The NZ Initiative has some good suggestions around the Govt’s fast track consenting law:

• Eligibility criteria for projects should include economic efficiency, with cost benefit analysis used to help prioritise projects for referral and approval.
• Expert panels should include expertise on economic analysis.
• Final decision approval, including the ability to apply conditions, should either be given to
  the expert panel rather than Ministers, or if Ministers remain decision-makers, disclosure
  requirements be included covering reasons for declining expert panel recommendations,
  applicants’ meetings with Ministers and any political donations applicants make.
• Include the Minister for the Environment in the decision-making process to ensure
  environmental considerations are given sufficient weight.
• A sunset clause to make fast-tracking temporary while wider substantial RMA reform (and
  reviews of other conservation-related legislation) is undertaken.
• The compensation payments under the Public Works Act should be increased to incentivise
  early agreement with landowners.

I have previously written on the need for enhanced disclosure requirements if Ministers are decision makers. I like the proposal to have a fourth Minister involved as decision maker, and to have a sunset clause for it. Also a very good idea to make sure all expert panels have an economist on it. We’ve seen with Wellington City Council what goes wrong when no one on an expert panel understands economics.

1 News reports:

Labour MP Grant Robertson says being gay was “a factor” — though not the entire reason — behind his unsuccessful runs at his party’s leadership in the mid-2010s.

The outgoing MP put his name forward for the Labour leadership in 2013 and 2014 and was narrowly defeated. While he had won the majority of support from his caucus colleagues both times, he lost once other votes from the wider party membership and union affiliates were counted.

In 2013 Grant only got 17% of the union vote. In 2014 he only got 19% of the union vote (and would have won if it were not for them). So one can only assume that he is saying the unions are homophobic.

Raw Story reports:

Attorneys for Donald Trump declared Monday that he is unable to secure the $464 million bond due in his New York fraud case, saying that turning over the entire amount is “a practical impossibility” — and that development could lead to his New York empire becoming property of the state, a legal expert said.

“He is now being asked to put up a bond to secure basically a half-a-billion-dollar judgment, which would represent about one-twenty eighth of his entire assets as Donald Trump [and his lawyer Alina Habba] say,” Kirschner said. 

Kirschner went on to say that if Trump’s assets are valued at the level he says they are, “I would think insurance companies and sureties would be beating down his door to do business with him.”

This is the hilarious part. Trump pathologically exaggerates his wealth. Because he did, he got hit with a massive fine. He can only appeal it if he puts up a bond, but no one will lend him the money because they all know he massively exaggerates his wealth.

The Herald reports:

The $3.2 million documentary has already had $800,000 of public money approved by the Film Commission – and is likely to be eligible for a further $1.2 million in taxpayer money through the government’s screen production rebate (SPR) scheme.

So $2 million of taxpayer money for a hagiography.

“It is authored by New Zealand filmmakers who have firsthand experience of this significant period in New Zealand’s recent history. It’s important to note that this film is not a biopic of Jacinda Ardern, but rather it is focused on the reaction to her leadership.”

You can just imagine it, can’t you. It will paint her loss of support as all being about sexism, racism etc and nothing to do with a lack of delivery, a cost of living crisis etc.

Slate reports:

Amid all the calls for an Israeli cease-fire in the war with Gaza, a few key facts are getting short shrift. Israel has put forth a cease-fire plan. It was negotiated along with U.S., Egyptian, Qatari, and Saudi diplomats. Its terms are quite favorable to Hamas. And Hamas is the party that’s rejecting it.

The plan, which has been on the table for two weeks, calls for a 40-day cease-fire. During this period, all military activity by Israel and Hamas will stop. Israel will suspend aerial surveillance over Gaza for eight hours of each day. Hamas will free 40 hostages—one a day. They will include women, children under 19, people over 50, and ill hostages. In exchange, Israel will free 400 Palestinian prisoners—a 10-to-1 ratio.

A 10:1 prisoner ratio and a 40 day cease-fire.

Meanwhile, the six-week cease-fire plan seems as if it has something to offer for all sides. Diplomats from neighboring Arab states have been pushing Hamas to take the deal. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Qatari officials have threatened to expel Hamas’ political leaders—who have been living in cushy houses and condos in the small, oil-rich nation—if they don’t accept the cease-fire, though no action has yet been taken.

So Israel, US, all the Arab states think it is a fair ceasefire. But Hamas won’t agree.

A senior Hamas leader openly said, in an interview with Russian TV two weeks into the war, that protecting civilians was the United Nations’ responsibility, not his. They don’t care about the lives or well-being of ordinary Gazans. As long as he and other Hamas leaders survive, down in their tunnels or wherever they happen to be, they’re willing to hang on.

Lovely people.

Newstalk BZ reports:

Comedian Jimmy Carr is in hot water after jokes at a recent gig left one woman saying he used his platform to “put down those who have a tough life”.

Carr, whose shock comedy often leaves audiences gasping, was performing a warm-up gig in for his upcoming tour when he began directing comments to a woman in the audience.

Carly Ahlen, 44, was in the front row at the Orchard West Theatre in Kent, England, when Carr asked her why she was wearing a beret.

“I used my right hand to lift my beret, exposing my hearing aid,” Ahlen, who is deaf, told Metro.

“I hoped he was at least a decent guy and would move on, knowing I was deaf. It didn’t work. It had the opposite effect as I was like a sitting deaf duck now,” she said.

She said she was using a transcribing app to read Carr’s jokes as he performed them.

Carr pushed on, asking if she was going to use her phone to “call for back-up from the French Resistance”.

Ahlen said the British-Irish comic then doubled down, claiming “you can say anything about deaf people because they can’t hear you”.

“I was shocked — this isn’t comedy,” she said.

“Comedy is an amazing tool for progressive change, yet Jimmy decided to use his platform to put down those who have a tough life.

Had she never heard about Jimmy Carr? Carr always makes fun of people in the audience – they are some of his best bits. And if you really think comedy is simply a tool for progressive change, then go to one of those progressive comedians’ shows – also known as the unfunny ones.

For those who do actually like comedy, here is some of Jimmy;’s best audience insults.

Cancer is tough at any age or stage, but battling it while having three young children is extra tough. Hopefully the chemotherapy is successful.

Ipsos report:

In a famous Yes, Prime Minister episode Sir Humphrey Appleby once explained to Bernard Woolley how you could get contradictory polling results on the same topic – in this case the reintroduction of national service – by asking a series of leading questions beforehand and asking the key question you want to know about in a certain way. 

But what would happen if we asked Sir Humphrey’s questions today? To find out we asked 1,000 British adults the first set of questions that were positive about national service and 1,000 British adults the second set that were negative. Below is a comparison of the results. You can see that it is indeed true that you get different results on the level of support for the reintroduction of national service based on the way you ask the question and the questions you ask before it.

The results are:

Ipsos point out:

First of all, to be clear, we would never ask questions on such a topic in this way. These are taken from a comedy sketch, a sketch that works because of the obvious absurdity of what Sir Humphrey is suggesting.   At Ipsos, we take great care not to ask leading questions. Questionnaire design is a key part in how our researchers are trained. Our professional reputation is based on providing quality data and acting with integrity. It is why clients come to us.

Related to this, it is worth pointing out that Sir Humphrey’s central allegation – that polling companies don’t publish all of the questions they include in surveys – is not allowed under British Polling Council rules. Under these rules, polling companies have to be transparent. They must publish all relevant questions asked in a poll in the order they were asked. Interested parties can then reasonably disagree on question wording and so on in an open way. In many ways this acts as something of a public peer review of survey results.

The same in true in NZ. All relevant questions must be published, and for political polls the primary voting question should be asked before any other question which could influence it.

I am no fan of Trump. No amount of good policies can make up his manifest psychological flaws. I’d take a zombie Biden over a robust Trump anyday.

But Trump has won the GOP nomination for President, and has a better than even chance of winning in November. This can be quite baffling to people as to how this is possible.

There is an answer on Quora, which helps explain his appeal well. It says:

I want you to try to imagine something:

Imagine that, for your entire life—or at least a significant chunk of it—the people who run for high office in your country have been, essentially, carbon copies of each other.

You’ve quit watching presidential debates, because there’s no point. You already know what everyone will say. The candidates are just talking heads. Zombies. Robots. They don’t give straight answers to moderators’ questions. They dodge, they prevaricate, they bring every conversation back to themselves and their pet issues. Their statements are a meaningless mishmash of buzzwords carefully calculated to appeal to their base and avoid offending anyone. And at the end of the day, they’re all the same: career politicians who just want your vote and the status quo to continue.

You are desperate for a candidate who’s different. Who says what’s on his mind, consequences and image be damned. Who promises to make real change, clearly means it, and isn’t just saying what he thinks you want to hear. Who is, in other words, not a member of the establishment, that shadowy political class currently running the country and driving it deeper and deeper into debt and chaos. In fact, he’s someone who will fight them and stick it to them, horrify and disgust them. (Them and their useful idiots, the woke progressives, who claim to stand for justice but in fact support tyranny and injustice.)

For such a person, you’d be willing to overlook almost any flaw.

And so it was with Donald Trump. People who only consider the man’s personality and character without really understanding what he represented (and still represents) to the American people are missing the key aspect of his appeal. The 2016 American presidential election wasn’t just Trump vs. Clinton. It was self-made man vs. professional thief. Private businessman vs. corrupt corporatist politician. Dark horse vs. reigning champion. Scrappy underdog vs. galactic overlord. Outsider vs. insider. Anti-establishment vs. establishment. The disenfranchised vs. the enfranchised. The real America vs. the privileged coastal political elite.

Get the idea, now?

The American political arena is chock-full of smarmy, slimy, wishy-washy politicos who speak in sound bites and talk a big game but never deliver. It doesn’t need any more. What it needs is more Archie Bunkers—assertive, unvarnished, politically incorrect types who care less about their positions and more about fixing what’s wrong with the country.

When the hero you’ve waited for your entire life finally comes along, you don’t turn your nose up at his hairdo or his spray-tan or his ego-stroking. You load him into the barrel of a gun and fire him at the enemies of the American people.

Now I might not agree with everything said, but I think it is a good explainer of how many feel. Polls have shown most Americans have felt negative about the direction of their country since the 1970s. Doesn’t matter who was run office. So when an outsider comes along, he strikes a chord with the disillusioned.

This is one reason it is important in NZ to have Governments that do actually achieve things. If the population stays disillusioned for long periods of time, then populists do well.

ACT announced:

Employers will no longer be obligated to automatically deduct fees from union members’ pay if a bill lodged in Parliament’s ballot by ACT MP Dr Parmjeet Parmar is drawn and passes.

“Currently, the Employment Relations Act makes employers responsible for separating union fees from wages and salaries, and passing those fees on to the relevant union. This is an administrative burden, imposed by law, apparently intended to tilt the playing field in favour of unions at the expense of businesses,” says Dr Parmar.

“ACT believes union membership is a private agreement between a worker and a union. If a union wants to take fees from workers’ wages, that union should be responsible for the administrative process.

I agree absolutely. Unions should be given contact details of those who fall under a collective contract, and arrange directly with that worker for an AP or DD for their membership fees – as every other NGO has to do.

It will actually improve good unions, by incentivising them to be more responsive to their members.

The Herald reports:

Rotorua Library’s Rainbow Storytime event has been cancelled due to security concerns amid “hostile dialogue” and “rapid spread of misinformation”, the council says.

It comes after Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki last week pledged to shut down the event prompting calls for a counter-protest to protect attendees. Two Rotorua Lakes Council elected members clashed over differing views of the event.

The free event planned for tomorrow would have seen Taranaki drag queen entertainers Coco (Sunita Torrance) and Erika Flash (Daniel Lockett) reading children books such as Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae.

The council released a statement this afternoon advising the event will no longer be held.

This is the wrong call. This has deprived the parents who want their kids to be able to attend, to do so. It is forcing the views of some on others. Those who don’t want their kids to attend, don’t have to.

Those who think the event is inappropriate have the right to protest it. But there is no right to shut an event down. And the Council’s job is to provide security if needed, not to allow the threat of protest to stop an event.

NZ’s ethic breakdown is approximately:

• 70.2% European (3,297,860 people)
• 16.5% Māori (775,840 people)
• 15.1% Asian (707,600 people)
• 8.1% Pacific peoples (381,640 people)
• 1.5% Middle Eastern, Latin American and African (MELAA) (70,330 people). 

39% of Aucklanders were born overseas.

And yet … the Labour government edicts are still in place in Government departments. I looked at an Education Review Office advert on Seek today. To be fit to work for them you need to have:

“- a demonstrated commitment to biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand.”
(www.seek.co.nz/job/74621849?savedSearchID=4d316ac8-0ee7-4b19-9b79-602e382904df&tracking=JMC-SavedSearch-anz-2)

Does the 25% Asian, Pacific Peoples, and MELAA (and all of those new Aucklanders) – know that they are either Pakeha or non-entities and do not matter in our education system?

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

The Electoral Commission has published the expense returns for political parties for the 2023 election. I’ve put them in a table with how many votes a party got so we can see the spend per vote.

National only spent $3.34 for every vote they got, almost half that of Labour. It’s a reminder that money can’t sell a bad product.

The left want to force taxpayers to fund political parties so go on about the impact of money on politics. But the empirical evidence is that the correlation between how much you spend and how many votes you get is very very weak.

Sure more money is better than less money. Just as more volunteers are better than fewer. And more members are better than fewer etc. But none are as important as a party’s leadership, brand and policies.

Here is the list of recessions since the 1980s, in NZ:

• Jun to Dec 86: -4.9%
• Jan to Jun 91: -4.8%
• Jan 08 to Mar 09: -2.9%
• Jul to Dec 10: -2.6%
• Jan to Jun 20: -10.6%
• Oct 22 to Mar 23: -0.9%
• Jul 23 to Dec 24: -0.5%

They do seem to occur a lot under or just after Labour Governments. Must just be coincidence and bad luck I guess.

1 News reports:

Amalgamating councils is being pitched so that challenges around the structure of local government in the region can be addressed.

Under the early plans there would be one council for Wairarapa, one for Wellington, the Hutt Valley and Porirua and one for Kāpiti and potentially Horowhenua.

There would still be one regional council.

That seems a good solution to me. The four urban city councils merge into one urban city council. The rural Wairarapa doesn’t merge with Wellington but does merge the three local Councils. And the provincial areas of Kapiti and Horowhenua join together. Otaki and Levin should not be in seperate Councils.

This is a fascinating trend. Polls are not an election result, but it does show a real weakness for the Democrats that their biggest drop in support is from Hispanics and Black voters. The tweet series also shows how the Democrats now lead the GOP amongst the wealthiest voters, while working class voters have increased support for the GOP.

The Government has now published equity numbers and bands for all schools, replacing the old decile system. The equity numbers represents how disadvantaged students at a school are, and so the higher the equity number the more disadvantaged the students.

There are 2,463 schools with an equity index. The number in each range are.

• Fewest 325
• Few 345
• Below Average 346
• Average 351
• Above Average 361
• Many 331
• Most 404

I’ve merged some spreadsheets together so people can search for a school and see its equity number, its band and group.

Emeritus Professor of Engineering Mike Kelly has published a paper estimating the costs to New Zealand to achieve net zero emissions.

He says three major projects would need to be completed:

• Ground transport will have been electrified.
• Heat, especially industrial heat, will have been electrified.
• The electricity sector – generation, transmission, and distribution – will have been greatly expanded to cope with the increased demand from the first two projects.

And this has to be done within the next 26 years.

The electricity sector would need to grow from 155 PJ to 425 PJ. The total cost is estimated at NZ$500 billion.

Liam Hehir writes:

In 2019, the government led by Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on the issue of new permits for offshore exploration of oil and gas. The ban was nationwide but, naturally, hit some regions much harder than others. While centres of media, art and government like Wellington and Auckland were not directly affected the results were devastating for Taranaki.

Thousands of well-paying, blue-collar jobs would go. Tens of thousands of dollars would be lopped off average household incomes. Families would be forced to move.

There was some mention of this in reporting at the time. Nothing quite likes the outpouring of grief that has accompanied the recent loss of media jobs, however. To be fair, if Taranaki oil workers had means of mass communication, then we probably would have seen a fortnight of jilted-lover style attacks on the government of the day.

The media demand the Government must save jobs in their industry, yet show little empathy for employees in industries such as mining, oil, primary industries who face large industry job losses also.

The media is going to have to face the reality of its situation. There is no white knight who is going to ride to the rescue with an unconditional basic income for media firms. There is just not enough trust or goodwill among the public or the politicians for this to even be proposed. That is a fact that the sector has to come to grips with.

You should never, ever presume to tell anyone how they should feel about a tough situation. Journalists are facing great uncertainty and worry. And it’s not just them, remember, but production crews, makeup artists and all manner of others required to put together a quality broadcast production.

But as media is forced to cover itself, it may be good to look back and remember the disciplines and balance of sympathies that were maintained when it came to reporting on other sectors that underwent similar disruptions. Because the plight of welders servicing gas exploration companies in Taranaki were no less destabilised and worried by what the previous government did to them, and if nuance and detachment could be insisted upon then, it can be now.

Exactly.

Amy and Hamish Bielski write:

You might be thinking that everyone has to play their part – the sacrifice needs to fall on every sector in the battle against global warming. If that is the case, we should compare ‘apples with apples.’ Our ruminant methane and your car emissions are both greenhouse gases – but they differ significantly. Our emissions can only occur by our using lots of CO2 – greenhouse gas – to create them.

Compared to you, we have a ‘net’ position. Here is what our research showed.

According to a paper published called Phase 3 Multivariate analysis of Greenhouse Gas emissions from sheep and beef farms – April 2020 it takes up to 7 tonnes of CO2 to grow a hectare of grass on our farm. It’s called photosynthesis (if you can’t remember your college science.) Plants use CO2, sunlight, water and mineral salts.

We turn those 7 tonnes of CO2 per hectare into enough feed for 10 ewes. Those 10 ewes each emit about 20 – 22 grams of methane a day which means they produce in total 80 kgs of methane per year. It is accepted that methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 – generally regarded as 28 times stronger. If we multiply our ewe’s 80 kgs of methane by 28 we get 2,250 kgs of CO2 equivalent.

We are, therefore, using over three times more CO2 than we emit. A car owner cannot say that. Or a coal fired boiler. Or a private jet going to a climate conference. Farmers are not quite the villains we are made out to be.

A reasonable argument.