Bruce Cotterill writes:

We were promised the most transparent Government ever. We received the opposite. Now they’re gone. …

I believe it’s now part of our history that her Government and that of her successor were the least transparent in our lifetimes.

Along with her co-conspirators Grant Robertson, Chris Hipkins, David Parker and Nanaia Mahuta, Ardern presided over a Government that chose not to be completely open or honest. They misled us and manipulated the media in the process, while they conceived, crafted and delivered policies that in some cases bore no resemblance to what they had campaigned on. Furthermore, they set out on a pathway to racially divide and re-engineer us socially, while core services such as schools, hospitals, roads, police and even the judiciary failed us.

We should never forget the impact of a Government that claimed to be “the single source of the truth”. The worst part is that they seemed to believe that. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when many New Zealanders were genuinely fearful of their safety, our Government cruelly promised we were “in the front of the queue for vaccines” when the reality was that we were far from it.

I’m not sure what was worse – the lack of transparency or the blatant gaslighting.

Joel MacManus writes:

The Wellington Town Hall is a building that has lost most of its architectural and aesthetic value. It is notoriously earthquake-prone and seems almost certain to face more issues in the future. The city already built the Michael Fowler Centre, the venue that was intended to replace it, 40 years ago. The council has already moved its offices to a different location and doesn’t plan to return. 

This week, Wellington City Council approved another $147m to bring the heritage-listed building up to code, bringing the total cost as high as $330m – more than the construction of Spark Arena and the new Tākina Convention Centre combined. 

The Stadium in Wellington cost only $130 million, and the Council is spending more than twice that on reopening a building that has been closed for ten years.

With the Michael Fowler Centre under construction, the question became: what to do with the old town hall? The Historic Places Trust in 1978 commissioned a report on the building’s heritage quality by William Toomath, one of New Zealand’s most prominent architects and a graduate of Harvard’s school of design. 

That report has never been available online, but a scanned copy was provided to The Spinoff by Heritage New Zealand.

 “Externally, the building in its present state is of dubious merit both historically and architecturally,” the report said. “This building has lost the greater part of its original Victorian swagger, pomposity, and grandeur, an ill-proportioned mockery of a classical work of architecture.”

“As it stands now, the building’s external design is inexpressive and insignificant… As a townscape or scenic unit in the texture of the city, the existing building has little to offer.

“The building might be allowed to stand as a sad joke, regarded with kindly humour and tolerance. But it is another question whether the expenditure of considerable amounts of public money would be justified for the sake of preserving such a debased work under the guise of a worthy example of the classical style in architecture. This, categorically, it is no longer.”

Basically the building is a dog. We’re paying $4,000 a household for a building that will have only a minuscule proportion of the city actually use it.

It began in 2012, with a $30m budget. A year later, it was re-estimated at $43m. This was the figure that started to set alarm bells ringing. The council’s chief executive Kevin Lavery warned it was “an awful lot of money for zero return” and property council president Ian Cassels said the town hall was becoming a “white elephant”, asking, “Is it important enough to justify the amount of spend?”

It was a bad deal at $43 million and an insulting one at $330 million.

Stuff reports:

Man with 150 convictions, including manslaughter and killing pet dog, granted parole

Sounds an ideal candidate for parole!

But the Parole Board has confirmed he was released last month, with a report detailing that he had ‘’embarked on a fundamental process of change’’ while inside.

Would be good to have data on what percentage of people whom the Parole Board grants parole to, reoffend.

I think it is grossly unfair to candidates, political parties and the public that the Electoral Commission does not release a progressive count of the special votes. It means that candidates and parties have a vacuum of weeks where they get no indication of likely outcomes both run marginal seats and for List MPs close to getting in or staying in.

The electoral authorities used to release updated voting totals as they worked through special votes. I recall in 2002 analysing them every day so I could advise Katherine Rich and her family how it was looking for whether she would remain an MP. But at some stage (and as far as I know, there was no legislative change mandating this) the Electoral Commission has decided that after counting on the day votes, they then have a period of three weeks where it is an information black hole.

In many countries there would be outrage if you get provisional results on the day of the election and then just magically get told the final result three weeks later with nothing in between.

The new Government should change the law so that the Electoral Commission is required to publish at least daily updated vote totals in each electorate, until the final result.

The reality is probably 99% of votes have now already been counted and verified. We should be able to see the interim count in progress, rather than have the final results come as a total surprise to everyone on 3rd November.

Stuff reports:

Kaikōura’s council has voted against creating a Māori ward after feedback from the local rūnanga.

Now is not the right time for a Māori ward, Te Rūnanga o Kaikōura chairperson Hariata Kahu said.

The rūnanga expressed concerns with the legislation around Māori wards, saying it would be undemocratic for Māori voters. …

Anyone on the Māori roll would only be able to vote for the mayor and the one Māori councillor, whereas those on the general role would be able to vote for seven councillors under the present system.

So the reason they are not going ahead is because there would be only one Councillor for the Maori Ward.

Maori make up 18% of Kaikoura’s population and generally half are on the Maori roll so say 10% of the population are on the Maori roll and under this proposal they get 12.5% of elected Councillors. This is now deemed undemocratic.

1 News reports:

Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier said there had been no evidence – from his investigation into eight councils – that showed decisions themselves had been made in workshops. 

However, he said practices – including making workshops closed-door by default – were counter to transparency and accountability principles. 

Boshier said: “Meetings should be open to the public, unless there is good reason to exclude them. These meeting requirements can’t be avoided simply by calling what is really a meeting a workshop.

“I also discovered that a range of council officials and elected members didn’t want to open workshops for a number of reasons including that asking questions could make them look stupid. I don’t consider that to be a valid reason to close a workshop.

“Elected members should be resilient enough to withstand reasonable public scrutiny. It is the job they are elected to do.”

Here’s an idea. Don’t stand for Council if you don’t want public scrutiny.

Lambie turned up on Tuesday in one of our paddocks. We have no idea who his Mum in as he was in a paddock that normally has horses only in it. We do have around 10 pregnant ewes but only one of them has given birth (twins) and is the wrong breed to be the mother. So our best guess is he somehow got into our paddock (we are a lifestyle block) from a neighbouring farm, but we don’t know.

I picked him up and put him with our ewes but none of them claimed him, or would feed him. He was already pretty close to death and couldn’t stand up as may have been a day or two without feeding. But luckily just down the road a store sells colostrum and milk replacement for lambs.

So for last three days have been bottle feeding him six times a day, including 2 am, 5 am etc etc. After our second son went onto solids, I never thought I’d be doing overnight bottle feeding again!

Sadly Lambie isn’t a good drinker. I’ve been told some lambs guzzle down a bottle, but it takes 60 minutes or more to get him to drink even 100 mls (he should be doing 150 mls six times a day) so I’m spending several hours a day feeding a lamb rather than polling or blogging or sleeping!

Also he is really difficult to keep feeding standing up (he runs away) so much of the time I have him on my lap on a towel, which he poos on like any new born!

So the kids love having a pet lamb, but I’m hoping we can adopt it out to someone who has more time to feed it!

An excellent column by Ben Kepes on being Jewish. Some extracts:

The Jewish people have existed for thousands of years. For most of that time, they had no country of their own and hence have lived across the four corners of the earth. Every year for thousands of years during the Passover festival, Jews have been saying “next year in Jerusalem” with no real hope or expectation of that being possible.

And so, we have overwhelmingly been an “other”. Guests in other countries at the mercy of our hosts and neighbours. Maybe tolerated, maybe assimilated, maybe the butt of jokes but still, at some level, an other.

Now I absolutely get that this sounds dramatic. But there is something that non-Jews find hard to understand, and that is that, given the arc of time, our welcome wherever we are has historically always run out.

Imagine thousands of years with no country of your own, as an “other”, let alone the centuries of discrimination.

Jews have a shared memory, engrained into our DNA, that comes from the collective trauma of thousands of years of persecution. Quite literally, Jews are painfully aware that, for us, a significant proportion of the world wants to kill us. …

So every Holocaust Memorial Day, when we (and others) say “never again”, we don’t say it as a matter of fact, but rather as a matter of hope. A hope that truly feels a little naive. October 7 showed us that our paranoia isn’t naivete, but rather a reaction to our shared reality.

October 7, while sad and shocking, is the millennia-long reality for us. And it is because of this shared trauma that the pain we all feel about what happened that day isn’t some kind of dissociated and intellectual pain about suffering from distant people, rather it is the pain about suffering that our own family faced.

Just as it is (correctly) said in the US that non-blacks can’t understand the experience of racism to the same extent as black Americans, it is very difficult for non-Jews to understand how October 7 is not just a random terrorist attack for Jews, but part of thousands of years of hatred.

So it’s important for readers who don’t know much about the Middle Eastern conflict and what has led to it, to understand our reality outside of the current situation. It is absolutely right and appropriate for people to show concern about the plight of the Palestinians, and hope for peace in the region. But to do so without a parallel empathy for how we, as Jews, are suffering is ignorant at best, and cruel at worst.

We hear random liberal commentators opining that the Hamas terrorist attacks were simply an act of decolonisation and an attempt to regain autonomy. We hear that and very quickly remember that the Hamas charter suggests that until all Israel is annihilated, its job will not be done.

For Jews, that isn’t simply a charter, it is a clear message that a group wishes every single one of us dead.

And that is a wish that we’ve been facing as a people since the dawn of time.

Ben’s column should be mandatory reading in schools and universities.

This is bizarre and not correct. It was reported widely the day after the attack that the terrorist e-mailed media and the PMs Office a few minutes before the attack. All that got revealed today was that a staffer in the PMs Office rang 111 within 120 seconds of receiving the e-mail, in case it was an actual attack. That staffer acted incredibly promptly and trying to make this into some sort of dark conspiracy is wrong.

The incoming National led government in NZ has promised significant change and improvement in education.

To be able to measure who they do we need to very accurately know the current situation.

Each year I do a process of the LEAVERS data for every high school in the NZ education system. It is matched with their Equity Index Number (used for extra funding based on the background of the students at a school).

It covers the performance of every high school in the country on a range of metrics as well as looking at aggregates.
 
For each school it looks at:
– NCEA Level 3+ for Leavers
– University Entrance for Leavers
– The gap between L3 and NCEA
– Retention until 17 years of age.
– Progression to Degree Level study.
– A range of system aggregate measures (ethnicity, boys vs girls, attendance, etc).

I also think it makes clear who the top schools in our nation are – some will surprise you – and just how badly many of the self-acclaimed high-flyers are.
 
It allows Principal’s/SLTs/Boards and sector stakeholders (including parents) to see exactly where their School stands and strongly facilitates goal setting for the future – school by school and sector wide.

It also allows a greater understanding of the system as a whole and seeing some of the bright spots so as to find out what they are doing. Many schools/organisations/researchers use the data for exactly that reason.
 
As a one off set I can make it available for $300 for schools and professional use and would send an invoice at the same time so you could get the data immediately. For individual use I can send the data on a donation basis.

Alwyn Poole
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Roy Morgan reports:

The L-NP Coalition would now win a Federal Election as ALP two-party preferred support plunged 4.5% to 49.5% and is now behind the L-NP Coalition on 50.5% (up 4.5%) after all six States voted against the proposed ‘Voice to Parliament’ at the nation-wide referendum on Saturday October 14, according to the latest Roy Morgan Poll taken in the first week after the referendum from Monday October 16 – Sunday October 22, 2023.

This is the first time the Roy Morgan Poll shows the Coalition leading the Albanese Government on a two-party preferred basis since last year’s Federal Election.

This is a huge shift in support. Too early to know if it is a temporary backlash, but voters seem to think the Australian Government has been focused on the wrong things.

Stuff reports:

Kiwi pensioner Eric Chang says he thought he’d flown to Thailand to pick up a Covid-19 award from the United Nations. Instead, it turned out to be two kilograms of heroin. …

According to court documents obtained by Stuff, the Aucklander said he believed he was flying to Thailand to pick up an honour from the United Nations for the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

I’m sorry, but why would you think that a random person is selected to receive an honour on behalf of a country, and that the UN would hand it out in Thailand?

While he was in Bangkok, a woman met Chang at his hotel and gave him a black carry-on bag with “carry gifts for officials he would be meeting in Australia”, the court documents said.

He told police that inside the bag he had only seen soap and clothing wrapped in plastic.

After taking the gifts to the “officials” in Melbourne, Chang would then receive US$23 million and the certificate.

If someone is promising you $23 million for nothing except transporting a bag, you are being wilfully ignorant.

The Daily Mail reports:

A volunteer who works in a military base morgue cleaning the bodies of mutilated Israeli soldiers before they are buried says the brutality of Hamas’ massacre of innocents is ‘worse than the Holocaust.’ …

‘There is evidence of mass rape of so brutal that they broke their victims’ pelvis – women, grandmothers, children. …

‘People whose heads have been cut off. Women standing in their night dresses woken up and shot. Faces blasted off. Heads smashed and their brains spilling out.

‘A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded.

‘Women and children burned to charcoal. Bodies murdered with their hands tied behind their backs. …

‘We see evidence of torture and savagery.

‘We have babies with their heads cut off. Bodies without hands, without legs, without genitals.

This is the work of evil. Anyone who defends this is also evil.

The Auditor-General in their annual report states:

This year we continued to focus on improvements needed to the information that public organisations provide about their performance. It is still too hard to tell what New Zealanders are receiving for about $160 billion of central government expenditure each year, and whether it represents value for money. I have raised this matter in several of my reports, as well as directly with the Officers of Parliament Committee. In my view, fundamental changes are needed to the system for how public organisations are required to report on performance, to ensure that the public sector meets the accountability requirements of a 21st century New Zealand. This is an important and urgent matter.

We’re spending $160 billion a year and the Auditor-General is saying he can’t tell if it is value for money and that fundamental reform is needed as both an important and urgent matter. This should be a major story.

Nate Silver writes:

On Tuesday night local time — Tuesday afternoon New York time — there was an explosion near a hospital in Gaza City. At 2:32 p.m. the Times sent subscribers like me the following news alert: …

In case you can’t see that image, the headline reads: “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say.”

Almost every word of that first clause is now disputed. The Israeli Defense Forces said that the blast was the result of a misfire from a Hamas rocket, and President Biden, citing Department of Defense evidence, has backed that claim. Also, the explosion appears to have hit a parking lot adjacent to the hospital, not the hospital itself. And it remains unclear what the death toll was — but forensic evidence doesn’t seem to be particularly consistent with a three-figure number. I’m sure you can find better summaries of the various claims and counterclaims elsewhere; I’m deliberately trying to be circumspect as I make a broader point about the news business. …

Shouldn’t newsrooms just be more careful in these situations? The short answer is “yes”. The Times’s excuse is basically that it was just passing along a newsworthy claim made by a Palestinian spokesperson. I don’t think that really works, however. 

Sure, technically, the claim in the Times news alert was attributed. “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say” (emphasis added). But that’s not how most readers see it, particularly when the attribution comes at the end of the sentence. They’ll see ISRAELI STRIKE KILLS HUNDREDS IN HOSPITAL (palestinian officials say). The Times is providing some degree of dignity and veracity to that claim by printing it, just as it would if it sent out a breaking news alert that said:

“U.F.O. Cited Over Manhattan, Nate Silver Says”

If it later turned out that the “U.F.O.” had just been a 747 landing at LaGuardia, and I’d made the claim while tripping on psychedelic mushrooms, this wouldn’t really absolve the Times for printing it without some independent verification or a second source.

Worth reading the entire piece, which is about how the NY Times especially won’t admit it was wrong with its initial reporting, and that this is part of why trust in media has fallen so much.

A guest post by Owen Jennings:

According to Plato, a “noble lie” is a myth or an untruth, often connected to religion, knowingly propagated by the elite to advance an agenda.  Plato determined that the noble lie is not merely a fabrication but rather a carefully constructed myth that serves as a unifying force in society.

Wouldn’t Plato have a ball today if he was around?  All his stated ingredients are in place.  We have an “elite”, a “myth”, a green religion, an “agenda” and, of course the resulting propagation of the lie.

Our farmers around the country are painfully aware of at least one “noble lie”.  Plato would draw big crowds in the Hokonui Hall or the Eketahuna Saleyards if he was promoting his noble lie theory, today. They would all be keen to update him on the modern noble lie keeping them awake at night.

The farmers would quickly show Plato websites like the Ministry for the Environment, statements from the Climate Change Commission, Government policy, even claims by the main political parties and their leaders that say, “farmers are responsible for nearly half our greenhouse gas emissions”.  

That’s our noble lie.  We have our elite, some who fly to exotic places in private jets to tell us to eliminate our emissions, others, more locally, faceless Wellington mandarins, out-of-touch academics, Māori with new found influence, politicians with their finger in the wind and the odd commentator who enjoys getting their feathers preened.  It’s a lie because the claim has been made redundant by more recent science.

Research by Oxford University scientists showed that when ruminant methane emissions are stable or falling as they are in New Zealand, then the warming potential of methane is reduced massively – 300% to 400%.  Even the “we-hate-being-wrong” IPCC agreed and said, in its AR6 report, page 1016 of Chapter 7, “…expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent of 28, overstates the effect on global surface temperature by a factor of 300% – 400%″. That’s not fringe differences at the margins – its unbelievably significant.  On its own, it potentially saves farmers tens of thousands of dollars.

It’s a lie because there is even more recent robust science, unrefuted and unfalsified. It is backed up by satellite data – a first when most computer modelling on temperatures grossly exceeds reality. It concludes that methane is heavily out-absorbed by water vapour and can only absorb in two minor and weak frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. More than 300,000 transitions have been researched and the research showed clearly that present warming is limited and even if methane levels were doubled the impact on temperature would be barely discernible.  It could not be taxed due to its minute nature.

Fortunately, the farming industry groups – Beef and Lamb, DairyNZ and Federated Farmers have come out of the hazy stupor called HWEN where they spent months chasing minutia and irrelevant factors to suddenly discover it’s all about science and having a sound researched base to anchor any policy judgements.  All they need to do now is focus on current science.  They need reminding science evolves. 

To cap it off, all the “official” participants in the “lets-tax-methane” camp are shutting their eyes to the requirements of the Paris Agreement that stated very clearly that no mitigation measure should be taken that threatened food production.  The same officials said 20% of the sheep and beef industry and 5% of our dairy sector would be decimated. They don’t seem to be able to figure out that our lost production will be picked up by another country with a much larger footprint making a sad mockery of taxing our farmers.

One thing Plato missed in his hypothetical city, his theory on noble lies – incentives, especially financial rewards.  The Government is pouring nearly a billion dollars of hard-earned taxpayer’s money into “fixing the methane emissions problem”.  The usual band of troughers are lined up.  There is money to be made from finding a way to repeat the noble lie; write reports on it, research it, promise new solutions, hold seminars and hui, korero on it, anything to keep the lie alive and propagated.

Yes, Plato will feel well justified.

If you think our farming community should be spared a ‘noble lie’ go to https://methane-accord.co.nz and join up so with the help of the rural and urban communities, we can exact some urgently needed justice.

Owen Jennings on behalf of the Methane Science Accord.