The Herald reports:

A former Labour leader believes Labour MP Ginny Andersen’s claims about Mark Mitchell’s past as a private security contractor are “divorced from reality” and encouraged her to speak with the Police Minister to better understand the nature of the work.

David Shearer, a former Labour MP and Opposition leader, recently concluded heading the United Nations mission in South Sudan amid working for about 20 years co-ordinating aid in a host of countries including Rwanda, Somalia, Iraq, and Sierra Leone.

It was during that work he interacted with many companies akin to Mitchell’s and said Andersen’s recent claim that the current Police Minister was “paid to kill people” is not a fair description of the work those companies do.

Companies such as Mark Mitchell’s allowed UN officials such as Shearer to do their job, and keep them alive.

Shearer said he felt her knowledge of security work in such areas was lacking and should learn more about it.

“Without understanding the reality, I suggest that you can’t really make those sorts of comments because you really don’t know and I think Ginny doesn’t really know and it’s probably better to stop digging and to understand what the reality is.

“It might look like something from a distance but believe me, when you’re in the operation and you’re in Iraq and you’re in Somalia and you want to save lives and you want to move goods from place to place, you’re going to have to have security.”

Maybe Ginny thinks UN staff and diplomats should not have protection?

(I know it is late but occasionally educators do work the long hours).

For many years in NZ schools have fudged their data. There used to be something called participation data that was, frankly, gamed to the point of being fraudulent.

The previous National government hit that on the head.

In February schools publish their “roll” data which does not account for all of the students who have left school prior to the relevant cohort. Some schools with apparent reputations will have lost 30% or more of their students before they turn 17. It is a much higher proportion for Maori and Pasifika students in those schools.

This data set is incredibly instructive about the NZ education system: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/how-nz-secondary-schools-rank-on-ncea-level-3-and-university-entrance-results/ITJFFEL225GATGRSI464TRYAE4/

I have no doubt that some schools will say that the Ministry data is not accurate. In the past when I have published that data some prominent Principals have told me that I am wrong. On each occasion my work has proved accurate. Others will complain that Derek Cheng and Chris Knox doing this is creating unfair league tables. Some will say UE is not important as a lot of their kids are not suited to study (they normally mean the brown ones). That is not why UE is important. It is the highest qualification most schools are involved in. It is aspirational.

There are two important points to make. The LEAVERS data is far more honest and respectful to the school communities as it shows the schools in a much more accurate light in terms of academic achievement (i.e. what school is for).

Here are some examples of schools with those “problem areas” we talk about in NZ – boys,Maori, lower decile.

Manukura: 85.7% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
St Joseph’s Maori Girls: 88.9% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
St Peter’s (Epsom): 94.2% UE pass rate for LEAVERS (their neighbours Auckland Grammar at 74.9%)

Here are 8 schools who pump their reputations – especially through sporting prowess (i.e. the Super 8 competition).

Rotorua Boys: 14.9% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
Tauranga Boys: 30.4% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
Hamilton Boys: 40.0% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
Palmerston North Boys: 41.8% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
New Plymouth Boys: 32.3% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
Napier Boys: 42.0% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
Hastings Boys: 35.0% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
Gisborne Boys: 22.6% UE pass rate for LEAVERS

Have a thought for the UE pass rates for LEAVERS from these pivotal South Auckland high schools.

Manurewa High School: 12.2% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
Alfriston College: 22.2% UE pass rate for LEAVERS
James Cook High School: 12.2% UE pass rate for LEAVERS

Those three are by no means the worst in the country and have been trending up a bit but should we be at all comfortable with the gaps? The school I went to – Whanganui City College – sits at 2.6%. Which brings me to my second point.

A school like Rotorua Boys (or any other low performing academic school) will not become a St Peter’s overnight.

What each Board of Trustees, Principal and community can do is be very honest about where they are at and set aspirational but incremental goals (not like Hekia Parata’s blunt axe goals).

These are the relevant ones:

– Full attendance (published weekly).
– Retention to 17 – accompanied by tracking destinations.
– NCEA L1 for LEAVERS
– NCEA L2 for LEAVERS
– NCEA L3 for LEAVERS
– UE for LEAVERS
– Percentage going into Tertiary study/full apprenticeships.
– Surveyed parental/family engagement.

What this data set shows is not solvable by government and certainly not by the Ministry – although both must massively lift their games and the top 12 in the Ministry really do need to move aside as their failure is monumental for young people, families and the national as a whole. From 2,700 to 4,300 employees in 6 years and this is the definitive data.

Every school & community needs to work very hard and with great skill to lift the students. 

Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/
www.wood2water.co.nz
www.russellinfo.co.nz

Radio NZ report:

In March and August 2018, up to a year before he attacked two Christchurch mosques, Brenton Tarrant posted publicly online that he planned to do so. Until now, these statements have not been identified.

In fact, for four years before his attack, Tarrant had been posting anonymously but publicly on the online message board 4chan about the need to attack people of colour in locations of “significance”, including places of worship. …

When he wrote in his manifesto that he was driven to violence by the lack of a political solution – a realisation that came to him in 2017 – we now know he had been calling for attacks against civilians at least as early as 2015.

Where he claimed he was not driven by antisemitism, we found hatred and conspiratorial distrust of Jews were central to his entire worldview.

The researchers have done an excellent job here. It is significant that Tarrant was posting such things. Now obviously not under his name, and he might not have been traceable, but at the least it should have rung some alarm bells.

Because 4chan posts are anonymous, we used a combination of indicators to identify Tarrant. 4chan’s “politically incorrect” board – referred to as /pol/ – provides the time, date and location of each post, allowing us to match this against Tarrant’s travel to numerous countries over five years.

Tarrant also frequently provided personal information in his posts, and he used the same distinctive language. In some cases, he repeated points we know he made elsewhere. He openly and proudly stated his Australian identity, even as he called for violence.

He also often made specific grammatical errors which make his posting stand out. He uses this style in online writing samples as early as 2011, in his 2019 manifesto, and in a great deal of online posting in between. In combination, these indicators identify Tarrant.

Our team of four researchers reviewed thousands of anonymous posts and hundreds of threads on /pol/. We used the platform’s search function for particular words, phrases and images. As a team we carefully evaluated all posts which included several of the above indicators.

We maintained a very high evidence threshold for including posts in our analysis. We excluded some important statements that were almost certainly written by him, but for which only one or two of the above indicators were present.

This seems a very robust methodology.

Winston Peters announced:

Foreign Minister Winston Peters has appointed Leon Grice and Heather Simpson to serve on the Antarctica New Zealand board. 

Good and interesting appointments. Leon Grice is very very capable.

The appointment of Heather Simpson is especially interesting. She is also very capable, and very no nonsense. I suspect she is partly there to sort out the cost blowouts on the Scott Base rebuild. The staff responsible should be somewhat nervous!

The NZ Association of Economists released:

The ninth NZAE Member Survey asked questions inspired by the recommendations recently released by the Independent Hearing Panel on the Wellington District Plan. 

A great idea. Here is what they found:

Land use restrictions in district plans reduce housing supply – 96% agreed

Land use restrictions in district plans reduce housing affordability. – 94% agreed

Easing restrictions in district plans will tend to increase housing supply and affordability. – 98% agreed

There is an overwhelming consensus on the economics of housing supply. Yet the IHP decided white is black and that housing supply is immune from supply restrictions.

The Council should over-ride their recommendations. This will then refer the disagreement to the Minister (Chris Bishop) whom I am confident will be on the side of common sense.

Newsroom reports:

The veteran MP is smarting at a revelation in new disclosures published by the Electoral Commission: ASX-listed mining firm Bathurst Resources donated $32,600 to 29-year-old independent Patrick Phelps to fully fund his campaign for more mining on the West Coast. 

Candidate spending limits were $32,600 at last year’s election. So Bathurst, unhappy with a Labour policy banning more mining of conservation land, funded Phelps’ entire campaign – every last dollar. It gave him a far bigger war chest than the more established candidates.

“Look, it was a very credible result for him. And I acknowledge that,” O’Connor tells Newsroom. “Clearly, across the wider West Coast region, people saw our policy as a blockage to further any further mining development.

It’s a worthwhile story that one company entirely funded the campaign of an independent.

Richard Tacon says the company’s man was never going to win – but he did pull enough votes away from O’Connor to hand the West Coast-Tasman seat to National’s Maureen Pugh.

What Tacon and O’Connor do agree on is that Phelps took more votes off O’Connor than he did off Pugh.

This is where the data disagrees. The split vote analysis shows that only 940 Labour Party voters voted for Phelps compared to 2,198 National Party voters. He basically took twice as many votes off Pugh as O’Connor.

O’Connor lost the seat because around 23,000 voted for CR parties and only around 13,000 for CL parties.

O’Connor had 77% of Labour voters vote for him while Pugh only had 70% of National voters. On the basis of the split vote data, she would have a larger majority of Phelps had not stood.

Across the whole electorate in the 2020 election, O’Connor had won 6208 more votes than Pugh. In 2023, Pugh turned that around to a 1017 vote majority. 

And the difference? There was a big nationwide swing against Labour, but that on its own wouldn’t have been enough to unseat O’Connor.

Yes it was. The 7,225 change in the majority was one of the smallest in NZ. 39 seats had a majority change by over 10,000 votes.

The CR beat the CL by 21% in WCT – that is why O’Connor lost.

Pugh saw her vote cut from 14,545 to 13,317. But the impact on O’Connor was far worse: his vote plummeted from 20,753 to 12,300.

Yes her vote dropped because helps took votes off her. The only seat which had a bigger drop for National’s electorate vote was Tamaki. Damien O’Connor’s drop was because Labour lost support everywhere. 26 other seats had larger drops for the Labour candidate.

The data totally contradicts the story.

As an adult – now in my 50s – I have been rocked four times by periods of depression and/or anxiety. It comes with a lot of complications – especially when you have children and professional responsibilities. Also – when the issue that seems to be hacking at you is a society wide one such as the government’s response to the pandemic – you can also have a form of survivor guilt. Appearing outwardly successful can also stand in your way for getting help as it becomes an irrational fear that if people know you are struggling you will be sidelined.

I went to a wonderful concert last weekend by Ohio band The National. Lead singer Matt Berninger is someone who has at times spoken of his bouts of depression including during the US pandemic response. Here he speaks with the great David Letterman. Well worth an evening’s listen. Below that is the final song in the same manner it was sung in Auckland – with 10,000+ singing it for him.

Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/
www.wood2water.co.nz
www.russellinfo.co.nz

Joshua Drummond writes:

To recap, quickly: The Atlas Network is a “think tank that creates think tanks“; a global network of more than 500 right-wing think tanks and lobby groups. New Zealand members of Atlas include the Taxpayers’ Union and the New Zealand Initiative (formed from a merger of two think tanks, one of which was the infamous Business Roundtable.)

This, like everything else, is wrong. Atlas does not create think tanks. It did not create the NZBR, the NZ Initiative or Taxpayers Union. I know. I co-founded the NZTU and don’t think I had even heard of Atlas when I did.

Seymour’s extraordinary denial came during a recording of Mata with Mihingarangi Forbes on RNZ, recorded and released on Waitangi Day, February 6 2024. The relevant parts of the transcript are excerpted below. 

Forbes: And those indigenous Australians are now warning Māori that the same groups are behind this referendum. Are they, do you think? 
Seymour: Well, if you’re about to go into the new Pizzagate of the left conspiracy theory, then I’ll be real disappointed. 
Forbes: What’s that, the Pizzagate?
Seymour: That’s some crazy conspiracy theory that Trump has had in the US.
Forbes: The campaign in Australia had links to the Atlas network.
Seymour: Oh, here we go.
Forbes: A network of think tanks, which promote individual liberty and free enterprise. And it said that the network pushes opinion pieces in favour of free speech. Do the ACT Party have any links or connections to the Atlas group? 
Seymour, very quietly: No. 

That is a lie. David Seymour and the ACT Party have numerous links to the Atlas Network. Here are some of them.

They have links, in the sense that people are linked to Kevin Bacon. They have links in the sense that I am linked to Hitler because Hedy Lamarr once babysat my father, and her husband had dinner with Hitler. You can claim almost anything is linked to anything else if you try.

After a 10 month stint as an electrical engineer – his sole non-political, non-think tank job – David Seymour worked for a Canadian think tank called the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, from 2007 to 2011. From January 2013 to February 2014, he worked for The Manning Foundation (now called the Canada Strong and Free Network). Both these think tanks were members of the Atlas Network at the time.

Yes David Seymour interacted with Atlas when he worked for a Canadian think tank. As Atlas is basically a support network for freedom focused organisations, this is about as surprising as the fact someone who worked for Greenpeace interacted with the Climate Action Network.

There are other overt ACT links to Atlas. According to his LinkedIn profile, Louis Houlbrooke is currently “working at Parliament in support of ACT’s vision of an open and benevolent society in which individual New Zealanders are free to achieve their full potential.” Before this, he worked as Campaigns Manager for the Taxpayers’ Union, an Atlas Network member, for four years, eight months. During this time, Houlbrooke attended multiple Atlas Network events, as documented by the Atlas Network.

This is even funnier. Louis attended events when he worked for NZTU. He then went overseas, and when he came back he got a job (again) working for ACT. Somehow this means Atlas controls or influences ACT.

One former NZTU staffer was the daughter of a Labour MPs. That means Labour is linked to Atlas by this insane conspiracy theory,.

Forbes: Have you spoken or taken advice from them or any group associated with them about the treaty?
Seymour, even more quietly: No. 

This is not true, as Forbes quickly demonstrates. Seymour attended a Taxpayers’ Union (which is part of the Atlas Network) function in Wellington where British politician Lord Daniel Hannan – one of the principal architects of Brexit, and founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade (which is, if you haven’t guessed, part of the Atlas Network) – spoke specifically about the Treaty.

This part gets funnier. In conspiracy world, taking advice from a group means listening to a speech by someone whose organisation is a member of that group.

This would mean I take advice from the Fabian Society, the CTU, the Greens etc etc.

Now why I am even wasting my time on ridiculing this stuff? If it was just Josh blogging I wouldn’t. But again his theories formed the basis of an entire program on TVNZ which was funded by taxpayers. Its the equivalent to the state funding a program on how the WHO and WEF secretly control the NZ Government.

Graham Adams at The Platform dissects the conspiracy theory and actually talks to some people involved.

She asked him about Act’s links to the Atlas Network, which fosters connections between centre-right think tanks around the world. When Seymour expressed his incredulity and disappointment that she was raising a “conspiracy theory”, she defended her line of questioning with: “My role is to ask questions on behalf of other people.” In fact, at that moment, Forbes closely resembled an arsonist asking a fire crew if they could help her find out more about how a blaze had started when she had lit it herself. In effect, she was asking Seymour to respond to insinuations she herself had made in her earlier 25-minute documentary on the proposed Treaty principles referendum.

Yes it was asking about her own program.

The first culprit to be singled out for attention in the programme was the prominent “No” campaign lobby group Advance Australia, “bankrolled by some of Australia’s richest people”.

However, this was only the prelude to introducing the Atlas Network — which Advance Australia was alleged to be linked to. Dr Jeremy Walker, a political scientist at the University of Technology Sydney who “studies the Atlas Network”, told us it was established in 1981 “to promote free-market policies around the world” and that some of its funding comes from “oil and gas interests”.

Advance Australia incidentally is not a member at Atlas. An inconvenient fact they ignored. And one prominent Yes campaigner is on the board of an Atlas member.

Every major Australian news outlet in the run-up to the referendum publicised the eye-watering amounts of money that major businesses pledged to the “Yes” campaign. Some estimates put the total in the tens of millions of dollars. And, ironically, the biggest donors included the big oil and gas producers.

BHP and Rio Tinto donated $A2 million each, while resource giants Woodside Energy, Newcrest and Origin Energy, among others, publicly advocated for the “Yes” vote. The Minerals Council of Australia backed it too.

That Forbes failed to mention these well-established facts about corporate Australia’s enthusiasm for the “Yes” campaign while she pumped the narrative that a sinister and secret conspiracy with links to the oil and gas industries had propelled the “No” side to success is a sorry indictment of the programme’s integrity.

So in fact big oil all backed and funded the yes campaign.

However, New Zealander Debbi Gibbs — who is the chair of the Atlas Network, headquartered in the US — told The Platform that Forbes had not contacted her for comment.

Asked whether Atlas had put any money into supporting David Seymour’s campaign on the Treaty principles, or whether it intended to, she replied:

“We don’t make donations to campaigns, candidates, or parties. Additionally none of the partners in our Network are political parties. They are all independent, non-governmental, civil society organisations.

The entire conspiracy theory is based on the fact that freedom orientated think tanks belong to a network of freedom orientated think tanks.

“We have just finalised the figures for the 2023 Annual Report that is not yet published, and we spent a total of $62,000 on grants to partners in Australia and New Zealand… You can see examples of the projects we have supported on our web site.”

Yep $62,000 spending in Australia and NZ. This is publicly available information, but one they chose not to report.

In addition, Gibbs corrected two claims made or implied in the documentary: “Advance Australia is not an Atlas Network partner… and the statements made about the Atlas Network’s source funding are completely false.”

I understand that any industry donations or Koch donations happened around 20 years ago. Yawn.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Forbes’ allegations about well-funded groups working behind the scenes to promote Seymour’s principles bill is that the $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, administered by NZ on Air, has been running for three years with explicit criteria about how the Treaty must be presented and promoted by successful applicants — namely as a partnership.

Ironic indeed.

“Trick or Treaty?” was funded by taxpayers’ money, but surprisingly NZ on Air doesn’t seem to have ready access to the exact amount the programme cost. The Platform’s request for that figure has been classed as an inquiry under the OIA, with a response promised “within the statutory timeframe”.

I think I know a good area Nicola Willis can save money.

Oliver Hartwich from NZ Initiative also writes:

Many of you have probably heard about Atlas Network in recent weeks. It is a network of think tanks around the world, and the Initiative is proud to be a part of it.

Despite being a friend of Atlas, I was unaware of its influence. There is a conspiracy theory that Atlas controls government policy in many countries – at least in Australia and New Zealand.

If only that were true. Atlas promotes sound policies, noble ideas and inspiring projects.

To achieve this, Atlas provides support to local organisations. Although these policy shops are diverse, they share a commitment to individual liberty, property rights, limited government, and free markets.

Atlas’ affiliates make abstract ideas concrete. In the favelas of Brazil, they helped residents establish property rights, become entrepreneurs and escape poverty.

Against a bureaucracy that prevented independent Nepali e-rickshaw drivers from operating, Atlas helped them register.

In the US state of Georgia, Atlas partners with the ‘Georgia Center for Opportunity’. They embarked on a large project to rehabilitate former offenders. That was a decade ago. Since then, the prison population and recidivism have significantly decreased.

There are dozens of success stories like this from all around the world that were supported by the Atlas Network.

So, when the Initiative started in 2012 and Atlas asked if we wanted to be affiliated, we felt honoured to join this network. We still are.

Atlas does not fund our work. Well, they gave us a camera a decade ago (and thank you, it still works). That was it.

For us, it has always been about belonging to an organisation that helps people achieve amazing things, and being part of a network whose goals we share.

I can say the same for the NZTU. Not once in ten years on the board was there ever a conversation about what Atlas might think on a policy issue.

So people might wonder what does Atlas do? Why would organisations join. Well here’s my experience:

• They have some great training courses you can send staff to. They range from fundraising to communications to video editing etc etc.
• If you have a successful local project, you can enter it into one of their awards and if you win you get kudos and a small amount of money (think under 1% of income).
• They have regional forums where you get to meet other organisations and share ideas, strategies, trends, fundraising ideas etc.

This is all unexceptional. This is why almost any NZ organisation joins a global body of like minded organisations.

As I said I don’t think I even knew of the Atlas Network before we formed NZTU. It is possible before 2013 I have interacted with someone from Atlas as I have attended events in the US hosted by Heritage, Cato, ATR and the IDU, but they were not on my radar.

Since 2013, I attended one Atlas forum in Sydney in 2022 or 2023. It was a small gathering of around a dozen people where we talked about how to increase support for policies that enhance economic freedom. If the Australian referendum or the Treaty of Waitangi was ever discussed, it must have been while I was taking a five minute toilet break.

I look forward to the taxpayer funded documentary on how the Open Society Foundation is actually influencing events in Australia and NZ. After all like Atlas they are a network of 120 partners. They have funding of US$32 billion, compared to Atlas annual spending of US20 million.

Of course when it happens on the left, it is not something the media show any interest in.

Dave Armstrong writes:

Imagine you’re a struggling Wellington apartment owner. Your mortgage payments have skyrocketed and you’re struggling to make the council deadline for earthquake strengthening your building. It’s going to cost you half a million bucks which you don’t have.

Then you get a call from the local council who want to take you out for dinner and buy you expensive bottles of wine so they can buy the land underneath your apartment. This will allow you to pay for earthquake strengthening yourself and if you want to buy back the land years down the track, no problem, it will only cost you what you sold it to the council for.

I know this seems absurd, and yet it is exactly what happened to Reading Cinemas just days after Tory Whanau was elected mayor.

Lots of Wellingtonians would love such generosity.

Wellingtonians should be asking hard questions about the Reading deal. The first is why can’t Reading pay their own strengthening bills like everyone else? Didn’t they get an insurance payout? Remember that they are a multinational company owned by millionaires who recently opened three cinemas in Australia.

If Reading are such a great company, concerned about revitalising Courtenay Place, why have they done absolutely nothing about renovating their building to the required level, apart from quaffing from free council-provided wine at Ortega and putting out their hands for over $30 million? Why are some councillors so worried about one of the ugliest buildings in the city? Old St Pauls the Reading Centre is not.

If a tornado were to flatten it tomorrow, Wellington’s heritage value would increase. Not decrease.

I agree but as Wellington thinks rusty storage tanks are heritage buildings, I suspect the cinema complex will soo receive heritage status!

Councillor Iona Pannett, hardly a raging, pro-austerity Thatcherite, has filed a “notice of motion of revocation” to nix the Reading deal. This time around few councillors, apart from Green councillor Nīkau Ni Weera and Independent Tim Brown, have confirmed they still support the deal.

And our Labour councillors with possibly the crucial votes? Unlike their colleagues at national level, I have noticed that Wellington’s Labour councillors have often outflanked the Greens on the left when it comes to supporting low-income people and protecting council assets from privatisation.

Will they vote against the neo-liberal madness of bailing out a struggling overseas company to possibly strengthen its central city eyesore, when water is continuing to leak and library hours and swimming pools are being openly touted for the chop?

Voting for Pannett’s motion would send a message that our Labour councillors did not just have the best interests of ordinary Wellingtonians at heart, but were also fiscally responsible.

This will be a test indeed for Labour Councillors.

The Heraald reports:

One of our biggest commercial media company’s newsrooms – Newshub – is set to close at the end of June, with dozens of journalists out of roles.

Warner Bros. Discovery has laid out plans to close its Newshub news division from the end of June, and will apparently look to “co-fund” local news with a partner.

“Look this is awful,” Warner Bros. Discovery NZ boss Glen Kyne told staff at the meeting.

The company would look to co-fund local news but Three was now the “core” of the future business, staff were told.

This is sad, in two different ways.

A lot of people are losing their jobs, and have families who depend on them.

The other sadness is a loss of competition. This will leave TVNZ as the dominant broadcaster. We do have many new media players such as The Spinoff, Newsroom, The Platform and RCR but they don’t have the reach that television still has.

The Herald reports:

Police have launched a homicide investigation after a man died at a Kāinga Ora housing estate in the Auckland suburb of Mount Albert this afternoon. …

In 2020, newsroom.co.nz reported Kāinga Ora had spent $300,000 on security guards to ease concerns about one resident at the housing complex on He Ana Way.

Madness. People need to learn about consequences. Paying $300,000 to protect the neighbours just rewards the person for their behaviour. He should have been evicted long ago.

A person living in the nearby area, who asked not to be named because of fears for their safety, said Kāinga Ora refused to answer their complaints about the ongoing poor behaviour of some tenants living in the complex.

”We had bodyguards here for months,” he said. “There was a lot of smashing but this has been escalating and escalating.”

No-one should have to live like this. Labour’s no-eviction policy should be scrapped asap.

A man who was allegedly involved in the incident has been causing issues in the area for at least a year, witnesses said.

“If they [Kāinga Ora] actually dealt with stuff, it would be a deterrent to others,” one resident said.

Exactly. And maybe someone would still be alive.

Newstalk ZB report:

Police are laying a fourth charge against former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman, who had her first court appearance for alleged shoplifting delayed again.

Astonishing. How many more incidents might there be out there?

It seems this is from a third store, and for another expensive designer item.

The Greens defence that this is all because she received some nasty e-mails looks very weak.

NewstalkZB reports:

Nash – who took over as Police Minister from Chris Hipkins when the latter became Prime Minister – said the first thing he did in the role was talk to Hipkins about dropping the seizure limit to $0. 

“He said, ‘Well, see if you can get it past Kiri [Allan]. And I went to Kiri and said this is what I want to do. And she said ‘No, we need to leave it at $30,000.’” 

Nash then asked to take the issue to Cabinet. 

“And she said ‘No, this is what it’s going to be.’ She obviously went to Hipkins and Hipkins said, ‘Okay, we’re going to leave it at $30,000′. Why? Because it’s anti-Māori. Bulls***.” 

Nash claimed police were “race-agnostic” when it came to gangs. 

“It doesn’t matter if they’re Māori, European, Chinese, Indian, what ethnicity – a gang member is a gang member is a gang member and they need to be held to account.” 

Nash said the harm gangs perpetrated across communities, including destroying communities through methamphetamine, meant “we need to go really hard” on them. 

I would have thought being anti-gang was being pro-Maori considering the huge harms to many Maori caused by gangs.

Radio NZ report:

Air New Zealand and Auckland Airport are continuing to trade accusations over a planned increase to the airport’s charges.

The same issue came to light last year, when some airlines claimed travel would become unaffordable as the airport announced a five-year plan to help fund its multibillion-dollar redevelopment plans.

Air New Zealand chief executive Greg Foran said based on “information that we receive from them [the airport] and we can see in the public arena”, the airport’s regulated charges would add about $46 to the price of a domestic ticket by 2032.

An extra $46 per ticket is very significant. As some tickets are under $100, that could increase fares by 50%.

Airports are regulated by the Commerce Commission as they are near natural monopolies. But the maximum price they can charge airlines tends to be a percentage of their asset base. So it provides airports with an incentive to spend up large, as this will allow them to increase landing fees to airlines.

In an ideal world you might have more than one airport in a city, as competition is the best answer. But this is very unlikely in NZ, as most cities do not have the space for a second airport.

The next best options seems to be having the Commerce Commission change the basis of its price regulation, so that it doesn’t provide an incentive for massive capital expenditure beyond that which is necessary for an efficient and pleasant airport.

The Post reports:

New tracks, same old woes for the troubled Wairarapa train line.

After years of reduced-speed trains, bus replacements, delays and general unreliability while a years-long upgrade took place – the big slow-down is back.

This time, because the newly laid tracks in Wairarapa are too narrow and causing vibrations on the train. …

Areas within a 16km section of track near Featherston were found to have been laid on average 4mm narrower. …

While the vibration issue has had no impact on the locomotives pulling the Wairarapa trains or KiwiRail’s freight locomotives and wagons, its impact on carriages means trains cannot run at their top speed and are restricted to 60kph instead of the intended 100kph.

So commuter trips are going to take twice as long because Kiwirail couldn’t measure the width properly.

And some people wonder why the Government doesn’t intend to hand over $3 billion to them for the ferry project!

Personally I think Kiwirail should be back in private hands. When the taxpayer bails you out for all your mistakes, you have far less incentive to not make them.

Greg O’Connor has a bill to remove the vote from ratepayers who don’t reside in the district they own property in. On balance I tend to support this, but there are good arguments either way.

Liam Hehir writes:

But in any event, that’s not why we still have a ratepayer roll. It is instead justified on the basis of “no taxation without representation”. Whether landowners live in a district or not, they will be taxed there if they have land there because the taxation of land (through rates) is the primary source of income for local government. 

The link between representation and taxation is an essential principle in a democratic society. It holds that those who contribute to the financial wellbeing of a community through taxation have a right to have a say in decisions about how those funds are used. It’s a such an important bedrock principle that it is quite bizarre that, as a concept, it would rate not a single mention in the article. 

But what about “one person, one vote?” Is there an issue there? Not really.

There is no such thing as the triennial “New Zealand local election.” New Zealand has 78 different local authorities and each of them is a discrete body politic. They hold their own elections in their own jurisdictions. 

No person can vote more than once in any such election. The real question is who should participate in each election.

If that violates the principle of one person, one vote then we have real trouble. 

Consider, for instance, that New Zealand citizens residing in the UK are permitted to vote in both New Zealand’s general elections and the UK’s general election. Parents with children attending two different schools can cast a vote in the school board elections of both. 

Yet nobody seriously argues against these as violations of democracy, which raises the question of why the ratepayer roll system should be viewed differently. At the very least, these considerations illustrate that the issue is at least somewhat complex. 

I have sympathy for the notion that ratepayers should get a vote even if they don’t reside there, but against that is the argument it is those who live in an area and have to live with the decisions about roads, parks, libraries etc who who should vote only. You can argue either way win good faith.

It is important to note that the number of non-resident ratepayers on local electoral rolls is very small. According to data from DIA which LGNZ kindly shared with me, here is the data for 2022:

• Residential electors 3,361,906
• Ratepayer electors 7,164 or 0.21% of residential electors
• Residential voters 1,324,599
• Ratepayer voters 5,818 or 0.44% of residential voters

So it is unlikely in most cases that the removal of ratepayer electors would impact election results.

It does vary by TLA though. The proportion of ratepayer voters to residential voters is highest for:

• Thames-Coromandel 8.8%
• Mackenzie 5.2%
• Kaipara 3.2%

I hope the bill passes first reading at least, as it would be good to have a select committee process to hear about the pros and cons of keeping ratepayer electors.

Stuff reports:

Far right activist, Kyle Chapman, has avoided jail after he was found with a banned gun and unlawfully possessed ammunition.

In the Christchurch District Court on Tuesday Judge Tom Gilbert sentenced Chapman to community detention with supervision after he was charged with unlawfully possessing over 130 rounds of ammunition, having several magazines and the possession of a Norinco semi-automatic rifle – a gun which is banned in New Zealand.

Chapman is a neo-nazi. As in an actual neo-nazi, not just the term some on the left use for anyone to the right of them. He once firebombed a marae. He is definitely not someone you want armed, let alone with a banned semi-automatic.

Judge Gilbert told the court that Chapman’s daughters said he had given up his “preoccupation with various causes which is a relief to them”. …

Judge Gilbert said the pre sentence report explained Chapman had decided to give away activist activities and “focus primarily on your family”.

“Ordinarily I’d be somewhat skeptical about those comments but the material I’ve read and the report and various letters does suggest that is actually what has happened – though time will ultimately tell,” he said.

He sentenced Chapman to six months of home detention with supervision.

I hope the daughters are correct, but I think it is somewhat naive.

In 2009 he said he was giving up on the far-right when his partner left him. He didn’t.

In 2019 he said he was turning his back on them, to focus on faith and family. He didn’t.

Nate Silver makes a strong case for why ignoring Biden;’s age could lose the Democrats the White House. He points out:

• Biden’s approval rating remains below 40%
• Trump leads Biden in the polls in all major swing states
• Despite the improving economy, Biden’s numbers are not improving
• It is reasonable for voters to see the fact that Biden would be 86 years old by the end of his second term as disqualifying and the fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden
• Someone who can’t sit through a Super Bowl interview isn’t someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat
• Biden has done fewer interviews than any recent president, and it’s not close. By this point in their presidencies, Barack Obama had given more than 400 interviews and Trump had given more than 300. Biden has given fewer than 100
• Since taking office, he has not done a single interview with reporters from a major newspaper
• To restore confidence, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn’t mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. 
• If he can’t, it’s awfully audacious to ask Americans to make him president for another four years.

Biden is now at only 28% in the betting markets to win re-election. He might do it if Trump implodes, but that is a hell of a risky strategy. He needs to show he is up to the job, or get out of the way.

This is not a joke. This has honestly been classified as a heritage building that needs protection.

The Spinoff reports:

Wellington’s independent hearing panel this week recommended a former British Imperial Oil storage tank in Miramar should receive heritage protection in the District Plan. Wellington city council’s heritage evaluators found the tank had value as “an increasingly rare representative example of bulk storage tanks erected nationally in the 1920s”.

It’s an effing bulk storage tank. What’s next. They’ll decide that a power pylon is a heritage building.

The company wanted to build facilities for 150 new crew members, and the gas tank site was the only suitable location he had found. “Providing the heritage listing would make the situation significantly more difficult, including making our ability to increase employment in Miramar more problematic,” he said. 

So we have a choice of a rusting storage tank or facilities for 150 crew members, and WCC has gone with the storage tank.

The solution here is to take away the ability of authorities to destroy the value in buildings owned by others by declaring them heritage. Just give the heritage authority a budget of say $25 million a year and they can use that to buy anything they thinks needs protecting. I’m pretty sure a rusty tank wouldn’t then make the list.

The following is a slightly edited version that a group of high quality educators and myself compiled.

They remain relevant as National currently drags the chain.

My Proposals (with respect to many sources)

1)     A Crown Agency for “Parenting” to provide information to make New Zealand the very best parenting country on the planet.

–      Including “Project 5.75”: Ubiquitous education and support for pregnant women/partners re care for their child in-utero. Huge information/support programmes to counter FASD and other harms.

Massive parents as first (and most important) leaners and teachers programme age 0 to 5. Including health, reading, numeracy, movement, music, languages. See David Eagleman: The Brain e.g. “If developing brains are not given the proper. “expected” environment – one in which a child is nurtured and looked after – the brain will struggle to develop normally. … Without an environment with emotional care and cognitive stimulation, the human brain cannot develop normally …. The brain can often recover, to varying degrees, once the children are removed to a safe and loving environment. The younger a child is removed, the better his recovery.”

Language in the home is absolutely key. Many, many words and conversations and words that are positive!

Information and encouragement for parents to remain fully invested in the education of their children throughout the schooling year.

2)     Split the collective contract in two and super-fund/incentivise teaching in Decile 1 – 4 schools. Super-fund the decile 1-4 schools from Year 1 – 13. Provide Principals in those schools with a Business Manager to take care of resourcing, contracts, etc – allowing them to fully focus on academics. Trust these Principals with significant incentive payments to attract and keep great teachers. Limit class size to 15. Help the families – provide uniform, stationery and IT and don’t ask for donations. Make every year urgent in these schools but also have a 19 year plan so that by the end of that these young people, who will go on to parent the next generation have education levels, that don’t offer up an excuse for our school system. The secondary teacher shortage is qualitative as well as quantitative. To attract great degree graduates and second career people they must be paid to train as it is no longer tenable to have them without a year of income in a high employment economy and with so many international opportunities.

3)     Emphasise inputs:

–      Simplify the NZ curriculum (and dump the current “refresh”). Align it with the international highest standards.

–       Attendance, retention until at least 17yo, parental engagement. Make this data publicly available in real time. There is no possible justification for the attendance data to be voluntary and for the national statistics to take up to four months to be made available

–      Purpose, inspiration and role modelling is vital.

–      Teacher quality is hugely important. Emphasise it, incentivise it, talk about it always – not just as one person compared to another but in terms of each teacher becoming better by the day.

–      “Movement is medicine” physical fitness and activity is a huge part of human development and oxygen feeds the brain.

4)     Be honest about results but also provide the value added/progression measures. It is not that difficult. We are about to publish a “league table” that covers metrics for every high school. It is not “name and shame”. It is to provide information to every tax-payer, parent, Principal, BoTs, teacher, etc – about the inputs and outcomes of every secondar school. On that basis they can make their decisions.

5)     Rename UE. Too many Principals/teachers use it as an excuse when they state – “University does not suit our [BROWN] kids”. Keep the purpose of the qualification but elevate it as the true level of high-school graduation and extract the excuse aspect. Possible NCEA* would work.

Achievement gaps between rich and poor exist throughout the school system, but are widest at tertiary level. For example, at NCEA Level 2 there is a seven percentage point lag between the pass rates of low- and high-decile students, by the time pupils take University Entrance, that grows to 44 points. Similarly, while only 17 per cent of low-decile students go to university, 50 per cent of for high-decile students do.

The largest chasm, however, is in second-year university courses with limited numbers and high entry thresholds – degrees which also lead to the highest salaries.

Data sourced from six universities shows while 60 per cent of the almost 16,000 students accepted into professional law, medicine and engineering in the past five years came from the richest third of homes, just 6 per cent came from the poorest third.

If you only include decile one schools – the most disadvantaged – that figure drops to just 1 per cent.

For example, Victoria law school took just eight decile one students. Otago law took three. And of 2000 total entrants, Canterbury engineering took just a single decile one student in five years.

(https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/want-to-be-a-doctor-lawyer-or-engineer-dont-grow-up-poor/YLNUCK7L3KLN5EYJBFAEPJHCE4/)

6)     Have a superb Partnership and/or Designated Character School policy/process to allow for schools to develop that suit the non-cooker cutter kids. Make approval independent of the “network” and aside from Ministry officials.

7)     Drain the swamp. The Ministry of Education has gone from 2,900 to 4,000 bureaucrats in the last three years. This has been inversely related to school achievement. We only have 420 high schools and many of those are only semi-relevant to the Ministry being Private, State Integrated or DCS. The Ministry must get out of the way of success. Find the right people to lead the Ministry, the current leaders are simply not competent, and fully repurpose it towards actually serving the sector effectively and with accountability.

8)     Deal quickly and effectively with the Union demands after the next election. They offer nothing helpful to the dialogue so throw them a bone and walk on.

9)     Have input and achievement goals for every high school (approx. 410 – negotiated for improvement every year and fully available to the communities and nation.

10)  Mimic Success. Work out the schools in each EQI range that is excelling and make them “lighthouse schools”. Manukura, St Paul’s Ponsonby, McAuley High School, etc.

11)   Encourage public discourse from all of our school Principals. I was told by a Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of Education that their main priority was to “protect the Minister”. That is abject nonsense. There is so much IP and experience help by our 2,600 Principals. Encourage them to express their views. From Matthew Syed in his outstanding book Black Box Thinking:

“Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.

We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads.

Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died. We have purchased at great cost, lessons literally bought with blood that we have to preserve as institutional knowledge and pass on to succeeding generations. We cannot have the moral failure of forgetting these lessons and have to relearn them.”

12. Move away from the “stop kids falling through the cracks” mentality (recent Tinetti, Sio, Davis). If you don’t fall through the cracks you are still on the ground floor.

NZ kids need aspiration, and they lead to have leaders! It is the best time ever to grow up and this should be the Da Vinci generation. They have to be led out of the fog of fear.

We need to respect and love intelligence as much as brawn. If the All Black coach loses a game or two the nation goes nuts. The Minister and Secretary of Education can oversee HUGE systemic failure and very few appear to give a big rat’s backside.

13. Provide high quality afterschool care in keeping with Harlem Children’s Zone who look after all children from 7am – to 7pm (when needed).

I have watched my cat Small – bring up three kittens over that last 3 months. She has been BRILLIANT! Why do humans struggle?

Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/
www.wood2water.co.nz
www.russellinfo.co.nz