1 News reports:

More than 50 mayors and regional council chairpersons have penned a letter to the Government, criticising their bill that would require councils to hold referendums on Māori wards established without a local poll.

This is no surprise. Under Labour’s law, the Mayors and Crs would have sole decision making power on whether to introduce race based wards. Under the previous law and now current law, the residents are given the final decision making authority.

So of course Mayos will resent a law change that takes power away from them and gives it to their residents.

Newshub reports:

Applause and cheers erupted in the House on Wednesday afternoon as Children’s Minister Karen Chhour condemned Te Pāti Māori’s insults about her upbringing. 

Chhour, who grew up in state care, is repealing section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act – sparking uproar from political opposition. 

However, criticism of the repeal has moved to personal verbal attacks on the ACT Party MP. 

A comment on social media from Te Pāti Māori said Chhour, a wahine Māori, had a “disconnection and disdain for her… people”. 

“If Section 7AA were around in Karen Chhour’s time, she would have been raised Māori, she would have been raised being connected to her whakapapa and having a knowingness of her Māoritanga. Instead, she was raised Pākehā with a disconnection and disdain for her… people.  

“Karen and her experience is exactly why we need Section 7AA.” 

Labour MP Willow-Jean Prime also verbally attacked Chhour, calling her a “sell-out” during the First reading of the Oranga Tamariki (Repeal of Section 7AA) Amendment Bill on Tuesday. 

In the House on Wednesday, Chhour addressed Te Pāti Māori’s comments. 

“I am not going to stand here and justify how I was raised but I am also not going to let anyone else, especially Te Pāti Māori, think that they can tell my story for me. Especially when they have no idea what they’re talking about,” she said. In response, the House erupted in applause and cheers. 

That is disgusting – to hold the Minister’s childhood up as an example of why the Act shouldn’t be changed. Good to see Newshub cover this.

So Verve Magazine were paid for an advertorial or puff piece, and they ran it as if it was a news story.

Terrible ethics.

The Dairy and Business Owners Group released:

Dairy owners are calling on the Coalition government to toughen its Three Strikes 2.0, that has been so watered down, it risks being ‘no strikes.’

“In Opposition, the new government talked a great game so we’re guttered to see Three Strikes 2.0 turn into no strikes,” says Sunny Kaushal, chair of the Dairy and Business Owners Group Incorporated.

“All we see is something that sounds good but will give criminals a ‘get out of jail free card.’ 

“That’s the effect of limiting a ‘strike’ only to ‘sentences’ above 24-months and the government doesn’t seem to grasp there are two sentences. There’s a starting point sentence but then there’s the end point after the judge considers “discounts.” 

“So, what sentence does the government actually mean?

“For good measure, the government wants judges to have discretion where a strike is “manifestly unjust.”  The chances of getting a strike go way down and if one is landed, it might be deemed “manifestly unjust.”  Three strikes become no strikes.

“We’ll tell you what is ‘manifestly unjust.’ That’s 298 thefts and 17 burglaries every day last year in a record year for retail crime. Something that officials, judges and sadly now Ministers, don’t want to face up to.

“Here’s just two examples of what we mean.  In February, a person was finally sent to prison but only after 105 convictions over many years including “intensive supervision” for burglary.  They got 14-months. 

“Late last year, a criminal appealed their sentence after burgling a Hamilton vape store, who when arrested, added escaping custody, breaching bail, breaching community work and assaulting Police.  The final sentence for all of that? 17-months.

“This 24-month rule is a joke.  We are talking about the worst crimes and worst criminals for people who aren’t scouts.  Especially when ‘manifestly unjust’ provides a get out of jail card.

“Ministers need to get out of the Beehive and sit in on District Court cases to see how sentences get whittled down to wet bus tickets. As many of our people live where they work, we take the need for deterrence seriously. So should the Government,” Mr Kaushal said.

I agree that the law, as proposed, is so weak that it will be ineffectual.

The Herald reports:

When Whanau Ora chief executive John Tamihere was asked what his expectations for the Budget next Thursday were, he said: “All hope is lost.”

Last year Whānau Ora was allocated $163.1 million in the Budget to last for the next four years but Tamihere is confident Māori will draw the short straw this year.

“I don’t have any hope. Our mate from the Hope Foundation does, but I don’t.”

Tamihere is saying that thanks to the policies of the coalition Government, the affluent will stand ahead of the poverty-stricken this year.

John Tamihere is quite entitled to say he thinks a Budget he hasn’t seen will be terrible.

The Herald is not entitled to run his comments without disclosing he is the party president of an opposition party.

Bryce Edwards writes:

Willie Jackson will participate in the prestigious Oxford Union debate on Thursday, following in David Lange’s footsteps. Coincidentally, Jackson has also followed Lange’s footsteps by living in his old home in South Auckland. And like Lange, Jackson might be the sort of loud-mouth scrapper who could take over the Labour leadership to defeat a national government.

The idea of Willie Jackson as leader of the Labour Party might seem far-fetched. After all, the former Alliance MP is probably the most leftwing in Labour’s caucus and often still comes across as the shock-jock talkback radio host and union leader he used to be. He’s bellicose and mongrel in his style, reflecting that he’s the only Labour MP without a university degree.

Yet maybe that’s precisely what Labour needs right now – someone quite different to the usual “Professional Managerial Class” candidate running the party in the continued mode of the Helen Clark faction that has been in control of Labour for the last few decades. The technocrats have possibly had their day.

It’s an interesting idea. I’d assume that Jackson has a lower ceiling than Hipkins in terms of potential vote for Labour, but he would also have a higher floor.

So changing Hipkins for Jackson would not make sense if Labour is polling in the mid 30s, but if they poll in the mid to low 20s, then Jackson could become a better bet for them.

If you have enough time, click on the link and scroll down. Almost 300 pogroms and the like chronciled.

Stuff reports:

Residents of a wealthy eastern Auckland suburb are mobilising their efforts after learning that a fast food chain is doubling down on a proposal for a 24-hour restaurant.

Neighbours had been celebrating the withdrawal of an application by McDonald’s for the site at 152 Kepa Road in Ōrākei, but that victory was short lived.

McDonald’s has made a second resource application, this time arguing the restaurant design had been changed to meet concerns and would even bring social benefits.

This really makes me chuckle at the horror posh locals have at the thought of a McDonald’s in their suburb.

Someone should also apply for a Wendys!

The BBC reports:

Last season, Cuba’s production fell to just 350,000 tonnes of raw sugar, an all-time low for the country, and well below the 1.3 million tonnes recorded in 2019. …

Cuba now imports sugar to meet domestic demand – once unthinkable, and a far cry from the glory years when Cuban sugar was the envy of the Caribbean and exported around the world.

The slump in sugar has serious implications for other parts of the Cuban economy, he argues, including on its export earnings from rum. “We’re producing the same quantity of sugar Cuba produced in the middle of the 19th Century.”

So they’ve managed to get their production back to 1850 levels! A great success. To go from 5 million tons to under 500,000.

Radio NZ reports:

A union boss has been rebuked for going into a bus depot without permission amid a stoush over on-bus announcements.

On Sunday night, Wellington Tramsway Union secretary Kevin O’Sullivan entered the Kilbirnie bus depot and put almost 2000 leaflets on bus seats.

The leaflets asked passengers to call the Greater Wellington Regional Council if they thought the announcements, which alert travellers to which stops are coming up next, were “excessively loud and distracting”.

He included a phone number belonging to transport chair Thomas Nash, who said he received more than 40 calls and text messages as a result, starting from about 6.30am.

Passenger Tessa Moxey, who found the leaflet on her seat on Monday morning, thought it was in bad taste.

“At first, I was a little bit sympathetic, and then after that I felt a little bit angry because the request sounded a bit ridiculous that we, as the public, needed to call in to get the volume to be lowered even though there was probably quite a good reason that the announcement was on the bus,” she said.

On Tuesday, Nash wrote a letter to the Wellington Tramsway Union, co-signed by Blind Citizens NZ, which strongly backed the announcements.

“It is totally normal and standard practice to have on-board announcements on buses,” he said.

“It is an absolutely essential feature of an accessible public transport network, and I am 100 percent committed, and the council is 100 percent committed to making sure our public transport network – our buses, our trains, our ferries – are accessible for everybody.

Announcements are essential for blind passengers and useful for all passengers who may get distracted. Who would want to stop them?

Thomas Bryan from Blind Citizens NZ said blind people were dependent on the announcements to tell them when to get off the bus.

“When you are on a bus, and it is full of passengers, and people are talking on their phones, or they are having conversations, and all of the drivers have the payment system, the heating system turned up full bore, you need to have a reasonable volume otherwise you can’t hear it. And if you can’t hear it, what is the point of having it?” he said.

Yep buses are loud so announcements need to get over that.

O’Sullivan said he had driven buses for 45 years.

“Blind people have been navigating their way around Wellington quite successfully without all this stuff.

So the union official thinks that blind people don’t need audible announcements because they have managed in the past. Such empathy.

Rishi Sunak has called an election for 4 July, a few months earlier than expected.

It is going to be a bloodbath. On current polls the Conservatives will do worse than they did in 1997 vs Blair.

At the end of April the Conservatives were 21% behind Labour and forecast to win just 85 out of 650 seats. The betting markets have them at only 9% to win.

The country direction is a net -44% and Rishi Sunak has a -34% net favourability rating.

Starmer is not wildly popular with an average +8% favourability rating, but he doesn’t need to be. He generally leads Sunak by 15% in Preferred PM polls.

So things I’ll be looking for are:

• How big is Starmer’s majority
• How Labour does vs SNP in Scotland
• Do Conservatives keep 100 MPs?
• Who replaces Sunak after the election
• Are there any huge gaffes like Gordon Brown being recorded referring to a woman as a bigot

Most countries focus on the economic benefits of exporting. They accrue primarily to the producers but they flow on it to employees and relevant towns. Consumers lose as they end up either paying the world price for the product (e.g. our fruit, fish, meat, etc) or accepting a much lower quality. Anyone who has been to a country like Japan and seen NZ quality kiwifruit or apples is unlikely to forget how amazed they were. In my life – in NZ – I have only once eating export quality steak and any export quality fish I have caught myself.

We focus a great deal less on the benefits of importing – which are equal but accrue to the less powerful consumer block that has limited means of influencing government.

I am currently in Brazil. Below are watermelons and avocados that are not only much bigger and of incredible quality – but a fraction of our prices. The watermelon comes in at $1.90 per kg.

At present European farmers are protesting NZ products and NZ producers are offended. NZ consumers need to work out what they would like to come in at world quality and world prices and push for those products. It would improve our “cost of living crises”.

Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/

I’m not sure that Labour realise that outside of Wellington, most people will think it is a great idea they get to keep more of their income in return for returning public service numbers back to what they were in 2022.

Arguably National should have to declare Labour’s ads as a campaign expense for National!

Steven Joyce writes:

If you believe most of the commentariat, and apparently a majority of economists, the Government’s much-signalled and much-promised tax cuts are a very bad thing. Yet according to a Taxpayers’ Union poll, 74 per cent of New Zealanders surveyed want tax thresholds adjusted for inflation. In other words, a tax cut. How has the public managed to get so out of step with the thought leaders in our society?

I’m no unalloyed fan of the Taxpayers’ Union. It used to take more than occasional potshots at me when I was a Cabinet minister, casting me as a spendthrift adrift on a sea of profligacy. Of course, that was before it met the most recent Labour Government, but I digress. It does seem to have cottoned on to something which has eluded many people. And that is, members of the New Zealand public are roundly sick of being fleeced by their Government.

You don’t have to look too hard to see why. The 17.5c in the dollar tax rate has cut in at $14,000 of income and the 30c rate at $48,000 since 2010. Meanwhile, rampant inflation has driven people up the nominal wage scale so they have ended up paying ever more of their wages to the taxman.

Losing 30c in the dollar or even 33 cents (the rate at just $70,000) gets tedious pretty quickly, particularly when you lose a further 15c in GST when you actually buy something. Between cost increases and this stealthy increase in taxation known as fiscal drag, the much-discussed middle-income New Zealander has been well and truly squeezed.

Someone who was on $70,000 in 2011 will be paying $3.000 a year more in tax now than in 2011, for the same income in real terms. New Zealanders have had 13 years of stealth tax increases and these should stop.

The Herald reports:

Green Rongotai MP Julie Anne Genter has admitted she crossed a line when she yelled in the face of a minister in Parliament and says she will receive de-escalation training to recognise when she’s in “fight or flight” mode.

This is a cynical PR attempt to get sympathy ahead of the Privileges Committee hearing.

And trying to put it down to a fight of flight mode is nonsense. That is a physiological reaction to threats and attacks, not something that occurs because a Minister made an interjection you disagreed with.

Mahe Drysdale announced:

Businessman and former Olympian Mahé Drysdale has announced his bid to be the next Mayor of Tauranga at the Tauranga City Council elections to be held on 20 July 2024.

“My vision is that Tauranga is known as New Zealand’s best small city. I want to lead a new generation of strong and accountable leadership that can take our city forward.

“Tauranga has an exciting future. I was raised in Tauranga and I want the city to fulfil its potential.”

Tauranga has had challenges in the past years with governance, but Mahé says his focus is on the future and creating a modern, attractive city.

“We need collaborative and constructive leadership around the Council table. I will lead a team approach that brings voices and ideas from all parts of our community forward.

“My family has a strong tradition of community service and I’m keen to continue that legacy by contributing to the creation of a better city for the next generation.”

“The Council will need to manage the impact of population growth, major infrastructure builds and redevelopment of the centre city.”

“I bring experience in accounting and financial management to the table. I am determined to effectively manage the challenging financial situation that the TCC faces, due to rising interest rates and cost pressures.”

Drysdale is most well known as an Olympian, but he is a registered financial advisor and chartered accountant.

Nominations close on Friday. Candidates to date are:

• Mahe Drysdale
• Brian Friend
• Anthony Goddard
• Chudleigh Haggett
• Ria Hall
• Douglas Owens
• Tina Salisbury

A guest post by James Ross:

At 10 PM on Sunday 19^th May, New Zealand reached the latest in a long string of grim milestones. For the first time ever, government debt will tick up past $90,000 for every household in the country. 

$180 billion is a lot of money to owe. But if we’re being entirely honest, when someone says the country is paying $8.8 billion this year just to service a national debt which is well into the 12-figure range and climbing, the numbers are just too big to comprehend.

The huge numbers might go over people’s heads, but the financial pain Kiwis are feeling at the end of every week certainly doesn’t.

To put the numbers into a little bit of perspective, the average household is now paying almost $4,500 a year just to cover the interest on this debt.

That’s almost $4,500 that can’t be spent on food, or rent or heating. Or that can’t be used to pay down their own debts.

We’re paying more this year just maintaining the massive debt taken out on our behalf than we are on the total budgets for the defence force, police, corrections, and customs combined.

And to just really labour the point, that’s without even starting to actually pay off the debt. It’s just to keep the bailiffs away from the door.

The last six years of economic mismanagement have left us in a bad way, don’t doubt that for a second. Government spending shot up 84% without anywhere near enough economic growth to support the cost blowout. But the problem didn’t go away with October’s election, and debt is still only going one way. 

The Taxpayers’ Union only launched our debt clock about 8 months ago. Back then, your household’s share was 10 grand less than it is now. At this rate, it won’t be long at all until $100k Debt Day.

Government after Government, including this one, keeps spending well beyond their means. Even if the economy was booming at its maximum capacity, the Government would still be spending more than it raises.

But that’s not to say they don’t take enough of your money in taxes. Far from it, the average Kiwi is paying $49 a week more in income tax in real terms than they were in 2010.

The problem is that as a country, far too many of us have just come to accept getting less for more money. 

The Budget comes at the end of the month, and it’ll be make or break for a New Zealand which is listing towards being a poor nation.

The only way out is getting the books back into the black, but Nicola WIllis’ “cuts” so far barely even scratch the surface. New Zealand can’t afford for these not to go much further.

At the moment, optimistic forecasts suggest the next time we’ll see a surplus will be 2026/27, and even then it’s by the finest of margins. That means years more of spiralling debt.

There’s talk at the top that getting back into surplus might not be realistic, but let’s be frank. What’s not realistic is expecting hardworking people to keep finding more and more money down the back of the sofa.

In a few years it won’t be $4,500 you’re having to stump up. It’ll be $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 a year.

Yesterday’s $90k Debt Day needs to be a wake-up call for Nicola Willis. The time for half-measures is over.

James Ross is the Policy and Public Affairs Manager at the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union

Some key facts from the independent review into Kainga Ora:

• Kāinga Ora annual operating expenditure has grown from $1.5 billion in 2019/20 to $2.5 billion in 2022/23
• Deficits forecast to grow from $520 million to $700 million
• Debt expected to grow from $12.8 billion to $23 billion. by 2028
• Cash deficit of $21.4 billion forecast over next four years, or $4,000 per NZer
• Redevelopment costs $35,000 more per home than private developers
• Rent arrears have increased from $1 million in 2017 to $21 million

Simon Moutter has a big job ahead of him!

The independent report into DIA’s handing of an urgent passport application for a NZ DJ to go to Australia to play with a famous DJ has been released. There’s some minor criticism around some side issues, but the key finding is there was no special treatment.

What I was interested to find out is that there were 61 other urgent passports created that day. And in the last six months, over 14,000 passports produced within 24 hours of an urgent application. That’s a great service.

The Herald reports:

National’s New Plymouth MP David MacLeod has been stood down immediately from his select committee roles after failing to declare 19 candidate donations.

MacLeod, who held roles on both the Environment and Finance and Expenditure Select Committees, said he had “never, ever” tried to hide donations.

MacLeod received 18 candidate donations worth $168,335 in 2022 when he first became the National Party candidate.

“Because of a misunderstanding that the return was for 2023 only, both the information supplied to the party for my return and my completed return to the Electoral Commission did not include the 2022 donations,” MacLeod said.

This is very sloppy and disappointing.

It is true that party returns are annual, and candidate returns are not. But you should be aware that all significant donations have to be disclosed, and were not previously disclosed.

A stand down from select committees is a robust response from Luxon, especially as this is far from the first MP who has had to do an amended return. The question going forward I guess will be how long the stand down is for.