belonging to the rival Black Power gang.

Mr Shadbolt said the party-goers were very drunk and the brawl, involving up to 20 people, quickly spilt on to the front lawn and street.

Some adults were fighting, and others shouting them on while children of various ages were in the nearby house. …

Two women had been charged with assaulting police after one was said to have hit a male officer in the head and another bit into another officer’s arm.

The bite drew blood, requiring the officer to have the wound cleaned out and get a tetanus shot.

“It pierced the skin and you don’t know what these girls have got,” a police officer said.

The worst part isn’t even the brawl, but that the so called party for a five year old is used as an excuse for the adults to get pissed. A five year old’s party should be all about the kids, and them having fun, and the role of adults should be to supervise them – not to be getting pissed.

No doubt many of those five year olds will grow up associating alcohol with kids parties and it will just be a matter of time until they are demanding at the age of 10 that they can join the adults in getting pissed.

I am sure many readers will sympathise about how awful it is to have to fill in some forms to get paid $350,000 a year.

The Dom Post reports:

Delays in legal aid payments because of new computer procedures are causing problems for lawyers unable to pay their bills or further their clients’ cases.

Wellington specialist civil liberties lawyer Michael Bott said complicated new computer procedures and new forms that had to be filled in were delaying the payout of fees to lawyers, who were struggling to pay their own bills.

“Lawyers have rent or mortgages and they have to pay staff and sometimes the payments have been delayed weeks.”

The forms had become so complicated that the amount of time spent filling them in might not be worth the payment a lawyer ultimately got, he said.

Mr Bott earned more than $348,000 in legal aid for the July 2009 to June 2010 year.

I actually had some sympathy for legal aid lawyers up until Mr Bott implied that the amount they earn is so trifling it is not worth the time to fill in the forms.

The Legal Services Agency is obviously having some transition issues, and they should be able to process and pay promptly. But lawyers don’t do their case any good, by complaining that the amount they earn may not be worth the paperwork, when their earnings (just from legal aid) was $348,000.

The Dom Post reports:

A Wellington school’s boycott on full national standards compliance has in turn encountered a boycott – by a father who has vowed to stop paying school fees.

Peter McKeefry, whose three children attend Clyde Quay School, has accused his school board of pushing through a standards boycott without consulting parents.

“The school is denying me the legal right to know how my children are doing at school,” he said.

None of the board had mentioned they were anti-standards when they stood for election, or that they would vote for a boycott, he said.

“Other parents are quite disgusted, as I am myself. There has been no discussion about the boycott.”

He had written to the board expressing his “strongest disappointment of the boycott”, and made an Official Information Act request to it for information it had received on national standards.

He would withhold donations to the school next year in protest at the boycott until the school fully complied with the standards, but would not take his children away, he said.

This is a smart move. Why should parents pay, when the board is refusing to obey the law.

However, principal Liz Parata is hopeful Mr McKeefry’s stance is due to a misunderstanding of what the school has actually signed up to.

The board was still “progressing the work of national standards” and was refusing to report only their 2012 achievement targets to the Education Ministry next year, until they had some dialogue and more explanations from the ministry, she said.

“My sense is that people hear `boycotting’ and there’s a number of interpretations, which is very misleading.”

Education would not be compromised as a result, but the ministry would miss out on information with which to measure the school’s results against their targets, she said.

Yes, effectively the school is just refusing to fill in some forms at this stage – but will still report to parents against national standards. However some schools are refusing to even report to parents. Meanwhile 90% of schools are getting on with it.

The Press reports:

The “sheer strength and power” of the September 4 earthquake has more than doubled the number of reported supernatural events in Canterbury, a paranormal investigator says.

I don’t believe this is treated as a news story.

Most cases related to strange noises, although one man said he had been attacked by a ghost.

Did he file a Police report? Or an ACC claim?

Heyrick said the “sheer strength and power” of the earthquake may have been responsible for the increase in paranormal activity.

The number of old buildings damaged in the earthquake may also have been a factor, he said.

It was well known among investigators that when renovations on old buildings took place, “it tends to wake up dormant spirits, and activity tends to come out of nowhere”, he said.

Well known that renovations wake up dormant spirits – I am guessing this claim is not based on peer reviewed research!

One rule of politics is to never believe a rumour until someone denies it!

Claire Trevett in the Herald reports:

Sue Bradford and Matt McCarten have rejected speculation they are about to start a new left-wing party – but neither will rule out doing so at some future point. …

Yesterday, both Ms Bradford and Mr McCarten said there were no current moves to do so and they had not discussed the idea with each other.

However, both believed there were virtues in the idea.

What I find interesting is that neither McCarten or Bradford see the Greens as a suitable vehicle.

We’ve already identified how two of the leading activists against national standards are aspiring Labour Party candidates.

In this TVNZ item, they interview Island Bay School (my former school incidentally) board chair Jane Forrest saying parents have no confidence in national standards. Tony Ryall suggests the campaign is organised by the unions (which it clearly is – Whale has mounds of documents showing this) and is politically motivated. TVNZ report that the campaigners they spoke to reject those claims and that they come from right across the political spectrum.

Now of course there will be some parents who are anti national standards and vote National. Just as many parents who are for national standards vote Labour. But what is interesting is to look at the ring-leaders who are driving this campaign, such as Ms Forrest.

An Auckland reader has found Jane Forrest (spelt Forest but the video looks like the same person) in hard left anti-reform documentary “Someone Else’s Country“, in 1996. She is on clip 5 at 16:45 railing against user pays, privatisation, bulk funding, and Americanised education. She goes on to call for unions and student associations to work together to battle the then National Government.

So that sounds like across the political spectrum doesn’t it?

I’ve been getting many e-mails from angry parents at schools that have signed up to the union campaign against the Government.

Telling a deliberate lie in an election campaign is an offence in both New Zealand and the UK. S199A of the Electoral Act 1993 states:

Every person is guilty of a corrupt practice who, with the intention of influencing the vote of any elector, at any time on polling day before the close of the poll, or at any time on any of the 2 days immediately preceding polling day, publishes, distributes, broadcasts, or exhibits, or causes to be published, distributed, broadcast, or exhibited, in or in view of any public place a statement of fact that the person knows is false in a material particular.

If the person found guilty of a corrupt practice is an MP, then they can lose their seat – as has just happened in the UK:

Former immigration minister Phil Woolas lost his seat as an MP today after an election court ruled that he knowingly made false statements about an opponent in May’s general election.

The Labour MP could be barred from the Commons for three years, with the election contest for his Oldham East and Saddleworth seat set to be re-run.

But Mr Woolas said he would fight the ruling – the first of its kind in 99 years – and was seeking a judicial review.

“The court has decided that an election should be overturned and an MP should lose his seat and be incapable of being elected to the House of Commons for three years because statements which attacked a candidate’s ‘political conduct’ were also attacks on his ‘honour’ and ‘purity’.”

The court decided that the Oldham election should be be re-run, and that Mr Woolas should lose his seat and be barred from being elected to the House of Commons for three years.

And what did he do:

Mr Woolas, who won May’s general election with a majority of just 103 votes, is the first MP for 99 years to face a successful challenge to his election victory on the basis of publishing false statements about an opponent.

The specially convened election court had heard that the Labour MP stirred up racial tensions in a desperate bid to retain his seat in Oldham East and Saddleworth.

Giving their judgment, Mr Justice Nigel Teare and Mr Justice Griffith Williams said Mr Woolas was guilty of illegal practices under election law.

Mr Woolas was also found to have knowingly made a false statement that Mr Watkins had reneged on a promise to live within the constituency prior to the election.

That suggested Mr Watkins was “untrustworthy”.

Effectively he claimed his opponent was a liar, and in doing so lied himsefl.

Many an MP in New Zealand might shudder at the thought of losing their seat for lying. But it is only if you lie in the two days before an election.

His team allegedly hoped that by exploiting the racial divide in Oldham, the scene of race riots in 2001, they would “bring out the white Sun-reading vote”.

The incendiary remark was made in an email which said: “We need … to explain to the white community how the Asians will take him [Woolas] out … If we don’t get the white vote angry he’s gone.”

Mr Woolas was accused of fighting a “dirty and dishonest” campaign full of “lies, smears and totally false allegations”. Mr Watkins’s lawyers argued that: “Mr Woolas, believing that he was going to lose the election, resorted to terrifying white voters into believing that there was an extremist militant Muslim element in Oldham, who were in cahoots with Mr Watkins. He wished to convey the message that a vote for Mr Watkins was a vote for extremists.”

Emails between members of Mr Woolas’s campaign team, obtained by Mr Watkins’s lawyers, detail their alleged plans to claim falsely that Mr Watkins supported Islamic extremists and was “prepared to condone death threats” against Mr Woolas to secure their vote.

And this is from a Labour MP!

What is interesting is that the UK law specifically refers to lies about your opponents:

makes or publishes any false statement of fact in relation to the candidate’s personal character or conduct shall be guilty of an illegal practice

And the timeframe is:

before or during an election

which suggests the entire campaign period. Think of the number of MPs who over the last couple of elections may have lost their seats as they lied about their opponent’s character or conduct.

Would it stretch to calling your opponent cancerous and corrosive? How about claiming they will evict people from state houses?

The Press publishes this very useful article from Eric Crampton:

You could be forgiven for thinking that the health system could save $1.9 billion if tobacco had never existed. That’s what the Ministry of Health says smoking costs the public health system.

But, you’d be wrong.

The ministry’s latest estimate of the cost of smoking has nothing to do with the costs that smokers impose on taxpayers or the costs that could be avoided if smoking were to disappear.

Rather, it’s a politically convenient number whose promotion has much to do with gaining voter support for anti-tobacco initiatives and nothing to do with real economic costs.

I was pretty surprised when this figure started being cited earlier this year. It was much higher than the previous estimate of $350 million dollars – a figure produced not by the Big Tobacco lobby but rather by Des O’Dea in a report commissioned by anti-tobacco crusaders Action on Smoking and Health.

So the costs have gone from $350, to $1.9b – how did they achieve this?

After sorting the population by age, gender, income, ethnicity and smoking status, they then compared the costs of providing health services to smokers as compared to nonsmokers for each group.

The excess costs of the smoking group were tallied up to produce the $1.9b figure.

So what’s the problem?

It’s easiest to think of smoking as bringing forward a whole lot of end-of-life costs.

Smokers die earlier than nonsmokers.

We know that.

And the costs to the health budget of somebody who is dying are rather higher than the costs of somebody who is healthy.

But everybody dies sometime and most of us will incur end-of-life costs that will be paid for by the public health system.

Suppose that a smoker will die at age 65 and a nonsmoker will die at 75. Comparing 65-year-old smokers to 65-year-old nonsmokers and calling the difference the cost of smoking then rather biases upwards the measured costs of smoking.

We ought to be comparing the health costs of a smoker dying at age 65 with the health costs of a nonsmoker dying at age 75.

Yes. This is what I assumed was done. But obviously it did not produce a big enough figure.

The figures assume that in the absence of smoking, smokers would never have imposed end-of-life costs on the health system. But for their smoking, all smokers in this scenario would have died of a sudden, and cheap, heart attack and would only have had average health costs up to that point. That’s clearly nonsense, but the $1.9b figure only makes sense if it’s true.

So the $1.9b is a useless figure. Sadly I doubt it will stop people citing it.

If smoking disappeared tomorrow, your taxes would have to go up to make up the difference. Thank the next smoker you meet for helping to keep your taxes down.

And be as sceptical of numbers coming from the Ministry of Health as you would be of numbers produced by the tobacco industry. Neither is a disinterested party.

Indeed.

The UK Telegraph reports:

Red squirrels are cute. It is very unfair to them, to compare a politician to one.

NewstalkZB reports:

The Canberra Raiders are set to sack disgraced centre Joel Monaghan as early as this weekened after the saga surrounding his dog photo emerged.

The Canberra Raiders are expected to sack disgraced centre Joel Monaghan as soon as this weekend.

The Raiders board will meet to discuss Monaghan’s Mad Monday “prank” which saw a photo emerge showing him in a compromising position with a dog.

Compromising is one term for it.

My advice for sports stars:

1. Don’t stick your penis in dogs’ mouths
2. Even if it is a mate’s
3. If you ignore (1) then don’t take a photo of it

I’m not sure what the problem is, but Vodafone’s quality has not been great lately.

On around half a dozen occasions, people phoning me have not been able to get through – it goes straight to my voicemail, despite the fact my mobile phone is switched on, and not in use. I can only guess there was some sort of network congestion.

This is more than a minor inconvenience. Twice it has happened when radio stations are calling me to do live on air interviews at an arranged time.

I’ve also noticed lately many texts not being delivered to me for several hours, and sometimes not ever. Again this is more than a minor inconvenience when one of the texts is to say that someone is not meeting you at the airport, and you should grab a taxi instead.

Am I just very unlucky or have other Vodafone customers had these problems? Does this happen sometimes to Telecom customers? If calls and texts can not get through, then one has to seriously consider swapping networks.

I doubt any school manages to be totally without bullying, unless they manage to be totally without pupils. But despite that limitation, the reports around Howick College seem to be a cause for concern, as reported in the Herald:

Mr Ropati’s comments came after dozens of parents and some students contacted the Herald this week when the father of a Year 9 Howick student said his daughter was being so badly bullied, he was forced to send her to South Africa for school.

If that many went out of their way to contact the Herald, it is hard to not conclude there is a wide-spread problem.

Several parents said their children had also been bullied while at the college, with some saying students had had to change schools because the bullying was so bad.

And if this is the case, it should be picked up in exit interviews.

The woman said her daughter endured “a good full year” of bullying in 2008. She said she was disappointed with college staff, who seemed to dismiss the situation. “We had to talk to the dean, counsellors. The counsellor just said it would suit everybody else if she just left. …

The woman said she and her husband tried several times to meet the principal at the time, but were told the issue was not important enough.

Another parent said a young relative of hers had been bullied so much he flatly refused to go to school.

“The school passed us from one manager to another and to cut a long story short, they essentially threw up their hands, said they had a very big school and couldn’t take on the problems of this child, and encouraged us to send him somewhere else.”

This is the part that causes the most concern. The senior staff were not willing to take action.

Mr Ropati – who became principal in January – said he would encourage the parents who had contacted the Herald to speak to him.

“We may have bullies, we may have bullying behaviour, but all schools are vulnerable.

“And I stress that we do take every bullying case very seriously.

“If that hasn’t happened in the past, then that is out of my control.”

The fact the principal is new, is cause for some optimism that things may improve.

Simon Collins reports in the Herald:

The proposal follows a law change this year giving ACC the power to vary levies on employers in line with their accident records.

This system, known as “experience rating”, will take effect for employers next April.

The ACC’s consultation document suggests extending the same principle to levies on motorists and income-tax payers or “earners”.

An employee on the average income of about $50,000 a year will pay more than $1300 in ACC levies this financial year.

That is 2.6% or gross income or around 3.5% of after tax income, which is a huge cost.

The ACC document suggests that motorists’ levies, paid through vehicle licence fees to compensate road accident victims, could be increased for people who get many traffic tickets and for younger drivers, and reduced for people such as pensioners with good safety records.

Yes, absolutely. That retains the insurance component of the scheme, but provides incentives for safer drivers. Why should a 65 year old with a 45 year perfect driving record pay the same as a new driver who has already been involved in an accident and has several speeding tickets.

For earners, who now pay a 2 per cent income tax surcharge to compensate working people injured outside workplaces and roads, the corporation suggests a no-claims discount for people with no injury claims in the past five years, offset by higher levies for those with more injuries, such as many sports players.

Please. I don’t think I have had an ACC claim for well over 20 years.  Of course my employee levy is modest compared to the employer levy.

It also suggests an option to pay a lower levy in exchange for reduced benefits, and poses three questions:

“Would you prefer to pay lower ACC levies in return for a 10 per cent drop in compensation for lost income after a less serious injury, such as a sprained ankle?”

Yes.

“Would you prefer to pay lower ACC levies in return for a longer wait period. For example, extending the period without lost income compensation from a week to a longer period, such as three weeks?”

Yes.

“Would you prefer us to lower the earners’ levy in return for earners paying more of their accident-related treatment costs?”

Depends on the details of the trade off, but certainly keen to at least have the option so people can choose for themselves what best suits them.

Dr Smith said there would be problems in adopting ACC’s proposals for motorists and sports players.

Young drivers could register their cars in their grandparents’ names, and he did not want to harm the “broader social benefits” of sport.

I’m not sure the level of avoidance would be great. Agree you do not want to put people off sport, but I think the cost of ACC is not a major factor in decisions on sport.

NZPA report:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says her country’s nuclear-powered warships are safe and reliable, and whether they visit here again is something New Zealand has to decide.

US submarines carry nuclear weapons, surface warships don’t but most of them are nuclear-powered.

No, they are not. In fact few ships would be ineligible to visit.

The US Navy has 289 ships, being:

• 11 Aircraft carriers – nuclear powered
• 10 Amphibious assault ships – non-nuclear
• 9 Amphibious transport docks – non-nuclear
• 12 Dock landing ships – non-nuclear
• 22 Cruisers – non-nuclear
• 55 Destroyers – non-nuclear
• 30 Frigates – non-nuclear
• 71 Submarines
  • 18 ballistic submarines – nuclear powered and armed
  • 53 attack submarines – nuclear powered only

The ballistic submarines don’t really do port visits. They sit under the ocean waiting to blow Russia up 🙂

The aircraft carriers are also very unlikely to visit NZ, even if no ban. They’re too large for most docks, and more to the point they tend to be needed in hot spots a lot.

So really the ban on nuclear power (which is illogical but is now “iconic”) only stops the attack submarines from visiting.

Going back to the NZPA article which said most surface warships are nuclear powered, it is in fact only 11 out of 218, or 5% of the surface fleet.