The NZ Herald reports:

Prominent Green Party MP and human rights lawyer Golriz Ghahraman has stood aside from her portfolios after she was accused of shoplifting at an Auckland store, Newstalk ZB Plus understands.

The Green Party has confirmed it is aware of the allegations Ghahraman faces and that she “will stand aside from all portfolio responsibilities until the matter is resolved”.

According to sources, Ghahraman is understood to have been accused of shoplifting during the festive season from exclusive boutique clothing store Scottie’s Boutique in the electorate of fellow Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick.

The store declined to provide specific details when contacted by ZB Plus but confirmed the alleged incident was being handled by police.

An allegation is not guilt, but if the allegations are correct, this would be career ending.

I hated the end of the school holidays – even when I was a teacher/Principal. I loved it when I actually got back in there but the first day of school … Powderfinger sung it so well:

It’s coming round again
Slowly creeping hand
Of time and its command
Soon enough it comes
And settles in its place
Its shadow in my face
Puts pressure in my day
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQUE_kuyI04&ab_channel=PowderfingerVEVO)

At primary school I pretty much went all of the time – apart from when I could convince my mother that the chunder that looked a lot like fresh yogurt was real and/or that I had not stuck my fingers down my throat. At high school I went for the sport but wagged if there was something better to do – e.g. watching everyday of the 1984 Olympics, playing golf with my uncle. My high school was of very poor quality and without friends and sport I see very few other reasons I would have attended … oh … apart from those things called “qualifications” – which have certainly been helpful and I am thankful for – they have helped me do things like earn and income, buy a home, etc.

For a range of reasons we now have a HUGE attendance problem in NZ – both in reference to our own history and by international standards.

Percentage of NZ Learners Fully Attending

(NB: In Term 3 of 2023 it was 45.9%)

NZ Full Attendance vs other nations.

For most schools Term 1, 2024, starts in 3 weeks.

As a Kiwiblog reader:

• What would you do to turn the situation around?
• When do you think the big new strategy will be released?

Even if you have heard it before – this is possibly the best commentary on education ever:

PS – Asking for real – did John Clarke turn down a knighthood as it is very hard to reconcile Mallard having one and John Clarke not?

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

Stuff reports:

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau is facing criticism for a social media post the NZ Jewish Council says uses code for the “annihilation of Israel”, but has the backing of another Jewish group.

“Exist, resist, return”, Whanau’s Instragram post on Monday said above a picture of what appears to be a Hamas fighter with a gun slung over their back. The words “free Palestine” are below.

Whanau has long been a supporter of the Palestinian cause. However, her post has come in the wake of a deadly Hamas attack on Israel – and Israel’s widely-criticised counter-attack, which has led to a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

NZ Jewish Council president Juliet Moses said it was “shocking” the capital city’s mayor would post the message at a time when New Zealand Jewish schools and day cares were having to increase security due to a rise in anti-Semitic threats and rhetoric.

1,100 Jews were slaughtered, raped and executed by Hamas attackers. Their bodes were defiled. And Wellington’s Mayor thinks it appropriate to post something glorifying armed “resistance”.

Stuff reports:

One of New Zealand’s longest serving judges has died, just two year after leaving the bench.

Judge Tony Adeane, 72, passed away in Napier on Saturday after a period of illness.

Adeane became a District Court judge in 1993 and presided over more than 630 jury trials and countless other hearings, mostly in Hawke’s Bay, before reaching the compulsory retirement age of 70 in 2020. 

He was known locally for his firm but fair manner. He had a dry-wit that could bring a full courtroom to laughter, and a gravitas that could bring it to reverential silence.

A busy list day would see Adeane deal with more than 140 people, many of whom he’d come to know through a decade or more of court appearances. Respect was often, but not always, mutual, and he had little patience if he thought he was being given the runaround by defendants, lawyers, police, or anyone else.

A very good judge, and not one to be trifled with. He jailed one person for 28 days for calling him the c word.

A guest post by Owen Jennings:

Climate change is big business in New Zealand.  Government and local authorities now have a small army of people employed in the climate change industry paid by our taxes and rates.  An even bigger army work as consultants where the pay is better.  Its an industry with massive ‘oil tanker’ impetus.

Most of their work is predicated on the claim that things are getting worse.  Higher temperatures are driving the climate into chaos.  Weather events have already become more extreme and will get a heap worse.

But is this assumption true?  Do the facts support the chaos, ‘everything-is-getting-worse’ claim?

Is New Zealand experiencing deteriorating weather as a result of rising temperatures?  There are countless MSM articles, scientific papers, regular statements by people who ought to know supporting the proposition and the country is investing millions in mitigation and defensive projects.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone buys into the popular line.  A helpful contact of mine found a very thorough study that mysteriously received no coverage here but disputes the claim of everything-has-already-got-worse angle.  You can read it at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17477891.2021.1905595

It is an intensive study of insurance losses from 1968 to 2019, normalised to ensure we are looking at data that is adjusted for the passage of time.  ‘Normalisation is a standard device employed in such studies.  Here is their conclusion……..

“A key result emerging from our study is that normalised seasonal losses due to extreme weather show no statistically significant trend over time. In other words, once we control the loss data for factors that we know to have changed, we see no residual trend that needs explaining by anthropogenic climate change, or any other cause for that matter”.

This conclusion accords with world-wide work done by Dr Roger Pielke.  He points out that a study carried out by Munich Re, a large re-insurance company based in Germany and published by The Lancet showed as the world has become wealthier, the fraction of that wealth that is destroyed by extreme weather has gone down. This trend holds for rich and poor nations, and remarkably across all types of weather phenomena. It also helps us to understand why the focus on extreme weather among climate advocates is badly misguided.

Pielke keeps detailed information on all of the main weather events – cyclones, hurricanes, floods, droughts, wild fires, etc and he shows no negative trends.  In fact, many show a positive trend. In a recent published paper he concluded, “since 1990 both overall and weather/climate losses have decreased as proportion of global GDP”.

The findings of the IPCC and the World Met Office are in general agreement with no obvious changes in weather patterns except for relatively minor changes in rainfall and drought conditions in limited areas.  That does not prevent them from continuing, year after year running predictions of calamitous changes about to descend upon us.

The insurance industry findings are compelling.  Any chance they could justify bolstering premiums would be taken by both hands.  They simply cannot find any trends on which to hang their collective hats.

So, why are we bombarded daily with stories of on-going calamity?  Its easy.  Follow the money.  Too many jobs, too many research grants, too many scary, sensational stories that sell advertising are dependent on keeping the catastrophic theme alive and well.

Are we a gullible lot or what?

Stuff reports:

A statement Wednesday signed by the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom gave the Houthis what a senior Biden administration official described as a final warning.

“Let our message now be clear: we call for the immediate end of these illegal attacks and release of unlawfully detained vessels and crews,” the countries said in the statement.

“The Houthis will bear the responsibility of the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways.”

The US has intercepted 61 missiles. Without their actions, that waterway would be unusable.

Radio NZ further report:

Minister of Defence Judith Collins says it was important to join in condemning attacks on commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea because New Zealand is so dependent on supply lines.

This week, New Zealand and 11 other countries issued a final warningto the Iran-backed Houthis, who have carried out more than 20 attacks on boats in the key trade route, that they would face consequences if they did not cease hostilities.

Yemen’s Houthis have been targeting vessels in the Red Sea since November to show their support for Hamas amid the war with Israel.

Collins would not be drawn on what those consequences could be, but she said New Zealand must stand with its allies who believed in free access to these shipping lanes.

We are more dependent than almost any other country on shipping supply lines. Nice to see the Government backing the US in this area.

Three authors write on Newsroom:

Considering international events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the violence in Gaza, it could be argued that now is not the moment to be proposing disarmament and the abolition of the military. Isn’t a strong and professional military necessary for guaranteeing protection and national security? Don’t we require military force to deal with the threats posed by hostile states or groups, terrorism, weapons proliferation, great power rivalry, organised crime, violent extremism, climate crisis and all the other sources of instability today? Shouldn’t we be spending more on the military at this time, not less?

This is certainly the common-sense view. However, as we argue in our new book, Abolishing the Military, an honest and scrupulous analysis of the evidence and arguments shows that the widely held idea that we require a military to ensure national defence and security is questionable, and a comforting but misleading story from a bygone era.

The common-sense view could also be called the not crazy view. Having liberal democratic countries unilaterally disarm benefits authoritarian expansionist regimes.

In the first place, it has to be acknowledged that the use of military force has an abysmal record as a tool of foreign policy. There are few if any cases from history where the employment of military power resulted in peace, security, stability, democracy or improved human rights. In most cases, it leads to further violence and instability, and mass suffering for civilians. Russia, Ukraine, Israel and Hamas are all discovering this today, while the United States found it out in Afghanistan a couple of years ago.

If Ukraine did not have military power, it would no longer exist as a country. Is Israel did not have military power, there would be no Jews alive in the Middle East. If the Uk didn’t have military power, the Falklands would have been conquered by force. One could also talk about Grenada, protecting the Kurds, defeating ISIS, keeping South Korea free, keeping Taiwan free etc etc.

A direct alternative to the military is civilian-based defence (CBD), sometimes called social defence. Organised to respond to both foreign invasions or internal usurpations, it involves citizen-based protest and persuasion, non-cooperation, direct intervention and other forms of nonviolent defiance by the population and social institutions.

If a hostile foreign power invaded Aotearoa, for example, roads, airport runways and ports could be blocked by vehicles and ships. People could change road signs to confuse the invaders, something that Czechoslovakians did following the Prague Spring in 1968 to resist the Soviet invasion.

LOL. Their alternative to having a defence force is to have confusing road signs. Maybe they should all be in Te Reo, in case we get invaded by a country that doesn’t;t know how to use Google Maps or Google Translate!

Local power generators and community food gardens could make the population less vulnerable to coercive control.

I want some of those mushrooms, the authors are on.

There are also enough examples of such thinking in other countries – Iceland, Costa Rica, Lithuania and others – to know that it is more than wishful thinking.

Lithuania spends 2.8% of its GDP on defence – almost double NZ. They have conscription, and are members of NATO. They have 37,000 active soldiers compared to under 9,000 for NZ, despite having half our population. So I’m all for them as a model to follow!

Stuff reports:

The construction of a toilet block in south Auckland set the council back more than $3.7 million.

The development of toilets and changing rooms at Ōpaheke reserve in south Auckland was the most expensive, at $3.7 million for the 380sqm block.

So ratepayers forked over around $10,000 per square metre for a toilet block and changing rooms. Now standard builds for habitation are around $3,500 per sq metre. At $7,000 per square metre you get your architecturally designed dream home. Yet this toilet block and changing rooms comes in well above that!

Reuters reports:

Harvard President Claudine Gay said she would resign from her position on Tuesday, ending a six-month tenure marred by allegations of plagiarism and backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus.

Gay had come under pressure to resign from Harvard’s Jewish community and some members of Congress over her comments at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, while also facing several allegations of plagiarism for her academic work in recent months. …

Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Dec. 5 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.

The trio declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to a question by U.S. Republican Representative Elise Stefanik as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free-speech protections.

Some questions are simple yes or no answers, but answering if it is acceptable to call for the genocide of Jews, is one that does have a simple answer.

But this is not why Gay was forced to resign. It was the expose by a right wing journalist that her career has been brimming with plagiarism. At last count 50 separate instances had been identified, including (amusingly) even her thanks on her doctorate.

When Chris Hipkins became Minister of Education in 2017 his first three steps were:

• Snuggle up to the Ministry. This has ultimately led to the number of Ministry employees going from 2700 to 4200.
• Cancel things. In his case Partnership Schools and National Standards.
• Appoint a committee. In his case led by Bali Haque who had a solid reputation in NZ schooling.

When Erica Stanford became Minister of Education in 2023 her first three steps were:

• Appoint an Education Ministry Deputy Secretary (Ellen MacGregor-Reid) to her office on the basis of a recommendation of the Secretary for Education Iona Holsted (the $600k Woman). This effectively eliminated the ability for Stanford to go to the Public Services Commissioner and declare a lack of confidence in the Ministry leadership – something they deeply deserve. In the most paternalistic communication I have ever received Michael Johnston of the NZ Initiative contacted me after my critique of the MacGregor-Reid decision and told me that Erica Stanford was “devastated” by what I had written. Stanford could not stand up for herself? She needed a knight in shining armour? Clearly a conflict of interest here as Johnston was about to appointed as the chair of the newly formed Ministry Advisory Group (see next point) and had been significantly critical of Jan Tinetti without ever caring if she was “devastated”.

• Cancel things. In this case cell-phones. While this appears to be a brilliant BUMPER STICKER tactic there was so much more to think through. Do you ban “smart watches too”? Do you ban apple products in each class-room that all have texting options? Are they banned completely from bringing to and from school or just the classroom? What about the dyslexic and spectrum kids who use their phones to take photos of notes that they can review later with more time? Who will collect and re-issue the phones each day? Are you allowed to confiscate them? If they have to remain in bags how much expense goes on ensuring theft is not occurring? What if a kid is beaten up on public transport or lost without being able to contact a parent? How many micro-aggressions will be created around schools by teachers confronting kids on their phones in their breaks? How many arguments will happen at home and how many more kids will simply stay away from school as they lose one more privilege? I don’t think Luxon has any idea on education.

• Appoint a committee. In this case a Ministry advisory group, which – to the delight of the unions and political left – is effectively headed by the Right-Wing think-tank the NZ Initiative (through Michael Johnston – someone with much less sector experience than Bali Haque). Along with the Ellen Macgregor-Reid appointment – this shows a complete lack of situational awareness of the education sector. Has Michael Johnston resigned from his NZ Initiative role to accept this one and avoid accurate accusations of political bias?

There are so many more things that could and should have been done.

1. We are four weeks aways from a new school year … apart from kids drifting back to school … what is being done to get full-attendance rates above 50%?

2. Our outcomes for school leavers are appalling. Where are the goals for our high-schools in 2024?

3. Where are our strategies for teacher quality? What are we doing to re-engage parents and help
them understand the morass of the qualifications system?

These are the solutions I believe are imperative and urgent: https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2023/12/more_evidence_of_our_education_woes_plus_the_solutions.html

I would add immediately giving the new St Stephen’s school Designated Character status.

It is easy to label Hipkins (as Stanford did on the AM Show) as the worst Minister of Education ever. However, if you start just the same way he did, you are on 0/3 so far. When National was last elected and had nine years in office their supporters failed to hold them to account for anything but incrementalism. Tolley and Parata achieved nothing of lasting significance as Ministers of Education. They were barely better than Hipkins/Tinetti. Supporters of National must demand so much more from the new regime and allow them no complacency. Astute commentators such as Cameron Bagrie and Matthew Hooten have designated the Education portfolio as the most significant for the future of NZ.

As for the Associate Minister of Education, David Seymour, the initial method from National is a HUGE opportunity for him to go big and bring about the radical changes our NZ students and families so desperately need.

Alwyn Poole

[email protected]
Innovative Education Consultants
www.innovativeeducation.co.nz
www.alwynpoole.substack.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alwyn-poole-16b02151/

I blogged previously on the two month investigation by the NY Times, with over 150 interviews, documenting horrific sexual crimes. Within minutes on social media people were absolutely denying it, and claiming it must all be fabricated. Schwimmer is right to call out all the groups that normally staunchly call for believing victims, yet have remained silent.

Below are Stuff’s 10 predictions for 2024, along with my comments on them. They normally do 20:

1. An Opposition leader will resign. After the election, each leader kept their positions – despite the change of Government. As the new order settles in, someone – be that Chris Hipkins, Marama Davidson or James Shaw – will resign. DPF: Agree, and I predicted Shaw will be the one that goes.
2. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon will hit the sky, leading diplomatic and trade delegations to India, the US, and Pacific islands. DPF: Inconsequential but probably right.
3. The Government will re-engage with the World Health Organisation’s regulation updates, which New Zealand had been closely aligned with. For reasons unexplained, Luxon agreed to “reserve against” these soon-to-be-refreshed public health protocols in NZ First’s coalition agreement. Such reservations will be short-lived, given outright rejection of these updates would attract international and local ridicule. DPF: We will make reservations but they will be nothing big.
4. Leaning into life on the Opposition benches, Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick will become increasingly outspoken in the House. The Speaker will kick out Auckland Central’s MP at least once in 2024. DPF: Probably as she chants her normal pro-genocide slogan against Israel.
5. Finance Minister Nicola Willis will make another so-called “gaffe” in the House, following on from previous hits such as “how big is his hole” and declaring the “size of the sausage” matters. DPF: I hope so.
6. Following the January 20 hui with the Kīngitanga, sizeable protests will arrive at Parliament and at Waitangi as Parliament resumes and as Christopher Luxon heads north for his first Waitangi Day as prime minister. DPF: There will be protests almost non-stop for the next three years as the activists don’t like the policies the governing parties won election on.
7. The Government will deliver tax cuts in July, but the scale of those cuts will not be as large as was promised at the election. National will point to its coalition deal with NZ First, kyboshing the foreign buyers’ tax, and Labour’s so-called “fiscal cliffs” for the more modest tax relief. DPF: Disagree. I think they will be the same quantum.
8. House price growth will exceed the 5.3% forecast by the Treasury in December, growing by at least 7.5% in the year to June 2024. DPF: Good prediction and more likely than not.
9. When the Green Party holds its AGM and the co-leadership positions fall vacant, there will be a serious challenge or call from members for a new co-leader to take the (shared) reins. DPF: It will be Chloe to replace James and then at a later AGM Tamatha to replace Marama.
10. Local Government Minister Simeon Brown will appoint commissioners to take over the management of a city or regional council, which will fall into disarray due to failing infrastructure and economic mismanagement. DPF: So many worthy candidates!

The ABC headline:

The anal beads cheating is interesting because that was the allegation against 19 years old Hans Neimann when he beat Magnus Carlsen. The theory there is that someone at home with a chess computer feeds in the moves and signals through remote controlled vibrations what piece should be moved.

But this story has an even more sophisticated allegation:

The association was also forced to address rumours circulating online that Yan had cheated during the competition by using anal beads equipped with wireless transmitters to send and receive signals.

Yan allegedly clenched and unclenched rhythmically to communicate information about the chess board via code to a computer, which then sent back instructions on what moves to make in the form of vibrations, according to reports circulating on the Chinese social site Weibo.

It would be one thing to receive messages via anal beads, but truly impressive if one could actually send code via the anal beads through clenching and unclenching!